six
Harper Apple
Inside the house, I can hear people running, breaking shit, and yelling. A group of football guys is ripping the support beams down from the porch, trying to tear the whole thing off the house. There’s a giant crash that shakes the ground, and I turn to see part of the fountain rolling down the drive, water rushing across the ground after it. The front door swings open, bringing my attention back as I’m pushed inside with the flood of bodies. The house shakes with the footsteps of the stampeding herd. I dart out of the way of a falling light fixture and step into a living room, where a handful of guys are hurling a leather soft out through the picture windows.
Hysterical shrieking fills a side hallway, and I turn to see some guys carrying a blonde woman in a nightgown down the hall. “Lindsey,” she howls in terror, groping at the air.
“Come on,” Royal says, grabbing my hand and pulling me toward a set of winding stairs, the kind you see someone walk down in movies during the big prom scene. It’s a stairway for making an entrance—and we’re entering.
“Par-tay, par-tay,” shouts a chorus behind me, and I glance over my shoulder to see their whole crew behind us, pumping their fists.
“Time to break some shit,” Royal says, grabbing pictures off the wall on the stairs and turning to bash them against the banister. He hands some to me, and what can I say, I like breaking shit. For a minute, I get caught up in it, the sweeping hysteria of it, the gleeful demolition, the mob mentality. With a whoop, I lean over the railing to hurl the pictures at the floor. I’m sure these people have insurance, anyway, and ripping up a rich person’s house is a dream I never knew I had until this moment. I grab more pictures, smashing them on the railing and the floor below with abandon.
I’m about to hurl another one when I see a familiar face staring back at me from the frame.
Somehow, I didn’t put it together when I heard the woman screaming for her daughter. This is Lindsey Darling’s house—Faulkner High’s equivalent of Gloria Walton, the queen bee, the head cheerleader and student body president and perfect applicant to any Ivy League school. I went to school with her for the past two years, and though she’s never said a word to me, everyone loves her. She’s not a bitch like Gloria. She smiles at everyone, even me, when she passes in the hall.
But I don’t know her, and I’m swept up the stairs, and then I forget all about her. Royal drags me into a bedroom, turning to pull me into his arms. He kisses me hard on the mouth, and I kiss him back, clawing at his back, swept up in the mayhem. He pushes his thigh between mine, pressing his solid muscle against the softness between my thighs. At the same time, his hands cradle my body, one of them behind my head, his huge palm covering the back of my skull, and his other hand on my lower back, bringing me flush against him. The contact has me instantly breathless and wet with desire.
I open for him—my thighs, my lips, my fool heart. Angling my head, I slide my tongue over his, deepening the kiss, clinging to his shoulders and trusting him to support me, letting him bend me back with the force of the kiss, with all the need I can feel radiating from him. My own hurt and anger from the last week twines through the relief I feel at joining with him again, being absorbed back into his orbit so that, for a moment, I feel like part of something instead of outcast and alone. We don’t speak. We don’t need words. We only need each other, the one thing we can’t have.
The light blinks on, flooding the room and interrupting us as Baron and Duke charge in. “There’s time for that later,” Baron says, yanking at Royal as he passes.
Royal thrusts his tongue roughly against mine one more time, grinding his hips forward and flexing his quad against my hot center before slowly drawing away, leaving me breathless and throbbing with lust. Still cradling the back of my head in his huge palm, he pulls me forward and presses his forehead to mine. “To be continued,” he whispers against my wet lips.
“Destruction waits for no man,” Duke yells, ripping a Willow Heights pennant off the wall. He jumps onto the big bed, jumping up and down with a frenzied glaze to his eyes, like he’s not just having fun but intent on going balls to the wall until he crashes and burns. Baron has the same manic glee in his eyes as he runs to a trophy case on the far side of the huge room. He kicks the glass in, and it showers down around his feet. Reaching through the jagged shards left of the doors, he grabs out a tall football trophy and swings it like a baseball bat, smashing the glass case and sending more trophies tumbling to the floor.
“Don’t wreck the bed,” Royal says. “I want to fuck her on it later.”
Duke hops off and stumbles into an attached bathroom, and a second later, more glass shatters. I glance around at the bedroom, simple and clean with an air of disuse. Unlike Mabel’s bedroom, though, this one feels like someone lived here once, like he might come back. It has an impersonal but sophisticated masculine feel, although that’s quickly being pulled under by the havoc the twins are wreaking. Royal joins, ripping a huge piece of art off the wall above the dresser and smashing it on the floor.
“Let’s burn this fucker,” Duke yells, staggering out of the bathroom with a lighter in one hand.
“Like we did his face,” Baron says, with a huge grin that’s more than a little unhinged. “That’ll teach him to fuck with our cars.”
“You think he’s here?” Duke asks. “Where would a cockroach hide?”
He turns to me, and they all wait, like I have the answer. I want to tell them it would hide in plain sight, that I’m right in front of them. I know they’re not doing this just because I keyed their car, but that’s part of it. I let them believe it was someone else. And I’m standing here, knowing I’ll tell Mr. D everything they do to this house tonight. I’m the fucking cockroach.
“In the basement?” I say, because a cockroach doesn’t give itself away if it can help it.
Duke and Baron charge back out the way they came. I glance at Royal, but our moment is lost. He’s busy yanking out the drawers from the dressers and smashing them onto the frames. The urge to join the chaos disappeared with our passionate kiss. I turn and leave the room, suddenly feeling a little sick.
I hear a commotion down the hall, the echoes of cruel laughter I’ve heard way too often in my life. My mother, the Dolce boys, assholes at Faulkner… There’s a certain laugh that comes from a bully when they’ve cornered weaker prey and are caught up in the rush of destroying it.
I head that way and push through a group of people standing in another bedroom, outside an open closet door. Inside, at the back of a closet half the size of my bedroom, a little figure huddles against the back corner. She’s wearing a frilly pajama shirt and matching shorts, her face blotchy and tearstained, her fine blonde hair in disarray. I barely recognize her without a full face of makeup, heels, and her designer clothes. She looks plain and young and helpless without it.
“Y’all are heathens,” I say, shoving past Dawson and grabbing Lindsey under the arms.
She shrieks and cowers away from me, hyperventilating and blubbering at once. I slap her across the face, feeling the satisfying sting of my palm against her wet cheek. Never thought I’d slap the daughter of the founding fathers, but here I am. Desperate times.
Everyone cheers, but I didn’t do it for them. Lindsey sucks in a shocked gasp, and I haul her to her feet. “Let’s get you out of here,” I say, grabbing a trench coat from the section of jackets that’s as big as my entire wardrobe. I drag her out through the crowd of jeering Willow Heights students who boo me for ruining their fun but don’t dare contradict a Dolce girl. Outside the bedroom, I pause to wrap the jacket around Lindsey’s shoulders. “Most people here don’t even know who you are,” I say. “Get it together, and you can walk out the front door without anyone paying you any mind.”
She nods mutely, wiping snot off her nose and onto her sleeve without noticing.
“Good,” I say, and I grab her hand tightly in mine and drag her down the hallway and the stairs, even though she cringes every time we pass someone. No one’s here for her, though. They’re just here to dismantle her house piece by piece.
The living room is empty except for a rug and the sound system, which is blasting music. Someone is doing a keg stand, and a group of people dance in the shards of broken vases and the dirt from the smashed, potted plants. Lindsey starts sobbing, but I pull her past the living room, through the foyer, where more smashed pottery litters the floor and a crystal chandelier hangs sideways, dangling halfway to the floor.