Page 54 of Riot House

“I don’t know. I thought I did, but…” I shake my head, placing my hands so carefully on her hips that I can barely feel the material of her jeans against my palms. I pull back, putting some space between us.

We stare at each other, neither of us shifting an inch as we try to figure out what the fuck just happened.

Something prodigious.

Some sort of shift in both of us that makes no good goddamn sense.

One moment.

How can so much change in one blink of an eye?

Elodie swallows. “I, uh…I think I have to go.” Frantically, she gets to her feet, full of energy and electricity as she spins around in a circle, holding her hair out of the way as she scans the surrounding area for… for…

“Where the hell are my shoes?!”

“You didn’t bring any,” I remind her calmly. I don’t feel calm, though. I feel…untethered. Like I’m adrift, and nothing makes sense anymore.

“Fuck!” Elodie spins around one more time, still looking for her shoes that aren’t there, and then she spins on me, glowering like a she-demon. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she hisses.

“I didn’t do anything. You’re the one who kissedme.”

“All right, whatever. No sense in assigning blame. This is still your fault!”

“Hah! I thought there was no sense in assigning blame.”

“How can you just sit there like that?” she cries. “How can you not…I don’t know!React!”

She’s being patently ridiculous, but I know better than to tell her so to her face. I don’t think I could summon the words, anyhow. Elodie growls like a feral cat, hurling herself toward the crawl space that’ll take her back to the girl’s wing on the fourth floor. I watch her disappearing into the darkness, knowing I should tell her about the tinydoorwayon the other side of the attic that leads out onto the boys’ wing, but my throat’s too jammed up to manage it. I sit there on the blanket, very still, staring down at the half-drunk glass of wine Elodie left behind, reeling. An hour passes, and then another, and the candles blink out one by one.

I’m cold and sore by the time I eventually get up and leave.

The walk back to Riot House is a perplexing one to say the least.

I needed to fuck with her. It’s been the only thought that’s consumed me for weeks.

I wanted to wreck her, but back in the attic, kneeling alone in the dark, I saw everything so much clearer than before. I came to a stark and horrifying realization that’s turned my entire existence on its head.

I will not be the one to wreck Elodie.

She’ll be the one to wreckme.

This knowledge is cemented well and truly in place when I get back to my room and see the manila envelope there, waiting for me on the end of my bed. I come apart at the seams when I read the police report inside it, a fury like no other pinning me between sharp, steel teeth.

19

ELODIE

“Where the helldidyousleep last night?”

“What?” I open my eyes and all I see is sky—a gunmetal, angry, petulant sky, laden with clouds that promise rain. Carina appears a second later, her upside-down face materializing right above mine. Her hair’s tugged back into a fluffy ponytail. Her entire face is a grimace. Instantly, I suspect that she found out what happened last night and she’s come to cart me off to the mad house. “What do you mean?”

“I came by your room at six thirty and you weren’t there,” she says. “Your bed didn’t look like it had even been slept in.”

This is one of the many things people without military parents will never understand. “I got up early to run. And if I get up, I have to make my bed immediately,” I explain. “It’s physically impossible for menotto make it.”

Carina makes a revolted sound, stepping over me and sitting down beside me. “Sounds like you were living under a dictatorship before you moved back to the States,” she says. If only she fucking knew. “Running sounds horrible, too. Did you nearly kill yourself? Is that why you’re star-fished out here on the lawn all by yourself in the wet grass?”

I can’t tell her that I ran myself until it reallydidfeel like I would die, and then I collapsed here, unable to move, because I was too lost in the memory of trying to climb Wren fucking Jacobi like a tree. So instead I nod, groaning very loudly and very miserably.