Sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake, if we should have just dealt with our problem on our own. After we avenged our mother, Lennox had no interest in defending the Skull’s turf. Even after we formed the Murder of Crows, he’s not keen on riding along when someone’s stupid enough to disrespect our crew. He’s more interested in building our local community and organizing the Skulls than tearing anything or anyone down. Sometimes even I forget how well our crew name fits his dark side.
Sometimes I forget he has one.
five
#1 on the Billboard Chart:
“I’ll Be Missing You”—Puff Daddy & Faith Evans
Rae West
“Hola, chica,” calls Lexi, a girl who came over to help scrub the pool clean a few weeks ago. “You excited about the party?”
She sits smoking on a woven plastic lounge chair in the neighbor’s front yard, wearing a baggy T-shirt and jeans despite the sweltering heat. Her shiny dark blonde hair hangs in two loops on the sides of her head, and a half-smoked cigarette dangles casually from her fingers.
Even though I want to pretend I didn’t hear, I slowly make my way over. I’ve just returned from a run, and the last thing I want to think about is the horrible thing she just said. But she helped clean the pool for no reason other than Billy is her cousin and she apparently had nothing better to do that day, so I don’t want to be a bitch.
“What party?” I ask, careful to keep my voice even.
Sweat clings to me like a sodden blanket, and I want to go take a cold shower and talk to my crow, not deal with what is clearly a total emergency. Even in running shorts and a baby tee, I feel grimy with the heat that doesn’t seem to bother Lexi in the slightest.
“The party at your house,” she says, like I’m missing something obvious. “Tomorrow night?”
I grit my teeth and glare at the house next door, but my heart is hammering wildly.
I close my eyes and squeeze my hands into fists, fighting to keep my composure. “There’s no party.”
“Try telling Lenny that,” she says, puffing on her cigarette. “He told the whole neighborhood and all his friends.”
He didn’t.
He couldn’t have. Surely…
My nails bite into my palm as my mind races over the conversations I’ve had with Lennox over the past few weeks as we got the pool ready. The crew finished filling it the other day, and it’s now as close to the Beverly Hills version as an old pool in a rundown neighborhood can get. There are still cracked tiles around it, the grout between them stained brown, but we scrubbed down the entire inside of the pool and the area around it. We don’t have chairs or umbrellas or anything fancy, but it still makes me feel like the richest girl in the world when I step out my back door and see a sparkling blue pool.
I’d be more than happy to share the pool with all the people who came to help, thanks to the North brothers next door. It’s the least I could do to thank them. But I know Lee wouldn’t see it that way. He’d say no one asked them to do that or promised them any payment, and if they made the stupid decision to work for free, that’s their bad.
But I’m the one who will pay.
“And who exactly is coming to this party?” I ask.
“Oh, you know,” she says. “All the Crows, a few of their friends…”
“The who?”
“The Crows,” she says, like that’s something I should know. “You know. Mill Street’s crew—the Murder of Crows. The guys are all in it, plus some of the girls in their area…”
“Their gang,” I clarify.
“The Skull and Crossbones is a gang,” she says. “They’re just a little street crew.”
“That’s part of the bigger gang.”
She shrugs. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
“And they thought it would be a good idea to have a pool party at a policeman’s house?” I ask, not quite believing they could be that ballsy.
“It’s not like they’re going to hotwire his cruiser and do a drive-by in it,” she says, rolling her eyes. “They’re basically normal guys. They’re just… Closer than other guys.”