16. Xander
Iz is waiting for me after last period.
Not at my locker. Not in the hallway. In the locker room. Alone. Sitting on the bench with his forearms on his knees and his head down and the stillness of a boy who has been sitting here for a while, building the courage for what comes next.
I walk in. The door swings shut behind me. The sound echoes off the tile. Iz stands.
We look at each other across ten feet of locker room floor.
Two boys who have been brothers since elementary school, who have held each other up through every crisis, who stood on opposite sides of a pool house wall and chose to stay.
Two boys who are in love with the same girl and have been pretending it’s manageable.
It’s not manageable.
“You slept with her.” Iz’s voice is flat. Not a question. A statement that has been burning a hole in his chest all day.
“Yeah.”
“The same night I was in her room. The same bed.”
“Yeah.”
The first punch comes from Iz. I don’t see it—I feel it. His fist connects with my jaw and my head snaps sideways and for one shocked second I can’t believe that Issac Walsh—the emotional center, the anchor, the boy who resolves conflicts with words—just hit me.
Then I hit him back.
We collide. Not the choreographed violence of the Kole fight—this is ugly.
Desperate. Two boys who love each other throwing fists because the words aren’t enough to carry the weight of what they’re feeling.
I grab his collar. He grabs mine. We slam into the lockers together—the metal denting, the sound ringing through the empty room.
“You had no right!” Iz’s voice echoes. Not controlled anymore. Not the gentle therapist’s son. Raw. Cracking. “I was in that room four hours before you! I was holding her! I was being everything you should have been—slow, careful, asking—and she stopped me, X! She stopped me because it wasn’t YOU!”
He shoves me. I stumble.
“I never slept with her!” The words rip out of him.
“I never slept with her because YOU are always there! In her mind. In her body. In her fucking heart. I could have my hands on every inch of her and she’s still thinking about you.
I could be everything she says she wants and she’d still choose the boy who leaves bruises because her body is wired to your goddamn frequency and nothing I do can change the channel! ”
I rush him. We go down—hard, hitting the tile floor, rolling. His elbow catches my ribs. My fist catches his cheekbone. We grapple—not fighting to win but fighting to expel. To push the pain out through our fists because our mouths can’t hold it anymore.
Iz pins me. Forearm across my chest. His face inches from mine. Blood from his lip dripping onto my shirt.
“And you know what the worst part is?” Panting.
The fury converting to something else—grief.
The particular grief of a boy who fell for a girl who was already gone.
“The worst part is I’m not even angry at you.
I’m angry at myself. For thinking I could compete with something that started when you were seven.
For thinking that being kind and patient and fucking asking would be enough to override eleven years of friendship bracelets and treehouse blankets. ”
He gets off me. Sits on the floor. Back against the lockers. Breathing hard.
I sit up. Wipe blood from my mouth. Mirror position. Two boys on the floor with blood on their faces and the exhaustion of a fight that settled nothing and cost everything.
Silence. Long. The kind that recalibrates.
“I’m not backing down,” Iz says. Quiet now.
Not angry. Just… decided. “Not until Penny tells me to. Not because you claimed her or because you fucked her or because the bracelets or any of it. Because she has the right to choose, X. And I’m giving her that choice.
If she comes to me and says ‘Iz, I choose Xander,’ I’ll walk.
But she has to say it. Not you. Her. Because that’s what consent looks like—and some of us actually listen when a person speaks. ”
The consent line. Aimed. Finding bone. I start to stand. Fists curling. The animal—
Danny steps between us. I didn’t hear the door. Didn’t see him come in. But he’s there—hand on my chest, pushing me back.
“Sit the fuck down. Both of you.”
Ryan is behind him. Kaiden in the doorway. The Elite Five, assembling around another crisis. The familiar formation. The geometry of boys who keep showing up for each other even when showing up means getting between two friends who are trying to kill each other.
Danny’s face is wrong. Not angry-wrong. Destroyed-wrong. The particular expression of a boy carrying news that will change the temperature of the room.
“Daisy is home.” The words land. “From rehab. She came back yesterday. And she’s using again. Mom found the stuff in her bag this morning. She didn’t even make it twenty-four hours.”
Danny’s voice is steady but his hands are shaking. Ryan puts a hand on his shoulder.
“I thought—” I start.
“You thought you could protect her. I thought I could protect her. We all thought we could protect her.” Danny looks at his hands.
“Reece got to her before the rehab discharge papers dried. He was waiting, X. Like a fucking predator at a watering hole. She walked out of that facility and straight into his car.”
The locker room absorbs the information. Five boys processing the same failure—the failure of protection, the failure of distance, the particular helplessness of teenagers trying to fight an adult’s war.
Kaiden steps forward. The leader. “The dads. Tonight. Penny’s house. Callum, Thomas, Arthur, Gideon. All four. This is bigger than us and it’s been bigger than us since the beginning and we’re done pretending otherwise.”
Danny nods. “Tonight.”
Ryan: “Tonight.”
Iz, still on the floor, blood on his lip: “Tonight.”
I look at Iz. He looks at me. The particular eye contact of two boys who just beat each other bloody and are choosing—not forgiving, not forgetting—but choosing to put it aside because something bigger than their rivalry needs their attention.
“Tonight,” I say.
Iz extends his hand from the floor. I take it. Pull him up. We stand face to face. Blood on both of us. The handshake that is not peace but ceasefire.
“This isn’t over,” he says.
“I know.”
“But it’s paused. For Daisy. For Penny. For all of them.”
“Paused.”
We walk out together. Five boys. Bloody and bruised and broken in different places. Heading in the same direction.
Group session. Four-thirty. Darla’s office.
The circle. Eight chairs. The familiar faces—Marcus the mentor leaning back with his coffee, Maddie picking at her sleeve, the public school boys sitting together.
Me and Penny on opposite sides of the circle, the particular distance of two people who shared a bed twelve hours ago and are now pretending they didn’t.
Gina is leading today. The topic: triggers.
“A trigger is anything that activates the craving. It can be a place, a person, a sound, a smell, a time of day. It can be something as obvious as walking past a dealer’s house or as subtle as a song that was playing the first time you used.
Your assignment this week: identify your top three triggers and write them down.
Not to share—to know. Because you can’t dodge a bullet you can’t see. ”
I sit in the circle and think about my triggers.
The obvious ones: Reece’s name on my phone.
The smell of the Bridgeport warehouse. The particular time of day—three a.m.—when the craving peaks because that’s when Lucian used to come home drunk and the pills were the only thing that made the waiting bearable.
And the not-obvious one. The one I can’t write down because writing it down would mean admitting it to the room:
Penny. Penny is my trigger. The ache of wanting her and not having her.
The distance. The sight of Iz’s hand on her back.
The memory of her body underneath mine. All of it—the wanting, the guilt, the jealousy—all of it makes me want to use.
Because using is the only thing that dulls the frequency she broadcasts on.
And without the pills, the frequency is deafening.
Gina asks for volunteers. Marcus shares—bars, old friends, the ghost of his former life. Maddie shares—her mother’s medicine cabinet, the sound of her parents fighting. Each confession is a brick laid in the foundation of a structure that only works if everyone contributes.
Penny doesn’t share. She sits with her arms wrapped around herself and her eyes on the floor and I can feel the craving radiating off her like heat.
She’s fighting it. Right now. In this room.
The white-knuckle grip of a girl who is surviving the hour and will worry about the next one when it arrives.
After group, I drive home. The MacHale house. The porch light on. Always on.
The kitchen at seven p.m. is a war room.
Callum Monaghan at the head of the table.
Thomas O’Farrell beside him, notepad out, reading glasses on.
Arthur Walsh in a suit—came straight from the office, didn’t change, the urgency of a lawyer who has cleared his evening for something that matters.
Gideon at the other end, tea in hand, the host and the strategist.
The boys are in the living room. Close enough to hear, far enough to give the adults space to be adults. Kaiden monitoring. Danny pacing. Ryan on his phone, pulling data. Iz on the couch, ice pack on his cheekbone where I hit him three hours ago.
I’m in the doorway between the two rooms. Belonging to both. Belonging to neither.
The conversation is dense. Legal terms I half-understand.
Federal jurisdiction. RICO statutes. Gideon’s contacts at the DEA.
Thomas’s connections from the Pennington case.
Arthur’s framework for building a case that will stick—not just Reece, but his supply chain, his network, the architecture of an operation that has been hiding behind the money and privilege of Edgewood.