Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,177

have noticed the new girl. His friends, Aaron Fadler and Hael Harbin, are both gaping after her. They turn to each other with excited smiles because it isn’t often that a girl in such fancy clothes with such a wild looking frown shows up to torment them.

Cal is smiling and happy and excited because he wants to show this new girl how to dance. He loves teaching people that you can make art with your body, that when you dance, your very sad but sweet mother might just smile a little more than she frowns. He doesn’t know that the woman is actually his grandmother, a woman who killed her husband and forced her daughter to help dispose of the body. Cal doesn’t know that, right after he was born, his real mom tried to tell her story to the police and then his grandmother killed her, too. He doesn’t know how much she desperately wanted a son because she’s only ever had seven daughters, so she’ll lie to him and pretend like he is hers. One day, Callum will look at Aaron looking at Bernadette and Bernadette looking at Aaron and decide there’s no hope for him, so he may as well experiment with his dance partner. All the while, he’ll be thinking of Bernadette anyway.

Skinny and quiet and small, Oscar Montauk also notices the new kid, but even though the sight of her excites his curiosity, he also knows that nobody dressed that fancy would ever go to this school for very long. He reaches up to touch his freshly dyed hair, as black as the night, as black as his friend Victor Channing’s hair.

Oscar is also not used to this strange and wild place in south Prescott; he attended a prestigious boarding school until recently, one that he already misses because it means being away from the dark and hateful eyes of his father. For now, the family fortune is locked away from Oscar’s father by the hands of his own parent. His father will get it back, eventually, but it won’t last. Then, half a decade after this moment, that same father will strangle his wife and kids, but he will fail to fully finish off the last child. Whether that’s by accident or design, nobody will ever know, but the boy who he mistakenly thought was of his own seed will end up with his mother’s dead arms wrapped around his neck. He will be pushed into a shallow hole, but luckily, he will not end up buried as he comes to, feeling sick and dizzy and disoriented.

He will see his father put a gun to his own head, too drunk and distraught to finish burying his murdered family, and he will watch as the man pulls the trigger. Oscar Montauk will grow up hating touch and hating people and scowling at everything, but he will also fall in love with the girl who comes striding out the front doors of the school like she owns the place.

Her green eyes scan the crowd, briefly pausing on their little group. Can she tell with that intense stare of hers that the five boys have found each other because they all sense something in each other that’s rare in others: honesty. It draws them together like a moth to flames. Because even though later, almost ten years on, they will be bound by pain and by their intense love of the ashy-haired girl, that is not what binds them now.

Aaron lives at home with both parents, and even if his dad is a gambler and the occasional party-drug user, he doesn’t dislike his life. They’re poor and even though they live on the border of Fuller and Prescott, they know their son won’t fit in at the bourgeois middle-class school, so they send him here. Still, for now, he’s happy, and he will be even after he gets a little older and has to share his house with a baby sister. Even when his two-year-old cousin comes to live with him after her parents die in a car accident. He’ll be happy until his dad dies and his mom leaves, and he has to let go of the ashy-haired girl’s hand. Not forever, of course, but he will have to learn that when he takes it next, he’s sharing her with the other four people in his life that he loves so deeply and perfectly that he would jump in front of a bullet for any one