by Callie Hart
I have him pinned up against the side of the car in a flash, a handful of his shirt in my fist, my forearm across his throat, cutting off his air supply. “If you’re that keen for a fight, all you had to do was say so, man. It’ll be really annoying, having to go get fixed up at the hospital again, but it might just be worth it if they end up admitting you, too.”
“For fuck’s sake. You’re both fucking ridiculous.” Wearing a very bored expression, Wren peels me off Pax, sighing as he corrals me up the hill toward the party. “We’re here to bait Edmondson, not each other. We don’t need to bring any of this bullshit back to our house. Yeah?” He looks at me, eyes hard. He’s expecting an answer, so I give him one.
“You know me. I’ll probably be ordained Pope when the current one dies.”
Satisfied, he nods. “And you? You’re going to behave?”
Pax isn’t a fan of words. He flashes Wren a shark-toothed smile, nonchalantly shrugging a shoulder as he trudges up the hill.
“Don’t be a dick,” Wren warns. “Say it. Out loud. I wanna hear it. I promise I won’t be a psychopath.”
The look on Pax’s face isn’t very promising; neither his shit-eating smile nor the wicked look in his eyes inspire much hope that he’s going to behave. Still, he repeats the words as directed. “I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die. I will not be a psychopath.”
5
DASH
Napoleon Bonaparte was a bad motherfucker. When he was exiled, he escaped his island prison and started stirring up trouble for the English all over again. After he lost the battle of Waterloo, he was exiled a second time, to St. Helena, and that was the end of him. The English like exiling people when they misbehave.
When the time came to punish me for my sins, my father decided against exiling me to a tropical island. He chose Wolf Hall, because he figured I wouldn’t be able to get myself into any trouble halfway up a mountain in the middle of New Hampshire. He figured I’d be confined to a room, so desperate for something to do that I’d actually throw myself into my schoolwork. If he’d done his research, he’d have realized that there was another public school within Mountain Lakes’ town limits. And if he knew absolutely anything about teenagers, stranded in small towns with very few amenities, he’d have known that bored kids find ways to entertain themselves.
Every weekend, somewhere in Mountain Lakes, someone is throwing a party just like this one. We enter the farmhouse, and a thick cloud of pot smoke greets us. “Christ. Half the fucking county’s here,” Wren says.
Pax grunts. “Works in our favor. If there are this many people here, no one’s gonna notice us.”
The kid who owns this place comes from money. The place reeks of wealth. Framed, original art hangs from the walls. Everywhere you look, there’s plush, rich furniture and vases filled with lilies. A mosaic of photographs tesselate along the entryway wall—some steel-haired guy in a tailored suit shaking hands with the likes of Warren Buffet, Jeff Besos and…oh no. Come on. You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.
Wren stands underneath one of the photos, grinning like a monster. “Haha! Check it out, Lovett. It’s your old man!”
How can the world be this small?
Demonstrate to me that you can do better.
I hear the fucker’s voice loud and clear, like he’s standing right next to me, whispering the words into my ear. I haven’t been able to shake the worthless feeling that consumed me when I read his email; the feeling only worsens when I see his disapproving expression scowling out at me from the photo. I can never escape his judgement. I can never escape him.
I reluctantly follow the boys deeper into the house. A huge Steinway sits in the formal living room—perhaps one of the most beautiful pianos I’ve ever seen. My fingers immediately itch to skip up and down the keys and see how it sings, but that’s a no-go. The place is packed, and I don’t play in front of other people. Plus, Wren and Pax are on a mission, and I can barely hear myself think over the grinding EDM that’s pulsing out of the expensive speaker system, anyway. No way I’d be able to hear myself play. My old man would roll his eyes at the stunning instrument if he saw it here. He thinks music is a waste of time.
Try harder, boy.
A red light, rigged up on the other side of the giant living room strobes, painting the faces of the people dancing and grinding up against one another a slick, sweat-covered crimson.
Do better, boy.
Crossing the makeshift dance floor to the kitchen, I look down, and find that the Carrera marble floor is carpeted by caramel popcorn that crunches under the soles of my sneakers every time I take a step.
Try not to be such a disappointment, boy.
Pax searches the faces of the revelers as we pass them. “Most of these fuckers are rolling.”
“And? You gonna narc on them?” Wren prods.
Pax growls, his lip curling upward—an expression that’s preluded a number of violent disagreements between our group members in the past. At least he isn’t aiming it at me this time. “Screw you, man. I’m just wondering where the fuck they got the Molly from.”
The kitchen’s lousy with bros. There are backward-turned baseball caps, wife beaters, board shorts and Ray Ban sunglasses everywhere I look. My immediate response is to leave as quickly as possible, but my escape plan’s thwarted when Wren grabs me by the back of the neck and thrusts me into the melee.
“Don’t even think about it. If I have to deal with this bullshit, then there isn’t a cat in hell’s chance that you don’t. Come on. We’ll grab a beer. Talk to some girls. Get the job done and get the fuck out of here. Goddamnit, dude, smile already. You look like you belong on a mortician’s slab.”
“A mortician’s slab would be preferable to this,” I grouse, even as I force a ten thousand-megawatt grin onto my face. When a petite brunette hops up onto the island in the middle of the kitchen and starts to dance, running her hands all over her body, I cheer and shout along with everyone else, slapping a guy’s hand when he holds it up for me to high five. To an outsider, I must look like I’m one of them—just another disenfranchised youth with too much time on his hands, too scared of the future to admit that he feels lost.
On the inside, I couldn’t be more unlike these rejects. I’ve never felt lost a day in my life. Uncertainty is a foreign concept to me. I’ve always known what the future holds. My education and my subsequent career as an estate manager was laid out for me like a red fucking carpet on the day of my birth, roped off to the left and the right to prevent any thought of deviating off course.
I am a Lovett.
Lord Lovett. One day, I will be Duke Lovett.
I was born into generations of pride and tradition, and I’m expected to uphold and defend both with all my might until I take my dying breath. If my father knew I was in the kitchen of a public-school boy, participating in what essentially boils down to a frat party, he'd have an impromptu heart attack, die, and then raise himself from the dead so he could berate me for my poor decision making. Even if he does know a kid’s father well enough to shake hands with him in a photo, there are just certain types of people I’m not supposed to fraternize with.
A tall, gangly guy with the beginnings of a shitty mustache turns around and walks right into me. “Yo! Yo, hey man! Take a video for us? We’re gonna shotgun these beers.” He hands me a cell phone with a stupendously shattered screen, gesturing to his friend—a much shorter guy with a face full of acne—who’s prepped and ready with a beer in his hand.
“I’m gonna dessssttroy you, Travis,” his friend slurs.
Wren whoops, grabbing the short guy’s head; he shakes it like his skull is an uncracked shell and he’s rattling the nut inside. “Yeah, dude! Destroy him! You got this.”
The short guy’s too drunk to realize that Wren’s fucking with him. He thinks he’s genuinely trying to hype him up, which is fucking ridiculous. I know my friend; he’d rather loosen a few of Shorty’s teeth with a right hook than participate in this kind of dumb, mach
ismo bullshit. We have a pretense to maintain, though, and that means we have to play along.
I can do it.
Wren can do it.
Pax is physically incapable of pretending anything. He wouldn’t be able to play-act convincingly if his life fucking depended on it. He stalks off into the crowd, abandoning us to our fate like the unconscionable bastard that he is.
I film the idiots sucking on their beer cans, absently wondering if they’ve had their tetanus shots.
“Yeeeewwww! Yeah! Fucking KILLER!” Travis wins the absurd display. He hurls his crushed PBR can down onto the kitchen tile, throws his head back and bays like a rabid wolf. “You two! Come on! We’re doing shots!”
Wild-eyed and mentally protesting (I can hear him screaming inside his own head), Wren punches the guy in the upper arm hard enough to leave a bruise, laughing like a maniac. Both Shorty and Travis have been assaulted by my friend now but neither of them is astute enough to realize it. “Yeah! Lead the way, man!” Wren cries. “Fucking SHOTS!”
Four unreasonably large measures of Jim Beam later and I’ve reached my breaking point. I seize Wren by the back of his t-shirt and begin to back away.
“Sorry, boys. We need to find our friend. He has an anti-social behavior disorder. He’ll nail someone to a wall if we don’t keep him in check.” The crowd swallows us. Two seconds later, we’re on the other side of the kitchen and our new friends are nowhere to be seen. “Jesus fucking Christ, I need a shower,” I hiss through clenched teeth. “I hate faking that shit. I need to wash myself off me. Myself, Jacobi. You made me not like myself, and I always like myself. It’s one of the many things that I’m skilled at.”
“Quit griping, dude. Your seventeenth century manor house in the English countryside is showing.”
No one can deflate a guy like Wren Jacobi. Except me, when I really put my back into it. I give him a dour look, rolling my eyes. “You ever been cathed?”
“Cathed?”
“Yeah. Had a catheter jammed down your dick hole. It really sucks, dude. Hurts like a motherfucker. That’s how I feel right now. Like I’ve been cathed with barbed wire and I’m pissing razor blades. And that’s only when I’m standing still. When I walk, it feels like someone’s shoved broken glass down my urethra and they’re using a bottle brush to really wedge it down there good—”
“Oh my god, what the fuck is wrong with you? Stop!” His eyes are legit watering. “You look like a Grecian fucking god. We’re at a party full of half-naked, liquored-up girls. Find someone to kiss it better. I’ll grab Pax and take care of this. Be ready to bounce in thirty.” He melts into the sea of writhing bodies, which is perfect and also really fucking sucks at the same time.
People make assumptions about me. They assume I’m a good boy. They assume, because of my heritage and my upbringing, that I’m a gentleman, and they couldn’t be more wrong. I, ladies and gentlemen, am a fuck up. I like to scheme. I like to fuck. I like to set things on fire just to watch them burn. Nothing would make me happier than heading upstairs to join the boys in the next level fuckery they have planned, but I really am in a serious amount of pain.
I comfort myself with the knowledge that I’ll hear all of the details when I get back to the House. In the meantime, I snag an unchaperoned bottle of vodka and a Sharpie from the stand in the hallway.
“What the hell is that guy doing?”
I throw up a middle finger at the group of idiots who have gathered to watch me work and then get back to it. I’m no Picasso, but I step back from my masterpiece when I’m done feeling rather proud of myself. The Edmondson kids aren’t the only ones who like to draw dicks on things, and the one I’ve drawn on the photo of my father is a veiny, hairy monster, aimed right at the dipshit’s mouth.
“There we go.” I toss the Sharpie over my shoulder, grinning. “Take that, fucker.”
6
CARRIE
“Ahh shit. Incoming. I spy Mara. She’s heading this way.”
Mara never misses a party, regardless of where it’s being held. The two kind-of-hot guys Pres and I have been playing beer pong with elbow each other, laughing under their breath as an icy wind blows against my back, making me shiver. The wind isn’t real. It’s just Mara’s frosty mood. “What in the actual hell, Carrie?”
I spin around and face her, already cringing. Mara, with her long, jet-black hair, her bright blue eyes, and her impossibly high cheekbones, is extraordinary to look at. She’s beautiful in the same way that avalanches and hurricanes are beautiful: impressive and awesome from a distance, but incredibly dangerous up close.
She was curvy and cute when we first became friends, her button nose and her over-sized manga cartoon eyes making her seem a little childish. Her puppy fat burnt off two years ago, though, and her features became angular. Sharpened. Her eyes, once innocent and full of curiosity, took on a more predatory look. Now, she’s a straight up smoke-show.
“You’re here and you didn’t even message me,” she complains.
I should have let her know we’d arrived right away. Sometimes, Mara can be a little intense at these things. Boy hungry. It used to be charming, but after a while it just became exhausting. Honestly, I needed a moment to chill with Pres before we tracked her down.
“Sorry, babe. We got carried away with the game. Forgive us?” Presley offers her the bottle of Fireball she brought in her purse. We didn’t plan the little delay in finding our friend. Didn’t need to. Presley’s complicit in this little subterfuge, though; she loves Mara dearly, but she gets even more worn out by Mara’s energy than I do.
Mara eyes the both of us, and then eyes the Fireball. She takes the bottle, arching an eyebrow at us. “Fine. You’re forgiven. But you guys owe me big, and I fully intend on calling in the debt.”
Oh, I don’t doubt it for a second. When you’re in Mara’s debt, you’re really in it. She’ll wake you up in the middle of the night and drag you out of bed to drive her across the state, because she wants to take a photo of a rock formation at dawn for her Instagram account. She’ll make you turn down a date with the boy you’ve been crushing on for the past six months because he’s not suitably cool. Then she’ll go out on a date with the guy and screw him herself, because she’d never actually noticed how good-looking he was until you brought him up.
But what can a girl do? She’s my friend.
“You came on your own?” Pres threads her arm through Mara’s, guiding her back to the beer pong table.
“Oh, god no.” Mara, wearing the tightest, sexiest little black dress I have ever seen, laughs, shaking her head. “I’m not that lame. No, I got a ride from someone very unexpected.” She drinks deep from the bottle of fireball. When she’s finished with it, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and then points over to the other side of the room. To where Mercy Jacobi is pinning a guy up against the wall, running her hands all over his naked chest.
Mercy Jacobi, star of the theater department. Star of two note-worthy Broadway shows, too. Also, Wren Jacobi’s twin sister. In all good stories, one twin is good, the other dark. One good, the other bad. Two sides of the same coin. Mirrored reflections of each other. Not so with Wren and Mercy Jacobi. They’re both bad. Like, really, really bad. And once you’re on one of their shit-lists, congratulations, you’ve just made it onto the other’s by default. I’ve done my best to steer clear of Wren since day one at Wolf Hall. It’s been harder to avoid Mercy, though. We were in the same dorm together, freshman year. And now our rooms are both on the third floor of the girls’ wing in the main house, I get to listen to her gripe about the lack of hot water in the bathrooms every morning. I keep my mouth shut, though. I keep out of her way, because the girl is a nasty piece of work.
“Mercy? You came here with Mercy?” Presley whistles out a low, long note, her eyebrows climbing up her forehead. “Bold. I wouldn’t have thought the two of you would get along. You’re both so…”
Opinionated. Fiery. Reactive. Impulsive.
Mara sig
hs dramatically. “Just because two girls are both popular and pretty doesn’t mean they can’t be friends, Pres. And besides...” She smirks secretively.
“Besides what? What does that look mean?” It means trouble. Why did I even bother to ask?
She has a beautiful, light, carefree laugh. It sounds like pure delight—a tinkling silver bell. “And besides, Mercy is just about as close as a girl can get to Wren. He doesn’t have female friends. So…”
Ohhhh boy. Strap yourselves in, ladies and gentlemen, we are in for one rough ride. Sure, Mara said she’d love to take a shot at Wren a few weeks back, but I never thought she’d actually do it. I just stare at her. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“What? Why? People are always giving him such a bad rap, but he’s not a bad guy, okay. He’s just mis—”
“If you say he’s misunderstood, I’m going to flip this table right now, tear off all my clothes and run around this party, naked and screaming.”
Boyish, dumb laughter interrupts the conversation. “Dude, you should totally do that.” The guys we were playing beer pong with are still standing at the other end of the table, eavesdropping on our conversation. Mara shoots a bored look at them, plants her hands on the table, leans toward them and says, “Scram.”
The boys scram.
She pops up to sit on the edge of the wood, swinging her legs as she accepts Pres’ fireball again and takes a deep swig. When she’s done drinking, she hands the bottle to me, flashing me a smile. “It sounds stupid but he’s not as terrible as everyone thinks he is. I’ve only seen him make one person cry since I fell in love with him, and that guy deserved it.”
“You’re not in love with Wren Jacobi. You were in love with Joshua Rathbone last week,” Pres reminds her.
“A lot can happen in a week. I have a tender heart. I feel things very deeply. It might take you guys so long to fall for someone that your cunts grow dusty and fill up with sand, but I was blessed with an accelerated emotional intellect. I need constant stimulation.”