The Rules

Chapter 1

ONE

HARPER

I’ve been told I’m an angry person and that it’s unbecoming of a lady.

I told the person who told me that—my high school principal last semester—to go fuck himself. And maybe use the good vibrator this time to melt the stick up his ass.

Yeah, so... I got suspended instead of just detention.

I can’t help it sometimes. Rage on a low boil just seems to be my default setting lately, and that was before Darlene kicked me out of my bedroom to sleep on the couch so the most recent asshole of a month, fucking Todd, could use my bedroom as an office.

God, I have to get the hell out of here.

I’m busy stabbing the shattered face of the secondhand phone I got off Greg—this guy I occasionally hook up with—over and over and over, trying to force the Craigslist roommates and apartments page to load through the stolen Wi-Fi Ms. Hernandez next door doesn’t know how to password-protect.

When fucking Todd sits down beside me on the couch.

Not near me.

Beside me.

Close enough, I can smell his beer breath and the grease from whatever frozen crap he microwaved for lunch.

“Whatcha up to, kiddo?” His voice drips with fake-dad energy that makes my skin crawl. He scoots closer, invading my space like he’s got a right to it. “Hey, your hair looks real nice when you wear it that way. I ever tell you that?”

I’m seventeen.

He’s forty.

And we both know exactly what game he’s playing, even if Darlene’s too smashed in the back bedroom to notice. I got home from the library in time to hear the tail end of some screaming phone call earlier that had her downing an entire bottle of Jack.

The veneer of her, me, and Todd pretending Todd’s not a fucking pervert is wearing so thin I can practically see through it. Like tissue paper held up to the light, all the ugly shit underneath gets clearer.

And people wonder why I’m such a bitch.

Todd doesn’t even do any actual work in his “office.” He just games in there all day while I’m stuck out here, doing homework and sleeping on a couch that smells like spilled beer, with zero privacy.

I’m officially over it. Hence, the apartment hunting, even though I haven’t finished high school yet.

Z and I always talk about getting out once we turn eighteen, but it’s getting so bad here, I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth leaving early. We could hitchhike to Austin. Find some shitty room for like five hundred bucks a month if we shared with roommates.

But five hundred might as well be a million right now. Plus, there’s the fact that Z’s stepdad would have Amber Alerts out for him within the hour just out of spite, but still.

A bitch can dream, right?

Todd slides closer, his arm stretching across the back of the couch, trapping some of my hair underneath. His hand edges toward my thigh.

“You wanna watch a movie together? I could make us some popcorn.”

Or I could stab you in the eye with my number two pencil.

The heat of his body next to mine makes my stomach turn. I spring off the couch like it’s on fire, glaring at him.

“No, I don’t want to watch a fucking movie with you, Todd.”

His face shifts—wounded puppy to angry dog in half a second. “God, why do you always have to be such a bitch? I’m just trying to be nice. You need a father figure in your life.”

My jaw drops.

The audacity.

The sheer fucking audacity of this man who touches my ass every time we pass in the hall and stares at my tits like he’s cataloging them for later, to sit here and call himself a father figure.

I want to say something devastating. Something that will strip him down to nothing but the pathetic predator he is.

But the words stick in my throat, choked by rage and tears and the sick realization that my mother is passed out in the back and there’s no one here to stop him from being exactly who he is.

I choose rage and swallow all the rest down.

“Fuck you.” I grab my little backpack purse and stomp toward the front door.

“Where do you think you’re going? Get back here, young lady!”

I flip him off without looking back and slam the door so hard the whole trailer shakes.

I hope it wakes Darlene up to the world’s worst hangover.

The second my foot hits dirt, I’m running.

Past Ms. Hernandez’s place, where her garden gnomes guard a patch of struggling petunias.

Past the Jenkins’s house, where the nine-year-old twins are beating the shit out of each other in the dirt yard, screaming about whose turn it is on the Xbox.

Past the barrel fire where a bunch of folks are tailgating around a pickup truck, blaring Luke Bryan and drinking Bud Light at four in the afternoon because nobody here has anywhere better to be.

The ammonia stench of the chicken factory two towns over rides the breeze, mixing with the beer and smoke.

There’s no place like home, they say.

But they never lived in a shithole like Grass Valley Trailer Park. The V rusted out ages ago, so it’s just Grass Alley, which I always imagined as a dystopian image—or a great place to get weed. Both apply to Grass Alley.

Finally, I make it to the trailer at the end of the row—the only one that matters—and I don’t bother with the front door. I just book it around back to Z’s bedroom window, the one that’s always cracked open like an invitation.

I hop up on the crate we set up for exactly this purpose, grab the windowsill, give a little jump, and heft myself up and over the edge.

Z’s bed is right underneath, and today I don’t stick the landing. I come down half on my head, half on my back, and roll the rest of the way with all the grace of a drunk elephant.

“What’s up?” Z asks from his desk, barely glancing away from the clunky laptop he liberated from the library’s donation pile last year.

He didn’t consider it stealing. He reasoned that if it was going to charity, and he needed charity, why not cut out the middleman?

His finger slams a key over and over, and I can hear the tinny sound of something exploding on screen.

I never got into gaming. Why spend half my life fighting for thirty-minute slots on the library computers when I could be sketching or reading? Plus, the digital world feels too much like an escape I can’t afford. Real life has a way of dragging you back, whether you’re ready or not.

“Damn it. Goddamn it.” Z shoots up from his chair and glares out the window like the Wi-Fi signal personally offended him. “I fucking swear you’re so lucky you live right next door to Ms. Hernandez.”

I grin from where I’m sprawled on his bed like a starfish. My racing heartbeat is only now slowing down from the encounter at home. Z’s bedroom is one of the few safe places in my world where I can totally relax. “Benefits of a better signal cannot be denied. If I could ever stand being home.”

“Fucking Todd?”

“Fucking Todd.”

We sit in silence for a second, the background music from his game filling the space between us. This is what we do. We don’t dwell. We don’t unpack our trauma like some after-school special. We just exist next to each other, and that’s enough.

I change the subject because that’s also who I am. One foot in front of the other. Every day is one day closer to getting out of this shitty town and never looking back.

“Can you believe senior year starts tomorrow?” I sigh, letting relief wash through me. “We finally fucking made it.”

Senior year. The light at the end of this long, dark tunnel of survival we’ve been crawling through for what feels like forever.

I’ll turn eighteen in November, Z in March, and then we’re gone.

“Oh great,” Z says sarcastically, “another year of everyone calling me a klepto and you a slut. Why am I not more excited?”

I shrug. It’s not like we didn’t earn our reputations.

Well. I mean, I’ve only slept with three guys in total, but that might as well be a million to the slut-shaming rumor mill in a town as small as Selbyville.

According to them, I’ve slept with the entire football team—how cliché.

At least the rumors got inventive when they started saying that I’d fucked most of the marching band, too.

Anyway, none of this will matter soon. Z and I will leave and start over, and then we can be anyone we want to be. Completely new people, even.

But as I stare up at Z’s broken ceiling fan, I wonder. If I’m not who everyone says I am, who the hell am I, exactly? They say that being a teenager is a time of self-discovery—all that coming of age shit.

But I don’t feel like I’ll have any idea of who I might become until I get the hell away from here. Because if I don’t leave, I’m terrified I’ll get swallowed up by it just like everybody else in Grass Valley.

There’s a momentum to life, I’ve always thought, and if you don’t use the launch power while you still have some fight left in you, you never escape where you started out.

Darlene told me about her dreams once, and they sounded an awful lot like mine.

She wanted to make it to the city. To get out.

But she just ended up at the bottom of a bottle, all of eight miles down the road from where she grew up in an even shittier trailer park. And she never left.

I frown over at Z. “Did you get anything to eat today?”

He shrugs and looks away.

“Heads up.” I open my purse, rummage around inside past my little sketchbook until my hand closes around what I’m looking for. I pull out the candy bar and toss it at Z’s chest.

He catches it mid-air, eyes widening. “Did you go by Smithy’s without me?

” He immediately opens the chocolate bar and shoves half of it in his mouth.

Smithy’s is the little family grocery down the road that we shoplift from sometimes, but usually only when it’s both of us—one to distract, the other to lift.

Since I’ve got the tits, I’m usually the one doing the distracting.

“Careful, not too fast,” I say when Z just keeps inhaling the chocolate.

He rolls his eyes at me.

“I found some quarters on the ground and got it from the machine.”