Once, all I’d wanted was to go out at night. I would have given anything for a simple moonlit stroll. Arm? Leg? Why not my soul?
Now? Even the thought terrified me.
“She’ll definitely be there,” Kat said. “I’ll make sure of it. Now, get, get. Ali and I need private time to catch up.” She kissed each girl on the cheek and sent them all on their ways before returning her attention to me. “So, you received your schedule, yes?”
I ignored the fact that she had just guaranteed my party attendance. No reason to hurt her feelings with a belligerent (and childish) never, ever, you can’t make me go! “Yes.” Having memorized the blocks, I rattled off my classes and prayed we had at least one together.
“Rock on! We’ll have lunch and last block to plan our takeover attempt on the school. I’ve already decided. Me and my girls are ruling. Now, I’ll walk you to first period. You’re two buildings over so it’s gonna be a hike.”
“Are you over there, too?”
“Nah. I’m here.” She hitched her thumb at the door only a few feet away.
I glanced at the clock at the far end of the hall. We had six minutes until the tardy bell rang. “Won’t you be late to your own class?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry.” Grinning that sly little grin of hers, she twined her arm through mine. “This is my humanitarian deed of the day. Besides, you’ll owe me. And yes, I always collect. Ask anyone. There’s not a single person in this school who doesn’t owe me a favor. True story.”
As tiny as she was, she had no problem pushing her way through the crowds, telling people off or flipping them off when they did or said something she didn’t like. But she kept up a steady chatter with me, telling me everything I “needed to know to survive.”
“She’s a skank. He’s a player. He’s cute but almost OD’d last year, so he’s a bad bet. She’s a two-faced, lying, cheating witch. That’s right, Trina, I’m talking to you,” she shouted. “By the way,” she added just for me, “Trina cusses, which means cussing is trashy, which means my golden rule is to never cuss. I have class. Unlike Trina, the skank of Birmingham.” That last part was, of course, shouted.
I half expected the pretty but, well, somewhat masculine Trina to fly across the hall and introduce Kat’s teeth to her fist, but Trina just fronted and moved on with a glare that promised vengeance.
O-kay. New note to self: never mess with Trina. Her tank was regulation, but still managed to show off her muscular arms and tats. Her hair was chopped to just below her ears, and there were scars stretching across the back of her neck. Like, scars that resembled teeth marks.
And I really needed to stop rubbernecking, or I’d paralyze myself.
“He’s gay but in denial,” Kat continued, as though nothing had happened, “so just a heads-up not to try and tap that. Now his friend over there is loaded, but he’s a total douche. Oh, and she’s so snotty you’ll need Kleenex just to talk to her. Actually, just pretend that entire group has the plague, and you’ll be the better for it. She’s not bad. He’s—crap!” She ground to a stop, forcing me to do the same. “Laugh like I just said something amazingly hilarious.”
Laugh? Seriously? Did I even remember how?
She slapped my arm and whispered fiercely, “Laugh!”
Okay, so I forced out a laugh. I’m embarrassed to admit I sounded like a frog had jumped into my throat and played bongos on my voice box. Even Kat was horrified, her mouth hanging open so wide that I could see her tonsils.
She recovered quickly and tossed her hair over her shoulder, throwing off her own magical laugh. It was like an angel played the harp on top of a rainbow. So not fair!
“Why are we doing this?” I asked quietly.
“Don’t look now, but that’s my ex over there.”
Surely I’m not the only one who takes “don’t look now” as “there’s no better time than now.” I looked.
“Bad Ali!” Another slap to my arm. “Bad, bad, bad Ali! Have you no self-control?”
“Sorry.” I rubbed away the sting. Did I stop looking, though? No. I stared. Hard.
To the right of us was a group of eight boys. If I’d ever needed a visual definition of serial criminal, I now had one (or eight). They were tall, all of them, and they were stacked with muscle. Most sported tattoos on their arms and piercings on their faces. A few wore chains around their waists, as if the metal links were belts, but on those bodies they could only be weapons.
Proof: two of them had house-arrest anklets on display over their dirt-caked boots.
They were shoving one another, laughing and punching each other on the arms. One of them even rubbed his fist into another’s hair, holding the guy by the waist and forcing him to stay hunched over and take the abuse while others pointed and called him the worst kind of names.
“There used to be more of them,” Kat said. “Two died last year from some disease that turns your blood into a toxic sludge, basically causing you to rot from the inside out. It’s not contagious or anything like that, or so the proverbial ‘they’ say—pamphlets were sent out to all the students because everyone was totally panicking—but it’s weird that two guys got it at the same time, you know.”
I caught a note of…something in her voice. “Did you know them?”
“Yeah, and I thought I’d cry forever. And this might be horrible to say, but I’m kinda glad they went together. They were best friends and you never saw one without the other. And wow, this little chat became morbid. My apologies.”
“No worries,” I said—even though I was worried. I never wanted to think about death and blood again, much less talk about them. “So which one is yours?” I asked, changing the subject back to the living boys.
She snorted with disgust. “The blond, and he was mine. Was. He’s not anymore and won’t ever be again.”
I scanned the crowd. Two were black, one had a shaved head, two were brunettes, one had jet-black hair and two were blond. I wanted to look over the blonds, I really did, but once I spotted the one with hair so black it was almost blue, I was stuck.
He wore a bright red baseball cap. There was writing in the center, but I couldn’t make out the words. He was the only one not horsing around. With his back pressed into the lockers and his arms folded over his chest, he watched his friends with lazy amusement.
He was gorgeous, and I absolutely, no question, had to be drooling. After a quick and hopefully stealthy check—big shock, I wasn’t!—I found myself wondering what color his eyes were. Brown maybe. Or even hazel. Either way…wow, just wow. Deer? Headlights? Hi, I’m Ali.
“Yo, Kitty Kat,” someone called. I forced myself to stop staring at Red Hat and glanced—at one of the blonds. “Come over here and give me a proper hello. You know you want to.”
“What I want is for you to go to hell,” she called back.
“Aw, come on. Don’t be that way, baby.” He was the taller of the blonds, with cold brown eyes and a face that would have made the devil hide in a shadowed corner, sucking his thumb and crying for his mommy. Even though I couldn’t imagine him winning a girl like Kat, I could imagine him cheating. He had to be the ex. “You love me, ’cause you just can’t help yourself.”
“I hope Rina gave you an STD.”
The boys around him snickered, and the fact that he maintained his grin—rather than murdering Kat—surprised me.
“That’s harsh, baby. I was just teasing when I called you by her name.”
“Both times?”
Yep. The ex. Sooo Trina the “two-faced, lying, cheating witch” had to be the very same Rina he’d messed around with over summer break. And, honestly? That totally blew my mind. Kat was one of the prettiest, most feminine girls I’d ever met, while that Trina person was hard-core.