Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,132

and a faint chuckle from Hael’s direction.

“The family that jacks it together stays together,” he says, and Victor lets out an annoyed groan, chucking a pillow in his direction as I open my eyes and Aaron rolls off to lie between me and Vic.

“Thank you,” I tell them, and the playful bickering ceases right away. Nobody asks what I’m saying thank you for—they know it isn’t as simple and stupid as me thanking them for performing a group masturbation. It’s because they love each other as much as they love me, and there’s nothing but death that could ever pull the six of us apart.

I manage to last two weeks at Oak Valley Prep before I give in to one of my many obsessions.

Pamela Pence.

Mother.

Murderer.

Sitting inside the county jail, I rest my elbows on the scratched surface of a small white table and wait for Pam to be brought in. Meanwhile, I tell myself that everything is okay when … none of it is, really. None of it.

She murdered Penelope, I tell myself, but despite holding onto that knowledge for over a month, I don’t believe it. Rather … I don’t want to believe it. My stepfather was the Thing, right? This awful, evil, barely human monster. It only makes sense that he would be the one to end my sister.

Yet …

Pamela sits down in front of me as I raise my gaze from the surface of the table, the fingers of my tattooed left hand tracing a word scratched deeply into the plastic. HAVOC, it says. Because I scratched it there just now, without any of the officers in the room noticing.

“Bernadette,” Pam says, smiling when she sees me. But not like she’s happy I’m there, more like she’s relishing the idea that I might be suffering. She must be able to see it in my face. “I’ve been telling that pretty young officer everything I know about your little gang.”

My turn to smile back. It isn’t easy, especially when I take in Pamela’s disheveled appearance. I’m so used to seeing her in designer clothing, flawless makeup, and coiffed hair that the person sitting in front of me might as well be a stranger. She looks younger this way, somehow. More vulnerable. I think again about her age-gap romance with my already married father.

“Were you and dad in love?” I ask, even though I could snarkily spit back that she doesn’t know shit about my ‘little gang’. I mean, that’d be true. She doesn’t. She doesn’t know a fucking thing about Havoc or me or even Heather—especially not Penelope. Nothing. Nothing at all. “I mean, he was married when you met, and so much older. That must’ve been hard.”

Pamela just stares back at me from emerald eyes, ones that I’m familiar with because I look in the goddamn mirror every single day and see her. The last name on my list. The very last motherfucking name.

“Are you an idiot, Bernadette?” is how she chooses to respond to that statement. She slams her hands down on the surface of the table and one of the guards calls out a warning. “I’m rotting in jail, and you’re here asking about me and your father?”

“You didn’t kill him, too, did you?” I ask, because as far as I know, my father hanged himself. Then again, until recently, I’d assumed my older sister had shoved a bottle of pills down her throat and ended things. Some tragedies are not what they appear. “Dad, I mean. The way you killed Penelope.”

The words come up like bile, tainting my mouth and making my tongue feel sour. I crave to hold the hand of a Havoc Boy, any Havoc Boy, any at all. If I could just do that, wrap my fingers with one of theirs, I could stay calm, the way I have for weeks since I found out.

Weeks of pushing this down, walling it off, acting like it isn’t real.

I grind my nail into the scratched surface of HAVOC on the table, just to keep my fingers from digging into Pam’s eyes the way I did to James’. My other hand, I use to prop up my chin, to keep up the act, the one that says I don’t care about any of this.

I’m just Bernadette Savannah Blackbird, bad bitch and gangbanger.

Only … that’s a pipe dream. I wish that I could be that girl all the time, that I never felt sad or insecure, confused or angry. Devastated. Shattered. Broken up and bleeding.