2. Xander
Iknow she’s coming before I see her.
It’s the energy shift. The hallway—which was noise and chaos and post-break gossip three seconds ago—goes quiet in a wave, starting at the far end and rolling toward me like a pressure front.
Heads turn. Phones come out. The hush of a student body that has learned to recognize drama the way animals recognize weather changes: instinctively, collectively, with the camera already recording.
I’m standing with Kaiden and Cat by his locker.
Kaid has his face buried in her neck, murmuring something that makes her laugh—the real laugh, the one she saves for him, soft and private in a hallway full of people who don’t deserve to hear it.
The rest of the guys are filtering in—Danny leaning against the wall with his headphones around his neck, Ryan scrolling his phone, Iz dropping his bag and cracking his knuckles like he’s warming up for something.
“Can you two get a fucking room?”
Kaiden looks up. Grins. “Jealous, X?”
“Only jealous that Cat gets to cuddle you now.”
He laughs. The others shake their heads. It’s a bit—the same bit, the one where I pretend I’m fine and they pretend they believe me and we all perform normalcy because the alternative is acknowledging that I’m disintegrating and nobody knows how to stop it.
Cat stops laughing. Her eyes have gone past me, down the hallway, and her expression shifts from soft to sharp in the space between heartbeats. The ice princess surfacing. She steps away from Kaiden and puts her hand out.
“Penny? You okay?”
I turn. Penny is coming down the hallway like a storm with legs.
Combat boots—the only rebellion the uniform allows—hitting the marble floor with the movement of a girl who is beyond anger and into the territory where anger becomes physics.
Her plaid skirt is swinging with the force of her stride.
Her blazer is open. Her tie is loose. The teal streaks in her hair are flying behind her like war paint.
She’s looking at me. Only at me. With an expression that I recognize from a very specific place in my memory—the same look she had at thirteen, standing in the school bathroom after what happened with Garrett, scrubbing her arms raw under the hot water.
Fury and hurt and the betrayal of someone who trusted you and discovered you’re not worth it.
She reaches me. Doesn’t slow down. Just slams both hands into my chest with everything she has. I hit the lockers. The metal rattles. The sound echoes.
“Fuck you, Xander.”
She shoves me again. Harder. My shoulder blades connect with the locker handle and the pain radiates down my spine but I don’t move because some part of me knows I deserve this—deserves worse than this—and the pain from her hands is at least honest, which is more than I can say about anything else in my life right now.
“Why the fuck would you post those pictures? What is wrong with you? Does it make you feel like a big man to humiliate me in front of the entire school? Does it get your tiny fucking dick hard, Xander?”
I smirk. The smirk is a weapon—I learned it from Lucian.
The particular curve of the mouth that says “your pain is entertainment” without words.
I aim it at Penny the way my father aimed it at my mother when she cried.
The comparison makes me sick, but I do it anyway, because cruelty is the only distance I know how to create.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, Penny.”
Her fist connects with my face.
Not a slap. A fist. A proper, closed-hand punch that catches me across the cheekbone and snaps my head sideways. Pain blooms across the left side of my face—sharp, immediate, the sting of knuckles on bone. For a girl who weighs a hundred and twenty pounds, Penny MacHale can fucking hit.
The hallway erupts. Phones everywhere. Kids pressing forward. The feeding frenzy of a school that runs on spectacle.
I touch my face. Look at the blood on my fingers. Look at her, but she’s not done.
She comes at me again—swinging, wild, the technical form of someone who has never been in a fight but is running on enough adrenaline and betrayal to compensate.
Her fist catches my jaw. Her palm slaps across my ear.
She’s screaming now—not words, just sound, the raw vocalization of a girl who has been holding everything in since November and has finally found an outlet and it’s my face.
I don’t block. I don’t hit back. I stand there and take it because this is the least I owe her and we both know it.
Iz moves. Fast. His arms wrap around Penny’s waist from behind and he lifts her clean off the ground—feet kicking, arms still swinging, her body thrashing against his grip like a fish on a line. She’s small enough that Iz can hold her with one arm, but she’s fighting hard enough that he needs both.
“Let me go, Iz! I’m not finished!”
“Yeah, you are.” His voice is calm. The Iz calm—the one that sounds like a lullaby wrapped around a warning. He carries her backward, her boots leaving black scuff marks on the marble, and sets her down ten feet away with his body between us.
Penny is breathing hard. Chest heaving. Tears she’ll deny later building in her eyes.
She points at me over Iz’s shoulder. “Fuck you, Xander. You used to mean something to me. You used to be the one person in this entire world I trusted. And now? Now I could give a shit less what happens to you. Have a great fucking life.”
She turns. Walks away. The crowd parts for her like the Red Sea because nobody—nobody—wants to be in the path of Penny MacHale right now.
Cat hasn’t moved. She’s been standing four feet away with her arms crossed, watching the entire thing with the expression she reserves for people who have earned her contempt—cold, measured, the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
She steps forward. Not toward Penny. Toward me.
“You’re a real asshole, Xander.” Her voice is quiet.
The dangerous quiet. The Cat O’Farrell register that made Jon Pennington flinch in hallways and made Frannie Clarke walk away without finishing a sentence.
“I watched that girl sit by your bed after you showed up at Kaid’s and hold your hand for six hours while you slept.
She begged Darla to let her stay. She cried so hard she threw up in the bathroom and came back and sat right back down and held your hand again.
That’s the girl you just posted on GlossX for the whole school to mock.
That’s the girl you just called ‘slumming it’ yesterday.
Congratulations. You finally became the thing you’re most afraid of. ”
She doesn’t say what that thing is. She doesn’t need to. We both know.
Lucian.
Cat turns and walks after Penny. The ice princess and the hurricane, disappearing around the corner. The hallway stays silent for three full seconds before the noise rushes back in—whispers, laughter, the tapping of phones uploading footage that will be on every GlossX feed by lunch.
Iz stands in front of me. The calm is gone. What’s left is something I’ve rarely seen on Issac Walsh’s face: disgust.
“That was low, dude. Even for where you are right now. That was so fucking low.”
I shrug. Open my locker. Kaiden slams it shut. His hand flat against the metal, his body blocking me from reaching the latch.
“What the fuck is going on with you, X?”
“Stay out of it, Kaid.”
“No. We’ve been staying out of it. We’ve been giving you space and time and all the shit the therapist said to give you, and you’re getting worse.
You look like hell. You smell like a gym.
Your knuckles are shredded every Monday.
And now you’re posting shit about Penny on GlossX like a fucking eighth-grader? What happened to you, man?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Danny, from the wall, quiet: “Then make us understand.”
Ryan, not looking up from his phone: “Or don’t. But stop pretending this is normal, because it’s not. We’re watching you kill yourself in real time and you won’t let us help.”
The words land like punches. Each one finding a soft spot.
I do what I always do when people get close to the truth—I leave.
I slam my locker. Push through the boys.
Walk away. The bell rings behind me and I ignore it because class is the least important thing happening in my life right now and everybody in this building knows it.
The bathroom is empty. Cold. The fluorescent lights hum at a frequency that matches the headache building behind my eyes. I turn the water on. Splash my face. Look in the mirror.
The left side of my face is already swelling.
Penny’s first punch caught the cheekbone; by tonight I’ll have a proper black eye.
The second one split the skin over my jaw.
Blood is drying in the crease. I look like what I am—a boy who got hit by a girl half his size and didn’t move, because the girl was right and the boy knew it and the pain was the most honest thing he’d felt in weeks.
My phone vibrates. Reece.
I stare at the screen. The name sits there like a cockroach on a kitchen counter—unwanted, persistent, impossible to kill.
Reece Hall. Twenty-two. Dropout. The kind of drug dealer who operates in the space between local and connected—too big for high school, too small for the real players, but smart enough to build a network that feeds on prep school kids with trust funds and problems. He dates Danny’s older sister Daisy, which is how he got into our orbit. Which is how he got to me.
It started with the pills.
Three days after I found my mother in the closet, I couldn’t sleep.
Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t exist in the silence of a house where my father had already removed her photographs from the walls.
I needed something—anything—to make the noise stop.
Not the external noise. The internal kind.
The loop of the closet door and the rope and the bare feet and the nine hours of silence that played on repeat behind my eyelids every time I closed them.