Danny Ensbrook lying on the floor in a puddle of blood. Penelope screaming beneath the Thing. Kali laughing as she slipped into my stolen homecoming dress.

I think if gentle hands hadn’t grabbed me from behind, I might’ve killed her then.

“That’s enough, Bernadette,” a dark voice whispers in my ear, and then I’m overwhelmed with the smell of Callum’s aftershave. It’s a hard scent to describe, like private exchanges behind closed doors and pillow talk on a rainy morning.

I gasp like I’m coming to, releasing Kali’s hair as he hauls me backward, enveloping me in those strong arms of his.

“I’ve got you, Bernie,” Cal whispers, squeezing me tight, his head bent over mine, the hood of his sweatshirt hiding us from the world. “I’ve got you.” He holds me tighter than I’d ever imagine to be comfortable, but there’s something soothing about it. I feel my rage melting away, logic trickling back into my clouded vision.

Kali is on the ground, covered in blood and groaning.

Callum leaves her there, taking me by the hand and pulling me down the hall to the boys’ bathroom. He sits me down on the closed lid of the toilet and gathers up a wad of paper towels, letting the water in the old sinks run hot before he gets them damp.

“I can’t believe I just did that,” I say, my voice colored with dark wonder. Cal crouches in front of me, smiling tightly as he reaches out and takes my hand in his, carefully brushing aside Kali’s blood spatters.

“I can,” he says, voice gravelly and broken, but beautiful anyway, like a shattered tombstone on a sunny day. It’s a little sad, but the sun is warm, and the view is right. “Because I’ve been there. Remember how I told you that I almost killed the boys that did this to me?” He points to the scars on his neck. “You’re drowning in your own pain, Bernadette.” Callum swipes the wet paper towels across my face, and they come away red with blood. I must’ve gotten Kali even worse than I thought. “You need to learn to swim before you try to push someone else’s head under.”

I scowl at him, turning my head to look at the graffiti scratched across the walls of the bathroom stall. There are things written there that I’d never dare repeat. Boys are fucking gross sometimes. I wonder how many times my name has been scribbled across these walls? Looking now, I see nothing, and I just know deep down that Havoc had something to do with that.

“What happened to the boys that gave you your scars?” I ask mildly, because while Callum said Vic saved him, taught him how to seek revenge the right way … what is the right way? Castrating someone and carving the word Rapist into their face?

“They’ll never walk again,” Cal says, nodding his chin briefly before standing up. “They took my dreams away from me, so I took theirs, too.” He smiles again, and the sight of it gives me the chills.

“About the other day …” I start, because we can’t just forget that we almost had sex at the studio. I certainly can’t forget that out of all the boys, I chose to run to him. What the fuck does that even mean?

“It either means nothing,” Cal starts, shaking his head slightly. He reaches up to push his hood back, revealing that pretty blond hair of his. “Or it means everything. We don’t have to talk about it. Just decide what it is that you want.”

Callum turns away, flushes the paper towels down the toilet in the next stall over—likely to hide the evidence—and then disappears out the door.

I stay in the boys’ bathroom, crouched on the seat of the toilet in a locked stall, until lunch rolls around.

Nobody bothers me, and that’s just the way I like it.

There's not a goddamn student at Prescott High who isn't aware of our little war with the Charter Crew. I can feel their eyes following me as I walk down the halls, and it would be impossible to miss all of the money changing hands as students place their bets.

I just hope everyone who bets against us knows they’re placing their eggs in the wrong basket.

“This is not the senior year I signed up for,” Hael says, leaning back on the front steps as Callum sips a Pepsi, his hood flipped up over his blond hair again. The conversation stops as soon as I come out the door, taking a seat next to Oscar because, let's be honest, knowing that he hates me means we have the easiest relationship out of everyone here. We know what we want—and don't want—from one another.

He stares at me like I’m some sort of diseased slag, and I curl my lip his direction.

“This isn't the senior year I was expecting either,” I quip, giving Vic a sideways look. He laughs at me, making me bristle. How fucking dare he. After what he said to me the other night, I oughta dump his entire soda on his head and then curb stomp his balls. “My question is: what are we going to do about it? Vaughn is here, like nothing happened. That's as much a slap to our authority as Mitch and his buddies.”

I glance briefly at Callum, but he isn’t looking at me, and it’s quite clear from Victor’s lack of violent rage that he doesn’t know about Kali yet. Surprisingly enough, she hasn’t narked on me either. Likely, she won’t. It’d put her new crew at too much risk. The shitty part for me is, I will have to tell Vic at some point.

Just … maybe not right this second.

“So it's our authority, now is it?” Vic asks, and Aaron throws him a goddamn death glare.

“Lay off of her,” he growls, and the tension—and the testosterone—ramps up to dangerous levels. I probably shouldn't have gone after Aaron the way I did. It's turned an already messy situation into a filthy one. “Bernadette deserves better than that, after the way we've treated her.”

“After the way we've treated her?” Oscar echoes, the lenses of his glasses flashing as he lifts his gaze up from the surface of his iPad. Apparently, nobody's going to mention the one that I threw against the wall. “How, exactly, are we treating her, Aaron?”

“You know what I mean,” Aaron says, not looking at me. He's just staring across the street at the row of modest suburban houses. You can tell by the aged siding and the sagging roofs that even the homeowners who do care about their homes are limited by funds. Makes me think of the assholes in the Oak Park neighborhood with their luxury cars and soaring mansions, and I scowl. “The video. The thing with Kali. Everything.”

Aaron turns to look at me, his green-gold gaze cutting right through me as he furrows his brow. Are we going to talk about what happened on the couch? Are we going to talk about the fact that I said I still loved him? Looking at him right now, my heart breaks all over again, and I feel a lump forming in my throat. The day he broke up with me, I thought I would die. I truly and utterly believed that my broken heart would kill me. Somehow, I managed to patch it together and keep going, but the patchwork quilt of my soul is not the same as it was then. Aaron isn't the same either, not even remotely. I'm not even sure if it's possible for us to bridge the gap between us.

“I don't see the problem; you were shown the video. Is your problem then that you just weren't shown it sooner?” Oscar asks, his voice a derisive slight that I do my best to ignore. Kneeing him in the balls and wrapping my hands around his throat at Vic's house is one thing, but I can't do it here, especially not with things the way they are.