“Put that shit on a ninety-nine cent Valentines card. You could make real money.”
“Keep playing you didn’t feel it, too,” she says. “But y’all broke a lot of hearts when you broke up, not just your own. Everyone figured you’d get back together after spring break.”
“What’s your point?” I snap. I don’t need a fucking lecture about how much I disappointed everyone. She can add it to my fucking tab for all the times I fucked up and pissed off everyone who matters.
“My point is, even if Harper was devastated beyond repair, she’s not the kind of chick who would let a breakup destroy her. She’s stronger than that. You may be irreplaceable even to her, but you’re still a boy. And it would take more than one boy to break Harper.”
Maybe not one boy. But one boy who shared her with two more against her will? A broken hand and a rope she couldn’t get free of, a swamp full of snakes more poisonous than her?
Yeah. That could do it.
“Then it obviously had nothing to do with me,” I say. “Maybe she got hooked on Lady Alice or Pearl Lady or whatever the fuck they’re calling it now, and she’s selling herself to pay for it like a regular junkie. Hell, her mom basically said as much.”
“It did blow up the scene right around that time…” Gloria muses.
“Maybe she’ll tell you for the right price,” I say flatly. “That’s all she’s ever cared about.”
“Royal…”
“What?”
“Look, I don’t know everything that went down between you, but I know what it’s like to walk away from love. Just because you did the breaking up doesn’t mean your heart wasn’t decimated, too.”
My laugh is brittle, like stepping on glass. “You’re funny, Lo.”
I could ask her, just come right out and be blunt, like King.
Did you tell Harper about the Hockington?
But I can’t acknowledge that much aloud. The hotel is its own world. When we leave, we don’t mention what goes on there. I don’t tell the school that Gloria is a scholarship kid. I elevate her, take her to prom, win her crowns. And she never tells anyone that I get a room there every few months.
Would she risk telling someone, knowing she could lose it all?
Even if she hated me, she loves her status too much to risk it.
What would make her turn on me like that? Harper didn’t tell that creep where she found out the information. But it has to be Lo. No one else knows.
So, I hang up the phone, letting her think this is about a breakup. That it’s not about a murder, not about a girl coming back from the dead, a ghost dragging her broken body from the swamp and crawling back into my brain to fuck with it even more.
I open my email, the one connected to theOnlyWordsandOnlyPicsapps by default because it’s all made by the same company. I barely remember thumbing away the automatic notifications I got when someone sent me a message this summer. I ignored them all, knowing they were porn spam. My chest is hollow as I open one from my spam folder.
It tells me I have twenty-four new messages onOnlyPics. I follow the link and open my direct messages. The first one is a thumbnail of a video, sent this evening. If it’s from Harper, she changed her handle fromBadApple.For a few seconds, all I see is a closeup of part of her tattoo. I take it in, examining it until I realize it’s her hip crease, and pressed along the back of her thigh, an expanse of pale skin. It takes me a minute to make sense of what I’m seeing. Whoever she’s fucking, he’s got her folded in half like her legs are over his shoulders while he nails her into the bed.
There’s no caption, and there are no words even on the messenger, so I have to click on the profile to find an explanation.
Apple Cream Pie, $1k/min.
Time seems to skip. Some caveman part of me must take over, because the next thing I know it’s five minutes later, and I’m five thousand dollars lighter, and I’m slamming my phone against the top of the steering wheel over and over. I feel it crunch and snap, but I keep pounding it until there’s nothing left in my hand, and the pieces of it are scattered across my lap and the floor.
Time skips again. I’m in my driveway at home. Blood is dripping down the steering wheel and into my lap. I open my hand and find pieces of glass jutting from my palm in a dozen places. And all I think about is that day my car was bombed, and Harper tried to pick the glass from my face with her tiny, careful fingers.
I climb out of the car. There’s a black Jaguar parked on the gravel, a tall figure leaning against it. I walk up to him. Something in me seems to have been knocked loose, and I think I might fucking kill him, even though it’s just Oliver Finnegan, who never goes inside. He doesn’t approve of the family business.
“Hullo, Royal,” he says, his Irish accent distorting the words. Or maybe it’s the ringing in my ears. “Am I in your spot? I can move the car.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
He cocks his head, his weird, pale eyes taking in the blood on my pants, my hand. “You alright, mate?”