the chair skidding on the old carpet beneath my heels.
“Is this the part where you give me a trophy for trying my best?” I say, cocking a brow and knowing I’m essentially spitting in the face of someone who’s been nothing but nice to me. But I’ve had people be ‘nice’ before, and then turn around and destroy my life, people like Principal Vaughn and Donald Asher, my foster brother, that social worker …
“Bernadette …” Ms. Keating starts as I begin to cough, hacking and choking and leaning on the edge of her desk in an Oscar-worthy performance. “Do you need some water?” she asks me, standing up and rubbing my back in a small circle with her hand. “I’ll get you some water.”
She grabs a plastic cup off a stack on the sideboard and pops into the hallway to fill it from the fountain. We hardly have anything as fancy as water bottles or coolers here at Prescott.
While Ms. Keating’s in the hall, I move around the edge of her desk and grab the box. The window’s open, and it’s big enough for me to slip right out of.
Before she’s even finished filling the cup, I’m sprinting down the length of the building and around the corner, heading toward the basketball courts and the hole in the fence. I manage to slip through unseen, but I don’t stop running until I’m standing next to Hael’s car.
Sitting down, I pull out one page after another in that box until I find my statement, scribbled in wavy pencil down a lined sheet of paper.
They’re making my life a living hell. I’m scared to come to school. I’m scared to go home.
I stare at it for a moment, but it’s too much, so I tuck it away and hit the rest of the box. I’m not the first student to have reported Havoc to the principal, but just like with my report, most of them have been filed away and forgotten. Prescott High’s lacking in funds, so I bet these are the only copies of the reports. There’s not going to be anything scanned into the computer system, or any complaints filed via an online system we don’t have. Like I said, we may as well be nineties kids over here.
Flipping through page after page of incident reports and complaints from students, I know there’s enough ammo in here for Ms. Keating to suspend or even expel one or all of the boys. There’s maybe enough info in here to press charges on some of them.
Victor Channing punched me in the face between first and second period for saying Bernadette Blackbird was hot.
I check the date on the complaint and see that it’s from … sophomore year.
“What the hell?” I ask, seeing that the complainant is a student that no longer attends Prescott. Mostly because Havoc chased him off. But why would Vic stand up for me during sophomore year? That’s the year they tortured me; it doesn’t make any sense.
Licking my lower lip, I shove the paper back in the box and stare at it.
This is a lot of ammo.
This … is a ticking time bomb set to go off against the boys I hated more than anyone else, the only people I couldn’t figure out a way to get revenge on. And here this box is, full of uncovered secrets. I bet Vaughn had the box in his office because he was getting ready to go after the boys again—Vic especially.
What would a Havoc Girl do though? I think, pushing the box away with my heel and trying to think. I could take this box, hold onto it and wait for the guys to finish my list up. Then I could nail them with it. At the very least, I might be able to get Vic kicked out of school, so he’d lose his inheritance—I don’t really expect him to give me a cut anyway.
I could run, and pawn the ring, and …
But no.
Blood in and blood out, right?
“When you’ve been lied to by everyone around you, when you have nothing else, you realize the one currency you can carry is truth. So a single word does have meaning. A promise does hold importance. And a pact is worth carrying to the grave.”
What would a Havoc Girl do?
She’d burn this shit to the ground.
“You can thank me later,” I say as the boys come around the corner and find me sitting on the ground next to Hael’s car. I remember