Riot Rules

by Callie Hart

  I don’t even know what it makes me. All I know is that his expression has remained the same since he sat me down on the seat next to his, and I’m too numb, and cold, and tired to do anything about it. After all that’s happened tonight, my mother leaving me in that house, with those savages breathing down my neck, Jason selling me to his friend for drugs, being so fearful of what was going to happen to me, then the needle, and the panic, and the flight… God, now I’ve ended up here, nearly naked, sitting next to a man dressed in a fancy suit who may well rape and kill me anyway. What a mess.

  “What’s your name, girl?” the man asks. He seems solid. His skin, which was a light brown/tawny gold in the headlights of his car, is darker and richer now that the only light is that being cast off from the instruments on the car’s dash. I look in his eyes—Whoa. So, so blue!— for a moment, sneaking a breath, sucking it in between my teeth like he might not catch me doing it. Like it somehow isn’t allowed. “Hannah,” I tell him. “Hannah Rose Ashford.”

  “Okay, Hannah. You can call me Alderman. Wanna tell me how you ended up running down the side of the road in the middle of the night?”

  I shake my head.

  Alderman drums his fingers against the steering wheel. “Okay. I suppose we just met, and that could be considered a personal question. You gonna tell me where you came from, so I can take you home?”

  I shake my head.

  “Want me to drop you off with the cops?”

  I shake my head. Emphatically.

  “I think maybe…we should stop and grab you some clothes, Carina. That hoody you’re wearing is soaking wet. And if I get pulled over by the cops right now, my ass will be thrown in jail. They’re going to think I hurt you.”

  He's too kind to mention the fact that I’m clearly naked beneath the hoody. He’s right; if a cop were to pull him over and see me, showing all this bare skin, teeth chattering together, just a little kid, then they’d arrest him on the spot. For a second I say nothing. And then I say, “Hannah.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s Hannah. You just called me Carina.”

  “Oh. I did. I’m sorry. You remind me of a girl I used to know. Her name was Carina. She had eyes just like yours.”

  A thick, patient silence floods the car after. I stare out of the window, listening to the rhythmic wom, wom, wom of the tires as they spin over the blacktop, wondering as the seconds flicker on by how much distance I’ve put between me and that scary man’s dead body. The lights that streak through the black night, flitting through the trees, hypnotize me, quieting my thoughts.

  “I was visiting family back there. I know this area pretty well. There’s a twenty-four-hour CVS coming up,” Alderman says. “I’ll run in and grab you something warm and dry to wear. It’ll do for now. We can get you something better in the morning, okay?”

  He really isn’t going to hand me off to the cops? Relief swells over me. I’ve been waiting for him to go against his word…

  “I’m driving all the way to the west coast. I won’t be stopping much,” he says. “If you wanna come with me, you can. If you want me to take you somewhere, I will. But I’m going to need to know what happened if you want me to help you further than that, Hannah. Do we have a deal?”

  It's as if he can read my mind. I dare a sideways glance at him, and this time he’s not staring out of the windshield at the road. He’s looking at me. Our eyes meet, and he raises his eyebrows, waiting for me to respond.

  “Yes, sir,” I say softly. “I understand.”

  He nods. “Then I guess we have ourselves a deal.”

  17

  DASH

  I do not talk about my family.

  Not to anyone.

  The boys know my father’s a cunt. They’ve met him in person, and it’s pretty easy to deduce that little detail in the flesh. Actually, it’s impossible to ignore. They know he emails me constantly about my grades, or a million other things that he’s pissed off about, and they know that I get worked up over his bullshit. They don’t know anything about my dead aunt, or the fact that both my mother and my father not-so-secretly hate each other. Hate me. Hate everything about the world, now that Penny’s not in it.

  I overheard my old man telling my mother that he likes to daydream sometimes that it was her who died, and he was still married to Penny. He’d followed that doozy up with the revelation that it was easy to make believe that I was Penny’s son because I had her eyes, and her face-shape, and the same nose, but that I always ruined the illusion when I opened my mouth to speak because my personality was weak, like hers.

  The boys don’t know any of that.

  I’m furious that Carina knows now, but when I opened my mouth, I couldn’t force it closed again.

  After successfully avoiding Pax and Wren all night, I get so high, I pass out face-down on the sofa in my room and wake up hours later with a ballpoint pen digging into my cheek. I cranked the thermostat right down when I came in earlier and now my bedroom’s as cold as the grave. I’m in my boxers, shivering uncontrollably, still fucking high as shit, it’s one in the morning and I’m so disoriented that I don’t know who or where I am.

  It comes back in pieces.

  I’m Dash Lovett.

  I’m at the house.

  Riot House.

  My friends are in their rooms, sleepi—wait, no. Strains of driving hardcore metal reaches me over the static shushing out of the TV mounted on my bedroom wall, which means that Pax is still awake.

  I’m in New Hampshire.

  There’s a girl that I like sleeping in her room on top of the mountain.

  I—whoa. Man, life hits weird sometimes. I’m the heir to a fucking estate in England. How weird is that?

  My mouth feels like someone dumped half the Sahara Desert into it while I was sleeping, and my dick is so hard that it actually fucking hurts. This always happens when I get high—a bizarre physiological response that’s more of a hinderance than it is entertaining. It’s not as if I have problems getting my dick hard when I’m not high but fuck me if I’m not immediately sporting wood the very second the smallest amount of THC hits my blood stream. Sitting up, I squeeze myself to see if that will dull the throbbing between my legs, but it only makes it worse. I’ve been hard for hours. I can tell because my balls are aching like they’re punching bags and Connor McGregor just went to fucking town on them.

  I’ll have to make myself come. I’ll die if I don’t get some water in me first, though. I’m in the hallway, still clutching my erect cock, when Pax’s bedroom door bangs open and he appears on the landing with a pair of clippers in his hand. He eyes me, arching an eyebrow when he observes my hand on my dick, then huffs. “Mary Jane up to her old tricks?”

  My strange reaction to weed is common knowledge within the walls of Riot House. I shrug, letting go of myself as I shuffle past him into the bathroom. “She’s a relentless taskmaster.”

  Pax stands in the doorframe, watching me take a glass from the sink and fill it up with water. He says nothing while I chug, sweet relief flooding me as the water revives me. When I’ve drained the glass and I come back up for air, he says, “Ask me where Wren is.”

  I look at him. Pax always wears a guarded, stony expression, but tonight it’s even stonier. He looks seriously fucking unhappy. He knows. I slowly place the glass back down on the stand by the sink. “Not with Mara Bancroft, I’m guessing?”

  He slowly shakes his head.

  “Then…he’s at the gazebo.” With our English teacher. Doing something stupid. With a guy neither of us like. It’s all implied, and all confirmed when Pax nods.

  “Come with me,” he says, pushing away from the doorframe. “I need help with the back.”

  “The back of what?”

  He holds up the clippers, flicking the switch so that they buzz. “My ball sack. What d’you think, man, the back of my fucking head.”

  He’s never asked for help before. I follow him back into his room, marveling at that state of the
place. Barely a square inch of floor is visible beneath the mess. There are no dirty dishes or cups growing mold anywhere, thank god, but the sheer amount of clothes and books and stuff everywhere is overwhelming.

  The loud, grinding metal music churns on as he sits down heavily in a swivel chair and holds out the clippers to me. “No need to get fancy. Just make sure it’s all the same length. And I swear to fucking god,” he growls over his shoulder, “if you poke me in the back with your fucking hard-on, I will snap your dick off and feed it to the crows.”

  “Don’t worry. My dick has retracted all the way into my body,” I say sarcastically. “Being around you has a very sobering effect on a guy.” The noise of the clippers takes over then. The angry buzz even drowns out the thrashing music. I make quick work of the back of Pax’s head, running the clippers over his skull until his hair’s cropped close, neat and tidy.

  Pax shakes himself like a dog, swatting the short shards of hair from his bare shoulders when I’m done. “So, what are we gonna do about it?” he says.

  No point in pretending I don’t know what he’s referring to. I’m actually glad he knows. At least now I don’t have to feel like I’m harboring this motherfucker of a secret and I don’t have anyone to talk to about it. “Does anything need to be done?”

  Pax picks up an Xbox controller, throwing himself down on what I thought was a mountain of clothes but turns out to be a sofa underneath a mountain of clothes. I react instinctively when he tosses another controller at me, catching it out of the air. A second later, he shoves a stack of folded t-shirts off the sofa onto the floor and I’m sitting beside him, playing Call of Duty.

  His eyes are locked onto the game, his jaw working, his thumbs bashing ferociously at the controller’s buttons, but it’s all an act; I have his undivided attention. “Maybe.” He lifts one shoulder. “He’s being a fucking idiot but could be he has it under control. What do you think?”

  This is the deepest conversation I’ve had with Pax. Ever. We’ve lived together for nearly three years now and we’ve baited each other, taken the piss out of each other, wailed on each other, fought, and then fought some more for the hell of it. We’ve never really talked, though. Surprisingly, it isn’t all that awkward.

  “I think he’s being an idiot, too. But he hasn’t told us what he’s up to, so it’s not like we can say anything.”

  “’Course we can. We can sit that fucker down and have an intervention,” Pax points out.

  “Oh yeah?” I take out the sniper that was about to kill Pax in the game. “And what would you do if we sat you down and confronted you about a secret you’d been keeping? Not just any secret. A secret like this.”

  He snorts. “I’d knock both of your front teeth out.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Fair.” Rocking his head from side to side, Pax explodes forward, hammers on the controller, cursing through his teeth at the game on the TV. “This isn’t about the fact that it’s a guy,” he says. He’s firm about this. He says it clear and loud, so that I can hear him over the surging music and the rattle of gunfire. “I don’t care about that. I just want to make that clear. I’m not a fucking homophobe. I just don’t like him.”

  Pax is a hard person. Angry. Standoffish. Prone to aggression. He gets mad at the drop of a hat and has firm, aggressive opinions on a lot of things, but I never for one second thought he would be weird about Wren being with a dude. That never even occurred to me. I’m stoked that he’s of the same mind as me where Fitz is concerned, though. It’s a relief to know that I’m not on own there. “Wren can screw RuPaul if it makes him happy. Fitz is bad news, though. No two ways about it. He just…”

  “Creeps you the fuck out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So then…what?”

  I think about it for a while. Doesn’t take me long to come up with an answer. “We send him a warning. We make sure he understands that there’ll be consequences if he fucks with our friend. Come on. Put some clothes on, heathen.”

  Pax pauses the game. “What, right now?”

  “Yeah. Now. We’ve got work to do.”

  Pax grins like a pirate.

  Black hoodies. Leather gloves. We look like we’re about to rob a goddamn bank.

  We take the muddy backroad so that we won’t cross paths with Wren coming back down the mountain. We go on foot—the engine on Pax’s Charger is aggressive as fuck and loud enough to wake the dead. If we came screaming up the hill with that thing choking and snarling in the dark, the entire student body would be out of their beds and at their windows by the time we hit the fucking driveway. We’re used to negotiating the backroad on foot, though. This is the way we come running every morning. We know every hairpin and switchback, every rock and every tree. Even in the dark, we make our way up to the academy without so much as placing a foot wrong.

  As usual for this time of the morning, the main school building is in complete darkness. There are no lights at the windows. No suggestion of life inside. I can barely make out the imposing shape of the structure as we approach through the darkness, but I can feel its looming presence. It has a life of its own, Wolf Hall. The crenelations along the eaves, much like battlements, and the towers on the eastern and western wings, cast ultra-black shadows that could harbor any number of nightmarish creatures. The ivy that’s slowly consuming the exterior stonework, usually a wash of bright, jade green and firetruck red during daylight hours, looks like the tentacles of some hideous monster that’s trying to crack the building open and force its way inside. Atop each of the flying buttresses that run down the sides of the building, gargoyles perch, their claws gouging into the stonework, leering down at us as we hurry through the rose gardens and approach from the west.

  “Come on, then,” Pax rumbles in the dark. “How many ways do you know of to sneak into this place after hours.”

  “About a fucking hundred,” I reply.

  He laughs. “Good man. The laundry?”

  I nod, agreeing. “The laundry.” It makes the most sense. The laundry’s on the ground floor, and the grate they installed last year to vent the steam and condensation from the dryers was never bolted down. John, the school’s resident custodian slash handyman, usually does a good job with things like that, but for some reason he overlooked that one small detail. Lucky for us, really. When we reach the rear western corner of the building, Pax clambers through the undergrowth that’s sprouted up since I last came back here, holding it back so I can follow him. He has the grate off the vent and he’s shimmied in through the two-foot by two-foot opening seconds later. I’m right on his heels.

  The laundry smells pretty much the way you’d expect it to smell: detergent and bleach, underpinned by the faint whiff of starch. Unlike most boarding schools, the machines aren’t coin operated. A lot of Wolf Hall’s students come from exceedingly wealthy families and have parents who’d cringe at the thought of their child doing something so pedestrian as feeding loose change into an industrial top loader. The rows of washers and dryers here are top of the line, sleek-looking things with flashing lights, programmable from an app. The blue glow they cast off provides some light as Pax and I make our way out of the laundry and into the hall.

  We’re at the wrong end of the building right now. A syrupy silence hangs in the air as we tread carefully down the steps, past the night guard’s office. I hold my breath, waiting for Hugh to come storming out of the little room where he watches SNL all night. I grab Pax by the scruff of his shirt, mouthing for him to wait, which he is not happy about.

  I need to listen. I need to hear…

  A spluttered cough; A snort; The dry catch in someone’s throat, just before they begin to snore: Hugh is sleeping on the job.

  “Get the fuck off me!” Pax hisses.

  “Just move.”

  We jog as quietly as we can toward the entrance of the building, to the room on the right where we attend our English classes. The door’s locked. Can I pick said lock? Yeah, sure I can. I’m nowhere nea
r as proficient at it as Pax, though, so I leave that up to him.

  The door swings open.

  Just before we enter, something on my right catches my attention: a break-glass fire alarm. And underneath it, a wooden box, painted bright red with a fire axe hanging inside it.

  It’s just too fucking perfect.

  I have the box open in a flash, and then the axe’s polished handle is sitting prettily in my gloved hand; the leather creaks when I close my fingers around it. When he sees what I’ve got, Pax’s face lights up. “Yes, man. Fucking yes. I like your style.” His eyes flash silver in the monochrome moonlight flooding in through the den’s windows, full of mad excitement.

  These are the situations when Pax comes to life—when he gets to destroy something. I’ve seen him demolish hotel suites with his bare hands. There isn’t a single brand of flat screen TV that has withstood Pax Davis. We set to work quickly, aware that what we’re about to do will create a lot of noise. There will be severe consequences if we’re caught in here tonight. We probably wouldn’t be expelled, but life would be far less accommodating for us, that’s for sure. Our parents would be called. Fact. We’d be in detention until graduation. Fact. And we’d never be allowed to fraternize with people after school hours or on the weekends. Fact. We’d be confined to the house. Fact. Could be that they actually force us to move out of the house and back into the main building so they can keep an eye on us.

  None of these outcomes are acceptable, which leaves us with just one option.

  Don’t get caught.

  I have first swing of the axe. The weight of it feels so right. It sings, whistling as it cuts through the air, and the loud crack! that follows is stupendously satisfying. I feel that crack! everywhere all at once, my teeth clacking together, and I stagger back, staring at the giant hole I’ve just created in Wesley Fitzpatrick’s antique mahogany desk. Splinters stick up at all angles; smaller shards of wood rain down in the air, landing on the sleeves and the hoods of the black hoodies we wore on our early morning adventure.