Devils' Day Party: A High School Bully Romance - C.M. Stunich Page 0,78

don't stop until tears are bleeding down both our faces. It takes Luke a second to realize mine are real, and she curses, dumping her book bag on the floor and grabbing a small container of hand sanitizer. Luke's always joking that if a pandemic occurred, toilet paper and sanitizer would be the first items to go, that they'd be used as currency in place of money. She has a small hoarded stash back at her dorm room.

After she cleans her hands, she throws her arms around me and hugs me close.

“Sonja tried to act like she was playing me today, but do you really think even a monster like her would spend a whole year courting me in private for such a stupid joke?”

“I …” I start, unsure of where, exactly, she's going with this. “What does that have to do with Calix? He very clearly doesn't care about me. Do you know what I did this morning to make him so mad? I kissed him and asked him if he liked me. That's it. That's what brought me here.” I don't feel like re-explaining the time loop to Luke, so I don't.

She smiles at me, sitting back on her ass on the hardwood floor.

“Of course that pissed him off. He very clearly can't handle rejection or the disappointment of others. Kissing him like that … he'd have to think you were bullshitting him. That, or he was worried about what would happen when Raz and Barron saw you.”

Raz … My heart skips a beat and I feel suddenly choked up. The intimacy between us yesterday was like stained glass, perfect and beautiful, but so easy to break.

“They set you up the same way they set me up,” I say, hating how much I want Luke to be right. “Sonja recorded you two together; she tried to get you to say those fucked-up things to me.”

“She's as broken as the rest of them. They might be friends, but they're not like us. They think their vulnerabilities make them weak. Instead, what they don't realize, is showing another human your flaws and your imperfections, your dreams and desires, that's true strength.”

My eyes fill with tears again.

“I love you, Luke. I don't say it enough, but it's true. I don't know what I'd do without you.”

“Same girl, same,” she says, sitting up enough to wrap her arms around my waist. “I love you, too. Now, how the hell do we get out of here?”

The answer to Luke's question is: we don't.

Even after she gets up the guts to break one of the windows, the plywood is impossible to get loose. It must be screwed in in multiple places.

“This fucking sucks,” she groans as the night sky gets dark, and we both hear the beginning notes of the metal band that the Knight Crew invited to play. “Hopefully April stays home tonight. I don't like the idea of her going to the Devils' Day Party without us.”

“As monstrous as our classmates are, they seem to draw the line at hurting a pregnant woman,” I say, leaving out the little detail about how we were all locked inside the mouth of the Devils’ Den once upon a time.

“I suppose,” Luke hazards, and we both pause at the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Heavy footsteps. “That's not April …” she says, standing up and grabbing a heavy book from one of the low shelves. They decorate the rounded walls of the tiny single room cabin with its airplane-sized attached bathroom, but there’s little on them to use as a weapon. I decide on a round glass bauble, figuring I could hit any would-be attacker in the temple with it. On the plus side, if I do die here tonight, I’ll just wake up at the gas station tomorrow. No big deal.

Only … it sort of is, isn’t it?

The padlock on the door hits the deck outside, the sound of metal on wood making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. If this is the Knight Crew, dressed in masks and bullshit, come to drag us into the woods, then I'm going to fight back.

The door swings open, Barron leaning his shoulder against the jamb, a small key dangling from his right hand. He's wearing a different mask today, one I've never seen before.

A butterfly mask

A Diana fritillary butterfly mask, in orange and black. He has on the same strange white coat, exposing his chest and all of his