“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?”

“Roger that,” Hael says, slipping back outside to the smell of weed. It’s our own strain—Havoc at Prescott High—and it’s fucking delicious. I’d smoke some if I wasn’t about to drive three little girls to a party.

My mouth softens, thinking about Bernadette in her pink and white Cadillac Eldorado, hair billowing in the wind. I exhale sharply just before the back door opens and Hael reemerges with Victor, Callum, and Oscar at his back.

“If you’re all going to Wesley’s, then I’m going,” is what Vic says as he breezes past, and I sigh. We’re out of the woods as far as the GMP goes—at least that’s how it appears with their infighting and power struggles up in Portland—and we’re not being tailed by the VGTF anymore, but Vic is a good leader and he keeps us on our toes, reminds us that we need caution around every corner.

Especially after what happened to Bernie.

Pain seizes me, and I have to brace myself on the table to remember how to breathe. Bernie, lying prone on the ground, bloody bubbles at her lips, the surgeon coming out and removing the mask from her face …

I look back up as Ashley grabs onto my arm.

“Let’s go!” she whines as Oscar gives her a patronizing look and Cal shrugs into a hoodie. Even if Vic is taking his bike, we’ll need at least the Bronco and the Camaro. Or, I guess, we could take the Caddy …

“Alright, alright.” I encourage Kara and Ashley out the front door and then pause beside Heather as she checks her hair in the mirror one last time. A smile teases the edges of my mouth, made out of bitterness mixed with joy. How can things be so bad one minute, and then so good the next? How could Bernadette have been shot? How could she have died?

I exhale again, squeezing my hands into fists at my sides and then forcing myself to relax them.

“You ready now?” I ask as Heather finally turns back to me. She nods, and I shoo her ass right out the door, too, heading up the stairs to open the door to my bedroom—a place so inextricably entwined with memories of Bernadette that I could never see it and not think of her.

Never.

Not in a million years …

Bernadette Blackbird

Graduation day …

There are so many ways to end a story like mine. If I were to try, I would do it like this.

Born of vengeance and hardened by hate

Every act of revenge a cry for love

Desperate to keep believing

Kisses that scorch my skin and leave forever marks

A desperate sort of havoc, a broken chaos, a mayhem that crawls beneath your skin and makes you bleed

Anarchy that ensues inside a twisted heart

Only true victory comes with acceptance and mournful goodbyes

Only true victory comes with love

I die that day. I do. Hard for me to believe it, too. Especially the peaceful part. Because after everything I’ve been through, I assumed that when I finally lost control of my body, I would find myself on a rapid descent to some sort of hellish existence. Instead, all I feel is joy because I made those last few moments count. I smile because I know my boys are there with me. It seems too soon to say goodbye, but some part of me understands that I’ll see them again, somewhere, sometime, someplace.

Because love like ours doesn’t die along with a body.

You really think Havoc’s love is so fragile?

Fuck no.

So when the doctors—this beyond brilliant group of women at Joseph General that I never gave proper credit to—get my heart to start beating properly again, I come to with a sharp shock of recognition. This, Bernadette, this is where you’re meant to be right now.

My eyes roll in my head, and the people around me are blurry enough that they may as well be angels.