Page 184 of Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 5)
Vic stands up from the chair, the wood creaking as he lifts his heavy body. I don’t turn back to look at him, waiting for the rubber squeak of his boots against the linoleum. He pauses beside me, on my right. Hael is on my left. Oscar and Callum wait behind us.
“I’m Vic Channing,” is all he manages to get out. His hands are shaking by his sides. The unshakeable Victor Channing. He’s trembling so badly that I wonder if he doesn’t need medical attention. My eyes slide closed, and I struggle to breathe.
If Bernadette is dead …
Then Havoc is dead.
The letter of her name might not be in the acronym, but she is Havoc. She always has been. We live and die by the cadence of her breath. We exist as rhythm and pulse to her heartbeat.
“Mr. Channing …” the surgeon begins.
Tick, tock.
I can hear the old-fashioned clock on the wall.
It swallows up the words that follow, and I tumble into an emotional rabbit hole.
Down, down, down, and even deeper still until I was down too deep to swim, and the water filled my lungs, and then … I had my epiphany.Two months later …Getting three little girls dressed for a birthday party is a skill I never imagined I’d have in my wheelhouse.
“My hair looks weird,” Heather tells me, standing in front of a mirror with a fine pink mist covering her slicked-back brunette hair. “In a good way. I like it.” She turns around to grin at me as I plant my hands on my hips and smile down at her.
Not bad for an eighteen-year-old guy, huh?
“I do my fucking best,” I say, shaking my head as I glance over at Kara. She’s stacking bracelets on her left arm, a rainbow of rubber ones that she’s collected from various school events and charity donations. Anytime she sees an offering near a checkout counter, she makes me donate the dollar or whatever so she can get one. Or so she says. Secretly, I think she just likes the idea of helping people. “Let’s hurry up. These Oak River people are nuts.”
Not sure how I feel about the girls going to some fancy-ass mansion in Oak Park for a party, but I guess I’ll be there as a chaperone, so it doesn’t matter. We’ll stay for a few hours and then GTFO.
“Do my hair like Bernie’s,” Ashley says, handing me a can of red hair dye. It’s the spray-on kind that only lasts for like, a day, but the girls are obsessed with it. My heart skips a beat at the sound of Bernie’s name, and my throat gets all tight and hot the way it does when I think about her. That’s how it’s always been for me, that physical manifestation of being separated.
I felt like this during sophomore year when I betrayed the love of my life, my best friend, and my favorite person in the whole goddamn world for all the right reasons. To give her a chance. To send her away from Prescott. From Havoc and all of our fucking violence.
And, like in the most fucked-up and horrible way possible, my prophecies and my fears and my worries all came true.
I take the end of Ashley’s chestnut-colored hair and lay it over the back of the chair she’s sitting on. There’s a towel covering the chair, too, keeping the fine red mist away from the furniture while I spray.
Thinking about Bernadette … about her being shot … about her dying … that kills me.
“Okay, all done,” I choke out, swiping a hand over my face as Ashley leaps up from the chair and races over to the mirror where Heather’s still scoping out her pink locks—a color she attributes to Penelope since, apparently, she personally despises it. I sit down heavily in one of the other chairs while we wait for Kara to finish piling on the bracelets from her extensive collection.
The sliding glass doors open behind me and Hael steps in.
Our eyes meet, and I wonder if he can’t sense what I’m thinking about. His guilt runs deep, but we all know that it wasn’t his fault. I’m not sure how long it’s going to take to convince him of that fact, but we’ll get there.
“You’re running like, seriously fucking late,” he says, looking around the house like he’s going to miss it. I will, too, in a strange way. But I’ll also be relieved to start fresh somewhere else. Anyway, we’ve got some time to kill beforehand. We don’t move for a couple of months. “Do you want me to drive? Since, you know, you drive like a fucking grandma.”
“Fuck you,” I fire back, toying with my phone for a minute. “We could probably get Wesley’s on the way back?” Even though we’ve graduated, and the diner is sort of a Prescott High hotspot, I think we can get away with going there indefinitely. After all, we’re Prescott royalty, aren’t we? “Do you want to see if everyone else is interested in going?”
