Page 51 of Anarchy at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 4)
“Who are you talking about?” I ask mildly, as if her rant could be about anyone other than my illustrious stepdad, the man who raped her daughter into an early grave. A shiver passes over my skin, like Penelope’s hand from beyond the grave. Was her death truly suicide? Because it might not have been. It might not … but will I ever really know?
“You whore!” Pam screams again, breaking down into sobs and falling to her knees in the grass. As I look at her, dressed in an outfit worth several thousand dollars, I hate her all over again. Like, if she’d looked me in the face today and apologized, I might have been able to forgive her somehow. Not after this. “Where is Neil? What have you done with him?”
“Go home, Pamela,” I tell her, feeling superior, even though I’ve got no fucking right to. I couldn’t kill Kali. I couldn’t fucking do it. Even with Aaron and Callum telling me I should be proud of that, that it takes more courage to be kind than wield a knife … it doesn’t matter. We all know that in the last possible second, the culmination of all my revenge, I couldn’t do it.
So is it Pamela then? Is she the final roadblock on my journey to something new? Is she that strange feeling perched in my chest like a wayward gravestone?
I smoke my cigarette with one hand and sip my coffee with the other.
Fucking all my boys last night was this perfect mixture of heaven and hell. The threat of a punishment fulfilled, the promise of a reward. And then to wake up after all that to Pam pounding on the door? Jesus, it’s been a week.
“I’m not leaving until you tell me where he is,” she demands, sniffling and lifting her head up to stare at me. I wonder what demons she’s nursing? How many times has a man hit her? Or raped her? How much has she suffered? I know her own mother was the wife of an alcoholic who beat the fuck out of them both on a near weekly basis. They went to Prescott High, my grandfather and grandmother on my mother’s side. Southside trash, just like their daughter. The daughter who married rich and, for a time, escaped this hell.
Now, that woman’s daughter … she’s come back to rule it.
I just … have to prove it. To Havoc. To myself.
“What is there to take from her?” I wonder, staring at the pathetic creature on the grass before me. “She has nothing left. She is nothing.”
Cal watches Pam for a moment before turning back to me, his blue eyes the same color as the clear winter sky above us. It might snow, and it doesn’t snow often in Oregon. Fucking Christ. Wildfires and snow. Goddamn motherfucking climate change.
I smoke my cigarette harder and hope it kills me just a little bit faster than the poison in my blood that says that fucking all five Havoc boys last night was a good idea. My pussy is so sore that I winced when I sat down on the toilet. I also found myself wet and desperate for another round.
Shit, what was I thinking, deciding that I wanted five red-blooded men all to myself?
My mouth twitches in bemusement.
“We have some ideas,” Cal tells me, all cryptic and shit. If I ask though, he’ll tell me. I know he will. The boys will never make the mistake of lying to me ever again. “What do you want me to do with her?”
I hand Cal the rest of my cigarette and my half-drunk cup of black coffee.
Without slippers, it’s cold as fuck out here, but I step off the porch and move halfway across the grass. We’re going to be the scandal of the neighborhood come the next neighborhood watch meeting. Aaron worked for years to keep this place classy, and the boys and I have dragged the southside over here to ruin it all.
“Why are you here? Why on earth would you ever think a pig-ass cop would come crawling at the feet of these boys?” I cock my head to one side as I study Pam’s blond hair. It used to be the same shade as my own, but she dyes it now. It’s a strange brassy-yellow color, overprocessed and dry. Maybe she couldn’t wiggle her way into one of her fancy friend’s hairstylists this month? Sometimes, when that happens, she remembers that she was the whore of Prescott High, heads over to the Winco on Olympic and buys a package of bleach for five bucks. “Go home. Get your shit together. Don’t wait around for Neil. Move somewhere tropical. You’re only thirty-four years old. Act like it.”
My mother stares back at me like I’ve stabbed her in the heart, scowling as fiercely as I’ve ever seen. That’s when I recognize it. She hates me. Really and truly and utterly hates me. Maybe she hated Penelope, too, blamed her for taking away her youth? Sure, she snagged the rich, older, married guy that would later become my dad, but was getting pregnant at sixteen really something she wanted?
