Elodie leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees. A knot of worry has formed between her brows. “Seriously, Pres. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Carrie makes a choked sound. “You just directly referred to Pax Davis without your voice cracking. You said his name very clearly. Out loud. And you asked for his phone number.”
“What?” I shrug. “I want to talk to him about the project. Dash just reminded me. And Pax doesn’t seem like he checks his email very often.”
“You’d be right there,” Dash says. He’s already reaching into his pocket and pulling out his phone. “Normally I’d check to see if he was cool with me giving out his info, but this time I’m gonna throw caution to the wind and say fuck it. I am far too curious to see how this pans out.”
Carrie thumps him in the arm. “If he does anything to hurt Presley, because you gave her his phone number and gave him access to her, I will literally murder you.”
He laughs. “I doubt me giving Pres his number will be the root cause of any of the madness that’s about to ensue.” His fingers fly over his cell phone screen. A second later, my phone buzzes in my hand.
AirDrop
New Contact: Pax Davis.
* * *
“What are you talking about, madness?” Carrie demands.
Dash doesn’t look at his girlfriend. He looks right at me when he says, “Presley knows exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t you, Presley?”
And I do. I really do.
28
PAX
* * *
Unknown Contact
* * *
Clean content. Excellent description/world building. Some of the language was a little divisive. Can’t wait to see what you can do when you actually try.
6.8/10
* * *
I saw this documentary about volcanoes on the National Geographic channel last year. History’s most catastrophic eruptions or some shit. A lot of it was dramatizations—scenes constructed from reports of the people who survived these devastating events. The most horrific dramatizations, from eruptions like Pompeii, were not created from firsthand reports, though. There were no firsthand witness reports of those events, because there were no survivors.
Right now, I am a volcano. The largest ever known to man.
I am about to erupt, and when I do, there will be no survivors left to paint a picture of what happened here. They’ll have to rely on satellite images from space to piece together what happened in Mountain Lakes, New Hampshire on this fateful, beautiful summer morning, and even then, scientists will be left to wonder how a random eighteen-year-old guy somehow became so incensed that he went fucking nuclear and wiped out an entire state.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Dash stops me as I’m thundering down the stairs. “Where the fuck are you going with a face like that?”
“To avenge myself,” I snarl.
“I assume this has something to do wi—”
“Yes, it’s to do with fucking Chase. And I know I have you to thank for giving her my number, so you can stop standing there grinning like that. I’m tempted to bitch slap that smirk right off your fucking face.”
“Have you ever considered that if you got laid…you might be less angry all the time?” His voice goes very high at the end. It takes a monumental effort not to beat his ass black and blue right here on the stairs. He doesn’t know that I’ve been fucking Chase. I haven’t said a word, and he wasn’t even home last night. “How will ejaculating inside some random girl make me less angry with Chase?”
“You could just come inside Chase. Get an STD test first, though. Make sure she’s on birth control. Do away with the rubber altogether. I hate those fucking things.”
Okay. This is getting too close to the mark. I glower at him, working my jaw. “We all hate those things, asshole. No one likes them.”
“Now you’re furious about rubbers?”
“Yes. I’m furious about everything. And it’s all your fucking fault.” I blow an angry blast of air out of my nose, squinting at him while I consider planting my fist in his face again, and then I turn and continue my charge down to the ground floor.
Dash follows me. “Hey, what the hell do you have tied around your wrist?”
“What?”
He points. “You are wearing a friendship bracelet.”
“I am not.”
“What’s that, then?”
I shove my whole arm behind my back. “None of your damn business is what it is.”
If he fucking laughs, I will kill him. If he fucking laughs, I swear to God…
Dash is a smart guy. He sees my inner monologue expressing itself on my face, and he does not laugh.
Color me disappointed.
“If you want a ride up the hill, your ass better be in the car in the next fifteen seconds or I’m going without you.”
No English class today. No Econ, either, which means no Chase. Every Wolf Hall student’s schedule is available on the academy portal—I didn’t even need Wren to hack into the school’s systems for that information—and I already know I don’t have another class with Chase until Friday morning. I should be happy about that fact. I should be able to forget about her altogether—that was the whole point of this being just sex—but I’m still so livid over that message that I actually want to run into her. I look for her everywhere I go. From Math to History, I scan every face I pass, waiting for it to be hers. History to Photography. Photography to the parking lot. I even scope out Screamin’ Beans at lunchtime to see if she’s sitting at one of the booths with Elodie or Carrie, but she’s nowhere to be seen.
All afternoon, I barely pay attention to my surroundings, waiting for the burst of adrenalin to hit me when I finally set eyes on Chase. Only, she’s a ghost. I finally see her at the end of the day, as I’m pulling out of the parking lot, Dash sitting to my left, Wren in the backseat.
I apply the brakes a little more enthusiastically than usual and Wren nearly skids forward into the footwell. “What the fuck, man! Are you insane?”
I apply the hand brake and get out of the car.
Dash rolls down his window and leans out, calling after me. “Where the fuck are you going? I’m starving!”
“Left the keys in the ignition, didn’t I?”
He checks. Frowns at me incredulously. “Yes?”
“Then fucking drive yourselves home.” I don’t hang around to witness the look on his face, though I’m sure it’s priceless. Dash knows that any warning he expects from me is implicit: if he so much as fucking scratches that car, he’ll be eating through a straw for the rest of his miserable life.
Quickly, I jog across the parking lot and around the other side of the academy, heading in the direction Chase was walking when I caught that glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye. I half expect her to have vanished into thin air, but no. I round the corner and she’s there, heading down the steep slope that leads towards Wolf Hall’s maze.