Page 52 of Chaos at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 2)
I watch them, in their pre-ripped department store jeans and Lululemon leggings, and wonder what life is like when you're just … normal. And no, it's not just a setting on a dryer. It's a reality. Either you blend in, or you stick out. And we, we most certainly stick out, like broken graves in a green lawn.
Hael finally lifts his head up as I glance back at him, his jaw tight, his eyes flinty.
“August twenty-ninth?” he asks, like that's not a date he wants to hear. “Fuck my life.”
“You screw her on the twenty-ninth or what?” Vic snaps, lifting his own head back up and leaning forward to put his elbows on his knees. The way he looks at Hael, well, I don't envy the guy. “Speak up. I'm not exactly thrilled with you. On top of everything else, we now have to deal with this shit. The load's getting a little heavy, Hael.”
“Don't you think I fucking know that?” he snaps back, his skin ashen as he rubs at his face again. His stubble is just starting to come through, and it's a much redder color than I expected. Just yesterday, I was admiring how clean-shaven he was. Just one day of thinking about Brittany, and he’s stopped that routine entirely. “If you're starting to wonder if I might be getting psyched about this whole 'raising a baby with Brittany thing', then you clearly don't know me for shit.” He pauses, working his jaw as his eyes flick back in the direction of the Fuller High kids. “Late August, Brittany stole the keys to her dad's lake house. We spent a weekend up there. I don't know if it was the twenty-ninth or not. Thing is, she didn’t cheat on me until after we got back from that trip. So far as I know anyway.”
Oscar checks something on his iPad and makes a hiss of disapproval.
“You were at the lake house on the twenty-ninth, most definitely,” Oscar agrees, frowning as Vic sighs and grabs his cherry soda, flipping the plastic top off and using a flask of whiskey from his pocket to spike it.
“Alright, fine, you fucked her on the twenty-ninth or thereabouts. Keep going, Oscar. I haven't heard the tail end of this but just yet.” Vic swigs his whiskey-laced soda, and then offers the cup up to me. I just glare back at him until he scowls and takes it away again. We are not friends, not today. I'm still pissed, and we have yet to actually talk about my feelings in detail.
“Did you use a condom?” Aaron asks, which, apparently, is the wrong thing to say to Hael right now. He stands up and grabs his own milkshake, throwing it as hard as he can against the side of an old train car. It sits in the grass nearby, all its wheels missing save for one that's being eaten by rust. The side is covered in graffiti and now, strawberry milkshake.
It doesn’t need explaining that the graffiti tagged on that car says HAVOC.
“Of course I used a condom!” Hael roars, and I'm surprised to see so much emotion from him. Gone is the cocky swagger, and the cocksure smirk. He looks like any other member of Havoc now, just a tortured, tattooed asshole with a chip on his shoulder. “Keep going, let's just roll through the possibilities.” He snaps his fingers to get Oscar to keep going.
Oscar sits there with the iPad on his lap and gives Hael such a withering look that he finally sits down again, lifting a hand in an indication that Oscar should continue.
“We give her what she wants on the stipulation that she takes a DNA test at the earliest opportunity, and we require her honesty beforehand, to see if there's any other possible father.”
“There's no way,” Hael says, but almost like he's pleading, wishing he could change the past with a snap of his fingers. “It was just us at the lake house, and we were there for an entire weekend.”
“Four days to be exact,” Oscar corrects, and I wonder, if he's keeping such good track of everything, is he monitoring my fucking menstrual cycles, too? Dick. “But Brittany is—excuse the language—a whore. Likely, there are other candidates for her child's father.”
“So we give her what she wants on a trial basis, and we schedule a DNA test?” Vic asks, like he's mulling this over. “If the baby is Hael's?”
Hael makes a noise of protest but doesn't say anything.
“We tell her to kill Kali,” Callum says, speaking up for the first time. He's eating his fries one by one, carefully pushing the length of each one between his full lips. His voice is as deep and dark as usual, like black velvet and forgotten promises. “Pretty little white girl like her, she'd get away with it. Then we'd have Kali off our backs, but a smaller body count to our own names.”
