Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys #5) - C.M. Stunich Page 0,178

of them.

Aaron can’t seem to resist reaching down to squeeze Hael Harbin’s sweaty little hand. They both like new kids because new kids mean new opportunities. Hael is a bit nervous today because his father is acting weird, even weirder than usual, and last week, when he hit his mom—which wasn’t anything new at all—blood spurted everywhere and then she laid on the ground and cried while his father grunted on top of her. Hael doesn’t like that. The sight of all that pain and grunting makes him physically ill and he throws up a lot.

Still, when the ashy-haired girl comes down the steps and pauses in the courtyard, her eyes desperately flicking to the front gate as if she thinks she might take off down the sidewalk and escape this run-down nightmare forever, Hael can’t help himself. He feels hope. He wants to make a new friend. Eventually, he’ll fall so deeply in love with this girl that he’ll take anyone he can to bed, just so he can close his eyes and for a few brief moments actually fantasize that she remembers his name.

Victor Channing is the strangest one of them all, and the one who—in this very moment—is the one with the most pain. His mother hits him across the mouth if he spills a drip of soda on his shirt or gets crumbs on his pants. She yanks him around the way this new girl’s mother does, leaving them both with bloody crescents. Sometimes, his mom even takes him to fancy parties and parades him around like either a trophy or a cheap thrill for sale, he isn’t sure. What he does know is that when she hands him off to his ‘uncles’, bad things happen, things that make him crouch in his closet in the dark with his hands pressed over his ears and his sobs drowning out the darkness of his thoughts.

Victor—or as the other boys call him, Vic, because Victor is just too much work to say—finally catches the eye of the ashy-haired girl and something passes between them, something that can’t be described or explained but which is sought after by every poet and every artist and every musician who has ever composed since the beginning of time.

They are the first to realize that soul mates exist, and that they embody that ideal. That Bernadette Savannah Blackbird is connected to each and every one of them, but that they’re also connected to each other. Hael is connected to Aaron who’s connected to Victor who’s connected to Oscar who’s connected to Callum, and Bernadette is connected to them all, the center of the circle, the beating heart where all the blood flows.

Bernadette stares back at Victor and tries to pretend like she doesn’t see him staring at her like an endgame boss, the final line in a poem, or the epic last words of your favorite movie. She tosses her hair the way the snooty girls at her old school did, but while she can hair flip with the best of them, she isn’t snooty. Actually, she’s really sad, even with that other girl by her side, the one that none of the other boys noticed until just now. Because that other girl, she’s practically a ghost, quiet and stone-faced because she’s just met her stepfather and he, along with her mother, will orchestrate a sharp and violent end to her story.

Penelope Blackbird gazes over at her sister and then flicks her attention to the group of boys. Somehow, she knows as soon as she sees them that she won’t be around forever and that her sister will need someone on her side if Pen can’t be there to do it. She doesn’t know why she thinks any of those things, but she releases her sister’s hand and backs away, turning to a group of girls near the only nice tree in the front courtyard of the school which is all cement but which is also the only place for them to play.

Pen won’t make it to find her happily ever after, not in this life, but she’s the true protagonist of the story. Even with her voice silenced, she found someone to tell it. And, in her next incarnation, she is going to thrive. The universe demands it.

Bernie frowns at the boys as the wind picks up pieces of her pretty hair and tosses it around her face. She sweeps some of it back, still staring at Victor, and feeling her entire