twenty-two
Rumor Has It… WHPA’s beloved Queen clings to life by a thread after a vicious, unprovoked attack that can only be described as a hate crime occurred in the school parking lot. The brutality of the attack is reminiscent of the one that occurred last year and left the fallen king in critical condition for months. With the Queen in similarly dire straits, her future remains uncertain. Make sure to visit her at Faulkner Regional and show your respects before it’s too late!
Colt Darling
MaybeItsMabel: Congratulations.
Dynamo: on what?
MaybeItsMabel: you’re graduating, aren’t you?
Dynamo: thats the idea
MaybeItsMabel: plans?
Dynamo: ditch this town n disappear into the ether. Thats the tradition, rt?
MaybeItsMabel: did u want me to stay?
Dynamo: no
MaybeItsMabel: mom?
Dynamo: same
MaybeItsMabel: Dad?
Dynamo: same.
Dynamo: old. sad.
MaybeItsMabel: u?
I almost laugh. There’s not enough space in the text box to even begin to recount all that’s happened since she left town. I hooked up with the queen bitch. Got beaten nearly to death. Lost my memories. Spent months in the hospital. Repeated senior year—apparently she knows that part. Fucked her boyfriend. Recovered my memories. Hooked up with the queen again. Learned she’s not such a bitch. Oh, but she did hit my ex with her car.
Dynamo: same
I close my phone and climb down from my new truck. Dad and Uncle Justin fixed up the third generation Chevy C/K as a surprise graduation gift for me. Now that the Dolces won’t smash up any car they restore, they’ve taken up their old hobby again. Can’t say it isn’t worth it—the truck is sick as fuck, and it turns more than one head in the lot. I pat the hood affectionately as I circle it and head for the door.
A few minutes later, I step into a room so filled with flowers you’d think I was at the florist shop. I didn’t bring flowers, but I’ve spent plenty of time there over the past year filling Dixie’s thirst for proof that I loved her. I’m done paying for my supposed crimes, though.
The moment she sees me, Dixie goes limp on the bed, her lids fluttering as if she’s just waking up. She whimpers pathetically, muttering my name as she focuses on me.
Too bad I saw her through the window before I opened the door, when she was sitting up typing on her phone, giggling over her own cleverness.
“Critical condition sure looks different than I remember,” I say, approaching the bed.
“Colt,” she mumbles weakly. “You came. I knew you loved me.”
“Cut the bullshit, Dixie,” I say. “I have brain damage, but I’m not brainwashed.”
“What are you talking about?” she asks, widening her eyes.
“I’m talking about that,” I say, gesturing to her face. “I know when you’re making yourself cry, so save your energy for your next visitor. I’m sure they’ll believe your victim act.”
“Act?” she asks incredulously. “That psycho ran me over!”
“Technically, she just ran into you,” I point out. “If she’d run you over, you’d have a lot worse injuries.”
“You think this is funny?” Dixie demands. “She could have killed me.”
“Oh, that wouldn’t have been funny at all,” I assure her, then gesture around at the flowers, the cards, the stuffed animals and balloons. “This? This is hilarious.”
She gapes at me, touching the bruise on the side of her face. “How is this a joke to you?”
“You’re right,” I say. “I actually came to apologize. I should have broken up with you for good a long time ago, and not let you seduce me back all those times. The truth is, I was horny, and you made it easy. But that’s not an excuse for how I treated you. So I wanted to say I’m sorry and mean it this time, not just do it because you’re demanding it.”
She sniffs. “Not much of an apology.”
“And I want the ring back,” I say.
Her eyes widen. “Are you serious? You’re going to take the only thing I got from all our time together while I’m lying here on my deathbed?”
I sigh and rub my temple, the edge of the metal plate I got courtesy of her thirst for popularity. Dixie’s not the apologizing sort. I said my part, but I don’t expect her to offer one in return. She is who she is. And I’m done letting her manipulate me.
“You’re hardly on your deathbed,” I point out. “In fact, all in all, I’d say things worked out pretty well for you. No major injuries, you got rid of your enemy, and suddenly everyone’s rushing to offer you sympathy. Guess they’ve forgotten how you admitted you played them for fools.”
“I did put my own spin on it,” she says smugly, picking up her phone. “I thought for a minute they’d turn on me. Gloria couldn’t have picked a better time to show she was always the real villain.”
“Sounds about right,” I say. “You always were the master of spin.”
“I always come out on top,” she agrees, looking pleased with herself. “I play the long game. That’s why I’m always victorious in the end.”
“Except this time,” I say, holding out a hand. “The ring?”
She hesitates, staring down at it. “It’s really over?”
“It’s really over,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Do you love her?” she asks, peeking up at me from under her lashes.
“Yes.”
At last, she slides off the ring and drops it into my palm. “What are you going to do with it?”
I pinch it between thumb and finger, looking at the tiny diamond. “Probably throw it in the river,” I say. “I can’t believe you accepted something so small. Gloria would never.”
“You said you’d get me a bigger one later,” she protests. “It’s not like I picked it out. You asked me in the middle of the night. We couldn’t exactly go to a jewelry store and get the one I wanted.”
“And I just happened to have this one lying around?” I ask. “I must have thought that’s what you were worth when I bought it. What an insult. I really was an asshole to you.”
She huffs, clearly torn between defending herself and jumping at the chance to remind me how badly I wronged her. “That goes without saying,” she answers at last, giving me a wounded look.
“The funny thing is, I don’t remember buying this,” I say. “I forgot the month before the attack, but that’s when I broke up with you, so it couldn’t have been then. Maybe I didn’t buy it for you at all.”
“What?” she demands. “Of course you did!”
“I don’t know,” I say, examining it another minute. “It doesn’t look like something I’d choose, and if you didn’t choose it… Maybe someone else did.”
“She didn’t,” Dixie grits out, glaring at me.
“It’s almost as if I didn’t buy it at all,” I muse. “I guess I could look at my credit card receipts to make sure. Too bad there’s no record of me asking you. I’m surprised, really. It seems like the kind of thing you’d have your phone out for, so you could get a video for your blog.”
“You asked me,” she cries. “You bought the ring for me!”
“Did I?” I ask, drawing a cracked, old phone from my pocket. I lay it face down on the bed beside her. It’s dead now, but I didn’t have to turn it on to know it’s the phone I had on me when Royal beat me. Maverick doodled all over the case one night a few months before the attack when we were hanging out, just fucking around before the tattoo parlor closed. There’s not another one like it.
“What’s that?” Dixie asks, but her face has blanched of color.
“You got hit on last day of school,” I say. “I went by your locker to make sure you’d already cleaned it out. Imagine my surprise when I found my phone. Oh, and these.”
I pull out a wad of panties from my pocket and drop them onto the bed.
“What are those?” she demands, recoiling.
“Don’t worry, I won’t out you,” I say. “I’m not a homophobic piece of shit. But for someone who tried to destroy her enemy by implying she was a desperate nympho because she might have done stuff with other girls, you sure have a lot of used panties in your locker. And don’t tell me they’re yours because I know you don’t wear anything that skimpy.”
“They’re hers, ” she snarls, sweeping them off the bed onto the floor. “Is that what you want to hear?”
“No,” I say. “I want to hear why you have them.”
“Because you had them,” she says. “Was I supposed to leave them in your drawer so you could jerk off in them? You’re disgusting, Colt. You’re lucky I stuck around as long as I did.”
I bend and swipe them from the floor before stuffing them back in my pocket. “So you went through my stuff and stole them. Glad you’re finally admitting the truth now that it’s over.”
“It’s not over,” she snaps. “Maybe for us, but not for her. I’m going to make her pay for what she did.”
“Or you could accept that it’s done and move on.”
She snorts. “While she’s locked up with no phone, and she can’t destroy me like she tried to do at school? Like I’d give up that chance.”
“She didn’t try to destroy you,” I say. “She defended herself.”
“By running me over?” Dixie demands, picking up her phone. “I’m the one defending myself. I’m going to make her wish she’d never been born.”
“You fight with words,” I say. “There’s no rule that says other people have to do the same.”
“There are rules that say people can’t fight with their car, ” she points out.
“True,” I say. “Some people use words. Some use violence.”
“Which is why she’s in jail, and if I have anything to do with it, she’ll be there for life.”
“Everyone fights,” I point out. “Even if it’s not by choice, sometimes your hand is forced.”
“You can’t force someone to fight,” she says, giving me a sour look. “I learned that the hard way. No one forced her to run me over. She made that choice, and now she’ll pay.”
“You can’t force someone to fight for you,” I agree. “You can’t force someone to care. But you can force someone to fight, even if it’s in self-defense.”
“What she did wasn’t in self-defense,” she says, gaping at me. “I didn’t touch her!”
“Because you fight with words, not violence,” I point out. “You can force someone to fight if you back them far enough into a corner, but you still can’t choose someone else’s weapon. You can’t choose what victory looks like to them, or the path they take to get there.”
Her face reddens with anger, and she splutters to get out her words. “Victory?” she chokes out. “You think that washed up, ugly bitch beat me? She couldn’t even stay relevant when the whole world was handed to her on a silver platter. She probably hasn’t had a single visitor. Even her sisters came to see me, not her! She’s not a victor. She’s the villain.”
“And you’re the victim,” I point out. “That’s why everyone’s feeling sorry for you, just like you wanted. But you can’t be a victim and the victor at the same time.”
“I can,” Dixie fumes. “I am.”
“She showed everyone at school who you really are. You said so yourself.”
“She tried ,” Dixie says with a scoff. “I manipulated everyone to get exactly what I wanted. They all love me, and they think she’s trash. Clearly, I won.”
“Did you, though?”
She narrows her eyes, her tone turning confrontational. “Didn’t I?”
“Maybe you did,” I concede. “But you’re in a hospital bed with no ring on your finger, nothing to show for all your hard work except a bunch of flowers that will be tossed in the trash when you walk out of here. Not the best show of victory.”
“You don’t think I won,” she accuses. “You think Gloria won because she got you.”
“Gloria’s in jail.”
She stares at me a long minute. “Then who won?” she asks, and I can tell she’s frustrated by not feeling like the cleverest person in the room for once. It’s probably the only thing in the world she hates more than losing the ring. “The Dolces?”
I snort at that. “The Dolces folded as soon as Tony died. Royal was already halfway out the door. Baron scurried off to hide like a cockroach. Duke is a loser.”
“So who’s the victor?”
“Maybe there isn’t one,” I say. “Gloria didn’t make everyone hate you, but she finally proved you’re not exempt. You’re not untouchable after all. We’ve all paid now.”
“But someone always comes out on top,” Dixie insists. “If not me, then who won?”
I shrug. “You’re the queen of the long game. This should be easy for you. Who got everything they wanted in the end?”
I turn and walk out without waiting for the answer. I already know.