2. Xander #2
I went to Danny’s house. Not for Danny—for Reece. Because Reece was always there, sprawled on Danny’s couch like he owned it, Daisy curled into his side, and everyone knew what Reece could get you. Everyone. It was Edgewood’s worst-kept secret.
The first time was Percocet. Four pills.
Forty dollars. I paid cash because even in my worst moment I had the foresight of a rich kid who knows how to hide a transaction.
And when the pills hit—when the warmth spread through my bloodstream and the closet dissolved and the noise went from a scream to a whisper to silence—I understood, for the first time, why people sell their lives for this.
Because for thirty minutes, I didn’t want to die.
The second time was a week later. Eight pills. Eighty dollars.
The third time, I didn’t have cash. Reece smiled. “I got another way you can pay.”
That’s how the fights started. Not because I wanted to fight—because I owed.
Reece ran underground fights in Bridgeport and needed bodies.
I was six-two, athletic, angry enough to hurt someone and desperate enough to let them hurt me back.
My first fight paid off the pill debt. My second fight was supposed to be the last.
But Reece doesn’t let go. That’s the thing about men like Reece Hall—they don’t build relationships.
They build traps. The fights kept coming.
The winnings kept shrinking—Reece skimming thirty percent, then forty, then fifty, always with a new fee attached.
“Transportation costs.” “Facility rental.” “Insurance.” Bullshit line items designed to keep the debt alive, to keep me fighting, to keep the cash flowing through his operation.
Every time I thought I was close to zero, he’d add another charge.
And now he has something else. Something worse than debt.
She’s got some pretty big debts to pay.
I don’t know who he’s talking about. Daisy, maybe—she’s in as deep as anyone. But the way he said it—the grin, the implication, the word “girl” aimed at me like a knife—
I swipe the phone open.
“Yo. What’s up.”
“Fight tonight at the docks. I’ve got big money on you. Don’t be fucking late.”
“Text me the time.”
“You better be there. And X? Don’t forget who the fuck owns you.”
He hangs up. I pocket the phone. Lean over the sink.
Look at the boy in the mirror—black eye forming, blood on his jaw, the friendship bracelet on his wrist that he can’t take off because taking it off would mean something final and he’s not ready for final, not yet, not while the threads still hold.
The bathroom door opens. Iz.
He leans against the wall. Arms crossed. The posture of a person who has decided he’s not leaving until he gets what he came for. “Where you gonna be tonight.”
“Nowhere.”
“Another fight?”
“Fuck off, Iz. You don’t get it.”
He pushes off the wall. Steps toward me. Iz is the only one of the five who matches my height, and when he squares up the geometry is equal—two boys eye to eye, one trying to reach in, the other trying to stay closed.
“Then tell me! How are we supposed to be your boys if you just keep saying ‘you don’t get it, you don’t understand?
’ Fucking make us understand, X! We’re right here!
We’ve been right here since your mom died and you won’t let us in!
We went through the Pennington shit together—all of us, not just Kaid and Cat.
All of us. We’re supposed to be stronger now, not falling apart. So talk to me.”
The words hit the wall I’ve built and bounce off.
Not because he’s wrong—because he’s right.
He’s so right that letting the words in would collapse everything, and the collapse would be the pills and the fights and the closet and Penny and my father’s hands and my mother’s feet and all of it pouring out at once in a bathroom at Edgewood Prep, and I can’t. I can’t do that here.
“I can’t.” My voice cracks on the word. Just slightly. Just enough that Iz hears it and his expression shifts from frustrated to something worse: worried. “I’m sorry, Iz. I just… can’t.”
I push past him. He lets me go. But I feel his eyes on my back all the way down the hallway, and the weight of his worry is heavier than any punch Penny threw.
I make it through one class by sitting in the back with an earbud in and my hood up and a teacher who’s smart enough to pick her battles.
The work on the board is calculus. I could do it in my sleep—my brain works fine, always has, that’s the cruelest part, the machinery running perfectly while the operator is in flames—but I don’t pick up my pen.
I sit. I stare. I listen to the noise I don’t want to hear.
“Shit, man. Did you see that outfit Penny was wearing at that concert?”
“The things I would do to her in those fishnets…”
“Heard she was down for anything.”
Two rows ahead. Three kids I barely know. Talking about Penny the way boys talk about girls they think of as available—casual, proprietary, with the confidence of males who have never been told that women are not community property.
I plug my earbud in harder. Drown them out. But the anger doesn’t drown. It builds.
Penny isn’t like that. She’s not what they’re saying. She’s not what those photos made her look like. She’s—
What? Pure? Innocent? She was, until I put my hands on her in a closet and didn’t ask and didn’t stop and didn’t slow down.
I’m the reason those boys can talk about her like that.
I posted the photos. I created the narrative.
I took the girl who was off-limits by unspoken agreement—Xander’s girl, everybody knew it even when we didn’t—and made her look available.
This is my fault. All of it. And the worst part is I did it on purpose because I needed her to hate me enough to stay away, because staying away from me is the only thing that will keep her safe.
The bell rings. I wait for the room to empty, then walk out. The hallway is thinning—kids heading to their next period, the between-class chaos of a thousand students moving through corridors that were built for half that.
Kole’s voice. Loud. Carrying. “Bro, Penny is wild. I mean, do you see the concerts she goes to? The bands she follows? That bitch is definitely down for some freaky shit. I bet by the end of the year, I can hook up with her.”
His buddy, laughing: “Proof, dude. You gotta bring proof.”
Kole grins. “I’ll get you proof. Next party, Penny is mine.”
Red. Just red. The color that fills my vision when the leash snaps and the thing Lucian put inside me—the rage, the violence, the inheritance of a boy raised by a man who solved every problem with his fists—slips free.
I cross the hallway in three strides. Grab Kole by the collar of his blazer. Slam him against the lockers hard enough that the metal dents behind his shoulder blades. His feet come off the ground. His buddy scrambles backward.
“If I ever hear you say her name again, I will fucking end you. Do you understand me? Penny MacHale is off-limits. Off. Fucking. Limits.”
Kole’s eyes are wide. Terrified. The terror of a boy who talks big in hallways and has never been picked up by the shirt by someone who actually knows how to hurt people.
“She’s—she’s not even your girlfriend, dude—”
I slam him again. His head bounces off the locker. “Did I stutter.”
I drop him. He and his buddy scramble away like cockroaches when the light turns on.
I watch them disappear around the corner and the red fades and what replaces it is the nausea of a boy who just did exactly what his father does—used size and violence to control what someone says, who someone touches, who someone belongs to.
I don’t want her. But nobody else can have her. It’s sick. I know it’s sick. I can’t stop it.
I skip next period. Head to the locker room. Sit on the bench in the empty, echoing space and stare at the row of lockers across from me. The bench is cold through my uniform pants. The room smells like soap and bleach and the ghost of a thousand post-practice showers.
I press my forehead to my palms. The shredded knuckles sting.
Penny is everything I used to want. The girl who knew every track listing of every album by every band she loved.
The girl who’d drag me to shows and stand on my shoulders and scream lyrics into the dark.
The girl who made friendship bracelets and named her playlists things like “songs that taste like yellow” and believed, genuinely believed, that the right song at the right volume could fix anything.
That girl deserves the world. And I am the opposite of the world.
I am the black hole at the center of it, pulling everything in and giving nothing back, and the only decent thing I can do—the only kind thing left in me—is to push her far enough away that she’s outside my gravitational pull when I finally collapse.
All I want is to die.
The thought arrives without drama. Without the cinematic swelling score. Just a flat, factual sentence in the voice I use for everything now—the dead voice, the Lucian voice, the voice that states truths without feeling them.
All I want in my life is to die. And the only reason I’m still here is a faded friendship bracelet and the sound of a girl’s name in my mouth that tastes like the only home I’ve ever had.
Bright lights. Bass shaking the walls. The smell of sweat and blood and money—cash, specifically, the particular musk of bills that have been handled by too many hands and stuffed into too many pockets.
The warehouse in Bridgeport is packed. Standing room only.
The crowd is the usual mix: degenerates, gamblers, college kids slumming it, a handful of men in expensive watches who come to these things the way rich people visit zoos—to watch animals perform behind barriers.