Mr. Darkwood gives me an F on the poem because he found one of the notes I wrote him about the word ebon. He hates being wrong, so he punishes me with a terrible grade. I spend the rest of the class imagining what it would feel like to wrap my hands around his throat. Jesus Christ, what is wrong with people? Why can’t they just say sorry, I was wrong and move the fuck on. It doesn’t have to be a production either way.

After school, we get dressed for the party at Aaron’s house, and I decide to be a total asshole and wear a black hoodie dress that says Ouija across the front with a picture of a spirit board on the back. It’s got a planchet necklace that I always pair with it, one that I made with the piece that came from an old version of the game that I stole from the thrift store.

I’m sure it’s nothing like what anyone else might be wearing to the party.

“This is a party for teenagers?” I ask, because sometimes I forget that we are, in fact, all still teenagers. I mean, technically speaking. In actual years. In experience, I’m a crone. No, no, I’m a corpse buried in a shallow hole. I finger the planchet necklace as Oscar turns to look at me, gray eyes so empty I just know the look is intended to make me back off.

“It is,” he says, narrowing his eyes briefly for a moment. “I think it’s supposed to be Trinity’s birthday party.”

I curl my lip in disgust.

Trinity.

That’s the name of a book villain if I’ve ever heard one. Actually, if I read it in a book, I’d call bullshit and laugh. Instead, I get to deal with the nightmare of that girl in person, the girl who didn’t even scream when I slammed the heel of my hand into her nose and made her bleed.

“She doesn’t want a Ferrari cake and an episode of My Super Sweet Sixteen?” I ask, and Oscar almost smiles. I can tell because his poisonous line of a mouth, like the long blade of a rapier, twitches slightly. “How about her own private island and a gold tampon to shove up her designer cunt?”

“Bitter much?” Oscar asks me as I continue to play with the necklace. If Trinity were a villain in a book then I guess I’d be the motherfucking witch, the one who lights the planchet necklace around her throat up with power and summons demons from another world.

“Maybe,” I offer, not sure how far I should go with this man. This man who lost his virginity to me and left me to clean up bright, red period blood off the couch. This man who got a second chance from me, tied me up, fucked me in his bed and left me there. He’s running out of chances to prove himself to me before I just give up and beat the shit out of him. Or … try anyway. I thought before that I might win against Oscar. Now that I know him better, I’m not sure of anything. “Tell me: what does Ophelia have to gain from having her son marry this girl? Does she really think that if this happened, and they got divorced, that the girl would give her any of the money she may or may not win in court? Even then, I doubt Ophelia is going to leave Victor alone with half the fortune. They hate each other too much. One of them has to die.”

“You bring up valuable points,” Oscar tells me, adjusting his bloodred tie. It matches my hair tonight, but I can’t tell if that’s intentional or not. “Ones that we’ve already been over, many times. Do you think I haven’t thought of all of those things?”

I purse my lips.

I know what the plan is here. Ophelia needs to die. That’s obvious to everyone, even me. It doesn’t even need to be said aloud. But is this really the best way to do it?

Victor promising to get an annulment doesn’t make me safe.

Nothing but that woman’s death will serve.

“I hope I’m the murderer at the party tonight,” I say, thinking of Kali. I look over at Oscar, but he isn’t looking back at me. Instead, he’s adjusting his tie because he perceives it to be the slightest bit fucking crooked. His long, inked fingers tease the silk fabric in a way that’s criminal.

I move away from Oscar and toward the boys’ bedroom door, the one that I closed behind me on purpose when I came in here looking for him. We’ve had sex twice since the night of the dance. The group thing, and when I woke up and he was behind me. But that’s it. I can sense there’s so much more waiting inside Oscar that needs to be let out. I crack my knuckles and he finally turns to look at me.

“What do you want?” he asks, and I frown. Hard.

“You to stop being a prick. Why are you pretending you can still act aloof and disinterested when all you want is to tie me up and fuck the shit out of me?”

Oscar rises from his chair and moves over to me in an instant, slamming his forearms into either side of the doorjamb. The door is closed behind me, but I’m not trapped. I could reach back for the knob if I really wanted to. Of course, I don’t. I’m not afraid of Oscar Montauk and he knows it.

“Aren’t you going to ask me about it?” he says, and I’m not sure if he means the virgin thing or the serial killer comment that he made. “Don’t you want to know?”

“Either you’re going to tell me or you’re not,” I shoot back, but I really, really, really want him to tell me something about himself. His family, his dad, his virginity, anything. “Do you need me to tell you a horrible thing back, so you’ll feel better? Should I tell you about the time I got mad at Penelope for banging her headboard against the wall and keeping me up all night? How she cried and cried and cried while I was a total bitch to her?” Knowing what I know now, I understand what was happening to her, and it makes me sick. I want to die when I think about that memory.

Oscar frowns hard, like he can tell I’ve just laid something special out. If he rejects me now, he can never tell me the truth about the way he feels because I’ll always know that he’s such a good liar, he can lie even to himself.

“I’m sorry that I’m not good at this, Bernadette.” There’s something sad in his voice, a melancholy so deep and endless that it feels as if I’m staring into the depths of the ocean. “Vulnerability leaves a person open to endless pain.” He drops his inked fingers to the side of my face, stroking my cheek and leaving me with a tightness in my chest that makes me want to cry. He’s tragic, isn’t he? Oscar Montauk.

“Endless pain but also endless love,” I whisper back, which sounds cheesy enough to be printed on one of Sara Young’s coffee mugs. It’s true, though, that statement. One of my hands comes up to rest against the front of Oscar’s chest, right over that bloodred tie. He flinches slightly, but he lets me touch him.

“My father murdered my mother and my siblings, did you know that?” he asks, capturing my hand in his. The serial killer comment suddenly makes a hell of a lot more sense. “He tried to kill me, too, but I guess I’m just that hard to get rid of.” Long, tattooed fingers squeeze my own, warm and oh so human. He really isn’t as demonic as he thinks he is. “You know how he did it?” he continues, and I don’t dare interrupt for fear that he’ll never speak to me like this again. “He tried to strangle me. And now it’s become a fetish of mine. How fucked-up is that?”

I find myself enraptured by his eyes, their color so indescribably beautiful that only purple prose will do, only lines of that inane poetry I scribble in my notebook in the dingy classroom of a decrepit school. Oscar’s eyes are like wet fog on the morning of a funeral. They’re the color of that gray alley cat that lives by the dumpsters outside the high school, the one that was once a cherished kitten and now nobody loves. They’re the color of ashes in an urn or a gravestone with the name so worn off that it can’t be read by passersby.

“Oscar …” I start, but then he’s standing up straight as the door opens behind me. It’s Vic. I know without even turning around because our souls are twisted together and covered in thorns. If one of us pulls away, it hurts. Those thorns cut and make us both bleed.

In less time than it takes me to pull in a single breath, Oscar shuts down, his mouth thinning into a sharp line, his eyes darkening. Our moment is over, but somehow, even though what he’s just told me is unbelievably awful, I have hope for us both.

“We’re ready to go,” Victor says, but I can’t turn and look at him. We’re essentially going to a birthday party for his new girlfriend. I want to puke. When did I lose my ovaries and agree to this shit?

“Okay,” I say, feeling my stomach open up into a pit. Victor moves away without saying anything else and Oscar sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose with two long, tattooed fingers.

“Christ, you two will be the death of me,” he snarls, opening his eyes again and then grabbing my arm. He drags me out of the room before I tear away from him and we go storming down the stairs together.

Everyone is pissed off by the time we pile into the car.

“I want my goddamn Camaro back,” Hael says, starting the Firebird and cursing as the engine makes a funny sound. “Son of a bitch.”

“Brittany is back from the slopes,” Oscar offers, because the little rat bitch has been in Vail, Colorado for weeks on a surprise Christmas vacay. We thought at first that she was leaving to have her baby in secret or some other weird, medieval type bullshit. But she’s back again, and we have to deal with her.

“Yeah, I was aware of that,” Hael says, pulling out of the driveway so fast that he leaves black skid marks on the pavement. He cranks up the music to inhuman levels and we hit the road at twice the usual speed limit. I change the song to one that I like and close my eyes, letting the rhythm take me as we hit the highway, heading right across the river toward the Oak Park neighborhood.

Fancy.

Makes Ophelia and Tom’s place in Oak River Heights look like shit.

Vic drives the Bronco with Aaron and Cal, leaving me with Hael and Oscar.

“You can admit that you’re jealous as fuck,” Hael explains, turning the music down when we get to the fancy neighborhood and he slows down substantially, rolling down the window and scoping out the houses. I don’t think he’s looking at the architecture though. Pretty sure he’s canvassing places to rob. “Just say it, so I don’t have to make fun of you so much.”