Chapter 14 Catherine #7
My fist connects with his nose. The bandaged nose. The already-broken nose. I feel the crunch through my knuckles—cartilage shifting under impact—and the sound is wet and satisfying and horrifying and I don’t stop.
I hit him again. Open hand, side of his face, hard enough that his head snaps sideways.
He stumbles. I follow. My hands find his shirt—fisting the fabric, pulling him toward me, and my knee comes up into his stomach and he doubles over and I’m on top of him, hitting him, scratching, the particular violence of a person who has been trained by life to fight dirty because fair fights are a luxury she’s never had.
The room erupts. Screaming. Bodies moving. The particular chaos of a crowd that was expecting a verbal confrontation and just got an actual fight.
Penny’s voice, over everything: “BEAT THE LIFE OUT OF HIM, CAT! FUCK HIM UP!”
Jon tries to grab my arms. Tries to push me off.
He’s bigger than me—eight inches taller, sixty pounds heavier—but I’m faster and meaner and running on a fuel source that his privilege has never given him access to: the pure, focused rage of a person who has been victimized by men her entire life and just found out that the last safe person in her family is being victimized too.
I get my hand around his throat. Squeeze. Watch his eyes go wide.
Arms around my waist. Strong. Lifting me off the ground.
Kaiden’s arms—I know them by the grip, by the way his forearms lock against my stomach, by the particular strength that a lacrosse player’s body generates.
He hauls me off Jon and I’m kicking, thrashing, my body still running the attack program even though the target is being removed.
“Let me go! Kaiden, let me—”
“Stop. Cat. Stop.” His voice in my ear. Not calm—urgent, ragged, the voice of someone who is holding on to something they’re not sure they can control. “You need to stop.”
Iz appears. Helps Kaiden hold me. Two sets of arms now, pulling me backward, away from Jon, who is on the floor with blood pouring from his re-broken nose and scratch marks down his face and the particular expression of a person who has just learned, violently, that words have physical consequences.
Danny and Ryan are on Jon. Not gently. Danny has him by the collar, pulling him upright. Ryan has his arm, steering him toward the door. Their faces are set—no anger, no emotion, just the efficient physicality of two boys removing a problem from a room.
Across the chaos, Xander has Penny. She’s screaming—not scared, furious—trying to get around him to join the fight.
X has one arm around her waist, her feet off the ground, her body flailing, and his face is pressed against her hair and he’s saying something I can’t hear but the effect of whatever it is makes Penny stop thrashing and start shaking.
Jon’s voice from the door, garbled through the blood: “You’re fucking insane, Catherine! You’re a psycho! Your whole family is—”
Danny clamps his hand over Jon’s mouth. Literally.
His palm flat across Jon’s face, silencing him mid-sentence, and the casual authority of the gesture—the silent boy with the quiet eyes putting his hand over the mouth of the loudest person in the room—is the most effective thing Danny Rorke has ever communicated.
They drag him out. The door slams.
Kaiden releases me. I stumble forward. The adrenaline is crashing now—the red draining from my vision, replaced by the shaky, hollow aftermath of violence. My hands are trembling. My knuckles are scraped. There’s blood on my fingers that isn’t mine.
The room is staring. Every phone is up. Every face is shocked. Kaiden turns to the room. His voice fills the space the way it fills every space—big, authoritative, the voice that makes hallways part and classrooms go quiet.
“Party’s over. Everybody out. Now.”
Nobody argues. The room begins to drain—students grabbing coats, finishing drinks, moving toward the doors with the hurried compliance of people who have just watched a girl beat a boy bloody and are not interested in being the next target.
Iz is beside me. His hand on my shoulder. Steady. “You good?”
I look at my hands. At the blood. At the scraped knuckles. At the bruise already forming where my fist connected with Jon’s nose.
“He said my mother is being blackmailed by the Penningtons.”
Iz’s expression goes hard. “We heard.”
“Everybody heard.”
“Yeah.” He squeezes my shoulder. “We’ll deal with it. All of us. But right now, let’s just breathe.”
The room empties. The music dies. What’s left is the aftermath—red cups, spilled drinks, a broken lamp, the particular desolation of a party that ended in violence. And in the middle of it, me. In a boy’s sweatshirt. With blood on my hands. Shaking.
Again.
The house empties in under ten minutes. Kaiden’s voice carries that kind of authority—the kind that doesn’t need repetition. Students file out with their coats and their drinks and their phone footage, and the front door closes behind the last of them, and what’s left is silence and wreckage.
Red cups everywhere. A spilled bottle of something amber soaking into the hardwood. A broken lamp that nobody is going to acknowledge was a four-hundred-dollar antique. Crushed chips ground into the rug. The particular devastation of a house that hosted a party and lost.
The six of us stand in the living room. Kaiden. Iz. Xander. Danny. Ryan. Me. The aftermath settling around us like dust after a demolition.
Xander looks at the mess. Looks at me. Back at the mess.
“Well,” he says. “That was eventful.”
Nobody laughs. But the tension cracks—just a fraction, just enough to let air in.
“We should clean,” Danny says. Already moving.
He’s found a trash bag from somewhere—under the sink, probably, because Danny Rorke operates with the quiet efficiency of a person who has been cleaning up after other people’s messes his entire life and doesn’t see the point in standing around talking about it.
So we clean. All of us. No discussion, no delegation—just six people picking up cups and wiping counters and sweeping broken glass because the alternative is standing still and feeling things, and none of us are ready for that yet.
Kaiden takes the kitchen. I hear him running water, the clink of bottles being collected, the rhythmic thud of the trash bag filling.
Iz works the living room despite his ribs, moving carefully, not complaining, because Iz doesn’t complain about physical pain the way he doesn’t complain about most things—he just absorbs it and keeps going.
Ryan is on his hands and knees scrubbing something out of the rug with a focus that suggests he’s treating it like a problem to solve rather than a stain to remove.
Danny has graduated from trash bags to mopping.
Xander is reassembling the broken lamp with the casual competence of someone who has broken and fixed things in this house many times before.
I collect cups. Move through the rooms. The mindless repetition of it is grounding—bend, pick up, toss, repeat. My knuckles throb. The scrapes across them are crusting over, the skin split in two places where my fist met Jon’s face. I keep working.
Danny appears beside me. Holds out a damp paper towel without a word. I look at him.
“For your hand,” he says. Quiet. “The blood.”
I take it. Wipe my knuckles. The paper towel comes away pink. “Thanks, Danny.”
He nods. Goes back to mopping. Two words and a paper towel. That’s Danny’s entire love language, and it’s more effective than most people’s speeches.
Ryan straightens up from the rug. “For the record, that was the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen at one of our parties. And I once watched Iz do a backflip off the pool house roof.”
“That was sophomore year,” Iz says from the living room. “And I landed it.”
“You broke your wrist.”
“I landed it and then broke my wrist. The landing was clean.”
I smile. Can’t help it. The absurdity of having this conversation while cleaning up the aftermath of a party that ended with me beating a boy bloody—the normalcy of boys bickering about a backflip from two years ago while the adrenaline is still metabolizing in my bloodstream—is so deeply, specifically teenage that it makes the horror of the last hour feel survivable.
Xander finishes the lamp. Sets it upright. Steps back and inspects it with a critical eye.
“My mother won’t notice,” he says. Then, as an afterthought: “My mother won’t be home for six weeks. So even if she notices, it’ll be a delayed-reaction situation.”
He turns to me. His expression is the Xander neutral—blank surface, everything underneath. But his voice, when he speaks, has a warmth I haven’t heard from him before.
“Stay tonight. All of you. There’s enough rooms. No point in anybody driving.”
He says it to the group. But he’s looking at me.
“X, I don’t want to impose—”
“You just beat the shit out of Jonathan Pennington in my living room. You’re not imposing. You’re a guest of honor.”
Iz drops onto the couch. Winces, hand going to his ribs. “I’m staying. I’m not driving with cracked ribs and whatever Ry put in those drinks.”
“I didn’t put anything in the drinks,” Ryan says.
“You put something in my drink sophomore year and I’ve never fully trusted you since.”
“That was a vitamin supplement.”
“It was melatonin. I slept for fourteen hours.”
Danny sits beside Iz. Says nothing. His presence beside an injured friend is his statement.
Ryan shrugs. “I’ll take the pool house. I’ve got work to do anyway.” He means hacking. He always means hacking. I don’t ask.
Kaiden comes out of the kitchen. Drying his hands on a dish towel. His eyes find me across the room and do the thing—the compass-needle thing, the full-body recalibration toward wherever I am. He crosses to me. His hand finds mine. Squeezes.
“You okay?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Honest answer. I’ll take it.”
Xander tosses Kaiden a set of keys. “Second floor, end of the hall. Clean sheets. Towels in the closet.”