Lovely Vicious (19 page)

“For evidence,” I mumble, slowly standing as the rage fans its flames higher in me. “That fucking bitch –”

“Don’t!” Kayla clings to my arm. “Don’t, Isis, please! She’s my friend! She’s…she’s the only friend I have!”

“Wrong,” Jack interrupts, voice hard. “Look around you. It’s the people who are here now who are your real friends.”

Kayla looks like he slapped her. She breaks into tears again, and Wren winces, unsure of what to do but so obviously wanting to help. He looks to me.

“Let’s go. We have to confront her.”

I scoff. “Confront her? That’s a little mild, don’t you think? I’m gonna rip her tits off.”

Wren smirks and we stride down the hall together, leaving Jack and Kayla alone. We weave around groaning people waking up, puddles of vomit and sticky booze, and the occasional pile of shed clothes. We go to the second master bedroom, and Wren knocks. No answer. I motion for him to stand back, and kick the door with all my furious might.

Avery’s room is painted pale purple, with a beautiful canopy bed in the center. She sits up from the pile of silky sheets, princess costume still intact, if slightly disheveled. She sees me, sees the look on my face, and tries to bolt for the window. I lunge at her, pull her back by her hair, and punch her hard enough to have her crashing to the floor.

“You really don’t learn, do you?” I say softly.

“Wh-What –” She coughs. “What are you talking about?”

I lean down and grab a chunk of her red hair and pull. Hard. She screams and twists.

“Alright, alright! I’m fucking sorry!”

“No. You aren’t. But you will be.”

“You aren’t getting the funding, Avery,” Wren says stonily. “Not now, not ever. I’m declaring the president of the French club unsuitable for duty. I’m putting a sanction on you. You’re officially banned from joining any clubs, attending senior prom, and graduation night.”

“You can’t do that,” Avery snarls. “I’ve been homecoming queen for four years straight! I’m in the running for Prom Queen and everyone knows I’ll fucking win. If you ban me, no one will come to prom. No one will come to your stupid little graduation night, either!”

“Do you really think you have that much influence over the student body?”

Avery scoffs. “I say jump, they jump. You know that.”

“Do you think you’ll have that much influence when we tell everyone you drugged someone at your own party? How many girls will trust you again? How many will brave the threat of being date-raped to come to your parties?” Wren coolly asks.
 

Avery’s face goes white. I pull her up by her dress and sneer.

“If you so much as breathe in Kayla’s direction ever again, I’ll kill you.”

Avery rips out of my grip and points at Wren.

“You did it! Don’t lie, you sanctimonious cunt! You fucked her! You’re a sniveling little coward opportunist and I know you fucked her!”

Wren smiles, hell-bent gaze turning more determine, more fixed and just slightly amused.

“I’m not that boy in the forest anymore, Avery. I’m not someone you can force into doing what you want. We’re older. And I’m never going to let you hurt another girl again.”

Avery takes a step back, shocked. She looks down at her hands, turns them over.

“That’s right,” Wren says. “You were so caught up in getting those funds; you didn’t realize you were doing the same exact thing you did to Sophia. You did it again. You haven’t learned at all. And you’ll probably do it again, and again, until you kill someone or someone kills you for it.”

“I was doing it for Sophia!” Avery screams, livid. “Those funds, the French club trip, it was for Sophia! She doesn’t have long, Wren, you know that! You fucking know that!”

“So you’d hurt someone else to help her?” He asks.

“I’ll do anything to help her,” Avery says through gritted teeth. “Anything.”

Wren smiles. “It’s too bad you can’t wring the money from your parents. Then again, they’re too smart aren’t they? They raised you, after all. You’re their spitting image. They’d track where it went, who was invited. They’d find Sophia’s name, and dig around in her background. And then what you did would be brought to light. It’d explode in your face. The whole town would know. Maybe it’s time the world knew.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she snarls. “You and Jack would get dragged down with
 
me.”

“Maybe. But I’m sure in court Jack would get a pardon, and I could plead I feared for my life. We’d get off more easily. But you? No. You’d get something much longer.”

“GET OUT!” Avery roars. “GET OUT!”

She throws things – a vase, a picture frame. She rips a fancy lamp from the wall and chucks it at my head, but I duck just in time. Glass shatters and I run after Wren, back to Kayla’s room.

“We need to go,” Wren pants, helping Kayla off the bed. She leans on his arm, tears almost dried, but still looking confused.

“What’s going on?”

“Give me your keys,” I say. Kayla rummages in her purse and hands them to me. Wren helps Kayla downstairs, and Jack lags behind with me. Avery’s screaming is waking up what’s left of the party. It sounds like a banshee being squeezed out in a wringer.

“Someone’s unhappy.” Jack smirks.

“Wren threatened to come out with the truth about what happened with Sophia,” I murmur. Jack’s face falls, and settles into a granite-hard determination. Wren and Kayla stumble across the lawn to her car. Just as Jack and I get out the door, rapid footsteps come down the stairs and race behind us. I turn just in time to see Avery, nose bloody from my punch, eyes wild with savage fury, her red hair like a mane of a fire goddess, and a baseball bat raised, inches from coming down on my back. I duck, the bat swinging over me, and there’s a snap the sound of something being forced, and Jack suddenly has the bat. Avery pants, shrinking away as Jack looks at the bat, observes every inch of it.

“Just like the good old days, hm?” Jack smiles predatorily at Avery. “Although the one I used was metal, wasn’t it?”

Avery’s fury drains so fast she looks like a punctured balloon. Terror claws at her expression as she scrabbles backwards, jumps to her feet, and runs back into the house, slamming the door shut and locking it.

Jack doesn’t say anything more until I’ve dropped off Kayla. Wren drove behind us, and got out to help Kayla to her front door. She thanked him, quietly, and he watched her go inside. Wren and I nodded at each other in a farewell, and he even nodded at Jack. When we’re on the highway and I’m driving towards Jack’s house, I spare a glance at him. I’d given him back his shirt, and he has his chin in his hand, fingers over his lips thoughtfully, watching the world flicker by outside his window.

He speaks first.

“I broke up with Kayla.”

“Shocking. I thought you two were going to last forever.”

He shoots me a sardonic smirk. “Haven’t you heard? Good things never last.”

I switch lanes. Jack turns on the heater. It smells like skunk. He shuts it off quickly.

“What happened last night?” I ask.

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember being…I remember being scared. Shaking.”

“That’s all?”

I nod. Jack goes still. His eyes are unreadable chips of ice as they always are, but for a split second I swear I see them crack on the inside with pain.

***

She was scared. She didn’t enjoy any part of it. If she did, she would’ve remembered. But her fear overwrote her memories.

The wound is far deeper than I’d imagined.

I watch her face as she drives, hands white on the steering wheel. She’s waiting, confused, trying to piece the blanks together in her mind. She blocked it out. Last night was too much like the time that caused the wound. I want to tell her I was trying to make her feel better, or tell her that I was trying to help (liar, you were taking advantage, just like he did).

In the sober light of morning, what I’ve done hits me with petrifying acidity. I forced a kiss on a drunk girl who’d been forced upon before. I’d touched a girl terrified of being touched at all. I lost control. I, Jack Hunter, the one person who keeps calm and cool and collected at all times, lost all control. And it hurt Isis so bad she blocked it from her memory.

It’s better if she doesn’t remember.
 

***

But the cracks fill in, icing over again, and Jack shrugs lightly.

“You were pretty drunk. Some guy with a disturbing mask jumped out at you from a corner. You were shaking fairly hard for the rest of the night.”

“And why was I wearing your shirt?”

“You bumped into someone while dancing and spilled coke on it. It was sticky. So I offered you my shirt, and you washed your suit off and left it to dry on the floor.”

It sounds like something I’d do. I nod.

“Makes sense.”

***

She pulls up to my house, and I get out and hang in the window.

“Take care of Kayla in the next few days,” I say. “She’ll need you.”

“Since when did you start caring about her?”

She’s important to you. So I care.

I don’t say that. I shrug and lie, instead.

“I know what it’s like. Breaking up. And GHB.”

“Client of yours get too creepy?”

“Just a bit.”

My eyes find her neck, and my breath hitches. There, just below her jaw, is a soft red hickey.

“Something wrong?” She asks.

If she doesn’t look up and use a mirror to see under her chin, she won’t see it. I shake my head.

“Nothing. Thanks for the ride.”

“Thanks for helping. With Avery. And for lending me your shirt. And…for dating Kayla. It made her really happy.”

It made you happy.

I smirk. “Anytime you want to give me another 200 dollars to go out with one of your friends, let me know.”

She snorts, and I step back and watch her pull away from the curb with something like regret festering in my chest. I tuck last night somewhere deep in my mind – lock it away for good. I’ll revisit it, when the longing gets too bad. But it doesn’t exist, any longer. It never happened. And that’s for the best.
 

I’m the only one who remembers.
 

And that’s for the best.

***

Northplains, Ohio, is a town full of secrets.

You’d think the boring Midwest wouldn’t have things like savage popular girls with baseball bats and shady events that happened in the past no one wants to talk about. But it’s got those by the truckload. Deception, revenge, lies. They all merge together like a vortex over the school, hanging heavy in the air on Monday.

Jack walks into the main hall, takes one look at me and Kayla on the bench, and walks right past us. Kayla, of course, bursts into tears. It took a lot of coaxing and chocolate on Sunday to convince her to come to school on Monday. I’m torn between my urge to punt him for making her cry, and knowing the breakup was the best thing for both of them. It was inevitable. A guy like Jack Hunter just doesn’t date girls his own age. That’s the general consensus around school. Of course Kayla only lasted two weeks! He’s Jack Hunter! He runs around town with rich girls in Porsches. He got early acceptance into Harvard, a fact Mr. Evans has taken to reminding every student of when they look like they’re slacking in study hall.

Jack Hunter is just meant for bigger and better things than Northplains, Ohio.

His legion of admirers makes a quick comeback. Poetry girl has piles of paper taped over his locker. The statue in the art room has the sheet taken off its head and it’s moved to the middle of the room again, the artist happily chipping away at the features. Dramaclub wailer primps and preens in front of the bathroom mirrors like a seven-year-old who’s just discovered her mother’s makeup. Jack’s cake plans are bigger and better than ever and going to be entered in a baking contest downtown instead of being thrown at Kayla. The girls have returned with an admirable vengeance.

Avery hasn’t come to school in three days. No one talks about her bat-wielding fury, so I can only assume she threatened them to keep them quiet. But people say she isn’t well. The official rumor is she’s sick, but I know better. She’s licking her wounds, trying to figure out which designer skirt will hide the tail between her legs when she finally does come back. It’s only a matter of time. Sometimes I feel sorry for her. But then I remember what she did, and I just feel sorry for her body parts.

I take deep breaths to calm my rage, and focus on something else. Mrs. Gregory drones on. I doodle her face on my paper and then gracefully draw a banana for a nose. I still can’t remember what happened that night at the party. I was pretty drunk, so it’s understandable, but I’ve been drunk a few times before, and though things were fuzzy I’d always remember bits and pieces. But the other night? Nothing. It’s a massive black blank smeared across my memory. I don’t slip up like that – my mind is a fantastically sexy piece of equipment I keep in tip-top condition. So why can’t I remember even a scrap of that night?