“There’s always the possibility of a bathroom break,” Oscar muses, tilting his head briefly from side to side to stretch his neck, eyes closing for a moment. “Unlikely but possible.”

I sigh and rub at my temples a bit, determined to come up with a plan the way I did for Mason Miller. Because all I really want is to prove myself to Havoc, prove to my boys that I deserve to wear that crown and that I belong. If only I can see something they don’t …

Hael passes out more scotch, and then we all drink until the sky is fully dark and our blood is warm and thick with alcohol. After nearly six hours of discussing strategy and studying the map, discussing risks and listening to Victor and Oscar bounce ideas off of each other, we give up and retire to the bedroom.

What we do in there, it’s not quite as magical and mysterious as what we did surrounded by candlelight. But there’s a lot of touching and fucking and it comes pretty goddamn close.

Havoc—All of Them

Ten years earlier …

The little girl with the ashy blond hair is dropped off at the curb by a woman in a salmon colored raincoat, her expensive shoes clacking across the debris strewn pavement as she digs her fingernails into the child’s arm.

For her part, the girl looks unaffected by this subtle violence, her emerald eyes so bright that little Callum Park’s pink mouth parts in surprise. His own eyes, a blue so perfect that sometimes the adults in his life get caught up in imagining that he could be a famous child actor or model or something, sparkle as the girl is dragged past him and up the front steps of a dilapidated building with asbestos issues and too much mold in the gym.

Callum turns back to his friends and finds that he isn’t the only one in their little group to have noticed the new girl. His friends, Aaron Fadler and Hael Harbin, are both gaping after her. They turn to each other with excited smiles because it isn’t often that a girl in such fancy clothes with such a wild looking frown shows up to torment them.

Cal is smiling and happy and excited because he wants to show this new girl how to dance. He loves teaching people that you can make art with your body, that when you dance, your very sad but sweet mother might just smile a little more than she frowns. He doesn’t know that the woman is actually his grandmother, a woman who killed her husband and forced her daughter to help dispose of the body. Cal doesn’t know that, right after he was born, his real mom tried to tell her story to the police and then his grandmother killed her, too. He doesn’t know how much she desperately wanted a son because she’s only ever had seven daughters, so she’ll lie to him and pretend like he is hers. One day, Callum will look at Aaron looking at Bernadette and Bernadette looking at Aaron and decide there’s no hope for him, so he may as well experiment with his dance partner. All the while, he’ll be thinking of Bernadette anyway.

Skinny and quiet and small, Oscar Montauk also notices the new kid, but even though the sight of her excites his curiosity, he also knows that nobody dressed that fancy would ever go to this school for very long. He reaches up to touch his freshly dyed hair, as black as the night, as black as his friend Victor Channing’s hair.

Oscar is also not used to this strange and wild place in south Prescott; he attended a prestigious boarding school until recently, one that he already misses because it means being away from the dark and hateful eyes of his father. For now, the family fortune is locked away from Oscar’s father by the hands of his own parent. His father will get it back, eventually, but it won’t last. Then, half a decade after this moment, that same father will strangle his wife and kids, but he will fail to fully finish off the last child. Whether that’s by accident or design, nobody will ever know, but the boy who he mistakenly thought was of his own seed will end up with his mother’s dead arms wrapped around his neck. He will be pushed into a shallow hole, but luckily, he will not end up buried as he comes to, feeling sick and dizzy and disoriented.

He will see his father put a gun to his own head, too drunk and distraught to finish burying his murdered family, and he will watch as the man pulls the trigger. Oscar Montauk will grow up hating touch and hating people and scowling at everything, but he will also fall in love with the girl who comes striding out the front doors of the school like she owns the place.

Her green eyes scan the crowd, briefly pausing on their little group. Can she tell with that intense stare of hers that the five boys have found each other because they all sense something in each other that’s rare in others: honesty. It draws them together like a moth to flames. Because even though later, almost ten years on, they will be bound by pain and by their intense love of the ashy-haired girl, that is not what binds them now.

Aaron lives at home with both parents, and even if his dad is a gambler and the occasional party-drug user, he doesn’t dislike his life. They’re poor and even though they live on the border of Fuller and Prescott, they know their son won’t fit in at the bourgeois middle-class school, so they send him here. Still, for now, he’s happy, and he will be even after he gets a little older and has to share his house with a baby sister. Even when his two-year-old cousin comes to live with him after her parents die in a car accident. He’ll be happy until his dad dies and his mom leaves, and he has to let go of the ashy-haired girl’s hand. Not forever, of course, but he will have to learn that when he takes it next, he’s sharing her with the other four people in his life that he loves so deeply and perfectly that he would jump in front of a bullet for any one of them.

Aaron can’t seem to resist reaching down to squeeze Hael Harbin’s sweaty little hand. They both like new kids because new kids mean new opportunities. Hael is a bit nervous today because his father is acting weird, even weirder than usual, and last week, when he hit his mom—which wasn’t anything new at all—blood spurted everywhere and then she laid on the ground and cried while his father grunted on top of her. Hael doesn’t like that. The sight of all that pain and grunting makes him physically ill and he throws up a lot.

Still, when the ashy-haired girl comes down the steps and pauses in the courtyard, her eyes desperately flicking to the front gate as if she thinks she might take off down the sidewalk and escape this run-down nightmare forever, Hael can’t help himself. He feels hope. He wants to make a new friend. Eventually, he’ll fall so deeply in love with this girl that he’ll take anyone he can to bed, just so he can close his eyes and for a few brief moments actually fantasize that she remembers his name.

Victor Channing is the strangest one of them all, and the one who—in this very moment—is the one with the most pain. His mother hits him across the mouth if he spills a drip of soda on his shirt or gets crumbs on his pants. She yanks him around the way this new girl’s mother does, leaving them both with bloody crescents. Sometimes, his mom even takes him to fancy parties and parades him around like either a trophy or a cheap thrill for sale, he isn’t sure. What he does know is that when she hands him off to his ‘uncles’, bad things happen, things that make him crouch in his closet in the dark with his hands pressed over his ears and his sobs drowning out the darkness of his thoughts.

Victor—or as the other boys call him, Vic, because Victor is just too much work to say—finally catches the eye of the ashy-haired girl and something passes between them, something that can’t be described or explained but which is sought after by every poet and every artist and every musician who has ever composed since the beginning of time.