Chapter Thirteen - Good Boys Don't Bite

When Rowdy arrives back at the lava rocks, the girls are waiting for her. Everyone but Jackie is seated, their legs thrown out toward one another or curled into casual criss-crosses.

“Hiya,” Rowdy calls when she’s close enough.

“Took you long enough. Where’d you go, California?” Benny, as usual, makes her laugh.

“Close enough.”

Justice stretches her arms above her head and looks over her shoulder. Her eyes are, blessedly, their regular black. “We should clean up before we go back to camp. Not too much, but . . . you know.”

She gestures at her face and clothes.

“Do we have fresh clothes somewhere?” Benny asks.

“In the boat house,” Rowdy answers. “In Leena’s old kayak. She always kept stuff in there, might even be some lip gloss or something. There’s at least shirts.”

They all look down at themselves and seem to have the same collective thought: shirts will have to be good enough.

Rowdy nods and drops her arm over Jackie’s shoulders. “What do you think of your first year of camp then?”

“I think we’re probably going to go to vampire jail.”

“We don’t have vampire jail,” the twins say. “We’re not gonna get caught as long as we’re careful.”

Jackie shakes her head, and her eyes are far away but Rowdy knows they’ll have time later to make sure they’re all okay.

“Let’s head down. It’s gotta be almost three by now,” Rowdy says.

“Three-sixteen,” Hannah says.

The walk back through the woods is quiet despite the obvious high they’re all feeling. Rowdy knows for herself, at least, that even though this was a good thing—and that it was the best option they had all things considered—she’ll need time to come to terms with it and the memories it’ll leave her with.

They reach the boathouse and go inside as the water laps heartily against the shore. Benny reaches into Leena’s old kayak, and comes back empty handed.

“Shit.”

“Shit,” Rowdy agrees.

Benny pinches the bridge of her nose and lets out a deep, rough sounding sigh. “Great. What do we do now?”

“Show up naked?” the twins suggest.

Jackie lets out a bubble of nervous laughter.

“We could try sneaking into Curie,” Jen offers. “I don’t know what the situation inside is gonna be like though. We might have to beg for asylum or something.”

“I guess that’s better than nothing. Any other ideas?” Benny asks.

Rowdy starts stripping. Her sports bra—black, thankfully—reeks of blood. The sight of it is at least mostly normal.

“Maybe we can get some of the stains out in the water.”

The rest of the group doesn’t look convinced, but Rowdy opens her hands and gives them a grim smile. “Curie is a good backup option, but we shouldn’t count on anyone offering us anything other than a one-way ticket to the Guards at this point.”

“That was a lot of words for one sentence, Rowdy. Upping your usual word count?” Justice teases. She strips too. Muse follows suit, though she wrinkles her nose the whole time.

The twins’ clothes took the brunt of the gore. Hannah, Jen, and Jackie, though, are not so lucky. Rowdy clucks her tongue at them.

“I guess none of us were thinking this far in advance,” Hannah says as she looks down at her once white bra and panty set.

Benny stands in her tank top and briefs, her expression drawn. “Did I pick the worst night not to wear a bra?”

“Yes,” the room answers.

“All right. Well, maybe the water will save me.”

Nobody is waiting for them outside when they leave the boathouse for the lake. The water is its usual frigid self, and Rowdy shivers. She only goes in to where the water encircles her waist.

“That was . . . something back there,” Jackie says. The lake is almost covering her chest as she comes to stand beside her.

“Something good?” Rowdy asks. Her mouth turns down in an awkward smile as she wipes the front of her bra with wet hands. When she pauses to check, her palms come back tinged orange, so she leans over and tries to force water in and out of the fabric.

Jackie works on her skin as she hums. “Something I don’t think I’ll ever see again.”

The snort that rockets through Rowdy’s nose isn’t supposed to sound mean, but based on how Jackie winces, it definitely comes across that way.

“Sorry. I just . . . I hope that you never see anything like that again,” Rowdy tries to clarify.

“You know, I could never tell these last couple of weeks whether or not you were making fun of me.”

Benny floats by on her back, and Jackie goes quiet. She puts on a pretty smile and waves idly, though Benny’s eyes are closed as she goes past them. Rowdy can’t help but feel a little annoyed; seeing Benny without a top on isn’t necessarily a shocking thing, but it is a distracting one when Jackie is right next to her.

“I was never making fun of you,” Rowdy says once Benny’s closer to the shore where the twins are washing each other’s hair. Hannah and Jen keep disappearing under the water a few feet off, but she decides they’re probably not listening in.

“I think you were at least a few times, but I deserved those. Either way, I didn’t really feel like myself back there.”

“A frenzy will do that,” Rowdy says. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s not like we killed a human or anything.”

“Was it right that we did it?”

Her question hooks somewhere deep in Rowdy’s stomach and tugs.

Once.

Twice.

“Right and best aren’t always the same thing.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

Rowdy dunks her head under and savors the immediate quiet of the lake pressing into her ears. The part of her that keeps seeing and hearing Leena awakens and an image of her—arms cutting through the water, mouth open wide and eyes completely black flickers—to life the moment her eyes shut. Rowdy rips herself from the water and shakes her head out of her face. There’s no Leena charging her through the darkness, only the gentle slap of the rippling water against her stomach.

She folds her arms over herself and bounces on the balls of her feet as she starts to inch away from Jackie and back toward the bank. When the younger woman doesn’t say anything, Rowdy sniffs.

“D’you need somebody to forgive you or something?”

“That,” Jackie snaps her fingers. “I can’t tell if you’re being an asshole on purpose or just because it’s an unfortunate personality trait of yours.”

Rowdy’s eyebrows touch as she scowls. “You’re the one assuming I’m being an asshole in the first place.”

“I just wish you’d be a little more compassionate.”

“How do you want me to be compassionate?”

“You could kiss me,” Jackie snaps. “I see how you look at me but you haven’t asked or tried a single time this whole month. How do you think that makes me feel?”

Shock makes the water feel colder.

“I—”

“Yeah, I know, you’re carrying all this guilt because your friend is dead and so you act like you’re dead too. But now what, Rowdy? Do you want to live or are you staying dead?”

Rowdy sputters, words lost in the space between her brain and mouth.

“I— I don’t know.”

Jackie lets out a trembling breath, and then she wades back toward the shore. Her dark hair looks like it’s painted across her back as she goes.

Not willing to let it spoil her mood, Rowdy finishes cleaning herself up and then heads to the shore too. Hannah is the last one out, but when she does come, she at least doesn’t smell like blood anymore. Jackie stays pointedly at Hannah’s side.

“All right. Let’s . . . what’re we doing now, exactly?” Benny asks. She deflates from her previously confident pose, her fists slipping off her hips to dangle at her sides instead.

“We sneak back into Curie, Rowdy goes back to the mess, and we’ll just make everyone swear that we never left and go from there,” Hannah says as she rings her hair out. “Honestly, I think tonight might have been the best night I’ve ever had at Harcourt Autumn.”

No sooner are the words out of her mouth than the air sounds like it’s being ripped apart and the Guard crackles to life a few hundred yards up the shore from them.

“I stand corrected,” Hannah whispers.

Rowdy and Benny share a look.

“We don’t stand a chance if they get into our heads,” Benny says.

“Let’s not give them a reason to then,” Rowdy replies.

The Guard clears the distance in less than a second. Their terrible faces are hidden behind their hoods, and Rowdy lets herself feel at least a little pleased with that.

Where have you been?

Rowdy’s answering gag at the feeling of the paper voice in her head is loud and obnoxious. Somehow louder is Benny’s slap across her back as she pats Rowdy hard enough to make her head spin.

“I’ll be really honest with you,” Benny says as she gestures around to the group. “We talked our younger friends here into trying to hunt down Etienne to prove he framed us for the death of that cheerleader and, well—”

Rowdy elbows her, but Benny keeps going as if having the wind knocked out of her was not painful in the slightest.

“See, we thought we found him at one point, but then his scent just, sorta, poof.”

Poof?

The twins shriek with laughter, their birdcalls sending a flock of crows spewing obscenities as they clear the tree they’d been roosting in nearby. Rowdy winces and wishes the Guard hadn’t been broadcasting to all of them.

“Right,” Benny shouts over them. “It just disappeared. We were already out here, and we got sweaty running around the forest ,so we took a lake bath.”

It is unfortunate, but we are already aware that you have been framed. We found . . . evidence in Etienne’s office that there is something else going on that must be addressed.

“O-Oh? Oh? That’s news to us, what did you find?” Benny’s teeth start to chatter as she shifts her weight between her feet.

Where did you find the scent disappear?

Benny squints out into the distance and bites her lip. The immediate desire to run breaks through Rowdy’s wall, and it has Benny written all over it.

“Somewhere that way,” Rowdy says, pointing across the lake. “We started to smell more humans and didn’t want to see if it picked up again just in case we ran into a crowd of them with these kids.”

The Guard shuffle their cloaks. The night bugs start to sing again by the time they lift their heads.

You will return to your cabin and Matthias will keep watch as you cannot be trusted to follow directions.

Benny puts her hands up, “Listen, we’ve never claimed to be the most well-behaved campers, but it’s our last year, at least. Can’t we be given some kind of leeway or—”

Absolutely not.

“I tried,” Benny says to Rowdy. “Guess we’ll just be treated like children forever, dear friend of mine.”

“It’s what we get for being turned in our late teens,” Rowdy says.

The relief feels premature, but Rowdy takes it. The safety she feels knowing Etienne is destroyed is almost as heady as hoping they might actually get away with this.

The Guard walks them back up through the woods to Locke House. Inside, the curtain’s been put back over the square window and the air inside is all warm dust and wood.

“Thanks for the escort,” Benny says as she sinks down into her bunk. “Matthias, you can sit in my chair out on the porch. It’s the blue one.”

There are six blue chairs on the porch.

She flops over and faces the other wall without saying anything more.

“Guards don’t sit down,” Rowdy reminds her back as she climbs up above her.

“Actually,” Muse interrupts, “Guards are permitted to sit down when the Counsel gives them permission to during hearings that last longer than three hours. Does this count as a hearing?”

“Surely not,” Justice says.

“It could.”

“No way.”

“What if they can only sit down because after three hours, they start to get faint?” Benny adds in, her tone sagely and thoughtful.

Rowdy snaps her fingers. “I think you’re onto something.”

“I think if this is the beginning of a hearing it could count, but there’s no Counsel members present yet,” Muse continues as if she can’t hear either of them.

“Then it’s not a hearing, and he can’t sit down. Are the cloaks UV resistant?” Justice’s voice carries from her bunk like a sigh.

The four of them hum as if they’re thinking hard.

“Why don’t you ever see women Guardsmen?” Rowdy asks.

A ruckus breaks out as Benny, Justice, and Muse all begin talking over one another. There are cries of patriarchal oppression and demands for Mathias to explain himself and his view on women being allowed into the Guard.

The door slams shut. The girls grin at one another.

“Good work out there, Rowdy,” Hannah says as she climbs up across from Rowdy and above Jackie.

“Happy to help.”

“I guess we should get some sleep, right?” Benny asks.

“Geezer bedtime for us,” Hannah says.

“We should while we can. Who knows if they’re gonna bust in here and throw us into the sun.” Jen’s joke only lands with the twins, who somehow manage to keep their birdcalls to a series of choked off giggles.

“Is that a real possibility?” Jackie squeaks as soon as it’s quiet enough for anyone to hear her.

“I mean, technically that’s always a possibility, but I think we’re safe for now,” Benny says. “Besides, the sun doesn’t seem like too bad of a punishment after we all . . . you know. There’s worse things.”

“That just made me shiver, gross,” Jackie whines.

“I’m just saying! Like, the world is a better place now, you know?”

There are mumbled, sleepy agreements all around, though Jackie’s doesn’t seem as sure.

“You’re not gonna turn on us, are you?” Rowdy asks. She leans over the side of her bunk but can only see one of Jackie’s feet kicked back and out of her blankets.

“As if,” Jackie scoffs.

“Good. Just so we’re all in agreement here.”

The mood lightens. Somebody flicks the lights off, she thinks it’s probably Jen, and the sudden dark is welcoming instead of crushing. Rowdy smiles to herself as she relaxes into her bed. She presses her nose into her pillow, Leena’s pillow that she borrowed her first year and never gave back, and lets herself drift off.