Page 120 of Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 5)
My turn to smile back. It isn’t easy, especially when I take in Pamela’s disheveled appearance. I’m so used to seeing her in designer clothing, flawless makeup, and coiffed hair that the person sitting in front of me might as well be a stranger. She looks younger this way, somehow. More vulnerable. I think again about her age-gap romance with my already married father.
“Were you and dad in love?” I ask, even though I could snarkily spit back that she doesn’t know shit about my ‘little gang’. I mean, that’d be true. She doesn’t. She doesn’t know a fucking thing about Havoc or me or even Heather—especially not Penelope. Nothing. Nothing at all. “I mean, he was married when you met, and so much older. That must’ve been hard.”
Pamela just stares back at me from emerald eyes, ones that I’m familiar with because I look in the goddamn mirror every single day and see her. The last name on my list. The very last motherfucking name.
“Are you an idiot, Bernadette?” is how she chooses to respond to that statement. She slams her hands down on the surface of the table and one of the guards calls out a warning. “I’m rotting in jail, and you’re here asking about me and your father?”
“You didn’t kill him, too, did you?” I ask, because as far as I know, my father hanged himself. Then again, until recently, I’d assumed my older sister had shoved a bottle of pills down her throat and ended things. Some tragedies are not what they appear. “Dad, I mean. The way you killed Penelope.”
The words come up like bile, tainting my mouth and making my tongue feel sour. I crave to hold the hand of a Havoc Boy, any Havoc Boy, any at all. If I could just do that, wrap my fingers with one of theirs, I could stay calm, the way I have for weeks since I found out.
Weeks of pushing this down, walling it off, acting like it isn’t real.
I grind my nail into the scratched surface of HAVOC on the table, just to keep my fingers from digging into Pam’s eyes the way I did to James’. My other hand, I use to prop up my chin, to keep up the act, the one that says I don’t care about any of this.
I’m just Bernadette Savannah Blackbird, bad bitch and gangbanger.
Only … that’s a pipe dream. I wish that I could be that girl all the time, that I never felt sad or insecure, confused or angry. Devastated. Shattered. Broken up and bleeding. But I do. I feel all those things all the time—especially right now.
“Bernadette,” Pam begins, giving me another look as she pushes blond hair back from her face. She looks so young right now, and so sad. Pathetic, actually. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“I mean that—in-between playing games with Neil and the Grand Murder Party—you killed Penelope. It isn’t even a question, is it? You did it. But how? That’s the thing that’s been haunting me at night, the one thing that I just cannot shake.”
We stare at each other for a long, long moment. As we do, I wonder if I haven’t made a mistake allowing Pamela to end up in jail. Now, with a huge court case coming up, and her guilt providing an avenue for the VGTF to pursue RICO charges—that is, gang-related charges—against the GMP, there’s no way for me to get to her.
I mentioned finding one of Stacey’s girls to do the dirty work, to hang her from her sheets. I may still do that.
Pam’s case is an important part of bringing down everything and everyone else: Neil (posthumously of course), his father, his brother, Ophelia, Maxwell Barrasso. Every rich fucker that’s ever purchased a child from the GMP and all that money they launder through Trinity’s mother’s foundation, Save Our Precious Children League. If she dies, the VGTF will assume that the GMP arranged it. I mean, they very well could be in the process of doing just that as we speak. I could get away with it. Is that what you really want, Bernie? Is it?
The answer is: I have no fucking clue.
“Did you hold a gun to her? Make her take the pills?” I keep staring at Pamela as bits and pieces of my sister’s journal filter through my head. She wasn’t planning on dying, was she? When she asked me things like, do you think you’d be okay without me? She was planning on running. Escaping. Going to Nan-motherfucking-tucket.
I close my eyes for a moment, my heartbeat thundering, head spinning.
I’ve held it together for five weeks since I learned about Pam’s involvement in Penelope’s death.
And yet, for the first time, I’m really fucking feeling it.
I need my boys, I think, fingers digging into the sides of the table. But I can’t leave yet. Not without hearing her say it.
