Chapter 1: Prologue
Chapter Text
“No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall,' he returned. 'I only wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I'll plan it out: while I'm thinking of that, I don't feel pain.”
Wuthering Heights
Prologue
Veronica’s dad was the sheriff, so she was usually pretty scrupulous about not breaking the law. A bit of underage drinking during an illicit limo party was one thing, but she stayed away from anything that would look too bad if she got caught, or disappoint her father beyond what a good night’s sleep or a sincere apology could cure.
She wouldn’t have gone illegally snooping through Sheriff’s Department files for just anyone, was the point. But Lilly was her best friend, and Veronica loved her enough to do a lot worse for her, which was why she was currently downloading one of her schoolmates’ juvenile records while Inga was distracted. And if maybe she was distracted because Veronica had convinced Logan to lure her away from her desk, that was only a crime in the literal sense of the word.
He didn’t know why, of course – she’d told him she had to erase a speeding ticket or her dad would freak. Somehow she didn’t think admitting that she wanted to make sure his girlfriend’s pre-summer fling wasn’t the dangerous kind of obsessed stalker would have gotten the reaction she wanted.
It wasn’t like she could ask Duncan, who was still pretending she didn’t exist, and Lilly would never have taken it seriously. She’d already blown those concerns off. “Honestly, Veronica, it’s just an excuse to get out of gym. Didn’t we have way more fun in Pep Squad?”
But Lilly, for all she made of her extra six months of life and for all her worldliness, could be naïve about these kinds of things. Nothing had ever been able to touch her, so she thought nothing ever would, and she hadn’t grown up getting the age appropriate If A Man Makes You Uncomfortable, If He Controls You talk every time her dad caught a bad DV case.
For the rest of your life, wherever you go, I’ll always be there, just out of sight in the shadows – that was concerning, even if it didn’t quite constitute an actionable threat. She’d heard enough stories of ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands for whom ‘being there’ was a prelude to much worse, and most of them hadn’t already had a record that required a scrollbar.
Veronica didn’t try to read the files at the desk, although her heart sank a little when a quick glance showed several prominent assault charges and at least two of battery. She copied everything over to her USB instead, carefully closed out anything Inga hadn’t already had open, and started loudly looking for the bracelet she’d left there on purpose the day before.
When she met Logan outside, she put off his curiosity with some half-answer about the lost jewelry ruse working, and let him tease her about being the only girl in the world who’d commit a felony to cover up a moving violation. None of that was accurate even if she had been doing what he thought, but she let him have his fun anyway, feeling guilty. It wasn’t like Lilly had been cheating on him; they’d been broken up, and Veronica had no proof it had continued once they’d gotten back together – besides the attachment level of a volatile gang member, which didn’t mean anything.
Still. She was lying to him, and it didn’t feel wonderful to let him buy her ice cream and banter back and forth about the mystery flavour and whether the perpetually untouched pistachio gelato was even real when she had his girlfriend’s ex’s rap sheet burning a hole in her pocket.
It was easy enough to put him off after that – Logan was always, on some level, thinking about Lilly, and Veronica had an iron-clad reason to avoid the Kane house at the moment. A couple of misdirects and a carefully timed look-away-and-bite-your-lip maneuver, and he was dropping her off at home with no suspicions at all. It was easy to convince Logan she was still heartbroken over Duncan, since, after all, she was still heartbroken over Duncan, and if nothing else that made the manipulation go down a little easier.
Her mom was having a nap – which was probably okay, because she’d left a note saying she was having a nap and that there were cookies Veronica could have, so it really was just a nap and she didn’t need to think about it – and her dad was at work, so she could look through the files right away. No point in not capitalizing on the opportunity.
Veronica copied everything on the memory stick to her computer, renamed the outermost folder Ideas for Lilly’s party and stuck it in her Other Things folder with old school projects she didn’t want to delete and everything to do with Duncan she tried not to look at. Then she tucked the USB away and opened up the main file.
Eli Navarro’s arrest record went back almost five years, and a quick bit of subtraction confirmed that the first time he’d been picked up he was eleven, although Deputy Barker had let him go with a warning. Veronica wasn’t especially interested in pre-adolescent shoplifting, though; she skipped to the slew of assault charges.
A quick survey showed about what she’d… hoped for? Expected? It was hard to say. Almost all of the victims were male, a good portion of them other teenagers who’d apparently pissed him off somehow. There was a store owner who’d caught him shoplifting, a teacher – that was in middle school.
Middle school.
The female victims were similar – a girl who’d allegedly called him a slur, a worker who’d tried to kick the PCH out of the community pool, some driver he’d thrown something at. Missed punches, thrown objects, some shoving – general tough guy stuff. No romantic partners, no overtly sexualized violence. So far, so… good? Well, not really, but there wasn’t anything that made her more scared for Lilly specifically.
But that was assault: intent to cause harm, means to cause harm, but not necessarily… harm. On to the battery charges.
One last year, which looked like some kind of gang altercation; multiple people had been charged. Another one in January, with language that suggested a freak attack, although there was something about Deputy Lamb’s phrasing that set off alarms in Veronica’s mind, and not even about Navarro. He was so insistent that there was no motive, and what was some 09er college student even doing in that part of town anyway?
It didn’t matter, she reminded herself. Maybe that guy had started the altercation, or said something stupid, but either way it was Eli Navarro and his friends who’d put him in the hospital. And while that was as concerning as the rest of the very violent streak he was apparently flaunting all over town, it wasn’t the kind of three-alarm warning she’d been half-afraid of finding.
And half-hoping to find, because it might have made Lilly take her seriously.
The last battery charge was the oldest, and she hadn’t expected it to be particularly shocking, but the details made her sit back from the computer.
Holy shit. She ran the math again. Yeah, he would have been fourteen. Almost fifteen, but still. The victim’s injuries included two broken ribs and a cracked eye-socket. Veronica swallowed convulsively. Maybe she should be afraid for Logan. The letters had been mostly focussed on Lilly, but there had been more than one reference to ‘him’. He won’t change, he’ll never get you like I do, if you stay with him you’ll regret it.
Veronica reached over to shut the laptop – she had to talk to Lilly again, get her to take this seriously, to talk to her dad, or to Veronica’s dad, and get a restraining order or something – but then she hesitated. That wasn’t quite what the letter had said. She frowned, trying to remember.
I get it, you’re done with me and you don’t care how bad you hurt me. But if you stay with him you’re going to regret it, Lilly, I know it. Don’t make me watch you go back to that, when I saw how bad it was for you. If he really loved you he’d stay the hell away.
There had been more, ‘I’ll always be here for you’, ‘don’t you remember what we had’, ‘how could you do this to me’. The same you tore my heart out stuff that was in the others.
It was insane to think that Logan would ever hurt Lilly, but… it was true that sometimes he wasn’t an amazing boyfriend, in the same way that sometimes Lilly wasn’t an amazing girlfriend. Stupid teenage drama stuff, like Yolanda – nothing like this dark, disturbing version of the world where teenage boys beat people into the hospital and she had to steal private government files from her dad’s work to protect her friend. But if you lived in that world, maybe you would think Logan was dangerous, maybe if you’ll stay with him you’ll regret it was a genuine concern, not a threat.
And it sounded just enough like some of her dad’s lectures on what to watch out for, the same ones that had made her do this in the first place, that Veronica wondered…
Her hand hovered above the lid of the laptop for a long moment before she sighed and dropped it. She’d read the rest of the details, just in case.
Sacks had made the report, and he seemed weirdly unsympathetic to the victim. ‘Mr. Pereira claims that Eli Navarro…’ ‘…the victim allegedly arrived there for the purpose of seeing his daughter…’ Maybe it was just police talk, but the statements from the victim’s wife and the other residents of the apartment complex were all described neutrally – ‘Mrs. Pereira told police her husband did not live at the residence’, ‘Mr. Navarro said he found the Pereiras involved in an argument when he arrived’, ‘Miss Sanchez was unsure of who had instigated the altercation’.
And then there it was: he’d been there in the first place to babysit his niece.
That was weird to think about in itself – the scary gang member having a niece, let alone babysitting said niece, and honestly even having a niece at their age felt a little odd. So Mrs. Pereira was his sister, and it was his brother-in-law he’d beaten the shit out of.
She went back and reread it from the beginning, without losing details in her shock this time, and yeah, it made a kind of ugly sense: either the husband was a creep with no good reason for being there, or maybe he was just an ex taking the brunt of an over-protective brother’s ire.
She couldn’t access any information on David Pereira, not from her home computer, but Sacks had made a note at the bottom: multiple DV calls to Mr. Pereira’s residence when Mrs. Pereira still lived there. Mrs. Pereira has made two police reports against her husband for harassment. Mrs. Pereira had a visible black eye at the scene.
Veronica felt a little bit sick, but in a different way. Further reading showed the witness statements were conflicting – David Pereira said he’d come to see his daughter and been attacked unexpectedly by his wife’s brother; Claudia Pereira said her husband had come by unexpectedly, against their custody agreement, and been arguing with her when her brother arrived, that Dave had thrown the first punch, though she didn’t mention him hitting her at all; and Eli Navarro said as little as possible, most of it boiling down to well, he was asking for it. The only relevant statement was when her dad had asked in interrogation why he’d found it necessary to push Mr. Pereira down the outside stairs from his sister’s second-floor apartment.
“I had to get him out of there, man, Ofelia was there. I don’t want her seeing that shit.”
Assault was bad, and battery was worse, and violence was not to be condoned under any circumstances, and Veronica was not even the slightest bit sorry that a man who’d attacked his estranged wife in full view of their two-year-old daughter had been hospitalized on the strength of his teenage brother-in-law’s fists. Maybe that made her a bad person, but reading between the lines, Sacks was clearly furious that Claudia Pereira wouldn’t give them enough to arrest her husband on his own felony charge, and more than a little regretful that he had to book Navarro on aggravated battery.
He probably had thrown the first punch, at least against Pereira, and his sister was lying to protect him, because she wasn’t willing to tell the truth to protect him.
God, this had been a mistake. What was she doing rifling through people’s personal lives like this was something she had any authority to make judgements on? She wasn’t even a junior in high school, how was she supposed to judge if this made Lilly more or less safe, if it meant that Eli Navarro had a disgust of abusive men or just that he was horrifically violent when provoked, if justice had been served to anyone involved in the Pereira case.
She read the rest, because somehow she couldn’t help herself – Pereira had waffled, finally trying to have the charges dropped; when the sheriff’s department declined to do so because they already had plenty of evidence, he became uncooperative. Veronica wondered if he’d been threatened (did the PCH even let fourteen-year-olds in?), or if he was just afraid his wife would finally admit to the abuse if he actually testified against her brother. Navarro took a plea deal for misdemeanour battery – frankly impressive when multiple people saw him shove a man down a full flight of stairs and beat his face in.
But he had been fourteen. And did that make it better, or even worse?
This was not someone she would have wanted just out of sight in the shadows of her own life, but Lilly – there was a distinct chance that Lilly found it thrilling. This would not be the thing that convinced her to ask for help.
He’d never stalked anyone before, at least not anyone who’d gone to the police. There were no charges of domestic abuse, of assault or battery against a girlfriend or a woman who’d turned him down, or of sexual assault. Nothing that qualified as violence against women rather than violence, occasionally happening to be against women. It was a lot of violence, but… well, she’d known to expect that, or should have. You didn’t get to be a gang leader by sixteen by being cuddly.
You can act like what we had together meant nothing to you, but you can’t stop me from loving you.
Even the first time through, growing more and more alarmed with every letter Lilly showed her, she had felt (somewhat reluctantly) bad for him, maybe the more so because Lilly was so cavalier about it. It had been hard to understand that kind of blithe enjoyment of something testifying to the fact that you’d ripped someone’s heart from their chest, as if it was the same thing as naked pictures of a handsome Italian guy.
This was supposed to make her feel better, reassure her that everything would be fine – that, or give her the confidence to take action. But now she just felt more confused.
The letters had stopped, Lilly had said. The last one Veronica had seen was from March. Maybe she would leave it. Keep an eye on Lilly, just in case, do something if she saw any signs of danger… but hopefully there wouldn’t be any.
And if she was lucky, she could just forget all of this and never think about Eli Navarro again.
Chapter 2: In Times Of Pain
Notes:
I feel like I should mention that I do have a playlist for this fic. It might give some vague spoilers for later plot events, so be warned, but if you're interested, you can find it here.
Chapter Text
In moments of pain, we seek revenge.
Ami Ayalon
The last few months had been rough, but things were finally looking up. Veronica had a boyfriend – a boyfriend who was sweet, and patient, and wasn’t going to run off with his drug-dealer ex – and Lilly and Logan had actually stayed together for a solid four months without a big fight, and if she and Duncan weren’t exactly talking, she felt much less pathetic around him now that she’d dated two other guys and he knew about it.
Her mom seemed to be doing better, too, which was good. Junior year wasn’t shaping up to be as bad as it might have. Of course, a lot of that was down to Jeremy. He’d been so sweet when Troy bailed, and he hadn’t said a single thing about how if she’d gone out with him when he first asked in September, she wouldn’t have been dumped for Shauna the pill-popper. And she knew he wanted to have sex, but he hadn’t said a single thing besides, “No, I get it,” when she’d redirected his hands the first time. They’d gotten serious pretty fast, and it showed character that he wasn’t assuming everything else would be fast too.
Besides, she wanted it to be special. She’d gone to homecoming with Troy, and even if it had been kind of nice – weird, with Duncan glaring at him the whole time even though he had no right, but mostly nice – it was all spoiled in retrospect and she tried not to think about it. Maybe there’d be another dance in a few months that would be special enough, or there was the junior prom at the end of the year; she was seventeen, after all, and holding out for senior prom like she’d originally planned when she was with Duncan felt kind of childish, especially since it seemed like everyone else had been having sex for ages. Lilly certainly had. Veronica wasn’t… sure if she was ready for that, but soon, probably. Once she got over the last of the shaky unsureness that was left over from what had happened with Troy. Then she’d probably be ready.
And maybe it would be okay even if she wasn’t. Jeremy was so sweet. He brought her cupcakes and he’d made sure she knew he liked her even when she was with Troy, but without being a jerk about it. He was nothing like Troy, no edge, no hidden secrets, no dark past. Sometimes she remembered uncomfortably that Duncan had been the perfect affectionate boyfriend until one day she suddenly didn’t exist to him, but – Jeremy was different. She felt safe with him. Or without him. That was almost a bigger deal; she missed him when they were apart, but she didn’t feel anxious.
Jeremy always made her feel appreciated, and that should be an end to her dithering and prevarication. She could wait and give him the band T-shirt tomorrow, maybe make cookies to go with it, but she wanted him to know she was thinking of him now. That she could go shopping for a party dress and lipgloss and he would still cross her mind immediately the second she caught a glimpse of Blink-182 printed on basically any type of fabric.
Lilly would have told her she was being clingy. Lilly would have stopped her from buying the T-shirt and insisted that she play harder to get and pick five more shades of nail polish before they left the mall. But Lilly had bailed on her today, so she didn’t have a say, and anyway Veronica didn’t especially want what Lilly did. She didn’t even want what Lilly had with Logan, romantic as it might be – she liked her nice, stable, wholesome boyfriend, and she wasn’t afraid to make sure that he knew it.
She set the T-shirt gently in the passenger seat and pulled a left out the mall parking lot instead of a right. If Jeremy was busy, she could just drop it off and go; it wasn’t like she was angling to hang out with him. That was a double helping of good-girlfriend-ing, if she did say so herself. She hadn’t set out to be low-maintenance, but she could be, when it was necessary.
Veronica parked in the stall off the back alley, instead of on the street. Jeremy’s mom was sweet enough, but she was always trying to make friends with her son’s friends and girlfriend in a way that was vaguely uncomfortable, and Veronica didn’t really want Mrs. Lasky knowing she was there.
Fortunately, there was a separate entrance to the basement, which was where Jeremy spent all his time anyway. The Laskys might not have quite made it into the 09 zip, but no one could have called them middle class, either, and the set-up downstairs was cushy enough to, on occasion, tempt even Veronica into a couple rounds of whatever Jeremy’s favourite racing sim was this week, despite despite her generally being indifferent to video games at best.
Judging by the sounds from the TV when she slipped in the basement door, that’s what he was doing currently. Veronica debated the pros and cons of sneaking up behind him and covering his eyes. He might be actually angry if it made him lose, but it would be funny, and if she timed it for right after he crossed the finish line, she could have the best of both worlds.
And why not? This was the kind of dumb teenage stuff that she’d been too insecure to do with Troy, that had palled for a long time after Duncan. She should make the most of it.
So she eased the door shut behind her, even stopping to slip off her shoes at the top of the three steps that led down to the basement, and edged into the main room more surreptitiously than was truly necessary – she didn’t really expect Jeremy to hear her coming with the sound cranked up so loud.
And he definitely didn’t, but it wasn’t because of The Fast and the Furious playing unheeded on the giant TV. It was more that he was busy, and it took Veronica an agonizingly long three seconds to parse what she was seeing.
Because Jeremy was on the couch and he was in front of the TV, but the movie was clearly only on to hide what he was really doing from his parents, since he was slumped there with his eyes closed and his pants down, the better to get an enthusiastic blowjob from the girl he was encouraging with a hand to the back of her head.
And that was bad enough, like getting slapped in the face by someone you trusted, like a gutpunch, but even as Veronica started to gasp, to tear up, her brain spat out the identity of the girl who was going to town on him, and that was worse, more like a knife directly to the heart, because it was Lilly.
It was Lilly.
Somehow she didn’t cry or make some kind of pathetic hurt noise. Instead she shrieked, and threw the T-shirt directly at both of them. It hit Jeremy right in the face and he jerked upright with a shout that immediately turned into a screech. She hoped he’d made Lilly bite his dick off.
Veronica turned on her heel and stalked out, kicking her shoes out the door ahead of her because she refused to stop to put them back on. She let the door slam behind her, drowning out Lilly’s half-choked, “Veronica, wait!” She had to get back to her car before she started to cry, and it was the hardest thing she’d ever done. She snatched up the shoes, speedwalking as best she could in socks on the gravel path. The sharp edges bit at the soles of her feet, but she almost welcomed it. It felt about right, like the anger and shock and resentment she was fighting to feel, and in the same way, it all boiled down to pain in the end.
She slammed the driver side door, threw her shoes on the passenger seat, and pulled out dangerously quickly, before anyone could come after her. She didn’t want to know if they did. She didn’t want to know that neither of them bothered, and the idea that one of them would made her nauseous with rage. But that was okay, that was better than crying so hard she couldn’t see the road, which was already starting to happen without her consent.
Veronica took a left and then another one, turning back onto Townsend, passing the front of Jeremy’s house this time. She just wanted to see –
Lilly’s car, sitting right out front. She hadn’t even bothered to hide it. If Veronica hadn’t parked around back to avoid Jeremy’s mom, she would have known right away.
Except she wouldn’t, because it was Lilly. She trusted Lilly. She would have believed whatever weird lie they told her, because it was Lilly, and Lilly would never, not to her.
She was crying in earnest now, shaking and sobbing no matter how hard she tried to stop. Her dad would kill her if he knew she was driving like this. He said all the time that driving tired or emotional was nearly as dangerous as being on your phone, or even drunk. But if she stopped here, someone would see her. Lilly might find her, if she cared enough to look. Somehow the idea that she still did was even worse, the idea that she could really care and still do this to Veronica, even as the possibility that she didn’t left a huge gaping hole in Veronica’s chest.
No matter what had happened with Duncan, she’d always had Lilly. No matter what had happened with Troy, she’d always had Lilly.
No matter what happened with Jeremy, she was supposed to have Lilly. It was how she’d survived Duncan’s sudden shunning and Troy’s offhand manipulation and if she found Jeremy with another girl she was supposed to call Lilly and cry to her, and Lilly would say that bastard, let’s chop his dick off, she would find out who the girl was and make her miserable at school for months, she would force Veronica into some ridiculously over-sexy makeover out of her own closet and makeup bag and then stage a fake photoshoot where they made duckfaces at the camera until they both dissolved into laughter and cackled until they were snorting.
Veronica pulled over onto some other residential street before she got into an accident and sobbed until she couldn’t breathe.
*
There was basically no chance of cleaning herself up enough to look normal – not unless she was willing to go back to the mall and drop fifty bucks on makeup. And even the concept of that reminded her that she’d been supposed to go there with Lilly, that Lilly had bailed on her to have sex with Veronica’s boyfriend.
She would not start crying again. She refused.
Veronica pulled into the Sac N Pac instead, for some water and maybe a chocolate bar or a bottle of aspirin. The kid behind the counter eyed her like he thought she was going to shoot heroin in the restrooms or something – which made sense, because she was a total wreck. Even her hair was a mess, floating every which way like the girl in the mirror was some sixties flower child come to a bad seventies end.
She splashed her face until she looked less like a puffy raccoon and tried to tamp down her hair, but it was a losing battle. Finally she just gave up, grabbed a Coke and a bag of the first snack she saw, and braved the clerk, trying to get a look at his nametag.
“Hey, uh… Wallace, do you sell hair elastics?”
Her voice was still a little messed up from crying, which didn’t help with the junkie impression.
“Sorry,” he said. “But, uh…” he looked around for a moment, clearly trying to be helpful, “we do have these lanyards?” He picked one out of the bowl on the counter and held it up.
Veronica honestly didn’t care anymore. “Sure. Fine.” She’d try to tie her hair back with a lanyard that said Neptune all over it, with tiny anchors. “Thanks.”
“Sure.” He eyed her warily as he totalled up her items, and Veronica braced herself, but all he said was, “You’re the sheriff’s daughter, right? Sheriff Mars?”
“The one and only,” she confirmed, since she was just as much his only daughter as he was the only sheriff.
“He’s a decent guy,” Wallace said. “We got robbed a while back and, uh…” He winced as Veronica’s recognition must have shown on her face. This was the flagpole kid! She’d thought he looked familiar, but Neptune only had one high school, so that wasn’t especially notable. “Anyway… are you okay?”
Veronica laughed, and immediately winced, because she sounded hysterical even to herself. “Um. Sorry. I just – my boyf–” Her throat started to clog up with tears. She cleared it ferociously. “Bad breakup.”
He nodded, adopting a sympathetic expression. Congratulations, Veronica, you’ve gone from disturbing to pathetic.
“Anyway, thanks.” She paid as quickly as possible, forced a weak smile, and retreated to her car.
The lanyard was not an efficient way to tie her hair back, but once she’d doubled it up ten or so times, it worked okay – at least if you didn’t care about having a third of your ponytail covered by your hair tie, which Veronica honestly didn’t right now. She’d take ‘bizarre slob’ over ‘unstable druggie’ any day.
Lilly would probably have rather been pegged as the psycho junkie. Veronica balled up her fist and thumped it against the console more because she was trying to be angry than because she actually was. Anger you could do something with. This throbbing hole in her abdomen that couldn’t understand what Lilly had done to her could easily be crippling. The aching pieces of her heart that just wanted to cry over Jeremy made her feel stupid and pathetic on top of everything, and there was a sinking in her stomach that demanded to know what was wrong with her, that something like this had happened again. Duncan was a fluke, Troy was a jerk, but Jeremy was a pattern, and if even Lilly had betrayed her…
She took a shuddering breath, reaching blindly for the Coke in hope the carbonation would give her system enough of a shake that she could fight off the fresh rush of tears that was quickly becoming immanent. It didn’t quite, so she took a bigger gulp, almost choking.
That wasn’t the reset she was hoping for, but it did the trick. Veronica blinked away the fragments of tears her eyes were using to protest the sudden lack of oxygen, trying to swallow away the tight feeling of misalignment in her throat. She was uncomfortable, but she was back in control.
Her phone buzzed briefly in the passenger seat, where it must have ended up sometime, maybe when she grabbed her shoes to go into the store. Veronica glanced at it – she had a lot of unanswered calls and texts. They must have come in when she was in the Sac N Pac, or maybe she’d just been too distracted to notice them before.
She hesitated, reaching for it, and then finally snatched it up, against her better judgement. Text from Lilly. Two missed calls from Lilly. Another text from Lilly. A text from Jeremy. Three missed calls from Lilly.
She threw it angrily back onto the seat, trying to ignore the anguish tugging at the back of her mind. He’d only texted once, and only Lilly had bothered calling.
And why did Lilly think she could just call? How was she planning on holding a conversation when she was busy deepthroating Jeremy’s dick, anyway?
Enough of this. Veronica pulled out of the parking space, meticulously shoulder-checking despite the lackluster traffic. She refused to stay some kind of basket case, and she definitely wasn’t going to be the kind of basket case who got herself into a car accident over a boy, or a girl who had clearly never really been her friend. Besides, that would be so embarrassing for her dad.
She maintained her licence-test-perfect driving all the way home, feeling a little more poised despite the fact that she was still a mess on the outside. What she’d say when she got there was another story. Her dad wasn’t working today, and her mom would probably be home too, but if she was lucky she could get upstairs and, hopefully, into the shower before either of them saw her like this.
She’d have to tell them something eventually, and she didn’t know for the life of her how she was going to say it, or how she could possibly hide it. She wanted to cry in her mom’s arms, but she also wanted to refuse to admit it had ever happened; as hurtful betrayals went, this was the most humiliating one possible.
God, she had school tomorrow. Lilly would be at school. Jeremy was in three of her classes. Veronica wanted to throw up.
Well, she’d just have to deal, that was all. She’d make a plan. She’d work it out.
Her strong backbone and good intentions lasted as far as the living room, because she wasn’t lucky; her mom was there, and she took one look at Veronica and exclaimed, “Honey, what happened?”
“Jeremy’s cheating on me with Lilly,” she said, and burst into tears.
*
Sobbing into her mother’s shoulder didn’t help, exactly, not in the way she would have wanted, but it did ease some of the weight she was trying to carry. The ice cream her dad turned right around and went back out for when he got home from the store did the same. It wasn’t enough, it didn’t make it better, but it mattered that her parents loved her.
They didn’t seem to understand, though. Her dad ran through the regular mostly-empty threats about dragging Jeremy down to the station – “I can hold him for seventy-two hours before I have to charge him,” – her mom reassured her that there were plenty of fish in the sea.
And maybe there were, but what did it matter when you consistently only hooked the terrible ones and weren’t even smart enough to throw them back? It wasn’t that she wasn’t heartbroken over Jeremy, but the magnitude of her own credulity, of the third strike against her in less than a year, the overwhelming feeling of being stupid and naïve and pathetic – that was so much harder to bear.
And then there was Lilly.
Because she was heartbroken over Lilly, so much more than Jeremy. It hurt so badly, and she still didn’t understand how Lilly could do that to her, still kept desperately trying to think of a way it could have been a misunderstanding, still wanted to cry on Lilly’s shoulder about what had happened. And she was devastated, and furious, and she was so, so stupid, because how could she have ever believed that Lilly cared about her, except that she was sure that Lilly had cared about her, she must’ve.
The feelings didn’t even have the decency to take turns, they just swallowed her all at once, contradicting each other, and it made her feel crazy.
“I would never do that to her,” she said helplessly, and the look on her mom’s face told her it wasn’t the first time. But god, she would never. She probably could never, either – it wasn’t like Logan would go for her any more than Veronica was interested in making a play for him – but that was never the reason. Truthfully, she would probably never have done that to anyone, but Lilly? She would have cut off her own hand before she deliberately hurt Lilly. She would have walked through fire for Lilly. She’d violated her father’s trust and the law and stolen confidential information from the Balboa County Sheriff’s Department for Lilly.
And none of it had mattered to Lilly, not for a second, otherwise how could she have done this?
Her dad rubbed her shoulder comfortingly, and Veronica ate a little more ice cream, just to reassure her parents that this was the heartbreak of normal teenage drama even though it felt like anything but.
She didn’t want to be comforted. She wanted to die, or to burn Lilly’s house down, slash Jeremy’s tires. Lilly’s house was also Duncan’s house, which made the arson sound even better, now she thought of it.
She wanted to make Lilly hurt as bad as she was hurting, and some tiny stupid part of her thought that if she could just do that, then Lilly would be really sorry, properly sorry like a real friend, and somehow everything could be better. It was a stupid, immature fantasy, but it wouldn’t get out of her head.
“It’ll be better in the morning, honey,” her dad reassured her, and Veronica nodded automatically, but he was so very wrong about that.
“Keith, maybe she shouldn’t have to go to school tomorrow,” her mom interposed doubtfully, and Veronica loved her for it. But she didn’t want to hear them debate it, and as much as she wanted to crawl into a hole of blankets and never come out, if she didn’t face Lilly and Jeremy tomorrow, she would probably never manage it.
“Either way I think I’ll go to bed early,” she said before her dad could respond, forcing a smile. “Thanks for this.”
Her mom hugged her and her dad said, “Of course, honey,” and squeezed her shoulder, and Veronica left her bowl in the sink and went upstairs to brush her teeth and shower and lie in bed staring at the ceiling with her eyes burning. She felt very far away from both of them, and she didn’t know why.
*
She almost stayed home from school the next day after all, but even though she couldn’t bear the idea of seeing Lilly – and Jeremy – Veronica wasn’t willing to hide. It was just too pathetic even for her.
That didn’t mean she didn’t quail when faced with the front of the school.
But she had almost two more years here, and she was going to be significantly socially disadvantaged going forward, something she hadn’t let herself think about too much. Visibly quailing was a weakness she couldn’t afford, so Veronica took a quick breath and forged her way through the quad with as much nonchalance as she could manage.
She’d made it to the mid-campus circle when everything went awry.
Specifically, it went awry in the form of Lilly, who bounced up to her, hair swaying, and slipped her hand through Veronica’s arm just under the shoulder. “Did you see Shelly Pomroy?” she asked brightly, like Veronica hadn’t caught her with her boyfriend’s dick in her mouth less than a day ago, hadn’t ignored her calls for an entire day. “Is it tragic or just hilarious, what do you think?”
Veronica stopped walking to stare at her, and Lilly just looked back, eyes wide in an almost innocent expression that was really saying, Well…? What’s your problem?
Because this was how she did it. They were in public, and if Veronica started something, she’d be the irrational one, even more so because Lilly was Lilly, and Veronica wasn’t even Duncan’s girlfriend anymore.
Being the sheriff’s daughter wasn’t worth all that much without Lilly, and against Lilly, she wouldn’t just not be anyone, she’d be no one, like Yolanda was no one these days, famous father notwithstanding.
So she could blow it off, break up with Jeremy quietly, and pretend like nothing had happened. Maybe after a few months she would fall back into old patterns and forget, mostly, what Lilly had done.
No way in hell.
(There were middle grounds, of course – a quiet, hissed confrontation later in the girl’s bathroom; a strained, passive-aggressive détente; a slightly cooler friendship where neither of them ever mentioned it. That would be the smart thing to do, the thing the girl who’d ditched Yolanda for her own security would do.)
Instead, Veronica untangled their arms and shoved Lilly away from her, forcefully enough that the other girl staggered back a full two steps.
“Are you kidding me?” she demanded, loudly enough that it drew attention, but not enough to really qualify as shouting.
“God, Veronica,” Lilly said, only the faintest touch of desperation in her usual blasé nonchalance, “chill.”
“You slept with my boyfriend,” Veronica said, almost as surprised as she was proud that her voice didn’t shake and her eyes didn’t water. She sounded righteously pissed off – she felt righteously pissed off, but she also felt fragile and heartbroken and a little bit crazy, and none of that was coming through, thank god. No one around them could tell that she was also dying a little on the inside.
“Veronica, come on, that’s not–”
“I’m sorry,” Veronica asked, voice dangerously polite, “did I imagine the part where you were choking yourself on his dick? Or–”
“What?”
Well, that explained why Lilly was so invested in calming things down. Veronica hadn’t even seen Logan, but he must have been hanging around by the flagpole with Dick Casablancas and Thom Lemky – they were snickering in the background – and he looked furious.
As he really should.
“You know what?” she said, suddenly calm. It was about right that some of this devastation be returned to sender. “This isn’t my problem. I have more important things to do. Like literally anything.”
She turned and marched toward the school, her mouth tightening in something that felt too vicious to be a smile, as Logan started shouting behind her.
She’d pay for this later, but it was worth it.
*
‘Later’ was pretty much immediate. Jeremy didn’t try to come near her, which was, Veronica decided, the only smart thing he’d ever done, but it seemed like he’d been talking. Get in first and get your side of the story out there, Veronica thought furiously. Where ‘your side of the story’ is ‘whatever lie is most convenient’. Whatever. She didn’t care what Cole or Sean thought, and if Pam wanted to be a bitch to her in the girls’ bathroom, that was just fine.
Maybe it stung when Carrie Bishop spent most of first period whispering to Layla Ciccone about how Jeremy had dumped her because she was so… blah, and wasn’t it sad when people had to make up drama just to make themselves feel important, but it wasn’t like anything Carrie said mattered. She’d said the same kind of stuff after the breakup with Duncan – and apparently since Veronica had overheard her then, she wasn’t bothering to hide it this time around.
Well, Carrie was a bitch, which wasn’t anything that people could really say about Veronica, but that consolation felt hollow. Maybe if she’d been more of a bitch, Lilly would have thought twice about sleeping with her boyfriend. Maybe if she’d been more of a bitch, Lilly would have respected her enough not to have slept with her boyfriend. But Carrie was right about one thing – Veronica wasn’t anything special, not without Lilly or Duncan. She was a pastel, good-girl knock-off of Lilly, benign personality perfectly designed to fit with Duncan’s all-American wholesomeness. Subtract them, and she was nothing in particular, and it made a sick kind of sense that Carrie would hate her for thinking she was.
It wasn’t that she really believed all that, pathetic as it was. She was a real person, not an extra in some forgettable high school movie, but it wasn’t like who she was inside mattered, not at school. What mattered was how she acted, what she looked like, and who she stood next to.
Standing next to Lilly, maybe she was pathetic and naïve, but surely not so pathetic and naïve that Lilly really thought that Veronica would forgive her. Her texts the day before had seemed like she did – there hadn’t even really been an apology, just, Listen Veronica call me okay???? and Just let me explain!! <3 – but Veronica had assumed it was all bravado.
Maybe it wasn’t, given whatever Lilly had tried to pull this morning. Maybe she thought Veronica was so nice and sweet and dependent on her that she would just – just forgive her, and act like nothing happened. Just let her best friend betray her and then go back to being Lilly’s sidekick.
I would rather set myself on fire, she thought.
Well, she wasn’t the one in the wrong, so she could still hold her head up, and it shouldn’t matter what anyone else said, but the moral high ground would be a poor consolation if Lilly decided to go on the offensive – which she would, now that Veronica had probably broken her and Logan up, or at least caused them a whole bunch of trouble. Lilly got bored with Logan sometimes, but she was incredibly possessive of him.
It ached hollowly in her chest, the idea that she could be the target of one of Lilly’s revenge campaigns, just like that, that years of friendship, of love, counted for nothing. But it clearly hadn’t counted for anything when Lilly had been fucking her boyfriend, and probably all the love had been on her side anyway, and she was just a stupid little preppie kid who thought the popular girl was her BFF for realsies.
And it was still there, too, curdled and ugly inside of her, but not gone. She wished she could make it go away, just be angry and vindictive and bounce right off of every happy memory like they mattered as little to her as they apparently had to Lilly – but she couldn’t.
The bell rang, and she realized she had no real idea of what had happened in class. It didn’t matter; she was ahead in most subjects anyway. Still, she should try to pay more attention, even if it was only to prove that she wasn’t shaken by what had happened.
Especially since Jeremy was in her second period class too, and there was no way in hell she was giving him the satisfaction of seeing her torn up about him. Jeremy was trash, and what was more, for the duration of her remaining high school experience, he was invisible trash.
That didn’t keep his eyes from boring holes into the back of her neck the entire class. Only extreme force of will kept Veronica from turning around, or at least rubbing her neck to try to shake the feeling, but she clenched her fists and studiously ignored it. Maybe she’d ask Meg to switch seats with her; she could bend that far. It wouldn’t be so bad when he wasn’t directly behind her.
She swallowed hard, trying not to think about the feeling of a pencil eraser pressing playfully into her back, or the toe of Jeremy’s sneaker nudging the back of her shoes. Just this past Monday he’d leaned forward while the teacher was distracted and whispered to her that it wasn’t fair for her to wear skirts that cute. It had been sweet and romantic with only the faintest sexual undertone, exactly what she wanted to hear, and he’d almost definitely been banging Lilly on the side the whole time.
Veronica’s fingers hurt, she realized. She eased up her grip on her pencil before it snapped and bent with ferocious concentration to take notes. Four and a half periods left, and she could get the hell away from him. Half an hour, and she wouldn’t have to see him at all until sixth period, where Ms. Canning had a stricter seating plan and they were across the room from each other again.
Except that wasn’t true, she thought, her stomach sinking. Lunch. She always ate lunch with Lilly and Jeremy, and usually Logan, some of Logan’s friends, maybe Cole and Meg because Cole and Jeremy were friends, and even Duncan, these days, although that part was always an exercise in pure awkwardness. He’d been weird as hell the whole time she was dating Troy, even though he’d been the one who’d dumped her.
Well, she’d eat lunch alone today, and if anyone tried to give her a hard time, she’d give it right back, she promised herself. She wasn’t going to give Lilly the tacit victory of hiding in the library, or the bathroom; she wasn’t the one who’d stabbed anyone in the back.
Thank god it was Friday.
*
Veronica had expected all kinds of things out of lunch – for no one to really notice her and nothing to happen, because she really wasn’t all that special and why should anyone care about her personal issues; for whispers to start as soon as people saw her and keep up all through lunch hour; for catty nastiness from Lilly, or Lilly’s friends, or just someone like Carrie who thought it was a good opportunity (or even Logan, because, god, weren’t they supposed to be friends, too? Why hadn’t she told him before he found out like this?); maybe even an outright confrontation – Lilly would be wanting to go on the offensive.
The reality was somehow worse.
She’d barely left the building when she heard Lilly’s voice, calling, “Veronica! Veronica, come on!”
She was waving from slightly to the left of their usual table, where she was with Duncan and Logan and the usual 09er crew of Logan’s friends – Duncan’s friends, too, Veronica supposed, but she’d never thought of them that way. Cole and Jeremy were suspiciously absent, but Meg was there. Veronica stopped in her tracks.
Maybe it wasn’t surprising that Logan was there; Lilly could have played it off, or outright lied to him, or thrown Yolanda in his face, but regardless, he always seemed to come back. But more importantly, what the hell was Lilly even doing?
Veronica felt her face heating with confusion and embarrassment. She’d been prepared for an outright attack, for more treachery, but not for this, whatever it was. Did Lilly really, seriously think she could act like nothing had happened?
She was wavering between stalking off to her own table or just turning on her heel and fleeing back inside when she saw Logan grab Lilly’s arm. “What are you doing?” he demanded, not even bothering to keep his voice down. “Let her sit with the other rejects.”
Veronica’s chin went up, her shoulders went back, and she strode across to them, slamming her tray down onto the table across from Lilly and catty-corner from Logan. She held Lilly’s eyes with her own as she sat slowly and deliberately, channelling every bit of her anger into her gaze and squashing the heartbreak down ruthlessly. Lilly’s perpetual breezy good cheer faltered, her eyes darting away.
“Hi…?” Meg said, a little awkwardly. Unlike Lilly, she was probably just trying to make the best of a bad situation. Also unlike Lilly, she had not slept with Veronica’s boyfriend, so Veronica said, “Hi,” back, without looking away from her best – from her former best friend. “Hi, Logan,” she added. “Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t call you last night; I was too busy crying into my ice cream, but I caught Lilly with Jeremy and I kind of figured you should know.”
Dick Casablancas woooed, and he was probably about to follow it up with some kind of obnoxious commentary, but Duncan punched him in the upper arm, hard, and he fell silent with a plaintive, “Hey!”, rubbing it sulkily. Lilly looked almost shocked that Veronica had had the guts to call her out in public, despite what had happened that morning, but Logan snorted.
“That’s crap and everyone knows it. We get it, Veronica, you didn’t want to cop to getting dumped three times in a row, but you don’t get to make up shit and then act like you’re such a poor little victim. Maybe if you weren’t so pathetic, it wouldn’t keep happening to you.”
“Logan!” Lilly hissed, like she was actually trying to be Veronica’s friend somehow. Where else would Logan have gotten this dumb lie except from her? Did she think Veronica was stupid?
Poor Meg, trapped between Duncan, who had gone rigid at the mention of Veronica being dumped, and Veronica herself, didn’t know where to look. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Veronica felt coldly sorry for her.
Another part of her wanted to break down crying – how could Lilly have lied about her? How could Logan have believed it? How could Lilly think they could still be friends? How could Jeremy have cheated on her like that? How could Duncan have dumped her by pretending she didn’t even exist? How could Troy have said all the things he’d said, almost convinced her to sleep with him, and then left for his drug dealer ex? How could Lilly have betrayed her?
How could she have been stupid enough to think that any of them ever cared about her at all?
“Don’t be stupid, Logan,” Lilly interjected, widening her eyes at Veronica. Go along it meant. Cover for me, or I’ve got this. It was one of her primary tools for dealing with Celeste when they got caught doing something wrong, and it was like she thought it would still work. “Whatever Jeremy said, it’s not Veronica’s fault she believed it. I mean, he’s such a tool, can you believe how much better off she is without him?”
So that was how she was playing it. And if Veronica went along with it, she could have everything back, except Jeremy, and a designated villain to boot.
Did Logan really believe what Lilly was saying, she wondered – did he believe what he was saying? Or was he just forcing himself not to look too hard at any of it, because that would be it for them, again? It was hard to feel sorry for him when his chosen coping mechanism was sharpening his claws on her.
“No, I guess I am pretty pathetic,” Veronica agreed. “I mean, if I’d been thinking, I would have stuck around and picked up a couple details to convince you. You’d know how Lilly sucks dick, right, Logan?”
Lilly opened her mouth a little, maybe to argue or maybe just in surprise, but ether way Veronica rolled right over her. “I could even have taken pictures, if I’d been thinking! Well, I guess I was thinking, but it was mostly, you know, oh god, how could they do this to me, I thought she was my best friend, not so much ooh, what a good use for my phone’s camera.” She calmly cut a bite of the mystery cutlet that was the entrée today, face impassive despite the way her heart hammered against her ribs, and then ate it slowly. Meg and Duncan were both blatantly staring at her. Dick was doing the same, his mouth slightly open.
“Veronica,” Lilly kept her voice low, leaning forward across the table, “I know you–”
“Apparently not.” Veronica cut her off before she had to hear whatever new lie was on offer. She set her knife and fork down, forcing a deep breath. “Because it seems like you agree with Logan. You think I’m pathetic. I mean, why else would you think I’d just slink back and pretend like nothing happened?” Tears sprang to her eyes despite her best intentions, but she kept going, trying to keep them out of her voice. “You think you’re so special that people will just cut off their own arm to be around you, or something? I’m pretty sure there’s only one person who’s pathetic enough to keep taking you back no matter how many knives you stick in their back, and it’s not me.” She stood, tray rattling a little as she caught its edge. “I get it, you know, you never cared about me–”
“Veronica–”
Veronica raised her voice a little, talking over Lilly, “–because if you had, you never would have slept with my boyfriend, but,” her voice wobbled despite her best intentions and she bit sharply at the inside of her cheek. “Here’s what I don’t get,” she gasped. “How–” She had to stop and clear her throat, but no one interrupted, not even Logan. They were all staring at her in horrified fascination.
“How did you think you were going to get away with this?” she asked finally, getting some of her iron back. “I know all of your secrets, Lilly. You thought, what, I’d go along because you can make me a pariah or something. Go ahead. You’re only here for one more year, but I don’t need nearly that long to ruin your life.” She met Logan’s eyes, ignoring the tears streaking down her cheeks. “She definitely hooked up with that Italian guy she met in Milan. She never said so, but if she hadn’t he wouldn’t have been sending her naked pictures for half of last year.”
Then she turned and walked away, leaving her lunch, barely hearing Lilly still calling after her.
*
The rest of school was a blur, and Veronica wasn’t entirely sure how she’d made it home safely, but she was reasonably sure she hadn’t cried in front of anyone else, which was all she could bring herself to care about. Telling Lilly off had felt good – telling Logan off had too, although it had added a new ache to the collection in her chest. She’d been too wrapped up in her own pain to think about how any of this would affect him, but if she had, she might have thought they would be some kind of team, both wronged by Lilly.
It was more naïve nonsense, because this really wasn’t all that surprising. Logan could be kind, when he felt like it, and he was fun and charismatic and unexpectedly sweet at times, and he loved Lilly, but he wasn’t the fairest or the nicest person she knew, and… he loved Lilly. There was probably no scenario where he wouldn’t have blamed her for being the messenger that shot his happiness right in the throat.
As good as it had felt to just yell at someone, she didn’t feel any less raw or jagged or heartbroken. Righteous wrath had been a momentary respite, but it hadn’t even lasted through her little speech, and it didn’t help now, with no one in front of her to be angry at. The only thing that gave her lasting satisfaction was the look on Lilly’s face when she’d mentioned Manuele.
The spite did still comfort her a little, but what good was that? She hadn’t had any real intention of calling Lilly’s parents and rattling off an itemized list of every bad thing they’d done in the last couple years, every confession Lilly had made to her, every secret hiding place for illicit treasures. She could. But what would she be then except petty and vindictive and ineffective? Lilly would be gone in a year anyway.
It occurred to her that it had been a bad idea to make threats she wasn’t planning to follow through on, but really, what did it matter? It wasn’t like she was going to have any cred left after the production at lunch today, and she didn’t have the resources to really take Lilly on. She’d always been the follower in the daring things, the rule-breaking. What would she even do, sleep with Logan?
A half-hysterical laugh bubbled up in Veronica’s chest. Okay. Get it together.
Her phone buzzed, and Veronica checked it with a sigh. She wasn’t sure who would be texting her – Meg, maybe? Something like, Are you okay? Do you need a psychiatrist?
But it was a text from Lilly. Veronica stared at the notification in disbelief. Can you just… the opening read.
Before she could stop herself, she opened up the message, not bothering to read the rest of it, and sent back Can you just LEAVE ME ALONE
It was a mistake, because Lilly responded. Repeatedly.
I know you’re mad but you were too good for jeremy anyway
if you just call me I can explain
broke up with logan
I’m not mad ok just call me
She wasn’t mad? She wasn’t mad? Veronica lifted her phone, ready to throw it as hard as she could, but a new one would be too expensive, and she didn’t want to explain to her parents why she needed it. Instead, she let it fall through her fingers onto the bed.
The text alert sounded again, but she didn’t look at it. A helpless anger was rising in her gut, but worse were the tendrils of hope, of relief. Lilly didn’t hate her. Lilly still thought Veronica was worth her time. Lilly could explain–
But Lilly could not explain, not in any way that would matter, and Veronica hated that she still wanted it, hated that she still ached for the lack of her best friend in a way that hurt even more than losing her boyfriend. Than losing any of her boyfriends, even Duncan; maybe even worse than losing all of them.
How could Lilly think there was anything she could do that could just make this go away? It stung that Jeremy hadn’t even tried, but at least he was leaving her alone. He apparently had a higher regard for her self-respect than Lilly did.
Veronica’s phone went off again, and she snarled into the empty air.
She was losing it. She felt crazy. What was she going to do next, start talking to herself? Give a dramatic speech from atop a lunch table? Key Lilly’s car?
The last idea was actually tempting, and the only drawback she could think of off the top of her head was how humiliating it would be if her dad had to arrest her. That was concerning.
Maybe she should tell Celeste about the air vent at least. It would be real revenge, and maybe it would even keep someone else’s boyfriend out of Lilly’s traitorous hands. Of course, Celeste hated her for whatever reason, but maybe she could tell Lilly’s dad instead. It would probably have less oomph coming from Jake, but then again, maybe he’d ship her off to boarding school or something. The idea of never having to see Lilly again was even more appealing than keying her car.
Another text came in, and Veronica snatched her phone back up, seething. Yes, they were all from Lilly. More of the same. Call her. Just let her explain. She didn’t mean for this to happen.
And was this her actually cheating with Veronica’s boyfriend, or was it Veronica finding out about it? Veronica actually daring to stand up for herself? Veronica doing something bold without being nudged and coerced into it by the one and only Lilly Kane?
How long was she going to keep doing this, Veronica wondered. Another few days? A couple weeks? A month? All semester? All year? Why did Lilly even want her back, anyway – did she need a sidekick that badly? She couldn’t actually want her friend back, because then the word sorry would have appeared in even one of her endless texts over the last two days, and it hadn’t.
No, she wanted her possession back. Veronica was just some kind of accessory to her, like a toy, like a doll, like Lilly didn’t even care how badly she was hurting.
I get it, we’re done and you don’t care how bad you hurt me.
Veronica frowned, trying to remember what that was from. It wasn’t echoing in her head like a line from TV that she couldn’t place; she thought she’d read it somewhere.
Well, it didn’t matter. Lilly and Logan had broken up, good. If Duncan, or Meg, or even Dick thought that Lilly was a nasty slut who cheated on her boyfriend, good. If getting angry and vindictive and staying that way was the only way Veronica could chase out the worst of the sucking emptiness that had been haunting her since she’d caught them together, then fine. Fine. She’d be a bitch. She’d be the bitch.
She’d be a psycho ex-girlfriend who couldn’t let it go, a has-been wannabe 09er, a frigid loser, whatever, but she wouldn’t be crying in her bedroom over a girl who had never cared about her and didn’t even respect her enough to treat her like a threat.
A threat. That was where that sentence was from, one of those letters she’d been so disturbed about. God. Maybe she should be on the stalker’s side in all this; who knew what Lilly had done to him.
She winced at that thought, wishing she could walk it back. Who did know what Lilly had done to him, sure; she’d been disturbingly cavalier and blasé about having hurt someone badly enough that he’d say you ripped my heart out multiple times in multiple ways on multiple occasions, enough so as to fill up several different sheets of loose-leaf. It fell into a disturbing kind of place now, but even so, it wasn’t like Veronica would wish an actual stalker on her, or on anyone. If you were a heinous, cheating, manipulative bitch who led boys on, you deserved to get dumped, called out in front of people, maybe, to die alone because no one liked you – not to get harassed, or worse, and then blamed for it. She knew that. She did.
But it was hard to imagine getting someone to care about you that much and then using them as an excuse to get out of gym class. Of course, up until two days ago, it had been hard to imagine being someone’s best friend, telling them how great they were, giggling through sleepovers and sharing vows of eternal support and then sleeping with their boyfriend, so.
Veronica frowned. Lilly had never said anything else about the letters, since last summer; she was pretty sure they had stopped entirely. And nothing else had happened. It validated her judgement in not doing anything more about the whole thing than she already had, at least. She’d picked out the boy in question once school had started again and questioned that decision pretty seriously; he looked like bad news in a way that made his record seem very real. But he’d apparently done less to get back at Lilly over several months than Veronica had in a matter of days. Did that make her badass?
She snorted a little. Yeah, girl-drama at the 09er lunch table – very hardcore, Veronica. Definitely puts you on par with an actual gang member.
That thought stuck in her head for longer than she was entirely comfortable with. Lilly had, no denying it, carried on an actual affair with a literal criminal for at least two months. Celeste might lose it not infrequently about her daughter’s boy-crazy ways (not to mention everything else about her), and even Jake Kane would probably be disturbed by the naked pictures of Manuele the water-skiing instructor, but if it got out that Lilly had been hooking up with a member of the PCH Bike Club, her parents would freak in a very real way. And her social capital would plummet, no matter how many millionaires her dad had created.
It felt wrong to be thinking about this, malicious and calculating and willing to use a complete stranger as a pawn, even if only hypothetically. Veronica shook her head, but she couldn’t quite dismiss the idea. It wasn’t just Lilly’s parents; as far as things Logan might forgive went, hooking up with Veronica’s boyfriend or with some hot European might squeak its way on to the list, eventually, but doing the same with one of those gang kids wouldn’t. He might not be quite as overtly hostile to them as he was to other people who pissed him off – even Logan had a sense of self-preservation – but she’d seen how quickly he swung into outright racism whenever the person who pissed him off looked even vaguely like Eli Navarro.
Lilly had always blown it off, said he didn’t really mean it, and Veronica had gone along, like that mattered even if it was true. She felt shame curdle in her stomach, and a fresh flare of anger. Lilly had been sleeping with a Latino guy, and she’d still let her boyfriend talk a bunch of crap about ESL and affirmative action funds and say things like ‘el burrito, comprende’ to the lunch ladies without doing a single thing about it.
Using him as some kind of trump card against Lilly wasn’t exactly better. Veronica swallowed. She didn’t know how precisely she’d gotten here – she was angry, sure, but wasn’t out-of-control anger supposed to mean throwing eggs at Lily’s car or trying to rip out her hair, not turning into some kind of teenage Machiavelli? It scared her a little how easily all this scheming had come, how quickly wanting revenge had turned into at least somewhat actionable plans.
God, she just wanted it to stop hurting.
Or failing that, she wanted Lilly, and maybe Jeremy, to hurt as much as she did. Jeremy she couldn’t do much about, at least not now, and that was fine for the moment because what she really wanted was to never see or think about him again. It would take time, probably, but she’d already survived Troy, and she thought about him now barely half as much as she had at first. But Lilly was everywhere, woven into the fabric of Veronica’s life, and there was no forgetting about her, not for a second.
Maybe that was why she wouldn’t stop texting and calling. Maybe Lilly didn’t know how to disentangle them either. And maybe that was beyond Veronica’s abilities, too. Maybe she’d never be free of Lilly. But she could make damn sure that Lilly understood that they would never be friends again. She might have already pulled it off, today, especially if Logan actually got his shit together and cut Lilly loose properly this time, maybe even for good.
Or maybe he would just come crawling back like he always did. Before, Veronica had always thought that was romantic, if a little exasperating; the way Lilly and Logan always came back together. It wasn’t like Lilly hadn’t gone crawling back to him once or twice herself, but somehow, whether he was the offender or the offendee, it was usually Logan. Now, after Jeremy, that had changed with a disconcerting suddenness into disgust. How could someone let a person treat them like that and just take it? Even if he’d done the same thing to Lilly once or twice, it almost never seemed like it was about getting back at her, just that he couldn’t help doing things like kissing Yolanda.
Maybe Veronica had always been the soft one, the sweet one, the well-behaved one who mothers were supposed to love (even though Duncan’s had hated her), but she would never have let something like that happen and just taken it. She knew that now with absolute certainty. Maybe she’d let Duncan get away with dumping her out of nowhere, but she’d never have taken him back if he’d cheated on her, even though she’d loved him so much more than Jeremy. Even now she’d never take him back – not unless he could explain it, somehow, with something good enough to make even listening to an apology worth her time.
But that was her being weak again, the same plaintive little wish that wanted there to somehow be a reason that Lilly had stabbed her in the back. What possible excuse could either of them have?
Her phone went off again and she picked it up.
Veronica you’re like my sister please just call me
you can’t stay mad forever
we have to talk ok
Yeah, right.
So much for Lilly having gotten the message. But what else was there to do? Veronica couldn’t exactly go out and sleep with her boyfriend, and even if she could, it wouldn’t have anything like the impact of what Lilly had done, because Veronica had trusted her. She could out that relationship with Weevil Navarro to Lilly’s parents, but that would be tricky and hard to prove and probably unfair to him, when he’d never actually done anything to her, whatever he might have done to other people. Lilly had a hundred other secrets, petty ones and salacious ones and even risky ones, and Veronica hadn’t been lying when she said she knew all of them, but what could she even do with them?
She had to do something – she couldn’t let Lilly think she could get away with this, with acting like Veronica was her little pet that would come whimpering back to beg. And maybe it would finally get the point across:
We’re done. You never, ever should have crossed me, and the only thing you can do now is stay out of my way.
And maybe, if Lilly understood just how badly she’d hurt Veronica, she’d feel bad. It was a stupid, childish thing to want, but she did; she wanted Lilly to hate herself every time she looked back on this for the rest of her life.
Veronica set the phone down on her bedside table, not bothering to answer any of the texts. It would only encourage Lilly to keep trying. She should out Lilly and Weevil, and she should tell Lilly’s parents about Manuele and what was hiding in the air vents, and she should tell Madison Sinclair that Lilly had made out with Dick Casablancas at Shelly Pomroy’s party last spring. She’d been drunk, and she’d convinced Veronica not to tell Logan, and for some reason Veronica had bought her crappy excuses, but she still knew. She knew everything, and she’d even said so, and for some reason, Lilly still believed that she wouldn’t do anything with it.
Because she was so nice. So precious. Virtuous, virginal Veronica, drinking at convoluted Never-Have-I-Ever questions designed specifically to embarrass her and refusing to put out for her string of clean-cut 09er boyfriends. Rule-following, law-abiding Veronica, who had to be kidnapped into staying out all night because she wouldn’t want to disappoint her father the sheriff. Stupid, naïve, complete joke Veronica, who was supposed to be fine with her best friend sleeping with her boyfriend because, hey, it’s not like she was using him!
When Lilly had made that joke about Kelly Clifford’s boyfriend last year, Veronica had thought it was so funny and shocking. Now thinking about it made her want to gag. How long had Lilly been laughing behind Veronica’s back? Long before Jeremy, probably.
She wondered suddenly if Lilly had slept with Troy, too. Probably. Lilly was a traitor and a total slut, and Troy had been stringing along at least two girls the whole time, what was one more on top of her and Shauna? At least she didn’t have to wonder about Duncan.
Maybe it was good that Logan hated her right now. Veronica had enough rage building up right now that it might be enough to make her actually try sleeping with him to piss Lilly off, and she did still have the sense left to know that would go very badly. It would be too weird and too awkward, even on the tiny chance that he did anything other than laugh in her face, and then she’d be the joke of the century, even worse than she already was. She snorted.
There was something there, some kind of idea under the ridiculousness. Maybe she couldn’t make Lilly believe that virtuous, virginal Veronica hated her guts, but she could utterly destroy virtuous, virginal Veronica, and maybe when there was nothing left Lilly would have to see that it was true.
Or maybe she’d just lose interest, and that was bullshit, but you take what you can get.
Virtuous she’d made a good start on tarnishing today. She could break a few rules, maybe, abuse her Pirate Points, be nasty to Lilly every chance she got, catty to Carrie, maybe, but that wouldn’t get her all that far. It was still petty nonsense.
She wasn’t going to break the law – she cared way more about her dad’s good opinion than any high school drama. But there was always virginal. She could do something about that.
What was she being careful about anymore, anyway? It hadn’t hurt less when Duncan had stopped seeing her in the hall just because they’d waited. Jeremy had proven all her responsibly measured attempts to wait and judge the appropriate time were completely useless.
So… what, act like a bitch and dress like a slut? Great revenge plan, Veronica. No, she was probably better off tipping the Kanes to Lilly’s illicit stashes. She’d figure that out later. Right now...
She was trying to figure out what to do right now that wouldn’t make her think of Lilly, something to stave off complete obsession, but then her mom knocked on the door and called, “Veronica? Honey, are you okay?”
“I’m good,” she called back, a little disturbed by how normal her voice sounded, like she was still the same person, like virtuous, virginal, rule-following Veronica hadn’t been murdered stone dead without even a sin, broken rule, or carnal indulgence the second she saw Lilly with Jeremy.
“Why don’t you come down and watch a movie?” Lianne asked. “Make it a girls’ night.”
Veronica’s stomach went cold. There wasn’t any real reason for it – her mother sounded fine. Normal. She wasn’t being pushy. Her voice was the same as always, a little relaxed because it was the end of the day and she wanted to spend time with her daughter, but perfectly clear.
“Maybe in a bit,” she answered. “I have English.”
“Come down after!”
Veronica made a noncommittal noise, not touching the English homework she’d all but finished the day before. It was nothing. She was overreacting because of everything with Lilly, when things had been fine for ages.
Lilly was the problem. Lilly was the only problem.
She glanced at the door, wondering if maybe she should go downstairs. Forget about Lilly, and Jeremy, and all of it, watch a movie with her mom, make too much popcorn and laugh about it, prove to herself that she was wrong.
All she had to do was go downstairs and she’d see.
Veronica opened her computer, flicking into and out of folders until she remembered where she’d put the things she was hiding from her dad. Ideas for Lilly’s party. She smiled grimly at the irony. She’d find a way to get those letters in front of Jake and Celeste Kane, and then she’d see how long those texts kept coming.
Chapter 3: To Court Disaster
Notes:
We should be moving from introspection with a helping of action to mostly action with a helping of avoiding the hell out of introspection in the next chapter. Thank you for all the comments and kind words!
I always forget to say so, because I am from the Wild West of early-mid 2000s ffnet where you got it regardless, but I'm open to concrit. Just so it's out there!
Chapter Text
To take revenge half-heartedly is to court disaster: Either condemn or crown your hatred.
Pierre Corneille
The problem was that she didn’t actually have copies of the letters. Veronica had gone over them so many times in her head when she’d been agonizing over what to do to protect Lilly – and wasn’t that just the world’s funniest joke now – that it felt like she had them, but she didn’t. She didn’t even think there were digital copies, just the originals Lilly kept alongside her other contraband, and the copies she’d given to the school.
Just in case, she’d looked through her computer folders and email history to make absolutely sure they weren’t there, but after giving herself a full hour to remember any strange place they might be and a quick check of her school email just to make sure all the boxes were ticked, she had to admit they just weren’t anywhere she could access, unless she was willing to break into the counselor’s office or something.
She tried to remember if the letters had been signed with his real name. Not his last name, definitely, but there could only be so many Elis in Neptune. It was hard to imagine anyone signing a love letter, even an angry one, Weevil. He’d signed his real name to one or two of them, she thought; the early ones, where it was still mostly about asking her why she’d dumped him so suddenly, and about why she should ditch Logan and come back to him. A couple of the others might have been signed just E, but she distinctly remembered that the later ones, the angriest ones, had been unsigned. It had been one of the things that had given her pause, wondering if he was trying to avoid leaving evidence, if he was already planning on doing something to Lilly. Now, with the same anger hissing and spitting in her chest, she thought she understood a little better – it was too mundane, too much of a ridiculous politeness, to stop and sign your name like you weren’t about to boil over with fury and hurt, like you owed the person who’d done that to you anything at all. Or maybe he’d just started to feel stupid attaching his name to them, when Lilly so clearly didn’t care.
So if Lilly still had the letters (probable; she wasn’t going to give up the opportunity to gloat), and if she hadn’t considered that Veronica might try to expose them to get back at her (unlikely, given her response so far), and if she hadn’t taken Veronica’s threat at lunch as an indication to get rid of everything she was hiding in her air vents (which she well might have), then there was a possibility that turning the Kanes onto their daughter’s secret stash would out the affair as well – provided they weren’t too distracted by Manuele’s naked pictures to notice.
It wasn’t a very encouraging prospect.
She toyed briefly with the idea of making some kind of anonymous threat – I’ve left a little present in your daughter’s air vents, muahaha – but the odds were too high that the Kanes would get the police involved, and the last thing she wanted was for her dad to get dragged into any of this. The idea of him knowing she’d done something like that was the only deterrent that felt especially weighty, and Veronica wasn’t sure she liked what that said about her. She tried not to think about it too hard, marking it down as a checkmark in the ‘antivirtuous’ column and moving on.
It wasn’t as if she could go to the house and just get the letters, even if the idea of leaving them, and everything else Lilly was hiding, strewn all over her bed for her parents to find was just slightly delicious.
There was always the boy himself, she supposed, or the man, whichever you wanted to call him. It seemed vanishingly unlikely that he still had copies of them, but if a new letter showed up at her house it might do the trick just as well, if Celeste or even Jake got to it first. It didn’t even need to really be from him; Veronica might be on shaky ground these days, but she still wasn’t about to encourage someone’s stalker to start stalking them again, no matter how angry and hurt she was. But all it had to do was look like it was from Weevil - she didn’t imagine he’d go out of his way to deny it if he was asked. If he was still obsessed with Lilly he would want people to know they’d been together, and if he was over her he wouldn’t care about keeping her secrets.
Veronica paused. There had been multiple references in the letters to not wanting to keep things secret – everything from I know why it has to be this way but didn’t you ever want to go somewhere where everyone knew you were mine to did you plan it this way? Did you think it would be easier to forget about me if no one else knew?, the latter occasionally verging towards aggressive. None of it had ranked as especially concerning compared to the other material, so she hadn’t thought about it much, but now it was bubbling up uncomfortably in her mind.
It wasn’t that she thought Weevil Navarro was a good person or anything, or that he was a poor little victim – Lilly had treated him badly, but she had an entire stolen police file hidden on her computer that testified to the fact that he’d been known to treat people pretty badly himself, and it was outdated now, missing any number of things, not least of which was that poor Sac N Pac kid on the flagpole. But reaching her fingers into someone else’s personal heartbreak and picking around until she found something useful felt like going too far, like it didn’t make her much better than Lilly.
Maybe she could ask him to write another letter, a fake one? That idea was so ridiculous that Veronica snorted out loud. Just waltz up to a known gang member and bring up his embarrassing emotional trauma, then suggest he weaponize it for her benefit. Not to mention that if he was unstable, asking him to write a fake letter wasn’t much better than tricking him into thinking Lilly was still interested to get him to write one. Besides, if he’d wanted to get back at her, he could have gone public about their relationship himself – he didn’t need Veronica’s help for that. Maybe he still cared too much about Lilly to do that, or maybe he thought it would kill some non-existent chance of her taking him back, or maybe he just didn’t want to admit to that kind of emotional vulnerability, but regardless of the reason, his silence on the subject wasn’t encouraging.
She poked the idea a few times, wondering if she could get it to change shape into something more workable, or if she should consign it to the ‘half-baked’ pile with most of the rest. There weren’t a lot of people who’d be willing to take on Lilly Kane – she’d made Yolanda’s life pretty difficult, but Yolanda wasn’t the revenge type, and Madison would be pissed if she found out about Shelly’s party and Dick, but Veronica didn’t like her. Besides, Madison’s idea of revenge was slapping someone, or spitting in their drink, stupid sorority girl bullshit. Nothing Lilly would care about.
What did Lilly care about? She cared about Logan, and Veronica had already done her level best to blow that up, although who knew how long that would last. She cared about Duncan, but that was a little too much to deal with. Besides, Veronica had never quite been able to bring herself to hate Duncan as much as she probably should, and while the idea of upsetting him didn’t exactly put her off, she didn’t want to use him as some kind of pawn or sacrifice.
She’d cared about Veronica, once. Clearly she still did, in some twisted way, or she wouldn’t still be constantly blowing up her phone. Why did it even matter to Lilly what Veronica did now?
She jerked her thoughts off that subject. She didn’t need to go down that rabbit hole again; there was nothing new down there, just an aching, confused hurt and a sickening fury, and she had enough of those already. Regardless of why, Lilly did still care about Veronica, at least as far as controlling her. She cared what Veronica did. Maybe there was something in that.
Veronica got up, closing her computer. She’d let the ideas ferment for a while; she might get something useful even out of the ridiculous ones, but not if she sat there beating them into the ground. She had a couple chapters to read for English; the deadline wasn’t until Wednesday, but it was something to do, and then it would be out of the way. She thought about going downstairs for something to eat, or at least a drink – she was definitely thirsty – but her mom was down there, presumably watching whatever movie she’d been inviting Veronica to come down for, and she didn’t want to have to navigate whatever that was or wasn’t. In fact, she didn’t want to think about it.
So she settled onto her bed with Ethan Frome, expending a not-insignificant effort to pay proper attention. Logan had joked that he’d just watch the movie, and Veronica had given him a hard time about writing his essays on the cinematography and failing English, but it would have been a lot easier than trying to focus on Wharton’s endless subtext. Everything in the novel was happening under the surface, half-said, and Veronica was trying not to read into it and over-apply that to her own life, but it was hard, when she couldn’t even do her English assignment without thinking about Logan, and then Lilly, and how if things were different they’d be bantering about how the addition of Liam Neeson really improved the story while Logan pretended to take offense, or settling in just the two of them in front of the Kanes’ huge TV with way too much popcorn, while Lilly made increasingly off-colour commentary.
It was like her whole life was tainted now, even when she made a good faith effort to think about other things. All roads led to Lilly. Maybe she wasn’t so much better than Logan.
Veronica shook her head and refocused, trying not to wonder if she’d still be coming up hard against memories of Lilly in college, in grad school or law school or her first real job. It hadn’t been very long; it would get better. Right?
The book certainly didn't get any better. She’d forgotten, lulled by the memory of the elegant and cozy old-fashioned prose, that the whole novel was about a man wanting to cheat on his wife. It wasn’t like it was easy to feel sorry for Zeena Frome, or at least Veronica hadn’t for the first half of the book, but her sharpness and bitter digs felt more justified now. It was the eighteen hundreds and divorce was basically impossible, along with all that other cultural context her teacher had hammered into them when they started the book, and as much as Veronica had still thought that you shouldn’t marry people if you weren’t willing to stay committed to them, it had been academic, and she’d tried to set her judgements aside and engage with the nuances.
It was a lot more difficult now.
She picked her way stubbornly through a few more pages, so piecemeal that she wasn’t retaining as much as she should be, until she had to restart a paragraph for the third time and put the book aside in disgust. Maybe she should just rent the movie – she wasn’t sure she could stand actually seeing Ethan and Mattie mooning at each other practically in front of his wife for two hours, but at least it would go faster than trying to read the rest of the book.
It wouldn’t help her write an essay about the use of descriptive language to reflect the themes of the book, though, unless she could get a few hundred words out of how unnecessarily on-the-nose the name Starkfield was, which to be fair she probably could. And the test questions always had a long-answer about scenery and description.
What absolute bullshit. She couldn’t even do her damn homework without Lilly popping up all over it. It would be one thing if it was helping her decide what to do next, but this was just pathetic.
What had she done when Duncan dumped her? Cried a lot, mostly. Cried on Lilly’s shoulder, even. Dated a cute guy who joked around and flirted with her even though she wasn’t sure she was ready because Lilly had nagged her to, Lilly had told her she needed a rebound guy, Lilly had reminded her a dozen times that Troy was hot and available and way better than Duncan anyway, and she’d let herself be talked into it. Look how that had turned out.
Had Lilly known? It was probably paranoid to think she had, but the notion was still impossible to entirely shake, the idea that Lilly had been laughing at her the whole time.
Lilly had made a sloppy voodoo doll out of an old scarf she hated, after Troy had run off, and insisted that Veronica stick pins in him. By the time they’d finished, she’d been crying and laughing, and she’d only laughed harder when Lilly had admitted that the scarf was actually her mother’s, not feeling more than a tiny bit guilty when she imagined Celeste’s face at finding it full of holes.
Had Lilly felt guilty? Not about the scarf, certainly; she lived to antagonize her mother. Veronica speculated uncharitably that all those ‘fake’ names on matchboxes probably hadn’t been all that fake after all. Was there a reason Lilly had given one of those supposedly pretend lovers such an obviously Hispanic name? Maybe she really was sleeping with Chico and Tyrone and Leroy, or maybe they were all just code for Weevil. At least she’d been smart enough not to throw that in her mother’s face directly. God knew Celeste would probably be more upset about his race and his tax bracket than the gang stuff – which she would not have been remotely cool about either.
Although to be fair, there were very few parents who would be, and Veronica didn’t think her perspective was particularly skewed in this instance just because her dad was the sheriff.
She rolled that around in her head for a minute. The truth was that Lilly hadn’t actually broken any laws – well, all right, that wasn’t necessarily true; it was Lilly, and Veronica knew for a fact that she had a fake ID because they’d gotten them at the same time. Who knew what she and Weevil had gotten up to for fun? But hooking up with a known criminal wasn’t a crime in and of itself. She wasn’t sure why it mattered. If she still wanted to really screw up Lilly’s life, it would be better if she had committed a crime.
For a second Veronica pictured her dad perp-walking Lilly out of the school in front of everyone and smirked. Not that it would happen that way – her dad didn’t jump to the 09ers’ bidding like some people thought he should, but he maintained a certain amount of cautious discretion when he did have to arrest them, and he probably wouldn’t have perp-walked any teenager out of the actual school. Still, she could dream.
If Lilly ever did get arrested, her dad would just throw money at the problem until it went away, anyway, Veronica thought bitterly. Well, that was fine for some people, but Veronica would take the dad who actually knew what was going on in her life, thank you, and the mom who didn’t hate her while she was at it.
None of this was making her feel better, or fueling her dubiously healthy plans for revenge, or getting her English homework done. Why couldn’t she stop obsessing?
Maybe she should write Lilly some weird stalkery letters. There wasn’t much that would accomplish, although at least the idea made her snort with something resembling amusement. If Lilly wanted control that was one way to take it away from her, but it definitely wasn’t one Veronica would be pursuing. Lilly always wanted everything to be about Lilly – even when it was about someone else, it was about how right Lilly was, or what she wanted them to do, or what a good friend she was.
Veronica hesitated, face frozen halfway into a bitter sneer. That was true. Lilly wanted everyone focussed on her. Even when they were clearly not her friend anymore. Even when they dumped her – every time she broke up with Logan, she was always deputizing Veronica to see if he was watching, if he was jealous, and Duncan to find out what he was saying about her. She hoarded those letters from Weevil Navarro like they were proof of something important. She would not stop calling Veronica.
Just straight-up ignoring Lilly’s existence wouldn’t work; it was a pathetic middle-school tactic. But she could make Lilly feel like she didn’t matter.
And suddenly she knew how, all of those abandoned half-ideas coalescing into something a little terrifying.
It would make it pretty clear how far she was willing to go, which if nothing else might finally end the ceaseless texts and calls. It would make it easy to out Lilly’s big secret without catching an innocent person in the crossfire, if she played it right. It would certainly take everything Lilly was assuming about her, all her pathetic good-girl bullshit, and set it on fire. It might even help her shake off the pitiful little pangs of missing Jeremy, the ones that despite all her focussed animosity she couldn’t quite seem to avoid entirely.
And if she did it right, it might make Lilly feel stupid and easily replaceable too – not as much as she did, right now, but enough to feel like she’d turned the tables.
Not illegal, but would definitely be enough to shatter her polite little rule-following image. The virginal part too, while she was at it. If people were going to whisper about her at school, then she could give them something to whisper about.
Only. Was she willing to go that far?
It was tempting, the idea of proving she was desirable after all, pretty or sexy or slick enough to get a guy who’d gone for Lilly, even if he’d been one of her throw-aways, but she had probably gone off the deep end to even be considering having sex with a guy who’d probably been in her dad’s interrogation room more times than he’d made it to math class.
And he was a plagiarist. She’d forgotten about that until now. It seemed pretty stupid to care that he didn’t write his own poetry, but still. That kind of thing spoke to character, or something.
Now she was making jokes in her own head because the subject was so uncomfortable. Maybe she should just say forget about it, and send Jake Kane an anonymous email about his daughter’s air vents. That felt like giving up, but it was the sane thing to do, and it would get her some measure of satisfaction even if it didn’t get Lilly shipped off to whatever the female equivalent of military school was. But Veronica couldn’t quite convince herself, especially when she really thought that if she just planned out the crazy option properly, she could get almost everything she wanted.
She got up and walked around her bed to the other side, solely to move. She wasn’t serious about this, was she? She had an itemized list of reasons why it was not only a bad idea but a dangerous one on her computer, listed neatly from 1997 to 2004. It could backfire in a hundred different ways, and while a teenage boy was more likely to say yes to no-strings-attached sex than to workshopping a pretend ‘take me back’ letter, he might be too hung up on Lilly to say yes, or too busy trying to ignore the fact that she existed to want revenge, or, if he really was so emotionally unstable, he might just transfer that obsession over to Veronica.
Which would probably also piss Lilly off, honestly, but that at least she wasn’t reckless enough to consider worth it.
There were safer options, but the only ones that would be effective in getting her point across were out of reach – and unappealing into the bargain. Now that she’d calmed down a little, the idea of trying anything with Logan made her extremely uncomfortable. She was still mad at him for picking Lilly over her, especially when he’d made such a point of refusing to stop hanging out with her after Duncan had dumped her, even though Duncan was his best friend. She’d never expected to rate above Lilly in his priorities on a normal day, but they’d been friends and she’d thought that meant something. Thought it meant more than a girl who’d cheat on him and lie about it to his face.
More pertinently, she really didn’t want to sleep with Logan. It wasn’t like she wanted to sleep with Weevil either, but somehow it was a less upsetting prospect. Or no, no it wasn’t, but it was upsetting in ways that were easier to deal with, because they mostly boiled down to the words VIOLENT CRIMINAL in bold font. It wasn’t complicated or painful, just stupid and dangerous.
And she was going to do it, wasn’t she?
A couple days ago she would have thought she wasn’t the type to actually follow through with such an audacious idea – that she might come up with it, maybe even toy with it, but that she’d never really do it. But she’d never imagined coldly dragging Lilly, or anyone, through the dirt like she had today either. She was sick, suddenly, of being the careful, prepared one, the girl who always had to be goaded into things by her outrageous best friend. It would be worth a lot to prove to Lilly that she’d never had as much influence over Veronica as she thought she did.
Oh, if she got murdered it was so going to be her own fault.
Veronica paced back around to the other side of the bed. She needed to think about how to make it happen, how to get the most out of her incredibly unhinged plan, and then maybe she’d talk herself out of it. There was no point in obsessing over the decision for an hour only to realize she couldn’t really make it work and had been stressing out for nothing. She had to handle it carefully, and she was probably going to have to bank on Lilly not stopping with the incessant texts and the intermittent overtures of friendship, which rankled. But she already felt like it could work, like if she just played her cards right and sacrificed her virginity on the altar of vengeance, she could knock out every item on the list and be satisfied that she’d done as much to hurt Lilly as was in her power.
Was this who she was now?
Whenever she stopped and tried to consider it, she felt uncomfortable, guilty and itchy in her own skin, but what other options did she have? Nice, innocent girls like she’d thought she’d been really just tipped over into naivety, and taking all this on with quiet dignity was basically just giving up. Either was an invitation to be treated like someone’s doormat. Being angry and vicious was better than crying her eyes out, and whose shoulder was she going to cry on, her mom’s, like a little kid?
Veronica deliberately halted that train of thought. She wasn’t going there. And she wasn’t going to back down now. Maybe she’d work out some grand plan and then her lynchpin would refuse to cooperate and that would be that.
It was a comforting fiction (even if Weevil Navarro was the one teenage boy who’d say no to a point-blank solicitation of sex, and he probably wasn’t, there was no way he was passing up the chance to say he’d nailed the sheriff’s daughter), but it made her feel better. This was a hypothetical. No stakes, just a way to blow off some of the frustration and hurt of the last few days. And it would stay a nice, safe hypothetical until she was ready to put it into action.
Maybe she’d calm down, and all this would seem ridiculous a week from now.
*
Things did not improve at school. Jeremy had apparently decided a good offense meant he didn’t have to play defence, and whatever he’d been saying clearly had her contrasted unflatteringly with Lilly. Never mind that they’d never done most of the things he was running her down for being bad at. Never mind that it was apparently fine for a guy to cop to cheating if he could make a joke about his ex-girlfriend being bad at sex. If his friends wanted to hiss unflattering things at her in pre-calc, fine. Veronica could deal with that. It was the one or two (and the Dick Casablancas) who thought it was hilarious to offer to let her ‘practice’ on them that was getting to her. Dick at least she’d dealt with after two days of his unrelenting wit by asking, loudly, “You mean like you let Lilly practice on you at Shelley’s party?” and hoping Madison was somewhere nearby.
She hadn’t been, sadly, but that had gotten rid of him. Logan was still avoiding Lilly in the aftermath of the Manuele revelation, and there was no point in kicking him while he was down, so Veronica didn’t bother making a bigger deal about the party make-out. It was too bad she hadn’t led with that instead of the nude pictures; Logan’s almost-best-friend would have been a way bigger deal than some Italian guy he’d never meet. But they were broken up, and that was the main thing.
What was it with best friends, anyway? What was the point in having them if it always boiled down to betrayal? She supposed Logan and Duncan hadn’t done anything awful to each other, but between Logan’s more-than-occasional volatility and the fact that sometimes Duncan just decided people he used to care about didn’t exist anymore, it was probably only a matter of time.
On Thursday someone ‘accidentally’ tipped a tray of the cafeteria’s pseudo-lasagna onto the back of her shirt, and Veronica was resigned to stripping down to her bra in the girls’ washroom to scrub it down and maybe missing the beginning of fourth period while it dried, but then Meg caught her in the hall and lent her a jacket.
“Thanks,” she said, stripping her shirt off while the other girl held the jacket up as a shield and dropping it right into the sink. “I’ll give it back to you after school.”
“No worries,” Meg said. “I don’t need it right away.” She passed the garment over to Veronica, who put it on and zipped it up over her bra. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, it was just lasagna.” She focussed on getting the sauce out of her shirt for a minute, and when she looked up Meg was biting her lip. Oh. Okay okay.
Veronica almost asked, “What?” but she didn’t trust that it wouldn’t come out bitchy, and she didn’t want to be nasty to Meg, who didn’t deserve it and was basically the only person treating her normally anyway.
She went back to scrubbing her shirt instead.
But Meg didn’t ask if Veronica had lost her mind or suggest she try to make up with Lilly. Instead she asked, finally, “Is Cole giving you a hard time?”
Veronica frowned into the sink. “What do you mean?”
“I heard some of the things Jeremy and his other friends were saying,” Meg admitted. “Cole told me he didn’t know who did what and he was staying out of it, and I just wondered…”
“If he said anything especially terrible to me?” Veronica asked caustically. Then she winced. “Sorry. I’m not – I liked this shirt.”
Meg nodded, letting it go with more grace than Veronica would have. “I don’t want you to think I’d be cool with it if he was going along with…”
“You’re a good person, you know that?” There was a pause. “I haven’t even seen Cole, I don’t think,” Veronica said finally. “I mean, maybe you should dump him for having terrible taste in friends, but you’re not morally obligated or anything.”
Meg laughed, like she’d been meant to, and Veronica wondered if the lie was really doing her a favour at all. Cole hadn’t been one of the ones inviting her to suck his dick for practice, but she’d definitely caught some of the more general bullshit from him – now she thought about it, only in classes Meg wasn’t in.
But she didn’t want someone like Meg getting into relationship trouble on her behalf, and Cole was the least of her problems right now.
“I bet it’ll die down soon anyway,” the other girl said consolingly. “I mean, don’t they have anything better to talk about?”
Veronica snorted darkly. “Yeah, right. Have you noticed that Lilly sleeps with my boyfriend, cheats on hers, and a week later I’m the slut somehow? High school at its finest.”
Meg winced sympathetically as Veronica wrung out her shirt. “I don’t know what she was thinking.”
“She was thinking nothing she ever does has consequences, so why would this be any different?” Veronica shrugged, only a little bitterly. Meg didn’t need to bear the brunt of her feelings. “Only I never cared about her dad’s money, so. Too bad for her I was actually her friend. Anyway. I should put this in a bag or something.”
“I have a towel from gym,” Meg offered. “I was going to take it home and wash it, but I haven’t gotten around to it.”
“You’re an actual angel.”
Meg shot her a quick smile as she ducked out of the bathroom, and once she was gone Veronica braced herself on the edge of the sink, staring into the mirror.
She didn’t look different. Her hair was falling evenly on both sides of her face, only slightly disarranged from having her shirt pulled over it, her face annoyed, a little strained, but unremarkable. Same old Veronica, just wearing Meg’s yellow jacket. She didn’t look hideously angry, or permanently injured, or like she’d gone just a little crazy.
Had she always been vengeful and prone to spite? Before Jeremy – and Troy – Veronica wouldn’t have called herself a pushover, but she’d thought of herself as nice. Maybe not quite as naïve or sheltered as Lilly and Logan thought she was, not as unremittingly sweet as Duncan sometimes professed, but those descriptions hadn’t seemed entirely alien either. She hadn’t been repulsed by the idea of being sweet and nice, the way she was now that it felt synonymous with being a clueless stooge.
But that didn’t mean she’d let go of the idea of being a good person, and sometimes all the anger and vindictiveness sat uncomfortably in her stomach, making her feel almost sick. It felt like she should have at least looked a little different – like the damaged ingenue she was trying so hard to escape, maybe, or like some kind of raging bitch, but she just looked like her. Like Lilly’s best friend. Like Duncan’s girlfriend had, even.
She could cut her hair, she thought, but the thought just made her angry. Why should she have to change things about herself to get distance. Nothing was wrong with her; Lilly was the one who –
Veronica shook her head, pulling away from the mirror so she wouldn’t have to look at her own face scrunched up in anger. Maybe it was the fact that she was in a school bathroom, but it just made her look like some schoolgirl offended by teenage minutiae. Meg would be back soon anyway; the last thing she needed was for the other girl to see her making faces in the mirror.
She was, she thought, right where Carrie had been standing when Susan told her that Veronica had only been after Duncan’s money. Like she was going to pick her high school boyfriends based on their family’s bank account. Had no one told Susan that you married for money? Nobody did that in high school.
The bravado rang hollow in her own head. She could hear the echo of Susan saying, ‘Of all the girls in the school, Veronica Mars?’, like she was so insignificant there was nothing else to be said even in her detraction, and that she didn’t have any argument for.
The door opened, and Veronica turned towards it, managing not to jump or look guilty. It was just Meg. She spread the towel on the counter, already folded in half to keep the shirt from dripping on Veronica’s things. “Here.”
“You’re a lifesaver,” Veronica said. “I’ll wash it and give it back to you.”
“No rush.” Meg gave her a little smile. “Hey, Veronica… are you doing okay? I know you said you can handle Jeremy’s bullshit, but – I mean, a boyfriend is just a boyfriend. I know it’s not the same, but I keep thinking that if Lizzie ever–”
“Thanks again,” Veronica interrupted, wincing internally as Meg broke off, her expression a little hurt. You’ve got to get tougher, Veronica thought bitterly, but she softened anyway, backpedalled. “You’re a really good friend.” She shrugged, feigning casualness. “I don’t have a lot of those, it turns out, so, you know… I appreciate it.”
“Sure,” Meg said. “And let me know if you need anything, okay? Maybe we could go to a movie sometime, or… I don’t know.”
“Will you switch seats with me in precalc?” Veronica asked, trying to smile about it. “I’m right in front of Jeremy.”
“Oh my God.” Meg winced. “Yeah, of course.”
“Cool.” It felt painful to be any more sincere than she already had been, but she wasn’t sure how to move things to a lighter tone without seeming pitiable, so Veronica just pulled a dorky finger-gun. Meg, being the sweetest, actually giggled, like it was joke.
Nope, Veronica thought. I’m the joke – but she managed a mental tone of wry resignation, which was at least a step up.
Once they left the bathroom, Veronica peeled off to leave the shirt and towel in her locked, sighing internally as her stomach growled. Getting lasagna’d at the beginning of lunch meant she’d had time to clean up, but it also meant she’d pretty much lost her chance to eat. Not that either the lasagna itself or going back out there in front of everyone who’d seen her be humiliated – again – was particularly appealing even if she’d had time.
There was a crashing thud down the hall, and Veronica glanced over. A group of the PCH kids had surrounded someone’s locker – it was a freshman boy she didn’t know – and were getting up in his face. One of them had slammed his fist into the locker, or one next to it. It wasn’t Weevil, although he was there, watching from just outside the group as his lackeys tried their best to make the kid pee his pants.
She wondered how he’d pissed them off.
“Bitch, I know you took it!” That was the boy in the bandanna, the one who’d punched the locker. He leaned closer, so that he must have been spitting in his target’s face. “You think you can touch my shit?”
Veronica watched them for a minute. They had the intimidation routine down to a science, playing off each other and never giving him a moment to catch his breath, unless it was to draw out the anticipation of whatever horrible thing he thought they were going to do to him. She thought he was probably safe from physical harm – they were in a hallway in the middle of the school day – but she’d seen plenty of proof that they were willing to put their fists where their mouths were. Flagpole kid, for one.
“All right, enough.” That was Weevil, she realized. He didn’t even have to raise his voice; the authoritative tone was enough that the two boys in front of him immediately shuffled to the side, opening their circle to give him a straight shot at the hapless sophomore. He leaned on the locker next to the kid, his back to Veronica, but she could still hear what he was saying.
“Now, did you take Dante’s headphones?” His voice was faux-amicable, like a patronizing teacher.
The sophomore shook his head so wildly that Veronica could see his hair flipping even with Weevil in the way. “No! No way!”
“So,” Weevil continued cheerfully, “when I open this locker, I’m not going to see them?” He moved – maybe reaching for the lock – and the other boy squeaked.
“I, uh, I found, I mean, I found some headphones but I didn’t know they were his, I swear, they were just on the ground–”
“Just on the ground!” Weevil pretended astonishment, which was greeted with general laughter from the PCHers, and a couple low hoots. Veronica shook her head.
“I was going to take them to the lost and found, for real! But I didn’t have time, so… so…” The kid floundered, clearly coming up against the lack of decent excuses. He’d probably thought whatever oversized headphones he’d jacked belonged to some 09er who’d just shell out for another pair, but it was hard to feel too sorry for someone who was more or less a thief. It didn’t make her approve of how they were tormenting him, but Veronica had enough of her own battles these days; she wasn’t going to be picking anyone else’s.
She shut her own locker, just loud enough to remind them all that there were other students in the hall – although not many, and not any who wanted to get involved in that mess – and headed in the opposite direction towards her history class. At least Mr. Rooks always made class enjoyable, and Jeremy had woodshop that period, so she wouldn’t have to see him. She passed Mr. Clemmons as she turned the corner, shooting him a polite smile. Maybe the sticky-fingered sophomore would get lucky, and he’d shut things down before anyone started breaking said fingers.
She should probably be drastically reconsidering everything that had occurred to her the week before, but instead the thing she kept thinking about was what had ever drawn Lilly to Weevil in the first place. Lilly found drama exciting; she always had – even when the wool had still been firmly in place over Veronica’s eyes she’d known that, would probably have said if pressed that it was Lilly’s biggest flaw. And violence and intimidation was certainly dramatic, but hadn’t there been a better way to find that? Maybe with someone a little richer, or more on Lilly’s social level, or whiter, even. Lilly loved rocking the boat, but she usually stayed just on the safe side of the line when it came to going so far that her parents would enforce actual lasting consequences. Veronica would have expected her rebellion to involve someone like Troy – real Troy, not the façade he’d put on as her boyfriend: a smooth-talking rich kid with a nasty record who was toeing the line between dealing being his side hustle and his main event.
Still extremely illegal, a very bad idea, but leagues away from a gangbanger from the worst part of the wrong side of town, even before you thought about race.
But maybe that was the point. Maybe Lilly had liked slumming it.
The thought made Veronica feel gross, reminded her of all those times Logan had said something funny that relied on not being quite racist enough to get him in trouble, and Lilly hadn’t said anything, not even when he was talking about her other boyfriend.
But then, Veronica had never said anything either.
She slid into her seat quietly, belatedly shooting a distracted smile at Mr. Rooks in response to his cheerful greeting. It felt like all she’d done this week was wait for school to be over so she could go home, where she just seethed in her room about school, and Lilly, and everything else. It wasn’t hard to know that that was unhealthy, but what was she supposed to do, go downstairs and hang out with her mother? Her dad was working long hours lately, worried about some case from last year that he didn’t think was quite as solved as everyone assumed, and the last thing she wanted was more one-on-one time with her mom.
She told herself she just couldn’t handle Lianne’s sympathy, but it was getting harder and harder not to admit that the less time they spent together, the less Veronica had to see – harder and harder to ignore the fact that the mother she’d had a few months ago would have barged into her room and dragged her downstairs to make cookies and mocktails, instead of accepting her polite homework excuses.
But Lianne wasn’t so much about the mocktails these days.
The thought crept in before Veronica could stop it, sitting acerbically in her mind like a hot coal she tried not to look at, tried not to touch. She didn’t have any proof, and if she didn’t know for sure then it wasn’t real. This Jeremy bullshit, everything with Lilly, had shaken her, and she was being paranoid.
The other students had started to filter in, and Veronica pulled her notebook from under her textbook, eager to have something to do so she wouldn’t have to engage with any of them. Meg’s jacket rubbed strangely against her skin – it was windbreaker style, not meant to be worn without clothes underneath – but she did her best to ignore it. It was only a few more periods and then she could go home and put a real shirt on.
“Today,” Mr. Rooks said, moving towards the front of the classroom, “we’re going to shatter some of your illusions about the ancient world.” The bell hadn’t gone yet, but sometimes he liked to get them hyped up beforehand with some optional editorializing.
“The ancient Egyptians! Everyone knows who they were, right?” He adopted a ‘walk like an Egyptian’ pose, to assorted giggles and groans. “Today we’re going to learn about the actual mysteries of the pyramids – like, what does a bad pyramid look like? We’re going to find out just how ancient the Egyptians really were! And you’re going to make my job harder by giggling every time I say ‘Sneferu’!”
There was general laughter. Veronica set down her pen and gave him her full attention. At least this part of her day wasn’t torture.
*
All Veronica had wanted was to get out of school as quickly as possible, so she could go home and shower and put on a real shirt. Maybe her dad would be home early tonight and they could all watch a movie after dinner; he’d been making noise about making a big Italian feast for a couple days now.
She kept her head down on the way to her locker, just trying to forge through the crowd, forcing herself to ignore all the whispers. There was no way she was the only one they were whispering about, she reminded herself. Half the kids in this hallway were sophomores who probably had no idea who she was.
She was still shoving her books into her bag when someone sidled up to her. For a second she thought it was Tanner Ludwar, who had the next locker over, but when she looked over it was Jeremy.
“Get away from me,” she bit out, leaning as far away from him as she could without bumping into Katie David, who was on her other side.
“Veronica,” he said, in a tone that was half whiny and half patronizing. “You can’t just–”
“Get away from me.” She didn’t raise her voice, because the last thing she wanted was to attract any more attention than they were getting already, but her tone was icy enough that Jeremy actually flinched.
He did not go away, thought, because why would her life be remotely easy, even for five seconds?
“Listen,” he said, “my mom–”
“Fuck your mom.”
Jeremy had the gall to actually look offended. “You can’t say–”
Veronica slammed her locker shut, already so incensed she didn’t care who stared at them. “You have five seconds to get lost before I permanently ruin any chance you have of ever having children.”
He wavered, caught between taking the sheer unexpected rage in her eyes and voice seriously, and continuing on believing she was the girl they’d all thought she was, too meek and well-behaved to ever be a real threat. Veronica watched the demure pushover win, watched his eyes clear and his shoulders go back, like she was nothing, like she couldn’t hurt him.
She decided right then she was going to follow through. Her dad would have to understand, if she got suspended for using her knee to wrap Jeremy’s testicles around his tonsils. He wouldn’t be thrilled, but he’d understand. Maybe her new rep next week would be ‘psycho bitch’, but she didn’t care. It would wipe that confident look off Jeremy’s face and she’d never have to see it again – not from him or anyone.
“Oh, my God, Jeremy, leave Veronica alone. Why are you such a loser?”
Veronica stiffened. She refused to give Lilly the satisfaction of turning around, but she felt her teeth grinding as she tried not to clench her hands into fists.
Jeremy’s eyes flickered between them. He looked uncomfortable, but it wasn’t even a little satisfying. He was uncomfortable because of Lilly. And maybe he should be, since he’d told the whole school how good she was in bed, and ruined any chance of her stupid ‘it was all a misunderstanding’ story working on anyone at all.
Veronica waited until Lilly had come up nearly beside her and then whirled in the opposite direction, the lockers a brief blur before she stalked away from both of them.
“Come on, Veronica, wait!”
Veronica did not wait. She was never waiting for Lilly ever again. She walked faster instead, unafraid to shoulder-check an oblivious senior in order to get through. He shot her a dirty look and snapped, “Hey!” but she ignored him, silently urging the other students clogging the halls to close ranks behind her so that Lilly couldn’t get through.
When she got through the school doors she stopped for a moment, shutting her eyes and taking a deep breath. Someone stepped closer and jostled her shoulder and Veronica opened her eyes in annoyance – too late.
The ziiiiiip sound and the sudden flapping, cool feeling were simultaneous, and even as she stepped back the crowing started, not least from Dick, who was the one who’d been next to her, the one who’d just reached out and yanked the zipper down on Meg’s jacket, and left Veronica standing there at the top of the steps with only her bra to protect her privacy.
She grabbed for the edge of the jacket on instinct, hot, humiliated tears already pricking at her eyes. But she couldn’t unflash everyone – they were already snorting and snickering and ogling at her. If she clutched her jacket to her chest and scurried away, she lost; she’d be weak.
Instead she calmly zipped it up again, declining to rush and ignoring the catcalls and heckling, refusing to flinch even when one senior yelled out to ask why she was even bothering to hide those things, anyway. Then she reached out and grabbed the pocket of Dick’s own unzipped jacket. She knew what was in there: the 60 gig iPod Photo he never shut up about.
“Hey–” he protested, but she already had it.
“Don’t worry,” Veronica told him. “I bet Daddy will buy you a new one.”
It would have been a power move to snap the iPod, especially if she could do it one-handed, but she didn’t want to risk him snatching it back before she could, so instead she raised it and slammed it down as hard as she could on the curved metal railing bracketing the stairs. It crunched satisfyingly under her hand, bending and splintering.
Dick gaped at her, offended and furious. “You bitch!”
“That’s right,” Veronica said, faux-brightly. “Maybe keep that in mind next time.” She let the remnants of the iPod fall to the concrete and left him standing there to shove her way through the rest of the congregated students, acting as best she could as if they didn’t exist. She didn’t lower her chin for a second.
*
Lilly still hadn’t stopped texting her. Veronica had been ignoring it, but then she missed a text from her dad on Friday and completely failed to pick up the oregano for the spaghetti sauce he was making later, and didn’t realize until he called up the stairs to ask where it was.
It wasn’t too hard to course-correct – the spaghetti sauce wasn’t so time-sensitive that she couldn’t still run to the store – but it was still clear she had to deal with her text messages.
Most of them were from Lilly, of course. One or two harassing nonsense texts from Dick, who wasn’t even supposed to have her number, sent pre-iPod incident. She was invited to come to a private party – SUPER private. It was honestly amazing that he’d refrained from saying it was a party in his pants. A couple from Meg, which Veronica read right away. Meg hoped she was okay, didn’t need her jacket and towel back any time soon, and if Veronica wanted to go shopping for shirts that didn’t show lasagna, she was free this weekend.
Thanks <3 <3, Veronica responded. You’re sweet.
She didn’t turn down the invitation, but she wasn’t sure she should accept it either. Meg was too nice to get tarred with the same brush as her, and Cole was too close a connection to Jeremy for her to be entirely comfortable.
She probably should have wanted to go. Meg was sweet, and Veronica genuinely liked her. She was clearly making a deliberate effort to be nice, but her pity didn’t sting as badly as it could have. Maybe Meg could be her new best friend. They could go shopping and talk about boys, and Veronica could be the daring one for once. People might even stop talking about her quite so much. Meg might not be Lilly, but she was an 09er, and that had cachet, particularly with other 09ers.
The idea shouldn’t have left her quite so cold, but it held relatively little appeal next to making Lilly squirm.
Am I a bad person? Veronica wondered.
A week ago she wouldn’t have had to wonder. She’d known she was a good person. She still knew she’d never cheat or steal, that she would never, ever, have slept with someone else’s boyfriend. She didn’t commit crimes and she put her dimes in charity boxes and the worst thing she’d ever done had hurt no one and been to help a friend. But it didn’t feel like enough anymore. A good person would put this aside. Maybe not forgive Lilly, but forget about her. Get on with her life. Move on to better influences, like kind, responsible Meg Manning.
But it was a rigged game, because there was no forgetting about Lilly, was there? Not even if Veronica had loved her less, if she still had a heart that wasn’t full of broken glass, because they were in high school, and Lilly wouldn’t leave her alone.
She couldn’t even forget about Jeremy.
He had not texted her, which was a relief despite the tiny part of her that was hurt and lonely over it, that still missed him, despite the fact that missing him even a little bit just made her angry.
Before she forgot, Veronica scrolled down her text history until she found his name. The last text was the bullshit excuse he’d sent her right after she caught him with Lilly. She deleted it, stabbing the phone with her fingers a little harder than necessary, then the rest of their text history, then blocked him.
At least that was satisfying, even if he’d probably never know.
Lilly’s messages were harder to manage. There were a lot of them, and Veronica realized quickly that at some point Lilly had started just… texting her updates on her day, like they were still friends. It would have had her seething again if it wasn’t so baffling. What did she think this could possibly accomplish?
Buried under the avalanche of chatty gossip were the ones that were more what Veronica had expected, cajoling, teasing, employing every bit of Lilly’s charm she could cram into text format. She stared at a few of them for a long moment, that sick, curdled feeling sitting like a rock in her stomach. Once, Lilly’s carefully cultivated devil-may-care insouciance and sly coaxing had been charming; now, all Veronica could see was manipulation.
One or two of them paid lip service to the reason Veronica wasn’t responding, but far more common was the plea for understanding – just let me explain. You need to call me. Come on, Veronica. The closest any of them came to glancing in the direction of an apology was one brief I know I screwed up, but you can’t just never talk to me again.
Watch me, Veronica thought.
Then she caught something else: just read the emails, Veronica, PLEASE.
Great. One more way for Lilly to stalk her. No wonder she’d liked –
But she wasn’t going there. Veronica turned her phone screen off again and shoved it into her pocket. If there were more than two emails, she was going to lose her mind.
There were three, it turned out when she opened her computer, which made her purse her lips in annoyance but felt not worth throwing a tantrum about. The first one – the one that had been sent last – was titled VERONICA I KNOW YOU’RE NOT READING THESE DON’T DELETE. She almost, almost, snorted in amusement. Long habit, long affection, long acquaintance with Lilly’s melodramatic bossiness – regardless, she stopped herself, but it still brought that hollow, radiating ache in her chest back full force, the one that made her want to curl in on herself to try to fix the hole.
But it wouldn’t help, and she refused, she refused to miss Lilly. Veronica reached for the anger again, even though it felt painfully far away. She opened the first-sent email, VERY IMPORTANT!!!!!, only long enough to skim through it and catch the gist. There was the return of I know I screwed up, a first appearance of I never meant to hurt you, and a lot of self-justification about how pathetic Jeremy was and how it really shouldn’t matter. Because if your boyfriend was shitty enough to cheat on you, obviously the tramp who’d known full well he was your boyfriend held no blame at all! Veronica snarled and deleted the email.
The second one, sent on Monday, presumably because she hadn’t answered the one from Saturday, was at least titled without allcaps. Let Me Explain.
Veronica hovered over it for a moment, but what was there to explain? She knew what had happened. There was nothing that could justify it – hadn’t she torn her own brain to pieces trying to think of something that could? Wasn’t she still doing that, when she went to bed at night and stared at the ceiling, trying not to cry and trying not to think about Lilly?
She didn’t delete it – there might be something in it she could use – but she didn’t read it either. Not right now.
Veronica closed her email and opened her web browser, thinking maybe she could kill a little time on YouTube, but the unread emails felt like they were burning a hole in her brain, and she gave up and closed her laptop.
Immediately afterward, there was a knock on her door. Veronica started, although there wasn’t exactly anything for her to be caught doing. “Yeah?”
It creaked open a couple inches. “Hey, honey,” her dad said. “You’ve been up here a lot lately.”
Veronica swept her arm out to indicate the rest of the room. “It is where I live.”
He tipped his head to the side and pretended to laugh, lips framing a silent ‘ha, ha, ha’. “I like to think we’ve given you more than a hundred square feet to live in. There are ordinances about that.”
She rolled her eyes, and he pushed the door further open and leaned against the frame. “The last few days I feel like I only see you at dinner. I don’t like to think that you’re hiding up in your room over some boy.”
It wasn’t about Jeremy – avoiding being downstairs wasn’t even all about Lilly. But she didn’t have any proof, and anyway, they never talked about her mom, not that way. “It’s not that. I just haven’t felt like hanging out is all. Anyway, I have homework, and this seven-step revenge plan to finish.”
Her dad nodded, politely amused. “You know, Confucius said–”
“Dad. Not the two graves thing.”
“It’s a classic for a reason…” He let the last word drag out in a singsong, but Veronica remained stoic. “Fine. Plot revenge if it makes you feel better, but don’t,” he pointed at her sternly, “do anything illegal.”
Veronica saluted him. “Sir, yes, sir!”
“And seriously, honey, I don’t think it’s helpful to sit up here stewing. Why don’t you spend time with one of your other friends, or even your parents! We’re pretty cool once you get to know us.”
“Hmmm…” She furrowed her brow. “Pass. I think your idea of ‘cool’ might traumatize me for life.”
“I’m a better time than keying Jeremy’s car,” he suggested.
“I’m pretty sure that would be illegal.” Veronica shot him a sincere smile. “But thanks. I’ll feel better when we finish this stupid book in English. I’m trying to get it over with.”
Her dad nodded. “An admirable endeavour. I’ll leave you to it. But remember, nobody likes Miss Havisham.”
“You mean I have to return the wedding dress?”
“Har de har. Try to spend some time with other human beings, okay?”
“I’m going shopping with Meg this weekend,” Veronica offered. “She’s the only person I know who doesn’t suck.”
He winced theatrically. “Ouch, honey.”
“Hey, Dad–” The words were out before she could think better of them. The smart thing would have been to cover by asking him for reassurance, or advice, or even a hug, but Veronica couldn’t quite stand to make herself vulnerable like that. “Can I ask you a weird question?”
Keith adopted a more alert listening posture. “Sure, honey, shoot.”
“You know Weevil, right, from school? Like, you’ve arrested him?”
His demeanour went from alert to alarmed. “Why? Has he been bothering you at school?”
“No!” Veronica shouldn’t have been surprised, but for some reason she was. “I don’t think he’s ever spoken to me. He’s a senior.” She laughed humourlessly. “I get all my harassment from the 09 crowd. People like Weevil don’t actually care.”
Her dad frowned. “Maybe your mom was right – we should talk to the school.”
“And what, they’ll expel Jeremy for insinuating that I’m a slut? It’ll just make things worse.” She shrugged, affecting nonchalance. “They’ll get bored. It doesn’t matter.”
“Hm.” He gave her a long, concerned look. “So why are you asking about Eli Navarro?”
Veronica’s skin prickled. She kept her tone neutral. “Just something Lilly said once.” She tried to laugh. “I don’t know why I still care.”
“Because you were friends for more than five years.” He sighed, coming further into her room. “That doesn’t just go away. I’m sorry you’re having to deal with this.”
“It was dumb anyway,” Veronica said, feigning a downcast attitude. Or letting it show, anyway. “I just… I don’t get it. How she could do something like that. I thought maybe I could figure it out.” Real tears pricked in the corners of her eyes, and she bit down on the inside of her bottom lip to refocus.
“And how does this particular juvenile delinquent figure into that?”
Veronica rolled her eyes. “She said something one time. She was kind of making it sound like they had a thing. I blew it off. Lilly likes to shock people, you know? I guess I just didn’t know how much she liked to shock people,” she added bitterly. That part certainly wasn’t fake. She was so bitter sometimes she thought she would drown in it.
Her dad raised his eyebrows. “Well. That’s not what I was expecting to hear.”
“It was probably bullshit anyway,” she told him glumly.
“I have trouble seeing it,” he admitted. “I know you feel like Lilly must be capable of anything, but that’s a pretty big leap. And I’ve seen enough of Eli,” he paused to incline his head in a pointed manner, “to say that he’s not harbouring any warm and fuzzy feelings towards people with her area code.”
That was probably as much as she could get without making him suspicious. “Lilly was probably lying. She’s good at that.”
There was so much sympathy in her dad’s gaze that it hurt. He might actually understand, if she told him about the problem not being about Jeremy, not really. Maybe he already did. But he wouldn’t understand how badly she needed to do something about it. Ultimately she was just a teenager where her parents were concerned, and no matter how painful the heartbreak, it all boiled down to relationship drama in the end.
Veronica looked away. She was legitimately desperate to change the subject, so it didn’t sound especially odd when she said, “Is he really that bad? You kind of freaked out when I mentioned him.”
Her dad sighed. “I have arrested Eli for a lot of things, honey, and a decent chunk of them are things no teenager has any right being involved in. I don’t have any reason to think he’s in the habit of harassing the families of police officers or threatening young women, but I don’t have a lot of reason to think he wouldn’t do those things. There are times I’ve felt bad for the kid, even begrudgingly impressed, but I fully expect to arrest him for murder one day, and I don’t want you mixed up with something like that. I don’t need to tell you to stay away from him, do I?”
“No,” Veronica said, her stomach in knots. “I haven’t ever talked to him.”
“Better to keep it that way, I think, honey.”
Veronica nodded, telling herself that it wasn’t a lie because it was acknowledgement, not agreement. Or maybe it wouldn’t be a lie because she’d just… do what he said. Maybe the guilt chewing holes in her stomach would prove stronger than the anger and resentment.
She wished that was easier to believe.
Chapter 4: You Have Been Crushed
Notes:
I normally post (something, not necessarily this fic) every two weeks, because I have every other Monday off (I work weekends at my second job) so it's both a celebration and a chance to panic-write if I don't have anything.
But this week is a stat, so I still have it off, and I was pretty fired up after the lovely, in-depth comments I've been getting, and also I wrote about 4k today and deserve a reward, so I'm posting this today. Do not expect this to be indicative of the usual turn-around time on chapters, you will be disappointed! :)
In other news, this chapter includes indirect use of an ableist slur that was unfortunately popular in the early 2000s (not the r-slur). I don't endorse it but I do think it's in character for Lilly to use it, and I didn't want anyone to get an unpleasant surprise.
Chapter Text
To admit to wanting revenge is to admit you have been crushed and need to be rebuilt. Few are comfortable admitting that, even to themselves.
Laura Blumenfeld
Veronica went shopping with Meg on the weekend, because she’d told her dad she was going to. It was almost fun – Meg didn’t push like Lilly, and she still had enough opinions to get a good conversation going. But Lilly’s shadow was still hanging over Veronica’s head; two or three times she caught Meg’s blonde hair out of the corner of her eye while she was distracted by the clothes and forgot, for a second, that she wasn’t there with Lilly – that she wasn’t there with Lilly because the last time she’d been at that mall, Lilly had been sneaking around with Jeremy.
It made it hard to appreciate getting a good deal on a pair of halter tops. Still, it was nice to spend time with someone her own age outside of school, and Meg bought them both lunch without making a big deal about it, as if she really did just want to hang out with Veronica.
“This is the nicest pity outing I’ve ever had,” Veronica said when Meg dropped her off. “I owe you an ice cream or something.”
“Veronica!” But Meg was laughing. “Come on. It wasn’t a pity outing. Do you know how long it’s been since I got decent fashion advice? Lizzie just says ‘You look like a pastor’s wife’ no matter what I wear.”
Veronica snorted. “Helpful.”
“Seriously, we should do this again.”
“Ice cream,” Veronica said, hefting the shopping bag over her shoulder. “On me. Just say the word.”
“After school some time,” Meg agreed. She pulled out with a wave and a smile, and Veronica turned toward her house wavering between contentment and irritation. Meg was sweet and sincere and she was fun, given the chance – Veronica had always liked her, even though they hadn’t been super close. If she could just forget about Lilly, she could probably be perfectly happy hanging out with Meg and keeping her head down until things blew over at school. They would blow over if she didn’t fan the flames and just waited for someone else to get caught with ecstasy at their parents’ gala, or get pregnant, or cheat at a track meet.
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t because Lilly wouldn’t let her, and she couldn’t because Meg wasn’t even out of sight and Veronica’s mind was already clicking through the same old checklist – what Lilly had done, all the things Veronica had overlooked or forgiven for the last five years, Duncan, Troy, Jeremy, and then a cascade of all the ways she could put that stricken look back on Lilly’s face, the one from a week ago when Veronica had called her out in front of everyone.
Meg probably wouldn’t like her nearly as much if she knew how much she wanted to make Lilly squirm.
She let go of the door too soon, carelessly, and it shut louder than she’d meant it to, prompting a shout of “Veronica!” from a few rooms away.
“Sorry!” she yelled back, wincing.
But that wasn’t what was on her mom’s mind. “If you’re home, can you take Backup for a walk?”
“Yeah!” Veronica kicked off her shoes, smiling as the dog in question appeared in the hall. “Did you hear somebody say walk?” she asked him. He panted at her. “You did? Well, too bad, buddy, you have to wait.” She ruffled his ears on the way past. “I’m not dragging my purse all up and down the beach.”
Backup wuffed once in response, and she felt herself smile wider as she headed upstairs. He didn’t care if she was vengeful, or naïve, or secretly planning to overthrow the government and make puka shell necklaces illegal, as long as she walked him and petted him.
Which she hadn’t done as much of lately as she should, but that was okay. A good run and a sly allocation of people food when her parents weren’t looking always earned his forgiveness.
She thumped back down the stairs after dumping her purse and her purchases, half-expecting her mom to yell at her not to walk so loudly. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or apprehensive when there was no reprimand.
Backup was waiting by the door, right under the hook with his leash on it, mouth open in a pit bull grin. Veronica couldn’t help but laugh.
“Have you been lonely?” she asked. “Have I been neglecting you?”
He let out one short bark in reply, and she clipped the leash onto his collar with something resembling good spirits. If she could skip the actual high school part and just hang out with Meg and Backup, maybe she could find some kind of equilibrium, instead of making endless obsessive revenge plans in her bedroom.
“Do you want to go to the beach?” she asked Backup, taking his answering huffs as assent. He probably would have been happy with a brisk walk through their neighbourhood, but not a short one, so it was more convenient for Veronica if she could change things up by getting herself an ice cream or letting him off-leash to chase a couple seagulls. Besides, what she was wearing was fine for a casual walk but not really suited for full-out jogging, and she didn’t want to change.
He climbed into her car cooperatively enough; they’d done enough walks at Dog Beach that he knew by now he was still getting one, and Backup never minded a car ride. Veronica even went so far as to put music on as she pulled out of the driveway, a top hits station that, even if it had vague suggestions of other car rides, with different passengers, singing along too loud with the windows down, at least didn’t contain any specific songs that reminded her of Lilly.
The nearest lot to Dog Beach was full – it was the weekend – but Veronica parked a little way down the coast and they walked up, Backup panting enthusiastically as he pulled at the leash just enough to get the point across: hurry up, Veronica.
“Let’s pace ourselves,” she responded, keeping up her reasonably athletic stride. “We have to walk all the way back, and you know you’re going to want to go in the water.”
Her dog only panted agreeably, but one of the surfers sitting nearby laughed. “I always want to go in the water,” he agreed. “But I’ll pace myself for you, sweetheart.”
Veronica looked him over, slowing just enough for Backup to put more strain on the leash. He looked like your typical Neptune beach bum: college-age (or at least within a few years of it if you stretched the definition), blond hair bleached on top, surfboard probably worth more than her car. He could have been Logan or Dick eight years from now. A month ago she would have been flattered, even if she still found him a little sleazy. Right now she just felt vaguely disgusted. This guy was made from different material than Jeremy, but following the same pattern, and anything of worth there was superficial.
“I’m seventeen,” she said flatly, holding his eyes until he dropped his gaze, if only for a moment. “I’m walking a pit bull, and my dad’s the local sheriff. You didn’t really think this through, did you?”
One of his friends snorted and guffawed; the other called her a bitch under his breath. Veronica gave him her cheeriest, fakest smile. “People keep saying that lately!”
“Whatever,” the guy who’d hit on her said. “You’re not that cute anyway.”
It shouldn’t have stung – guys who said that when you turned them down were full of shit, and she’d never cared about their opinion before – but it did.
“Keep walking,” the one who’d called her a bitch added.
“Come on, Backup,” she said, speeding up. “We have permission now!”
Backup barked cheerfully, galumphing through the edge of the ocean with renewed good cheer. Veronica made a face as his back paws sprayed her calves with seawater and a small amount of sand. She put on a little more speed anyway, hoping to discourage any further attempts at conversation.
It was a nice day, and if she put the surfers out of her mind, it wasn’t too hard to enjoy herself, even if Backup’s walk was turning into something like a jog anyway – but the interaction stayed in the back of her mind, a niggling sour spot that got bigger when she tried to ignore it. Veronica pushed through instead, focussing on the sound of the damp sand and the splashing of water under her feet, the breeze of her movement, the smell of the ocean. She didn’t people-watch. Normally she enjoyed it, but she wasn’t in the mood for watching canoodling couples, and the occasional adorable kid couldn’t make up for that, not on a Saturday when all the couples were out full force and the kids were mostly at full obnoxiousness from the weekend and too much sugar.
They made the length of the beach without any other real unpleasantness, and Veronica kept going onto the less popular rocky ground bordering it. Backup was well-trained enough that she could, and had, let him off-leash at Dog Beach before, but it was too crowded today, and people got nervous around pit bulls. Besides, she didn’t trust other people’s dogs, and one delusional chihuahua had already tried to pick a fight with him.
They climbed over a few slabs of rock, Backup still panting contentedly. “I wish my life was as easy as yours,” Veronica told him. “You eat, you sleep, you go for long walks on the beach with gorgeous blondes…”
And on that note, maybe she’d get her mom to walk him next time. Veronica could wash out the garbage cans or do the laundry or something instead. Surfer Guy… well, actually, he might have hit on her mom, but as gross as that would have been, at least Veronica wouldn’t have been there to see it.
“You want to go in the water?” she asked Backup, unhooking his leash. He barked happily and raced into the surf, and Veronica parked herself on a jutting chunk of rock, kicking idly at the pebbly sand as she watched him.
Her life wasn’t so bad, she knew that. Here she was, sitting on a beach in California, watching one of her favourite creatures have the time of his life, and it was her chore. She lived in a nice house, drove her own car, and had parents who loved her and who she actually liked, most of the time. She made good grades, she had enough spending money to get ice cream after school or go shopping on the weekend, and she wasn’t pregnant or on drugs or anorexic, or otherwise starring in one of the very serious Issue Books with high school protagonists that had been so ubiquitous in middle school.
So her boyfriend had cheated on her. So what? They hadn’t been together that long, not really. Just because he’d been flirting with her the whole time she’d been with Troy didn’t extend that in any meaningful way, and actually, she should have known that flirting with another boy’s girlfriend was a bad sign, but she’d thought it was harmless at first, and then after Troy had left it had felt so good to have someone who was still into her, who could make her feel less stupid and pathetic.
And so her last boyfriend had lied to her and used her and dumped her for a drug dealer. So what? The person she’d thought he’d been had clearly never existed, so it wasn’t like she’d lost anything. He’d just been a rebound, anyway.
And so what… but she faltered, even inside her head. Even now she couldn’t dismiss what had happened with Duncan so easily – how could she, when she didn’t even know what had happened with Duncan? Maybe she was just kidding herself when she thought that she could get over it if she just knew why, or if he’d bothered to break up to her to her face… or if she didn’t have to see him every day at school – but how could she get over it when he’d never told her why, when she’d been in love with him and then suddenly it was like she just didn’t exist.
When he’d loved her, he had to have, and then suddenly it was like she just didn’t exist.
Backup came racing back with a huge chunk of driftwood, and Veronica smiled despite herself and threw it for him, watching him gallop off after it with a tugging wistfulness. She wished she was young enough that Backup could just be her new best friend, but she suspected his manicuring skills were sadly lacking.
He brought it back and she threw it again, and then a third time. The fourth time, she turned and hucked it into the ocean, mostly to see how far he’d be willing to go to get it.
Far enough, it turned out, after which he dropped the stick at her feet and shook off all over her, something Veronica really should have anticipated. How was dog water always worse than regular water? It was like it became musty as it left their fur.
“Urch, fine.” She picked it up and really threw it this time, putting her whole shoulder into the motion. Backup charged forward, then halted a couple feet in when he realized how far out it was – or maybe just when he couldn’t see it anymore. He looked back at Veronica judgementally, the waves lapping at his knees, but she shrugged unapologetically. “I’m not throwing it for you forever. Go get it or don’t.”
He didn’t, but he didn’t come back either, opting to chase the waves toward the shore instead, biting at them as he barrelled through and then circling back again. Veronica was okay with that. She kept an eye out, though; this area wasn’t especially popular but there were always a couple explorers or joggers around, and she was full up on awkward incidents. Backup was polite around people, but he wasn’t used to compensating for the water, and she could only imagine the fuss if he got swept into someone and knocked them over.
But nothing happened, and no one who passed by seemed to object to a dog tiring himself out by fighting the entire ocean, so Veronica didn’t have much to do besides sit and think. She’d left her phone at home, ostensibly by accident, because it had been in her purse, but if she was honest it might have been in part to not have to acknowledge Lilly’s endless texts. She should really just block her, but at first she hadn’t been able to give up that irrational hope that somehow there would be an explanation, or an apology, that would be good enough, that would somehow make it okay for them to be friends again – that would ease the vicious ache behind her breastbone and in the pit of her stomach. Then the texts had at least been fuel for her indignation, and since that had been the only thing keeping her from having a complete breakdown, she’d let them keep coming.
But there wasn’t really any excuse now. Now she was just leaving that particular chain of communication open in the interest of a stupid idea that she’d had because she was mad at a book from a hundred years ago, even though she’d flinched every time her phone went off all afternoon and nearly missed Meg’s text telling her when she got to Veronica’s house.
Veronica shook herself, wishing she could shake loose Lilly’s influence and impact on her life so easily. Before her thoughts could circle back around again she stood and dusted off her jeans, calling Backup. He trotted up to her with his tongue lolling out, looking pleased with himself. This time Veronica managed to move out of range before he shook himself off.
“Come on, boy, let’s go back to the car.” She clipped the leash back on to his collar. If she was lucky, Surfer Boy and his friends would be back in the ocean by the time she passed their spot.
The usual flash of thoughts and emotions followed – if Lilly were here she would have said this and that, she would have thought the one guy was cute and flirted back but if Veronica was too disgusted she would have had the perfect cutting remark, but she wasn’t here and none of that had been real anyway – but when she managed to tamp it down and shove the anger and hurt away, Veronica’s predominant emotional reaction was annoyance. She was sick of this endless spinning circle of the same bullshit, sick of not being able to get control over her own thoughts. She was trying, damn it. She had made a good-faith effort to spend time with other friends. She was finding other things to do with herself that weren’t brooding or plotting in her room. She was trying not to dwell on her fury and heartbreak. It wasn’t fair that she kept getting yanked up short.
It had only been a week, she reminded herself, but it was hollow comfort. It wasn’t like giving it time had helped much with Duncan, and Meg was right – a boyfriend was only a boyfriend, even if losing Duncan had been orders of magnitude worse than losing Jeremy. Lilly was her friend.
Had been her friend, she corrected angrily. She couldn’t even get it right in her own head.
Veronica took a deep breath as they rejoined the more heavily populated stretch of Dog Beach. Glowering her way through the weekend crowd didn’t seem appropriate, even if it kept people from talking to her. She glanced down at Backup, keeping pace with her now that he’d tired himself out a little. He deserved her full attention – certainly more than Lilly did.
She picked up the pace a bit, smiling a little to herself as Backup twitched an ear in interest. She didn’t need to race him all the way back to her car, but he got so joyful on joint runs that it was hard to work yourself into a funk.
Jeremy wasn’t Duncan. He’d been a breath of fresh air after Troy, but she could recover from that breath going sour. She’d let some time go by, and eventually it would just be Lilly haunting her thoughts. It wasn’t great, but it was better than nothing, better than it could have been. And when it got to be too much, she could go back to fantasizing about dumping Lilly’s secrets all over her bed for her parents to find, or rubbing her face in everything Veronica knew that could make her life unpleasant. It didn’t mean she had to do it.
“Good boy!” she told Backup, when they finally slowed to a regular walk at the path up to the parking lot. “Good run! Good walk. Good swim, too, I guess.” She spread an old towel over the back seat for him. “Thanks.”
He jumped gracefully into the car and turned narrowly, completing the obligatory circles without getting all that much damp dog hair all over her seatbacks. It was definitely worth all the time her dad had spent training him, and Veronica knew they had both had a blast doing it. “You’re so smart,” she told him, ruffling the damp fur on his neck. “Look at you, thinking in three dimensions about staying on the towel. We’re going to train you to do dog math next.”
Backup shoved his nose under her chin and Veronica laughed, pushing his only slightly slobbery muzzle away.
“Okay, okay. Maybe dog geography instead, then.”
She was about to pull out when she thought better of it, reaching into the cup holder for her phone. But it wasn’t there, and she pulled a face. Well, she’d text Meg when she got home, then – say thank you for the shopping trip, that they should do it again some time. Really make an effort.
“You have no idea how much credit I deserve for taking the high road,” she told Backup, who ignored her in favour of scoping out the view through the passenger-side window. He didn’t understand these things anyway; when people messed with Backup, he just bit them – or if Veronica told him not to, then he didn’t. She should at least be able to tell herself to ‘be cool’.
Her relative good mood lasted all the way home, where she rubbed Backup down with the towel and let him into the garage to finish drying off. He had a bowl in there, and some toys and a bed for when her parents wanted him out from underfoot during parties.
She brought the towel in with her, planning to drop it in the laundry room; she didn’t want it in with her clothes with the amount of dog hair on it, but her mom could put it in with her next load of the bathroom mats or Backup’s blanket.
But the fastest way to the laundry room was through the door directly into the house, and when Veronica opened it, it swung into returnables bin, which must have been pulled too far out, and sent it crashing to the floor, making Backup bark and Veronica wince as bottles and cans rolled in every direction.
“I know, I know.” She dropped the dog towel on the step and knelt to collect them. It must have been ages since her mom had taken the bin in to return them; it had been crammed full to exploding with orange juice 2-litres and Coke cans, which were now all over the floor. She did damage control on the ones trying to roll under the shelving units and her mom’s car before she stood the bin upright – she was still slightly damp, and crawling around on her stomach on the dusty garage floor seemed markedly more unappealing even than it usually would have.
Then she righted the bin and considered the best way to Tetris it all in. If she put all the Coke cans on top, they’d roll off, but she wanted the larger bottles at least somewhat grounded inside the bin or they’d just tip over. At least the bottom looked more organized than usual; the glass bottles on the very bottom had been set neatly upright instead of thrown in haphazardly.
Veronica stopped moving, because it was the only way to stop thinking – just froze her thoughts right there before she could pay attention to the one important word in that thought.
Glass.
She could have told herself it was lemonade – her mom liked to get the fancier bevelled glass bottles instead of the plastic 2-litres, in the same brand as the orange juice, that her dad always picked up. But the lemonade bottles had broad screwtops, and the ones in the bin all had necks, and Veronica knew how to look away, but she had never been able to lie to herself in the face of actual evidence.
She reached down and snagged a brown bottleneck between two fingers, wrestling it free from the tight pack of the others and from a few obstructive Mug cans.
Bourbon.
She could see enough of the label of the next bottle over to know it was vodka, and the one on its other side, obscured by cans and a few smaller bottles that Veronica now suspected were Bacardi Breeze or Smirnoff Ice and not Jones Soda, was squat and distinctive enough that she already knew it was Patrón.
The bottles her dad had moved in March, she thought distantly. She’d heard him rattling through the liquor cabinet and hiding them after that huge fight, and when things had improved after that, he probably hadn’t bothered to get rid of them. There were more; some of them had to be new. Maybe all of them were new – one Absolut bottle looked much like another, and while her dad wasn’t a big tequila drinker, he preferred Espolòn to Patrón.
Doesn’t matter if you’re only looking to get drunk, Veronica thought, clenching her teeth so tightly that her head vibrated.
There were so many bottles, crammed into the bottom until nothing else fit and then covered over with innocent containers. This wasn’t a slip-up, it was a coordinated campaign. It must have been going on for a while, because if Lianne had been going through this much liquor in a few months, it would have been too obvious to ignore, a sledgehammer instead of the niggling little taps that Veronica had been trying so hard not to notice.
How had she not noticed? Her mom had cleaned up after her birthday, after her dad had made it clear he could only be pushed so far. Things had been okay – better than okay, until everything with Lilly. Veronica had held her breath every time anything was off for months after, but her mom had never gotten that stiff, careful way of walking, of moving, the conscious placement of every finger and toe that always preceded some kind of binge, like she was afraid she would somehow put a foot wrong and accidentally chug a fifth of Baccardi. It was why Veronica had kept talking herself out of every suspicion, ignoring the tiny fault lines, feeling disloyal for not jumping at any way to prove herself wrong because there was a chance she might be right instead.
She would have noticed if her mom had slipped, if she’d started drinking again. She always noticed.
Maybe she just never actually stopped, she thought. Was there anyone who wasn’t lying to her?
Backup nosed at her shoulder, maybe concerned that she’d gone so long without moving, but she just shoved his face away with the hand that wasn’t holding the Jim Beam.
The door to the house was still open; Veronica set the bottle down and went over to close it, nudging the towel out of the way with her foot. Then she pulled everything out of the returnables bin and started repacking it. Liquor bottles on the bottom still, insulated with cans between the necks so they wouldn’t clank too much. Smaller bottles upside down on the shoulders of the larger ones, the one or two actual sodas on top to make the others look innocent. A scattering of cans over top to hide them, leaving just enough room to anchor the orange juice containers in the last few inches of the bin and jam them in place with the remaining cans. By the time she was done it looked slightly sloppy and due for a deposit run – just like before.
Her mom always handled those. It was convenient for Lianne, but for the moment it would keep Veronica’s dad from finding out the way she had, and that was enough.
Unlike her mother, she pushed it all the way in against the wall, out of range of carelessly swinging doors. Easy to get it back in its proper spot when you were sober.
“Go lie down,” she told Backup when he tilted his head at her quizzically, not even really looking at him. Then she pressed her lips together so she wouldn’t start crying and marched into the house.
It was tempting to wonder why Lianne had kept so many bottles – there was no way they were all recent; if she’d gone through that much alcohol in such a limited period of time it would have been incredibly obvious. But there was no point. Drunks were sloppy, and that was answer enough. Maybe she’d been afraid she wouldn’t be able to hide more bottles once the non-alcoholic containers had been traded in. Maybe she’d been alternating bottles and just finished all of them off at around the same time. Maybe she’d been hiding the empty bottles somewhere else and suddenly decided to get rid of them. It didn’t really matter.
Veronica threw the towel over the edge of the empty basket in the laundry room with jerky movements. What was she supposed to do? She couldn’t tell her dad – she couldn’t do that to him, and after what had happened that past spring she was afraid of what it might mean for her parents’ marriage. She might be furious and sick, but she still wanted her family to be a family. Besides, what would happen to Lianne if things fell apart?
She went back out, into the hall, and kicked off her shoes viciously, not bothering to straighten them when they landed in untidy disarray near the door. Then she stomped up the stairs, not sure what she was trying to accomplish with the display of temper but knowing she was hoping for something.
Come upstairs and ask me what’s wrong, she thought. Get mad, or… or tell me you found where dad put them, and dumped them all out, and that’s why – but she faltered, because even in her own head it sounded childish and stupid.
Instead of slamming her door, she just closed it quietly. What was the point in making a fuss or showing she was upset? Her dad had yelled and slammed at least one door in March, and it apparently hadn’t mattered. And it wasn’t like her mom cared about her feelings, because if she did this wouldn’t be happening.
Or she did care, but not enough for it to matter. If she was being fair, which she wasn’t inclined to be, Veronica knew that was true. But she also knew it was worse.
She shoved her purse and the bag of halter-tops and makeup off the foot of her bed and onto the floor, pausing only long enough to rescue her phone from the former. The book she’d bought in between the Sephora and the food court thudded against the floor, but she ignored it.
She had to do something, and this was out of her hands, too much for her to handle, too big and deep-rooted and horrible for her to have a hope of doing anything about, so instead Veronica opened her texts.
There was one from Meg – thanks again for today, I had fun! – and three from Lilly.
going to set celeste’s hair on fire with the power of my mind
ugggggggggh theres nothing to do you should come over and we can swim
i miss you Veronica
Veronica stared at that last one for a long moment, indignation and fury and anguish fighting each other in her stomach. Lilly didn’t get to be sad. She didn’t get to miss Veronica; she’d done this to herself. It was bad enough that Veronica couldn’t stop missing Lilly, but for Lilly to act like she had any right to have feelings about this –
Veronica threw the phone down on the bed and strode over to her desk before she could think better of it. She wasn’t letting those emails sit there any longer – she’d see what Lilly had to say for herself, and then she’d delete them, and delete the texts, and block the hell out of her. She was done.
She opened her email and scrolled down to the second message, clicking through immediately. She was too angry for hesitation.
Let Me Explain, huh? Well, she’d let Lilly explain. And then she was going to obliterate that explanation, and everything else from Lilly. Maybe she should start setting things on fire. She could start with the pictures that had been sitting in a shoebox in her closet since she tore them down the day she’d caught Lilly and Jeremy together.
Veronica, I know you’re mad, the email started. I get it, I screwed up, so just read this, okay – you’re really really really important to me and we can’t let some guy get between us.
Veronica almost gasped at the audacity. As if this was about ‘some guy’ and not Veronica’s actual boyfriend, as if Lilly hadn’t completely betrayed her, as if they were still on the same team, had some kind of mutual responsibility, as if there was anything Veronica had to do, let alone because Lilly told her to.
She clenched her fists and kept reading.
I never should have let things get that far, but it just kind of got out of control. I know Jeremy kind of cheered you up after Troy but you got so serious about him that I was just worried! The truth is that he’s kind of a loser and I just KNOW you can do so much better, Veronica, you DESERVE so much better, because you’re so fantastic. I knew he didn’t deserve you and maybe I got kind of carried away proving it but trust me, you weren’t missing much!
It went on, and Veronica’s eyes followed the lines down the screen, but she wasn’t sure how much she was actually reading. There was a strange angry buzzing in her head. You deserve better. He’s kind of a loser. It was almost the same thing Lilly had said when Duncan had pulled his disappearing act. First he was a spaz for not talking to her, and then suddenly, overnight, he was an idiot and Veronica was probably better off without him, just because Lilly said so.
She really thought she could just pull strings and arrange Veronica’s life however she wanted. Date Duncan, don’t date Duncan, date Troy, date Jeremy but don’t get too serious about him, now break up with him –
How many strings had Lilly been pulling behind the scenes? Had she known about Troy? Veronica had wondered that before, but the possibility was feeling more and more horribly real the more she saw. Lilly had pushed Veronica to go out with Duncan, had helped her get together with him, encouraged her to tell him how she felt. Had she really cared, at all, or had she just wanted her best friend to date her brother because it bound Veronica closer to her, or gave her more opportunities to mess with them, or maybe she’d just thought it was funny.
Had she made Duncan break up with Veronica?
That was a stupid idea – even now, she couldn’t stop trying to let Duncan off the hook like some kind of sucker – but the seeds of it were real. Lilly couldn’t have forced Duncan to stop talking Veronica, but she could have had a hand in it. Had she been trying to break them up? Had she encouraged him not to acknowledge Veronica and then turned around and assured Veronica it would all blow over? Had it been her idea to do it by just freezing Veronica out and pretending she didn’t exist?
Did Duncan even know he’d broken up with by Veronica freezing her out?
She stared at the computer screen, unseeing. If Lilly could have sex with Jeremy and say it was because she wanted Veronica to have a better boyfriend, than what was stopping her from telling her brother that she’d let his girlfriend down easy for him and then just… not?
The helpless fury swelling in Veronica’s chest wanted her to believe that Lilly was just lying, that she had fun fucking with people and making them miserable just for kicks, and maybe that was true; god knew Lilly loved a scandal.
But maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe she had, somehow, convinced herself she was doing Veronica a favour with Jeremy. The idea that she was somehow trying to help Veronica was so much worse. Had she decided – what, that it would be easer for Veronica to get over Duncan if she thought he was an asshole who’d dumped her with no notice or consideration? Or had she thought at first that he’d change his mind, so she didn’t bother breaking up with Veronica for him, and then just lied to cover her tracks when she was wrong?
Either way, it didn’t make Duncan less guilty – making your sister dump your girlfriend for you wasn’t much better than not bothering to break up with her at all – but it made Lilly so much more. Veronica wanted to throw up.
A phrase caught her attention – because, TRUST ME – and she refocussed on the email. A lot of it seemed to be more of the same: an outlay of reasons why Jeremy was a terrible boyfriend, actually; a list of why Veronica was great and deserved better that made her stomach turn; several paragraphs dedicated to Lilly’s feelings – because, of course, that was what mattered.
And then, at the very bottom, I know you’re mad but I’ll make it up to you, okay? You got me back pretty good, so let me fix this so we can still be okay. I’ll even grovel if you want, Veronica, I’m so so so sorry. Logan’s basically done with me and it’s probably better that way! It can just me you and me again – boys suck anyway.
Finally she used the word ‘sorry’, Veronica observed. This late it meant less than nothing. It might have meant basically nothing anyway, after what Lilly had done, but they’d never know now.
She was so, so stupid. Lilly had never even hidden that she was manipulating Veronica – no, wear this dress; no, feel this way about Duncan; no, we’re not going to Homecoming, you’ll thank me later. And yet she’d just taken it, considered it unexceptional – just part of friendship, or just part of who Lilly was, or even something to be grateful for.
She let out a long, heaving, shaky breath. She was so angry it took actual effort not to get up and just start breaking things, but she wasn’t going to do that. The room was full of her stuff, and she wasn’t going to sacrifice any other part of her on the altar of Lilly’s ego.
But she had to do something. She was shaking with impotent fury, so red and raging that it almost obliterated the bone-deep ache radiating through every part of her body, almost obscured just how deeply humiliated she felt. If she didn’t find something, anything, to take control of her life, she was just going to start screaming and maybe not stop.
Veronica Xed out of the email but didn’t delete it. Maybe she’d need it later, although she didn’t know what for. It was hard to think anything out logically when all she wanted to do was start smashing things. She opened the last one, the one with the allcaps plea for attention as the subject line.
Okay, Veronica, I get that you’re still mad, but you have to read the other emails!!! It’s really important, okay? I get that I screwed up and you can punish me as much as you want!!! But you have to talk to me! Listen, you can pick my next haircut, okay – make me go to school with a mullet or something. I know that sounds dumb! I’m not saying a bad haircut is like… a good punishment – but it shows you that I’m serious, right? And it doesn’t have to be that, you can do whatever YOU think of. I bet you can think of a lot of stuff, right?! AND the haircut thing too if you want. I’ll do whatever, I just want to be friends again.
You don’t even have to be nice to me, if we can just hang out sometimes I don’t care if you’re a total bitch. I probably deserve it.
You can’t just never talk to me again – we’re ride or die, remember? You’re basically my sister, only better, probably, because my actual brother is kind of a dud. I picked you over him, remember? I mean, who wouldn’t – anybody would be crazy not to pick you. I will be, like, your SERVANT for the rest of high school if you forgive me. Just a little bit! It doesn’t have to be all the way! Just talk to me again, and I’ll keep all those dickfaces off your back. I mean, I’m trying, but it’s hard when they all think we’re not friends anymore.
Would it have been enough, Veronica wondered, her eyes flicking over the rest of the email – more of the same, not as long as the explanations had been but still long. If she’d gotten this email before the constant texts where Lilly blew off what she’d done, if she’d read it first instead of last, before the one where Lilly showed her hand? She clearly hadn’t realized what she was admitting to in it, and maybe if Veronica had read that one later, she could have convinced herself that it wasn’t one long confession that Lilly treated her like her own personal Barbie doll. It shouldn’t have been enough, the emotional appeals and the deliberately provocative promises, but maybe it would have been. Maybe it would have worked. She’d missed Lilly so much.
She still did, even though it was making her actually sick to her stomach.
After a long time staring at the closing line (I miss you, okay? It doesn’t have to be like this.) she reached out and shut her computer. Then she got up and went downstairs, not really sure why or what she was doing.
She opened the cabinet in the kitchen – the one that used to be the liquor cabinet and now had a bunch of different vegetable oils and a tall plastic container of thick honey on the bottom shelf, underneath the drawers of chocolate chips and Jello packets and baking soda that had always been there.
Nothing was out of place or suspicious, but Veronica still reached in and tilted the honey to the side, as if there would be a fifth of whiskey hidden behind it somehow.
“What are you looking for, honey?”
She’d been standing there, waiting for hidden bottles of hooch to materialize, for so long that her mom had come in.
Veronica took a breath, shut her eyes. She closed the door and turned around, face neutral. “Just trying to figure out where everything got moved to.”
Lianne flinched, just slightly. It was easy to miss, if you wanted to. It was obvious if you didn’t. “I think everything’s where it was yesterday. Why, did you want to make cookies or something?”
Veronica did not want to make cookies. She probably should, because she was responsible for spirit boxes for the upcoming basketball game, but she had also skipped the pep squad meeting last week and wiggled out of this week’s by claiming debilitating period cramps, so somebody else might be taking up her tasks already, just in case. Most of the girls on the squad could just buy fancy baked goods for the boxes anyway. Lilly had never understood why Veronica insisted on baking them herself, although her complaining had never stopped her from stealing endless amounts of snickerdoodles right off the baking tray.
“I’m good,” was all she said.
Her mom fidgeted. “We could do something else – a cake, maybe? Get your mind off things?”
Get her mind off things. God.
“Meg and Backup pretty much already did that,” Veronica said. “Thanks.” She wasn’t overtly rude, but her tone was consciously devoid of warmth, and Lianne was clearly with it enough to tell, although Veronica wasn’t going to rule out a few surreptitious Smirnoff Ices while everyone else was out of the house. There hadn’t been enough in the returnables bin to make up a full pack, which meant there must be some left. A part of her wanted to search them out, rip the entire house apart until she found them, but she was old enough to know it was useless. Her mom would just buy more. Even seeing Veronica distraught wouldn’t make any kind of long-term impression on her. Embarrassing herself, or her family, in public never had; missing her own birthday party and spending the rest of the night in the worst fight she’d probably ever had with her husband hadn’t either, it turned out. What was her daughter’s anguish, then?
“Veronica, are you okay?”
This was always the worst part. The good things that never quite went away, that reminded her of how good things could be if only they weren’t the way they were. Her mom was still – mostly – a mom, and that was so tempting to rely on, but she couldn’t. She’d never been able to, once alcohol was involved.
Maybe it was just Lilly’s email, but Veronica couldn’t stop herself from wondering, this time, if Lianne’s concern was only a way to deflect suspicion, smooth over the awkwardness. And if it was, what did that mean for when she wasn’t drinking? Was it ever sincere? Did it ever mean anything?
“Aside from literally everything that’s going on in my life? Yeah, I’m great.” She smiled tightly, and her mom’s face fell.
“Sweetie, I know it’s been… hard for you, I wasn’t–”
Veronica shrugged. “No big. I have some stuff to work on.” She headed for the stairs, then turned back. “You should take the recycling in. The returnables are spilling everywhere.”
Lianne’s ashen expression was cold comfort as she left her mother behind her at the foot of the stairs, but she wasn’t going to find any other kind, so it would have to do.
*
It would be a mistake to answer Lilly’s email, so Veronica wrote her response out longhand so she wouldn’t be tempted to send it. She ripped the paper in several places, filled three sheets with the worst handwriting of her life, and cried twice, but once it was done she felt slightly better. Then she read it back, giving her harsh, judgemental side full rein.
It’s like you have no idea how much you hurt me, every day it hurts so much I feel like I can’t move and you just want me to get OVER it?
After everything with Duncan, how can you think I’d be anything other than devastated – you KNOW how much it hurt when Troy ditched me for another girl and at least he’s GONE and I don’t have to see him every day!
You were supposed to care more about me than being right –
I THOUGHT YOU WERE MY FRIEND –
It sounded like nothing more than a pathetic little girl crying in her room over someone who’d never deserved her trust or her loyalty. There was more, too – the feeble attacks of someone who was too weak to actually use her claws.
I wish you’d leave me alone, I never want to see you again!
You’re just a weird, freaky stalker who attracts other weird, freaky stalkers, and I don’t want anything to do with you – no one really does, they just like that you pay for things.
If Jeremy is such a loser, why don’t you go back to sucking his dick, since apparently you deserve each other?
We are NEVER going to be friends again! I HATE you and I don’t care WHAT you do, we are finished forever! I hope you die alone with no friends like you deserve!
As if any of that would have an effect on someone like Lilly.
She’d been right before, before she scared herself and wussed out – something had to be done. Lilly had spent her entire life with no real consequences, and it was time for her to pay. Even if Veronica had wanted to, there was no getting through to her, not if she thought ‘you’re too cool for him’ was an acceptable reason for fucking another girl’s boyfriend.
Or maybe she’d just thought Veronica was gullible enough to believe it. Well, if Lilly wouldn’t let Veronica build herself a new life where she was tough and cynical and separate but still had a couple friends, still had school and enough interests to make herself feel like a complete person without Lilly, wouldn’t let her be mature about it – then she was going with Plan A, and burning it all down, and no one would ever think she was gullible or naïve ever again.
She dug around in her desk drawers until she found a half-full pack of matches from her romantic phase a couple years ago, when she’d written in her diary by candlelight until it started to give her headaches, and burned all three pages of the letter over the metal lid of her new makeup set. They were too big for it, so she had to hold them until the last minute, when the fire was licking at her fingers, but it was appropriate enough. The old Veronica was going up in flames with every anguished loop and impotent underline, and if she hissed through her teeth before she dropped the last scrap onto the lid to shrivel into oblivion, that was fine.
It wasn’t so bad to hurt on the outside for a change.
Chapter 5: Life Being What It Is
Notes:
We're getting somewhere! Slowly!
I found out recently that as of the last chapter, this fic is as long as Of Mice And Men. As of this one, I think we're passing your average Narnia book. So I can stop feeling like I should have spaced things out more and get to the nitty-gritty in... probably the next chapter. (No promises, though, just to be safe.)
Also, anyone who was interested in what has and hasn't changed in this AU will also get a look at some of the butterfly effects in this chapter. I know there's at least one of you!
Chapter Text
Lfe being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
Paul Gauguin
Veronica wore a skirt to school in Monday.
It wasn’t like this was unusual enough to be noteworthy – it was more what she’d been thinking when she’d picked it out that made her so aggressively conscious of it. She tried to focus on her classwork all morning, with mixed success. Mr. Johanson seemed so bent on calling on her that when he finally asked a question that no one volunteered to answer, Veronica put her hand up just so he wouldn’t have the satisfaction of springing it on her unawares.
Then she asked to go to the bathroom.
The look of pained exasperation on his face would have been mildly amusing on another day, but Veronica was too anxious to appreciate it. She kept her innocent face on until he sighed and waved her toward the classroom door with bad grace, and then made her way as slowly as she could get away with to the restrooms, where she washed her hands more for something to do than anything else.
The girl in the mirror looked nervous, and Veronica made a face at her. She really had to do something about her hair; it wasn’t doing anything to dispel the sweet ingenue image she was trying to destroy. She should have grabbed some hair elastics at the drug store that morning, but she’d been too busy trying to play it cool to think about that. It would have come in handy keeping her hair out of her face later, too. Maybe someone else would lend her one, but it felt wrong to ask Meg for a hair tie and then use it for –
Veronica shook her head. She was getting ahead of herself. And it had probably been long enough to sell the idea that she’d actually needed to go to the bathroom, anyway.
She slipped back into the classroom as quietly as possible, trying to avoid Mr. Johanson’s attention. Luckily for her, he was in the middle of one of his rants about appropriate classroom etiquette; apparently Ric Fernandez had set him off by putting his feet up on his desk.
Veronica eyed Ric from the corner of her eye as she slid back into her seat. He was slouching in his chair with the usual PCHer smug nonchalance, too cool to give a shit about anything – although he did seem to have moved his feet. Performative violence and performative indifference were the two sides of that particular coin. She wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing; it was reassuring to think that some of their violence was as much posturing as the façade of being unflappable by things like ‘in-school suspensions’ and ‘jail time’ was, but that didn’t make anyone’s bones less broken at the end of the day.
There were twenty minutes left in class, and it was too much to hope they’d be able to spend it all pretending to nod along with the lecture – even Mr. Johanson couldn’t find more than five or six ways to say ‘don’t put your feet on the desk’ and ‘no one cares about manners anymore’ – so Veronica extracted her notebook from beneath her pencil case and started copying down the notes on the board. She’d missed most of what the teacher had been saying, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t read the book, so that should be more than enough, and if it made her look industrious enough, maybe he wouldn’t keep trying to call on her once class picked up again.
That was a little optimistic, it turned out, but by the time he got around to it all that was left was a softball question about symbolism, and the bell cut things short before she had to say more than the obvious things about the name of the town and the winter setting. Mr. Johanson shouted the homework assignment at them as everyone hurriedly packed up and headed for the door, and Veronica resisted commenting on how that wasn’t exactly good etiquette. She wasn’t worried about the homework – she was ahead in the reading, and the short-answer questions from the board would take her about fifteen minutes.
Someone jostled her shoulder as she exited the classroom for the hallway, and Veronica elbowed back, glaring, not realizing until she connected that it was Jeremy. He squawked, looking over his shoulder like he was about to get her in trouble with someone, but the hall monitor wasn’t paying attention, and Veronica breezed by him before he could try to talk to her.
At least they didn’t have any more classes together today except biology, and she wouldn’t have to acknowledge him at all; they were on opposite sides of the classroom, and Ms. Canning didn’t especially like Jeremy. He’d complained about it when they were dating – and before they were dating, actually. Veronica had felt a little guilty about still liking Ms. Canning at the time, but now she was equally disgusted with the memory of Jeremy’s whining and that of her own equivocation.
Well, she could use that; anger was much more actionable than sadness. If she’d been tempted to prevaricate and waffle today, there was an end to that.
There was only one more period before lunch, which Veronica had determined to be the best time to make her move – before school had been too awkward, but she didn’t want to give herself time to back out.
Time to think better of it, she couldn’t help but think, acerbically.
Regardless, she just had to try not to fall asleep in American History – not always easy, since Mrs. Galloway’s teaching method was essentially to stand in front of the class listing dates in the flattest monotone she could manage, although the idea of falling asleep in class today was laughable; Veronica had barely managed to sleep last night – and then she could get this all over with.
Or if not all of it, at least enough that she’d be committed, and she could relax a little.
She slipped into her seat next to Wanda Varner and flipped open her notebook more out of habit than anything else. The tests for this class were a joke; if you read through the relevant textbook chapters, you could basically predict what all the multiple-choice questions would be, and the textbook was more coherent than the teacher anyway, so it was barely worth showing up to class. Veronica still did because she wanted to maintain her almost perfect attendance; Wanda probably did because she was sick of detention. She was drawing on her binder instead of paying attention, but for once it was hard to blame her.
When the bell went, it took Veronica by surprise: she’d been staring so hard at the blank lines in front of her, dwelling on her plans for the day, that she’d missed the entire class. It was something of a relief, that she didn’t have to spend forty-five minutes watching the clock tick interminably toward lunchtime, both an escape and a looming ordeal, but she felt almost cheated of that last block of time. For once she wished she’d been thinking about Lilly. It was how she’d bolstered herself when she was tossing and turning at two in the morning, when she’d faltered a few times the day before: pictured the look on Lilly’s face if she pulled this off. She hadn’t even been dwelling on the real flaws in the plan – what if she bit off more than she could chew and earned herself a stalker? What if something went wrong and she got hurt? What if her parents found out?
No, she’d killed an entire class with juvenile concerns like how much will it hurt? What if I cry? What if I do something embarrassing?
She wasn’t supposed to care about that anymore, she thought fiercely, stacking up her unused notebook and unopened textbook and filing out a few steps behind the rest of the class. New Veronica was ruthless. She didn’t have time for insecurities, and she didn’t need reassurance. She didn’t worry about the kind of things that Jeremy’s girlfriend had, that Troy’s girlfriend had.
She definitely didn’t have anything in common with Duncan’s girlfriend. Not anymore.
Veronica hesitated as she turned into the hall her locker was in. She wasn’t stupid. She knew this was a bad idea, knew she was trying to talk herself into it because, whatever she told herself, she was scared. But she was more scared of spending the rest of her life getting halfway and then backing down, of being or staying or turning into the girl Lilly seemed to think she was.
And she hadn’t spent ten-fifty this morning for nothing.
It might have been dumb, but it worked; nothing like a sunk cost fallacy to motivate you. She slid back into the stream of students, ducked past Katie with a muttered apology, and spun her lock open. Some senior hooted at her from where he was flirting with Manuela Fierro six lockers down.
Veronica ignored him, but her heart sank a little. She slid her books into her locker sidelong and pretended to mess around with her backpack. She should just get what she needed and go, but she couldn’t shake the idea that she was being watched – which shouldn’t have mattered, because the people making mocking comments from across the hall didn’t care what she was doing, just if they could make her feel bad. But she didn’t want anyone to see, didn’t want to have to dodge a whole new slew of insults and innuendo.
Virginal, she told herself sneeringly. It was what Lilly would have said, only from her it would have been friendly teasing. Veronica thought about puppet strings, about how Lilly didn’t even have enough respect for her to take her threats seriously.
She thought about that night on the beach, when Lilly had made such a transparent effort to embarrass her, one that she’d somehow thought was a well-intentioned attempt to bring her and Duncan closer, about how sweet she’d thought it was and how stupid she’d been for thinking he was waiting for her.
He probably wasn’t waiting anymore. Veronica was viscerally glad she hadn’t slept with Jeremy, glad in more abstract but still more all-encompassing way that she hadn’t slept with Troy, who she didn’t trust not to have given her something, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she only hadn’t because she’d been waiting, if not for Duncan, for something as perfect as she’d once thought they were.
But they hadn’t been. And here she was, still calling it ‘sleeping with’, like thinking the words had sex with would make her brain explode. It was like she didn’t learn.
Veronica unzipped the middle pocket on her backpack and closed her hand around the box of condoms. She wasn’t quite brazen enough to pull it right out and open it where anyone could see, but she slipped her nail under the seal by touch and fished one out once the box was open, tucking it into the pocket in her skirt. It was why she’d worn this particular one, the pocket; it was the only skirt she had that had one, and if it was a little short, well… the whole point of wearing a skirt was ease of access. On second thought, she grabbed another one. Just in case – it was better to be prepared.
When she turned away from the locker, taking a deep breath to settle her nerves, her heckler had disappeared; maybe she’d taken longer than she’d thought psyching herself up, or maybe she was just too boring for him. That thought made her smile grimly.
She felt ridiculously self-conscious making her way out of the school – no one cared, and no one could read her mind or see inside her pocket, but it still felt like they could, and did. Veronica did her best to ignore it. It didn’t matter what people thought about her, especially when so many people had already bought Jeremy’s bullshit and it legitimately wouldn’t matter what she did.
She paused outside the doors, looking around for the PCH contingent. They weren’t immediately apparent, but someone else had noticed that she hadn’t settled on a place to sit.
“Veronica! Over here!”
Lilly was waving from a table with Duncan, Meg, and Cole. It was her usual enthusiastic wave, her whole arm in the air. Veronica turned away instantly, then thought better of it. The second part of her plan would work better if she pretended to be wavering now. She glanced back over her shoulder at their table and bit her lip, hesitating… then jerked herself back around and walked away.
A moment later, her text alert went off in her pocket. Despite herself, Veronica grinned. Some people were so easy.
Weevil was holding court on the opposite site of the lunch area from Lilly, she saw a moment later. He was taking up a truly impressive amount of the bench with his I’m-a-badass-gangster slump, one elbow on the table, with his lackeys sitting or standing around it. One was sitting on the table itself.
Veronica took a deep breath. It was the last one, she told herself. She was decisive and confident from here on out. She didn’t need to brace herself.
Then she approached them.
Most of the boys ignored her, but one of them, a slender boy with artfully messy hair and a ridiculously pretty face, elbowed the kid next to him and jerked his head towards her.
“Here comes the fuzz,” he said.
Veronica wasn’t sure how he knew who she was, but they’d probably had a class together at some point, or maybe he’d seen her at the police station. She tried to smile vaguely, make it look like she was taking the jibe with good humour, but her heart was pounding hard in her throat, and she wasn’t sure she managed it. Now that she was so close, the effort they put into the tough-guy image was extremely apparent. She was surrounded by leather and tattoos, and while she might have been inclined in another life to blow it off as posturing, she had a file on her computer that said otherwise, and right now every line of it felt burned into her brain.
Weevil slid around to face her, kicking his legs over the bench and stretching them out in front of him so that he was leaning back against the table. Veronica stopped short, suddenly blocked by his feet.
“Can I help you?” he asked, with terrifyingly over-sincere politeness.
Veronica took one last deep breath. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“Me?” He put one hand on his chest as if in shock and looked over his shoulder with exaggerated confusion.
Great. She wasn’t in danger – she was being laughed at. “I thought maybe you could help me with something.”
Weevil laughed, sparking various amusement amongst his flunkies. “Help you? With what? Maybe you should ask your dad for help, huh?”
The laughter among the PCHers took on a darker edge at the reminder that she was the sheriff’s daughter. Veronica forced herself to ignore it, to act confident. To be like Lilly, a voice whispered in her mind, but she refused to listen. She’d do whatever she had to in order to beat Lilly at her own game, and she wasn’t going to be swayed now. It was too late to back down anyway.
She shrugged casually. “I figured you’d want to piss Lilly off as much as I do, but…”
Something about his demeanour changed sharply, although he didn’t move from his casual position; the smile vanished. “What do I care about Lilly Kane?”
“I don’t know,” Veronica said. “What do you care about Lilly Kane?”
Something darker than anger flashed over his face, and for a moment she remembered all too sharply what he was capable of.
“If you want to talk privately…” she offered, trying to sound casual and not sure if she made it. Being alone with him felt insanely risky, but antagonizing him in front of his entire gang was a bad move.
And she was going to have to be alone with him either way.
“Yeah, you know what?” He stood with slow casualness, but when he reached out and grabbed her upper arm it was anything but slow. Veronica forced herself not to flinch. “That does sound good. Let’s talk privately.” He made it sound sexual enough that the PCHers hooted and catcalled, but his eyes held nothing but threat.
“Sounds good.” Veronica moved with him, not letting herself get far enough behind that he was actually dragging her. He was quick, but not too fast for her to keep up – not going so quickly, she realized, that he would seem out of control. It was an appearances thing. She’d gotten a bit of a crash course in that the last week or two, but he was probably managing his image constantly.
Just, in his case he was managing it by backing up the tough-guy routine with his fists, and she was trying to back up her tough-girl routine by having sex with a guy who’d thrown a grown man down a flight of stairs before he turned fifteen. Because she was crazy.
He stopped in the shaded walkway next to the school. It was mostly free of people right now, but it was still a little more public than Veronica preferred. “I was hoping to talk inside,” she said coolly. At least she hoped it was coolly.
“You’re wasting enough of my time already,” he said flatly. His eyes had gone flat and cold too, like a snake’s. It was a lot scarier than if he’d snapped at her, or even yelled. Veronica swallowed hard, but she forced a smile.
“Fine. I’ll make it quick.” He snorted derisively, which she forced herself to ignore. “Lilly screwed me. She screwed you too.” She paused for effect. “I mean, maybe a little more literally, but…”
“What the hell do you think you know about that?” he snarled at her.
“Only what Lilly told me. She’s admittedly not the most trustworthy source, but she does love counting the notches in her bedposts, so…” Veronica shrugged with studied nonchalance.
Weevil sneered. “And you thought, what? That if I was her lapdog, I could be your attack dog? I’ve got bad news for you, baby – I’m not domesticated.” He smiled at her, showing an unsettling amount of teeth.
“I have a pit bull already, and he’s scarier than you,” she returned calmly, trying not to show how badly unnerved she was. “I can get my own revenge. I just thought you might want to give me a hand – you know, if you knew it would piss her off. But maybe you’re still hoping she’ll come back around…” Veronica let that trail off, shrugging nonchalantly. It was a risky play, but this wasn’t going especially well, and she hadn’t even gotten to the important part. She needed something to get his attention, and if she got under his skin, made him think he had something to prove, she might be able to hold it.
But he didn’t react like she’d expected – instead of the justification of an obsessed stalker or dismissive tough-guy bluster, he laughed at her, one quick explosion of incredulous air. “I’m done being used by rich white girls, for your information. We done here?”
It wasn’t hard to read the double meaning there. Veronica felt panic creeping up on her, but she refused to let it in. It would sabotage her, and anyway, if he walked away, he walked away; it wasn’t the end of the world. She tried one last tack.
“You don’t even want to know what’s in it for you?”
He’d already started to turn away, but he swung back to face her at that, visibly unimpressed. “Oh, like you’ve got anything I want.”
Veronica fought the crazy urge to gesture at her entire body and say ‘This’ in a sultry voice. Instead she retorted, “You can show Lilly she doesn’t mean anything to you and get laid. What’s not to want?”
He blinked at her. His eyelashes were absurdly long. “What?”
Veronica took a breath, ready to launch into the main part of the pitch. “So–”
But then he started laughing – really laughing this time, with genuine amusement rather than calculation.
“So – so wait,” he said, once he’d managed to catch his breath. “Are you telling me you’re here because you want a piece of this?” He gestured to himself with all the confidence of a first-rate auctioneer with a Ming vase, and then started laughing again.
It was weird, since she’d just thought about doing that, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it.
“Lilly slept with my boyfriend, she lied to me, and now she won’t stop acting like I’m just going to run right back to her,” Veronica said coldly. “I’d like to make sure she gets the picture.”
“Oh, does it suck to be treated like shit?” he asked her mockingly, before dropping right into icy seriousness. “That’s what you get for throwing in with the 09.”
“Listen, I know what Lilly meant to you–” Veronica started, only to fall silent when he focussed on her with such intense animosity that she actually took a step backward. He hadn’t moved toward her, only changed his posture, but it was so intense and aggressive that she could easily understand how someone like this could have been conducting grown-up criminal business since he was young.
“Oh, yeah?” he asked softly, voice dripping with threat. “And what’s that?”
Veronica tried to reconstitute her scattered dignity. She couldn’t believe she’d lost control of the conversation again. “If she didn’t mean anything to you, you’d have told the whole school about it,” she said. No way was she stupid enough to admit she’d seen the letters now, seeing his reaction to the mere suggestion of them. “Definitely your friends; who wouldn’t want to brag about banging Lilly Kane? But obviously you didn’t, so you must have cared about her. She played you, just like she played me. She thinks that she can get away with it because she’s the most important thing in the known universe. I just want to show her she’s not as important as she thinks she is.”
Weevil’s jaw worked as he stared at her. Finally he said, tone viciously intense, “If you think Lilly cares about what I do enough for it to even fucking matter, then you’re delusional.”
The word delusional caught her strangely. It wasn’t the obvious choice, like naïve or stupid would have been, and she wondered if he was talking a little bit to himself, or to his past self, even, the boy who had written those desperately sincere, vaguely bitter letters.
“Maybe not,” Veronica said. “I don’t know. Lilly doesn’t like other people playing with her toys.”
Weevil snorted bitterly and didn’t argue. She pressed her advantage. “And messing around with her favourite toy is a great way to get back at her.”
“How is you fucking me going to mess with Logan Echolls?”
Veronica stared at him. “Me! I’m her – really?” How could someone be scary and annoying at the same time?
“You sure about that?” he asked, a knowing, cynical twist to his mouth.
That stung, even though it shouldn’t have. She wasn’t supposed to want to be important to Lilly anymore. “We’ve been friends since we were eight. Logan ditched her the same time I did, and she’s not texting him constantly trying to get him to respond, or come over, or–” She threw her hands wide in exasperation.
“She probably is. That’s how she gets boys to stop being pissed at her.” Weevil sneered, adopting a mockingly saccharine voice. ‘Oh, come over,’ ‘cause they know that means they get to fuck her.” He looked Veronica over with the kind of lasciviousness that was meant to intimidate. “Guess it didn’t work on you.”
“Oh, shut up,” she snapped, angry enough that the spike of fear just turned to adrenaline in her bloodstream. “If you’d rather have sex with Logan, then go have sex with Logan, but I don’t see him offering.”
Weevil scoffed derisively. “You are wasting my fucking time.”
“Listen, maybe Lilly likes me better than Logan, or maybe she just can’t stand it that she can’t control me. I don’t know. Maybe it’s some fucked up thing that only makes sense to her. But she’s so convinced that I’m some kind of perfect pure little porcelain doll that she thinks she can fuck my boyfriend because he’s not good enough for me and then act like she did me a favour. Or at least that that’s a believable excuse. So if you want to piss Lilly off…” She paused, trying to find the right way to put it, but he never let her get there.
“Pass. I don’t stick my dick in crazy.” He paused for effect. “And you, girl, are fucking nuts.”
Veronica’s mouth went tight, and she bristled, but she couldn’t think of anything to say in response.
“Out of your mind,” he added. “Bananas. Loco. Batshit fucking insane. And I don’t need this crap from the fucking sheriff’s daughter. I’m not stupid.”
And then he turned and walked away, taking all Veronica’s plans with him and leaving her shaking with rage and fear and irritation, and maybe a healthy portion of relief as well. Belatedly, she muttered, “You stuck your dick in Lilly.”
It didn’t make her feel better.
*
The rest of school was brutal. Veronica’s jangling nerves had kept her from being too conscious of her lack of sleep, but now that there was nothing to keep them on edge she was exhausted. The anxiety itself wasn’t entirely gone, swirling around in the base of her skull even though she had nowhere else to direct it. She felt stupid and humiliated, even though no one had witnessed their conversation – although that hardly meant no one would find out about it.
Well, whatever. Half the stuff Jeremy had said was completely made up anyway, so what did it matter if people were sneering at her for something that was actually true. She hoped Weevil’s friends got a laugh out of it.
If it got back to Lilly, maybe it would even do some of the job by itself – at least it would be a drop in the bucket of convincing her that Veronica wasn’t the sweet little naïf that she apparently though. Not as satisfying, but maybe worth the potential embarrassment.
She blinked herself back to focus, but it was a poor attempt at best. Normally she didn’t have much trouble concentrating in Mr. Rooks’s class, but not even his colour commentary could make her find slides of old buildings captivating. So it was the Colisseum. Yawn.
Veronica bit the side of her cheek to keep from actually yawning. The last thing she needed was to get called out in front of the class.
No, scratch that. The last thing she needed was to get pulled aside by her favourite teacher and asked sincerely if everything was okay, which was a real possibility if he caught her falling asleep in his class.
She pinched the web of skin between her left thumb and forefinger, just to help clear her head. The pain did the job, although it probably wouldn’t last long. So what now?
She’d be lying if she didn’t admit to some relief. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have to go through with it; she hadn’t chickened out, just hit an insurmountable wall. She was pretty sure that trying anything else to convince him would just piss Weevil off, and it felt safe to say that she didn’t want him angry with her. If it had been a little hard to picture a fourteen-year-old doing what he’d done to his brother-in-law, it wasn’t anymore, and her dad’s warning was hitting home harder than it had before.
So that option was off the table. No more Plan A – time to tip Jake off to his daughter’s more audacious illicit activities. It was probably too difficult to do that anonymously, but she kept circling back to that option, because why would he take Veronica seriously, if he knew it was coming from her? It wasn’t like she was especially close to the Kanes – Mr. Kane was a hell of a lot nicer than his wife, and he had an easy, almost jovial attitude with his children’s friends, but he’d never made an effort to really get to know her, the way her parents had with Lilly.
That burned in her throat. Every time she thought she was done with finding new things that hurt, new reasons it was so impossible to forgive or forget what Lilly had done…
“Veronica?”
She blinked at Mr. Rooks, who was giving her raised eyebrows that suggested she’d zoned out and missed a question. But she was usually a good student, so he prompted, helpfully, “The emperor in question?”
The slideshow was currently stopped on an artist’s depiction of a city in flames, so Veronica hazarded, “Nero?”
“And the instrument in question?”
“The fiddle hadn’t actually been invented yet, so it’s probably just a metaphor. But he could have been playing the lyre.”
“Good to know you’re actually paying attention,” he said with a smile, and returned to his lecture. Veronica made a good-faith effort to listen for a minute, but it immediately started to put her to sleep again. She went back to thinking about Lilly’s air vents.
She didn’t get anywhere, because she kept circling around the same two or three ideas, too tired and on-edge to drill down properly, but it kept her awake until the bell rang. She wished her body would realize it could relax, that she didn’t have to keep bracing for incoming trouble, but maybe the remaining anxious adrenaline was a good thing, if she could use it to stay awake in class. Mostly it just felt like it was tiring her out faster, though.
Just biology and Spanish, she reminded herself. Two more periods, then she could go home and sleep.
Biology was usually demanding enough that she’d be forced to focus, so maybe it would go by quickly, and if she was lucky, they’d be finishing the movie the Spanish sub had shown on Friday after that. Veronica shifted uncomfortably as she switched her history textbook for her biology textbook. The skirt wasn’t the shortest she owned, but she usually wore tights or pantyhose with anything that fell this far above the knee, and today she’d felt like that defeated the purpose of wearing a skirt. It was an impossible-to-ignore reminder of how badly she’d struck out today.
Can’t even get a guy when you’re giving it away for free, she thought, bitterly. Not that she’d especially wanted the guy in question in any capacity outside of the utilitarian, but that didn’t make her feel better.
What stung the worst was the fact that she’d thrown Lilly a bone for nothing. There was nothing for her to exploit now, only a useless bit of deception that just made her look weak. That was what she got for thinking she could play in the big leagues. If Lilly had known what she’d be trying to do, she probably would have just laughed.
Two hours, Veronica reminded herself. Then she could go home.
It wasn’t as comforting as it had been before Saturday, but what else did she have?
*
Veronica sat in her driveway for what felt like an hour, although the dash kept telling her it had only been fifteen minutes. Being exhausted made time stretch and distort in a weird way, but she couldn’t just blame that. Her mom was inside, and her dad wasn’t, and while that was probably for the best at the moment, she couldn’t help resenting it.
Part of her wanted to keep sitting there until he got home, just so that she could use the distraction to sneak up to her room without having to field any attempts at conversation, but the sensible part knew it would never happen that way; he’d want to know why she’d been sitting in the driveway for two hours, first of all. And that was if he got home on time at all, given the way he’d been pursuing that case.
So she forced herself out of the car, only shutting the door a little harder than usual to vent her feelings. She didn’t jerk or slam the front door when she got there, but she didn’t sneak in either – just because she wasn’t looking to attract attention didn’t mean she was going to act like she was the one who’d screwed up.
Nothing greeted her in response except for Backup padding down the hall to look up at her inquiringly, and he decided nothing important was going on once he saw her taking off her shoes and disappeared back into the living room.
Maybe she was lucky, she thought, unable to shake the edge of bitterness. Maybe her mom was in her room, or busy enough in the kitchen that she wouldn’t notice Veronica in the hall. Maybe she was passed out on the couch and wouldn’t notice anything.
But since when was Veronica lucky these days? She had one foot on the stairs when her mother appeared from the living room, and as soon as she stopped she realized that she should have just kept going, gotten into her room as quickly as possible and shut the door, banked on Lianne not being willing to confront her that aggressively. But of course it was too late.
“I know you’ve been avoiding me,” her mom said, with that combination of sternness and insecurity that Veronica hated. You’re the grown-up! it always made her want to scream. If you don’t want me to be mad, stop drinking!
“I was at school,” she said flatly. Playing dumb wasn’t a real solution, but she didn’t want to engage, didn’t want to validate the situation. This was her mom’s problem, right? So her mom could deal with it.
“I just want to talk to you for a minute.”
“I’m tired,” she said.
“Veronica–”
It was all too much. She didn’t want to deal with any of this, she didn’t want there to be anything to deal with, and she wasn’t even saying it to get away, it was just true, why couldn’t anyone take her seriously?
“I’m tired,” she snarled, lowering her head and forging up the stairs without sparing Lianne a second glance. She closed the door behind her and turned the lock in the handle, which she never did – her mom worried about fires – and threw her backpack in the general direction of her bed. Jerkily, she shucked her useless skirt, swapped it for sweatpants, and threw herself facedown into her pillows, trying and failing not to cry. The faster she fell asleep the better.
Even that was unsatisfying: she drifted, half-asleep and unsettled, feeling exhausted and devastated and mortified the whole time, because there was truly no way to get away from any of it. It would have been better to just get up and do something, but she was just far enough from real consciousness that she couldn’t quite rouse herself, not until she rolled over onto the keys she’d forgotten were in her jacket pocket and stabbed herself with them.
Veronica fought her way free of the light material, finally freeing her arms and half-throwing, half-thrusting it away from her onto the floor, but when she tried to settle back against the pillows, she was too awake to make it stick. She tried anyway for a minute, not wanting to deal with the scrape in her throat from crying, with the tacky tear-marks on her face and the fact that she was uncomfortably warm and vaguely sleep-hungover. But it wasn’t doing any good, so she got up to have a shower instead.
The alarm clock on her night stand said she’d been not-quite-sleeping for an hour and a half, which felt both embarrassingly long and far too short. Her dad would probably be home by now. Her parents would be talking about dinner. The last thing she wanted was to go downstairs and eat, to sit at the table and pretend that she didn’t know that two-thirds of their happy family act was a sham.
But there wasn’t anything else she could do – she couldn’t break her dad’s heart by telling him what she’d found, couldn’t risk the final, irrevocable split she’d been afraid of after her mom’s birthday. She couldn’t go back to being a happy, obedient daughter, because that had been inescapably tied up with everything she was trying to get away from.
She could say she was sick, and didn’t want to come down, and maybe even stay home from school tomorrow, but that would just mean a whole day alone with Lianne.
In the bathroom, she stripped methodically, trying not to look at herself. Her body wasn’t something Veronica was usually overly self-conscious about – at least not since she’d done her best to put the embarrassing Mammimax thing behind her – but right now it felt like a reminder of everything that was wrong with her. If there wasn’t some hideous defect, and she was pretty sure that there wasn’t, then there had to be something else going on, something that made Duncan think she wasn’t even worth dumping, that made Troy and Jeremy decide they could use her. Lilly had said she was hot, but either she’d been lying, or something about Veronica was so repulsive that not even a hot girl giving it away for free could overcome it.
All things considered, it would be better if she was ugly, but none of the glimpses she caught of her legs or stomach or the flash of the mirror before she pulled the curtain gave any suggestion that that was true, unless a reluctance to tan was somehow hideous.
She’d wanted to climb out of her skin a thousand different times since she’d caught Lilly and Jeremy together, in a hundred different ways for a hundred different reasons, but it had never been quite this deep. If she could just shed her skin, and the rest of her body, and the house around her, and float away from the inescapable trap of school and –
It all sounded vaguely suicidal, even in her head, which wasn’t what she meant at all. She didn’t want to die, or not exist, or whatever, she just wanted out. Out of all her stupid problems, or at least out of caring about them.
Maybe that was why people took drugs, she thought, squeezing the shampoo bottle too aggressively and ending up with half again as much as she wanted. It made a kind of academic sense, but it wasn't enough to make the idea seem appealing to her. She’d never been able to figure out what kind of problems her mom had that could be worse than – or worth – the ones her drinking caused, and drugs were just the same thing magnified, probably. The thought still left a hollow feeling in her stomach, one that didn’t wash away no matter how thoroughly she rinsed her hair.
Veronica turned the water off as soon as she’d gotten rid of the soap in her hair, ignoring the urge to shut her eyes and just stay under the hot water. It wasn’t any better a solution than trying to sleep had been. She rang out her hair instead, got out and yanked her sweats and T-shirt back on, dug a ponytail elastic out of the top drawer and shoved her hair back. She didn’t look in the mirror.
When she left the bathroom and hovered awkwardly at the top of the stairs, she didn’t hear anything happening below. It was possible that no one was making dinner yet, but she couldn’t hear her parents talking either, and the TV wasn’t on. She was tempted to go back to her room, to curl up and try to escape the sick feeling in her chest, but she knew perfectly well that there was a completely different sick feeling waiting in there.
She went downstairs, slowly enough that she didn’t make a lot of noise. Nothing. It should have been a relief, a chance for her to grab an apple and some chips and retreat into her room or the back yard, but instead it itched at her brain. She checked the living room. The lamp was on, not quite necessary yet but visible in a way it wouldn’t have been earlier in the day, but the overhead light was off. No one in the kitchen, either.
Instead of checking the back yard, or the driveway, or going upstairs and looking for her phone, Veronica opened the door to the garage.
Her mom’s car was gone, which somehow she hadn’t even considered. Were they out of groceries? She was pretty sure there had been a shopping trip a few days ago, but sometimes when Lianne was really slipping she forgot to buy things like ‘bread’ or ‘vegetables’. Had it somehow gotten that far without her noticing?
Or maybe her mom just hadn’t felt like cooking, and she’d be back in fifteen minutes with takeout, and Veronica would feel like a paranoid idiot instead of a gullible one.
She hadn’t come in here for the car, though. She yanked the returnables bin out from the wall and tipped it so she could see inside. The blue plastic was unpleasantly sticky with sugar residue, but the contents rattled against the sides close to the bottom. It wasn’t even halfway full, and there was nothing incriminating.
Her mother had taken her advice, then, Veronica thought numbly. It didn’t make her feel better, but shouldn’t it have made her feel something?
She put the bin back and washed her hands in the kitchen sink, sizing things up for signs of cooking. Had she missed dinner somehow? But there weren’t any utensils or pans out, and the dishwasher wasn’t running. The leftovers from last night were still in the fridge, so she took them out and peeled the plastic wrap off to make them microwave safe.
“Backup?” she called. There was no answer, so she left the microwave whirring and went to the back door. He was gnawing on one of his giant tooth-cleaning bones when she stuck her head out, and dropped it to trot over with an alacrity that suggested he hadn’t been fed that night.
“Or are you just playing me?” Veronica asked, ruffling his ears affectionately. “Is this an angle for extra kibble?”
He just nosed at her hands, and Veronica gave his head one last rub before she pulled open the hall closet to get to the dog food bin. If he had already eaten, one extra meal wouldn’t hurt him, and she didn’t want to risk leaving him hungry.
“There you go,” she told him, setting the bowl down on the back porch. “Don’t worry, it’s not you. She didn’t feed me either.”
And didn’t that sound pathetic. The microwave was beeping intermittently from the kitchen, the ‘you forgot your food’ noise, so she backtracked and stabbed the button with a knuckle so it would shut up while she washed her hands again, then pulled her rewarmed shepherd’s pie out of the microwave and leaned against the counter to eat it. Sitting down in the dining room alone seemed too sad.
She was about halfway through and considering putting what was left back in the microwave for a bit when the sound of a car out front made her pause. It could have been one of the neighbours, but it was followed thirty seconds later by the sound of a key in the door. Veronica teetered on the edge of tensing up, then shrugged determinedly and went back to her food.
Her resolve to remain indifferent was rendered irrelevant when the sound of the front door shutting firmly was accompanied by her dad’s voice calling, “I have returned!”
“In here!” she called back. A moment later Keith appeared at the kitchen door.
“Aw, honey, leftovers?” He cocked his head. “Did you miss me so much?”
“What, you think we don’t eat dinner when you’re not here? Maybe I just wanted shepherd’s pie.”
“Well, your mom can’t complain about me being late if it spares her needing to cook,” he said slyly.
“I think she went out somewhere,” Veronica responded casually. “I kind of fell asleep after school, so I don’t know.” She shrugged.
A faint frown creased her father’s forehead for a moment, then disappeared. That was bad news; if he’d been annoyed or confused he would have made much of it – a tiny reaction meant it was a big deal. “I hope you left some pie for me,” was all he said.
“Make your own!” Veronica told him, pulling the plate closer to her. She was actually starting to get a little sick of it, but she hadn’t wanted the bother of cutting a smaller piece, so now she had to finish the whole serving.
“What were you doing at work so late, anyway?” she added.
He sighed. “I don’t know if I should get into it with you, Veronica.”
“It must be bad, if you won’t tell me.” She pushed away from the kitchen island, awkwardly juggling her knife and fork as she slid the plate into the microwave. “Come on, I’ll make you a sandwich or something…” She trailed off tantalizingly, raising an eyebrow.
Her dad huffed a bit of a laugh. “Now, maybe if there was lasagna in the offing we’d have something to negotiate.”
Veronica leaned her cutlery against the spoon-holder on the stove, not wanting to put it down on the counter, or dirty a whole new set. “Well, actually…” She opened the freezer and dug through it for a solid minute, setting two different bags of frozen vegetables on the counter and playing an awkward game of Tetris with the ice cream cartons. “Aha!” There was the frozen lasagna, at the very back, hidden by some yogurt containers full of the homemade soup her mom had made to freeze during an industrious period in the summer. “I knew this was in here somewhere!” She retreated from the freezer and waved the package at her father triumphantly.
“And just how long has it been in there?” he asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Veronica shot back. “It’s frozen.” She flipped the lasagna over and found the recommended oven temperature, then spun the dial on the stovetop. “Pay up. Gory details.” In case it might be easier for him to share them if he wasn’t staring her in the face, she busied herself readjusting the disordered contents of the freezer.
Keith tapped the countertop a few times. “Well…” He sighed deeply. “All right. But only so you’ll know to be careful.”
“I’m always careful,” Veronica said, trying not to think about the fact that she’d propositioned a violent criminal less than eight hours previously.
“You’re a very responsible person,” he allowed generously, which made her feel like a heel. But the microwave went off before he could continue and Veronica cursed internally. She didn’t want to give him an opportunity to change his mind.
She collected her newly reheated pie as quickly as possible and propped herself against the counter next to the oven. “So…?”
Keith gave her a wry, affectionate look. “So. There was a case last year, a little girl went missing. Marisol Reyes.”
“Is that what you’ve been looking into?” Veronica frowned. “I thought that one wasn’t solved at all. Weren’t you looking over a closed case?”
“No,” he agreed, “it wasn’t. We found her body a few months later, but no leads. No, the one I’ve been taking a second look at is the E-String Strangler case.”
“But I thought they caught him in Oakland,” she protested with exaggerated offense. “You mean it wasn’t safe for me to go back to clubbing every night?”
Her father pointed at her. “Don’t even joke about that,” he said, firm beneath his humorous tone. Veronica shrugged and ate another bite of shepherd’s pie, and he relented. “They caught someone, and I wasn’t sure he was our guy, but when the murders stopped…”
“You don’t think he just went dormant?”
“It happens. You like to think the only reasons these guys stop are if they die or go to prison for something else, but some of them have the self-control to hold off when the police get close or if they find a good fall guy.” He arched his back, stretching subtly. “We had a strangling case a while back – not a murder, domestic violence – and the guy turned out to have a history of non-fatal asphyxiation, so I thought it was worth looking into him. Neither of the E-String victims were actually strangled,” he added as an aside. “It turned out he couldn’t have been responsible for the murders, but when I was going over the old case files to compare them, I noticed some inconsistencies with the guy they’ve got down in Oakland. He was never charged with any of the E-String cases, just the one in Oakland, so we don’t know for sure, but I’m thinking he’s not the guy.”
Veronica felt very serious, suddenly. “So you think we still have a serial killer in Neptune.”
He took a deep breath, then sighed heavily. “I think we might.”
She took another bite, chewing while she thought it over. “No wonder you’re at work so much.”
Keith winced. “I’m sorry, honey. It really is–”
“I’m not complaining!” Veronica interjected, immediately feeling guilty. She hadn’t meant it like that. “I like my town with less serial killers, actually.”
“Me too, honey.”
“I just meant I get why this is so important to you.” She glanced at the oven to see if it was ready. Not quite. “So did you catch the real E-String Strangler?” A worse alternative occurred to her. “Or did he kill somebody else?”
“No. Not yet. The short version is that we’ve been looking at a couple possible suspects and stumbled onto a lead in the Marisol Reyes murder. We brought in a guy who I think is the killer late this afternoon, but it took him a few hours to lawyer up.”
“God,” Veronica said. She shook her head to jar her mind back into motion. “How old was she again?”
“Five,” Keith said somberly.
“That’s so awful.” She set her mostly-empty plate down and opened the lasagna box. Getting it out and ready to go in the oven was something to do with her hands, anyway. “How sure are you that it’s him?”
“Pretty sure,” he admitted. “He’s into some ugly stuff, which I am not going to discuss with my daughter. But I don’t think Marisol Reyes was the first little girl he hurt, either. The first murder, maybe.” The lines on his forehead deepened. “But maybe not.”
Veronica didn’t have anything useful to say to that, nothing mature or observant. But maybe that was the mature perspective. Some things were just horrible and you couldn’t talk it away. She put the lasagna in the oven instead, set the timer, threw away the plastic wrap it had been in. “It’s good for the family, though, right?” she said finally. “I mean, if you get him for it.”
“I think we will,” he told her. “It might take a little time, but he’s one of those guys who likes talking. He knows he shouldn’t, but he can’t help himself. We’ll get something we can use. Besides, there’s DNA evidence.”
Veronica could tell from the definitive tone that he wasn’t going to elaborate, but she hadn’t been a cop’s daughter her whole life for nothing. She knew what kind of DNA evidence there would be in a case like this.
“Good,” she said, quietly vehement. “I hope you nail the bastard to the wall.”
“We will,” her dad said, with a certain amount of grim satisfaction. “But, Veronica,” he added sternly, “I want you to be careful. You might not be that scumbag’s type that I’ve got in holding right now, but you’re too close to E-String’s for my peace of mind.”
“Don’t worry,” she told him earnestly. “My hard-partying lifestyle is on pause until you catch him.”
“You do not comfort me,” he stated with admirable deadpan. Veronica hid a smile as she forced herself to finish the last few bites on her plate. A car approached as she opened the dishwasher, and she glanced up towards the nearest wall, but it kept on going past the house. She went back to slotting her knife and fork into the cutlery holder, but her dad’s keen gaze told her she wasn’t fooling him.
“Do you want something to drink?” she asked. It was a little transparent, but it was the first viable distraction she could think of. “I should have had milk with that or something. Juice? Kombucha?”
“Do we even have kombucha?” he asked.
“I don’t know who bought it, but I refuse to drink it, so it just won’t go away.”
Keith smiled, but it was surface-deep, a distraction in kind for her. “I’ll pass, honey. Whatever you’re having is fine.”
Veronica poured them each a glass of apple juice, staring at the amber liquid as it curled and sloshed before settling. It didn’t look that much like bourbon – just enough to make her think that her dad should be able to come home after the one-two punch of separate cases both awful enough for their own salacious late-night documentaries and have a drink that wasn’t apple juice.
They’d tried that, in the past, before it became clear it wasn’t possible; the bourbon or the whiskey in an out-of-the-way place, maybe even one Lianne didn’t know about, or relegated to special occasions only. It never worked.
But neither did banishing it from the house entirely, apparently, so what was the point in her dad restricting himself? He wasn’t even the one who needed to abstain.
“Dad,” she said, turning around, but whatever she was going to say died on her lips. She couldn’t do it. Didn’t she owe her mom something, no matter how angry she was? What if she was somehow wrong – not about what was going on, but maybe about the magnitude? She didn’t want to lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, just as incapable of ignoring another fight like the one her parents had had on her mom’s birthday as she had been then. Things were still hanging together, weren’t they? If she hadn’t found those bottles, she wouldn’t know, not really.
“Veronica?”
“Sorry,” she said. “You know what, never mind, it’s stupid.”
“Veronica…”
She took a deep breath, passing him one of the glasses of apple juice. “No, it really is stupid. I was going to ask if you’d tell Lilly’s dad something for me. But it’s not… Forget it. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“I’m going to need more details, honey.” He regarded her evenly over his glass.
“You can’t just spare my dignity and drop it?” The look he gave her indicated a no. Veronica sighed for effect, glad she’d had an easy backup plan. “It’s dumb, okay? I know she’s been hooking up with guys she shouldn’t be, and I never said anything because she made me promise. But I don’t care about that anymore, and I just thought…” She let her shoulders slump. “I was worried when she told me. But it’s over now anyway. I guess I mostly wanted her parents to know so she’d get in trouble. I shouldn’t’ve…”
“When you say guys she shouldn’t be hooking up with–”
“Just older guys,” Veronica said. “They were on vacation, so it’s not like… when she told me I convinced myself it wasn’t a problem because he didn’t live here, and then when – you know – I guess I kind of convinced myself I had a good reason for wanting to tell her parents. But I think I was wrong.”
“I don’t think that’s something I can take to Jake and Celeste,” he agreed. “But cut yourself a break, okay, Veronica? I know you have a lot to deal with right now; you don’t need to be hard on yourself about it.”
“Why not? Everyone else is.” The attempt at humour didn’t really land, and she saw the sympathy in her dad’s eyes deepen. Hastily, she changed the subject. “But if you ever suspect her of hiding contraband, look in the air vents in her room.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, honey.”
The sound of another car broke the moment as Veronica smiled back at him. She waited for it to keep on going, but this time it didn’t.
“Why don’t you go to bed?” her dad suggested.
It was barely seven, and she’d already told him she’d fallen asleep after school, but Veronica didn’t mention either of those things. Instead, she said, “I promised to make you lasagna.”
“I think I can handle taking it out of the oven, honey.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Veronica told him, pretending she wasn’t listening for her mom’s key in the door, wasn’t trying to hear if it went in cleanly or scraped at the keyhole repeatedly.
“Why don’t you owe me one instead?” Keith suggested. The tone was right, playful and light, and he smiled as he said it, but there was a distraction under it that Veronica knew too well. “You can make dinner tomorrow, and none of this frozen malarkey.”
“Malarkey?” Veronica shook her head sadly. “If you’re going to use words like that, I’m definitely going to bed.”
He shot her an absent smile as she placed her empty glass in the sink, and Veronica’s heart sank despite her best efforts at keeping it in place. But she didn’t want to make things worse for him, so she traipsed reluctantly upstairs, still half-listening for the door.
It opened and closed just as she reached her room, and she didn’t turn the light on when she went in. For a moment she just stood there with her back to her own door, trying not to fall off any of the ledges she felt poised on the edge of. Then she swallowed hard a few times and crossed the room to her bed. The lamp wouldn’t show under her door as much as the main light would.
Then she dug out the first book she could find, the novel she’d bought with Meg and immediately forgotten about, and pretended she was trying to read it while she strained her ears for sounds of an argument downstairs. None came, and she didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
She heard her mom come upstairs to bed eventually, and then her dad later, but she never got through the first chapter, and she didn’t sleep for a long time.
Chapter 6: On Wrongs
Notes:
I sprained the hell out of my ankle last weekend, which sadly didn't really translate to much extra writing time, but I'm updating on schedule anyway! I make no promises, but I have a bunch of stat holidays coming up, and the next chapter is one I'm excited for (and have a bunch of chunks of written already) so I may have it up sooner than the usual two weeks.
Anyway, this one kicks off with something we haven't seen so far, so I'm eager to hear your thoughts. (And thanks again to anyone who's commented or interacted with the fic! I've never had this kind of response before and it means a lot.)
Chapter Text
On wrongs, swift vengeance waits.
Alexander Pope
It had been the weirdest fucking day, and Weevil truly didn’t need this shit. He’d gotten no sleep last night because Ariana got sick and didn’t make it to the bathroom, so he’d had to put her back to bed and spend an hour at 2 AM cleaning up the puke from the carpet outside his door. Then he’d gotten called on in fucking first period English, which would have just been annoying, but somehow the teacher had thought his off-the-cuff sarcastic comment had been insightful, and then Sabrina Fuller got offended and spent most of class arguing with him about how reductive he was while he smirked at her and said things like, “Well, if he had just killed everyone, a lot less people would have died,” until she looked ready to scream. Not that he objected to getting into fights with hot, bitchy rich girls, but it had definitely been the most he’d participated in class in about two years, let alone that early in the morning
Then he’d walked out of class feeling a little better only to nearly smack into Lilly and some douchebag from his History class she was flirting with. Of course, it was Lilly, so ‘flirting’ was more like a strip show.
He still wasn’t sure what he’d snarled at them, but it had left him way too shaken and much less kindly disposed towards the existence of hot bitchy rich girls.
She hadn’t even looked at him.
It wasn’t like he’d expected Lilly to come crawling back to him when Echolls ditched her a-fucking-gain. He’d thought about it, maybe, last year. Played some pathetic fantasy where she realized what a piece of shit her boyfriend was and showed up at his house crying, which was fucking stupid because Lilly didn’t know where he lived. She’d reach out and then pull back, like she didn’t think she deserved to touch him, and call him Eli, like he was an actual person and not just a way to fulfill her gangbanger fetish.
(Sometimes in those fantasies she has Echolls’s handprint on her face, or around her neck. He kind of hates himself for that, but it’s something about incontrovertible proof, about everyone else having to see Logan Echolls for what he really is. Or maybe he just wants an excuse to really beat the shit out of the guy.
Maybe it’s the only reason he can imagine her wanting him again.)
He’d thought he’d ditched those for the ones where she begged him to take her back and he laughed in her face, but they’d been coming around again, with Lilly’s petty 09er drama taking over the school – as fucking usual. Whatever.
So he hadn’t been in the greatest frame of mind when Lilly’s pastel little knockoff had waltzed up and started yanking his chain.
No way was he touching that shit with a ten-foot pole. It was clearly some kind of trap, not that he had any fucking clue what kind. And as sweet as it would be to be able to say he’d nailed the sheriff’s daughter, he knew how bad that could come back to bite him the next time he got arrested. (And the truth was that he didn’t really hate Sheriff Mars or anything. If Deputy Lamb or Deputy Faustini had a teenage daughter, Weevil would be all over defiling her and telling them all about it when they picked him up, but there was only a limited satisfaction in the idea of pulling that shit with the sheriff.) But there was no way to say what had happened without sounding like a headcase or a liar, so he’d had to make up some excuse for his boys and then spend the rest of the day wondering if it had really happened at all and why all this surreal bullshit was happening to him.
The day had started out shitty and just gotten weirder and more fucked up from there, and now Margarita Galvez was crying in his grandma’s kitchen.
Weevil didn’t have anything to say to her – she’d made it clear what she thought of him over the years, but he wasn’t in the habit of being nasty to grieving old ladies, so anything he might have said a year ago was off the table, and she probably didn’t want to hear ‘Sorry about your granddaughter’ from him. He shrugged an apology at his grandma and fished a Coke out of the fridge, so it didn’t look like he was running away when he headed upstairs.
Danny and Alex were playing some fucked-up soldier game on the stairs, and they nearly hit him in the face with some Nerf bullshit Chardo’d bought them right before he got sent up for his fucking credit card nonsense. Weevil cursed them out with more vehemence than usual, and Danny started crying, which, perfect. He called Chardo a few choice names for good measure and stomped past them into his room.
Sometimes his life was nothing but fucking bullshit.
He stared at the ceiling for a while, untouched Coke weeping condensation onto his comforter. Normally he’d blow off some of his feelings blowing things up in GTA, but with Chardo gone that was pretty hit or miss. Sometimes video games just made him bitter his cousin was doing sixteen months over money he knew perfectly well was chump change to Lynn Echolls. Bitter that Chardo had blown that money and his freedom and his grandma’s job on crap for his 09er bitch and obvious shit like his bike.
Weevil sat up and cracked his Coke, wanting to at least drink it before it warmed up. The science book he’d forgotten to take to school was still on the table beside his bed. Not that he needed it when class was just a showcase for Saunders to brag about how he studied under Dr. Suzuki, like anyone even knew who that was. There was a test soon, though, and he’d skipped last period twice last week, because when was he going to need to fucking know which kind of volcano was which?
He knew he should go out and get the kids to calm down, make sure they didn’t disturb the adults. Margarita didn’t need a bunch of bratty kids shrieking around her, and after a conversation with her, his grandma would be in no mood to deal with them.
He didn’t get up.
He didn’t do anything with the textbook, either, just drank his Coke and stared moodily at the little bookshelf against his wall. It mostly had things that weren’t books on it, but the top shelf was nearly full of random ones from when he was a kid, and library books from middle school that he’d never given back. A couple paperbacks about fucked-up murders he’d got at the thrift store when he was trying to help Ariana find a Halloween costume last year. It was too depressing to read about gang stuff (and the authors always pissed him off), but that shit was interesting – not the stupid nonsense that went on sometimes, guys who took a swing at a stranger and ended up giving him catastrophic brain damage or whatever. He wasn’t into serial killers, but that lady who’d burned her kids alive? It just made you want to poke into every corner until you found out what was wrong with them.
He'd quit halfway through the second book, the one about the girl who’d killed her stepmom because her dad told her to, because that was when Marisol had died, and it wasn’t interesting anymore so much as painful and sick, but he’d never gotten rid of the book. Maybe he should give it another shot. Stop letting the past matter so much.
It was hard to do that when Marisol’s grandma was crying in his kitchen downstairs.
Weevil took one last pull of Coke and hucked the mostly-empty can in the general direction of his garbage bin. He’d have to dig it out later and put it in with the other shit you could get money back for, but just for once he was going to pretend that he didn’t care.
Someone knocked tentatively on his door. Probably Ariana. The boys would have pounded on it. He pretty much wanted to ignore her, but she was sick, so he dragged himself off the bed and opened up, frowning at her. “Yeah?”
She still looked kind of bad – pale, and her hair was a mess. Her clothes were sloppy, too, under the thin blanket she was trailing from her shoulders, so she’d probably been lying in bed all day. “Weeva? Can I have – can I have popcorn.”
“Don’t call me that,” he said without heat. “You’re not a baby anymore. Why d’you want popcorn? If you’re sick you should have real food.”
Ariana shook her head. “My belly doesn’t like real food.”
He gave her a hard look, but it wasn’t as easy to be tough on her as it was with the boys. Maybe he was just being soft, but he always ended up giving her the benefit of the doubt. It wasn’t so much that she was a girl – Ofelia manipulated the hell out of him sometimes, and he was more than wise to it – but Ariana always ended up doing that baby shit, and even if it was annoying it reminded him just how fucked up all the stuff with her mom had been, and then he felt sorry for her and caved.
Besides, her stomach probably was too upset for real food.
“What about soup instead of popcorn?” he said, aiming for commiserative. “Your belly’s not going to like butter, either, and popcorn with nothing on it isn’t worth it.”
“Can you get me it?” she asked, confirming his suspicion that she wasn’t trying to get away with anything.
“You can’t eat soup in your room. Come down to the kitchen and I’ll make you something.”
But Ariana clutched the blanket in tight, shaking her head. “Uh-uh. La Llorona is in the kitchen.”
Weevil stared at her, mouth tight. “Don’t say that shit,” he said, shortly. “Señora Galvez is crying ‘cause she misses her granddaughter.” A prickle ran up his spine. He might not like Margarita, but he didn’t think she was capable of anything truly awful, and she’d doted on Marisol – but the suggestion still shook him. Hadn’t he just been thinking about women who murdered their kids? Grandchildren weren’t that far off, and even the idea –
He didn’t think it was a real possibility, not for a second, but having to even think of it as an option long enough to reject it still sunk everything back into the darker, grimmer version of the world they’d lived in after Marisol’s disappearance. It wasn’t like he didn’t know that people hurt their kids, but it was different to think about when it was murder, when you knew someone, when they were in your house, right now.
And he was being a dick, because Ariana wasn’t thinking about how La Llorona had drowned her children, or about that Debby Green woman who’d set her house on fire, she was thinking about how Angel’s piece of shit ex had told her that if she cried, La Llorona would come take her away, and then burned her with fucking cigarettes.
“Come on,” he said instead. “You can sit on the couch and watch TV, okay? I’ll get a chair to put the bowl on or something.”
Ariana nodded solemnly and reached for his hand, which he gave her even though they were supposed to be encouraging her to act her age. She tucked in next to his side, and he felt guilty for being annoyed. Ariana was already the most messed-up of all of them, and she was only seven. It wasn’t fair to be thinking about how much less work Ofelia was to deal with, even though she was younger.
The boys were playing on the stairs again, and Danny ran off when he snapped at them to cut it out, but Alex just started shooting him with the Nerf gun until Weevil yanked it out of his hands and said viciously, “If you bother Ariana, I’ll let her puke on you.”
She was starting to look like she might, so Alex backed off and ran into the living room, which was great, because now he was going to have to clear them out of there too. Maybe he’d get an empty bowl for her before he did anything else.
Resisting the urge to snap the Nerf gun, he snagged the trailing edge of Ariana’s blanket before she could trip over the frayed satin and scooped it up to a safe height. “You want this?” he asked Ariana, gesturing to her with the toy. “If they bug you, you can shoot ‘em.”
But she just shook her head and reached for his hand again. Weevil sighed and let her take it. She was going to have to toughen up at some point, but he probably wasn’t qualified to make decisions about that.
Instead he just got her settled on the couch, tucked the blanket around her more to make her feel better than because he was worried about her temperature, and gritted his teeth to go back into the kitchen.
Margarita was still crying into her hands, hopelessly, although her volume and insistency had decreased and she wasn’t trying to talk through it anymore. Weevil winced expressively at his grandma, who was sitting at the kitchen table next to the older woman, a hand on her wrist, her own face drawn. She gave him a sharp look when he started opening cupboards, but when he came out with the big silver bowl she relented. It was basically the unofficial barf-bowl anyway.
“We going to get our kitchen back at some point?” he muttered, low enough that Margarita wouldn’t be able to hear him over the noise of her own gasping breaths. To his surprise, he got a long look and a slow disappointed shake of the head, instead of the telepathic bitch-slap he’d been expecting. A little louder, he said, “I told Ariana I’d make her soup.”
His grandma closed her eyes and sighed. Honestly, he was starting to get kind of pissed at Margarita. That made him a terrible person, probably, but didn’t she know Leticia had to go to work in a couple hours? She’d been holding down two jobs to pull in the money she used to get from the Echollses, ever since they’d fired her for something she hadn’t even done, and she barely had time to sleep. Didn’t Margarita have anyone else to cry on?
It felt hollow and shallow in light of a dead five-year-old, but he couldn’t help thinking it anyway.
They started whispering in Spanish, and he retreated quickly. Margarita had always judged him – sometimes loudly – for not speaking Spanish, and he was pretty sure she didn’t realize that he could still understand it. Ordinarily he’d have been happy to use that to find out things people didn’t want him to know, or just to give them a nice sharp shock after they’d been talking shit about him for a solid five minutes, but he wasn’t petty enough to do that to her now, or to eavesdrop on whatever she was saying about Marisol.
He slipped the bowl onto the couch next to Ariana, telling her it was just in case so she didn’t do that thing where you puked because of the bowl, and turned the TV on, snagging one of those Barbie movies she liked from the bottom of the VHS bin. Someone had to go through it and put all the movies in the right cases, stop them from getting left loose and half-rewound and ripe to get unspooled from catching on something, but the kids would just mess them up again in two days, so he didn’t bother doing anything about it.
Weevil messed around with the volume for a minute, fast-forwarded through the commercials for Ariana, less because he cared than because he was hoping his grandmother would be able to navigate Margarita at least in the general direction of the door so that he wouldn’t have to cook around them. Nothing sounded especially promising, but when he got up again they’d both migrated into the hall, and he took the opportunity immediately.
The chicken soup was just out of a package, so it was on the stove and he was debating the pros and cons of making Ariana a grilled cheese to go with it when his grandma came back. He braced himself for a lecture or a thwap to the back of the head – the latter, if he had his choice – but instead she just said, “You’re staying in tonight?”
It was halfway between a question and a statement, so he just shrugged noncommittally. There weren’t any particular plans going on, but after the day he’d had, he could use a couple hours on the highway to clear his head, get the hell away for a bit. If he hadn’t been so eager to dodge any questions from the others about where his head was at, he might not even have come home after school.
“I need someone watching Ariana,” she said with exhausted annoyance.
She was right, which kind of pissed him off. Alex was responsible enough when Danny wasn’t around, but having a younger boy to look tough in front of turned him into a monster, and Danny was always around. The kid was so needy he was constitutionally incapable of reading a book in his room for half an hour. Weevil had never been that way with Chardo, and he did not get it.
Besides, Alex could handle the microwave, but he shouldn’t be using the stove unsupervised. They needed an actual adult in the house even more than usual, and Claudia had enough on her plate without having to come over and let Ofelia catch whatever Ariana had.
“Yeah, whatever.” He stirred the soup. “What’s with that?”
“Eli.”
Weevil shrugged off her disapproval. “Hey, I feel bad for her! But why’s it always got to be your problem, huh? What about that fabulous son she’s always going on about?”
Leticia snorted. “The one who bothers to see her twice a year? You notice she’s not living with him, m’ijo?”
“And I bet Mrs. Reyes appreciates hearing so much about how great her brother is,” he agreed with false cheer.
She rapped him on the arm with her knuckles. “Maybe she’s just happy to have her mother with her.”
Weevil had his doubts, but he’d barely seen Mrs. Reyes since her daughter died. She’d always been quiet and unassuming, fading into the background given the chance, but after Marisol it was like she’d been made of paper, ready to flutter off in the first wind. She’d put in an appearance at the funeral and then just… stopped leaving the house. Maybe even a mother who kept comparing her unfavourably to a sibling and preaching at everyone she saw how to live their life was better than being alone with her husband and his temper, which had flared out of control in the last year. He was always breaking shit and getting picked up for drunken fights, which seemed at least better than the utter breakdown everyone knew he’d had at the police station when they questioned him. The Reyeses didn’t live right next door, but the other neighbours talked, and it was apparently common for Julio to lose it and break the furniture before he spent all night sobbing in the back yard.
“She’s probably not happy about much,” was all he said.
His grandmother sighed, shaking her head. “I know if one of you children – ah, dios no lo quiera.” She crossed herself. “I don’t know how I’d recover. It’s hard enough with your cousin where he is.” She didn’t say the last part with pathos so much as resignation; Chardo had no one to blame but himself. “But hopefully it will be easier now.”
Weevil turned, his hand still on the wooden spoon. “What? What’s that mean?”
“The police arrested someone. It’s why she was so upset. It’s all…” She waved a hand. “It’s difficult.”
“You’re shitting me.” It felt unreal for a long, suspended second, and then his brain started whirling. “Wait, who’d they arrest? Was it Julio?”
“No, of course not!”
What was he supposed to think when she talked about how difficult it was? “Well, I’m not thinking they arrested Sofia Reyes.”
“It’s not anyone we know.” She sounded almost offended.
“Then why’s she upset? This is a good thing,” he said emphatically. Not as good as if the police had been a little less close about it and he and his boys had gotten their hands on the guy first, but still. “Motherfucker’s gonna rot. The sheriff’s like a pit bull when he’s got something like that.”
Leticia shook her head, but she didn’t respond.
“Everyone’s going to be raring for a trial, but maybe it’d be good if he took a plea,” he continued, thinking out loud. “Then they wouldn’t have to hear that all that shit he probably did to her–”
“Eli!” His grandmother looked pained by that, and he shrugged something that wasn’t quite an apology.
“He might get less time, but with any luck he’ll get stabbed in prison anyway,” he finished. “So it won’t matter.”
“And maybe that would be better for everyone, but I don’t want you thinking about these things.” That tone meant the conversation was over, and he didn’t have the motivation to push back right now. He hoped she didn’t think it was anything other than academic, that he somehow had the reach to get someone stabbed in Chino. Maybe it was more that she was afraid he would, one day.
The idea was more terrifying than appealing.
Rather do my own dirty work anyway, he thought, but it sounded like false bravado even inside his head. “Well, I’ll stay in and make sure they don’t burn the house down, but I’m not watching that Barbie crap with Ariana,” he said. “I got homework.”
He wasn’t planning on actually writing the essay, any more than he’d actually bothered to read Hamlet, but between what he’d scribbled down from reading Wikipedia and the giveaways in some of the suggested topics, he could probably get the outline for something that was C material out of it, and Cervando would finish it for him if he put in a good word with Angel – the kid was easy to manage, and Weevil knew he wanted a job so he could afford to take Jasmine Carrera out.
Maybe he’d skip the middleman and just put in a good word with Jasmine. Not that it wasn’t weird to be passing his castoffs on to his boys, but Jasmine was a good sport, and she’d never been serious about anything or anyone in her life, which might teach Cervando to loosen up.
“Thank you, Eli.” His grandma squeezed his shoulder, shaking him gently, and he smiled back at her, reluctantly affectionate.
“Yeah, sure, don’t get used to it.”
“You can’t fool me, m’ijo,” she said. “You always come through for your family.”
If that was true, Chardo wouldn’t be sitting in Chino right now – but then, Chardo was sitting in Chino, for the stupidest collection of reasons possible, so Weevil was looking pretty good by comparison. It wasn’t like his grandmother made a habit of going easy on him, but at least she knew he wasn’t going to throw it all away on some rich bitch.
Not his freedom or his future, anyway. Just his self-respect and his common sense.
But she wasn’t wrong that he tried to, that even at his most fucking pussy-whipped, he never would have picked Lilly over her or Claudia or the kids – or even Chardo. When he got sent up it was for real shit, and half the time it was for them. Not just the obvious stuff like when he came home with the rent money in rough periods, or took care of Dave because Claudia couldn’t, but even the dumb posturing crap, because he wasn’t going to be able to pick up rent money in a couple nights of jacking cars, or get Alex those paints he was so freaking crazy about, or make sure everyone in the neighbourhood treated his grandmother with some fucking respect and was too afraid to mess with Ariana at school if he didn’t take care of business, and sometimes that meant beating the hell out of a snitch or vandalizing some douchebag’s front window, or cubing some asshole deputy’s car. It wasn’t like he didn’t enjoy it, but there was a bigger picture.
So he gave Leticia a lopsided smile and a shrug. “I get it, I’m the free babysitting.”
She flicked his cheek. “And I used to be the free babysitting for you, so don’t try to give me lip.”
That made him grin, and he pulled her roughly into a surprise hug that she pretended to protest. “Lip? I’d give you my ears, my kidney, whatever–”
“Ay, get off!”
He did, grinning at her poorly suppressed smile. “I’m gonna boil Ariana’s soup dry.”
His grandma waved him off, fond exasperation playing around her mouth as he dished up chicken noodles and fished around in the bottom cupboards for the tray he’d almost forgotten they had. It tilted a little, but it wasn’t like it would have been perfectly even on the couch anyway.
Ariana was engrossed in whatever ballerina Barbie shit was on the screen, her thumb edging into the corner of her mouth. Weevil pulled her hand away gently, hoping she didn’t start crying. She usually didn’t suck her thumb anymore, but he remembered how hellish it had been trying to break her of it, and he didn’t want one of those meltdowns on top of everything else. “Hey, I got that soup for you.”
She looked at him with big eyes. “And then can I have popcorn?”
He snorted. “Let’s see you eat the soup first. You keep that down, we’ll talk.” The Nerf gun wasn’t on the couch anymore, he noticed with an internal groan. Great. Alex must have it again. So much for hiding it in the back of his closet until the two of them forgot about it. Whatever – Alex would have just bullied Danny’s out of him anyway. But if he shot Weevil with it again he was getting thumped.
“I have to go do some homework,” he told her. “Yell if you need anything, yeah?”
Ariana wobbled on the edge of tears for a moment, but then she rallied and took a spoonful of soup. It must have passed muster, because she nodded solemnly. “Sank you, Weeva.”
He pinched her shoulder – more gently than usual, just enough to make her blink instead of jump. “Hey.”
“Thank you, Weevil.”
“Sure.” He ruffled her hair softly, keeping an eye on her expression, but it seemed like the combination of Barbie and chicken noodle soup was keeping her stable, so he turned and trudged up the stairs to his room, keeping an eye out for rogue Nerf crap. He had a notebook somewhere. He had to feed the boys somehow, and he couldn’t be sure if his grandma was going to cook before she left, so he could work on that essay for a bit, and then finish it while he had the spaghetti on later, or whatever. It didn’t need to be completely finished, just enough of a thing that Cervando could work with it – he was pretty sure the younger boy actually liked finishing and fixing stuff, even if he pretended to complain about it, but he’d get stubborn if you expected him to do the work from scratch.
Weevil paused outside his door, listening for Alex and Danny. He didn’t hear anything, but they had to be somewhere, so he raised his voice. “Fucking behave yourselves until Grandma goes to work or you’re getting carrots and crackers for dinner!”
He’d still make spaghetti, and he’d eat it in front of them, too.
Alex quietly swore somewhere, and Weevil smirked despite himself. They knew he didn’t fuck around. It was convenient sometimes. Maybe he should threaten the next snitch with baby carrots for dinner.
He dug out the notebook and hashed out a few notes – mostly the stuff he’d said to Sabrina Fuller in class, elaborated a little with information picked out of the essay topic suggestions and half-remembered plot details from the internet – but his mind kept drifting over to the bookshelf. Finally he threw it down and stalked over to flick through the books, trying to manufacture some interest in the creased Newberry Award winners and the erstwhile Neptune Middle adventure novels, but it was as useless as it was stupid. He knew which ones he’d been looking at – the two that said Ann Rule on the back.
But he didn’t pick up the one he was halfway through. It was the other one, Bitter Harvest, the one he’d finished more than a year ago. He flipped open to the pictures in the middle, the pretty white brunette college girl who’d grown up to poison her husband and murder her children, then a few pictures later, the fat, short-haired mom she’d turned into, who’d only been a few years away from doing the worst thing imaginable. No one we know, his grandma had said. But the guy was from Neptune, wasn’t he? Otherwise how would the sheriff have picked him up. And he wasn’t some 09er, either, because if he had been there would have been press all over it, but the press didn’t care about Marisol.
Weevil flipped the book closed, turning the back cover to face out so that he didn’t have to look at the flames that were eating a kid’s drawing on the front. The last line of the copy caught his eye before he could put it down and dismiss it from his mind.
…a disturbing portrait of strangely troubled marriages, infidelity, desperation, suicide, and escalating acts of revenge…
It could have been a description of his family, or his neighbourhood. But no one wrote books about poor Mexicans killing each other. It wasn’t shocking enough.
It wasn’t shocking at all.
*
Veronica was starting to get used to being treated like a joke – as much as it was possible, anyway. She was certainly getting used to being an object of derision.
She honestly would have rathered a double helping of that instead of waiting endlessly for the anvil to drop, but every day this week she’d had her shoulders around her ears just waiting for one of the PCHers to sidle up to her and make a disgusting suggestion, or for someone to think of calling her the school motorbike like it was a clever joke, or for Logan, who was ignoring her existence much more aggressively than Duncan ever had, to walk by with Dick or Thom or Carter and make a loud, pointed comment about how she needed to be important so badly that she’d…
Well, that she’d done whatever it was that Weevil would have said. But it never came. It was Thursday, and she was halfway through the day, and still – nothing. Nothing but the usual helping of scorn she’d gotten for the last few weeks, anyway.
Not that she wasn’t happy to skip even a portion of the abuse she’d been expecting, but not knowing when it was going to kick in was worse. At this point she was starting to think that maybe it wouldn’t, maybe she’d dodged that particular bucket of crap, but if the last month or so had been any indication, that just meant that the anvil was gearing up to drop on her head.
And if Weevil was keeping his mouth shut, why? None of the potential answers really made sense – he couldn’t be that afraid of her dad, surely. Maye he’d thought that she was blackmailing him with that hastily glossed-over reference to the letters he’d written, or maybe he’d just decided that it would be safer to keep his mouth shut in case she knew about them. But none of those were satisfying answers, and it just made Veronica edgier that she didn’t know what his game was. They hadn’t spoken or interacted at all since Monday, except for him sneering at her across the hall when they happened to pass each other.
The texts from Lilly hadn’t stopped either, but Veronica wasn’t reading them anymore, not even in anger. She might have if she’d had any way to use that knowledge, but she didn’t, not without a plan. She was still too stubborn, apparently, to block Lilly’s number, as if it would be an acknowledgement that she’d failed.
Well, she had failed, so she should just get over herself.
It was too bad she’d had to tip her hand to her dad – not that he was so close to the Kanes he’d necessarily hear about it if they found Lilly’s stash and hit the roof, or probably find it necessary to say anything to them if he did, but Veronica could perfectly imagine the sympathetic and vaguely disappointed way he’d look at her, and she didn’t want that on top of everything else right now.
Her mom was behaving herself, as far as she could tell, anyway, and that should have taken some of the pressure off, but instead she just felt like she was waiting for the hammer to fall. Whatever evidence of where her mom had been on Monday night had worn off by the time Veronica had gotten home from school on Tuesday, and there was no indication of what her parents had said to each other. She hated not knowing.
She hated knowing, too, so it wasn’t like there was a good option.
At least there were enough things going wrong in her life that there was always something to distract her from whatever was most unbearable, she thought bitterly, thumbing open Lilly’s texts and hovering over the Block button. Some masochistic urge, or just an abundance of caution, urged her to skim over the text history, and Veronica resisted, but…
…so lucky that your parents actually LIKE eachother I swear
With a sigh at her own predictability, she scrolled up. The first part of the text was a catty analysis of Jake and Celeste arguing, following up on several preceding texts where Lilly complained about them disagreeing over where to spend the holidays. Veronica stared at it, her eyes feeling glazed and unfocused.
Europe or South America.
Did Lilly even know how she sounded, complaining that Bora Bora wasn’t even an option? She did realize a holiday for Veronica’s family was driving a few states away, or flying to New York or Florida, right? And how had it never bothered her before, hearing Lilly throw around Paris Hilton levels of entitlement – her speeding tickets never mattered because her dad would pay them, her family’s vacation rental only had three bedrooms, a daughter of one of her dad’s employees had shown up in knock-off Prada.
With a sinking feeling a lot like shame, she admitted to herself that she’d used to like it. It had made her feel glamourous and important, an honorary high-roller, like being the kind of girl who had conversations about couture and the Hamptons changed anything about the fact that she could never have afforded either.
It wasn’t that Lilly had ever actually said anything judgemental about her family or their incredibly middle-class situation – even now, Veronica had to admit that. She always said she liked Veronica’s house, despite the fact that it was a third the size of her own. She’d never said a single thing about Veronica’s crappy car. She was always criticizing Veronica’s wardrobe, but that was about style, not brand. But that didn’t stop her from talking like casual European vacations were de rigeur, or ripping into Susan Knight over her dad’s déclassé vacation home in Vermont – and maybe Susan had deserved it, and maybe it had really happened because she’d insulted Veronica, but…
Block, Veronica thought, but she just closed out her text program. There was a rock sitting in the middle of her chest that was hard to breathe around, but she studiously ignored it. Lunch would be over soon, and they were wrapping up the Egypt unit with another game-show-style revision session, which was always fun. Then it would be Ancient Rome, which was less exciting, since they somehow ended up covering it every year, but it had saved her during the historical disasters PowerPoint on Monday, so she shouldn’t complain.
The rock didn’t go away, but Veronica forcibly ignored it until it faded into the background with everything else. Three more periods before she could get out of there. Five more hours until her dad got home – optimistically.
And eighteen hours until she could get out of the house again.
*
Veronica ducked out of American History on Friday by claiming she needed to go to the counselor’s office, which she did, although in the moment she was more interested in escaping another droning narrative about the Civil War. Mrs. Galloway’s teaching style was painful at the best of times, but coming almost immediately before Mr. Rooks, who could make things from way longer ago incredibly interesting, it was unbearable – Veronica’s schedule hadn’t done her any favours in that department.
Besides, it was her best chance to avoid missing anything that actually mattered.
When she put up her hand, she didn’t even bother saying that the thing she needed to discuss with Ms. James was her schedule. Maybe it was self-defence – if people were already saying she was a basket case, then it wouldn’t really matter if Weevil started telling people she was an unhinged nymphomaniac. Maybe she was just finally starting to achieve her aspired level of truly not giving a fuck.
Mrs. Galloway blinked and waved Veronica out, and as she packed up her things, Veronica heard her restart her lecture from several sentences back. She winced in sympathy – not that she was particularly well-disposed to most of her classmates at the moment, but seriously. Some things were not to be borne.
Which was why she was going to the library if she finished early with Ms. James, instead of back to class.
Still, in the interest of looking like she was in good faith, Veronica carted her binder and textbook to the counselor’s office instead of leaving them in her locker. Ms. James looked up when Veronica tapped lightly on the barely-open door, nudging it open a few more inches.
“Veronica!” she said, putting down whatever paperwork she’d been doing. “How are you? Come in!”
It was a little over-friendly – a lot over friendly, when you factored in the fact that Veronica had basically never spoken to the woman outside a couple schedule adjustments last year. But guidance counselors were pretty much contractually prohibited from being sincere about anything, so she forced a polite smile and came in, setting her things in her lap. She didn’t love it – it made her seem too much like an over-eager schoolgirl – but she wasn’t going to put them on the floor, and directly on Ms. James’s desk seemed too aggressive.
“So,” Ms. James said, pushing her hair behind one ear and giving Veronica her full attention. “What can I do for you?”
“I need to drop pep squad,” Veronica said bluntly. She softened the words with the friendliest tone she could manage. “It’s after school, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Right.” The guidance counselor nodded sympathetically. Veronica kind of wanted to pinch her. “Well, I can look at that, but the thing is–”
“The PE credit, I know. I have a spare next semester, so I can take regular gym then.”
“Hmm.” Ms. James nodded. “It’s later in the year than we’d usually allow a student to drop a class, Veronica. Can you tell me more about why you want to?”
“It’s not really a class, though,” Veronica pointed out. “And even if it was, it’s not progressive. It’s not like I’m going to fall behind next year because I never finished learning how to throw a car wash.”
“Well, that’s certainly true.” The counselor smiled, but it felt strained. She was trying to be a good sport, to build rapport, but Veronica was pretty sure that the irreverence actually pissed her off. “But it’s a school policy.”
“You let Lilly drop gym last year.”
Ms. James’s smile froze, but didn’t vanish. Could her face actually make any other expressions? “Veronica, I’m not at liberty to–”
“So I thought that you could drop classes if you had a stalker.”
The woman took a deep breath, forcing her face into an understanding expression. “Veronica, that’s a pretty serious thing to say. Why didn’t you lead with that?”
“Because I don’t like discussing my private business with a total stranger?” Veronica raised her eyebrows to really drive the point home. Ms. James was irritating the hell out of her with her condescending tone, but she was enjoying needling her back probably more than she should. She hadn’t really thought this would be easy, but she’d hoped. But no, she had to suffer through an enforced heart-to-heart first.
“Okay. Okay. That’s fair.” The guidance counselor nodded. “But, Veronica, I do hear things. I know things are a little rough between you and Lilly right now–”
“You mean, you heard that she slept with my boyfriend and lied to my face so I told everyone about it? Yeah, that happened. And if I have to be in the same room with her and pretend to be happy about it, I will rip out all her hair by the roots.” Veronica pasted on a huge, insincere smile. “Think of it as a little paperwork now to avoid a lot of paperwork later!”
Ms. James’s cheek twitched, but she kept her composure. “I’m sympathetic, Veronica, but I really can’t let you drop a class just because you’re having some difficulties with a friend. I can set up a regular time for us to talk about this – maybe even some time when all three of us–”
“So Lilly can drop a class when she has a stalker, but I can’t?”
That brought the conversation to a momentary halt. Ms. James took a breath, refocused. “I thought this was about you and Lilly. If someone’s stalking you, we can–”
Veronica set her binder and textbook down on the counselor’s desk – it was past time for a power play – and pulled out her phone. “Here.” She held the phone so Ms. James could see and slowly, deliberately (maybe a little condescendingly) pulled up Lilly’s texts. She scrolled up… and up… and up, keeping her speed down to really emphasize just how many there were, all on one side of the screen. She had to go back almost two weeks to find the last text she sent, and there were dozens of texts every day, sometimes more.
She stopped at the last thing she said, letting Ms. James take a good, long look. Can’t you just leave me alone??
And then she scrolled up a little more, to drive the point home, another couple screens full of nothing but texts from Lilly.
“I told her to leave me alone,” she said with grim satisfaction. “Repeatedly. I have it in writing.” A little jiggle of the phone accompanied that point. “She emails me. She keeps trying to talk to me at school. This.” Veronica jiggled the phone again. “I don’t want to take this to my dad, but…”
Lilly wasn’t the only one who was connected, after all. Sure, she had the money, but Veronica wasn’t defenseless. Clemmons and Morehead would both shit a brick if they had to explain to Jake Kane why his daughter was in legal trouble, and even the prospect of that would bring them down hard on Ms. James if she let it happen – and from the look on her face, the woman knew it.
Letting Veronica drop pep squad was a painless alternative, and all she’d have to do was let go of her belief that this was harmless teenage nonsense, Veronica running away from her problems.
She took a deep breath. “I understand why you’re upset, and I am more than willing to have a conversation with Lilly about appropriate boundaries and violation of trust, but this is simply not the same situation. I can’t let you drop a class at this point in the year without a threat to your safety.”
Something inside Veronica snapped. She was so sick of this bullshit. “Here’s what’s going to happen. Pep squad is after school on Fridays. I’m not going, and I’m not making excuses anymore, either – as far as I’m concerned, I’m not part of it anymore. You can do the paperwork to get me into gym next semester, or I’ll get no PE credit, then when my parents want to know why I have to do summer school for gym, I’ll explain that you wouldn’t move me out of a class where I felt unsafe, and you can explain the complaint my dad makes to Principal Moorehead.” She got up and picked up her things, tucking them under her arm and ignoring Ms. James’s attempts to get her to sit back down.
At the door, she turned back, not satisfied with simply throwing out a couple of the phrases Lilly had laughingly described using. “And, just so you know? Lilly’s a liar. She was never afraid of Weevil. She showed me those letters and laughed about it. She liked getting them, and she was thrilled with herself for finding an excuse to get out of gym class.” Veronica leaned forward a little, smiling nastily. “She played you.”
Then she shut the door on Ms. James’s suddenly frozen expression and stomped off to the library. She’d find Ms Stafford at lunch and tell her she was dropping the squad, and good luck getting her to go back after that. She could take the black mark on her report card; pep squad didn’t even assign real grades.
Mr. Robicheaux shot her a dark look as she entered, and Veronica took a deep breath and tried to walk more quietly. She’d had vague intentions about working on some of her pending biology assignments, but none of them were urgent, and she just didn’t feel like it, so she headed for the computers instead, deliberately picking one on the opposite side of the bank from the librarian. She wasn’t really planning on doing anything she shouldn’t, but she didn’t need any pointed questions about why she was on EW.com when she should be in class.
The site couldn’t hold her attention for long, though. It was hard to care about movie news or wardrobe malfunctions when she felt like one of those animals that chewed their own feet off. All the individual little moments she could steal with her dad or Backup or a movie, an enjoyable class, a half-hour with a book she actually liked – it never added up to anything; when it ended, she was right back in the same trap, and when she managed to extricate herself, she was just caught in another one.
But she was out of the pep squad trap for good, anyway. She wouldn’t have to try to make up another excuse every Friday until her one good one rolled around again. That was how you knew you needed out of something, when you were counting down to your period like it was a good thing.
So now that she’d gotten rid of that one, it was just Lilly, and her mom, and the crushing court of public opinion, and the knowledge that three guys in a row hadn’t even thought she was worth dumping properly.
The bell went for lunch, and Veronica closed out the Who Wore It Best window she’d been staring moodily at without really seeing, but she didn’t stand up. What was the point? It would just be a bunch of assholes staring and whispering about her, and the cafeteria food was hardly worth running that gauntlet. She should start packing a lunch, but going hungry today didn’t sound so bad, all things considered. She glanced over at Mr. Robicheaux, who was deep into scanning in a cart of books, and pulled up one of the game websites the firewall didn’t catch, trying not to remember that Logan had showed her how to find them.
The mindless jumping and sliding was enough to keep her occupied for most of lunch, but her phone went off after twenty-five minutes, and made her jump the wrong way and miss the bells so that her rabbit fell about a hundred feet and died. She’d had a really high score, too.
Between that and everything else, she was halfway to seething when she picked up her phone, but it wasn’t Lilly – it was Meg.
hey – just checking in! can’t see you anywhere. do you want me to save you something?
Veronica stared at it, wrestling with a host of conflicting feelings. There was annoyance and frustration, but underneath it all she was humiliatingly grateful that anyone cared or noticed that she was missing lunch. That just circled around and made her angry, but not with Meg. She wasn’t that far from reasonable.
After a moment’s consideration she tapped out, You caught me. Can’t face the cafeteria food anymore. :P
Meg’s response came quickly. we have enough PPs between us for delivery…
Veronica almost laughed, only biting it back at the last minute with a guilty glance at the librarian. I think that’s Pirate Point abuse.
they are called PIRATE points, she got back after a moment.
How about ice cream after school instead? Veronica offered. She hadn’t followed up on that like she should have, but she didn’t want Meg to think she didn’t like hanging out with her. They didn’t spend a lot of time together at school – the Cole-Jeremy axis (and even the Cole-Duncan-Logan axis) was too awkward for that – but she’d had a good time with Meg before her mom had ruined everything, and she should have reciprocated by now. Might as well get some use out of her newly free Friday afternoons.
But Meg’s next text put paid to that idea. Cheer practice :( sorry!
Veronica sighed, shook it off. That’s not how you cheer! she sent back, following it up with a text that was obnoxiously full off happy emoticons. A moment later a heart popped up below them, and she smiled. At least she wasn’t a complete failure.
Raincheck, Meg promised, and Veronica sent her a thumb’s up before she put her phone away. It would almost be easier if it was just her against the world (or the school, anyway), but the idea of having some tiny thread of normalcy left in her life was dangerously appealing.
It wasn’t like she had anything else to do with herself this weekend – she’d find the time.
Veronica checked the time, checked surreptitiously for the librarian, and decided she had enough time for one or two more attempts to beat her game. She wasn’t actually sure if it was beatable or if it just went on forever, but what was one more impossible task? At least this one was fun.
Chapter 7: Some Of Our Innocence
Notes:
I am so excited to get this up (and early, too!); I've had parts of this one written since probably before I started posting.
Content note: this chapter (well, mostly this chapter) is the reason I added the ‘dubious sexual situations’ tag – I definitely don’t consider the scene in question to be dubcon, but it does feature people (…Veronica) making poor decisions with regard to sex, and general unpleasant experiences in that area, so if you want details on that before you read (to be prepared, or to know if you need to skip/skim it), they’ll be in the chapter endnote to avoid spoilers.
I’ll be doing the same thing with later chapters if it seems necessary, although I don’t think there will be anything particularly extreme (it’s mostly going to be stuff like ‘banter instead of explicitly-stated consent because they’re teenagers posturing at each other’). If you ever want any further information or need to ask about something I might not think to warn for (or about anything else), I’m on tumblr at theserpentsadvocate and I’d be more than happy to answer at length!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
When we take revenge against another, we lose some of our innocence.
Patrice Redd Vecchione
Lilly and Logan were back together.
It was hard not to notice, the way Lilly had set herself up as queen of the lunch hour for the last week, as if that was going to entice Veronica back, as if she’d been in it for the perks and not because she’d really, truly been Lilly’s friend. All of Lilly’s aside glances and careful looks were cloaked enough to give her plausible deniability, but Veronica had known her for years; she knew when Lilly was looking at her, and if it was a little less today, it wasn’t never.
This was what she got for pretending to waver.
Logan was the one really making the showy displays, although maybe that wasn’t surprising. He’d probably heard that Casey Gant had been sniffing around Lilly – Veronica didn’t know if that was true, and even if it wasn’t, it was probably Lilly who had started the rumour herself. She liked to be the center of attention, and as usual invoking Logan’s jealousy had worked like a charm. He might have been trying to make a point to Casey – or even to Veronica, or to some unspecified potential interloper. See how magnanimous I am. Or maybe it was directed at Lilly. See how forgiving I am, how much I love you. Either way it was disgusting to watch. She would have felt bad for him, but no one was forcing him to fawn over a girl who’d cheated on him. Multiple times, which he had to suspect, even if he didn’t know it.
Veronica tried to lean into that disgust, to not think about ice cream with Logan or afternoons giggling with Lilly about boys and actors and college plans. She didn’t need that ache, not for them. She’d indulged it too long with Duncan, and that had been bad enough – she’d had to throw herself heart and soul into her next relationship to get out from under it, and look how that had turned out. Besides, Duncan was almost as bad as Lilly. Veronica didn’t want Lilly’s pathetic justifications, and the idea that the other girl thought they’d somehow be acceptable still made her blood boil, but at least Lilly had bothered to make some up.
Veronica tapped her straw against the edge of the table, staring stone-faced at her tater tots. Somehow, Lilly got everything back, even after what she’d done, and Veronica was the one who’d lost everything. So maybe she’d thrown it away with both hands – that was what you did when you realized something was rancid and covered with maggots – but that didn’t stop it from stinging.
There was the clatter of someone sitting down across from her, ostentatiously noisy, and Veronica jerked her gaze up to see Weevil – and only Weevil; his usual entourage was nowhere in sight.
He met her eyes, challenging. “What, you got better things to do than talk to me?”
“Well, I’m crazy, apparently,” she shot back. “So who knows? Me and my imaginary friends have big plans.”
“Guess that means that offer is off the table, then?”
He said it mockingly, raising his eyebrows at her like he was expecting her to flinch and run away. Veronica raised her chin and met his eyes calmly, ignoring the sudden flurry of nerves in the pit of her stomach. “What, you couldn’t close the deal with your latest conquest? Getting frustrated enough to lower your standards?”
He leaned one elbow on the table. “You talk pretty big for a limpet that just got pried loose from the 09, but we both know you can’t handle what I got.”
“No wonder you can’t get laid,” Veronica said in tones of dawning understanding. She took a casual sip of juice, ignoring the way his jibe stung.
Weevil snorted, a laugh with no amusement in it. Broken eye-socket, Veronica remembered. Hospitalization required for five of those involved in the altercation. The flagpole kid. She refused to quail.
“You better watch your mouth,” he said, an almost jovial threat. “I already did you a favour, not telling my boys you’re desperate enough to go for me like that, when I’m sure they’d love to know how easy you give it away, and you think you can talk to me that way? If you think I’m scared of your pops, you’re gonna find out the hard way–”
“That you’re very tough and you’re not scared of anything and jail is a picnic,” she finished for him, trying not to show how hard her heart was hammering against her ribcage. “What are you even threatening me with, anyway? I’m the one who was trying to have sex with you.”
“That’s what I thought.” There was a certain smug bitterness to the words that confused her, until she realized that she’d said ‘was’. “Got your taste of acting like a bad girl and it was too scary for you, huh?”
“I’m not scared, I’m bored,” she lied, looking him dead in the eye. “Are we doing this or not? Because there’s not enough time left in lunch.”
Weevil’s head tilted back just slightly, the only sign besides a brief flicker in his eyes that she’d surprised him. “Baby, you got no idea what I can do in twenty minutes.”
To her utter surprise, Veronica snorted an ugly laugh. She cleared her throat hastily. “I do want to consume actual sustenance today. Or what passes for it here,” she amended, poking the tater tots. “I didn’t think to plan around your dramatic change of heart.” She cocked an eyebrow, hoping it might put him on the defensive instead, at least for a moment.
And maybe it worked. He didn’t actually look over at Lilly – and Logan, who was dropping a kiss on the top of her head – but his eyes flicked abortively in that direction, just for a moment, his shoulders going stiff and defensive. Of course. Maybe she should thank Logan for having no backbone. Or maybe not, since she was about to get herself into a real mess.
Weevil didn’t bother to address what she’d said. Possibly he was trying not to give himself away, or he might have just known that he already had. “After school, then. Autoshop.” When Veronica blinked at the choice of location, he added caustically, “I have to be there anyway, so when you change your mind and don’t show I won’t be wasting my time.”
She felt her jaw tighten in annoyance, but he was gone before she could think of anything worthwhile to say in response. Well, fine. She’d just show him by being there. And… and having sex with him.
Yeah, excellent response, Veronica. That’ll serve him right.
She rolled her eyes at herself, shoving the trembling uncertainty into a box in the farthest part of her brain. She was handling herself, wasn’t she? So she’d just keep handling herself.
Maybe this was better. She’d have less time to think about it beforehand. Three more periods, lose her virginity to a guy who didn’t even like her, head home to walk Backup. Easy peasy, business as usual.
Shit, did she still have the condoms? Veronica resisted the urge to jump up and go check her locker. She was pretty sure they were still there; she hadn’t wanted to risk carting them around in her backpack in case one of her parents noticed – it wasn’t like they made a habit of going through her things, but she’d imagined a parade of unfortunate coincidences that all inevitably led to an incredibly awkward conversation.
Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she was going to show up after school to get pig’s blood dumped on her while the other PCHers laughed and took pictures. The truth was that it didn’t matter as much as it should. At least if she fucked this up and humiliated herself, or ruined her life, or made herself miserable, it would be something she was doing, and not just her standing there and taking it while everyone else used her life as a toy or a punching bag or a fun little curiosity.
There was a kind of relief in knowing she was doing something stupid, because at least if it all blew up she wouldn’t be caught off-guard and undefended.
Good luck explaining that to her parents, or the school, if they got caught. Veronica winced. She’d had a classroom all picked out before she approached him last week, but that was apparently off the table. She didn’t know how much traffic the autoshop class saw after hours, but since it was her only option she’d just have to hope that Weevil had enough experience sneaking around to cover them. The idea didn’t fill her with confidence; he seemed like someone who broke the rules blatantly and smirked about it. Relying on him to avoid getting caught seemed like a bad idea – after all, if he didn’t get caught pretty frequently, her dad wouldn’t be so familiar with him.
He and Lilly had never been caught, though, she reminded herself. And who knew, maybe he’d committed three times as many crimes as he’d ever actually been arrested for. Somehow that wasn’t as comforting as she’d hoped it would be, and it didn’t sound as sarcastic in her head as she’d meant it to; there was a thread of desperation that was hard to ignore.
But she couldn’t back out now. The whole point of this was to be someone who wouldn’t do that, someone who was tough and uncompromising and impossible to hurt. If she had to fake it, then she had to fake it, but she wasn’t backing down now. She couldn’t. And if that meant going through with the stupidest thing she’d ever done, and pretending that the pit of her stomach wasn’t full of something very like dread, then that was what she was going to do.
Veronica pulled it together enough to feign proper attention in her History class after lunch, although when the bell went she had no recollection at all of anything that had happened for the last hour. She made a beeline for her locker afterwards to beat the rush of students and groped through it until she found the box that she’d deliberately hidden under her spare sweater, the one she’d kept at school ever since someone’s lunch had ended up all over her shirt.
There wasn’t anywhere good to keep condoms on her person at school, but she felt weirdly paranoid that she wouldn’t have a chance to get them later, so she slid a couple into her pocket, trying not to wince. It wasn’t quite the ‘cool, dry place’ recommended on the box, but having them in her pants pocket for a couple hours probably wasn’t as bad as keeping them in your wallet for two weeks or your glove box for several months. It would be fine.
She’d gotten to her locker before anyone else, but she ended up standing there, half-finished thoughts tumbling into each other in her brain like it was a washing machine, for so long that she was almost late to Biology. Mrs. Canning called on her halfway through class and she fumbled her way through a barely correct answer even after the teacher had repeated the question. Her only consolation was that most of the class was too bored and distracted to mock her for it, although Jeremy shot her a patronizing sneer that made Veronica’s spine stiffen.
If there’d been any chance of her chickening out, it was gone now.
Jeremy wouldn’t care whether she slept with Weevil, probably. But he would care that she was willing to put out for someone like that when she hadn’t had sex with him, for someone who hadn’t made so many careful investments of candy presents and calculatingly sweet comments and cumulative hours pretending to care how she felt and what she had to say.
It would piss him off. And even if things went sideways and he never found out, Veronica would know. She’d know she’d given it up to the scariest, most inappropriate guy she could find, but Jeremy Lasky still hadn’t made the cut. That could be satisfying enough, if it needed to be.
She did manage to jerk her attention back to class just in time to avoid being caught out by another question, and even got a tightly approving smile from Mrs. Canning. There were benefits to being thought of as a good student, and she didn’t mind the extra gratification of knowing the teacher was hard on most students and actively disliked Jeremy.
They had a quiz in Spanish, which was honestly a relief. Veronica could probably afford to bomb it, for one thing, although it would be a blow to her pride, but mostly she was glad to avoid the forced collaboration of language practice, which was about fifty percent of the class most of the time. It wasn’t her favourite activity these days – she didn’t mind the actual practice, although even that would have been difficult with her mind and her gut whirling like they were today, but the fact that she had to interact with her classmates was a dealbreaker ever since she’d made herself public gossip fodder. Meg didn't sit near her in Spanish, and there weren’t that many other people who she felt like talking to.
Getting to sit and write on a piece of paper was probably the best option, although she definitely wasn’t managing work that lived up to her usual standard.
And then the day was over, suddenly, like she’d snapped her fingers after lunch and skipped the rest of it. She’d finished the quiz with ten minutes to spare, and there’d been another fifteen or so of discussion and deadlines and dumb questions from the back of the room, but that time had somehow passed in about thirty seconds, and now she was down to the wire with all her bravado slipping away as she tried to grasp at it.
Veronica hid in the bathroom until the halls cleared out a little. At least it was Monday, and there wasn’t a lot of after-school activity going on. Only the French Club, which met in Mr. Phillips’s French room on the other side of the school from the autoshop.
She was definitely freaking out – it was getting harder to pretend that she wasn’t. What if it was some kind of prank? The idea was both humiliating and a shameful relief. What if it wasn’t? It wasn’t like she was expecting this to be fun; it would probably hurt, and she wasn’t expecting any real consideration from Weevil either way, but suddenly she couldn’t stop thinking about how she’d never had sex before and she didn’t know how to actually get all the way there. It was probably different when you were dating someone – she could see how you could transition from a heavy makeout session or some of the more boundary-pushing encounters she’d had with Troy into actual sex, but that wasn’t going to happen here. When did she take her clothes off? Did she take all of them off? She didn’t think she wanted him to see her completely naked, but would leaving her shirt on be an obvious sign she was apprehensive?
Veronica started to bite down on the inside of her cheek, then stopped and clenched her fists instead, nails digging brutally into the flesh of her palms. She didn’t want to have blood in her mouth, which was a real possibility if she wasn’t careful.
She inhaled sharply and deeply, held it long enough to hitch, then leaned against the wall of the stall and shut her eyes. She wanted to go out and splash water on her face, but there were other people out there, voices she didn’t recognize that probably belonged to freshmen.
What if it hurt so much she cried, or worse, had to stop? Veronica focused on the absolute mortification of that possibility, because the other potential result if it happened, the one that was hovering darkly at the back of her mind, would stop her cold if she put actual words to it.
She had a little bit of time before he decided she just wasn’t showing up – at least she hoped she did – and it was probably smart to use it, because if she was going to pull off the second part of her plan it would be better if no one knew about this until later.
The plan in question felt a lot shakier and more flimsy than it had a week ago, but she didn’t have another one, and besides, this was what she wanted, wasn’t it? To be one hundred and eighty degrees from the girl Lilly had lied to and strung along and used – to be someone who never would have let those things happen in the first place? Well, she was about to do something that girl never, ever would have done, so there was no point to hyperventilating about it in the girls’ bathroom.
The harsh tone of her thoughts galvanized her enough to get her out of the stall. The gossiping freshmen had fortunately disappeared, and the only other occupant of the bathroom was some goth sophomore Veronica only vaguely knew by sight, fixing her thick black eyeliner. She gave Veronica half a glance and then turned back to the mirror, visibly dismissing her.
The non-interaction boosted Veronica’s determination. She was sick of being dismissed, whether it was as a preppie non-entity or as an easy mark who wouldn’t fight back. She washed her hands and pretended to fix her hair until the other girl sighed and tucked her eyeliner back into her bag, then splashed enough water on her face to drag her a little further back from the edge.
“You’re doing this,” she told herself in an undertone, her lowered gaze just briefly touching the mirror. “Get it over with.”
She didn’t have a hair elastic – again, although it was a little more forgivable this time, since she hadn’t known things were going to shake down this way. It was too late to borrow one, and she didn’t know what she’d say to explain it anyway. There were one or two girls who might have given her one just to make her go away, but the idea of an encounter with Madison Sinclair serving as the warm-up act to the gauntlet she was about to run made Veronica shudder. Besides, Weevil was obviously into girls with long blonde hair; maybe leaving it loose would be a selling point.
Not that she cared if he had a good time, but maybe he’d be less of a jerk if he had something to look forward to. For that matter, he could pretend she was Lilly if he really wanted – it would be kind of pathetic, but it wouldn’t bother Veronica.
The noise of the students in the hallway was dying down. Everyone wanted to get home on Mondays, unless they were pretentious French kids. It was probably clear enough now, but Veronica hesitated for another long moment at the sink, not quite able to tear herself away or to ignore the anxious twisting hole in her stomach.
She pictured Lilly’s face in the moment when she’d realized Veronica was going to tell everyone at the table what she’d done, but it wasn’t as helpful as she’d imagined. She brought out the big guns: Lilly on her knees in the Laskys’ basement. A screen full of bitching about Celeste, when Veronica hadn’t responded in weeks. Jeremy sneering at her in class today.
Duncan looking right through her, Troy telling her she was too sweet for words like it was a compliment and not an insult, Lilly waving her over as if nothing had happened, Logan calling her a liar.
Veronica clenched her fists and pushed herself away from the sink.
She’d been right; the halls were mostly empty. It was hard to fight the temptation to sneak around, glancing surreptitiously over her shoulder, but that was a bad idea. It wasn’t that long after the end of school, and she was a student – her best bet was just to walk around like she was supposed to be there.
She’d already dumped her stuff in her locker after Spanish, but Veronica still stopped there, rearranged everything so she was ready to go, so all she’d have to do after was grab her bag and her car keys and leave. She could have brought them with her, but she was too cautious for that; if this was all some kind of nasty prank, or if things went bad somehow, she wanted her stuff and her escape route locked up until she came and got them.
Then she shut the door decisively, before she could indulge any more second thoughts, and strode off in the direction of the autoshop. Even false confidence would get the job done, and if she built up enough momentum, it was almost as good as the real thing.
Veronica managed not to falter until she got to the door, at which point it occurred to her that Weevil might not be the only person there, and she tried to stop mid-step and stumbled. Nothing to be done, she tried to tell herself. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been aware of the possibility that he might have told someone already, and was having to kick someone out really that different? It would almost certainly be one of his biker friends if someone was there, so there shouldn’t be any problems getting rid of them, but…
But she was, deep down, a little afraid that maybe he wouldn’t get rid of them. There was a worse case scenario here than being laughed at, and she’d been trying very hard not to think about it, but the awareness had never entirely gone away. There were all kinds of half-cohered ideas floating around in her head about the things that could happen to girls who made bad choices, or had bad luck, with criminals, or strangers, or the wrong kind of teenage boys, and all three of those were waiting for her even if Weevil was the only person in there.
Veronica took a deep breath and backtracked, her heart in her mouth. At her locker, she pulled out her purse, fumbled through it for the mace she’d taken pains to forget about, and slipped the tiny dispenser off her keychain and into her pocket. She was about to do something stupid – that didn’t mean she had to be idiotic.
Then she put everything back and headed back to the autoshop classroom. The walk felt a lot longer this time.
The upside of her grim detour was that the hallway actually was empty the second time, and while Veronica couldn’t quite conjure her previous confidence, she managed to compensate for it with grim determination. This time she didn’t even break stride to open the door.
Weevil’s head jerked up from where he was bent over something on one of the tables. Veronica didn’t care much what it was because she was too busy being relieved that he was the only one there, and trying to hide that relief so she didn’t look soft.
After a second, he put his surprise aside, finished whatever he was tinkering with, and went to the sink to wash his hands. The silence was already making her edgy, but Veronica refused to be the first one to speak. She wasn’t going to start babbling into the silence and brand herself inexperienced.
He dried his hands and sauntered over to her with infuriating nonchalance, only stopping a foot and half away to lean against the nearest table. “You showed.”
“This was my idea,” Veronica said, doing her best to project casual annoyance.
“What were you doing, standing in the hall trying to work up enough courage?” He smiled at her, nastily.
With an effort, she snorted. “This will work better if no one knows about it for a couple days. I didn’t want anyone to see me.”
“Oh, sure,” he said, his voice going high and falsely accommodating in what might have been a parody of her. “That’s why you don’t want anyone to know.”
“I’m not exactly concerned for my reputation,” Veronica told him, glaring. “I have a plan, and I’ll even tell you what it is, if you stop being an asshole for five seconds.”
That prompted something that she thought might have actually been a genuine smile, and it threw her a little. He made a little ‘go on’ gesture, circling his hand, and Veronica sighed heavily and rolled her eyes to buy time.
“The short version,” she said, collecting herself, “is I’m going to let her think something else is going on, make a huge deal about it, and try to get people on her side, so when I tell her she’s delusional and actually…” she waved her hand vaguely between them, skipping the effort of finding a way to refer to the impending activity that wasn’t either tactless or childish, “everyone will hear about it, and she won’t be able to walk it back. So it won’t work very well if people are talking about this already. It might still freak her out,” she added, “but I’m pretty sure we can aim higher than that.”
“Ambitious, huh?” His eyes skimmed over her; Veronica fought not to fidget. She wasn’t really dressed for the image she was trying to project, just in jeans and a green T-shirt. She’d thrown them on in the morning because they were easy, and she hadn’t exactly been trying to impress anyone, but now it felt somewhere between sloppy and juvenile. It was hard not to regret failing to at least look for something red. “Sure. Whatever you say.”
“Can we just get on with this?” Veronica asked, trying for brisk but overshooting and landing on bitchy instead. “I want to get home before my dad finishes work.”
Weevil pushed himself off the table, taking a single step forward that brought him somehow much too close to her. She refused to flinch. “So what’s this exactly? Got specifics you need for your little plan?”
His mockingly helpful tone made her want to grind her teeth, but instead she pretended to ignore it. “Not really. Most of the things she said about you were broad enough that they won’t exactly be hard to reference.”
That wiped the smirk off his face. Veronica felt a moment of triumphant satisfaction, immediately followed by panic. Had she forgotten how truly bad an idea it was to make this guy angry?
His jaw flexed, mouth tightening in an ugly, pissed-off expression, but he didn’t lash out, just snapped, “Fine. You doing this with your clothes on?”
Veronica fished a condom out of her pocket and slapped it into his palm, trying not to think about the mace in her other pocket and how she wouldn’t be able to get it easily once she took her jeans off. The situation felt a bit less overtly dangerous now, but she was a little worried that if it rolled out, he might be mad she’d brought it at all. Maybe she should have left it on her keychain for plausible deniability. “Nope.” The extra willpower she had to use to reach down and unbutton her pants without hesitating or giving herself away by going too slowly made her feel like she was moving through playdough, but she did, and then she unzipped them. Her momentum faded there, before she could push them down, but Weevil was still watching her sardonically, his eyes on her face instead of what she was doing. He didn’t believe she’d really do it either, Veronica thought, and she hooked her thumbs under the edge of her underwear and shoved it and her jeans down all at once. “Are you?”
He turned to set the condom on the table behind him while he undid his fly one-handed, which gave Veronica the chance to surreptitiously kick off her shoes before she stepped out of her pants. She should have thought to take them off first, but she hadn’t planned for this – if she had, she’d have been wearing a skirt, like last week, and this would be a lot easier, and feel a lot less weird and cold.
She stepped away from both him and the door; the table was the obvious option, but it didn’t look entirely clean, and she’d bet none of the others were, either, which meant a risk of getting engine grease in her hair. Not the worst possible outcome of the afternoon, but not something she was excited for, either. Stepping farther into the room at least meant he wouldn’t assume she was chickening out now.
“Looking for something?” Weevil asked, that annoying half-sarcastic edge back in his voice. Veronica glanced back at him, trying not to be squeamish but still not quite able to bring herself to look at anything below the middle of his chest. It was ridiculous when she was standing in the middle of a classroom in just her socks and T-shirt, but she couldn’t help it.
Especially because she was pretty sure – well, he had to get things going, maybe, before he could put the condom on. It wasn’t like he was standing there jerking off to her bare ass. Probably. But he was definitely doing something with his hand and his… and the idea of watching made a vaguely hysterical bubble swell up in her chest.
“Just figuring out the best place for this,” she said with slightly forced casualness. It sucked that there weren’t really any chairs in here, she thought, with a manically determined practicality. It would have made things a lot easier.
“Table or wall,” he said bluntly. “Unless you want to fuck on the floor.”
Veronica shuddered before she could stop herself – there were floors she might have been willing to have sex on, but the autoshop classroom’s was not one. Whether he thought she was more generally squeamish of floors (or hearing things stated so baldly) or had simply been trying to get under her skin on purpose, Weevil’s response was a bitterly satisfied sneer. Just to spite him, Veronica said, “Wall.”
This was who she was trying to be now, right? The kind of girl who hooked up with petty criminals against the wall at school. Why do things halfway?
Maybe she should take her shirt off. Would that help him get hard? Not that she had all that much worth looking at. It might make her look more… unfazed by the prospect of nudity, but she sort of hated the idea of being completely naked when he wasn’t. Besides, then she’d have to take her socks off or she’d look really stupid, and she didn’t want to hop around on one foot with no pants on – not to mention having to put everything on again after.
What she really needed was to just stop overthinking everything and get it over with. Couldn’t Weevil hurry up?
She glanced at him, trying not to seem anxious. “Does it usually take you this long?” It was stupid to antagonize him, especially about something that was basically calculated to jab a guy right in his pride – but she had to say something or she was going to explode, and confrontational and abrasive was better than jumpy and anxious.
To her surprise, he didn’t fly off the handle, although he definitely didn’t seem happy either. “Maybe you just don’t do it for me,” he said, tone biting enough that he almost managed to hurt Veronica’s feelings, despite how little she cared about his opinion. It was actually kind of impressive.
But maybe he liked bitchy girls – he’d have to, to have spent that much time with Lilly – or maybe he’d just been almost finished anyway, because she heard the ripping sound of the condom wrapper as she turned back to assess the wall closest to her. Next to the lockers would probably work. At least there weren’t any greasy spots, and the nearest fire alarm was far enough away that there wasn’t too much risk of whacking her head on it or worse, setting it off accidentally.
And maybe if she stayed academic about this whole thing, she could get through it without too much difficulty. Veronica swallowed. This was really it. Once she went through with it, all her old ideas of a sweet, romantic first time with a boy who thought she was beautiful and special (Duncan, it was supposed to be Duncan) would be gone for real, not just theoretically. She wavered one last time, wishing despite herself that she could reach back for that stupid, naïve girl and trade places with her – but it was really, truly too late to back out now. The dynamite might not have gone off yet, but there was no un-lighting the fuse.
Still, it was enough to make her turn as Weevil approached and say, with poorly-applied nonchalance, “No kissing – it makes things weird.”
“Whatever,” he said, his tone suggesting he was annoyed she expected him to care. Veronica was relieved he’d left his jeans on, just open, and frustrated with herself for being relieved, and resentful that she had to be standing around awkwardly trying not to notice every tiny air shift against her bare legs while all he had to do was have his fly down. “Are we doing this or not?”
She should have picked the table, Veronica thought, because then she could have just sat on it and let him do it, and she wasn’t sure what to do next. But there was no way she was admitting that to him, so she was going to have to figure this out.
She backed up a little towards the wall, making sure to center herself in the clear space she’d marked. Maybe she should put her back to it, and then he could…?
A few seconds was too long, apparently, or maybe it was just more obvious than she thought that she was flying blind, because Weevil snorted in irritation and reached out to grab her.
Veronica froze, afraid of doing the wrong thing, and he took hold of her waist and hefted her up and back, stepping forward so that his chest pressed into hers at the same time her back hit the wall. It wasn’t a harsh impact, despite the fact that his hands weren’t especially gentle; he had enough control that it wouldn’t have hurt at all if she hadn’t leaned away from him instinctively and accidentally cracked her head against the wall.
It was a short, brutally sharp sting, and she knew it would ease quickly, but that didn’t make it any less painful in the moment, and Veronica bit down on the inside of her cheek to keep from letting on. She didn’t need to look like any more of an idiot than she already did.
She braced herself with a hand against his shoulder, planting her other palm against the side of the locker bank several inches away. It kept her in place, although she still felt precarious. Should she wrap her legs around his waist now, or did that have to wait until he actually got it in?
She compromised by hooking one knee around him, leaving the other extended awkwardly out of the way. It must have been good enough, because he got a hand under her thigh and boosted her a little higher; Veronica tightened her fingers on his shoulder reflexively and he made a small noise, too quiet to be a grunt. Embarrassed, she forced herself to let go, although she didn’t move her hand, still feeling too off-balance without something to hold on to.
Their faces didn’t quite line up, which was honestly a relief. She hadn’t been dreading the awkwardness of having to look right at him as much as some of the other things she was dreading, but it had definitely been on the list. He wasn’t looking at her, either, his gaze directed down between them. Veronica kept her own steadfastly pointed over his shoulder, focussing on the middle distance and trying not to think about how close he was pressing in, or the fact that she could feel the warmth of his torso pressed up against hers, or that she could smell him, oil and soap and something else that was probably just a ‘him’ smell. It wasn’t unpleasant in itself, but she hadn’t bargained for scents. Which was stupid, probably, because everything smelled like something. The room smelled like cars and stale oil, which she didn’t like either.
Veronica could feel the backs of his fingers nudging against the inside of her thighs as he positioned himself, and she stubbornly refused to gasp when his knuckles brushed briefly against the outer lips of her vulva. Then he shifted his other hand on her leg, hoisting her a fraction higher, and they were lined up – she could feel it. He glanced up, and she fought not to tense, to return his look with equanimity and muster a poker face if she couldn’t quite manage bored.
“Do–”
“Can you get on with it?” she interrupted, increasingly disinterested in whatever he was going to say. She wanted this over with – the act itself, but especially the waiting. She couldn’t stand the waiting.
There wasn’t any more bickering or negotiations; he just did, shoving in hard and fast like it was easy and simple. Veronica did gasp then, her head slamming back against the wall right on the sore spot from earlier, eyes squeezed shut in a mostly-futile attempt to stop herself from tearing up.
It hurt. Not in the way she’d expected, either, although that hit her in a wave even as she thought that; the first push in, instead of stretching her out like in some of the trashy romance novels she’d read bits of in middle school, felt like he’d popped all of her stitches out. If they’d been going any slower she would have stopped him once the push really started, because it felt like something was going to tear, but she hadn’t had time, and now he was already inside her, past the chokepoint, and she didn’t think anything actually had torn, but that didn’t make it hurt less.
It hurt inside, too, like she’d just shoved something far too big in, a log or a Pringles can or something. For some reason she remembered her dad telling her about people who ended up in the emergency room for putting lightbulbs in their mouth – then Weevil pulled back and shoved forward again and her thoughts scattered in the face of trying not to cry out or push him away. He’d only drop her, and then it would all be for nothing. She just had to hold on long enough for him to get himself off and then it would be over. It would be fine. Like getting a root canal.
Veronica had never had a root canal, but it was probably worse than this. Maybe. Or not.
This couldn’t be normal, could it? People said it hurt, but not like this. Was she just being a wimp? Weevil didn’t seem to be having a problem, so it probably wasn’t that she was too tight or anything like that – although guys were supposed to like that, so who knew. Maybe he was huge or something. She hadn’t really gotten a good look at him after he’d taken his pants off; she could admit that the truth was she’d avoided doing so, nervous it would be too intimidating or too real and she’d change her mind. And maybe it wouldn’t have mattered regardless; she hadn’t seen that many guys naked anyway – one or two brief glimpses in movies, those naked pictures Lilly had showed her, and the time they’d spent an afternoon watching a bunch of two-minute clips from porn, giggling and making fun of it and hoping Celeste wouldn’t (or in Lilly’s case, probably hoping Celeste would) come in. Veronica had assumed the porn was an exaggeration, but it didn’t feel like an exaggeration right now.
It felt extremely realistic, in a very painful way.
But she could handle it, she could. No way was she letting him think he’d been right about that. As long as it was over soon – as long as she didn’t crack her head again and start crying, she thought she was safe from the tears now. She tried to focus on the little things, on wrapping her other leg around his waist so it wasn’t just dangling there getting tired, then bracing her free hand on his other shoulder so she was balanced better, then changing her mind and trying to figure out something else to do with her arms. He had both hands now to hold on under her thighs, which was good, since he was supporting most of her weight, and that probably helped a little, but not enough to really make a difference. Her shirt was riding up in the back as each thrust and withdrawal shoved her just slightly up and back down, the hem bunching into an uncomfortable lump behind her, and she could feel her hair snarling with the movement.
Why couldn’t he live up to the stereotypes about teenage boys, she thought, trying to put some pained humour into it. I mean, he got kind of clingy, Lilly had said with that mischievous, impish look that meant she was being outrageous on purpose, but the stamina, Veronica!
She’d failed to really consider that part before now, which was on her, but god, it was not the selling point Lilly had made it sound like.
The initial pain, the really scary one, had faded to a jabbing shock that mostly only hurt when he was pushing back in, but the rest of it, the intense ache from being wedged open too far, was getting harder to stand. Not worse, she forced herself to acknowledge, gritting her teeth. Just harder to take the longer it went on.
Then Weevil pushed in again, and when she drew in a sharp breath he just stopped, leaving her pressed tightly between his body and the wall. Veronica tried not to squirm instinctively – the last thing she needed was to start wriggling around when she was pretty sure that would just make it hurt more. She could breathe okay, but only shallowly, and her body kept trying to raise an alarm about it.
She panted a little to get more oxygen, hoping he’d take it as some kind of enthusiasm and just get back to it. Weren’t guys supposed to basically not be able to stop once they put it in? She knew she probably wasn’t great at this, but how did she screw it up so badly that he didn’t even want to keep going? That was so much more embarrassing than choking before they actually did it and chickening out. Maybe she shouldn’t have taken her hands off his shoulders, but it wasn’t like her arms were in his way or anything. Was she weirdly-shaped – too small or too tight or something? Because it hadn’t seemed to bother him up until now.
He was frowning, Veronica could see, which did not make her feel better. He juggled her a little, and she leaned her weight to one side as he freed a hand and then pulled back, only halfway inside her. She couldn’t see what he was doing – maybe checking the condom? Had it come loose? Or broken? Oh god.
Whatever he was doing, it apparently didn’t suit him, because he made an annoyed sound and pushed back in, almost experimentally. “Jesus,” he grunted into the wall next to her ear, “you’re bone-dry. What the hell?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Veronica panted, trying to sound normal, to convert the pained squeeze in her throat into an ordinary out-of-breath cadence.
“It’d hurt less if you were at least a little into it,” he told her dispassionately, like he was her freaking sex tutor, or something. She wasn’t here to have fun, she was here to be able to say she’d had sex with him. And it was rude of him to notice that it was hurting her, when she was putting so much effort into keeping quiet about it. She’d given him the go-ahead; what more did he want?
“It’s fine, go ahead.” God, she wished he’d hurry up. It hurt very slightly less now that he wasn’t moving, but not enough to be worth it. The sooner he got going again, the sooner it would be over, and that was all she wanted.
He pulled back again, enough she could get a look at his face, which was displaying an emotion somewhere between annoyed and pissed off. It was not, she imagined, how guys were supposed to look when they were having sex with you.
“Just shut your eyes and think about whatever you are into,” he snapped, insinuating a hand between them. Veronica blinked, unsure, and when he shot her a hard glance she did close her eyes, solely so she wouldn’t have to meet his. This was not an awkward situation she had a script for.
His fingers slid over her thigh and into the cramped space between their bodies, brushing at the top of her vulva. He swore under his breath and readjusted their position a little, making Veronica grab for his shoulders, her eyes flying open in alarm. Then he was touching her clit, and it was too weird even if he wasn’t looking her in the face anymore; she shut her eyes again. It wasn’t like touching herself at all – his fingers were bigger, and the angle was all different, and when she did it she was usually already at least a little turned on so things were slipperier. But it didn’t feel bad, just dry and strange –
There was a tiny flare of pleasure, nothing that would be exceptional under other circumstances, and she squeaked before she could help herself. It wasn’t as good as – well, as masturbating, but it was so different having someone else touch her, not knowing what to expect or being able to change the pressure or the speed, that it made her shiver. She and Duncan had never gotten –
But thoughts of Duncan were like a bucket of cold water, and she’d already been barely lukewarm at best. It still hurt, being stretched open like that, and she was even more uncomfortably aware now of her shirt riding up unevenly in the back and the hardness of the wall behind her. But if he wasn’t going to keep going until she was at least a little turned on, then it was in her best interest to take his advice, and think about something sexy.
The problem was that most of her go-to fantasies were about Duncan, and at least half of them always had been. The more easily reskinnable ones currently starred Troy or Jeremy, which was almost as much of a problem. Something generic, she decided, but it was hard to focus with the wall under her back and the distracting touch between her legs and the fact that it still hurt.
It was an old, childish one, but it would do the trick: it was David Boreanaz who had her pressed against the wall, and he was murmuring all the trite complimentary things she’d thought were the height of romance when she was fourteen. He’d waited a hundred years for her, and no girl was like her, and whatever nonsense. She didn’t have to pin the words down exactly; it was about the vibe.
Weevil’s breath was hot on the edge of her cheek, just barely touching her neck, but she could work with that; the fantasy was all blurred edges and ill-defined action already, because she’d been young enough when she came up with it that it had still been embarrassing to admit she was thinking about sex. It wasn’t like she was going to ask him to bite her neck, anyway.
His fingers kicked off another little shudder of pleasure – one that made her wince a little as it jarred him inside of her, but it was still something. What he was doing had started to feel a little more like what she usually did, and Veronica realized it was because she was just barely wet. She felt herself flush a little, but ignored it. Being turned on while having sex was much less embarrassing than being terrible at sex, so there was no point in worrying about it.
“Yeah,” he muttered, mostly to himself, but she pretended for a moment it was because he was really into her, and that felt good, even if it was a lie. It was nice to imagine that someone was.
In her mind, Angel kissed her neck again, just slightly grazing her skin with his fangs, and he caressed her breasts softly, thoroughly. Weevil’s fingers slid from her clit to just slightly lower, right above where he was inside her, and he made a considering noise. Then they went back up, and he rubbed her a little more firmly.
That felt good, although she wasn’t entirely sure if it was sexy good or just regular good, but it helped take her mind off the pain a little more, and she could feel herself getting more slippery against his fingers. So that must mean it was the sexy kind of good, even if it wasn’t the way it usually felt.
His fingers were rougher than hers, and the way his skin almost-but-not-quite caught at her clit made a tiny thread of real arousal curl in her stomach. It wasn’t enough to really affect anything else, not by itself, but it was enough to feed into the fantasy, if she wanted to.
It was hard to keep a consistent narrative, though; everything was too distracting. Veronica let disorganized snippets of what she’d already imagined play in her head as he kept going, sparking another one of those sudden pulses of pleasure. She wouldn’t say that it felt good overall – he was still too big inside her, and she was too aware of all the weird awkwardnesses of her body, and even the nice parts weren’t as intense as they were when she was the one touching her clit – but it was… good, knowing what sex felt like. He was right, it hurt a little less now, although she’d probably just gotten used to it.
But then he shifted her weight again, reached down to wrap a hand around himself, just at the base, and pulled out. Veronica made a confused noise before she could stop herself. Was he really just going to stop? She was such a lousy lay he didn’t even want to finish?
He reached down again, but instead of rubbing her clit, he sort of… rubbed the whole thing. Veronica squirmed a little, embarrassed, annoyed that it still felt kind of good – and then she put it together. She was wet now, at least somewhat, and he was spreading it around so it would… so that… so it would be like lube. Which was not a consideration that had even occurred to her, because she was a total amateur. Her face felt hot, and she was glad her eyes were closed. No way was she looking him in the face for this. Actually, never again, which was fine because it wasn’t like they were friends or anything.
And then he was pushing back in, condom still in place, and it hurt, a lot, but not as much as before. Veronica tipped her head back (carefully) and thought about Angel again: kissing her neck, fondling her breasts, maybe touching her like Weevil just had but without any of the awkwardness. And they were in a bed, too, because why not. Yeah, that helped.
He pushed in and out a few times, and it still felt weird but the pain was less, manageable. She felt kind of dumb for not considering this aspect of things, but whatever. It didn’t matter if he judged her for being crappy at sex, because she didn’t care what he thought. Then he sped up and she just tipped her head to the side so it wasn’t resting on the tender spot and played the fantasy some more. It still ached, but the rest of it felt kind of good – not great, not anything that would get her off or even make her want to go do that herself after, but enough that she used it to make her imaginings more realistic. There was hot breath on her neck and faint grunting noises stirring her hair, and if she thought about it was kind of hot that he was strong enough to hold her up like that. It was definitely suitably vampire-y.
Then the fantasy hit the point where she had to start making decisions about whether Angel liked her enough to lose his soul, and that wasn’t sexy unless you were thirteen and stupid, so she dropped it and risked opening her eyes. It was kind of surreal, being able to watch him – okay, there was no point in being a baby about it, being able to watch him fuck her, even if she could only really see the side of his face, and not very well. His eyes were closed, or mostly closed, and he seemed so focused on what he was doing, his breath coming fast and hard. It must feel really good – well, of course it did, guys liked anything fuckable. But it still sent a bit of a pleasant shiver through her that she could get a boy this worked up just by letting him have sex with her. And not just a random boy, either; one who’d probably slept with lots of girls. With Lilly.
It wasn’t even a turn-on, but the part where he swore, and his rhythm went unsteady, and then he was groaning out, “Fuck!” into her hair was still more gratifying than anything else.
He let her down more or less gradually, afterwards, instead of just dropping her, which Veronica appreciated. She was sore enough that although she was braced for the jolt, she wouldn’t have enjoyed it. Her legs didn’t feel at all wobbly, which she’d been half expecting, based on half-heard gossip and trashy TV and a few cherry-picked sex scenes from cheap novels – but maybe that was only if you came. Instead, she just felt like she was standing weird, her legs uncomfortably far apart to ease the ache.
“Well, thanks,” she said, trying to sound businesslike. There was no dignified way to put her jeans back on, so she turned slightly to the side – it seemed better than bending over with her bare ass in his face, and less awkward than facing him – and just tried to get her underwear and pants on as quickly as possible.
When she straightened up again, he’d recovered, leaning back against the lockers right next to where he’d had her up against the wall with no sign of being fazed by it at all. Veronica felt a twinge of annoyance that all he had to do was zip his pants back up.
“Thanks,” he echoed without inflection, giving her a hard stare. It was definitely him mocking her, not a sincere response, but Veronica said, “You’re welcome,” anyway, in as blasé a tone as she could manage.
“I’ve got it from here,” she added. “Just… give me tomorrow to handle Lilly, and I’ll tip you off when to, uh, proposition me, I guess.”
“You pretty much are crazy, aren’t you?”
“Yep,” Veronica said with vicious cheerfulness. “Better hope it’s not sexually transmitted.”
To her surprise, he actually laughed. “Oh, I got the booster shot for that.” He rolled his neck almost lazily. “And this proposition is supposed to be public, is that it? You’re not doing your reputation any favours.”
“What reputation?”
He just shook his head. “You better not be fucking with me, or I’m going to be obligated to make you sorry.” He said it with the studied resignation of a mob boss who didn’t want you to have to sleep with the fishes, but, well…
“I have to go shower,” Veronica said, ignoring the sentiment, and fighting the urge to touch the back of her hair to see how bad the rat’s nest was. “See you around.”
*
Veronica showered in the girls’ locker room, shamelessly stealing Madison Sinclair’s froofy conditioner to get her hair in order, and dried off with her spare sweater, since she didn’t have a towel at school. Maybe she would have brought one, if Weevil hadn’t sprung this whole thing on her, but she’d make sure for next time.
That was weird to think about so soon, so she brushed it off and headed for the parking lot. He wasn’t there, which was a relief – no one else was, either, which was a bigger one. She didn’t feel like trying to find an explanation to give the French Club snobs.
The drive home was weird, with the ache in her groin flaring in odd ways whenever she pressed the pedals. It was probably partly because she was so conscious of it, but knowing that that didn’t make her less conscious of it. It was a lot less intense now, at least; nothing excruciating so much as distracting.
Her dad’s car wasn’t in the driveway when she pulled in, which was good because it meant she didn’t have to look him in the face immediately after doing something that would turn every hair he still had instantly white, but also because it meant she was still getting home at a reasonable hour.
Her mom was home – of course she was, where else would she be – that much was apparent as soon as Veronica opened the door, unless it was Backup baking chocolate chip cookies.
The smell made her tempted to go and get one, or three, and eat them with a glass of milk. The fact that she could smell them from the hallway meant they were probably still hot out of the oven. It felt like such a strangely normal, even childish, thing to do after… everything else today, but she stuck her head into the kitchen once she kicked off her shoes, figuring she’d at least see how big the batch was.
“Hey, honey. How was your day?”
The inevitable flash of guilt died halfway through its journey to the pit of Veronica’s stomach. Her mother’s speech was too precise, too crisp; a second look revealed that her casual position against the counter was covering a rigidity that could maybe be explained by the way her eyes flicked toward the new coffee maker, as if it was concealing something.
It was barely five o’clock.
Veronica felt grimly pleased that she could stand there and say, “You know, it was good,” like she hadn’t lost her virginity forty-five minutes ago on after-hours school property.
Her mom hadn’t even noticed that she was home late – or she hadn’t bothered to care, even though Veronica didn’t have any friends anymore, or a boyfriend, or any reason to be out after school. She hadn’t been thinking about her mom when she’d made the plan, but she was fiercely glad, suddenly, that she’d spent her time after school getting fucked against a wall in the autoshop classroom by a boy who would have given her mother heart palpitations just from seeing him and had a record that could make the tattoos and the motorbike seem as unimportant as Jeremy’s embarrassing band T-shirts.
It still hurt, a little, and she felt self-conscious that she was standing with her legs too wide, but she couldn’t help but wonder if her mom would have even noticed if she’d come home still smelling like sex.
“Your hair’s wet,” Lianne observed, her words still carefully enunciated. So not quite blackout yet.
“Yep!” Veronica agreed brightly, forcing a sunny smile without caring whether her mother could see how brittle it was, and tripped blithely up the stairs to her room.
She shut the door a little more forcefully than she’d meant to, winced – then shrugged. So what if her mom thought she was mad? She was mad, and it wasn’t like it would change anything either way.
Her backpack went on the floor by the foot of her bed, her damp hair went into a quick ponytail, and herself Veronica just flopped gracelessly onto the bed. She squirmed uncomfortably when the impact sent a jolt of discomfort through her nether regions. It wasn’t hideously painful, but she definitely wasn’t going to forget about the afternoon’s activities any time soon. Not that there was much chance of that regardless.
Veronica rolled over, tracing the barely-visible patterns on her baize green wallpaper with her eyes. She didn’t feel any different. Or she did – a little satisfied that she’d broken the cute little best friend mold Lilly had put her in all to pieces, a little embarrassed that things hadn’t gone more smoothly in the moment – but none of the big picture stuff had changed. She didn’t feel any less hurt and over her head with Lilly, she didn’t feel older or worldlier or more confident – she didn’t even really feel sluttier.
She didn’t even feel any more ready to have sex – despite the fact that she’d already done it.
She didn’t feel traumatised, either, or dirty, just kind of sore, and overall less nervous about doing it again later. It turned out sex was just a thing, like taking out the trash (if it hurt), or getting a root canal (if the dentist left you vaguely turned on). Go figure.
More surprising, maybe, was the fact that the big, bad PCH kingpin had, if not a softer side, at least a decent side. If he’d just gone ahead like she’d told him, she’d probably be substantially more uncomfortable right now, and maybe not only physically. Of course, maybe it wasn’t as good for guys if the girl wasn’t suitably wet – she cringed a little, not used to thinking these things so directly – but still. With all her friends dropping her like a hot potato at best and sleeping with her boyfriend at worst, it was weirdly nice that the scary stranger she was revenge-fucking cared about whether or not she was in pain, even when he was pissed off at her for being a lousy lay.
And wasn’t that a hell of a summary of her life at the moment.
Veronica sighed, rolling onto her back again. It was probably a good thing her mom was so occupied with her own problems, even if ‘her own problems’ could and should have been something other than vodka. If she’d been as nosy about and involved in Veronica’s life as she had been a year ago, she would have had all kinds of questions about where she’d been after school and why her hair was wet, and who was she spending her time with at school these days anyway? This was way more convenient.
And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
She huffed at a loose strand of hair, but it was still damp and barely moved. Perfect.
Veronica stretched a little, trying to see if shifting position would do anything for the lingering ache. It wasn’t really that bad anymore – less painful than period cramps, if decidedly different in scope. Moving didn’t seem to do much, except for when she moved wrong and made it worse for a second.
She fought the urge to do that on purpose, like poking at a loose tooth. It was just strange, almost the more so for also being kind of normal, or at least kind of mundane. Besides, turning over her encounter with Weevil in her mind was less emotionally fraught than letting her mind wander back to her mother.
It hadn’t exactly been enjoyable at the time, but the experience was vaguely titillating in retrospect. Not that she was planning on doing anything about that; the soreness was definitely one thing that made the prospect unappealing, but she also just felt vaguely squeamish about taking any initiative in that department. If he’d managed to turn her on a little, fine – although she’d done half of the work, really – but the whole thing wasn’t supposed to be enjoyable – it was about getting back at Lilly, about proving her wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be about having a good time, just a means to an end.
But it was hard not to think about those intermittent flashes of pleasure. She’d never felt that in an unpremeditated way before, never experienced it as the result of someone else’s actions, except for once or twice inadvertently with about five layers of clothes in the way, and the briefness had made it feel even more intense whenever it happened.
She was still a little too uncomfortable to be actively turned on to any meaningful level, between the damp spot under her hair and the knowledge that her mother was downstairs (and probably drinking) and the still-noticeable aching between her legs – and that was to say nothing of the fact that it was just weird to think about. Certainly Weevil Navarro had never been the sort of boy she was inclined to find attractive. Veronica liked… well, hair, for one thing. All the guys she’d ever liked had had hair.
But she still couldn’t help but feel some non-sexual curiosity – if it could even be called that – about where things could go under slightly improved circumstances. Academic curiosity, maybe.
It hadn’t been quite as good as touching herself, even when he had actually managed to turn her on a little, but it had been more exciting, if nothing else. In other circumstances, she might have preferred to explore that with someone she at least had a rapport with, but right now the fact that she didn’t really know Weevil and they didn’t particularly like each other felt like a selling point. Of course, he might not be especially inclined to hook up with her again, but her expanded plan for getting revenge on Lilly required them to have sex one more time. Or at least pretend to, but he was a teenage boy; she didn’t expect him to say no even to bad sex.
She didn’t hate the idea. At the very least she knew how bad the worst-case scenario was now, and it was… markedly unpleasant, but nothing worse. And she had the unlooked-for security of knowing that he actually gave a shit about not hurting her, which was more than she’d expected going in. That already eliminated about ninety percent of the reasons she’d been afraid and apprehensive before, and being less nervous could only make it easier to enjoy it, right?
Veronica sighed. It was still weird to think about. At least unpleasantness was straightforward. Maybe-kind-of-sort-of-pleasant-with-caveats felt like too much work to figure out, but at the same time, if she could get something out of this, why not? Everyone said it hurt less the second time, which she really hoped was true, but she could probably stand it even if it didn’t. If what had happened today was already sexier in retrospect than it had been in the moment, then that would probably be true again, so at the very least she’d be buying herself some more valuable experience, and maybe something a little more realistic to fantasize about at night. There was a decent chance it would help if she was turned on going in, which might or might not be doable, but she could definitely buy some of the condoms that came with lube on them already.
It was embarrassing that she hadn’t thought of that, but she reminded herself steadfastly that she didn’t care about Weevil’s opinion of her. She’d be prepared next time, and the time after that, for that matter, regardless of who it was with. On that note, she got up and dug around in her bedside table for the jumbo pack of brown hair elastics she’d bought during the summer. It had been windy and she hadn’t had one, and she’d figured that if she was going to spend the same money she might as well get thirty as ten, but Lilly had mocked her mercilessly for how boring they were and how she was turning into a deal-hunting housewife, and she’d only really used the coloured ones she already had since then. She usually preferred them anyway, but the memory left a sour taste in her mouth regardless.
Maybe they were boring, but they’d get the job done, which was all she needed, she thought, tucking them into her bag. She didn’t need to be putting her hair back for sex with some childish rainbow of elastics, she just needed it out of her face and less prone to tangling.
Veronica arched a little, stretching cautiously. She was still uncomfortable in a way it was hard not to keep nudging at, but she wasn’t in that much pain anymore. She’d poked around between her legs a little in the shower at school, just to make sure nothing was wrong, and there hadn’t been any blood or anything. So it was probably fine, and she had a day or two to recover before she had to test things out again.
She lay back down on the bed and picked up her phone. The last text from Lilly was from half an hour ago, and it said, duncans being such a whiny little bitch.
Stop texting me, Veronica responded. She couldn’t weaken too suddenly or it would be obvious she was up to something – which meant that the gap between her affected hesitation last week and her first reply in ages was suddenly very helpful – but any response at all would encourage Lilly to keep trying.
Sure enough, ten minutes later her phone started buzzing again, repeatedly. Veronica let the texts come in without reading them, smirking a little. For someone who acted like such a puppetmaster, Lilly was almost shockingly easy to manipulate.
She didn’t respond again – there would be time enough for that later.
Notes:
More detailed note: Veronica and Weevil have sex. It’s her idea, and she’s explicitly choosing it throughout, but she ignores a lot of her own doubts and second thoughts (including some concerns about the possibility of consent violations if she does change her mind, since she doesn’t know him well). Clear consent is given (aloud) multiple times for the sex itself, but it’s a largely painful and unpleasant experience for her. He exhibits some minor concern for her comfort, but it’s entirely veiled in annoyance, and they both spend the whole encounter being mean to each other. (She notes afterward that she’s not especially upset, and that she’s no longer apprehensive about potential future encounters.)
Chapter 8: Her Own Wounds Green
Notes:
I'm finally done this one! For the record, I enjoy all the music mentioned in this chapter; Veronica is just very much not in a Britney Spears mood at the moment. (I do, however, take concrit on music+characterization choices; I spent my entire teenage years listening to a mix of whatever pop I happened to stumble across and my parents' music, so it was a bunch of late 2000s Top 40, Canadian/Celtic folk music, 70s rock, and obscure Broadway musicals mixed together with random other things for flavouring, and generally I'm such an omnivore that I can't tell what different characters would and wouldn't like. I did do research on what would be new and popular, but if anyone who's more aware (or was an American teenager in 2004) has notes, go for it.) And yes, I chose 'Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine' in large part for the irony.
Chapter Text
A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.
Francis Bacon
The texts she’d been getting all morning had been decidedly less diary-esque and much more coaxing and persuasive, compared to anything from the last week or two. Veronica had encouraged this by texting Lilly Just leave me alone at 7:30 the night before.
There was a grim satisfaction in reading over several iterations of just talk to me again, I can make it worth it which was at least better than wanting to tear her hair out in frustration every time her phone went off. (Although once her triumph had worn off, it hadn’t made the repeated text notifications interrupting her reading any less annoying.)
This morning she was making a point of avoiding Lilly, but as conspicuously as possible, lots of not-so-surreptitious glances over her shoulder and sad contemplation of her locker or her notebook whenever the other girl might be looking. It had been a relief up until now that she and Lilly were in different grades, but right now things would have gone faster if they’d had a least a couple classes in common.
She’d only been staring mournfully at her macaroni for ninety seconds when her phone went off, and Veronica grabbed for it immediately and then checked herself, as if she was more eager than she wanted to admit.
It was hard not to look for Lilly’s reaction, but she kept her eyes on her phone, opening it slowly.
you should come sit with us
It was tempting to acquiesce – but it was too soon. Lilly would catch on when Veronica started baiting her unless she played hard to get now. Instead she put her phone down on the table and pushed it carefully away from herself.
Her text alert went off again within ten seconds.
It was offensive, she thought, that Lilly believed she’d really give in, shrug it off after being betrayed. But it meant that what she was doing was working, so the feeling was more of a passing grievance than a deep wound, for once, and she shrugged it off.
you dont have to talk to me. megs here. or sit with duncan.
The audacity of the last sentence took Veronica’s breath away. The idea that Lilly would throw Duncan in her face – hold him over her nose like a dog treat – when Lilly of anyone should know how badly he’d hurt her would have made Veronica furious if she wasn’t so focussed on her next step, wasn’t too busy to remember that Lilly had never taken any of it seriously when they broke up, gone from ‘he’s just in a phase’ to ‘you can do better’ without bothering to notice she was devastated. As it was, her hands still shook as she picked up her phone, but that was good. She could use that.
She stared at the screen for a few moments, in case a convincing response came to her, but nothing did, so she thrust it into her pocket and grabbed her plate as she stood, hoping she looked suitably upset. None of this was real, she reminded herself. It was just something she had to get through to get what she wanted.
On her way back inside, she caught sight of the biker table, over by the edge of the lunch area, as usual. Weevil wasn’t looking at her, which was more of a relief than it should have been – she wasn’t as self-conscious about the day before as she’d thought she might be, but for some reason the idea of playing an indecisive little stray felt much more humiliating if he was seeing it. Maybe she was just afraid he’d buy it, and ruin the rest of her plan.
Inside the school, she ducked into the gap between the fire extinguisher case and the first bank of lockers and checked her phone.
Veronica come on
i'll stop texting you if u come back
Veronica smiled. She’d been planning on waiting another day to cave, but this was too good to pass up.
Just stop, she sent back.
I promise X my <3
That set her back for a moment. It was obnoxious and stupid, and it had always been obnoxious and stupid, but she’d used to think it was funny, to smile when she got some dumb cryptogram text because it was from Lilly, and Lilly was just like that, and Veronica loved her.
And maybe you couldn’t make yourself stop loving someone, but she thought she’d at least wrung all the fondness for Lilly out of her heart. Apparently it was a sponge, and it was never quite as dry as it looked.
She took a breath and brushed it away. Pushed it down. Whichever. She was going to go over there and sit down and ignore the hell out of Lilly for the next half-hour, so it would be believable when she gave in tomorrow and actually spoke to her. She wasn’t even a little afraid she would weaken for real.
She was just suddenly afraid she would want to.
There was a free seat next to Lilly, probably by design, and one next to Meg because Cole wasn’t there. He might have just been getting more food, but Veronica sat there anyway – she didn’t like Cole, and while she didn’t want to drag Meg into the drama, talking to her still seemed better than spending the rest of lunch staring silently at her cold macaroni like a sad little moppet.
“Hi.” Meg sounded surprised, but not unwelcoming.
“Hi,” Veronica said, carefully aiming her tone somewhere between exasperated and friendly as she ignored John Enbom brushing imaginary crumbs off his pants on her other side, presumably so he wouldn’t have to talk to her.
“I thought you went inside,” Meg said, casting a careful look at Veronica. Her first instinct was to bristle, but after a moment she realized the other girl was concerned for her.
With an effort, Veronica set aside her twinging conscience. “I did. Now I’m back.” She did some unenthusiastic jazz hands to sell it. Meg smiled; several of the others rolled their eyes.
Logan went so far as to mutter something under his breath that Veronica didn’t bother trying to hear; Lilly immediately smacked him, and not gently, either.
“I guess I didn’t expect you to sit here,” Meg said with a little self-deprecating eyeroll, like it hadn’t been a perfectly reasonable assumption to make.
“Apparently it’s the only way to get my stalker to leave me alone,” Veronica said caustically, avoiding looking anywhere near Lilly. Meg winced sympathetically and didn’t say anything.
John edged slightly away from her so he could turn and talk to Talia Grantley as if Veronica didn’t exist, which honestly suited her fine. John was a drip. The way the entire table shifted in response until suddenly the remaining gap was next to Veronica instead of Lilly stung a little more, even though she told herself it should be more funny than anything.
Lilly was very pointedly talking to Shelly, who was on her other side now, with only brief asides to Logan. Veronica was a little surprised – she’d expected an ostentatious display of how much fun they could be having. But she supposed this was just another kind of performance, Exhibit A in the case Lilly was making. ‘I said I’d leave you alone, and I did!’
It didn’t make any substantial changes to the game plan, though. Veronica worked her way methodically through her lukewarm pasta, traded a few pleasantries with Meg, and kept a sidelong view of Lilly.
It was a little comforting that Lilly was looking at her a lot more often and a lot more obviously. Having the power wasn’t everything – it didn’t undo any of what had happened, and she knew it was limited – but there was that same rush of gratification in it that she’d felt last night, knowing she’d done something Lilly never would have thought her capable of, that she’d shattered the insufferable idea that Lilly knew her the way Veronica knew Lilly.
With twelve minutes left in lunch, Veronica made an excuse to Meg in an undertone and headed into the school, shooting Lilly one last lingering hurt and angry look. She tried to keep it only skin deep, just a mask, and when she told herself she’d been successful, she almost believed it.
This was more exhausting than she’d thought it would be, but if she got out of there pretty quickly after school, she wouldn’t have to worry about it again until tomorrow. On the other hand, if Lilly cared enough to catch up with her before she could get to her car, she could just accelerate things a little more, maybe even get the bulk of it done tomorrow. It felt like a good idea – probably mostly because she wanted this part over with. She was holding it together, but being around Lilly, thinking about Lilly so constantly, not just what she’d done and who she was, but what she was doing right this second, what she was thinking about Veronica, was like being back on the same manic merry-go-round she’d been trapped on after she’d caught Lilly with Jeremy. Up and down and up and down, around until you got sick, and you didn’t realize how much you were getting jerked around until you got off and saw it from a distance.
Her phone went off and she jumped, and then grimaced angrily. Perfect.
It was Lilly, of course. see you didn’t die!!!
There was plenty of leverage to ridicule that sentiment from at least two or three different angles, but Veronica couldn’t quite muster up the mental energy to do it. She turned her phone off and left it in her locker.
*
It wasn’t in keeping with his image to be jumpy, but every time Weevil saw something moving out of the corner of his eye, he kept expecting it to be the sheriff there to – what, arrest him? Mysteriously ‘misplace’ him on the way to the station? Yeah, right.
Still, it took a certain amount of effort not to twitch at every shadow and disinterested teacher. He needed to get over himself.
You’re such a dumbass, he thought, not even sure if he meant for this bullshit or for even showing up yesterday at all. He’d known it was a bad idea, and all his resolve had still instantly crumbled when he’d seen Lilly wrapped around fucking Echolls again. He’d probably have done a lot stupider things just to get her to pay attention to him.
He had done stupider things to try to get her attention, but that didn’t make it any easier to stomach. Like he didn’t already have enough proof that messing around with rich white girls was a bad idea. At this point he probably had enough evidence to just write off blondes entirely.
What part Veronica Mars played in all that he really wasn’t even sure. So far she hadn’t decided that he had to pay for her regrets (as evidenced by the lack of aggressive pursuit by the local sheriff) which at least made her better than Caitlin Ford, but could someone who’d spent that much time running around after Lilly Kane really be all that great in the first place? Maybe she thought they were the same in that, panting after Lilly until she found something better, but she was wrong. Someone like her would never be expendable in the same way someone like him was, and anyway, Lilly wanted her back, which didn’t really surprise him. She’d talked a lot about Veronica, for someone who’d only been using him for sex.
Maybe that was why he’d really done it. To hurt something she actually cared about.
That was uncomfortable enough to think about that he shied away from it a little. It had pissed him off that Lilly’s little lackey thought she could just use him for whatever she wanted, but it was one thing to decide he was going to show her what playing with the grown-ups really meant, and another thing to look back and think…
The truth was that he’d never thought she’d show, and then when he’d thought better of teaching her a lesson by giving her what she was actually asking for, and tried to be decent about it, she’d shut him the fuck down, so what the hell did he have to feel guilty about, anyway? If he had hurt her, it was pretty much her fault.
Besides, it wasn’t like nailing a girl’s best friend wasn’t a time-honoured way to show her how little you cared about her. He didn’t need to be getting so fucking deep about it.
He wasn’t stupid, either; he knew trying to hurt your ex, or even trying to prove you didn’t give a shit, was only marginally better than trying to get her back. Everything was still all about Lilly. Everything was always all about Lilly; she made sure of it.
“What do you think, man?” Dante asked, forcing him to jerk his attention back to the conversation.
Shit. What had they been talking about?
“You’re really going to ask me that?” The best way to brazen it out was to make them tell him what they figured he thought, and go from there. It was the same strategy he used when someone had done something really stupid – made them tell him why it was fucked up, why he was mad. It also usually freaked people out, which helped too, but there was humour in it when the issue was low-stakes.
“I freaking told you, man!” Felix said, pounding the table. Thumper rolled his eyes in annoyance and went back to carving his initials into the bench, ignoring the debate.
“No way,” Dante argued. Bootsy was shaking his head, seemingly in agreement with Dante. Weevil waited them out, pursing his lips in an unimpressed manner.
“Come on, have you seen those swimsuit pics? Anna Kournikova–”
Bootsy made a loud, rude noise, drowning Felix out. “That’s bull!” he said loudly. “If you wanna waste your time staring at skinny white chicks, that’s your dumb–”
“Rebecca Romijn is a white chick too,” Cervando said, frowning down at Weevil’s Shakespeare essay.
“He didn’t say was she the hottest woman alive, he said she wasn’t as hot as Anna Kornikova.”
“Kournikova.”
“What the fuck ever,” Dante interjected. He turned back to Weevil. “Come on, man, tell him. Rebecca Romijn, right?”
Weevil surveyed them all wearily. This was the kind of irrelevant bullshit he vaguely remembered his mom used to say ‘not my circus, not my monkeys’ about when she was sober. Sadly, this was his circus, and his monkeys required a certain amount of supervision. “Eva Mendes,” he said finally.
Cervando crowed in agreement, making a little note on the essay. “Yeah!”
“She’s got a great rack,” Bootsy agreed, taking the loss philosophically. Most of the others murmured in agreement, but Felix wasn’t going down so easily.
“No one said anything about Eva Mendes,” he complained.
“That’s because you’re stupid,” Weevil told him jovially, to general laughter. Felix shot him a dirty look, but then caught himself and shrugged. Weevil let it go – Felix never stayed mad, anyway. He didn’t have the focus.
“Okay, but.” Dante clearly wanted to keep on going because he felt like he’d made some kind of point. “No one here is ever going to score with Eva Mendes.”
Javi put a hand on his arm. “Do you think you’re going to score with Rebecca Romijn?” he asked solicitously, prompting more laughter.
Dante shoved the hand away. “Shut up, asshole. There’s plenty of girls at this school who are actually in the running. I’m just saying–”
“So who’s the Rebecca Romijn of Neptune High?” Weevil interrupted, cutting the dispute off before it could get too ugly. “Come on, we’re hanging on your every word here.”
It did the job of lightening the atmosphere, which was good, because Dante could and would sulk if you handled him wrong.
“I don’t know–”
“Then why’d you bring it up?” Javi demanded.
“Hey, do I have to separate you two?”
“I was saying,” Dante insisted, his jaw set in the bulldog way that meant he was about two minutes from making this a real problem, “we should be judging it separately, not just comparing them.”
“Yeah.” Cervando looked up from what he was doing. “Shelly Pomroy looks the most like Rebecca Romijn –”
Everyone groaned.
“That’s what I’m saying,” he insisted. “She does, but there are like twelve girls who are hotter than her at least.”
“You know, I’m failing algebra again, but even I’m pretty sure X is larger than twelve,” Weevil observed. Cervando only shrugged.
“Okay,” Felix said, “but Lilly Kane is definitely the Anna Kournikova of school and she’s way hotter than Shelly Pomroy.”
Dante threw a used straw at him. “That’s what I’m saying, ese.”
Weevil rolled his eyes with an effort. “Why is it always blonde white girls with you, huh? You’re as bad as Chardo.” It wasn’t like he had any room to talk, these days, but what the fuck ever. Pretty much nobody knew about Lilly, and absolutely nobody knew about what had happened yesterday.
“Jasmine–” Cervando started, but Bootsy punched him harder than usual in the shoulder.
“Yeah, you think she pisses perfume, we get it.”
“Jasmine’s pretty hot,” Weevil sad noncommittally. He didn’t want to get Cervando’s back up about the fact that he’d spent his sophomore year hooking up with her, but it wasn’t like he could pretend he hadn’t. “But this is supposed to be about girls Dante has a chance with.”
That brought the usual laughter and razzing, which Dante at least took with good humour. It wasn’t that he couldn’t take a joke, he just fucking refused to be wrong.
“Weevil thinks Carmen Ruiz is hotter,” Felix added slyly – for him, which pretty much meant dialing down from ‘sledgehammer’ to ‘regular hammer’. Weevil wondered if it was an apology for bringing up Lilly, a little misdirection as a favour. Felix wasn’t usually much for subtlety, but it was all just a bit too neat to be a coincidence. Maybe he was developing some hidden depths.
So he shrugged easily. “You’re a little out of date, man, but I won’t pretend it’s not a damn shame she’s wasting herself on that white-bread asshole.”
There was a general murmur of agreement, except for Thumper, who said, “Girl dresses like a librarian.”
Weevil snorted. “And that’s bad? What, do you never watch porn?”
Felix and Ric both outright cackled at that, and Cervando finally stopped glaring at Bootsy long enough to crack a smile.
“What happened to ‘girls Dante has a chance with’?” Javi asked, smirking. “Carmen Ruiz is a stuck-up bitch – she’s not gonna look twice at any of us.”
“Oh, and Shelly Pomroy is?” Bootsy demanded belligerently.
Weevil opened his mouth to make a joke about Lilly – the way he had every so often over the last six months but never actually went through with because he didn’t trust himself to be able to sell it as just a fling he didn’t care about – and stopped.
He didn’t want to ruin whatever weird little plan Veronica Mars was running, he told himself. The point was keeping it under his hat until she pulled the trigger on the dominos she was setting up.
It might have been more convincing if he’d ever actually believed she’d manage to pull off – well, anything. Or if he hadn’t tried to turn last year into a casual conquest story seven or eight times since Lilly washed her hands of him, like that would make it true, and punked out every single fucking time except for the night last summer when he’d been drunk enough to slur some vague admission at Felix.
The conversation had moved on while he berated himself, which was mostly a relief. He didn’t want to have to decide whether to defend Carmen or not – as much as he hated to see a neighbourhood girl with some little twerp like Tad Wilson, there was part of him that was glad that she was probably going to get out. Not because of Wilson – Jesus – but because she was smart and light-skinned and had two parents, and if you were careful you could parlay that into a real life, as long as you were clever enough to get the hell out of Neptune. Carmen probably would never give any of them half a chance, but that was just because she wasn’t dumb enough to torpedo her own chances by association. He’d liked her in middle school because she hadn’t been stuck-up, because he’d had less to prove back then and could still afford to be into a girl because she was nice.
Not a whole lot of that going around anymore.
The others had descended into what was essentially a comparison of bra size, and Weevil rolled his eyes and interrupted before Cervando could throttle Javi for saying that Jasmine’s boobs were all she had going for her. (Who even said boobs anymore? What were they, twelve?)
“When’s Hector get out, again?”
Bootsy frowned, tapping the table in a poorly-disguised tally of the time. “Two weeks?”
“Something like that,” Ric agreed.
“What about Phuong?” Javi asked.
“He shouldn’t’ve punched that deputy,” Weevil said. “There’s tough and then there’s fucking dumb.”
“I’d have done worse,” Thumper announced, leaning an elbow on the table like he was a big man.
“Then you’d have gone away for even longer than Phuong,” Weevil pointed out. “Don’t be fucking stupid, man, aren’t you eighteen next month? That shit won’t fly after that.”
Thumper just shrugged and rolled his eyes, which was fair on one level – it was probably only a matter of time for most of them. But Weevil didn’t appreciate being dismissed, and anyway, the fact that it was only a matter of time and luck just made it more important not to waste your first strike on stupid shit, whether it was a literal one or not. Especially in a small town, where even if they sealed your juvenile record, the cops still remembered you.
“Maybe you and Chardo can be cellmates,” he said. “Be nice for him to have someone on his own intellectual level.”
There was a round of snickers – Thumper had spent more time than anyone bitching about how dumb Chardo was to have trashed his life over some 09er bitch – and the other boy’s eyes darkened, his jaw flexing. Weevil raised an eyebrow, daring him to make a big deal of it, and after a moment Thumper backed down, forcing a tight smile and looking away.
“Whatever,” he muttered.
God, Weevil missed Hector. He always forgot how much easier it was to emotionally regulate the group with him around until the idiot got himself sent to juvie and it got three times harder. Felix was too flighty to be useful in the same way.
He stretched, popping his back, and glanced around the lunch area. Everything was business as usual – although if that Corny kid wasn’t careful, he was going to get busted for bringing edibles to school. He was being way to squirrelly about the brownies in his lunchbox for them to be anything else.
Casablancas was jumping around on the stairs, climbing the railing, and Weevil kept an eye on it because there was a non-zero chance he’d manage to bust his head open, and he was close enough to them that it would probably end up being the PCH’s fault somehow.
There were the usual clusters of freshmen at the lower tables, giggling and snickering and shoving each other, but it was one of the 09er tables that caught his attention. He was about to reprimand himself for paying attention at all when he realized that the girl whose long blonde hair he’d been staring at wasn’t Lilly – it was Veronica Mars.
Lilly was at the same table, though, he noticed. Huh. That had happened quickly. Well, he hoped it was worth it – maybe her entire plan had been to bang him and then smirk about the knowledge once she went back to her old life, but it seemed like a pretty steep price to pay, since he was reasonably sure she hadn’t enjoyed herself.
Or maybe she was going to tell Lilly. It wasn’t very sophisticated, but nothing about the situation was. If it shook down that way, he could probably expect some kind of ambush – either in the next few days, or down the line when they got into some kind of girl-fight and Veronica blurted it out. He wasn’t excited about the prospect, Weevil told himself firmly. He would just rather have Lilly after him than the sheriff, and maybe he wouldn’t mind seeing her face when she learned the entire fucking world didn’t revolve around her.
He dragged his attention away, making a face when he saw Carmen at one of the other 09er tables, extra cozy with her asshole boyfriend so that she was nearly in his lap. What was it with mediocre white boys? Echolls was the fucking worst, but that was understandable, anyway. At least he had a personality. Lasky and Wilson were the epitome of boring and useless, and the way every girl in school drooled over Duncan Kane like he wasn’t just a rich piece of cardboard…
There was no point in this, so he honestly might as well just start paying attention to the conversation again. Maybe it had gotten better.
“So then,” Javi was saying, his tone full of barely suppressed laughter, “we go back to the counter, right? And Hector’s being all serious, like, ‘We need this urgently, and it’s not where it’s supposed to be, can I speak to your manager?’”
“I taught him that,” Weevil said, smirking.
“Right? So I’m hanging around, like ‘this is ridiculous, man, we’d get better service at Walmart, let’s just go buy it at Walmart…’ And this idiot just wants to get away from the scaaaary Mexicans, right? So when no one answers his little phone, he’s all ‘I’ll go get my manager’ and he walks away–”
“And we walked out with a couple thousand dollars of product,” Weevil finished.
“But they saw your faces?” Ric interrupted.
“Not mine and Bootsy’s. If you know where the cameras are you can keep out of the way okay.”
“And me and Hector were waiting at the desk the whole time,” Javi added. “We complained to the manager and he walked us down to where they were…”
“And there weren’t any,” Bootsy added, grinning. “Because me and Weevil lifted ‘em all.”
“He apologized and gave us a coupon.” Javi cackled. “I gave it to my sister.”
Weevil smiled and took a bite of the weak-ass macaroni that was on offer today, mostly as an excuse not to say anything. He glanced over at Lilly’s table, where Veronica Mars was pointedly not looking at her.
Yeah, she’d definitely been using him too, but at least she’d been up front about it. It was kind of refreshing, actually. Maybe he was only thinking that because he’d been reluctantly impressed by her yesterday – she was annoying as fuck, and he was mostly still pissed off about it, but he couldn’t say the girl didn’t have grit. Came from not being a real 09er, probably.
Too bad she was apparently doing her best to forget that she wasn’t one.
*
Lilly had been waiting oh-so-coincidentally in the parking lot, lounging against her car as if to indicate that her being there had nothing to do with Veronica, but Veronica was hardly going to fall for that. She’d backtracked, waiting an extra ten seconds first so Lilly would see her, as if it was all part of the plan – but the truth was that she just didn’t have the energy for any more scheming, or for any more Lilly.
So here she was in the library again, reading the back of Pride and Prejudice because she’d heard somewhere that you had to read it if you got Ms. David for senior English.
‘Somewhere’ probably meant Lilly. Fuck.
Veronica winced – she wasn’t sure if it was at the mental profanity or at her own immediate impulse to take it back somehow. Could you get more prissy and sheltered? She wasn’t in middle school – why did she have to work herself up to drop an F-bomb?
Especially when, she realized with a bit of a shock, she’d done it.
That gave her a some of her confidence back. So maybe she still had a juvenile habit of trying not to swear – it wasn’t like she was some blushing virgin.
The whole encounter in the autoshop already felt a bit surreal, like she’d made it all up, but Veronica reminded herself that she never would have come up with details like banging her head on the wall, or standing there for a solid two minutes with no pants on, or having to stop halfway through because she hadn’t thought about lube.
Besides, her… vagina didn’t really hurt anymore, but the back of her head was still tender, so. Concrete proof.
Veronica reread the back of the book, focussing on her mild annoyance that it talked up the classic and timeless nature of the story and characters while saying absolutely nothing about the plot. Still, it couldn’t be more of a drag than Ethan Frome, right? People were always talking about what a heartthrob Mr. Darcy was, so hopefully he wasn’t a depressing farmer who cheated on his wife.
It was hard to know how long to wait – Lilly hated being bored, but she was also very stubborn. It was possible she’d be gone already, but it was also possible she’d find an excuse to wait in the parking lot for an hour. There was something even more humiliating about waiting an obvious amount of time and then coming face-to-face with her.
Which shouldn’t have mattered, because this was all a strategy anyway. The more pathetic Lilly thought she was, the better.
She just had too much pride, apparently. Veronica snorted, sliding the book back onto the shelf. At least it was better than being prejudiced.
She checked the time on her phone. If she wanted to make any kind of credible claim that she’d just needed to get something or talk to a teacher, she should go now; if she wanted to be sure of avoiding Lilly, she would need to wait at least another half hour.
What would Weak Veronica do? she asked herself. Probably go now, because Weak Veronica would be secretly hoping, at least a little, that Lilly would be there. That she cared. Maybe even that she’d magically manifested some kind of explanation or apology worth accepting.
It felt uncomfortably close to home.
The weak version of herself would have seen Lilly’s emails and been pained and wistful instead of furious, Veronica reminded herself – would have read the incessant texts, tortured herself with old photos. Weak Veronica wouldn’t have burned the proof of her own feebleness, would have run away when Logan mocked her; Weak Veronica would have been terrified of Weevil Navarro, because Weak Veronica was a figment of Lilly’s imagination.
Veronica snagged a random book off the shelf to stop the librarian from glaring at her suspiciously and went to check it out. She wasn’t interested in some paperback fantasy doorstopper, but it was conveniently within reach, and at least more believable than Pride and Prejudice.
Lilly wasn’t immediately visible when she reached the parking lot – her car wasn’t where it had been – which was probably a relief, although Veronica didn’t bother analyzing her actual feelings.
But when she got to the third row, there was Lilly’s Mercedes, parked not next to Veronica’s LeBaron, but a very deliberate two stalls away. Lilly was sprawled out in the half-reclined driver’s seat, blaring Britney Spears. Veronica’s lips tightened as she caught some of the lyrics. Yeah, it was about right for Lilly to act like ‘playing with’ someone’s heart was something you could do by accident.
Her original thought, if Lilly did turn out to still be waiting, had been to keep her head down and try to get out at quickly as possible, but standing there listening to Britney coo about how her problem was wishing heroes truly existed, Veronica changed her mind.
Instead, she strode up the passenger side of the Mercedes, hidden from view by the body of the car, and opened the door.
Lilly jumped as Veronica slid into the passenger seat, closing the door behind her as a theatrical touch – she wouldn’t be staying long.
The way Lilly’s face lit up sent simultaneous pangs of loss and rage through Veronica’s bloodstream, but she ignored them both as she leaned over to eject the CD.
“Veronica!” The exclamation was both pleased and apprehensive, and Veronica ignored that too, mostly glad she was somehow able to maintain a detached demeanour. She flipped the CD over before dropping it on the console. Her parents had raised her right, even if Lilly could just buy another one if it got scratched. Then she reached for the stash of CDs Lilly kept in the compartment in front of the cupholders, praying that they were still the same ones as the last time she’d been in the car. If Lilly had switched out her music selection, Veronica was going to look incredibly stupid.
But she’d already committed, so instead of trying to play it safe now, she said flatly, “That’s not really your song.”
“Listen, Veronica,” Lilly started, her earnestness only slightly tarnished by a hint of her perpetual sardonic flamboyance – but Veronica had found what she was looking for: a pale blue cover.
She extracted In The Zone, slipped it into the player, and skipped ahead five tracks. The metallic swinging sound of the song’s opening cut off Lilly’s attempt to define stalking her into the parking lot as ‘space’.
“This is more like it,” Veronica told her, maintaining a hard, no-nonsense expression.
Bizarrely, Lilly smiled, even as Toxic kicked into high gear. “So are you talking to me now?”
Veronica shot her a disgusted look, and turned to get out of the car, but apparently the other girl thought this was some kind of opportunity. “Hey, I meant it! I don’t care if you’re a bitch to me. I probably deserve it. Just have lunch with us again tomorrow and you can be as mean as you want.”
Probably? Against her better judgement, Veronica turned. “I can be as mean as I want to you now.”
Lilly grinned. “I won’t text you anymore. Like, at all. But only if you come at lunch. Come on, Veronica…” She was at least smart enough to leave off the you know you want to, but Veronica could hear it anyway. It was always there, one way or another, and it had been said aloud enough times that she could hear the inflection exactly.
Lilly thought she knew Veronica better than Veronica did, and she always had. She thought she knew better, period. For a brief moment, Veronica could really, completely believe that Lilly had slept with Jeremy out of some fucked-up good intention for correcting Veronica’s life – and the thought made her want to vomit.
But she was trying to do something here. She wasn’t going to ruin it. “Stop texting me.” She didn’t quite promise to be there, but Lilly seemed satisfied. Maybe she hadn’t noticed. More likely, she was too confident in her ability to manipulate Veronica to be bothered.
“See you tomorrow!” she said brightly as Veronica opened the door and got out, her voice blending weirdly with the music.
I’m addicted to you, don’t you know that you’re toxic?
Veronica fought off a wince. She’d picked the song more for the title, and the heavy repetition of it within the lyrics, but if Lilly decided to read into the specific lines, it would only help in the long run.
It still rankled. Veronica wasn’t Logan. She wasn’t going to keep coming back again and again for more mistreatment.
But Lilly could think that if she wanted, she told herself firmly, as she shut her own car door with more aggression than was strictly necessary. The more she thought Veronica was a sucker, the more of a sucker she’d be.
None of that stopped Veronica from feeling shaky as she drove home. Not physically – but her emotional foundation felt wobbly. Well, she’d survived worse, and after this week – it would not take more than a week – she would never have to speak to Lilly again.
Maybe she technically didn’t have to now, but by the time she was done, she wouldn’t have to deal with Lilly trying to talk to her, either.
Yesterday, at pretty much this time, she had been alone and half-naked with a boy who she’d been afraid – she could admit it now that she was reasonably sure he wouldn’t have – might really hurt her, losing her virginity in the kind of painful and prosaic way they made depressing coming-of-age movies about, and it had left her less rattled in the end than changing the music in Lilly’s car had.
Veronica ejected the CD that was in her player, some old Matchbox 20 album, fumbling it into the accordion case on the passenger seat. Normally she would have waited for a light or something, to be safe – but just now she really needed to flush Britney Spears out of her head as soon as possible.
She fished out the newest The Killers album and slid it in, feeling slightly less keyed up by the time the first song hit the chorus. The gritty baseline and slightly raspy vocals were a good antidote to Britney’s sickening sugariness, and regardless of the subject matter, it was impossible not to be belting out ‘Jenny was a friend of mine’ by the end of the song. Veronica turned it up – although not as high as Lilly had had it.
At the last moment she turned left and not right onto Burdett, with some kind of vague intention of getting herself some ice cream or something. Then she changed her mind; there was a bakery a few blocks down, and if she got a couple cream horns or giant cinnamon buns, she could bring one to her dad. It was still variable whether or not he got home on time these days, and getting to finally spend some time with him was almost as appealing as dodging another uncomfortable conversation with her mother. Lianne had acted like nothing was wrong at dinner last night, and Veronica hadn’t known if she was just acting, or if she’d already forgotten, or if she’d somehow been oblivious to Veronica’s hostility when she got home.
‘Somehow’ being the generous way to phrase it.
It turned out there was some kind of cookie sandwich called a ‘conversation’, although the big ones looked more like weird pies. Veronica got two of the individual ones, because how could she pass up that opening gambit? Then she added a pretzel at the last minute, so she’d still have something to enjoy if they were terrible.
The parking lot was crowded when she got to the station, and Veronica sat in her car until she finished her pretzel, hoping there hadn’t been some giant break in the E-String Asphyxiator case. If her dad was in there interrogating a serial killer, he definitely wouldn’t have time for pastries that were also puns.
Based on the clothes and attitudes of most of the people she saw, though, Veronica felt reassured by the time she got out of the car that this was less a ‘reporters clamouring for a story’ (or ‘anxious citizens demanding reassurance’) situation and more… ‘rich parents pissed off their kids got busted for something stupid’.
Party last night? she wondered, sidestepping Travis Kittelmeyer’s father, who was berating his son a few feet from their silver Porsche. It had barely been an hour since school let out, so it was hard to know what they could have done today. Maybe she could convince her dad to tell her what they’d been picked up for. Or at least to hint at it enough that she could guess.
Sacks dodged her neatly as she entered the building and she turned to walk backwards, calling after him before he could leave, “Help a girl out – what did I miss?”
“Ask your dad,” he retorted in a friendly enough manner, and Veronica flipped back around before she ran into someone.
Her dad was talking to Inga at her desk, it turned out, and she kept out of his sightline as best she could while she waited. She was hardly planning on jumping out at him, but she did want him to be surprised when he turned around. Inga saw her – Veronica held up the paper bag with the pastries in it and made a shh gesture, and the receptionist smiled but didn’t give her away.
At least not deliberately, but Keith was clearly expecting something when he turned around, which wasn’t exactly surprising. He was pretty sharp. “And what have we here? Come to turn yourself in?”
“Whatever it was, I didn’t do it,” Veronica retorted, since for once that had the benefit of being both literally true and appropriate to the situation. “I just thought maybe you’d like to have… a conversation.” She held up the bag and raised her eyebrows.
“Do you have those word magnets in there?”
She laughed. “It’s a kind of tart or something.”
“For you, honey, I always have time for a conversation.” He put an arm around her shoulder with exaggerated courtesy. “Inga, hold my calls.”
“Of course, Sheriff.”
Veronica’s dad pulled her slightly to the left, dodging a scowling suit who was trying to get his attention, directing the man toward Inga with his head while he ushered Veronica into his office.
“It’s not very nice to stick her with all the pissed-off parents,” she told him reproachfully.
“It’s what I pay her for, honey,” he responded.
“What are they so pissed off about anyway?” she asked with artless innocence. Her dad snorted, not buying it for a moment.
“There’s a certain expectation of confidentiality in this job. It’s frowned upon to violate it just to give you gossip on your classmates.”
“Gossip?” Veronica blinked at him. “I would never. I only want to make sure I’m not going to school with a dangerous element.”
“It’s nothing exciting,” he promised her mock-seriously, otherwise letting her over-earnest demeanour go by without comment. “Call it a mass trespassing event. The kind of thing these kids are used to getting away with, I’m sure, but this particular area was less abandoned than they thought.”
“I hope they enjoyed their brush with mild consequences,” she said drily.
“The company that owns the property is eager to ensure they don’t. I’m sure it will all be worked out behind the scenes, but until then...”
“And how do you enjoy being a pawn in petty slap-fights between rich people?” Veronica asked, setting out the pastries on his desk with a napkin under each.
“Oh, it’s exactly what I hoped for when I took the job.” He settled into his chair. “These look good, honey. Can I inquire as to the occasion, or is that gauche?”
“Do I need an occasion to spend time with my dad?”
“I know I haven’t been around as much lately–”
“That is not what this is about.” Veronica shook her head firmly. “I just wanted to hang out for a bit. Like we used to, before I got all obsessed with my own drama.”
Keith smiled and shook his head gently. “I don’t know if I’d describe it quite that way, but I’m always happy to see you.”
She dropped the light tone for a moment. “Seriously, Dad. You know I’m proud of you, right? I want the serial killers and the messed-up child murderers off the street.”
“Are you suggesting there are non-messed-up child murderers?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
Veronica rolled her eyes internally. Aloud, she said, “If you were trying to kill someone else and got the kid by accident? That’s less messed up.”
“And such a cheerful subject of conversation.”
She shrugged, taking a bite of her other conversation. It wasn’t half-bad, cream-filled with kind of a sweet, almond-y taste. “Hey, you chose to go into law enforcement. I’m just playing the hand I was dealt.”
“And you play it very well.” Her dad took a bite of his pastry, nodding in appreciation. “Well, this is lovely. We’ll have to have conversations more often.”
Veronica did roll her eyes this time, fondly. “If puns are the price for getting dessert on the regular, I guess I’ll pay it.”
“Unless I’m very much mistaken, this pun was your doing.”
“They automatically become terrible when it’s your dad making them,” she told him, laughing when he feigned offence.
By the time the pastries were gone and he had to regretfully usher her out and get back to work, they’d exhausted the entire gamut of stupid jokes about the name, and Veronica was feeling much better. She hadn’t heard anything else about his on-going cases, but he’d promised to be home by six-thirty, and she could almost pretend that everything at home was going to be normal again.
*
Lunch on Wednesday was almost exactly as Veronica had predicted, to the point that it almost felt scripted. She ate lunch at Lilly’s table again, hunching over her food and pretending to ignore everyone except Meg in favour of her American History homework until she ‘forgot’ halfway through and disagreed with something Shelly said about The OC – which, completely accidentally, put her on the same side of the argument as Lilly. She didn’t mention that she hadn’t actually watched a single episode of the show since she’d stopped talking to Lilly.
Veronica clamped her mouth shut immediately, Lilly beamed and took up the argument, and Logan rolled his eyes and pointedly turned his back to her to talk to Dick. Well, that was fine. He’d made it clear he wasn’t interested in common cause, and if that meant he ended up being collateral damage, that was on him. It wasn’t worth feeling guilty about it.
She feigned a few more slip-ups, which emboldened Lilly enough to ask her a direct question at the end of lunch. Veronica answered it, and then tried to look furious with herself, shoving up from the table and escaping to the bathroom for the last ten minutes before class. It was all just a little too easy.
That didn’t mean she was weakening, she reminded herself. Without the need to reel Lilly in, Veronica never would have given her any of those openings at all. Maybe it felt easy to just slot back in, even with half the table looking at her like she was gum on their shoe – that was just habit. Too many years of habit.
At least there was no ambush waiting for her in the parking lot after school this time, and nothing upsetting waiting for her at home. She took Backup for a walk, finished her homework early, complained when her mom refused to let her dad talk about work over dinner, let herself be talked into popcorn and a movie with her parents.
The weirdest part was how close it felt to normal.
Rinse and repeat, she told herself on Thursday. If Lilly pushed enough, she might be able to pull off a convincing enough semi-reconciliation by the end of the week and be done with the whole thing. When Meg asked her after second period if she was going to eat with them and told her sincerely that it was nice to have her around again, Veronica’s heart sank, but she forced a smile and said that she guessed she would, and that having Meg there kept her from murdering anyone.
“Probably good,” the other girl said, laughing, and Veronica watched her walk away, wondering if it was really worth it.
But she was in too far to back out, and Meg was the only person she’d regret losing, so she gritted her teeth, looked away resignedly when she saw Lilly in the hall, and let herself get dragged repeatedly into the conversation over lunch.
She kept it to brief, not-quite-curt responses, but apparently it was encouraging enough that Lilly decided to bank on Veronica not being willing to give her the silent treatment in front of a bunch of people, and started throwing out, “Right, Veronica?” and “It was blue – I think. Veronica?” almost every other sentence for the second half of the lunch period.
It wasn’t exactly subtle, more of a skillfully applied boulder than a stiletto, but Veronica went along with it, answering with aloof coolness that wasn’t quite enough to offset the fact that she was answering. She was almost there.
When Lilly wasn’t talking to her, most of her attention was focussed on keeping her carefully constructed façade up, and it was an unexpected shock to glance up and realize that Weevil Navarro was looking at her balefully from across the quad. She’d told him a few days, but maybe he thought she’d just been bullshitting.
Veronica was suddenly afraid he was going to do or say something and give the game away, but she couldn’t talk to him, and she didn’t have his phone number or any other way to let him know surreptitiously that the plan was still on, so she did the only thing she could think of to get the message across – checked to make sure Lilly wasn’t watching, and winked broadly at him.
He blinked back, a dubious, judgemental look crossing his face, like he was perplexed about how she could be such a loser. It kind of pissed Veronica off, but since her face was already heating at the dorkiness of the gesture, it was hard to deny that he was a little justified.
The next time she cut her eyes quickly at the corner table where the PCHers had congregated, he was paying no attention to her at all. For the best, Veronica told herself, ignoring the wavering feeling in her stomach.
But she put it aside, and when Lilly cornered her at her locker after school and started talking about how she was going shopping at some new boutique on the weekend with Shelly, and maybe Meg and Veronica wanted to come, did Veronica know if Meg was free… she knew she had her.
“I’m not going shopping with you,” Veronica said disgustedly, and Lilly smiled, the same way she had after every ineffective barb she’d received over the last two days, as if she was absolutely delighted that Veronica was being nasty to her.
“Okay! I’ll just go with Shelly. She’s kind of a grandma, honestly, like the terrible kind that thinks they’re fashionable, but she just says, ‘Well, it’s the style in Belgium,’ which, whatever.” Lilly rolled her eyes. “Like Brussels is the cutting edge of fashion. Or Bruges, she’s so pretentious. But she has her dad’s car this weekend, and it’s worth it just for that, so. If you get bored.”
“I have plans,” Veronica said, which was a blatant lie. It didn’t matter whether Lilly clocked that or not.
Lilly just shrugged. “See you tomorrow,” she said, giving Veronica an infuriatingly sincere smile before she turned to go.
Yes, you will, Veronica thought, and then blinked, taken aback by her own melodrama. She snorted, shaking her head. Apparently she was a supervillain now. Maybe she should really lean into it, get a cape and a mask, really freak out everyone who was already looking down on her.
It might not go over well with the teachers, though, and she had a sterling record as both a good student and a well-behaved one that was very useful on the occasions when she did want to get away with something. Like her frequent inattention over the last few weeks.
Maybe once she was done with this, once she’d untangled and unhooked as much of Lilly as she could from the snarled mess inside of her, exorcised everything she could manage of the bits she couldn’t just get rid of, that would be less of a problem. And if she was thorough enough, maybe all those deeply-entrenched roots would stop trying to grow back.
*
It wasn’t that much of a surprise when Lilly came bouncing up to her almost the second she got to school on Friday, although for a moment it reminded Veronica so strongly of the day after she’d caught Jeremy and Lilly together (also a Friday – for some reason that threw her even more off-balance) that for a moment she faltered.
“Listen, if you change your mind about shopping, Shelly’s going to book us in for manicures,” she said. “You can just call and get another slot or two, but if you tell her before she calls, I think she’ll just pay for you.”
Veronica shot Lilly a disbelieving look, but otherwise let it lie. She was assessing whether it was worth it to try and steer the conversation in the direction she needed it to go, or to just let Lilly talk and hope it would get there eventually. It might be better to wait for lunch, anyway –
But then Cole handed her an opportunity on a silver platter.
They were approaching the largest paved circle in the quad when one of the boys who was messing around on the irregular concrete ledge that bordered it came flying off and nearly bowled them both over. Veronica registered that the bag that had almost hit her was Jeremy’s obnoxiously teal backpack almost belatedly, more concerned with the fact that his dumbass friend had pushed him. She was ready to tell either or both of them off, but Lilly beat her to it.
“Ugh, Jeremy, what the hell? It’s not like I’m surprised nobody wants you around, but can’t you stay out of normal people’s way?”
Jeremy had staggered several more steps away from them under his own momentum, and he turned with a frown on his face, tucking one hand cockily under the strap of his backpack – but when he saw Lilly and Veronica together he wilted a little, mumbled something, and slunk around them back to Cole (pretending to be sympathetic) and Mike Pappas (who was snickering).
“What a loser,” Lilly muttered disgustedly. “God. You are so much better off without him, Veronica.”
Somehow Veronica kept her cool. “I guess you’re right,” she said calmly, if a little icily. “Maybe you did me a favour.”
She felt anything but icy, and the vaguely shamefaced expression that flitted across Lilly’s features didn’t do anything to dampen the anger that was suddenly raging under her skin. The practical part of her brain, which was decidedly in the minority but which was still somehow driving, hoped that she wasn’t flushing. It would ruin the effect.
“I mean. Listen, Veronica, I know I handled it wrong, okay? But he was always kind of…” She made an ‘eh’ motion with one hand. “And you’re anything but,” a more exaggerated version of the gesture.
The sincerity in her voice was indistinguishable from the genuine thing, and it burned at Veronica’s heart like acid.
“I just thought – I mean, I knew he didn’t deserve you, but then you got serious, and I just thought… I wanted to see if I was right. It just kind of got away from me,” she added, with a shrug that was so Lilly. “I wasn’t going to actually do it, but we were both there, and it seemed hard to get out of it, and anyway, I knew you’d dump him when I told you, so…”
“So no big!” Veronica finished with sarcastic cheerfulness.
“He was basically your ex, right? Totally different.”
Veronica nodded, pretending consideration, but her voice was still hard. “Exes don’t count, is that what you’re saying?”
“Veronica, you have to know that I’d never – I mean, if it had been Troy or something–”
“But Jeremy was a loser, so it’s cool.”
“Well… it will be once I make it up to you, right? And I will, Veronica, I swear, I am so sorry.” Lilly actually stopped walking to really sell her supplicating expression. “It’s like you said – exes don’t count in the same way.”
Here it was. This was the perfect opportunity – of course it was; she’d engineered it to be. Veronica wanted to take a deep breath, psych herself up one more time, but that would look completely wrong, so she tossed off her next words casually, with only a second of hesitation.
“Great. So you won’t mind that I slept with your ex, then.” She let the pause go just long enough. "Or... I mean, he was pretty much your ex, right? Same difference."
Lilly actually turned pale. Veronica hadn’t been entirely sure that it would matter, aside from making her angry that she didn’t have control over as many things as she thought she did, but now it was clear enough – Lilly did legitimately care about Logan, or at least about being with Logan, with whatever limited sincerity she was capable of.
“I have to get to class,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the steadily dwindling flow of students as if she hadn’t noticed Lilly’s distress. As if she hadn’t engineered it. “See you at lunch, I guess.”
Chapter 9: A Kind Of Wild Justice
Notes:
So one the one hand I meant to have this up this morning, but on the other hand it's now 16K when my average is 10K, so hopefully no one's too disappointed.
It's also where things get horny and bascally just... stay that way. Just for everyone's information.
Content advisory at the end as usual.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
Francis Bacon
The second art classroom was locked, because in practice it was only used every other semester, and it was too hard to repurpose towards another subject, but it wasn’t all that difficult for Veronica to get the keys. She was a good student and overall well-behaved, so telling Mrs. Hauser that she was supposed to get extra construction paper for another teacher had worked like a charm. Mrs. Hauser never bothered to check the key-ring when Veronica gave it back; why would she?
And now the key to an out-of-the-way, largely ignored classroom was burning a hole in Veronica’s pocket. Metaphorically, of course; she wasn’t stupid enough to keep a suspicious solo key – it was on her keychain now, between her house key and her car keys. That didn’t stop her from being hyperconscious of it, even though no one would know what she was planning on doing even if they did catch her.
Meg shot her a sympathetic look from Veronica’s old seat, the kind that had been notably absent during first period. Whatever the current rumour was or how fast it had spread – and she’d deliberately hung back in English and been almost-late for second period so she wouldn’t have to deal with finding out – it either wasn’t bad enough to change the other girl’s opinion of her, or maybe Meg just didn’t believe it. It was even possible, albeit unlikely, that Lilly had kept what she thought she knew to herself, which would be an annoying hurdle to deal with, but wouldn’t prevent Veronica from making her point.
She gave Meg a reassuring smile, realizing only belatedly that she didn’t actually have to force it. This was supposed to be a means to an end, she reminded herself; the bow tying up the part of the plan that actually mattered. She wasn’t supposed to be excited about a necessary occurrence that, her previous experience indicated, would be both awkward and painful.
Maybe it was just spillover from her anticipation of what she had planned for lunch, or relief making her jittery. Being nervous about potential awkwardness and whether or not you were going to embarrass yourself was something that was light enough to expand to fill her body and make her tap her foot, when the anxiety about the first time – how badly would it hurt? How much trouble was she really getting herself into? What if she couldn’t go through with it? – had sat leaden in her stomach. And she was so close to being done with all of this, clawing herself some closure out of the screwed-up situation.
Veronica glancing in Meg’s direction again, just for the pleasure of seeing a friendly face. Instead, she inadvertently caught Jeremy’s gaze. Disgusted, she pulled a face and turned away.
What would sex with Jeremy have been like, she wondered despite herself. She couldn’t be sure – they’d hadn’t gotten as far as she had with Troy – but she thought he might be smaller than Weevil, at least, so maybe it wouldn’t have hurt as much.
That didn’t seem like as big of a deal as it should have. Jeremy had been sweet (well, he had pretended to be), but a little flaky. She’d ended up hanging around watching him play video games enough times, just because it hadn’t occurred to him she might like to do something else, that she doubted he would have stopped things simply because she wasn’t enjoying herself enough – although he probably would have stopped if he hurt her.
For some reason, the idea of a mostly-okay first time with Jeremy was much more depressing than her actual first time, unpleasant and impersonal as it had been. She would have been expecting it to be really special – in a way she was no longer sure was achievable even if the guy didn’t suck. She couldn’t imagine any amount of flower petals or candles making up for how painful it had been, if you were expecting a gentle romantic experience and a little pinch.
The thought crossed her mind that maybe with Duncan –
But she cut it off. She wasn’t going to senior prom with Duncan, or junior prom, and there wouldn’t be any sweet, careful fumbling where pain and setbacks were something they could get through together. There probably never would have been, because Duncan had clearly never been the person she thought he was either, and she wasn’t going to torture herself wondering if he’d be the only one still drinking at Lilly’s convoluted never-have-I-ever, or if he’d found some girl who put out sooner and easier than Veronica.
Not that that was why they’d broken up – probably – and not that she cared. The point was that a legitimately unpleasant first time with someone she barely knew was less upsetting than a mediocre one with Jeremy would have been, and that said enough, didn’t it?
She hated that she still missed him sometimes. It felt weak and stupid, especially since she certainly wouldn’t have taken him back even if he asked. It shouldn’t matter that he’d given her neck rubs, or that he used to pick all the pink Starbursts out of the bag and give them to her. He’d always forgotten that her favourite was actually red.
“Mr. Lasky, if you could pay as much attention to the board as you are to Veronica, maybe you’d be able to answer the question?”
There was an inescapable schadenfreude in Jeremy getting in trouble, but Veronica kept her face impassive. She wasn’t sure it was worth having her name linked with hers – although better for people to think he was obsessed with her than the reverse.
“Uh – it’s a vertical parabola–”
“No.” Ms. Fediuk raised an unimpressed eyebrow. “Fiona, can you help Jeremy out here?”
Fiona Penner had never volunteered an answer in class in her life, but she nearly always had the correct one when teachers called on her. Veronica suspected she’d been chosen more to embarrass Jeremy than because the teacher needed to verify that she was paying attention.
Madison Sinclair, who she’d traded Jeremy for as a neighbour, took Fiona’s answer as an opportunity to lean over, ostensibly for the designer bookbag under her desk, and cough “Slut!” in Veronica’s general direction.
So Lilly had been talking. That was going to make this much more satisfying, because the more people she told, the more impossible it would be for her walk it back later. In the meantime, Veronica waited for Madison to sit up and then accidentally slammed the heel of her sneaker into the pocket of the bag that had clear outlines of nail polish bottles. They crunched under her foot, and that was pretty satisfying too. Madison, who had straightened up to play the wholesome, attentive student, didn’t notice it, which was all for the better. Veronica wouldn’t have to swear it was an accident, and the longer it took Madison to realize, the worse the stains would be.
Slut, she repeated thoughtfully in her own head. She’d signed up for that one, that was for sure. But you could pretty much be designated a slut for breathing, anyway, at least in high school. By the end of today she was going to be a slut and a bitch – what would she need to get bingo? Whore, maybe? Unlikely to happen; no way would she ever earn the literal meaning, and even in casual usage it was more specifically tailored for girls who did things like steal people’s boyfriends than the all-purpose slut. ‘Prude’ was probably off the table now, although she was sure someone had called her that sometime before all of this. She’d give it some thought.
English at least held her attention well enough that she didn’t spend much of it distracted by scrutiny of her own thoughts or speculation over what would happen at lunch, or have to amuse herself with wry analysis about slurs, but American History was the same mind-numbing exercise in futility that it always was, and she caught herself touching the keyring through her pocket three different times. There were at least a few nasty looks and whispers, but after the last few weeks that was hardly anything to bother about.
Logan caught her right outside the classroom, barely thirty seconds after the lunch bell went, and Veronica was almost surprised that it had taken him so long. She’d started to wonder if Lilly had just frozen him out without telling him why – it wouldn’t have been the first time.
Still, she was braced enough not to drop anything when he grabbed her upper arm and dragged her to the side, fingers digging in so hard and deep she thought she might have bruises later.
“What’s wrong with you?” he demanded. “You think this makes you important or something? Are you that desperate for attention?”
Veronica stared at him, going for confusion over innocence. “What?”
He didn’t let go of her arm. “You lied about Jeremy too, huh? What the fuck is this, Veronica? You got sick of riding Lilly’s coattails and decided you’d take her down, is that it? You’re psycho.”
She let herself get mad at that. It was more real than she’d expected, the hurt at the ease with which he’d dropped their friendship sharper than she’d realized. “I didn’t lie about Jeremy. It’s not my fault you’re pathetic enough to believe anything Lilly says.” She jerked her arm away from him – or tried to. All she really did was wrench against his fingers. It hurt. “Get off me!”
He didn’t let go. “Why drag me into it, huh, Veronica? What’s your problem?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” She injected a little desperation into her voice, and this time when she pulled, he did let go, although he still had her boxed in against the wall. “I’m psycho? You just tried to rip my arm off, you freak!” Logan actually blinked at that, although even the increasingly interested onlookers didn’t convince him to step back. “And I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re the one who signed back up for more of Lilly’s bullshit – I didn’t make you do that.”
“You’re the one who told her I hooked up with you,” he spat. “Like I’d ever touch that with a ten-foot pole.”
If the argument had been real, Veronica would have pointed out that he was on record – literally, because Lilly had been filming – as calling her hot. But it wasn’t real, and besides, she’d known even at the time that he’d only said it to be shocking. Logan enjoyed being shocking; he and Lilly were alike that way. She was starting to think they pretty much deserved each other.
Instead she glared at him incredulously and bit out, “First of all, gross. Also, what the hell are you talking about?”
Logan opened his mouth to fire back, but the belated interference of the faculty put paid to that. “Whatever is going on here needs to stop. Immediately.”
Despite the fact that they were right outside her classroom and his was down the hall, Mr. Wu had beaten Mrs. Galloway to the punch – unsurprisingly, since she probably wouldn’t have bothered to get up from her desk for anything less than actual punching.
Logan stepped back, raising his hands in an ostentatious display of innocence that oozed smugness. “Just a conversation.”
“Yeah, well, it’s over,” Veronica said, ducking away from him hastily. Logan looked like he was about to follow her, but Mr. Wu pinned him with a stern gaze, and she took that opportunity to make her escape. A public confrontation with Lilly would serve her needs pretty neatly, although she would have settled for a private one in a pinch, but there was one thing she needed to set up first.
She was lucky, because Lilly wasn’t waiting for her in the cafeteria, doubly so because it only took her a few seconds to spot Weevil in the disorganized crush that passed for a line. Why anyone was so eager for the sub-par lunch offerings she had no idea; the food wasn’t even terrible enough to be interesting, most of the time. That didn’t stop them from squawking and muttering as she cut in, but Veronica didn’t care – if they wanted to keep their place, they should have lined up properly. Wanda Varner called her a bitch as she slid past, and Veronica tossed a “Low on Pirate Points, Wanda?” over her shoulder as she applied a judicious elbow to a stubborn sophomore’s side. She’d been a little too distracted to care about the election, but everyone knew Wanda still had sour grapes about the outcome. It had only been about a week, but she never shut up about how it had been rigged, and it had already ruined whatever sympathy Veronica had left.
It wasn’t too hard to slide in next to Weevil – everything went much faster when you didn’t care about pissing people off. Life lesson learned. Veronica didn’t look at him, but made sure he was solidly in her periphery so that she could see when he noticed her.
“Give me five, ten minutes,” she said without otherwise deigning to notice him. “Should do it. You’ll know.” It may have been an over-optimistic sentiment – the snapshot she’d gotten of his life choices didn’t scream genius – but being too rigid would sink the plan anyway, and he did seem to have a certain knack for finding people’s weaknesses. Although ‘having your face punched in’ was a pretty consistent weakness among the human race, so maybe she was giving him too much credit again.
Weevil snorted, but he nodded, and then he grabbed his apple and slightly sad-looking sandwich and extricated himself from the crowd. Veronica waited long enough to buy a Coke to justify her presence, and by the time she stepped out into the main lunch area there seemed to be a full-on fight going on at Lilly’s usual table.
It wasn’t like Lilly and Logan had never fought at school before, but it was usually icier – the fireworks got saved for other occasions, driveways and living rooms and parties. But this was an actual yelling match, intense enough that Duncan was trying to physically separate them, only they were shouting at each other across one of the tables, so it was hard for him to actually get in between.
“–still believe her over me!” Logan was saying when she finally got close enough to pick his voice out from Lilly’s. Nothing else could have given Veronica a moment’s pause, but that made her hesitate just for a second.
“Veronica wouldn’t lie about that!” Lilly slammed the words back at him like a tennis player. “And she wouldn’t have just decided to do that, either – I know it was your idea!”
Logan’s palms were flat on the table, and he leaned his weight more heavily on them for emphasis, his words overlapping Lilly’s. “Do you even care about anything that’s not fucking Veronica–”
“Um, what the hell is going on?” Veronica asked. She went so far as to set her Coke down on the table, like she’d really been planning on sitting there, even though everybody except Duncan had either scrunched into the opposite side from the screaming match or gotten up entirely.
But not left – this was too juicy not to stay and watch.
They both turned, surprised, too wrapped up in each other to have noticed her coming. Lilly managed to whirl in a way that made her ponytail swoosh dramatically behind her – although her wide-eyed, almost teary desperation seemed enough unlike her that it might have even been sincere.
“Logan says he doesn’t know what you’re talking about,” she accused.
“Yeah, well, I don’t know what Logan’s talking about,” Veronica said in her best I’m-so-over-it tone. “But you can tell him he can’t ignore me for two weeks and then start yelling at me about random stuff he made up.”
Lilly stared at her for a long moment, her gaze sharp, assessing, and for an instant Veronica thought maybe the entire jig was up. Then the other girl shook her head quickly, dismissing whatever it was she was thinking, and pressed, “You said you slept with my ex. You said we were even.”
Veronica had not said that. She ignored the inaccuracy, pulling a shocked burst of laughter from somewhere. “What? Oh, my God. Because you only have one ex-boyfriend.”
There was a brief sense of the air deflating like a flat tire. Everyone had been primed for a catfight or a showdown, and a misunderstanding wasn’t even in the same ballpark. At best it might be funny.
Well, she was going to blow their tiny minds.
Lilly blinked, trying to reconcile that she’d miscalculated. From her badly-hidden relief, she hadn’t thought much beyond the immediate implications of what Veronica had just said. “But – you said–”
“I never said I slept with Logan.” Veronica imbued the name with every bit of disgust she felt about both of them, fueled by the memory of his fingers digging into her arm, and was viciously pleased when he flinched. “It’s not my fault you made some stupid assumption – everyone knows you never stay broken up. I wouldn’t hook up with someone else’s boyfriend.”
She let that land, gave it enough time for the less obvious insults to sink in too, and then pulled a face and added in a less angry tone, “And not everything’s about you, you know. Maybe I just wanted to know what it’s like with someone who doesn’t cry the whole time.”
That send a ripple of rude snickering through the onlookers, interspersed with judgemental faux-shock from everyone who was pretending they weren’t listening. Jeremy could protest once it got back to him, of course, but his only real defence would be to admit that he’d exaggerated what they’d done by at least a base and a half, and that would make him look almost as bad as being a weeper would.
“Like you didn’t let her think you meant me,” Logan said. He’d recovered some of his cool, but Veronica knew him well enough to tell that most of it was still fake.
She snorted. “I actually wasn’t thinking about you at all, Logan, because why would I? You haven’t spoken to me in what, two weeks?”
Logan opened his mouth, but Duncan, who apparently still couldn’t quite bring himself to speak to Veronica, pressed on his shoulder and muttered something. Veronica caught what she thought was “Let it go, man,” but not the rest. It was enough to distract him, anyway – but not her, because Veronica was studiously ignoring the twinge it gave her to see him defending her, even indirectly.
Duncan wasn’t important. Logan wasn’t important. The object here was Lilly.
“Why wouldn’t you?” Veronica looked sharply to the left in time to see Madison Sinclair toss her long blonde hair over her shoulder like a bad teen movie stereotype. Her usual calm superciliousness was in place, but it was poorly concealing the fact that she was spitting mad underneath it. She’d worked out who was responsible for the nail polish, probably. “You’re always after a new payday to hang on to. First Lilly, then Duncan… you use them up and then ruin them, like Troy. We’re supposed to be shocked that Logan’s next?”
With an effort, Veronica managed not to gape at her. She wasn’t surprised by Madison acting like a bitch, but the reference to Troy shook her more than she wanted to admit. She’d ruined him? He was a drug dealer!
“Shut up, Madison,” Lilly snapped. She took a breath, clearly ready to unleash one of her truly savage comebacks, but Veronica interjected before the subject could stray too far.
“Maybe guys kissing like a wet fish does it for you, Madison, but I try to aim a little higher than that.” Madison flushed, which told Veronica that Lilly’s unimpressed commentary on Dick’s technique was accurate.
“So why pick one of Lilly’s exes?” Logan asked, nastily – but his voice was tight. He was trying to be mad at her, Veronica thought, so he didn’t have to hold his girlfriend accountable, didn’t have to do the math about what all of this meant. So what else was new.
“Look, no offense, but if I’ve got access to the Zagat of Neptune High hookups,” she inclined her head vaguely in Lilly’s direction, “I’m going with the best-rated one.” She shrugged a careless apology at him. “And even if I’d considered it, I knew you were just going running back when she snapped her fingers, so…”
With any luck, that barb would sink in deep enough to rankle the next time he thought about getting back together with Lilly. But if not…
“God, Veronica, stop.” Lilly had finally realized that things hadn’t actually improved for her. Was it being called a slut guidebook, or seeing that Veronica was absolutely willing to tell both Logan and Madison that she’d made out with Dick last year that had prompted it, Veronica wondered.
“You’re the one who sicced your boyfriend on me. I think I have bruises.” She kept a carefully annoyed tone. There was a line, somewhere, and while she was probably over it already, implying that Logan had really hurt her was a little too far. “You could have just asked who it was, because, just to be absolutely clear, I have definitely never hooked up with Logan.”
“That’s good.” Weevil was much better at being unobtrusive than the rest of the gawkers, which was pretty impressive given how much he stood out among the 09ers who made up roughly eighty-five percent of them. He was leaning casually against the low wall a few feet behind Madison, and if he hadn’t been projecting his voice so everyone could hear him, the nonchalance would have been entirely convincing. “I was getting kind of tired of getting his sloppy seconds anyway.”
The timing. Veronica almost wanted to clap; he’d clearly been waiting for a really good opening and he’d pulled it off with casual panache that made it seem entirely unpremeditated. Shelly Pomroy actually gasped.
He pushed off the wall, cracking his neck like he was only half-interested in the conversation. “First place, huh? Aren’t they supposed to give out a certificate or something?”
“You want a certificate?” Veronica eyed him with calculated dubiousness. She wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but it seemed like a good idea to play along.
“A trophy seems kind of juvenile,” Weevil clarified, his tone easy. If you were looking at his body language and not the tight way he held his jaw, the way he never quite looked at Lilly, he would seem entirely unconcerned. “But if I’d known I was under review, maybe I would have broken out the big guns.”
“Big enough for me,” Veronica said. She could do him a bit of a favour while she was laying this out – and anyway it was more than true. “I found everything as described, actually, which doesn’t explain why you’re crashing a private conversation.” Internally the very small part of her that really was as untouched by all this as she pretended to be was smirking at her own audacity, when she’d deliberately engineered this to be public.
He shoved both hands into the pockets of his jeans and somehow contrived to lean against nothing. “Doesn’t look all that private to me.” Veronica – and everybody else – watched his eyes travel over a few of the less discreet spectators, linger momentarily on Duncan, who was standing dumbstruck on the other side of the table, and slide over to Logan with a smirk.
It was only for a moment, but it was enough to galvanize the situation; Logan, who was already flushed, turned almost purple and took a step forward, but a couple of Weevil’s friends materialized out of the crowd. The one who kind of looked like him stared Logan down, but the other one hooted, adding insult to injury. “Man, I knew you pulled Lilly Kane, but the sheriff’s daughter? You got balls of steel!”
Veronica didn’t know if Weevil had told his lackeys to say that or if they really had already known about Lilly, but either way the semi-independent verification was enough to turn Logan toward Lilly instead of Weevil.
“This guy?” he choked out, sounding like he didn’t know if he was trying to hiss the words or spit them at her.
“I hope she washed after,” Dick Casablancas muttered in his version of sotto voce, which wasn’t all that quiet.
Lilly didn’t know where to look. Veronica had never seen her look so confused. “I–” She shook her head. “Veronica, you didn’t really–”
But Logan was sick of being ignored. He reached across the table and grabbed Lilly’s wrist, jerking her attention back to him. Veronica’s arm ached sympathetically where he’d grabbed her earlier, although it didn’t look like he was digging in nearly as hard. Strangely, Weevil flinched, taking half a step in their direction before covering it with a pretty good facsimile of a shift in stance.
“What the fuck? Why would you–” He shot a disgusted look at Weevil, but the other boy had recovered his unfazed expression.
“Logan–”
“Maybe,” Weevil put in helpfully, “it’s because I don’t have to take girls out on my dad’s boat so I have an excuse when I… miss.”
Veronica almost choked – not just at the information, but at the way that Lilly turned pale and Logan whirled, letting go of her, at the way their reactions verified it.
Logan was much less red than he’d been a moment before, almost ashen, but Weevil wasn’t returning his slightly wild look. His eyes were locked on Lilly’s face instead, for the first time since he’d made his dramatic entrance. Veronica watched him purse his lips in a sour, assessing expression before he looked away, resuming his affectation of mild, disinterested amusement. Before his face settled back into that expression, she thought she saw him swallow hard.
“What did you say?” Logan demanded in a near-whisper, the words scraping against his throat.
Weevil shrugged. “Ask your girlfriend, man. This bullshit isn’t my problem.” He glanced at Veronica. “You wanna get out of here?”
She had told him to proposition her, although at this point it was almost superfluous. “I mean, yes, but I’m going to the library. The soap opera is ruining my appetite.” She took a few steps toward the nearest building, then stopped and glanced over her shoulder like she’d only just thought of something. “I’m free after school, though.”
She probably shouldn’t have said it, but Duncan was standing right there, looking like he wanted to throw up. Probably because he hadn’t wanted to ever know this much about who his sister was or wasn’t having sex with, but it still put Veronica in mind of the way he’d gotten brusque and weird as soon as she’d started dating Troy, like he’d had any claim on her at all after what he did. Was it so wrong to want to take a sledgehammer to his memories of drinking their mutual admission on that beach?
Besides, she’d gone to all the trouble of getting that key. She couldn’t let that be for nothing.
“Yeah, we’ll see. I got things to do.”
Veronica shrugged. “Whatever, then.”
His lips twitched, but otherwise he didn’t react, and the crowd of onlookers was already breaking up into hushed, gossiping groups, which indicated the impending presence of a teacher, so Veronica really did head inside and go to the library. She didn’t go in, because that Coke was all the lunch she was going to get, and she couldn’t have it in there, but she leaned against the wall next to the doors and drank it, letting her pulse slow down and ignoring the students who hadn’t been privy to the scene outside giving her weird looks.
So much for marionette-Veronica, she thought. No matter how badly this backfired on her, even if Lilly managed to bounce back in a few weeks like she always seemed to, she’d accomplished that much. And if she’d trashed her reputation, at least it had gone out with a bang rather than a whimper.
“Ba dum tish,” she muttered, lobbing the Coke can underhand at the recycling bin a little way down the hall. It came within half an inch of the opening, but bounced off the raised corner of the bin so that she had to march over to put it in properly, which dented her self-satisfied devil-may-care self-image a little.
There was still at least twenty minutes left in lunch, somehow. Maybe she should have gone with Weevil – the fizzy energy she was feeling from the sudden abatement of anxiety and anticipation might have combined interestingly with sex, and if anyone thought they could still justify calling her a liar, it would have put paid to that pretty quickly. But it would have made it too easy for someone like Madison to report them to a teacher, especially if anyone saw where they were going.
A couple of freshmen dodged her on their way past. Veronica wasn’t sure if the wide berth was because they’d witnessed the scene outside or just because she was a junior. Probably the latter; for all the drama, only the nearest tables and the people who’d been willing to stand and gawk had been close enough to hear the actual details of what had gone down, and most of them had been upperclassmen.
She was starting to think about getting her textbook and just camping out in the history classroom until class started, maybe flipping idly through that novel from yesterday since she was done her homework. It turned out it was about cavemen instead of dragons or whatever, so she wasn’t exactly interested, but it would kill a few minutes.
But then she turned to go the long way back to her locker and there was Lilly.
“God!” Veronica jumped, despite herself. She hadn’t expected anyone to be that close, she hadn’t expected Lilly at all, and there was a vaguely The Ring-esque thing going on with Lilly’s hair because she’d taken the ponytail out that was more disconcerting than it had any right to be.
“You did that on purpose,” Lilly said, her tone strangely blank. She looked like maybe she’d been crying.
“Uh, jumped three feet in the air?” If she couldn’t help looking stupid, she could just own it. “No, that was your Samara impression.”
“Cut the crap, Veronica.” The intonation was so similar to a hundred other conversations that it dug at those torn-up bits inside of her that still wanted to fix this somehow, but there was none of the playfulness that was Lilly’s stock in trade.
Veronica was okay with that, if it meant she wasn’t being played with.
“That was you getting back at me or something, right?” Lilly laughed mirthlessly. “God, like I wouldn’t have let you do whatever you wanted.”
“Oh, right, because being invited to call you names makes it all better.” Veronica set her jaw. “I’d tell you to cut the crap, but I honestly don’t think you even know how.”
“God, Veronica, do you even know what you did?”
“I guess it sucks to have someone ruin your life, huh?” Veronica shot back. “To just stick their fingers in it and pull it all to bits for fun?”
Lilly blanched. “I didn’t–” She cut herself off before Veronica could, which was honestly for the best. “Forget it. Just forget it. I’m really mad at you–”
Veronica scoffed, but Lilly just kept on going. “–I felt so bad, but this is just – I’m so mad, but it doesn’t even matter, because – look, you can’t do this.”
Veronica put a thoughtful finger to her lips. “Hmm. I mean… I think I did.”
“I don’t know how you got Weevil to say that stuff,” Lilly said, soldiering on with a grim determination that was unlike her, “and I mean, god, it’s my fault or whatever, I shouldn’t have told him that about Logan, okay? But you didn’t actually hook up with him, right? I mean, you remember, when…” She shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable, and waved a hand as if to elide all the things she’d been so proud of before. “He’s not, you know, super stable.”
“I’m pretty sure you said it was fine.”
“Yeah, well, I’m an idiot.” Lilly laughed, high and brittle. “I’m an idiot, okay? You should just… just stay away from him. I can’t believe you told him where you were actually going.”
“And yet, only my actual stalker is here.”
Lilly shook her head briefly, one more dismissal. “I’m trying to tell you you don’t want to get involved with him.”
“I’m not involved with him. We just have a couple things in common, that’s all.”
“Come on, Veronica, can’t you just – I don’t want you to get hurt, okay?”
“Gee,” Veronica said flatly. “I wonder what it would be like to be hurt.”
“Can you not take me seriously for one minute? I want to strangle you and I’m still warning you, shouldn’t that count for something?”
“What, you’re still mad?” Veronica cocked her head to the side. “But, look, Logan was a drag anyway. You can do so much better.” Lilly paled, and she went in for the death blow, mockingly parroting what Lilly had said last year after she’d pulled that about-face on Duncan. “Can you trust me? It’s for the best.”
“Don’t,” Lilly said. “God, Veronica, you’re being such a bitch, but you don’t know what you’re messing with, okay? You don’t get it. And trust me–” she faltered, hearing what she’d just said, then kept going, “you don’t want to, all right? You don’t want to end up like me.”
“I’m nothing like you,” Veronica said, with the quiet simplicity of utter fury. “You don’t care about other people at all. All you care about it what they can do for you. You’re basically your mom but perkier.”
Lilly slapped her.
The blow stung, and it was hard enough to turn Veronica’s head to the side, but it felt like triumph, and she started laughing as she shook it off. “Okay, cool. Glad we got that straightened out. You’re going to stop texting me now, right?” It didn’t really matter, because she was blocking Lilly’s number as soon as she got a second between classes.
Lilly took a deep, trembling breath, pulling herself upright. “You know Weevil’s not your friend, right?” she said, voice brittle. “He’s using you – he just wants to hurt me.”
Veronica laughed again, this time short and sharp. “I know. That’s what we have in common.”
She didn’t stick around to watch Lilly’s eyes well up.
*
It wasn’t as hard as she’d thought it might be to keep her head down for the rest of the day. It helped being able to throw herself into History right after lunch, and then she just kept going, riding the momentum of not giving a damn through Biology and Spanish. Logan had skipped Bio, which made it easier, and looks and whispers weren’t exactly new at this point – and there was something almost like relief in knowing that whatever people were saying, it was something that had actually happened, something she’d done on purpose. Better to be some psycho bitch than a pathetic schmuck, to be a slut for the guy she’d really had sex with than for a bunch of lackluster blowjobs she’d never actually given.
Meg was in her Spanish class, which was harder to be blasé about. She wasn’t staring or whispering – if nothing else, Meg always paid attention in class – but Veronica caught her shooting concerned looks from her seat in the middle of the room. It was hard to imagine Meg ever understanding why someone would do what Veronica had – any of it: the manipulation, the revealing people’s private lives, the public catfight, the having actual sex just to get even with somebody…
It hurt, to think maybe she’d torched the only real friendship she had left, but more difficult to reconcile was the knowledge that she should be guilty, should have some kind of regret – but she would probably have done it all over again. Meg could find better friends than most of the people she spent time with; she could probably find better friends than Veronica, too.
Sra. Hockley cast a stern look at Veronica as she turned down the nearest aisle, on the prowl for inattentive students, and Veronica gave her an innocent smile and went back to her assignment. According to her work – and her somewhat limited Spanish vocabulary – her plans for the weekend involved walking with her dog, watching her favourite movie with her mother and father, and (for those extra points for demonstrating complex sentence structure) if it didn’t rain, then she would go swimming, because it was warm in California.
In reality she planned to do almost none of those things – Backup always needed a walk, but her mom hated South Park and swimming lost its appeal when you were by yourself. But ‘I plan to languish in my room feeling bitterly satisfied that I blew up someone I used to care about with the same grenade I also used to absolutely detonate my last chance of a normal high school experience’ didn’t translate very well, and ‘After school I will go for a walk with my dog. On Saturday I will go for a walk with my dog. On Sunday I will go for a walk with my dog again’ would get her a D.
It was better than having to talk amongst themselves, or even answer the teacher’s questions, anyway. Sra. Hockley was hard on hecklers – not for the heckling so much as the fact that it was usually in English – but that didn’t mean Veronica wanted to deal with it. She added a few specifics to her second paragraph and set the sheet of paper aside. If she could finish her precalc homework before school ended, she’d have the weekend pretty much free.
“Señorita Mars – has completado tu tabajo en clase?” Sra. Hockley had worked her way back around the classroom, and she frowned sternly at her from two rows ahead.
“Si, Señora,” Veronica told her politely, gesturing to her completed assignment. It was as least twice as long as the single paragraph she could see Travis Kittelmeyer torturing himself over. Sra. Hockley pursed her lips, but didn’t say anything about the math homework on Veronica’s desk; she moved on to lean over Amber Geldorf’s shoulder.
Veronica was one question from the end of her precalc when the teacher cleared her throat and told them to start passing their assignments forward, and she set it aside reluctantly. It was almost pleasant to have nothing but numbers to concentrate on, but Sra. Hockley was a stickler for full attention during wrap-up announcements. It would have probably been a better use of Veronica’s time to finish off her homework instead of listening to her classmates groan at the announcement of the project they’d be doing as part of the next unit, but she didn’t especially feel like getting scolded in front of the entire class. It would be the third time today a teacher had drawn attention to her, and the day had been plenty exciting enough already.
Instead she opted to leave the problem for after the bell rang, letting most of the class filter out while she was working on it. If she was lucky, she’d dodge at least some of the consequences of her stunt at lunch – hopefully most of the people who would have made her life miserable wouldn’t be willing to put in the time and effort to wait around in order to do it. Sra. Hockley raised her eyebrows when she didn’t get up to leave right away, but she didn’t say anything, so Veronica just carried on until she was done and then started packing up, slowly.
“Uh, Veronica… do you have a minute?”
She paused with one hand on the zipper of her pencil case, then closed it deliberately, trying to ignore the way her stomach had dropped into her shoes. “Sure. What’s up? I didn’t see you at lunch.” Might as well bite the bullet.
Meg bit her lip, hovering next to Travis’s desk. “I volunteered to set some things up for Cheer Squad. I missed, uh…”
“The fireworks?” Veronica asked with fake cheer. “Don’t worry, I’m sure the recaps are at least sixty percent accurate.” She stacked everything up and slotted it under her arm, turning to face the other girl. “Which is actually not bad for high school, when you think about it.”
“Are you okay?” Meg asked. It was clearly an opening gambit rather than the sole reason for the conversation, but even so it made Veronica’s heart twinge.
“Working on it,” she admitted, which was closer to the truth than she would have gotten for most people. “Get tough, get even… you know.”
“Get even, huh?” Meg considered her, concern written plain on her face. Somehow it stung more than judgement.
Veronica forced herself to shrug. “We can’t all be like you.” She tried to smile, to show she meant it as something other than a petty dig, but she wasn’t sure it worked out. “For what it’s worth, if I had to pick between you and Lilly, I’d want to be like you.” It was true, in the sense that she thought Meg was the better person – but it felt like a lie, because when she’d actually been given the choice she’d burned herself down to be less like Meg, to be tougher instead of kinder.
“I know she really hurt you,” Meg said seriously. “I don’t think that was okay. But…”
“Yeah, I know. What I did was wrong and uncalled for.” Despite the somewhat flippant tone, she gave Meg a what-can-you-do smile. “The thing is… I really don’t care.” The smile softened into something rueful, and she couldn’t decide if she’d done it on purpose or not. “I’m just not built to rise above it, I guess.”
A conflicted expression crossed Meg’s face. “Did you have to do it in public, though?”
“If Lilly and Logan want to have a screaming fight at lunch hour and drag me into it, what am I supposed to do, ask to speak to them privately?” It was disingenuous, but she was willing to lie by omission to hang on to a tiny bit of Meg’s good opinion.
The other girl shrugged one shoulder, conceding the point but not the discussion. “I just think… you’re better than that, Veronica.”
It should have been condescending, but Meg just sounded worried. Maybe a month ago, it would have been enough to make Veronica feel ashamed. She’d always thought she was a nice person, a good person – better than Carrie, or Madison, or Dick. But when it came down to it, it turned out she cared more about being strong.
“No, I get it,” she said. “No hard feelings. But if you’re looking for someone of your calibre to hang out with, it might be worth considering that Cole and his friends aren’t quite up to snuff either.” There was no point in mentioning Pam specifically; Veronica didn’t know the rest of the cheerleaders super well outside of joint pep squad events, and one girl wasn’t worth making it sound like she wanted Meg to have no friends.
“Veronica, I wasn’t saying–”
But Veronica had been maneuvering them towards the door, and Meg cut herself off when she realized that Weevil was leaning against the opposite wall in the hallway.
“Qué tal?” he said, and when Veronica looked at him blankly, he rolled his eyes and amended it to, “Qué pasa?”
“Class finished eight minutes ago,” she pointed out. “They can’t require me to speak Spanish.”
“Yeah, which they’re clearly not teaching you.” He eyed Meg, visibly dragging his gaze from her head to her feet, which made her look away. “Cut it out,” Veronica said, bristling. “She never did anything to you.”
“What, I can’t look?” He smirked, like it hadn’t been a blatant act of intimidation.
But Meg didn’t leave; instead she took a deep breath and resettled her binder in her arms. “Do you want a ride home, Veronica? Or we could – hang out, or something.”
Veronica’s chest ached, suddenly, with fondness and gratitude and regret. Part of her wanted to take the out – not because was afraid of Weevil, not because she needed Meg to rescue her from him, but because she wanted to be the girl Meg thought she was, someone who deserved that kind of friendship and protection.
But she wasn’t. She’d been planning what had happened today, one way or another, since the day after she’d walked into Jeremy’s basement, and none of Meg’s good intentions and kind overtures and ice cream had made her feel even a little bit better when compared with the vindication of the look on Lilly’s face right after she’d slapped her. Some people broke into soft dust, and some people broke into sharp pieces, and apparently Veronica was the latter. Meg, if she had to guess, was soft enough, flexible enough, not to break at all, like a scarf or a cushion, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t susceptible to getting slashed to shreds.
Was that how Lilly had seen her? Veronica wondered. Something delicate and only theoretically aspirational, who couldn’t handle the rough side of life?
But Lilly would never have tried to protect anyone from herself.
And besides, on a less pretentious level, Meg didn’t need Veronica dragging her down like a millstone. Maybe they could still be friendly – say hi, partner up in class – but this was high school. Even Meg Manning wouldn’t be safe from slut-dom if she started hanging out with the wrong people.
“It’s cool,” Veronica said. “I have plans.”
She didn’t nod at Weevil or anything dramatic like that, but some of the real details must have leaked back to Meg, because she blinked frantically and stared at Veronica.
“Really?”
There were still enough people in the halls that her mild outburst caught attention. Down the hall, at the bank of senior lockers, she could see Miranda Savinkoff nudge someone on the other side of her, out of Veronica’s sightline.
Miranda had the locker next to Lilly.
“Hey, if you decide you want to get that ice cream, text me,” Veronica said. “But seriously. No hard feelings. I get it.” She shot Meg a small, sincere smile and turned away.
“There is no way I’m doing the autoshop again,” she announced breezily over her shoulder – ostensibly to Weevil, but if other people heard, so be it. “I have a better plan.”
“Does your better plan involve keeping me waiting for ten minutes?” he asked pointedly, pushing himself away from the wall. At least he’d switched to ignoring Meg, from what Veronica could see peripherally. “Because most people know better.”
“I’m not most people,” Veronica said, adopting a breathy voice that wasn’t really a take-off on anything in particular.
“Yeah, no shit.” He caught up to her without visibly exerting himself – presumably it was bad for his image to let her lead the way. “Where exactly do you think you’re going?”
Veronica slipped her keys out of her pocket and twirled them around her finger, ostentatiously. “I have the key to the other art classroom.”
“Okay, so? It’s three thirty. The school’s crawling with teachers.”
“There’s no class there this semester, and the only classroom near it is Mr. Pascuzzi’s. He always takes off right after school unless he absolutely can’t get away with it.” She added, pointedly serious, “And the furniture isn’t covered with motor oil.”
“I don’t remember the furniture mattering all that much to you on Monday.”
Veronica didn’t validate his smirk by looking at it. “I’m broadening my horizons.”
He actually laughed at that – a real one, she thought. Or at least it was less nasty than most of the ones she’d heard from him. “Is that what I am? A horizon?”
“I wouldn’t call you broad.” Her tone stayed snarky, even though it wasn’t really an insult; barely even an observation. He wasn’t all that big, for all he gave the impression of it: short side of average, not quite slender but hardly hulking. He had some pretty impressive muscles on display – Veronica didn’t glance at his conspicuously and perpetually bare arms, but she remembered with extreme clarity how easily he’d supported her weight in the autoshop classroom – but otherwise it was all attitude.
“I wouldn’t call you broad either,” he said, mock-chivalrous.
“Thank you, Humphrey Bogart.”
“What, you saying this is the start of a beautiful friendship? Because I think you’re overshooting a little there, Ilsa.”
Veronica stopped walking, mostly because she was surprised by the mostly-correct reference. “Uh – The Maltese Falcon.” It wasn’t a great comeback, but she could hardly be blamed for being thrown at the implication that Weevil Navarro had seen Casablanca.
He kept going, leaving her to be the one trying to catch up without visibly hurrying. “Sure.”
At least they’d cleared the part of the hall that was full of lockers, so there weren’t all that many people to stare. Veronica took a breath and started over.
“It’s a better location.”
“Right.” Weevil stopped and turned to face her. “Clear something up for me here – are you going slow so no one gets suspicious, or do you wanna make sure that if she’s following us you don’t lose her?”
Apparently she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed Miranda trying to get Lilly’s attention. “I don’t care either way.”
He snorted.
“I don’t,” she said icily. “I did what I meant to, and it went over like it was supposed to. Anything else is just gravy.”
“I just need to know if the gravy is voyeurism-flavoured or not,” he told her with condescending politeness. Veronica grimaced automatically with distaste, then bristled when he snickered.
“The point’s been made,” she said. “That was an admirable performance, you know. You really got the job done efficiently.”
It was supposed to put him on the back foot, make him angry by being patronizing, but it didn’t work. Weevil raised his eyebrows at her and gave it right back.
“Seems like you didn’t even really need me. Kicked things off pretty good all by yourself.”
The original plan had been more complex and carefully engineered, although it seemed slightly juvenile now, to cop to sleeping with Lilly’s ex, decline to mention who it was, and then let everyone see her with Weevil and draw their own conclusions. It was an artfully complex piece of drama, and she should have known it wouldn’t survive three seconds of contact with high schoolers.
Aloud, she only said, “I didn’t know Logan was going to be so helpful.”
That drew a hyena smile. “Maybe you should have picked him for this.”
“One: in no lifetime ever. Two: he’s too busy running after Lilly so she can kick him around some more. Three…” Veronica paused briefly, unease almost reining her in. She and Logan were friends. Had been. There was over the line and then there was too far.
But she wasn’t in this for moderation. “Three: from the sounds of it, the… logistics may have been complicated.”
His smile broadened, the honest self-satisfaction at least as intimidating as all his various expressions of anger and annoyance. “Hey, I just report what I heard.”
“I can’t believe she actually told you that,” Veronica muttered, feeling a belated urge to try to regain the moral high ground. She wasn’t sure if she was trying to stay above him, or Lilly – either way, the bar was so low it hardly mattered.
“Are we going to stand here talking about it, or…?”
He was right; they’d reached the corner that hid the doors to the back-up art classroom and Mr. Pascuzzi’s Latin class – already locked and dark, as she’d expected. Veronica jingled the keys in lieu of answering, sliding past him to get to the first door. For someone who really wasn’t all that big – overall – he managed to take up a lot of space.
No one was in this part of the hall to see them, which was probably for the best. It didn’t exactly matter who saw them together – that would just erase whatever doubts the student body had managed to muster up – but Veronica wasn’t eager to be reported to a teacher by anyone who knew exactly where she was breaking the rules into smithereens.
That didn’t stop her from turning the lights on once they were inside, although only one bank of them. All the blinds were firmly down, and it was too dark and gloomy without another source of light. Having sex in a dim shop classroom was one thing – a regular classroom with the lights off seemed somehow far more depressing.
When she found somewhere to put her binder and turned back to Weevil, he was giving her a look she couldn’t parse – dubious, maybe, almost assessing, or even something that might have been concerned if it wasn’t so skeptical.
“What?” It came out hostile instead of tough-but-nonchalant and Veronica winced internally. Getting defensive would not help with the image she was trying to project.
“What is your deal?” he asked, shaking his head. “You’re so freaking bipolar.”
“Who cares what my deal is?” she asked, dialing back the aggression. “You got what you wanted out of it, right? Plus now you’re a big Casanova, that’s got to be good for your rep.”
“My rep didn’t need the help, but it’s nice of you to care so much,” he responded with eager insincerity. “You’re a real humanitarian.”
Veronica rolled her eyes. “Look, can we just… get on with this. I mean, we’re not here because we like each other, so why talk?”
“Why do anything?” he shot back at her. “Everyone saw us come this way, and after your little performance at lunch it’ll get around. We could play checkers in here for half an hour and it wouldn’t change anything one way or another.”
“Well, I don’t see a checkerboard, so…” Her irreverence bounced off his unimpressed expression, leaving her feeling wrong-footed and silly.
“Come on, don’t act like your parents haven’t been warning you about big, bad criminals like me since you were little.” He shot her a leer that was somehow threatening on top of flirtatious on top of a completely different kind of threatening. “You should be begging me to stay on the other side of the room while you do your homework or something.”
“I finished my homework in class,” Veronica said, hoping the subject swerve would at least nudge him in the direction of off-balance. Even when she surprised him, he seemed to just end up laughing at her or rolling his eyes like she was a tribulation, which left him with the upper hand more than she’d like.
Weevil pulled a bitchy little ‘so what’ expression and headshake, which was about on par with the eyeroll for how much it dented his composure. She’d have to try harder.
“I’m not a liar,” she said, before he could find some other way to take a dig at her. “Lilly’s the liar – I’m not going to play that game with her.”
“So instead of lying and saying you fucked me, you just actually do it so you can say you did.” He shook his head. “You need a therapist.”
That stung her more deeply than it should have – this coming from a guy who was stealing and extorting his way through high school? “If you’re having trouble… performing, you could just say so,” she gritted out behind an insincere smile. “You don’t have to make it about me.”
He squared up to her immediately, going from his somewhat normal if antagonistic attitude to outright menacing in a moment. He was in her face so fast that Veronica took a step back instinctively, but she caught herself before she could shift her weight off her front foot and give herself away, even though her instincts were screaming at her to get away from him.
“You’re a mouthy little bitch,” he said, with a measured, almost friendly tone that was calculated to be terrifying. “Some people might think that makes you pretty stupid, under the circumstances.”
With an act of will, Veronica made herself stay put. Somehow she kept an unconcerned expression on her face, although she didn’t think she had much chance of actually convincing him he hadn’t scared her, not when her whole body had gone rigid. “Yeah, but that’s because some people are all talk.” She cocked her head at a marked angle. “I thought you were an action guy.” There was a long, suspended moment where she couldn’t make herself do what had to came next – she couldn’t do this, she was playing way, way out of her league and she was going to get hurt and humiliated and have to crawl away with her tail between her legs – and then something shifted in his face. It was just a tiny movement of the muscles around his eyes, and it probably didn’t mean anything at all, but in that second all she could see was contempt and dismissal.
She reached out and grabbed him through his jeans.
Weevil reared back. “Shit!”
He was more surprised than anything; she knew she hadn’t hurt him, because that hadn’t even been the point. It was just about upping the ante – and slowly, and then suddenly, she realized that he’d flinched first.
It was so surreal that for a second she felt dizzy. He’d been bluffing, and she’d won whatever fucked-up contest they’d been having. Like she was really as jaded and untouchable as she’d been pretending – trying – to be.
Succeeding at being. Apparently.
Veronica fought back a triumphant grin, at least turning it into something less obvious, but she didn’t bother to hide the glee in her voice as she said, “It doesn’t feel like there’s anything wrong with it…”
It wasn’t the pithiest possible remark, but she was doing pretty well for an almost-virgin honour student whose most adventurous sexual encounter until five days ago had been grinding against Troy Vandegraff in his back seat with most of her clothes on. She’d never actually put her hand on a guy’s dick before, so she could cut herself a little slack.
Weevil shook his head. “Well, now you’re just asking for it.” He’d adopted a resigned tone, like he didn’t want to hurt her, but… – but it didn’t have any real teeth in it. He knew she’d won.
What she’d won was unclear, but Veronica was due for a success – or two, if you counted lunch.
“Congratulations, your listening comprehension is improving.” She pressed her advantage by stepping forward and getting up in his space the way he’d done to her. It didn’t have exactly the same effect because she was too short, and beyond crowding him a little she didn’t have any real idea what to do with kissing off the table, but she wasn’t giving up the upper hand now. He didn’t step back, regarding her with what looked like amusement, but it was absent the usual condescension, so Veronica decided not to bother being offended.
“Yeah, okay, I get it. You’re a femme fatale.” He reached out and snagged her around the waist, dragging her forward so that he could heft her into the air. Veronica yelped and grabbed for his shoulders – somehow she kept doing that – as he used the leverage to slide his hands under her thighs from the outside.
It was a lot more physical than it looked in the movies when people were always jumping on each other lightly or lifting someone else into their arms with ease. He’d actually half-thrown her into the air for a brief moment, like when you adjusted your grip on something large and heavy you were carrying, and even though there hadn’t even been half an inch of space between her legs and his hands (and that for barely half a second), and he caught her with only a small grunt, Veronica was suddenly very conscious of her own weight, and the distance between her and the floor. It wasn’t so much that she was afraid of falling – by the time all the factors of the situation had made their way into her brain he had a pretty firm hold on her – as that she felt suddenly aware of herself as heavy, as a physical object. What else did anyone carry around in a day that was as heavy as a person?
“Uh,” she said, mentally kicking herself for opening her mouth at all when she didn’t actually have anything to say. His face was right there, and that was honestly pretty awkward, because it felt like a situation you would deal with by kissing each other, but she didn’t want to do that. Weevil took several steps toward the half of the room that was set up like a regular classroom and dropped her unceremoniously onto the nearest desk. Veronica grunted at the impact – it was only an inch or so, so it didn’t really hurt, but it was uncomfortable and very undignified. She glared at him.
“So?” He gave her a challenging look, eyebrows raised, and Veronica rolled her eyes and hiked up her skirt without fanfare. It was the same one she’d been wearing when she’d first approached him – less for symmetry than because it meant she hadn’t had to stress about figuring out a second outfit that toed the line between access and innocence – so she didn’t have to hike it very far.
Belatedly, she realized that she’d just made it extremely difficult to get her hand into the pocket with the condom in it, because the opening was now scrunched upside down against her waist, but before she could try to find the least embarrassing way to fish it out, Weevil managed to produce one from his jeans.
No textbooks or writing utensils in evidence, but he had condoms – talk about priorities, Veronica thought acerbically. It was actually kind of annoying; she wouldn’t have wasted her money on a whole second package to get ones that came with lube if she’d known he was just going to bring his own. Now she had twice as many extra condoms and nothing to use them for.
But what was she going to do, insist on using hers like a weirdo?
“Wait,” Veronica said, thinking better of her attempt to slide her underwear off. Weevil did stop, shooting her a judgemental look, and his eyebrows went up with pointed confusion when she pulled her shirt off over her head.
“You had a point,” she said, aiming for a collaborative tone and trying not to cross her arms over her chest. “About people following us.” There wasn’t any guarantee that it would even be Lilly, if someone did. “I don’t want anyone watching, but if they do, it should look good.”
“Why do things halfway?” he asked with exaggerated cheerfulness. Veronica ignored the mocking, reaching behind her to fiddle with the clasp of her bra. It wasn’t actually difficult, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to just take it off. She’d never actually taken her bra off in front of a boy – she’d taken her shirt off, or at least let Troy do it, and she’d had both his and Duncan’s hands inside her bra, but outright flashing someone had just never quite happened. Although she supposed it wasn’t flashing if you didn’t bother putting them away again.
What if he laughed? She was uncomfortably conscious of the fact that she didn’t have all that much to reveal in the first place.
“Right,” she said, unclipping her bra but holding both ends of the strap in place so it stayed on. “So you should take your shirt off.”
Weevil came back toward her instead, leaning close enough that his shirt was brushing against her bare skin. Veronica almost leaned back reflexively but caught herself. He didn’t touch her, though – for a second she thought he was bracing his hands on the desk, but then he pulled, and it jerked into abrupt motion with an unpleasant squeal against the linoleum. Veronica lurched and grabbed… his shoulders. Again.
With more squeaking and creaking and probably grey scuffmarks on the floor, he dragged the desk around. For a moment, she stubbornly refused to ask what the hell he was doing, but when he stopped, she realized she’d gone from facing the door – and therefore probably being blocked completely from view by his body once they got down to business – to facing the wall, giving any hypothetical voyeurs a revealing cross-section view.
Props to him for thinking outside the box, Veronica supposed. Her bra was on the floor, she realized – she’d dropped it when she’d been trying to keep her balance on the desk. No point in being self-conscious now.
“Perfect,” she said, attempting nonchalance. “I’m noticing that one of us still has a shirt on, though.”
The bravado felt hollow – maybe because she knew that her misgivings were starting to crowd back in. It was one thing to find the idea of sex appealing or exciting once you were alone and fielding a dull ache instead of searing pain, but now that she was staring the act in the face again, she wasn’t all that enthusiastic about enduring it a second time. But it would be over in fifteen minutes, for better or worse, and there was no way it would hurt as much as last time, so probably better to get on with it.
Weevil rolled his eyes, setting the condom down on the edge of the desk, and pulled his shirt over his head one-handed, leaving her with an extremely close-up view of his pectorals. They were very nice, to be fair, although the bulldog wearing a fedora that she was now staring at made Veronica feel more like she was in a very surreal movie than anything. Underneath it were the words ‘Dog 4 Life’, which added just enough context to confuse her about the hat.
But she wasn’t here to analyze his tattoos, so she put that aside and focussed on trying to ease down her underwear without falling off the desk. It was harder than she’d anticipated, and after a few moments she heard him snort and then the back of his hand brushed against hers, startlingly warm, and made her jump.
His fingers were equally hot on the bare skin of her thigh, although they were gone almost as quickly, hooking under the side of the fabric and tugging it smoothly and efficiently out from underneath her.
Then her underwear was past her knees, and he went back to opening the condom. The fact that he hadn’t already managed that suggested he’d been watching her. Veronica tried not to look at him, afraid she might be blushing. So much for passing herself off as competent at this sort of thing – although it was more for her pride than anything else; surely he didn’t have many illusions about the depths of her experience after the last time. Hiding the fact that she’d been an actual virgin was probably the best she could hope for at this point.
She wiggled the garment down her legs, letting it fall to the floor because at this point it didn’t even really matter, and rearranged the hem of her skirt so that it was folded more neatly. She felt exposed, in a way that was both more and less acute than it had been on Monday. Being topless felt more… natural, or at least less unnatural, than being bottomless with her shirt still on, but there was so much more of her on display, and having her legs open like this, framed by her skirt, felt obscene in a way that standing partially naked in the autoshop hadn’t.
Veronica ignored the urge to close them, taking the opportunity to put her hair up instead. At least she’d thought to put the elastic on her wrist during last period. Having to get down and get it from her things would have been beyond embarrassing.
“So?”
She flicked the ponytail behind her and out of the way, glancing back at Weevil. It was slightly aggravating to realize that her gaze still skittered away from everything below his belly button – at least there was that huge tattoo just above it as an excuse, she thought. She could claim to be reading the word ‘Ride’ over and over again.
“So what?” she said, relieved to hear that she sounded unconcerned. “Go ahead.”
He squinted at her for a moment, then shook his head with an exasperated exhalation and stepped right back into her space. Veronica was suddenly very aware of her shirtlessness, even more than his. If her breasts had been a little larger, they’d have been brushing against his chest, and as it was she could feel the heat of him a lot more viscerally than when there’d been two layers of fabric between them. She could feel him reach down and push her thighs a little farther apart, almost gently. Then he was touching her – Veronica inhaled a small, quiet breath through her nose, but she kept herself from flinching, or squirming, or trying to hide her face by looking away. Her gaze was fixed over his shoulder, but their bodies were close enough together that it wasn’t embarrassingly obvious that she was avoiding meeting his eyes.
She was still at least a little wet – not enough that she’d been especially aware of it, until it was brought to her attention by having someone’s fingers there, but enough that it felt noticeably different from the dry strangeness of last time. She wondered if he could tell it was from a while ago, this morning, maybe, or at least an hour or two ago, when she’d been thinking about this more rosily than she probably should have. The consistency always seemed thicker, when that was the case, but maybe that was just her, imagining things or having a weird vagina or something. Maybe it wasn’t noticeable, or maybe he wouldn’t care enough to read into it.
One of those things must have been true, because he didn’t get bitchy and annoyed with her again, or try to delay. In fact, the whole thing was going much faster than last time, Veronica thought, with only a faint edge of anxious panic colouring her consciously jaded internal narrative. Maybe he was into her having her shirt off, or maybe it was just because he was in a better mood–
She caught her breath sharply as he pushed in, smoother and less jarring than last time, but still painful. The initial resistance, the feeling that she was about to tear in half, was so reduced that it was almost gone, and after the first moment she could feel relieved, but the unpleasant overwhelming stretch was only slightly mitigated. It wasn’t too bad, once the first bloom of pain had settled down enough for her to get accustomed to it, but wasn’t enjoyable, even if the firm warmth of his hands holding her in place was unexpectedly grounding.
Make it look good, she thought, not sure if the sentiment was for his benefit, or the potential gossips who she desperately hoped weren’t actually peeking through the glass pane in the door, or even her own. He pushed in and out a few more times, breath hot where it touched her face and neck, and when nothing got worse Veronica took a long breath and let it out slowly, sternly commanding her body to relax, and reached out to put her arms around his shoulders. It felt awkward and silly, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to wind them around his neck like she actually wanted to kiss him or something, and there wasn’t anywhere else to put them. To make it less weird, she pulled him a little closer, finishing up by wrapping her legs around his waist. It changed the angle, which she hadn’t expected to matter, but suddenly it hurt less, and when he pushed back in with a grunt there was a slow flare of pleasant sensation deep inside her.
Veronica stifled a gasp. The feeling was a lot less intense than anything she’d had before – even the diluted, distracted arousal from last time – but it was completely alien. She’d never had anything inside her like this before until this week, and it certainly hadn’t felt good on Monday. Everything then had been had centered around her clit, or been entirely psychological, but… She squirmed a little, trying to figure out what was going on and how to make it happen again. Did she want it to happen again? Probably, right?
Weevil’s hands shifted on her hips, adjusting her slightly, and she hiked her left leg up a little so it wouldn’t slip, and – oh – okay – that was good, that was nice. His skin was smooth and warm under her bare arms, something which hadn’t seemed very important a minute ago but was becoming steadily more relevant as her body heated up and her breath came a little faster. It still hurt, but less, or maybe she just cared less, because this was – she’d been going to think that it wasn’t so bad, but then he made another one of those little adjustments, thrusting into with more vigour, and at the same time he’d come close enough that her nipples were just dragging against his chest, and Veronica bit down on a squeaky little noise of embarrassingly shocked delight at the lightning that shot through her. It was gone instantly, leaving her suddenly aware of how panting and worked up she’d gotten in the last minute or two, how wet she was now. If he just wasn’t quite so big, this would feel fantastic.
If she hadn’t already been aware of the spike of her own arousal, she would have been soon, because something squelched when he pulled back and shoved back in, and Veronica squeezed her eyes shut, cheeks flaming. She slid her arms up to his neck, pulling him close enough that he couldn’t possibly see her face. He went along, his hands migrating from her hips to the edges of her back, his breath hot and harsh against her ear. That was turning her on too, she thought with a bizarre sense of self-consciousness, but not as much as the shockingly intimate feeling of his chest pressed against her. He was so smooth and firm that she wanted to run her hands down his back and feel the rest of it, but that felt like crossing some kind of ‘boyfriend’ line, so she didn’t – it was more than enough to feel him everywhere like that, anyway, pressing warm and unrelenting against her breasts, her belly, as he fucked her harder, his fingers tightening against her sides and back.
She’d never touched this much of anyone’s bare skin, she thought with sudden disbelief. No one had ever touched this much of her bare skin, not all at once. It was such a weird line to cross with someone she barely knew – so much weirder than the actual sex. She could feel him breathing: not just his breath hot against her neck, but his lungs expanding and contracting in his chest.
Veronica wiggled against him. She had a vague sense that she was supposed to be moving with him, to demonstrate her participation or something, but she didn’t want to unalign their bodies, so instead she settled for arching against him on the in-stroke and tightening her legs, then twitching impotently whenever he pulled back. Maybe it made her look ridiculous, but it felt good, and it wasn’t going to dislodge him and make things awkward, and he wasn’t complaining – so she was fine, it was fine, it was…
He breathed out a rough sound against her neck, something between a groan and a sigh, and sped up a little, hips jerking more than they had been. Almost over, Veronica thought, trying to force herself not to be disappointed. If she focussed on the ache that was still stabbing at her, especially as the angle grew less consistent, it was a little easier to be glad, but her focus kept slipping because of the way he was pressing against her from the inside, and the way her nipples were aching from dragging across his chest, and even the way something was tickling her neck –
Weevil’s breath exploded against the edge of her cheek, and his hands dropped from her back to brace himself on the desk as he sagged against her for just a moment. Then he was pulling away, shrugging off her arms, and Veronica took a moment to consciously unlock her legs from around his waist. It took more concentration than it should have.
She took a breath, stretching lightly to try and get her equilibrium back. Weevil seemed unfazed – of course he did. He was breathing a little hard, she guessed, but he didn’t seem to be worried about what he was supposed to say or do now, so she decided firmly that she wouldn’t be either.
Instead she slid off the edge of the desk, pushing her skirt down, suddenly feeling naked again. Well, one way to fix that. She bypassed her underwear and bra in favour of getting her shirt back on first. She didn’t really need her bra that badly – it could go in her bag.
By the time she got sorted out and was putting her underwear on under her skirt – trying not to pay attention to how noticeably wet and squishy she was against it – he’d disposed of the condom and fixed his jeans, although he didn’t appear to be in any rush to put on his shirt. He had more tattoos than Veronica had realized – yet another one on his chest and several climbing up his arms. She didn’t see any other bulldogs, though.
“Well, thanks,” she said. “See you around.” She resisted rubbing her neck at the realization that it had been his tiny little beard tickling it.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” he told her with elaborate sarcasm. “We’ll be lab partners.”
“My grade point average forbids blowing things up,” Veronica shot back. She hesitated. “Are you going to move the desk back?”
He snorted. “Are you for real right now?”
“I don’t want anyone knowing we were in here,” she said tetchily. She’d been friends with Lilly for years – did he really think she was such a suck-up she couldn’t even leave school furniture misaligned without having a crisis about it?
“It’s a desk,” Weevil said. He was still shirtless, and Veronica was having trouble not looking. She wasn’t even sure if it was the awkwardness or the fact that most of her skin was still screaming at her that it wanted to be touched that was drawing her attention back to his chest, but either way she felt exposed by it.
She turned around with an exasperated sound, killing two birds with one stone, and dragged the desk back into place herself. When she turned around he was watching her, and when he raised a sardonic eyebrow at her, she realized he’d been staring at her ass.
At least that she could deal with; she rolled her eyes at him with pointed annoyance and snatched up her things on the way out the door.
*
Veronica’s body was still humming when she got home. It was embarrassing and exciting at the same time, and she kept thinking that everyone could see it on her, even though there wasn’t anyone to see – the other drivers were hardly going to go, ‘Oh, that girl in the LeBaron with 6BLA504 is completely horny, what a loser’. It wasn’t like she hadn’t come home this turned on before, from making out in Duncan’s back seat, or the time she and Troy had ended up grinding against each other until they nearly crossed a base, but this felt different.
Maybe because there was an entirely different kind of ache reminding her just how she’d gotten this way.
She schooled her face into a neutral expression before she opened the front door, just to be safe. Her dad’s car wasn’t in the driveway, so he was probably still at work, anyway. Her mom… well, she guessed there were upsides to things falling apart again.
Lianne was in the kitchen, washing dishes, and she turned as Veronica passed the doorway. “Hi, honey. How was school?”
“Fine,” Veronica said automatically. She was more interested in running the gauntlet quickly so she could get some privacy than sticking to her guns, especially when she was never sure what her guns were when it came to her mother.
“Do you want something to eat?” Her mom dried her hands and folded the towel back over the oven door handle. “You’re home late again.”
That answered the question of whether Veronica was imagining the tentative, hopeful note in her voice, or if she did remember getting brushed off the other day, after all.
“I had stuff to do after school.” She kept her tone casual and her thumb under the strap of her bag, not wanting to do anything that would suggest she was settling in for a chat.
“Pep squad?”
Veronica shrugged. “I dropped pep squad.”
Which Lianne knew, or she should have. She realized it, too, if her stricken expression was anything to go by.
“Anyway.” Veronica flashed a brief, substanceless smile and turned back to the hall. She half-expected her mother to call after her, and her relief when she didn’t was tainted with anger and disappointment.
She slung her bag at the floor near the foot of her bed and went into the bathroom to wash her hands, then braced them on the sides of the sink and looked her reflection in the face. It was flushed, just a little – not so much, she told herself, that anyone would notice if they didn’t already know. And her hair was lightly disarranged, but nothing that couldn’t be explained by the fact that she drove a convertible.
Veronica tilted her head to the side, reflexively checking for signs of a hickey, even though Weevil hadn’t really had his mouth on her neck – he’d just been breathing on it.
Which shouldn’t have been sexy, but the thought made her clit twinge, and she squeezed her pelvic muscles reflexively.
It felt really good, and she was wasting her time in the bathroom for no reason. Veronica splashed a tiny bit of water on her face and went back across the hall. She shut the door, locked it, and after a moment’s thought turned the light off. The curtains were sheer, so it wasn’t really dark, but she didn’t want the overhead light glaring down at her.
Then she shoved the covers back. Usually she was doing this after she went to bed, or before she got up on weekends, and she didn’t like the idea of being so exposed as she would be lying on top of the covers, even if it felt silly and juvenile to be getting into bed in the middle of the day just so she could get herself off.
In the interest of not being ridiculous, she pulled the sheet up all the way, but the comforter only up to her knees. She left her clothes on.
The waist of her skirt was tight, so she flipped it up in the front and slid her hand into her underwear, sucking in an audible breath. The exchange with her mom probably should have dulled her arousal, but it really, really hadn’t.
Veronica shut her eyes. The humming in her body was looking to become a fully-fledged roar, but that didn’t make staring at the ceiling while she did this any less awkward.
She was so wet – more than she ever was except maybe at the very end, everything silky and soft. When she pushed the lips apart so she could run her finger down and then up, from her clit to her entrance and back again, her flesh felt almost swollen under her touch. Maybe that should have been concerning, but it felt delicious, and she shuddered with the knowledge that it was from having sex, from spreading her legs on a classroom desk and holding onto a boy’s shoulders while he pounded into her. Her breath shuddered, too, but she kept it quiet. She was always afraid someone would hear.
Veronica rubbed up and down several more times; she kept thinking that she should get down to business, but it felt so good, the tiny shocks every time she hit her clit on the upstroke making her gasp or jolt, the immediate loss of that sensation leaving her biting back a groan. It was the world’s best-worst rollercoaster, and she would never come this way, but she couldn’t stop.
Would Weevil have touched her like this? Probably not, given how utilitarian the encounter had been, but it was hot to think about. It seemed like the kind of asshole move he would pull, working her up without giving her any satisfaction.
Her breathing was getting loud as she thought about it, as she imagined him pinning her against a wall to do it, as she rubbed herself harder, faster, the sharp jolts of pleasure getting more intense, the slower drag of her finger on the way down setting a gradual, overwhelming heat in her stomach that reminded her of how good it had felt to have him inside her. The usual anxiety about being heard wasn’t gone, but the heavy pull of her breath was also exciting, just the knowledge that she had less control than usual revving her up even more.
Was it weird to be turned on by your own body’s reactions? Narcissistic or something?
Veronica tipped her head back further against the pillow. Her skin felt hot and tight and so sensitive and tingly that her stomach brushing against the sheets where her shirt had ridden up made her want to moan. She should have taken her bra off, she thought with vague regret, frantically palming her breasts through two layers of fabric and almost whining when it wasn’t nearly enough. Or at least not put it back on when she had that attack of self-consciousness in the car. She thought about sitting up and taking it off, but then she’d have to stop, and she didn’t want to touch her shirt with her right hand and get stuff on it.
Instead she squeezed, making a small noise at the pressure and then closing her hand until she was pinching her nipple between two fingers and her thumb, rolling it between them with too much force to compensate for the excess fabric.
She’d stopped with her up-and-down strokes, Veronica realized – her fingers were circling her clit, gingerly, slightly wider than usual, some instinct still prompting her to drag this out as along as possible.
She whined. She wanted to come now, and she didn’t want it to be over for ages, and –
Veronica switched her hand to her other breast, arching. She moved her feet farther apart and bent her knees for better access, wishing she had an extra hand, or, or something. The nipple she’d abandoned was aching, and she was losing her ability to hold off, her fingers circling her clit tighter and faster.
Not yet, she thought, but it was nearly a futile endeavour when every part of her was doing its best to rush headlong toward the finish line. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter and bit down on the inside of her cheek, sharp and quick, and the brief flash of pain gave her the leverage to actually jerk her hand away.
Veronica lay there for a minute, panting, other hand still compulsively kneading and pinching at her breast, and then slid farther down, feeling a combination of excitement and embarrassment at just how slick everything was. She traced the edge of her entrance with one finger, trembling in self-conscious anticipation, and then slid it inside.
She’d done this much before, although it never did all that much for her unless there was a fantasy it tied into; it was mostly a way to stretch the act out a while. But it seemed different this time, now that she’d had more than just her own fingers inside her.
On impulse, she pushed further in than usual, but it left her wanting. She tried again, with two fingers this time, something that had always been too uncomfortable to waste time on in the past. There was a ghost of the ache from earlier, more a reminder than anything, but even so it felt good, full – she wasn’t so used to having sex that it had eclipsed several years of being unaccustomed to having anything there – but still not quite enough.
Veronica squirmed against the sheets, trying unsuccessfully to yank her bra up above her breasts through her shirt. She pressed in further, her entire hand damp with her own arousal, and moved her fingers almost wildly, trying to press at the walls of her vagina, to find that deep quivering sensation that had so quickly spun out of her control less than an hour ago.
It was something – she was so turned on that almost anything she did would have felt good at this point – but it wasn’t what she wanted. With a frustrated whine she pulled out, tossing her head on the pillow, and went back to rubbing desperate circles against her clit.
Everything spiraled quickly at that point, her mind groping frantically for anything to hold on to, too frantic to keep focus on any of it for more than a few seconds. The warm, smooth skin of Weevil’s shoulders under her arms – his hands pushing her legs apart as he filled her up, hot on her lower back, firm under her thighs as he supported her weight – Troy’s mouth sliding from her neck to her collarbone as she ground down against him – the agonizing delicious drag of her breasts against Weevil’s chest – Duncan’s hands on them under her shirt, eager and gentle and insistent – a dozen tiny snapshots of silly fantasies, Josh Duhamel, David Boreanaz, an imaginary hot tub encounter with Casey Gant she thought she’d blocked from her memory – the constant, overwhelming push-pull-push of real, actual sex, Weevil filling her up over and over again, stretching her out and pressing so inescapably against the inside of her and his breath against her neck – Duncan’s mouth on her neck, sucking and kissing and – she needed – against the wall, Weevil’s fingers rubbing right where hers were now, if he was here he could put them inside her, she’d take it, anything, Weevil’s fingers, Duncan’s, that floppy-haired boy from Gilmore Girls, leaning over her and pressing –
She cried out when she came, a choked-off sound she barely remembered to stifle, because it snatched her up and rocked her, body juddering as she tensed violently, shaking so hard the pleasure was almost an afterthought, but god, what an afterthought! It rolled through her in waves, too much to feel all at once, little shocks making her whimper because she couldn’t quite pull her fingers away from her clit, not until the sensation sharpened so severely it was almost painful and she yanked her hand away before she could lose the will to do it, letting it fall between her thighs as her whole body went limp.
God.
It was hardly ever that good. Once in a long while, maybe, but…
She lay there for a long moment, breathing hard, her left hand falling belatedly away from her chest. It was tempting to just stay like that, feeling fuzzy and satisfied and relaxed, but if she left her fingers where they were, they’d get wrinkly and they’d smell like – they’d hold the smell for hours no matter how much she washed her hands, so Veronica slid them free, wiping her hand off as thoroughly as she could on the inside of her underwear and trying not to touch the sheets.
After one more reluctant moment, she kicked off the sheet and slid out of bed, noting vaguely that the comforter had fallen completely away at some point. The upside to wearing a skirt was that she could just tug it back down with her clean hand and not have to worry about crossing the hall with her pants undone, but she still kept her guilty hand behind her back until the bathroom door was shut behind her.
Veronica tried not to look in the mirror as she scrubbed her hands, then washed them briefly again, because it felt wrong to slick her flyaway hair back with the same water that she’d used to clean off…
Her annoyance with herself for being juvenile enough to dodge the actual word faded a little as she realized she didn’t know it. Men’s bodily fluid she knew the grown-up word for – several, actually – but in this case there just… wasn’t one. No wonder she’d gone several years not-quite dodging the topic by thinking about it as a concept instead of a word, although honestly she did that with a lot of sex stuff regardless.
This was completely ruining her buzz. Maybe next time she’d get a washcloth beforehand and just throw it in the laundry afterwards. She’d thought about doing that before, but it had always felt somehow important to pretend that masturbating was spontaneous, almost accidental. She couldn’t plan it.
That was dumb, Veronica told herself firmly. It was fine to be weird and emotional and inconsistent when you were a virgin with your first real boyfriend, but there was no excuse for being neurotic at this point. She’d had sex twice, she’d contrived to enjoy it, and she’d just gotten herself off in a very intentional way to the extremely recent memory of getting railed by a guy she hardly knew. It was time to dispense with the ‘stuff’s and the ‘down there’s.
She put her ponytail back in. It probably would have been better not to take it out at all, but nothing killed the moment like putting your head back onto the hard nub of the elastic. Although maybe that had been overzealous. Even Duncan working his way in there – she winced – hadn’t been enough to put her off the experience. Next time she’d do better at blocking him out, but still.
Next time probably wouldn’t be as viscerally satisfying, either, since she wouldn’t be coming off a sexual encounter with an actual other human being, but she’d still have the memory of it, and like the first time, it was even sexier in retrospect. It was too bad she wouldn’t get to see how much further that carried, but there was a sense of achievement in having knocked out most of the big milestones and answered most of the big questions. First time, check. Casual sex, check. Have a good time, check. Orgasm… it was more of an honorary check, but she wasn’t complaining. It was better than anything that Jeremy had ever managed to do for her, even when he was present.
That made her smirk. A success, she thought. Wham, bam, thank you, Sam.
No regrets.
Notes:
Before the content notes, please consider voting for Weevil in this poll. I wrote an impassioned argument for it when I submitted him and everyone who's reblogged it agrees but somehow he's still losing to some X-Files guy and I have ABSOLUTELY no shame.
Weevil and Veronica have sex (again); it's much more enthusiastic than the first time, but it is immediately preceded by a conversation where they snipe at each other, and when she crosses a line he responds by physically/sexually intimidating her. (She deals with this by groping his junk, so it sorts itself out, but she is pretty rattled.)
Also, Logan gets physically violent towards Veronica in a way he's implied to also have possibly been to Lilly. It's not extreme, and Veronica downplays it in the narrative and doesn't consider it to be a huge deal, but it's there. I'm not planning on typically warning for everything that's potentially upsetting in these endnotes, just the dubious sexual stuff, but given how this fandom tends to be about Logan, this is everyone's final warning that I have no intention of character-bashing but my interpretation of his character is MUCH less charitable than most people. He is not going to be a main or major bad guy here, for the record, but if anyone has questions or concerns about this (or anything else), I am ALWAYS happy to answer/explain. You can find me on my tumblr (see the poll link) if you don't want to get into it in the comments.
Chapter 10: Private And Personal
Notes:
Not much by way of warnings in this chapter, but there's minor one in the end note just in case. (And while I'm at it, this chapter contains that tiresome brand of early-2000s-high-school homophobia-lite where acknowledging the existence of gay people is just hilarious.)
Also, since cam_elia_35 mentioned liking the playlist... I have two 'bonus' songs that have really impeccable vibes but which are ruled out by certain lyrics: Bad Thing by Ceara Cavalieri (the lyrics don't quite work but I'm not one for violence but I'm all for revenge is SUCH a Veronica mood for this fic) and Bad Idea from Waitress (heavy V/W soundtrack for this if only it didn't talk about being pregnant and cheating on your spouses).
(And I am once again asking everyone to go vote for Weevil, this time in round two.)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Revenge is private and personal, and so readily gets out of hand.
Ernest Lucas
Dinner was awkward. Lianne spent the first half of it trying too hard to engage Veronica in conversation, and all of Veronica’s short answers felt petty and stupid in their brevity – but she was too embarrassed by thoughts of what she’d done that day to give longer ones. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, and she wasn’t sure why it was, when it wasn’t the first time for any of it, but she still couldn’t quite manage to look her dad in the face. It was almost a relief when he had to step away from the table to take a phone call.
Of course that left her alone with her mother, which wasn’t entirely better.
“So what were you doing after school?”
There was a painfully transparent hopefulness in Lianne’s voice, like a child trying to get a potential friend to pay attention to them. Veronica wanted to ignore it, to act like everything was fine; she wanted to be sarcastic and shut it down entirely, convince her mother and herself that she was too jaded to care.
But neither of those were options, because she didn’t have a cover story in place – she’d been too fed up earlier to bother coming up with one. Pretending to be resentful was her safest bet, and that sat badly with her, despite the fact that she wavered in and out of real resentment almost daily.
“Does it matter?”
Her mom’s mouth trembled, and Veronica felt a lump rise in her throat. She tried to keep up a façade of unconcern, cutting a bite of her steak. She hated that she couldn’t stop wondering if the choice of meal had been a calculated attempt to get into her dad’s good books. Everything seemed fine between her parents, which should have been a relief, was a relief, but still made her antsy. The other shoe had to drop sometime, didn’t it? Maybe her dad didn’t know about the carefully-hidden stash of empty bottles in the garage, but he had to know something. He caught people in lies for a living.
She wanted him to know so that he could do something about it, and she was terrified of him knowing because he might do something about it – but if she pushed past the overwhelming tide of emotion, hushed the reactionary, confused five-year-old in her brain, the truth was that he probably wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. She’d never been privy to the adult debates and conflicts between her parents – her mom’s birthday being one of the few times it had ever gotten loud enough for her to hear – but after ten, twelve years, what other conclusion was there? She was old enough to deal with the reality that there were things parents couldn’t solve, that her dad wasn’t in control of everything. Surely he’d done everything he could do, by now; what was left except to live with it?
“I want to know what you’re up to,” Lianne said, injecting an upbeat tone into the words that didn’t hide the way her voice wavered. “You’ve been so quiet since you and Jeremy broke up. Did you go somewhere with your friend Meg?”
“I was having sex in the extra art classroom,” Veronica said flatly, unable to help herself.
Her mom set down her fork with an aggressive clink. “You know, I am getting pretty tired of this attitude of yours, young lady. I know you’re a teenager and everything seems life and death, and I know you’ve been through a lot lately, but that is no excuse.”
What would she do if I called her bluff? Veronica wondered, regarding Lianne uncompromisingly from across the table. If I just… said it out loud?
For once, the thought wasn’t angry or bitter – just sad, and disconnected from her, like she was floating somewhere watching a tableau. It would make a good one-act college play, she thought: the beleaguered, absent father; the alcoholic mother; the rebellious, sexually active daughter. The theatre majors would eat it up, and the production would bear no real resemblance to her family, even if they got all their lines exactly right. No one would care about the long periods where her dad was home at six on the dot every day, about the way her mom had snuggled Backup as a puppy and doted on Veronica when she was sick, about Veronica’s straight As and dreams of Stanford.
The daughter in the play would say, “No excuse? What if I chugged a fifth of vodka, would that be an excuse? It always seems to work for you.”
Veronica’s life wasn’t a play, or maybe she just didn’t have the guts for it. She said, “For having sex in the art classroom?” and mother shot her a look of such parental annoyance and exasperation that she felt, for a moment, entirely reassured.
Then the feeling faded into an aching kind of homesickness, but before Lianne could threaten her with some irrelevant punishment – given the state of her social life, who cared if she was grounded? – or Veronica could say anything else she’d probably regret, her dad came back into the room, his face so grim it stopped the sniping in its tracks.
“I have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry, Lianne–”
“I’ll keep it warm for you,” she reassured him.
“Is it the E-String Strangler?” Veronica asked, instantly feeling like a nosy kid but unable to keep from asking. She couldn’t think of anything else that would prompt this kind of instant reaction.
But Keith shook his head. “There’s been a shooting,” he said. “I don’t know when I’ll be home.” He came over to the table and squeezed her around the shoulders, then kissed her mom briefly. “Don’t wait up, okay?”
All three of them knew that Lianne would – she always did. But he said it anyway.
Usually Veronica liked that about her parents’ relationship. It was solid, straddling the border between wholesome and romantic in a way that didn’t make her think any icky thoughts about them. But tonight all she could think about was what her mom would be sitting up doing.
It wasn’t a school night, though, so there was one way to solve that problem.
“We’ll watch a movie,” she said confidently. “Or three. It’s been ages since I saw a good romcom.” She pretended to roll her eyes at him, and he cracked a very small smile.
“I like a good romcom,” he said, faux-injured.
“A yearly watching of You’ve Got Mail is not enough to keep a girl going,” Veronica told him. “Now go save the world.”
Her dad kissed her mom one more time and vanished into the hall. It must be serious if he wasn’t even taking the time to put on his uniform.
She took a deep breath, scrutinizing the remainder of the dinner on her plate. “So. Legally Blonde, Pretty Woman, or Ever After?”
“We’re not eating dinner in front of the TV, Veronica,” Lianne said, with the weariness of long habit. “We are not that kind of family.”
“But steak pairs so well with witty legal repartee!” Veronica stabbed the largest chunk of meat on her plate and popped it ostentatiously into her mouth. “Fine,” she said, after chewing determinedly for at least thirty seconds. “But if I have to sit here like a Victorian urchin until I’ve eaten all my food in silence, I demand popcorn later.”
Her mom smiled, reluctantly, and warmth crawled through Veronica’s chest. Maybe, she thought despite herself, everything would be okay.
*
It was okay for a movie and a half, but partway through Good Will Hunting, Lianne started insinuating that Veronica should go to bed. It was a Friday night, and it wasn’t that late, not to mention that she was about nine or ten years too old to leave a movie half-finished just so she could go to bed on time – but Veronica stubbornly missed the point, throwing out light-hearted insistences that she couldn’t go to bed until they’d finished the truly gigantic bowl of popcorn she’d helped her mom make. If she curled her fingers so tightly around the edge of the bowl that the rim dug into her flesh and her knuckles turned white, it was on the side Lianne couldn’t see.
Why don’t you just get the booze and drink it in front of me? she wished she was brave enough to say, even as the very idea of the words made her sick to her stomach. It’s not like I’ve never seen it before. At least there’s no dessert cart here for you to fall on.
As the credits slid up the screen, she helped herself to another handful of the popcorn, gaze grimly focussed on the screen as if she really cared who the key grip was.
“I forgot he left a note,” she said with forced casualness. “That always bugs me in movies. I don’t know, I think I like the way it is in my head better.”
“It’s always better in your head,” her mom agreed, but her attention was at least half elsewhere.
“Yeah, because, in my head, I’m the one Matt Damon is sucking face with.” Veronica kept the tone breezy, trying to ignore the way her heart sunk at her mother’s distracted smile. “Another one? If Dad’s still not home, then it might be a while.”
But Lianne shook her head. “I’m not watching three movies with you in one night, Veronica. I know you’re a big girl now, but there’s a line!” She smiled, charming, inviting a laughing, cheerful acquiescence. It was so like something she would say because it was true, instead of because she wanted an excuse to get drunk before her husband got home.
“Right,” Veronica said. “Sure. So why don’t we play cards instead.”
“Honey, your dad wouldn’t want you waiting up for him.”
“He doesn’t want you waiting up for him either,” she pointed out, hating how tiny and young her voice sounded. “He specifically said so.”
Lianne gave her that patronizing, ‘this is for parents to understand’ smile. “Why don’t you head to bed? If you want to get up early, maybe we can make your dad a special breakfast?”
“Are you sure you’re going to be up to that?” Veronica said before she could stop herself. Lianne turned her flinch into a blink and an innocent look. “I mean, if you’re up so late.”
She was such a coward.
“Don’t worry about that.” Her mom’s pleasant expression couldn’t quite disguise the way she’d drooped, the way her shoulders and mouth were even still inclined just slightly downward, as if the weight of lying to her daughter was pulling them down. “Waffles, okay?”
“I thought this was supposed to be a special breakfast for Dad.” What was meant to be a glib volley came out flat and harsh. Even if Veronica had been bribable, did her mom really think she was still susceptible to something so simple, so juvenile? She’d been perfectly capable of making her own waffles for years, even if they never came out quite as good as her mom’s.
Lianne blinked a few times, fighting to keep her face from crumpling, and Veronica hated herself for making her look that way, and hated herself for being weak enough to care. Abruptly, she couldn’t handle it anymore.
“You know what? I’m tired. I will go to bed, actually.”
She was tired – tired of being lied to, tired of getting her hopes up, tired of backing the wrong horse when she knew perfectly well it was going to veer right off the racetrack and into the nearest bar. That should have been enough to stop her mom’s quiet, “Sleep well, honey,” from digging its way into Veronica’s heart as she left the living room. But it wasn’t.
Veronica still had the bowl of popcorn, and instead of detouring to set it down in the kitchen she just took it with her to her bedroom. It wasn’t like she was really going to sleep, anyway; she might as well have something to chew on that wasn’t her fingernails.
Maybe this was better, anyway. It was never good when her mom’s drinking got bad enough it couldn’t be disguised any longer, but at least then they all knew. They didn’t have to dance around it like this, watch all the good times be slowly poisoned by never knowing what was happening behind the scenes. When it got bad it got bad, but at least when Lianne stopped bothering to hide it, you knew that when she was sober she was actually sober.
It didn’t feel better, but she didn’t have much else to keep everything from chewing on her brain besides trying to make the best of it. If this had been happening a month ago she would have called Lilly, who loved any excuse to be awake after midnight, and spent an hour or three distracting herself with TV talk and the latest Logan drama and this or that insufferable thing that Celeste had said or done, long after the clock had ticked past twelve.
But there was no chance of that anymore, and somehow Veronica doubted Meg wanted to field a call from her at 10:37 on a Friday night – or maybe ever, after today.
Still, she had to do something, so she opened her laptop, carrying it over to her bed even though she almost never used it anywhere but at her desk, and set the bowl next to her. Maybe fortunately for her sanity, it only took about twenty or thirty minutes of compulsively surfing the internet without really reading anything and making futile inroads into the remainder of the popcorn before she heard her the front door open and close downstairs. It wasn’t usually audible in her room unless you were listening for it – which she was.
Veronica got up, resisting the urge to tiptoe to her door, and turned the light out. Her laptop screen still glowed from its place on her bed, but it wasn’t bright enough to give her away by leaking under the door. On another day she might have gone downstairs – told her dad she just hadn’t fallen asleep yet and quizzed him about what the call had been, who had been shot.
Suddenly, it occurred to her that it could be someone she knew. Violence could happen to anyone, she knew that; her dad had drilled it into her head for her entire life. But a shooting – that was different, or it felt that way. It hadn’t occurred to her to worry that it could affect anyone she knew, not really. Especially since calling it ‘a shooting’ sounded almost public. Maybe it was just the rush to get out the door that had had him phrasing it that way, maybe she was reading too much into the fact that he hadn’t just said ‘someone’s been shot’, but suddenly she couldn’t help but wonder if this was some gang thing, if the person who’d been shot had been Weevil, or Ric from her English class, or that kid Rooster she’d been stuck with on a group project last year. Or if one of them had been the shooter. She’d never heard of the PCH messing around with guns, but that didn’t mean anything, and it certainly didn’t mean that they never tangled with people who did.
She couldn’t decide if wondering that made her kind of racist, or if dismissing the idea would be hopelessly naïve.
There wasn’t much to hear from downstairs, and Veronica risked edging her door open. If she leaned out into the hall, she could hear the murmur of her parents’ voices from the kitchen, her dad’s too quiet to pin down, her mom’s with a rising plaintive edge.
Then suddenly they came clearer, in a way that suggested they’d both stepped out into the downstairs hall, and Veronica pulled back inside her room reflexively.
“–can’t just let this be–” her mom was saying.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow.” Her dad’s voice was tired, firm. Veronica bit the inside of her cheek, wishing she could go hug him and say goodnight like she was a little kid, wishing she’d left the popcorn in the kitchen for him with a note that said something stupid like ‘POP in and say goodnight when you’re home!’
She shut her door, and stepped to the side, because her dad always caught her. He always knows, she’d told Lilly once. She would not put it past him to see her feet under the door.
The stairs creaked, and she knew she’d made the right call. From below, her mom said, “Oh, that’s it? You’re not even going to–” She stumbled over her words briefly. Veronica wondered if she’d been pregaming between the movies. Had she slipped some Jack Daniels between Elle Woods and Robin Williams, while Veronica had spent all of five minutes getting herself a fresh Coke? They’d paused partway through Good Will Hunting for a bathroom break; had that been a ruse? Or maybe it was just that half an hour was enough to start feeling it, if you got down to business quickly enough.
“I just had to arrest a pregnant teenager for shooting her mother’s husband dead because he assaulted her, Lianne, so I’m not in the mood for this right now.”
Her dad didn’t raise his voice – he almost never did – but the forced evenness in his tone was its own kind of frightening. Usually, the angrier Keith was, the calmer he seemed; if he was upset enough to need to hold himself audibly in check…
It must have been a very bad scene.
Veronica would have liked to backtrack, climb into bed and try not to listen to any of the conversation that might move into the hall, but she didn’t want the floor creaking under her feet, and anyway, she was still dressed, and her bed was occupied with the laptop and the bowl of popcorn. She stayed put.
On the stairs, her mom was sputtering a little, too far gone to have a good response but apparently not drunk enough to start slurring out whatever crossed her mind. The sound of footsteps closed the distance from the stairs to the hallway, and Veronica heard her dad pass, open the door to her parents’ bedroom, and then close it again. She waited – too long, until it was ridiculous to still be standing there – but Lianne never followed him.
Finally, at some point after time stopped feeling real, she pulled herself away from her position by the door and went back to her bed. She should move everything off it, change into her PJs, or at least a different T-shirt and some sweatpants, and try to go to sleep. Being asleep always helped – but she knew from experience that getting there was like torture on nights like this.
Instead she climbed back onto the bed, sitting cross-legged, and pulled her computer around to face her. After a moment’s thought, she Googled, ‘Neptune California shooting’, and then, thinking better of it when the results came up, added ‘2004’ onto the end of the string.
Nothing came up, at least not anything actually current. Apparently some rich spring breaker had taken his friend’s eye out with a paintball gun a few years ago, but that wasn’t anything that would tell her what had happened tonight.
But it was something to read, something to think about that wasn’t her mom, that wasn’t the exhausted resignation in her dad’s voice. Veronica set the popcorn on the floor and clicked through to the article.
It was the weekend. She could sleep tomorrow.
*
Weevil was tired as hell at school on Monday, but for once it didn’t bother him. Deputy Freaking Sacks had picked him up on some bogus auto theft charge on Sunday – which he definitely hadn’t done because he’d been on the other side of town stealing a different car at the time. It wasn’t a great alibi.
Normally, he would have been pissed off by the whole thing, but halfway through they’d switched from Sacks questioning him to the sheriff doing it, and it was hard to feel anything but smug when he was sitting there thinking about how he’d nailed the guy’s daughter. Twice. He’d had to work a bit to keep a lid on it, and it had seemed like the sheriff had been a little unsettled by his good mood – he’d gotten the gimlet eye more than usual.
They’d let him go in the end, without being clear why – probably turned up a better suspect, although the limited eavesdropping he’d been able to do on the way out hadn’t provided much information besides suggesting that they’d found something in the car. (Which should have been enough to tell them he didn’t take it – did they really think they’d have recovered it if he had? The Volvo he had ganked on Friday was already well and truly chopped.) But by then it had been almost 6 PM, and he’d still owed Angel about six hours of work, so he didn’t get home until one, and he’d still had to find something to eat, because somehow the kids had gone through all the food his grandmother had left.
At that point he’d just said fuck it and made something real to eat, because it was too late to get any decent sleep anyway. So he was exhausted, but a lot less pissed than usual. There was nothing like having something to lord over the cops, even if they didn’t know it, and having leftover tortilla casserole for breakfast and lunch, instead of dry cereal and cafeteria slop, didn’t hurt either.
Neither did the fact that he was still the big man with the club. Ric and Dante had been inclined to disbelieve him about Lilly at first, but the fact that Felix had known already tipped them both over. (He hadn’t mentioned the drunken almost-crying, because Felix was fucking staunch.) No one was going to disbelieve the Veronica Mars thing, not when she’d basically given him a five-star rating in front of the entire school.
It had rankled a bit that he hadn’t really deserved it, but he thought he’d redeemed himself a little after school. She might be tough enough not to let on much when she was having a bad time, but she definitely wasn’t as worldly as she pretended to be, because she sucked at hiding it when she was enjoying herself.
Maybe it had been a way to really close the fucking door on all that bullshit with Lilly – to burn that bridge and dynamite the supports so he couldn’t try and build another one he next time he got weak – but having everyone treat him like he was some kind of Don Juan badass sure didn’t make him feel worse.
So trying not to fall asleep in English class was less onerous than usual, even if he was probably going to need to have a couple stern conversations with the stupider members of the gang to make sure they didn’t immediately rat him out the next time he got arrested, just to get one over on the sheriff.
Not that he’d done anything terribly illegal – he wasn’t eighteen for another few months – but somehow he didn’t see that cutting a lot of ice with Sheriff Mars.
Then he got jerked out of his thoughts when Ms. Dunne called on him again, which was what he got for saying something accidentally intelligent last week or whenever. She even left it open-ended, which was a pain in the ass, because then he couldn’t even guess – ‘What do you think is the significance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’, like he even remembered what the fuck those were.
So he shrugged, and she pushed, “How is their relationship important, what can we learn about Hamlet?”
“He’s progressive,” Weevil said, wishing she’d shut up so he could get a couple minutes sleep on his desk.
“He’s… progressive?”
“Yeah, didn’t they kill gay people back then? If he’s got two gay friends then he’s got to be really progressive.”
That prompted the expected outburst of laughter and heckling.
“Eli – that’s not what I mean by relationship,” Ms. Dunne said, her voice pinched. That was all it took for him to slip back down to where he’d used to be in her estimation – just a dumb gangbanger again. It was what he’d been going for, so he ignored the perpetually burning coal of outrage in his stomach and said, in his most obviously provocative voice, “Sure, but have you ever met a straight guy named Rosencrantz?”
“Okay, but he did kill them, though,” some girl called from the back.
“He killed everybody,” Weevil argued, grinning. It was the one thing he remembered about the play. “That’s equality.”
Then he slumped back over his desk and let everyone bitch about why Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were fucking, or weren’t fucking, or why it was prejudiced to say they were, or they weren’t, or offensive to say that hating gays was bad, while some of the burner white kids in the back made jokes that were way more inappropriate than what Weevil had said and still didn’t get yelled at by anyone. It was entertaining, anyway, and if they got really out of control, it might keep the teacher from calling on him for the rest of the semester, instead of just the rest of the week.
It was on his way out, when he was thinking that maybe he’d sleep through Health instead of heckling all the material and trying to score free condoms, so that he might be awake enough to pay attention in Algebra later, when someone’s fingernails sank into his arm.
He hated that he knew who it was instantly, almost as much as he hated that he went, letting Lilly drag him into the narrow storage room between the English and History classrooms.
It was nicer than a janitor’s closet, but they’d still only hooked up in there once or twice – because they were going to get caught, he’d told her, but the truth was that having sex while staring shelves of school supplies had weirded him out. It was too back-to-school-sale, and he’d always felt like he was defiling his childhood or something.
Weevil tried to focus on that and not the fact that he’d been yanked into a small space by a girl he had an increasingly pathetic thing for. He was pretty sure she wasn’t looking to suck his dick this time.
“What,” he said, trying for a lazily lascivious tone, and at least managing to avoid desperate, “you got something for me, baby?”
Lilly was rigid with something that might have been fury or might have been anything else. Urgency, maybe. He’d never seen her hold herself so stiffly, and both the emotion and the self-control looked unnatural coming from her.
“Why?” she said, voice clipped, and shaking with whatever she was suppressing. “What are you looking for?”
The lack of overt hostility threw Weevil, but he tried not to show it. “You dragged me in here,” he pointed out. “I’m gonna be late for class.”
“You don’t care about class,” Lilly accused him, still with that strange, tense holding-back.
“And you don’t care about me, but here you are.” Shit. Could he sound like more of a little bitch?
“Listen–” she flashed back, tossing her head angrily before catching herself all of a sudden and going still and strange again. As brief as it was, it was still hot as hell, even as it made his chest ache. She was up to something, he reminded himself, but it was hard to make it matter. He was such an idiot.
“Listen,” she tried again, doing a poor job of her usual nonchalance. “I just want you to leave Veronica alone.”
Weevil laughed, a harsh burst of half-amused air. “Don’t you think it’s a little late to be getting possessive, baby?” He couldn’t stop himself from circling back to the idea that she wanted him, no matter how many times he got his nose rubbed in the fact that it wasn’t true, but he could at least make it mocking, and leer at her in the way that usually sent 09er girls scurrying.
Although not Lilly. And not Veronica Mars, either.
“Veronica’s never done anything to you!” Lilly hissed, tossing her hair over her shoulder impatiently. She was shifting her weight around impatiently, movements sharp and un-Lilly-like, and it kept falling back into her face. “She’s a good person, and she doesn’t deserve this.”
“Oh, but she deserved you fucking her boyfriend?”
Lilly flinched, but some of her usual irreverence slid back into place when she retorted, “Oh, please, I never actually–” She shook her head, dismissing him. She was good at that. “Whatever. This isn’t about the lamest blowjob I ever gave, okay? This is about you dragging Veronica into your stupid stalker bullshit.”
He laughed at her – deliberately, but with real amusement. “What, you think this was my idea? It was all Little Miss Perfect – all I did was show up.”
She looked distressed – but not entirely surprised – by that.
Weevil pressed his advantage. “It was kind of a chore at first, but she runs pretty good if you test drive her long enough.”
Lilly’s eyes flashed and she pulled herself even straighter in righteous indignation. This was her; this he could deal with. That was all – it wasn’t giving him some kind of sick thrill to know he could take the brittle statue she was pretending to be and turn it into Lilly.
Fuck.
“You don’t know anything about Veronica!” she hissed at him, full-on pissed-off housecat. “Leave her alone!”
“I know she was right,” he shot back. “She’s your favourite toy. Running out of playthings, huh?”
Lilly flinched, violently. For a second he saw naked horror on her face, and something that might have been anguish, before she shut her eyes and took a deep breath, wiping everything away. Weevil waited, and she took a solid five seconds to calm down or whatever she was doing. It was too weird to interrupt.
Then she opened her eyes and shook her hair back from her face again, not bothering to flip it over her shoulder. Her grey eyes looked even bigger than usual, and Weevil felt his skin tingle.
Lilly smiled, fresh and bright as always, and his gut clenched, misgiving and arousal tugging him back, and forward. He ignored both and stayed put, refusing to balk.
“Listen,” she said, with a toss of her hair that was entirely for effect, “you got what you wanted, right? So I’m asking you to leave her alone. Veronica can’t keep up with you anyway.” She hesitated, like she knew what she was about to say was a bad idea. Weevil clenched his fists. “Not like I can.”
Did she really think he was that stupid? The fact that he almost was only made him angrier. Most of his chest was caving in with desperate urgency (grab her and show her what there is to keep up with, as long as you keep her distracted she won’t leave again), while the part of his brain that sounded like Gus sneered that he was an idiot getting led around by his cock and he should put her in her place and then walk away.
He did neither, but he was starting to think it was paralysis or cowardice, not strength of will.
“Oh, yeah?” he managed, hoping the words sounded biting instead of choked. “You were pretty slow on the draw last week.”
A muscle twitched in her cheek, then disappeared under her bright, peppy façade. “Well, I’m making up for it now! Come on, Weevil, you’re smart…” She let it trail off enticingly, like he didn’t know she was patronizing him.
“Yeah? I don’t know, maybe you need to spell it out for me.” He kept his voice flat, not wanting to risk sliding into anything resembling banter. Even if it started out harsh, somehow it always ended up as some kind of desperate flirtation when she was involved.
Lilly sighed with pretended unconcern. “Listen, I know you’re not the kind of guy who does something for nothing. I can respect that!” she added, twinkling at him. Weevil set his jaw and didn’t respond.
“So – what’s the something that would make it worth your while?” She tilted her head to the side.
He just looked at her stone-faced, not trusting himself to speak. After a moment Lilly huffed with annoyance.
“To leave Veronica alone,” she elaborated with deliberate condescension.
Weevil crossed his arms across his chest to keep from reaching for her. “What do you think I want.” He fought to keep his voice even, to make it a challenge instead of a capitulation.
Lilly eyed him cautiously from beneath the casual shrug she threw in his direction. “I don’t know. A new bike?”
He snorted violently. “A new one? You know how much work I’ve put into that thing? Nothing new’s as good as what I’ve got, baby.”
She shrugged again. “So a new paint job, then. Whatever you want.” She tilted her head in a way that exposed the curve of her neck, strands of blonde hair caressing her skin as they slid away, and Weevil’s fingers twitched against his chest. She couldn’t see, he told himself. Don’t react.
But he wasn’t great at ‘not reacting’ at the best of times, and when it came to Lilly –
“Or, if you still mean all that stuff that you said…” She did that little princess shrug-head-shake combo that almost looked like a curtsey. “I mean, it’s not like I’m getting back with Logan, so–” The carefree smile cracked for a moment before she pasted it back on. “You’re in a good bargaining position. If you really wanted…”
Weevil took a step forward, reflexively. He tried to make it look threatening, instead of pathetically eager, because he couldn’t bring himself to step back.
“Yeah?” he said, the words coming out, rough, on his second try, his mouth dry. “If I really wanted, what?”
The last word landed with more force than he’d intended, all the harsh emphasis he’d been trying and failing to put into the sentence condensed in that one syllable, and Lilly flinched.
“I–” She glanced, jumpy, over his shoulder at the door, and Weevil was suddenly disgusted with himself, and her, and the whole fucking situation. No way did she mean any of it, and he would have known that anyway, but after yesterday? After he’d exposed her real boyfriend in the nastiest way he could possibly think of? There was no way she didn’t hate his guts. There was no way – no way – he was going to find the concept of some kind of transactional girlfriend appealing, not even if half of him was aching to pull her into his arms and murmur, ‘Baby, don’t be scared, I’d never hurt you,’ and the other was desperate to shove her up against the shelves and fuck her until she remembered what she was missing.
He jerked himself backward instead, playing a tight reel in his head of how pathetic it would be to drag her around while she pretended to care about him to keep himself from caving like wet cardboard. It was too heady an idea to ignore entirely – having someone like her, to make the whole school talk; having the daughter of the 09er acknowledge him publicly; having Lilly. But it wouldn’t mean anything. It was all hollow, and that would turn him crazy.
And he was not Lilly Kane’s little bitch.
“You got nothing I want,” he gritted out.
She stared at him, all grey eyes and smooth pale skin, and they froze that way for a moment, gazes caught and held like magnets.
Then he swallowed hard, once – twice – and jerked himself around. He slammed out of the storage room before he could change his mind, leaving her there.
*
Veronica had determined she was going to eat lunch in the main area on Monday. It was what she usually did, but in this case she had very particular plans about picking herself a table and aggressively ignoring anyone who stared or mocked her. It wasn’t a bad plan – elegant, simple, easy to follow. Of course, it was also so simplistic it was barely a plan, but she’d had it in her head since at least Friday, so it counted.
So when a shadow fell across her American History textbook, she was annoyed, and initially determined to ignore whoever it was. But she couldn’t help cutting her eyes upward, just for a second, and then she blinked in surprise and forgot about ignoring everyone else.
“Yolanda?”
“Hey.” Yolanda tugged the strap of her pale orange top back onto her shoulder. “Is it okay if I sit here?”
Veronica mentally recalibrated. “Sure.” She moved her history book a little closer to her in a gesture of welcome.
“Thanks.” The other girl slid onto the bench, leaving a solid six inches between them. “So… how are you?”
Veronica raised her eyebrows thoughtfully, stalling for time. “How am I…?” she mused.
Yolanda shrugged. “I heard that you and Lilly kind of…” She winced expressively.
Veronica gave her a tight, ironic smile. “Serves me right, I guess. Listen, I know it doesn’t mean much now, but for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
Yolanda looked almost surprised. “It’s okay. I mean, I get it. And I have Gabrielle now, and Anna to hang out with, it’s not like I’m miserable.”
“That’s generous of you.” Veronica poked at her neglected pizza. “So… why are you bothering with me, then? I’m pretty sure Gabrielle never stabbed you in the back.”
Yolanda smiled. “I think that’s a little extreme?” she suggested.
Veronica shrugged self-deprecatingly. “Even if it’s not, I guess I paid for it already, huh?”
“I can’t believe she had the guts to lose it over her boyfriend kissing me,” Yolanda said, shaking her head. Her tone was a lot less nasty than Veronica’s would have been, if it was her. “And was she really sleeping with that Weevil guy the whole time?”
“I don’t know,” Veronica said, scrupulously honest. She certainly didn’t owe Lilly the truth, but she probably owed Yolanda. “It was for a while last year – I only found out after, and I told myself it was only while they were broken up, but…”
Yolanda raised an eyebrow and inclined her head knowingly. “But – yeah, right.”
“I should have known, after the way she made out with Dick at Shelly’s Christmas party last year.” Veronica snorted. “But she told me she was drunk, and not to tell Logan because they’d just gotten back together and it would never happen again. And I’m an idiot.”
“It’s not stupid to trust your friends.”
Veronica just shrugged. She couldn’t even rely on her own mother not to lie to her – you’d think she would have learned not to have that kind of faith in people.
“Besides, didn’t she always use to talk about how crazy jealous and violent Logan was? I can see why you wouldn’t want that, you know, to come back on her.”
Veronica raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I thought you liked jealousy in a man.”
“I’m not interested in Logan! He kissed me, remember?” For a second Veronica thought she’d offended her, but then Yolanda shook her head and laughed. “Of course you remember that.” She shrugged. “I like a guy who wants to know where I was, and who was there, if he couldn’t come, you know? Not a guy who starts fights with whoever I talk to when he can.”
Veronica laughed. “Okay, sure. That’s fair.” There was a comfortable pause. “So…”
“What am I doing here?” Yolanda pushed her hair behind one shoulder, frowning thoughtfully. “I guess I just wanted to say… are you okay?”
No, Veronica contemplated answering. I slept until two on Saturday because I was up all night wondering how much progress my mom had made on the Jack Daniels. Oh, you meant Lilly? Whoops.
“Why don’t you poll the student body?” she said. “I bet they have an opinion.”
Yolanda laughed, but the twist of her mouth was a little sad. “Oh, probably. I try not to pay attention to stuff like that.” She cast a dubious glance at Veronica’s floppy pizza. “You can sit with me and Gabrielle if you want.”
“Why?” It sounded blunter than she liked, so Veronica amended, “I didn’t exactly stick my neck out for you. It’s cool you’re not holding a grudge, but that doesn’t mean you have to be nice to me. I don’t know why you’d want to.”
“Honestly? I thought about it a lot, and… I mean, I like to think I would have handled things differently, if it was me? I did at first, but now… I really don’t know. I probably would have done the exact same thing as you.”
Veronica didn’t know if that made anything better, but she didn’t have so many people eager to give her the benefit of the doubt that she really wanted to argue. “Maybe. But you didn’t.”
Yolanda smiled. “Well, if you decide you want to…”
“I’ll think about it.” Veronica tilted her head thoughtfully. “You could always just come sit with me at the slut table again.” She shrugged with performative casualness, and Yolanda laughed.
“I think–”
She stopped in surprise, which drew Veronica’s attention to the fact that Weevil had positioned himself meaningfully just inside her sightline. She might not have bothered acknowledging him unless he actually said something, but Yolanda had already made that look ridiculous, so she raised an eyebrow and said, archly, “Yes?”
“I want to talk to you,” he said.
“So talk.” Veronica nodded elaborately at the rest of the table, conspicuously empty except for her and Yolanda.
“Privately,” he amended meaningfully. Veronica delayed answering. She wasn’t sure if talk privately meant ‘talk privately’ or ‘talk privately…’ but either way she wasn’t enthused. There were only fifteen minutes left in lunch, and she didn’t really want to waste it making conversation with him – and if this was some kind of uncharacteristically subtle innuendo, that wasn’t appealing either. She wasn’t in the mood for some kind of impromptu hookup, and it was annoying that he thought he could apparently just snap his fingers for her.
“I don’t have time to talk privately,” she said. Yolanda raised her eyebrows, but she didn’t comment, and Veronica felt something almost like fondness. She’d forgotten how cool the other girl was.
Weevil rolled his eyes and jerked his head toward the shaded walkway next to the school. “Come on.”
Well, it wasn’t like she’d really been going to eat that pizza anyway. Pizza should not be square. With a put-upon sigh, she closed her history book and got up reluctantly.
He ushered her over to a mostly-secluded part of the walkway and actually stopped there, to Veronica’s mild surprise.
“You were right,” he told her, with grim satisfaction.
“What?” It wasn’t the smoothest response, but Veronica tried not to wince. He didn’t need to see her second-guessing herself.
“Lilly was all over me this morning, trying to get me to give her toys back,” Weevil said, bitterly pleased. “She basically offered me free access.” He gave Veronica a tight, mirthless smile.
She blinked. “To what?” Lilly had a lot of money, but she didn’t have Logan’s easy access to famous people, and none of her connections would be helpful to Weevil. He didn’t want an internship at Kane Software; probably he just wanted to steal things and beat people up.
The boy himself was staring at her like she was an alien – or, Veronica realized with a sinking feeling, a fifth-grader. He raised his eyebrows slowly, while the general gist of what he must have meant dawned on her, and she tried and failed to act like there was no way her face was actually as red as it felt.
“And you said no?” she asked, trying for breezy and probably ending up with manic. “Or are you just playing both sides now?”
He shot her a disgusted look. “What, you think I’m stupid?”
Replying No, I think you’re a stalker seemed inadvisable, so she just shrugged and said, “Stupid enough to turn down free sex, or stupid enough to get back with Lilly? Because you’re pretty much an idiot either way, it’s just up in the air how much of one.”
Veronica was braced for a bad response, but his mouth actually twitched, like he thought she was funny. “Who says it’s an either-or thing? I know how bad you want to piss her off.”
“Someone’s impressed with himself,” she muttered, suddenly far too aware of the fact that she’d thought about him in order to get herself off as recently as yesterday. At the time it hadn’t seemed like that big a deal – it was mostly a collection of sensations and body parts, not like fantasizing about an actual person, and anyway she’d already done it once, so it shouldn’t have really mattered.
Weevil only raised his eyebrows and jerked his head to the left. Veronica looked, carefully so as not to be too obvious. It didn’t do any good; Lilly was looking right at them from partway across the quad, more serious than Veronica had ever seen her, and her eyes caught Veronica’s almost immediately.
It was hard not to flinch and look away, but she didn’t. After a long few seconds of deliberation she shrugged and turned away, back to Weevil. “Okay, yes. Point made. What exactly are you suggesting we do about it?”
She knew, but she wanted to make him say it. If nothing else, maybe forcing him to eat his words would stop I don’t stick my dick in crazy from popping into her head at the absolute worst moments, like English class or lunch with her dad.
“Well, you could come have lunch with us a couple times,” he said with false helpfulness. Veronica glanced over at the table his friends were at. A heavy kid with a neck tattoo that was visible even at that distance was telling some story that involved miming boobs, and Ric Fernandez was laughing at it with his mouth open.
“Mm… no.”
Weevil did not seem especially surprised. “So?”
“So, what?” She tilted her head to the side and twinkled innocently up at him, but relented when he didn’t so much as smile. “Yeah, fine, but after school isn’t going to cut it for the point you want to make.”
“Isn’t it the point you want to make?”
He talked a good game, but Veronica could see how much effort he was putting into not looking at Lilly. Beneath the blasé exterior, he was desperate to prove that he didn’t care about her.
Maybe turning down whatever gross offer she’d made to him was proof he was a reformed stalker (even if he wasn’t a reformed anything-else), or maybe it just meant he was running some kind of deranged plot to make her come begging on her knees like all the Spanish Billionaires in the extra-trashy checkout romances novels that were too ridiculous to do anything other than make fun of. Either way, Veronica doubted he wanted it pointed out.
“Oh, so this is just you doing me a favour, huh?” She shot him her most dubious look, but all he said was, “I’m busy after school anyway. Lunch is better. Tomorrow,” he added, when she shot him an incredulous look.
She should say no, Veronica thought. She’d gotten what she wanted, and anyway, this conversation was probably covering most of the bases that an assignation would. Getting entangled in any of this any further than she already had was a bad idea.
But Lilly was watching them, and if Friday had been about getting even, about making a point in a way that couldn’t be ignored, this seemed like a pretty good way to set the standard going forward: that she didn’t care what anyone thought, and she didn’t care what Lilly said.
“Fine,” she said, before she could think better of it. Why shouldn’t she, anyway? Following the rules had never gotten her anywhere. “I’ll meet you here first.” Putting on a show any more than she already had was dangerously close to making her choices about Lilly again, but it would probably be necessary for whatever he was doing. Veronica could be reasonable.
Besides, he was the one asking her for a favour now, no matter what he said about it. It was possible she’d been a little disappointed that the sex thing was going to be two-and-done just when it was starting to get good, but there was no way she was going to go chasing after some guy, even just for sex, and it was incredibly not worth it to try to find anyone else to have it with. Saying yes to something he wanted was different; it didn’t put her at a disadvantage, didn’t make her look needy or presumptuous, or whatever epithet boys used for mediocre lays who wouldn’t leave them alone.
Weevil only nodded at her, a swift jerk of his head, before he headed back to the table. Veronica wondered if she should have tried to unload her pizza on him. Teenage boys would eat anything.
*
Veronica could really have gone straight to the art classroom once the lunch bell rang on Tuesday, but she didn’t. Mostly she wanted Lilly to see her leave, but not needing to cart her stuff around was a pretty big factor too.
She didn’t bother getting food for the same reason. Besides, it was a waste of time. This wasn’t like doing this after school; she was very conscious of being on a clock as she swung her locker open. Binder in – condoms out. Hair up. Locker closed. Brisk walk to the main lunch area, channeling some no-nonsense executive in a derivative romcom, pre unlikely-love-induced softening.
She must have looked it, too, because some freshman goofing around in the middle of the hall almost jumped out of her way. Veronica allowed herself a smirk. ‘Scary’ hadn’t been the reputation she’d been trying to cultivate, but it suited her just fine.
There was an empty table diagonally adjacent to the one where the PCHers usually sat, and Veronica commandeered it before all the nearby-but-not-too-obvious options were taken. Her stomach rumbled, and she thought wryly that she was going to need to start bringing her lunch more often if this became a regular thing.
The idea should have given her pause, but it didn’t. It wasn’t like there was any reason it shouldn’t happen again. She wasn’t exactly planning on looking for a new boyfriend, after how things had gone with the last three – if she wanted to hook up on a semi-regular ad hoc basis with some guy she barely knew, why not? Especially if it would upset Lilly as much as Weevil had alleged. She was officially a slut now, so what was the point in pretending like she didn’t kind of want to, or finding increasingly absurd excuses the way she might have a few months ago? Might as well just go for it until he got sick of her.
She sat and fiddled with her hair for lack of anything better to do, taking her ponytail out and redoing it a couple times, trying to find the ideal location for it. Not that it would matter all that much if they went with the desk option again (there weren’t really that many alternatives, not at school), but she didn’t want the nub of elastic digging into her head if it went another way.
Veronica took a minute to look around for Lilly, under the cover of her hair. For a moment, she wondered if the other girl would skip lunch – or even school entirely. Yesterday couldn’t have been fun for her, she thought with faintly malicious satisfaction.
It didn’t matter, she told herself. This whole thing was about breaking free of Lilly, not just pissing her off. Going ahead with it regardless made just as much of a point.
Besides, she had a nagging feeling that doing something just because Lilly had told her not to wasn’t all that different, conceptually, than doing something because Lilly had told her to.
But then Veronica spotted her, sitting with effortless nonchalance on top of the half-wall that bordered the raised part of the lunch area. It was a completely different posture and location than Weevil had used to such good effect on Friday, but the similarity still shook Veronica sharply. There was something there, something to be said about why they’d come together in the first place, but she didn’t know Weevil well enough to know what. Maybe didn’t know Lilly well enough, either.
Regardless, it was a smart play on Lilly’s part – it added to the impression of being unfazed by everything that had happened, and she didn’t have to risk rejection from anyone she tried to sit with. Veronica was almost impressed that she was still managing to project her usual brand of casual insouciance.
That meant not overtly looking at Veronica, but if you watched carefully, she was flicking her eyes over every so often without actually moving her head. Then she would do the same in almost the opposite direction, where Logan was having a raucous conversation with Dick Casablancas by the stairs. Duncan wasn’t with them, Veronica noticed, and then mentally slapped herself for caring.
Then the table about ten feet away that she’d been keeping an eye on started filling up – at first with Ric and the tough-looking kid from the other day, knock-off Weevil, and then a few others she mostly didn’t know. Veronica waited until the kingpin himself showed up, then tossed her hair back, caught his eye pointedly, and got up to go inside. She didn’t look to see Lilly’s reaction.
She didn’t look to see when Weevil followed her, either, but she was only in the art classroom for a couple minutes before the door opened, so he couldn’t have wasted much time.
“You always do that?” he asked, nodding to indicate he meant the ponytail she was in the process of re-re-redoing. Veronica thought idly that the best description for his tone was ‘insufferably casual’.
“It gets in the way,” she said, letting an unsaid ‘you idiot’ do the heavy lifting. She didn’t actually feel like getting into some verbal one-upmanship contest, but she wasn’t going to let his opening sally go unanswered, either.
“You know what nobody ever says? ‘Hey, you know what’s hot? A ponytail.’”
“Fortunately, I don’t care what you think.” Veronica tugged the elastic a little less off-centre and put her hands back on the desk behind her, boosting herself up. If she was proactive about it, she didn’t have to worry about the logistics of the wall, or whatever else he might have been thinking.
“If this is going to work you’re gonna have to make more of an effort not to look like you just came from a tennis lesson,” he told her, eyeing her skirt with a frankly offensive distaste. It was the shortest one she owned – what else did he want?
“Who said there was a ‘this’?” Maybe she was shooting herself in the foot with that, but she couldn’t let him get away with being catty. The cool, take-charge move would be to follow that up by ripping the condom packet open and getting down to business, but Veronica couldn’t quite bring herself to touch him like that. She’d still never actually touched a penis, directly – not with her hands, anyway.
Besides, he was too far away, and she didn’t want to get off the desk.
Weevil just rolled his eyes and unfastened his belt, which was probably the best possible outcome. Veronica hitched herself up a little so she could slide her underwear down. She didn’t take them off, just made sure they wouldn’t be caught underneath her later, then extracted the condom from her shirt pocket. Maybe the short-sleeved button-down was a little tennis-y, but it wasn’t like she had an abundance of non-jeans clothing with pockets – it was harder when you were a girl.
“Here.”
He took it with a raised eyebrow, but Veronica raised hers right back and he apparently decided not to editorialize. He had to come closer to take it, and then they were right back in the newly-familiar position of having their faces far too close for comfort.
Oh, what the hell. This was ridiculous anyway.
“So,” she said, applying her nonchalance maybe a little too broadly. “If we’re going to keep doing this…”
“Who said anything about keeping doing this?”
She shot him a dirty look, but at least the annoyance creeping into her voice made her sound more natural. “I was going to say it makes it pretty dumb to have rules, but hey, if you want things to be weird…”
“Your dad had me in a holding cell two days ago – weird is a low bar to shoot for.”
That knowledge should have disturbed her more than it did, but mostly she just wanted to wipe the smirk off his face. “I hope you were nice to Inga.”
Weevil laughed, surprised. Point one for Mars.
“The point is that I don’t have the same restrictions on…” she shrugged, groping for the right words, “casual favours, as when it was a one-time thing.” It was possible he wouldn’t know what she was talking about, but she couldn’t come right out and say –
“This is a weird way to say you want me to kiss you.”
Veronica bit the inside of her cheek. He was so infuriating! This was supposed to have been one tossed-off sentence, and now it was a thing. “I don’t care if you do or not. I’m just saying, rules for a one-time thing don’t apply to… whatever.” She waved a hand, acting as if the vagueness was a deliberate lack of caring rather than not being able to find the right words. “Can you hurry up? I don’t want to be late for class.”
Weevil snorted. “Jesus. Are you brown-nosing right now? You seriously can’t help yourself.”
“I have plans for after graduation that don’t involve accommodation on the government’s dime,” Veronica shot back. She pretended to give it a moment’s thought. “Actually, I have plans to graduate, so…”
He reached out and grabbed her legs, yanking her right to the edge of the desk. Veronica narrowly avoided squeaking. “You talk too much.”
She had her mouth open to respond before he finished the sentence, but it never went anywhere, because his mouth came down on hers without missing a beat, and that made it pretty impossible to keep talking.
It was a more aggressive kiss than Veronica was used to – she’d never kissed a boy she wasn’t dating, or hoping to, and suddenly she was very aware of that – but it wasn’t as bruising or forceful as she might have expected from half-sneeringly skimming through the sex scenes in off-brand Harlequins. He didn’t have to force his way into her mouth because it was already open, and there was relatively little invading going on; instead he focussed his attention on her lower lip, tongue tracing along the edge and kicking off little sparks under her skin. There was just the right amount of suction, and Veronica’s whole body responded in an eager, immediate way it never had with Jeremy – not since Troy. She wrapped her arms willingly around his neck, revelling in the strange little tingles that spread from various illogical parts of her body, prickling up and down her sides, stiffening her nipples and running through her breasts, making the back of her neck flush. His mustache tickled the skin above her upper lip, which was strange but kind of exciting – like kissing an adult without the gross part where you were actually kissing an adult.
It was even better, it turned out, when you didn’t care if the boy you were kissing thought you were easy, or whether he was banging other girls on the side, or if he was going to turn around tomorrow and act like you didn’t exist.
It was too late to grab his shirt and drag him closer, but the kissing had done the job well enough; there was just enough room left between them for him to still put the condom on – at least, she assumed that was what he was doing with his hands down there. He’d turned his head just right to deepen the kiss to truly fantastic effect, and she was more focussed on kissing him back than anything, on his soft lower lip and his deft tongue and the faint taste of apple than anything else. The running awkward play-by-play she’d been so conscious of the first two times was fading into the background.
Then his hand was on her thigh, fingers hooking into her underwear. Veronica broke away to breathe, and then, because she didn’t care what he thought of her so there was no reason not to, she said, “You taste like apples.” It hadn’t been anywhere near the list of things she’d expected.
“Yeah, because I ate an apple,” he said with measured condescension, his warm breath hitting her nose. Veronica rolled her eyes.
“That’s not very ‘dog for life’ of you,” she quipped, shimmying to help him get her underwear down and her skirt up.
“What, you want me to consume exclusively motor oil and raw cigarettes?” he snarked back. Veronica grimaced at the thought, then sucked in a sharp breath as he pushed her legs apart and thrust in without fanfare. It didn’t hurt much this time, not enough to matter. She slung her legs around his waist, trying to recreate the angle that had felt so good last week, and dragged his face back down.
There was something perversely exciting about doing this fully-clothed, but it was insignificant compared to the slick shove and withdrawal of him inside her, the way it heightened and built on every familiar thrill of devouring someone’s mouth. Her hands slid up to the back of his neck, but she hesitated there – it seemed weird to touch his head without hair there to hold onto or run her fingers through. His fingers were deliciously firm on her hips, sinking into the softness above the bone and making her shiver.
“Maybe tequila,” Veronica gasped the next time they separated for breath. Weevil made a harsh, annoyed noise at her and she dodged his mouth to add breathlessly, “Very brand-aware.”
“’S fucking racist,” he shot back, shoving in a little harder so that she gasped and wriggled.
“Better than apples,” she panted, barely aware of what she was saying but not willing to let him get the last word. He was so deep inside her, it felt like she was stretching into a different shape. It was funny how that had kind of been the point, originally.
“Yeah, well, you taste like bitchy white girl. Shut the fuck up.”
His mouth came back down on hers, which Veronica was fine with. She thought she might have lost, but she wasn’t sure what the contest was anymore.
One of his hands was still tight on her hip, but she wasn’t sure where the other one had gone. She wished he’d put it back, because the sensation of being held in place while he fucked into her was really doing it for her, and having that tiny bit of extra stability would have helped her chase that in-deep source of pleasure from before. It was good already, the way he was pressing out against her walls, the too-fullness, the slight ache, even – at this point she could pretty much enjoy anything. And his mouth was hot and slick over hers, tongue sliding in like he owned the place. To prove he didn’t, Veronica angled her head a little more to the left, sucked at him in a way that had always made Duncan go crazy. Kissing she was good at, and Weevil groaned and thrust into her unexpectedly hard, and she gasped into his mouth and tried to drag him closer with all her limbs at once. There it was; that was what she wanted.
Then his free hand, the one that had gone missing, was sliding down the crease of her thigh, his fingers against the groove of her skin sending shivers up and down her legs, and he let go of her hip to spread his other hand across the middle of her back.
Veronica wasn’t sure she wanted him down there, though. He’d performed to good effect the first time they’d done this, but it had been awkward and intimate and embarrassing, and she was already enjoying this, so it wasn’t exactly necessary. She just wanted him to go harder, deeper, really get her going, and maybe finish quickly enough that she’d still have time to lock the door and get herself off after he left, since there was no way she was doing that in the girls’ bathroom, and the idea of waiting until after school was fast beginning to resemble torture. But every time she tried to pull away to say something he pursued her, kissing her hard and quick and breaking out what must have been every trick he knew – little nibbling kisses all around her mouth, tracing the edge of her lips with his tongue so delicately she shuddered, then more deep, consuming kisses she would have had trouble breaking away from even if she’d wanted to. She could have shoved him away to get a second to breathe, but that would have meant unwinding her arms from around his neck, and she really didn’t want to do that.
So she let him work his hand in between them. It was a more fiddly prospect than before, because he was actively moving inside her, but Weevil seemed to know what he was doing. He thrust in hard again right as his fingers found her clit, and Veronica moaned and shivered and clutched at him, feeling him smirk against her mouth. What an asshole. She dragged their mouths apart and used her legs to pull him even closer, sucking at his earlobe.
That drew a surprised breath, at least, although it was hard to be smug when he switched from long, hard strokes to short, rhythmic rocking motions to accommodate the cramped space between them. How did everything feel so good? She’d never anticipated this many diverse sensations, especially when so many of them were really the same in essence, and still so different to experience. She probably should have; she’d done enough kissing to have a vague idea, and sex was like kissing with a two-digit exponent. Thirteen, maybe. Or twenty-one.
Or seventy, because those short, rocking strokes had hit whatever angle or part of her she’d been trying to achieve, and his exploratory touches just above where he was inside her had resolved into firm, confident circles against her clit, just how she liked, only – god – and he was running his tongue down the shell of her ear in retaliation, which Veronica had always thought was gross until now. She was panting against his cheek, she realized; she’d completely lost track of what she was doing.
“Harder,” she gasped, because if she couldn’t trust her body to keep its wits about her, at least she could usually find something to say. “Unhhh.”
Okay, maybe be careful, if it wasn’t only noises she meant to make coming out of her mouth. He already had the advantage of a lot more experience; she didn’t need to hand him her vulnerabilities, even ones that felt really good.
“Or what?” he panted, breath puffing against her skin. Veronica shivered despite herself; that shouldn’t turn her on, but at this point it was hard to think of anything that wouldn’t. “You’ll talk tough at me?”
His strokes did get firmer and faster, though, and his fingers pressed harder, and now she definitely didn’t trust herself to talk, so she nipped lightly at his ear instead.
Weevil’s body jerked, and his hand clenched against her back, nails scraping at her through her shirt. She hadn’t expected such a strong reaction – but he liked it, she realized, as the tempo picked up even more, making her dizzy. Little sparks were kindling between her legs, under his thumb – shooting into her bloodstream and setting her entire body tingling and throbbing. Her skin was too tight, flushed, so hot she was sure she must be glowing like stovetop left on for too long. She could feel his muscles moving under her arms, even through his shirt – the fabric had been disarranged by their activity and her wrist was up against the skin of his neck and back. It was somehow warm even against her super-heated skin. And through all of it there was the relentless, intoxicating rhythm of him pounding into her, a beat she couldn’t do anything but helplessly try to match. She didn’t have much brainpower left for anything else, but she managed to close her teeth gently on his earlobe again, not even sure if she was trying to hold her own somehow, or if she was so far gone she just wanted to make him feel good.
He shuddered violently against her, dragging his dick inside her in some kind of sideways motion that sparked nerve endings she didn’t know she had, his fingers stuttering on her clit in a way she’d never expected and sending her off the edge so abruptly she almost didn’t understand what was happening. She shook against him, tensing, every tremor dragging some part of her against some part of him in a way that intensified the heat pulsing through her as she clung to him, her whole body clenching with pleasure and desire and a faint knowledge that she should try not to fall off the desk. Her head fell against his shoulder, eyes squeezed shut so tight she saw starbursts against her eyelids, hands grasping at nothing. Weevil groaned, and she felt it through her whole body as the orgasm tapered off.
He kept going, which made sense, she guessed vaguely. She was used to thinking of sex ending once you came but of course it wouldn’t, if the guy hadn’t. She didn’t mind, really; she felt so hazy and satisfied she wouldn’t have minded much of anything, and she was too floppy and useless to do anything about it anyway. But it still felt good, actually, him moving inside her – too much in the best way, decadent, almost. He was holding her by the sides again, which was probably bad because he’d get her shirt dirty with his fingers, but Veronica didn’t even care. She’d spot-clean it in the sink before class or something.
She wondered idly if when people talked about ‘seeing stars’ they just meant what had happened to her, coming so hard you squinched your eyes until they imagined bursts of light. It made more sense than just spontaneously seeing fireworks, and it wasn’t like she was disappointed or anything. It had been a really good orgasm; not as spectacular, objectively, as the truly exceptional one she’d given herself after the last time they did this, but maybe better, just because it had been so completely unexpected. She’d never come without warning before, without more than a faint idea that she might, because she was always the one doing the touching, and she knew what was going to happen. No wonder people got so dumb about sex; if she’d let Troy make her feel this way she would still be crying about him in a closet somewhere.
She was breathing on Weevil’s neck, she realized, and she tried to turn her face so she wouldn’t be panting on him like a dog, but she just ended up banging her nose on his shoulder. He didn’t appear to notice or care; his shoulder was a lot harder than her nose.
But it did give her more incentive to detangle herself from him, despite the lingering heaviness in her limbs, and once she’d unlocked her arms from around his neck and tried to sit up a little instead of being draped over him, he pulled back enough to be able to surge against her with more force, withdrawing almost completely before slamming back in. It definitely made the discomfort of the stretch more noticeable than it had been when she’d still been all worked up, but it was kind of hot anyway, sending a lazy spiral of heat through the pit of her stomach. Interesting.
Veronica’s legs were slipping; she hiked them up, which made him grunt and tighten his grip on her. Was he almost done? she wondered, remembering Lilly’s comments on stamina. She had no idea how long it had been because she’d completely lost track of time in the heat of the moment and the brain-melting aftermath, but as much as she didn’t mind him taking his time to finish in theory, she really didn’t want to be late for class. Plus, now she’d have to go do something about the fact that he was touching her clothes with fingers that had been all up in her… in her business.
In your vulva, Veronica, don’t be such a baby.
Maybe she should do something to hurry it up, but she wasn’t sure what. The ear thing was probably getting old – he’d think she only had one trick. Which was true, and it was a trick she’d stumbled on by accident, so it was even more important he didn’t realize any of that.
Experimentally, she tried tightening her pelvic muscles, remembering the noise Weevil had made when she came and clenched up around him. She’d never tried something like that before – what did you even use those muscles for other than sex? – but she must have done something right, because he groaned again, deep in his chest, and dragged her closer again, almost off the edge of the desk.
Veronica grabbed for the edge of it to stabilize herself, noting with more than a little satisfaction that he was displaying the already-familiar signs of being close – the rougher breathing, the erratic thrusts, a vague sense of clumsiness in the way he handled her, compared to his previous deftness.
He moaned heavily into her hair when he came, and the sense of warm gratification that came with it felt a lot more important than the minute twitch of arousal in her belly. Maybe she was inexperienced or naïve or dressed like Lynn Echolls taking a tennis lesson, but she was still good enough to make him do that.
Weevil helped ease her back onto the desk properly once he’d recovered enough to step back, which was surprisingly considerate of him. He was still breathing hard, and Veronica had to make an effort not to grin.
“So,” she said, her voice only a little breathy. “Good talk.”
He snorted, turning away, presumably to get rid of the condom. “Did you not understand what ‘shut up’ means or something?”
“Oh, sorry, was it supposed to be indefinite?” She shrugged carelessly. “I have to go, but this was fun.” It wasn’t the right word, but it was the best one she could think of – casual, no strings attached to it, sufficiently worldly for the image she was striving for, if not sufficiently jaded. “Let me know if you want to do it again some time.”
He rolled his eyes, leaning against the wall next to trashcan to catch his breath. He hadn’t done up his jeans or fixed his underwear yet and Veronica wasn’t sure where to look. Averting her eyes felt silly and immature; gawping at him wasn’t much better. She slid off the desk, steadying herself on it when her feet hit the floor. Her legs weren’t actually wobbling but they felt like they should be, that overcooked-pasta sensation still more present than she’d thought it was. Where had he put her underwear?
It was on the floor, inside out, and Veronica winced at the idea of putting it on. The classroom was unused, so it was probably as clean in here as a classroom floor ever got, but still. She couldn’t go without, though, not in the skirt she was wearing. Maybe she should get an extra pair or two and just keep them at school.
A backup shirt wouldn’t be a bad idea either. She glanced over her shoulder – it didn’t look like he’d left any obvious marks, but she still wanted to clean it up. And hey, if anyone threw lasagna at her again, that way she’d be prepared.
Weevil still hadn’t answered her, so she rolled her eyes right back at him. “Uh, no pressure, but if it’s a solid no you might as well tell me. No point in holding onto this key if I don’t need it for anything.”
“How’d you even get it?”
“I don’t ask your secrets,” she retorted. She might have overdone it on the sass, but he just looked amused.
“I was right,” he said. “You’re nuts.”
Veronica came up short on responses. She could say yeah, and you love it, or show up tomorrow and I’ll show you how crazy I can get, but both of those sounded like Lilly in her head. Finally she just shrugged. “So that’s a no?”
His gaze drifted over the slightly off-centre neck of her shirt – Veronica fought the urge to fix it – and slid slowly down her body, lingering on her chest and the hem of her skirt. “It is if you’re going to dress like this.”
“You want to buy all the condoms, fine,” Veronica said, doing her best to project unconcern. “I need pockets to put them in.”
Weevil reached into his jeans pocket – at least he’d rebuttoned everything while she was getting her underwear – and produced three condoms, grinning at her with infuriating smugness. Veronica rolled her eyes skyward in disgust.
“I’ll keep an eye out,” he said, all but snickering at her. Of course he was, now she had to try and pick an outfit he liked – like some kind of hotness audition – or give up on the whole thing. Neither option gave her back the upper hand, not unless she passed his stupid test and then didn’t have sex with him, which wasn’t great for her either.
“You do that,” she told him, trying to compensate for the lack of substance in her reply with sheer attitude. From his widening smirk, Weevil saw right through her.
She left him and his smirk in the art classroom and went to find the nearest bathroom.
Notes:
Content warning: Veronica and Weevil have sex. There's a moment when she thinks that she'd really rather he didn't touch her a certain way, but she can't really say no because he won't stop kissing her. This is more of a teenage-awkwardness thing than a consent issue - she explicitly acknowledges that she doesn't want to stop kissing him either, and that she could push him away in order to tell him to stop but she just doesn't really care enough to interrupt the rest of what they're doing. But the language used could potentially evoke concern.
Chapter 11: Live Through It
Notes:
General warning (as usual, honestly) for early-2000s-typical insensitivity, in this case a flippant reference to suicide and a misuse of the word psychotic.
I cannot believe we crossed the 100K barrier last chapter; I'm not even really halfway through part one. Um. (Pretty pleased with myself for having this up on time, since I had a work trip and a minor computer issue this week.)
Specific content warnings are in the endnotes as always.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
You can't avoid hurt. Your only choice is to live through it.
Rebekah Crane
Veronica had been assessing potential outfits for tomorrow for at least half an hour, and resenting every minute of it, and if huffing and muttering to herself was actually slightly enjoyable, she wasn’t planning on letting on to anyone.
She wanted something that was a little casual – no collars, ideally no buttons – but most of the options in her closet that fit the bill were either pink or T-shirts. She’d had a little too much pink for the time being, and the T-shirts were comfortable, but not exactly sexy. She could go with one of the tops she’d bought on that shopping trip with Meg – the light purple one was a little innocent, but not full-on tennis-lesson preppy, and at least the straps were the tapering fabric kind, thick enough that she could wear it at school without getting dress-coded. The other one was better, a dark puce shading into brown, but the halter was just thin ribbon strap, and even though the white flower pattern embroidered on it made sure the shirt wasn’t especially scandalous, she almost certainly wouldn’t get away with showing shoulders and collarbone.
It was the skirts that were the problem – most of the short ones did start looking like a badminton uniform when paired with anything pastel, and her only skirt that hit below the knee was denim, and wouldn’t hike very easily. Jeans were honestly probably her best bet, but the memory of standing awkwardly in the autoshop with only her shirt on made her reluctant to go in that direction.
Growling, she got up and rummaged through one of her bottom drawers until she found the grey-black skirt she’d impulse-bought last year. It was flounced and slightly heavier than any of her miniskirts, and she never really wore it because it was a little too goth-y, but she could probably get some mileage out of it now. With the right top it could be kind of skater-punk, which Weevil might maybe be into.
She kind of hated him for making her care about that. It wasn’t like it really mattered, anyway; he hadn’t exactly spent a lot of time looking at her clothes, had he?
But whatever – she was going to pass his stupid little test, and then she was going to find some equally demeaning hoop for him to jump through. Veronica tucked the edge of the skirt into her waistband, then held up both halter tops in front of it in succession. The light one just looked weird, but the darker one was pretty good. Maybe she could just wear a jacket with it. She had a dark red one that might work.
“Veronica? Honey?” Her mom knocked on the doorframe, peering around the slightly-open door. “Up to something important?”
“Just picking out my clothes for tomorrow.” Veronica set the halter top and skirt on the corner of the bed and started picking up the discarded henleys and collared short-sleeves covering the comforter. “Remind me why everything I own makes me look like I’m trying to get into a country club?”
“I think your wardrobe is pretty fashion-forward,” Lianne said with a conspiratorial smile. “Some day I’ll show you some pictures of what I looked like in high school – you’ll feel better then!”
“Flared is one thing, bell-bottoms is another,” Veronica quipped dutifully. She dumped the shirts into one of the top drawers in her dresser, intending vaguely to go back and fold them properly later.
“It wasn’t all bad, though,” her mom mused, picking up one of the miniskirts Veronica had rejected and idly folding it. “There were a few winning looks. Did I ever tell you I was prom queen my senior year?”
“No,” Veronica said, pausing halfway through shoving the drawer closed. “Who did you go with?”
Lianne shrugged, a too-casual movement that usually meant she was having trouble keeping her movements from giving her away, but her hands were steady and not even a little clumsy as she picked up another skirt and folded it. “Oh, just whoever I was dating back then. Your dad hadn’t come along yet – he’d graduated already and I didn’t really know him until later. We might still have his yearbook around here somewhere. I bet you’d like to see that! He had a lot more hair in the 70s.” She smiled fondly.
“I like him with his current amount of hair,” Veronica offered. She’d seen a couple pictures from when she was a baby where her dad hadn’t started going bald yet, but by the time she’d been old enough to form memories he’d been visibly thin on top. It was just how dads were supposed to look, in her mind.
“Me too, honey,” her mom said, a little too enthusiastically. Urgh. “But they’re fun to look at. And you know what?” She set down her pile of miniskirts and crossed to Veronica’s desk. “Do you mind?”
“Sure, go ahead.” Veronica watched curiously as her mom opened the laptop and tapped at the keys without sitting down.
“Here,” she said after a moment. “I wasn’t so bad myself, back in the day.”
“Mom,” Veronica told her wearily. “I will commit ritual suicide if you tell anyone I said this. But you’re still pretty hot, for a mom.”
“I won’t tell. Even though it’s my life’s ambition to be hot for a mom.” Lianne smiled impishly at her and Veronica rolled her eyes.
“Should I be concerned there are apparently pictures of you on the internet?” she asked. “They’re not of you going wild, are they? Because I cannot survive seeing that.”
Her mom only turned the computer to face her. Veronica studied the attractive blonde in her 70s belted jeans and striped sweater. “Mom,” she said. “This is a picture of Jane Fonda.”
Lianne laughed. “I had that exact same shirt, I swear. And I wore it better.”
“Oo-kay, crazy.” Veronica pasted on a patronizing smile, but her stomach felt lighter than it had in a few days – a few weeks, maybe. Things were still okay.
Cynicism niggled at the back of her mind, but she ignored it. She’d had enough of that lately.
“Did you want something?” she asked, picking up the skirts her mom had folded. “I’m not busy.”
“Do I need a reason to spend time with my daughter?” Lianne smiled softly, tipping her head to one side. “I thought maybe we could have a spa day. But we can make it a shopping trip instead if you need to revamp your closet.”
“That sounds nice,” Veronica said. “But it’s kind of late to make an appointment, isn’t it? Unless by ‘spa day’ you mean ‘home mani-pedis’, which to be clear I am not opposed to.”
“Why don’t I set something up for tomorrow, then? You can tell me all about school, and when you don’t want me to know something, you can pretend you just don’t want to talk about it in front of strangers.” She shot a sly smile along with the last words and Veronica laughed despite herself.
“There is nothing worth talking about going on at school.” She paused. “I think Mrs. Galloway might have bored herself to sleep in class yesterday, but other than that.”
Lianne laughed. “That sounds good enough to me. But come down and let’s do something! We can make something for dessert tonight, and then I’ll figure out the details and pick you up from school tomorrow.”
“Not unless you’re going to drop me off, too,” Veronica said. “I’m not leaving my car there, and I draw the line at being dropped off in a police car.”
“Boys like a girl who can handle a little trouble.”
She made a face. “Ew, Mom. And anyway, I am anti-boys right now. It’s not happening.”
Lianne’s face dropped in sympathy. “Oh, honey. I understand. But sometimes it’s better to get back on the horse.”
“That’s what I tried to do with Jeremy.” Veronica fought back the emotion that was creeping into her voice and tried to smile. “No boys. Except Backup. And if all we do is talk about him, it’s going to get pretty boring.” She lowered her voice. “He’s a bit of a square.”
Her mom’s expression only softened, but she said, “There’s more to school than boys! You can humour me and tell me all about your latest English essay. I’m getting old enough that that sort of thing is interesting, you know.”
Veronica rolled her eyes. “Mom, I’m not seven. I know you’re not old.”
Lianne reached out and squeezed her around the shoulders. “Of course not. You’re just young. Now, come tell your not-old mother all about your life and we’ll pick a place to go tomorrow. There’s some new nail salon on Chester, isn’t there?”
“And it costs about seventy dollars a nail,” Veronica said, but she followed her mom downstairs without protest. She wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
*
School wasn’t so bad on Wednesday. Maybe it was that she had finally shocked everyone so badly that they couldn’t come up with anything to say about her more scandalous than the truth. Maybe because Lilly had stopped texting or trying to talk to her, or because seeing Logan look miserable (whenever he forgot to hide it behind manic good spirits) actually made Veronica feel a little better, at least when she could keep from feeling sorry for him. Maybe it was just that she was in a good mood, or that viewing school as a source of fun G-rated anecdotes for her parents made it go by faster, or just that the end of Ethan Frome made everyone’s life look good by comparison – not to mention, made any and all of your questionable decisions look good. Could you go more wrong than suicide by sled?
Well, failed suicide by sled, apparently. Maybe having Ms. David for English next year wouldn’t be too bad, because no way could Pride and Prejudice be stupider than that.
Veronica sailed through to lunch pretty easily, buoyed by the knowledge that however it went, it would be immediately followed by the one class that reliably wasn’t a huge waste of her time, and braved the main lunch area without too much concern. She picked the first empty table she saw to sit at, but that didn’t stop one of the PCHers from whistling at her on his way past and calling her something dubiously complimentary in Spanish. Veronica graced him with a sarcastic eyebrow raise.
“No wonder you have so many girls falling all over you,” she commented. Maybe he did – he was the bizarrely cute-looking one, and if he had less of a chip on his shoulder he probably would be popular with girls, but in her hazy, inattentive memories she didn’t think she’d ever seen him with a girlfriend. Most of the PCHers hung with other bikers at school, so that might not mean anything either; even so, the fragility of a teen boy’s ego was a marvelous thing.
She’d hit true somehow, anyway, because he turned and said, “Oh, they fall.” It was just a little too emphatic, and Veronica suppressed a smile. Weevil could maybe even have pulled that line off, but for good or ill, this boy would never be Weevil no matter how hard he tried.
“Uh-huh.” She looked away disinterestedly, which made him huff with outrage, but someone yelled, “Hey, Felix!” and he turned and jogged over to where his friends were sitting. When Veronica glanced over, casually, a full fifteen seconds later, he appeared to be complaining about her animatedly to Weevil. It was too bad she couldn’t hear that conversation, she thought, amused.
Sitting around staring at her lunch was a recipe for ending up watching for Lilly, or cutting her eyes too-frequently at Duncan and the rest of them over in the very center of the sunshine, or even making awkward, too-early eye contact with Weevil, so Veronica dug out her English Lit homework and applied herself to interpreting more poetry between bites of her sandwich. It wasn’t exactly her favourite part of the subject, her opinion of the specific novel they were reading in regular English aside, but it wasn’t especially difficult, so it was a good way to occupy her time.
She finished before the bell rang, but by then Weevil and his friends had moved on to other conversation, and Lilly wasn’t anywhere in her immediate sightline, so it was easy enough to say she hadn’t looked for her at all. Easy, too, to justify getting up and going to her locker, with only fifteen minutes left in lunch, although Thom Lemky hissed a few imprecations at her as she passed him that made her want to go sit right back down just to prove she didn’t care what they said.
Counterproductive, Veronica, she told herself, severely. Thom was useless anyway; when he wasn’t hanging around being smug with Dick and Logan, he spent most of his time with Boris Isakov, doing chuckleheaded things like throwing heavy objects off the school roof and trying to do flagrantly illegal driving tricks in his dad’s Maserati. If his dad wasn’t a senator, he would have been suspended three or four times over by now. So would Boris, if he hadn’t been an ambassador’s kid.
It was embarrassing to think that she’d ever cared about these people’s opinion of her, even a little bit. Logan and Dick pulled enough moronic stunts, ones she’d always managed to at least excused Logan’s end of, that at some point it should have added up for her. Even Duncan, who she still liked to think was too steady and mature for that kind of thing, had tried to pull that ridiculous shark prank with Troy (and the less said about Troy, the better). Lilly had always managed to make the girl version of moronic stunts seem cool and sophisticated, but really, what was remotely cool and sophisticated about mooning passing cars from a limo?
Mr. Rooks was writing on the whiteboard when Veronica slid in the door, and he glanced over his shoulder with a smile. “Early again?”
“Have to get the prime spot,” she told him, smiling, and slipped into her usual seat.
He finished his topic headings and came over, perching comfortably against one of the nearby desks. “You know, Veronica, it’s nice to see one of my students actually eager to learn.”
“I think most of us are at least more eager to learn here than anywhere else,” she said, shrugging. “You should audit my American History class sometime. Makes this class look like an actual theme park.”
He laughed. “Well, as much as I’d like to think it’s my engaging teaching style bringing you in early, I think I’d be failing the ‘cool teacher’ test if I didn’t ask if there was something else going on.”
She appreciated the uninvasiveness of the approach, but Veronica really wasn’t interested in discussing any of the non-scholastic parts of her life with a teacher – even Mr. Rooks. “I’ve kind of changed up my routine, and now I keep ending up with a spare fifteen minutes at the end of lunch. This seems better than lingering in the halls.”
He chuckled, a little too knowingly for her comfort. “Okay. It’s not like you really need the extra study time, but far be it from me to talk a student out of applying themselves.”
Veronica smiled, politely but distantly, and he backed off, retreating back to the whiteboard. Maybe that made her an asshole – or a cliché, one more dramatically tortured student convinced their teachers could never understand them. But she wasn’t interested in hashing around the details of the entire ugly Lilly situation with any adult, especially not at school. Besides, what good would it be, when she’d have to keep at least half the story to herself, anyway? There was no way in hell she was telling anyone about the Weevil thing, and without it the entire thing lost its teeth. If she wanted to sit around sounding pathetic about being betrayed by her best friend, she could just start a blog or something.
Although maybe she could keep it in her back pocket for if anyone else started getting too concerned about her. The sarcastic confession to her mother had been risky, but it had gotten Lianne off her back. She liked Mr. Rooks too much to try to scandalize him on purpose, but it was amusing to think about. She’d love to throw Ms. James for a loop that way, even though it was possibly more ill-advised. It felt like a kind of power, knowing she’d done something no one would expect of her, that she could tell someone whenever she wanted and shock them – or not tell them, and keep knowing she had a secret.
Possibly that was fucked-up, but the ancient Egyptians had married their brothers and sisters, so what was a little dysfunction about someone she wasn’t even related to?
*
“Can you seriously believe that bitch?”
“Yeah, sure,” Weevil said, visibly not giving Felix his full attention – it would only encourage him. “But the thing is, they don’t exactly stay fell, do they?” There was some general laughter. “When have you ever kept a girl around for more than a week?”
Felix bridled, then rallied. “All I’m saying is, you need to get a handle on your girlfriend.”
The word was slightly mocking, but Weevil couldn’t help reacting. “Whoa, whoa, hold on.” Some of the others looked over with interest, and he reeled himself in. He couldn’t sound defensive, or they’d be all over him. The thing was that Felix had hit uncomfortably close to the truth – not about Veronica Mars, who was annoying even if she was just strange enough to be interesting, and not entirely good enough in the sack to make up for it… but about Lilly. Right now he was the legend that bagged Lilly Kane and slid it to the sheriff’s daughter right under his nose, but if any of it became about his feelings (and Felix had enough of the pieces to possibly be able to realize just how many feelings he had, if Felix had it in him to quit being an idiot for five seconds) then he’d be in deep shit. “Is that what you think?” he asked, lacing just enough laughter into his voice. “Because I think we may have found the problem – if you think every girl you bang once or twice is your girlfriend–”
Felix protested, but it was too late. The rest of them smelled blood.
“What, you been scaring them all off, Felix?” Thumper asked in a mocking baby-voice.
“How clingy do you gotta be to make a girl afraid of commitment?” Ric added.
Weevil forced himself not to wince at that one, nudging Felix, mostly gently, instead. He raised an eyebrow to really sell it.
“Yeah, none of you know what you’re talking about,” Felix said. He sounded huffy, as usual when they ended up giving him shit, but he wasn’t trying to sell it nearly as desperately as Weevil had expected.
“What, you got some secret girlfriend we don’t know about?” he prodded. “The last chick you hooked up with sold you out to the sheriff!”
Felix didn’t respond any of the ways Weevil had expected, though – a loud proclamation that he hadn’t thought Wanda was his girlfriend (and that she wasn’t so great in bed either), a diversion onto the lines of how at least he never had any trouble getting girls, a contrary claim that he’d do it again because Wanda was just that good in bed, mostly-empty threats to fight one or the other of them. He shifted uncomfortably, looking away, and then muttered, “That was a mistake.”
“Yeah, like I didn’t see you all cozy with her at school too,” Weevil said, but he figured he could let it go at that, so he let the words trail off casually, like he’d stopped caring, and the others mostly took his lead. Felix didn’t do more than shrug in response, which took some of the wind out of their sails too.
Bootsy took the opportunity to change the subject to some girl he’d had an exaggerated sexcapade with last year and if it was half bullshit at least it was a safer subject, and one that everyone was willing to share their opinion on it except Cervando, who was staring across the tables at Jasmine like he was in a schmaltzy teen movie. Weevil could practically hear the wistfully hopeful instrumental soundtrack.
He sighed. He had gotten a B- on that essay. And Angel wasn’t looking for any more help.
“Got something I have to handle,” he said, cutting across a truly improbable description of Bootsy’s friend’s breasts. “Back in a minute.”
Jasmine saw him coming, and she stood and flicked her curly hair over her shoulder, flashing him a smile. “Oh, look, it’s Weevil.” Her tone was just slightly mocking, but he didn’t take offense. Jasmine was just like that.
“Got a second?”
“For you, baby?” The friend she’d been sitting with giggled. “I got five whole seconds.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He grinned despite himself. Jasmine was fun, and she never expected too much. Maybe last year he should have seen if she was up for another round of hooking up, once Lilly had dumped him, but he’d still been all raw about it, sulking in his room writing those stupid letters she’d never even read instead of finding a new girl to fuck and forget about her. It was probably for the best anyway; it would have made things awkward with Cervando this year, not having that extra distance between their thing and the present. “I heard you need all your time for English these days anyway.”
Jasmine pouted, but not at him; just generally. “You came all the way here to make fun of me for failing?”
“Hey, you pass this time, you can do senior English next semester and still graduate on time.” It was allegedly what he was trying to do with Algebra, although his chances were probably worse than hers.
“What, you offering to help me?”
“You know I came this close to failing last year too – just glad I’m not stuck with fucking Daniels again.”
“I hate him. He’s such a hardass.” She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans, the jokey attitude fading for once. “I just suck at English, you know?”
Jasmine had a lot more excuse than him; he was pretty sure the only other person in her house who even spoke English was her baby brother. It should have counted for something that she never made obvious mistakes out loud, or that she barely had an accent most of the time, but of course it didn’t. “Well, I got a tip for you. My boy Cervando, he got me a B on my last essay. It actually sounds like I know shit about fucking Shakespeare.”
Jasmine crinkled her forehead at him. “That’s… weirdly sweet.” She patted his arm, then blatantly squeezed his bicep. “You after something? ‘Cause I don’t need published reviews to know what you’ve got’s worth having, but maybe you learned some new tricks since the last time we hung out?”
He stepped to the side, neatly sliding out from under her hand without actually backing up. “Hey, I got no complaints. I just got a lot on my plate right now.”
“Yeah, I heard what you got on your plate.” She exaggerated the innuendo almost into parody and Weevil rolled his eyes. Then she stopped to think for a moment. “Wait. Aw, no…”
Damn it. Jasmine wasn’t actually stupid, she just never really bothered to really think about anything. When she did, she usually caught on pretty quick.
“You’re not try’na shove me off on your friend, right?” She looked more annoyed than offended, at least. “Weevil. Come on. Just ‘cause you’re in charge now doesn’t make you my pimp.”
“Jesus Christ.” That one wasn’t worth dignifying with a response. “Excuse me for caring about whether your mother dies of a heart attack when you don’t graduate.”
Jasmine shrugged one shoulder, toeing the ground with her white sneaker. “Not a lot I can do about that.”
“For your information, Cervando likes you,” Weevil added. “He’s an easy mark; he’ll help you for free.”
“Long as I put out, right?” She looked up at him through her eyelashes, not really mad. It didn’t look as ridiculous as it had two years ago, when she’d had about two inches on him, but it was still pretty stupid, because they were basically the same height.
“Put out if you want, I don’t give a shit,” he said, which made her laugh. “I just want to stop hearing about how tight your sweaters are.”
“They are tight, right?” Jasmine grinned. “I don’t know, Weevil, he’s a sophomore.”
“You never regretted making time for me when I was a sophomore.” He leered at her, neglecting the fact that she had also been a sophomore back then, and that Cervando was technically a freshman who’d squeezed his way into a couple advanced classes.
Jasmine shrugged and sighed, but she cut her eyes across the lunch area at Cervando. “I’ll think about it. Carlos is getting boring anyway.”
“That guy? Jesus, is that the best you can do these days? You should be thanking me for the opportunity.”
“On my knees, right?”
“Well, you’re such a good Catholic girl.”
Jasmine laughed and dragged him closer by his shirt. Weevil hoped she wouldn’t kiss him – it wasn’t a big deal, with her, but Cervando was probably watching – but she just smacked a tiny one on the tip of his nose.
“Your abuela used to tell Mami you were the sweetest little thing. Guess she was right.”
“You repeat that, I’ll have to break your legs,” he told her seriously, but Jasmine just laughed.
“You don’t have to break ‘em, don’t you remember how flexible I am?”
He shook his head at her, lackadaisically ogled the friend to make her shriek and giggle, and headed back over to where the club was hanging out.
“Are you seriously making time with Jasmine Carrera now?” Bootsy asked, apparently unbothered by having his tall tale interrupted. “Because damn, man. That’s official legend status or something.”
“Jasmine’s easy,” Thumper objected.
“Jasmine,” Weevil interrupted, before Cervando could take a swing at any of them, “failed English last year. She’s trying to make it up, but she sucks, and the teacher’s a hardass. She needs a tutor.” He eyed the younger boy. “And even if she makes it? In which case she’ll be pretty goddamn grateful,” he added, “then she’s gotta pass English 12 next semester. So whoever helps her better be willing to stick around.”
“Yeah?” Cervando looked hopeful. “Hey, you told her how good I fixed your essay, right?”
“Never say I never did anything for you.” He slid in next to Thumper and Ric. “Now you just gotta fucking talk to her.”
Not even the inevitable snickering dampened Cervando’s grin, and Weevil rolled his eyes, but the truth was he didn’t entirely mind. At least this shit was simple. They hook up, they don’t, they date, they don’t, whatever. No weird tangled bullshit where you tied yourself in knots for someone who wouldn’t even look at you in public.
“Hey, I can do that, no problem.” Cervando kicked Ric under the table. “I’m just not stupid enough to do it with no reason. How’s walking up to girls and going Hey going for you?” He dropped his voice in a pretty decent imitation of the fake-deep thing Ric did when he was trying to score, and Weevil snorted so hard he almost hurt his nose.
*
Weevil happened by Veronica’s locker about five minutes after the final bell rang, with such casualness that she nearly rolled her eyes. She ignored him pointedly, but he didn’t go away; she honestly would have been a little disappointed if he had. She took her time packing up her things, just for the hell of it.
“Nice skirt,” he said, smirking, when she finally closed her locker door. “Not exactly country-club approved, but I bet it folds up real nice.”
“If I ever find out, I’ll tell you,” she said with cool cheerfulness, shooting him a customer-service smile. “But thanks for your unsolicited fashion advice. Girls love that.”
“And here I thought you wanted me for my body.” He said it like it was a joke, even though they both knew it wasn’t. “Guess I better start brushing up on my Hot Or Not.”
“Frosted nail polish,” Veronica shot back, even though she’d meant to brush him off.
“Not,” he said, which was technically wrong, although Veronica was inclined to agree with him, maybe simply because she’d had too much pastel for the time being, and frosted nails usually ended up being pink or white. “Sounds boring. Are you seriously going to come to school dressed like that and act like it’s no big deal?”
“I’m within the dress code.”
“You don’t wear anything with a colour on it for two years and now you’re vampire Barbie?”
That brought Veronica’s head up sharply. “How do you know how I dressed last year? Or this year, for that matter?”
Weevil’s mouth thinned. “Don’t get excited,” he bit out. “I wasn’t looking at you, I was looking at Lilly. You were just always there. Where’s Lilly? Oh, look, Veronica Mars. You were like someone photocopied her on low ink.”
That stung. How had he turned something that should have been an admission of weakness into a weapon against her? But she wasn’t exactly defenseless.
“Oh, because as long as you weren’t stalking me, it’s cool.”
He snorted mirthlessly. “Yeah, everyone knows looking at your girlfriend is only for nutjobs. God fucking forbid.”
For some reason that word threw her entirely. He’d thought Lilly was his girlfriend? Veronica had known they’d spent… a while, anyway, hooking up, and obviously he’d been into her for more than just that, and Lilly had to have known that, maybe even encouraged it – but it had always been an affair in her mind more than anything, even before she’d admitted to herself that Lilly must have been cheating on Logan with him; a secret, sordid thing, not a relationship.
But what high school junior was going to call the girl he was involved with, or obsessed with, an affair partner, or, what, his mistress? That was ridiculous. Of course he’d called her his girlfriend.
It was just almost equally weird to think of Weevil with a girlfriend at all. Didn’t guys like him have crime groupies, or, what did they call them – an old lady? Some girl who hung around him and let him crash at her house when he wasn’t in jail and looked the other way when he fucked other women.
Okay, maybe he was kind of young for some of that, but still.
“I would really love to tell you you blew your shot at… whatever you were after when you came over here,” she tried to make the euphemism sound carelessly disdainful rather than squeamish; really she just knew if she came at the sex thing head-on, he’d turn it around and call her conceited, “but actually you never had one anyway, so…” She wiggled her hand at him in a patronizing little wave.
“Oh, you got something better to do, huh?”
Veronica tilted her head and shot him a falsely conciliatory look. “I’m hanging out with my mom.”
Weevil looked disgusted. “Your mom?”
“What, don’t you have one of those?”
She regretted the words almost as soon as they were out of her mouth, because what if he didn’t? She’d gotten a little too comfortable giving back whatever she got, or trying to, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t retaliate if she really crossed a line, and she knew she wasn’t equipped to deal with the kind of thing she still remembered seeing on his rap sheet.
And of course, if he really wanted to fuck her over, he could just tell her dad what they’d already done. It wouldn’t be great for him either, but honestly she had no idea how stable he was. He had more control over his emotions than she’d expected, and she’d let that lull her into a false sense of security, but you could be unhinged without being manic.
His eyes widened momentarily, but then he recovered and flashed her a tight smile. “Not since I was ten. Guess morphine works faster than booze does."
Veronica felt herself paling, but as badly as she wanted to cut his legs out from under him, to wildly swing in self-defence, most of her couldn’t help but feel that she’d deserved that. Not since I was ten echoed in her head. Besides, if throwing his dead mom and surely-messed-up family in his face couldn’t shake him, why did she think she could find anything that would?
She could double down, but she’d lose, and they both knew it. She’d lost the moment she’d let on that her mom was a sore spot, and even more so because he’d been willing to throw his baggage out there like it was nothing, and prove he really was tougher than her.
She could slink away, call it an unsatisfying ending to their association, and hope the shame welling up in her stomach didn’t taint everything related to him, try not to run his words over and over again in her head, because Weevil had never even met her mom, and if he knew…
Or she could do the hard thing – the thing Lilly would never have done, that the old Veronica probably wouldn’t have either. It was strange to have the moral high ground on her old self for once, but a year ago she probably would have slunk.
Veronica took a deep, shaky breath. “I’m sorry.” She swallowed hard. “I didn’t know – I shouldn’t have – that was out of line.”
Weevil blinked, although it didn’t give her much relief from the gaze he was pinning her with. Mostly she couldn’t help thinking that his eyelashes were incongruously long. “Yeah,” he said flatly. He did not apologize in return, she noticed – even though, if she was trying to defend herself, he’d been cruel to her on purpose, while she’d only been cruel to him by accident. But she’d done it first. “So are you planning on making it up to me or what.”
It took her a moment to parse that. “I have plans,” she said, not entirely sure if he was serious. Maybe it was a power thing. It wasn’t like she’d never heard of guys having sex with a girl they hated as some kind of domination or whatever. “With my mom.” He didn’t say anything, and she added, not sure if it was a burst of inspiration or just desperate stupidity, “Want to come? We’re getting our nails done.”
She’d finally taken him by surprise, which gave her the confidence to add, “You’d look great with the chrome look. Very in, match your bike. Or you could get them bedazzled. It’s kind of tacky, but it seems like something you’d be into.”
He raised an eyebrow in studied incredulity. “Are you calling me tacky?”
It shouldn’t be so much of a relief, that he seemed to be forgiving her for what she’d said. But whatever dubious things she was willing to do right now, she wasn’t so far gone she was okay with throwing someone’s dead mom’s narcotic use in their face like that. It wasn’t someone she wanted to be, and at least he was letting her get out from under it. “You are the reason I’m dressed as Vampire Barbie.”
One side of his mouth rose in an immensely self-satisfied smirk. He’d already known it, she’d been perfectly aware he’d known it, but neither of them had been expecting her to ever acknowledge it out loud.
But that was it – no more self-flagellating give-away points. After this it was back to normal. Or… whatever they were doing, anyway.
To prove it, she eyed him up assessingly. “You could stand to make a bit more of an effort yourself.”
“You expect me to come to school dressed as vampire Ken?”
“You would not be believable as any variety of Ken,” Veronica said drily.
Weevil seemed to take that as a compliment, but nevertheless he retorted, “What, you never drew on your Barbies?”
She had, once, but that had been a disastrous attempt at makeup, not tattoos. “Nobody gives Ken a makeover. He’s not important.”
“So you’re saying I’m important.” He leaned back against the wall, pose relaxed. Veronica fought the urge to roll her eyes so hard she sprained her brain.
“Whatever makes you happy to think,” she chirped with the brightest insincerity she could muster. “Bye.”
She could see him blink out of the corner of her eye as she turned away, looking surprised she was actually ditching him. It didn’t bring them out even, but it made her feel a bit better about losing.
*
It was possible Veronica had shot herself in the foot with this ‘proving to Weevil he wasn’t calling the shots’ thing. She’d neglected to consider that if he wanted to get laid he could probably take his pick of biker chicks, whereas her only other options were guys who made her want to take a Silkwood shower just thinking about it, and that vibrator Lilly had bullied her into buying, which was still lying unused in the depths of her sock drawer, and tainted by association into the bargain. It shouldn’t have mattered, especially after all the ways their conversation had gone south, but apparently her body had already decided that him showing up meant sex, and she couldn’t get it to turn back off.
But she had to put him through some kind of test or punishment or something, because otherwise he’d think he could tell her what to do. The fact that she’d kind of bungled it and then had to give ground just made that more true. No way was she getting shoved in some box labelled ‘PCH groupie’. Sadly, it wasn’t like she could make fun of his clothes and force him to show up for school in a polo or something. He’d laugh her out of Neptune.
Although Weevil in a polo shirt was a pretty good image. Veronica took a moment to imagine the whole PCH tricked out that way, in full tennis-playing, country-club attire that would meet even Celeste Kane’s standards, and smiled. They could all stand in front of their bikes like a really incongruous boyband. Maybe one of them could drape a motorcycle jacket over his shoulder by one finger. Weevil would be a good pick – really show off the gothic script on his forearms.
It wasn’t much of a distraction from the low, frustrated humming under her skin, since he had pretty nice forearms, tattoos aside, but knowing her little imaginary album cover would piss him off did make Veronica feel a little better. She wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing that she wouldn’t be able to take matters into her own hands, since they’d probably be leaving for the appointment her mom had made more or less as soon as she got home, which didn’t exactly afford much privacy. But probably better to go out and get French tips with her mom than to give in, albeit belatedly, to her hormones.
Although maybe she’d go with something other than French tips, after all. That had been something she and Lilly had always done, trying to seem more grown-up. Maybe she’d get a nice dark blue instead.
Veronica pulled in and parked on the right, so she wouldn’t box her mom’s car in. Her dad would park behind her, even with the open slot; he knew she’d need to get out again for school in the morning.
Backup came panting up to her as she closed the door, and she scratched his ears. “No manicure for you, boy! They charge extra for four paws, and it’s a total rip-off.”
“Something wrong?” Her mom appeared at the door to the living room, flushed like she’d been exercising, although Veronica hadn’t heard any music.
“Backup wants to come get his nails done,” Veronica said, looking up as the dog pushed his ear against her hand, squishing it into her knuckles. “But I told him he’s banned after he ate the nail files last time.”
Lianne laughed, high and a bit too hard, and Veronica’s heart sank. “Wouldn’t he look cute with painted nails? Next time – you know, next time we do it at home, we should paint his nails too.” She wagged a finger at Backup, movements just a little too big, a little too uncontrolled. “But no mani-pedi for you today.” She paused for a moment. “Or a pedi-pedi. It would be a pedi-pedi, wouldn’t it?” She turned a dazzling smile on Veronica, who couldn’t feel anything but leaden resignation.
“Mom,” she said quietly. “Why don’t we go tomorrow? Or Friday, then it’s like a weekend thing. More relaxing, right?”
“What?” Lianne blinked and shook her head, her tone veering toward petulant. “Don’t be ridiculous, Veronica, I already made the appointment.” She rallied, aggressively cheerful. “It’ll be fun. Come on, let’s go!”
“What if we do that at-home spa day?” Veronica tried, even though she knew it was too late. “We can paint Backup’s nails pink, wouldn’t that be…” She trailed off at the look on her mother’s face.”
“We have an appointment, Veronica. In this family–” Lianne’s mouth wobbled, just for a moment, “we keep out commitments. Now.” She drew herself up with an attempt at dignity. “Go get in the car.”
Veronica looked at the hook with the keys on it. Her dad’s was empty, like hers, but her mom’s keys were there.
She could put her foot down and refuse, but it often didn’t take much to tip Lianne over from a cheerful drunk to an obstinate one, and even if Veronica won the argument, her mom would probably be sulky and disagreeable with the salon staff. They didn’t deserve that, and Veronica wasn’t sure she could stand the humiliation.
Instead she forced a smile. “Yeah, okay. But let me drive.” She jingled the keys in her pocket. “You’re always driving me places. Isn’t it about my turn?”
It felt like a stupidly high-stakes moment, the entire house holding its breath. It wasn’t like she had no other options – the keys to her mom’s Honda were still on the rack; she could just take them, hide them somewhere in her room, refuse to give them back, leave, even. But that would blow things up in a way there was no coming back from, no smoothing over. No matter how many doors she slammed or barbed comments she threw out, she still wanted things to be okay. She didn’t want her mom to hate her.
Then Lianne forced a smile. “Look at you, all grown up! Yes, let’s take your car!” She patted Veronica’s shoulder. “That’s a nice treat, thank you!”
When Veronica swallowed, it tasted bitter, but she said nothing. This was the point, right, letting her mom save face? Hoping the employees at the salon didn’t care enough to notice that she was drunk at four o’clock on a Wednesday? That there were no other customers close enough to talk to? That Lianne hadn’t hidden a flask in her purse somehow?
It didn’t feel like a victory.
But she still had to handle things, so she dropped her backpack in the hall and held the door open for her mom, using her legs to block Backup from getting out of the house. Then she slid outside, taking a moment on the porch to take a deep breath. Her mom was already in the passenger seat of the LeBaron, fussing with the seatbelt and shooting a bright, indulgent smile Veronica’s way.
Veronica forced a brittle smile in return and fished her keys out of her pocket to lock the door.
The afternoon passed in a numb blur – she’d forgotten most of it by the time they got home, although she knew there was nothing too awful, no drunken outbursts or dramatic catastrophes. Just dozens of tiny, insignificant flashes that felt endlessly shameful and humiliating in the moment. The too-loud comments. The clumsiness. Lianne’s insistence in calling Veronica’s nail tech ‘the Asian girl’ whenever she was (supposedly) out of earshot, no matter how much Veronica widened her eyes and hissed at her. She hadn’t said anything bad, but it was small comfort. No wonder near-strangers at school knew what she was like.
Veronica had put on music on the way back, to stave off any attempts at conversation, and at least Lianne seemed content to admire her new manicure and sing along off-key and two syllables behind.
When Veronica saw her dad’s car in the driveway, she wanted to collapse in relief. The dread followed, inevitably, the way it always did because what if this was it, the time that something irreversible happened – but at least it was out of her hands. She tried to find something to say as she shut the music off, but all she could come up with was, “Let’s go inside.”
Her mom stumbled slightly getting out of the car – nothing that wouldn’t have been explicable by a dozen mundane reasons if Veronica hadn’t seen it before, if it hadn’t been accompanied with a too-carefree, “Whoop!” She said nothing.
She was so tired, and not in an ordinary way. She felt old.
Backup didn’t greet them in the hall; her dad must have fed him. He was clanking around in the kitchen, probably getting dinner started. Hopefully not anything fancy, Veronica thought numbly. It would be so much worse if this ruined some kind of impromptu special occasion.
“Ah, the rest of the Mars family!” she heard him call over the clank of whatever he was setting down. “Returned suitably bedazzled?” He leaned into the hallway, smiling. “Since I’ve managed to extricate myself at a reasonable hour tonight–”
But he must have seen Veronica’s expression, or maybe he was just even more attuned than she was by now; maybe he could tell just from the way Lianne was taking off her shoes. Despite herself, Veronica glanced over her shoulder. Maybe he could tell from the fact that Lianne wasn’t taking off her shoes.
“Mom,” she said quietly.
“Hmm? What’s that, honey?” Her mom swung over, limbs loose, and threw an arm around Veronica’s shoulders. “Show your dad how pretty your nails are!”
Veronica’s nails were a shade of light purple which suited neither her previous aesthetic nor her current outfit. She didn’t remember picking it. She met her dad’s pained, disappointed eyes. The somber expression on his face made her want to cry.
“Don’t worry,” she said with an effort. “I drove.” She peeled Lianne’s arm away and took a couple steps, but once she’d put some distance between them she couldn’t stop. “I’m just going to…” she told her dad, hovering vaguely on her toes, desperate to get away. “I’ll come down for dinner.”
He smiled, and it was sadder than any other expression he could have made. “Go do your homework, honey.”
Veronica fled. It was as good any excuse as anything.
She could hear her dad’s first measured overture to her mother as she reached the stairs, but with an effort she tuned out his actual words. She didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to know, didn’t want to think about any of it. When she reached her room, she scrunched herself up against the headboard of the bed, her pretty purple fingernails digging viciously into her pillows, and cried.
*
She wore jeans and a T-shirt to school the next day and ignored anyone and everyone around her except for her teachers, sat with Yolanda at lunch to discourage anyone else from talking to her, and glared so hard at one of Jeremy’s friends when he looked like he was going to approach her in the hall that he actually stumbled, and decided to go bother somebody else.
It was hard to derive much satisfaction from it.
Veronica was so fed up with everything that she missed two questions in a row in Spanish, even though she absolutely knew how to conjugate in the past tense, something that just made her want to get out of school faster. There was nowhere to go but home, but maybe she’d drive up the PCH a bit, find a rest stop and watch the ocean until she could stand to be around people again, until she could face the familiar lines that had etched themselves back onto her dad’s forehead last night, until she could forget the way her mom had chattered mindlessly through dinner while the silence between her husband and daughter had gotten deeper and deeper, forget the way her dad had wordlessly gripped her shoulder before she went to bed, the kind of comfort that only made the hurt more poignant.
Maybe she’d take Backup to the dog park. She should join a club or something – not through school, which would be unbearable. But some kind of community organization, maybe. Painting sets for some truly mediocre local production of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf would at least be a reason not to be at home.
Morphine works faster than booze, Weevil had said. Sometimes she wished the booze would work faster.
Veronica froze, horrified in an aching, chill way that seeped into her bones and immediately turned them cold and brittle. Class was breaking up around her, but all she could think was no, no, no, no.
Sra. Hockley was going to notice, but Veronica still couldn’t bring herself to move. Sorry, Señora, I just death-wished my mother. With an effort, she forced herself to fumble with her pencil case – not really doing anything, just making it look like she was.
I didn’t mean it! she desperately wanted to protest, but what good would that do? She’d still thought it. And who would she even be wailing at, God?
When the classroom was mostly empty, Veronica dragged her things into her arms in a disorganized pile and forced herself to her feet. She wanted to drop them and – what? Curl up and cry? Run away? Start hitting things? None of those seemed appealing, or helpful, or forgivable.
Mostly she wanted to get away – not to run away, crying, but to sprint like she was training for the Olympics, until all she could hear was her own heart and she could pretend she was running for its own sake. Or to throw herself at some problem that actually had a solution, find a way to forget, just for a minute, by letting herself be absorbed into something else. Or – she made a choked, horrible noise that was supposed to be a laugh – chug a fifth of vodka until those words stopped echoing in her head.
Or.
Veronica didn’t have the wherewithal to ease her way gradually through the corridor, and her arms were fully, so when Garrett Fisher didn’t bother moving out of the way of her locker, she just shoulder-checked him, sending him lurching into Katie David, who he’d been trying to flirt with.
“Hey! Bitch!” He righted himself on Katie’s shoulder, and she shoved him away in disgust, but Veronica ignored them. She spun her locker open, dumped her stuff inside, and slammed it shut again.
“You are seriously damaged,” Katie told her icily.
“Probably!” Veronica told her, pasting on a smile that a psychotic clown would have probably thought was a bit much. Katie didn’t back up, but her angry expression faded into uncertainty. Veronica turned and walked away without a second thought. She was trying not to have any first thoughts, either, and she kept up a pace that made that a little easier.
She didn’t have the faintest idea what Weevil’s last class was, but she was pretty sure she could find his motorcycle in the parking lot. Or she could find the motorcycles, anyway; it didn’t really matter that she didn’t know which one was his.
He was there, joking around with some kid she vaguely recognized but hadn’t seen around school for a while. Henry Cortez, she thought. Veronica didn’t bother waiting for a break in the conversation; she just walked up and said, “Do you still want me to make that up to you?” over whatever maybe-Henry was saying about juvie.
“Excuse me?” he asked, borrowing a bit of Weevil’s threatening faux-indignation, but Weevil waved him down.
“Yeah, excuse Hector,” he said. “He’s been out of real society for a while. You wanted something?”
“Yep.” She left it at that, and Weevil laughed.
“You ask less and less nicely,” he said. “And you blew me off yesterday.”
“Definitely a mistake,” Veronica said tightly. “Definitely should have gotten my nails done with you instead. On the plus side I think this colour goes really well with your skin.” She held up a hand, not really caring if what she was saying made sense or not.
Weevil laughed again, but he sounded genuinely surprised this time.
“Wait, what?” Hector demanded, blinking at each of them alternately in confusion.
Weevil had made a pretty decent recovery. “Yeah, take off, huh? Tell Ric and Javier I’m gonna be late. You guys can get started without me, yeah?”
“Uh… yeah.” Hector blinked at her a few more times. “Uh, Weevil?”
But Weevil just waved a hand at him. “Thumper can fill you in. I got things to do.”
“I’m things,” Veronica said. She would have cringed away from something so tritely vulgar normally, but she was so far from caring about anything right now. “Now you’re filled in. Go away.”
Hector goggled at her, and Weevil put a hand on the back of her shoulder and steered her back toward the school, his mouth twitching in perplexed amusement. “Are you high or something?” he asked.
“At school?” Veronica asked derisively.
“So what the fuck is with you?”
“Do you care?”
He shrugged. “I guess not. I got a schedule, though, things to do. You better not be thinking you can just snap your fingers and I drop everything for you.”
Veronica shrugged back. “I don’t care what you do. If you’d rather steal cars and graffiti the Sheriff’s Department than get laid, that’s your business.”
“Hey, hey, hold up.” He grabbed her by the upper arm and physically forced her to stop walking and face him. “You think that was us? Do I look stupid to you?”
“Is that a trick question?” she asked, mostly by rote. She really didn’t care about keeping up whatever level of banter they’d established; she just wanted to stop thinking. Good sex would do it – bad sex honestly probably would have done it too, if it hurt as much as the first time. Given her options, she was probably making a pretty okay choice right now, and what that meant about her life was one more thing she didn’t want to think about.
“We don’t graffiti the fucking police station. I got bigger things going on, for one. What, you think every Mexican petty criminal is automatically a PCHer?”
Veronica didn’t actually remember the name of the kid her dad had picked up last year for the graffiti, but her thought process probably had been somewhat similar to that. All her guilt was already being used for something else, though. “I really don’t care.”
He frowned at her for a second, but he didn’t ask if she was all right or if she was sure she wanted to do this, just started walking again, held the door to the school for her with an elaborate flourish.
They got a couple looks in the hall, but a decent number of students had already filtered outside, and fortunately there were no teachers paying any real attention. Veronica yanked the art classroom door open as soon as they got there, which made Weevil raise his eyebrows when the key almost jammed, but she ignored him. Her ignoring game was pretty strong today, but still not good enough, which was why she was here in the first place. She undid her jeans, kicking off her shoes.
“Oh, just like that, huh?” He started backing her toward the desks, but Veronica shook her head.
“Wall,” she said.
Weevil raised his eyebrows, and she knew he was about to say something about how she hadn’t liked that all that much before, so she shucked off her pants before he could.
“Damn, okay.” He spun them around and backed her toward the wall next to the door instead, and Veronica was swamped with an embarrassingly heavy wave of gratitude. She kissed him before she could do something stupid like start talking, and he went along enthusiastically enough, pursuing her mouth until her back hit the wall and they were well and truly entangled.
The kiss was hot and wet and distracting, and Veronica dived into it eagerly, her rigid posture easing as he licked at the inside of her mouth, pressed her hard against the wall with his body, which was supple and hot and insistent. She could feel him getting hard against her, and that sent little sparks flying around under her skin, and a warm feeling welling up in her brain that eased the ache living there just a little.
The pressure of his body on hers lessened, and Veronica whimper-snarled, trying to drag him back. She’d put her hands on his head without really thinking about it, and the feeling of his skin under her fingers was strange, compelling – but he kept her at enough of a distance he could undo his jeans. It was what she wanted, and he was still sucking at her bottom lip in a way more than sufficient to build up the heat already burning in her stomach, but she didn’t care about cause and effect, she just wanted –
Weevil slid his hands behind her thighs and hefted her upward, still kissing her. He must have gotten the condom on while he was undoing his pants – at least, she hoped so, because she did not have the wherewithal to call a halt if he didn’t have one. An emergency visit to the pharmacy and a clandestine STD screening would certainly take her mind off her mom, but it wasn’t exactly what she was aiming for.
Veronica braced herself on his shoulders, spreading her legs as far as she could as he pushed into her and then wrapping them around his waist once he was fully in. Yes. That was what she wanted, what she needed, the almost-painful stretch of him pressing against her walls, filling her so completely there was no room for thoughts, or guilt, or horrible sinking feelings. It felt different – the angle wasn’t quite the same as when she was sitting on the desk, and gravity was changing the game in ways that would have been interesting if she wasn’t utterly uninterested in conscious thought. She had a faint notion that it didn’t feel different in a way that would have suggested the lack of a condom, a vague worry that she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to tell just from that, but that was the outer limit of real concerns she could sustain, and then he started moving and it was so, so easy not to think at all.
She moved with him to the best of her ability, sucking on his tongue and squeezing his waist with her legs and trying to pull him closer every way she could manage with her arms, glorying in the heat of his mouth and body and wishing he had his shirt off, that she did, so she could feel that smooth, hot skin with more than just her hands, feeling him pound into her in a rhythm she could feel in her bones, erasing everything else. She was turned on enough for her head to swim and her heart to pound, but not enough to come, which was perfect. She wanted it to last as long as possible.
Weevil tore his mouth away from hers and sucked his way down her neck instead, and Veronica moaned out loud. “Yes,” she gasped, and then just kept saying it, “yes, yes, yes–”
It should have been embarrassing, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
She let herself get lost in it, lolling back against the wall while his lips and tongue at the seam of her neck kicked off a delicious sensitivity that spread from the skin he was working on to all the rest of it, the inside of her thighs, the palms of her hands, her breasts under her sports bra whenever the fabric dragged against them – while the push-pull of him inside her built and built the ache of desire higher and higher so that she didn’t care to do much beyond clinging to him, pulling him as close as possible.
She didn’t know how long it went on, because time was one of the things she didn’t have to care about. Finally Weevil’s breathing started to get harsher against her neck, and he stopped trying to do anything other than fuck her, and since if it was going to be over she might as well, she tightened one arm around his neck for balance and slid the other down between them to touch herself.
If she’d bothered to think about it, if she’d cared about putting him off, she might have worried that it was a weird or offensive thing to do, but she didn’t, and when he realized what she was doing he groaned, “Fuck,” right into her ear, jerking as he thrust into her, sending hot little tendrils of fire licking up her spine.
She wasn’t fancy, just rubbed her clit hard and fast as he thrust into her harder and faster, squeezing her eyes shut because she was getting there, she was getting close, she just had to come before...
The pressure should have been a turn-off, but instead the idea that it was some kind of race ratcheted everything up, more intense, more urgent, the smell of their sweat and the sound of his breathing and the heavy feeling of him inside her and the tingling skin on her neck and shoulder that was still damp from his mouth and the unrelenting, frantic pressure of her fingers, winding tighter and tighter and tighter until it snapped and she came hard, giving a choked cry as he slammed into her at the exact same second.
Weevil moaned, his breath brushing her cheek, her neck, making her shiver and gasp with overstimulation, and finished about thirty seconds later, with a groan that was unattractive but still gratifying.
After a long moment, he let her slide slowly down the wall. Veronica tried to only use her clean hand for balance, which was easier because he didn’t really step back until she had her feet under her. There was a torn condom wrapper on the floor, she saw when he did – so that was good. He’d even thrown it vaguely in the direction of the garbage can.
She leaned back against the wall for a moment, catching her breath, eyes closed. She should get her clothes, and wash her hands, and pick up that wrapper because he probably wasn’t going to and they didn’t want to leave evidence. But she was still coming down, still pleasantly distanced from everything she didn’t want to think about, even if it was edging slowly back into her consciousness.
Finally she blinked her eyes open and pushed off the wall. Weevil was watching her, but she ignored him for a moment while she fished her jeans off the floor and put them on. After a moment’s consideration, she said, “Thanks.”
She meant it this time, as more than a business transaction. It wasn’t like they were friends, but… she felt better now. Not good, but better. Like she could get home without pulling over to throw herself into the ocean.
“Hey, any time.” He was still eyeing her like he knew something was going on, but he didn’t ask. Whether it was because he didn’t care or because he somehow got it, Veronica was grateful.
“What happened to ‘I can’t just drop everything to have sex with you’?”
He shook his head. “There’s no pleasing you, is there?”
“I’m pleased.” She raised an eyebrow at him archly, and he smirked.
“Sure. I’m late, I gotta go.”
Veronica bent to pick up the condom wrapper. “Don’t steal anything I wouldn’t steal.”
He shook his head at her on the way out, tsking like she was a naughty child, but she found it legitimately didn’t bother her.
Notes:
There's sex. It's largely without potential issues, but it does take place because Veronica is in a rough emotional state and explicitly trying to forget about her problems. There's also a section where she's unsure whether Weevil used a condom or not, but he did.
Chapter 12: Probably Worth Doing
Notes:
I really didn't think I was going to have this ready in time, but I'm in under the wire!
I have a copy of the version of the Purity Test I created for this chapter up on my tumblr, for the curious. Also, I'd love it if you'd vote for Weevil again in this poll and read my thoughts on what the show would look like from his perspective if you want. Extremely minor warnings in the endnotes.
Thank you so much to everyone who commented on the last chapter! I try to respond to all of them, but just know you guys are fantastic! (And if you've commented on a previous chapter, or kudosed the fic, or just READ it, thank you also!) You all give me so much motivation to get going when I'm behind. And when I'm ahead. And just in general.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing.
Hunter S. Thompson
The weekend was miserable in a way Veronica found all too familiar, and yet was somehow blindsided by every time it came around again. Maybe it was worse this time because she didn’t have Lilly to take her mind off of things and convince her for a minute that this was something she could blow off, or maybe it was just worse this time the way it was always ‘worse this time’, no matter how used to it she should have been.
There was nothing exceptional about it, just everyday life coloured by all three of them pretending as hard as they could that nothing was wrong, that nothing was different. Then Lianne would get drunk in the living room at 4 PM (or get drunk and embarrass herself in public, or get drunk in private and stumble around hungover in the morning, or get drunk and disappear – that was always the worst one), and they’d grit their teeth and get through it, swallow hard and hope it wouldn’t happen again, rinse and repeat. Eventually either her dad or her mom would give up and bottles would start showing up in the cupboards again, but they wouldn’t stay long. Sometimes Keith got rid of them, but mostly Lianne went through them quickly enough that it didn’t really matter. And now that she was older, Veronica knew that he often felt that it wasn’t worth it; at least if his wife was drinking at home, she wasn’t out at a bar, wasn’t surrounded by strangers who didn’t care what happened to her, wasn’t driving.
Rinse, repeat.
It was almost enough to make her eager for school again, although she certainly knew that wouldn’t last long. But they were moving on to something new in English, and she always enjoyed Mr. Rooks’s class, and – maybe she still couldn’t quite stop herself from dancing around the subject in her own head, but the bald truth was that she wanted to get laid. She hadn’t seen Weevil on Friday, but she’d been increasingly frustrated all weekend: vaguely turned on, but too tense to do anything about it, especially when every creak of the house made her wonder if something was going on with her mom. No one wanted to think about their mom while they were doing that, all else aside.
She threw the black skirt and the first shirt she laid her hands on onto her chair on Sunday night and refused to think about it any more than that. What was the worst-case scenario? She looked like an idiot? Probably too late to worry about that anyway.
It wasn’t the worst choice, at least – when she got dressed in the morning she looked like she’d only half-committed to a look, not like she’d been trying for some kind of deranged ‘Vampire Barbie goes sailing’ thing. It got her out of the house without much of a raised eyebrow, which was good, because grabbing a piece of French toast on her way out the door was about as much interaction as she could handle at that time of day.
Mrs. Murphy called on her in class within five minutes, and it was hard not to feel persecuted, but Veronica took a deep breath and did her best to summarize Thoreau’s stance on government and morality. “For example,” she finished, because teachers loved it when you demonstrated knowledge of the subject material by making it relatable, “if there was a rule by the school administration that students who fail a class have to be publicly stoned to death, Thoreau would say teachers have a moral responsibility to do something like refuse to share their grade, or to refuse to fail anyone – to provide friction within the machine.”
There was a ripple of polite laughter. It wasn’t really funny, but it was a high school obligation to laugh whenever anyone poked even mild, brown-nosing fun at the teachers.
Mrs. Murphy smiled approvingly. “The punishments and rules in schools when Thoreau was alive were much stricter than today – but not quite that strict!” That prompted another weak murmur of obligatory amusement, and the teacher moved on to someone else, but something caught Veronica’s eye from across the classroom and she had an instant premonition of doom – it was Jeremy shooting his hand up like his elbow was rocket-propelled.
It wasn’t like he never volunteered comments in class, outside of Biology, but never with that much eagerness, and doing it right after her would have been a bad sign regardless.
But she wasn’t exactly lucky, lately; Mrs. Murphy called on him almost immediately.
“Um, so, this is the guy who thinks we shouldn’t have governments, so, isn’t it kind of stupid to say he’s right?”
Veronica’s mouth tightened, and despite knowing she was being baited, she put her hand back up. There was no way Jeremy had read the whole thing – he’d probably read the first paragraph, skimmed the next three, and maybe looked up a summary of the essay on the internet. He wasn’t entirely stupid, but he hated working; she wasn’t even sure why he’d taken AP English Lit in the first place, aside from his dad wanted him to. Probably just because his dad wanted him to.
“That’s an interesting perspective,” Mrs. Murphy said. “Haley?”
“Isn’t it kind of different than teachers, though, because governments are elected and teachers aren’t?”
It was a much more valid criticism of what Veronica had said, but she shot Haley Montez a mild glare anyway.
“Veronica?”
“Haley has a point, but only some of the government is elected. A lot of it’s appointed. And democracy isn’t the only system of government.” Mrs. Murphy nodded approvingly, and Haley shrugged. “And I’d ask Jeremy why he’s pro-slavery, since he thinks Thoreau can’t possibly be right about anything.”
“I’m not pro-slavery!” Jeremy exclaimed, earning a frown from Mrs. Murphy. “You–”
“Since Thoreau makes it clear,” Veronica said, raising her voice but keeping a clear, even tone, “that he thinks slavery is a sin and opposing it is a moral imperative, and that’s one of his main arguments to support his premise, if it’s stupid to say that he’s right, you must think he’s wrong about that too, right? So does Jeremy think it’s bad slavery was abolished? Because I don’t know what else he could be saying.”
“Yeah,” James Van Zyl said, angrily. “He spends like the whole thing talking about how people have to stand up against slavery. You think that’s dumb?” He fixed his gaze on Jeremy, who fidgeted and didn’t answer. James’s dad might be a professional basketball player, but James himself was on the wrestling team, and he looked it. He also took English Lit a lot more seriously than Jeremy, because he needed good grades to stay on the team and he was terrible at science – so he’d almost certainly actually read the material. “You think you should be able to buy me, huh?”
“I never said–” Jeremy protested, but Mrs. Murphy swooped in to rescue him, suggesting sternly that he might have misunderstood the material. Whether he didn’t want to admit that to the teacher’s face or just wasn’t willing to let Veronica win, he didn’t take the out.
“Yeah, but he does say there shouldn’t be a government.”
“He says governments should be involved less in people’s lives.” That was Reina Cardenas, who had a nearly photographic memory for assigned reading. She had her hand up, but didn’t wait to be called on. “He’s a libertarian, not an anarchist. And if his position on the purpose of government means he’s wrong about standing up to authority, why wouldn’t it mean he’s wrong about what you should stand up for? You’re basically saying you think slavery’s good and we should start a war with Mexico.”
“All right, enough,” Mrs. Murphy said definitively. “Everyone makes some interesting points here – while it’s valid to criticize some of Thoreau’s rhetoric here, throwing out his entire argument so we don’t have to do any work is not the point of the class.”
James Van Zyl put his hand up, glaring at Jeremy, but the teacher shook her head. “We are not here to litigate the specific political opinions anyone had a hundred and fifty years ago. This is not history class.”
Veronica rolled her eyes, because she wasn’t confident her American History teacher would be willing to take a hardline ‘slavery was bad’ stance either. Mrs. Murphy clearly just didn’t want things to degenerate into a verbal brawl where she lost control of the classroom, but James looked furious, and she realized, embarrassingly belatedly, that the other black kids in class didn’t seem thrilled either, and Reina, who was usually kind of a suck-up, looked sulky. She’d put her hand back up, but Mrs. Murphy ignored her.
“Let’s move on,” she said, and Veronica winced internally. She felt vaguely guilty – she could move on, even if she was annoyed, but was this going to be following James or Reina around all day the way the health unit on substance abuse always did for her? Marina Fuller had the same American History class as Veronica, so she’d have to sit through Mrs. Galloway’s droning explanations of how tactically brilliant Robert E. Lee was without a single mention of what it was he was so brilliantly defending. It seemed like the kind of thing she should have thought about before now.
Somehow the rest of class went smoothly, and James even gave Veronica an almost-friendly look and a half-shrug on their way out of the classroom, before ‘accidentally’ shoulder-checking Jeremy into the doorframe. Despite everything, it made her smile.
Precalc and regular English were pretty normal, anyway, especially since there wasn’t anything for Jeremy to get on her case for in Precalc. Why he’d chosen today for that she didn’t know, but she wasn’t interested in giving him another opening.
Things got more interesting in American History, although not for any of the reasons she would have guessed if you’d asked her after first period. It took about five minutes of Mrs. Galloway kicking into her usual monologue, occasionally punctuated by laboriously writing a single word or phrase on the board for emphasis, before Madison, who was a couple seats to her left leaned over and started whispering to her neighbour about a test. Veronica would have ignored it – they did have some kind of unit test coming up, but she was more than prepared – but she was fairly certain that there weren’t any questions on it about sex positions.
“I mean, more than four positions, duh,” Amanda was whispering back when she started really paying attention. “But more than five guys? Can you say ‘slut’?”
“I think there should be questions about what kind of guys you’ve slept with,” Madison said, her voice barely qualifying as a whisper. “I think it’s way sluttier to hook up with gutter trash than to have a few decent boyfriends.” She tossed her blonde hair behind one shoulder, pointedly not looking at Veronica, who pretended not to hear her. “But you’re right, of course.”
“Well, it’s not like the other option is better, anyway. I heard Kristin had to ask someone what cowgirl was.”
Madison snorted. “Can you say ‘not surprising’? That girl is inhibited and dim.”
Amanda murmured something in agreement and Veronica tuned them out, bored almost as much by the rote cattiness as by the teacher’s droning. Only Madison could use a quiz from one of her trashy magazines to call other girls sluts.
The problem with trying to ignore two strands of conversation was that neither of them really faded properly into the back of your mind, and now she was forever going to associate the eighteenth president of the United States with having sex in a hot tub. It was not a picture she had ever wanted in her head, particularly not when she suspected the other party under discussion was Dick Casablancas, so it was an even bigger relief than usual when the bell rang for lunch.
She was regretting the outfit a little as she fished her lunch out of her locker. It definitely sent a message, and this morning she’d been more than willing to endorse that message, but she kind of wanted to just eat and then hunker down and wait for class to start. She was still a little out of sorts from clashing with Jeremy, even if she’d come out on top, and the only thing that was a bigger turn-off than listening to Madison Sinclair talk about sex was picturing Dick and Ulysses S. Grant hooking up in Madison’s hot tub.
Sure enough, Weevil slid up to her out of nowhere as she closed her locker, eyeballing her skirt. Veronica sighed, but she tried to maintain a polite, if put-upon, demeanour as she turned to him. He hadn’t asked her any awkward questions on Friday, or tried to figure out what was wrong, or help, and she was grateful for that, anyway.
“I need that key,” he said.
Veronica blinked. “What?”
He huffed with annoyance. “The key. To that classroom. I need it.”
She eyed him dubiously. “What for?” The equal futility and danger of that question struck her immediately. “Never mind – seriously, don’t tell me. And also, no.” There were a lot of reasons she wasn’t going to lend it to him, which began with the likelihood of him wanting it in order to do something illegal, and ended with the unlikelihood of her ever getting it back, but she just said, “I very legitimately stole this myself. Come up with your own plan to get one.”
He smirked, although there was genuine amusement hiding in there somewhere. “I have to get something.”
Veronica didn’t remember him every bringing anything with him any of the times they’d met up – except condoms. In fact, she distinctly remembered judging him for not having any textbooks or pencils to dispose of. “What, exactly?”
Weevil rolled his eyes, like it was completely unreasonable for her to be concerned about aiding and abetting… whatever he was doing. Excuse her, but she wasn’t stupid; there were very few things that could both fit in his pockets and be worth this amount of fuss, and most of them were drugs. Although he did actually have a bag with him, for once; she wasn’t sure what to make of that.
“Listen, I don’t have time after school, and I have to get something.” He leered at her, provocatively. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
“Oh, whatever.” It was probably the easiest way to get rid of him. “I’ll let you in, but you can’t have the key. And I actually want to eat lunch today.”
He eyed her skirt again, but didn’t say anything, so Veronica turned in the direction of the classroom, pulling her container of grapes out of her lunch. She ate them on the way, which at least discouraged conversation, even if she couldn’t stop Weevil from stealing several. Glaring only seemed to encourage him.
When they got there, she let him in, and, after several moments’ internal debate, slipped in after him. She just wanted to know. If she was making herself culpable, there wasn’t much point in trying to maintain plausible deniability.
He was rattling the door on the big art supply cabinet when she closed the classroom door behind her. “It’s locked,” Veronica said, shooting him a judgemental look.
“‘It’s locked,’” he parroted back in an annoying falsetto. “I know. Shut up for a second.”
She thought he might force the door, but then he shook his head and crossed the room to the teacher’s desk, pulling open one drawer after another. “Is there even anything in there?” Veronica asked, drifting over despite her better instincts. She caught a glimpse of empty file folders and a moldy coffee cup as he shut a drawer, and winced.
Weevil switched to the other side of the desk, produced a paper clip from a disorganized tangle of abandoned stationary supplies, and shot her a supercilious look before going back to the cabinet. She rolled her eyes and stayed put as he used it to pick the lock, trying not to be impressed by how quick he was – it wasn’t a real lock, just one of those cheap built-in ones. He made a satisfied noise as the door popped open, and started sorting through the shelves.
Veronica perched on the teacher’s desk and ate the rest of her grapes, watching him. Maybe she should leave – it wasn’t like they were friends, or anything, and she didn’t want him to think that she thought they were – but she didn’t have anything better to do, and at least no one was around to deal with. Except Weevil, anyway, and he was a pain but at least he was weirdly honest about it, even if he was always putting on a front of some kind. It wasn’t like there was never any fake niceness from him, but it was the kind that was supposed to be obviously fake: a knife with a smiley face on it, instead of a poisoned cupcake.
“You made me come here so you could steal art supplies?” she asked, moving on to the sandwich she’d made last night.
Weevil glanced over his shoulder briefly. “Who said anything about stealing?”
Then he slid several tubes of paint out of the cupboard and into his bag, so Veronica felt safe raising her eyebrows sardonically. He ignored her, so she got up and strolled over, trying to peer around him into the cabinet – but he shut the door on her.
“Hey.” It wasn’t worth putting up more of a protest, although it did make her a little more curious. Why was he trying to hide the fact that he was taking the fancy oil paints and not the big bottles of regular paint that would be much more useful for whatever vandalism he was probably planning? “If you’re going to make me party to petty theft, you could at least let me see what we’re taking.”
“There’s no we here, baby,” he said, and Veronica made an irritated face at him before she could stop herself. If she let him know she hated being called that, he’d probably just do it more.
“You know that’s oil paint, right? It’s not that great for throwing at statues, or people’s cars, or whatever you do on Saturday nights.”
“What happened to not wanting to know?”
He was right, and that annoyed her. “What happened to making it up to me?”
Weevil cast his eyes pointedly at the half-sandwich left in her hand. “What happened to eating your lunch?”
He was enjoying himself. What an asshole. Veronica met his eyes and took an over-large bite of what was left, and he laughed. She backed up, still holding his gaze, and managed to boost herself up onto the nearest desk with one hand. She wasn’t sure exactly when she’d changed her mind – again – but it still felt like he always had the upper hand, and she was sick of letting him win.
She took another two large bites of the sandwich as soon as she reasonably could, demolishing it, and tried not to be obvious about how much she was still chewing as he sauntered over.
“Okay,” he said, grinning at her. “Since I owe you. Go ahead.”
Veronica blinked at him, still working on the remnants of peanut butter and jam. It felt like a juvenile choice under the circumstances, but she hadn’t had the energy to put all that much effort in last night. “What?” she asked, mostly coherently.
“You can have whatever you want.” The grin was fast becoming a smirk. “Go for it.”
For a second, she seriously considered getting off the desk and walking away with his purloined oil paints – whatever she wanted, right? – but there was always the possibility of that going badly, and anyway, it might read as her chickening out. But she wasn’t quite finished chewing, so she just reached over and grabbed him by the belt, dragging him forward until he was right in front of her. It was getting easier not to hesitate in the moments when she normally would have, so she undid the buckle without a hitch, feeling a little proud of herself, and yanked the belt out of his pants.
“Hey!” Weevil protested. “I have to put that back on later.”
Veronica shrugged, finally swallowing. “You said I could do what I wanted.”
He rolled his eyes but didn’t pull away, and she got to work on his jeans, taking a slightly perverse pleasure in shoving them down once she’d gotten them open. Let him be the one awkwardly bottomless for once. Then she changed her mind and yanked his shirt up from the bottom, inadvertently tangling the fabric around his head. Weevil cursed and reached up to free himself, and Veronica dropped her hands, wincing. That was embarrassing.
By the time he could see her again she’d recovered her nonchalance, and while he shook his head in exasperation before he tossed his shirt onto the neighbouring desk, he didn’t get in her face about it, just knelt and started working on the laces of his boots.
He was only in his boxers now, but that didn’t seem to bother him, Veronica thought, envious and a little admiring, as she stripped off her own shirt. She left her bra on – it was a sports bra, snugger than usual and too much of a pain to wiggle out of – but slid her underwear off. Might as well, right? Her clothes were a lot easier to get rid of than Weevil’s boots, so she got to watch him finish one and work on the other one, muscles moving under brown skin as he focussed on the laces. It seemed incongruous that they were so tightly tied, but she guessed he couldn’t afford to risk anything getting caught when he was on his motorcycle – not to look a little more rebellious.
There was a tattoo on the back of his right shoulder, a single word in cursive, and Veronica tried to read it upside down. C something: Clean – Chari – Clianat –
Then he finished and stood up again, and she leaned back so they wouldn’t knock into each other. “What’s your tattoo say?” she asked.
Weevil laughed. “Which one?”
She was nearly face-to-bulldog with the ‘Dog 4 Life’ one, so she just shrugged. “Didn’t you get a condom while you were down there?” she said, nodding to his pants. The black skirt didn’t have any pockets.
He stared at her. “What, don’t you have one?”
Veronica stared back. “Are you kidding me?”
He rubbed the back of his head. “Uh, you usually…”
“I usually have pockets, because I pick clothing based on whether it has ways to carry things, not on its relative lack of country-clubbery!” This was unbelievable. He’d had one on Thursday! What did she have to do, start shoving them into her bra?
Then he grinned, teeth flashing, and flipped his hand over, showing one between his fingers.
“You–” Veronica’s voice failed her in sheer outrage, which of course only made his smile grow.
She was too indignant to manage a proper response, and hitting him seemed like a bad idea, so she seethed at him mutely as he shucked his underwear and opened the condom. It was the first time she’d gotten a good look at him, naked – the first time he’d been entirely naked, although that wasn’t what she’d meant. He was big, or at least she thought so; it wasn’t like she had much to compare with. Not porn big, but it had probably been a good idea to keep her eyes above the waist that first time in the autoshop. It might have been the final straw that had her backing out.
It didn’t look quite how she’d expected, either; it seemed like there was just sort of… extra skin part way down. It didn’t look like the drawings she vaguely remembered seeing in those ‘your body is changing' books of uncircumcised penises, where it went all the way to the top, but maybe that was because he was mostly hard.
Veronica pulled her eyes away before he could accuse her of staring, letting his hands slip into her peripheral vision as he got down to business and tracing up over the huge Ride tattoo on his stomach to his chest. There was another one on the right side of his chest. Or the left side – his left, her right. It was small compared to the dog dominating the other side of his upper torso: just a cursive Ann Marie.
Veronica rolled her eyes internally. She hoped he hadn’t gotten Lilly’s name tattooed anywhere.
She flicked her gaze down long enough to confirm he’d put the condom on, and then summoned her courage and reached down. Weevil made a noise of surprise, but he relinquished his dick to her without objection – willingly enough that Veronica wondered if she’d made a mistake, because she had no idea what she was doing.
He felt thick in her hand, but aside from the angle of her wrist, it wasn’t hard to get her fingers all the way around him, and when she shifted her arm a bit it was suddenly less awkward. Physically, anyway. She never actually held a boy’s penis before – except his, that one time, and a quick grope through the pants to call someone’s bluff was not the same thing. Everything before that had been furtive grinding, no hands involved to preserve plausible deniability, but she didn’t want Weevil to know that.
The lube on the outside of the condom felt cold, and kind of strange. Veronica tightened her grip carefully, not wanting to hurt him but suspecting her hold was still too loose. He made an encouraging noise in his throat, so she started dragging her hand up towards the tip, mimicking the motion people made when they were imitating jerking off, only slower – but before she’d managed more than half a stroke, Weevil’s hand came down on hers, his fingers pressing against hers until she closed her hand another few degrees.
“I’m not fragile,” he said, and Veronica felt her cheeks heat. She ignored her embarrassment – it was too late to back down now – and picked up the same movement again, keeping her hand tight and speeding up slowly until he hissed in appreciation. He curved up, just a little bit, which she hadn’t realized until she was tracing that same curve with her hand.
It was kind of exciting, once some of the embarrassment and a little bit of the nerves wore off – maybe she wasn’t the handjob queen of the world, but she clearly wasn’t doing anything wrong, and the way his breath sped up incrementally the more she touched him felt incredibly validating. It was turning her on a little, too, or maybe it was just all that bare skin, so close she could feel the heat of him, that was making her feel warm and tingly. She could probably get him off like this, even though it might take a while. Her wrist was starting to get tired, admittedly, but she was too stubborn to quit, so all in all it was a relief when he caught her arm and said, “Are we doing this or what?”
His voice was lower than usual, rough, and the arousal it sent pinging up and down Veronica’s spine made her realize with something like shock that it was sexy. She’d known Weevil was attractive, objectively; he had muscles and good skin and a mustache that didn’t look stupid, and some girls were really into the leather and the bike. But she’d sort of thought that when he managed to turn her on, it was because he was there, and she was a teenager with teenage hormones, and having sex was sexy, just inherently. But no – that was dumb even without the voice, because she already knew she liked watching his skin ripple as he moved and she liked the way he kissed her and maybe his obnoxious, annoying smirk was starting to get her going. It was a Pavlovian response, probably, because he was always smirking and most of what they did was have sex – but still, there was objectively hot and there was hot hot, and at some point he’d slid over the line into the second category.
“We’re doing this,” she said.
“Great.” He caught her underneath her knees and dragged her forward in a motion that was becoming familiar, leaving her perched on the edge of the desk. In exchange, she caught him by the neck and dragged him down until their faces met, making him fumble a little trying to line them up. He cursed against her mouth, lips almost ridiculously soft as they moved against hers, but he didn’t pull away.
Veronica sucked his lower lip into her mouth, teasing the edge of it with her tongue. He growled and did his best to do the same with her upper lip in retaliation, and she was fighting a snicker when he slid into her.
She gasped, a little. It didn’t really hurt, but it was uncomfortable; maybe she’d rubbed too much lube off the condom, or maybe it was psychosomatic because there was a part of her brain that kept thinking about how big he’d felt in her hand – but it didn’t really matter. Even when she wanted to squirm awkwardly, there was still more good than bad.
Weevil had taken the opportunity to escape her mouth, and now he leaned in to trace his tongue along her neck, but Veronica wasn’t having it. She wrapped an arm around his neck to pull him closer, and applied her mouth to the seam between his neck and shoulder. He groaned in surprise, establishing a shallow, fast rhythm as she hooked her legs around him, and Veronica could feel herself heating up against him, the motions coming smoother and smoother as her arousal heightened and made things wetter and slicker. That still felt embarrassing, but she pushed it out of her mind firmly. It wasn’t like he was going to care.
Instead she sucked at the skin of his neck, trying to get him to groan again. Her hands roamed over his back, fingers splayed to drink in as much warm skin as possible. Was it weird to think that someone had nice shoulder-blades? Because she liked his shoulder-blades.
“What are you trying to do, leave a mark?” he muttered, faintly breathless, and then made his next stroke harder – solely, Veronica thought, for the purpose of making her voice go all weird and gaspy halfway through trying to respond.
“Is that some – kind of problem for you?” she managed. “Good for your rep, right?”
He snorted, picking up the pace, and she slid her mouth down and started working on his shoulder instead – maybe she’d only been half-thinking about giving him a hickey before, but she was definitely going to now. If he decided to get squeamish, he could just wear a shirt with actual sleeves until it went away. One of his hands slid away from his grip on her hips and slid between them, tangling momentarily in the fabric of her skirt before he freed it and worked his way down to rub at her clit, and Veronica almost bit him accidentally from the unexpected rush of sensation.
Should have seen that coming, she thought. It was still a strange novelty to have someone else touch her like that. He was pressing a little lighter, going a little slower than she usually did, the circles not quite what she was expecting because of the angle and because his fingers were bigger, and she didn’t know if it was better or if it was only that everything felt more intense when she couldn’t feel it coming.
Veronica tried to push against his hand without throwing off their rhythm, see if she could get him to press harder, but he just snickered, and she realized she’d lost track of what she’d been doing. Weevil slowed down, deliberately, both his hand and the rate he was thrusting into her. It was a little bit horrible, and also good in a way that made her feel sort of crazy, but she bit down on a noise of protest, refusing to react to his provocation. Maybe she wasn’t good at multitasking in this sort of situation yet, but she’d get good at it.
She combed over the back of his shoulder idly with her fingers, trying to see if she could feel where that tattoo was. There wasn’t any obvious difference, and she wondered if it would be any different with the big one on his chest, or the much larger letters on his stomach. When she did it again anyway he shivered, and Veronica grinned against his shoulder and dragged her fingertips lightly down the entirety of his back. Weevil swore at her, and she laughed.
In response he pinched her clit, and she yelped both in shocked offence and because it sent an entirely unexpected shock of lightning up her spine. Weevil grunted in her ear, and she realized she’d dug her nails into his skin. She forced her fingers to relax, but she didn’t apologize. It was his own fault – and how could something like that feel good anyway?
She did tug on his earlobe with her teeth, careful to avoid his earring, not sure if it was supposed to be a form of apology or an escalation but remembering that he’d liked that. He bit out, “Jesus Christ,” right in her ear, and gave up on the slow, torturous thing he was doing, which Veronica was pretty sure meant she’d won… something. Her head was starting to get fuzzy in the way it did when things really heated up. They were so close together that the movement of the actual sex was almost rocking instead of thrusting, and when he speeded up, it rubbed his dick against the top of her vagina and made her feel dizzy and restless and full. That sort of three-dimensional pleasure wasn’t something she’d ever considered, and she was losing brain capacity quickly enough that all she could think of to do was dig her fingernails into his shoulders – gently, this time – to try and tell him she liked it.
But then his fingers on her clit got more erratic, the sensations they provoked half satisfying, half frustrating, and Veronica shut her eyes, trying to chase the exciting parts, wishing more than hoping that she could get there before…
…Before Weevil jerked against her and groaned, the hand at her hip dropping to brace himself on the desk as he slumped against her momentarily, his other hand stilling against her. Veronica couldn’t help but feel annoyed; it wasn’t like she hadn’t enjoyed herself, but she’d been sort of counting on getting off, once they started. It wasn’t really his fault – maybe if she’d been more into it from the beginning, instead of changing her mind a bunch of times, she’d have managed to come before he did. But now she’d have to wait until she got home, and who knew how she’d feel by then – and she’d have to sit through her afternoon classes with uncomfortably damp underwear basically for nothing.
Well, maybe not nothing, but she was still annoyed. He got stolen paint and an orgasm out of this, and what did she get? He was so close that a lot of their skin was touching, and it was just turning her on more, entirely fruitlessly.
Then he made a sound between a sigh and a groan, pushing himself off of her and pulling out. He stripped off the condom, still close enough that it was obscured by their bodies, and tossed it towards the nearest garbage can. Veronica winced, looking away so she wouldn’t see if he missed.
Maybe that was why she was so surprised when he slipped his hand back between her thighs, or maybe it was just that it had never seemed like that was ever going to be part of this. Weren’t they both in this for what they could get? It was one thing to work someone else up before you came, because you were benefitting from it in the long run, but after? Wasn’t that – admitting something, or disadvantaging yourself somehow, or being generous in a way that wasn’t part of what they were doing?
Or maybe she was just bad at casual sex, and there wasn’t any internal logic to that at all. Besides, who cared? She leaned against him, enjoying the warmth of his skin and the fact that doing nothing and letting him take charge suddenly felt like a power move instead of an admission of weakness. Then she reconsidered.
“Press harder,” she told him. “Tighter circles. Mm. Also, I was right, my nails do look good with your skin.”
“Do you ever stop talking?” he demanded, pressing harder and tightening up the circles. Veronica fought the urge to wriggle against him like a cat.
“No,” she said.
That made him laugh, which prompted a warm feeling in her stomach that was kind of embarrassing. It felt like a long time since she’d just had fun with somebody – even though she could absolutely be eating lunch with Yolanda right now, and Meg would probably still be nice to her if Veronica had the guts to actually talk to her – but that was no excuse to be using the guy she was having ill-considered sex with, literally right now, as some kind of substitute friend.
“So this is how you like it?”
He sounded almost conversational, albeit in a lower tone than usual because he was right next to her ear, so she matched it, trying to sound like she did this all the time. “I don’t have time to mess around. I didn’t finish my lunch yet.”
Weevil snorted, with much less consideration for her hearing. “Dirty talk not your thing, huh?”
Veronica flushed. Oh. Yeah, that seemed obvious in retrospect. Maybe she gotten a little too businesslike about this whole thing. “Um…”
“Oh, that’s right,” he said smugly. “I forgot you only ever date useless rich losers.” She stiffened in offense, which was hard when most of her still wanted to melt into the relentless movement of his hand. “Whatever they had going on was probably a turn-off.”
“I guess you’d know about turn-offs,” she told him, which was a pretty weak comeback, considering what he was currently doing.
Weevil seemed to think so too, because he laughed at her, leaned in, and said, his breath caressing the inside of her ear and making her shiver, “If that was true, you wouldn’t be so wet for me, baby.”
Veronica made a choked noise, not sure what she was trying to say or not say, but hyperaware of the wave of heat that had washed over her. Sexy voice, she thought vaguely. It had been a turn-off when Jeremy had called her baby, and she’d made him stop, and anyway she had general objections to the word, so it shouldn’t be revving her up like this – none of what he’d said should be, it was just a kind of vulgar way to say a fact, and oh, god, she was way closer than she’d thought.
She tried to find something clever to say back, but her head was swimming too much for anything articulate and mangling out something that revealed how compromised she was would only make him smugger, so she didn’t say anything, just grabbed onto his free arm with one hand and the edge of the desk with the other one, fingers tightening in concert with the tension inside her until it snapped and she came, gasping.
Weevil peeled her fingers off his arm, smirking. For once she didn’t especially object, especially since he looked pretty good in just boxers and ink and now she got to watch him bend over and stretch as he got dressed again. Before he put his shoes on, he went and dug through the still-unlocked cabinet for some kind of wet wipes and cleaned off his hands. Right. Art classroom.
Veronica shook off some of the languor still enveloping her and fumbled for her shirt, trying to figure out where her underwear had gone. By the time she got everything sorted out, Weevil had laced his boots back up and was watching her.
“What?”
“Just wondering how many points I’m personally responsible for.” He stretched, smirking lazily in a way that was frankly insufferable.
Veronica blinked at him. “Points?” She reconsidered her curiosity before the word was even out of her mouth. “You know what, never mind. I’m not interested in whatever teenage boy scoring system you and your friends have invented.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s not my bullshit. I had to listen to a bunch of sophomores talk about that sex test the whole school got emailed for all of Algebra. It was worse than the actual Algebra.”
“Huh.” So maybe Madison hadn’t just been talking about some quiz in Cosmo. “There’s a lot of that going around.” There was a small bank of computers near the teacher’s desk, and Veronica crossed to them and woke one up. It was only asleep, not off, even though the room wasn’t being used – total waste of power. Probably not good for the computers, either. “Don’t you want to see what the fuss is about?”
“No.” Weevil snagged her bag lunch with one finger, letting it dangle by the handle. “Is this refrigerated?”
“No, it’s just insulated.” She logged in to the computer and pulled up the school email, then glanced over her shoulder. “Cut it out!”
He put two of the cookies back, looking completely unrepentant about the two still in his hand or the one in his mouth. “Why’re they so tiny?”
Veronica didn’t have an answer for that. They tasted otherwise okay, so probably Lianne hadn’t been drunk making them, but who knew. Maybe she’d thought it was cute. “Because they are.” There was the email – it wasn’t like she got a lot on this account; mostly she used it to email herself homework assignments. She clicked through to the link and instantly made a face at the cartoony homepage. “How pure are you?” she read incredulously. A moment later, a mock-demure voice, probably meant to be the nun, declared, “I’m an angel!”
“I’m hot!” an equally overdone sultry tone contended, and Weevil started laughing so hard she thought he might fall off the desk he’d perched himself on.
“Oh, shut up,” she told him, clicking through with morbid curiosity. The test was just a bunch of questions with clickboxes next to them, and the first glance looked fairly benign – Have you ever: held hands romantically, been on a date, been in relationship, danced without leaving room for Jesus? Veronica laughed.
“What?” Weevil asked. He was still finishing off her cookies.
“How much room does Jesus need, anyway?”
He frowned at her. “What, like in your heart?” When she turned back to the screen, grinning, he protested, but she ignored him, clicking the back-button and then re-entering the test. The first four questions, the ones she’d clicked, were still grey, so it must be personalized. Weird, but if this was some prank designed to out embarrassing secrets so they could be published to the whole school – she was picturing a list of ‘the biggest sluts and studs’ or something equally ridiculous – Veronica was more than willing to play along.
Some of the later questions were in a different order now; they must be at least partly randomized, which was interesting but not very important. She went through the kissing ones, most of which she’d done. Duncan had gotten his mouth close enough to her breasts to count as kissing them, but she couldn’t really say she’d ever kissed someone below the belt. She glanced over at Weevil. “Hey, come here.”
He shot her an annoyed look, presumably because she’d laughed at him. “I need your leg,” she added, and the look went from annoyed to dubious.
“Do I get it back?”
“Ha ha. Come on!”
He came over and sat on the chair next to her - backwards, of course, to prove how badass he was. Veronica had to bend all the way over to kiss his knee while he stared at her like she was nuts, but she studiously ignored the awkwardness crawling up her spine. “Below the belt. Check.”
He leaned forward a little to see her screen. “That does not count.”
He better not think he was getting a blowjob out of this. “It’s a kiss, it’s below the belt.” She and Duncan had definitely kissed for two hours consecutively once or twice, but she was pretty sure she’d never hooked up with a friend’s crush. Not knowingly, anyway – she wasn’t Lilly.
The next questions were about masturbation, and she tried not to blush as she answered them, hoping he wasn’t still looking at the computer. Done it, yes; used a visual aid – yes, technically; been caught, used an object, done it with another person in the room – no.
“What did you get?” she asked him as a distraction, clicking the box for ‘seen or read pornographic material’.
Weevil snorted. “You’re kidding, right? I don’t have time for that dumb crap. I don’t need some hot aaangel to tell me if I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to be two different characters,” Veronica said, trying to ignore the pointedly smouldering look he was shooting at her. “And I’m doing it.”
“And if you jumped off a cliff, I should too?” he asked, doing a mocking sing-song.
Veronica rolled her eyes, checking her way through most of the general hook-up questions about grinding and undressing and fondling. She’d never showered with a guy, but otherwise she was in pretty good shape. “How about, if you don’t, I’ll take it for you and say that you’re exceptionally pure and you’ve never even…” She glanced at the next one, ‘had an orgasm due to someone else’s manipulation’. That would be giving him way too much ammunition, she thought, clicking, and skipped to the next one, “sent a sexually explicit text?”
Weevil eyed her sardonically. “Is this your way of saying you want me to explicitly text you?”
“No. Wait, actually…” She’d always been careful about that kind of thing, but it wasn’t like her parents were in the habit of checking her text messages. “Do you have your phone on you? I want to score as high as possible.” She frowned at the screen. “As low as possible? What’s sluttier?”
He shook his head. “There’s something wrong with you.”
“Yeah, probably, but are you really one to talk?” There was a moment of silence, and Veronica thought she might have crossed a line, but when she looked over he was smiling almost reluctantly. “Come on, text me something graphic about your dick.” It felt slightly surreal to say; she’d never been quite that specific about a guy’s personal anatomy when talking to him. “Send me a picture while you’re at it; that’s worth another point.”
“My phone doesn’t take pictures,” he said – but after a moment he dug it out of one of his jeans pockets and spent a few seconds tapping at it. “Fine, what’s your number.”
She told him, and a moment later her phone dinged. Against her better judgement, Veronica read the message: This is a sexually explicit text message.
The massively unimpressed look she shot him only seemed to make him grin more, so she responded with the filthiest thing she could think of and sent him, I want to bend you over the nearest flat surface and fuck you raw.
It was vaguely adapted from something she’d seen in a risqué novel when she was still young enough for that to seem mildly horrifying and stick in her brain, but you never knew what was going to be useful one day. When Weevil read it, his eyebrows went so far up that for a moment she thought he had hair, but all he did was laugh.
“Not sure you’ve got the equipment for that,” he said, apparently unconcerned.
“I could buy it,” Veronica shot back, trying to get a good angle on her cleavage from halfway inside the collar of her shirt. In the end the picture was sort of blurry, but it served the purpose, which was the letter of the law, not actual titillation, so she sent that to him too.
“There’s better uses for your money,” he said, opening the text. “Jesus, you’re not exactly a photographer.”
“So delete it.” She didn’t look to see if he did, moving on to the rest of the questions. If she really stretched the definition of ‘sexual activity’ she could count that fake-out kiss in the limo party last year as a lesbian encounter, so she did. Weevil’s chair scraped as he dragged it closer, looking over her shoulder in time to see that she’d purchased contraceptives, never had oral sex, and had decided that sleepovers with Lilly counted as ‘spending the night’ with Duncan. He snickered when she ticked the first couple alcohol-related drug questions and moved on without any of the other ones, but she ignored him, trying to scroll quickly through the sex-position-related questions so it wouldn’t be obvious that they were all ‘no’s.
She skipped through the crime questions too, not wanting to waste time, which was when the impending commentary she’d known was coming finally made an appearance.
“Hey, hey, no cheating.” He pointed to the top of the screen. “‘Crime not otherwise mentioned here.’ Unlawful sexual intercourse. Check it off.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m seventeen,” he said, strangely smug about it. “Age of consent’s eighteen.”
“Uh, I am also seventeen,” she informed him, with exaggerated slowness.
Weevil ignored the implied slur on his intelligence. “Doesn’t matter. Having sex with someone under eighteen is unlawful sexual intercourse, unless you’re married. You were literally breaking the law ten minutes ago. Check it off.”
Veronica stared at him. “We’re both seventeen,” she repeated.
He rolled his eyes. “No shit. Which is why I was also breaking the law.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“It is in California.” He raised one eyebrow. “I know people who have been arrested for this shit. I’m not just fucking around.”
“That’s…” She should have known he had some kind of personal experience – it was an illegal activity. “Just… stupid.”
Weevil laughed. “Yeah, no shit.” He made a check-mark gesture with his finger. “Tick, tick.”
She rolled her eyes and clicked the box. “Happy?” Since they were applying the letter of the law, she checked a few more boxes relating to the police, adding, “My dad is the police,” when he shot her a dubious look.
“So ‘having the police called on you’ is just any time someone called your dad?” He snorted in disgust. “That’s definitely cheating.”
“I thought you didn’t care about this test.” She skipped over the more serious crimes, then hesitated when the questions looped back to sex. “Can you commit to having sex five more times? And in at least two other positions?”
He shook his head. “You’re so strange. Yeah, fine, but that’s also cheating.”
“It’ll be true soon,” Veronica argued, clicking the boxes anyway. She had to skip the rest of the questions, and she didn’t want him paying too close attention, especially since if he thought too hard about it she’d just accidentally given him enough information to know for sure that he was the only person she’d ever had sex with.
“Does this count as public?” she added when he didn’t seem inclined to reply.
“Door’s locked, so no.”
“And do you speak a language other than Spanish?”
He gave her a look. “No.”
No point for that one, then. “Well… do you speak fluent Spanish?” Maybe she could count it as a language she didn’t speak – she was only at a high school level, anyway.
“No.”
“Oh.” He seemed annoyed about the question, which made her uncomfortable. It wasn’t racist to ask, because she was pretty sure she’d heard him use Spanish at least once, but – well, was it?
The questions got more extreme from there, so there wasn’t much left except – “Do you have a dollar?”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t have any pockets in this skirt.”
Weevil sighed, as put-upon as any harried fifties housewife. “Why do you need it?”
“I want you to pay me for having sex with you.”
He feigned exaggerated surprise. “You never said there was a fee!”
“It’s the last question I can get.” Especially since pretty much the only ones after it were about incest and bestiality, which she didn’t want to think about at all if she could help it.
“I’m not paying you.”
“Fine. If I give you a dollar tomorrow, will you have sex with me?”
He raised an eyebrow at her again, but he said, “Sure.”
“Great.”
“Five dollars if you want to be guaranteed to get off.”
That merited retaliation; Veronica flicked him in the side of the head. He dodged, but she still made some contact, and it must have hurt a little because he slapped her hand away harder than necessary. It didn’t seem worth it to apologize, so she turned back to the computer and hit submit.
Her score flashed up immediately: 70 points – 59%.
“Still more than half pure,” Weevil said sardonically.
Veronica cut him an annoyed look. “We’ll just say it’s fifty-nine.”
“Oh, and let people assume it’s the total instead of the percentage?” he asked, sounding exasperated. “Were you going to take out a billboard?”
“At some point someone will get the super clever idea to ask me what my score is,” she told him, breaking out her pep squad voice for super clever idea. “Confusion would not be a helpful response.” She finished logging out and dramatically scootched her chair back. “Your turn.”
He shook his head. “Are you kidding me? No way. I don’t take stupid little tests. Fudge your own results, whatever. Maybe if you use the wrong average to figure out what the usual score is, you can make yours look worse. Leave me out of it.”
Veronica frowned at him. “The wrong average?”
“Yeah, ‘cause there’s a bunch of ways to do it, so you just pick the most common one, instead of the regular average, or some shit.”
That took a few seconds to parse. “Oh! Like mean, median, mode?”
That didn’t appear to ring any bells. “If you want the average, you get everyone’s score and add it up and divide it, right?” He paused momentarily for her to nod, like he really thought he might be wrong about that. “But if it makes you look better – or worse –” he raised his eyebrows meaningfully, “you can take, you know, the most common result and call it average, ‘cause it’s what the average person gets.”
“Right,” Veronica agreed, surprised. “That’s taking the mode instead of the mean. Usually when people say the average they mean the mean–” That sounded strange as she said it, and she blinked, reparsing her words. No, she was fine. “And the mode is the most common result. And then the median is the result exactly in the middle, but they’re all ‘average’. But I don’t think they ever went over it in math class.” Her dad had shown her how people could fudge statistics when she was a freshman, because of some project she’d been working on for Social Studies. “Are you some kind of weird prodigy?”
Weevil snorted. “Fuck off.”
Okay, whatever. “Anyway, I did it, so it’s your turn.”
He ignored her, so she prodded his upper bicep, noting how firm it was. “You ate half my lunch. More than half my cookies. Click some boxes.”
“Are you seriously trying to tell me what to do?”
“Everyone got their own link. I know your full name and I can find out your student ID.” She actually had no idea how easy that would be to do, but it was probably possible. “It shouldn’t be too hard to reverse-engineer your specific link, and then I can take it as you and give you a purer score than I got.”
He stared at her for a long moment, not quite threatening but definitely intimidating. She tried not to show that it still worked on her, a little. “You know, most people try to avoid pissing me off.”
Veronica shrugged with careful nonchalance. “Maybe you should be worried about pissing me off.”
He tipped his head to the side, regarding her with guarded amusement, his lips pushing out slowly into something that was somehow a smile instead of a pout. “Oh, sure. You’re dangerous.”
He was definitely having fun at her expense, but Veronica pushed forward. “So chop chop.” She rescued her two remaining cookies from her lunch bag and bit one in half pointedly.
Weevil laughed, shrugging in defeat. “Fine. You know what? Might as well.” He stood and swung the chair around in a wide controlled arc, nearly hitting her but not quite. Veronica didn’t flinch, but he shot her a knowing look, like he could tell how hard she’d had to fight not to, before he settled in at the computer, right way around this time.
“Okay,” he said. “School email!” It took him a second to get into it; she figured he never really used it for anything. The email about the purity test was the only thing in his inbox. Veronica winced when she realized the link was spelled out in its randomly-assigned-number-and-letter entirety, but either he wasn’t computer-savvy enough to call her on lying about being able to reconstruct the one sent to him by swapping her name for his in the URL, or he didn’t care.
Maybe the second one, because she kept finding out that he was smarter than she thought. Did he want the oil paints to forge a Rembrandt or something?
Then the test opened, with its high-pitched cartoon mascots and annoyingly bouncy music, and he clicked through to the actual test, all business, and then kept clicking. Veronica dragged her chair a little closer. All the preliminary stuff was in the same order, and of course he’d done it all, but when he got to the part where she’d had to read more carefully he just kept clicking. Hooked up with a friend’s crush, showered with somebody, been caught jerking off. Nothing really surprising, although she felt a bit better when he finally had to skip something – apparently he’d never ‘engaged in sexually explicit behaviour over video chat’. Kind of a relief, since she didn’t imagine he had a home computer.
Or was that racist? She was a little on edge about that after the weird thing about Spanish earlier. It wasn’t like his motorbike was cheap; maybe he did have a computer.
She missed a couple questions, thinking about that, but started paying attention again when he hesitated, just for a moment. The one that had given him pause was ‘been the ‘other woman’ (or man)’ and Veronica winced at the hard set of his jaw, then stopped halfway through the expression, surprised. He’d never cheated on anybody?
It felt hard to believe, with all the swagger and the ‘girls love me’ attitude and the biker-criminal thing, but he was halfway down the page, checking other boxes, so apparently not. It’s not like he’d lie about it, if he was willing to cop to being Lilly’s bit on the side.
He’d done most of the sex stuff pretty consistently (although it was a no to the gay encounter question, she noticed), and he went straight down the drug and crime section, ticking every box except the ones for hard drugs. “You’ve never taken horse tranquilizers?” she asked, faux-shocked. He was going through the test way faster than she had, and she felt like she should be saying something.
Weevil snorted. “They’re not fucking horse tranquilizers, people just say that to sound tough.”
That was somehow not any of the potential responses she’d anticipated. “Well, the test says horse tranquilizers.”
He paused his perusal of the more extreme sex questions. “They mean K,” he explained with marked patience. “You get it from vets, mostly, so they call it horse tranquilizers to sound like a big deal. Does your vet get a lot of horses?”
“No,” Veronica said carefully. It felt like a trick question.
“Yeah. They’re fucking dog tranquilizers.”
She laughed in surprise, and he grinned at her roguishly before going back to the test. The clicking had slowed down a little now, but there were still a lot more greyed-out boxes than she’d had, so she leaned in to see what the stand-outs were. He’d never had sex in a car or hot tub, which was surprising. He’d never had sex in a plane or while his parents were home, which was less so. He’d apparently never had sex without a condom, which surprised and impressed her. It probably shouldn’t have – he’d been scrupulous about it so far – but the stereotype was hard to shake.
He glanced at her before saying ‘yes’ to having sex with a virgin, and Veronica stiffened a little. She pretended she hadn’t seen that; there was nothing she could say that didn’t sound defensive.
The most extreme stuff he largely hadn’t done – she could see he’d skipped the threesome question and a bunch of other stuff like bondage – but he acknowledged, unsurprisingly, that he’d had more than five partners, and (with a sly grin in her direction) that he’d been paid for sex.
36 points – 30%
“Does this mean I win?” he asked her smugly.
Veronica rolled her eyes. She was going to sprain her eyeballs if she kept hanging around once the sex was over. “We both knew you’d get a lower score than me. I just wanted to see if you’d ever actually held hands with a girl.”
“Lindsay Gomez,” he said unhesitatingly. “Fifth grade.”
“Of course you were one of those boys,” she said. “You know what I was into in fifth grade? Horses.”
“Of course you were,” he agreed, knowingly, and Veronica flushed. That was maybe not the most worldly, jaded thing she could have said. “So this means I win?”
“Yes, fine, you win.”
“What do I get?” He leered at her, hooding his eyes and dragging them over her body.
Veronica gave him her best unimpressed gaze. It wasn’t like they had time, even if she’d been inclined to entertain a second round. She handed him her last cookie.
Weevil laughed and took it. “That’s a pretty lousy prize. But okay.”
“Maybe your prize is ten tubes of oil paint.”
“You better keep your mouth shut about that,” he said, turning serious. It wasn’t as aggressively threatening as she’d seen him be, but it was plenty sobering.
“Don’t worry, I’m not stupid,” she said. “What would I even say I was doing in here? And anyway, I’m the one with the key.”
“You are,” he agreed, turning away to log out of the computer. “Glad we understand each other.”
*
When she walked into school the next morning it was a zoo. There had been a few arguments in the quad which Veronica had ignored, but the noise and chaos inside the building was legitimately astounding. A group of freshman girls was shrieking at each other about lies and boyfriends and – a turtle? Jenni Foyt was hitting her boyfriend repeatedly with one of her notebooks, while he protested that it had just been a regular crash, he’d forgotten to put the parking brake on. Some rugby meathead was following his friend around repeating, “That’s sick! Was it Marley? I’m reporting you, man! That’s sick!” while the other boy hunched his shoulders and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. Stacia and Allyson Cunningham were in some kind of slap-wrestle fight in front of Stacia’s locker, while Allyson yelled, “You called me a slut! You called me a slut!” At least three couples were loudly breaking up in the hall.
“What is going on?” Veronica breathed. She was half-fascinated, half-exasperated.
“What’s going on?” she repeated as Shelly passed her, forgetting for a second that they weren’t really on speaking terms.
“The website lets you buy other people’s tests,” Shelley said, her tone brittle. She wasn’t really looking at Veronica, though, and it was hard not to wonder what answer she was afraid someone would see.
“I should have tried harder to get a low score,” Veronica said after a minute, watching Jenni drop her notebook and burst into tears. She hadn’t noticed that part – it wasn’t like she cared what anyone’s score was.
Maybe Lilly’s. But not enough to pay for it.
(Maybe Duncan’s – but not enough to admit it to herself.)
Shelly didn’t appear to notice what she’d said, just staring at the carnage, but after a few seconds it must have registered, because she jerked and gave Veronica a disgusted look.
“I can’t believe you’ll sleep with those bikers but not Duncan,” she bit out.
For some reason, all Veronica could think of to say was, “You bought my test?”
Shelly turned red, and Veronica’s brain kicked into gear in time to put the rest of it together – her purity test would have revealed that she’d had sex with more than zero and less than five people ever, but without a specific number, the only way to know for sure that she’d never slept with Duncan was if –
Was if he’d said ‘no’ to “Had sexual intercourse”.
It didn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. She didn’t care what Duncan did, or if he’d slept with Shelly, or anyone else.
So what if she felt vaguely triumphant, and bittersweet, and sick to her stomach?
“I’m sure he’ll put out for you eventually,” she told Shelly sweetly, and forged through the crowd to her locker.
She was trying to get through the crowd on her way to English Lit when Meg and Cole caught her attention. Meg was scrubbing at something on her locker – it looked like it started with a 4 – while Cole listed numbers at her aggressively.
Veronica hesitated. She didn’t know if Meg wanted her around at all, let alone escalating Cole’s animosity by showing up in all her Jeremy-insulting sluttitude to pick a fight with him, even if he was way too much in Meg’s face. But nobody else was saying anything, or doing anything about it.
Then Cole said, “You turned me into a joke,” and Veronica’s jaw clenched. He’d made enough comments under his breath after Jeremy had started telling the whole school that she sucked at blowjobs that it felt like an infuriating irony. But he was gone before she could think of something appropriately crushing to say, and Meg was scrubbing at the red 48 on her locker and trying not to cry, so Veronica didn’t bother with Cole.
“The easiest way to become a slut at this school is to not have sex with your boyfriend,” she said, trying for a sympathetic smile.
“Veronica!” Meg’s voice broke high on the first syllable. “Hi – I…” She scrubbed at the half-erased eight, the edges of the number stubbornly refusing to vanish.
“Listen, I didn’t catch most of that, but I have trouble believing anyone turned Cole into a joke except himself.”
“I didn’t even take the stupid test,” Meg said, her voice a wavering line of tension. “I don’t know…”
“My trust in the basic goodness of humanity isn’t what it used to be, but I have trouble believing you scored lower than I did,” Veronica said, threading a line between casual and compassionate. “I don’t know what Cole thinks happened–”
“He thinks I had sex with the tour guide when my family went to Spain last year.” Meg sniffed and tried to wipe surreptitiously at her eyes. “But I didn’t! I’ve never had sex with anyone. This guy I met there wrote me some letters, but I never did anything with him, and it wasn’t even Javier! He was like thirty.”
Why was it always letters, Veronica wondered, wearily. “Well, Cole likes an excuse to call somebody a slut.”
Meg blinked at her. “I thought you said…”
“I lied. He’s an asshole.” Meg’s face crumpled, and Veronica added, “Only an asshole would have said that stuff to you. Me? Fine, whatever. But you’re basically made of sugar and unicorn tears, so…”
The other girl laughed tearfully. “So you believe me?”
There was a tiny voice in Veronica’s head reminding her that she couldn’t exactly trust her judgement when it came to trusting people, but Meg wasn’t Lilly, who she’d trusted because they were friends, not because she’d thought Lilly was incapable of doing something reckless and cruel to anyone. And Cole was friends with Jeremy, so what did that say about him?
“I believe you,” she said. “But I don’t know how much that helps. I’m not exactly the best person to hang around with if you want to rehab your reputation.”
Meg shook her head. “I just want to be around someone who doesn’t think I’m a liar.”
“Well,” Veronica made an effort to sound cheerful, “You’re always welcome at the slut table with me.” She dropped the voice. “Even when you’re exonerated, you can hang there if you like. We’ll make you an honorary slut or something.”
That got an actual smile. “Thanks, Veronica.” Meg hesitated. “I don’t think you’re a slut.”
Veronica shrugged. “I did what I said I did. I didn’t do what Jeremy said I did. So make of that what you will, I guess.”
“I never really thought that mattered,” Meg said, which probably wasn’t true, but was still nice of her. “I just don’t know if…”
It was about the way she’d handled it, not what had happened. Veronica knew that, but she also knew Meg had never texted her to get ice cream. “Look, until this all goes away?” It probably would eventually – this was Meg. “You’re going to want to get tough too, because when they smell weakness? It gets five times worse.”
“I just don’t understand why this is happening,” Meg sidestepped.
Veronica let her get away with it. “Someone’s sabotaging you, probably because you’re perfect and talented and they’re jealous.”
Meg laughed, for real this time. “Sure, Veronica. Let’s go with that.”
Veronica shrugged. “If you can think of a better reason…”
“Some kind of mistake?” Veronica raised an eyebrow and Meg deflated a little. “Yeah, I know.” She stopped outside Mr. Farley’s classroom. “I have to drop something off – I’ll see you first period?”
“We can switch back in second if you like,” Veronica offered, although her heart was sinking at the idea of sitting so close to Jeremy. She didn’t know what he’d say to Meg, so it seemed only fair.
But Meg shook her head. “No way. I’ll be fine.” She smiled, wan but sincere, and disappeared into the classroom.
*
Veronica didn’t have time to find a free computer and check how much it would take to buy Cole’s test results, but she was at least able to check on Meg during English Lit and Precalc. The other girl looked pale, but she seemed to be holding up okay.
The drama kept up in the halls between classes, spilling over into the classrooms a couple times, although Mrs. Galloway seemed completely oblivious to Erica Singer and Shane Pelletier breaking up right under her nose up until Erica burst into tears and ran out of the classroom mid-lecture. It was almost a relief to get to lunch.
Meg joined her hesitantly at the table she’d scoped out, shooting a couple looks at the place she usually sat.
“You don’t have to sit here,” Veronica told her, but Meg shook her head.
“No, Kimmy and Pam are still being… you know, normal, but Cole’s there.” She blinked hard. “And anyway, I just don’t want to deal with that right now.”
“We don’t actually have to sit here at all.” Veronica took a healthy bite of her sandwich and passed Meg one of the tiny chocolate chip cookies they still had at home. She’d packed extra today, in case of thieves. “We can go to the library. I want to buy your test, see what we’re up against. And I wouldn’t mind getting Cole’s while we’re at it, just in case.”
“He said he got a 91,” Meg said miserably. “I told him that was sexy.”
“And it might even be true! But better safe than sorry.” It was probably screwed-up to hope Meg’s boyfriend had cheated on her, but he was tight with Jeremy, and it would at least make him a less sympathetic supposed victim.
“I guess.” Meg stared at the table. “Can we talk about something else? If one more guy slut-sneezes at me…”
“Slut-sneezes?”
She demonstrated.
“Huh. The virus must have mutated, I’ve only heard coughing before.”
Veronica didn’t get the smile she was going for – Meg only looked more sober. “Did Cole really… what did he say to you?”
She shrugged. “Nothing that bad. Just the usual, jokes about how bad I was in bed, just loud enough I could hear.”
“But why’d you lie?”
Meg’s face was so sincere it was hard to look at, but Veronica managed not to look away. “I guess I figured you weren’t going to break up with him over it, so what was the point in making you feel bad about it?”
“But I would have made him stop!”
Veronica laughed before she could stop herself, and immediately winced at the hurt on Meg’s face. “No, I wasn’t – it’s not that. It’s just… you were always too good for him. You might be too good for any of us?” She considered, then added thoughtfully, “This school is a cesspit.”
“Everybody doesn’t suck,” Meg protested. “Some of the squad is acting like…” She shook her head. “But I told you, Pam and Kimmy are being great.”
“They’re still sitting with Cole,” Veronica pointed out.
“It’s not about Cole – Pam just really likes Dun–” Meg stopped, catching herself too late. Veronica forced a smile.
“You said you never took the test at all, right?”
“It’s really not my thing,” Meg said, seeming grateful enough for the rescue that she’d go along with the not-quite subject change.
“Okay, so someone must have taken it for you. Maybe they got into your email?” Veronica suggested. “I threatened Weevil I was going to do that, but I don’t think it would have actually worked.”
“You threatened–” Meg began. “Actually… never mind. I don’t think I want to know.” After a moment’s thought, her eyes widened in surprise. “And I definitely don’t want to know what’s on there that he’d be afraid of people knowing about.”
“There’s a bestiality question,” Veronica said, a little regretfully. Meg looked as horrified and grossed out as she’d been. “But I just told him I’d say he was virgin who’d never smoked pot or held hands with a girl.”
That earned her a weak smile. “I don’t know how someone could get into my school email without signing in as me at school. The address or the username or whatever is weird because there was a Michael Manning here when we were freshmen, so I’m mcmanning instead of just mmanning.”
“Huh. Twins,” Veronica said. “I’m vamars because it has to be at least six letters.”
“What’s the A for?”
“Ann. Yeah, I know. It was my great-grandmother’s name. She died the year before I was born and Dad was feeling sentimental.”
“I think Veronica Ann is pretty,” Meg said stoutly.
“You’re a gem,” Veronica told her. “Megan Cecile.”
“Margaret Caroline.”
“That’s okay too.”
Meg laughed. “The password is the same, anyway,” she added after a moment.
“And you never told anyone what it was?” Veronica pressed.
The other girl shook her head. “No. I mean, why would I? I guess someone could have figured it out, but…”
“You should change it just in case.”
Meg nodded. “It’s not like it was Cheer123 or anything,” she said, trying to smile. “I did the names of both our cats from when I was little – so I could remember,” she added when Veronica winced. “But you’d have to know their names and then guess what order I put them in, and I did the period in ‘Mr. Twinkles’ and everything.”
The name made them both smile. “Would Cole know?”
“Maybe?” Meg looked dubious. “But why would he do this? If he wanted to break up with me, he could just break up with me!”
It bothered Veronica that she could think of a reason so quickly. “If he thought you hooked up with that Javier guy, maybe he was trying to trick you into admitting it.”
“But I didn’t!” The other girl’s voice choked up a little. “I wouldn’t have done something like that.”
“I know,” Veronica told her. “You are literally the reason I haven’t given up on humanity entirely.”
Meg managed a watery laugh. “I think I’m starting to get why.”
Veronica winced at that, because she was about to make it worse. “Meg… Lizzie would know the cats’ names, right?”
But Meg shook her head. “No. No way, Veronica. She wouldn’t do this.”
The conviction in her voice seemed real, no faint echo of denial, but Veronica wasn’t convinced. Two months ago she would have sworn up and down that Lilly was a good friend, loyal. Someone who would never turn around and betray her.
You’re like my sister, Lilly had said, a few times, back when she’d been trying to drag Veronica back in. Here was hoping that wasn’t true.
“Okay,” she said. It wasn’t like it really mattered. Even if it had been Lizzie, it wasn’t like there was anything they could do about it, except try and convince people – and where did you even get proof of something like that?
But Meg’s attention was elsewhere. “Um, Veronica?”
The object of her concern was leaning against the wall of the school, a few feet away from them. He raised his eyebrows at them, and Veronica winced. “Right. Just give me one–”
“You owe me five dollars,” Weevil said, sauntering over.
“Raincheck? I’m busy.”
He ignored her and sat down at the table – fortunately, closer to her than Meg. “It’s not raining.”
“And you can’t sit here.” He tilted his head in a study of polite confusion, and she added, “This is the slut table. Only sluts can sit here.”
“Wait. You’re saying I can’t sit here because I’m not enough of a slut?” He played the confusion even bigger – Charlie Chaplin would have been proud.
Veronica shrugged. “I’ve never heard anyone slut-sneezing at you.”
Meg made a tiny noise of amusement before she could stop herself, then clamped her lips together and fixed her eyes on the edge of the table.
Weevil glanced at her momentarily, then dismissed her. “Is this about that test? Because I got a lower score than you.”
“No, it’s about whether or not the whole school calls you a slut. And they don’t, so scram.”
“Scram?” He shook his head in mock disbelief. “You judge me before you even know me.”
That sounded weirdly familiar, but Veronica brushed it off. “Go away.”
“Five dollars,” he said, and got up. “Those are good, right?” he told Meg, nodding to the cookie she was still holding.
Meg smiled awkwardly at him, too polite for her own good. “Um, yes.” She ate it as he walked away, grinning.
“This is really good, but why do you owe him five dollars?” Meg asked, clearly trying to find the safest possible subject. Veronica winced, more for the other girl’s sake than her own.
“I, ah, may have told him I’d give him five bucks to…” She counted the seconds it took to twig – the dawning realization was crystal clear on Meg’s face. Two and a half.
“You paid him to–” Meg glanced around, dropping her voice to an urgent whisper. “You didn’t pay him to have sex with you?”
“Listen, I was trying to get a low score on the test on purpose, and one of the questions was if you’d ever, you know, paid for it. That’s all.”
Meg processed that for several seconds. “I don’t know what to say to… any of that.”
“So don’t!” Veronica responded quickly. “I still owe you ice cream, right? After school?”
“That’s sweet, but I think I want to go home and curl up in a ball once school’s over.”
Veronica thought about her original plans for Lilly, about all the incriminating evidence that was probably still hiding behind the grille in her wall. “Listen, Meg – you said some other guy sent you letters? Do you still have them?”
“Yeah. I never answered, but nobody ever wrote me love letters before. And they were kind of sexy. Nothing really bad, but…” She blushed a little.
“Maybe get rid of them? Or hide them somewhere? I don’t know how cool your parents are, but–”
“Not cool,” Meg said, instant and emphatic. “Not about stuff like that.”
“Just play it safe,” Veronica told her. She didn’t mention Lizzie again. It was more important for Meg to listen to her.
“Yeah, you’re right. I probably shouldn’t have kept them anyway.”
Veronica shook her head. “This isn’t your fault. But anybody who’s willing to come after you is willing to play dirty.”
Notes:
No real warnings regarding the sex in this chapter, but there are mentions of bestiality and incest in the purity test. Also a comedy 'I forgot a condom' moment - he did not actually.
Chapter 13: A Little Less Pain
Notes:
Happy Canada day! Getting this out in time was an EFFORT, but I hope you enjoy it!
Chapter Text
We don't even ask happiness, just a little less pain.
Charles Bukowski
If he had put money on one person completely refusing to take that stupid test, Weevil would never, ever have picked Felix. He would have picked himself, first of all, and then he would have picked literally anyone other than Felix.
But that assessment hadn’t taken into consideration Veronica Mars, and whatever weird bullshit was going on with Felix’s dumb ass these days.
It wasn’t like he disagreed that it was a stupid waste of time, but hearing those particular arguments coming out of Felix’s mouth was more than a little surreal, when Weevil would have put actual money on him either bragging about his score or dashing around trying to lower it by a few points. Thumper was equally disdainful of the thing, which made a lot more sense, but Ric had taken some kind of offense to both of them and was still bitching about how Felix was probably afraid of people finding out how lame he was when the bell rang for sixth period. Weevil hadn’t minded it at first – it took the attention off the fact that he’d more or less been shot down by a booty call (and a prearranged one, no less) – but he hadn’t skipped all of History just to listen to Ric complain.
Besides which, it was never good when he got this way. Ric wasn’t exactly shy about his actual opinions, so when he started venting his feelings by beating some random pointless crap into the ground it was always a bad sign. Usually a sign that he’d decided he was hard-done-by in some way and was about to do something stupid to get his due.
Weevil wasn’t planning on sitting him down for a nice talk about how he could have more than one friend and he didn’t like Felix more than Ric – partly because he did like Felix more than Ric – and besides, when Ric got a chip on his shoulder, he inevitably worked his way around to remembering that his cousin had been jefe before Gus, and convincing himself that that meant something, which it fucking didn’t. There was a reason Felix wasn’t running things these days, and it wasn’t like anyone was going to put Chardo in charge if Weevil bit it like Damien had, which he wouldn’t because he wore his fucking helmet.
“If you wanna know how freaky Wanda Varner is in bed, just ask,” he said, finally deciding he’d rather sit through an hour of World Religions than stay out behind the gym and listen to more of this. “I’m going back to class.” Ric sputtered and protested, but Weevil ignored him. There was only a faint chance this was remotely about Wanda, but it should at least get him to shut up.
“I’m not – I got better things to do,” Ric snapped, when he finally realized that Weevil wasn’t paying attention to his annoyed bluster.
“So go do them.” He grabbed Ric’s upper arm before the other boy could storm away. “And don’t fuck with me, Enrique. You know the fucking rules.”
“Hey, man, that was one time!” Ric yanked at Weevil’s grip, but not hard enough to pull free.
“One strike is all you get. I’m not stupid, I know your brother’s out of prison.”
“Yeah, well, his hookup’s not.” Ric dropped his eyes to the ground, so it had at least crossed his mind. “I told you last year – I won’t do you like that again.”
“Yeah? Well, maybe you wanna remember – you get one strike with me? You get zero with the Fitzpatricks. Just–” He snapped his fingers. “Poof. I catch you dealing again, being out’ll be the least of your problems.”
“I told you, that was a year ago!” Ric was more angry than defensive, which was a good sign. “Manolo’s not even doing that shit anymore; all he does is work that crappy convenience store job and watch TV on the couch. He won’t even do his fucking laundry.”
“I don’t care if he’s cooking his own meth in the basement – he’s not the boss of you, I am.” Weevil let the intensity ease off, just a bit, but he sharpened his tone to make up for it.
“Whatever,” Ric said, doing a bad job of covering his acquiescence with scorn. Weevil let him save his pride by making a big deal about shaking off the restraining hand.
“All right, get out of here.”
Ric went, his shoulders easing from defiance into relief when he thought he was out of Weevil’s sightline. Good. Relief meant it would probably blow over. Resentment would have been a problem.
He wasn’t exactly on time for World Religions, and Mr. Zebrowski was visibly annoyed.
“Mr. Navarro. Glad you could join us.”
Weevil gave his best ‘what can you do’ expression, spreading his hands wide, and the teacher shook his head and waved him to an empty seat.
He didn’t pay all that much attention during class – he’d taken it last year, and he probably would have passed if he hadn’t spent most of the last month of class in juvie and missed that final project thing. As long as he didn’t get arrested in December, he’d be fine – especially if he could snag Catholicism before anyone else did.
He drew a cat on his desk with Sharpie instead. Curve with ears, attached to a squash-bottomed oval, then add a long wavy tail. Easy, even if you weren’t much of an artist. When Ariana had come to live with them, Weevil had spent hours drawing cats for her because it was the only thing he could draw that wasn’t a star or a gimmicky barn. He hadn’t thought about that in ages, but birthdays always made him think weird shit.
It was too bad he couldn’t get Alex to chill about their grandma having to work on his birthday by drawing some cats. Not that it was actually about Leticia having to work – it was about Chardo being in jail. But if you said the words ‘Your brother’ to Alex these days, he’d start screaming and breaking shit, and it just wasn’t worth it.
Maybe he should cut out early. Fifty/fifty odds they had a pop quiz in Earth Science – they hadn’t had one in nearly a month, and Saunders liked Tuesdays and Wednesdays for that because he thought it was surprising or some shit – but whatever. If he left after sixth period, he could take the car when his grandma finished work, get an ice cream cake or something so it wouldn’t just be cupcakes. Of course then Danny would bitch if they didn’t have ice cream cake at his birthday, but that was months away, and Danny would get over it. He needed to grow up, anyway.
Ben Forness bombed a question about what goddess the teacher was showing a picture of, and Weevil actually remembered that from last year, so he earned a little credit back with Zebrowski by raising his hand and answering. He wasn’t entirely sure on what the difference between Kali and Durga was, because they both killed shit and had too many arms, and were kind of the same person, but to be fair he hadn’t paid that much attention beyond realizing that the teacher liked to use that one as a gotcha.
Actually participating in class was enough to justify skipping last period, in Weevil’s opinion, especially when he had something approaching a good reason, so he took a hard right once they wrapped up, even folding up the homework assignment and virtuously making sure it made it in with his other stuff instead of languishing in the bottom of his locker.
His good mood didn’t last, because Danny was already home when Weevil got there, which was not something he wanted to deal with. But his grandma wasn’t home yet, and someone had to.
“What the fuck are you doing, skipping school?” he demanded, which sent Danny scrambling up to turn off the TV. Which he should have done anyway, as soon as he heard the front door open, because if he thought Leti Navarro was going to let her nine-year-old grandson cut school for no reason without hell to pay, he was stupider than Weevil thought.
“You’re skipping school,” Danny said, wavering between sullen and defiant.
“Don’t give me that shit.” Weevil threw his jacket at the back of the couch, noting with satisfaction that his cousin flinched at the sound of leather hitting upholstery. He stepped closer. “What I do is none of your business, first of all. Unless you got some kind of promotion I don’t know about? You PCH now?”
Danny glared at the floor.
“Well?”
“No,” Danny muttered.
Weevil feigned surprise. “No? So, what, no bike, no cash flow, no tough guy shit?” When Danny stared mulishly at the carpet, he reached out and thwacked the kid under the chin, just hard enough to remind him who he was dealing with. Danny jumped back, making a half outraged, half plaintive noise that mostly sounded like a wet cat.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” Weevil said, easily. Nothing pissed kids off more than acting like they weren’t worth the effort to get mad at. His cousin met his eyes with resentment, and Weevil raised his eyebrows expectantly.
“No,” Danny snarled finally.
“No? So you’re not putting food on the table, I guess? Or buying those games you were just playing? Are you paying the rent? Are you keeping things in line so no one fucks with anyone who lives in this house?”
“No.”
“So do you get to have a fucking opinion on what I do?”
He waited until Danny muttered another begrudging, “No,” then said with fake cheeriness, “That’s right!” and snaked a hand around to grab the kid by the back of his hair.
He wasn’t holding on all that hard, but Danny yelped and wriggled, then yelped more when the wriggling backfired on him.
“You’re supposed to make sure Ariana gets on the bus okay,” Weevil said, lowering his voice menacingly. It was probably the thing that pissed him off the most. “How’d you even get home – did you just leave at fucking lunch?” He didn’t like the idea of Danny walking all the way home by himself either. Weevil’s influence only went so far, and nine wasn’t that much older than five in the long run; just because the guy who killed Marisol was off the street didn’t mean there weren’t more like him out there.
“I took the bus,” Danny whined, still trying to squirm away. “Ow, ow–”
“You got money for the bus?” Weevil demanded. “I guess maybe we gotta fix that, then.” He spun Danny around and marched him toward the stairs, ignoring the boy’s protests.
“Alex can help Ariana, if she’s gonna be a baby,” Danny argued, but he kept up, finally getting the picture about how it was going to go for his hair if he didn’t.
“Did you tell him he had to look out for her?” Weevil demanded. The silence he got in response was telling. “And I can’t believe he’s at school on his birthday and you’re sitting at home playing GT-fucking-A.”
Danny’s shoulders dropped, so he was at least a little ashamed of himself. Good.
Weevil steered him into the boys’ bedroom, only slightly more gently than he deserved. “If you got money to burn skipping school, then no money, no cutting class, right?” he asked, putting on the patient tone that his boys knew meant Do Not Fuck With Me. “Makes sense to me.”
But Danny wasn’t exactly PCH material. “No, Weevil–”
“Unless you’ve got another idea,” Weevil said, relentless. “Because obviously I can’t take your word for it, ‘cause you promised Grandma you’d behave yourself after that shit with the Torres kid, and look what that was worth, huh?” He shook the boy lightly. “So cough up.” He jerked his head toward the blue piggy bank on the half of the dresser that was Danny’s.
“No!” The kid jerked away so hard he might have lost a few strands of hair, but Weevil grabbed his shoulder. “My mom gave it to me!”
That was enough to make Weevil waver internally, but he kept his face impassive. Danny wasn’t the only one with a dead mom.
He still almost caved, but he forced himself not to – it wasn’t like he was going to smash the thing. “Did she give you the money? No. You got it couch-diving and stealing second-graders’ lunch money out of their backpacks. She gave you the fucking piggy bank. So separate the two, or I’ll do it for you.”
He would have done it carefully, but after a certain point the threats implied themselves. Danny scrambled over and worked the plug out.
There was more in there than Weevil honestly would have liked, because it maybe meant that Danny was stealing money from the little kids again. The worst part had been that he wasn’t even threatening them – when Felice Torres had caught him taking her son’s keychain it had all come out, because he’d been sneaking around and stashing it all in the same place, like he was afraid of a bunch of seven-year-olds.
(The actual worst part had been that all the kids he’d stolen from had been neighbourhood kids, or close to it, but Weevil had laid down the law on that one. You don’t fucking take from other poor Mexicans when there’s twelve 09er kids in the same goddamn class.)
The good news was that it was probably enough to cover the cake he was still considering picking up. There was some vague symmetry in it that it would help hammer the point home a little harder, but Danny would still get some of the cake, so that would hopefully keep him from taking his feelings out on Alex.
And Weevil wouldn’t have to spend his own money on it, which was good too. Between that and managing not to shell out for Alex’s present he wasn’t in bad shape at the moment. It was almost like if you managed your life right you didn’t need to commit credit card fraud.
He was kicking himself for the thought before it even really finished forming. Like he needed to be thinking about that crap now – but no, he’d think he was over it, done churning up his mind over Chardo’s bullshit, and then up it popped again like a fucking jack-in-the-box. Great.
He stacked the bills and swept most of the coins into his pocket, leaving Danny a tangle of nickels and dimes that might have technically been enough for bus fare if he hadn’t been confident the kid would blow it on five-cent candies.
“I’m going out,” he said. Technically he wasn’t going anywhere until their grandmother got back, because you couldn’t exactly take a cake on a motorcycle, but he didn’t want to put up with Danny pouting. Should be any time now, anyway. “Fix your shit.”
*
Alex got off the bus holding Ariana’s hand, and that made Weevil feel pretty good about the whole cake thing.
“I losted Danny,” she told him as they hit the porch, all big eyes. But at least she wasn’t crying.
“You lost Danny?” he repeated calmly, and she nodded.
“He didn’t get on the bus,” Alex said. “He was probably hiding in the library or something pathetic.”
Weevil shook his head. “Yeah, I dealt with Danny, it’s fine.” He tousled Alex’s hair. “Happy birthday. Good job watching out for her.”
“Uh-uh!” Ariana insisted. “I got on the bus myself.”
“Yeah?” Alex nodded. Yeah, okay, that was worth a bit of babytalk; Ariana hated making decisions like that for herself. She locked up and started crying under any kind of pressure. “That’s pretty cool too. Guess you don’t need Danny anymore.” Weevil pinched her nose gently to make her smile and shooed her inside.
“I didn’t know he ditched her until she came and sat with me,” Alex said defensively. Weevil waved him off.
“Nah, you’re good. I explained to him why this isn’t going to happen again.” Alex mostly hung out with the tough crowd at school – boys who liked to think they were future PCHers. It probably hadn’t won him a ton of cred to let Ariana come and sit with him on the bus. “You’re a pain in my ass, for the record, but you’re a good kid.”
Alex rolled his eyes, which might have been more believable if he hadn’t been puffing out his chest at the same time. “Whatever.”
“Come on, Grandma made cupcakes.” This wasn’t exactly a surprise – she’d made them yesterday, and put one in Alex’s lunch for his birthday – but Alex put on a dutiful smile and trooped inside.
Danny was in the kitchen with the others; their grandmother had straightened him out enough that he had his present for Alex and was pretending to be a good sport. It was next to her own carefully wrapped present and a slightly creased card that must be from Ariana.
“Be right back,” Weevil said – the paints were still under his bed in a wooden box he’d nicked from the woodshop. It had been holding tools, so he was reasonably sure it wasn’t someone’s project; the disappearance would be puzzling, not concerning. Besides, they looked pretty good in it.
“We have to sing happy birthday,” Ariana told him sternly. She was stickler about birthdays. It had been the only thing she was still normal about when Angel had gotten her away from Laura.
“Yeah, I know, let me get my present.”
When he came back, they’d started on the cupcakes. Alex was pretending he wasn’t disappointed by the lack of fanfare, which was fine. Weevil set the box on the table with the rest.
“Okay, someone said we had to sing happy birthday?”
“Normally there’d be candles,” his grandma added, “but it seemed like a bad idea this time.” She tousled Alex’s hair affectionately as he frowned in confusion.
There wasn’t time for anyone to work it out because Ariana started them off with a tone-deaf, “HAPPY birthDAY to YOU–” and then everyone had to scramble not to fall behind. Danny looked like he wasn’t going to bother, but Weevil smacked him on the back of the arm and he decided to mumble along. Somehow Leticia still managed to coordinate sliding the cake out of the freezer with the final ‘to youuuu’, and it was more than a little gratifying to see Alex’s expression go from embarrassed tolerance to shocked delight.
“Wait, for real?”
“Of course for real, m’ijo,” she said, chucking him lightly under the chin. “You think it’s made of cardboard? Your cousin–” but Weevil shook his head and she pivoted easily into, “–s have presents, but cake first.”
“Yayyyy!” Ariana clapped, bouncing. Alex had had ice cream cake once at some school party for a teacher who was retiring, last year – and he hadn’t shut up about it for weeks – but she probably never had. She waited her turn, though, and even Danny stopped sulking for a minute when he got his piece.
Weevil’s was a little larger than the rest, but when he caught his grandma’s eye she shrugged and looked away, all confused innocence. He smirked knowingly at her anyway, pretending it didn’t get him a little whenever she approved of him, and leaned against the fridge to eat it.
Alex got another piece, and Ariana said she wanted one too but she’d barely finished the first one, so Leticia cut a sliver out of the cake and split it between Ariana and Danny. Weevil didn’t take a second one. “Where’s your cake?” he said.
His grandma shook her head and waved him off in exasperation, covering the cake again and putting it back in the freezer. Maybe he’d try and get home at the same time as her tonight, convince her to actually have some.
“Presents,” she announced, clapping her hands together. “Let’s go, Alejandro, I want to see everything before I have to leave.”
“Do mine first!” Ariana picked her card up off the table with apparently the sole purpose of shoving in an inch and a half into Alex’s hands. Weevil covered a smile.
It bridged the moment where Alex’s face fell at the reminder that their grandma was leaving in an hour, and then he was making appreciative noises over the card, and the homemade coupons Ariana had put inside it, which he could cash in for three instances of her dessert and one of getting to ‘pick the movie’. Danny’s giftbag had a used backgammon board in it – no tissue paper or anything, but Alex seemed to like it more than Weevil would have. He liked that kind of thing, card games with no gambling and whatever.
Their grandmother had managed to get some kind of science kit; it was small and the booklet that came with it looked suspiciously thick, like it was full of the kind of stuff you had to provide your own supplies for, but it should manage at least one or two small explosions anyway. She caught Weevil’s eye when she warned Alex to only use it outside, as if the fire on their old couch had been his fault and not Chardo’s.
But the paints definitely took the day. It was almost enough to make him feel guilty for not being able to swing a real easel – Alex was still stuck with the shitty kids’ one crammed into the corner of the room he was sharing with Danny. Not that they had the space for a decent one anyway.
“You can practice with ‘em later,” he interrupted Alex’s effusive plans for what he was going to do with them. “I’m taking you to meet your friends soon, right?”
That hadn’t been the original plan. “I need the car, Eli, unless you were going to drop me off.”
“Nah, I’ll take him on my bike,” Weevil said, pretending he didn’t see Alex light up a little more. Showing up on an actual PCHer’s motorcycle would redeem whatever credit he’d lost taking care of Ariana.
His grandma eyed him narrowly. She didn’t like him taking the kids on his bike, usually, even though he was always careful about helmets and speed limits when he had them. But she didn’t say anything about it, just patted Alex on the shoulder and told him, “Finish your homework before you go out, all right? I’ll give you some money for the movie.”
“Do not waste it on fucking candy,” Weevil warned him. “Buy it at the dollar store and sneak it in.”
That got him swatted for swearing in front of the kids, but he didn’t mind. They weren’t listening anyway, except for Alex, who heard worse at school. Said worse, too, probably.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Can I use the–”
“No,” Weevil cut him off. “The only part of my bike you’re touching is the seat, with your ass.”
He got a resentful stare for that, but Alex was smart enough not to piss him off when he was in a magnanimous mood. “Well, can I take my stuff upstairs?”
They both waved him off, knowing full well he was going to spend a while fucking around with the paints and the gameboard and looking at everything in the science kit. It was worth it, especially when there hadn’t been any explosions about Chardo, or Leticia having to work, or anything else.
“Tania call?” Weevil asked under his breath as the kids scattered and his grandmother started collecting the plates. He didn’t really think she had, but maybe this year, with everything…
“No.” His grandma’s mouth tightened into a thin line. He didn’t know if she was more angry with her daughter or with Tania’s piece of shit new boyfriend (he’d been her new boyfriend to Leticia for going on six years, because he wasn’t Marco) for not letting her keep her kids.
It was complicated, Weevil knew that – the asshole didn’t let her do much of anything; in some ways he was almost worse than Dave, but they didn’t live in Neptune anymore and so there was fuck-all Weevil could do about it. But it was hard to care; his mother had tried, no matter how little it had mattered in the end. Even Danny’s mother hadn’t abandoned him for some guy when she’d killed herself. He’d tried to imagine Claudia ever doing Ofelia like that, and…
“Does she even know Chardo’s in jail?” he asked, like he was going to get a different answer this time.
“I don’t know, m’ijo.”
She looked so tired that he pushed off the fridge and came over to hug her around the shoulders from behind. For a moment he felt her relax against him, but then she straightened her shoulders and went back to cleaning up.
“Make sure Alex wears a helmet,” she told him severely.
Normally Weevil would have protested, “Don’t I always?” and made a big show of being offended. Right now, he kissed the side of her head, right at the top, and said, “I will.”
*
Do you still want to get ice cream? I could use someone to talk to.
Veronica had waited around after school for a little while, since Weevil had made such a big deal about that raincheck, but he wasn’t anywhere she could see, and she wasn’t going to go looking for him – so she was just walking in the door when her phone dinged with Meg’s text, and she made a one-eighty in the front hall, pulling her hand back from the key-hooks.
“I’ve had some extreme reactions to my meatloaf, but that’s a little much, don’t you think?”
It was her mom, standing in the doorway to the kitchen with a frown.
“I have to go to Meg’s,” Veronica said, not without a twinge at the idea of leaving when everything seemed actually normal. There was a part of her that was smugly pleased at leaving her mother hanging, but she tried to ignore it; it just made her feel ugly. “It smells good, really. I’ll probably be back for dinner.”
“We’re eating dinner early,” Lianne called after her, voice wavering between cheerfulness and anxiety. “Your dad will be home soon!”
“I’ll be back – it’s only four!” It wasn’t even, not for another couple minutes; Veronica stepped back into her shoes, wincing slightly when the left heel scrunched under her foot. She waited to text Meg back in the car, on my way – I can pick you up?
Meg’s answer came back so quickly it was concerning: Can you just pick something up and bring it? Can’t leave the house – it’s complicated.
Amy’s, Veronica’s usual go-to, didn’t do pints, but Ziggy’s did, so she swung by, verifying Meg’s preferred flavour and grabbing a second option for each of them in case the ominous overtones in that text spiralled into an all-night comfort event.
She’d only been to Meg’s house once before, for a birthday party a few years before, and she’d forgotten how comparatively modest it was next to most of the other houses in the zip code. Certainly it was nothing like Lilly’s or Logan’s – although it was both bigger and fancier than Veronica’s. That was what happened when you made your money in investment banking instead of movies or software, she guessed; you weren’t as flashy about it.
When Mrs. Manning answered the door she seemed like she’d been expecting company, so Veronica risked asking if she could stash the back-up ice cream in the freezer before she took the other two up to Meg’s room. The other girl was sitting on the foot of her bed, clutching a handset from one of those phones you could carry around the house. She forced a smile when she saw Veronica. “Hi. Thanks for coming. I just…” She winced.
“I am always up for ice cream,” Veronica said, her upbeat tone only a little ironic. “What’s up?”
Meg chuckled darkly. “What’s up? Well, according to half the male population of Neptune High… they are.” The phone rang while Veronica was trying to parse this, and Meg answered it instantly, stabbing at the button and spitting out a tense “Hello?” only to jerk the phone away from her head in disgust and press the ‘Off’ button so hard it looked like her finger was bending.
She dropped the handset onto the bed next to her, looking on the point of tears before she shook herself and forced another, even tenser smile. “I don’t want my parents to answer – I don’t know what they might say to my mom, or…”
Veronica wrestled with the absolute rage that swamped her when she realized why Meg hadn’t wanted to go out for ice cream. “How many calls have you gotten?”
“I think that was the sixth?”
Veronica handed her the pint of mango ice cream. “Then I’m guessing you need this.”
Meg laughed, thready but sincere. “I really do.”
“Your mom gave me spoons.” She passed one over.
“It’s mostly just heavy breathing or really horrible jokes,” Meg told her, almost apologetically. “But I don’t want someone else answering them, you know?”
“No kidding,” Veronica told her. “You shouldn’t have to answer them either.”
Meg shrugged. “What are my options? Lizzie isn’t going to do it. She’s busy with some…” she waved a hand vaguely, “makeup thing.”
Veronica raised an eyebrow and held out her hand for the phone.
“Veronica, no – that’s not why I asked you to come over.”
“I know. You’re a saint.” She repeated the gesture, more emphatically, until Meg reluctantly passed the handset over. “Listen, six times in ninety minutes is bordering on harassment. If you want me to talk to my dad…”
But Meg was shaking her head. “I can’t make a big deal out of this. I got rid of those letters, like you said – I should have done that ages ago. But my parents are still pretty on edge after this stuff that happened with Lizzie at summer camp, my dad especially. I don’t want them finding out about this.”
“But they’d believe you,” Veronica said, willing it to be true. “I mean, you’re the squeakiest, cleanest person I know.”
Meg shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope so. But I don’t want to plant the idea in their minds, you know?”
That made sense, or at least Veronica thought it did. “Okay. And it’ll probably die down – these assholes think they’re funny; they’ll give up eventually.” She paused. “Did I tell you Dick Casablancas made me flash half the school?”
“What?” Meg stared at her. “No! What happened?”
“It was the day you lent me your jacket.” Seeing the appalled look on the other girl’s face, she added, “I crushed his iPod. He’s not going to do it again.”
“God, Veronica. That’s so awful.” Meg looked like she was about to start pouring sympathy on Veronica, which was the opposite of what should be happening.
“Well, I survived, and no one’s tried anything like that since. It helps that there’s not much to flash,” she added wryly.
“Still.” There was a thoughtful pause, devoted mostly to ice cream. “Did… did anyone email you?” Meg asked after a minute. “Gross stuff, I mean.”
“Lilly emailed me a bunch of essays about why I should go back to being her little lapdog,” Veronica said, striking a far more casual, ironic tone than her actual emotions called for. “That was pretty gross.”
Meg’s lips twitched, very briefly. “A few guys sent me porn. I mean, maybe more than a few. After I realized what was in the first couple emails, I didn’t read the rest.” She frowned. “I think one of them actually was Dick, though.”
“It figures,” Veronica said grimly. “What fucking assholes.”
The profanity surprised a laugh out of her friend. “They kind of are, aren’t they?”
“The absolute worst.” The phone rang again, and Veronica answered it. “Hello!” she said, turning the perkiness as far up as her voice would go. “Manning resi – oh. Yeah, I think she’s here.” She covered the receiver with one hand. “It’s for Lizzie.”
“I’ll get her.” Meg got up, setting her half-finished ice cream carefully on her bedside table. “One second.”
She disappeared into the hall, and a few moments later Veronica could hear a click on the handset as Lizzie picked up. She was tempted to listen in, just in case this was someone Lizzie would confess to, if she was the one who’d sabotaged her sister, but the odds were so low, and it would be way too awkward to explain to Meg, so she hung up instead.
“At least I don’t have to worry about that anymore,” Meg said, shutting the door behind her. “Lizzie can be on the phone for hours, and the other line only goes to Dad’s office.”
“I bet it’ll piss them off when they can’t get through,” Veronica said with some satisfaction. “Whereas we will be having a nice time with too much ice cream.”
The other girl laughed with real sincerity. “I’d rather be hanging out with you anyway,” she said. “Some of the cheer squad was going to Lino’s, but I didn’t really feel like it. Which is why I was home to intercept the calls, so I guess it worked out.”
“Lino’s is pretentious,” Veronica told her with assurance. “Their manicotti isn’t properly cheesy and they charge too much. You’re not missing anything. Mama Leone’s all the way.”
Meg laughed again. “Well, that’s good to know. Maybe we can have the cast party there this year instead.”
“Are you in the musical again this year? I guess you always are.”
Meg winced. “Auditions are tomorrow. I’ve been practicing, but… I just can’t focus today. I was really hoping to get Sally, but I don’t know now. I think I’m off my game.”
“Completely understandable,” Veronica told her. “But seriously. You’ve been in every musical since, what, middle school? I bet you’ve got it in the bag.”
“Maybe.” Meg shrugged. “Kimmy’s pretty good – I mean, her singing could use a little polish, but her acting is really good!”
Veronica wasn’t entirely convinced; Kimmy had never had enough presence that Veronica had even noticed her that much, and they’d been on pep squad together last year, before Kimmy had switched to cheer in September. It was hard to imagine her making an impression on stage.
“You’ll be great,” Veronica told her. “I don’t even really like musicals, but we went a couple years ago, when you guys did The Sound of Music? I don’t even remember who played the lead, but I was actually shocked by how good you were. If I think about it I can still hear your part from Sixteen Going On Seventeen in my head.”
Meg looked down, smiling. “Aw, Veronica. I think Rachel Taverner did a good job as Maria, but thanks. Really.”
“I only ever tell the truth,” Veronica said, putting a hand against her heart. Meg laughed.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
There was a moment of silence. Finally, Meg put down her empty ice cream container on the bedside table. “Do you think this will… I don’t know, blow over? I wish I could show Cole he’s wrong, or–” She shook her head, eyes squeezing shut in a defence against tears that Veronica recognized all too well. “But I just want this to stop. I can – I can live without a boyfriend.”
“Yeah, you can, especially one like that. Cole was never good enough for you, Meg, you have to know that.” The words gave Veronica pause. She swallowed, trying not to let her face show the echo of Lilly she was hearing in her own voice. It was different, though. She hadn’t broken up Meg and Cole, would have never tried to meddle in Meg’s relationship for her own good, except by talking to her. It wasn’t the same.
She still felt that ugly apprehension sitting awkwardly in her chest.
“I really cared about him, though.” Meg’s mouth twisted. “I still do. I mean, he should have believed me…” She trailed off miserably.
“He should have believed you.” Veronica made an executive decision. “I got us each another pint. Yours is peach-raspberry. Want it now?”
That provoked a watery but sincere smile. “You’re a good friend, Veronica. I’m sorry I haven’t been around as much, I just didn’t know what to say.”
“It’s fine.” Veronica really didn’t want to get into that subject. “More ice cream? I can text my mom and say I’ll be late for dinner.”
Meg shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I mean, you can eat with us if you want, but you don’t have to stay. Lizzie will probably be on the phone until dinner anyway, so it’ll be fine.”
And after dinner? Veronica thought, but she didn’t say anything. If Meg was lucky, the calls were just Cole and his shitty friends, maybe a few jokers like Dick who thought they were absolutely hilarious, and the harassment would drop off when they got bored. But blow over?
It hadn’t for her, but then she hadn’t really given it a chance to. It was tempting to think that it would be different for Meg, who was so inescapably wholesome, but it probably wouldn’t be. A tarnished good girl was judged more harshly than someone who’d been average, or kind of slutty already. It burned that Meg might get more backlash for doing absolutely nothing than Lilly had for cheating on her boyfriend with someone else’s.
“Maybe I’ll call you after dinner, then,” was all she said. “Tie up the phone lines for a while.”
“Wow.” Meg shook her head. “Why didn’t I think of that? I could have just called you instead of making you come all the way over here.”
“I don’t mind a chance to get out of the house,” Veronica said, not entirely sure if she was telling the truth or not. She added a joke for good measure. “I’m trying to play hard to get with my parents – make them appreciate me more.”
Meg laughed. “Thanks, Veronica. You’re a good friend.”
“I try.” She got up, dusting imaginary fluff off her skirt. “If I am going, I better go before my dad gets home. We have big family plans for dinner, apparently. But I’ll call you.”
“We’re usually done around seven,” Meg offered.
Veronica shot her a meaningful nod, which made her smile. “Don’t forget, there’s more ice cream in the freezer if you need it.”
Meg hesitated, then got off the bed and hugged her. After a moment of surprise, Veronica squeezed back. It was almost surprising how soft and warm the hug was – how long had it been since someone other than her parents had hugged her? Or really touched her at all, in a way that was more than brushing against someone in the hall, or passing something to someone?
Except for Weevil, who didn’t really count.
“It’ll be okay,” she told Meg’s shoulder. “You just need to get tough – you can handle this.”
“Get tough, huh?”
Veronica pulled back and shrugged. “Step two: get even,” she offered.
“With who?” Meg asked, raising an eyebrow.
It was a good point. “Cole?” Veronica suggested, but it didn’t seem to get elicit much in the way of agreement. “Or the trolls that keep calling you? The emails I need to work on, but for the rest of it, I bet I could get you an airhorn.”
That made Meg laugh. “Kinda hard to explain to my parents. But I’ll keep it in mind.”
“That’s all I ask.” She squeezed Meg’s arm before she left, almost deciding to leave her own second pint of ice cream for the other girl too – but she hadn’t had Ziggy’s blueberry-pomegranate ice cream in ages. They usually went to Amy’s because everyone except Duncan liked it better, but Amy’s only had straight blueberry.
“Thanks, Mrs. Manning,” she said when she ducked into the kitchen to retrieve it. “The other one’s for Meg, later.”
Meg’s mom smiled and waved her out – it felt almost surreal, being catapulted back into her old, parent-approved shoes, even if it was absolutely a good thing that Meg’s parents didn’t know the current gossip about her.
Neither did hers, Veronica reminded herself. Her parents might be cooler than Meg’s about baseless rumours, but she very much did not want them to know about the un-baseless ones. And in the interest of not raising questions that might lead to that topic, she should get home in time for dinner.
*
Cole, it turned out, had pretty much been telling the truth about his 91, which threw Veronica off a little. She been almost relying on him having lied or cheated or both – not only because then it might be possible to convince people he’d lied about Meg, but because he was Jeremy’s friend. It had seemed both obvious and necessary that he be full of shit. But the incriminating box next to ‘Cheated on a significant other during a relationship?’ was stubbornly empty, and the other boxes that might have indicated he’d been up to something he shouldn’t, or just that he’d actually had a taste before he dated Meg of some of the things he was always bitching about not getting were mostly empty as well.
There went her best idea for trying to help. She still suspected the person targeting Meg might be Lizzie, but she couldn’t prove it and unless Lizzie confessed it wouldn’t help Meg anyway. So that didn’t leave much except to blow another ten bucks on Meg’s test, to see what they were up against.
She’d been kind of hoping it would be so deranged it would be easy to throw out – with a felony accusation that would be a simple matter to disprove, or a random selection of nonsense that contradicted itself – but mostly it seemed pretty logical. ‘Danced without leaving room for Jesus’ was unchecked when it seemed like it really should be given what else Meg had allegedly done, but either the real culprit was trying to make her look like a hypocrite, or they’d been clicking so fast they’d just missed, because everything else made sense given the narrative the test was holding up.
Which was honestly just another nudge toward Lizzie, because who else would have been trying to craft a deliberate narrative? Except maybe for Cole, who she wasn’t ruling out, but who had no actual evidence pointing at him. Apparently he wasn’t even a hypocrite, just an asshole.
She printed Meg’s test, so they could look at it at school tomorrow if they needed to, and then on second thought printed Cole’s as well. She didn’t know what she was going to do with it, but you never knew when you might need information.
She’d been thinking of the letters Lilly had shown her, but that wasn’t the only information she had. There wasn’t any point in spending money on Weevil’s test, but there was something she had access to that no one else did.
There wasn’t much point in dwelling on Meg’s situation any more – she couldn’t do anything else about it, at least not right now, and if she called, they would still all be having dinner – so she tapped the print-outs into order and set them on the edge of her desk, then opened up her Other Things folder.
The title of the one she’d hidden his record in – Ideas for Lilly’s Party – made her stomach turn over uncomfortably, but keeping it hidden and innocuous was more important than scrubbing all mention of Lilly. She was a big girl, she could handle it. Besides, half the files in the outer folder were pictures of Duncan she couldn’t bring herself to delete. If she purged all the painful memories, there’d be nothing left but Weevil’s rap sheet, and then it would stick out no matter what she called it.
Veronica wasn’t really sure what she was looking for – she’d already read through most of the extreme crimes. It was just prurient curiosity, she supposed. There was nothing new in the tangle of altercations and petty crap that made up the majority of the assault and battery charges, and she didn’t revisit the attack on his brother-in-law. That felt sordid, now that she knew at least one of the players.
But there were several counts of grand theft she hadn’t paid attention to before – mostly of the ‘auto’ variety. Not entirely surprising, honestly, and less juicy than she’d been hoping, since the majority of the cases were pretty straight-forward. Presumably the ones that weren’t hadn’t resulted in convictions.
Lots of vandalism, several counts of trespassing – apparently on one occasion the PCHers had let themselves into the mall in Pan, tagged a bunch of things, and tried to make off with an assortment of clothing, jewelry, and midrange luggage. That was a bit embarrassing, honestly; she hoped for Weevil’s sake that he’d been one of the ones robbing Kay, not trying to steal a forty-dollar wheeled suitcase. A few drug charges that looked extreme but turned out to actually be for smoking pot.
Well, that was mildly interesting, anyway. She wasn’t sure what she’d really been looking for. Something to take her mind off the fact that she didn’t really know how to help Meg, maybe. She knew what she’d do if it was her: lift her chin and decide she was better off without her friends and her reputation, get even, and remind herself it was only two more years until college. But how to walk back the damage? She hadn’t even tried, when she was the one taking it.
It was nearly seven, so she called Meg, but there was no answer. Veronica chewed on her lip for a moment. There could be any number of explanations for that, but somehow the simple ones seemed less likely than they might have under better circumstances. But if Meg and her family were still eating, she didn’t want to make herself an annoyance.
Or make Meg think the harassment had started up again. With that in mind she texted Meg’s cell – It’s just me calling – and tried again. No answer.
She couldn’t just keep calling forever, so she texted again, Call me on the landline whenever, and went downstairs to read a book in the living room. She’d spent more than enough time locked up in her room lately, so she might as well earn some points with her parents by existing in roughly the same space as them. Her dad came in eventually and put the TV on, and the background noise of some baseball trade update while she read and her parents talked over the commercials was even kind of nice, but Meg didn’t call, and eventually Veronica realized it had been almost an hour. She frowned at her phone, as if a text might spontaneously appear.
“Everything okay, honey?”
She looked up, blinking. “I was just checking on Meg. School’s–” She shook her head. “She’s having a high school experience. But she hasn’t texted me back.”
“Maybe she’s less glued to her phone than some teenagers,” her dad suggested.
“Yeah, maybe.” She would have liked to run the phone calls by him, but Meg had asked her not to, and anyway, she didn’t want to open a door that led to her score on the purity test. “I’ll see her at school, so – it’s fine. I just wanted to make sure she’s okay. People are–” she considered and rejected several terms, “evil vultures.”
“A lot of things seem like the end of the world in high school,” her mom added, reaching for the remote to turn down the lotion commercial that had just started. Veronica’s mouth tightened. She didn’t need a lecture about how nothing was as bad as she thought it was.
“Lianne,” her dad said, but her mom shook her head.
“And mostly they’re right,” she said. “I’m not pretending to know how rough things have been for you, sweetheart, but I do know all the things that have been going on lately would be hard on anyone. But that’s why teenagers are so tough – because the world keeps ending and you just keep on surviving. Most adults could never, you know,” she added, with a conspiratorial smile that was maybe a little sad. “I’m sure Meg will be okay. And high school ends.”
It would have been sweet, without a decade of monitoring the level of the bourbon in the cupboard to tip her off to what most adults could never really meant. Still, Veronica let herself ignore that part and just appreciate the rest – appreciate what it would have meant a couple months ago, what it should have meant.
“Meg’s parents just aren’t as cool about… everything as mine are,” she said, not sure if it was a peace offering or just a statement of fact.
“But she has you,” Lianne said.
Veronica blinked. Of course her mom thought that was a weighty consideration – she was a mom, she was obligated – but it made her pause anyway. Having Meg, even just a little, had mattered to her when Jeremy was going around telling everyone she sucked at blowjobs and convincing them to throw lasagna at her, and all her other friends had evaporated, so maybe it was significant that Meg had Veronica in her corner, even if she’d spectacularly failed to do anything useful for her.
“Yeah,” she said. “She’s got me.”
*
Meg was at school, at least; she was in her usual anchor seat for the Neptune Navigator midweek announcements, which went fine until Tim Cavanagh shot her a sideways dig about how good an actress she was and she fumbled her chance of answering.
Veronica didn’t believe that he’d actually been talking about Guys and Dolls, but Meg shot her a brave smile when she slid into her desk in English Lit, and Veronica knew she was giving him the benefit of the doubt. They didn’t get a chance to talk until class wrapped up and they were both on their way to Precalc.
“Sorry about last night,” Meg muttered, cleaving a little closer to Veronica than usual as they walked. “My dad answered one of those calls over dinner and I guess it was even worse than the other ones. He kind of flipped out, and now he wants to sue the school.”
Veronica winced. “Well, whoever sent out those links obviously had access to the entire list of student email addresses, so there’s some kind of case, but he might have more luck suing the website.”
“I don’t want him to sue anybody,” Meg said. “Can you imagine how much worse that would make everything?”
That was probably true. “Yeah, that’s fair. I guess you couldn’t talk him down?”
The other girl nodded. “And then he and my mom wanted to go through my phone, to make sure no one was sending me stuff that way. Which they haven’t been, anyway, so at least…” But even Meg couldn’t sell that as a real benefit; she trailed off weakly. “Anyway, I kind of forgot it on the kitchen table after that, and then it was late and I didn’t want to text you back.”
“Seriously, don’t worry about it,” Veronica told her. “You should not be worried about me right now. I hung out, it was all cool.”
Meg nodded. “I’m going to change,” she said. “I like this outfit, but…”
“A bare midriff isn’t the stuff of reassurance,” Veronica agreed.
“And why give them ammunition, you know?”
It was so unjust and ridiculous that her clothes should even matter that Veronica couldn’t do anything but pull a disgusted face in response.
“Well, it’s almost the weekend,” Meg said after a moment, which was a bold thing to say before second period on Wednesday. “And auditions are after school – at least that’s something I’m good at. And then they’ll be over and I won’t have to worry about them anymore.”
“You’ll get a part,” Veronica said.
That elicited a genuine smile. “Thanks, Veronica.”
“I can’t be the only person who’s told you that.” She hesitated. “You said Kimmy and Pam are still on your side, right?” Meg nodded, and she went on, “I’m not complaining – I mean, if I’m honest? Pam was never my favourite person on the cheer squad,” she took the sting out of that by nudging Meg meaningfully as they reached Ms. Fediuk’s classroom, “– but it would be a lot better for your reputation to hang out with them.”
“We don’t have any morning classes together,” Meg offered, which made sense, as had the reason she’d given for them not eating lunch with her yesterday, and yet…
Maybe Veronica was just annoyed that Pam wasn’t living down to her expectations, the same way she had been about Cole. It was a good thing that Meg’s friends were proving more loyal than she’d anticipated, and Veronica needed to get over herself and stop being so suspicious of the fact that Kimmy had suddenly developed a backbone. Who was more worth developing a backbone for than Meg Manning?
Not Veronica, apparently, but being jealous of Meg was about as stupid as comparing Logan and Kimmy, which she was apparently half an inch from doing. She mustered a reassuring smile as they split to go their respective seats. “Step one, remember?”
Meg frowned performatively, raising her fists in an interpretation of ‘get tough’ that was more adorable than threatening; Veronica rolled her eyes, smiling. At least she still had some fight in her.
The rest of the day went by more smoothly, or at least Veronica thought so. Pam and Kimmy apparently were willing to ditch their usual table – and the inevitable allure of Duncan Kane – to sit with Meg, so Veronica only said a brief hello at lunch and spent it working on her homework instead. But it seemed like the fault lines that everyone else’s test results had caused were still breaking and settling, which took some of the pressure off Meg, and by the time last period rolled around, her friend seemed more cheerful.
“I always get nervous before an audition,” she confessed (in English, keeping a weather eye out for Sra. Hockley). “But once it gets down to the wire, it kind of turns to, I don’t know, energy? And I love singing.”
“Maybe I’ll come watch,” Veronica offered. She’d been chewing the idea over all day. “If they let people do that?”
“Yeah, of course! I wouldn’t mind the moral support – Kimmy and I are supporting each other, of course, but it’s not the same when you’re both trying out for the same part.”
Then the teacher headed in their general direction and they had to switch to Spanish. She paused between them long enough that it probably meant she’d noticed them ignoring the vocab practice, but an earnest discussion of which fruits were their favourites and whether the shape had anything to do with it eventually drove her away, while Meg tried not to giggle over the fact that Veronica had said she liked grapes but not coconuts even though they were both round. Veronica pressed her advantage by declaring that she didn’t like any square fruits, and they were both still grinning when the bell rang.
The optimism didn’t fade until midway through the second audition for Sally, when Veronica realized just how many of the other people in the auditorium were there as spectators. She was a spectator, but it didn’t seem quite the same – there was too much jovial shoving and kidding around. But nothing terrible happened as Alyssa Irving finished up and Kimmy started in on the same song. She was… not amazing. Not outright screechy, Veronica thought, struggling to be fair, just – giving the impression of screechy. Because she was trying too hard. But Meg had said her acting was good.
It looked to Veronica like she was trying too hard there too, but what did she know about musical theatre?
The assorted spectators and theatre kids were surprisingly encouraging when Kimmy finished, but Ms. Popham seemed to share Veronica’s opinion, if the tone in which she said, “Well done, Kimmy,” was any indication.
Then it was Meg’s turn, and she was clearly very good, but it took about twenty seconds to go straight to hell. The song choice didn’t help, although there was nothing Meg could have done about that, and Veronica had no choice but to sit there, simultaneously furious and heartsick, as Meg dropped the note early on lacy pants and her delivery got weaker and weaker while the heckling stayed just on the wrong side of plausibly deniable. Ms. Popham was playing the piano, and maybe she couldn’t even hear them, but Veronica could, and Meg clearly could as well, because she gave up two verses in and ran offstage, visibly fighting tears. Veronica got up and went after her.
It took a minute to figure out where she’d gone, because she wasn’t in the nearest bathroom and she wasn’t in the library, which was one of the go-to spots for students looking for solitude. Then Veronica thought about Meg being a cheerleader, and she tried the locker rooms.
“They suck,” she announced loudly as soon as she heard the muffled crying coming from the showers. It wasn’t the most tactful thing, but she mostly wanted to make sure that Meg knew it was her. “They suck, and I bet every single one of them has done more of the stuff on that list than you have.”
Meg pushed the curtain aside, a damp spot showing on the arm of her jacket where she must have leaned against the wall. “You must think I’m pathetic,” she said, her attempt at humour folding under the gurgle of barely-repressed sobs. She sniffed, scrubbing at her face with the back of her hand.
“I don’t think you’re pathetic,” Veronica said, trying to keep the sympathy out of her voice so Meg would believe her. “I think Kimmy’s singing is pathetic, I think Cole’s insecurity complex is pathetic, but I don’t think you’re pathetic.”
“She tries really hard,” Meg said, swallowing hard. Her throat must be clogged with phlegm from crying, and her face was wet, her eyes red, but she still looked mostly put-together – nothing like the snot-monster Veronica had turned into after she’d seen Lilly and Jeremy together.
“Do you even hear yourself?” Meg blinked at her, and she added, “No one at this school deserves you. And now their musical is going to suck, so they’re really just punishing themselves.”
Meg laughed wetly. She collapsed onto the bench between the rows of lockers, staring despondently at the tiny square tiles. “I’m sorry you came to the auditions for nothing.”
Veronica sat down beside her, biting back an argument. Maybe that kind of thing worked to keep herself going, but it wasn’t going to help to say it to Meg. She put an arm around the other girl’s shoulders instead, squeezing gently, and didn’t say anything when Meg started to cry again.
Chapter 14: The Only Weapon
Notes:
Sneaking this update in just under the wire (shh, I clicked 'Add Chapter' before it hit midnight, it counts). Minor warnings in the endnotes.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
If spite was the only weapon at my disposal , I would continue to wield it.
Amy Harmon
Meg hadn’t been in great shape to drive herself home, but she’d turned down Veronica’s offer of a ride because apparently Lizzie had stuck around after school so she wouldn’t have to take the bus. Veronica hadn’t seen her at the audition, which made her more suspicious, but Meg hadn’t taken it as strange. She’d done her best to clean herself up – so her sister wouldn’t worry, she said – and Lizzie had only complained about how long she’d been waiting, without saying much to Veronica.
So now Veronica was at home staring at an error message which told her that Elizabeth Manning hadn’t taken the purity test at all.
It saved her ten bucks, she supposed, but this was the final dead end. If Lizzie had somehow contrived to take Meg’s test for her, maybe it would have been smart to leave her own blank – clearly she’d know how dangerous it could be if someone bought it. That was the whole point of what had happened to Meg. But on the other hand, why bother worrying? Lizzie already had a reputation that was more or less the diametric opposite of Meg’s, and Veronica couldn’t see her being concerned about whether or not people had hard stats on what, specifically, she’d done.
Or maybe she was barking up the wrong tree entirely, and Lizzie hadn’t taken the test, for herself or her sister, because she thought it was stupid. Maybe it had been Cole, or maybe Meg had left herself logged into a random computer at school and some stranger had taken the test as a joke.
“You look deep in thought.”
Veronica blinked, looking up from her screen. “Oh. Hi.”
Her dad raised his eyebrows. “Hi yourself. I’m taking Backup to the beach – want to come? A little daddy-daughter time?”
“No,” she said. “But I will.”
He pressed a hand to his heart in mock hurt. “What have I done to deserve such an ungrateful child? When I was your age we had to walk to the beach barefoot, uphill both ways.”
Veronica sighed and smiled, shutting her laptop. “I just don’t feel much like the beach. But I could use some quality time with Backup.” She gave him a smile and a brief squeeze to offset the slight before she started looking for her purse. “Besides, it’s not like I’m going to get anything done here. I don’t know why I thought I could fix this for Meg. I’m not exactly a detective.”
“Want to talk about it?”
She shrugged. “It’s just this stupid rumour. I thought I could find who started it, or at least prove it wasn’t true, or that her boyfriend’s a liar in general – ex-boyfriend, whatever. But it’s not happening. Maybe it’ll blow over, but not if she keeps hanging out with me, and I’m one of the only people who will hang out with her, so…”
“I think you’re being a little hard on yourself, honey. If you were that much of a social pariah, would Meg have been spending time with you in the first place?”
“You mean after Jeremy told everyone I’m a ho who gives terrible blowjobs?” Veronica rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, she could afford to, back then.” She avoided mentioning that Jeremy’s poorly-constructed face-savers were hardly the sum total of her scarlet letters these days. “And she’s too nice to ditch me. But maybe I should just convince her to keep eating with Pam and Kimmy instead. I’m not sure Kimmy knows what a blowjob is, so that might help.”
“Please stop saying ‘blowjob’,” her dad said, looking pained.
“It’s not true. I’ve actually never given anyone a blowjob.” She smirked at him, a little too pleased with the fact that it was both true and exceedingly misleading. “Jeremy just needed an excuse for why he went looking elsewhere, I guess.”
“That kid,” her dad said darkly, and Veronica thwapped him gently and affectionately on the arm.
“Come on,” she said. “Before he leaves without us.”
“That dog,” Keith told her with over-wrought earnestness as they headed downstairs, “is a very smart dog, and I believe he could learn to drive a car.”
“Well, I never gave him permission to take mine.” Veronica snagged a windbreaker out of the front hall closet as he stuck his head into the living room to tell her mom where they were going. She always started getting cold in October and relentlessly employed the use of long sleeves until the weather got actually hot again. Logan had used to tease her for being such a California girl – she made a face at the thought.
“Ready to go?”
Veronica slipped her keys off the hook and jingled them before he could insist they take his cruiser. “Born ready.”
Her dad didn’t argue, which felt a little wrong and a little exciting at the same time. She still got a bit of a thrill of grown-up-ness from driving one of her parents anywhere, as long as it wasn’t because they were sloppy drunk. She called Backup and let her dad get him settled in the back seat, where he panted with polite excitement.
“So you’ve been getting home on time,” she commented, as she backed carefully out of the driveway, shoulder-checking with slightly more assiduousness than her usual habit. “Anything exciting on the crime front? Or is it the opposite?”
“The Reyes case is with the D.A. now,” he told her, with the half-amused, half-guarded tone he usually got when she tried to pump him for information. “Our guy’s been charged, so now it’s just a matter of whether he plea-bargains before the trial.”
“And you think he will.” Veronica didn’t make it a question, although she left a little room at the end of her sentence for confirmation. She liked to think she could read her dad pretty well, but he could be inscrutable when he wanted to be, and anyway she couldn’t look directly at him while she was driving.
“I’d like to think so,” he agreed cautiously, and Veronica smiled, because she knew that meant he did think so and was just afraid of getting too optimistic.
“But that’s good, right?” she pressed. “Good for the taxpayers, good for the family…”
“As much as anything can be, at this point.” He sighed. “This is a very cheery topic of conversation, honey…”
“Well, what about the E-String case?”
He shook his head. “We’re spinning our wheels right now. I’m waiting on some information to come back, but sometimes it’s just like that – unsatisfying. If we’re lucky, he’s doing time for something else, or he had a heart attack, and that’s why he stopped killing.”
He left the rest of it, the part where if it wasn’t the murders would probably start again eventually, unspoken, but Veronica could hear the echo of it. She didn’t say anything, though. He didn’t need any more pressure than he was already putting on himself.
“We are lucky,” she told him instead, taking a left onto the highway. She wasn’t up to Dog Beach right now. “Do you know how many terrible sheriffs there are out there? And yet ours is excellent. That’s some luck right there.”
That won a smile. “Is it? I think the electorate deserves some credit.”
Veronica squinched her face in a parody of thought. “Do they? I seem to recall you ran unopposed last election.”
“Is that why no one voted for my opponent?”
Backup signalled his agreement by barking once from the back seat, and Veronica laughed. “Sounds like someone was campaigning for you.”
“My most loyal supporter,” her dad agreed. “Certainly deserving of a walk. On which subject, where are we going, exactly? You do remember that you are a tag-along on my outing?”
“I thought the daddy-daughter time might be higher quality if we removed other people from the equation. I was just thinking that place up by the cliffs where we went last year for that barbecue. Remember, with the mutant seagull? It should be nice, and there won’t be five hundred people with their loud kids.”
“Fewer dogs, though, which is sort of the point of Dog Beach,” he pointed out.
“Backup doesn’t need other dogs, he has us. Right, boy?” Her response was another brief bark. “See, he agrees with me.”
“I suspect bribery,” her dad said, leaning back to ruffle Backup’s ears. “Collusion, even.”
Veronica found the place she was looking for pretty easily, even though she still didn’t know what the name of the beach was, or even if it had one. There weren’t any signs up, so maybe it didn’t.
There also weren’t many cars in the parking lot, which was something of a relief. She wasn’t desperate to avoid other people, but if she’d ended up picking somewhere just as crowded as Dog Beach, she’d be hearing about it from her dad, and hanging out was always more fun when she made fun of him. She parked one stall over from the grey Volvo near the trailhead, keeping a cautious distance between her car and the SUV belonging to the harried-looking couple who were letting their kids run and scream their pent-up road trip energy out all over the adjacent pavement. She didn’t want sticky hands or carelessly-bestowed dents all over her car.
“This is a nice spot,” her dad observed as he got out, grabbing Backup’s leash.
“Sometimes I do actually know what I’m doing,” she observed archly, putting the top up before she got out. Better safe than sorry.
Backup was raring to go, but he still waited for her dad to snap the leash onto his collar, vibrating with barely-contained excitement. “Look at him,” Veronica said. “He thinks you’re going to let him chase the seagulls.”
“That will never be on the table,” Keith said sternly, looking down at the dog with his best gimlet stare.
“Not even the mutant ones?” The top of the trail down to the beach was a mix of sandy and pebbly, but the slope was an easy one and the hill itself wasn’t that tall, just enough to block out the road and make the beach seem more peaceful than it really should have been. “What is the point of having a dog if he can’t protect you from mutant seagulls?”
“The day I can’t protect you from a seagull is the day I hang up my hat and pack it in for good,” her dad told her drily. “Besides, from what I remember that bird was probably in the middle of expiring from chemical toxicity. It needed protecting from humans more than the reverse.”
“I think joining the environmentalist lobby might be a bit beyond Backup’s capacities,” Veronica admitted, looking fondly down at the dog’s excited pit bull grin. “Even if he does appreciate the benefits of nature.”
“Just remember that when you’re old enough to vote.” He shortened the leash a bit as they reached the beach. “Now, some ground rules: there will be no chasing of seagulls, no digging of holes that spray sand on my clothes, and no eating of strange and disgusting objects. Is everyone clear on that?” He shot another stern look at Backup, who remained unfazed.
“If I’d known I wasn’t allowed to eat fragments of rotting kelp, I wouldn’t have come,” Veronica said. “This is false advertising.”
“Then it’s a good lesson for you in how the real world works,” her dad said brightly. “I’m preparing you for adulthood.”
She rolled her eyes at that and stepped over the cockeyed concrete block that someone had put at what they apparently deemed the official end of the trail and beginning of unfettered beachfront. It was one of those rectangular ones that usually bracketed the end of parking spaces, and she wondered if it had been dragged down from the lot, and why anyone would bother.
Backup strained at the leash as they made their way down the beach, a consistent pressure that betrayed his enthusiasm even though he knew better than to tug. His eagerness made her smile. “You’re never going to convince him to let you off the leash at that rate.”
“No one is going off-leash today regardless,” her dad proclaimed, and he put an arm around her shoulders as if to confirm the sentiment.
“Afraid I’m going to chase the seagulls?” Veronica teased him, but she leaned into the warmth and security anyway. It was a relief to have a real reprieve from hashing over all the various different types of nasty personal dramas she’d been embroiled in for the last several weeks, although she felt guilty thinking it. Surely her dad needed a reprieve worse than she did.
But when she glanced up at him he seemed perfectly happy – as if all he wanted was his daughter and his dog and the beach – and she let everything else float into the very back of her mind, just for a while.
*
Veronica waited by Meg’s locker before she went to first period, just in case, but she wasn’t quite willing to be late, so when 8:37 rolled around with no sign of arrival, she cut her losses and went to class.
Her concern didn’t really have time to build up, because Meg slipped into class with about eight seconds to go before the bell, out of breath but otherwise seeming unharrassed, and slid into one of the few remaining empty seats at the back. When Veronica raised pointed eyebrows in her direction, she mouthed ‘Lizzie’ and shrugged.
That was practically an eyeroll, coming from Meg, and Veronica took it to mean that Lizzie had almost made them late for school, rather than that she’d admitted to trying to sabotage her sister’s entire life.
At least they were next to each other, since they’d both come in at the last minute. There was something to be said for teachers who didn’t have assigned seating.
“How are you doing?” she murmured once Mrs. Murphy was distracted.
Meg shrugged, visibly putting on a brave face. “It could be worse. My dad went through my room yesterday – to be safe, I guess. It’s a good thing I got rid of those letters Rafael sent me.” She gave Veronica a thin smile. “So you kind of saved me.”
Score one for her spiteful, vengeance-based mind. It was hard not to be disturbed, though. Veronica couldn’t imagine her parents searching her room – not unless they thought she had drugs in there or something. At the very least, the idea they thought they had cause was evidence pointing at Lizzie. “Do you know why?”
“My parents are just really strict.” Meg seemed unfazed. “And Lizzie–”
But right then Mrs. Murphy paused her lecture meaningfully and they both took the hint and shut up.
It drove Veronica nuts for most of class, wondering if Lizzie really had lied about Meg to their parents – but when the bell rang for the end of first period, it turned out that no, Lizzie had hooked up with the swim coach at summer camp and kicked off their dad’s protective spiral.
That was pretty much it, since their seats weren’t together in Precalc and then they had different schedules until seventh period.
Cole, on the other hand, was in Biology with Veronica after lunch, and she took the opportunity to go through her print-out of his purity test with a highlighter. There wasn’t much that he had done that was embarrassing, besides getting caught jerking off, apparently – but there was plenty he’d probably be embarrassed that he hadn’t done.
She thought about slamming it onto his desk to make a point, but Mrs. Canning wasn’t exactly a permissive teacher, and anyway she couldn’t print another copy until she got home. Besides, she didn’t want him to have more ammunition for his poor betrayed boyfriend schtick. Maybe she’d make a few copies instead. The office copier had a colour setting, if she could just convince a teacher she had a good reason to be using it.
She watched him joke around with Jeremy, who was in front of him – Mrs. Canning wouldn’t let them be lab partners, but somehow they’d still managed to sit near each other. She’d never quite figured out what Meg saw in Cole, and maybe that meant she should have reconsidered why she’d thought Jeremy was so wonderful. Sometimes she did wonder that, because the more time went by, the more she looked back and saw an unexceptional kid with nothing interesting to say who thought that because his parents spoiled him he was entitled to special treatment from the world, someone she must have been stupid to care about in the first place… but then she’d remember the way he used to slide chocolates onto her desk when the teacher wasn’t looking, or kiss her right on the wrist, and she’d get wistful for a moment.
Mostly she didn’t really miss him, but she still weakened enough sometimes to miss having a boyfriend, and it was easier to think about Jeremy than Duncan or even Troy. But that was just missing the point, because what was the good of cute little moments and sweet gestures and a sense of security if it was all fake and just resulted in getting your heart cracked open like a pistachio?
She was better off tabling the whole boyfriend idea – which was convenient, since it wasn’t like there was anyone at school who would have been interested in dating her at this point. Besides which, the no-strings-attached thing was going pretty well for her so far, and there was nothing to be gained by wishing herself into dissatisfaction. If even a girl like Meg couldn’t keep a mediocre boyfriend like Cole Patterson, or compel him to break up with her respectfully, then the problem was clearly with the male species, or at least with the high school species of the genus ‘men’. She could try again in college, when maybe some of them would have grown the hell up.
And in the meantime, there was nothing wrong with blowing off some steam, which she could honestly use after seething for most of the week. Meg would probably eat lunch with Kimmy and Pam again, so there was no reason for Veronica not to fulfil that raincheck.
Or at least, that was what she thought until she got to her locker after History and saw Meg and Kimmy having some kind of conversation. Kimmy’s locker was too far down from hers to quite hear, but the amount of dramatic gesturing going on didn’t bode well, so Veronica closed the door to hers and then slid sideways until she could hear, weaving between her neighbours.
“–get everything!” Kimmy was exclaiming, viciousness underlying the tearfulness of her voice.
“But I didn’t get the part!” Meg said, confused and upset. “I blew my audition, remember? I really thought that maybe you–”
“Stop pretending!” Kimmy exploded. It didn’t have the force it would have had coming from anyone else, but it was still the loudest thing Veronica had ever heard her say. “You pretend like you’re so nice and you pretend like you’ve never done anything wrong and you pretend like you’re a virgin–”
Veronica’s jaw clenched angrily and Meg took a shocked step back. “You said – you said you believed me. I never even–”
“You never even what? You got the best spot on the team and you got the anchor job and you still wanted the lead in the musical – you never leave anything for the rest of us, so why wouldn’t you try to take all the guys too?” Kimmy slammed her locker door and burst into tears, like she was the one being wronged.
Meg didn’t seem to be able to respond; she was standing there with her mouth open, one tear trickling down her cheek. Of course she was. Cole was just some guy, when you really got down to it. Kimmy was supposed to be her friend.
“Maybe you should take your screechy little voice and your Sesame-Street-quality acting and get lost,” Veronica said sharply, before she even realized she’d decided to intervene. “No wonder you didn’t get the part – you can’t even turn out a decent performance as ‘friend who doesn’t suck’.”
They both turned toward her, blinking, Meg’s lip trembling and Kimmy so shocked she stopped crying for a second. It was more noise than water, Veronica noted.
“Did you not hear me?” she added. “Take off.”
Maybe it was the threatening note in Veronica’s voice and the fact that now everyone knew how far she was willing to go, or maybe it was the fact that now it was two on one, or maybe it was just the presence of an outsider who could see more clearly than Meg that everything she was saying was bullshit, but Kimmy wavered, stepped back, and finally whirled around and fast-walked away, straightening her back in a poor pretense of dignity, even though anyone watching would know Veronica had chased her off.
“Are you okay?”
Meg shook her head. “No.” She swallowed hard, visibly making an effort to keep it together. “I’m really – I’m really not.”
“She’s a spiteful little nothing,” Veronica said, trying to swallow her fury. “She knows she can never measure up to you, and if she wants to tear you down instead of appreciating you, that just shows how pathetic she is.”
“I don’t even know why she’s mad at me,” Meg protested. “Alyssa got the part!”
“Because she decided she wasn’t getting what she wanted because you were too good, when actually it’s because she sucks. And now she can’t hide behind that anymore, so she’s just going to blame you so she doesn’t have to admit that she cannot sing.”
Maybe she was laying on the vitriol a little strong – it was her automatic response, but that sort of thing never seemed to make Meg feel better. But she was so angry it was enough work just to maintain a cheerfully vicious tone, instead of one that suggested she was going to turn Kimmy inside out and eat her intestines.
“I would have helped her rehearse if she asked.” Meg swallowed. “And Tim’s the one who beat her out for the anchor position – I was already doing it since last year. I always said she should have won, but they didn’t want two blonde girls doing the news. It plays better with a girl and a guy, apparently.”
“Your answer is from the land of reasonable people, where Kimmy does not live.” Meg didn’t have answer for that, so Veronica took a deep breath. “Come on, let’s get some food.” She’d packed a lunch, more to free up her lunch hour than anything, but this was more important than her previous half-made plans and the five-dollar bill in her pocket. At least it meant she didn’t have to eat cafeteria food.
It didn’t seem fair to expect Meg to brave the cafeteria line, so Veronica mentally divvied up her lunch as they walked. One of the more isolated lunch spots might have been better, but whatever Veronica’s personal opinion of Pam, she at least wasn’t as fragile as Kimmy, and highly unlikely to be offended on the other girl’s behalf, or to blame Meg if she was. It was probably worth it to prove that Meg still had some friends left.
But when they got to the main lunch area, Pam was tucked cozily into a table with Kimmy and a couple of the other cheerleaders and student council members, including Madison Sinclair, who was both. Meg made a choked noise, but Veronica didn’t let her run away; she linked their arms together and half-marched, half-dragged the other girl over to the table where Yolanda and Gabrielle were eating that day’s square pizza.
“Mind if we sit here?” she asked briskly.
They both blinked in surprise, and Gabrielle looked taken aback – but Yolanda said “Sure,” and slid over to make room. It wasn’t really necessary, since there were only four of them, but Veronica appreciated the gesture.
“Hi,” Meg said, forcing a weak smile.
“Meg Manning, Yolanda Hamilton. Yolanda, Meg.” Veronica frowned. She didn’t know Gabrielle’s last name – generally she didn’t keep close track of the seniors unless it was because of Lilly, and Lilly had never mentioned Gabrielle, probably because she was Yolanda’s friend and therefore beneath notice. “And Gabrielle – sorry.”
“Pollard,” Yolanda filled in, while Gabrielle blinked and said, “Um, hi.”
“Meg’s old friends suck, so we’re going to sit with you until they realize she’s five times better than they deserve and come to beg her on their knees to take them back,” Veronica explained, unpacking her lunch. Meg made a vague spluttering noise of protest, but Yolanda laughed.
“You really are something else, Veronica,” she said. “Meg seems better than your old friends too, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
Veronica did mind, but it didn’t make Yolanda less right. She shrugged. “We also have a matched set of worthless ex-boyfriends.”
That seemed to win over Gabrielle. “It is just not worth it with high school boys,” she said, shaking her head. “Last year, when I was dating Perry Allister… Oh, I could tell you some things about worthless boy behaviour.”
Yolanda winced and nodded in confirmation. “It was bad,” she said.
“I got someone better now,” Gabrielle said, nudging Yolanda with an elbow. She didn’t elaborate, which made Veronica wonder if she’d upgraded from high school boys. She didn’t understand the appeal, personally – the older guys who were actually willing to date high school students were not exactly the cream of the crop – but it wasn’t any of her business.
“I thought I was getting over it,” Meg said, making a valiant effort at a brave face. “Breakups happen, I guess, but you don’t expect your friends… well, they’d been great until now.”
Veronica winced. She was glad she and Yolanda had cleared the air, but however much awkwardness that removed from the situation, there was plenty left over.
“You’re a cheerleader, right?” Yolanda said, before the silence could become noticeable. “Your friends are on the squad?”
“Some of them,” Meg agreed. “Pam’s on student council, but she’s not much for cheer. She quit last year. And I’m not friends with all the cheerleaders,” she added. “I didn’t expect… I don’t know, Madison–”
“No one expects anything good from Madison,” Gabrielle interjected. “She ruined my purse last year and then yelled at me.”
“Sounds about right,” Veronica muttered.
“I didn’t expect them all to side with me,” Meg continued, still too nice to bash even someone like Madison Sinclair. “Claire thinks she should have gotten my spot because she’s a senior, so we’re not exactly close. But Kimmy and Pam were so great until today – even after I lost my cool on the announcements yesterday. I don’t know what happened.”
“Kimmy didn’t get the lead in the musical and she wants someone to blame even though Meg didn’t get it either,” Veronica explained to Yolanda and Gabrielle. Both girls nodded, knowingly. Meg looked besieged, but this time she accepted the conclusion without argument or attempts to dodge.
“I don’t know if she said something to Pam, though,” was all she said.
“That’s that girl who dresses like a politician’s wife and always acts like something smells bad?” Yolanda asked. Veronica covered a smile as she nodded. “I bet she’s just trying to get in good with the really popular kids. She’s always hanging around their table trying to get herself a permanent spot with that crowd. And I guess yours is free now,” she told Meg apologetically.
However tactful Yolanda had decided to be about it, they probably all knew that it wasn’t Meg’s spot Pam wanted. “Pam doesn’t have a chance with Duncan anyway,” Veronica said dismissively. “She’s too fake.” A moment later she realized how that sounded and added, “Shelly might, if she calmed down a little.”
Yolanda laughed in something like surprise and Meg covered a smile. “Shelly? Really?”
“If she acted less desperate, she might have a shot,” Veronica said, shrugging. It wasn’t something she enjoyed thinking about, but what did it matter? What did it matter if she happened to know he liked blondes, and sincerity? Duncan was two boyfriends ago; he was irrelevant.
Frustratingly, that didn’t stop her from zeroing in on his voice two tables over when he parried whatever Cole was saying with a laughing, “So you were her noble Justin.”
Veronica had never actually liked Justin Timberlake that much, and Cry Me A River kind of pissed her off (very Cole, now she thought about it), so it took her a second to track what he was talking about – but Meg stiffened and Cole broke out an immensely terrible Bill Clinton impression in order to claim unconvincingly that he “did not… have sex… with that woman,” and then, yeah, she got it.
“Meg’s a good girl,” Cole went on, in an obnoxious drawl that she guessed was supposed to sound worldly. “Really good. Good at what she does–”
Yolanda put a sympathetic hand on Meg’s arm as he finished, “–and she does do everything.”
Veronica’s mouth tightened and she leaned down to grope through her bag for Cole’s results – she’d like to see him explain that – but before she could straighten up, a sugary sweet voice said, “Keep it up, hotshot. Everyone’s so impressed.”
It was Lizzie, Veronica saw a second later when she surfaced with the print-out, and she was currently threatening to make all of Cole’s love poetry public. It was sweetly vicious, and while that didn’t mean it was impossible for Lizzie to still be behind the slander, Veronica’s assumptions about her were being knocked back pretty hard.
Cole and Lizzie sparred for a little longer, while Meg tried to stubbornly ignore the argument – the usual, boy accuses girl of being immature, girl accuses boy of premature ejaculation – until he rounded things off by loudly announcing that she didn’t even like Meg, who gasped and went pale.
“Maybe not,” Lizzie shot back. “But I love her.”
She floated away in unconcern, and Veronica had to reluctantly hand it to her. Meg scrambled up and extricated herself from the bench, and Veronica reached out to stop her – you couldn’t show that kind of weakness – but Meg wasn’t interested in stopping, or apparently in running away either. She caught Lizzie next to the table Pam and Kimmy were sitting at and threw her arms around her. Lizzie put on a disgusted expression, but she didn’t push her sister away.
Veronica didn’t think Meg was even aware of who she was standing right in front of, but the awkwardness and shame on Kimmy’s face and the annoyance on Pam’s and Madison’s was worth savouring. She didn’t get all that much of a chance to, though, because Cole was doing his best to awkwardly laugh off Lizzie’s criticism, and his obnoxious laugh was drilling into Veronica’s head.
“Excuse me,” she told Yolanda and Gabrielle, and got up.
Cole was not the problem, she thought coldly as she strode toward the table. There were always Coles. The problem was his cheering little sycophants, who would gleefully jump at any chance to believe a girl was a whore as long as they didn’t have to say the word out loud and admit how ugly their vulgarity really was
Cole glanced up as she passed him, no doubt planning some supposedly cutting remark, but Veronica didn’t have time for him. She sunk her fingers into Duncan’s arm instead, dragging upward as hard as she could.
He bit off his protest halfway through the first word, as soon as he realized who it was – but it was hard to ignore someone completely with their fingernails as deep into the meat of your arm as hers were.
“Let’s take a walk,” she told him, voice as brittle as the smile she was forcing. Duncan’s eyes darted to her face, then cut away, like he wasn’t sure if he should keep trying to pretend she didn’t exist or not.
Veronica did her best to get a good angle to lever him upright and pulled again. She probably couldn’t heft all of Duncan’s weight, but the surprise at how much muscle she was putting into it still popped him partway out of his seat.
“Ow – Veronica–”
So I do exist, then? Veronica almost said – but this wasn’t about her, and anyway no amount of sarcasm would entirely hide the hurt. She wasn’t exposing that to him, and she sure as hell wasn’t sharing it with Cole and his clowns.
“I can say what I’m going to say in front of your… friends,” she said instead, pausing to emphasize the disdain she was pouring into her voice. “But I don’t know how well that’s going to go for you.”
There was a chorus of ‘Oooh’s, but Veronica ignored them and met Duncan’s eyes steadily, willing him to remember what had happened when Lilly thought it was a good idea to confront her publicly.
Eventually he muttered, “Fine,” and stood reluctantly. As soon as he was free of the bench, Veronica dragged him away from the table and inside. She had a vague idea of what she was going to say, and her leverage wouldn’t actually be effective if anyone heard them.
He dug his heels in when she opened the door, protesting, but he couldn’t quite free his arm from her grasp without hurting himself, so Veronica jus kept going until they were in a properly deserted hallway, and then she let go and rounded on him. “I heard what you said about Meg.”
He rubbed his arm. “Cole’s my friend. What do you expect, Veronica? I mean, she–”
“Meg didn’t even take the test, she didn’t cheat on Cole, and she definitely didn’t sleep with him.”
Duncan opened his mouth, looking skeptical, but Veronica shoved Cole’s purity test into his chest, the paper crinkling as her hand smacked home. She refused to think about how broad and solid he was. “Cole lied. Either he lied on his test, or he lied to you five minutes ago, so he’s a liar either way, but let me ask you something, Duncan – what teenage boy lies to make himself look more pure?”
That seemed to get through to him, and he blinked, frowning. Veronica wished he’d take the paper, so she wouldn’t have to be standing there with her hand on his chest.
“Take it,” she said forcefully, hoping he couldn’t tell how badly she wanted to stop touching him. “Show all your friends. Tell them Cole’s a liar.”
Duncan had glanced down when she mentioned the results, his fingers curling around the edges of the paper, but his head jerked up at her last sentence, annoyed. “I’m not going to just–”
“Just what, take Meg’s word for it? You took Cole’s word for it.”
He flushed. “Why would Cole lie?”
“Because he’s a jackass, and you encouraged him,” she snapped. “Did it make you feel big, Duncan? Ghosting girls not doing it for you anymore?”
Duncan flinched. “We shouldn’t be – you don’t get it.”
“And I have better things to do with my time than convincing you to explain it,” she agreed, falsely cheerful. “I get that you hang around guys like Jeremy and Cole, who lie about their ex-girlfriends for cred.”
“Don’t act like you’re so pure and wholesome,” he said angrily, and then broke off, turning red again.
He could have just meant the fact that she’d deliberately aired her sexual misadventures in front of the entire school, but the reaction suggested otherwise. “If you bought my test,” Veronica returned, trying not to feel the pitter-patter her heart was doing at the idea that he cared, “then you know that whatever I actually did, I still didn’t do what Jeremy said I did.”
“I’m not still friends with Jeremy!”
It was true she hadn’t seen them eating together since she and Jeremy had broken up. Veronica had assumed that was because Jeremy was avoiding Lilly, but if Duncan was this passionate about it…
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter whether Duncan didn’t like Jeremy because he’d dated Veronica, or because he’d cheated on Veronica, or because Duncan thought the way he kept his dad’s baseball memorabilia in his glove box so he could brag about it was obnoxious. It was irrelevant.
“You’re still friends with Cole,” she pointed out sharply. “Who spends most of his time with Jeremy. Do the math.”
Duncan swallowed and looked away – Veronica wasn’t sure if he was ashamed or if he just didn’t want to look her in the face. This was the first time they’d talked in any way that counted in months, and he’d still spent the first half of it trying not to make eye contact. Regardless, she pressed her advantage. “You’re going to keep your mouth shut about Meg. Right?”
Duncan rolled his eyes – or more specifically, he wobbled his head noncommittally and raised his eyes to the ceiling, but Veronica still saw red.
“If you think I can’t screw up your life because you’re a guy and guys get high fives for actually doing the kind of thing you’re crucifying Meg over, just remember that with my reputation, I can say whatever I want and people will believe me. There were a couple questions on that test that even a boy would want to lie about, and if I start saying you had a suspicious fondness for the family dog, or that you used to moan Lilly’s name when we were hooking up, it doesn’t matter if people think it’s true, they’ll act like it’s true. Everybody loves a scandal.”
The disgust on Duncan’s face at the implication of bestiality turned immediately to horror and something akin to panic when she mentioned the incest question. The coup de grâce of her final shot probably wasn’t even necessary, but she couldn’t stop herself.
“So you’re not just going to keep your mouth shut about Meg, you’re going to be her number one defender. Right?”
Duncan swallowed hard, his gaze darting anywhere and everywhere but towards her. Veronica took a step closer and his eyes widened in alarm. “Right?” When he didn’t respond, she prodded him in the chest with a finger, the paper he was still clutching crinkling under the impact. “Right?”
He still wouldn’t look at her, and Veronica did her best to ignore the sinking feeling that maybe she’d finally crossed the line. Duncan was a terrible boyfriend and he was failing dramatically to live up to the expectations she’d had of him back when she still thought he hung the moon, but he wasn’t Lilly. She wouldn’t have actually followed through on those particular threats, would have found something less horrible like a penchant for bizarre sex toys or dominatrices, or an embarrassing malformation somewhere critical – but it would still have been a lie. Lilly had done what Veronica had dragged her over the coals of public opinion for.
But he managed a jerky nod, so Veronica forced a bright, insincere smile, said, “Great!” in her best pep squad voice, and turned her back on him.
Her confident stride nearly sent her crashing into Lilly when she turned the corner, and Veronica jumped back to avoid making physical contact.
For a second they just stared at each other, but then Lilly bodily shook off her surprise and asked urgently, “Where’s Duncan? What did you say to him?”
“Why do you care?” Veronica asked, the question coming out a little too sincere in her surprise.
Lilly’s eyes went just slightly too wide, and Veronica remembered what Carrie Bishop had said last year about Duncan having a crazy violent fit. She’d mostly blown it off as gossip – the most upsetting part in the moment had been what they were saying about her, and later the thing she hadn’t been able to stop obsessing over had been the part where he’d supposedly been saying her name.
But Lilly didn’t actually think he would hurt anyone, did she?
She didn’t admit it if she did; she only shrugged and said, “It’s got to be something juicy if you dragged him all the way down here.”
“That’s up to Duncan,” Veronica said, and exited on that satisfyingly cryptic note.
*
Meg had apparently been bolstered enough by Lizzie’s defence to brave the dwindling commissary line, so Veronica at least got to eat her entire lunch herself, even if she didn’t have time to do anything else. Or anyone else, ba dum tish, she was here all week. It wasn’t so bad, though, sitting with Meg and Yolanda and Gabrielle and forgetting for a moment that two of them were pariahs and two were knuckling through high school under the ‘keep your head down’ method. Gabrielle was full of entertaining but vague stories about her boyfriend, who Veronica was not 90% sure did not attend Neptune High, and she teased Yolanda a couple times about some mysterious guy she was supposedly always emailing, although Yolanda just smiled and refused to confirm or deny. They even managed to coax Meg into sharing a couple quotes from the letters Rafael had sent her from Spain.
“He was kind of cute,” she admitted, “but just… really over the top with the sexy stuff, you know? That’s more Lizzie’s thing than mine. And besides…” she looked momentarily crestfallen, then rallied, “I was dating Cole.”
“You’ll find another guy who writes you love letters,” Yolanda said. Veronica perked up.
“Lizzie said something about poetry?”
Meg laughed. “Well… he tried,” she said.
“She’s right – we should publish them, because I need to see those.”
Gabrielle giggled, and while Veronica doubted that Meg could ever be vindictive enough to publicly eviscerate her ex’s terrible attempts at love poems, it was probably a good sign that she could enjoy the idea of it.
But then lunch was over, and Veronica was left feeling jittery and unsatisfied. Ripping into Duncan had felt good while she was doing it, but it had left her with way too much adrenaline – and a few unanswered questions.
She spent most of History debating the merits of being late home after school in between taking notes on Mr. Rooks’s lecture. It annoyed her that she was still thinking around the subject, but it was hard to shake a decade and a half of looking coyly away from things regarding sex unless you were trying to be deliberately shocking. She had some stats to make up, and energy to burn off, so if Weevil was still around after school that was what she was going to do – and if he wasn’t, honestly, she was going to go home and lock herself in her room until she’d burned some of that energy off herself. It wouldn’t be quite as effective, but it would get the job done.
Waiting two more periods was a drag, though. Not that anyone was ever jazzed for two hours and change of taxonomy and verb tenses, but things started looking up halfway through Bio, when she realized exactly what it was being passed around and giggled about on the other side of the classroom. Mrs. Canning confiscated it from Jeremy, because he was blew his cover by hissing loudly at Susan to ask who’d given it to her. She was smart enough to ignore him, but it was too late for Jeremy, and as the teacher informed him he was on his last strike and about to take a trip to the office, Veronica caught sight of some very familiar highlighting on the paper she was holding. When Mrs. Canning returned to her desk, Veronica yawned and stretched to get a good angle to see what had been written in large, dark letters at the top: ‘Everything’, according to Cole.
Brutal and effective, especially for Duncan. Maybe Lilly had told him how to put it, but it was definitely his handwriting. Too bad she’d only given him one copy, but word would get around one way or another. It might be optimistic to hope it would do much for Meg, but who knew – if Cole was known to be a liar, her test results might carry a little less weight.
Veronica waited until Mrs. Canning wasn’t looking and blew Cole a kiss. His mouth opened in impotent outrage, but she simply swiveled back to face front and made herself the picture of an attentive student.
That carried her through Bio, and Meg seemed cheerful enough in Spanish – more subdued than lunch, but you could hardly expect any different. Veronica kept the circulation of Cole’s test, and the reason for it, to herself, but she regretted it when Meg fixed her eyes firmly on the looseleaf in front of her and said with a rigidly forced attempt at casualness, “Were you meeting that guy at lunch? Um… Weevil?”
Veronica was so surprised she answered before she could think about it. “For five minutes?”
The incredulity in her tone made Meg blush, which then made Veronica blush, which made her annoyed with herself… but then she started to laugh. “You’re not doing Cole any favours with those expectations.”
“I don’t know!” Meg protested. “I’ve never… and anyway, I didn’t know how long you were gone for. I was talking to Lizzie for a bit, and Yolanda just said you left, so I went to the cafeteria and when I came back you were back. She’s nice, by the way – Yolanda.”
“Nicer than I deserve, honestly. But stop changing the subject! You are the worst tramp I’ve ever met. F-minus in tramp-ology.”
“Veronica!” But now she was laughing too. “You’re going to get us in trouble.”
They assumed serious faces before Sra. Hockley could take note of their non-Español antics, but she was absorbed in explaining some grammar rule they all should have learned two years ago to Ethan Remple and, by the look on her face, too busy fending off a migraine to notice anything else.
“So what are you doing after school?” Veronica asked more composedly.
Meg smiled at her. “I might do something with Lizzie. It’s been a while.” Her expression grew more thoughtful. “I think we kind of drifted, since the summer? But I didn’t want to admit it. We were really close – we are close,” she corrected. “I just want to…”
“Do maintenance?” Veronica suggested, and Meg shrugged.
“Kind of. Remind her that she likes me, I guess? And I’m going to try and convince her to do something with Grace this weekend, like a sister thing. Lizzie’s lots of fun, Grace always loves going shopping with her or to the pier and stuff. I think Lizzie likes that, but she never admits it.”
Veronica blinked, startled. “Right. I forgot you had a younger sister. I mean, younger than Lizzie. I didn’t see her at all at your place.” She had some vague expectation that kids that age were apt to be loud and annoying. If she’d had an older sister like Meg when she was a kid, she probably would have been hanging off her constantly.
“She’s pretty quiet,” Meg said. She frowned, briefly, but whatever she was thinking about, she brushed it off. “And she’s really sweet. But anyway – we could hang out tomorrow if you want? Or Saturday night? My parents always want us to do family stuff after church,” she added apologetically.
A thin layer of guilt slid under Veronica’s skin, since she’d mostly been asking to see if she was clear to ditch Meg after school without completely abandoning her to whatever wolves remained. “No, I just wondered. I maybe locked myself in my room a lot after – all that stuff with Lilly, and it did not help.”
“If I’m out of the house, they can’t call and ask if my vibrator’s running, right?” Meg said, laughing a little with disgust.
“Original,” Veronica agreed darkly. “Very cutting and intellectual.” She wrote a few sentences in Spanish, went back and fixed a verb. “You can borrow Backup, if you want. Let him answer the phone. People find him very intimidating.”
Meg laughed. “I’m assuming that means he’s your dog, not your cat. But my parents don’t like animals in the house.”
“I truly appreciate that that’s your objection.” They were far enough off the subject of Weevil that Veronica felt safe letting the conversation lie, without continuing to coax it in the opposite direction. None of that was anything she wanted to interrogate with Meg. Possibly not with anyone, but certainly not with Meg. She went back to her Spanish assignment instead, body half-canted outward to show she was still open to talking, but Meg applied herself to her own paper instead, and they were both in good shape when Sra. Hockley finally pried herself free of Ethan and made her rounds to peer at everyone’s desks.
*
Veronica dawdled at her locker instead of waiting more obviously for the bulk of the students to clear out. It was mostly because she didn’t need to borrow suspicion, especially since Mr. Wu was talking to one of the gym teachers Veronica had never had in the hall, and he paid a lot more attention than most teachers – but it was also partly because she was second-guessing condom etiquette. They were coming in just about even, weren’t they? Three to her, two to him, but after today, then what? Did they take turns? That seemed depressingly juvenile, but she was equally unwilling to shoulder the entire burden of providing them as to rely entirely on Weevil to provide protection. He probably would, he seemed to just carry them around with him most of the time, but it was the principle of the thing.
In the end she decided better safe than sorry and snuck a couple into her pocket next to the five dollars before she fitted everything into her bag and shut her locker. It was easier just to take it with her than worry about having an excuse for coming back for it half an hour after school ended.
She tracked Weevil down in the parking lot, where he was planted smack in the middle of a swarm of motorcycles, talking to a couple of his cronies. One of them saw her coming and nudged him, and he glanced over his shoulder at her, raised his eyebrows exaggeratedly, and shook his head.
He had things to do, apparently. Still, to save face, Veronica extracted the five-dollar bill from her pocket and pretended to examine it, holding it up with a crisp snap so it would be visible even from across the lot. Weevil’s shoulder raised and lowered in something that could have been a shrug or a laugh, and then he looked at the sky and raised his hands, palm up.
It took her a second, but then she got it. It wasn’t raining, so the rain check wasn’t valid. Very clever. She rolled her eyes, hoping he could see, and headed for her car like it had been the point the whole time.
When she got home, she told her mom she had homework, and she actually did sit down and try to finish her Spanish assignment for a solid fifteen minutes before she gave up on the way her mind kept wandering away from the vocabulary, got a damp cloth from the bathroom, and locked the door and turned off the light.
She’d been trying not to keep track of exactly how much more often she was doing this. You’d think having semi-regular sex would satisfy your sex drive but instead she was masturbating, or at least giving it serious thought, almost every day she wasn’t hooking up with Weevil at school, at least for the last week or so. It had used to be two, maybe three times a week, maybe a little more often when she was dating Troy because she’d come home worked up, a little less when she was first dating Duncan because it had still been so embarrassing then to be thinking about an actual person she saw every day while she touched herself that she used to wait until she was so frustrated she couldn’t stand it anymore. But now she’d spent the entire weekend thinking about it, had sex on Monday and still gotten herself off before she fell asleep, repeated the second part two days in a row and now she was just doing it in the middle of the afternoon. Her fingers hadn’t gotten this much of a workout since right after she’d first crossed the barrier from ‘vaguely naughty exploration’ to ‘figured out how to make an orgasm happen’.
It felt good – she was at least wet enough that she could cut right to the chase, and she wasn’t feeling patient enough to do anything else – but it wasn’t what she’d been anticipating today, and that left her vaguely dissatisfied even though she was pretty good at this. A quick and easy orgasm was fine, most of the time, but it didn’t really stack up next to coming on someone else’s fingers with their breath hot on your face, or feeling them moving inside of you, or just the heat and pressure of bare skin against bare skin.
She did have the washcloth, so she slid her other hand down and tried pressing her fingers in. It wasn’t bad, but her left hand was clumsy, and it wasn’t quite what she wanted anyway. She left them there regardless, because she didn’t have anywhere else to put her hand without getting the sheets dirty, and it did feel good, after all, just not the same. Her fingers were too small and the angle was off.
But it didn’t take that long to work herself to the point of orgasm and tip over. It felt fantastic for a few seconds, and then good, while she panted her composure back, and then, very quickly, she regretted not taking her time. Her clit was still throbbing a bit with the aftershocks, so she pulled back and made wider circles, not quite touching it, flexed the two fingers inside of her and shuddered a little.
The pleasure faded into frustration and Veronica let her head thump back into the pillow. She’d known she was rushing things, and now she felt better but not really satisfied, and she knew from experience that she could keep going, and it would feel good as long as she gave it a minute before she went back to the really intense action, but she wouldn’t come a second time and so it would ultimately just drive her crazy.
She kept going anyway, because knowing it was a bad idea didn’t make it any easier to stop rubbing at herself and edging closer to her clit again and thinking about all the things she should have taken the time to fantasize about in detail before she let herself come, running a little mental parade of all the highlights of what she’d been doing with Weevil, with an occasional pure-fantasy interjection of a teen heartthrob or old TV crush to keep things fresh.
It was good – she knew what she liked, and messing around with her other hand created some interesting effects, especially once she tightened her spiral back down to her clit, even if most of them weren’t anything special on their own. If she’d just taken the time before she got off it might have been approaching great, but she hadn’t, and so it wasn’t going anywhere except in the direction of leaving her wet and squirming and frustrated until after about twenty more minutes she growled and got up, wiped her hands off almost violently and stalked into the bathroom to have a shower. In the end she wasn’t any less distracted by the time she got back to her homework, but she grimly dashed out another two paragraphs of what was probably B- work anyway – her grade could take it – and then pulled out her phone.
The texts from Monday were still sitting there – Weevil’s dumb joke and her X-rated response, plus the blurry shot of the top of her breasts – and for a minute she really considered texting him You better be at school tomorrow, but in the end her better judgement prevailed. They weren’t friends, although it took a lot less effort to tolerate him now, and she definitely didn’t want him thinking she had any expectations. Beyond getting off, anyway, but she’d been the one who’d been busy with Meg all week, so she didn’t have a lot of cause to complain.
In fact, it was probably better not to blur that boundary at all, so Veronica deleted the texts. She hadn’t saved him as a contact, so that was that – plus, it meant no one could find those texts on her phone, which in the wake of Cole’s poems and Meg’s love letters (to say nothing of Lilly’s collection of breakup material and amateur softcore porn) was definitely the safe option even if she didn’t anticipate that her parents would ever violate her privacy that way.
He had still better be at school tomorrow.
Notes:
Content warnings: No directly sex-related warnings, but Veronica threatens Duncan with accusing him of some pretty gross stuff (bestiality, incest, per the purity test questions) if he doesn't do what she wants - 'what she wants' being 'stop talking shit about Meg, you asshole' - and although she doesn't have any intention of actually spreading gossip that's quite that bad, it hits him pretty hard for canonical reasons.
Chapter 15: It's Natural
Notes:
Huge thank you to emwithoutnumber in particular and to everyone else who's commented; so many of you leave such detailed, lovely reviews and commentary and it really helped motivate me to get this up on time after I burned myself out a bit with the double Satisfaction/JEC update last time. (And let's be real, the one day off/two weeks schedule I have going on in RL doesn't help!) I've never had this kind of response to a fic before and I really hope it's clear how much I appreciate all of you, whether you've reviewed or bookmarked or are helping make this fic my most-viewed at four times as much as #2. <3
Chapter Text
Revenge may be wicked, but it's natural.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Veronica got her period on Sunday.
It figured. She’d been antsy since at least Wednesday, because apparently going two days without getting laid was a big deal now. Not that she’d gone since Wednesday without getting off, obviously, but at a certain point it got embarrassing, and that point was around when she realized that she was actively disappointed Weevil hadn’t shown up to school on Friday.
Because of course he hadn’t.
But she’d spent the weekend very aggressively spending time with her parents and doing homework and texting Meg, because it wasn’t normal to masturbate every single day, right? Sometimes twice?
(Three times, on Friday, which had felt so excessive she’d been self-conscious and embarrassed the whole third time, which hadn’t stopped her from coming hard enough that she fell asleep without even getting up to wash her hands. It had been after midnight, but still.)
It had taken the enough of the edge off at the time, anyway, but it wasn’t the same as getting actually fucked, and it was the latter that she’d been getting increasingly eager for – and now they were both off the table.
She didn’t know what she was going to say to Weevil, either, especially since she didn’t want to put him off entirely. Once you were The Girl Who Talked About Her Period Out Loud, you were basically unfuckable. Even Duncan, who’d been markedly more mature about it than the other boys she knew, had been visibly uncomfortable with even indirect allusions. It wouldn’t have been the hugest deal if they didn’t have that pending raincheck agreement still hanging there unfulfilled; Weevil could just go find someone else to hook up with for a week if he wanted. Who knew, maybe that was what he was doing on Friday – he was diligent enough about condoms that Veronica didn’t really care. But two weeks was a long time, and if he lost interest it wasn’t like she was swimming in other options.
Aside from the vibrator still languishing in the back of her sock drawer, behind the rainbow toe socks she’d never worn from three Christmases ago, but even if she’d been willing to go there, it was a little one – if you actually put it up inside, it would probably get lost up there.
It was ridiculous to be this disappointed, although to be fair her mood was not being helped by the steadily increasing ache in her abdomen. She should go downstairs and get some ibuprofen, but if her mom (or worse, her dad) made sympathetic faces at her when she was primarily angry she couldn’t get laid, the cognitive dissonance would probably make her head explode.
Why couldn’t it have started on Tuesday, anyway, if it was going to come early? Then it would have been pretty much over by now, and she wouldn’t have missed anything on that account.
Eventually she dragged herself downstairs to self-medicate with chamomile tea and Midol. It wasn’t like there was anything she could do about it other than get on with her life. She’d fish something pleasant and non-demanding off her bookshelf and hope this was a short one, three or four days instead of the usual five-no-wait-it’s-six-after-all-bet-you-wish-you’d-worn-underwear-to-bed. The cramps usually weren’t too bad after the first day, although it was late enough that they might last into the night and make it hard to sleep. But hey, the point of Mondays was to be horrible, right? Might as well get it all over with at once, or something.
In keeping with that, she woke up to a truly depressing iron-grey sky that didn’t seem like it belonged in California, and since her luck apparently wasn’t perfect enough, it drizzled all through the morning, which gave Weevil a seemingly irresistible opportunity to sidle up to her locker at lunch and say, “It’s raining, and I have this check…”
Veronica reflexively dropped he pad she was holding back inside her bag, willing her face not to turn red. “Right. Very clever.”
She could see his smirk from the corner of her eye, and it only widened at her lack of a pithy response. “Most people say that ‘clever’ is the first thing they think when they think of me.”
“I’ll bet.” She left her locker door just ajar enough that it provided a barrier between them, but not so much that she was obviously hiding behind it. She wished he would leave so she could get her pad and go to the bathroom. “I actually have to go do something.” That felt too awkward, rude in a way that wasn’t part of their usual back-and-forth, so against her better judgement, she added, “I’ll talk to you later?”
From her perspective of not-quite-looking at him, she could see at least one eyebrow raise and his forehead crease dubiously. “I’m doing you a favour here, remember?”
“I have an excellent memory,” Veronica said, trying for her usual faux-brightness. “And I remember it as contracting you for a service.”
He laughed, an almost-surprised ‘you got me there’ quality to it that felt like it was fast becoming familiar. “Well, leave it too late and the price might go up.”
This was starting to verge on actual prostitution, and Veronica didn’t know if she was willing to go there – even if it was entertaining. Not that it really mattered either way, under the circumstances. “I’ll check my budget.”
“Oh, sure.” The eyebrow went up again – this time she was reasonably sure it was alone. “Call me when your bank gets back to you.”
The mocking tone set her teeth on edge, mostly because she couldn’t think of anything to snap back with.
And maybe Weevil was expecting her to, because there was a lag of several seconds before he actually turned and left, and Veronica could finally dig around until she found the fresh pad and head for the bathrooms. Her cramps were still bad enough that the idea of eating anything other than pear she’d put in her lunch for that reason felt onerous, so she killed some time groaning under her breath and splashing water on her face, wincing theatrically at her face in the mirror. She looked exactly the same, only grumpier, which always felt massively unfair when her abdomen was throbbing insistently and her skin felt vaguely grubby no matter what she did and her nether reasons were unpleasantly squishy because she hated changing tampons at school and her period was too heavy the first few days to go the full seven hours on just one.
Then she washed her hands an extra time for good measure, collected her Tupperware of pear slices from her locker, and went to find Meg. Nothing terrible had happened at lunch on Friday – between Lizzie and Duncan, Cole must have gotten the message to keep his mouth shut – but it still felt risky to leave her alone, even though part of her thought that Meg could handle herself, and another part insisted that she had to learn.
The other girl had been smart enough to sit with Yolanda and Gabrielle again, at least, and Veronica slid in beside her with only the briefest eyebrow raise of request. “Sorry,” she told Meg. “Nature calls but once a month, but it calls loudly.”
Gabrielle, who’d turned back to talk to Yolanda when Veronica arrived, snorted loudly and covered her mouth with a hand.
“I get that,” Yolanda said with feeling. “I miss at least one day of school every month and it is not worth it.”
They fell back into whatever conversation they’d been having, and Veronica raised an eyebrow at Meg in an attempt to convey a so? how are you as she cracked open her container of pears.
Meg smiled. “I don’t need you to babysit me, Veronica,” she said, with a warmth that kept it from stinging.
“Babysit?” Veronica said. “No way. You remember that you’re my only friend, right?”
The other girl laughed once in surprise, then glanced over at Yolanda and Gabrielle.
“Not that Yolanda isn’t very friendly and outstandingly classy,” Veronica added, earning herself a quick little smile of acknowledgement, “and Gabrielle seems cool.”
“My other option was sitting with Lizzie,” Meg acknowledged. “Which I would be fine with! But I don’t think she really wants me around that much.”
“It’s a sister thing,” Gabrielle threw in, breaking off her discussion with Yolanda for a moment. “If I had to see my sister at school every day too, I’d scream.”
“At least you have a sister and not a brother,” Yolanda told her in a dark tone, which made Veronica laugh. She turned back to Meg.
“I’m just very on board with this whole ‘decent human being’ thing you have going on,” she said. “Also, I can feel my uterus having a temper tantrum in my ears and I was hoping your aura of incorruptible pureness would be like airborne Aleve.”
Meg laughed in surprise, looking away. Veronica wasn’t sure if she was uncomfortable with the over-the-top compliment or the less-than-demure reference, but she was still smiling when she dragged her gaze back to meet Veronica’s, so it didn’t really matter. “I guess I’ll think angelic thoughts at you?”
“Sounds perfect.”
*
She might have overstated some of her symptoms for dramatic effect, but that didn’t change the fact that Veronica was tired and irritable by the time school ended – as predicted, her cramps had kept her squirming restlessly all night, which was catching up with her, and she had a headache starting. It really made her regret that her schedule capped off with Biology and Spanish. Her English classes she could get through with a headache or even half-asleep, no problem, but Biology required a certain amount of focus, and while she enjoyed Spanish, it felt like the ‘other languages’ part of her brain was always the first part to switch off. It was a general discussion day with the whole class, which didn’t help.
When she saw Weevil in the hall, it made her headache and her irritation worse – she didn’t want to deal with this. He was talking to one of his friends, so before he saw her, she turned to Meg and asked, “Is it still raining outside?”
“Uh, I think so,” Meg said. “A little.” She seemed confused – Veronica’s intensity, while not quite over the top, must have seemed disproportionate to a question about the weather.
“Great.” Not that he really needed that particular opening, and he probably wouldn’t reuse it anyway, but Veronica didn’t have the wherewithal to parry anything more nuanced than ‘Hey’. “I’m just going to…” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder in the direction of one of the nearby bathrooms.
Meg wasn’t stupid, and she probably also knew that there was a bathroom directly on the way to Veronica’s locker; it was literally just around the corner. “Is everything okay?” She must have seen Weevil, because her expression changed and she dropped her voice to a near whisper. “Are you okay? Did something happen?”
“Yes,” Veronica said, and then blinked. “And no. In that order.” She shook her head, trying to reboot her brain. “I’m dodging an awkward conversation, and I just don’t have the energy, so…”
“You just hear things,” Meg said, glancing down the hall at Weevil. “I heard he carjacked Boris and Thom and stole Ambassador Isakov’s Bentley. Like, at gunpoint.”
“Boris and Thom probably drove it off a cliff,” Veronica said dismissively. “Trying to recreate a scene from The Fast and the Furious or something.”
Meg smiled, but she still looked worried. Veronica patted her arm. “See you tomorrow. And relax. I don’t think Weevil even owns a gun.”
That sentiment was effective at amusing herself, but not at reassuring Meg, and honestly, Veronica didn’t have any particular reason to think so, really. Aside from the fact that he’d never shot anybody, which was something she definitely would have heard about.
She didn’t know how she was going to dodge him all week, though. If she was lucky, he could take a hint – after all, if he got around half as much as he and everyone else liked to say, then this couldn’t be the first time something like this had happened. He probably had a back-up hookup for these kinds of situations or something.
It seemed like a lot of work to Veronica. She was barely finding time to sustain one hookup and still maintain her single remaining friendship. But then she also cared about doing her homework and didn’t skip school twenty percent of the time.
Washing her hands didn’t take long enough to justify her presence in the bathroom, but she scrubbed the sticky stain that had adhered to the bottom of her pencil case sometime during the week until it was almost gone, which was apparently the best that was possible, and by the time she’d finished rewashing her hands and messing around with the dryer until the fabric was only tolerably damp it seemed safe to go get her stuff.
The drive home was a pain; her headache wasn’t so bad she couldn’t pay attention to the road, but it did mean she had to focus more than usual, which just made her headache worse, and by the time she go home it was more than just annoying.
“I’m popping a Midol and having a nap,” she told her mom when Lianne suggested they make plans to meet her dad and go out for dinner later. “You guys have fun, though.”
She didn’t know if they would still go; it sounded like it was a last-minute thing and her dad hadn’t signed on yet. But it kept the tone light, and explicitly mentioning Midol gave her mom something to chalk her refusal up to that wasn’t resentment or mistrust. Gave Veronica a reason for it, without forcing her to admit that her thoughts were too haunted by the nail salon and the dessert cart incident from four years ago and the only time Stella Belknap had come over in fifth grade to be able to stomach a family dinner that took place in public.
Still, she didn’t nap as such, just flopped on her bed and alternated shutting her eyes for a few minutes at a time and staring at the ceiling. It was like a magic switch: eyes closed, instantly awake. Eyes open, suddenly exhausted. Eyes closed, burst of energy.
Finally, she rolled over until she was half-falling onto the floor, which forced her to actually get up, and hunted through her bookshelf until she found something entertaining but not too mentally taxing. It was probably technically a kids’ book, and she hadn’t read it in few years, so it might not hold up, but she wasn’t up to anything that took too much brainpower. Elves and ogres it was.
She was approaching the tragic and completely avoidable death of the main character’s mother (being the Fun Parent was at least a more interesting narrative cause of doom than being an inapproachable bastion of purity and love, like most dead fantasy moms seemed to be, but from the position of approaching adulthood it was kind of aggravating that the woman had died because she wouldn’t drink her magic antibiotics) when her own mom – flawed but at least very much alive – knocked softly on the door.
“Honey? Are you still sleeping? We’re going to order Chinese.”
“Extra egg rolls,” Veronica called, and at the sound of her voice Lianne opened the door and stuck her head in.
“Feeling better?”
“I guess so.” She put the book aside. “Menopause in how many years, again?”
Her mom laughed. “I’ll tell you when it shows up.”
“Well, no hogging it all to yourself.” Veronica patted her hair, belatedly aware that it was probably sticking up from her lackluster attempts at napping. “I meant it about the egg rolls; I’m going to eat at least three.”
“Save some room for the almond chicken.”
“What? Come on, lemon chicken.”
“Your dad likes the almond.” Her mom raised a shoulder in a half-shrug. “The lemon is better,” she added conspiratorially. “But there’s no reasoning with him.”
“How come he gets to pick?” Veronica asked with deep affront.
“Because it’s the only thing he has an opinion on,” her mom told her, not without amusement. “Chicken chow mein? Or shrimp?”
Veronica considered. “Yeah, chicken. And no beef broccoli – we should get the curried shrimp and vegetables.”
Lianne winked. “That I can work with.” She eased the door closed with a smile and a moment later Veronica heard her head back downstairs. She tried not to worry about how long her mom’s level-headedness would last.
*
“I’m busy this week.”
Weevil raised his eyebrows, throwing out a casual elbow as the usual lunch crush pushed a sophomore into him and making the kid yelp and recoil. “Did I ask?”
“Well, since you just happened to end up right behind me in line – macaroni, thanks – it seemed like a good time to mention it.” She slid her tray out of the way of the girl to her left who hadn’t been served yet, eyeing the lean pickings on offer for fruit, and he snorted.
“This is your idea of a line?”
There wasn’t any arguing with that, so she didn’t bother answering, just picked out the least sad apple she could find and edged down the tray slide to pay for her food.
“Busy doing what?” Weevil said in her ear right when she was about to go sit down. Veronica managed not to jump; she hadn’t realized he was still next to her. She tried not to think about the faint tickle of his breath against her skin.
“Does it matter?”
“If you’re blowing me off for cafeteria macaroni, it matters.” She made a face and he added, “You’re the one throwing around specific numbers and flashing cash around. I’m just trying to live up to my end of the bargain, here.”
“Something came up,” Veronica said. It would have made a good euphemism if the rest of the world decided to get on board, she thought – gym class? Er, something came up. Go swimming? Something came up. Sex? Something came up, if you know what I – no, that sounded like something else. Regardless, for the moment it was suitably vague for her purposes. “Monday’s good, though.”
“Monday?” He raised his eyebrows at her incredulously.
It would make it practically two weeks all told, so he wasn’t even wrong. It felt like a long time to ask someone to wait in an arrangement like theirs, although Veronica reminded herself that it wasn’t her fault he’d been so hard to pin down last week.
“I’m just busy,” she said. “Can’t you find something else to do for a few days?” Or someone else, even, but that still felt a little too much to say in public.
“Yeah, I get it.” He sounded unaccountably miffed, especially since the tone so far had been the usual provocative smartassery. “Your lunches are otherwise occupied.”
Not just her lunches, but she’d take it. Veronica shot him a tightly sarcastic smile and a wave and went to find Meg, who was gazing into her yogurt like she’d find answers there.
“I think you need an actual crystal ball for that,” Veronica told her, sitting down.
“Huh?” The other girl glanced up, blinked, then forced a smile. “Oh… just thinking.”
“Do I need to publicly embarrass somebody? Or are we at ‘privately threaten’?”
Meg frowned. “Which one is worse?”
“I’m actually not sure.” Veronica debated between apple and pasta for a moment, then decided that at least the apple couldn’t get cold. “So?”
“No, nothing – I mean, nothing new. Mrs. Kinard wants to make sure I’ll be at cheer practice on Friday.” She winced. “I kind of skipped last week.”
“I feel like you’re entitled,” Veronica said through the remainder of her mouthful of macaroni.
“I guess I just feel like I have to decide, you know? I can’t skip again, I have to either quit or show up.”
“You can go to one?” Veronica suggested. “And then quit later if they’re insufferable to you.”
Meg pulled an uncharacteristically sour face. “Claire wants my spot.” She ticked off the point on one finger. “Kimmy is still acting like I’m evil.” Finger number two. “Madison was barely nice to me before; I don’t think she knows how to be nice to people.”
Veronica covered a snort.
“Deb and Sophie have been treating me like I have syphilis ever since that test got posted.” Meg switched to her other hand. “Amy is Cole’s cousin.”
Veronica made a face. “Really?”
“The others can’t decide if they want to ignore me or act like they stepped in something awful whenever I’m around.”
“And Shelly desperately wants to be the first sophomore on varsity, so she’d love it if you quit.” When Lilly had started hinting that Duncan and Shelly were having some kind of on-again-off-again fling over the summer, Veronica had tried not to hyperfocus on the other girl like a stalker, but even when she’d been dating Troy, she’d still noticed pretty much anything that might end up being relevant. It hadn’t helped that Shelly was a cheerleader and she could still remember that horrible anecdote about the locker room and the cheerleaders that had seemed so appallingly funny when Logan had slid it in there during Homecoming last year.
“She started to say something to me in the hall, actually.” Meg’s frown faded for a moment. “Duncan told her to stop it. I guess he changed his mind.”
“Duncan’s just dumb, he’s not actually stupid,” Veronica said lightly. She wasn’t sure if she was more reluctant to get into a discussion about Duncan or to admit to Meg just how he’d ended up changing his mind.
“I’m not exactly in a position to be picky when it comes to people believing me,” Meg said, finally taking a spoonful of her yogurt. A moment later she gasped.
“I didn’t mean–” she added thickly, an anxious, pained expression on her face.
It took Veronica a second before she realized how that could sound like an insult, but when it twigged she found it more funny than anything. “Meg, you and Yolanda are about the only people who still talked to me after Jeremy-gate. Definitely the only people post Weevil-gate.” She wasn’t sure if the latter referred to her or Lilly, but it didn’t really matter. Same event, anyway. “I’m not going to accuse you of ulterior motives.” She smiled. “And even if that was why you were hanging out with me – you’re still basically the best person in school.” With a thoughtful frown, she added, “Maybe then you’d have to take second place after Yolanda, but she’s a literal saint. I totally sold her out when Lilly was out for her blood last year and she still made a point of checking in on me.”
Meg wasn’t familiar with that, beyond some vague knowledge of Lilly and Logan’s breakup at the time, which was mixed up with her vague knowledge of all Lilly and Logan’s other breakups last year, so Veronica laid out the basics. It was less painful to think about than she’d anticipated, although the memory of hanging Yolanda out to dry still made her wince. At least it wasn’t one of those glaring instances where she looked back and thought, I should have known – for once, Lilly had actually been the wronged party, even if she’d blamed the wrong person.
“But she survived,” Veronica added, nudging Meg gently in the shoulder. “She seems good now, right? She’s got friends and nobody bothers her that much. Plus, less than a year until graduation.”
“I could do worse,” Meg agreed. “But I don’t know if I want to keep my head down that much. It’s not just cheer – I made the ensemble for Cabaret, anyway. I don’t want to quit just because I didn’t get the lead.”
“Because you’re an angel,” Veronica said, to cover for the fact that she was surprised by the amount of raw backbone in Meg’s voice. Not that she’d thought the other girl was a pushover, exactly – just far, far too nice for her own good, and understandably devastated by the baseless malice directed her way. She’d assumed that even if Meg stood strong, she wouldn’t have it in her to say Fuck you to anybody. “I have all this extra time, now I dropped pep squad – maybe I’ll come paint some scenery or something. Beats joining French Club, anyway.”
“I meant it when I said I didn’t need a babysitter, Veronica,” Meg said, fondly but firmly.
“Who’s babysitting? Maybe I’m just inspired by your example.” The truth was that she didn’t have any intention of actually following through; she’d just been talking. “Or I might need something to tell my mom when she asks what I have planned for the week that isn’t this.” She waved a hand in an all-encompassing way at the entire lunch area.
“If you really want to, I know Ms. Popham can always use more people for stuff like that.”
“Maybe I’ll let you scope it out and tell me if it’s worth my time.”
Meg laughed, then added more thoughtfully, “Alyssa’s actually really nice. And it’s probably not a bad thing for the main role to go to a senior.”
It seemed over-optimistic to Veronica, but what did she know? She’d overestimated Pam (of all people) and underestimated Meg and Yolanda, to say nothing of badly misjudging Lizzie. Maybe Alyssa would be lovely to Meg. Maybe she’d still have a great time with Cabaret, and she could always go for the main role next year.
“You’re probably right,” was all she said.
*
The rest of the day dragged, and Wednesday dragged as well, to the point that Veronica was seriously considering painting scenery for Cabaret after all. Was that really all she had going on? School, home, and hooking up with a casual acquaintance? That was distressing – especially since the last item was apparently the least complicated and the most satisfying, at least when there weren’t any uterus-created roadblocks in the way.
She had caught a couple of hard looks from Weevil over lunch, which she wasn’t sure how to parse, but that wasn’t her problem. If it hadn’t meant the loss of her one uncomplicated outlet, she might have been tempted to be more direct with him, but the enjoyment she’d get out of a few moments of utter horror on his face wasn’t worth losing that. She could still remember how badly all the guys had lost it when someone had left an (unused, fully wrapped) tampon in the back of the school bus in freshmen year. The entire fieldtrip had nearly gone off the rails.
Still, by the time last period rolled around (there was a pun in there somewhere, but she was too annoyed to figure it out), it was a relief just to be able to hang back and let the crowd pass her by, so that she didn’t have to pay attention to what anyone else was saying or doing. She took her time getting her locker open and getting her stuff in order, wondering if maybe she should go to the beach or something to change things up.
“Busy, huh?”
Veronica jumped, dropping her pencil case. It clattered against the floor of her locker, probably breaking some of the leads. “Uh–”
“Because,” Weevil said, over the opposite shoulder then the one she’d glanced over, which threw her more than it should have, “last week it was like you were chasing me around everywhere, and now…” He made a ‘poof’ gesture with one hand, eyebrows raised in a decidedly unfriendly way.
“I wasn’t chasing you,” Veronica retorted defensively, before she could help herself.
“‘Can you commit to five more times if I pay you?’” he demanded in an insultingly nasally voice that did not sound like her. “You got what you wanted and so much for follow-through, huh? Got your kicks and your precious low score and now you’re all set.”
“First of all, I owe you nothing,” Veronica snapped, taken aback by how suddenly this had gone off the rails but not willing to show weakness.
“You owe me five dollars,” he countered.
She growled in frustration. “And secondly, I am busy this week.” Why couldn’t he take a hint? Shouldn’t most reasonably perceptive boys be stammering an excuse and avoiding the hell out of her until she made it clear she was no longer tainted by the presence of menstruation demons?
“Yeah, clearly. I can see what a rush you’re in.”
“I have things going on, for your information,” she informed him tightly.
“It’s pretty obvious what things you have going on. You got your little friends back and you want out of the mud before they decide you’re too dirty to play with, huh?” The bitter disgust in his voice was palpable. “You know what, that’s fine. Go running back. You could just fucking say so, but no, you need to jerk me around first. Typical 09er crap – gotta prove you belong, I guess.”
“I’m not an 09er.” Veronica set her jaw and glared at him. “My zip code ends in six, for your information.”
“Well, goody for you.” A word like that should have sounded incongruous or silly in his mouth, but the vicious sarcasm he delivered the sentiment with made it anything but. “I guess that makes all the difference.”
“And I don’t have anything to do with those people, not that I owe you any explanations. Yolanda and Meg aren’t 09ers either.”
Weevil snorted, his expression ugly. “Oh yeah? What’s their area code, then?”
“You know what I mean,” Veronica bit out tightly.
“You mean you think Miss Christian Crop-Top doesn’t count because she’s less of a bitch than fucking Lilly Kane? Like she’s not living the high life while the rest of us clean her pool and her closet and her stove for six dollars an hour? And don’t even start with me about Bone Hamilton – dangling a guy out a window because he didn’t give you a good enough record deal isn’t street, it’s just regular psychopathic millionaire shit.”
“Whereas throwing someone down two flights of stairs is how normal people do it,” she snapped back before she had time to think better of it. Yolanda’s dad had dangled someone out a window? There was no way that was true, right?
Weevil’s mouth thinned into a tight line. “Been talking to your dad about me, huh?”
“Maybe I should be!”
He nodded with a barely controlled anger that was more frightening than if he’d shouted in her face. For a second, Veronica thought about Logan’s fingers digging into her arm, but Weevil didn’t touch her. “There it is. Why clean up your own mess when you can play the victim card, right? Guess I should be glad Lilly never got around to that one.” He shot her a look of pure disgust. “You and Caitlin fucking Ford.”
“What?” She was completely at sea – she’d barely known Caitlin Ford, who didn’t even go to school there anymore, and he was acting like she’d threatened him with her dad, when she’d only meant that she could get dirt on him pretty easily. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but you need to get out of my face, or I will be having a very different kind of conversation with my dad about you.”
This was what she got for getting angry enough that she didn’t think about what she was saying, probably, although it didn’t make him any less of an asshole.
“You know,” Weevil told her with forced casualness, “I figured your whole thing was crazy, but whatever – it’s not like this is a fucking relationship, I can get on board with watching someone be a nutcase, it’s funny, and hey, credit for saying out loud when you’re using someone.”
Veronica felt her jaw tighten, but before she could snap that he was using her right back, that was the point, he added, “But somehow I am still getting jerked around. What is with fucking rich blonde girls, man? Do you all sign a fucking contract to pull this shit?”
She opened her mouth, but Weevil shook his head. “I don’t have time for your crap.”
The mingled dismay and anger in her stomach curdled into something unified and truly unpleasant. “Fine,” she snapped, dragging her bag to the front of her locker and digging through it until she found what she was looking for. “This is what you want, right? Keep the change.” She slapped the ten-dollar bill into his chest, refusing to let her hand linger the way she’d been forced to with Duncan a week ago. It chased her fingers for a moment, then fluttered to the floor. “I don’t have time for your crap either.”
She slammed the locker shut and stalked away, leaving most of her things. Behind her, after a moment, she thought she heard Weevil walk away too. She didn’t think he’d bent down to get the money, but when she thought better of leaving her bag and circled back after taking five minutes to calm down in the bathroom, it was gone.
*
Apparently she was glum enough on Thursday that even Yolanda noticed it. They were eating lunch at her table again, because the one Veronica and Meg usually sat at had been taken over by roughhousing freshman boys.
“How do you keep that from happening with this one?” Veronica asked, nodding at the madly giggling mob and completely ignoring Yolanda’s question about whether she was okay. “You and Gabrielle always sit here, right?”
“It wobbles,” Gabrielle said. She pushed her feet against the thick support pole in the center of the table and it wiggled back and forth – by less than half an inch, but it was nevertheless alarming. “Nobody else wants it.”
“Yikes,” Veronica said, steadying her bottle of Snapple. “Okay, very resourceful.”
Meg laughed, but she wasn’t the type to let the topic fade away, even if Yolanda was. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Veronica raised one shoulder, hedging. Yolanda (and even Gabrielle) she might have told the truth to – a version of it, anyway, the parts that made her seem and feel grown-up and coolly casual and unconcerned, leaving out the sinking feeling that she’d screwed up somehow, the one that made her feel young and stupid – but she didn’t want to throw out a breezy ‘I’m annoyed I can’t get laid’ in front of Meg, and whatever deeper exploration of her overall feelings these day she might have used to keep Meg from noticing that she hadn’t answered the question with regards to right now was too personal for Yolanda and Gabrielle to hear.
And the fact that her dad had gotten home later than usual and visibly grim wasn’t something she wanted to factor into the equation even in her own head. He hadn’t told her anything about why, and even when she’d risked eavesdropping on her parents, all he’d said to her mom was that he’d had to make a stop at the hospital. It wasn’t anything she wanted to pull out into the light in the middle of lunch, even if when she thought about it she was also seized with the urge to beg Yolanda and Gabrielle to not ever go to a club no matter how cool it was and how connected they were.
It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, given her dad’s job, but everything felt more serious lately, heavier. Less like it couldn’t touch her.
“I can’t believe I have another year and a half of high school,” she said instead, laying on the ironic cheer maybe a bit too thick. Only Gabrielle bought it, but Yolanda laughed because Gabrielle did, and Meg smiled because Yolanda was laughing, and it wasn’t hard from there to shift the subject onto school subjects and teachers and how glad Yolanda and Gabrielle were to be graduating this year. It wasn’t until she was packing up her lunch that Veronica realized that Yolanda had dodged every chance or opening to talk about what she was doing after graduation – even when Gabrielle had said she wanted to get out of Neptune as soon as possible, her friend hadn’t made any comment one way or another, just a joke about how it was the only way Gabrielle’s sister would learn to do her own homework.
Maybe that was why she hadn’t pressed Veronica – she was too busy covering her own uncomfortable secret, whatever that was.
Veronica hadn’t caught on quickly enough to say anything, which would have been a calculated risk in any case, and she wouldn’t have asked about it in front of Meg and Gabrielle anyway, but she made a note in the back of her brain that she wanted to know what was going on there. It was probably something harmless – Yolanda wasn’t confident she’d get into her safety school, or something – but it was still better to know.
Just in case.
Maybe she should see if Yolanda wanted to spend time together outside school. She had vague weekend plans with Meg already, but that still left plenty of available time, and so far she’d gotten a lot more out of the relationship than she’d put it, so it was only fair. Yolanda might be busy – she had Gabrielle to go shopping with, and that other friend she’d mentioned, Anna, who was apparently some big movie buff – but it was at least worth throwing the invitation out there.
That would have to wait until tomorrow, since she didn’t think she had Yolanda’s number anymore. Sunday, maybe – Meg wasn’t supposed to go out after church, a rule her parents had started enforcing again in the wake of the test drama, so Veronica had nothing else to do, and anyway, she wanted to be available on Friday just in case something went horribly wrong at the cheer squad meeting.
Meg had, however, been very firm that Veronica didn’t need to stick around for the first play rehearsal that afternoon, and in the interest of not pushing her luck, she went straight home. She needed to give Meg some credit anyway. She was handling herself better than Veronica had expected – better than Veronica had when it was her, probably, if she was being honest.
So she went home after school with some vague intention of offering to run errands or something – pick up some groceries, take her mom’s car through the car wash, walk the dog, something to get her out of the house and feel less like the only interesting thing in her life had been an ill-advised protracted hookup with a guy she didn’t even really like, which had just exploded in a cloud of temper issues and scheduling mishaps. Instead, she walked into the kitchen with the virtuous intention to unpack her lunch bag right away instead of leaving it to the last minute, and found her mom on the phone, a lowball glass of something that was probably bourbon by her elbow.
“Oh, hi, honey!” Lianne sad brightly. Not too brightly – at least it didn’t seem like it. She was just getting started, then, or balancing in a perpetual state of ‘taking the edge off’ the way she did sometimes when she’d stopped pretending she wasn’t drinking and started pretending that it just wasn’t a problem. “Say hi to your Aunt Sheryl!”
“Hi,” Veronica said, unenthusiastically. Then she unpacked the containers from her lunch, rinsed them, and pulled together something for tomorrow, because what else was she supposed to do? She could hear her mom embroidering her response into something politer over the phone, and when she finished, she waved and let her mom make of that whatever she wanted, but she didn’t let herself reassess the level of the glass before she left the kitchen.
Errands felt like too much effort after that. She did her homework sprawled out on the floor in the living room instead, half-watching the TV and scratching Backup’s ears every time he nosed her hand.
It wasn’t a half-bad way to spend the afternoon, anyway, if she ignored the anxiety bubbling in her stomach. It reminded her of middle school. So did the anxiety, actually, but she ignored that fact as well. Some things were too bleak to be worth confronting.
Then the door opened and closed, and she couldn’t help looking over her shoulder to see if she could catch her dad in the hall. He waved as he passed, but he didn’t stop, and Veronica scooped up her papers and deposited them on the end table next to the couch and went after him, back into the kitchen.
She honestly wasn’t sure if she was trying to delay him so he wouldn’t see what she had, or make sure he did see what was going on, but it turned out not to matter; her mom was off the phone and had presumably gone upstairs, and the glass was gone.
“Everything okay?” she asked, not even really confident of what she wanted him to say.
He sighed. “Not really, honey. But it’s nothing you can help with.” He squeezed her around the shoulders, then opened the fridge. “Remind me if we have any almond chicken left?”
“I didn’t eat it,” Veronica told him. After a long moment of indecision, she put her thoughts of her mom aside and asked, “Is it the serial killer case? E-String?”
Her dad sighed heavily, the fridge door hiding the expression on his face. “No.” Veronica waited, but he didn’t elaborate.
“Mom said you were at the hospital last night?” she tried, settling into a chair at the kitchen island, even though Lianne had said no such thing. The justification she felt in throwing her mother under the bus would wear off eventually, but it hadn’t yet, so she might as well go for it.
Her dad’s mouth tightened as he emerged from the fridge with the remains of the other day’s fried rice. “It wasn’t related.” There was a long pause, and then he added, reluctantly, “Marisol Reyes’s mother attempted suicide on Tuesday night. They entered the plea deal on Monday.”
That shook everything else out of her mind. “Oh, god.” After a long pause to let that settle, she waited for him to finish prepping the rice for the microwave and then asked, “Is it… did he get off, you know, with a light sentence?” It seemed too horrible to contemplate, but these things did happen. How could it not drive you to something extreme, if it was your child who’d been murdered?
“Life with no possibility of parole,” her dad said, with something that might have been relief if it wasn’t overshadowed by the magnifying tragedy. “Murder with special circumstances.”
“Then why–” Veronica broke off. She wasn’t a kid. Her dad wouldn’t have the answers she wanted. No one did; even asking for them was probably immature.
But he sighed. “If you ask me, honey, she was holding out to see him brought to justice, and now that it’s happened… You can see these things in retrospect, sometimes. I should have caught it, but I was too worried about the husband. He wasn’t coping, but he wasn’t coping… louder.”
“It’s not on you,” she told him instantly. “What would you even have done?”
The microwave beeped, but her dad paused to squeeze her shoulder before he retrieved his food. “It’s not your job to run interference for me, Veronica. I don’t know if I should even be telling you about these sorts of things, but most of it will probably end up in the paper, eventually. You might be old enough to hear them, sometimes, but I don’t want them living in your head.”
She almost didn’t ask, but it felt cowardly not to. “Do they live in your head?”
“Sometimes,” he said quietly, closing the microwave door gently. It still sounded loud as the latch clicked home. “But. I have other stuff stuck in my head too. Finding a missing kid when I was a deputy and bringing him home. Watching whales with your mother on our honeymoon. You. So it’s not so bad.”
“It’s got to be pretty bad right now,” she contended, wanting him to know he didn’t have to soften the truth for her, and he raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement.
“Well, the bad guy’s in prison, I’m at home with my wife and daughter, and eventually there’ll be a case with a happy ending and this one won’t feel so bad.”
“Is she going to be okay?” she asked. “Marisol’s mother?”
“Probably not.”
Veronica nodded. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
“I wish this one had a better ending to tell you,” he said, and she shook her head and hugged him.
“I’d rather have the truth, anyway,” she said, but she couldn’t help looking at the spot on the table where that glass had been and wondering if she was really just a hypocrite.
*
The only positive of Friday, other than the obvious, was that her period wrapped up early overnight, which quickly became a negative when it changed its mind and made a reappearance during her morning classes. There were probably worse things than having to put up her hand in English and ask Mr. Johansen for a bathroom pass, but then again, while asking Mr. Rooks might have been more personally embarrassing, he wouldn’t have required her to justify the request by emphasizing that she needed to go to the women’s washroom.
She should be beyond getting caught by surprise like this, Veronica thought as she dug through her locker. It wasn’t like it didn’t happen at least a third of the time. But no, she hadn’t wanted to waste another pad, and she’d been too fastidious to just keep wearing last night’s underwear just in case. Well, now she probably had blood on the ones she was wearing, so that was great.
She glanced up as someone came around the corner, ready to justify herself to a teacher, then turned back to her locker quickly when she realized it was Weevil. She wondered if he was just getting to school now; he still had his leather jacket on.
Not that it mattered. Veronica got what she needed and shut her locker, only to see that he’d stopped at the edge of the bank of lockers, even though she knew for a fact that his was somewhere else.
He was staring at her, and she was wavering between ignoring him and finding something cutting to say when she realized he was looking at her hand, not her face. Reflexively, Veronica curled her fingers ineffectively over the pad, cursing the fact that she never bothered with tampons at school unless she was going to be exercising or something. They were uncomfortable, but it was a small price to pay. Her face was heating traitorously.
“Are you on your period?” he asked incredulously.
She glared at his shoulder so she wouldn’t have to meet his eyes. “That’s none of your business.”
Veronica wasn’t sure what reaction she expected, but it wasn’t for him to start laughing. Not a smug little chuckle, either – he legitimately burst out laughing hard enough that she glanced over her shoulder to make sure they hadn’t attracted the attention of the teacher.
“Shut up!” she hissed at him, lost for any other response.
He got himself under control quickly, but a truly insufferable grin kept slipping out no matter how hard he was trying to keep it off his face. “Wait, is this what all the bullshit is about? Why didn’t you just fucking say that?”
Veronica made a noise like an angry cat, which was humiliating, but the best she could manage in the moment. “Because – what, like you’d just – because.”
“Holy shit.” He wasn’t even trying to hide the grin anymore. “Are you embarrassed?”
She shot daggers at his sternum with her eyes.
“This isn’t the first time, right?” he asked her with immense solicitude. “’Cause you don’t have to dump pigs’ blood on everybody, you know, you can just take the day off school or something.”
“Fuck you,” Veronica muttered, utterly wrong-footed. This was not how any of the guys she knew would have reacted to even the concept of a period. Not just the teenagers, either – Lilly had once told her she kept her brother and her dad out of her room by leaving tampons around. Veronica’s dad wasn’t some juvenile high school kid, and she could tell him when she had cramps and stuff, but she couldn’t remember him ever using the word period. It only ever came up in vague terms – she said she had cramps, he asked if she wanted ice cream, or a hot pad, or if she was feeling better after a day or two. She put ‘’maxi pads’ on the grocery list and they showed up in the bathroom without comment, but she never would have actually asked him to buy her some.
“That’s not even how Carrie goes, anyway,” she added, belatedly. It felt weak and inadequate even before it was out of her mouth.
“Should’ve,” he said succinctly. “A whole week, huh? Sucks for you.”
“I’m aware!” she snapped at him. “Why do you care, anyway? What happened to not having time for my crap?”
“Got good news and my schedule opened up,” he said, flippantly enough, but Veronica thought she might be able to see a trace of apology in his expression. He obviously wasn’t going to give her one out loud, but it was good that he knew he’d been an asshole, right?
Or not even that, since as far as she could tell he was being an asshole on purpose most of the time and seemed to really enjoy it. But knew he’d overreacted, maybe. He hadn’t threatened her or hurt her, but the vitriol underlying their argument had shaken loose all her half-forgotten concerns about emotional regulation and stalking and the way Lilly had called him unstable. There was a difference between having a temper tantrum and thinking that they were normal.
“Reappropriated some of the time previously dedicated to being a total psycho, huh?”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Something like that.”
It should have been less reassuring than it was, and Veronica paused for a long moment, wondering exactly how shot her judgement was and if she was really going to put herself back in a dangerous situation just because the orgasms were better than she could usually manage by herself.
Maybe she shouldn’t be making this decision after a week-long dry spell.
“Must be nice for you to have so much extra time all of a sudden,” she told Weevil acerbically, putting off the actual decision. If he flipped out on her it would have made things easy, but instead he just smiled.
“Monday, right?” He shot her a cocky grin as he walked away – backwards, because he was apparently trying out for the ‘charming hood’ role in an 80s movie. “Since you’re so squeamish.”
Veronica rolled her eyes at the presumption, but his follow-up comment threw her for enough of a loop that she couldn’t come up with an adequate retort. “I want my ten dollars back.”
“Didn’t take it,” he said. “Maybe your 09er friends can spot you.”
It wasn’t hostile, but she couldn’t figure out what purpose it served for him to remind her of the things he’d said, especially if he was – if not regretting them – at least de-emphasizing them now. But maybe he just wanted to make it clear he wasn’t planning on groveling. It was pretty unnecessary, since she hadn’t been stupid enough to expect that.
After a moment’s consideration, she flipped him off before he was out of view, then did an about-face without giving him time to respond and headed for the bathroom. She’d have the whole weekend to think better of this, anyway.
Chapter 16: Best Served Hot
Notes:
Not much to warn for here, but my due diligence is in the endnote! (Also, I have been sitting on this quote waiting for the right chapter to use it for for AGES.)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
When they say revenge is a dish best served up cold they were wrong... revenge for me has instead turned out to be a dish served hot, steamy, and very satisfying!
Vanessa E. Silver
The only thing that got Weevil to school on his bike on Monday was the knowledge that if he took the bus or borrowed his grandma’s car, he’d be laughed out of the gang, but he was so exhausted it almost felt worth it. After spending all weekend blowing off steam once he didn’t need to watch the kids anymore, the only thing keeping him from sleeping until noon was the fact that his grandma was home sick with some bug she’d caught from being at the hospital with Margarita, and she’d drag him out of bed if she knew he was trying to skip – and she had enough to worry about already. So here he was trying not to lay his bike down out of sheer exhaustion.
The usual group was thinner when he pulled up and parked – no surprise there. Ric had apparently decided that science class was better than being at home with his brother, and Cervando was there because he was a freak who liked school.
Felix was the standout – Weevil would have laid odds that he’d be taking any excuse to miss school. Maybe it wasn’t that surprising, though; he’d been cleaning up the highway all weekend, courtesy of Wanda Fucking Varner, instead of living it up with the rest of them. A couple hours of partying on Sunday night wasn’t the same as tearing things up for two days straight.
“You look like I feel,” Ric told him, and Weevil punched him in the shoulder, because he was obligated, but not as hard as he should have. His head was full of angry snakes, so it was hard to actually care.
“At least I have English first,” he said, even though he was not looking forward to sitting through Ms. Dunne’s usual opening lecture when he was in this kind of state – Ric had gym first period, which was a whole different kind of torture.
It bought him the expected groan and the inevitable snickering from Felix and Cervando, which he smirked at even though exactly none of those things helped his headache.
“I’m going home after school and sleeping for five hours,” Cervando said. He punched Ric in the shoulder in a much more friendly way than Weevil had and headed to class. What a weird kid, honestly. No way was Weevil planning to be in class when the first bell went; that shit was always louder inside. It wasn’t like racking up another tardy was going to matter one way or another.
Ric stumbled off resentfully, but Felix hesitated, bouncing on the balls of his feet and glancing around like he expected something to happen. Weevil couldn’t see what the deal was – it looked like the same boring parade of rich assholes and whitebread nobodies to him.
“What’s with you?” he said, rubbing his temples wearily. “Nobody should have that much energy this early in the morning, and you could have the goddamn grace to pretend to be at least a little hungover.”
Felix shrugged. “You know. Nothing.” He grinned.
“You take your sister’s Adderall or something?”
“Nah, nah, you know how much my moms has to shell out for that?” Felix shook his head. “‘S not like we have health insurance.”
“The club is your health insurance,” Weevil said pointedly, leaning into the implication of keep annoying me and I’ll kick you out. Felix just laughed, probably because he knew full well that would never happen.
“Yeah, man, you’re right. So is it you I ask who’s in my network, or–”
Weevil took a half-hearted swipe at him, which Felix dodged easily, dancing backwards. “You’re the fucking worst, man. Go to class, since you came all the way here. Don’t know what you have to be so excited about.”
“Church,” Felix said. He shot Weevil a cheeky grin and a wave and headed toward the school. He probably should be on Jenifer’s Adderall.
Then the bell rang, and Weevil blew it off. There was always something going on with Felix. It never came to anything, anyway; he didn’t have the focus to get himself into real trouble. Impulsiveness, sure, but that was less something Weevil had to watch. All of them did spur-of-the-moment dumb shit on occasion – as long as no one ended up dead or in juvie for the long haul, it wasn’t worth worrying about.
Besides, dragging himself to class was about all he had the brainpower for right now anyway. Most of the teachers had given up on litigating five or ten minutes, but if he was any later than that, Ms. Dunne would bust his balls. She was a hardass, although in a less obnoxious way than somebody like Daniels – maybe because imagining Daniels staring at him sternly in an empty classroom, smacking a ruler meaningfully into one hand while holding it with the other, was pure nightmare fuel instead of something you didn’t entirely mind dreaming about. Or maybe just because Daniels was the biggest fucking dick.
In support of the second theory, Ms. Dunne shot him several glares as he yawned his way through class, but she did not single him out in front of everyone and make a bunch of cracks about his home life and future prospects the way Daniels would have done. God, he was so fucking glad he’d scraped up sixty-seven percent last year so he wasn’t stuck with that prick again.
Mrs. Hauser did yell at him in Health, but she was always a bitch, so he just waited for her to finish her rant and said, “What?” in his stupidest voice. The way she went off on him for that almost made the effect her snotty tone had on his hangover worth it, but Algebra made his headache so much worse that he immediately regretted it, and Mr. Dalton took one look at him when he showed up for autoshop and told him to go sleep it off. Weevil barely protested; if Ric hadn’t been there he might not have bothered to at all. He was guaranteed an A in autoshop anyway, so he found a chair in the library that was almost comfortable and went to sleep, ignoring the incessant throat-clearing coming from the librarian. What was with following him into the stacks, anyway – did the guy think he was going to steal the books, when he could just check them out for free?
In the end he slept through fourth period and pretty much all of lunch, and a chunk of fifth period to boot. He felt guiltier about lunch than History class; he was pretty sure he’d had an implied assignation with Veronica Mars, although it wasn’t like he would have been good for much today. Maybe it wouldn’t have nagged at him so much if he hadn’t gotten all up in her face last week, but her having to chase him again felt like unnecessary nonsense.
He still didn’t know what he’d been supposed to think, when she’d gone from making appointments with him to blowing off her own arrangements so she could hang out with the 09 Lite without even having the fucking decency to tell him to his face that she’d moved on to better things, but maybe if he hadn’t been so pissed that she got to swan around completely ignorant with her rich friends while his entire block was killing themselves trying to find a way to help Sofia Reyes with their last fucking dollar or by dragging themselves to the hospital after two shifts scrubbing other people’s floors in order to support her family, if he hadn’t had Margarita goddamn Galvez look him in the eye and say Thank you, Eli for the first goddamn time in her life when her daughter was on life support six feet away because he’d carried in a Tupperware full of sandwiches he hadn’t even freaking made, maybe he wouldn’t have gone quite so Gus on Veronica’s ass.
Also, in retrospect, he should have waited until she left and picked up that ten dollars instead of leaving it on the floor. Danny deserved a reward for doing twice his chores without complaining. Maybe Weevil would just lift something for him instead, to make up for it.
It honestly just made him pissed at Irene all over again, though. Couldn’t she have called the non-emergency police line, or left a note for a neighbour or fucking anything to make sure her eight-year-old son wasn’t the one who found her? Danny would be about thirty percent less fucked-up right now if he hadn’t had to see her in the tub like that, and Weevil wouldn’t have had to think about it every time he looked at his cousin’s face for the last week. He’d nearly slapped Alex a couple times last week for not laying off; maybe they were always at each other, but there was a fucking time and place.
Sofia’d turned it around, though, he reminded himself. Recovery not guaranteed, or whatever, but apparently she was in a different kind of coma now, which was a good thing? It wouldn’t be so goddamn suffocating in the house anymore.
Although with his grandma home today, he could afford to get home late. He was already feeling better – if he ate something, he might be in some kind of acceptable state by the time school let out. The cafeteria was definitely closed, but he had half an hour before sixth period, since there was no point in going now; plenty of time to cruise around for some freshman with a hall pass who could be terrified into handing over his leftover chips or something.
*
Veronica made her excuses to Meg for lunch prematurely, and when she realized there was no sign of Weevil anywhere she didn’t exactly feel like walking them back and explaining why. She went to the computer lab instead, trying to tamp down her annoyance. If she’d known he wouldn’t be at school, she would have worn jeans, and her legs wouldn’t be cold.
Also she wouldn’t have gotten her hopes up, but that was beside the point.
The lab was empty, which at least meant she could still eat her lunch despite the fact that food wasn’t technically allowed in there. It was actually nice to spend a lunch hour on her own – not that it wasn’t unexpectedly great every day to sit down with people who actually liked her and pretend to be normal again for forty-five minutes, but the time alone was nice too, especially when it was alone alone and not alone-while-surrounded-by-hostile-crowds.
She killed the rest of the time by surfing the internet, and by the time History started, she was in a moderately good mood, bait-and-switch notwithstanding. The rest of the day went smoothly enough – Jeremy and Cole got in trouble twice for talking in Biology, which she wasn’t beyond appreciating – and then when she got back to her locker Weevil was leaning against Katie David’s, next to it. Katie herself was hovering a foot away, visibly furious but not brave enough to tell him to move.
“Did you show up at school just for last period?” Veronica demanded, blithely spinning her locker open.
“You got a distorted idea of how much I like Earth Science,” he told her, stretching. “So are you… busy… this week?”
His tone was so deceptively mild it took a second, after which her face immediately turned red. There was no salvaging the situation, but she tried anyway. “You have a massive misunderstanding of how certain things work.”
“Hey, all I know about for sure is Friday. Four days isn’t that weird.”
She couldn’t believe he was actually commenting on her period. Mocking her about it, sure. It was Weevil; that was eminently believable. But observations, like they were talking about the weather?
“That’s none of your business,” she told him, trying for a cool, stern tone, but he just laughed at her.
“Well, in that case…” He pretended like he was going to leave, and Veronica gritted her teeth and didn’t react. She’d beaten him in games of chicken before, she could do it again.
But those were for different stakes, and once he’d exhausted all the possible fake-outs that didn’t leave him looking ridiculous, he turned and actually left, and Veronica snapped and called, “Wait!”, wincing even as she said it.
He turned back in affected confusion, and she ground her molars with aggravation, keeping a vacuous smile pasted on externally. “Don’t you need this?” She held out the key to the art classroom like she thought that was where he was going, tilting her head with a half-confused, half-flirtatious air that wouldn’t have been out of place coming from a Playboy bunny.
Weevil flashed her a victorious grin and flipped the key from her fingers to his with an unnecessary amount of flare, then ambled away in the opposite direction he’d originally been going. At least that was a good sign, although she already suspected it had been a miscalculation to give him the key; she’d probably never get it back now.
When she’d finished packing her bag and depositing everything else in her locker, she found him leaning smugly against the cabinet in the art classroom. It reminded her to wonder what he’d done with all that oil paint, but she didn’t bother asking. It wasn’t like he’d tell her.
“So,” he said when she shut the door behind her. “Where’s my five dollars?”
Veronica blinked in annoyance. “Don’t screw around with me. I gave you twice that, and it was gone when I got back. What exactly are you suggesting happened to it?”
Weevil raised his eyebrows at her. “You didn’t give me shit, you insulted me with it and threw it on the ground. Maybe you shouldn’t keep your money on the floor if you want it to be there when you come back.”
Argh. Completely aside from the fact that he had her and he knew it, it was aggravating to think that she’d flushed ten dollars down the drain. Probably he had taken it, but she couldn’t exactly prove that.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll have it for you tomorrow. Assuming you’re actually planning on being here.”
“Oh, so should I just take off then, or…?”
God, he was insufferable. “I cannot believe that one lousy point is causing me this much trouble.”
“Hey, you were the one who wanted to cheat,” he pointed out.
Veronica shook her head. “Look, you spent all last week chasing me. Do you want to get some, or not?” She tried to make it sound like an idle question, but her frustration was a little too transparent. She also hadn’t gotten laid in almost two weeks, thank you very much, and even if he hadn’t taken the opportunity to hook up with whoever else he spent his time hooking up with, for a good chunk of that time he’d had relief available to him that she hadn’t.
The image of it struck her, suddenly; nothing too specific, but still enough to raise her eyebrows. Male masturbation had always seemed vaguely distasteful, something she’d never given too much thought to, but the thought was more of a turn-on than a turn-off, maybe because she actually had seen Weevil with his dick in his hand on previous occasions.
Fortunately for the potentially embarrassing direction her thoughts had taken, he took the bait. Or maybe it wasn’t bait so much as an overture; after all, they both knew why they were here.
Regardless, he pushed off the cabinets and came toward her, and Veronica hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her underwear and pushed them down. It was a good reminder to bring an extra pair tomorrow, she thought. She could get home fine commando, since no one would see her, but if they’d done this at lunch she would have had to put them back on after they touched the floor. In fact, she should make good on all those vague intentions and just keep a full change of clothes at school, just in case.
One thing she had remembered to bring was a hair elastic, and even as she backed toward the desks and Weevil followed, she put her hair up, making a face as her sloppiness caught a few strands in a way that made them strain painfully against the tension of the hairdo. She didn’t have time to redo it, though; he was already there, pressing her back against the desk, and with a sigh that only managed to be half as exasperated as she’d intended, she surrendered, putting her arms around his neck as he helped her onto the desk.
“I thought there was something about other positions,” she contested half-heartedly, but he was already shoving her skirt up and sliding a finger through her folds up to her clit, so her voice jumped halfway through the sentence and trailed off into something she fought very hard not to allow to be a moan.
“Yeah, well, we’ll talk when you’re not in arrears,” Weevil said, looking genuinely pleased by her reaction. Or maybe by how wet she was getting; after the peek-a-boo ‘end’ of her period on Friday she’d firmly refused to touch herself at all until she was absolutely sure it was over, and her body was beyond enthusiastic to be finally getting some attention. His other hand was under her shirt and sliding over her stomach, which was new but not something she was complaining about.
“In arrears? How come you–” Veronica bit her lip as he fondled her through her bra, trying not to squeak. “How come you always talk like you’re Lex Luthor or something?”
He leaned back, looking offended, and she clamped her thighs together instinctively to keep him from taking his hand away. “Lex Luthor? Are you for real?”
“Sue me,” Veronica said, reaching for his shirt to drag him forward again. “You sound like a supervillain, I don’t know. Do I look like a comic book nerd to you?”
“So you pick the famously ugly bald supervillain?”
“I don’t think there are any hot bald supervillains,” she snarked back. “Except maybe Lex Luthor. On that Smallville show.”
“You think he’s hot?” He eyed her dubiously.
Veronica honestly had no idea what Lex Luthor looked like on Smallville, just that she’d once heard two girls on the pep squad debating Clark-versus-Lex and she’d gotten the impression that they were both hot. Or maybe it was just that Melissa Campano had issues. “I don’t know, I don’t watch that show.”
“Yeah, me neither, but I know he looks like an egg.”
She couldn’t help snorting at that, which made him grin. Then he figured out that the clasp on her bra was in the front, and a second later his hand was on the bare skin of her breasts while the other one rubbed firmly up and down, fingers circling teasingly around her clit and then backing off to repeat the entire maneuver. It was granting him far too much leverage over the proceedings, she decided, and dragged him down to her mouth so that she could kiss him aggressively.
He met her without hesitation, giving pretty much as good as he got, so she upped her game and bit his lip, something she’d never done on purpose before – but she must have gotten the pressure right, because he made an appreciative noise into her mouth and switched from his slow, teasing routine between her legs to more focused attention on her clit.
At the same time he was squeezing her breasts with a firm, relentless pressure that felt exciting and reassuring all at once. His hand was hot on her skin, and Veronica was highly tempted to push him back far enough that she could peel off his shirt and run her hands all over him. She would have had to stop kissing him, though, so she made do with sliding her hands under the straps of his tank top and touching the back of his shoulders. If that was weird, he didn’t bother complaining about it.
God, she’d needed this. It felt really good; there was nothing that could recreate the heat or solid presence of having another person touching you, the thrilling little shocks of surprise whenever they did something you hadn’t anticipate, like his fingers nudging their way inside her, angled just right to stretch and tease, and Veronica made some kind of choked moan into his mouth and dropped one hand to search his pockets for condoms.
She could feel him hesitate in confusion, and then his body shook with laughter when he realized what she was after. He started to pull away so he could make fun of her, but she grabbed him by the back of the neck with her free hand and refused to let him go anywhere, which just made him laugh more. She ate his laughter just as she had his attempt to mock her, and by the time she dragged the little plastic package free from his jeans, he’d complied with being consumed.
Or she thought he had; after another thirty seconds of satisfyingly wet kissing and increasingly hot and urgent tides of arousal building from everywhere he was touching her, he slid his hand to the side and pinched sharply at her nipple.
Veronica gasped and jumped, which rocked her lower body against his fingers. She didn’t know if she liked the pinching, but the combined sensation of his slow thrusting and the rolling motion she’d accidentally stumbled on made her choke and moan and half-fall against him, stabbing him in the cheek with her nose. It was hard to care about that part, though, and apparently Weevil didn’t either, because he muttered, “Shit,” in a tone so appreciative it made her shiver, and immediately made a creditable effort to recreate the action with just his hand. It wasn’t exactly the same, but it still felt so good, and she pushed herself upright and sort of scrabbled at him until she got what she wanted, mind too hot and fuzzy to coordinate her movements or note the specifics of what they were doing, other than his voice in her ear, hot and amused – “You like that, huh?” – but somehow he ended up with the condom, and she shoved his shirt up while he put it on, hissing in his hurry, and ran her hands over his stomach, appealing softness over the firmness of his muscles moving under his skin, and revelled in the tactility of it all when he sucked in a sharp breath. She liked the way her hands looked on him, against his skin and the black ink covering that strip of his torso.
Then he was ready, and he pushed her hands away so he could get close enough to push into her. Veronica settled for sliding them around to his back and pushing his shirt further up, throwing her head back and groaning as he slid home. Two weeks was officially too long, and fingers were nothing like the real thing, not even his, no matter how nice they were.
She hiked one leg up around his waist, changing the angle into that perfect one she liked, that felt like it was hitting all the right spots inside her. Weevil grunted, manhandling her just a little closer, his hands warm and urgent on her hips, and Veronica bit the inside of her cheek so she didn’t start making embarrassing noises or babbling about how good it felt. His breath was hot on the column of her neck as he pulled back and thrust again, and she clutched at him until a sudden sharp breath told her she’d dug her fingernails into the skin of his back.
Apologizing wasn’t really on the table, so instead she relaxed her grip and raised her head again, easing up on the tight leash she was keeping on her reactions just enough to groan, “Yes, come on, harder.”
She didn’t actually want it harder – it was already hard enough, for one thing, and also pretty much perfect – but it felt like harder was something you could say during wild, illicit sex, while just like that was more emotional, somehow, only to be said to a boyfriend.
It was a dumb hangup, but he seemed to get the spirit of it, speeding up instead of increasing the force. Veronica bit down on a moan, and he leaned in close, his breath on her cheek as he half-whispered, “Come on, tell the truth – how desperate were you for this?”
She wasn’t sure what noise she made at that – was there even one that properly encompassed the shock and embarrassment and arousal and irritation and utter determination that he was not going to get the better of her that she was feeling? – but it made him laugh, a burst of air against her face.
“How desperate were you?” she demanded, wincing internally at the weakness of the comeback but satisfied that her voice only sounded slightly breathless.
“You’re the one who showed up already soaking wet,” he said, and this time the fact that he was saying it into her skin was clearly deliberate. That was obnoxious, and arousing, but not as obnoxious and arousing as what he was saying. To her utter mortification, hearing him talk about her privates like that made her entire body prickle with violent heat. She wanted to squirm away and she wanted to squirm just to feel him inside her and his body against hers and his lips moving against her face or her neck or –
“What can I say,” she managed to choke out, forcing herself not to let his assertion stand. It wasn’t even true. Definitely an exaggeration. Not that he cared. “I have Spanish last. It’s a sexy language. Too bad–” He did something with his hips she couldn’t quite conceptualize but that left her gasping – “Ah – uhh… it’s–” Now he had one hand between them, rubbing far too gently at her clit again, that absolute cheater. “’S too bad – you don’t speak it,” she got out, desperate for the end of the sentence so she could clamp her mouth shut against the sounds that wanted to pour out of it and forfeit any advantage she’d managed to claw away from him.
Weevil laughed breathlessly against her ear, sounding almost surprised. “I can rock your world without that, baby, don’t worry. But now that I know it’s on your list, I’ll see what I can do.”
Shit. Oh no. It hadn’t ever been on a list, not specifically, but from the way she heated up when he did the objectively gross thing of calling her baby, if he really did speak Spanish to her she might overheat and die from organ failure. Not that it had to be Spanish; French or Latin would do it – fuck, she was so desperately, overwhelmingly turned on that German might even get the job done. Her response had backfired so hard.
How did he always make her feel like a middle-schooler playing chess with a grandmaster? No, wait, Veronica, don’t compare yourself to a middle-schooler during sex –
He did a little scooping half-circle movement with his finger that she hadn’t been expecting, and it started a tiny little shiver at the base of her spine, snowballing as it rolled upwards until she was shaking against him, groping hopelessly for some way to put herself back in the game.
“Less talking, more doing,” she said, somehow, which was pretty much inspired, under the circumstances. She was only operating with 40% brain function, after all.
“Like this?” he said, and pressed on her clit. “Enough doing for you?” He was still breathing hard, which was something.
For a few seconds it didn’t feel like it was doing much, but then he moved his finger just a little, back and forth, without letting up on the pressure and it felt like he was trapping her between him and her own bones, tension building up with nowhere to go. Veronica gasped and arched toward him, which pushed him further inside of her at the same time, and she made a sobbing noise she was too far gone to be embarrassed by and clutched at him with as many of her limbs as she could get to function.
“Yeah, I thought so,” he said into her ear, the humidity from his breath hitting the shell of it and dragging a whimper from her. “Come on, baby, that’ll do it, come for me.”
With some form of willpower Veronica didn’t realize she had, she made a noise of protest at him, but all her bones were turning to hot liquid, and it just came out sounding like more of the same. It didn’t help that she was close, blood pounding in her ears and desire building in her trapped clit until it felt like she was twitching under his fingers.
Weevil was still talking, like he thought they were in porn or something. She hated what it was doing to her, but it was impossible to fight when the heat in his voice kept sending secondary spikes of desire through her, twining up with what he was saying until she wasn’t even sure she was catching all of it.
Then he slid his other hand a little higher up her back, and fucked her a little faster, and said something about how she was always wet for him but he still knew she was close, and oh fuck fuck fuck –
Veronica mewled and twitched her way through the orgasm, her entire being, as far as she could tell, centered on her clit. He never let up on the pressure, which dragged it out, like the pleasure couldn’t all get out of her at once, leaving her shaking against him for far too long. She was only vaguely aware of his groan as she clenched up around him, but it still gratified something deep in her brain, so that when she finally slumped forward against him, she was so deeply satisfied that it was a real effort to muster her annoyance again.
The movement of him inside her was just on the edge of too much, overwhelming to the point of starting to approach unpleasantness, but it wasn’t like she could just tell him to get off her halfway through, and anyway it seemed like he was getting closer to finishing, breath rough and movements less controlled. In the interest of speeding things up, and also maybe to see if it would still work, she leaned in and closed her teeth on his earlobe, tugging gently and then more firmly when she heard his breathing spiral into erratic disarray.
Then his hands went so tight on her hips that it almost hurt and he slammed into her one last time with a deep groan Veronica could feel through both their bodies. She wondered if maybe he hadn’t wrangled an alternate hookup over the last couple weeks. She’d assumed he’d have one waiting in the wings, but it would explain why he was so especially into it today if he hadn’t.
Or maybe he just liked it when she really attacked him with her mouth, who knew.
Reality was setting in enough that she was starting to feel uncomfortable, although her body was still frustratingly loose and floppy. She felt like such a pushover, getting off because a guy told her she was into him, and his ego definitely didn’t need the help, either. There wasn’t a lot to do about it now, except –
“For the record,” she said, somehow pulling off an even tone, and leaned back to point at herself. “For me. Not for you.”
Weevil raised his eyebrows, then laughed. “Sure. You can keep that one.” He winked, and Veronica bit back an exasperated smile.
“Just get off me so I can find my underwear.”
He levered himself away from her and pulled out, hand circling the base of the condom so it didn’t slip off. She was too distracted to pointedly avert her eyes the way she usually would have, but it wasn’t as gross as she’d thought it might be. Being grossed out by that kind of thing was immature, anyway, she thought, and made herself watch him take it off before she slid off the desk and picked up her underwear. Her bra managed to work its uncomfortable way down her back as she did, and when she straightened up again it fell out the back of her shirt, which made Weevil snicker, and then laugh for real when she made an aggravated noise through her nose.
Okay, so she was definitely keeping a stash of underwear-that-had-not-touched-the-floor at school. And maybe a shirt, because he kept putting his hand in her vagina and then touching her clothes.
It was hard to keep the annoyance up at the level she wanted, though, when she was so much less tense than she had been half an hour ago.
“I want my key back,” she said, keeping an easy tone. If she started off demanding or harsh right off the bat, she already knew he’d take it as an opportunity to needle her to death and probably refuse.
“Is it your key?” he asked, and Veronica could feel all of her internal organs rolling their eyes simultaneously.
“I feel like we’re had this conversation before. Steal your own stuff.”
“I’m stealing it from you,” he pointed out. This whole thing would be so much easier if he was stupid.
“You can’t steal it from me, I lent it to you. You’re defaulting. It’s much less badass.”
“What are you, a bank?” He finished doing up his belt and turned back towards her with a smirk. “Then you should understand the concept of collateral.”
“It’s five. Dollars.”
“I don’t think you understand what happens to most people who owe me money.”
Veronica rolled her eyes, reflecting that even though it was hard to take him seriously as a threat to her, specifically, she didn’t disbelieve him. She couldn’t even say it was impossible to imagine him laying the hurt on someone over something as little as five dollars, because she could, if there was point to be made.
“I will have it for you tomorrow,” she told him, in a creditable facsimile of a bored tone.
“I’ve heard that before,” he said, easily enough, stretching. Veronica didn’t dignify that with a response.
*
“Somebody’s in a good mood.”
Veronica looked up from her English essay. “Huh?”
Her mom dropped the teasing tone, but she leaned an elbow on the kitchen island in a confidential way. “You seem a lot more cheerful today. Especially for a Monday!”
Veronica wasn’t sure what would have given that impression. Sure, she’d been mindlessly tapping her pen, but it wasn’t exactly a joyous drum solo on the edge of the table. “Was I that much of a drag before now?”
“No! Just… subdued.” Her mom squeezed her shoulder, rocking it gently back and forth. “What do you want for dinner? Spaghetti?”
“The six-year-old in me is ecstatic,” Veronica said drily, but she didn’t object. Spaghetti sounded good, actually.
“I thought I’d do the sauce from scratch,” her mom said, almost eagerly. Veronica ignored the plea for approval behind her eyes. She couldn’t accept it, and she wouldn’t reject it, so the only thing to do was pretend it wasn’t there, that there was no reason Lianne would need her absolution.
“Sure, sounds good.” She adopted a diffident tone and went back to her essay, but where before she really had been thinking about what to write next, now her mind refused to focus on the assignment, Shakespeare slipping from its grasp like soap. She’d had something to say about the weather that seemed important, hadn’t she?
“Want to chop some garlic for me?” Lianne asked, and Veronica glanced up again, met a pair of raised eyebrows, and couldn’t help smiling. The starkness of the light in the kitchen felt like it was fading, leaving everything normal again – or as close as they could come.
“Okay,” she capitulated semi-reluctantly. “Just let me finish this.” What was it? Natural order of things, Elizabethan hierarchy extended through nature and society, murdering the king causes thunderstorms. She got the rough outline of her intro sentence for that part of the essay down on paper and then set the pen down definitively. “Garlic, you said?”
“I need it in tiny little pieces.” Her mom slid the cutting board out of the drawer on the other side of the table with a flourish and slid it across to her. “Just as small as you can get ‘em. I mean, absolutely miniscule.”
“All right, all right,” Veronica protested, laughing, over Lianne’s continued exhortations. “I get it. Prepare for the teensiest, tiniest garlic you’ve ever seen.”
Her mom was busily producing sauce and spaghetti pots, herbs from the cabinet, so busy and efficient that it would be easy to miss the wine glasses that joined everything else on the counter. “After that you can grate the carrots for me. Even tinier than the garlic!” She shot Veronica a smile as she produced the grater like a grand finale.
“Carrots don’t scream spaghetti to me,” Veronica hedged, dubious. She got to work on the garlic.
“If they’re small enough, you won’t see or feel them, but you need the carrot to complete the flavour.”
“Really?”
Lianne raised an eyebrow, letting the question hang for a minute. “I don’t know, but why else would it be in the recipe?” she finally said, winking mischievously.
Despite herself, Veronica got the giggles. Her mom smiled brightly at her across the table. “So,” she said, “what’s the good news? A+ on a test? Pizza party at school? I know you said boys are off the table, but did Jeremy fall down the stairs?” She shot Veronica a sly, conspiratorial look, but for a second all Veronica could think of was Weevil’s brother-in-law and the two flights outside his sister’s apartment. She probably shouldn’t have let him know she knew about that. And she should probably be more disturbed by it, too, considering everything that had happened recently.
“Jeremy who?” she said, throwing the ball back to her mother with an eyebrow raise.
Lianne laughed. “Exactly! No special family spaghetti sauce for him!”
“Mom, I know you got this recipe off the internet.”
“Every old family recipe starts somewhere!” Her mom swung the fridge door open – ostensibly for the carrots – and Veronica dropped her eyes back to the garlic. She didn’t want to watch the wine actually being poured.
The click of glass and proceeding glug of liquid didn’t sound quite the way she expected, though, and she glanced up in time to see Lianne set the bottle of lemonade down and slide the glass toward Veronica. Even more surprisingly, she filled her own glass from the same bottle before she put it back in the fridge.
“We’re going to be fancy tonight,” she said cheerfully when she caught Veronica looking.
The quickly-pasted-on smile felt plastic on Veronica’s face, but she was too surprised for a real one, and she didn’t want to risk borrowing trouble when for once it seemed like there wasn’t any.
“Glass bottle – that is fancy! Dad just gets the plastic jugs.”
“That stuff is eighty percent sugar,” Lianne said, shaking her head. Veronica still half-expected her to produce a bottle of vodka and doctor her glass, but none appeared. “No one in this house is eight years old; it’s worth shelling out for the good stuff.”
“The good stuff, huh?” Veronica said drily. She took a sip of the lemonade to soften the implications of the remark. It was classier than the stuff they usually got – definitely a good pair with spaghetti. And if it stopped her mom from having a glass of wine, who was she to complain?
“Garlic successfully diced,” she announced after a moment.
“Oh, honey, we’re going to need more than that!” Lianne broke the remaining bulb in half and handed one of the pieces to Veronica. “You can never have too much garlic.”
“That sounds like Dad talking.”
Her mom laughed. “We both know your father’s a better cook than me!”
“Triple the garlic, copy.” She diced for a few moments, then paused. “How about some music?”
“Ooh! Good idea!” Veronica rolled her eyes as her mom abandoned the canned tomatoes for the tiny kitchen radio. “What are you in the mood for? A little I-tal-ian mu-sic?”
“Please, no,” Veronica told her, amusement slipping through her stern demeanour. “Can’t we find a Top 40s? Or at least a rock station,” she added, to fend off the impending complaint about teens and bleakness. Her mom could rock out to Britney with the best of them, but she’d made no secret of her consternation over the fact that one of the current popular bands was called ‘The Killers’, and when her husband had spilled the beans on the inspiration behind Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine, she’d banned it from her car.
“I guess we could do worse than a little Van Halen,” Lianne admitted. She fiddled with the radio until a classic rock station came on, Journey fading out as they tuned in. “Oh, how’s that?”
“I’ll take it,” Veronica said. She reached for the onion her mom had left on the other side of the kitchen island. The carrots could wait until last. “How much?”
Lianne turned up the volume, nodding along with AC/DC as ‘Thunderstruck’ came on. “Oh, just do the whole thing. I don’t want to have to wrap up a quarter of an onion.”
Veronica shot her a dubious look. “Is that what the recipe says?”
“Onions add flavour!”
“Aaand this is why Dad is a better cook than you.”
Lianne smiled warmly at her. “Veronica, if your dad told you to chop a whole onion, you’d do it even if the recipe called for no onion.”
“Sure,” Veronica agreed cheerfully. “Because Dad wasn’t responsible for the scrambled eggs incident of ’98.”
Her mom just laughed and shook her head. She turned back to the tomatoes, and Veronica reached for the onion, a tiny smile ruining her attempts at a skeptical expression. She sliced off both ends; if she was actually going to cut up the whole thing, she might as well stabilize it a little more.
The song switched over to ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and Lianne set the empty tomato can down with a clunk to sing along. Veronica shook her head, and then regretted it when her mom took it as a challenge and snatched up the wooden spoon so she could sing into the handle, like it was her mission to be as embarrassing as possible. Veronica chopped the onion extra fine, determinedly pretending she couldn’t see or hear the dramatic headshaking and extended vowels. When she set down her knife and reached for the carrot peeler, her mom held it out to her microphone-style and refused to let go of it until Veronica reeled off an irritated, “Where the skies are so blue…”
“That’s it!” Lianne said, and launched into a much more enthusiastic, “Lord, I’m coming home to youuu!”
“You’re the worst,” Veronica said, biting the inside of her cheek so she wouldn’t smile. Her mom paid it no attention at all.
But as the last notes faded away, she shot Veronica a shrewd look as she stirred the beginnings of the sauce. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed you dodging the question.”
Veronica blinked. “What question? Huh?”
“Something good happened today and you’re not telling me what it is…” Lianne adopted a near-singsong tone, raising her eyebrows meaningfully.
Well, okay, sure, when she put it like that. But the ‘not telling’ was definitely something that wasn’t up for debate.
“I don’t know,” Veronica said, employing a casual affect as she wrestled with the grater but choosing her words carefully. “It’s just been a while since I enjoyed myself at lunch. I think things are getting better.”
Technically true, even if said enjoyment had more to do with EW.com and The Onion than her social life.
“Did you go out with Meg after school?” Her mom gave the pot a final stir and began adding the onion and garlic Veronica had prepped.
Right. Because sometimes parents noticed when you got home late.
“Oh, you know,” Veronica hedged. “We hang.” She didn’t want to overcommit when she wasn’t positive Meg would alibi her – especially since it would be majorly tacky to not even give her a heads-up first. “It’s a good time.”
A little too good, she thought guiltily. And she should probably make actual after-school plans with Meg soon. Yolanda could come if she wanted, or even Lizzie.
“I’m glad things are getting better for you,” her mom said. Her pleasant expression faded to something more thoughtful, and for a moment Veronica thought she was going to say something else, but she didn’t.
“I’m glad you’re spending your time with people who appreciate you properly,” Lianne said finally, as Veronica gave up on grating the last nubs of the carrots without grating her fingers and just started eating them. She shouldn’t have cut off the butt end, in retrospect, because it could have been a handle, but oh, well.
She smiled back, but her mom’s words made her feel tired rather than reassured. It was the simplistic thinking of a parent who thought teenagers’ problems were, at bottom, kids’ problems, black and white and easy to understand – and who thought their own child was self-evidently special. Lilly had betrayed her, sure, but Veronica couldn’t really accuse her of not being appreciative enough. If anything, her never-ending attempts to get Veronica to talk to her in the beginning were the opposite. And Duncan (and Troy!) had been a dream boyfriend right up until he wasn’t. Even Jeremy had spent all his time talking about how hot and nice and cool she was, it just hadn’t stopped him from having sex with her best friend.
And if the solution was to decide that none of them had ever appreciated her, ever, at all, where exactly was the proof that Meg wasn’t the same kind of perverse liar? Not that Veronica thought she was, but that was the logic.
“Even if they do put carrots in the spaghetti sauce,” she said, deflecting, and Lianne laughed, pleased.
*
Dinner was fine. It probably should have been great; the spaghetti sauce turned out to be excellent, her dad was in a good mood, and even if Lianne washed out her glass and refilled it with Pinot once the pasta came off the stove, she kept pace with her husband instead of draining the whole bottle. But Veronica couldn’t help but feel juvenile, sitting there with her lemonade, suddenly the only one drinking it and helplessly wishing she wasn’t.
So it was fine. The bottle even went back in the kitchen once it was poured, instead of sitting on the table, which was a good sign. She’d had far worse Mondays. The only real struggle was keeping her mom from turning the conversation to her social life at any given opportunity, which in some ways felt comfortingly familiar. Keith had a new ‘dumb criminal’ story, with a crime that was low-stakes enough not to make them feel like ghouls for laughing about it, and it wasn’t hard from there to convince him to give the greatest hits, Veronica’s personal favourite being the guy who’d robbed a camera store and taken a picture of himself with one of the display cameras.
Then her parents floated the idea of watching a movie after dinner, and it was late enough that she felt justified in telling herself that when she made her excuses it was a virtuous exercise in giving them alone time together, rather than a choice to go upstairs and get her things in order for tomorrow so that she could keep lying to them.
She’d still have to be careful, because if her mom was noticing what time she got home, she’d probably also notice if Veronica came home in different clothes, and it wasn’t uncommon for her dad to have breakfast with them, in which case he would definitely notice. She could always belatedly own up to the lasagna incident, but that would only work once; any more than that would have them in Clemmons's office demanding action, and even if her social status was permanently sunk, she didn’t need the additional humiliation.
Veronica solved the clothes problem, at least for tomorrow, by picking two very similar shirts, one for wearing and one to stash in her locker. For the future, she could throw on a sweater in the morning and then take it off at school; it was essentially winter, so that would be reasonable. She probably didn’t need an extra skirt, but she folded up an old pair of sweatpants and added them to the bag along with the extra underwear and sports bra just in case. Having a whole additional change of clothes looked more like generalized preparedness than picking out only the specific ones likely to be compromised in an illicit sexual encounter, anyway.
Then, rolling her eyes at herself, she put a five-dollar bill in her pencil case. It was time for this particular dead horse to be retired from the beating line.
Her Shakespeare essay was still downstairs, Veronica realized, annoyed. She thought about sneaking down to get it, but it didn’t feel worth the effort, and she really didn’t want to interrupt her parents if they were being lovey-dovey in front of the movie. She would just have to remember to get it tomorrow morning.
Instead, she flopped onto her bed with a long sigh. It was… weird, to feel like a regular teenager for a bit, embarrassed by her parents in the ordinary way for once, hiding a hook-up from them, trying to balance boys and friends at school – the details were still more than a little atypical, but if she zoomed out and didn’t look too hard at any of it, it was almost like she had something normal again.
Not that there was anything normal about the hook-up, and Weevil wasn’t ‘boys’ in the traditional sense even if she was having sex with him. She wasn’t sure what she’d call it at this point; once you’d had sex with someone five or six times you probably couldn’t call them an acquaintance anymore, but he wasn’t exactly her friend. More like a bizarrely sexy annoyance she kind of enjoyed arguing with. Now, why didn’t they have a word for that?
You’re always so fucking wet for me, baby, but I can still tell when you’re close – make some more noise, come on –
Veronica shivered, and admitted to herself that the reason she was thinking about this at all was because she was vaguely turned on, and she kind of wanted to be more so. It was probably greedy, to have already gotten off once today and planning another encounter tomorrow and to still be tempted…
She tried to remember if she’d ever been this aggressively horny before she’d started having sex. Not with Jeremy. Troy had turned her on a lot when they’d been together, but the urgent need to do something about it had usually come after they’d already started touching or kissing each other, or occasionally when he’d caught her eye across a classroom. Either way it had always been very specifically about him, not about having sex in general.
Maybe with Duncan? But they had never gotten farther than second base, and for a lot of their relationship she’d been too self-conscious to give in and masturbate quite as much as she might have, otherwise, so it was hard to say. Maybe she’d just been thinking about sex constantly back then because she hadn’t been taking care of it herself often enough.
Well, that thought made it pretty clear how juvenile she was being, anyway. She was trying to have a grown-up attitude toward sex, and not being weird about getting herself off seemed like fairly basic part of that.
So, she told herself firmly as one of her hands hovered over the lowest section of her stomach, was getting up now and getting a damp washcloth so she didn’t have to do that later, even if she didn’t feel like getting off the bed.
She was, however, not going to think about the stuff Weevil had said today. It was probably time to break out a couple celebrity crushes, anyway; playing back real encounters was extra hot, but she really only had one set of them to play, and she didn’t need him becoming some kind of central figure in her fantasies. She’d borrow, a bit, but she was cutting out the stuff that shouldn’t have been hot in the first place.
Veronica dragged herself off the bed and into the bathroom for that washcloth, suspecting deep down that it was the only good intention she was actually going to follow through on.
*
Waiting around for Weevil to show up and unlock the art classroom door was not something she appreciated, and Veronica was more determined than ever to get the key back from him by the time he showed up, even though it had only been about five minutes.
“Finally,” she said.
“Nice to know you’re so eager,” he said, flashing her a grin. Well, she’d walked right into that one.
“The only thing I’m eager for is to get back into the black and put this tired schtick of yours to bed.”
“Aw, don’t say that, baby.” He winked at her, and Veronica rolled her eyes, throwing a little neck motion in to really make her point. “I know you missed me.”
“It’s been nineteen hours,” Veronica said flatly.
“You counted?” he asked with delight as the door swung open.
“No, I can do basic math. And don’t call me baby,” she added, sliding past him into the classroom to set down her things.
“No promises,” Weevil told her distractedly, raising his chin defiantly at a passing teacher who was giving him a hard look. Veronica forced a smile and a wave, and the woman shrugged and relaxed, and kept going, probably assuming she must be running an errand for someone.
“Benefits to being a responsible student,” she told him with a sickly-sweet smile when he turned and arched an eyebrow. “Now get a move on. I have five dollars here with your name on it. Two-fifty per position.”
Weevil shook his head at her. “Options are limited. Maybe you should have picked a better location.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Have we gotten caught yet? No. So I’ve done my part.”
He rolled his eyes right back, but he also went to the little bank of computers at the back of the room and dragged one of the chairs out and into a bit of empty space.
It was plastic – honestly not that much sturdier than the flimsy ones that populated the larger table when the room was actually in use – and Veronica winced.
“What about that one?” she suggested, nodding toward the teacher’s desk.
“It’s got arms.”
He had a point – it might have been feasible, but she’d either be banging her thighs on the arms of the chair, or forced into being careful in a way that seemed like it would be awkward at best, uncomfortably intimate at worst. Hard and fast was more her speed with this.
“Okay, but if I get dumped on the floor, I’m blaming you.”
“I don’t care what you do,” he told her, planting himself firmly on the chair. Annoying, but probably fair; she didn’t care what he blamed her for either.
Veronica crossed the room and straddled his legs, settling herself on his knees. She was a little hesitant about letting her weight fall on him – she wasn’t that heavy, but it had been a long time since she’d sat on someone’s lap. And never facing them, as far as she could recall.
He didn’t reach out to brace her, just raised his eyebrows mockingly, so Veronica pressed her lips together and forced herself to settle properly onto his legs. It felt a bit strange, but she only wobbled a little. Then she one-upped Weevil’s challenge by leaning forward and undoing his belt, which had the added advantage of improving her balance slightly.
In exchange, he slid his hands under her skirt, making a cursory attempt to take off her underwear when what he was really doing was feeling her up. Veronica rolled her eyes but didn’t object; his hands were pleasantly warm, and if he wanted to put them on her ass instead of helping, that was fine, whatever.
He was already stiffening in his boxers when she got his jeans open – teenage boy plus girl in his lap, she thought, faintly amused – and Veronica fondled him through the fabric just for the gratification of making him grunt and close his eyes. It still gave her a thrill every time she did something bold like that – this was who she was now, a girl who just touched penises like it was no big deal.
Okay, only one, technically. But still.
She had the presence of mind to fish a condom out of his pocket before it got too hard to reach, and tried to remember how to put it on while she fumbled one-handed with his boxers. Usually he did the condom part, but she’d figure it out. Pinch the tip, roll it down – it couldn’t be that hard.
But she must have hesitated too long opening the package, because Weevil tilted his gaze down and asked, smirking, “You need a hand with that?”
Veronica glared at him and pinched the end of the condom with pointed precision. It was slipperier than she’d expected, maybe because the lube was much more noticeable before you got it on. “I have enough hands, thank you.”
His smug expression didn’t falter as she eased the latex down over him, but his eyelids did stutter, those stupidly elegant eyelashes batting in a way that made her feel vaguely triumphant.
The feeling faded when she realized she still had her underwear on. You’d think she would have developed a little foresight by now, but apparently not.
Trying not to look like it was an afterthought, she braced her free hand on his shoulder and pushed herself up enough to get some leverage on the waistband, taking the opportunity to wipe as much of the lube as she could off her fingers. That still left getting them down her legs, which would be difficult. She was too stubborn to get off his lap, but maybe she could use the chair leg to kick her shoe off, and balance –
“This is fucking ridiculous,” Weevil muttered in her ear. He reached down and knocked her hand out of the way, grabbed her underwear with both hands, and pulled. For a second nothing happened, and she was preparing an acerbic comment when a slow riiip quickly accelerated into an efficient, complete rupture, leaving her crotch suddenly much draftier.
Veronica was left frozen with her mouth halfway open, no idea how to react. She should be mad, right? He had no way of knowing she had an extra pair in her locker, that he hadn’t just sentenced her to three periods of sitting down with intense caution and gluing her knees together. And he’d ripped her clothes! Just because it was underwear didn’t give him the right!
But she was too shocked to really feel the outrage, even with the smugly self-satisfied expression she was staring at. Shocked and, embarrassingly, so turned on it was hard to care. It wasn’t like this was a guy ripping her clothes off because he was so passionately desperate for her – he was just lazy – but her brainstem apparently couldn’t tell the difference, and the rush of cool air between her legs was more titillating than she would have expected.
“Unbelievable,” she said finally, but his grin only widened.
The remaining scraps didn’t quite fall away when she stood – at least one of them was still intact around her leg – but they did slide down enough that they weren’t in the way as she braced her feet in order to raise up over him. Weevil, apparently willing to be helpful for one single time in his life, wrapped a steadying hand around the base of his erection, so at least she didn’t have to figure out how best to line them up. She stabilised herself with a hand on his shoulder, darted a glance at his lap to make sure she was positioned properly, and sank down slowly.
It didn’t go perfectly; the head of his dick caught her slightly too high and pushed its way up her vulva instead of going in, dragging hotly through her folds and making her gasp and shudder, and him groan, but which wasn’t very conducive to looking like she knew what she was doing. Veronica lifted up slightly, feeling the slow, controlled pace in her thighs, and eased back down. This time she got it right, and he slid home almost too easily, the hot, solid stretch making her feel greedy and grabby.
This new position thing was going to be a problem, she thought, striving for dispassionate practicality when all her body wanted to do was go up in extremely unpractical flames. Every time they changed it up, he pressed against her from the inside in slightly different ways, and that shut her brain right off, made her want to pant and rub against him like a cat.
She was tempted to stay put for longer, enjoy the feeling, maybe wriggle a bit to enjoy the ensuing sensations – but Weevil was already getting impatient, his hands closing on her hips in something just short of an actual lift. Probably she should have tormented him a little, especially after the underwear thing, but she was feeling uncharacteristically magnanimous, so she planted her feet and raised up, Weevil’s hands helping her eagerly. The withdrawal felt different like this. It was good – weird – but it made her slightly paranoid; he was supposed to stay at least a little inside her, right? She stopped a bit before she thought she had to, just in case, and slid back down again slowly.
Weevil groaned, and despite herself, Veronica felt her eyelids flutter shut. It really was good, like he was opening her up, smooth and thick and perfect.
When she raised up again, slowly enough that her legs were thinking about complaining, Weevil groaned, encouraging her up faster. “You’re killing me here.”
“I don’t – want to –” Veronica bit her lip. If she could figure out hard and fast, it seemed appealing, but she didn’t want him to slide out, and what if she came down at the wrong angle and – bent him, or something? She wasn’t positive that could happen, but it didn’t feel worth the risk. She let him lift her a little higher, though, pull her down a little faster, leaned a little more of her weight on his shoulders.
That brought them closer together, and she couldn’t help but notice how close his face was to her chest as she rose up again, her nipples tingling and her skin tightening with heat. It was suddenly impossible to ignore the fact that they were both fully clothed, except for the remnants of her underwear around her ankles and his open jeans. It shouldn’t have been hot – she had no idea why it was revving her up so much.
Okay, a little faster, she could do that. She sank down on him faster, eased back up, then repeated the motion. It was teasingly exciting; the mismatch of speed kept her just on the edge of frustration even while all the individual sensations were still driving her to distraction. The only consolation was that Weevil seemed just as frustrated. When she sank down onto his lap again, he grabbed her by the waist and urged her up so strongly he was practically lifting her.
Veronica made a noise of complaint for form’s sake, but she didn’t resist; she wanted to speed things up almost as badly as he did, she just wasn’t sure about how to do it properly. And if he put her hesitance down to her wanting to torment him, instead of not knowing what she was doing, even better.
She kept up the pace he was trying to set, groaning in her throat when she came back down onto him. This was a lot of work, but she liked it: liked the slick fullness every time he filled her, liked the agency of being the one directing the main action, liked the urgency it brought out of him when she made him wait. And they both still had all their clothes on, which was convenient, she thought, panting as she rose up again, came down on him smooth and perfect like putting the cap on a pen. It was impossible to kiss, but that wasn’t so bad; she didn’t have the focus for it right now anyway.
“Fuck,” Weevil said into her collarbone as she rose up again, and Veronica couldn’t help but laugh breathlessly.
“Really – cutting edge observation there–”
He yanked her back down roughly in response, which made her yelp and lose the rhythm. Weevil made a strangled noise of annoyance.
“This is your fault,” she told him, bracing herself on his shoulders so she could get going again. Her thighs burned as she lifted up, slowly again, just to make sure she knew where to stop.
“This is not worth five dollars,” he said.
“Oh, so should I just…” She turned toward the door, gesturing over her shoulder. The motion nudged him against the edges of her vagina and she bit back a noise of surprised pleasure, enjoying the look of outrage on his face.
“Get the fuck down here.”
“Or what?” she said, even as she did so. “You’re not the one with the leverage here–” She broke off, fighting a moan as he filled her, his hips jerking up towards her as she came down. God, that felt good. “And I’m the one who could just walk out right now. You’d at least have to do up your pants.”
“One day you’re going to get what you deserve,” he told her, his head falling back as she reestablished a good rhythm.
“Yeah, I’m feeling pretty good about that at the moment.”
He made a half-hearted face at her, but his hands and his dick and his body as he surged up to meet her were anything but reluctant, and Veronica gave herself the win for that one and sped up as much as she dared, just to wipe that look off his face.
The truth was that, upper hand or not, she was enjoying herself almost as much as he was. Muscle strain aside, she probably would have been happy to keep going indefinitely, but soon enough his breathing sped up and his hips got decidedly jerkier, and Veronica bit back a wince of disappointment. She thought about slowing down again, just to drag things out, but that would probably actually piss him off, and besides, she was really starting to feel the physical exertion, so maybe it was for the best.
She sped up instead, experimenting with tightening her muscles when she was on the way down. She wasn’t sure she was pulling it off, but one thing or the other did what she wanted it to, and he groaned, his hands tightening on her ass.
“You were saying something about how this wasn’t worth five dollars?” she asked him, out of breath but still smug. Weevil’s eyes flew open and he glared at her, but he didn’t appear to have the brainpower for a comeback, and the satisfaction of having the last word was almost as good as watching him lose all coordination and shudder underneath her a scant minute later.
Veronica propped a forearm on one of his shoulders for balance, panting. Damn. Not that she hadn’t enjoyed herself, and she was fairly sure he’d still get her off – now she thought about it, that had been part of the deal in the first place – but there was something to be said for doing this after school, when there was no time pressure. Maybe then she would have had the guts to drag it out a little longer.
After a minute to catch her breath, she levered herself off him, smiling slightly at the way he grunted when she leaned her weight on his shoulders. “Okay, great. You’ve earned a dollar. I remember there being other requirements for the rest of it.”
“Just get on the fucking desk,” he growled at her, but it felt more like performative grouchiness than real animosity. Veronica considered protesting, but she didn’t really want to sit on his lap for real; that would be weird. She fished the remnants of her underwear from around her ankles and tossed them neatly into the garbage bin, then did what he said.
Weevil disposed of the condom and did up his jeans and his belt before he approached her, and Veronica raised her eyebrows at him challengingly, and he rolled his eyes as he dragged her closer to the edge by one leg.
At this point she was getting used to kissing him when they were lined up like this, but it seemed strange to do that now, and anyway, she wasn’t all that interested in anything besides locking down an orgasm, so she leaned her forehead against his shoulder as he insinuated a hand between them, so they wouldn’t have to stare awkwardly into each others’ faces.
It was actually hotter than she’d expected; first she was watching the muscles flex and move in his arm as he rubbed at her clit, which was strangely fascinating, and then when he zeroed in on a rhythm that got her gasping and squirming against him, she shut her eyes automatically, and the darkness unexpectedly turned things up a full notch. Something about not being able to see narrowed her focus in on the slick slide of his fingers and the ache in her thighs and the clenching emptiness that brought with it a shadow of how he’d felt inside her.
“You’re so goddamn wet,” Weevil said into her ear and even though it sounded more like an observation than the ostentatious seductiveness of the day before, she couldn’t help sucking in a breath and shivering against him, which dragged his fingers deliciously side to side. And he noticed, because of course he did.
“Oh, you like that, huh?” The smug tone was back in his voice, and there was no way Veronica was letting him walk away with the final word this time.
“You know what I really like?” she breathed into his ear, raising her head, and then dropped the suggestive tone cold. “When you shut up.”
“Yeah, that’s not what your pussy says.”
“Ew,” Veronica said, not having to extend any effort to sound disgusted. “Do not say that.”
Weevil raised his eyebrows. “You seemed pretty okay with it yesterday.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t use that word yesterday.” That was dangerously close to accepting his assertion, but she was mostly concerned about making sure she didn’t get any more linguistic buckets of cold water dumped over her.
He snorted. “What do you want me to say? ‘It’s raining in your garden of pleasure?’”
Despite herself, Veronica laughed, and groaned when the movement had predictable results. “I don’t care. Just not that. Either.” She groped for a term that would make her seem sophisticated – it didn’t feel like vulva would cut it, and privates was completely off the table. “I don’t know, say cunt.”
It was, actually, probably the first time she’d ever said the word out loud, but he didn’t need to know that.
“Cunt,” he said, like an irritating parrot. Veronica pinched his arm, because it was what she could reach, and then he pinched (much more gently) at her clit, and she choked and twitched and forgot about the conversation in favour of pressing herself against his fingers until the tension that had started building up again shattered into a pretty fantastic orgasm.
When the buzzing in her head settled, she slid off the desk and crossed the classroom, pretending that her legs didn’t feel even a little wobbly. It was probably from the workout she’d given them earlier, anyway. “Okay, great.” She extracted the five dollars from her pencil case and waved it at him. “I want my key back.”
“I just prostituted myself for you and that’s all I get? I want my key back?” He did an unflattering impression of her, but Veronica ignored it.
“Listen, I’m busy tomorrow, but I’ll be around.” She didn’t have any specific plans, but she couldn’t ditch Meg again. “I do not trust you not to get body-searched by the establishment in that time. Give me the key back.”
His lips twitched, but he put up a decent façade of seriousness. “It’s like you don’t have any faith in me.”
“Correct! I don’t. Key, please.”
He gave up and grinned at her, fishing it out of his pocket. “Fine. But only because I have solid proof that the establishment will walk right by when they catch you breaking and entering.”
“I have a key,” Veronica said primly, plucking it out of his hand. “So it’s only trespassing.”
That made him laugh. “Gotta try that one on your dad some time.”
Veronica blinked, disconcerted by the reference to the rest of her life – or maybe to him getting arrested. She shrugged at him to hide her confusion. “It’s been fun, but I have something to finish for class.”
It was mostly an excuse – anything that was due today she’d finished over the weekend – but Weevil only raised an eyebrow. “Of course you do.”
She was tempted to ask him what that was supposed to mean, but that came too close to crossing the line into friendly banter, as opposed to their usual one-upmanship, so she only shrugged again and said, “Try to show up to class,” on the way out.
It wasn’t her strongest exit line, but all told she was pretty sure she was coming out ahead today.
Notes:
Content warning: There's one moment where Veronica doesn't finish a sentence and it could appear that she's saying she doesn't want to be doing what they're doing (although her actions make it fairly clear that's not it). Also, brief allusion to unfortunate accidents involving penises, if you're sensitive to that.
Chapter 17: Hold The Reins
Notes:
This is going up a few minutes after midnight, so it's technically late and I'm sorry, but that's because I added a whole two-page scene (and subsequently had to revise another one) at the last minute, so hopefully you'll forgive me.
Also, special thank you to emwithoutnumber (who I will also credit by tumblr name if you're comfortable!) - we are probably doomed to disagree about Keith, (although once I've finished refining my thoughts I'd be willing to give that discussion another shot XD) but your comments on him really helped me drill down on some of the stuff in this chapter to better represent what I was trying to get across.
Content warnings in the endnote as usual.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.
Benjamin Franklin
Meg seemed surprised by how many tacos Veronica was managing to put away, which was a clear sign they needed to spend more time together outside of school.
“It’s not like I’m complaining,” Veronica told her, between bites, “but they should probably work on their branding. ‘Taco Wednesday’ is not catchy.”
“Don’t you usually skip lunch?” Meg said, her tone strangely careful.
Veronica shrugged. “No? I mean, it’s not like the cafeteria food is usually inspiring, but I’m trying to get better at packing a lunch. Tacos, though,” she added, taking another bite and chewing studiously, “they do have figured out.”
“That’s true,” Meg said, picking up her last taco again. “You just vanish at lunch a lot. And give me your food.”
“Once!” Veronica protested. “Wait, what are you accusing me of, anyway?”
“Nothing!” Meg looked distressed. “I just… didn’t know you liked tacos so much.”
Veronica frowned at her suspiciously, but after a moment she decided to leave it alone. “Who doesn’t love tacos?”
Meg laughed, only a little awkwardly. “I guess they’re better than the pizza.”
“It’s tomato sauce on cardboard, and it’s square,” Veronica said. She shuddered. “Maybe I should start skipping lunch. Double up on breakfast instead.”
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Meg said, looking concerned again. “Seriously, Veronica – I’m glad you’re not, like, starving or anything, but a lot of girls on the squad skip meals, and it’s always a bad idea.”
“Oh,” Veronica said. The conversation was making slightly more sense now, but it was also making her a lot more uncomfortable. “Uh… you know I am eating even when I’m not out here, right? I’m just usually inhaling a sandwich right before fifth period.”
“I did kind of wonder if you were sneaking off-campus,” Meg admitted, looking relieved at either the reassurance or the subject change.
“Not exactly.” She accompanied the words with a rueful smile, then picked up another taco while she tried to figure out how much to say.
Cole, of all people, saved her, by walking by their table with Mike Pappas, and nudging Mike, who promptly ‘slut-sneezed’ in Meg’s general direction. The other girl’s mouth tightened, but she didn’t say anything. Veronica, on the other hand, swung a foot out casually to impact Cole’s shin, and when she was sure she had his attention, she smiled sweetly, made a fist, and fake-coughed “Virgin!” into it.
Then she did it again, to get the point across.
Mike, an equal-opportunity heckler, cracked up. Cole flushed, his mouth working angrily, but what was he going to do? Call her a slut?
Finally he muttered, “Bitch,” under his breath and turned away.
“Oh, no,” Veronica deadpanned, pulling a reluctant smile out of Meg. “I’m a bitch.”
“I’m sorry,” Meg said.
“Excuse me? You are not responsible for that slimeball.” Veronica pulled the straw out of her apple juice and carefully sucked the bottom third of it clean, trying not to think about how it probably looked. It was on-brand, for what she was doing, anyway. Then she rifled through her pencil case, trying to find something sharp enough to cut slits in the side of the straw.
“Not that you were when you were dating, either,” she added. “But definitely not now.”
“What are you doing?” Meg asked.
“Can I have your napkin?” Veronica said instead of answering. Baffled, Meg handed over her unused one.
Using the corner of her ruler, she managed to make two cuts, almost as smooth as she wanted, one at the top of the straw and one a little way down. Then she folded the napkin a few different ways until she could get the edge to stay in the straw, found her darkest marker, and wrote Official Slut Table on the brown paper, then wedged the whole thing upright into the circular hole in the center of the table.
“Veronica!” Meg said, but she was laughing.
“There’s something to be said for removing all doubt,” Veronica said, and went back to her tacos.
*
Bootsy was waiting for Weevil after school, and Red was with him, which he wasn’t expecting, because Red had said to hell with school about two years ago. “What happened?” he said.
“My cousin’s in the hospital,” Bootsy said, face hard. That made things clearer; Francisca was Red’s ex, and everyone knew he was still hung up on her. “She got jumped on her way home this morning.”
“She still working nights?” Weevil verified. He was pissed off, but this was business, and he was going to handle it like business. He didn’t know Francisca well enough to be thrown off his game; her mom and Bootsy’s dad didn’t get along, so it wasn’t like she was around all the time or anything.
“Yeah, that place on Valencia.”
That at least made it unlikely the Fitzpatricks were involved – the last thing he wanted right now was to start the kind of shit that had gotten Gus killed. “Neighbourhood, or what?”
Red cracked his knuckles. “She said it was some tweaker. He pistol-whipped her.”
Weevil nodded, face hard. “Guess we better find out who, then, because somebody needs to explain to him that he shouldn’t be playing with guns. Somebody could get hurt.”
“I can go–”
“No, Bootsy’s going back to the hospital to talk to her.” The last thing Francisca would want would be for Red to show up – again, it sounded like – and they wanted her willing to talk to them. “You’re gonna make some calls, get everyone together, and I’m taking Hector and Dante and getting to the bottom of this.” He caught Felix’s eye across the parking lot and waved him over. “Stick with Red,” he said, briskly enough that neither of them realized Felix was on babysitting duty. It was no good going apeshit on some motherfucker if you didn’t have the self-control to stop once you got your point across, and if Red pasted this piece of shit into glue that was a felony for all of them, plus he was on parole. “Make sure he doesn’t miss anybody, and give Maxi a call. He’ll talk to you.” Maxi was out, but he and Gus had been tight; he never took Weevil’s calls and Felix would have better luck weaseling something out of him. “Parking lot outside the car wash in a hour, you know which one.”
Then he waved Bootsy off and made a beeline for his own bike, already texting Hector.
They didn’t find anything on the guy right away, despite terrorizing a couple low-level dealers on the south end of Valencia, but apparently Francisca used to make bank runs for the all-night liquor store she worked at, which made Weevil wonder if the guy had been expecting her to have money on her. Not that anyone would be going to the bank at six in the morning, but if the guy was as tweaked-out as Bootsy reported, he wouldn’t have been applying logic to the situation.
Felix was late to the meeting, but he showed up with a piece he’d talked out of Maxi, so Weevil forgave him. He even let Felix hang onto it, because as flighty as he could be sometimes, he knew how to handle a gun properly; Gus had beaten it into him, occasionally literally. “That’s good,” Weevil told the group at large. “Insurance only, but we’re not chasing down some meth-head with a sidearm without any. He might remember how they work next time,” he added, earning some rough laughter.
“I got better,” Felix said, leaning one elbow on his handlebars. Only the grin he couldn’t quite supress ruined the hard man image he was trying for. “Maxi says he sold to this guy, Ricky, who deals down on Chapman. Wanted protection or something, but he’s gone downhill lately.”
Chapman was only a few streets over from Valencia. “It’s a good start. Francisca walk home that way?” he asked Bootsy.
Bootsy shook his head. “Nah, but I think it’s on the way to the bank they use. It’s on Chapman and Juarez.”
“So Ricky dips into his own supply,” Weevil said. “He comes up short on what he owes, or what he needs for his next buy, and he used to see Francisca taking the money to the bank for the drop. So when he sees her real early, with no one around…”
“He deal other stuff?” Ric asked. “Manolo knew some guy named Ricardo, but he was mostly about pot and E and shit.”
“That was before Manolo went to prison,” Weevil pointed out, “and left a nice little opening in the meth supply line. You know where he lives?”
“Yeah, some flophouse on Cordova with like five other guys.”
“They’re smart, they’ll clear out,” Weevil told him, which met with general approval. “They’re not… we’ll handle it.”
“I get first crack at Ricky,” Red said, grinning real big, but Weevil was having none of it.
“The hell you are. You got a record for assault and your fingerprints are in the system. You can’t hold off, you can go home and have a timeout, but no one does shit unless and until I say, are we clear?” He leaned on his own handlebars, doing a better trade in menacing than Felix had managed. The assault in question was on Francisca’s last boyfriend, which wouldn’t help if the cops managed to put two and two together. Always an open question. Bootsy had said the deputy who talked to Francisca spent most of his time implying she was a hooker, so they weren’t exactly killing themselves on that one.) If he’d thought he had a chance in hell at keeping Red away entirely he would have tried his luck, but it was bad leadership to set yourself up to be undermined. He wasn’t the fifteen-year-old kid who’d managed to drag things into line after Gus vanished with nothing but grit and guts, but Red was still a head taller than him and twice his weight, and while he could handle his shit if it came to it, the optics of that face-off weren’t what he’d like them to be.
But the guy was all fire and no strategy, so he snarled in frustration but he didn’t argue, and Weevil held his gaze until he was sure Red wasn’t going to try anything.
“All right,” he said. “Thumper and Red are gonna clear out the rest of ‘em – Hector, you help them. Ric and Felix are with me. The rest of you are running backup and watching the doors in case he splits, and I want two guys keeping an eye out for the cops.” He did a quick sweep, assessing reactions. Resentment and lookout duty didn’t mix unless you wanted everyone to end up in jail. “Javi and Playboy. Everyone’s clear?”
There was a ragged noise of agreement, and he rolled his eyes. “I said, are we clear?”
It came back crisper, and he nodded. “Good. Ric, where’s this place exactly?”
*
Gabrielle wasn’t at school on Thursday, so when Veronica saw Yolanda sitting by herself on the edge of the lunch area and staring thoughtfully at her yogurt, she waved her over. “You don’t mind, right?” she asked Meg, belatedly, but Meg just said “Of course not,” like it was obvious.
“Come sit with us at the slut table,” Veronica said when Yolanda came over, which Meg choke on her homemade soup.
Yolanda hid a smile. “That’s kind of harsh, Veronica. I told you, he kissed me.”
“And Meg’s never gotten past first base, what’s your point?”
“Veronica!”
“Sorry,” Veronica said, shrugging. “But Cole told everyone, so.”
“You mean, before he told everyone I was a total freak.”
“Yeah!” Veronica cocked her head and pulled a sarcastically cheerful smile, and Meg shook her head, but she was smiling as she went back to her food. “We don’t have a sign,” she continued, making a falsely apologetic face at Yolanda. “It broke.”
“It was a straw,” Meg said.
“I need a popsicle stick, or something,” Veronica said, digging out the napkin from the day before. It was somewhat worse for wear after living in her pencil case for a day. “…And maybe a new flag.”
Yolanda peeked around Veronica’s shoulder to read the triangle of brown tissue paper, and then burst out laughing.
“Never change, Veronica,” she said, which should have felt patronizing, but Veronica decided she didn’t mind, maybe because Yolanda followed it up with, “I wish I had half your guts.”
“She’s fearless,” Meg agreed, which felt strange. It wasn’t true; she was scared plenty. Although not so much lately, and not of any of the things Meg probably expected her to be afraid of. So maybe she was fearless, but only because she was usually too angry to be scared.
Somehow that sat worse than the idea she was a fraud.
But she shrugged and blew it off. “There were too many undesirables milling around. I had to get strict about the non-sluts.” She glanced at Yolanda. “Gabrielle can sit here if you vouch for her, though. Honorary slutitude, maybe?”
Meg responded to the raised eyebrow that accompanied this proposal with a shrug that Veronica took for assent, but Yolanda shook her head, smiling.
“I don’t think she’s going to go for it, but that’s nice of you. I’ll pass it on.” She hesitated, trying to be diplomatic.
“You don’t have to use the word ‘slutitude,’” Veronica said, generously, and Yolanda laughed again.
“Why is Gabrielle an honorary slut but I’m a real one?” Meg asked, sounding more curious than offended.
“Because if the whole school says you’re a slut, then you’re a slut,” Veronica said, pointing at Meg and then at herself. “And if you have a reputation for doing one slutty thing, one time… also a slut.” She indicated Yolanda. “This is high school; the truth is irrelevant.”
“That’s cheerful,” Yolanda said lightly, but she didn’t disagree.
“Is Gabrielle sick?” Meg asked, her tone coloured with genuine concern. God, she was such a good person. Veronica couldn’t quite work out why she had ever been dating Cole in the first place. Maybe that was just how limited your options got when it became public knowledge you were ‘waiting’, whether marriage came into it or not.
“I doubt it,” Yolanda told her. “We went out last night, but she went harder than I did – her boyfriend was supposed to be there, but then he bailed, so, you know...”
Meg made a face, withholding judgement on Gabrielle’s hangover. “That sucks. Who’s she dating, anyway? She never said.”
Yolanda shrugged evasively. “He doesn’t go here.”
Nailed it, Veronica thought. College guy. Or older, even, if Gabrielle was taking such pains to hide the relationship, but she hoped not. A college guy dating a high school girl might not be a total creep, but anyone older definitely was.
“What about you?” Meg was asking Yolanda now, but the other girl just smiled and didn’t answer.
“Guys are overrated, anyway,” Veronica said. “I’m not dating until university.”
That seemed to bother Meg. “So if the perfect guy came along–”
“In high school?”
Meg ignored her cynicism, which made it harder to avoid thinking about the fact that Veronica had thought she’d met the perfect guy in high school, once. “Or if you got to know someone you didn’t know yet, or someone new starts next year and he doesn’t… well, participate in –” Meg flapped her hands in the general direction of one of the 09er tables. “And he likes you, you’d just say no? No matter what?”
“Yeah, probably.” It was blunt enough that Yolanda laughed, but Meg looked taken aback, so Veronica relented. “Look, I’m not swearing an oath of singlehood for ever and anon – or a year and anon – but there’s no way I’m getting sucked back into convincing myself that some guy is worth tying myself in knots over. All the guys at this school are some variety of terrible, anyway. Are any of them being nice to you?”
“James volunteered to be my new biology partner,” Meg said stoutly. “He probably just wanted to get away from Corny so he doesn’t have to do all the work, but I don’t have to listen to Ashley’s little comments about sterilizing the microscope so she doesn’t get herpes anymore.”
There were two Jameses in their grade, unless Veronica had missed one, which was unlikely. “Harper?”
“Van Zyl.”
“Huh.” Veronica wasn’t sure what to make of that. James was an 09er – or at least, he lived there. He’d never run with any of the usual 09 crowds, probably because he was an athlete and went so far as to hang out with any and all of the wrestlers, regardless of zip code, but she still had trouble imagining him being so decent to Meg. Ignoring her instead of being nasty, maybe. But things like that only ever went so far.
It was kind of weird that James never spent time with Duncan or Dick or Casey or any of the various flavours of rich entitlement he had access to, now that she thought about it. It had never occurred to her to wonder about that before.
The entire idea left her a little unsettled, but she set it aside for later. “He’s not so bad, I guess. But just because he agrees with me that Jeremy’s take on Thoreau is shitty doesn’t mean he’d want to date me, and even if he did, it’s probably not worth it.” She paused, worried her definitive tone was too prescriptive. “I mean, you can, I’m not trying to tell you what to do.”
“No – I –” Meg looked awkward and caught out, and she glanced guiltily at Yolanda for some reason. “He’s just my lab partner. I’m just saying not every guy is terrible.”
“Okay, fine. But thirteen percent is not good odds.”
Yolanda smiled, folding up the peelable top of her yogurt and stowing it in the now-empty container. “You’ve got a point, I just don’t know if I could do it. Being single is so lonely.”
“I don’t know if it’s worth dating someone just so you’re not lonely,” Meg argued, devoted to fairness as always. “Especially when you have friends – or sisters,” she added, with a half-shrug to acknowledge that Yolanda and Veronica weren’t so lucky.
“Sure, but it’s not just about being lonely,” Yolanda said, “it’s about being lonely.” She raised her eyebrows meaningfully, and Veronica snorted into her chips. The scandalized expression on Meg’s face didn’t help.
“Listen, I said I wasn’t going to date, not that I was becoming a nun.”
That got her an extra helping of Yolanda’s attention. “Okay, spill.”
Veronica shrugged. “What’s there to spill?” She held up the tattered napkin-flag and cocked her head pointedly.
“You’re not still doing that?” Meg sounded aghast. “I mean – you made your point, Veronica, don’t you think – is that where you were on Tuesday?”
“Whoa, hold on.” Yolanda frowned around Veronica at the other girl. “Where’s the judgement coming from? Veronica can do whatever she wants. It’s not like her reputation is worse than yours!”
“Hey–” Veronica broke in, bristling a little at Meg’s words but more offended by the unjustness of that last dig, but Meg interrupted before Veronica could defend her.
“I’m not being judgemental, I just don’t want her to get murdered!”
“O-kay!” Veronica said loudly, clapping her hands together. “Open season on Veronica’s extra-curricular activities is officially closed.” The other two subsided, Yolanda looking apologetic and Meg mutinous, and she added, “Speaking of judgement, lay off Meg’s reputation. And you –” She pointed at the girl in question. “Weevil is not going to murder me.” I’m pretty sure the only person he’s ever tried to murder is his brother-in-law, she wanted to add, but she held back. Pithy or not, that would not allay Meg’s concerns.
“Wait, for real?” Yolanda sounded legitimately surprised. “I heard you slept with him, but I figured it was just gossip. I mean, he’s…”
She trailed off tactfully, but Meg filled in the blank with a disapproving, “A criminal. He’s a criminal.”
“Yeah, I know,” Veronica said. “I read his entire record, and I’m not worried. I mean, maybe if I drove a Maserati I’d be concerned, but my car’s barely worth parts.”
Yolanda snorted at that, but Meg didn’t look convinced, even when Veronica added, “And there’s no way that carjacking story is true. My dad would have told me about it, for one.” She turned to Yolanda. “And weren’t you here that day?”
“I wasn’t sitting close enough to hear everything,” Yolanda said. “I got some of it, and I would have figured the part about you telling everyone Lilly slept with him was true anyway, but the rest of it sounded made up.” She frowned. “Um… it’s only the Weevil thing that’s true, right?”
“She made out with Dick at a party last year, but I didn’t think Madison managed to put together that that’s what I was saying.”
“Oh – no –” Yolanda looked awkward, and Veronica tried to think what else she might have heard, and what could be messed up enough that she didn’t want to say it.
She ticked off what she could think of on her fingers. “I never had sex with Jeremy. I guess that means the blowjobs were bad, since ‘nonexistent’ is probably ‘bad’ in his book. I did flash a bunch of people, but only because Dick sabotaged my top. Blanket ‘probably not true’ on anything you heard about me and Duncan–”
“Veronica would never sleep with someone else’s boyfriend,” Meg said, shooting Yolanda an unfriendly look. The utter faith in her voice knocked Veronica back a bit, even as she cringed a little at the realization that Meg must be right about what the issue was.
“Aaand I definitely never hooked up with Logan,” she finished, tagging her last finger. “I said ‘your ex’ and she immediately took it and ran in the wrong direction.”
She didn’t mention the part where that had been the entire point. Yolanda might have been able to accept that more or less with equanimity, but she didn’t want to shake the confidence Meg had in her – not when saying it out loud in front of Meg was one of the things that might make her feel actually ashamed.
“I didn’t think you would,” Yolanda said, biting her lip. After all, hadn’t Veronica raked her over the coals for supposedly doing the exact same thing, only less extreme? “But I didn’t think you’d have slept with Weevil, either, so I just…”
“It’s cool,” Veronica said, which was true enough. It stung a little, but she could brush it off. “I’d ask if you really thought he’d go for it, but he’s not exactly consistent.”
Yolanda laughed and shrugged and changed the subject, which had the added bonus of getting Meg’s shoulders down from around her ears on top of recategorizing Veronica’s choices about guys as her own business again. Maybe she wouldn’t have minded spilling if it was just her and Yolanda, but Meg’s presence made everything feel harder to justify.
*
Veronica wasn’t especially expecting to see Weevil between classes, but while she was swapping her English Lit textbook for the Precalc one on Friday he passed her in the hall and raised his eyebrows meaningfully. She shook her head at him, albeit with a little regret, and when he slowed down a little she leaned out from her locker and said quietly, mindful of avoiding another misunderstanding, “I can’t. My friends are starting to think I’m anorexic or something.”
He snorted. “So after school.”
That would make three times in one week, and she had no idea if that was too much or not – but she wanted to, and she was still a little behind the numbers she’d claimed on the purity test. It was as good an excuse as anything.
“Fine.”
He slid away, to whatever class he had next, Autoshop or Communications or Intro To Felonies, and Veronica tried to calm the excitement that was starting to rise in her stomach. Completely aside from eager anticipation being out of step with what she was trying to do here, getting enthusiastic about something that wasn’t going to happen for six hours was a recipe for frustration.
It was hard not to think about it, when Precalc gave way to English and the faint need to pay attention dissipated in the face of her being about a week ahead in the material. Mr. Johansen started in on symbolism (again), and off her brain went to the art classroom and the greatest hits of the last few weeks. It was a lot more interesting than what he was saying, but by the time she jerked her mind back to the present, she was restless and tingly and mildly turned on. And frustrated. Damn it. She tried to force her mind back to the lecture, with some mild success. At least she was vaguely interested in the topic, broadly speaking, and some of Mr. Johansen’s little sidebar rants were entertaining.
American History, on the other hand, offered absolutely nothing to prevent her from running the same reel again in much more detail, grasping hands and hot skin and the deep, satisfying push and pull that kicked a deep, tingling ache inside her and suffusing the flesh of her vulva until it was all she could do not to squirm in her seat. That led nowhere good, she was sane enough to know, but it was impossible not to be hyper-aware of how turned on she was, and that just catapulted her violently into a memory of soft lips brushing her skin, air ghosting over it like a caress, and Yeah, that’s it, you like that, huh?
She was smoothing her skirt forcefully with both hands, Veronica realized, and made herself stop. She picked up her pencil instead and started writing, notes half on what Mrs. Galloway was saying and half on how annoying and ineffective was, just anything to keep her focus on the paper in front of her. When the bell rang for lunch seventeen years later, she practically catapulted herself out of her seat in order to escape and shut herself in a bathroom stall without even dropping off her things in her locker, just so she could shut her eyes somewhere where no one could see her.
She didn’t let herself think about other potential uses for the privacy; there was still a line, somewhere, and that was way over it, and her stuff wouldn’t go unmolested on its perch beside the sink forever, so she took a deep breath, tried to ignore how damp her underwear already felt, and splashed some water on her face before she went to get her lunch.
It didn’t hold her attention very well, but fortunately Meg distracted her by dropping into the seat next to her and saying, “I have something for you.”
“Hmm?” Veronica glanced up, taking a hasty bite of the Nutrigrain she’d been staring at. Why did she always convince herself she liked these things?
The thing Meg had for her was a triangular scrap of light green fabric, and Veronica blinked at it for a moment, feeling very stupid. Was her brain still offline? “It’s… nice?”
“I have Textiles third period,” Meg said, sounding pleased with herself. “Nobody cares what we do with the extra stuff we cut off. I still think it’s kind of asking for trouble… but I’m sitting with you, so I guess I have to get used to that.”
Veronica smiled at the humour in the other girl’s voice and reached out to take the piece of cloth, trying to figure out what she was supposed to do with it. Meg, clearly seeing right through her and immediately taking pity, added kindly, “It won’t get crushed in your pencil case.”
A second later it twigged, and she laughed. “I still need a better flagpole.” She scrutinized the triangle for a moment, then asked, jokingly, “Wasn’t there anything in red?”
Meg shook her head in amused exasperation. “I just picked something I thought the marker would show up on.”
“I bet they have popsicle sticks in the art classroom,” Veronica pondered aloud. “Or those little wooden dowel things. This holds promise.”
“Or you could tape it to a pen,” Meg said, laughingly.
“And let down sluts worldwide? Where’s your pride?”
“Veronica, you’re crazy.” Her friend started unpacking her lunch kit, which was a lot more organized than Veronica’s. “And does your lunch have two containers of grapes in it?”
“Purple and green,” Veronica said, sighing slightly. “My parents both went grocery shopping. Separately. Now we have two of almost everything, and still no decent ice cream.” It was a slight exaggeration – although the ice cream thing was true enough. Her mom never bought anything but vanilla, and her dad, that traitor, had deliberately bought the black liquorice ice cream no one liked but him, just to keep her from eating it.
“And you didn’t want to pick a favourite?” Meg asked, forehead slightly creased in an attempt not to laugh. She was a much better person than Veronica.
“I didn’t feel like digging through the giant tetris game two simultaneous shopping trips turned the fridge into,” Veronica said lightly. “I just took what was in front, and two slightly different batches of grapes seemed better than one giant container of green grapes.” She offered the small container to Meg, who took one grape and then shook her head at the rest.
The truth was that she’d just wanted to get out of the kitchen without looking like she was hurrying, to get away from her mom’s passive-aggressive sniping about how her husband didn’t even think she could handle the grocery shopping. Her dad’s measured responses had been coming faster and getting longer as Lianne failed to take his hints to drop it, and although he never raised his voice – he so rarely did – Veronica hadn’t wanted to be there when the tension broke. She hadn’t wanted to be hearing any of the snide comments in the first place. Her mom didn’t frequently run her dad down even when she’d been drinking, but it wasn’t completely unfamiliar either. Mostly-sober and resentful was the danger zone, rather than too-casual tipsiness or being sloppy drunk, but it didn’t really matter; Veronica hated hearing anyone criticize her dad, hated it even more because she’d never heard him say a word against Lianne, even when he’d had to break hard realities to his daughter.
I guess Mom forgot, she remembered him saying about some childhood heartbreak she’d all but forgotten now. I’m sorry, honey – sometimes these things are hard for her, but I understand why you’re angry. Just know that she’s trying. In retrospect he’d clearly been angry; she could faintly recall him making multiple phone calls about whatever disappointment she’d been suffering under, finally leaving his wife a terse voicemail that was much more comprehensible to Veronica now even if she couldn’t remember any of the actual words. But he’d never once put her in the position of having to choose who to side with.
Why doesn’t she try harder? Veronica had demanded, and she didn’t remember anything else – hadn’t thought about it in a long time, actually, until the reminder of watching only one of her parents try to save the brewing argument until she was out of the room.
It felt like a refrain of her life right now, a child’s plaintive, fruitless question. Why doesn’t she try harder?
None of that was anything she’d say to Meg. Mostly, she hadn’t even mentioned it to Lilly, who could joke about her mom popping Xanax and then blow it off, and who had housekeepers to do the grocery shopping anyway.
She choked down a couple more bites of too-doughy Nutrigrain, then exorcized it with some green grapes and repeated the exercise until it was gone and she could accept half of Meg’s cheesy bun in good conscience. “Seriously, help yourself to the grapes. I probably overshot, but it felt very helpful to be getting the food out of the fridge.”
Meg laughed and took a couple more, which made Veronica feel better. When she couldn’t manage fine, then she could be concerned. “You have cheer practice after school, right?” she added.
“Veronica, I meant it,” Meg said, unexpectedly stern. “You don’t have to babysit me. And anyway,” she added with a sudden smile, “Lizzie just happens to be staying after school today, and I’m sure she’ll just happen to come by the gym, and if anyone says anything, maybe she’ll just happen to spill a bottle of Gatorade on their gym bag. She’d never admit it, but…” She shrugged, and Veronica felt a tug of guilt for her previous suspicions of Lizzie, which annoyed her, because the whole point in asking was to assuage her guilt about skipping out immediately after school to have sex with the resident uber-delinquent.
“Relax,” she said, “I wasn’t going to crash cheer practice. Although I guess let me know if you want me to wander by with some extra-blue Gatorade,” she threw out, just to get Meg to smile. “I have a thing, anyway. But we should do something this weekend.”
“Beach?” Meg offered. “I can go tomorrow. I might have to bring Grace,” she added, but Veronica shrugged.
“She can swim, right? Then no big deal. I’ll just leave Backup at home.”
“That is your dog, right?”
Veronica crunched a grape. “Did you think I had a parrot named Backup?”
“No!” Meg protested, laughing. “I just wanted to make sure!” She shook her head. “Grace likes dogs.”
“He’s a pit bull,” Veronica offered. “People get weird about it. Although, she’s what, like ten? Nine?” Maybe it wouldn’t be an issue.
“Seven,” Meg said. “Almost. If you ask her. Maybe you should leave him at home – I’m sure he’s great,” she tacked on hastily. “My parents are just kind of… overprotective.”
“He’s extremely well-trained and total sweetheart,” Veronica said, “just because I want that on the record. But I get it, no worries.” She paused, something about Meg’s awkward, half-apologetic attitude niggling at her. Because she’d seen something similar yesterday, she realized. “Hey…”
Meg waited, while Veronica took a beat to figure out how to formulate her question. It wasn’t exactly high stakes, but the curiosity would eat at her if she didn’t ask. “Did Yolanda and James date or something? You were just… kind of weird about him yesterday.”
The other girl bit her lip. “No! I mean, I don’t know – I just…” She stared down at the tabletop. “Honestly, Veronica… My parents aren’t bad people, they’re just… strict, and old-fashioned. They’d never say… I mean, they’d be offended if…” Her shoulders slumped and she sighed. “But I don’t think they’d be…okay… with me dating a – you know, a black guy.” She winced as she said it, like the word black was a slur. “Not that I want to date James,” Meg added. “We don’t know each other or anything. Not because he’s black!” she added, eyes going wide. “I’ve only been his lab partner for three days, that’s all.”
Veronica was too taken aback to know what to say, but she had to say something before Meg dug herself an even deeper hole. “I don’t know him either,” she said, a sinking feeling in her stomach pointing out that maybe this was the reason James didn’t spend his time with any of the main 09er crowds, and that, maybe, that should have been obvious from the beginning. She’d known Logan and Dick threw around racist jokes like they were edgy and cool, but that was mostly stuff about Latinos. She’d never stopped to consider that every single one of their friends, every single one of Duncan’s friends, was white. “He seems okay, but that doesn’t mean you have to date him. And he probably wouldn’t want a girlfriend with racist parents anyway.” Then she winced, because Meg had bent over backwards not to call her parents racist.
But her friend only winced. “I just… didn’t want to say any of that…”
“In front of Yolanda,” Veronica finished, grimly.
“They wouldn’t mind me being friends with her or anything,” Meg said, almost pleadingly. “They’re not like that.”
There were a hundred barbs on the tip of Veronica’s tongue about how it was only race mixing that was an issue, but she bit down on them. None of this was Meg’s fault, after all. She wasn’t the one with the problem.
God, what would it be like to know something like that about your parents? Veronica couldn’t imagine. Even her mom, who could be inappropriate about a lot of things once she’d had enough drinks, never really did anything more than loudly referencing people’s race, insisting on saying things like ‘you know, the tall black one’ or ‘that Asian girl is so pretty’. On the rare occasions she said something worse, it was always some ignorant comment or question, never anything hateful, like the time she’d pondered whether black people’s skin got hotter in the sun because dark colours hold heat. Veronica had been mortified, despite the fact that no one had been around to hear, but it seemed pretty mild now. Neither of her parents would have turned a single hair if she came home with someone like James Van Zyl.
“Parents are complicated,” she said, and offered Meg another grape.
*
Lunch had dulled the edge a little, and focussing was easier in History, because at least class was generally entertaining, but its still required a certain amount of effort to pay attention that she might not have bothered to exert if Mr. Rooks hadn’t been her favourite teacher. But he was, and she did, and by the end of fifth period, she’d mostly managed to convince herself that she wasn’t counting down for the end of the day. And if she was, it was just because it was school, and who didn’t want school to be over? And while she was on the topic, maybe she should invest in a bridge or two.
Veronica made it to the art classroom first, after Spanish, and immediately shucked her sweater and underwear – the former more to hide the latter, because it seemed slightly too odd to just leave her underwear on a chair, no matter what had happened to it before. But she also didn’t need to be sweating through her clothes, which was a distinct possibility after the last time. Technically speaking, Weevil still owed her one more alternate position (or she owed the test one alternate position? the specifics were getting kind of dubious), and the chair on Tuesday had been more of a workout than sitting on a desk or letting him pin her against a wall.
That set of memories sent a rush of heat through her, lingering with intensity in her breasts and face and escalating the tingling between her legs to something almost painful, but at least she didn’t have to pretend not to be turned on anymore. There was something to be said for having something uncomplicated to look forward to.
The door had apparently auto-locked behind her, because Weevil had to jiggle the handle in annoyance to get her to let him in. He kept on shaking it agitatedly even once she told him she was coming, and she had to glare at him through the glass panel on the door to get him to stop.
“Quit it!” Once he stopped abusing the handle it was easier to get the door open, but she still pinned him with a hard look as he shut it behind him. “What are you, twelve?”
“And if I was, what would that make you?” he returned with cheerful venom, smirking at the disgusted face she pulled in response. “Getting that key back sent you on a real power trip, huh?”
Veronica rolled her eyes. “It locked behind me.”
“Yeah, sure it did.”
She ignored him. “I have to get home at a reasonable time today, so maybe you could stop wasting it?”
“Yeah, like you’re the only one with things to do.” He approached her, backing her up not towards the wall or one of the nearest desks, but to the far side of the classroom, where the teacher’s desk was. Veronica went, but she complained, to keep things balanced.
“What are you, a sheepdog?”
He stopped once she was next to the large desk. The top was just slightly lower than the student chair-and-desk units, which made her wonder if the angle would be better, or if he’d just end up having to bend his knees or something, but it wasn’t quite wide or broad enough to lie back on or anything. “You wanted to keep changing it up, right?”
She eyed him with sudden misgiving. “Yes…”
There was a ghost of his usual smirk dancing around his lips. “So. Turn around.”
Veronica gave him a long, unamused stare, eyebrows raised in judgemental trepidation, but she turned… slowly. He stepped closer, but she looked over her shoulder in mild alarm that she tried to cover with sternness, and he stopped.
“Hands on the desk,” he said finally, an eyebrow arched as if to ask what the hold-up was.
For a second, she considered saying ‘no thanks, let’s just lie on the floor’. The idea of having sex without facing him was unexpectedly daunting, and the prospect of bending over the desk made her feel frighteningly at his mercy.
Not that she really thought Weevil would do anything to her – the feeling itself was more than enough to shy away from.
But that would be giving ground, and she had no intention of doing that, so she faced the desk again ad reluctantly leaned over enough to brace her hands on its surface.
Weevil’s hands on her hips tugged her backwards. They felt big, somehow, and warm in the way she always noticed, but she still had to bite her lip in order not to squeak in surprised protest.
It felt a lot dirtier than expected as he nudged her legs apart, and not exactly in a hot way. The short skirt and the position made her feel self-consciously salacious, like she was starring in porn or something. Being in a classroom was probably the capper; it made her feel like there was a legend above her head reading Horny Blonde Schoolgirl Gets Fucked By Class Bad Boy – only, if was real porn, there’d probably be some weird racially provocative description in there too.
She never should have let Lilly talk her into watching all those clips to make fun of them; now they were in her head, making actual sex less sexy.
It was easy to hear Weevil undoing his belt behind her, and the sound left her feeling unpleasantly vulnerable. She was stuck here, just waiting, and maybe her – if she was going to tell him to use the word then she should – maybe her cunt didn’t care, but the rest of her didn’t like it.
His jeans hit the floor with a thwump, there was the ripping noise of the condom packet tearing, and Veronica wished she had something to do. She bit her lip and stared at the scattered items on the desk. On the other side, where the teacher would actually sit, was one of those perpetual motion ball things, only it was still, which was almost creepy.
Then he reached between her legs again, fingers warm on her thighs, and gave a pleased little exhalation of surprise – maybe at her lack of underwear, or how turned on she was.
“You walk around like this all day?” he said in her ear, hot breath making her shiver.
For the sake of her dignity, Veronica decided he meant the underwear. “No, I took them off a minute ago so they didn’t get destroyed.”
Weevil laughed, which she could feel against her skin and also through his body as the movement nudged them closer together. “Sure. Or maybe it was just that you wanted it so bad.”
“We can go with that if it makes you happy,” she told him, sucking in a breath as he slid a finger between her folds and dragged it forward and back a few times.
“Feels more like it makes you happy,” he murmured, in what must have been his seductive voice. It was eyeroll worthy, but that didn’t stop her sensitive parts from thrumming in response – breasts, vaginal lips, even the back of her neck.
“Will you just hurry up already?” she demanded, hoping hat once she had the fullness of hm inside her to focus on, she’d feel less exposed.
“You got no appreciation,” he complained, but he complied, hands on her hips to reposition her, the head of his dick nudging at her teasingly before he reached down to line them up and slid home.
She bit back a deep, satisfied sound at the thick solid stretch of him, the way he rubbed against the inside of her in delightful new ways. “Of what?” she lobbed back, voice almost even.
“Anything.” He grunted, bottoming out, his hips flush against her, which felt strange. “You don’t appreciate things.”
Veronica was appreciating him a lot at the moment – physically – but there was no way she was telling him that. “I appreciate lots of things. Ice cream, Italian food, animation that’s not for kids–” She choked on a gasp of surprise when he put a hand on the small of her back and pushed her further down, her face dipping closer to the desk. It came out as a strangled breath, but she didn’t protest, because as weird and porny and awkward as it was, the new angle felt really good. And it seemed like it made it easier for him to go faster, too, which she was entirely in favour of.
“Unnh – mm, if it’s worth appreciating, then I – oh – I appreciate it.”
“You’re telling me you don’t appreciate this?” he demanded breathlessly, tightening his grip on her hips and slamming into her hard and fast. Veronica’s hands slipped, and she had to scramble to brace herself so that she didn’t end up flat on her face on the desk. “Maybe I should take this somewhere else.”
Given the circumstances, this was clearly an empty threat, so Veronica fired back, “I paid you for this. What more do you want?”
“Bullshit – you did.” He hit something inside her that dragged another embarrassing noise out of her mouth, and this time she didn’t manage to muffle it. There was a note of triumph in his voice when he added, “You got what you paid for. We had – a deal.”
“I paid you fifteen,” she got out, struggling to speak evenly despite the way the motion of his body into hers kept shaking her. “So you owe me double still.”
“The fuck I do,” he said. “I was being generous with this extra positions shit for your weird requirements, but if you’re going to be like that–”
He broke off, surging into her with focus, but Veronica got the point. She probably shouldn’t be pissing him off right now, when she couldn’t get a free hand to touch herself without smashing her nose into the desk. She shut her eyes instead, doing her best to rock back against him, which he seemed to appreciate. He didn’t start running his mouth again, which was mostly a relief, but there was a tiny part of her brain that felt… not bored, exactly, not now, but unengaged, like if he wasn’t going to whisper a bunch of aggravatingly hot stuff in her ear, he could at least argue with her about something. It was very stupid, because she’d literally just decided not to do that.
It would go away once she came, anyway, Veronica figured, but she wasn’t quite sure how she was going to get there, because Weevil’s hands were still firmly on her hips, and as good as the fullness and the friction and the motion of getting fucked was, it wasn’t going to do it by itself. Did he really need to hold her in place? She could manage to hold herself in position, probably. Maybe. But she couldn’t figure out how to get him to move them, and she couldn’t spare a hand to drag him around to her clit because that presented the exact same falling-on-your-face problem.
No wonder people usually had sex in bed, it had to be so much easier.
“Can you–” She cut the words off, because even if she couldn’t see the smug look on his face when she said it, she’d be able to picture it perfectly.
“What?” Weevil said, breath hot on the shell of her ear.
“Nothing.” She squeezed her muscles around him, smiling when he groaned against her hair. She should have put it up and it was going all over the place, but it was hard to care, because tensing her muscles like that did really delightful things to the friction of him inside her, and despite the weirdness of getting bent over a teacher’s desk, she really thought that if she just had a hand free…
“Fuck,” he said clearly, hands tightening on her hips, and she could feel the usual signs that he was getting close starting. Veronica pushed away her instinctive disappointment – this got her closer to what she actually wanted, and besides, she’d get to at least turn around. She clenched around him again to savour the feeling of his dick inside her, and he swore violently and came, thrusting into her with one or two more erratic strokes before one of his hands dropped from her waist to brace himself on the desk.
After that long, suspended moment that always seemed to follow, he grunted and peeled himself off of her, stepping back. Veronica took the opportunity to sidle away from the desk, just a bit to the left that took her closer to the regular ones. It seemed somehow presumptuous to just climb up on it – or on the first one, for that matter – but she didn’t want to move too far away.
He got rid of the condom and got his pants back up, as usual, in perfect unconcern, and it wasn’t until he was finishing doing up his belt that he looked up and appeared to notice her watching him. “What?”
Veronica blinked in disbelief. “What?”
“Did you want something, or…?” He gestured toward the door. “I gotta…”
The innocent act was so perfectly applied that there wasn’t a single hole in it, not one amused eyebrow or overdone syllable, but she still knew he was full of shit. “Excuse me? You’re leaving?”
“Uh… yeah? I mean, we’re done here, so…”
She stared at him fixedly, only half-trying to keep a lid on her outrage, until he decided to pretend to get it. It was at least a full minute, and his impression of dawning realization was a masterpiece of acting that Veronica was too pissed off to appreciate.
“Oh, you mean, you want–” He raised his eyebrows at her.
“Um, yes.” A wild strand of hair was ghosting across her face, tickling, but she refused to blow it out of the way. What happened to the even exchange thing he’d been doing before? If he just wanted to blow his load and bounce, he should have established that as how they were doing things before he’d started sticking his hand between her thighs when he’d already come!
“Huh – I mean, I guess…” Weevil pretended to consider, tipping his head to the side. His act was getting broader and broader, probably because he was so fucking pleased with himself. “What do I get?” His mouth twitched, the façade cracking on the last word.
“What do you mean, what do you get?” she demanded, infuriated. “You just got off!”
“You were really mean to me, though,” he said, not even trying to hide his grin. “You said I wasn’t worth appreciating. Feel like it’s a waste of effort.”
Veronica actually snarled. “I don’t carry five-dollar bills in my bra, you asshole.”
“You’re the one who made it about money.” He stretched his arms out behind him so he could lean against one of the normal desks, giving Veronica an excellent view of the spiky tattoos running up his forearms. She wasn’t sure if they were words or just weird Gothic designs, and she was not into them. “Maybe I just want to be appreciated.”
She should just walk away. He had her backed into a corner, and he and his smug, smirking face knew it. If she gave in, he was going to make her crawl. She was perfectly capable of getting herself off. She could… put her damp underwear back on, drive all the way home thrumming with arousal and frustration, fidgety and hyper-aware of how wet and inevitably squishy she was, how much her clit and breasts ached. Dodge her parents, lock herself in her room, and get herself off.
He was such a motherfucking asshole. Nobody had ever made her angry enough to want to use that word before, because it was gross, but this was –
“Come over here, and I’ll appreciate you,” Veronica said, trying and failing to keep her voice even. It kind of sounded like she was threatening his life, and it wasn’t like she wasn’t tempted.
“I feel like you should already appreciate me,” Weevil told her, casual demeanour still unruffled. “How’d you get so wet, huh, if you don’t?”
“I was thinking about sex,” she shot back, trying to squash down the awkwardness that instantly colonized her stomach. She wasn’t used to anyone, including herself, being so frank about her physical reactions, and without the distraction of actually having sex, or any excuse not to look him in the face, it was uncomfortable and strange and bizarrely titillating.
“Oh, yeah? I thought you were thinking about hand-holding.”
She legitimately wanted to rip her hair out. “What’s your problem? You want a sticker or something? Why does it matter?”
Weevil pushed off the desk and approached her, and she had to fight not to cant her body toward him. It didn’t care that he was busy humiliating her for fun; it just wanted him to touch it.
“You want to know what I think?” he asked.
“No,” Veronica said, because it was a gimme.
He ignored her. “I think you want me so bad you can’t stand it, and that’s why you’re such a giant bitch all the time.”
Veronica wanted to scream. “Yes,” she bit out sarcastically, voice hard. “I was thinking about your big, hard cock and your big, hard muscles and the way you hold me against the wall and fuck me. Oooh.”
Weevil looked taken aback for a moment, his mouth open just a tiny bit, his forehead furrowing slightly – and Veronica bitterly resented that she was so tuned into his physicality that she couldn’t help noticing those details – but then his face smoothed and he burst out laughing.
“Come on,” he said, a little less cocky at least, “you gotta give me something here.” He moved a little closer, pressing into her space, closer enough she could feel his body heat. Then he reached down and pushed her skirt out of the way, slid the pad of his finger through the slick, sensitive flesh. She tightened her facial muscles in an attempt to swallow the moan the feeling provoked; it came out choked and tiny, and Weevil grinned. “How long you been like this?”
She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping that giving in would be less embarrassing if she couldn’t see anything. “Fourth period. It’s really boring.”
He snorted, rubbing his finger along her slit but staying at least half an inch away from her clit. “And?”
“And what?” Veronica reached behind herself and grabbed the edges of the desk for stability.
“And?” He stopped moving his hand, to really drive the point home.
She bit down on her cheek until she could manage a measured tone. “And I knew I was getting laid. So I thought about sex. It turned me on. The end.”
Weevil started touching her again, so lightly it was worse than not being touched at all. She was going to kill him if he stopped. “Guess that gets you something.”
He didn’t push any further, just kept going like that, so light, so good, nowhere near her clit. Damn it, damn it, damn it.
She was not caving, Veronica thought, not if he wasn’t even going to try anything else. Maybe she could come like this. Or at least make him say what he wanted her to do, instead of folding like wet cardboard and proving his point at least as much in her capitulation as in what he got her to say.
“Fine,” she muttered. “I was thinking about–” The words caught in her throat, because she didn’t know how to do this. The closest she’d ever come to dirty talk that wasn’t just saying ‘I’m into this’, ‘Are you into this’ was shyly admitting to Duncan that it made her shiver all over when he kissed her neck while they were making out – and even then she’d lost the nerve to emphasize all at the last minute and it came out sounding almost demure. She hadn’t ever really imagined taking it further than that, anyway; that feels so good, maybe, but nothing vulgar. She hadn’t even thought that saying the vulgar stuff would be hot, just kind of gross.
It didn’t make sense that it was easier to do this than say it out loud.
Weevil pressed a little more firmly in encouragement, and she shivered and took a deep breath and tried again. “I was thinking about – getting fucked,” she told his chin, cursing the unevenness of her tone. “And – imagining it. And since at this point you’re a significant proportion of the guys I’ve had sex with, statistically speaking it was probably your dick I was imagining. Does that fix your appreciation kink?”
“I can’t believe you brought math into this,” he told her, sounding legitimately disgusted, but his fingers slid up to her clit and Veronica gasped in relief. “And even I know 100% is statistically significant, don’t be so fucking pretentious.”
“Just shut up and get me off,” she muttered, pressing against his hand and enjoying the way their bodies brushed against each other as she did. “It’s all I keep you around for, anyway.”
“Do you think I stop existing when you’re not thinking about me?” he demanded, pinching her clit with firm, slow pressure, making her hips buck toward him. “You got a formula for how much of a narcissist that makes you?”
“Look who’s talking,” she shot back, faintly breathless. “You already finished, you don’t need this. You just like making girls talk about how great you think you are.”
“I am pretty great,” he agreed, falsely conciliatory. “Tell me more about it and I’ll make it worth your while.”
That was a trap, probably, but all the heat that had been trapped inside her skin had risen to the surface now, made her lightheaded and fizzy and much more kindly-disposed towards him than when he hadn’t been touching her. And curious. So she hunted around for the least-exposing thing she could find, and finally said, “I was just sitting there in class, thinking about how badly I wanted –” but she was not saying she wanted his dick, and she didn’t want to give him an opening to say it either. “How badly I wanted to be, um, full.”
Her tone had switched from faux-seductive to awkwardly matter-of-fact halfway through the sentence, but Weevil didn’t seem concerned. He just said, “Funny you should mention that,” and pulled his hand away to heave her up onto the desk. Veronica sucked in a sharp breath, but before she could figure out what her reaction was, he was sliding a finger inside her and the breath turned into a smothered moan. His fingers were smaller than his penis, obviously, but they were bigger and rougher than hers, and then he had another one lined up next to it, stretching her out almost too much as he slid his hand out and then back in, fingertips pressing deliberately at her inner walls as his thumb found her clit.
She moaned and let her forehead fall forward against his shoulder. They were nice shoulders, she thought. Firm. Good shoulder-blades. Properly jointed so he could bend his arm just right to fingerfuck her while still sending shocks of increasingly overwhelming pleasure from her clit to her breasts and her spine and the muscles that were involuntarily clenching around him. She let her brain turn off and just rocked and squirmed against his hand until the tension finally, finally snapped and her orgasm jolted through her with enough force that she didn’t even care about the ugly noise she made when it did.
*
It was just Veronica and Meg at the beach in the morning – Meg had wiggled out of having to watch her sister, and Veronica had already opted to leave Backup at home regardless – and they ended up spending most of it lying out on the sand, people-watching or staring at clouds, because Meg was the kind of person who brought towels to the beach in November ‘just in case’. It was pleasant: no pressure, for once no tension, not between the two of them or between them and others or between what was going on and how things were supposed to be. Veronica wasn’t sure she knew how to enjoy it properly, anymore. It felt like something was missing.
She had a good time enjoying it improperly, regardless; Meg could find something musical-theatre-related in even the tiniest wisp of cloud, which was a lot funnier than you might expect, and when the people-watching got predictable there was a higher-than-usual number of interesting dogs to refocus on. It was even almost warm. In some ways, not entirely different from lying out by the pool or at one of the private 09er beaches with Lilly in the summer, before everything had gone to hell, only none of the conversation or the motives behind the activities was quite so sharp-edged, now. Which was strange in itself, because she had definitely been softer then that she was now. Meg had less of an agenda than Lilly, she supposed. Lilly always had an agenda, even if it was a fun one, or a silly one. She was always trying to do something.
It wasn’t like it wasn’t nice, not to have to be planning something or managing something else – she just wasn’t sure what to do with herself.
“Okay, last one,” she said as they shook the sand off the towels before Meg put them back into her bag. “That one.”
Meg shaded her eyes to take in the shapeless blob. “It’s Boq dancing with Nessarose,” she said.
Veronica laughed. “I have no idea what that means. Isn’t it kind of… square-ish, to be dancers?”
“She’s in a wheelchair,” her friend explained.
“You really do have an answer for everything.”
Meg smiled and shook her head at Veronica’s admiring tone, but it was only half-joking. By the way Meg had dodged the subject of yesterday’s cheer practice all morning, it had not gone well, but she was relentlessly positive anyway. Veronica was pretty sure that when she was this far out from the implosion of her own useless boyfriend relationship, she’d been five times more of a mess. And Meg didn’t seem poised to ruin Pam or Kimmy’s life, or any of the other friends who’d abandoned her, which definitely made her a better person than Veronica.
“Want to stop for ice cream before I drop you off?” she added but Meg shook her head.
“It’s too early for ice cream,” she said regretfully. “And I have to get back; I promised my mom I’d take Grace to her Daisies thing.”
“Mark it down as a record that you somehow managed to get me to have a good time before ten on a Saturday,” Veronica told her, and the other girl laughed.
“I texted Yolanda – I felt bad about Thursday, I kind of snapped at her – but she said–” Meg dug her phone out to check. “‘You’re insane, hmu after 1 or no dice.’”
“If eight-thirty is the only time I can hang out with you, then I will get up at eight-fifteen,” Veronica said loyally, making Meg laugh. “But maybe next time I’ll just go to sleep wearing makeup, make it eight-twenty-five.”
“It’s so bad for your skin, though!”
Veronica just shrugged and opened the car door so Meg could put her bag in the back seat. “I do not care about the sand,” she said when the other girl hesitated. “Backup sits back there all the time.”
She was sad to see Meg go when she pulled up at the Mannings’, but a little relieved that she could go home and maybe even go back to sleep. The early morning was starting to catch up to her, that you-got-up-too-soon pressure behind her eyes. It was kind of nice to have something nice to do that you could also be happy when it ended.
Ugh, did that mean she should start getting up earlier? Not worth it.
Her dad’s car was gone when she got back, so she pulled into the close side of the driveway. He’d said he might have to run in to work quickly today, but when they got their claws into him he’d be lucky to get away after four or five hours.
Her mom was home, though, and Veronica waved at her on the way past the kitchen, briefly declining an offer to help with the homemade lasagna Lianne was apparently already starting for lunch, and went upstairs to nap.
She woke up to the smoke alarm going off, disoriented and startled, and rushed downstairs in a panic only to find that her mom had left the oven on and gone… somewhere. Somewhere that wasn’t downstairs, although Veronica didn’t exactly have time to look anywhere else as she yanked the lasagna out of the oven with a too-thin dish towel and threw open the back door and the kitchen windows. Maybe she was passed out in her bedroom, or the basement, or in her car in the driveway. Wherever she was, she couldn’t hear the alarm.
It finally stopped going off after a solid minute and a half of fanning it with a handful of takeout menus, at which point the adrenaline faded and left Veronica feeling empty and defeated. She closed the windows and doors slowly, including the one to the garage she’d thrown open in the brief hope there would be answers in there, somehow.
It had been a spill or something that had caught fire, just a black clump inside the oven now, but the lasagna itself was still almost perfect, only slightly too brown on top. It looked delicious.
She should have known, Veronica thought. Who started a lasagna at ten-thirty in the morning?
She could have checked upstairs for her mom, or called her cellphone, or been a good daughter and carefully covered the lasagna once it cooled and said nothing about the fire alarm at all.
Instead, once it stopped bubbling, she cut a giant chunk out of it, right in the center where there was none of the too-dark portion that ringed the sides, and put it in a Pyrex container. She knew who she wanted to be a good daughter to right now.
*
When Veronica arrived at the sheriff’s department, Deputy Lamb was pouting, which wasn’t that unusual – she wondered if her dad had told him off about something.
“What’s that about?” she asked Inga, mostly by way of making conversation. She set the dish she was carrying on the edge of the woman’s desk, jerking her head in Lamb’s direction.
“He jumped the gun on an arrest,” Inga told her confidentially, leaning forward and lowering her voice. “No evidence. It’s probably gone by now.” She was usually too discreet to give away more than that, but Veronica had been a cop’s kid long enough to put it together – Lamb hadn’t just made a bad arrest, he’d most likely tipped off the perp (whether it was his guy or not) and now there wouldn’t be much chance of getting anyone on it. She winced.
“Yikes. I hope it wasn’t murder,” she half-joked, but Inga didn’t respond.
“Allegedly, that’s a completely different felony.”
Veronica blinked, glancing towards the back of the station. She’d never really seen Weevil outside of school before, and while she assumed he was as familiar with the police station as she was, it was still jarring to hear his smug voice somewhere she associated so strongly with her dad.
Especially now.
Veronica shrugged with careful nonchalance, turning back to Inga as Weevil accepted his belongings from a scowling Deputy Lamb, turning the knife with his excessive cheerfulness. “So, is my dad–”
She broke off due to the five and a half feet of probably-a-grand-thief-auto doing his best to loom over her shoulder. “Um, excuse me?”
Inga glanced over her own shoulder, as if she was about to call for the sheriff. Veronica was both touched and annoyed by the woman’s concern. She wasn’t afraid of Weevil – he wasn’t harmless, but she really didn’t think he’d hurt her – and anyway, she could handle him.
She was just afraid of what he might say.
“What?” he said, all injured innocence. “I can’t be curious?”
“Go be curious somewhere else,” Veronica told him. “Shoo.” She affected nonchalance, but her heart was pounding – partly from fear he’d say something incriminating right in front of Inga, and partly from an absolutely ridiculous excitement.
“Don’t see girls like you in here every day, you know,” he remarked, leaning an elbow on Inga’s desk and ignoring her noise of protest. “What are you in for?”
“Lunch,” Veronica said drily, indicating the container of lasagna.
Weevil nodded solemnly. “That sucks. Is it felony lunch, or have they only got you on a misdemeanour?”
She stared at him for a brief second before snorting much more loudly than she’d meant to. It edged its way into actual laughter. “Oh my god. You’re such a dork.”
Maybe this paid her back for his obnoxious stunt yesterday. It was such a dumb joke, she half-expected him to start in on the old standbys. Boy, were his arms tired, et cetera.
Her dad’s office door had opened, so Veronica collected their lunch and stepped away from the desk, ignoring Weevil’s performative indignation.
“You can’t say that shit to me!” he called after her, affronted – although if she’d had to guess, Veronica would have said the emotion his bluster was barely concealing was amusement. “Hey! You better watch it, Mars.”
“Maybe we should be keeping you in custody, Eli?” Keith said from where he was standing in his open office door, in that clear, calm voice that meant he was very angry. So she was going to have trouble with her dad – just a completely different kind than she’d been afraid of. Although she couldn’t really blame him for misreading the situation; she remembered what he’d said about gang members and arresting officers’ families.
“Have you told her how scary I am?” Weevil asked with that faux-affability he was so fond of. “Because I don’t think she realizes how scary I am.”
“Nerds aren’t scary,” Veronica told him over her shoulder. “Goodbye, Weevil. Go steal a car or something.” She sailed into the office without further comment; her dad followed her, shutting the door with a bemused expression.
“Now, excuse me if I’m wrong,” he said slowly. Veronica sighed internally. It never boded well when he played dumb. “But shouldn’t you be a bit more upset at being threatened by an active gang member?”
“He’s all talk,” Veronica said, hoping futilely that she could dismiss the subject.
Keith crossed his arms over his chest. “That is absolutely not true.”
“Okay,” she allowed, pulling the cutlery out of her bag and busying herself setting an improvised table on his desk, “sure. But this is all talk. I’m not a narc or an interloper or whatever makes guys like that mad.”
“He seemed pretty mad,” her dad pointed out. “And some people might automatically assume the sheriff’s daughter was a narc.”
“He’s just pissed off because I called him a dork. He’ll get over it.”
“You called him a dork.”
She’d known he wasn’t going to drop it. Veronica sighed, setting the plastic lid with her half of the lasagna on top of it on the near side of the desk. “Look, I know he’s probably not your favourite person, but there aren’t that many people at school who are – I don’t know, normal, anymore. It’s not like we’re friends or anything, but I’m pretty sure he’s not going to hunt me down and beat me up for making fun of his dumb jokes.” She shrugged. “He’d have to tell his friends why they were beating me up, and then he’d lose his street cred.” Cocking an eyebrow at him, she jiggled the container with his half of their lunch in it enticingly. “Your lasagna is getting cold.”
Her dad raised his eyebrows at her much more dubiously, but he unbent so far as to sit and pick up a fork. “Thank you, honey.”
“No problem!” Veronica dialed up the perkiness a little more than was strictly advisable, to make him laugh.
To her surprise, he let the subject drop, digging in with a pleased expression. “Maybe I should have you cook for me more often.”
“Uh-uh.” She shook her head, working to swallow her mouthful. It was too much to bring herself to get into the specific circumstances of its creation. Besides, she was the only reason it wasn’t entirely charcoal, so why shouldn’t she get the credit? “This was a fluke. Do not read into it.”
“Hmm.” He took another bite. “It doesn’t taste like a fluke…”
Veronica shot him a fondly exasperated look and focussed on her own lasagna. Her dad waited until she had her mouth full and then said, “I thought I remembered you telling me that you didn’t really know Eli.”
She should have known he was only retreating in order to ambush her. Veronica glared at him, making a point of chewing thoroughly.
Finally she said, “I didn’t. I still don’t, I guess – he just isn’t exactly captain of Lilly’s fan club either.”
“So they did have a thing,” he commented blandly.
Veronica made a face. “Do you know how weird it is to hear my dad saying ‘had a thing’?”
“Are you saying I’m not hip with the kids these days?” he asked, pressing a hand to his chest.
“It’s no longer hip to be square,” she informed him. “Not since about 1985, actually.”
“Why does no one tell me these things?” Keith took another bite, shaking his head as he chewed.
“You have to know the right people,” Veronica said, shrugging. “I don’t exactly have my finger on the beating pulse of the social world at the moment.”
“Must one have one’s finger on the beating pulse of the social world in order to be told that one’s teenage daughter is hanging around with known gang members?”
Veronica sighed, shutting her eyes with annoyance. “We’re not hanging out.” It was even true, more or less. “Sometimes I say something bitchy about Lilly under my breath while I’m waiting in line for terrible casserole and he laughs, and if we pass each other in the hall he jokes about how I’m the fuzz – that’s basically it.” And a straight-up lie to balance things out. She rounded it off with something between the two. “I honestly think he only talks to me because it makes Lilly mad.”
“Hmm.” Her dad eyed her – not quite skeptically, but definitely assessingly. “There may be worse things than saying hello to each other at school, but I’m not loving the threatening-you-in-a-police-station aspect of things. Especially given what he was arrested for.”
So maybe not grand theft auto. Veronica couldn’t help her curiosity, but she tried to push it aside for the moment.
“Dad. He was mad I didn’t laugh at his stupid felony joke. He’s not going to do anything. If he was actually threatening me, he’d do it where you couldn’t hear.”
He conceded the point with a wave of his hand. “That’s probably true. But that doesn’t mean I like it. I’m also not sure you should be encouraging people to steal cars.”
That one was hard to argue with, so Veronica just shrugged with wide-eyed innocence and went back to her lunch.
Keith shook his head, exhaling thoughtfully, and did the same, but after a moment he put his fork down. “I have to ask. They’re telling felony jokes now?”
Veronica huffed derisively. “I said I was here for lunch and he asked if it was a misdemeanour or a felony.”
To her everlasting betrayal, her dad made a sound that was closer to a chuckle than a snort.
“Dad.”
He shrugged one shoulder in an unconcerned mea culpa. “It puts the rest of what he said in a new light.”
“Yeah, a dorky light.” She shook her head. “I know you think he’s going to kill someone in a bar fight one day, but I’m not worried. I don’t even go to bars.”
Her dad smiled dutifully at the joke. “Well, I’m glad to hear that, honey. It would make dinner tonight pretty awkward if I had to arrest you for underage drinking.”
“Har de har.”
“And I know you know better than to repeat anything I tell you.”
It was Veronica’s turn to put down her fork. She leaned forward, desperately interested despite herself.
“But some things are important for you to know, so in this instance, the charges in question involve a firearms charge, a drug charge, and an aggravated assault.”
That did surprise her, the first one most of all, although she couldn’t say why, exactly. “I heard they weren’t going to stick.”
He sighed. “Probably not. But even if Reddick Paredes is the one who committed the assault – which he probably is, which is why I told Don not to make an arrest yet – he’s not smart enough to have disposed of the contraband that was taken at the same time.”
“So you think Weevil did that, and now he’s going to ditch the gun,” she finished. “And-or the drugs.” Was he really involved in that kind of thing? she wondered. The PCHers in general, sure, she’d never seen any of them with guns, but she could believe drugs – but you would never catch Veronica working in a liquor store, and she’d just sort of assumed that Weevil felt the same way, after what he’d said about his mom.
“Something like that.” Her dad eyed her across his desk. “I know the best way to shoot yourself in the foot is to forbid your teenage daughter to do something, but I don’t want you making friends with him, Veronica, casual or not. Even acquaintanceship is really not something I should be letting slide.”
“Speaking as a parent, or a sheriff?” she quipped, but the immediate displeased eyebrows that resulted put her on a more conciliatory tack. “I’ll be careful, Dad, I promise. I have friends at school already – you know, actual ones – it’s not like I’m going to start hanging out with Weevil.” After all, it couldn’t really be termed ‘acquaintanceship’ or ‘hanging out’ when you’d had multiple parts of someone’s body inside your own. “I’m just not going to start ignoring his very existence, either – that might piss him off.”
“I’m sure he’s in a good mood today, after having put one over on the Sheriff’s Department,” her dad observed drily. “I know you have a good head on your shoulders, Veronica, but somebody like Eli is operating on a different paradigm than what you’re used to. I’d trust your assessments of anyone who was on the same one as you, but in this case…”
“I’ll stay away from him,” Veronica promised, wincing internally at the lie. At least, she hoped it was a lie. “Can I ask you one thing, though? Who was the – you know, the victim?” When her dad looked taken aback, she got right to the important part. “Was it a woman?”
Keith sighed, looking tired in a way she didn’t quite understand. “No,” he said. “Pretty much the opposite, actually.”
So, a man? Veronica thought, but for once she kept her quips to herself.
Notes:
Content warnings: I cannot think of a formal professional way to say it the way I usually try to, but basically Weevil bullying/baiting Veronica into a level of dirty talk she's not entirely comfortable with (by refusing to get her off otherwise). She's very aggravated and somewhat embarrassed but otherwise suffers no emotional ill-effects. They also have sex in a position that makes her feel somewhat (emotionally) uncomfortable, but she chooses to go along with it without sharing that fact with him.
Also, I don't usually warn for the gang stuff (since it's a bit of an expectation, canon-typical, etc.) but this one gets into a bit more of the nitty-gritty of illegal and violent activity than usual, in case that catches anyone by surprise.
And (somewhat casual) references to the concept of disordered eating.
Chapter 18: Few Truths
Notes:
This one's for sunshine-lover, who's been having a WEEK, and emwithoutnumber, who asked a few chapters back whether Weevil was going to make the period misunderstanding debacle up to Veronica. (That is not exactly his motivation, here, but I'd say it counts. :) )
I also have bonus content this week, because someone posted a meme about badly describing fics as AITA posts on the VM fic Discord, and I have no chill. So we have the inciting incident, while Weevil would be worried about something entirely different.
Usual content warning in the endnote.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The body, I started to learn, was not a secondary entity. The mind contained very few truths that the body withheld. There was little of import in an encounter between two bodies that would fail to be revealed rather quickly.
Emily Witt
Weevil was almost home when his phone rang, and he was about to turn it off and throw it back in his pocket because he’d missed lunch while Lamb was trying to sweat him, and he just wanted to have a sandwich and kill an hour on GTA without having to worry about needing to remind Rooster or Javi not to send him incriminating texts about getting rid of the piece they’d lifted off Francisca’s mugger – but then he saw who was calling him.
So he answered, but he tried to sound annoyed. It wasn’t like he wouldn’t drop everything and head over there if something was up, but he could at least pretend to hold out for an apology first. Just because he showed up for family didn’t mean he wasn’t still pissed. “Yeah?”
“Eli?” Claudia said, like it would’ve been anyone fucking else.
“Lemme guess, you want something.”
“You haven’t called me in weeks,” she said, even though she hadn’t called him either. He could hear scraping in the background, and he bet she was making a sandwich for Ofelia or something, standing there with the phone between her shoulder and her ear like their mom used to do with the handset.
“You made it pretty clear you didn’t want me around,” he said, aiming for a tough guy tone over a resentful one. It was Claudia, so it wouldn’t really matter, but it made him feel better.
“That was Andre,” she said, like the guy didn’t basically live with her already. “And can you blame him, Eli? It’s not like he’s wrong –”
“He got a job yet?” Weevil asked nastily. He knew the answer was no; guys like Andre subsisted by freeloading off women who thought they could fix him – or, in this case, the ones who thought not getting slapped around meant you’d landed a good guy.
“It’s more complicated –”
“I guess if he’s got so much of a problem with how I make money, he won’t want me helping you out with groceries like I used to.”
He could hear her pressing her lips together in the silence. Finally she said, “Ofelia misses you.”
Yeah, he knew where that was going. “Guess you need a babysitter, huh? Too bad Andre banned me from your apartment.”
His sister huffed on the other end of the phone. “Stop being such a baby. He has this thing tonight for his friend – if it pans out, it could be big. But I got a chance for an extra shift, and…”
Honestly, he didn’t like the idea of her leaving Ofelia with Andre anyway. The guy wasn’t a creep, just a loser, but Weevil wouldn’t go so far as to trust him to handle it if she got a papercut.
He put up a little more token resistance. “And you probably have to work doubles now to cover Andre’s share of the bills, right?”
“At least he’s around,” she snapped. “Instead of in prison.”
“Call Chardo and bitch at him about that,” Weevil suggested.
“Don’t act like you’ve got your hands so clean, Eli–”
“You think I told him to commit credit card fraud?” Weevil asked with real disgust, turning the corner. His bike was right where it should have been, thank you, Hector. If it had just sat around at the rest stop where they’d arrested him, it would have gotten stolen, and then he’d have to hunt down whoever took it and put them in the hospital, and that was a giant fucking hassle that would take up his whole night. “Have you been drinking Andre’s Kool-Aid or did you just get stupid all of a sudden? His dumb ass would be in the hospital if I’d caught him doing that shit, not Chino.”
“This is exactly what Andre was talking about,” Claudia said, but he could hear the doubt and the faint thread of guilt in her voice. She’d always been like that when he was a kid too – taking things just a bit too far and then desperately trying to make him feel better with ice cream or by letting him use her tape recorder.
“So… you just called to tell me how much your boyfriend thinks I suck, I guess.”
She took a deep breath. “No, I – listen, I’m sorry, I – can you just come over?”
He could have dragged it out longer, but he was already home, so – “Dunno. When?”
“The shift starts at six.”
That meant he’d probably be there until three or four, but whatever, it was Saturday. “I’ll text you.”
He hung up to get the last word and pushed the gate open, keeping an eye out for the kids because with his luck today they’d pop up and start shooting him with Nerf guns or some shit.
His grandma was home, at least; she only had one client on Saturdays and they usually wanted her early. She eyed him narrowly from where she was vacuuming the couch cushions. “The police were here.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not stupid enough to keep whatever they were looking for in my freaking bedroom,” he said, like he hadn’t been about to take the meth they’d liberated off Red’s hands literally this afternoon if he hadn’t been arrested first. It had been destined for the locker of the kid who’d dinged Rooster’s bike last week and then immediately vanished on some family vacation before they could mete out the appropriate punishment, but Deputy Lamb’s car was a tempting alternative after today.
Not that the sheriff would be likely to fall for it, but they’d have to follow procedure anyway. Plus it would be funny as hell.
“I gotta go to Claudia’s tonight,” he said, ignoring her raised eyebrows. “Her new boyfriend is more useless than usual.”
If she’d objected, he would have made Claudia bring Ofelia there, even though dealing with all four kids at once was exhausting, and someone always managed to get hit in the face somehow or other. But instead she just nodded thoughtfully. “I was going to go to the hospital. Sofia’s doing better, but Julio had to go back to work and Margarita doesn’t like to leave her alone. She needs to go home and sleep but she doesn’t listen to me.”
“Jesus,” Weevil said, “they’re not going to let her ice herself in the hospital.” He ducked a swat for being insensitive. “So go now. I can finish that.”
His grandmother looked from him to the vacuum and back suspiciously, then gave the back of the couch an extra-aggressive final pass, as if she didn’t trust him to be able to tell whether it was clean. “Well… all right. Do not let those children destroy my house.”
“When do I ever?” he protested as she pressed the now-silent extender arm firmly into his hands, but Leticia declined to answer.
*
At least Claudia had been for real when she said Andre wouldn’t be there; Weevil had half-expected him to have cancelled whatever urgent recording session or supposed business meeting he’d been talking up. He’d lay money that whatever way Andre thought he could land ‘something big’, it was either about being a freelance producer or starting some insane business. He’d come back with shitty demos from some friend-of-a-friend who thought he could rap, or scribbly blueprints for a gym that was also a bar, and act like that was the same as a job interview.
Ofelia was colouring on the living room floor, but she jumped up and ran over when she saw him. “Uncle Eli!”
Weevil poked her in the stomach in the way that always made her giggle and asked her if she was going to help him knock over a liquor store, which made Claudia yell at him from her bedroom, but Ofelia just laughed.
“We don’t have a backhoe,” she told him.
“Who needs a backhoe?” he asked, going along with her misinterpretation. “All I need is a wrecking ball.”
“Maybe Tio Angel has one,” she said thoughtfully.
“You know, I’ll ask him. Show me what you’re doing,” he told her, dropping to one knee to take his boots off while she ran over to get her paper.
“See, it’s Blossom and Buttercup!” She was impressively close to inside the lines, although both the Powerpuff Girls in the picture had yellow skin for some reason – bright yellow, like the sun. Maybe she needed some new markers. He’d have to see about sneaking them to her so Claudia didn’t notice.
“You’re still into that instead of Dora, huh?”
Ofelia wrinkled her nose. “Dora’s for babies.”
“Do the Powerpuff Girls speak Spanish, though?”
She gave him an unimpressed look. “You don’t speak Spanish.”
“Yeah, well, don’t you want to grow up to be smarter than me?” He made spider-hands at her stomach, half-tickling her, and she squirmed and giggled and danced away.
It wasn’t like Claudia’s Spanish was really any better than his – she just tried to throw in little figures of speech sometimes, like saying Gracias a Dios every so often was fooling anybody. But maybe Ofelia would want to take classes in school or something.
“That picture’s really good,” he said, while she shifted from foot to foot just out of his reach. “Tell me what’s happening in it?”
She gave him a suspicious look, like she was wary a real tickling was in the offing, but after a moment’s consideration she came and sat back down on the floor, next to him. “Um, they were fighting Mojo Jojo, but then he cheated and ran away, and Princess Morbucks came, and–”
“Wait, wait. Princess More Bucks?”
“She’s mean. And she thinks she can do whatever she wants ‘cause she has lots of money. She got a supersuit and she tried to be a Powerpuff Girl, but Blossom froze her.”
Weevil nodded thoughtfully. “Okay. Maybe this show is better than I thought. You gotta show me an episode some time.”
Ofelia giggled. “Boys don’t watch Powerpuff Girls!”
“Hey, nobody tells me what to do!” He flexed for her to drive the point home, not even caring when she laughed at him.
But making a show of his arms had given her new ideas. “Did you get new tattoos?”
“Not since the last time you saw me.”
She looked briefly disappointed, but then she appropriated his forearm to trace the letters on it the way she liked to, which seemed to be good enough. Her tiny little fingers always tickled, but Weevil held still anyway.
Claudia bustled out of her room, still doing up the top button of her uniform shirt, and he looked up. “I have to go, I’m going to be late. Dinner’s on the stove – that means the vegetables,” she added, skewering both of them with a look. “Do not let her stay up late, you know what her bedtime is.” She fumbled with her purse, probably checking that her keys were in it. “And do not watch TV all night, she always wants to watch grown-up shows and then she has nightmares. I’m going to miss the bus – I have to –”
Ofelia pried herself away from Weevil’s forearms to say goodbye, and Claudia kissed her forehead and told her to be good all in one breath, gave her daughter the shortest hug in the known universe, and swept out the door in a cloud of harassed anxiety.
“You’re welcome,” Weevil called after her as the door closed. Ofelia laughed.
“Hey, c’mere,” he told her. When she did, he raised a conspiratorial eyebrow at her. “Wanna see how many snacks we can find?”
“Yeah!”
“Okay. So we’re gonna eat all the vegetables your mom made, right? And then she can’t get mad if we make popcorn and watch a movie.”
“Can it be Powerpuff Girls?”
“If you have Powerpuff Girls,” he allowed cautiously, since he was fairly sure Claudia would consider a trip to the video store on his bike grounds for justifiable homicide.
“And Oreos,” Ofelia added, with that self-assured tone that meant she was trying to get something past him.
“If you have Oreos,” he agreed, and she giggled, unrepentant.
“Maybe…”
“Well, maybe we should get in there and have dinner,” he suggested. It was barely past five, but that only gave him about two hours before he was supposed to get her ready for bed. Not that Claudia would know if he let her stay up a little later – Ofelia could always be bribed into brushing her teeth by the promise of an extra hour or so, and anything else he could do after she passed out on the couch, if he had to. She had braids in; he could undo and redo those without even waking her up. “So we have more time to have fun.”
She jumped up willingly enough, and Weevil insisted she help him get up, so she spent a couple minutes pulling very hard on his hands while he groaned and protested that he was too tired, and then collapsed into laughter when he popped up like a jack-in-the-box and insisted she’d done it.
“What, I gotta help you up now?” he asked her disbelievingly. “No way, you’re too heavy.”
“No, you!” she cried, wriggling, and he bent down and tickled her until she crawled back up to her feet to avoid his fingers.
Then he shoed her into the kitchen, because if he got her too worked up right before feeding her, she’d feel sick, and dished out the peas and boiled hot dogs Claudia had left, reserving a helpful portion of the peas and two of the hot dogs for himself. He wasn’t sure if his sister had meant for him to eat too, or if she’d had some kind of plans for Ofelia’s lunch, or if she somehow expected the kid to eat six hot dogs, but whatever. He even threw some cheese and crackers on his niece’s plate to round things out, feeling virtuous.
Being in Claudia’s kitchen always made him feel weird. Even with Ofelia’s pictures on the stove and the little decorations her mom crammed into the windowsill, it reminded him so much of the kitchen in his own mom’s crappy apartment, when it had been just the two of them, after Claudia had refused to live with her anymore. Crappy linoleum, counters from the seventies, big, blocky fridge. Even the food, tonight, was the same budget single-mom deal, although at least Claudia had enough that he wasn’t sitting there watching Ofelia eat like his mom used to do sometimes.
He checked the fridge under the pretense of looking for something to drink. It was a little thinner than usual, but he’d seen a lot worse. The door was full of Coke, even though he knew Claudia never bought it; she had the usual ginger ale on the bottom shelf above the crisper – she thought it was healthier or something.
“Ginger ale or Coke?” he asked Ofelia, even though he knew full well she wasn’t allowed to have pop with dinner.
Her face lit up. “Ginger ale!”
Weevil took one of Andre’s Cokes for himself and shut the door. He snagged a blue plastic glass from the cupboard for Ofelia – she hated drinking out of the can.
“Andre must be around a lot, huh?” he asked artfully as she took a delicate sip.
Ofelia made a face. “He’s supposed to have his OWN apartment, but he’s hiding from the landlord.”
Yeah, that checked out. “What, you don’t like him or something?”
Her nose scrunched up in offense. “He calls me BABY girl. I’m five!”
Weevil tried not to laugh and hurt her dignity. “Yeah, he told your mom I’m a bad role model. I didn’t like that much either.”
“You’re a good role model!” Ofelia insisted. “You’re really smart! You can fix cars, and motorcycles, and toys, and you work really, really, really hard. Even harder than Mom,” she said, like that was the biggest compliment she could think of.
“Oh, yeah? How do you figure?”
“Um, ‘cause you didn’t quit school, and you have a job like Mom does, and you do… um… bike stuff?”
He laughed. “Bike stuff?”
Ofelia chewed on her answer for a bit, shoving a too-big round of hot dog into her mouth. Maybe he should have cut it for her. “Yeah. You have to ride it around and do things. Like… like police stuff. Except they don’t really help, and you do.”
Weevil took a big swig of Coke so he wouldn’t have to answer that. Finally he blew off the implications and inaccuracies of what she’d said and just told her, “You know, I work way less hours than your mom does. Angel only needs me after school sometimes, or a weekend here and there.”
“It’s cool to have a job like a grown-up,” she said, unconcernedly. At least whatever she still remembered about her dad that had made her compare him to the cops wasn’t hanging around and making her feel bad.
“You saying I’m not a grown-up?” He pretended to be offended.
She giggled. “You go to school.”
“Yeah, that’s true. Hey, how’s school been treating you, anyway?”
“It’s good. My teacher’s nice. Can I have another hot dog?”
“Yeah, gimme your plate.”
She did, and he topped up her peas, too, before helping himself to what was left. “We finish this off, we can go to town on the cool stuff.”
Ofelia bounced in her chair. “Can we eat Andre’s Oreos?”
Oh, so that was what she’d been trying to sneak by him earlier. “We can absolutely eat all of Andre’s Oreos.”
*
Ofelia fell asleep for good sometime around nine-thirty, although she’d been grimly hanging on through the last half hour of the romcom she’d bullied him into watching with her once the first movie finished, just awake enough that he couldn’t get away with turning it off.
Weevil let the last five minutes play anyway, because he was kind of hoping there’d be a bit of an explosion when the woman found out her secret penpal had run her out of business, but she just got all teary and schmoopy, which he should have expected. All he got for his trouble was some insufferable cover of a song he hadn’t even liked in the actual Wizard of Oz.
Why did Claudia like this crap so much, anyway? None of the guys she dated qualified to star in even the most annoying and fucked-up of these movies.
At least it wouldn’t give Ofelia nightmares, unless she was secretly afraid of Tom Hanks. And she was already in her PJs, so getting her into bed was easy. Easier than cleaning up, but he hadn’t been raised by a housekeeper for nothing, so by the time he was done, you’d have to check the garbage to know just how much junk he’d helped her put away. Gave Claudia less excuse to yell at him, plus he was probably going to end up crashing on the couch, and he didn’t want to sleep on stray bits of popcorn.
The empty Coke cans he left out, though. Maybe Andre would take the hint and get lost. (Or maybe Claudia would take the hint and turf Andre out. A guy could dream.)
The TV got, like, three channels, which was the first encouraging sign that maybe Andre hadn’t worked his way in as deep as he probably wanted. Or maybe the guy didn’t care how pointless the TV he was watching was, but he didn’t seem like the news and cooking shows type. Still, that meant not much to watch besides Ofelia’s Disney shit and the giant stack of romantic comedies his sister kept next to the TV, and he was not signing on for freaking Amélie.
Finally he spotted The Mask of Zorro at the bottom of the stack and fished it out. He wasn’t all that into history crap, but at least it looked like it had sword-fighting in it. Maybe even guns, if the vague scenes he remembered from the last time someone had been watching it around him were accurate. Plus Catherine Zeta-Jones was doing some sex-kitten thing on the back cover, so that was promising.
The movie was pretty decent, actually, and by the time it was over it was past midnight, so at least he could’ve gone to sleep without feeling like a loser. For whatever reason he kind of wandered into the kitchen instead, staring at the walls and the windowsill.
Theirs had had all his toy cars crammed into it – model cars, ‘cause he’d been nine and trying to be dignified – but Claudia’s too-cute little nick-nacks took up the same amount of space. He wondered if any of them were Ofelia’s, if her mom let her keep her stuff there so she felt important, like his had.
He was still pissed at Claudia for refusing to move back, but the truth was that he’d liked having their mom to himself, in the beginning. But it had killed her to only have one of them, and then when everything went to hell again, they wouldn’t let him stay with her, even though…
Well, he wasn’t a kid anymore – the truth was maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, in the end. But that had been the end for her, and he’d been handling everything pretty okay up until then, so it was hard not to be mad about it. Maybe it would have been different if he’d been able to stay with her, but it definitely would have been different if Claudia hadn’t ditched them.
At this rate, he was going to pick a fight when she got back. It was like some kind of bubble, being alone in the kitchen at this time of night – although it wouldn’t be that late for him, really, if he wasn’t babysitting. No point in hashing over the past, anyway, at least not that part of it. He’d bounced Dave’s head off the side of that fridge, that time, if he wanted something to dwell on.
It was just hard, sometimes, because he hated how much Claudia was like their mom, in some ways. Why should she get to be? She hadn’t even stuck with it. She just bailed when things got hard, even on her family.
Well, except Ofelia. Which was another way she was like their mom.
Weevil exhaled sharply in aggravation. Normally he’d just find a way to burn this shit off, but he couldn’t leave the apartment. Claudia didn’t have a gaming system, for obvious reasons, and he’d already watched the one decent movie she owned. He might even have been willing to do homework or something, but he hadn’t brought anything with him.
He opened the fridge and spitefully took one of the last three cans of Coke. If he couldn’t find something halfway decent to watch on TV, maybe he could at least find something to make fun of.
Not so much luck with that, of course, which was why he was asleep on the couch when Claudia finally got home. The TV was off, since he’d given up on it sometime before midnight, which was the only reason the door closing was loud enough to half-wake him at all. He could hear her rustling around on the table by the door, probably putting her keys away or something, and he tried to go back to sleep so she couldn’t tell him to go home before Andre got back, but it was a lot harder to ignore someone who was trying to be quiet than some loud asshole.
When she slid down the hall to check on Ofelia, linoleum creaking under her feet, he sighed and got up, feeling groggy. Might as well give a status report; it might wake him up enough to go home.
Claudia was in the bathroom, rubbing a cloth over her face – maybe taking off her makeup, or maybe just trying to steam the stress of a night shift out of her pores. The kind of housekeeping calls you got at one in the morning were grim, but she’d be getting overtime, since he knew she’d hit forty hours this week already.
She jumped when she saw him in the mirror, which he felt kind of bad about in a vague, over-tired way. He’d just been trying not to wake Ofelia, but she didn’t yell at him for startling her.
“Did she go to sleep okay?”
Weevil kept his voice at the same hushed volume, mildly surprised by how rusty it sounded. “Yeah, I don’t know, eight?”
Even edited to be more appropriate that was still at least half an hour past Ofelia’s bedtime, but Claudia didn’t jump all over him about it, for once. “Do you want a blanket?”
It would probably be more comfortable than sleeping under his jacket, like he had been. He hadn’t realized he’d been so sure she was going to kick him out – or, more likely, sigh and hint about Andre being back in the morning until he got fed up and left anyway. “Yeah, sure.”
“Go lie down, I’ll get it for you.”
He did, even though she was probably more tired than him, folding up his jacket to be a decently serviceable pillow. It was a small apartment, and he could hear her going through the hall closet, closing it, the detour she took through the kitchen before she leaned over the back of the couch to hand him the blanket, her dark, curly hair hiding her face like a curtain until she pushed it out of the way. “You did the dishes?”
Weevil propped himself up on one elbow to take the blanket. It was one of those knit ones with the holes that were supposed to be there, the kind that spawned in church basements or their great-grandmother’s guest room before she’d had to move, and he had no idea where she’d gotten it. Probably she didn’t either. No one ever bought those things, or made them, they just showed up. “Cinderella wasn’t exactly riveting.”
She smiled, maybe, just a faint change in the shadows of her face. “Thank you, Eli.” The Coke cans he'd left out were pretty obvious on the coffee table, and he saw her eye them, but she didn’t say anything.
“Yeah, sure. I like her more than you anyway.”
Claudia sighed and flicked him perfunctorily in the shoulder. “Go to sleep.”
He watched her disappear into the hall, her teal uniform three shades darker in the gloom, the only hint of colour still perceptible in the shadows. For a second he almost called after her – you could do better, or something – but she’d just think he was running down Andre, or rubbing Dave in her face; that he was being a brat, because with Claudia he could never quite get out of the little brother box.
You deserve better, maybe. But it was too late by the time he’d worked it out, and anyway, nobody took that crap seriously from him. Lilly fucking hadn’t, and he never had been able to convince Chardo to stop hanging around the phone hoping his mother would call, even though Tania had barely made the time to look at her kids during her own sister’s funeral. So why would Claudia listen to him? He should probably take a leaf out of her book, be glad Andre wasn’t hitting her, that he was just a leech and a fucking annoyance.
They’d break up eventually – guys like Andre got bored easily – and she wasn’t going to apologize for letting her manchild boyfriend calling him a juvenile deviant (jury was out on whether Andre was trying to be clever or just didn’t know what the word delinquent meant) but things would smooth out again. He wasn’t sure if that was depressing or comforting, but he was too tired to figure it out, so he stopped trying and lay back down. The blanket was warm enough to be comfortable and the cool leather under his face was kind of nice, actually, so it was easy to fall back asleep.
*
The thing was, Veronica had completely spaced on sourcing some kind of makeshift flagpole from the art room on Friday, which was embarrassing, but at least provided her with some kind of excuse to give Meg after she spent the first five minutes of lunch on Monday inhaling her apple turnover and leftover lasagna. It was a weak one, but Meg was trying to finish an assignment for one of her afternoon classes and didn’t raise any objection, so Veronica tucked her lunch bag away and stood, glancing around to see which table the PCHers had colonized today. Hopefully she’d won herself a few points by bothering to show up for lunch at all, but she was not planning on staying.
Conveniently, they were near one of the entrances, so she only had to go slightly out of her way in order to catch Weevil’s eye and raise an eyebrow, the exact same way he had in front of her locker that morning. She didn’t wait for him to respond – the nice thing about having an excuse, however flimsy, to be in the art room, was that if he didn’t show up her pride would remain undented.
Apparently she didn’t have to worry about that, although even after having to dodge Mr. Wu and double back to avoid Madison Sinclair, she was still already unlocking the art classroom door when he appeared behind her. He announced himself by snagging her around the waist and attaching his mouth to the seam of her neck and shoulder in a way that should have prompted a sarcastic comment about limpets instead of the truly embarrassing noise she made instead.
It was risky, letting him do that in public – while it might not be as juicy as his thing with Lilly, plenty of the school probably still knew they were hooking up, but out in the open like this it would be easy to get caught by a teacher.
She cared a lot less than she should have.
His mouth was so hot. Veronica tried to push aside the sensations of his lips against her skin, his tongue tracing the line of her shoulder so that she could open the door, but all she managed to do was hyper-focus on the temperature instead, on the way the heat paradoxically made her shiver.
“Cut it out!” she complained, pleased her voce hadn’t gone as limp and shaky as the rest of her, like he’d turned her into overcooked spaghetti.
She could feel him grin against her skin, which was the weirdest sensation, and then he started working his way up her neck, which was no help at all unless you counted letting her muster enough annoyance to get the key in the door properly. One of his hands was already under her shirt, sliding upward, and Veronica wanted enough privacy to dispense with this teasing intermediary crap.
She stumbled forward when the door opened, taking him with her. He laughed into her neck, which was obnoxious but still made her legs tremble. Okay, not just her legs – everything below the waist was trembling. Noticeably.
Veronica shoved him off long enough to right herself and shut and lock the door. When she turned back he was smirking at her, and she rolled her eyes even as she eagerly pulled her shirt off.
It felt like normally his would be gone by now too, she thought, and then derailed momentarily on the bizarreness of there being a ‘normally’ for this.
It could be hot, sometimes, when he still had a shirt on while they had sex, but Veronica was a little disappointed she couldn’t rub her hands all over his bare back and shoulders.
Sometimes she felt slightly crazy, these days. It was normal to be a horny teenager, and it was normal to want to see a boy with smooth, shiny skin and truly impressive muscles bare-chested, probably, but it couldn’t be normal to be so obsessive about it that you wanted to lick the outline of his bicep.
Weevil crowded her against the door, kissing her in earnest. He was really good at it, Veronica thought, not for the first time. It had been a truly excellent idea to put that back on the table.
Making out with him against a door that had a clear glass panel in it at around head height was a less brilliant idea, but her judgement went flying off god knew where when they were this close together, his sold heat pressing in so close that she was deliciously stuck, thrilling at the inescapable knowledge that he was already fully hard.
Veronica tried to wiggle backward to point out that they needed to move, but there was nowhere to go and the friction just made him groan and attack her mouth more aggressively. She fought not to melt against the door as he rocked his hips against hers – she was not going to be seduced into having sex against a door where anyone who walked by could see what they were doing.
Finally he slid a hand between them, and that woke her up enough wriggle sideways, biting back a low moan at the way it rubbed their bodies together. She leaned away far enough that he couldn’t quite reach her mouth and gasped, “Not here! There’s a whole – unh –” He’d brought his knee up between her legs like an absolute bastard. Veronica tried not to grind down on it. “There’s – a whole classroom. Get off me.”
To prove her point, she wedged her hands in between them and shoved at his chest. It didn’t end up being as hard as she’d intended, because she had almost no leverage, but he slouched reluctantly backward anyway.
“Come on,” she said, doubling down on the annoyance to make up for how breathless she was. “Get it together.”
He backed up a little, almost daring her to come after him, and Veronica did, wishing that there was a chair she could push him into that could actually be trusted to hold their weight if she did. The mood she was in made shoving him down and climbing on top of him seem incredibly appealing, but he couldn’t sit on one of the desks, and the computer chairs were too flimsy for anything close to what she wanted, so instead she just followed him back until he hit the nearest one, and then took off her bra, meeting his eyes challengingly.
Weevil grinned and reached for her waist again, dragging her closer. Veronica was pretty sure he was going to pick her up, but she was worried about kicking the desk behind him when she wrapped her legs around his waist, so she grabbed him by the shirt and manhandled him around until their positions were reversed.
He let her, laughing. “Oh, you think you’re in charge here, huh?”
“Don’t like it, take it off.”
He boosted her onto the desk. Veronica went easily, bracing herself lightly on his upper arms; she was used to it by now. But instead of taking his shirt off, he pushed up against her and started kissing her again, hot and wet and overwhelming, one hand searing against the skin of her lower back, the other one slipping between them to fondle her breasts.
It wasn’t like that had never been a part of things before, but this was different – more thorough, not a side event to something else, just his fingers focussing exclusively on rubbing and squeezing and then brushing gently over the same territory so lightly that it was calculated to make her go out of her mind. Veronica whined, wrapping her arms around his neck and trying to hook her legs around his waist as well so he’d stop needing to hold her in place; she wanted his other hand free to touch both her breasts at once, instead of alternating, especially now that he was doing that – that thing he was doing.
Then he stopped making slow, maddening circles over her nipple with his thumb and pressed it between his finger and thumb instead, something between a pinch and a squeeze that had Veronica arching and twisting and rubbing herself frantically against his hardness as she keened. Her clit was aching so much she thought she’d lose her mind, and her neglected nipple throbbed in sympathy with the one he’d imprisoned.
Weevil laughed into her mouth, because he was an asshole, and then pulled away to suck his way down her neck. She tried to pull him closer, even though it was trapping his hand between them, but he pulled deftly away. She growled at the loss of contact, desperate for something to move against, but his hand was still squeezing and rolling agonizing circles and his mouth kept moving downward over her shoulder in a trajectory that made every inch of her skin tingle violently with anticipation, so she let him get away with it.
Weevil’s other hand slipped around to rest on her hip, but Veronica had already forgotten about getting it on her chest, because his mouth was working its way down her collarbone, the damp skin he left behind shivering with the way the air felt cold after his mouth.
The skin at the very top of her breast didn’t feel all that different from the skin half an inch above it, but Veronica still twitched and mewled when he got there, squirming against the desk without getting any relief. Maybe it still mattered more than she thought it did, being small, because the heat that curled headily throughout her body – the way it made her tremble on the inside, too, that it really didn’t seem to matter to him, even though she hadn’t thought he’d had more than a cursory interest in her breasts before, that he was just as enthusiastic about licking and sucking –
Then he closed his lips over her nipple and Veronica cried out, one hand grabbing the edge of the desk so she didn’t fall. The other had made its way to the back of his neck somehow, and it was hard not to lose all her sense and try to urge him closer. If the circumstances had been just slightly different, she might have done it anyway, and who cared if it pissed him off, but the extra layer of intimacy kept her in check. It was one thing to put your hand in someone’s hair to try to move them around, but it felt somehow different to be touching their bare scalp. She’d only done that once, and it still felt out of bounds.
She dragged her hand away before she could give in to temptation, letting it rest awkwardly on his shoulder. Moving made her realize that this time she could see what was happening. No one’s body was in the way, and she could watch his fingers working against her skin, see the way he was lapping and sucking at her breast, and it turned out the sight made her dizzy.
Duncan had always been reassuring that he liked her body, a subject which had really only come in the first place because she’d still been insecure about it when they’d been dating. And Troy had never raised any objections – although he also hadn’t bothered scamming her all the way into bed, so maybe he’d thought it wasn’t really worth it – but Jeremy had always been noticeably more interested in girls (and female video game characters, and action movie protagonists) if they were visibly busty, and maybe it had gotten to her, because seeing Weevil nuzzle his way between her breasts like he wasn’t interested in anything else, before swapping his mouth for his hand and vice versa, was leaving her light-headed in a way that was only mostly about how good it felt.
Veronica shut her eyes and tipped her head back, breathing hard through her open mouth as all the sensations intensified – the heat, and the wetness, and the way his mouth pulled at her, sending shockwaves of pleasure through her so sharp they were almost indistinguishable from agony, and the press of his tongue, and the whole time his fingers squeezing and twisting and gently tugging in a way she could feel in her clit.
It was good, fantastic, just to shut her eyes and feel, but it meant she couldn’t watch him anymore, so she forced them open again.
It made her go all shivery inside, watching his lips move against her skin, his fingers dark against the extra-pale skin of her breast, his tongue tracing around her nipple before he pressed back in to devour her. She squeezed his torso with her legs out of a sheer need to be doing something, her own breath harsh and ragged in her ears, so loud it should have been embarrassing except that it was hard to care.
Then his hand dropped lower, and Veronica whined in protest, squirming against him as it landed hot on her stomach, and then slid lower, the top of her thigh, the inside of her thigh. She was more than ready for him, but she didn’t want him to stop what he was doing, to give up the inexorable sucking pressure that had her leaning forward into his mouth, had her aching, muscles flexing with want.
It would be so good to have him inside her, but she still nearly whimpered when he let her nipple slip from his mouth and kept kissing his way down her body. His mouth was still hot and wet, his tongue so delightfully active against her skin, her head swimming so frantically from the onslaught of sensation that she didn’t correctly track what it meant until he adjusted his position to drop properly onto his knees, and then she was too shocked to do much of anything.
This was just sex, after all, and what was in it for him was pretty clear when he was fucking her or burying his face as best he could in her limited cleavage, but there wasn’t any reason for him to be down there, and he wasn’t – he couldn’t –
Veronica’s mind was hazy with the tingling pleasure lingering everywhere his mouth had been, and she was still groping for thoughts when his tongue touched her – just, right there, just below her clit, the sensation such a shock it jolted her right out of and then back into herself, his face right up in – he was actually –
He pushed her legs a little farther apart, hands firm and solid and hot, and licked at her, and Veronica gasped in shock. It felt good, she realized belatedly, still not quite able to believe it was happening. His tongue was broad and warm and didn’t hesitate for even a moment, and the pleasure caught up to her and nearly swept her away before she’d even processed the fact that it was really happening. He kept on licking broad strokes over her flesh, and Veronica gasped again, snatched at the edges of the desk for something to hang onto, because she was going to fall, she – she –
Weevil’s tongue found her clit, and she groaned deep in her throat and let her head fall back. It would have been a relief, not to see him anymore, not to stare disbelieving at his head between her legs when even just seeing it turned her shuddery and weak, but he was persistent enough that nothing felt like relief. Which was fine, because she didn’t actually want any, she just was going to die if she didn’t get some.
He’d been tonguing delicate little circles around his object, close enough to what she liked with his fingers, or her fingers, to feel oddly familiar, and yet strange and different and intense and overwhelming – but then suddenly he stopped, and then he was flicking at her with the tip of his tongue, tiny little relentless assaults that made her clit throb and ache so much it felt nearly like it did when she’d already come and didn’t stop touching herself fast enough.
She was panting, hard, fingers so tight on the desk they were nearly cramping, making ugly little moaning noises that sounded straight out of bad porn, but she couldn’t stop. She was a runaway train with no control, no brakes, no care at all for what she might hit. Only the fear of falling off the desk kept her from grabbing the back of his head and pushing it into her, trying to get more, get closer.
Some faint, far away part of her was embarrassed, was thinking about how wet it was down there and whether it tasted weird, or what if he thought she was faking because the broken, gasping uhhn, uhhh noises she couldn’t stop making sounded so stupid, and also, what if he expected her to reciprocate, because she had no plans to go down on him right now, or maybe ever – but all of that floated vaguely in the distance, there but not as important as it probably should have been.
He kept at it, gentling the motion just slightly so it was a little closer to licking over her, starting a flush of pleasure that rippled through her until she shivered against his mouth, receding and then coming back stronger – over and over again until giant, tingling waves of sensation were crashing over her, each time making her think this was it and then disappointed and relieved and desperate for more as they ebbed, leaving her almost ticklish as he licked over her and started another one welling up. She was just starting to think that she was really, really getting there this time, eager and faintly regretful it would be over, when Weevil shifted, licking broad strokes over her again, the slight tickling sensation winding tension into tight circles in the pit of her stomach. It felt good, it felt so good, but she couldn’t help whimpering at the loss of what he’d been doing, and then he was – was he sucking on her clit – she’d lost track of what was his tongue or his lips or anything, but there was heat and soft pressure and suction, and she felt hot and dizzy and light-headed, like she might float away.
“More,” she mumbled without meaning to, and instantly hoped he hadn’t heard. Maybe he hadn’t, but his eyes flicked up, and Veronica shut hers immediately. She could not, absolutely not look at him while he did that, not while he could see her! But everything felt heightened in the dark, sharper and hotter and more urgent, spiraling tighter and tighter until she thought she couldn’t take it, almost painful in intensity, thought she was at the limit of what was possible except it kept going – and kept going – and kept going –
And then it burst, actual light flashing behind her eyelids as she shook with ecstasy.
It was hard to tell how she managed to stay upright, exactly. Maybe some instinct she hadn’t been aware of, maybe the death grip she had on the desk. Some part of her was faintly aware of him pushing himself upright on her thighs, but her brain was utterly unable to draw conclusions from that information. It was completely offline.
Weevil grinned at her as he realigned them, undoing his belt, which was fine, but then he leaned in and Veronica realized he was going to start kissing her again, so she forcibly pried one of her hands off the desk and shoved it into the middle of his chest as a deterrent.
“Nuh,” she said, not quite capable of proper speech yet. “Uh-uh.”
She wasn’t sure if she’d have to fend him off more extensively – it couldn’t be normal to do that, right? But he’d clearly wiped his face at some point while she was distracted (although his mustache was still… glistening, a little bit) and maybe he thought that was enough – but he just laughed and leaned back, undoing his pants one-handed.
“So?”
Right. Veronica belatedly dropped her hand from his chest, managing to let go of the desk with her other hand and flexing her fingers to make them feel normal again. “Uh… yeah. Okay. Sure.”
Her brain was still buzzing like it was full of low, faintly-pleasant static, so she wasn’t positive that what she was saying lined up properly, but that was fine. He was laughing at her again, but she actually didn’t care. It’s not like there was anything to worry about, anyway – he obviously wasn’t put off by… whatever might put guys off down there, if he still wanted to have sex, and whatever part of her dignity she’d just sacrificed was evened out by the fact that he’d just been down on his knees, right?
Veronica shook her head try and refocus her brain. It worked, a little; her eyes had drifted off to stare at the right side of his chest without really seeing anything, and at least now she had it together enough to read what she was looking at.
“Who’s Ann Marie?” she asked, less because she especially cared and more because it felt important to relearn how complete sentences worked.
For some reason Weevil looked disturbed by the question. “Don’t ask me that now!”
“Whatever,” she muttered, because even though she didn’t care, letting it go might have tipped him off to just how thoroughly he’d fried her brain. “I don’t care about your ex-girlfriends.”
“Seriously,” he said, making a very weird face, “shut up.”
He had the condom on by then, anyway, so Veronica shrugged and did, widening her knees slightly to indicate he could just go ahead – which he did.
Her fingers still felt weird from holding onto the desk so tightly, so instead of stabilizing herself that way again, Veronica leaned against him like she was a plank of wood, which made the angle more awkward and also made him grunt, but meant she didn’t have to expend any physical effort at all. It wasn’t like she cared, especially; she was still fizzy and light-headed from coming so hard, and from the aftermath of all that – all those sensations he’d managed to inundate her with, but she didn’t think she had anything left to be turned on. The orgasm had burnt her lightbulb out completely.
The thought made her laugh, although she tried mostly-successfully to stifle it. It wasn’t like having him inside her felt bad, right now; it just wasn’t hot the way it usually was, even conceptually.
Not for her, anyway; from the firm grip Weevil had on her sides and his eager breathing, she figured he was having a pretty good time, which set off a kind of triumphant pleasure in the pit of her stomach that she tried not to think about too hard. It was enough to sort of lean on him and enjoy the lingering euphoria still swirling around in her bloodstream and watch the interesting way the muscles in his torso flexed as he fucked into her. His stomach was kind of soft down at the bottom, gently padded even though he was also pretty jacked – which she guessed probably meant the muscles were from normal stuff, instead of lifting weights or something. What that would even be she had no idea – punching people? Bench-pressing stolen cars?
She reached out and touched it, smoothing over the lines of his huge Ride tattoo as an excuse. She’d felt him close up against her, but she hadn’t really touched anything besides his back – well, and his dick – he didn’t seem to mind, his breath hitching briefly, maybe in surprise, and then evening out again. His skin was smooth and warm to the touch, pleasantly soft with firmness not far beneath. Maybe she should touch him more. If he could put his entire face up in her – vulva was definitely the wrong word, she was going to have to get used to saying cunt – then she could probably touch his stomach or whatever without it being weird, right?
His breathing sped up, not a crazy amount, but enough to let her know they were getting somewhere, and she slid her palm up his chest, just to see if that did anything. Duncan had been too ticklish for that type of touching to be sexy, but Troy had been into having her hands all over him pretty much regardless.
Weevil did not appear to be ticklish; he grunted when her fingers brushed the underside of his pecs, and when she swept her hand higher, brushing aimlessly over the tattoo he hadn’t wanted to talk about, he thrust into her harder.
Veronica tightened her muscles around him instinctively, and he groaned, which she really liked despite still being a little too thoroughly satisfied to be turned on by it. He wasn’t the only one who could make people make stupid noises. She ghosted her fingertips lightly across his chest, Ann Marie to bulldog, until her elbow was bent too awkwardly to keep going, reveling in the explosive way he exhaled – then dragged them back the other way, because why mess with something that was working?
“Shit,” he hissed into her hair. Veronica flattened her palm and slid it down over his abs, forming idle circles and lines. She didn’t really care what she was doing specifically, just that he seemed to like it and she enjoyed the feel of his skin under her fingers. Maybe the unpredictability was working in her favour too; maybe that did something for him the same way it did for her.
He cursed again and sped up, and she just kept on doing the same thing until his body jerked against hers and he groaned in a way she was getting familiar with. Then she dropped her hand, because not stopping would have been weird.
Weevil made a noise that was half a sigh and half a grunt as he levered himself off her. It was suddenly very hard to look at his face, now that the extreme euphoria that had left her with no concerns was fading into a more general pleasant physical contentment that no longer quite provided enough distance from her embarrassment. She couldn’t help the sudden rush of hyper-awareness about where his face had been ten minutes ago.
He didn’t seem bothered, or anything – well, obviously if it had tasted terrible, or she’d done something wrong somehow, he probably would have stopped, or at least not been as revved up as he seemed to have been when they moved on to actual sex. But he also didn’t even seem that different from normal. (There it was again – normal. Weird.) It couldn’t really be completely ordinary to him, could it? She’d assumed he’d at least… at least something. Make a big deal about how into it she was or bitch at her about making unsexy noises or say something catty about her pubic hair or something.
Should she start shaving? It was neat enough down there, but it was definitely a discussed topic that guys allegedly liked things bare. It had always seemed too weird to her, but maybe it was a manners thing, if a guy was going to put his mouth–
Anyway, was it a breach of sex etiquette or something? Maybe she should have already been doing that.
On the other hand, if it was already too late, why should she bother starting? It wasn’t like she would shave her legs for him, specifically, if she wasn’t already going to – why should she shave anything else?
Oh, God, was he going to have some kind of oral sex beard burn? Probably not, right? The angle was different.
She had to stop thinking about this.
Weevil bent over to get his shirt and Veronica, focussing on that one tattoo on his back for something to keep her from spiraling like a loser, leaned over and finally managed to read it upside down.
“Why does it say Channel on your shoulder?”
He froze for a second, the muscles in his upper back tightening, and then he let out an annoyed sigh. “It says ‘Chanel’,” he said shortly, straightening.
Veronica stared. “Like… the fashion house?”
He didn’t answer, which was enough of one. “Why?”
Weevil shot her an annoyed glare. “Because I told Lilly she could pick my next tattoo, okay? Fucking drop it.”
She chewed on that for a moment. “I mean… at least it doesn’t say ‘Gucci’.”
That prompted a bizarre strangled choking noise that made her jump, but when she saw how tight he was pressing his lips together she realized she’d caught him by surprise and he was trying not to laugh.
“Why would you tell her that?” she asked, encouraged and more than willing to push the envelope to satisfy her curiosity. “Like, getting a flower or something would have been a terrible idea but it makes sense, but why would you give her that much power?”
The not-quite-smile morphed into a scowl, but instead of snapping at her, he said begrudgingly, “She was asking me about the other ones and why I got them. Then she said she should pick the next one, so I said, yeah, sure, whatever. I figured she was just talking.”
“Ooh.” Veronica winced. “Yeah, bad idea.”
Weevil huffed in annoyance. “Yeah, well, when I started saying I was due for another one, there she is, all ‘you said I could pick!’ So–” He dropped his gaze. “I let her, and she thought it was fucking funny. At least I don’t have to look at it,” he added with vicious good humour.
Veronica shook her head. “At least Ann Marie only wanted to be written over your heart.”
“Fuck you,” he said, sounding more aggravated than enraged. “That’s my mom’s name.”
Shit. How did she keep jumping on this particular button? “Oh,” she said, lamely, at a loss for how to apologize.
“Yeah, oh. You got any other opinions on how I live my life? Fashion advice? Some more commentary on my tattoos?”
“Yes, actually,” Veronica said, matching his tone, although she kept hers slightly subdued as a gesture in the direction of remorse. “If you’re going to spell Dog 4 Life with the number four, ‘life’ should have a Y in it. Dog 4 Lyfe.” She did her best to pronounce the spelling.
“I’ll take that up with my ink guy.”
“Great.”
“Great.” They stared at each other for a second. It had been a mistake to start a conversation, Veronica thought – now she had no idea how to end it without being weird or rude or insensitive about his dead mother.
“Okay, well,” she said finally, pulling a day of the week out of nowhere in particular, “same time, same place, Wednesday?”
Weevil snorted and shook his head. “It’s like you think I got nothing else going on.”
“So… Thursday?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose like he was trying to hide a smile. “Won’t be here.”
“It’s like you’re trying to make things difficult.”
“And you’re mad ‘cause that’s your job?”
Veronica bit the inside of her cheek in order to maintain a glare. “I have things to do before class. Wednesday, yes or no?”
“Yeah, fine.”
She slid off the desk, surprised by how wobbly her legs still felt. He was never, ever, ever going to know, but she suspected that was the hardest she’d ever come. It was hard not to wonder if this was just something that was on the table now, if he was going to do it again on Wednesday, if she should let him or if he’d expect her to reciprocate. “Great.”
She fished her bra off the floor where she’d dropped it, making a face over the fact that it was inside-down. She had to stop letting that happen – put all her clothes on a different desk or something.
For once, Weevil actually noticed. He laughed at her. “Just leave it off. You don’t need one.”
She glared at him for real this time. “Thanks. I don’t care what you think.”
He shrugged. “Just saying I’d appreciate it.”
Well, that was a backhanded something, although she wasn’t sure if it qualified as compliment or insult. “Sadly, I still don’t care what you think.”
He winked. “Don’t be sad, baby. I know how to cheer you up.”
Veronica grimaced, almost as much as his stupid fake flirting as at the epithet. “You’re so gross. Go away.”
He made an obnoxious kissy-face at her on the way out the door, and she barely held onto the last word by looking away before he could see her turning red, because it was once again impossible not to think about where his lips had been.
The responsible thing would be to stop him, next time, since she wasn’t going to do it back, but it was two days out and she was already losing that battle. The smart thing would be to assume he wouldn’t do it again, because she had no guarantee, and it was pointless to get all excited and anxious and probably turned on about something that might not happen… but that battle was probably pre-lost.
She would not shave her privates for Wednesday. That was a winnable battle. Battle won. There we go. You’re killing it, Veronica.
She was going to be absolutely useless in History, Veronica thought, putting her bra back on in defiance of Weevil’s opinion and any lingering floor contamination. It wasn’t usually hard to pay attention, but between how her body felt about what had happened and the many different ways her brain felt about it, she wasn’t going to be good for much.
This whole thing was going to be very bad for her performance in school, but at least it was probably too late in the semester to tank her grades meaningfully. Maybe they should put a moratorium on sex next week, considering she had at least one test, but the idea of another weeks-long hiatus was unappealing, especially when break was already two entire weeks by itself. Not that she wasn’t glad for some time off school, but still.
Also, Weevil would make fun of her. That was a given, but she didn’t need to just hand him openings like that.
God, one more week until break, two weeks until 2005, and then suddenly they’d be almost done with first semester. She was halfway to never having to see Lilly again. The thought gave her a simultaneous pang and sense of triumph.
If she didn’t get herself straightened up and head to class, she’d be late, and, reason aside, it was never a good day to get chewed out by your favourite teacher. She tugged her shirt straight and slipped out of the classroom – she had to find a bathroom and fix her hair. Weevil had been all over her so fast she hadn’t had time to put it up, but on balance, she really wasn’t complaining.
Notes:
Warnings: Nothing too extreme, but this chapter has surprise cunnilingus in it. (Technically Weevil is, to his mind, telegraphing his intentions, but that doesn't quite land because she's distracted.) Everybody's having a good time, but there are some vague objections in Veronica's inner monologue if you're sensitive to that. (Honestly it's mostly just surprise and the rest of it is based on social expectation rather than distress, but there is a certain amount of 'he couldn't/shouldn't be doing that'.)
Chapter 19: Little Restraint
Notes:
So. Guys. I quit my job.
The weekend one, that is, and I still have to work out my notice, but I am SO looking forward to having my weekends back. No promises as of yet as to whether this will affect the release schedule (it may just mean my Mondays are less stressful!) but who knows? :)
Also, I know I already linked to the playlist, but I've added some songs to it and a (semi-)annotated tracklist (major spoilers redacted) is up on my tumblr, in case anyone's interested.
Anyway, (very brief) content warning in the endnote, and on to the main event!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
'Sex' is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.
Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
In Veronica’s opinion, she couldn’t really be blamed for forgetting to find some kind of flagpole, but it was still embarrassing to have forgotten twice, first of all, and the circumstances weren’t the kind she especially wanted to explain to Meg, so she’d slipped into the regular art classroom between Chemistry and Spanish, and filched a couple different lengths of dowling, and then tried them out whenever the teacher was occupied elsewhere, muttering, “Por la mesa de las putas,” out of the side of her mouth and making Meg giggle helplessly.
Finding a marker that would make a legible banner on actual fabric was harder, which was why she was still trialling options at lunch the next day. Even the one that had been so dark on the napkin was only a sort of lackluster grey on the new flag.
“You need a Sharpie,” Meg said. “I can’t believe you’re actually going to put that thing up.”
“Think Yolanda will still sit with us?” Veronica asked, grinning a little as she hunted through her pencil case as if a heavier pen would just magically appear.
“It didn’t bother her before. Unless you’re going to start making jerseys or something.”
Veronica made a face. “Very unslutty. Not even regular sexy. Crop-tops that say ‘Certified Floozy’, maybe?”
“Oh, God.” Meg covered her face with both hands less in horror than in exasperation, tenting her fingers above her nose. “When everybody finally leaves us alone, you know it’s just because they think we’re crazy, right?” she said, words muffled. “Or they think you’re crazy and just don’t want to get too close.”
“I believe ‘nuts’ is the current verdict.” Normally she didn’t mind having a bit of an in-joke with herself, but Veronica tried not to think about the source of that verdict too much. Thinking about things Weevil had said led very quickly to thinking about his mouth, and it was a half-step from there to the constant tingling awareness she’d been fighting off all day.
And there it was. Great.
Veronica gritted her teeth and did not shift in her seat. She was ignoring this. She was not going back down that rabbit hole.
She was not going to start wishing it was already tomorrow.
“You’re probably right,” she said, making a face at the lackluster result her efforts had produced. “I’ll look for one after lunch, I guess.”
“I can look in my locker,” Meg offered. “I think I only have a pink one, though.”
Veronica made a face. “Yeah, I don’t think that’ll show up great, all things considered.” She folded up the green fabric and tucked it away, returning to her little Tupperware of almonds. “Oh, well. I can scavenge at home if I have to. I’m sure there’s one in the office.”
It wasn’t really an office so much as an exercise/storage room, but there was a desk in there, with the family computer she’d used before she got her laptop, and the assorted detritus of office supplies accumulated during her mom’s sporadic attempts at occupation over the years – more hobbies than jobs, but plenty that had involved delusions of professionalism. “I’m not going to wear leopard-print like some of the moms,” Lianne had said a few years ago during her brief soap-making phase, laughing at herself for her failure to spreadsheet the expenses and ingredient breakdowns separately. “But I have to try and keep up somehow.”
Veronica remembered suggesting she just buy a pantsuit. It had been funny, at the time, because Lianne had been sober. At least she’d given up on that one quickly enough that they hadn’t had any lye around by the time she inevitably slipped up.
God, why did everything in her life have to circle back to that? Couldn’t she just have a thought?
“You’re very invested in this,” Meg observed.
“Well, what else am I going to do with my time? Besides, it entertains me.”
The other girl shook her head, smiling. “I guess. At least I’ve still got Cabaret. And cheer.”
“How’s that going, anyway?” Veronica asked, pausing in the middle of putting the empty almond container back in her lunch bag. She should have asked sooner – but Meg hadn’t seemed notably upset over the last few weeks, at least not when she wasn’t being actively harassed.
“The play? Fine. Kimmy isn’t even pretending to be a good sport, so she didn’t even sign up to help backstage or anything, which means I don’t have to see her. And everyone else pretty much ignores me when we’re not rehearsing.” She paused. “Alyssa’s nice.” Then she cocked a worldly eyebrow and said, “Cheer? Unpleasant. But I’m not going to let them make me quit. I’ve been doing cheer since middle school. If they don’t like me, they can leave.”
Veronica held up her hand for a high five, ignoring the fact that she had very much quit pep squad. It wasn’t exactly the same, anyway. Lilly not liking her had not exactly been the problem.
“I bet Madison hates that you’re better than her,” she observed as Meg smiled and slapped her palm firmly.
“Madison hates everything.” That made Veronica shoot her a quick look – she still hadn’t quite gotten to expect that kind of thing from Meg – but the other girl just raised a should with a ‘well… what can you do’ expression, and Veronica laughed.
“Do you think she hates everything because everything hates her, or did it start out the other way around?”
“Veronica!” But Meg was smiling. “…Obviously a little of both, and it escalated.”
“Makes sense.” Veronica tucked away her lunch bag and pencil kit, popping open the pouch of fruit gummies her mom had bought a box of. On the one hand, she wasn’t eight years old anymore, but on the other, they were good. Although the scant handful in a serving didn’t tide her over like it once did. “Want one?”
“I’m – actually, sure,” Meg interrupted herself. She selected a tiny bunch of grapes and popped it into her mouth. “Grace loves these.”
“Hogs ‘em all?” Veronica suggested, and her friend laughed.
“More like my mom would be very disappointed if Lizzie or I was so selfish as to steal any.” She took a bite of her sandwich. “Maybe I should have waited. I don’t know if it exactly sets off the ham and lettuce.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Veronica demanded. It was meant to be a meaninglessly casual quip, but a sudden flurry of movement across the lunch area meant her eyes caught and held on the PCH table for a second, and Meg read into it.
“I’m not sure a sense of adventure like yours is entirely healthy,” she said, half disapproving and half affectionate.
Veronica shrugged. “Like I said. It keeps me entertained.” She frowned, looking for something she could say that Meg would understand – that anyone would, really, because trying to articulate the fact that she found Weevil’s obnoxious posturing and her own constant attempts to one-up him to be something adjacent to enjoyable was a losing proposition that sounded insane even inside her own head. “When you spend so much time surrounded by people pretending to be nice and then stabbing you in the back, sometimes it’s nice when someone’s just… an asshole. You know, without trying to hide it.”
Meg looked dubious, but she didn’t argue. “I mean – I’d rather people were just… actually nice.”
“Sure, but you’re the only actually nice person in this entire school, so…”
“That’s not true!” the other girl protested, laughing. “Gabrielle and Yolanda are nice, James is nice… Doug always says hi to me, I don’t think he believes any of the rumours. And there’s you.”
She was obligated to say that, Veronica knew. Although it was Meg, so she might actually believe it.
Not that Veronica was the worst person ever, or anything – she just had other priorities than being nice. A good friend, she might have called herself, instead.
“Okay, first of all, even if I did admit to being nice, which I don’t, that doesn’t help me any.”
Meg smiled and shrugged, conceding the point.
“And two,” Veronica added. “Who is Doug?”
That prompted a frown. “You know. Douglas. He’s in my biology class.” Meg thought for a second. “And don’t you have English together?”
Veronica looked at her blankly, so she continued, slightly frustrated. “Douglas Cornwall? He used to be James’s lab partner, before me?”
“Wait, Corny?” Veronica couldn’t help laughing. “Sure, I mean, I guess he’s too stoned to be a jerk most of the time.” She paused, thoughtfully. “I never knew his name was Douglas.”
“He goes to my church,” Meg offered. “Well, his parents do. I think he mostly spends it getting, you know, blazed, out back.”
Veronica valiantly refrained from laughing at the incongruous turn of phrase. “Unsurprising.”
Her friend shrugged. “I used to judge him,” she admitted, as if it was a cardinal sin. Maybe it was – Veronica wasn’t exactly a church-goer – although if so a lot of allegedly-devout Christians were going straight to hell. “But now… I mean, there are worse things, you know?” She checked an automatic glance across the commons, but Veronica could see Cole over there out of the corner of her eye. She gave Meg a wincingly sympathetic smile.
“It’s not like Thou shalt not smoke up is one of the really big ones,” she offered, trying to make it funny and not sacrilegious. Meg smiled, sort of, so maybe she’d succeeded.
“I better go put my stuff away,” she said. “We have a test next period.”
“Lucky you,” Veronica told her, rolling her eyes. “I have one tomorrow. Just in time to forget it all over Christmas.”
Meg did laugh at that, waving slightly as she extricated herself from the table and headed inside. Veronica let her gaze flit over everyone else at the tables. All she needed to do before class was drop off her lunch bag.
Cole was still yukking it up with Jeremy and Mike Pappas and a couple of his other mediocre friends. No girls, she noticed. Logan and Dick Casablancas had secured a table not far away with a couple of Dick’s usual crowd, including Shelly but not, Veronica noticed, Madison. His brother was there too, fighting off a forceful attempt at a noogie. Veronica rolled her eyes.
A chunk of the student council had set up not to far from her, and Veronica watched Pam toss her hair in annoyance at something Madison had said with a decent measure of schadenfreude. Kimmy wasn’t anywhere she could see, maybe skipping lunch, or set up somewhere else with the other second-string cheerleaders.
Duncan was sitting with Lilly, not at one of the tables, but down on the grass. Or rather, he was sitting, on the edge of the irregular concrete barrier that bordered the circle in the middle of the commons, and Lilly was lying on her back in the grass, either ignoring him or monologuing at him as he ate his sandwich and stared off away from the rest of the student body.
Veronica wasn’t sure if she wanted to roll her eyes and write them both off, or give him begrudging kudos for sticking by his sister if nothing else. It would have stung, when she wasn’t the wronged party, even aside from the wedge it had clearly thrust between him and Logan. Veronica’s conviction in his moral rectitude wasn’t what it had been a year and a half ago, when she’d still been wide-eyed and adoring, but she did know he wanted to be upright and unimpeachable. It was both admirable and infuriating that Lilly was apparently worth compromising that for.
Corny, who she wouldn’t have thought to pay any attention to if it weren’t for Meg mentioning him, was sitting at the edge of the patio space with some of his friends, goofing around and throwing chips in the air. He was mostly failing to catch them in his mouth, and the others were laughing, but he looked like he was having more fun than Duncan or Pam or even Dick.
James she didn’t see anywhere, but Yolanda and Gabrielle were at their usual table, so she waved when she caught Gabrielle’s eye – Yolanda was too immersed in what looked like homework to notice.
And then there were the bikers in the same place she’d noticed them before – spread out across two tables, posturing and shoving each other, Weevil sitting on the edge of one with his feet on the bench like he was holding some kind of leather-themed court. As she watched, he leaned forward to say something to Rooster, who she knew vaguely from last year’s Soc class, and propped one elbow on his knee, like he was aping some medieval tableau on purpose. It was a truly ridiculous pastiche, and for a second Veronica could very clearly see the incongruous oil painting it should have been, the one that would get passed around the internet on lists and sites about funny and weird art. The Sharks meet Richard III.
Then, of course, he straightened up and saw her looking, and winked broadly. Veronica bit the inside of her cheek to keep from jerking her gaze away like she was embarrassed. She was – it was completely unfair that the one time she managed to get her thoughts off what he’d done yesterday was when he caught her staring – but no way was she admitting it. Unfortunately, marching over and insisting that she’d been thinking about how he should be an oil painting did not spell ‘unobsessed’, so she just shrugged at him with her best unconcerned face and turned away casually, picking up her stuff like she’d been going to leave anyway. Even without seeing his face, she knew he was either laughing or smirking, which made her grind her teeth.
Even worse, her thighs were tingling again, and her brain wouldn’t stop reminding her that the last time she’d gotten off had been a whole twelve hours ago, and that was too long, actually, and maybe he was free after school?
It was academic, because she was not going begging like some ingenue who’d never had a real orgasm before, and hadn’t been perfectly capable of taking matters into her own hands last night when she couldn’t stop thinking about his mouth, and didn’t have any self-respect probably – but god.
Katie David had her locker open, and she shot Veronica an unfriendly look. Ordinarily Veronica would have squeezed in anyway, but she had about ten minutes before class, and it wasn’t worth antagonizing Katie any more than she already had, so she just waited, trying not to shiver at the memory of sensations that seemingly just got reinforced the more she tried not to think about them. Her bra felt very constricting, suddenly, and she tried not to squirm against the fabric.
For one thing, highly inappropriate at school, and for another, she was wearing it, so she’d just end up shimmying like a demented backup dancer.
Katie shut her locker and strode away, and Veronica slipped into the opening and claimed her own locker. She had to put the combination in twice, because she was too distracted and got it wrong the first time.
Okay, focus. They had a study session in History today before the quiz tomorrow, which meant Mr. Rooks’s gameshow competition, and she had no intention of dragging her team down, or losing at all. So what if Ashley Banks always looked at her like she was some kind of bug? It would just be sweeter when she owed Veronica her first place finish.
*
If school was initially frustrating and then proceeded into something close to infuriating, being at home was agonizing.
Her mom was insistent that Veronica sit down and talk about her day, sample the crumble that was supposed to be for dessert while Lianne did the dishes, and there was really no way to get out of it without being outright bitchy or, worse, upsetting the delicate equilibrium the house always existed in during times like this by dragging up the spectre of the night or the week before during a time when everything seemed okay. But she’d had intentions for her time after school, unless she claimed to have homework (unlikely the week before break, especially given she usually tried to have hers done a few days in advance) she didn’t have any good reason to escape to her room and shut the door.
But the tension that had been building all day was extremely unhappy at being denied the expected release, and she was getting dangerously close to snapping at her mom for some tiny thing that didn’t even rate on the usual scale – and then she’d be guilty and horny, which was objectively the worst possible combination. It was completely impossible to get off when you kept seeing your mom’s face fall in the back of your mind – or at least, she sure hoped it was.
Finally, approaching real desperation, she said, “Mom, I might – go have a nap?”
Lianne paused with the cupboard door open. Understandable, as Veronica hadn’t had a nap since she was about six. “Is everything okay, honey?”
“Yeah, yeah.” She shrugged nonchalantly. “I just didn’t get to sleep right away last night. I think I was awake pretty late.” Technically true, although she’d certainly been in bed. She embroidered a little. “I kind of thought I was going to pass out in Biology.”
“Go rest up, then. I expect you to be in top form for dinner.”
“If this is on the menu for dessert? No way. I’m having one lettuce leaf and saving the rest of the room for crumble.”
That chased away the lingering crease between her mom’s eyes. She closed the cupboard door on the bowls and pretended to swat at Veronica with her dishtowel.
It was a nice moment and she should probably be enjoying it, but there was a biological imperative to be obeyed, or something. Rampaging teenage hormones. Id-driven decision-making. Whatever you wanted to call it. Regardless, she washed her hands, snagged a washcloth out of the basket on the back of the toilet, and was in her room with the lights out and her hand down her jeans within three minutes.
The primary feeling in the first several seconds was relief more than pleasure. Not that it didn’t feel good; she was tempted to dial it back in order to make it last longer, but it was hard to do when it felt like she’d been waiting literal hours for this.
Everything seemed a little more mundane and sordid than it had last night in the dark, under the covers, but on the other hand… she didn’t really care. At least philosophically she didn’t care, and if her emotions weren’t quite as enlightened, they were easily distracted by a couple deftly-selected memories. Or, if she was less pretentious about it, by snippets of yesterday played out of order.
It still felt – ostentatious or embarrassing or shameless, something – to actively, deliberately think about Weevil’s mouth against her, not an intrusive thought she couldn’t dispel but an actual fantasy, but it wasn’t like she could think about anything else. Veronica squeezed her eyes shut and ignored the heat rising in her cheeks in favour of the heat suffusing the rest of her skin, overlaying the very real sensations of her fingers against her clit and the eagerly sensitive flesh of her vulva with the memory of his lips and tongue. The image of his head between her legs rose unbidden in her mind and made her shudder. This time, since it wasn’t real, she reached down and put her hand on his head, feeling his scalp under her fingers (she wasn’t sure if it would be bristly, but in her head it was smooth like his shoulders) as she pushed his face further into her cunt.
The word made her shiver, too, even though she’d resolved to start using it more. Hadn’t she been into normal stuff until a couple months ago? Broad shoulders in sweaters, hunks with their shirts off, kisses on the side of her neck? When had it become about words she was using in her own head and some asshole whispering filthy stuff in her ear and the memory of how much he’d been into licking and sucking at her breasts –
She whined, just a little, and immediately clapped her free hand over her mouth. It had been plucking indecisively at her shirt over her bra, but not making noise was more important – even if hearing herself make that sound had sent a little shock of electricity up her spine.
Okay, weird, insane, whatever: that was tabled for later. Or never, honestly, given how things were going. The order of business now was to get herself off as thoroughly as possible and then hopefully have some kind of shot at acting normal for the rest of the day. Veronica stepped up the pressure a little, her imaginary clip show of the day before going slightly fuzzy as she remembered the feelings more strongly than the images: his hot, wet mouth engulfing her nipple; his tongue flicking gently over her clit; the delicious sloppy confusion of his entire mouth on her cunt, all mixed up with vague impressions from last night of heavy blankets and hushed darkness and the luxurious self-indulgence of giving in –
There it was, she was almost there –
Come on, baby, that’ll do it, come for me.
Veronica made an ugly strangled noise into her fingers, her mind crowding every little moment that might serve as a tipping point in front of her until the edges started to blur together, more fiction than memory, hot breath against the shell of her ear and the sensation of sliding down onto Weevil’s lap as the movement opened her right up and tongue/fingers/lips against her clit –
Then she was falling back against the pillows, hand falling loose to her side, lips pressed tightly together to keep from doing more than grunting as the orgasm jolted through her almost roughly.
Veronica took a second to catch her breath. Okay, maybe she would have a nap, actually. Just a little one. She cleaned off her other hand and set her alarm clock to go off in half an hour. It was probably a mistake, and now she’d be awake late again, but what did it really matter? Most of the classwork was pre-break wrap-up, so it wasn’t a big deal if she was too tired to pay attention, and her English Lit test wasn’t until Thursday.
And if she maybe had some vague, half-guilty plan, already, to do this again tonight, well… it wasn’t her fault getting head turned out to be life-changing. No wonder guys were so obsessed with it.
Being gross about it was on them, though, she thought as she closed her eyes.
*
She hit the snooze button twice, but when she caught herself fumbling around with the clock to reset it for another twenty minutes, Veronica bit the bullet and dragged herself out of bed. Once she was free of the perilous warmth of the blankets, she’d be awake again pretty quickly, but it was hard to muster the willpower. She rubbed her face and ducked into the bathroom to speed the process up with cold water, where the sound of the door opening and closing downstairs told her that at least her timing wasn’t terrible.
“I come bearing food!” her dad called from the hall. “Provisions lovingly bestowed on us in the grand Deutsch tradition!”
Veronica snorted, finger-combing her hair back into order before she went downstairs and wishing she hadn’t slept in her jeans because it always made her feel weird. “Inga’s doing Christmas baking again, huh?” she called. “Dibs on the schwarz-weiss gebacks!”
“Hmm, I don’t know, I think your accent was a little off,” he told her dubiously as he slid his boots into the hall closet with one foot, hands full of cookie tins. “Sounded a little like shwartz. And you know what that means – you only get them if you can pronounce them!”
“I’ve been saying ‘schwarz-weiss geback’ since I was ten,” Veronica said, glaring at him. “I know you’re just hoarding them all to yourself.”
“Mm, sorry,” he said, not sounding remotely sorry, and adopted a terrible German accent. “Ze rules are ze rules. But can I interest you in spitzbuben?”
“You can always interest me in a spitzbuben,” she told him, plucking the jam cookie from the tin as soon as he lifted the lid. “But this conversation is not over.”
He danced around her and headed into the kitchen, greeting her mom’s pleased exclamation at the volume of baked goods with, “We’ve got spitzbuben – we’ve got springerle – we’ve got rocky road–”
“Very traditional,” Veronica said, following him and leaning against the doorframe. “Very German.” She took a large bite of her cookie, catching the crumbs with her other hand as she savoured the redcurrant jam. Her mother, who was insane, rejected the offered tin of spitzbuben in favour of a springerle.
“Rich likes them,” her dad said, meaning Inga’s husband. He went back to his ridiculous showman voice. “We have sugar cookies of assorted shapes and sizes… and we have the all-important box of popcorn balls!”
Veronica’s eyes widened at the reminder, and she immediately made a beeline for the cookie tins, but her dad swept most of them away, shaking a finger at her, and her mom said, “Leave room for dinner!” so she was forced to stop and take a rebellious bite of her cookie.
“Fine. You both suck.” They shared a very parental affectionate look, and she rolled her eyes, as was only obligatory, but the truth was she didn’t mind if they wanted to gang up on her. There was a rightness to the united front and the recalcitrant child, and she was old enough that it was nearly always funny instead of spurring actual conflict.
“Dinner in thirty?” her dad asked, kissing her mom briefly.
“Forty-five?”
“Sounds perfect.” He moved the tins to the counter out of her way and pretended like he was setting up the old ‘hair across edge’ trick to tell if anyone opened them.
“Ha ha,” Veronica said. She finished off her spitzbuben, trying to figure out from across the room where exactly the black-and-white cookies were. She liked a good chocolate chip or a snickerdoodle, but Inga’s schwarz-weiss gebäcks blew American cookies out of the water. “I’m not having any more tonight anyway. Mom made dessert.”
“Truly my favourite wife of all the ones I’ve ever had,” Keith said, wrapping an arm around Lianne’s waist. Veronica rolled her eyes for form’s sake, but she couldn’t help smiling.
*
Dinner was great, at first. Lianne had tried something unusual with the risotto, but it had come out really good, and even with dessert pending Veronica still took seconds. Her dad had a funny story about a chihuahua who had managed to knock Sacks over and bruise his tailbone, which everyone enjoyed even though Lianne felt guilty for laughing and Veronica secretly suspected that the tininess of the dog and the magnitude of the outcome had been exaggerated. Her mom had heard some piece on the radio about the electoral college, and her parents had a great time debating why both pundits had been wrong while Veronica tried to put away her salad and her second helping of risotto quickly enough that she wasn’t holding up dessert. There was a lot of hinting about Christmas presents without really saying anything, and then they teased Lianne for breaking her usual themed-music-while-cooking rule to listen to Christmas carols.
“I was drinking eggnog,” she said primly, raising her glass like a trump card. “So it’s appropriate.”
Then crumble came out. Everyone was seamlessly adjured to switch their lemonade (Veronica) or O’Doul’s (her dad) for eggnog, and her mom joked about how it had been officially taste-tested.
“A+ blue ribbon rating,” Veronica agreed as her dad savoured his first forkful like some kind of apple crumble sommelier.
“Mmm.” Keith shut his eyes in ostentatious enjoyment. “Quite right. Not exactly themed to the season…”
Veronica could tell he was about to say something about how that just made it more delicious, or lobby that they convert Christmas to be apple-themed from here on out – what else would he be saying – but Lianne’s mouth tightened and she stood abruptly before her husband could finish his sentence.
“Well, if it’s not seasonal enough!”
Veronica’s dad blinked, caught by surprise. “What – no, Lianne–”
“I have never seen you make a dessert in your life that wasn’t, wasn’t cookies with ice cream and chocolate sauce or something stupid like that, but don’t worry, there’s always Inga–”
“Mom!” Veronica protested, but Lianne swept up the pyrex dish and vanished into the kitchen, leaving the rest of her family stunned. A small, stupid, childish part of Veronica wanted to say, “But Mom likes Inga,” but she tamped it down until she had enough equilibrium to only say, with bitter composure, “Eggnog.”
Out of something that might have been spite, or might have been something else she couldn’t put a name to, she reached across the table and snagged her mom’s glass, taking a solid swig of the milky liquid. It burned, which was horribly unsurprising, but she refused to flinch.
“Veronica,” her dad said, warningly, but he didn’t say anything else or take the glass away from her. He was still reeling, a little, maybe even blaming himself for not constructing his joke more carefully, and Veronica hated that she could tell. She stared fixedly at her pristine serving of crumble, untouched because they’d been waiting half-jokingly to get her dad’s verdict on it, and tried to give him privacy to compose his face.
After a long moment, he got up, leaving his own plate, and said, “I’m going to talk to your mother.” Veronica nodded without looking at him.
She should have realized, she thought as he left the room. There had been plenty of little hints that she hadn’t seen, her mom laughing a little too much, leaning forward a little too far to make her point a little too vociferously, a little too inelegantly. The eggnog by itself should have been a dead giveaway. They drank it virgin, at least when Lianne was on the wagon, but it was practically designed to be both a smokescreen and a temptation. But she’d let herself be lulled into complacency by the family atmosphere and her parents’ lightheartedness and her own earlier distraction, by three and a half days of nothing serious, and if she had suspected anything, she’d put it down, the same way her dad probably had, to Lianne maintaining a casual buzz, not drinking herself into volatility.
She felt like a six-year-old again, watching the level in the bottle and waiting to see if she’d get singing Mommy or yelling Mommy – only she’d forgotten to watch the bottle.
Lianne’s glass was almost full, bar the gulp she’d already taken – her mom must have topped it up when she ducked into the kitchen for dessert, which would explain why it tasted so strongly of bourbon.
It wasn’t even the right liquor. You were supposed to use rum.
Veronica chugged the rest of it anyway, like making it disappear would somehow stop her mom from getting more. Then she drank some of her own, to try to chase away the taste and the feeling in the back of her throat, and slowly finished it while she ate her apple crumble, listening to her parents argue and semi-apologize their way from the kitchen to the hall to the stairs. She couldn’t hear most of the words, but she knew the deal – her dad would conciliate if he could, deescalate the situation and have the serious discussion later assuming he could catch Lianne sober. No point in arguing with her when she was like this.
Tonight it wasn’t working – the tone of her mom’s voice wavered from tearful to angry with no apparent cause, sometimes in the middle of a diatribe, and then the bedroom door slammed above her and she heard her dad coming slowly back downstairs. He went into the living room, and Veronica heard the click of the lamp, but nothing from the TV.
She hoped he was reading a book or something.
Still, when she got up to bring her dishes to the kitchen, she took his apple crumble too and heated it up in the microwave while she rinsed away all the evidence and eggnog and crumbs, then took it and his untouched glass of straight eggnog to him in the living room.
He wasn’t reading, although at least he was looking out the window instead of staring at the wall or the blank TV screen. He looked up when she came in and sighed. Veronica could see the apology coming and she didn’t want it, so she held up the plate in front of her like a shield. “I reheated it. Want ice cream?”
“No, I’m sure it’s perfect as-is. Thank you, honey.”
She forced a smile. “Any time.” After a moment of hesitation, she added, “I might just… go to bed early.” For a second, when she saw his face, she wished she could take the words back, but she didn’t know how much alcohol had been in that eggnog and the last thing she wanted right now was to be drunk, so better to sleep it off. She’d already napped and she shouldn’t be – wasn’t – tired. But at the same time she was so, so tired.
“I ate mine already,” she said instead, a poor bridge to normalcy but better than none at all. Her dad smiled at her, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
“Okay, honey. Sleep well. If you change your mind, come down and we can watch a movie.”
There was an appeal to the idea, sharing the couch or even curling up under his arm like she was nine years old again, but Veronica didn’t want to have to explain why her breath might still smell like bourbon. There was no way she’d convince him it was some irrational anger-based denunciation and not a truly ill-considered coping mechanism, in danger of tipping her down the same hill her mother could never quite seem to stay at the top of.
“I cannot watch Slap Shot one more time without my head exploding,” she told him. “Every time we watch it, I feel like I’ve been hit with a hockey puck.”
Keith clapped a hand over his heart in mock distress, but it was lackluster compared to his usual flair. “Betrayal. My own daughter.”
Veronica smiled, just a little. “Goodnight, Dad.”
She hesitated in the hall, then went back into the kitchen before she went upstairs. The tins of Christmas baking were still stacked neatly in the corner of the counter, under the cupboards. She crossed the room and eased the lids up quietly one at a time until she found what she was looking for.
There were six popcorn balls. She transferred two of them into a plastic bag, threw together a brown bag lunch for her dad tomorrow – pastrami sandwich with extra mustard the way he liked, an apple for balance, a pouch of fruit snacks because he’d think it was funny – and added the popcorn balls. Then she took her own two, put one in her own lunch and set the other one aside to eat tonight. What was the point in saving it to eat while they were decorating, like she usually did?
If she was younger, or greedier, she might have taken her mom’s two as well, and eaten them out of spite, but she wasn’t twelve, and anyway that didn’t send any message besides ‘I’m selfish’. She could have apportioned three each for her and her dad, but he would never go along with that, and it would split all the unspoken fault lines right open if they had to have a conversation about it.
She threw them in the kitchen trash instead, right on top where Lianne would see them when she made breakfast in the morning, and went upstairs.
*
Veronica had woken up around midnight, vaguely disoriented from a dream that seemed to be a recreation of a childhood vacation, only with strangely unremarkable giant crabs and a colour palette that was bizarrely washed out. Other people had poignant, meaningful dreams when their lives were going to hell, with insight into their psyches or painful yet clarifying reproductions of the relevant interpersonal dynamics… she got a talking crab telling her to keep her arms and legs inside the washed-out green rollercoaster. Maybe that on-the-nose stuff only happened in movies.
So she’d gone back to sleep, and woken up two hours late fresh off a sex dream where instead of Weevil it was Duncan down on his knees in the art classroom, only when she was about to come she looked down and he was gone.
Maybe a little too on the nose.
It had left her frustrated and turned on and also slightly shaken and infuriated that she was emotionally affected at all. Getting herself off while refusing to let her mind stray even in the direction of any guy she’d actually dated had taken the edge off one or two of those, but it hadn’t especially rated on any metric other than determination, which was not sexy – so she’d spent most of her morning classes zoning out and waiting for them to be over, banking on the teachers’ inclination to blame the upcoming break for student apathy. She ducked out of American History, grabbed her lunch, and made a beeline for the art classroom, not sure if she was more eager for an orgasm that didn’t feel like maintenance or just for a distraction.
She started on her sandwich while she waited, a clone of her dad’s pastrami only with less mustard, and it wasn’t until she was making unusual vicious inroads on her popcorn ball that she realized lunch period was a solid fifteen, twenty minutes in, and still no Weevil.
Her heart sank more sharply than it should have. It was a disappointment and an annoyance, but at the moment it was apparently doing the heavy lifting for every other disappointment in her life. Veronica ground her teeth, refusing to cry over a missed assignation. She knew perfectly well that the worst of her internal turmoil wasn’t even about Weevil, but that didn’t make it any easier to dismiss.
Plus – she had been counting on that assignation for other reasons as well. Tumultuous personal life or not, it was hard to discount the possibility of Monday’s events without some measure of distress.
He probably wasn’t even going to, she told herself, but even inside her own head it sounded glum instead of incisive.
She finished her lunch, slowly, because she could not wait around for him to show up, but that didn’t stop her from hoping he would. Was he at school today? She tried to think if she’d seen him, but she wasn’t sure. Ric was here, because he’d gotten in trouble in English for putting his boots up on the desk again, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
Not that it made it any better that he’d stood her up. Showing up to have no-strings sex at roughly the time you said you would was the lowest possible bar; why were high school boys such trash?
At least she amused herself, Veronica thought, pitching her saran wrap and discarded wrappers neatly into the garbage. She hesitated one last second in the doorway, in case he was about to miraculously appear from thin air, then headed in the direction of the library. She was not feeling up to answering questions about where she’d been and why she was back.
She had a quiz fifth period, of course, but it was History; she knew the material even distracted. Mrs. Canning carried on intractably with her usual lesson plan in Biology no matter how many students she had to reprimand, which Veronica would normally have appreciated, especially since Jeremy and Cole were the recipients of those reprimands at least as often as anyone else. Today it was hard to appreciate.
Spanish, at least, was a low-effort class – essentially a craft project under the thin guise of holiday vocabulary. At least Sra. Hockley hadn’t resorted to the Spanish-dubbed Christmas movies yet.
“I borrowed a Sharpie,” Meg said, as she deftly manoeuvred around the fiddly edges of a paper wreath with the scissors. “But you missed lunch.”
“I was busy getting stood up,” Veronica told her, with more than a little attitude. “I should have had lunch with you. Do you still have it?”
Meg freed the wreath from its paper confines and set it aside. “Here. It’s just Lizzie’s; I can give it back to her whenever.”
“Might as well do it now.” Veronica set down her own slightly hackier attempt at cutting out decorations and rescued the flag from her pencil case. She traced over the letters, noting with satisfaction that the Sharpie covered all the sub-optimal results from her previous attempts. “Perfect. Ready for deployment in January.” She handed the pen back and went back to her mildly mangled jingle bells. “Big Christmas plans?”
“The usual. My aunt visits. Lots of church-going. Mom has a bunch of charity stuff we usually help with. Then Colorado for New Year’s.”
Veronica felt very fond at the tactful generalization, but she punctured it anyway, adopting a tone of faux-awe. “Ooh, Aspen?”
“Vail,” Meg said repressively, and Veronica laughed.
“Sounds fun. Well, maybe not the church stuff? We don’t really go to church.”
“I like church,” Meg said slowly. “I liked it when I was a kid, anyway – things were a little less… strict, then. I think I’d rather go to a different church? But still go. Do not tell my parents I said that,” she added, her voice suddenly serious nearly to the point of alarm.
“I’d never. Do I look like a tattletale?”
Meg smiled, and then laughed, and then Sra. Hockley made a lackluster pass down their row, and they had to find something to talk about in Spanish.
*
Fortunately for Weevil, her better mood lasted through seventh period, so she saw him approaching after school with annoyance rather than icy disdain. He slid smoothly in front of Tanner Ludwar, cutting the other boy off from his locker so that Tanner had to backpedal to avoid running into him. There would have been consequences for that, Veronica assumed – Tanner certainly thought so, because he paled slightly and found an excuse to wander vaguely down the hall, still holding his binder.
“Oh, now he shows up,” she remarked archly without looking up, snapping her locker door shut smartly. “Unless the next words out of your mouth are, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I got run over by a snowmobile’, I don’t want to hear it.”
“In California?” Weevil said, all innocent confusion.
“You stood me up,” she said, “pal.” It was a weak epithet, but her initial instinct was to throw some Spanish slang in there, call him ése or vato or something, and that was probably… not cool. “There are about four other things I could have been doing.” She adjusted the zipper on her bag, mostly to make it look like he was an afterthought.
“Things, or guys?” he shot back, grinning as he circled her to get back into her sightline, and Veronica threw her head back and pretended to laugh, silently.
“I don’t waste my time on people who don’t respect my time,” she said, realizing too late that it was something her mom used to say when she was little. Well, Weevil wouldn’t know that, so hopefully she still sounded tough, instead of ridiculously dweeby.
“Relax,” he said, following his own advice as he leaned nonchalantly against Katie’s locker. “I had to retake a test, okay?”
“Who’s the brown-noser now?” Veronica asked him smugly.
Weevil rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, they sprung it on me, and if I kept the D I’d be failing. I’m not taking this fucking class again.”
Veronica didn’t want to care, but she couldn’t help being curious. “Which class?”
He gave her a weird look – why do you care, writ large – but after a few seconds he said, “Algebra.”
Wow. Well, that was what he got for putting it off this long; Algebra was a freshman-level class, but you could take it earlier. “You left Algebra until last year? I took it in Grade Eight.”
“Yeah, laugh it up. I had bigger things going on. And I never said last year was the first time I took it.”
The leaning had become markedly, ostentatiously casual, matching the bluff unconcern in his voice. Because of course he wouldn’t just tell her to shut up about it, not if that meant letting on that he cared. Maybe a few weeks ago she would have made a point of jabbing at that, but now she didn’t even want to. Didn’t she get any credit for being cool about his extremely dumb fashion tattoo?
She couldn’t figure out a way to get any of that out there without making it sound like she felt sorry for him, which would probably go over worse than outright derision. And, admittedly, she was judging him, more than a little, because how could it take you three tries to pass Algebra?
Or to not pass Algebra, since it sounded like he was dancing on the edge.
“Besides, I know everything I need to,” he added, leering at her, and that Veronica knew how to handle.
“Sure,” she said, rolling her eyes pointedly, and turned away from him with affected nonchalance.
“You got complaints?” he asked, pretending shocked offense.
“Yeah, my complaint is that I wasted my lunch hour.”
He laughed. “Come on, baby, don’t be like that. You know I can make it up to you.”
“Stop calling me baby,” she said firmly. She might not be holding a very firm line, but during sex it was regrettably, a turn-on. The rest of the time, it was just weird. “If you forgot my name, you could just ask. It’s Veronica.”
That got her another laugh, a surprised one. “Come on, V. Tell me you don’t want me to make it up to you.”
Veronica hesitated. As long as she was home by five, there was only her mom to notice she was late, and she was having fewer and fewer qualms about lying to Lianne these days – besides which, if someone was going to make it that easy, well…
And however much she wanted to maintain the upper hand, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about his mouth since Monday. Maybe getting him back down there would make her stop losing her actual mind. Besides, if he was the one who she was trying to make something up to, it wouldn’t be capitulation if he decided to milk it for all it was worth, right? So why should it be different for her?
You just want an excuse to let him go down on you without having to return the favour, her brain whispered, but honestly so what? He was getting what he was getting, and if he didn’t like it he could refuse, or go ask somebody else for a blowjob.
“Okay,” she said finally, like the memory of his tongue on her clit hadn’t turned her into a complete nymphomaniac in two days flat. “Fine.”
And then, for some stupid reason, she added, “Make it good and I’ll help you with Algebra.”
It wasn’t the worst thing in the world to have said – if it was tit-for-tat with something else then she had a good excuse not to reciprocate, and it was probably the tamest possible way to lord it over him that he’d failed what, twice? – but she hadn’t planned on saying it, which was distressing.
Weevil’s face almost made it worth it. Watching him struggle to hide his surprise made it hard not to grin; every time he had his expression mostly schooled, it seemed like he thought of another reason it was nuts for her to say that, and the incredulity popped out again, like an octopus that refused to be stuffed in a bucket.
He was too quick to let that actually faze him, though. “You know I always make it good.”
She almost told him to put his money where his mouth was, flushed, and then, annoyed with her own embarrassment, pushed her hair back defiantly so she couldn’t hide behind it and said, “Why are you still talking? Don’t you have anything better to do with your mouth?”
He gave her a look like she was an ice cream cone he was planning on eating, and Veronica flashed hot all over at the realization that that wasn’t as metaphorical as she’d intended. Weevil could definitely tell, because his grin widened.
“What, right here?” he asked. Veronica swatted at him and declined to answer. She opened her locker again to fish the art room key pointedly out of her pencil case and put her bag away, and Weevil raised his eyebrows pointedly at the fact that she hadn’t actually locked it.
She ignored his smugness, but it was still awkward walking next to each other. This was why lunch hour was better, she thought; they both just showed up and that was that. It seemed equally weird to make conversation, and anyway she didn’t want to be the one to break first, so she just kept pace with him, forcibly blankened her face, and tried not to think about the way her entire vagina was lighting up, making her hyperaware of every nook and cranny of her own anatomy.
When they turned the corner to the main senior locker bank, he stepped away from her, which made Veronica glance up, surprised. If anything, she would have thought it would be good for his rep to be seen with her.
Or maybe it was because Lilly’s locker was on this hall. She’d forgotten, for a second, and the thought tasted sour.
Weevil’s face was impassive, but he stopped and exchanged some excessively macho pleasantries with a kid who looked like he should have graduated five years ago, so she took the opportunity to skip ahead. At least it meant they wouldn’t have to fill the silence.
He caught her up when she was about to unlock the door, and she tossed off a quip about him being slow, because she couldn’t formulate a jibe about Lilly, or even his friend, that didn’t sound like she resented losing his attention.
Why was being mean so difficult sometimes?
“Better than being too quick,” he told her with a rakish grin and an elevated eyebrow. Veronica rolled her eyes to keep herself from smiling.
“Just get in here.”
He slid past her, deliberately too close, brushing their chests and thighs together. She huffed with deliberate exasperation, banking on him not being quite close enough to feel her pulse speeding up.
“Since you get all anxious when you don’t know where I am,” he started as Veronica kicked off her shoes, forcing her to scoff loudly at him.
“Excuse me for having better things to do than sitting around at the mercy of your substandard time management skills.”
“Yeah, well, me and my substandard time management skills have better things to do than sit around watching the first two-thirds of five different Christmas movies.”
He had a point, she admitted to herself, although outwardly she only raised a dubious eyebrow. Aside from Biology, the History quiz today and the English test tomorrow were the only important things she had going on this week. Otherwise it was all snowflakes and fluff projects.
“Starting your Christmas vacation early,” she observed. “Very Neptune. Wouldn’t want to risk hitting traffic on the way to the Hamptons.”
“Fuck you,” he said, aggrieved, as Veronica peeled off her underwear, making sure it ended up on a chair instead of the floor.
“I might have to, if you don’t show up when you’re supposed to,” she told him haughtily, and managed not to shriek when he snagged her around the waist and dragged her up against him, trapping her between his body and the nearest desk.
“Oh, yeah? Like you’re not going to be panting after me until school starts again.”
“You have a really high opinion of yourself,” Veronica said, trying not to sound breathless. “Has it occurred to you that you’re just my only option?”
“That’s not what I heard,” he told her, his mouth twitching.
“Oh, yeah?” Veronica shoved firmly at his chest so she could get enough space to wiggle up onto the desk. It ended up involving a lot of rubbing against him, and maybe she played it up because why not? She liked seeing that muscle jump in his jaw. “What did you hear?”
“A lot of things,” he said, briefly losing focus. Point to Veronica.
“Well, then I guess they must be true. I heard you carjacked Boris Isakov at gunpoint.”
Weevil snorted so violently that Veronica winced and wiped at her face, although fortunately there wasn’t actually anything to wipe. “What? Jesus Christ. Rich white kids will believe anything.”
“I didn’t say I believed it,” she told him primly.
“I didn’t say you were rich,” he retorted. “You got a secret Bentley I don’t know about?” He undid his belt one-handed, fishing a condom from his pocket with the other.
“Why, do you need extra money for Christmas shopping?” He made an annoyed face at her, so Veronica added, encouraged, “You could try getting a job. I hear they give you money for that, too, and if you get caught you don’t even go to jail.”
“I have a job,” he said, catching her entirely by surprise as he started on his pants. Belatedly, Veronica realized that this wasn’t entirely what she’d intended, but she was too taken aback to course correct.
“You have a job?”
“I work for my uncle,” he said impatiently.
Veronica goggled for a moment, before getting herself under control. She forced herself not to ask if his uncle was some kind of gangland kingpin. “Ah, so, what happened to making it up to me?”
He paused, button undone but zipper still up. “Why, did you have something specific in mind?”
She wasn’t sure if he’d planned that innocent schtick from the beginning, or if he just saw an opportunity to mess with her, but seriously, how much more explicit did she have to be? She’d said that thing about his mouth, hadn’t she? “Your memory’s not the greatest, huh?”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You want something, baby, all you have to do is ask nicely.”
Oh, no, she was not going to do this with him again. “Okay,” Veronica said with marked politeness. “Would you please follow through on our prior agreement without being such a dick about it?”
Weevil laughed outright at that, which gave her a bizarrely outsized sense of accomplishment. “You know what, fine. I’m feeling generous.” He winked. “And I might as well give you something to remember me by.”
“You’re not going to war,” Veronica said scathingly as he slapped the condom onto the desk next to her.
“Hey, I remember how nuts you went on me last time you didn’t get any for two weeks. Maybe I want to see how freaky you get if I really give you something to think about.”
He slid to his knees before she could do more than open her mouth in a vain attempt to find a retort, and then he was holding her open to lick his way up her cunt, and all that came out was a choked, desperate noise.
His mouth was as warm and wet and soft as Veronica remembered, and she grabbed for the edges of the desk to steady herself, nearly knocking the condom onto the floor. It was still heady to the point of dizziness to see him down there, and whatever he was doing down there felt soft and nibbly and almost ticklish, except that the sensation was suffusing her whole body.
She tried not to think about the way she’d imagined holding onto his head – too tempting, inappropriate – or the cockeyed dream image of Duncan down there – too weird, too distressing – but then Weevil switched to spreading her open with two fingers and slid his other hand up to toy with her clit and stroke the backs of his fingers against her thighs, and she wasn’t really thinking much of anything.
He kept going, dragging his tongue against the sides of her vulva, the more sensitive undersides of her inner lips, angling it just a little to slide under the slight overhang of protective flesh and stimulate parts of her she didn’t think even she’d ever touched.
All Veronica could hear in the moment was her own breathing, harsh and rapid and building up to a whine, until she was whispering “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” without knowing exactly when or how she’d started.
Then he swapped, tongue caressing gentle circles around her clit, fingers sliding into her and pressing against her internal walls, close to the entrance where the sensation was so much more intense. The not-quite tickling feeling increased until she was squirming against him, not sure if she was trying to get closer or away, and he had to steady her with his free hand. His fingers left a smear of dampness against her thigh, but Veronica didn’t even care, she just wanted – she just wanted –
God, look at him–!
When she came, it was so sudden and intense she almost yelped, stifling it into some kind of bizarre choking noise she would have been embarrassed of if she had any higher brain function yet. The sharp spike of pleasure faded into little waves and eddies that tingled in her skin and around her clit and deep in the pit of her stomach, even as Weevil pulled back and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He moved in closer to her, and Veronica leaned back to make room for him, but she was wobbly and half-drunk on sensation and she moved too abruptly. He stopped, miffed.
“Yeah, I remember, relax.”
She puzzled over that while he pushed his pants and boxers down and reached for the condom, before she realized she should probably be helping him. Her hands were clumsy, and Weevil laughed at her, but almost nicely. He helped her help him get the condom on, which probably defeated the purpose, but did mean she got to run her hand up and down his dick and make him groan.
Then he batted her hands away and lined himself up and slid into her. Veronica gasped with overstimulation. She didn’t know that she liked it, but it wasn’t bad, just too much.
It was only fair, though, and there was a perverse kind of pleasure in the way all her nerves were screaming at her for more, or less, or some kind of relief she probably wasn’t quite physically capable of.
Weevil pulled her closer and set a fast pace, and she wondered if he’d been as impatient all day as she had. Hopefully it hadn’t impacted his performance on that retest. She slipped her hands under the hem of his shirt and ran her fingers up and down his spine, lighter and lighter until he shivered and cursed. Then she leaned in to suck and kiss at his neck, since his mouth was currently off-limits.
Maybe that was what he’d been talking about a minute ago. Had he actually thought she’d want to kiss him after that, on Monday? She’d mostly thought he was fucking with her or something.
He caught an angle inside her that made her go “Mmm!” into the skin between his neck and shoulder, which he seemed to find both amusing and arousing. Veronica escalated by tugging gently at his earlobe with her teeth in the way she knew he liked, and then moaning when the resulting irregular jerk of his hips sent another shower of too-bright sparks through her pelvis and stomach.
She kept it up, alternating between his shoulder and neck and ear, tracing circles on his skin with her fingers when the up-and-down motion started to feel stale, until he was swearing and tightening his grip on her hips as he came.
Veronica hissed as he pulled out, still sensitive and overstimulated. She was going to have to put her underwear back on in a minute and she wasn’t positive how that was going to go.
Weevil sorted himself out, as usual, and leaned against the nearest desk to catch his breath, one palm braced flat on its surface. He looked more wrung out than usual, like he’d come almost as hard as she had, which Veronica didn’t entirely understand but was claiming partial credit for anyway.
“See you next year,” he said after a minute, shooting her something between a smirk and a grin, as if he could tell she hadn’t entirely recovered yet. Veronica rolled her eyes at him, but she couldn’t help but think, as he left, that he had a point.
Christmas break had the potential to be a real problem.
Notes:
There's a brief moment where Veronica isn't entirely enjoying what they're doing but goes ahead because she feels like she owes Weevil an orgasm in return. It's fleeting and the experience doesn't end up being unpleasant overall, but the philosophy behind her choice is not amazing.
Chapter 20: As Much Of It As You Can
Notes:
Listen, today's chapter is quite Catholic, and I am not, so it seems like a good time to reiterate that I am open to concrit. Anyway.
I also have a continuity note on this one: Feeisamarshmallow pointed out to me a little while back that in S2 Weevil does not appear to know that Patrick Fitzpatrick is the priest at St. Mary’s. Which, thank you! That was immensely worth knowing/thinking about for many reasons.
…However, when I went to revise the beginning of this chapter (since that was all I had written at that point), I realized that there was no way I could make that make sense, unless Leticia isn’t going to church at all in canon, which I honestly don’t find very likely. (The Catholic iconography in that house!) So for the purposes of this fic at the very least, it is my contention that he was fucking with Molly when he said that – it’s not like playing dumb is an uncommon strategy for him to use.
Chapter Text
Life's pain. You just have to get over as much of it as you can.
Maggie Stiefvater
The whole Christmas thing felt like it had gone incredibly fast this year. Or not the Christmas thing – Weevil’s grandma would skin him alive if she caught him throwing around inaccurate terms like that, and the actual Christmas shit in school and all the stores and whatever felt like it was right on schedule. It was Advent that had gone by in about five seconds, probably because his grandma had been too busy with work and Margarita’s family to hit all the important days, or nag him about them. Lynn Echolls used to let her come (and stay) late on those days so she could go to mass, which burned now. Lynn had always acted so magnanimous, but not enough to give an innocent woman her job back, apparently.
But no mass for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception this year. She wasn’t going to be able to make St. Stephen’s Day either, since cleaning up after two sets of spoiled rich assholes – and their bratty kids and their fifty closest, drunkest friends – meant a double shift. It wasn’t one of the big ones, a holy day of obligation, but she’d still always liked to go before, and it still pissed him off. The whole thing pissed him off, even though he should have been relieved that he got to skip the part where he got guilt-tripped for not wanting to spend an hour and a half getting lectured on violence and sin by Patrick freaking Fitzpatrick while Gus Toombs still didn’t have a fucking grave. But instead he was just antsy and annoyed.
Maybe it was that the longer he stayed away from church the bigger it loomed over his head. It wasn’t like he never went, or anything – aside from the first few months after it became clear Gus was gone for good, he’d always let his grandma browbeat him into going every month or so, and Christmas and Easter were obviously mandatory. Hell, ever since Danny had landed at their grandmother’s, he basically had to do more babysitting during church than actually listening to the sermon, especially now that Chardo was gone.
But she hadn’t been on his case about it nearly as much lately, for obvious reasons, and it had probably been a solid two months, maybe more. Anything you avoided that much got under your skin in some perverse ironic way, even if it was only half on purpose.
He’d made the mistake of trying to get a sandwich while his grandma was packing up about five weeks worth of food and a completely superfluous Bible to take to Sofia Reyes, so of course now he was chopping vegetables for her while she talked shit on the hospital chapel, which made it hard not to consider all of that.
“Eli, are you listening to me?”
“Yeah, it’s too small,” he said, even though that had been at least a minute ago.
“So why are you still cutting it that way?”
He glanced down at the tomato slices, which were thin in a fancy way, in his opinion. “To match the chapel. Which is also too small. Because I’m listening.” He widened his eyes at her in a show of sincerity, and she thwacked him on the back of the arm.
“No one wants it like that,” she told him with some annoyance.
“I’ll just put it on my sandwich, then,” he told her, meaningfully. “Unless I pass out before then from not eating.”
“You ate seventeen sopapillas this morning, you won’t need any more food until January.”
Despite himself, Weevil laughed, and Leticia scrutinized his latest slice of tomato.
“That’s better.”
He pushed the rejected slices to the side with the knife and resumed cutting. “If someone ate seventeen of your sopapillas they’d explode.” After a second, even though he knew it was a bad idea, he added, “Don’t you think Margarita already brought her a Bible, probably?”
“It’s never a bad time to be reminded…” she trailed off, gracefully eliding exactly why Sofia was in the hospital. In his opinion, being reminded of how the church and everyone she knew thought about what she’d tried to do would probably make her feel shittier, but it wasn’t like he was going to win an argument about it, even if he knew what everyone had said after Irene died. Sofia Reyes probably did too. Her own mother had said plenty of it.
“Yeah, well, I don’t know how she’s going to read two Bibles at once.” He dodged her swat without even mangling the tomato. “Especially since there’ll be no room left in the hospital once they unpack that hamper.”
“Some of it is for Julio,” she told him repressively. “Rita doesn’t have time to cook for him these days.”
He could always cook for himself, Weevil thought, but he kept it to himself. Mr. Reyes was a mess, and it wasn’t his fault his mother-in-law used to sniff at Weevil’s mother for the sin of sometimes buying frozen dinners, like that was an equal offense to having two children out of wedlock or doing six months for possession. Like anybody living in the real world had the time to make three-course traditional Mexican meals every day.
And anyway, this was America. Everyone liked pizza.
“Yeah, well, maybe I kind of wish I hadn’t given you so much extra money for groceries if I’d known it was all getting given away.”
Fuck. Great. Why the hell couldn’t he keep his mouth shut?
His grandma went still, the lines of her shoulders and arms suddenly rigid with hurt and anger. So he was an asshole, which just made him more pissed off.
“Your neighbours are suffering under the worst thing that can ever happen to someone,” she said, resuming her packing with sharp movements. “Something that drove one of them to despair in even the Lord’s power to mend. They are separated at the time of their lives when they should most be together, and the pain of another Christmas without their daughter is even worse for it, and what is it you want to do? Shut your eyes and put your hands over your ears? Look after yourself first and everyone else never? This is a community, Eli. You think Sofia’s mother was counting pennies instead of helping when your grandfather left? No, she was here with dinner twice a week so your mother and her brothers didn’t go hungry.”
Weevil stared down at the heel of the tomato, jaw clenched, shame and indignation roiling in his stomach. It wasn’t like he was living it up in some mansion on Sunrise or Arlaine.
She wasn’t finished. “But this can go back in the fridge, then. Sofia can eat hospital food for Christmas, and Julio can spend it getting drunk in his dead daughter’s room while Margarita wastes her money on overpriced muffins from the cafeteria.”
Like she couldn’t take them Christmas dinner without also bringing enough food and shit for a whole month. “I never said–”
“I’ll just ask your permission, then, every time it might do some good for someone outside this house. Eli, is it all right with you if I use the gas in my car to drive to the hospital after work instead of home? I’d like to tell Sofia Reyes that we’re all praying for her, but since she’s not family...”
“Fine,” Weevil said. “You just make sure you tell Señora Galvez exactly where the money for that came from.” It was a low blow, but he felt justified. They never talked about where the cash came from when she needed a little extra help, and he put up with the injustice of being chided for it whenever he got in trouble or came home late and battered because it wasn’t like she asked for this either, and usually he didn’t mind putting up with a little unfairness so his grandma could still feel like a good Catholic or a good parent or a law-abiding citizen, whatever it was. But Margarita Galvez had been telling everyone she could think of that he was a bad seed since he’d been about eight, and an irredeemable criminal since he was twelve, and if his grandmother thought he didn’t know what her friend had said about his mom after she died, then she was being stupid on purpose. The thought that Margarita got to eat out on the profits of a set of fancy hubcaps and a shitty Toyota Corolla that could have landed him in CYA and still maintain her moral superiority pissed him off, but not as much as the thought that, at least some of the time, his grandma agreed with her.
Ariana came barrelling in begging for another sopapilla, and it broke whatever thin string was keeping him there. He put the knife down and walked out of the kitchen.
It wasn’t like he felt any better for having said that, because why would he? Why would he feel better about anything? God fucking forbid.
He yelled at Alex on the way up to his room, which didn’t make him feel any better either, and threw himself sullenly onto his bed, still feeling equal parts angry and ashamed of himself.
It was just so fucked from top to bottom. What happened to Marisol was fucked, and his piece-of-shit grandfather taking off was fucked, and his mom getting shafted no matter how hard she tried and then dying had been fucked. What Marisol’s mom had done was fucked (although not as much as what Irene had done, since she still had a kid, and while he was on the subject, Tio Victor taking off on her and Danny like a fucking culero was fucked), but it was even more fucked no one had done anything to stop her from getting so bad she took all those pills in the first place. Claudia having to drop out of school had been fucked, and Chardo’s stupid side hustle with Caitlin Ford had been fucked, and every single thing that had happened with Lilly.
Tania ditching her kids was fucked, and whatever had happened to Gus was fucked, and it was even more fucked that absolutely nobody, not one single person who wasn’t Felix or Jenifer or their mom, gave a shit. Boosting cars to pay the bills was fucked the same way shoplifting so he could eat when he was ten had been fucked, and Margarita Galvez judging him for any of it when she was living off her daughter and her son-in-law was fucked. The fact that he’d gotten six months of juvie for dealing with Dave when the cops had done fucking shit to stop him beating on Claudia for three years was fucked. Ofelia watching her dad hit her mom was fucked. Every single thing that had ever, ever happened to Ariana was fucked.
And blaming his grandma for any of it was fucked too, and now he was mad at himself all over again, which was even more fucked-up.
Weevil punched the bedframe, which hurt his hand and didn’t even really make a noise because the angle was bad, so he sat up and kicked the bedside table instead.
Merry goddamn Christmas.
He could only sulk for so long without something to do, so he picked up the book that had fallen when he kicked the table and flipped through it, still too angry and churned-up inside to really focus. He couldn’t remember why he’d been reading it anyway; it was just some middle school book he’d never taken back to the library after eighth-grade graduation. Something about buried treasure and juvenile detention that he’d never finished because even though the hole-digging thing was pretty stupid the camp the main character got sent to had still hit a little too close to home back then.
He put it back on the bookshelf and dug around until he hit on some paperback bestseller he’d picked up a while back, the one by that history guy who’d turned out to be a fraud. He couldn’t remember if he’d finished it or not, but he did remember that it was the kind of stupid you could enjoy with your brain turned off. And also that it had pissed off the church because the main character was descended from Jesus or something, which scratched a petty, vindictive part of his brain. He flopped onto the bed with it, and ignored Danny banging on his door halfway through the first chapter. The kids could get their own lunch. It wasn’t hard, and he wasn’t their fucking mother.
The banging made it hard to focus, but after a minute Danny gave up and thumped down the stairs, complaining loudly about how Weevil wouldn’t answer the door. So maybe their grandma hadn’t left yet. Whatever. He didn’t care. If she wanted to waste her time before work at the hospital or not, it wasn’t his problem.
By the time he was mostly finished the first chapter, he’d pretty much made up his mind to go cruise around for a bit. The kids could handle themselves, and even if he didn’t find some opportunity just begging for him to take advantage of it or anyone he could take his feelings out on, a ride would clear his head. Maybe he’d skip rounding anybody up and just head for the highway.
He went out through the kitchen. He’d never gotten anything to eat, after all, and his bike was parked by the side of the house; it’s barely farther to go out the back than the front door. There was some kind of serving dish on the counter that his grandma must have left behind, but it wasn’t until he shut the fridge door, disgruntled but not entirely sure what he’d been looking for, that he saw there was a piece of paper on top of it.
For a second he resisted, just out of stubbornness, then went over to look. It was one of the cut-up squares of scrap paper she used for grocery lists, folded in half so it looked like a little place-card from a fancy banquet.
Eli.
He flipped it open reluctantly, but there was nothing inside. Not a note so much as a warning to the kids, maybe, so he lifted the lid on the container.
It was a sandwich. Extra ham, lettuce, four or five paper-thin slices of tomato.
*
Veronica had spent some years looking forward to the Sheriff’s Department Christmas party and some years dreading it. It was pretty obvious, in retrospect, what the common denominator was.
Not that dreading it kept her from throwing herself fully into helping with the decorations. It got her out of the house, right? Draping some tinsel artfully along the bannisters and through the slats of the duty desk didn’t carry any of the baggage that decorating at home would have, and none of the deputies knew her well enough to see through her semi-sarcastic exaggerated holiday cheer. Cliff McCormack might have been able to, but she’d truly enjoyed annoying him by dialing the perkiness up to eleven, so for a brief moment there hadn’t been anything for him to see through – and then his client du jour had started throwing things, so that had been the end of that.
She hadn’t been left entirely on her own, of course – one of the deputies she hadn’t met before had jumped at the opportunity to help her. She wasn’t sure if the draw was her specifically, or if he just wanted something less boring to do than paperwork. He’d been pretty flirty until he found out she was, one, still in high school, and, two, his boss’s daughter.
Now he kept glancing at her with rueful embarrassment, but he hadn’t bailed entirely. Which was nice, actually: he wasn’t bad as eye candy went, and keeping up a good front turned out to be less exhausting when she had someone to play off of. Inga was never much help in that regard.
She had brought cookies to the station, though. Which Veronica refused to think of as anything but a positive as she crunched her way through shortbread and springerle and pointedly didn’t think about the ones waiting at home, which would probably not be eaten while decorating to Christmas carols. (Or worse, which would, while they all desperately tried to pretend things were normal, or while her mom sang along too loud and failed to notice no one else was dancing with her. If they were lucky she wouldn’t take the tree down with her this year, the way she had when Veronica was nine.)
Regardless, it would still be more awkward than doing all that with a guy she’d semi-effectively shot down less than ten minutes ago.
“So do you have a boyfriend?” he asked, handing her an ornament shaped like Santa’s head. Veronica shot him a look and he spread his hands innocently. “What? I’m just asking. Can’t I make conversation?”
It should have sounded defensive, but his slow, almost lazy way of speaking and the hint of a self-deprecating glint in his eye made it somehow charming instead.
“No,” Veronica said, hanging the ornament on a lamp fixture that looked sturdy enough to hold it. She wasn’t entertaining any serious thoughts about Deputy Leo-It’s-My-Name-But-Also-My-Sign, but it was… nice, to have a normal guy think she was cute and worth talking to, so she didn’t add anything to shut him down.
“No?”
“No.” She hopped down from the chair she was on. “I am one hundred percent off high school boys.”
“Fair enough.” He passed her the box of decorations while he moved the chair back to its usual place.
“And older guys are either unavailable or total creeps, because what twenty-five-year-old wants to go out with a teenager?”
“For the record,” he said, in that same unhurried, unconcerned way, taking the box back, “I’m twenty.”
“Who said I was talking about you?”
She got a lazy grin in response. “Ouch! I’m wounded.”
Veronica smiled back in spite of herself. “You were really angling for that ‘creep’ label, huh?”
“Now, listen. Even I’m not enough of an idiot to date my boss’s daughter, even if she wasn’t in high school.” He handed her a string of those thin, twinkly Christmas lights. “Now, flirting with my boss’s daughter on the other hand…” He held one of his actual hands up, tilting it back and forth slightly. “That I think I can work with.”
Veronica laughed. It was hard not to. He was clearly being charming on purpose, but he wasn’t hiding that, either. In a weird way it reminded her of Weevil, not that he was ever charming – deceitful (or manipulative, maybe?) but weirdly straight-forward about it.
Maybe that was partly to blame for how warm and faintly tingly her skin was – although that jawline and lazy smile was doing a lot of heavy lifting, as was the fact that it had been nearly a full week since the last time she’d had sex. (He had nice hair, too, dark and thick. It was good to know she still liked that in a guy.)
Of course, becoming conscious of it immediately catapulted her arousal from a low-grade, vaguely pleasant background noise to one of the main thoughts in her brain. It was almost too bad, because she’d been having fun with this whole… thing, but there was no way anything was coming of it for a whole variety of reasons.
Maybe a real slut would have taken a shot at hooking up with him anyway, she thought, trying to find some vague amusement in the situation – but she didn’t want to get him fired even if she probably could have talked him into at least making out with her, if she’d been willing to put in a real, solid effort. It was illegal for him to have sex with her anyway (thank you to Weevil for that tidbit), and her best guess was that he probably wouldn’t go that far regardless.
It made her feel weird – a bit of meaningless flirting with a hot guy was one thing, but doing it while you were half-fantasizing about him was a different story, and she’d apparently had too many illicit hookups in the last couple months to keep her mind completely free of that sort of thing, now that she was suddenly aware of just how sensitive her nipples and the skin on the inside of her thighs was now.
“Almost finished!” she said briskly as she did her best to secure the string of lights above the peak-in window to the casual interrogation room. It fell down in the middle and Leo laughed at her.
“Here,” he said, snagging a tape dispenser from the nearest desk and making one of those little loops that left only the sticky side exposed.
The tape was a little lightweight for the task assigned to it, but Veronica got the lights in place and secured them at an angle that meant most of the actual weight was still resting on the upper lintel of the window, and it stayed. At least for now. If it fell down while someone was interrogating a suspect… well, that would actually be pretty funny. She was disclaiming all responsibility for it, though. They should have sprung for one-way glass instead of regular.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Christmas achieved?”
“I think we did okay,” he told her after a long moment of consideration, and held up a hand. Veronica high-fived it, trying not to think about how warm his palm was.
“I should see if my dad’s ready to go,” she said, meaning their lunch plans.
“Abandoning me.” He shook his head in mock disappointment. “I should have known you were fickle.”
Even if she’d been inclined to take him seriously – which she wasn’t – it would have been impossible with that smile giving him away.
“Got any reasons I should stay?” she asked him, arching an eyebrow. It couldn’t hurt to have a little fun.
“Inga’s cookies,” he told her, which actually won him a few points. But secretly.
“We have some at home,” Veronica informed him smugly.
“Ah, foiled again!” He snapped his fingers, still grinning at her. “I’ll think of something next time.”
“I may, occasionally, be tempted by popcorn balls,” she admitted. “But you didn’t hear it from me.”
“That would be good to know if I had any idea how to make popcorn balls.”
“Then let this be a lesson in broadening your horizons.” She patted him on one uniform-clad shoulder as she walked away, leaving him with the mostly-empty box of decorations. He could decide where to put the mangled pipe-cleaner pinecone reindeer that somehow never quite died, no matter how bent the pipe cleaners got. Veronica thought she might have been responsible for one of them, when she was little, but the whole abominable herd didn’t have much reason for being there. Whatever children had cheerfully contributed them after community events past were long since past caring (or remembering) whether the sheriff’s department kept their googly-eyed spawn, and yet the ornaments remained.
Presumably whoever eventually broke down and actually threw them out would be cursed for always and eternity.
Her dad was shrugging into his jacket when she stuck her head into his office. “Hi, honey. How goes the decorating?”
“Oh, I think we managed to avoid maiming anyone this year,” Veronica said breezily. “Your new deputy makes a good improvised crane, but he doesn’t have much initiative.”
“I’ll put that on his performance report.” He adopted a serious voice. “Deputy D’Amato: doesn’t have much initiative, but on the other hand, he’s tall.”
“I abrogate all responsibility for work-related matters,” she told him.
“SAT word?”
“Are you suggesting the faculty of Neptune High teaches to the test?” She pressed a hand over her heart in feigned shock. “A test that could inflate their academic standing among the rich and famous?”
Her dad chuckled. “Let’s get you some fuel for that cynicism, shall we?”
“A cynic cannot live on Christmas cookies alone,” Veronica agreed. “You can tell me what you think of the decorations.”
He nodded approvingly as they left the office. “Very festive.” His mouth twitched as he observed Deputy D’Amato holding one of the cursed pinecone reindeer up to his eye-level and scrutinizing it as if they were having a staring contest. “Good job, Leo!”
Leo lowered the ornament. “Thanks, boss.” He waited until Keith was looking the other way to wink at Veronica. She rolled her eyes for the sake of form, but she smiled – or maybe it was the other way around. But regardless. Today could have gone worse.
*
It was definitely a waste of her money, Veronica thought. She should not have bought them. What was she even going to use batteries like this for, unless she dug that Tamagotchi Lilly had given her a few years back out of whatever part of her closet it was gathering dust in and voluntarily chose to spend a giant chunk of her time cleaning up digital poop coils and feeding a pretend animal pizza until it inevitably died because she’d spent her afternoon reading instead of pressing tiny buttons.
If she was going to waste her money on tiny annoying circular batteries to put in something Lilly had given her, she might as well use them for the original purpose.
And then what? She was probably ruining her rebellion credentials (not to mention her slut credentials) by being so precious, but an actual vibrator felt different somehow.
(Well, of course it did; it was metal and silicone, and her fingers didn’t vibrate. Ba-dum-tish, she was here all day. Why be mature when you could make a joke about it?)
There was a knock on the door and she jumped and shoved the pack of batteries under her pillow. They were completely out of sight when her mom pushed the door open, but she was too flustered to act normal.
Lianne frowned, interrupting whatever she’d been about to say. “Are you okay, honey?”
“Yep!” Veronica said, feeling like a stereotype from a bad teen comedy. She forced a smile. “Just… thinking. Deeply, apparently.”
There was a brief moment where she thought her mom was going to ask what she was thinking about, and she silently begged her not to – but when Lianne’s expression flickered and she clearly thought better of it, it left Veronica with a sour taste in her mouth. They all knew what was going on; why should her mom, of all people, get to be a coward about it?
“Well, do you want to come down and get started on the tree? We can put some tinsel on the bannisters if you like, listen to that pop-Christmas station your dad hates. What do you say? I’ll make hot chocolate,” she added, smiling.
Not eggnog, Veronica noted. Instead of being reassuring it just felt like another dodge. It wasn’t like you couldn’t doctor hot chocolate with Baileys.
“I sort of did the department Christmas stuff this morning, so I’m all decorated out,” she said. She tried to soften the words with a rueful smile and a shrug, hating herself a little for letting her mom off the hook even as she felt guilty for her own resentment.
“Oh.” Lianne looked disappointed. “Well, I tell you what, I’ll start with the hall, and if you change your mind, we’ll still have the tree. And I’ll make you some hot chocolate either way.”
Veronica smiled tightly, not willing to cosign that by agreeing outright but not quite able to reject it, either. “I’ll take mine straight up,” she said, swallowing hard when Lianne flinched. It had been meant as a dig, not a test, and she hadn’t even known she was going to say it. But she wasn’t exactly surprised, was she? “No marshmallows.”
“Sure, honey.” Her mom hovered briefly in the doorway, like she was going to say something else. But she didn’t.
Once she was gone, Veronica flopped onto the bed on her back, her head sinking satisfyingly into the pillows. Well, that was one way to kill your libido. It was probably for the best, anyway – what would she have done if her mom had come upstairs fifteen minutes later? The very, very best scenario would still mean having to explain why she was in bed in the middle of the day, and any buzzing would have been an absolute game over.
With a sigh, she rescued the batteries from beneath her head and shoved them into her ‘weird clothes’ drawer, under the rainbow toe socks she’d gotten in her stocking a few years ago and the underwear with the lace that was too scratchy to wear. At least everything would be in the same place if she changed her mind.
She debated reading for a bit and rejected the idea along with that of getting a head start on classwork for after break (how much more ahead could she get, anyway?), finally settling on opening her laptop. She wasn’t in the mood for your standard mindless web surfing, but she might be able to kill some time on one of those goofy Christmas-themed games that always seemed to pop up at this time of year, or find the kind of poorly-punctuated inspirational articles that served the same purpose for people who wanted to seem less frivolous. Maybe it would make her feel better – or at least she could make fun of it in her head, which would probably also make her feel better.
The inspirational Christmas nonsense was a bust, but throwing snowballs at jerky Flash-animated elves was actually surprisingly fun and cathartic. She hit Santa on purpose a few times, even though it lost points, because the staticky, “What in the Sam Hill!” that resulted amused her.
There was something to be said for primitive snow-splatter graphics and unrealistic sound effects, it turned out.
The faint strains of Christmas music from downstairs indicated that her mom had gone ahead with her plans, which was a good sign, probably, but having to do the calculus at all just made Veronica tired. She tried to frame it as a relief that the whole decorating event wouldn’t get dragged up again until she was forced into a fight or into going along with a painfully insincere expression of holiday spirit.
The worst part was that she really did want some hot chocolate. It felt silly and juvenile and ridiculous, because maybe some part of her was making it subconsciously symbolic or heavy with meaning the way these things always were when you looked back on them, but there was an immature, petty part of her that just wanted hot chocolate, and was mad she’d done herself out of marshmallows just to make a point.
Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world to go down just for a bit. She was still full from lunch, but she could manage one more cookie. To go with the hot chocolate. It wasn’t capitulation if she didn’t hang any ornaments, right?
Veronica sighed and shut the computer. She honestly had no idea if staying upstairs was the safe, responsible thing to do or if it would just mean being petty and immature. If going down made her the bigger person, willing to put in the effort to get things back on the right foot, or just the stupider person, jumping at the same tired bait for the thousandth time.
She didn’t even know what she wanted to do.
In a perfect world – even a slightly more okay one – she’d want to go downstairs. She’d probably already be there, laughing with her mom over the more outlandish Christmas decorations and wrapping tinsel around her neck like a scarf. Maybe trying for something a little closer to that ideal was progress, aspirational. Or maybe it was just naïve.
There was always the one tried-and-true standby. Veronica got up and grabbed her jacket off the back of her desk chair. “Mom,” she called down the stairs. “I’m taking Backup for a walk.”
*
Weevil was leaning against the counter to attack some leftover pizza when his grandma cornered him. He really should have seen it coming, but he’d been lulled into a false sense of security by how hectic the last month had been. If he’d bothered to think about it practically instead of vanishing introspectively up his own ass and then getting distracted by their stupid fight, and then relief that it was over, he’d have known a less-than-typically-observant Advent meant jack shit when it came to Christmas.
“You’re coming with us tomorrow?” she asked, somehow giving the impression that she was continuing and existing conversation.
Weevil had his mouth full. Of course he did. He suspected she’d done that on purpose.
He made a point of chewing and swallowing while she regarded him impatiently, then finally said, “Coming where?”
“Eli.”
“Kind of late for Christmas shopping.”
“Eli.”
“Mm?” He blinked at her, innocently. “I was gonna sleep in. It’s the weekend.”
“It’s Friday,” she told him, lips pursed.
“Which is the weekend.”
She swatted at the air in his general direction to demonstrate annoyance. “It’s Christmas, Eli. You’re going to spend it sleeping instead of at church with your family?”
“Christmas is Saturday,” he pointed out. “Tomorrow’s not even an obligation.”
His grandma’s pursed lips became more severe. “And Sundays are, but I don’t see you at church every week, do I?”
“Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place,” he offered cheekily, pre-emptively ducking. “Besides, I don’t hear you complaining when Claudia’s working and you need to leave Ariana with somebody.”
Ariana acted up in church, or threw tantrums about going, enough that even their grandmother didn’t bother trying to drag her there anymore. Christmas was an exception – even last year, when she’d whined through the whole service.
“If you want to help me with the children, you can come to mass,” she said, neatly check-mating him.
Weevil grinned. He appreciated a deft twist, and he’d been half-meaning to come anyway. It had been ages since he’d been to church two days in a row, but maybe it would buy him some credit and he’d be good until Easter. “Don’t know what the point is, then. It’s not like I’m going to absorb the sermon.”
She shot him a sharp look, but he could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She already knew she’d won. “I’ll settle for getting you there.”
He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and kissed her temple, even as she waved him off. “I know you’re lying. It never ends there.”
“Get off and let me fix dinner,” she told him with mostly-feigned irritation. “If your church clothes are at the bottom of your dirty laundry, so help me…”
“It’s not even Christmas, I can wear jeans.” He ducked away before she could read him the riot act on that one and fished another piece of pizza out of the box, balancing his half-eaten one on top of it.
“Ay, were you born in a barn?” His grandma snagged a plate from the drying rack and shoved it forcibly into his free hand. “Get out of here before I take a wooden spoon to you.”
“You’d never,” he retorted. “You need that for cooking.”
She called a few dire threats about withholding dinner after him as he escaped into the hall and up the stairs, but Weevil wasn’t bothered. She hadn’t tried sending him to bed without dinner since he was seven, and even then she’d deliberately looked the other way when Claudia snuck him an apple and a sleeve of crackers, but these days she didn’t even follow through when it was the kids. Danny had been grounded to his room for a week when he’d been caught stealing, but she’d still taken him plain pasta or a peanut butter sandwich every night.
Or maybe that was just because she suspected Danny had actually gone properly hungry after his dad left. Irene had not exactly been keeping things together even then.
Most of the pizza was gone by the time he got upstairs, but he gnawed on the crusts while he wiped his other hand on his jeans and dug through the bottom drawer of his dresser. The good pants he could wear two days in a row, but he’d need two decent-enough shirts, and he was always forgetting which one had the tear down one armpit right up until all the other ones were dirty and it was laid out for the next day. His grandma would fix it if he asked her to, but he only ever remembered when things were crazy and she was already doing five things at once.
The blue one was too small now, and he hated the dark grey one because it always made him feel like he was going to a funeral, but there was a red shirt in the regular drawer that had a collar and buttoned at the top. It was good enough for tomorrow, anyway, even if it did have short sleeves. And then the dark green button-down Claudia had bought him last year, for the day after – look at him, the fucking spirit of Christmas.
He stuck his hands inside both of them quickly, checking for the tear, even though he’d worn the red one pretty recently because it made an impression with his motorcycle jacket. All good. It would show up at some inconvenient point in the future, but at least all he had to do tomorrow was get up early enough to shower.
His mom had used to let him wear normal clothes to church, which half the congregation did anyway. Of course, she hadn’t made him go every freaking week either, which his grandma had until he’d put his foot down after Gus disappeared.
He’d actually taken his bike up to Pan, after the first few months, sat in on a couple services there, thinking it would be okay when he didn’t have to stare up at a freaking Fitzpatrick behind the goddamn lectern. And it had prevented the constantly welling rage that had left him sitting there with clenched fists, teetering on the edge of jumping up and shouting at the priest for the entire hour and a half service, that had nearly choked him the one and only time he’d tried to go back to St. Mary’s in that first six months – but it hadn’t made him feel any less snarled up inside. It was just easier, to do what he had to do, make the decisions he had to make, when he wasn’t always getting put on the back foot, having to run it all through the what does God think test on top of everything else.
Besides, Gus had gone to church every week from the time he was four, and what had it gotten him? He might have been a violent, sanctimonious motherfucker sometimes, but he’d been more than sincere about religion. If God couldn’t be bothered to return the favour, he could have at least bothered to make sure Gus’s body turned up. Gus would’ve hated knowing he wasn’t in the graveyard at St. Mary’s.
Some people managed to figure it out. Felix went to church as much as his brother had and it never seemed to give him a moment’s pause about the shit they did. The head of the PCH before Gus had been Damien, who’d talked a big game about God being dead, but before him, when Weevil had just been a punk on a stolen ten-speed, the big boss had been Endo, who’d allegedly put a guy in the hospital one time for cursing out the Virgin Mary. The contradiction hadn’t been enough to stop him from going to church or from slamming that guy’s head into the bar in Good Times so hard he gave him brain damage. Last Weevil had heard he was two years into his second strike and presumably as devout as ever.
And then there was all that other shit, fucked-up priests and being bitchy about women who had kids without being married and sending gay people to hell over basically nothing, and all the other messed up shit in the world that no one was fixing. Weevil didn’t know any gay people, so he wasn’t overly invested in that one, and he didn’t know anyone who’d been molested by a priest – but there were plenty of regular child molesters to make up the difference, and his mom had gotten shit from the church crowd every day of her life. But she’d liked going. He’d liked it, when he was a kid, liked all the stories and the traditions and the idea that God was going to make everything okay. Not that that had ever happened.
Some days he didn’t know if he loved the church and hated God, or loved God but hated the church, or if the problem was just him. After Gus it had felt like the second thing for a while, so he’d gotten that cross done so he could still have something, even if he never went back into a church. He didn’t regret it, exactly. Not like the one he’d let Lilly talk him into getting. But he’d gone back later and gotten them to add the memorial to his mother, because it felt like that made it cleaner somehow, less grimy and complicated.
But things faded and you made compromises, and here he was two years later, gritting his teeth through one of Father Fitzpatrick’s sermons every couple of months to make his grandma happy and keep her off his back. Mostly he zoned out and thought about his mom, or his childhood, or the way the light was hitting the stained-glass windows – or the way he was going to be hitting Alex and Danny, if they didn’t stop squirming and punching each other. In a weird way it wasn’t so bad.
One of the boys bounced off the bedroom door and jerked him out of his thoughts. Weevil barked, “Hey!” more to keep up appearances than anything, jumping up and yanking the door open. Alex, who’d presumably pushed him, was making good his escape, but Danny was slightly winded and still within grabbing distance, so Weevil grabbed.
“Alex pushed me!” Danny whined immediately, squirming.
“Nobody likes a snitch,” Weevil told him ominously. “Now quit whatever bullshit you’re doing and go get your stuff ready for tomorrow. You’re too old to be making Grandma pick your clothes. It’s embarrassing.”
“I don’t make her, she just does.”
“Then don’t show up downstairs in dirty jeans for fucking church, moron. Go get your shit together.” He shoved Danny more or less gently in the direction of the boys’ room. “That means sleeves,” he yelled after his cousin.
Alex was probably a lost cause by now as far as catching him went, but then Alex actually liked looking nice, even though he pretended he didn’t. There was at least a sixty percent chance that he’d show up looking presentable on the first try.
It was probably going to be a while still before dinner was ready, so Weevil abandoned his plate to check on Ariana. He’d get grumbled at for leaving it, but it was just crumbs – it wasn’t like it was going to mold.
Ariana was on the floor playing with her mermaid Barbie, what looked like a math assignment lying neglected on her bedside table.
“Hey,” he said. “Your teacher give you homework for over the break?”
“Uh-huh,” she told him, making the Barbie swim through the air.
“That’s evil.”
“It’s only one page,” she told him, as the Barbie hid under her knee. Even cross-legged that didn’t leave a lot of space, and the tail stuck out. “It’s adding. I’m good at adding.”
“Yeah?” It didn’t look done. He leaned over to see it. “Did you erase this?”
“Yeah.” She looked up at him like he was finally worthy of her full attention. “The sharks are gonna get you.”
“Is she hiding from sharks?”
Ariana nodded solemnly, and he ruffled her hair. “How come you erased your homework?” Math wasn’t exactly his strong suit – not in school, anyway – but he could probably help her with addition if he had to. If it was some weird emotional thing, though…
“I was finished.” She squished her mouth up in disapproval. “The sharks are gonna get you.”
“I’m not scared of sharks,” Weevil said. Kids could tell when you were blowing them off, so he bared his teeth and pretended to put some energy into it. “I got a whale.”
“Whales don’t eat sharks,” Ariana said severely.
“This one does. He’s a… whale shark!”
Weevil actually wasn’t sure if a whale shark was a whale or a shark, but it made Ariana shriek and giggle, and while her guard was down he tried again. “Why’d you erase your homework?”
“I finished it.”
“I think you’re supposed to leave it finished.”
“There’s only one page,” she told him, like he was being slow. “I have to erase it to do it tomorrow. I did all the problems already.”
“You erased it so you can do extra math?” Freakish, horrifying, but not his problem. “Okay, well, speaking of tomorrow, how about Ariel helps you pick out your clothes for church.”
“She’s not Ariel! She’s Melody!”
He rolled his eyes. That thing had a different name every week. “Fine, Melody can help you.”
“Melody doesn’t like church.”
“She’s not going, you’re going.” He watched her squirm and set her jaw in petulant stubbornness, and decided it was worth breaking out the strict tone before she got herself actually worked up and stopped listening. “We’re all going, so you better be ready on time or Grandma’ll leave you behind.”
“She won’t,” Ariana said, but her tone wavered uncertainly.
He raised his eyebrows for effect. “You better pick something out to make sure.”
She got up, but then just stood there, scuffing her foot on the floor. “I don’t wanna go to church.”
Weevil eyed her sternly. “Why not? Everybody goes to church.”
It was a lie, obviously, but that kind of thing had worked on him when he was a kid. Not when he was her age, but definitely when he’d been younger.
She stared at the scratchy brown carpeting. “I don’t wanna.”
“I don’t wanna either, but I don’t throw tantrums about it.” He poked her in the arm, gently despite his frustration. “Why do you always do this, huh? You know it’s Christmas. We gotta.” Maybe it was time to deploy the you’ll make baby Jesus cry strategy his mom had used when she got really desperate. “It’s Jesus’s birthday. He’ll be sad if we don’t go to his birthday party.”
Mildly sacrilegious, but if it got the job done then what was one more sin?
Ariana side-eyed him. “How come we get presents if it’s his birthday party?”
“Because he’s very generous and he wants people to give each other presents instead. Come on, you can wear a pretty dress.”
That should have at the very least gotten her attention, but she didn’t so much as flinch in the direction of the dresser. “He doesn’t want me to come.”
“What?” Weevil didn’t know what to make of that. Kids weren’t supposed to figure out that they could do the ‘I know what Jesus wants’ thing back at you until they were at least twice her age.
Ariana hugged herself. “He doesn’t like me.”
“Jesus loves everybody,” he said slowly, barely registering the weirdness of having those words come out of his mouth, because it was dawning on him that maybe he was out of his depth after all.
She didn’t say anything for a minute, rocking a little on her toes while he tried to think of what else to say. Then, finally, she said, “But I’m bad.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Weevil said – but he could see immediately that he was losing her, so he course-corrected to, “It doesn’t matter, anyway. He loves bad people too. I do bad stuff all the time and he still loves me.”
It was embarrassing that saying that actually made him feel good, for a second.
Ariana looked hopeful, but then her face fell. “God’s gonna hit me with lightning.”
Yeah, he knew where that came from. “Did your mom tell you that?” What a fucking bitch. If he ever got his hands on her…
He tried to swallow the anger, though, at least until Ariana wasn’t watching. “Listen, you should’ve said something sooner. I know how to handle this stuff.” He sat down on the bed and patted the covers next to him until she sat down too. “First of all – loophole number one. Bad stuff kids do doesn’t count. You’re not supposed to, but it doesn’t go on your permanent record until you’ve got double digits going on. So even if you did do something bad, you’re okay until you’re as old as Alex. Okay?”
She chewed thoughtfully on her lip, so he went on, “Number two. God doesn’t hit people with lightning unless they do something really bad. You basically have to kill somebody.” He pretended to be concerned. “Did you kill somebody?”
“No!”
“Okay, you’re fine, then.” He couldn’t tell if she was buying it, so it was time for the big guns, the ones that were probably cheating and definitely Biblically unapproved. “Trick number three: You can stick right next to me. I’ve done way more bad stuff than you, and I’m taller. So I’ll definitely get hit by lightning first, and you’ll be fine.”
Ariana looked at him with huge eyes. “I don’t want you to die!”
“Well, nothing will probably happen. I go to church like six, seven times a year and I’ve never even gotten electrocuted. But if it does, I got you.” He made a fist and held it out. “Come on, it’ll make Grandma happy.”
She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a while, but right when he thought he’d lost, she made a fist and knocked her knuckles against his, just the way the boys did when he was throwing them a bone and letting them act tough. It was probably stupid to be proud of her for fist-bumping him. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“No yelling tomorrow, right?”
“Okay.”
“You gonna pick out a dress?”
She grinned, finally. “Yeah!” She slid off the bed and ran to the dresser, but then hesitated. “Weeva?”
“Hm.”
“What did you do that’s bad?”
“Stole stuff,” Weevil said, candidly. He didn’t need to scare her.
Ariana looked relieved and disappointed at the same time. “That’s not really bad.”
“Yeah?” He got up from the bed, trying to play it casual. “What did you do that’s so bad?”
She stared at him with big eyes. “I’m just bad.”
He should probably have pushed at it more, but he wasn’t sure he could take the answer. And what good was it, forcing her to drag all that shit back up? “I don’t think so.” He crossed the room (it took about two steps) and kissed the top of her head. “You’re my favourite cousin. Don’t tell anybody, though. So you can’t be that bad.”
*
The church was already half as full as it was going to get when they slipped in, the closer pews occupied by the legitimately devout and the ones who based their entire personality on impressing the priest and probably people who just liked getting up early even when they didn’t have to. Weevil would have been fine with the back, but his grandma steered them to one halfway down the aisle, and he managed to shuffle Ariana in in front of him, while she put herself firmly between Danny and Alex before joining them. Danny ended up next to Weevil, which was probably a good call. Alex got distracted too easily and started whispering to whoever was next to him, but even he wasn’t foolhardy enough to try that with their grandma. Danny, on the other hand, liked church, when he wasn’t getting stirred up by external forces. He wouldn’t be leaning around and distracting Ariana, or pestering Weevil.
Ariana was fussing with her little sash and didn’t appear to need immediate hand-holding, so he took a second to glance around. Plenty of their neighbours were there, obviously, Ric and Manolo’s mother without either of her sons, Mrs. Finlayson his kindergarten teacher, Carmen Ruiz from school and her family. Claudia wouldn’t be there – she had to work, and apparently Andre had better things to do than bring Ofelia to church – but Thumper, who was weirdly observant, was parked on one of the front pews. Weevil knew a plenty of devout people who didn’t really go to church, and a decent number of people who did go who were just going through the motions, but he didn’t know anyone else who showed up for church three times a week without ever bothering about any of the rest of it. It wasn’t like there was no other way for Thumper to get out of the house these days, but whatever. You got into habits, maybe.
He could see a few others: Javi, Bootsy in the back, no surprises there, and Felix, who had apparently shown up without Jenifer or Teresa and who jolted in surprise when he saw Weevil.
It hadn’t been that long, Jesus Christ.
Before he could spend any time figuring out what the hell was going on with Felix’s little shamefaced wave, Ariana was tugging on his arm and complaining that she’d untied her bow, and then he had to spend the next ten minutes fucking around with her dress, because no matter how he tied it, it apparently wasn’t good enough.
It was almost a relief when the sermon started, although he forced himself to pay closer attention than usual. He’d already decided that if Father Fitzpatrick said one word about hellfire, he was going to suddenly need to take Ariana to the bathroom, urgently – but it was the usual Christmas forgiveness, love-thy-neighbour stuff, and she seemed okay, mostly. She was fidgeting with her sash so much that she untied the bow again within five minutes, which made him want to smack his head on the pew in front of them. But just this once it could slide by.
It took about forty-five minutes for her to start squirming in a more intentional way. She wasn’t used to sitting through church anymore, he reminded himself.
Not that he was, either, but high school set you up pretty good for that.
Still, he’d put himself in charge of her, so he leaned over and whispered, “Hang in there and I bet we can steal some chocolate after Grandma goes to work.”
“You shouldn’t talk about stealing in church!” she whispered back, too loud.
“Shh.” He reached over to fix her sash again, mostly as a distraction. “Maybe even a candy cane.”
“I want buñuelos,” she told him, a little bit quieter.
“Nah, you know those are for dessert tonight.” Ariana pouted at him, but she didn’t have Ofelia’s skill at subterfuge, so it just made him smile. “If you get bored, look at the windows for a bit.”
She sighed, but she kept quiet, leaning against him and staring at the stained glass. He probably should have nudged her upright, told her to act her age, but he didn’t. The truth was that he didn’t really mind. The kids would probably be driving him out of his mind as soon as Leticia left for work, but Christmas Eve dinner always meant gorging himself on Christmas Eve salad and beef birria, and then once he made it through church tomorrow he’d get to see how Ariana liked to new Barbie he got her, and pretend to love whatever godawful thing Alex had painted for all of them, and smell the ham cooking all afternoon.
He glanced over at Danny, who was still listening attentively to the sermon, and accidentally caught his grandma’s eye as she finished firmly redirecting Alex’s attention. She smiled, and reached around Danny to squeeze his shoulder.
Honestly, sometimes this really wasn’t so bad.
Chapter 21: Simple Lust
Notes:
I'm happy to say I finally got to really kick off my favourite ridiculous sub-plot for this fic. (And a non-ridiculous one I'm also excited for into the bargain.)
No real warnings for this one, I don't think, aside from not quite negative but very 2004 (or, technically, 2005) attitudes toward homosexuality.
Chapter Text
It's a pity nobody believes in simple lust anymore.
Ava Gardner
If it was something of a relief to get back to school, the student body did their level best to make Veronica wish for the last week of break again. Sara Abrams tripped her on the way into the school (possibly by accident, but that didn’t make her ankle hurt less), Cole hissed something unclear but malicious at her as she passed him, like he still hadn’t learned his lesson, and when she got to her locker a couple of vaguely-familiar sophomores were making out against it. Neither of them even had lockers on this hall – why pick hers?
She had to clear her throat several times before they even noticed her, at which point the girl shot her a mind-your-own-business look and dragged the boy’s face back down. Okay. Fine.
Veronica shoved her hand in behind the girl’s back until she could reach her lock, then used her arm as a lever to thrust them forward until she could almost see what she was doing. Fortunately Tanner wasn’t at his locker, so she had room.
The guy – Trevor? Tyler? – grunted protest, and the girl squealed, “Hey!” – right into his mouth, it looked like, by the way he jerked back, nonplussed.
“Don’t mind me,” Veronica said sweetly. “Really. Who wouldn’t want to have a threesome just to get into their locker?”
“You’re a freak,” the girl told her, trying to shove back, but Veronica locked her elbow and let it oh-so-coincidentally jab into the her opponent’s back, and she yelped and moved a few inches out of the way.
“Crazy bitch,” Tyler-Trevor muttered, pointedly loud enough for Veronica to hear as she muscled her way in behind them. She rolled her eyes and ignored him.
They moved over about a locker and a half – Katie wouldn’t be happy – and made an ostentatious show of petting each other’s arms. Veronica dug around in the front pocket of her backpack until she found the package of tissues her mom always put there on the first day of school, then, upon further consideration, rescued that original box of condoms from the depths to which she’d consigned it once she’d bought the replacements.
“Here,” she said, holding out a tissue between their faces. “You kind of have…” A vague gesture with the other hand and an eloquent wince served to communicate saliva. The girl glared at her.
“You might want this too,” Veronica added helpfully, holding the condom out to Tyler. “I’d consider it a personal favour if you didn’t, you know, breed.”
He blinked at her in confusion, reaching out automatically to take it. His girlfriend screeched, “Taylor!” and hit him in the arm.
Huh. Well, close enough. Veronica flicked the tissue in their general direction, slid out her binder and pencil case, and shut and locked her locker in one smooth motion.
“What kind of freak just walks around handing out condoms?”
The accusation followed her down the hall. Veronica wanted to smile, pack it in neatly with everything else she’d done on purpose to make people say exactly that kind of thing, but for whatever reason it stung more than she liked to admit. She hadn’t built her thick skin up to school levels again, apparently. Two weeks at home with her parents had dragged her back in the direction of the person she was with them, the person they still thought she really was. Which meant that now she felt like she was faking it, again. She hadn’t even realized that feeling had gone away, for the most part, until it was back.
No point in going down a rabbit hole about it, she told herself firmly. She just had to get back into the swing of things. There wasn’t even that much to it – say a few spiky things to people like Taylor’s girlfriend, ignore the rest of it, eat with Meg, schedule a no-strings attached rendezvous. While attending class, but it wasn’t like that part was going to be a problem.
She ducked into first period still a little ahead of most of the rest of class and installed herself in one of the chairs at the back. She didn’t necessarily object to being called on in general, but… it was the first day after break. Full participation was a lot to expect.
She’d done pretty much all the reading for the rest of the semester, anyway, mostly from having nothing else to do with her time. The last week of break had been pretty unexceptional, maybe because Christmas itself had been anti-climactic in a lot of ways. The presents had been good, the ones she’d given her parents had gotten a good reception, but she’d just been so braced for something awful or embarrassing to happen that when middling-to-expected was the worst of it, she hadn’t known exactly how to process it. It should have been a good thing that her mom had only gotten moderately, cheerfully drunk at the sheriff’s department party and sung Christmas carols with Rich, no more notable than a full third of the adults there who were using it as an excuse to overindulge; that Christmas morning had gone off without a hitch and Lianne had spent the rest of the day alternately silly and harmless and sleeping off the eggnog, that she’d been back to something resembling normal in time for family dinner. But it all felt… flat, instead. Not the terrible thing she’d been bracing for, not some holiday miracle of one perfect day.
On the flip side, she was way ahead in English and English Lit.
Meg slid in next to her and Veronica roused a little, shooting her a smile. “Good vacation?”
The other girl shrugged. “It wasn’t terrible. The skiing was good, and Grace had fun.” She smiled for a moment. “But Lizzie hooked up with one of the snowboarding instructors and now my parents have gone DEFCON 1 again.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how she even met him – we’re not allowed to snowboard anyway.”
Veronica blinked. “Wait, what? As in… skiing only, or what?”
“Pretty much. Snowboarding is gauche, or something.” Meg shrugged one shoulder. “I mean, I don’t think Lizzie is interested in snowboarding, anyway – just snowboarders.” She sighed. “So it’s been fun at home.”
“Yeah, I bet.” Veronica hesitated, but it was hard not to ask. “How old was this guy, anyway?”
“Nineteen?” Meg offered. “I don’t know, he didn’t exactly stick around for the fireworks. Not that old.” After a moment of consideration, she rolled her eyes. “But probably too old.”
“How old’s Lizzie?” Veronica asked, trying to work out just how too they were talking about. She was reasonably sure Meg’s sister was a sophomore, but her sexpot-based sense of style could be aging her up in Veronica’s estimation.
“Fifteen.” Meg winced. “Her birthday’s in March, though.”
That was indeed gross. Veronica almost made a comment about the age of consent – but she was only familiar with California, not Colorado, and she didn’t want to get into how she knew the specifics of their own state anyway. Besides, ‘hooked up’ could have meant a lot of things. “I feel like they should be getting him fired instead of yelling at Lizzie,” she said instead.
“Oh, they tried,” Meg said. “They got that counsellor from last summer fired too. But this guy didn’t work for the resort, and she wouldn’t tell them which program he was with.”
“I didn’t know it was a counsellor.” Veronica pulled a face. “Gross and illegal.”
“Yeah. Well, swim coach. I don’t know the details, she just got kicked out and they spent the rest of the summer yelling at her or on the phone with lawyers.”
It wasn’t an unreasonable reaction, but something about it was rubbing Veronica’s skin the wrong way, like sandpaper. Maybe it was the very much unreasonable snowboarding thing. Maybe just the fact that she felt, personally, that fifteen was young enough for the appropriate reaction to be concerned intervention instead of anger.
But then she wasn’t exactly making textbook responsible choices with regard to her own sex life, so it might be a bit rich of her to be taking a patronizing view of Lizzie’s choices, like Veronica was some kind of mature adult.
“Well, he sounds like a creep,” she said definitively enough that it wouldn’t be hard to move on to a new subject. “Fun holidays all around.”
Meg made a sympathetic face and asked, “How were yours?”, somehow managing to make it sound like she was genuinely interested instead of being essentially strongarmed into asking.
Veronica shrugged. “You know. Got my period on Christmas.” It kind of summed up the whole experience – not awful, but hardly fantastic.
Meg winced. “Yikes. They should give us a do-over where we still come to school but don’t have to do any work.”
Veronica laughed, and she was about to make some comment on the trade-offs of having to be around the rest of the student body, but then Mrs. Murphy called the class to order with a hard look in their direction, and she let it go.
*
Her first two classes were pretty normal, although slightly lighter than usual in what was probably a nod to giving them a readjustment period, but Mr. Johansen was clearly taking the recommencement of classes at least as hard as the students were, because he let them watch vaguely English-related YouTube videos projected onto the whiteboard for most of class, only remembering to collect their over-break homework at the very end. Unfortunately, Mrs. Galloway was in her usual excruciating form, which made for a truly unpleasant sense of whiplash. Veronica ignored her in favour of knocking out the softball assignment Ms. Fediuk had given them in Precalc, but it was hard to concentrate with all the whisper-yelling and snickering going on around her. She could have sworn she saw at least one paper airplane.
It was a relief to escape to the hallway when the lunch bell rang and an even bigger relief to scope out a table that was at least slightly away from the loud and irritating portions of the student body, even if it was chilly out. Meg didn’t seem bothered by it, but Veronica was glad she’d worn jeans and a jacket, even if the faux fur around the hood didn’t really do much to keep her warm.
“I’m ready for summer,” she said, and Meg laughed.
“You and Yolanda both, I guess. I saw her in the hall and she said was going to find the nearest radiator and eat lunch sitting on it. It’s not that cold.”
“So says she of the ski vacation,” Veronica told her. “I am entirely a California girl, and all my family vacations have been to Florida.” She ignored the pang she felt at the epithet, pushing aside the memory of where it had come from. “Anyway, I run cold.”
“Isn’t it that you run hot? So it’s a bigger difference between the air and your body temperature than the rest of us?” Meg offered her an apple slice and the accompanying tiny container of cinnamon-sugar, but Veronica shook her head.
“Sure,” she said, starting lunch with desert in the form of one of Inga’s left-over sugar cookies, “if you want to get scientific about it. I’m all humanities this semester – I was being rhetorical.”
Meg nodded. “So a figure of speech,” she agreed in a vaguely scholarly tone, “like how one might say you’re cold-blooded?”
“That’s me. I’m a lizard.”
Her friend dropped the affect and giggled. “It’s not what I’d pick as your animal.”
“So what would you pick?” Veronica winced. “Don’t tell me you thought I’d be a wolf girl.”
“But you could really rock some of those terrible T-shirts!” Meg protested, smiling. “No, I don’t know, but I definitely would have gone with ‘mammal’.” Her forehead furrowed thoughtfully. “Maybe a cat? But I feel like that’s not impressive enough.”
“Ooh, a tiger! Then I can be a frat boy.” They both dissolved into giggles for a moment and Veronica was caught between a pang of familiarity – the fading but still extant feeling that she was sitting next to the wrong laughing blonde girl – and a wash of warmth in the pit of her stomach.
For a moment she was worried that her face had done something she’d have to explain, but Meg’s attention had been captured by something across the commons. Veronica glanced over. What looked like half the bikers in the school were rolling up at a leisurely 12:15. They vanished out of sight behind the nearest building, which blocked any direct view of the parking lot, and she rolled her eyes. “Must be nice,” she said.
“The motorcycles?”
“Sleeping until noon the first day back.” She rolled her eyes. “No wonder Weevil’s failing Algebra.”
“I thought he was a senior.” Meg, bless her, frowned in confusion. The combination of slacking and failing necessary to be a senior in Algebra I was presumably incomprehensible to her.
“I’m pretty sure he’s majoring in ‘how to fail Algebra’.” Veronica shrugged. “Or just ‘how to fail’, I honestly don’t even know what his other classes are.”
Meg shook her head disapprovingly, picking up another apple slice. “How many years has he been in high school, anyway? Is he… I don’t know, an adult?” She cast Veronica a look that was equal parts arch and concerned. “Since we were talking about appropriateness.”
“He’s seventeen,” Veronica said quellingly, not quite managing to suppress the humour in her tone. “I am… eighty-nine percent sure this is his first senior year.”
Meg snorted, reluctantly amused. “Does it count as your senior year if you’re taking Algebra? One?”
Veronica gave it some thought. “I’m not sure. It might be technically possible for him to still graduate this year? Math-wise, I mean. I don’t know what else he’s failed. Or how many Autoshop credits he has.”
That got her a whole smile. “I took this college drama course last year and got dual credit for it.” Meg looked like she was trying to formulate something, but Veronica wasn’t sure what. A joke? A criticism? After a moment’s thought, she added, “I guess it’s too bad he can’t get credited for his extra-curriculars?”
“If you want to get credits for unrepentantly robbing people you have to join the Future Business Leaders of America,” Veronica responded without missing a beat. It wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny (she was pretty sure you didn’t get credits for FBA, just padding for your college application), but she’d managed to construct it with less awkwardness than Meg’s lead-in, so she was satisfied with it anyway.
Her friend snorted and rolled her eyes. “You’re such a rebel, Veronica.”
It was hard to know how to respond to that. Laugh and agree, that was probably the right way to go. Arguing defensively wouldn’t be, and would be an overreaction to boot – Meg didn’t mean anything bad by it. It bothered her anyway, for reasons Veronica couldn’t quite put a finger on.
Maybe because none of the things she’d done over the last few months had been about rebellion, which seemed silly and juvenile, Lilly needling Celeste, some idiot spray-painting graffiti all over the sheriff’s department just because it was the sheriff’s department. Or maybe because, if it was rebellion, that meant granting that Lilly was an authority over her – or had been.
She opted for quirking a smile and saying, “I prefer ‘iconoclast’.”
It might have been a second too late, but Meg didn’t seem to notice, or maybe she was just too kind to admit it. “If you turn up on the morning news, I’ll make sure to mention it,” she said.
“Mention this too,” Veronica said, belatedly fishing out her pencil case so she could set up their plucky little flag, none the worse for wear for weathering most of break in there. There really was something to be said for fabric. “How’s that going, anyway? You didn’t do them this morning.”
Meg shrugged. “It’s been fine. Tim’s acting kind of… weird, but he’s not being a jerk. I can’t tell if he feels sorry for me or if he thinks it’s all funny. Anyway, this morning was just a tech issue. We were supposed to film at lunch instead, but the connection’s still down. Or something – I didn’t really get it when they explained.” She shrugged. “We’ll probably do them tomorrow morning, it’s not a big deal.”
“Kick off the return to school not with a bang but with a whimper,” Veronica commented. “Most of the teachers are on board with that idea.” She got started on her carrot sticks, making a face. They weren’t exactly terrible, but if she hadn’t been throwing her lunch together at the last minute she would have opted for something else. “I can’t believe I’m stuck with these things. Break made me lazy.”
“And here I thought you were an over-achiever.”
She glanced up as Weevil slid onto the bench opposite them, looking fresh off his motorcycle – black leather over his black shirt, gloves peeking out of his breast pocket. It looked disturbingly good on him.
“You can’t sit here,” Veronica told him. It was a knee-jerk response, partly because her immediate reaction to seeing him was pleasant surprise, and that seemed like something she should step on. But also, she was talking to Meg, and he was being rude.
“Oh, really?” He raised an eyebrow at her delicately. “I can’t?”
Veronica raised one right back and pointed emphatically at the flag. “This is the slut table. Sluts only.”
Weevil frowned at it, blinking in surprise like he hadn’t actually expected it to say that. He suppressed a laugh. “It doesn’t actually say ‘Sluts only’.”
“It’s implied.”
Meg was watching the interplay with dubious interest, and Veronica turned to her studied earnestness. “Wouldn’t you say it’s implied?”
“Um.” Meg looked from Weevil to the flag. He made innocent cow eyes at her, like he didn’t even remember leering at her solely to scare her away, back in November. Maybe he didn’t. “Yes. That’s the point of the sign.”
“Are you saying you don’t think I’m a slut?” He pressed a hand to his chest in mock shock. “Me? I’ve had sex with way more people than you. Like fourteen times as many.” He gave Meg a considering look. “Seven times if this whole… slut thing has a lesbian hookup component.”
Meg half-choked and turned red. Veronica bit down on her cheek to keep from having a similar reaction – at the slur on her experience, rather than the suggestiveness. Weevil being gross wasn’t exactly a shocker for her, and the teenage-boy predilection for faux-lesbians was hardly a surprise either.
It wasn’t like she had anything to gain by pretending otherwise at this point, so head-on was the best bet. “Fourteen seems low,” she told him, making an effort to sound as judgemental as possible.
“It’s a conservative estimate.” She raised her eyebrows at him skeptically, and he shrugged. “I’ve been to a lot of parties. I’m not exactly sure how many repeats there are, you know?” And then he winked at her, like his fake humility wasn’t a total brag.
“Conservative estimates aren’t very slutty,” Meg said. She was still red-faced, and she didn’t look either Weevil or Veronica in the eye, but when Veronica parsed what she’d said, she wanted to clap.
Weevil blinked – clearly he hadn’t expected it of her – then grinned. “What’s your unconservative estimate, then?”
Meg sputtered.
“She doesn’t need an estimate,” Veronica said repressively. “She’s already a slut. Ask anyone.”
“How is she more of a slut than me?” he demanded. “How are you more of a slut than me?”
“Ask. Anyone,” she told him with emphasis. “You can’t sit here. Go away.”
“I can sit wherever I want,” Weevil said, in a tone that danced nimbly on the line between patient and menacing, like he was explaining to her how being threatened worked. Or maybe how being threatening worked. Either way she didn’t have time for it.
“If you didn’t want to look stupid in front of your friends, you should have listened the first time I told you you couldn’t sit here,” Veronica told him. She plucked the flag out of its precarious perch in the table-center and poked him with it. “Get lost, prude.”
Meg choked. It occurred to Veronica that she might have gone a bit far with the epithet, but there were only so many antonyms for ‘slut’. She couldn’t call him a virgin.
Weevil laughed almost awkwardly, too nonplussed to do more than that to cover. At least she’d taken him enough by surprise that he’d been caught flatfooted, which was something to be proud of. “You – what?”
“If you’re not a slut…” she shrugged at him with faux regret. “I don’t make the rules. Here, look–” She reached out and grabbed a passing freshman by the arm, making him jump in shock. “Come here. What’s your name?”
“Um, Justin?”
“Justin, have I ever spoken to you before?”
He frowned at her. “No?”
Veronica rolled her eyes. “Not very convincing, but we all know you’re not a plant. Justin, do you know who I am?”
“Um, yes.”
“Okay, great. Would you say I’m a slut?”
“I don’t believe any of that stuff,” he responded immediately, earnestness overflowing from his voice and his rapidly-widening brown eyes. Meg winced.
“So that’s a yes,” Veronica said. “Great. Do you know who she is?” She pointed at Meg with her free hand.
“Yeah, she does the announcements.”
“Is she a slut?”
He shifted uncomfortably. Veronica rephrased. “Have you ever heard anyone call her a slut?”
Justin shot a guilty look at Meg, his over-spiked hair bristling in discomfort. “Well… um…”
“It’s okay to tell the truth,” Meg said. She was turning pink again, but she gave him a reassuring look, and he smiled for a second, presumably at all this attention from hot, allegedly-slutty junior girls, before very obviously remembering how weird the situation he was in was.
“Well… yeah.”
“Okay, last question.” Veronica pointed decisively across the table at Weevil. “You know who this is?”
All remnants of a smile disappeared from Justin’s face. “…Yeah.”
“Great. And is he a slut?”
Weevil leaned one elbow on the table, cocking his head to the side with ominous innocence. Justin sputtered.
“Have you ever heard,” Veronica began patiently, then reeled in the sentence as Weevil raised his eyebrows and leaned across the table. He wasn’t – quite – within grabbing distance, but the kid clearly interpreted it as a threat. “No leading the witness,” she told him severely. “And no taping this kid to the flagpole for telling the truth.”
Weevil put a hand to his chest and widened his eyes in true ‘who, me?’ fashion, but his broad grin undercut the innocent act severely. Veronica ignored him, insofar as she moved partially between him and Justin and refused to look directly at him while she finished her questioning.
“Have you ever heard anyone – at all – call him a slut, like Meg? Or me?”
“You got more than one friend who sits here,” Weevil called. Veronica flapped a hand behind her and made a shushing noise.
“Um… no.”
She smiled. “Great. Oh, and do you know Yolanda Hamilton?”
“No!” Justin blurted out in relief. Then he winced and reconsidered. “I mean… I don’t think so?”
“Okay, fine. You’re excused.” She let go of his arm and shooed him away, then turned back to Weevil. “If you can’t pass the basic sluttitude test, I don’t know what you think you’re doing here.”
“Sounds like your friend Yolanda can’t pass it either,” he commented, not moving.
“He didn’t know who she is. He did know who you are. Besides, Yolanda’s more of an associate member, and I vouched for her.” She handed him a carrot stick. “Thanks for playing. Goodbye.”
Weevil looked almost more offended by the carrot than the rest of it – although he took it anyway. “So vouch for me,” he said.
“I already vouched for Yolanda.”
“So there’s a limit?” He bit off a chunk of the vegetable and made a face. “That’s not very slutty of you.”
He had a point, unfortunately. She hadn’t thought she was going to have to create rules for her petty act of defiance, but she’d overcommitted in her attempt to get dominance over him and now they were probably going to end up with a whole slut constitution. “I can vouch for more than one person, I just don’t want to.” Veronica pretended to think for a second. “It’s really more about you. You just don’t… come off as very slutty to me.”
He stared at her. “What do you want me to do, do you in public?”
Ignoring the fast-rising heat in her face, she brushed that off. “The bar is just higher for guys. I don’t know what to tell you. At best you might qualify as a player.”
“So?”
She shrugged. “So go sit at the player table. With the other amateurs.”
That was a misstep – she knew it instantly, even before his grin widened with delight. “I’m actually a professional. One time, this girl paid me five whole dollars–”
Veronica poked him with the slut flag again, mostly to make him stop talking. “Not good enough. I happen to know you were going to have sex with her anyway, so it doesn’t count.”
“Doesn’t count? Now you’re just making things up.”
“I am absolutely not. There are three ways to qualify to sit here, and none of them include a thin self-reported story with no corroboration. Meg?”
“That’s right,” Meg said loyally, rising to the occasion with a brilliant poker face. “We decided when we let Yolanda sit here. You can be vouched for…” She glanced at Veronica.
“…by an accredited slut,” Veronica finished, going heavy on the emphasis to buy herself time to think of the other two. “You can provide proof – real proof –
“I’d have real proof if you’d just corroborate –”
“–and submit it for approval,” she said, raising her voice to talk over him. “To me.”
“What are you, the queen slut?”
She was more of a founding member – and slutdom seemed like it should be some kind of democracy – but she’d wasted enough time on this already and she didn’t want him pestering Meg to prove a point, so Veronica just said, “Yes. If you’ve sufficiently proven your case, you’ll be acknowledged as an associate slut pending approval by the rest of the table.”
She’d hoped that would be ridiculous enough to get rid of him, but he just smirked at her and said, “What’s the third way?”
“General consensus,” Veronica said flatly, gesturing between herself and Meg. “If everybody knows you’re a slut, then you’re a slut. Good luck on that one,” she added with an arch look. “Now get lost.”
For a moment she thought he was going to keep resisting – after all, what was she going to do, physically remove him? – but after a moment’s thought he smirked in her general direction. “Fine. I’ll play your little game. You can meet me after school and I’ll have your proof.” He shot Meg a smouldering look that made her shift uncomfortably in her seat. “Unless you want to vouch for me.”
“Sorry.” Despite her obvious discomfort, Meg’s tone was cool and even. “I don’t have any personal knowledge of your… sluttiness.”
Weevil raised an eyebrow and winked at her, reaching over to steal one of her remaining apple slices as he stood. “You gotta start bringing better lunches,” he told Veronica, handing her back the half-eaten carrot stick. She took it reflexively, then made a face. Gross. What was he, three?
It was too late for a pithy retort – calling it in the general direction of his back would not be a win no matter how snappy it was – so she contented herself with sighing and rolling her eyes.
“A real slut would probably eat this anyway,” she told Meg confidingly. “But I really don’t want to.”
Meg shook her head. “Veronica, that was all so unnecessary,” she said, looking like she couldn’t decide whether to be appalled or amused. “That poor kid.”
“Oh, he loved it,” Veronica said dismissively. She glanced around until she caught sight of Justin down on the grass with some other freshmen, gesticulating wildly. “Look, he’s telling all his friends about it. He’ll dine out on that one for weeks.”
“He’s fifteen,” Meg told her disapprovingly.
“They don’t have a phrase that means ‘his friends will pay for his video games at the kiddie arcade’.”
Her friend snorted, watching Veronica calculate the distance to the nearest garbage can. “Don’t do it,” she warned.
“I’m a risk-taker,” Veronica told her, lobbing the truncated carrot stick in the direction of the garbage. It made it over the edge with just under half an inch to spare. “Woo! Nothing but net, baby!”
Meg reached over and took one of the carrots, even though it was hardly likely she really wanted it. “You guys really have a… thing, huh?”
“What, me and Weevil? Sure.” Veronica took one final carrot stick and abandoned the rest in favour of her sandwich. “He annoys me, I aggravate him. Technically thing-shaped. Sorry about that, by the way,” she said, nodding at Meg’s depleted apple slices. “I forgot he does that.”
“Take things that belong to other people?”
Veronica considered. “Well… you’re not wrong. But I meant he steals food. It’s annoying. Full circle!” she remarked brightly.
“Okay, so… why?” Meg asked. “I mean, I know you wanted to upset Lilly, but even if you just wanted to hook up, there are lots of guys at this school who are down for that kind of thing.” She gave a weary sigh. “I can probably give you the highlights, courtesy of Lizzie. You’re really pretty – you have options that aren’t, like…” She cast about for a moment. “So gangster?”
Veronica snorted. She couldn’t help herself. “Look, I’m not saying the tattoos do it for me, but they don’t put me off, either. And he’s not bad-looking once you get over the hair thing. He has nice skin.”
“I kind of assumed it wasn’t a looks thing,” Meg said apologetically.
“I’m telling Weevil you think he’s ugly.”
“Please don’t,” the other girl said emphatically, making her cackle. “And anyway, I just meant… I figured you had a type, you know? And it’s really not… him.”
“Fair,” Veronica conceded. “It’s… okay, look.” She lowered her voice, half-bit her lip because it felt like what you were supposed to do when you talked about these things. “He’s really good at it.”
Meg exhaled a shocked half-laugh, and she added, “Which I hate sometimes, because he’s super obnoxious. But he’s not that scary if you know how to handle–” the accidentally double entendre she was approaching was a bit much; she swapped words last-second, “things.”
“I guess at least you’re having fun?” Meg offered cautiously. She didn’t sound sold on what she was saying, but she got credit for the effort.
“And learning things,” Veronica said. “Seriously, whenever you decide to take the plunge, there are things you need to know. And it is worth the awkwardness, trust me.”
“I’m not into that casual stuff,” Meg demurred. “And it’s not like I’m going to get a boyfriend any time soon.” The smile was creditable, but she didn’t quite manage to hide the downcast slant of her eyes or the way one corner of her mouth tried to turn down.
“You never know,” Veronica said. She couldn’t construct a truthful sentiment that was also comforting, so she went for humour instead. “I think you’ve got a real chance with Justin.”
As eye-roll worthy as it was, it got her friend to smile for real. “I don’t know, I think his heart belongs to you. You heard him, he doesn’t believe any of the rumours.”
Veronica smiled ruefully in return. “He’d be better off with you. Some of the stuff about me is true.”
“Are you really going to meet him after school?”
“Who, Justin?”
The other girl shot her a look that said, very clearly, really?. “Weevil.”
“Dunno. I’m not really dressed for it.”
Meg pursed her lips, unwrapping a homemade rice crispy square. “He came all the way over here to ask you.”
“Wait, now you’re on his side? I thought you were on my side!”
“You shouldn’t be on a different side from the guy you’re hooking up with, Veronica. It’s very weird. And I am on your side. I’m just saying… if he wants to sit with you…”
“He doesn’t actually,” Veronica told her breezily. “I just told him he couldn’t so now he wants to prove a point.”
“You don’t think he likes you, maybe?” Meg cast a glance at the PCH table. “I’m not saying that’s a good thing, exactly…”
She had to laugh at that. “No way. That’s just logistics. It’s not like we’re texting buddies, you know? Plus he loves an opportunity to be a pain.” After a moment’s thought, she added, “Do we need a ‘sluts only’ sign?”
“Anything more might get Clemmons’s attention,” Meg pointed out. “Plus, I don’t really mind if Gabrielle or whoever sits here. As long as she doesn’t steal my lunch,” she added with a flash of humour.
“I will reimburse you one apple slice,” Veronica promised. “Thanks for backing me up. I really thought I’d be able to get rid of him faster.”
Meg raised her eyebrows, as if to say, see?, but Veronica just rolled her eyes. “Seriously. You have relationship blinders on. Which is fine, if you want to do the waiting thing, I have no objection. But some people are just having fun.”
“Do those people always flirt with each other so much?”
Veronica paused before the final bite of her sandwich, taken aback. “That was not flirting.”
“What would you call it, then? Just because he’s pulling your metaphorical pigtails instead of real ones doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.”
She thought for a moment. “I call it banter. One-upmanship, perhaps. A perpetual struggle for dominance which I will one day win.”
Meg laughed. “What happens when you win?”
“I’m not sure. I think I get his motorbike.” Veronica tucked the sandwich bag back into her lunch kit and debated the merit of working her way through the last couple carrot sticks. In the end she put them back too, telling herself she’d eat them tomorrow even though she knew it wasn’t true.
“And then what?”
She shrugged. “Sell it for cash? Hide it somewhere and make him look for it so I can watch and laugh? The possibilities are endless.” After a moment of hesitation, she added, “Hey, my parents don’t usually make a big deal about when I get home after school, but if they ever want to know and I can’t say…”
“Oh, Lizzie uses me as an excuse all the time,” Meg said, completely unfazed. “At least you bothered to ask first.”
“So–”
“Go for it.” Her friend fixed her with a stern look across the table as she packed up her own lunch bag. “But you have to promise nothing bad’s going to happen to you, because if I end up lying for you and then you turn up dead, I will never forgive myself.”
Veronica raised a hand. “On my honour. I have Mace in my purse.”
Meg considered for a moment, then shrugged one shoulder in acceptance. “Well. As long as you’re prepared.”
*
Even halfway through sixth period Veronica wasn’t sure what her plans were for immediately after school. On the one hand, she was more than ready to blow off a little steam, and at least a little curious as to what tricks Weevil might be planning to break out if he really wanted to ‘prove’ anything to her.
On the other hand, she had plans with her dad later, and he’d been distracted and unfocussed at home for the last week or so; she didn’t want to kick off the new year by lying to him quite so blatantly as she’d have to. And she felt… slightly awkward, maybe. Not nervous – their dumb little interplay at lunch had broken the ice, if it needed breaking – but like a thin barrier had grown up over break. Once she got over herself and pushed past it, she knew she’d have a good time, but it still engendered a strange reluctance. Like forcing yourself to go to a beach party even though you’d been recently dumped; you knew it was for the best, but it was hard.
Of course, in the beach party example, she’d had Lilly to push her out the door. She’d also met Troy at that particular party, so maybe it wasn’t the best example. Or maybe it was, since there was a not-insignificant chance of unpleasant fallout from this as well.
But, back to the first hand, if the fallout was inevitable, which it might (or might not) be, she might as well have fun in the meantime, right?
And then, lastly but embarrassingly significant, there was also the fact that she didn’t want to have to take her pants off. Most likely she was assigning far too much weight to the awkwardness that had attended their first sexual encounter, but she still would have vastly preferred to stick to skirts for the assignations. Unfortunately when she’d gotten dressed that morning, she’d only been thinking about staying warm – frankly, she’d half-assumed that Weevil would skip the first day of school entirely.
Mrs. Canning asked her a question, and Veronica dragged her mind out of the art classroom and answered it, earning an approving smile. Cole was glaring at her from across the room, she noticed – presumably for daring to enjoy herself in proximity to Meg. She smiled sweetly at him, giving a precious little wave with just her fingers, and he turned away in disgust.
That brought her attention to Jeremy, just in front of him. He wasn’t looking at her, so it didn’t quite sour her mood, but catching sight of him made her decide to show up after school, mostly out of spite. Some of the stuff about me is true, she’d told Meg – and some of the stuff that wasn’t she didn’t really care about, not the really ridiculous stuff about doing coke at school and working her way through the rich-kid in-crowd, or the things she’d started herself, like the story about Logan. But what Jeremy had told people about her still stung, and so did the rumours she occasionally caught about being obsessed with Duncan. The time she’d followed him in from lunch to threaten him really hadn’t done her any favours on that front.
Adding a little more fuel to the things-she-had-done fire, publicly or not, would make her feel better – even if she wasn’t quite prepared to try proving Jeremy wrong about her skills just yet. She was managing to do pretty decently at the ‘actual sex’ side of things, and she had absolutely no desire to put blowjobs on the table at this juncture.
Although she still hadn’t worked out what she was going to say if Weevil put her on the spot. Aside from ‘no’. Strong start, at least?
The bell rang, and Veronica swept her various belongings onto her binder without bothering to organize them and heaved herself to her feet. Maybe she should start brainstorming approaches. No battle plan survived contact with the enemy, et cetera, but it couldn’t hurt to be prepared.
Of course, she had to brainstorm around Spanish class, but since they spent half of it engaged in conversation practice, she had the chance to ask Meg if she’d heard anything else that Veronica wasn’t aware of (well, she had to say ‘stories that are lies’, because they hadn’t covered how to say ‘rumour’ en Español) and left faintly amused by the idea that she’d banged her way through the entire PCH Bike Club. It made an original variation on the old ‘football team’ chestnut, but couldn’t she get a little credit for discernment? Some of those guys were fifth-year seniors, and they did not qualify for any of the perks that sometimes made older guys worth the risk. She’d never spoken to most of them, whereas she had spoken to at least a few members of the football team.
Bang one biker and you’ve banged them all, she thought to herself as she dropped her things in her locker, trying not to smirk. At least she still had condoms buried in her bag – the good ones, not the kind she’d offered to the over-amorous couple that morning. And the one plus of jeans was much easier access to pockets, which was useful for the key as well. She didn’t want to resort to having to keep them in her bra.
Weevil was leaning against the wall next to the classroom door when she approached. He shot her a self-satisfied look. “I figured out your game, you know that?”
“Uh-huh.” Veronica didn’t look at him as she unlocked the door, adopting a bored tone. “And what game is that.”
He pointed at her. “You’re trying to make me jump through your weird hoops so you don’t have to make good on your word.”
She kept a disinterested expression on her face as she wracked her brain for what he could possibly be talking about. She hadn’t been stupid enough to promise him something, had she? “Excuse me?”
“‘I’ll help you with Algebra,’” he said in an annoying falsetto. “Now all of a sudden you’ve got all these weird commandments? I know what you’re up to.”
“I will help you with Algebra,” Veronica said, although she’d completely forgotten about that conversation until now. “It just won’t get you a seat at the table. And I expect you to work it off.”
“Oh, yeah?” He followed her into the classroom. “I’m thinking, you stand behind the desk and explain things to me, and whenever I get something right, you take off a piece of clothing.”
She gave him a hard stare, and he added, unrepentant, “And you should put your hair up in a bun this time, not a ponytail.”
Veronica thought it was just generic teasing for another second, and then she twigged. “Oh, ew. I am not indulging your weird sex fantasy about Ms. Dunne.”
“What, like you’ve never had dirty thoughts about a teacher?”
“No,” she said firmly. “They’re teachers. It’s gross. You’re gross. I rescind the offer.”
Weevil leaned against one of the desks, perching on the edge of it. “See, I knew you were trying to get out of it.”
“Is there even any point?” she asked him, putting her hair up – in a ponytail, thank you very much. At least she always had elastics these days. It pulled weirdly on the barrettes she was wearing, so she took them out and put them in the pocket of her jeans. “I heard you were failing anyway.”
“Nah, I got a C- on that retest,” he said. “Back in the running. But if I don’t pass I can’t graduate this year.”
She blinked at him. “Wait, do you actually want my help?”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “Not really. But if I gotta be tutored, at least you’re kinda hot. And Cervando never puts out when I do good.” She made a face at him, and he added, “Besides, he gets mad real fast. He’s good for doing your homework for you, not so much for helping you pass tests.”
“I don’t need anyone to do my homework for me, but I’ll keep that in mind,” Veronica told him acerbically. “Fine, do you have your Algebra tests from this year?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Why would I keep a test I got an F on?”
“So we can see what you need help with,” she said, viciously patient.
“The stuff from September,” he told her, which made Veronica blink. She hadn’t expected a useful answer. Seeing her surprise, he sighed and elaborated, “I was in juvie for like six weeks. I missed the beginning of school.”
That was certainly one way to end up failing Algebra. It had been long enough since she’d taken those classes that Veronica didn’t remember for sure what was Algebra I and what was Algebra II, but she was pretty sure all the subsequent material built on the beginning units. No wonder he’d bombed a couple tests.
Although apparently it wasn’t his first time through the class, so her sympathy was limited.
“Okay, I’ll see if I still have my old notes. You find whatever you do still have. Assignments, that last test, whatever. And the textbook.” She shot him a hard look, expecting him to have lost it or never opened it, or maybe deliberately set it on fire or something like that, but he didn’t argue. “Bring it to school tomorrow. I will help you in the library, at lunch, for half an hour. I will not take my clothes off. If you take it seriously and don’t spend the whole time being an obnoxious moron, I might keep helping you until the end of the semester.” She shucked her jacket, shirt, and jeans, in that order, and made a spinny gesture with her hand, meaning they should switch places. “Now convince me it’s worth it.”
Weevil pushed away from the desk slowly, a grin spreading across his face. “Suddenly not as invested in getting me to keep my mouth shut, huh?”
Veronica felt herself turning red, but she did her best to ignore it. “If you think you can convince me by giving a speech, go ahead. I wouldn’t say talking is your top skill, but if you want to try your luck…” He was finally out of her way, and she hefted herself onto the desk.
“You don’t think we’re getting into a bit of a rut?” he asked, smirking, as he bent to untie his boots.
“Just hurry up.”
He kept the rest of his clothes on, which Veronica appreciated for multiple reasons. It was weirdly sexy, but then every combination of clothedness versus unclothedness so far had found a way to be sexy, so that probably didn’t mean much. More pertinently, it validated her previous logic that the math thing was a good way to get him to keep going down on her without expecting reciprocation, which at present was heavily overwhelming all her doubts about the deal she’d just laid out.
She’d had some idea of making him take her underwear and bra off – really lean into the ‘working for it’ theme they had going on – but instead when he got down there, he applied his mouth directly to the fabric, which made Veronica suck her breath in.
The feeling was muted, leaving her at once dizzy and faintly unsatisfied, reaching for a sensation that was there but still elusive. He kept at it, laving upward strokes across her until she was making little throaty sounds of frustration, then pressing his tongue in like an arrow until he was almost touching her clit, the texture of the fabric rubbing against her in a way that was delicious but not enough.
Veronica reached out to put a hand on the back of his head, like she’d imagined at least once, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. The sight of him down there was still heady, and she shut her eyes and tried to squirm closer instead, her breath impossibly loud in her own ears. This was his way of dragging it out, she suspected, because it felt wonderful, but it would take her ages to get off this way, if she even could.
Finally he pulled back, and even blind she could see the smirk as he asked smugly, “Oh, did you want them off?”
She kicked him in the arm, and he laughed in surprise. “Hey, if you get violent, I’m leaving.”
“That doesn’t sound like someone who wants to pass math class,” Veronica panted, pleased with herself for managing to connect even though she hadn’t opened her eyes. “And stop asking questions you know the answers to.”
He smiled audibly, and a moment later his hands were just below her hips, easing and teasing her underwear down and out from under her until he could slide it down her legs – then went back to what he’d been doing.
Veronica hooked her legs over his shoulders, which made his tongue stutter against her in a way that had her groaning, and gripped the edges of the desk, letting the heat of his mouth overwhelm the rest of the world, bringing her closer and closer to the edge in those perfect rising waves he was so good at creating until…
Until Weevil pulled back and stood up.
She whined before she could help herself, mind lagging too far behind to catch the sound or too immediately realize what was going on – but then she reined herself in and applied some logic to the fact that he was undoing his belt. “Come on,” she protested, half a plea and half annoyance.
“You’ll get what you want,” he told her with long-suffering tolerance. “Cut me a break, I haven’t gotten laid since last year.” He shot her a stern look, like the existence of Christmas break was her fault.
Veronica blinked in surprise, but she wasn’t about to let an opportunity like that slip by. “Wow. Am I really the only person who’ll have sex with you? I thought you’d at least have one backup.” She shook her head and tsked in faux sympathy.
“Nah, you just don’t poke holes in the condoms,” he shot back, which confused her enough that he was able to get his pants down and the condom on with relatively little commentary. At least she could keep hers for another time; she was about halfway through the pack already.
“That’s still not very slutty of you,” she commented, losing the last word in a gasp as he slid in. It felt bigger than she expected, probably because of the two-week hiatus or maybe just because her mind was playing tricks on her, but it felt good.
“Will you give it a rest with that?” Weevil complained, his tone falling slightly short of irritable. “Just–” He made a deep, satisfied noise as he found a good rhythm. “Just shut up, for once in your life. For variety. Have a new experience.” His hands slid up to her hips, warm and solid against her skin, and Veronica wrapped her arms around his neck, kind of wishing she could kiss him. He was a good kisser – but she knew where his mouth had just been.
“I have very specific expectations from this experience,” she told him, slightly breathless, “and if they’re not fulfilled you are not going to be privy to me having any new experiences.”
“Relax,” he said emphatically, hiking her leg up higher until the angle he was hitting inside made her squeak, then muttered, “Privy. And you take shots at my vocabulary.”
Nevertheless, he slid one hand off her hip and worked it between them, albeit with a put-upon air, like he’d been asked to take out the garbage when he was about to do it, already, get off his back. Once he’d gotten situated, though, thumb against her clit, dick rubbing just right inside her, chest warm through his shirt when it brushed hers, the fabric etching tantalizing sensations on her skin, Veronica didn’t care all that much how obnoxious he was being.
He outlasted her, but not by much – by the time she’d gotten her breath back, he was grunting into her hair. It wasn’t a sexy sound, objectively, Veronica thought, although she was pretty sure she’d found it arousing in the past. It turned out a lot of things became inexplicably sexy if you were already turned on, which might be one of the weirder things about this whole situation.
When Weevil took a little longer than usual to disentangle himself from her, she pushed gently at his chest, which did the trick. He did shoot her a dirty look as he pulled away, but Veronica ignored him. She slid down and got redressed, wincing at the feeling of denim with no underwear. Her spare change of clothes was in her locker, and she wasn’t putting the original pair back on, that was for sure – although she did lift them carefully by the waistband and try her level best to get them into her pants pocket without touching any of the damp parts. Another negative and a positive for jeans.
It didn’t really matter, she told herself, rubbing her fingers together with a wince. She was going to have to shower before she met her dad anyway, and if she changed her entire outfit it would suggest she’d gone home and changed, which she probably didn’t otherwise have time to do before five. Still.
“How do you decide what to be squeamish about?” Weevil asked. Veronica jerked her head up to see him regarding her with amusement from the floor, where he was putting his boots back on. “Do you spin a wheel or something? Because you’re inconsistent as hell.”
“You should be nicer to me,” Veronica told him, annoyed that he had a point. “Or I won’t help you save your grade-point average.”
He snorted derisively. “I don’t care about the average. They give you the same diploma for a D as an A. I just need to pass.”
“Try to pass for a normal human being who’s grateful for help,” she suggested, throwing her jacket haphazardly over one shoulder with her cleaner hand.
“Hey, I earned it.”
“Mm,” Veronica acknowledged doubtfully. “You’re on probation.”
“I am, yeah, but what’s that got to do with anything?”
In response, she shut the door on his smug expression, reflecting that it was too bad she couldn’t lock him in the classroom. She’d love to see him explain that one to the administration, but sadly all the doors were openable from the inside when locked.
She’d have to settle for imagining it.
Chapter 22: That Isn't Spiteful
Summary:
Apologies for the extra-long wait! I have been wrangling... just, so many things, so I'm going to blame work scheduling stuff a little, but mostly it's on me. I'm hopeful I'll be able to make it up to you (one of the problems is I keep writing stuff and realizing it needs to go in a later chapter), but at the very least I should be back to maintaining my usual pace after this!
Warnings (minor) in the endnote as always.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Nothing's amusing that isn't spiteful.
Leo Tolstoy
“I can’t have lunch with you today,” Veronica told Meg in first period, adopting an air of long-suffering saintliness. “I have to go to the library for tutoring.”
Meg looked concerned. “Tutoring for what? I thought you were doing really well in school.”
“I am the tutor, not the tutee. And I am already regretting it, for the record.”
“That’s pretty last-minute,” her friend commented. “Did someone drop out of the program? Because there’s only so much you can do this late in the semester.”
“It’s unofficial,” Veronica told her glumly, playing it up for effect. “I got caught in a sympathetic moment.”
In truth she wasn’t sure whether she was dreading or looking forward to lunch time. Helping Weevil study – or reteaching him enough algebra that he could pass the final exam, which seemed more likely – gave her the upper hand, but it also felt like blurring the lines a bit. A little bit too much, maybe. She probably could have worked it into what they were already doing instead… but she’d been sure yesterday that if sex was remotely on the table, he would never pay attention.
It was hard to know if she should be looking forward to the chance to lord it over him, or apprehensive about – well, honestly, if he decided to be a pain in the ass she could just bail, so there wasn’t anything to worry about. Worst-case scenario it might be awkward.
And what was a little awkwardness? She’d survived worse. Don’t insult his dead mother, smack him if he talked about taking her clothes off, and how bad could it be?
Why tempt fate, Veronica? she thought. It’s like you’re begging Murphy to come along and lay down the law.
“I did tutoring in middle school,” Meg said, because of course she had. “It can be really rewarding, you just have to be firm with the ones trying to goof off. And be patient. Sometimes they’re trying even when it doesn’t seem like it.”
“Firm, I can do. Patient… I’ll give it a shot,” Veronica told her.
Meg laughed. “You know, it’s probably less of a problem in high school. I was tutoring ten-year-olds, and sometimes they cry if you look at them wrong.”
“I bet ten-year-old boys don’t tell you they’d study better if you took your shirt off, though,” Veronica pointed out.
“You would honestly be surprised.”
“Gross,” Veronica said. “Very gross. Should not be surprising to me, and yet.”
“You don’t spend a lot of time with kids?” Meg asked, smiling.
“Not since I was one. I mean, sometimes the department does events, and I–”
Mrs. Murphy neatly cut off the conversation by stepping in between their desks. Neither of them had seen her coming down the row from behind. “Meg. Veronica. I don’t expect either of you to be the reason I regret not assigning seats. Do I have to move one of you to the front?”
Meg ducked her head in apology, Veronica dutifully said, “No,” and pulled her completed assignment into a more prominent place on her desk, and the teacher sighed and let it go.
Veronica shot a wide-eyed look of exaggerated alarm across the aisle. Meg’s mouth twitched, but she bent obediently over her own work anyway.
Time to erase a couple sentences, rephrase them very sightly, and rewrite them. Veronica was conscious of Mrs. Murphy having one eye on her. It was only Tuesday morning, and it already felt like a long week.
Next semester would offer a little more respite, anyway. She’d have Gym – unless Ms. James had decided to really screw her on her schedule, but as little as Veronica felt like dragging out the big guns now that her righteous fire had faded a little, she still would, if she had to. She hadn’t deleted any of the incessant texts Lilly had sent her.
And she’d picked Foods for her non-academic elective, less because the idea not having to bring lunch was appealing (although it was, especially now that she considered what it might free up her lunch hour for), and more because the only other class that worked with her schedule was Drama, and there was no way she was signing up to put up with that. Computer Science wouldn’t be overly strenuous either, and of course she was stuck in Health, which would be a drag but not terribly difficult. Health assignments were always easy to fake, anyway – here’s my extremely fictional nutrition plan, and here’s the log of the hour-long runs I definitely take every single day, and here’s an essay on the dangers of syphilis. That would more or less cover the class for the whole semester, honestly.
And at least she hadn’t coordinated half her schedule with Jeremy (or Troy), like she had with Duncan last year. That had made the breakup extra torturous. If she got lucky, he might not be in any of her classes – a girl could dream.
Precalc and her regular English class, in which Mr. Johanson chose to make up for his slacking the day before by hitting them with a pop quiz to see ‘how much you all forgot over break’ (like she was going to forget a plot point that was essentially ‘suicide by sled’), didn’t do anything to dispel Veronica’s dreams of a light academic semester, but Mrs. Galloway brought her back down to earth with a bump by forcibly reminding the class that ‘easy’ did not mean ‘easy to sit through’. By the time the lunch bell rang, all she wanted to do was bury herself in a book or in a meaningless conversation with Meg and kill time until the class she actually enjoyed rolled around – but she’d made a commitment, and she was admittedly looking forward to getting paid for it, so she put most of her books back and dutifully shlepped her pencil case and calculator to the library.
Weevil was late.
Of course he was. Why was she even surprised? Veronica hadn’t actually been able to find any of her old Algebra tests or study guides (hardly shocking, since it had been a couple years even since Algebra II), but she was already resenting the brief time she’d spent looking the day before.
She had printed out a sample final exam from the internet. It looked slightly more rigorous than she remembered Algebra I being, but who really knew – the two classes were already merging in her memory at this point. It would help her get some kind of idea, anyway.
Veronica set out all the material with immense precision, as a demonstration of her annoyance, lining up three pencils above her calculator as if they had any chance of using them all, and making a point of zipping up her pencil case. She was tapping the pencils into line for the third time (one kept rolling away, and at least it was something to do) when he finally showed up.
Veronica shot him a dirty look as he slid into the chair across from her. “You can’t be all that interested in passing if you can’t bother to show up on time.”
He rolled his eyes at her. “Five minutes. Get over it.”
It was more like ten, but she decided to let it go when she saw he actually had brought his textbook and his most recent test. “Okay, let me see what you’re working with.”
He handed it over, and she frowned at the 70% at the top. Not ideal, but still technically a C. She glanced across the first page, trying to get a sense of what he was struggling with, but it didn’t help much. The rest of the test was similarly all over the place.
“Okay.” She pushed the practice test across to him. “Try the first question–”
“Yeah, I can’t do that.”
Veronica clenched her teeth. “You didn’t even try.”
“It’s graphing shit. I can never do the graphing ones.”
“They taught you this the other times you took this class – how do you expect to pass the final exam if you can’t graph?”
“I didn’t.”
She reached across and poked him with the business end of the nearest pencil. “That’s my point.”
Weevil snagged it close behind lead and tugged until she reluctantly let go. “How come you’re always poking me with shit, huh? Don’t you know that’s backward?”
Veronica ignored his self-satisfied smirk. “Which one do you think represents the function.”
He shrugged, and then pointed randomly at one of the graphs. The line wasn’t even going in the right direction.
“No.” She opened up his actual test and flipped through it. “You got one like it right, here. How did you do that one?”
“I did the problem.” He pointed at the function.
“It’s not an equation, it’s a function.” When Weevil only looked at her blankly, she elaborated, “You can’t solve it – there’s more than one variable. It’s like a process you can put any number through.”
“I just did the math.”
He had indeed scribbled down the results for X equalling two, three, and five beneath the problem – Veronica had assumed he was just trying to show his work.
“Okay, but you had to pick a graph, so how did you pick one?”
He indicated the correct answer he’d circled with the butt of the pencil. “That one has all the answers on it.”
It wasn’t as good as being able to recognize the trend of a graph – especially since these were straight lines, not complicated at all – but it would get the right answer. “So do the same thing.”
His lips tightened in response to her exasperation. “There’s no numbers on this one.”
“Okay, but the one you picked goes into negative numbers.” When he didn’t react, Veronica frowned. “You know the left side of the X-axis is negative, right?”
“Yeah, I know that,” he grumbled at her, an edge of bitterness in his voice. “So?”
“So do you think 2x – 2 goes into negative numbers in the top quadrant, or should it be coming out of negative numbers?”
He looked at the question, the graphs in question, and then back at her, and shook his head. Veronica sighed. “Just do it the way you did the other one.”
He did, complaining under his breath that it didn’t matter because there were no numbers on the graphs. It was hard to tell upside down, but his actual math was fine, and he didn’t lose track of what was X and what was Y. Once he had three values – he used two, three, and five again, which seemed like a decent spread – she indicated the graph he’d first chosen with a pencil. “Two X is two Y.” Veronica traced up from roughly where the two would be on the X-axis, away from the line. “And three X is four Y.” She did the same thing again. “So…”
“Yeah, I get it, not that one.” He rolled his eyes. “The other two both go up, and I can’t check them because there are no numbers. So how’m I supposed to know which one’s right?”
Veronica pointed at the place on each graph where the line crossed the X-axis. “You know this is zero, so solve for zero.”
Weevil paused for a moment, then produced the right answer without writing anything down. “Minus two.”
“Negative two, yeah. So?”
“So find zero on those graphs.”
He glared at her. “Stop acting like a kindergarten teacher and just tell me how to do the question.”
“Well, the way I do the question is to pay attention in class and then just know which graph is right by looking at it, so…”
“This is not worth whatever you think you’re getting out of it,” he told her.
“Guess we’ll find out,” she told him with a sweet smile, and he pulled a disgusted face. Veronica just waited, and after a long moment, he turned begrudgingly back to the test, followed the Y-axis up on both graphs, and discovered that the function line intersected one of them right at the conjunction of X and Y.
“This one,” he told her, a faint hint of triumph in his voice, and pointed to the other one.
“I’m pleased to know you’re teachable,” Veronica told him. “Okay, come sit over here and we’ll go over the rest of this.” She rustled his old test. “Maybe just try to pay attention in class when your teacher explains the new stuff.”
Weevil got up and heaved his textbook and the practice test around to her side of the table like they weighed fifty pounds each. “You want me to come closer, huh?” He leered at her, and Veronica realized in surprise that he’d barely been inappropriate at all so far.
He must be really sick of taking Algebra I.
“Just shut up,” she told him, “and show me what you’re worst at, so I can see if you’re salvageable.”
Weirdly, if perhaps unsurprisingly, it turned out that he really wasn’t bad at math, exactly. His terminology was terrible – he didn’t know what a surd was and when she tried to explain she was horrified to discover that he didn’t really know what ‘integer’ meant either (explaining that one got her a response of ‘so it’s a number’, which she didn’t even bother arguing about), but his actual skills seemed halfway decent, as long as he understood the question, because whenever there were actual numbers involved he did okay. He mostly seemed to be missing a solid grasp on all the review material from the beginning of the semester that would have made word problems and some of the more general test directions comprehensible, although his propensity for arguing that they were stupid didn’t do him any favours. Veronica honestly had to wonder how many points he’d lost on tests over the years because of some week or other he’d missed in Grade Seven. Not that it exculpated him, when if he had a better attitude he could have gotten makeup work or a tutor back then.
Aside from the constant bitching, he continued to take things surprisingly seriously, working through several more problems in front of her so she could check his thought processes. Twice he’d set up a completely different problem from what the test was actually saying, then managed to solve the new one more or less correctly. It was a little shocking to some small remaining goody-two-shoes part of her how willing he was to admit that he was just guessing about what the question wanted, but it did make getting a handle on his extremely uneven capabilities easier.
“Your main skill appears to be faking your way to a D,” she said, shooing him off with ten minutes left of lunch – although in truth she was begrudgingly impressed by how much he’d managed to accomplish with such an inadequate toolset, maybe from taking the class almost three times. It wasn’t a high grade by any means, but if she could find a way to get his head around graphing, he might even pass the final.
She wasn’t as sure about his odds with Algebra II next semester, but this had been a spontaneous strategic pity offer – none of that was her problem, and she certainly wasn’t volunteering to reteach him the entire middle and high school math curriculum.
Veronica slid into her seat in History discreetly to hide the granola bar she’d tucked in front of her textbook. No one appeared to notice it, although when she surreptitiously unwrapped it and took a bite, she was pretty sure Mr. Rooks saw. He shot her a wink and Veronica smiled to herself. It paid to be one of the good students.
“I have two weeks to teach you everything you need to know about the history of the world,” he said, clapping his hands to bring the class to order as Veronica snuck one last inadvisably large bite. “Then it is revision time!”
The class groaned, performatively, and he pretended surprise. “You mean you don’t want to win the class gameshow?”
Everyone collectively protested that they did indeed want to do the gameshow, complete with a little exaggerated bragging from some of the class brainiacs. Veronica joined in the former, if not the latter.
“Then let’s get to work,” Mr. Rooks enthused, dragging the class more or less willingly along with him. Veronica rolled up the wrapper over her granola bar and resolved to finish it later.
*
Her dad wasn’t in when Veronica swung by the station after school, but she gave Inga the paper bag with the conversation tart she’d bought to give to him, hoping it would make him smile. Then she went to the beach for a while, finished her lunch while sitting on a rock, because it seemed somehow bleak to go straight home.
It was chillier out than she would have liked, although not really cold. Veronica was glad of her long sleeves and jeans anyway. Maybe she was a baby about temperature, but she owned it, which counted for something. Counted for what she had no idea, but hey. At least she could count.
She smiled, amused by her own thoughts. The damp, gritty particles of sand shifted beneath her as she zipped her lunch kit back up. You always thought a rock would be a great solution, prevent all the drawbacks of sitting right in the sand, and then it never quite worked out that way, she reflected, pushing up and brushing herself off. Backup clearly had the right of it – ignore the dirt, put a towel down in the car, then have a bath when you got home. Although Veronica was going to use the bathroom shower, instead of her tongue and the garage.
A hot shower sounded good, although she might honestly have been better off with a cold one. Math might not be the sexiest thing in the world, but she’d spent more than half an hour sitting directly next to a guy who she was usually having sex with any time she was around him for more than five minutes, and her body had been understandably confused. It wasn’t quite enough to get her actively worked up, but enough that she noticed, sporadically – like a perpetual case of pre-arousal. When are you going to get around to it? she imagined various parts of her body asking. I didn’t hit the button yet, but I cleared my schedule.
A shower of any kind, Veronica decided firmly. At the very least it would jolt her brain back in the general direction of sanity. She was off-kilter today – from the disruption of her usual habits, with Weevil; from missing her dad or eating lunch after school; from messing up an answer in Spanish class.
Or maybe it was just that she didn’t want to go home, and she didn’t want to admit it. She was so tired of dodging and guessing and tiptoeing, and none of the alternatives seemed any less exhausting. How long had it been since she’d taken Backup for a walk on the beach half a mile from here, and come home to trip over proof of her own naivety? And it didn’t feel like that much had changed.
It had – that had been pre-Weevil, which was weird to think about, and she remembered spending the whole time trying not to think about Lilly – but in some ways it was just inevitably the same, in the same way sitting in the living room with her dad on Christmas while her mom ‘napped’ upstairs wasn’t the same as when Lianne had gone AWOL from her own birthday last year and they’d had no idea where she was… but had still felt the same, somehow. Hopping from one concentric circle to the next was still going in circles.
She reached her car before her internal monologue could get any more bleak. Maybe it was the sky. It wasn’t obviously cloudy, but there was a pervasive steely grey cast to it that didn’t predispose anyone to cheerfulness. Veronica cranked the radio to offset it, switching to a top 40s channel, although she stopped short of forcing herself to sing along.
It was only because the song that was playing when she pulled into the driveway was an almost toxically upbeat pop song that the energy in the house didn’t take her more by surprise. The clanging from the kitchen was her first indication that something was going on, but whatever she expected, it wasn’t for her mom to have every piece of kitchenware they stored on the bottom shelves of the kitchen island out on the counters. There were a bunch of pots from the stove drawer, too.
“Oh, hi, honey.” Her mom looked up from where she knelt on the floor – wiping down the now-empty shelves, it looked like. “You’re home late.”
“I went to see Dad,” Veronica said, wondering if it was a good sign that she didn’t even have to lie. “He wasn’t at the station so I went to the beach. What are you doing?” There was a faintly frenetic note to her mother’s voice that kept her from being too optimistic.
“Cleaning up!” Lianne said, as if it was obvious. “It gets so dusty under here and I just – I mean, we cook with these!”
“I don’t,” Veronica said, the teasing perfunctory. She wasn’t sure what was going on – her mom was wound too tightly for this to be one of her drunken bright ideas, which were almost always loose and silly, big swings that got abandoned halfway through – but she didn’t think she liked it. “I thought those things were just for show.”
Her mom laughed, but it felt forced, a little too shrill. “Well, I needed something to do. Why don’t you rinse everything out while I–”
“Mom, the pots are fine.”
“I am trying to clean up, Veronica, so if you don’t want to help then just – just go to your room.” Lianne braced her hands on her thighs as if she was about to stand up, but she didn’t. Veronica hesitated, hovering, despising her own weakness in wanting to read into the words, like clean up didn’t have a perfectly obvious meaning. Refusing to flounce off to her room in way that would be equally immature. Not quite able to bring herself to cross the kitchen and give her mom a hug, the way the more magnanimous part of her wanted to.
“Okay,” she said finally, purposefully ignoring the sudden irritability the sentiment had been delivered with in favour of a lighthearted rejoinder. “I hope you’re not using chemicals down there. We cook with–”
“Just go,” her mom snapped. Veronica went, before she said something she regretted.
It was probably nothing, she told herself. Maybe her parents had had an argument. It was stupid to take it personally and equally stupid to get her hopes up. She’d tried over the years not to notice things like the fact that getting anxious and jittery usually meant that Lianne had gone too long without a drink, but that if she was cleaning then that was probably on purpose, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t.
It didn’t mean she hadn’t also noticed that if it wasn’t precipitated by an especially embarrassing incident or a particularly bad fight, it almost never took.
Nobody keeps their New Year’s resolutions anyway, Veronica thought with a grim facsimile of humour. She hadn’t even bothered making any.
Which was probably for the best, if you gave it any real thought, because they would have had to be either outright lies or deeply unhinged. The idea of a list of resolutions saying things like Have sex with a known felon and Get vicious revenge and Establish Slut Constitution and crown self queen was entertaining, until you imagined your dad getting a hold of it.
Her phone buzzed, and Veronica glanced down at it. A text from her dad: Thank you for the pastry.
That was strange – he almost never texted. A call wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary, especially if he was going to be staying late, but he’d only text if he didn’t have even five minutes to call her, or if there was something going on at the station he didn’t want her to know about.
Texting back wouldn’t get her an answer, if he didn’t want to give one, so Veronica sent back a heart and tried to put it out of her mind.
She did go back downstairs after that, although it was at least half out of the feeling that she was too old to be sent to her room. Propping herself on the couch to scratch Backup’s ears while watching junk TV seemed like an entirely reasonable act of rebellion.
Her mom’s scrubbing and clanking routine continued, sporadically audible from the kitchen, for a long enough time that it eventually occurred to Veronica to check whether any actual food was being made. Her dad still wasn’t home – probably unsurprising considering his mysterious texting choices – but it was getting close to dinner time and the late lunch had done very little to tide her over.
Judging by the full drying rack and the upturned pots and dishes on hand towels along most of the counter, Lianne had decided to rinse everything herself, which was unsurprising. She had moved on to cleaning out the fridge, even though the lack of counter space presented an obvious problem, and half of its contents were piled up on the kitchen island.
Veronica bit back her first sharp-edged comment, reconsidered her second more lighthearted one as likely to land badly, and said only, blandly, “I could order takeout. Chinese, or something? I could call Dad and see if he doesn’t mind stopping by Mama Leone’s to pick up an order, but I don’t know when he’s going to be done.”
“I’ll make something,” her mom said, voice stiff with distracted anxiety. “I’m just – organizing things.”
Resignedly, Veronica tried to find some way to say it’s almost seven without setting her off. She was still wrestling with that particular puzzle when she realized Lianne had gone strangely still, almost like she was afraid to move. She’d gone from paying only absent-minded attention to her daughter to absolutely none whatsoever, and for a brief moment Veronica was afraid to wonder why.
She wasn’t a little kid anymore, though, so she stepped around the fridge door to see that her mother was face-to-face with that long-abandoned container of kombucha, which must have been shoved to the back, invisible behind two kinds of lemonade and a glass bottle of organic but uninspiring peach juice.
It’s not even really alcoholic, Veronica thought acidly, and was immediately appalled with herself.
She reached in and grabbed the first other thing she could make plausible, a six-pack of mini yogurts. “Just until there’s something good,” she said, with a false smile that felt disturbingly convincing on her face – then doubled back for the kombucha like it was an afterthought.
“Nobody’s even drinking this stuff, it’s awful,” she announced, carelessly, trying not to wonder exactly who had bought it in the first place (her dad never would have), if it had been a desperate attempt to do damage control on an impending relapse or an attempt to gratify the existing one right out in the open without getting caught… or worse, if was the precipitating event, purchased in innocence or ill-conceived confidence. “I’m going to dump it, it’s probably going bad anyway. If it even can get worse.”
Veronica opened the bottle and tipped it over the sink with one hand, using the other to fish a spoon out of the cutlery drawer. It seemed like the best way to project unconcern, but when she glanced up, she couldn’t avoid the ashamed gratitude on her mother’s face. It was too naked, too raw, something she didn’t want to see. Too close to supplication.
“I’ll just call Bamboo Garden,” she decided aloud. “I can go pick up the food; I know you have to finish…” a gesture encompassed both the food and the dishware, “all this. Hey, we can have lemon chicken for once!”
Lianne mustered a tremulous smile. “Don’t think I can’t tell you’re just trying to get out of cleaning the fridge.”
“You know what they say about too many fridge-cleaners in the kitchen,” Veronica agreed. It wasn’t hard to play along. She slipped around to the other side of the fridge door and tugged the Chinese food menu out from under its magnet. “I can pay on your card, right?”
“It’s in my purse,” her mom said. “No pit stops.”
Veronica snapped her fingers. “Alas, my dastardly plan for free lipstick!” Then she escaped into the living room with her unwanted yogurt before the façade could become any more grotesque.
*
They were halfway through the chow mein and lemon chicken when her dad finally got home, and it only took Veronica one look at his face to know that something big had happened. She set her plate down on the table next to the couch, and her mom, seeing the same thing she did, stood abruptly.
“Keith?”
“I don’t want to jinx it,” he told her, with a sidelong look at Veronica, “but I think I just made the biggest arrest of my career.”
It took a couple seconds for all the tumblers to fall into place. Veronica got there first. “You caught E-string?”
He spread his hands in triumph. “Walked him right out of his music store.”
Lianne exclaimed and hugged him, while Veronica rescued her mom’s plate from its precarious perch on the couch cushions. “That’s a little on the nose.”
Her dad winked at her over his wife’s shoulder, returning the embrace, and she couldn’t help smiling. It felt like a mistake to be over-optimistic, but… the fragile bubble of hope welling up in her chest proved strangely impossible to pop.
“Nice to have a win,” he commented as they moved gradually toward the dining room. Veronica slipped ahead to set down the plates and grab the remaining containers of food from the kitchen.
“Are you short on those?” her mom was asking as she set down the chow mein and stir-fry. Veronica watched her dad’s expression flicker, just briefly. If she had to guess, he was holding back an expression that would have said more clearly, I told you already, and I thought you were sober when I did.
But then the smile was back, and he just said, “I didn’t feel much like celebrating the last one. It’s all very well to keep someone from being fileted like a pumpkin, but it’s less exciting if in the process you see very clearly why one might want to do so.”
“Fileted like a pumpkin?” Veronica asked, as her mom raised a finger in silent realization – though not of the topic under discussion – and headed to the kitchen herself for another plate and set of cutlery.
“A long and sordid story,” her dad told her, patting her shoulder, “which it is much better you not know. Suffice it to say that one should not sleep with the catering staff, even other people’s catering staff, or for that matter anyone who is not one’s wife.”
“Fascinating but unhelpful, since I don’t foresee having a wife,” Veronica shot back, more than a little interested in the details, but not so much as to forget that he’d caught an active serial killer tonight.
“Then how about: if a man gets you fired, trying to stab him will just get you even more fired.”
“Words to live by,” she agreed, taking the fresh plate from her mom and serving him some of everything but the lemon chicken. “Now spill on the arrest.”
“We had some results come back recently,” her dad said as they gently bullied him into a seat the table, falling easily into his usual habit of obscuring important details until the case was out of court, or at least until they were public. “Something I sent in as a hail Mary a few months back. Nothing definitive but enough to refine our parameters, and when you narrow things down… sometimes people rise to the top.” He repressed the strength of his smile, but it was easy to see he was proud of himself. “I didn’t want to say anything in case it turned out to be a bust, but we made an arrest today, and judging by the evidence we found at his workplace…”
“It’s going to stick?” Lianne asked, at the same time Veronica said, “He was going to do it again?”, which made her mother shoot her a quick, horrified glance.
Keith took a bite of noodles. “Yes,” he said delicately around the food, nodding to his wife, “and probably,” inclining his head towards Veronica.
She was not-quite-ashamed to admit that the knowledge gave her a bit of a guilty thrill. A real serial killer was exciting, and even more so with the addition of active – especially since no one was really in danger anymore. And there was nothing wrong with wanting a few more details. Still, she stepped on the feeling as best she could as she tucked herself into the chair catty-corner to him and drew her own plate toward her. “You said his workplace? Not his house?”
Her dad nodded. “Hence the weekend abductions. It looks like he was keeping them at the shop while it was closed. I’m sure the partying-college-student element was a factor – the reasons these men always seem to have for hating women do tend to dovetail very well with that sort of victim – but it probably wasn’t the primary one. We’ve got hair samples and possible blood from the… place of probable confinement, so assuming they come back positive, we’ve got him dead to rights.”
“And you stopped him from hurting anyone else,” Lianne added. “That’s fantastic, honey.”
“Not bad for a day’s work,” Keith said, his satisfaction apparent. “And with all the paperwork I did and calls I made tonight, I’m hopeful about implementing regular hours from here on out.”
“At least until spring break,” Veronice teased him, which got a laugh from her mom and a wince from her dad.
“Don’t puncture my triumph,” he told her. “It’s unfilial.”
Her mom slid in then with logistics questions – was there a lot of press and was there going to be, did the county commissioner know, was he expecting a plea deal and if not what were his expectations on the timing of a trial – and Veronica finished her plate, watching her parents half-fondly and half-thoughtfully. She wasn’t sure what she was trying to see or if it was there. Maybe just the immediate future; whether the confluence of something like this would give her mom the boost she needed to level out or just an excuse to backslide even quicker than usual. Maybe some kind of answer for how things had gotten like this, and whether this was even good or bad.
Neither of them noticed her silence until she polished off the rest of her food, but reaching over the table to serve herself a little more chow mein got her dad’s attention.
“You’re quiet,” he said, smiling just a little.
Veronica shrugged. “Just contemplating the human cost behind my impulse to be titillated by sordid gossip.” She set the serving spoon back down before she took too much for her parents to have seconds. “Don’t worry, I’ll be over it by tomorrow.”
He shook his head indulgently. “This is our guy. I’m sure of it. Which means the cost is a lot lower than it could have been.”
“Then I guess I’m contemplating the weight of being the daughter of an honest-to-god hero.”
Her dad made an attempt to demur, but her mom was agreeing with her before he could get more than two words out, and between them they wore him down by the time his plate was clean.
*
The arrest was in the paper the next morning – courtesy of the county commissioner rather than the Sheriff’s Department, who Veronica had on good authority would have preferred to hold on to the information until their DNA results came back: E-String Strangler Arrested; Oakland Killer False Lead, Says Sheriff’s Department.
Students were whispering about it in the halls, and one or two of the braver or more clueless kids even asked her about it, but she just dusted off the old my dad doesn’t talk about work at home wide-eyed stare, asked one of them who he was and the other one how long it had been since they talked, and the questioners melted shamefacedly back into the crowd.
Yolanda was a different story, of course – especially since she still remembered the other girl mentioning that she and Gabrielle went out to clubs on occasion. It was never a bad time to instill a little caution, because Veronica was apparently turning into her father.
“You probably don’t know anything,” the other girl started when she caught Veronica in the hall on the way to lunch. “I don’t want to be a pain…”
The consideration wasn’t all that surprising, but the diffidence in Yolanda’s voice was unusual. Veronica remembered what Weevil had said about her dad, the Google search that had told her Percival ‘Bone’ Hamilton had done a stint in Victorville last year for what he’d done, and the fact that Yolanda had never mentioned her father to Lilly or Veronica at all, back then.
“…But you want to know just how many serial killers are lurking?” she asked, deciding to help smooth the subject over. “Understandable, but harder to pin down than you might think.”
Gabrielle met them at the tilty table that she and Yolanda always claimed. “Did you see the paper?” she asked.
“Veronica was just giving me the full story,” Yolanda said, setting out her salad and apple as Veronica glanced around for Meg, who wasn’t immediately apparent. She was probably buying lunch today.
“The full story is that he killed two college girls last year,” Veronica said matter-of-factly. “Found them at clubs, locked them up for a weekend, then dumped them. Let this be a cautionary tale.”
Gabrielle looked more perturbed than Yolanda did, pausing with her yogurt cup half-open. “God.”
“It freaks you out, right?” Yolanda said. “Kind of makes me want to stay home,” she added, albeit lightheartedly.
Her friend seemed inclined to take her seriously. “Well, they caught him, right? And he was only in Neptune? We usually go to L.A. to go clubbing.”
“Statistically, L.A. probably has at least one active serial killer at any given time,” Veronica told her helpfully. Both girls stared at her, and Meg, who was approaching with a hot dog from the commissary, did a double-take.
“Is this what we’re talking about now?” she asked dubiously.
“Just passing on some good old-fashioned scaremongering!” Veronica told her cheerfully. “I guess you heard about the E-String Strangler. Who, for the record, did not strangle anyone. I guess E-String Asphyxiator didn’t play as well with the press.”
“Happy subject,” Meg said, sliding in between Veronica and Gabrielle.
“Gabrielle is reconsidering her extra-curricular activities,” Yolanda told her, which prompted an immediate protest.
“You said it made you want to stay home!”
“You only go to clubbing to see Dustin, anyway,” Yolanda said. “Half the time you ditch me before midnight. And Mr. Mars caught the guy.”
Gabrielle flushed but didn’t contest the allegation; Meg shook her head. “So was this guy… did he go somewhere else? I heard something about Oakland – Dad hid the paper; he didn’t want Grace seeing it.”
“The commissioner pinned the murders on the Oakland killer because he was worried about tourism, and the real killer was probably smart enough to stop for long enough that everyone wrote it off,” Veronica said, her bluntness stirring a shocked laugh from Gabrielle. Yolanda frowned.
“So the mayor is… basically the mayor from Jaws?”
Veronica considered for a moment, pegged it as a fair assessment, and nodded. “That’s reassuring,” Yolanda said drily.
“It was only two people, right?” Meg was trying for a nonchalant tone, but Veronica suspected she wanted a little reassurance.
“As far as we know.” She made a face. “I like to think missing college students would have made the news, even if he took them a couple counties over. But they’re going to nail him for those two.”
“Okay, tell?” Yolanda pressed, but Veronica only shrugged. She didn’t want to tip the conversation into actual grimness by sharing what her dad had told her about the chest those girls had been locked in, but more importantly, that would be over the line of acceptable insight. She’d learned over the years how to walk the line of being a source of fascinating information without saying anything that might get her, or worse, him, in trouble.
“Dad doesn’t tell me the details. I just know he’s not worried. They have some kind of test coming back, and then he’s expecting a plea deal.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Gabrielle said. She took a last large bite of her yogurt and stole a cherry tomato out of Yolanda’s salad. “I have to go talk to Mrs. Dunne about something. But thanks. I feel better. I think.”
“You probably still shouldn’t go to clubs,” Veronica observed with a raise of her eyebrows. Gabrielle smiled faintly and Yolanda laughed.
“The one I can get into, the bouncer used to be my dad’s bodyguard,” she said. “I’m not worried, not for real. It’s just freaky.” She waved as Gabrielle vanished toward the school building.
“Now that she won’t be tarred with the same brush.” Veronica bent and retrieved the flag from her pencil case. “Not that I care, but I’d hate to cause trouble with your friend.” She delivered the words archly, but she meant them. She’d caused Yolanda enough trouble.
The other girl only smiled. “Are you seriously going to keep putting that up? Clemmons will pitch a fit if he sees.”
“Let him.” Veronica shrugged unconcernedly. “He can’t stop us from calling ourselves sluts.”
“I am so much less invested in this than you are,” Yolanda said, half-laughing, but Meg shook her head.
“You have no idea. She’s making actual rules now.”
“We can’t let just anyone sit here!” Veronica protested, pressing a scandalized hand to her chest. “Think of our reputations! What if this becomes merely the hussy table, or worse, the tease table?”
“I think you can let the guy you’re sleeping with sit here one time without becoming less of a slut,” Meg said drily, fishing some chips out of her lunch bag to offset her sandwich. Veronica had barely started her own lunch; she tried to take a larger bite to make up for it.
Yolanda shook her head, smiling. “Maybe you–” Her phone rang, and she glanced down at it even before she had it fully out of her pocket. “Oh – I have to answer this.” She grabbed the edge of her salad, hooked an arm through the strap of her purse, and hurried away without saying anything else. She didn’t, Veronica noticed, actually answer the phone – instead she let it ring out and then started dialing as she speed-walked away from the lunch area. Maybe she was just calling whoever it was back, but it seemed… weird.
“We’ve been abandoned,” Meg commented.
Veronica shrugged. “I was talking too much anyway. I’ve barely gotten a chance to eat.” She shot her friend a bright smile. “Your turn!”
Meg laughed, as Veronica had hoped she would, and after a moment she did start talking, about rehearsal and then about a poem her little sister had written for school. She didn’t mention cheer, which was about par for the course, even though as far as Veronica knew she was still stubbornly turning up to practice every Friday.
Then the description of Grace’s illustrations nearly covering the words faded away politely. For a moment, Veronica thought Meg was waiting for her to say something, but –
“Hi?”
Veronica glanced up from her leftover baked macaroni in surprise. “Hi,” she returned cautiously. She didn’t know the girl who was standing next to their table, but the thin figure-hugging sweater and the too-tight jeans would have been a pointed fashion statement if the jeans weren’t also half an inch too short. If she’d wanted to be mean, she would have said that the outfit didn’t so much say behold my impressive cup size (although it was hard not be duly impressed) as it did I can’t afford new clothes. As it was, she just felt faintly guilty about thinking it.
On the other hand, maybe this girl was just expecting a flood. Her hoop earrings were big enough that they couldn’t have been that cheap.
“Are you Veronica?”
Meg looked over at that, as if she was planning to try some sort of I-am-Spartacus maneuver. Veronica only let herself entertain the idea for a moment, as amusing as it was.
“Yes.”
The girl nodded, twirling her dark, curly hair around one finger. “So… Weevil told me to tell you he’s a slut?”
Meg choked; Veronica stared. The girl – Veronica thought she was a senior? – shrugged one shoulder, apparently unbothered.
“And is he?” Veronica managed finally, striving for an even tone.
The girl shrugged again, both shoulders this time. “Sure, I guess. He hooks up with a lot of girls. I don’t think he’s ever had a disease or anything, though.”
“That is basically what it takes for guys, isn’t it?” Veronica muttered. “Okay, sit down. Or–” She glanced at the flag, which drew the other girl’s attention to it.
“What is that?”
“This is the slut table,” Veronica told her by way of explanation.
The girl frowned, but apparently it wasn’t any of the obvious things that were bothering her. “Nobody told me.”
“Are you a slut?” Veronica asked with exaggerated patience. Meg made a noise of disapproval at her rudeness.
Dark curls bounced as their guest shrugged. “Ask anyone.” She climbed over the bench and sat down without fanfare. “Are there only two of you?”
“Yolanda sits here sometimes,” Meg offered.
“There are way more sluts in school than that,” the girl said. She looked at Meg. “I’m Jasmine.”
“This is Meg,” Veronica told her.
“Cool.” Jasmine looked back at Veronica, assessing her. “So, like – what’s the deal, anyway?”
“I told Weevil he couldn’t sit here because it’s sluts only, and now he’s decided to be a pain, apparently,” Veronica said drily.
The other girl giggled. “Well, I’m supposed to tell you, um,” she frowned in thought, “I have ‘personal knowledge of his sluttiness’. But I don’t know, because that kind of makes it sound like there was a threesome, or something, and I’m not into that.”
Veronica considered and rejected several possible responses, while Meg made an attempt to sink into the earth at hearing her words repeated back like that. Finally she settled on, “Do you?”
Jasmine shrugged. “Sure. He gets around. I’m on the list. Don’t know what I can tell you that you don’t already know, though.” She squinted at Veronica, like she was trying to assess whether whatever rumours she’d heard were true.
Veronica considered for a moment. The truth was that she was a bit surprised that someone like Weevil was on good enough terms with one of his exes to send her on this bizarro errand, between his whole tough guy thing and the intensity he’d apparently brought to the relationship she did know about. Unless he was still hooking up with Jasmine – which would make this pretty ballsy of him, even though Veronica didn’t care who he slept with and presumably the other girl didn’t either. She might be a little impressed in that case.
“Just how slutty would you say he is?” she asked finally. Meg, who seemed to feel that enough was enough, put her head in her hands.
“Just let him sit here sometimes, like Yolanda,” she said, voice muffled. “I thought you said he just wanted to prove a point, and then he’d go away.”
Jamine looked like she was still considering the question, so Veronica took the opportunity to scoff and say airily, “And let him win?”
That earned her an exasperated eyeroll from Meg and a snort from Jasmine, who added, “I guess it depends? I think he was hooking up with other girls sometimes during sophomore year – well, it was mostly the second half, you know, after he broke up with Mia Esparza? But I never asked. I was hooking up with other guys when he wasn’t around, so.”
“Well, you can definitely sit with us,” Veronica told her.
Meg looked uncomfortable. “I mean, isn’t hooking up behind someone’s back kind of cheating? Even if you’re…” she made air quotes, “‘casual’?”
Jasmine laughed before Veronica could intercede, fortunately not offended. “It wasn’t behind his back! But, you know, if he was around, I’d just pick him. He’s got the goods and he knows how to use them, you know? Plus he’s not all squirrelly about giving oral like some boys–” she turned to Veronica, “which is kind of slutty for a guy, right?”
Veronica had honestly never thought about it that way, but she supposed it wasn’t exactly consistent with the ‘did you score’ mentality that shuffled teenage boys’ activity away from slutty towards macho. “I guess you have a point,” she conceded nonchalantly, trying not to blink at the plainness with which Jasmine just said it, and hoping to steer the conversation away from anything that might lead to talking about blowjobs. “But how about last year?”
“Oh, there was, like, nobody,” Jasmine said candidly. “It’s not like we’re always at the same parties or whatever, so I’m not saying for sure, but I never heard anything. He might have been keeping it quiet, like if he was pulling 09er girls back then, but I guess I sort of figured he was just busy with stuff, you know? ‘Cause Gus was gone. And then all those girls who used to go after Gus started in on him, right? It was gross. Marina and Vicki are like twenty. But they want, like, child support money or whatever. It probably would have worked on Gus eventually if he hadn’t died, but Weevil’s not stupid.”
Veronica glanced at Meg, who seemed as unsure of how to respond as she was. “Wow. I guess that could theoretically count in his favour, but if he’s not actually taking advantage…”
“It’s not like I keep tabs on him – I don’t know what he does with the less crazy ones. Most girls want a meal ticket, not a baby trap.” Jasmine shrugged. “I can buy my own fries, you know? I just want to have a good time.” She considered for a moment. “Cervando’s sweet, though. I’ll probably throw him a bone, at least.”
Well, Veronica was never thinking about that phrase the same way ever again. “Okay,” she said. “Well… monogamy is very unslutty, even if it’s secret monogamy, so I still say he loses points for the Lilly thing.” She didn’t quite have the guts to say that pining away for a girl was unslutty, even if it would have made her case a bit more convincing – Weevil’s reaction in the beginning had made it pretty clear how he felt about allusions to those letters, and even if she found him much less intimidating these days, the memory of that shiver of fear in her spine made her cautious.
“Were they dating?” Jasmine’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “I thought he was just, you know, hitting that. She’s not exactly his type,” she added.
That was a novel idea – not that Weevil’s history involved mostly girls who were distinctly unlike Lilly, but for the qualifications that mattered to be hers, not his. Veronica felt uncomfortable; up until now, she’d only thought about the ways in which he wouldn’t have measured up to Lilly’s standard as contributing factors in that whole mess. It was strange to think that Jasmine would’ve considered the things that separated Lilly from someone like her to be undesirable – and Veronica didn’t like what that strange feeling probably said about her.
She didn’t say anything about it, though.
“Whereas, if it’s just sex, it’s more of an anything-with-a-pulse situation?” she observed drily, and Jasmine shrugged in cheerful acknowledgement.
“I think that’s pretty slutty, Veronica,” Meg said in a patient voice, like she thought Veronica was being unreasonable. Then she stopped and blinked. “…I can’t believe I just said that.”
Veronica didn’t have so many friends left she could afford to lose one, so she refrained from cackling. Jasmine just frowned, like she didn’t know why Meg was so surprised. “Yeah, definitely,” she said. “Like on a scale of all the guys at school? Sure.”
“It’s more of a scale of all the people at school,” Veronica said, not quite willing to abandon the point. “Which does change things. But I’ll take it under advisement.”
“This is ridiculous.” Meg shook her head. “Just let Jasmine, uh, sponsor him or whatever.”
“It’s vouch for him, not sponsor him. And she can’t sponsor anybody, she’s new.”
“Now you’re just making things up.”
Veronica shrugged. “I don’t want him to sit here. He’s a lunch thief.”
“Well, I think she’s right,” Jasmine said, “but I don’t mind giving Weevil a hard time. What if you say you can only have one new person, like, a month?”
Meg snorted outright and Veronica smiled slowly. “It is a pleasure to have you on board.”
The other girl smiled brightly and shook the hand she offered. “I can’t sit here on Monday and Friday – Cervando helps me with English. He’s been writing some of my essays but I have to pass the final exam.”
Meg looked even more scandalized by the idea of cheating at school than she had about cheating on a guy, and Veronica had to try not to giggle. “Sure. Let me know if you need any other help; you seem like you’d been more fun to tutor than…” She rolled her eyes in the direction of the table Weevil and his friends had taken over today. He wasn’t watching them, as far as she could tell, but one kid with short-cropped hair and a faint hint of a mustache had a resentful eye on Jasmine. He didn’t look like he’d be much use as a tutor, but she thought Weevil had mentioned something about that too, so maybe she was wrong. Fortunately it wasn’t Veronica’s problem either way.
“That’s sweet, but I like the perks,” Jasmine said, grinning, which jarred a memory loose. Apparently Weevil was wrong about Cervando not putting out when his students did well.
She refrained from mentioning that – it didn’t seem like the right audience. “I have no ability or desire to compete with that,” she said instead, and Jasmine giggled. “Anyway, you two talk, because if I don’t finish at least the main part of my lunch I’m going to hate myself all afternoon.” She took a large bite of the remaining half of her baked macaroni to emphasize the statement.
“Um,” Meg said. “I’m Meg.” She poked the flag. “And I’m a slut?”
Veronica snorted through her mouthful of pasta. “We’re not Sluts Anonymous.”
“Slut and proud?” Meg offered, shooting her an amused sidelong glance. Jasmine offered her a high-five and Veronica shook her head at them both.
*
Weevil was still at his locker by the time Veronica got her stuff stashed in her locker after school, which was fortunate – especially since she’d had to guess where his locker even was, and her first guess had been wrong. Less fortunate is the fact that he’s surrounded by flunkies, which is going to be annoying.
Fortunately, Veronica was perfectly capable of being annoying herself. Rather than asking if he was free now or something equally transparent, she adopted a regretful expression and leads with, “I’m afraid I have bad news.”
Weevil glanced up, already grinning at something the tall boy Veronica thought of as a try-hard had said. “What?”
“The thing is, we only have one opening per month, and the other candidate was just… much more convincing.” She made a visible effort to perk up. “On the other hand, your character references are certainly adequate, and we’re not unaware that you put a little extra effort in, so if you reapply next month, there’s definitely a chance that you’ll be selected. Especially if there are no other applicants,” she added, reaching up to pat his shoulder in a conciliatory fashion.
“The fuck are you talking about,” he said, while the kid behind him blinked in confusion. It wasn’t exactly a question, so Veronica elected to ignore it.
“Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’m sure you’ll qualify eventually. And you might have a whole extra year – I wouldn’t worry about it. Really.”
He pointed a finger at her face. “You’re yanking my chain and I don’t like it.”
Veronica shrugged, ignoring the oohing from the peanut gallery. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just wanted to let you know the news in person.” She smiled sweetly at him. “Jasmine’s really nice, though. She’s going to be a great addition to the table.”
“You’re fucking kidding me.” He looked ready to say more, but the kid from lunch pushed his way to the front of the group before he could.
“What about Jasmine?”
“You must be Cervando,” Veronica said, prompting a wave of laughter from his friends. “Don’t worry, people are still allowed to date after they join the slut table. You’re probably fine.”
Cervando bristled. “Jasmine’s not a slut!”
“Yeah, well, she’s a thief,” Weevil said, tone rife with performative anger. “You’re telling me she stole my spot?” Howls of laughter followed that one. “She was supposed to be a fucking character reference, because you told me I needed one.”
Veronica shrugged. “What can I say, she was just more qualified. Don’t get discouraged.” She patted his shoulder again, ignoring Cervando glaring at them in baffled hostility. “Anyway, I have an art project.”
There was an outburst of confused amusement and questions as she walked away, half-regretting her closing remark. It was probably too broad, although at least his friends wouldn’t automatically know what it meant. Although who knew, maybe they would. She had no idea how many specific details guys usually shared about that kind of thing; she was more or less resigned to the possibility that every biker in school knew his opinion on her breasts, or worse, on how much of a detriment her inexperience was, but she hadn’t really considered they might be up on the logistical details.
To be fair, Lilly had mentioned a few things about him to her, and she had some unpleasant details on Dick’s kissing technique from the same source, although she’d always protested and plugged her ears if Logan came up in that context. That had always been a bridge too far; she’d had to look him in the face.
The worst Weevil could do was not show up, anyway. Which would be embarrassing, but she’d survive, even if he took off with his friends and they all giggled about her sitting there by herself. She would just snicker right back the next time they had to spend the night in jail.
He did show up, although not until she’d started debating putting her bra back on. The underwear had had to wait, because she hadn’t specifically planned on this today, and she was wearing jeans, so she’d opted to just lean against the teacher’s desk. He didn’t make any particular inroads into taking them off, either.
“I can’t believe you let her scoop me,” he said, crossing his arms and leaning back against the door once he’d closed it. “And I call bullshit on your one slot crap.”
Veronica tipped her head and gave him her most innocent eyes. “I don’t what to tell you. I don’t make the rules.”
“You literally made them up this week.”
She bit back a smile. “Sorry. We agreed – two thirds of the vote. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Oh, what, and you were the lone hold-out?”
It was actually that Yolanda just hadn’t been there – Veronica still wanted to know what was up with that phone call – but instead of saying so she just batted her eyelashes at him in pretended confirmation. Weevil snorted.
“This is such bullshit.” He approached her, closing the distance slowly until there were only a couple inches between them. “But fine. What would it take to make you change your mind?”
“Are you trying to bribe me?” Veronica pressed a scandalized hand to her chest. “Unethical!”
“Yeah, it’s pretty slutty, though, right?” Weevil smirked at her, like he knew he had a good point. He did, damn it.
Veronica tilted her head to one side, pretending to think about it. “It’s just, we already promised it to Jasmine…” she said regretfully.
He raised an eyebrow, running one finger down from her clavicle to just above her belly button. Veronica tried not to shiver as the rest of his hand brushed against her breasts. “So I’ll make it worth your while. You don’t want her, anyway, she’s practically got a steady boyfriend.”
Veronica definitely didn’t want Jasmine by the same standard she wanted him, that was for sure. “I’m not sure. Maybe I’d be able to consider it more thoroughly if you took your shirt off.”
His mouth twitched and she thought the noise he made in his throat was a hastily swallowed laugh, but then his face smoothed out and he stepped back, shrugging out of his leather jacket and dropping it across the nearest desk. Veronica raised a single eyebrow, doing her best to project a cool, ‘I’m waiting’ attitude, and he locked eyes with her and pulled his shirt over his head. The muscles in his chest rippled in a way that had to be at least partially deliberate, although that didn’t make her want to touch them any less.
“Hmm,” she said. “I could speak to the committee for you, but I don’t know… these things are usually so procedural…”
“Is this what hanging out with rich people does to you?” he asked, dropping his end of whatever they were doing and catching her off-guard. “Roleplaying non-profit administrative corruption is what gets you off?”
“Who says it’s a non-profit?” Veronica shot back, to buy herself time.
“Because then it’d be the whore table.”
To her embarrassment, she started to blush at that. “Non-profits pay taxes. We’re more of a… hobby group.” She’d almost said professional organization, but that would have run headfirst into the same problem, and he was already laughing at her. “And actually, on that subject, it’s amateurs only. You might be disqualified for having engaged professionally.”
“That’s not what you said the other day.” He gave her a smarmy grin that was eminently smackable.
“I’m just saying… I can keep that under my hat for you if you make it worth my while.”
That got them back on the right track. “That sounds like extortion.”
“Call it what you like,” she retorted. “It doesn’t make a difference to me.” It was a blatant lie, because apparently roleplaying administrative corruption did get her going when he was involved. It was kind of annoying, actually.
“Sure it doesn’t. I know what you’re after.” He stepped closer again and reached for her belt loops, dragging her with him as he backed up. “You’re not real subtle.”
Veronica’s face heated a little at the suspicion he was talking about her reactions during sex. After all, she hadn’t really tried to be subtle anywhere else. “Subtlety is a waste of time. Take your pants off.”
“Not what I thought you wanted,” he said, and winked at her. Now she really was blushing again, damn it, damn it. Veronica forced herself to ignore him and pull off her shirt as he got working on his belt. Weevil whistled when he saw she was braless, and she pretended to swat at him, but the appreciation settled in her stomach as pure heat.
He reached for her jeans as soon as he was done with his own, and after a moment of consideration, Veronica let him. No point beating around the bush, right?
Her underwear was next, after which he hefted her onto the nearest desk and gave her a look of exaggerated consternation. “Oh, no, the condoms.” Before Veronica had time to formulate a response, he added with something she could only describe as ‘deliberately terrible acting’, “I better get one. Hold on,” and dropped to his knees, proceeding to loudly narrate his search through his pockets.
What the fuck was he even doing?
“Got one!” he exclaimed, turning toward her. His face was about level with her knees until he knelt up, and his breath skimmed across her skin as he said, still in the same stupid voice, “You know, since I’m down here…”
“Sure,” she said with half-mock annoyance, feeling both called-out and exasperated. “Do whatever.”
“Whatever, huh?” Weevil asked in his normal voice, and bit her thigh.
Veronica yelped in protest, kicking at him and missing before she even realized that he’d barely pressed his teeth into her skin. “You – fucking – asshole –”
“What, you didn’t mean it?”
It’s an awkward angle to kick him again, but Veronica jabbed him in the side with her toes. “You’re not going to need that condom if you keep this up. And you can say goodbye to–” She bit the inside of her cheek as he pressed two fingers to the center of her cunt, refusing to let her voice stutter or squeak even as the pressure radiated deliciously through her nether regions. “…whatever you thought you were getting out of this, by the way.”
“Oh, sure,” he said affably, grinning. “Like I don’t know an excuse when I hear it. Your billion-dollar ex-boyfriend couldn’t be bothered to get down here, huh? Might’ve scuffed his chinos.”
The casual reference to Duncan hurt more than anything he could have said if he was trying to upset her, but Veronica did her best to brush it off, refusing to be the girl who got worked up over nothing. She glared at him mutely instead, wanting to protest the rest of it but not sure where to start.
And then it was a moot point, because he leaned in to lick around his fingers, and it became necessary to focus on not making embarrassing noises. She was starting to hate how good he was at this. It was amazing, and she’d take as much of it as she could get, but it always felt like he was winning.
Veronica sucked in her breath as he spread his fingers, pressing them against the outer lips of her vulva and licking between them. The fact that he was completely avoiding her clit made her want to chew on his scalp, and even though she recognized how insane that thought was, she couldn’t bring herself to care. He’d bitten her first.
After another minute of amazing, infuriating activity, she put her legs over his shoulders to give herself a rest from the stretch – that, and in the hope it would encourage him higher. It didn’t, but the motion pushed his fingers and mouth against her in new ways and she could stop herself from groaning.
The skin of his shoulders and back was smooth and warm under her legs; it was strangely tempting to just rub her heels up and down over his back, and if she wasn’t concerned he’d stop what he was doing to ask why she was being weird, she might have done it.
Instead, she reached down with one hand and tried to reposition his head. She was utterly unsuccessful, but it made Weevil laugh against her flesh, and the sensation drew a full-body shudder from her.
“Uhn – can’t you just –” Her words choked off as he slid lower and instead of his fingers, slid his tongue inside of her. Veronica gasped – for air, in shock, she didn’t even know. Who did that? Was that really part of it? When she’d been young – really young – she’d thought that was what oral sex was, that something had to go in somewhere or it didn’t count. Then she’d gotten older and realized what an embarrassing misconception that was, only to repeat the whole thing with fingering a few years later when she’d worked out that masturbation worked a lot better if you figured out where your clit was, instead of shoving your fingers in and hoping for the best.
This wasn’t like that at all, though – for one thing she was already wet, which had been hit-or-miss back then; for another his tongue was soft and wet itself in a way her fingers never had been. The warm sweep of him tracing the edges of her opening, brushing with firm softness against the lowest part of her inner walls wasn’t as intense as what he’d been doing, but the novelty made her squirm and pant and press her heels into his mid-back.
Weevil laughed again, which was enough to jar him loose, and he must have decided he’d hit his torture quota for the day, because he licked a long, firm line up her cunt with the flat of his tongue, leaving her breathless, and finally applied it to her clit.
He’s got the goods and he knows how to use them, Jasmine had said. She’d probably meant his dick, but it was hard to argue either way. Veronica wondered vaguely if Jasmine had had any more success with putting him where she wanted him back then, when he was being a tease. Maybe if he’d had hair? A handle would make it easier, but the real problem was the awkward angle of always being on a desk. If they’d been on a couch or something…
At that point she lost track of her thoughts entirely, caught in the swirl of arousal that he was tracing with his tongue, not managing anything coherent until the steadily-building waves finally broke, and she came with a choked-off groan, and he didn’t stop.
“What are you doing?” she managed to get out, even though her head was still fuzzy from the aftershocks, pushing clumsily at his forehead.
Weevil pulled back, his mouth and even his nose all shiny from what he’d been doing. Veronica felt a faint jolt of something that might have been embarrassment or arousal. “Just trying to clear all my debts at once. I still owe you for the math shit, right? Wasn’t that the point?” He cocked an eyebrow at her and Veronica made a plaintive mph noise and shut her eyes for a second.
There was no way she was telling him that he’d be wasting his time, that all she’d get was worked up with no relief. It had never seemed particularly abnormal that she couldn’t come more than once in a row, but there was no way he wasn’t going to make her feel dumb about it, with all his stupid experience. He was already enjoying rubbing it in that he was wise to her ploys to get head far too much. But letting him wind her into tighter and tighter knots until he got bored with being down there just so she wouldn’t have to explain was a horrible idea, no matter how much the part of her brain that didn’t understand cause and effect wanted it. Especially since he was almost as stubborn as she was.
“I have to get home,” she said once she’d worked through all that at double-speed. Well, post-orgasm double-speed, which was almost as fast as her normal speed. “I don’t have time. Unless you’re good not getting off,” she added as if it was an afterthought, cocking her head and shooting him an innocent look.
Weevil groaned and levered himself to his feet, somehow having kept track of the condom he’d allegedly gotten down there for. “You just like having something to hold over my head.”
That was true, if not applicable to this particular issue, so Veronica only smiled sweetly and said, “Wipe your face off first.”
She was so surprised that he complied without arguing that it took her a precious second too long to realize it was her shirt he was holding – at which point, naturally, she tried to kick him again in frustration. She had another shirt in her locker, but how was she supposed to get there?
Weevil caught her foot before it could connect and pulled her toward him so smoothly that she almost fell right off the desk before she could grab the sides to steady herself. Instead, the front legs tipped up, and she almost went over on him desk and all before he hastily pushed her back and let go.
His mouth twitched as the landing jarred her enough to make her breasts bounce, and Veronica was so relieved not to be in a bruised and scraped pile on the floor that would have been very difficult to explain that she couldn’t help laughing once she caught her breath.
“Yeah, that’s not happening,” Weevil said, and he dragged her toward him by the legs instead and picked her up. “No more desks.”
“There’s a wall over there,” Veronica said helpfully, swinging her whole arm out to point and nearly overbalancing him, which didn’t make it any easier to stop laughing.
He backed her into the adjacent wall instead, grumbling, and pinned her there with his upper body while he dealt with his boxers and the condom. Every time she tried to say something he went to kiss her, and after the third time she’d shoved his face away, he said, “So shut up, then,” smirking in a way that told her he remembered perfectly well that she never let him do that after he’d gone down on her.
“Grow up,” she retorted, and fortunately by then he had things sorted out well enough to sink into her, and it was easy at that point to hitch a leg up around his waist and let everything slide into a pleasant rhythm.
Notes:
There's a bit at the end where Weevil tries to kiss Veronica a few times even though he's just gone down on her and he knows she's not up for that. It's more of an attempt to be obnoxious than to actually violate her boundaries.
(There's also a bit where she pretends to be coercing him into sleeping with her to get something he wants, but the thing he wants is for her to get her imaginary slut committee to give him slut membership to her lunch table. So it honestly doesn't really merit a warning, but maybe you're sensitive to that. Or maybe I just want an excuse to snicker about how funny I think I am.)
Chapter 23: We Take Such Pains
Notes:
I am so sorry for a second delayed chapter in a row - I promise I'm not intending to switch to once-a-month updates, I just spilled iced tea on my laptop and my keyboard stopped working, which has been messing with my (physical) writing momentum in a big way. It should be fixed this week, though!
No warnings for this chapter (aside from canon-typical PCH activities). On which note, I believe it was sunshine_lover to whom I promised a scene giving Veronica a closer look at some of Weevil's extra-curriculars. (I mean, I promised it because it was coming anyway, but regardless, I hope you enjoy!)
Chapter Text
Pride and resentment are not indigenous to the human heart; and perhaps it is due to the gardener's innate love of the exotic that we take such pains to make them thrive.
Hope Mirrlees
This whole thing with Jasmine had been doing Weevil’s head in a little bit this week, which was not something he’d anticipated when he’d decided to help Cervando get a bit of an edge.
Not the lunch table stuff – that was just a dumb joke, even if it was a dumb joke he was determined to win. It was mostly just having her around all the time, like a weird reminder of sophomore year. The part where now he had to dance delicately around Cervando’s precious feelings was starting to get annoying (for real, they used to fuck two years ago, she wasn’t even his ex or anything – and Cervando had been about ten years old back then anyway), but the reminder of how different things had been just a couple years back was what had been screwing with him off and on for the last week.
Back then, he’d thought Mira dumping him because she liked Hector better had been the worst thing that had ever happened to him. It had really been more about the cred than his feelings (although they’d still been significantly bruised) – about looking like an idiot in front of Gus and Red and even Chardo. None of that mattered much now, except for how horrified Hector had been, how he’d sworn up and down to Mira that he would never, ever, ever go out with her. It had felt humiliating at the time, like even Hector felt sorry for him, but by now it had become kind of nice in retrospect.
Not that he’d ever been in the habit of thinking about it much once Gus was gone and he had bigger things to worry about, until suddenly Jasmine was constantly around, making him think about how things had been back when they were hooking up. It had been simpler back then – you met a girl at a party and you fooled around, and then you decided if you wanted to date her or if you wanted to be able to pick a different girl next time. You kept your eyes peeled and your head up and you tried not to piss off the guy in charge, but if someone else got themselves in shit, it wasn’t your problem. You didn’t worry about the future, because everyone acted like they were all going to live forever. You didn’t go around dating white girls and letting them tie you into a little pretzel for fun, or getting your jollies with a girl whose father could personally arrest you for it, or taking risks that put the club in jeopardy – although actually, Gus probably would have thought that banging the sheriff’s daughter was excellent, and to hell with the risk. The truth was that Weevil couldn’t be sure if that made him feel better about the whole idea or not. Gus had always seemed to think that he was immortal, and god knew he was wrong about that. It made it hard to decide if Weevil had been an idiot back then, or if he was being one right now.
It got him in his head about a lot of things.
For instance: Veronica Mars was not Weevil’s usual type, if he was being honest. Blondes he was cool with, obviously, but she’d always had this whole preppie thing going on that he’d never been into. Jean skirts and long sleeves, that shit.
The skirts did tend shorter these days, which he appreciated on multiple levels.
Right now, for instance, when the only thing he had to get out of the way was her underwear. He had one finger under the elastic already, but the way she was wriggling against him and panting in his ear made him want to draw it out. Maybe twist the fabric, see if he could get it to rub against her clit. (It was a win-win, too, because if it didn’t work out the way he wanted, it still served as a stalling tactic – get her more worked up and frustrated.)
Then she dug her fingernails into his back, right behind his shoulder blades, and he forgot about that entirely, just like he always seemed to do his reservations.
Her stupid tight shirt had trapped her bra even after he got the clasp undone through the fabric, and now it was jabbing him in the stomach when he tried to get closer. He didn’t even know what she needed that underwire shit for anyway – she was small enough that she could probably get away with not wearing a bra at all, which he would frankly love.
He only spent a second thinking about it, though – how it would be even hotter than when she wore those tinier skirts and he knew every time he saw her in the hall that the whole point of them was so it would be easier for him to fuck her – because then he dropped the fucking condom and had to step back and pry her hands off him to pick it up.
At least it was still in the wrapper. If he had to go back to his locker – well, the hard-on he had right now was not conducive to brain function or subtlety.
She got her own underwear off while he was down there, fishing her bra out of her shirt into the bargain and dropping them both unceremoniously on the next desk over, and he didn’t waste any more time with the condom.
Veronica reached out and dragged him back in, barely giving him time to get it on properly, and he went with a muffled groan, feeling his cock jump in his hand. She was so goddamn grabby that it probably should have reminded him of Lilly, but it didn’t. Lilly had always been ostentatious about it, putting on a show for him or her or no one; when Veronica grabbed him, it was because she wanted him to go where she was putting him. The only thing that really made him think of Lilly was the way her hair got in his face sometimes.
It was hard to care about her hair when she was wet and warm and frantically clawing her way up his back, so he just blew it out of his face and lined himself up, sliding in without fanfare.
Fuck.
She was so wet, he almost thought he could feel it through the condom. It made the choked-off little uhh noise she made even better, and when he pulled back he could see from the way she had her eyes closed and was trying to bite her upper lip that she was trying not to make noise, and he laughed breathlessly at that even though it also made him a little crazy. She thought she could keep quiet? Then he was going to make her scream, fuck her until she forgot about teachers or getting one over on him or whatever it was.
He was going to have marks on his back from her fingers, he thought vaguely, slamming back into her hard enough that his thighs hit the edge of the desk. The idea would have been hot if he wasn’t so distracted with the muffled noises she was making in her throat and the way her body gave against his and the tight heat of her cunt.
It was nice, sometimes, not to have to think about anything. How often did he get to have a good time, anyway, without having to manage a bunch of shit?
He got one hand under Veronica’s thigh and hiked it up just a little higher, finding an angle he knew she liked, and sure enough she gasped and then groaned, squeezing her eyes shut. Mostly he didn’t care, but there was a part of his brain that wondered if the groan was about how good it felt or about the fact that he’d managed to get her to make noise, and it almost made him want to start laughing again. She was so fucking ornery – it shouldn’t have been hot, but it was –
She dragged his head down and Weevil lost the rhythm for a second, his train of thought flying out the window along with it. He almost let the latter go, because her mouth was nearly as wet and hot as her cunt, and who even cared? It was something, whatever – but then he realized she was cheating, that she probably figured he couldn’t get her to make noise the way he wanted if they were kissing.
It was the winning that was hot, probably, he decided as he pulled back, sliding one hand around to brace her back so that he could use the other one to fondle her breasts in the way she tried to pretend didn’t drive her crazy, driving in a little harder and shallower. She whimpered, biting her lip so hard there was a little white line from the pressure – it made him grin and curse all at once.
He’d always liked winning, but honestly all this weird bitchy back-and-forth was fun, and she was just unpredictable enough that he could never be entirely sure if he would win. Weevil liked a challenge, but there was something to be said for stakes that didn’t affect your whole entire life. He rolled her nipple between his thumb and forefinger to get that sound again, squeezing gently with the rest of his hand. God, she had nice tits, though. He’d never felt compelled to complain about Jasmine’s, which were what the kind of novels they read in English called ample, or Lilly’s, either, but there was something about being able to fit pretty much the whole thing in your hand that always went straight to his dick via the base of his spine.
Veronica made an inarticulate noise in her throat and tightened around him – arm around his neck, fingers digging into his back, cunt flexing around his cock – and he couldn’t help making a similar one at the flood of sensation.
She was coming a little too close to scraping the skin off his back now, though, so he pressed slightly closer, dropping his bracing hand to her waist to hold her steady as he adjusted the angle he was fucking her and grunting when she clenched around him again.
Weevil wanted to drag it out more, give her other breast some attention and see if he could get her to really squeal, but he was getting close to the point of no return, and the inexorably building pressure made slowing down as much as he’d have to in order to last longer seem extremely unappealing. He could just get her off after, but that seemed like an incomplete victory, so he slid his hand reluctantly down, trailing his fingers over the softness of her stomach. She made a plaintive, desperate noise when his hand left her breast that was almost as good, anyway, and then he got the angle right to get his thumb on her clit, which got her squirming delightfully against him, and shit, he was going to have to get her off fast, because he wanted that first and he could only hold off so long.
“You didn’t think you could keep quiet, did you?” he whispered. Focusing on putting the right words in the right order forced him to actually think instead of sinking into rhythmic pleasure and letting it take over, plus he loved how much that kind of thing pissed Veronica off. Or maybe it was the fact that it turned her on that pissed her off. Either way – it was good all the way down.
She hissed at him, and he tried not to laugh, which was a mistake, or not trying harder was a mistake, because the half-checked movement tickling inside his stomach, the way he couldn’t help jerking minutely against her, the addition of one more repressed pleasure building within his chest, tipped him halfway over the edge, and before he could grapple for control, Veronica attached her mouth to his neck, hot and damp and her tongue teasing at his skin, and that was it, he had three seconds.
He dragged his thumb back and forth over her clit, moving sideways instead of up and down, pressed his hand more firmly against the warm skin of her back, and gritted his teeth in a mostly-futile attempt to hold out a bit longer. Time felt broken down into one huge, insurmountable second at a time as the tension built to overwhelming levels, rising from his gut and the base of his cock to fill his entire body – and then snapped, his whole body jerking as the first pulse of exhilarating pleasure took hold of him.
Weevil tried to keep his hand moving, even though most of his thoughts were whiting out entirely. Most of the world had disappeared around the time his eyes closed automatically, like it tended to, but he could still hear all the little mmm sounds she was trying to stifle, and the raw animal part of his brain still wanted to get her off even if his higher functions were offline. He had to be doing something right, because she clenched around him as he came, intensifying the pleasure of the remaining pulses until he had to catch himself on the edge of the desk a little harder than usual.
When he pulled out to deal with the condom, he wasn’t actually sure if he’d gotten her there – details got lost in the haze of hormonal satisfaction, and she was all flushed and breathing hard in a way that left it up in the air if it was aftermath or lead-up. The heavy breathing did fantastic things to her tits, which he took a second to appreciate before he reached back in between her thighs, figuring better safe than sorry, but Veronica slapped his hand away, which answered that question.
He still hadn’t quite worked out why she was so weird about that (for one thing, she was grabby and demanding enough that he would have expected her to really, obnoxiously enjoy shoving him down between her legs and refusing to let him up until she’d come at least twice), because it might have just been that she got extra sensitive after she came, but he hadn’t gotten that impression from any of previous times when she’d finished before he had. Even if she was trying to keep things exactly even for one of her crazy-person reasons, he was pretty sure he would still owe her one or two.
Not like he was complaining, though. If nothing else, this had definitely been a better time than beating his head against more freaking Algebra questions. Although it wasn’t like that had ever actually been on the table, no matter how hard she’d tried to pretend this morning – if this was really supposed to be a study session, she would have worn jeans to school, or maybe that black skirt he couldn’t help thinking of as her vampire skirt, not the miniskirt she was currently smoothing back down.
As insane as she acted sometimes, the girl had no idea how predictable she was. She so clearly wanted to be running the show that it was just that little bit more gratifying when he got ahead of her, not to mention entertaining. It didn’t hurt that he minded less when she did get one up on him lately. A win-draw situation, no losing.
“I’m busy at lunch tomorrow,” Veronica said, sliding off the desk. Weevil shrugged.
“So?”
“So I can’t go over that probabilities stuff with you tomorrow.” She looked like she was about to make a crack about how if he’d focused, or something, they could have gone over it today, but he smirked at her and she visibly reconsidered, rolling her eyes and backtracking to, “Maybe next week.”
He didn’t bother to ask if she was busy after school; he had shit to do on Fridays. He had shit to do today, but it was good to make people wait for you every now and then, just to prove you could, and this was actually worth it, unlike the slope-intercept crap he kept ending up banging his head on when he tried to study by himself.
“Maybe next week,” he told her with a grin, a little too nicely, and left it up to her to decide what he was making fun of her about.
*
It had been a complicated week.
Every time Veronica parked in the garage, she fought a mental battle about whether she should check the returnables bin or not. When she did and didn’t find anything, she felt guilty; when she didn’t look she felt sick and suspicious. So far, she never had found anything, but she still checked more often than not.
So she felt guilty, and resentful, and then guilty for the resentment, because how unfair was it to be mad at her mom for trying, just because it was hard having her hopes up? It wasn’t Lianne who kept dragging them back down three times a day, after all; that was Veronica herself, and the cynicism she couldn’t quite shake.
It wasn’t hard to tell that her dad had an eye on things too. He hadn’t said anything, but he’d been home from work scrupulously on time since the big arrest, even though he still had hopes of getting a confession before the DNA results came back (“He’s not as smart as he thinks he is,” he’d told Veronica, “although it’d be hard to be, and we’re not nearly as dumb as he thinks we are. Although it’d be hard to be.”). And that meant she should let it go, right? If the question of whether she had faith in her mom was more complicated than it should have been, the question of whether she trusted her dad was never n doubt for a second. But it just wasn’t that easy.
She wondered what Yolanda would say if she asked about Mr. Hamilton. Given that she never talked about him going to jail, the way she’d gone out of her way not to mention it to Veronica and Lilly, it wasn’t hard to take a guess, but there was no way of knowing whether you were right – if that had just been about what they might think, or if Yolanda would find the subject intensely painful. It would be nice at this point to talk to someone who was familiar with this particular rollercoaster, or at least a similar one; the internet had informed her that Yolanda’s dad had been to prison more than once, so maybe she’d get it. But Veronica didn’t know how to broach the subject without overstepping, and she couldn’t really lead with her own issues. She’d never really talked about her mom’s drinking even with Lilly, not in a way that couldn’t be blown off or walked back. Duncan she’d almost told, once or twice when things were getting bad again, but she’d never been able to manage to choke the words out.
It would be fine. She just needed to get over herself. Don’t borrow trouble, Veronica.
It wasn’t like anything else was going wrong, either; she hadn’t caught more than the occasional accidental glance of Lilly at school in ages, Jasmine had sat with them three more times since last Thursday and her frank outrageousness had proven refreshing and funny enough that Yolanda hadn’t turned a hair at the addition to the table – even Gabrielle had seemed to get along with her – and while the balance of her illicit meet-ups with Weevil seemed to have a little too much algebra at about forty percent, otherwise Veronica was not complaining. There was absolutely no sense in letting herself work up a state of paranoia, especially when she could just be enjoying relatively normal family time. Even if it did prove to be short-lived, wasn’t that more reason to appreciate it while she could?
Deep down, Veronica suspected she wasn’t wired that way, but surely she owed it to her mom to try. Which was why she was painting her nails on the couch and watching Splash on a Saturday, instead of at the mall with Meg or even Yolanda and Gabrielle. Or painting her nails on the couch while watching a better movie.
“Oh, come on,” her mom said, every time she made a face at the screen. “It’s a classic!”
“It’s annoying.”
“It’s nostalgic!”
“I’m supposed to be nostalgic for before I was born?”
“It’s romantic,” Lianne said, with amused exasperation.
“Doesn’t he die at the end?”
Her mom set her own bottle of nail polish down on the side table, fighting a smile. “No!”
“And there is no way she would learn English that fast just from TV. I liked that other Tom Hanks movie from last year better; it took him months to learn English.”
“She’s a mermaid,” her mom said. “She’s magic. It’s magic.”
Veronica considered this for a moment, taking a long look at Daryl Hannah on the screen. “Mmm… no, I can never like a movie that popularized the name Madison.”
“Veronica!” Backup whuffed in agreement – with one of them, it was hard to say who – and put his head on her mom’s knee, making her laugh again, with less outrage. “Oh, you want your nails done too?”
Veronica smiled automatically at that even as discomfort crawled up her spine, hoping it didn’t look as false as it felt. If she hashed up every embarrassing incident from the last decade, she’d never be able to do or talk about anything with her mom without turning into a killjoy, but that one still felt too recent, too raw. She wondered if Lianne had lost it in the slew of other incidents, or if she was trying to paper over the memory, or if she’d simply been closer to blackout that day than Veronica had thought, and didn’t remember it at all.
Then she caught herself, and felt like a traitor.
She forced the smile up a notch, put a measure of perkiness into her voice when she said, “He always messes up his topcoat. Don’t fall for it.”
Her mom laughed, and Veronica honestly couldn’t tell if it was slightly brittle or if she was just projecting. She finished her left hand and held it up. “Not bad, if I do say so myself.”
*
Monday was a drag. Admittedly, if Veronica hadn’t stayed up so late reading she probably would have been happier, but she’d slept in on Sunday and then hadn’t felt tired until somewhere around two in the morning. She was paying for it now, even though she had vague hopes of lunch curing her headache. Maybe if she spent the whole time drinking water.
But of course it was inevitable that the next table over ended up being occupied by a group of sophomore boys who kept cackling and yelling and blasting five seconds at a time of bad rap music from a portable speaker.
“That has got to be against the rules,” Gabrielle muttered, picking at her sandwich.
“It is,” Meg said. She shook her head, but didn’t say anything else. Yolanda was too absorbed in her phone to notice, and Veronica didn’t have the energy to do anything about it, so she just kept on eating her macaroni one piece at a time. For maybe the first time this year, she wasn’t looking forward to History class; Mr. Rooks’s energy was usually a high point, but right now it felt like it would just give her a worse headache.
“Where’s Clemmons when you actually need him?” she commented with an effort, when the table slid in the direction of awkward silence. Gabrielle smiled politely and Yolanda put down her phone to speculate that he was in possession of a radar about wherever his presence was least needed.
“The big question is whether he’s a robot or just spiteful,” Veronica added, even though she would have rather just eaten in silence. She did feel some responsibility to keep the conversation going, and since silence was off the table anyway thanks to their neighbours, at least she could exercise a small measure of spitefulness by still managing to have a conversation. “Who are you texting, anyway?”
Yolanda laughed. “Oh, just this kid I grew up with. Sorry, lunch is like the only time we can talk lately. Different schedules.”
Veronica wondered if this kid was the same person she’d taken a call from a while back, and if there was any chance Yolanda would have referred to a female childhood friend that way, or if it was safe to assume she was talking about a boy. Very interesting.
Gabrielle said something about her cousin in L.A. who went to a school that had staggered lunch periods, and the conversation drifted away. Veronica let it, forcing herself to take another drink of her water. When lunch drew to a close, she waved to Gabrielle and Yolanda, shot Meg a smile, and girded herself to slog through the rest of the day.
It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, although Veronica had to admit that when she wasn’t being inspired by her favourite teacher, her interest in the ancient world was anemic at best. But Mrs. Canning did a fun little experiment with them in the first half of Biology, and in Spanish they got to watch a video and then answer questions about it, which shouldn’t have been fun for anyone older than twelve, but was anyway – probably because Sra. Hockley was pretty lax about letting them chat during work time as long as it was in Spanish.
“So are you going out with Yolanda and Gabrielle tonight?” Meg asked, lowering her voice as she switched to English. Veronica blinked, vaguely remembering Gabrielle extending the invitation. Meg had said no, unsurprisingly, and she thought she’d made a vague, noncommittal answer because she’d been distracted by her headache.
“Probably not,” she said. “My dad would kill me if he found out I went to a club in L.A. Plus, I don’t have a specific curfew, but I’m pretty sure it’s before two in the morning, and L.A.’s nearly two hours away with traffic.”
“You could leave before midnight,” Meg said, raising her eyebrows, but Veronica snorted gently and shook her head.
“Then what’s the point of going? I’m not driving all the way to L.A. for a few hours of the early club crowd, especially when I have to drive myself home, and eleven is the latest I could be back without getting caught and grounded for life.”
“Well, it’s not like you could drink anyway,” Meg pointed out. “Yolanda knows the bouncer, not the bartender.”
Veronica nodded noncommittally, not entirely eager to own up to her fake ID. Or, technically, her fraudulent ID, since it had been made in a government building with government equipment.
Lilly probably still had hers. Veronica hadn’t thought about that in a while. Not like there was anything she could do about it without implicating herself, and it would probably be overkill at this point anyway.
“I’m not really a big ‘club’ kind of girl,” she said instead. “Give me two years to get over the serial killer using that as his hunting ground and maybe I’ll reconsider, but I think I’ll need a bigger girl posse first. Three becomes two really fast when one of you has a reputation for bailing to hang out with her boyfriend.”
Meg smiled. “Two years won’t quite do it for me, but if you extend it to three and a half I’ll join your girl posse.”
“Sounds fair,” Veronica said. “Maybe I’ll just save it all up for my twenty-first, and we’ll party so hard we blow up the club.”
That made Meg laugh hard enough that they attracted the teacher’s attention, and Veronica bent over her worksheet with a smile. She still had a headache, but school was almost over, so there was an aspirin and a twenty-minute nap in her near future.
“Imagine being known for that,” her friend whispered, once it seemed like they were in the clear.
“I’m always looking for ways to expand my bad reputation,” Veronica murmured back, adding a neglected accent to the word papá. “…which is why I want to avoid saying that I went on a similar rollercoaster with the Pope.”
“Better than Connor Ripley and his fifteen anuses,” Meg said out of the corner of her mouth, and it was Veronica’s turn to laugh.
“Oh, god. I forgot about that.” She shook her head. “Ah, freshman Spanish, before all the football players got weeded out. We do not miss thee.”
*
Tuesday started out much better than Monday, although Veronica had completely forgotten to do her English homework and had to dice it out in first period, which led to her mixing up what was for English and what was for English Lit and very nearly embarrassing herself in front of the class when Mrs. Murphy called on her. She managed to turn the misstep into a literary comparison instead, which definitely got her bonus points with the teacher, and finished her homework right before the bell rang, which was proof of what you could do when you got a decent night’s sleep.
It didn’t hurt that she had plans for after school that were zero percent algebra, either. Precalc was enough math for her at the moment, and as long as her mom didn’t notice she was home late – and Veronica had been trying to make a habit of doing that a few times a week regardless, so that the assumption would be that she’d been with Meg or Yolanda – it was pretty much the best way to do things, now that she had people she actually wanted to hang out with at lunch.
The group makeup was variable, of course. Veronica had passed Jasmine and Cervando in the halls after English, looking so cozy she wasn’t sure they would make it to fourth period, and she’d assumed the other girl wouldn’t be joining them at lunch again – but when they were actually installed at the wobbly table, it was Yolanda who didn’t show up.
“I thought this was your official table?” Veronica asked, leaning the slut flag unobtrusively against her lunch kit in deference to Gabrielle, who shrugged.
“I didn’t see her in class, either. I guess she stayed home today.”
“Who stayed home?” Jasmine dropped dramatically onto the bench and swung her legs over with a flourish. “Don’t they know we need all the sluts we can get?”
“You ate with your friends yesterday,” Veronica pointed out.
Jasmine shrugged cheerfully. “Yeah, but Laura doesn’t want me around today, ‘cause she’s trying it on with Adam and I used to do him. So I’m Team Slut again!”
“I don’t remember joining Team Slut,” Gabrielle muttered, but her mouth fought off a reluctant smile as she unwrapped her sandwich.
“Yeah, sorry about colonizing you,” Veronica said unapologetically.
“You people always say that,” Jasmine remarked. She popped her package of cartoon gummies in her fist and handed one to each of them, not appearing particularly upset despite her comment, although Meg looked as taken aback as Veronica felt.
“I hope she’s okay,” Meg said, steering the conversation into safer waters.
“Hangover?” Veronica asked Gabrielle, arching an eyebrow, but the other girl winced and shook her head.
“I was actually with my boyfriend last night, so we kind of lost track of each other, but she never skips school for that. She’s probably on her period,” she said, which did sound right – Yolanda had said something about missing school for it before. Veronica shrugged.
“At least she gets to sleep. Best way to handle it, honestly.”
Jasmine snorted. “I wish, right? I’d have to be bleeding from the mouth before my mom let me stay home from school. ‘Tienes fiebre? No? Vamos!’”
Gabrielle laughed in agreement. “Before my mom went back to work when Alannah started middle school, it was like an interrogation every time I got sick. Now she leaves for work at seven-thirty, thank god.”
“Convenient for when you’re hungover?” Veronica teased, putting her container of grapes in the center of the table, where everyone could reach. If Jasmine was sharing, she should too, but she didn’t have enough cookies for everyone.
Gabrielle flapped a hand at her. “Shhh!” But she smiled. “The nice thing about Jamie is that he doesn’t get carded.”
Still not enough reason to date a guy in his twenties, in Veronica’s opinion, but she only raised her eyebrows thoughtfully in response.
“Is he old?” Jasmine asked. “Or does he just look old? Because you know all the older guys, right, they hit on you ‘cause they’re bad in bed and they think you can’t tell.”
Veronica snorted so hard she nearly aspirated her mouthful of pizza, while Gabrielle made a choked noise of half-amused offence and began protesting immediately. Meg put her face in her hands, but her shoulders were shaking.
“Okay, he gets carded,” Gabrielle was saying. “He just doesn’t have to – he doesn’t need a fake, you know? I’m always afraid I’ll get caught when I’m the one – and anyway, that’s none of your –”
But the last sentence broke off in the face of Jasmine’s impervious grin, and Gabrielle threw up her hands, only half-seriously.
“Maybe it’s not true in every instance,” Veronica said, valiantly striving to hide the amusement that was trying to seep into her voice, “but I think it makes sense as a rule.”
“Or it’s because they know they can be selfish,” Meg added, surprising them. She blinked at the sudden attention. “What? About sixty percent of my parents’ friends from church got married when he was twenty-eight and she was nineteen or something. At a certain point you start to draw conclusions – and they can’t all have been pregnant. Men have been marrying women who are too young to know you can tell him to do his own laundry for hundreds of years.”
Jasmine guffawed and leaned across the table for a high-five, which Meg returned with pleasure and mild surprise. Gabrielle just shook her head. “You guys are all too cynical.”
“Who’s cynical?” Veronica protested. “For your information, my dad does the laundry all the time.” That got the laugh she wanted, but she continued anyway. “And I believe in love! Just not in high school.”
“Which is why I’m not dating a high school boy,” Gabrielle pointed out – which was hard to argue with, admittedly.
“As long as you don’t end up being his child bride, I guess,” Veronica conceded, which made Jasmine laugh and Meg shake her head.
“Seriously, though,” she said. “I’m starting to think my parents want Lizzie to get married right after high school. I know they’re afraid she’ll get pregnant or something, but… it’s weird. They had some guy over for dinner last weekend and it was so awkward. Lizzie was late and Dad dragged her into his office after dinner and chewed her out for like an hour.” She shook her head. “Like she’d ever go for some twenty-five-year-old divinity student. I know they can’t force her or anything, but what is this, the eighteen hundreds?”
Gabrielle looked almost as perturbed as Veronica felt, but Jasmine nodded. “Most parents just don’t get the world, you know?” she said with an air of practical sympathy. “My mom keeps telling me college is a waste of time because I’ll be married by the time I’m twenty. I’m not even trying to convince her to let me go, like, I know it’s too expensive to go to real university, and I’m not smart enough anyway. But I could do a little two-year thing and still work at the same time, and then maybe I could get a really good job. I mean, I will get married one day, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to quit and stay home to make tamales all day!” She rolled her eyes. “It’s so dumb, too. She has a job! But I’m supposed to marry Mr. Machismo from the fifties and have five kids while he pays the bills. I want to work more than I want to get married, anyway.”
“Wanting to put yourself through college would make you a lot of people’s dream daughter,” Veronica pointed out. She didn’t usually feel like the rich person at the table, even now, but the idea of writing off university altogether for purely financial reasons felt vaguely tragic. It wasn’t like she hadn’t known a lot of people were in that position, technically, but it felt very different when somebody was saying it flat out in front of her – not like it was an embarrassing secret, but just an inexorable fact of life. She’d always known finances could be a potential barrier for her… but also that it was probably nothing enough grit and scholarship applications couldn’t fix, nothing her parents wouldn’t manage to bridge the gap to if necessary. Even if they couldn’t, the odds were good that it would only mean giving up an acceptance to a prestigious dream school or an overseas opportunity for something well-respected but more affordable. State school, the thing that was so out of reach for Jasmine, was Veronica’s worst-case scenario, the backup to her backup plan.
At the very least, it seemed monstrously unfair that Jasmine was saying she wasn’t smart enough for college when Veronica could be reasonably sure that Dick Casablancas’s father was going to pay his way into some Ivy League legacy.
Jasmine was unbothered by it, though, and apparently oblivious to Veronica’s (and probably Meg’s) discomfort as she laughed and said, “Try telling Mami that, I swear. She doesn’t have perspective on anything – and she still thinks I’m a virgin.” She winked broadly, and Gabrielle smothered a snicker.
“Girl, I get it,” she said emphatically. “Maybe I can roll with all this slut stuff after all.”
*
Weevil was not having a good day.
Apparently, because his Algebra teacher was literally evil, they had a unit final and a class final in the last two weeks of school. Literally all of the stuff from their concluding unit was going to be on the final exam anyway, but no, can’t leave it at that. It was seemingly necessary to make him stumble over all of this stupid graphing crap twice in a row and probably tank his grade even before the final exam, even though none of Weevil’s other Algebra teachers had bothered doing that.
To be fair, he’d missed the finals the time he’d had Ms. Curtis because he’d been in juvie, so he could be wrong about that one – but everyone said she’d left because she had a nervous breakdown, so he couldn’t imagine her making more work for herself.
He’d actually thought he had pretty decent odds on the final – three or four light study sessions probably hadn’t accomplished much, especially when it was impossible not to wish they were busy doing something else, but it definitely felt like he understood the questions better, anyway. But even if he had a shot at scraping up a C on the final exam instead of just trying not to fail, the best-case scenario was that the unit test would wipe out whatever effect that might have had on his overall grade.
It shouldn’t have even mattered. Graduating this year was a long shot anyway, and it wasn’t like he cared whether he got a C or a D, as long as he was finally done with Algebra freaking I.
And maybe he was just extra pissed off because he’d gotten into it with fucking Andre again over the weekend and the lecture from Claudia he’d been dodging ever since then had ambushed him last night, and then he’d slept like crap. Whatever.
Normally the fact that Autoshop was right after Algebra would have been the one redeeming factor, but somehow he’d managed to slice his hand open five minutes into class, so he’d spent most of it running cold water over the cut and arguing with the nurse that all he needed was those little closure bandaids, and the rest of it not allowed to touch anything.
Angel was going to be pissed, too; Weevil was supposed to put in four hours after school.
At least it wasn’t raining – but that was hardly a notable perk in California. He was reflecting that lunch being hard to ruin was small consolation as well when some kid looking the other way shoulder-checked Bootsy on his way past. It wouldn’t have been something they let pass ordinarily anyway, but today it was the last fucking straw.
Bootsy already had the guy by the sleeve, but Weevil grabbed the back of his preppy, expensive jacket and swung him all the way around until he was teetering on the edge of the stairs – then let go with a slight shove that sent the kid careening down them, frantically trying to stave off a faceplant. Hector and Ric closed in and blocked his escape at the bottom, smelling something juicier than the usual intimidate-and-pummel routine.
Bootsy moved up just behind Weevil’s shoulder, grinning as the offender tried to regain his balance and compose himself.
“Did you… touch me?” he demanded with gleefully exaggerated affront. It was a little broader than Weevil would have played it, but that just gave him more room to pinch the kid between different approaches – keep him confused and off-balance, which was to their advantage at least as much as fear was.
As their target shied away from Hector’s ghoul-grin, trying to set his shoulders so he looked less pathetic, Weevil recognized him. The vague familiarity resolved into something that was half resignation, half glee. As much as he hated the fact that he could never quite get away from Lilly no matter what he did or didn’t do, he was still perfectly happy to grind Jeremy Lasky’s face into something painful.
Personal reasons aside, the guy was fucking annoying.
“I don’t – uh – I don’t know what you’re talking about. Man,” Lasky added, glancing nervously from Bootsy to Ric, who was cracking his knuckles. Hector hooted derisively at the lame attempt at bravado.
“I saw you,” Weevil said, going for an earnest, disappointed-teacher tone. “You’re not lying to me, right, Jeremy?” He enjoyed the flinch when he used the other boy’s name. “Because I thought we were friends,” he added with false, hurt solicitude, and sauntered down the stairs to lean against the railing a step and a half above Jeremy. The guy was tall, but not tall enough to top that.
“Uh…” The kid’s eyes darted everywhere, too surprised and confused to be quite as scared as he knew he should be. He edged a little closer to the stairs, susceptible even to obviously false friendliness in the face of Ric and Hector’s menacing affect.
Very stupid. He would have been better off taking his chances with them.
“Hey, hey,” Bootsy demanded. He hovered at the top of the stairs, ready to cover if Lasky broke and ran – although Weevil was pretty sure he wouldn’t. Not smart enough or brave enough. “You shoved me. What the fuck, man?”
That was how it always went. It was a nearly fool-proof escalation. Someone touched you? Then they shoved you. Someone shoved you? Then they hit you. It was win-win, because either they denied it and gave you an excuse to beat the shit out of them right off the bat, or by the time you got to the accusations of punching they panicked and copped to touching you in order to try and set the record straight. And then you just re-escalated it and beat the shit out of them for admitting they’d hit you.
He didn’t especially feel like getting suspended today, though, which still left some decent options.
Weevil shook his head sadly. “I’ve always thought you were pretty decent, man. But this is beyond the pale.”
It was entirely bullshit, but Lasky looked like he might actually be buying it.
“Uh, I don’t – we’ve never–”
Spoken? Yeah, no shit, dumbass.
“A real man,” Weevil said to general laughter, “would make it right with my friend here.” He jerked his head toward the top of the stairs, where Bootsy was contriving to look both vicious and injured.
“Oh…” Lasky said. “Uh… sorry, man.” He forced an anemic self-deprecating smile and shrugged one shoulder jerkily. “No harm, no foul, right?”
“Oh, nah, nah, nah.” Bootsy shook his head with an air of grave offence. “You for real here? No way.”
Below them, Hector tsked, and Weevil shook his head with slow, sad deliberation.
“You’re gonna minimize it like that?” he said mournfully. “Nobody takes accountability for their actions anymore.”
Javi, who’d drifted over once he realized what was going on, cackled like a hyena, and Lasky flinched. He glanced up the steps at Bootsy, who took the opportunity to ostentatiously rub his shoulder. “Damn, he really messed me up… You know any personal injury lawyers?”
He delivered the line with a straight face, but when Weevil caught his eye they both hid smiles.
“Okay,” Lasky muttered, shifting his weight uncomfortably. “Okay, I get it.” He dug in his pocket for his wallet – so only mostly stupid. It worked for Weevil, although he didn’t actually intend to let it rest even if Lasky coughed up for real.
But the kid stayed pretty much on-trend – instead of doing the smart thing and handing over the wallet, he opened it and counted out a few twenties. “Here…” He wavered, unsure of whether to offer it to Weevil or Bootsy, but after clearly realizing that it would be a poor choice to expect Bootsy to come down to outnumber him even more thoroughly, he turned back to Weevil, arm extended. “This is, uh, enough for a massage, I bet that’ll fix–”
Weevil slapped the wallet out of his other hand instead.
“Are you kidding me with this shit?” he demanded as the boy squawked and made an abortive grab for it. The iron grip Weevil suddenly had on his arm discouraged completing the motion, and Hector stepped forward with a grin to scoop the wallet up from the stair where it landed. Weevil crisply snatched the bills out of Lasky’s hand as an afterthought.
“Man, there’s nothing in here!” Hector complained, flipping through the wallet as he neatly pocketed whatever cash was left. “Guess if he really wants to make it up to Bootsy he could hand over the credit card…”
It wasn’t actually on the table – too traceable – but it was a good way to make the kid sweat. He shifted his weight awkwardly, leaning away from Weevil without having the guts to try and pull his arm free.
Weevil tapped a finger slowly against his lower lip, mostly for effect, although he was considering the best way to play this. He was about to launch into his chosen gambit when he saw Lasky’s eyes flickering to the top of the stairs.
It could have just been because of Bootsy, who was still rubbing his shoulder ostentatiously at the top of the stairs and keeping up a steady stream of complaints, but something in the way the kid’s gaze flicked there-and-back, there-and-back revealed poorly-hidden hope, and so it was necessary to check for Clemmons.
The vice principal was nowhere to be seen, fortunately, although Weevil didn’t have the best vantage point halfway down the stairs. He could, however see who Lasky was looking at: Veronica Mars, who had apparently not gotten the memo that the student body was avoiding this area until PCH business was concluded. She’d stopped, presumably short, a little way from the top of the stairs and was frowning thoughtfully down at them.
Well, maybe this was a little much for her. She was a cop’s kid, after all, and a little goody-two-shoes in a lot of ways, even if recent events had made him forget that for a while. Weevil shrugged mentally, making a note to resign himself to having to put effort into getting laid again. It was going to suck, but right at this second he was more worried about losing the algebra help… not that either of those things could be helped.
“Something for you?” he called, schooling his face into an ironic smirk to hide the disappointment.
Veronica pursed her mouth in consideration. “Just watching you waste your time.”
Weevil feigned laughter, injecting some false heartiness into it for effect as his boys at the bottom of the stairs snickered. “Waste my time? I’m not saying this loser’s worth much, but –” He jerked Lasky’s arm, making the other boy lurch back and forth. There was a brief protest, swiftly muffled in the face of Weevil’s glare.
Veronica didn’t flinch, though. “I mean, go after chump change if you want.” She glanced down at Lasky, who was staring at her with huge, hopeful eyes, and her expression hardened. “But he likes to keep his dad’s signed baseball cards and stuff in his glove compartment. They’re worth way more than whatever he has in his wallet.”
The kid in question wailed in betrayal, which settled the question of whether she was right pretty definitively. The boys cackled in response, Bootsy hopping down a few steps like he was on springs. Weevil was more surprised than they were – he tried to remember what specific beef she had with the guy, because there was no way she was doing this to help him. It was probably the Lilly thing, but he didn’t have time to wrack his brain for the specifics.
He shot Veronica a quick eyebrow-raise of acknowledgement, inclining his head slightly, and she smiled. It was a smile with an agenda, but from the hooting coming from the bottom of the stairs, the boys mostly thought she was doing it to get in good with him. Well, that would do for an explanation until he could find out what was really going on.
For the moment he turned his back on her, letting go of Lasky’s arm and throwing an arm around his shoulders. “You know, it hurts my feelings when you hold out on me.”
The kid was trembling like a leaf. It was kind of pathetic, and for some reason Weevil had a sudden flash of Veronica gritting her teeth and stripping off her pants in the autoshop classroom. “When God was handing out guts, I think he gave your share to someone else,” he told the kid with false sympathy, smiling internally. “So maybe I can forgive you. You know, if you stop pulling this crap.” He put a little pressure into the arm around the guy’s shoulders, ushering him forcefully down the stairs. Lasky balked as they approached the crew waiting at the bottom, but he didn’t have the physical strength to resist or the backbone to make a break for it. “So remind me, which one’s your car again?”
He patted down Lasky’s pockets and Bootsy thumped down the stairs behind them, catching up in time to join the others in taunting and prodding the guy. He flinched so big, it was even funnier than usual.
The keys were in one of the guy’s back pockets, and Weevil fished it out with two fingers, shooting a triumphant grin at Ric and Javi.
“Sweet,” Hector said.
Weevil wagged a finger at him. “Now, me and Jeremy are going to have a little chat about how this is going to work, ‘cause he can’t take advantage of my friendship anymore, you know?” He lobbed the keys at Javi in a slow underhand. “No fingerprints.”
Javi saluted, Bootsy cackled, and Ric broke off from them to keep an eye out for interfering teachers without needing to be told. Weevil didn’t need Clemmons or Wu interrupting him while he laid out what would happen if anybody got arrested for this, and Hector could keep an eye out out for the others.
“Let’s talk,” he told Lasky, with another big, malicious grin. “Just you and me.”
*
Yolanda hadn’t been in school on Wednesday either, and when she didn’t answer Veronica’s Wednesday night text asking if she was okay or needed anything and then failed to appear at lunch on Thursday, it was hard not to feel concerned. Meg hadn’t heard from her, and Gabrielle had opted to sit by herself today, so Veronica tried to put her vague swirling apprehension aside, but halfway through the period she was too restless to let it lie.
“Just a second,” she told Meg. “I texted Yolanda last night and she never got back to me, so I want to see if Gabrielle’s heard from her. We’re almost at finals; she’s going to be in trouble if she misses any more school.
“You don’t think she’s got something bad, though?” Meg asked, and Veronica shrugged. She was more worried about the fact that the last time any of them had seen Yolanda it had been in a club in L.A., but she didn’t want to worry Meg, and she wasn’t willing to admit to the tiny but unavoidable part of her that was convinced Yolanda was mad at her, specifically – so health and grades would do as a pretext. It wasn’t a bad reason.
“Hey,” she told Gabrielle, who looked up from the homework she was doing with mild surprise. “Sorry, I just wondered if you’d heard from Yolanda? I texted her last night, but I haven’t heard anything.”
The sudden worry on the other girl’s face was not reassuring. “No, she hasn’t answered any of my texts. I called her last night, but I only got her voicemail.”
So much for Veronica’s dumb insecurities. “Look, this is probably nothing, but… did you hear from her at all after Monday night? You didn’t come home together, right?”
“No, she drove us but I went home with Jamie.” Gabrielle winced, embarrassed. “I mean, he drove me home, not–”
Veronica flapped a hand. “I’m not going to judge you either way. I’m just… I don’t like it.”
Gabrielle set her pen down almost eagerly. “Me neither! I keep getting worried – like, what if there’s another strangler or something? But her parents would know if she never came home, right? So if something bad happened to her we’d already know! I swear, my parents would kill me if they found out about Jamie, but if I thought something really bad happened to Yolanda…” She bit her lip, whether at the possibility of something ‘really bad’ or because she was realizing that she was actually less willing to get herself in trouble than she’d thought Veronica wasn’t quite sure.
But Yolanda was a rich kid from the 09, even if she wasn’t running with the usual crowd, and Veronica knew perfectly well how little oversight some of them had. She’d been to at least one blowout party a year that was only possible because Logan’s parents liked to take off together for a week or more at a time, and even some of the parents who were at home year-round barely spoke to their kids for weeks at a time. She’d never met Yolanda’s dad, and barely met her mom – it was hard to guarantee that they would have noticed if Yolanda hadn’t come home on Monday.
Or there was always the other possibility – the one that seventeen years of hearing gradually less edited accounts of her dad’s cases had made sure she could never be entirely unaware of: something had gone wrong at home. If Yolanda’s parents were the reason she wasn’t at school, the fact that the police hadn’t showed up to question Gabrielle and Anna and even Veronica and Meg meant nothing. It could just be an overly-extreme grounding if they’d caught her sneaking in on Monday night… or it could be something much worse.
“Maybe I’ll grab some homework for her,” Veronica suggested. She didn’t have any real grounds to worry, let alone to talk to her dad, but checking in would hopefully calm the unease that was sitting uncomfortably in her stomach. “Unless you’re already doing that?”
Gabrielle shook her head. “We don’t have all the same classes.”
“Do you know what she does have? It would suck to get behind right before finals.”
“I think so? Let me check with Anna in fifth period, I think they have English together but I can’t remember if it’s third or fourth period. What do you have next?”
“History,” Veronica said. “Mr. Rooks. I can come grab the list from you between classes if we’re in the same building.”
“Yeah, I have Health.” Gabrielle rolled her eyes. “It’s so pointless. It’s not like any of that stuff has changed since last year.”
“At least you’ll be prepared if it does,” Veronica quipped. “Thanks.” She considered, then added the obligatory, “And look, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
Gabrielle smiled – a little weakly – and Veronica turned back to where she and Meg were sitting, hastily sidestepping Cole as he nearly walked into her. He shot her a nasty look, and her eyes traced him back to his table as she walked, where Jeremy jolted and hunched into his shoulders when he saw her looking.
Well, that would serve him right, she thought, fighting a smirk. She hadn’t been originally intending to sell him out, but the way he’d looked like he just expected her to help him and made her so angry she hadn’t really considered the potential consequences of what she was doing.
Which was not to say she wouldn’t do the same thing again.
Chapter 24: First It'll Piss You Off
Notes:
Ignoring that it's technically Tuesday and not Monday... how's a chapter a whole week early to make up for the recent delays? :) I make no actual promises, but I'm also going to try to update next week on schedule as well.
Marry Christmas if you celebrate! And merry not-getting-your-period unless you're unlucky like me; I've decided it's funny because I did nearly the exact same thing to Veronica on her Christmas.
Chapter Text
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
Joe Klaas
It still seemed ridiculous to get her dad involved because one of her friends had missed a few days of school, but that wasn’t stopping Veronica from worrying. None of it was that bad by itself – maybe Yolanda hadn’t gotten her text, maybe she hadn’t been in touch with Gabrielle either simply because she’d dropped her phone in the pool or something, maybe she just had exceptionally bad cramps this month and she’d be back at school tomorrow, or Monday – but all together it made Veronica antsy. She’d gotten plenty of lectures in her life about how it was better to assume the worst and be wrong than the reverse. No one ever died from embarrassment, her dad liked to say. But like Gabrielle had said – if something was wrong, Yolanda’s parents would know, right?
It was hard not to think about the fact that all she knew about Yolanda’s father was that he’d been to prison twice and liked to dangle people out of windows when they made him angry – which was why it was also a uniquely terrible idea to be sitting in her car outside Yolanda’s house.
Maybe she should be immune to embarrassment at this point. But if she got her dad involved when nothing was really wrong, that would embarrass Yolanda, and Veronica wasn’t willing to toss her friendship aside again. Even if it meant running stupid risks involving ex-cons – again. At least this time, she supposed, it was for a noble reason.
She’d told Meg where she was going, of course – but she hadn’t said anything about exactly how worried she was or why. The other girl had proven herself more than capable of surprises, but Veronica still wasn’t sure how she’d react to the whole jail thing… or the fact that the uneasy feelings Veronica had gotten listening to Meg talk about how her parents handled her sister had been what opened the door to being suspicious of Yolanda’s.
There was a distinct possibility that she was being ridiculous. Maybe about Yolanda, who could surely miss three days of school for her period, or even a bad cold, without the involvement of foul play. Maybe about Mr. Hamilton, who was, after all, somebody’s dad. What was he going to do, throw her out a window for asking if Yolanda was okay? Maybe about his record and reputation, which at the very least made her a hypocrite, considering the fact that she was currently splitting the difference between ‘math tutor’ and ‘fuckbuddy’ with regard to someone who had twice as many violent crime convictions as Percival Hamilton.
But then, she knew that because she’d stolen government files when she was worried about Lilly, who hadn’t deserved any of the risk, or effort, or worry. Yolanda, who’d never backstabbed her and had forgiven her for own misplaced loyalties with a generosity Veronica couldn’t even approach, should merit at least a checkup, right?
Regardless, if she sat there for much longer, she would be ridiculous. Veronica huffed an irritated breath, not even sure if it was directed at herself or the overall situation or some more generalized target, and started her car.
The intercom felt intimidating – Lilly’s family, even Logan’s family, had gates but not this kind of security, and their neighbours were mostly the same. If there even was an intercom, you got the house, not a security booth, and certainly not one that loomed up beside you.
“I’m here to see Yolanda?” she told the man on the other end. “I have some of her homework?”
There was a pause that Veronica didn’t like, one that made her worry she’d laid the innocent high school girl thing on too thick. It wasn’t like she was lying – she did have most of Yolanda’s homework; she’d gotten a rundown of the other girl’s schedule from Gabrielle. She was just… trying not to give the impression she’d looked up this guy’s boss and read the Legal Issues section of his Wikipedia page in detail.
The speaker crackled. “Just a moment.”
It had already been a moment, and Veronica’s unease grew, seeming steadily less unreasonable. She waited patiently, drumming her fingers lightly on the steering wheel in an effort to seem less suspicious, more oblivious. It was an uncomfortable amount of time before the speaker reactivated. “You can come in.”
The gate opened, and Veronica felt the possibility that driving through it was a bad idea keenly, but what else was she going to do? She pulled through and parked to the left, her LeBaron hopelessly outclassed by the three flashy vehicles that must have belonged to the family. She couldn’t help noticing that Yolanda’s car wasn’t one of them.
There was no one outside, which left the enclosed lawn and driveway feeling strangely deserted, but Yolanda’s parents were waiting for her in the foyer. Mrs. Hamilton she recognized faintly from last year, and Mr. Hamilton looked almost exactly how she would have expected – he was big, taller than her dad and broad of more than just his shoulders, although after a second you could see that the way he held himself and the cut of his designer sports jacket made him look still larger, and he was wearing at least three immediately visible pieces of jewelry, including a thick silver necklace with a blindingly shiny cross hanging from it.
He looked very much strong enough to dangle someone out a window.
Mrs. Hamilton frowned, like she was trying to place Veronica – fair enough, since they had only met once, and briefly at that. “You’re Yolanda’s friend, right? I’m sorry… is it Lilly?”
Ouch. Veronica hoped her reaction didn’t show on her face. She tried to smile instead. “Veronica, actually. I got some of Yolanda’s homework for her, since she’s been sick? Is she okay to see anybody, or…?”
The Hamiltons exchanged a look, and she lifted the folder of Yolanda’s assignments slightly, as if it was proof of her own innocuousness.
“Who told you she was sick?” Yolanda’s dad asked. His tone might have intimidated Veronica, but his wife immediately tsked sharply and exclaimed, “Percy!”
It was hard to tell if the mitigating factor was the familiarity of the fond marital scolding, or just the impossibility of being afraid of anyone called Percy, but Veronica relaxed fractionally, and then by a whole integer.
“Well,” she said, trying to seem unaware of the tension in the room – which was difficult, because it was thick, “she missed three days of school, so I just figured?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Hamilton said. “Her dad’s just concerned, because…” She didn’t seem sure how to finish the sentence, and Veronica threw caution into the wind.
“Oh, is she in trouble?” she asked, maintaining the same bright, bubblegum tone. “I guess that explains why she hasn’t been texting any of us back, if you took her phone away!” She laughed. “Gabrielle was afraid she got, like, murdered by some E-String copycat, but I told her all those girls got reported missing.”
Even if she hadn’t been specifically looking for it, it would have been hard to miss how violently Yolanda’s mother flinched at the mention of the E-String Strangler, and Mr. Hamilton shifted his weight uncomfortably when she said reported missing. Maybe they hadn’t done something awful to Yolanda, but at the very least they were some kind of negligent.
Or maybe Yolanda had run away because they’d done something awful to her – but Veronica couldn’t make that make sense. If she was pushed, she could have found something potentially concerning in Gabrielle’s mother’s alleged strictness or Jasmine’s mom’s plans for her, and Meg’s parents seemed dubious without needing to put in effort in at all, but Yolanda was always positive. She’d never complained about her parents – but maybe that was because she never talked about them at all.
Veronica fought off a chill. Whatever was going on, there was no guarantee that anyone had seen Yolanda since Monday night. This was way over her head; she was going to have to talk to her dad.
“If you’re going to ground her from school, though, you should wait until after exams,” she added blithely, thinking better of pushing any harder to see Yolanda. “Anyway, here.” She held out the folder of homework to Mrs. Hamilton, doing her best to hide her heightened apprehension behind a bright smile. It was harder to maintain equanimity close to Yolanda’s dad than his wife; Veronica didn’t like the way he was frowning at her.
Yolanda’s mom took it, but she looked worried. “So you haven’t heard from Yolanda at all?”
Bingo. She was right – Yolanda wasn’t even in the house. She probably hadn’t even come home on Monday. Had her parents not noticed, or had they not cared until she’d been gone for multiple days, or were they afraid of something else being exposed – abuse, or more tough guy rapper crimes, or a second round of tax fraud?
It didn’t really matter – none of it was an excuse for not reporting her missing. Veronica tried to imagine her own parents’ reaction. Her dad would have hit DEFCON 1 if she was out past midnight without telling him; she’d been grounded for over a month for the limo party stunt and the only reason he hadn’t been scouring the town for her was because he’d known she was with Lilly and Duncan and probably because the limo driver sort of counted as an adult. Her mom would never have missed her not coming home unless she was blackout drunk, and even then she would never go multiple days without realizing Veronica was gone.
She shook her head in response to the question. “I mean, not that I’d rat her out, but no. When’s she ungrounded, anyway? I guess I can’t say hi.”
Mrs. Hamilton didn’t answer, just looked hard at her husband. He heaved a deep breath, rolling his shoulders back like he wanted to redistribute his weight but didn’t want to look shifty, but he didn’t say anything until his wife tightened her lips and said, “You’ll have to ask Percy.”
“We’ll tell her you came by,” he told Veronica, voice short. She tried not to flinch – then, uncomfortably, realized that poorly-concealed fear might be what he expected from a ditsy rich white teenager. “She can call you once she’s… ungrounded.”
“Okay!” Veronica chirped, a little too brightly, because she just wanted out of there. “Gabrielle helped me get her homework – you should tell her, I don’t want to take all the credit.”
“Thank you,” Yolanda’s mom said. Her sleek clothes and slicked-back hair made the worried expression on her face seem deeper, and it lasted even as she tried to cover it with a smile.
“No problem.” She gave them both a jauntily awkward wave and backed most of the way to the door, her own smile feeling increasingly forced. “Tell Yolanda I said hi!”
She’d already said that, but it didn’t matter, because she was out the door before they could notice. It must not have raised too many flags, because no one came outside to yell at her or tell the guard not to open the gate, but Veronica still drove ten minutes away and took an unnecessary detour before she pulled over and reached for her phone.
Meg was her first stop.
I’m headed home.
You have Gabrielle’s number, right?
It was an agonizing two minutes before she got a response – it was less than an hour after the end of school, so Meg would still be in rehearsal, which was why Veronica hadn’t called, but she’d still been hoping for a quick reply.
great! I think I do. hang on.
A moment later, the number popped up on her screen.
everything okay? Meg asked.
Hope so! Thanks.
Veronica took a deep breath before she plugged Gabrielle’s number in. She really wanted to have this conversation by text too, but that was the coward’s way out.
Gabrielle answered on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Hey. It’s Veronica.” She didn’t wait long enough for Gabrielle to ask why she was calling. “Listen, something is seriously wrong at Yolanda’s house, and her parents are trying to cover it up. I’m going to have to get my dad involved, and that means the police – you should tell your parents about your boyfriend before they hear it somewhere else.”
*
Her dad didn’t for a second take her anything less than seriously, even though she knew how it had to sound, accusing someone’s parents of lying about where they were. He wrote down Yolanda’s name and the date and time she was last seen as Veronica talked, which eased the knot in her chest slightly. It wasn’t like she’d thought he wouldn’t listen, but it was different when it was really happening.
She’d been so focused on that that she’d completely missed the other potential pitfall – at least until her dad set down his pen and fixed her with a deadly serious look.
“Veronica, why would you go there in the first place?”
“I didn’t think they’d be hiding her or something – I just wanted to make sure they were actually home and would have noticed if she didn’t come back. I took some of her homework over.” She bit her lip. “I was hoping… I don’t know, that she’d have dropped her phone in the pool and gotten the flu, and I’d feel like an idiot. But they’re definitely lying, Dad. Mr. Hamilton nearly jumped down my throat when I asked if she was too sick to see me, and when I pretended I thought she was grounded they went with it, but they couldn’t tell me when she’d be ungrounded or anything. And even if they were telling the truth, is it even legal to keep your kid from going to school? Finals are barely a week away, and she’s a senior.”
“It’s concerning,” he said, “but not as concerning as her last being seen in an L.A. club on Monday night. Is your friend eighteen?”
“I think so,” Veronica said. “Is that good or bad?”
“It means her parents lose a couple ways to stonewall us, but sometimes the ‘minor in jeopardy’ angle can be helpful.” He reached across the desk and squeezed her upper arm. “You did the right thing. I’ll do a wellness check, see what kind of read I can get on the parents, and we’ll have a look into whether anything’s turned up with her car.”
An accident on the way home hadn’t even crossed Veronica’s mind, but it did so now in a flash of too much detail. There were all kinds of places where you could go off the road into the ocean without leaving a trace.
“Thanks,” she told her dad, trying to smile. “I don’t want to get Yolanda in trouble or anything – or Gabrielle – but…”
“I promise I won’t go out of the way to make your friend’s life harder,” he told her. “But either way, alive and mad at you is better than the alternative.” He squeezed her arm again before letting go.
“I don’t know if it’s anything, but when I called Gabrielle, she said Yolanda’s mom called her on Tuesday to ask when Yolanda left, and Gabrielle told her they were studying until midnight. She thought they were just trying to bust Yolanda for lying about where she was, but if it was because she never came home…”
“Then she’s been missing for three days and her parents knew about it and didn’t report it.” He shook his head. “Thanks, honey. Go home, and I’ll call you if there’s anything else I need to know.”
“Or if you find anything out, right?” Veronica asked, even though she knew it was a stupid, immature thing to say. He couldn’t just tell her details of an active case.
“I’ll give you an update as soon as I can,” he told her reassuringly. Veronica didn’t miss the careful wording, but she tried to smile.
“Okay.”
*
The garage was empty when she got home, but Veronica parked in the driveway anyway. She didn’t have the energy to run the recycling bin gauntlet today, but not having to walk past it didn’t stop it from crossing her mind. The last thing she should be doing right now was bringing more stress home.
The thought made her feel vaguely lonely, isolated, but this didn’t feel like the kind of thing she could bring to her mom anyway. Boy drama, friendship problems, sure. Lianne was good with those. Veronica might even have told her about everything that had happened with Yolanda and Lilly last year, if she hadn’t been worried about it getting back to her dad. He was proud of her for being strong and independent, and she was, usually, but there was nothing to be proud of in the way she’d caved to Lilly back then.
But the heavy stuff? Even if she wasn’t afraid it might end up being the final weight on the scale of whatever tenuous grasp Lianne had on her self-control, that wasn’t something they were given to talking about anyway.
It hadn’t always been that way – Veronica could remember her mom explaining to her in simple terms what abortion was when she was ten or eleven, clearing up confusion she’d had about gay people and homophobia when she was even younger – but at some point almost all of the serious things, anything that wasn’t light or personal, had become her dad’s area alone. He talked to her about serial killers and child murderers, about the dangers in associating with known gang members, about things to watch out for in a boyfriend or why some parents hurt their children. Her mom just… didn’t, anymore.
She didn’t think they could start with this.
“How was school?”
“Okay,” Veronica said, glancing up from the mat she was kicking off her shoes on. “I might have a friend over? There’s some weird stuff going on.”
“Of course, honey.” Lianne frowned. “You know you don’t have to ask unless they’re staying for dinner. Are you sure everything’s okay?”
“Dad’s handling it,” Veronica told her. “I just… really don’t want to talk about it again.” She cringed a little internally at how much it sounded like a brush-off, even though it was the actual truth. “I actually just want to think about something else.”
That was… a bit more of a stretch, because there was no way she’d be able to think about something else until she knew what was going on with Yolanda, but talking about this stuff with your parents was just different than talking about it with your friends. Besides, any conversation with her mom would have had to start with an explanation, and Veronica was not up to that.
“Sure,” Lianne said, although she didn’t sound very sure. “You’ll let me know if you need anything, right?”
Veronica pretended to ignore the edge of vulnerability in her voice, like it didn’t rub against her spine like sandpaper. “Yeah. Thanks.”
She hugged her mom quickly, and headed upstairs, glancing at her phone as she did so. She already had a response to the text she’d sent from the car, but another one came in as she watched.
Come over once rehearsal’s over?
sure. I just have to check with my parents
okay see you soon
She’d made her bed that morning, but sloppily, so she tugged the comforter straight and unbunched the sheet on the left side, then shoved her laundry basket into the closet. It wasn’t like Meg would really care, but it felt like she should be doing something to prepare for having someone over.
It had been ages, she realized. Not since Lilly had stopped coming over – almost three months.
She’d really had no other real friends, she reflected bitterly. Aside from Duncan, who hadn’t counted after they started dating, and Logan, who’d turned around and done the same thing to her that she’d done to Yolanda, only worse. All her other girl friends (aside from Yolanda) had been Lilly’s friends, really, or friendly acquaintances, or before Lilly.
Or after Lilly, she reminded herself forcibly. She’d done okay since Lilly. Gabrielle probably wasn’t going to want to hang out with her anymore, but she had two and a half whole friends. At least, if Yolanda was okay, and if this hadn’t been some kind of crazy misunderstanding that resulted in the other girl never speaking to her again – for real, this time.
Meg would be there soon, so she glanced around briefly for any errant embarrassing details before dropping her bag by her desk and heading back downstairs. Backup emerged from the living room and was panting in the hall by the time she finished descending the stairs, angling for a walk. Veronica scruffed up the fur around his neck and told him he was a good boy, then gave him a thorough ear-rub to make up for disappointing him. It helped, for a moment, but when she heard Meg’s car outside, she abandoned the dog and went out onto the porch. “You can block me in,” she called. “Our neighbours hate it when people park on the street.”
It wasn’t like there wasn’t room, but the Andersens were pretentious. They liked to believe they had a fancier area code than they did, and Veronica did not have the wherewithal for one of their tantrums today.
Meg dutifully eased into the driveway behind the LeBaron. “Hey,” she said, shooting Veronica a smile as she got out. “Is everything okay? I mean, I’m happy to just hang out, but you didn’t really say why you wanted me to come over.”
“I’ll explain,” Veronica said, more grimly than she’d meant to. Fortunately, Backup chose that moment to lighten the atmosphere by sticking his head out between her knees to appraise the new arrival, which made Meg laugh.
“This is Backup,” she told Meg drily. “Backup, Meg. Be nice.”
He didn’t really need the command; he could tell when they liked someone and he didn’t need to be on the alert, and anyway the more heavy-duty training her dad had given him didn’t exactly see a lot of use – but it felt like the right way to cap off the introduction.
“Your parrot, right?” Meg said, grinning. Backup whuffed politely in response and withdrew his head. Veronica made a face as his nose brushed the back of her knee.
“That’s him,” she said. “Come on, we’ll go to my room.”
There was a pause – Meg removed her shoes and then had to fondle Backup’s ears and rub his stomach while he acted like Veronica hadn’t just spoiled him with attention. “He’s not allowed upstairs,” she told Meg, shooting a stern look at the dog.
It was mostly true, although Lianne had let him sleep on Veronica’s bed a couple years back when she’d had that especially nasty flu. “Don’t tell your dad,” she’d said, even though there was no way Keith hadn’t known.
They both washed their hands in the kitchen, and Veronica got each of them a glass of lemonade before they went upstairs. The stuff they were going to be talking about felt like it would be easier to handle with something to hold or even to briefly hide behind.
Nevertheless, she didn’t pull any punches. “I think something bad happened to Yolanda,” she said once the door closed behind them. “I went to her house and her parents were super weird. They kept asking if I’d heard from her without really asking if I’d heard from her, and Gabrielle said they called her on Tuesday to ask when Yolanda left. She thought they were just trying to bust her, but I don’t think she came home on Monday.”
Meg looked increasingly disturbed, but her expression dropped into outright appalled at the last sentence. “You mean she’s been gone for three days and no one knew?”
The icy lump in her stomach that Veronica had been trying to ignore got heavier. “Yeah. I think so. Except her parents. I don’t know why they didn’t report it, but something has got to be wrong.”
“Maybe she got kidnapped?” Meg suggested. She didn’t sound like she entirely believed it – more like she was trying to find an explanation that didn’t involve fatal car accidents or serial killers. “They always say not to call the cops, right? And her dad has a lot of money.”
“Maybe. But doesn’t everyone know by now that you should call the police anyway? And why would her mom ask if she’d called me, then?” Meg bit her lip, and Veronica went on, “I’m hoping she ran away. Maybe her parents were doing something to her and they’re afraid the cops would find, or maybe they’re just doing something else illegal. But she might be okay, then.”
“Maybe they were locking her in the closet,” Meg said.
There was an air of grim levity about it, but it didn’t sound like a joke. Veronica blinked. “What?”
Her friend sighed. “Sorry. When Lizzie and I were little, my mom used to say that if we were bad we could go into the closet and think about our sins.” She sighed. “It was kind of messed up, actually.”
“Um, yeah.” It felt like there was another question she should be following up with, but Veronica couldn’t quite find it, but after a moment Meg shook her head and returned to the subject at hand.
“But we have to do something, right? I mean – is Gabrielle the last person who saw her? Did she ever even come back from L.A.?”
“I told my dad,” Veronica said, and Meg sighed with relief. “Gabrielle’s probably going to get busted for dating that guy, and everything, so she’s not my biggest fan right now, but… I had to.”
“Of course you did!”
“I think he’s over there right now, but he might not be able to tell me anything,” she added. “But yeah, I think… I think she might not have come home at all, after Monday. I didn’t see her car when I was there.” After a pause, she added, “To be fair, they do have at least two whole garages. But I didn’t see it out front with the other ones.”
“What do you think happened?” Meg asked. “For real?”
Veronica chewed on her lip, thinking. The run-away theory was the best for Yolanda, but it felt naïve to pin her hopes on it. “I mean… I was worried she met some psycho, but then someone would have found her car and asked questions, right?”
“In L.A.?” Meg pointed out, which made Veronica wince. “It probably just got towed. Or she’s got seven thousand dollars in parking fines.”
“Okay, maybe. But if she had an accident on the way home–”
“But then someone would have found her car.”
“Not if it went into the ocean,” Veronica said, which made Meg blanch. “It was late, and she was by herself – she could have fallen asleep or something.”
“Oh, God.”
“Yeah.” There was a long, oppressive silence, until Veronica forced herself to say, “Or maybe she met a guy and took off with him, or something."
“Yolanda doesn’t really seem like the type,” Meg said solemnly.
It was impossible to argue with that. “Okay, so maybe her parents were, you know, abusing her or something. Her dad has a record, so maybe he loses his temper and hits her or something – or maybe her mom is afraid they’ll turn out like him, so she’s insanely strict, like one of those parents that locks the fridge or grounds you for two months for getting a B.”
That made Meg wince, but she just said, “A record for what, though?”
“Tax fraud and hanging a guy out a window.” When the other girl stared at her, Veronica shrugged. “I guess he wanted the guy to sign a record deal. Which I’m pretty sure doesn’t even count if you were coerced, but I guess if he was a lawyer he wouldn’t have gotten caught committing tax fraud.”
“When did he hold a guy out a window?” Meg demanded, which was a fair question.
“About a year and a half ago. So it’s not like it’s old news.”
“If my dad held me out a window, I would so run away,” her friend muttered. “I would take Lizzie and Grace and drive to Mexico.”
Veronica hadn’t even thought of that. If she had run away, Yolanda had left her brother.
Maybe he hadn’t been a target, though; maybe it had only been her. There could be a lot of reasons for that, but the most obvious one, the horrible thing that sprung instantly to mind, wasn’t something she wanted to say to Meg.
Instead, she said, “Well, maybe Bryce knows something. Maybe he’ll tell my dad, and we can sort this out quickly.” She took a gulp of her lemonade before setting it back on the bedside table. Meg blinked, realizing her own was forgotten on the chair Veronica had dragged over to serve as a table, but she only looked and didn’t actually pick it up. “It’s not like I want her parents to be abusing her, but if she ran away, then she’s probably okay.”
“Yeah,” Meg said. She hugged her knees to her chest. “We should have noticed sooner.”
“Maybe Gabrielle should have,” Veronica said. She could understand why Gabrielle was upset with her, but that didn’t entirely kill her resentfulness about it, and the defensiveness didn’t leave her feeling charitable. “But you and I had no reason not to think she was fine. At least not until she didn’t answer my text yesterday, and that could have been a lot of things.”
“Is that why you really went over there?” Meg asked, shrewder than Veronica had anticipated.
“A little bit,” she acknowledged, caught by surprise. Then she forced herself to admit, “I was kind of afraid she was mad at me or something.”
Meg smiled sadly in commiseration, her expression utterly nonjudgemental. “Yolanda doesn’t really seem like she does the silent treatment, you know?”
“No, that was Lilly.” Veronica shook her head, dismissing her own bitterness. “I knew it was dumb, I just… worried anyway, you know?”
“Yeah, I get it.” Meg picked up her lemonade but didn’t drink it. “This is just – so awful. I can’t believe a little while ago I was worried about my reputation.”
“Maybe it’s nothing and we’ll all feel stupid by tomorrow,” Veronica offered, not able to put much conviction into the words.
Meg tried to smile. “Yeah. Maybe.”
*
Her dad didn’t get home until long after dinner, so Meg wasn’t there for the update, which Veronica was instructed to keep to herself. She texted her friend anyway – none of the sensitive stuff, about abandoned cars and belated ransom demands, just Nothing big yet but she’s definitely missing. Dad says keep it to yourself if you can.
Then she stared at her ceiling for a while, trying and failing not to think about all the things ‘allegedly kidnapped’ could mean.
Her mom knocked and stuck her head in without waiting for an answer before she went to bed, to ask if Veronica was okay. Veronica said she was.
Fifteen minutes later, her dad did the same thing, which for a brief second made her want to laugh. Her parents weren’t very similar, but sometimes you could so tell they’d been married for nearly twenty years.
“You okay, honey?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Veronica told him, and he came in and sat on the foot of her bed, so she sat up. She wasn’t quite at the level of depressing navel-gazing introspection that she was going to have this whole conversation with him while staring at the ceiling.
“I know you’re worried about your friend,” he said. “But this might be good news. If it really is a kidnapping for ransom, we have a better chance of finding Yolanda than if she vanished without a trace.”
“You still think her dad’s lying?”
His expression tightened. “I think it would take a lot more than not trusting the police to keep me from doing everything possible to find you if your car turned up abandoned a few blocks from our house, especially once I got a ransom demand. Mr. Hamilton isn’t known for making stupendous life choices, so maybe he is telling the truth about that, who know? He did hire a private investigator, and I’m inclined to think if anything else was going on at this point his wife would have told us. But I’m not taking anything on faith.” He sighed. “I don’t have a lot of experience with kidnapping, but I’m hoping the FBI can get him to be a little more cooperative.”
“If there was anything to find, wouldn’t the private investigator have found it, though? I mean, kidnappers are… a big deal.”
Her dad made a face. “Van Lowe isn’t exactly a class act, honey. He’s not completely incompetent, but I wouldn’t count on him cracking this open, either. Your friend Gabrielle was a lot more helpful.”
“Yeah, she’s definitely not my friend now that I got her busted for clubbing and dating an older guy,” Veronica told him drily.
“LAPD is talking to him too,” her dad said. “I’m sorry you had to go through this, honey, but we’re going to find her if it’s at all possible.”
She flipped the corner of her pillowcase back and forth between two fingers, trying to find the right words. “Maybe Meg was right. We should have said something sooner. I can’t believe she’s been missing for three days and no one knew.”
“Her parents knew,” Keith said. “This is on them. There was nothing else you could have done.” He stood, patting her shoulder as he did so. “Try to get some sleep tonight, okay, honey? I’m not going to be able to give you a play-by-play on this one, but if we find her, you’ll know about it. Okay?”
“Sure.” Veronica tried to smile. As an afterthought, she added, “Was Yolanda’s dad mad that I tipped you off?”
“He was not pleased,” her dad said, raising his eyebrows. “But if he doesn’t want to go back to prison for obstructing justice and whatever else I can throw at him, he’s going to keep that to himself.” More seriously, he added, “If any of the Hamiltons do approach you, I want you to leave, make a scene, whatever you have to do. I don’t think you’re in any danger of that – he has bigger problems to worry about than a teenage girl who realized he was being shifty – but better safe than sorry.”
“Snitches get taped to the flagpole,” Veronica observed, which made him blink at her. “Never mind. I get it.” She sighed. “I was hoping Yolanda ran away because he dangled her out a window or something.”
“I am not Bone Hamilton’s biggest fan,” her dad said, “but I don’t think he was in the habit of holding his kids out windows.” He shook his head. “He has a lot of enemies, though – I’m hoping the ransom is real and not a red herring.”
He didn’t complete the thought, but Veronica could put it together – if the motive was revenge, and not money, there was no reason for the kidnappers to keep Yolanda alive.
“Me too,” she said quietly.
Her dad patted her sympathetically on the back and headed to bed, but even though it was late he didn’t tell her to put her light out, so she didn’t.
*
Getting up and going to school the next morning like nothing was wrong was one of the more surreal experiences of Veronica’s recent life. Her mom had offered to let her stay home, but with exams coming up and nothing to do around the house except slowly go crazy, that didn’t seem like a great option either, lack of sleep or no.
Besides, what if she heard something at school? It was a long shot, especially since Gabrielle probably wasn’t planning on hanging out with her, but wondering if she’d missed something that could have been important really would drive her crazy.
Her dad was already gone when she got up, which she let herself hope was a good sign, one that meant he had something to do. She choked down half a grapefruit, reasoning that if she had to force herself to eat in the first place, she might as well pick something she didn’t like instead of wasting something she did, tried to appreciate the tighter-than-usual hug her mom enveloped her in on the way out the door, and focused intently on the road as she drove to school. Yolanda hadn’t been in an accident, at least – but that brief, too-vivid image of the potential crash was still hard to shake.
School was just as freakishly normal. She’d half-expected word to spread, but Meg must not have told anyone, and Gabrielle was hardly going to start rumours about what was going on, whether for Yolanda’s sake or because she herself had the most to lose. All the buzz was the usual stuff – Shelly and John might have hooked up, Caz and Sabrina might have broken up, some sophomore girl Veronica didn’t know had allegedly gotten an STD from her last boyfriend and given it to her new boyfriend and only found out because he gave it to his brother’s girlfriend he was cheating with and it showed up on her physical… Same old Neptune High.
Veronica was so invested in scanning the crowd for Meg that she almost walked into Weevil, grabbing the handrail in the middle of the stairs to the main building so she could swing to the side and avoid him. He raised an eyebrow at her and she responded with a shrug that said as little as possible.
“Hey, V.” The words were accompanied by a very deliberately dazzling grin. “You got another hot tip for me?”
Even after she remembered what he was talking about, it took a moment longer (and a little more effort) than usual to take a breath and put on a show-smile, but it wasn’t like she could get into the weeds on what was going on. “Out of ideas already?”
“Just showing my appreciation.” He crossed his arms, leaning back slightly without even losing his balance. “Besides, nothing’s for free. You keep doing me favours, I’ll end up in the red. No one wants that.”
Veronica rolled her eyes. “I didn’t do it for you.”
“You just really hate baseball cards, huh?”
“More like I don’t like my ex expecting me to help him after he stuck his dick in my best friend’s mouth.”
She could almost see the light go on behind his eyes, sparking a strangely wholesome glee at solving the puzzle. “Oh, that’s right. I forgot you used to waste your time on that guy.”
On the one hand, he was entirely right that any time spent with Jeremy was wasted – but it wasn’t like Veronica could let him get away with saying that. “Fortunately, I’m not interested in your opinion.”
“Which is why you handed me such a nice payday?” he asked, grinning.
She dodged, not quite willing to admit to criminal complicity out loud. “I’m very serious when I say it wasn’t even about you.”
Weevil shrugged. “Sounds good to me. I didn’t do it for you, either.”
It was necessary to stifle a snort at that, and he immediately looked far too smug about it, but Veronica let that go. She felt the slightest, tiniest bit better about Yolanda. Release of tension or something.
“You want me to do something for you, I’m free later,” he added, raising his eyebrows as if she needed help figuring out what he meant.
For a brief moment she considered it – as far as releases of tension went, you couldn’t do a lot better – but she truly wasn’t in the mood. Too jittery and ratcheted up, too worried about something legitimately terrible having happened.
“I can’t,” she said. “Monday?”
“Your loss,” he said, flashing her another smug smile, and disappeared in the direction of his first class – or maybe just of wherever he was planning to go to cut, since most of the academic classes were in the building he’d just left.
(Although what was the point of showing up to school and then cutting first period? If Veronica was the kind of person who skipped classes, she’d just sleep in. Esoteric gang-related reasons, probably.)
She looked after him for a minute, wondering if his parting shot meant he was going to hook up with another girl over the weekend and if there was any chance it would be Jasmine or if that violated some kind of code now that she was not-quite dating his friend. It was a faintly interesting question, but she couldn’t ask anybody; saying anything to Jasmine would make her look jealous instead of curious, and Weevil would laugh his head off at her if she mentioned it to him as anything other than a joke.
Maybe if she hadn’t been so worried about Yolanda, she would have strategized a way to bring it up, just to see if she could do it, another way to secretly get one over on him – but it was hard to care for very long right now, so she turned back around and headed for English Lit, where Meg had already staked out seats in the back corner for them. She was full of concerns and apprehensions but no new ideas or suggestions, and Veronica had to hush her a couple times, because while she had never cared less about getting reprimanded by the teacher, this was one rumour that could do real damage if it spread all over the school. Particularly the part about the police being involved – you never knew who that would get back to.
It was almost a relief that they couldn’t sit next to each other in Precalc – it was a strain to deal with Meg’s jangled nerves on top of her own, but from across the room they could still look at each other and know there was someone who was just as distracted and who had slept just as badly, who got it, without feeling obligated to talk about it. It was a comfort Veronica decidedly felt the lack of in her next two classes, although at least neither of the teachers noticed her distraction.
She did run into Gabrielle in the hall between third and fourth period. It was almost anticlimactic, nothing but a tight-mouthed look and a quick aversion of the other girl’s eyes, but it still left Veronica feeling decidedly rotten, and it wasn’t a feeling that went away any time during American History.
Lunch didn’t help much either. She hadn’t packed a lunch yesterday and the food was lackluster as usual, the crush of students at the commissary more oppressive than average. The table they found was smaller than usual, but it still felt empty with only her and Meg, who seemed to have exhausted her entire scope of things to say during first period.
Veronica couldn’t blame her. The only thing she felt less like doing than talking was eating.
She was still staring morosely at her cold pasta salad when her phone dinged. Veronica wasn’t sure who would be texting her – Meg was across from her, Gabrielle was a few tables over, eating by herself, and Jasmine didn’t have her number – but she checked anyway, on the extreme outside chance it was Yolanda.
It wasn’t Yolanda, though – it was her dad.
Can’t give details, but there’s been a development. Hopeful news – don’t worry.
Veronica took a deep breath, her fingers already tapping out a response – but she deleted it without sending, and did the same with the next one. Her dad couldn’t and wouldn’t answer questions like Is she okay? or Did they let her go?
Instead she just told him Thanks – be careful! and then tilted her phone so Meg could see his text.
The other girl gasped, her reaction much more obvious than Veronica’s had been. At least no one was looking at them. “Do you think they let her go?”
“Maybe the ransom demand was fake?” Veronica suggested, keeping her voice down. It was the only thing she could think of that might get her dad to tell her not to worry anymore. “That happens sometimes when someone rich is missing.”
“But how did they even know she was missing?” Meg asked, and she didn’t have an answer for that. “And what about her car – your dad found it with the door open, right? So it’s not like she drove somewhere and decided not to come back.”
“Yolanda’s parents told him that they found it down the street with the door open,” Veronica corrected. “Or actually, that her brother did, I think. Maybe they were keeping her from coming to school and they lied?” It didn’t make any sense, even though it was the only thing she could think of that worked with the established facts, but Meg went suddenly quiet and looked down at the table.
“Are Yolanda’s parents religious?” she asked after a moment, her voice far too quiet for Veronica’s taste.
“I don’t think so.” Veronica frowned. “I guess her mom could be. Her dad doesn’t seem like it – I mean, he was wearing a cross necklace, but I’m pretty sure it was just an excuse to show off his bling. But what does that have to do with anything? It’s not like Yolanda talks about church or anything.”
“Just… some people can be really strict. If they caught her coming home from a club maybe they just didn’t want to let her leave the house. And they could have panicked and made up the kidnapping story when your dad got involved.”
Veronica considered. “Maybe. I guess it makes sense with everything. But they just really seemed like they didn’t know where she was. And they weren’t hiding it super well, either.” She shook her head. “There’s no point in beating it to death. Dad’s on it, so we’ll know more soon. Besides, Yolanda’s a rapper’s kid. I can’t see her parents losing it that badly about her being out late.”
“I guess you’re right,” Meg conceded. “Just… text me as soon as you hear anything. I won’t tell anyone, but this is so crazy. I still can’t believe she just vanished.”
*
Veronica still had nothing to report during Spanish, which was probably for the best, because they spent the whole class doing review and there was no opportunity to talk anyway. She was still edgy when she headed home, and she walked Backup around the block several times until he put his foot down and refused to trace the same rectangle again, too afraid of missing her dad’s return to go any farther away from the house.
It burned off some of the energy, anyway, although Backup seemed somewhere between bemused and dissatisfied with his walk. “At least you got outside,” she told him, hanging up the leash. “It can’t always be long walks on the beach – you’re just spoiled.”
She ended up watching TV with her mom and doing her homework, without really paying any attention to either. It wasn’t like there was much homework to do in the first place; only Mrs. Murphy was still assigning any this close to finals, and that was because English Lit was an AP class.
Her dad finally got home around six, about half an hour after Lianne abandoned the living room to start dinner, and he was clearly in a bad mood, but he still came in and hugged Veronica. “Hey, kiddo. How are you holding up?”
“Dying from lack of information,” she said, “but otherwise fine. Did you hear anything – from the FBI, or –”
“The FBI can go home,” he said, and shook his head, lips a thin line. “That family is a piece of work. What a colossal waste of everyone’s time. No, honey, we can definitively say that your friend wasn’t kidnapped. It sounds like she left of her own volition. Which is still potentially concerning, since we don’t know who she’s with, but if you’ve been biting your nails over her being tied to a chair somewhere, you can stop now.”
Veronica stared at him. “They lied about the kidnapping? Why? They didn’t even want you involved – they could have said she went to visit family or something!”
“Yolanda’s brother staged the kidnapping,” he said, an unusual level of annoyance in his tone. “This doesn’t go beyond us at the moment, but apparently he wanted his dad’s attention – badly enough to risk the local police, apparently, but not the FBI. He fessed up this morning when he found out they were involved. The parents thought the kidnapping was real, which makes their utter failure to report it –”
He stopped and took a deep breath. “I don’t need to tell you that none of this goes beyond you, for the moment.”
“No, of course not.” She paused. “But I can tell Meg Yolanda’s okay, right? She is okay? Where did she go?”
“Where we don’t know yet, but her brother heard her making plans to run away. And yes, he could be lying, but I don’t think so. It’s still of concern until we locate her, but she’s eighteen – she’s allowed to leave if she wants.”
“This is so insane,” Veronica muttered. “Who fakes a kidnapping?”
“Who indeed?” Keith said, his sardonic tone doing a poor job of covering his ire.
At least if Yolanda’s parents had bought into the kidnapping, Veronica wasn’t an idiot for thinking something was really wrong, but it still rankled that she’d hung Gabrielle out to dry with her parents over something so much less urgent. “Are they going to – I guess, is her brother being arrested? Did her parents do anything illegal?”
“If it were up to me, I’d smack them all with an obstruction of justice charge,” her dad said, “but I suspect the DA will decide it’s not worth the effort. And Bryce Hamilton definitely broke the law, but the person he was trying to extort is his own father, who’s unlikely to cooperate if we prosecute, so – probably not. Although I’d like to land that kid with some heavy-duty community service, if nothing else,” he added, half to himself.
“I can’t believe this,” Veronica said, anger finally starting to pierce through her shock. “I ruined a friendship, I got Gabrielle grounded until graduation, I thought Yolanda might be dead – and it was all fake? I can’t believe I got put through that for some stupid stunt – I can’t believe he put his own parents through it.” She shook her head in disgust. “Although apparently Meg and I care more about Yolanda than her parents do, anyway. Even Gabrielle had a reason for not saying anything. Are you sure they aren’t hiding anything illegal?” she asked hopefully. “Like, really illegal, I mean.”
Her dad sighed. “Nothing as such from what I saw, and we don’t have any more excuse to poke around their house, unfortunately. It looks like they’re sticking with the good old ‘I don’t trust the police’ schtick.” He snorted. “At least that hack of a private investigator they hired will be happy. He gets paid regardless.”
“Honey?” Lianne leaned into the room. “I can’t find the basil.”
“I finished it off,” her husband said. “New container has a red lid.”
She smiled at him, worry a faint underline to the more obvious fondness. “Stop talking shop with Veronica, she’s stressed out enough already.”
Veronica was considerably less stressed out (if maybe a bit more wound up) than she would have been if he hadn’t talked about the case with her, but she accepted her dad’s faintly apologetic follow-up hug without protest and clicked off the TV so she could get ready for dinner. She got halfway through a text to Meg with the barest possible bones, then stopped and stared in the mirror for a long moment.
Maybe Yolanda wasn’t kidnapped, but that didn’t mean she was safe. Veronica tried to imagine her mother hiding her own disappearance, if it meant admitting to negligence to report it, or to her drinking, or…
She couldn’t. Her mom let her down sometimes, but she had always been ready to do whatever she had to in order to protect Veronica from the big stuff, from kidnappers or poorly-trained and bad-tempered dogs or fully adult ski instructors who slept with fifteen-year-olds. Maybe Yolanda’s family was the obvious dysfunctional one, with the blatant neglect and prison stints and soap opera fake kidnappings, but Veronica was starting to think that morally speaking the Mannings weren’t much better, no matter how upstanding their careers and their reputations and their lawn were. Not that she knew anything about parenting a kid like Lizzie, but Meg threw things out casually sometimes that made Veronica uncomfortable in the same way that watching Celeste Kane single out Lilly and rip into her had used to make her uncomfortable.
Only Lilly had never taken it lying down, and Meg seemed to think everything was normal most of the time.
Veronica shook her head and finished the text, set her phone down and washed her hands for dinner. It was still a far cry from ignoring a kidnapping, or staging a fake one – but it wasn’t nothing. At the very least it was a reminder to appreciate her own parents.
In the service of that, she gave her mom a sidelong hug when she came back downstairs. Lianne smiled at her in surprise.
“Oh, hey, honey. Something up?”
“I’m just glad you’re my mom,” Veronica told her. She ignored the vulnerability that flickered over her mother’s face before Lianne squeezed her around the shoulders.
“I’m glad I’m your mom too.”
They stood that way for a few moments, but Veronica took a deep breath and changed the subject with a big smile before things could go from sweet to awkward. “Where’s dad?” she asked.
“On the phone,” her mom said, drily accepting of the intrusion.
“Already? He just got home!”
“That’s the job.” Lianne picked up the salad bowl and settled it into Veronica’s hands. “Put that on the table, okay? I have to take the garlic bread out.”
Veronica did so obediently, shooing Backup out of the dining room. “You know the rules,” she told him with mock sternness. “And no headscritches, I already washed –”
“You’re kidding me!”
That was her dad, in the living room. Veronica stopped cold.
“No,” he was saying when she managed to swallow down her initial fear to realize that the tone of the exclamation was closer to exasperation with a touch of anger than to the type of grim fury she would expect to accompany news of a dead body. “No, that’s not necessary.” Veronica couldn’t help migrating toward the door to the living room as he continued, “I sure would like to talk to her! There are some things I’d like to say. But if you verified – yeah, that’s good enough. I’ll inform the parents.” He sighed heavily. “I appreciate it. Thanks, Tom.”
He hung up, glancing up to see Veronica hesitating in the doorway, and his face did something complicated involving both frustration and relief. “Good news, honey.”
“Good news?” Veronica asked, her voice unusually fragile.
“Your friend Yolanda is in Vegas.” He sighed, coming very near to rolling his eyes. “She just got married.”
Chapter 25: Younger Than They Should Be
Notes:
...Okay, after this one it's back to one chapter a fortnight because this is not sustainable. :)
Content warnings in the endnote (and certain canon grossness, which you will be prepared for if you know which episode we're roughly up to), but one thing I want to say up front is that there's a simile about sunburns in this chapter and yes I know that's not actually how sunburns work, but it's how it feels like they work when you have one.
Anyway, enjoy! One of the major scenes in this chapter has been written for so long and I'm excited to have it out there, even if I have had to tweak it a bit as the story progressed.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
People generally have sex fairly young, and probably younger than they should be having it.
Steve Carell
Yolanda called on Saturday morning, on her new husband’s cellphone, apologetic and faintly embarrassed. “I didn’t think anyone would worry about me being gone,” she said. “Aside from my parents, who kind of deserve it. I can’t believe Bryce did something like that.”
There were a lot of things Veronica could have said to that, but after a moment and a deep breath, she only replied, “What did they do, exactly? Your parents?”
“What do you mean?” Yolanda said, sounding legitimately confused.
“You said they deserve it – what did they do to you? Because I can still talk to my dad –”
“No!” The other girl sounded alarmed. “Nothing like that – just, all this stuff with Ben’s dad, and my dad, and now our families never even talk to each other and Ben and I had to sneak around just to see each other… It’s been ridiculous. I was just sick of putting up with it, you know?”
Veronica bit back a retort along the lines of ‘So you decided to bail on graduating from high school?’ with some effort. “You could have told Gabrielle,” she said instead.
“I didn’t want her caught in the middle, you know?” It was clear from her voice that Yolanda could see the pitfall in that logic now. “Listen, if she’s mad at you… tell her I said it was my fault, okay? I should have gotten in touch with one of you, I just didn’t want my parents blowing up my phone – I had no idea Bryce was going to make everyone think I got kidnapped. He really is a freak.”
“I’m just glad you’re okay,” Veronica said. It was true, overall – assuming Yolanda was okay. She couldn’t have waited another few months, until after graduation? Or even just another two weeks, to finish off the semester? Maybe her new husband had enough money that finding a way to finish high school wouldn’t be a difficulty, but it still seemed insane. Besides, apparently he was a college student or something; they weren’t known for being solvent.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” There was a smile in Yolanda’s voice. “I’m great, actually. I’m sorry about all the drama, but I have to say… being Mrs. Bloom is worth it.”
It’s been one day, said a cynical part of Veronica’s mind. The rest of it was busy chewing over the prospect of someone she knew, someone barely older than her, going from Yolanda Hamilton to Yolanda Bloom, like she was somehow a completely different person. There had never been a reason to get overly worked up about name changes before (aside from surreptitiously trying out Veronica Kane on the inside cover of notebooks she was sure Lilly would never see in freshman year, before she and Duncan had actually gotten together) – but it seemed so strange and uncomfortable now. Yolanda Bloom didn’t sound right.
It wasn’t helpful and she didn’t like the feeling, so Veronica tried to put that aside, and not think about it, but it got in her head instead, throwing out unhelpful hypotheticals. Veronica Vandegraff. Veronica Lasky. Meg Patterson. It was too weird. She probably would have ended up trying out the obvious combinations for Jasmine and Gabrielle, too, but Gabrielle had been careful never to say her boyfriend’s last name, and Veronica didn’t know what Jasmine’s was now.
“Well, that’s good,” she told Yolanda. “Look… about Gabrielle – you should call her yourself.”
“I will,” her friend promised. “And I’ll email you, okay? I have to go, though. Ben has to call his mom.”
She was technically on her honeymoon as well, Veronica supposed. “Okay. Um… congratulations, I guess.”
“Thanks!” Yolanda said brightly, and hung up. Veronica flopped down on her bed, still strangely fixated on the name thing. It had always been abstract, like, yes, sure, she’d get married one day, and change her last name, unless she had some kind of professional job where it would be a pain, maybe. But now she was reconsidering that. What if she ended up with someone like Yolanda’s boyfriend – Yolanda’s husband? Veronica Bloom sounded awful. It was a weird name for Yolanda too – not just because Veronica wasn’t used to it, but because ‘Yolanda Hamilton’ sounded right for her. It was insane to think it just… wasn’t her name anymore.
Ben Hamilton sounded a lot better than Yolanda Bloom, in Veronica’s opinion, but that wouldn’t have been on the table. Too radical. Although that didn’t exactly make a lot of sense, and she’d never thought about why it was supposedly so insanely hyperfeminist. It was only fair, right?
On the other hand, Reynolds wasn’t the most interesting last name in the world, so at least her mom had traded up. Maybe that was what it should be based on, whose name was the most interesting.
And maybe she was just using all this to distract herself from how crazy and destabilizing it felt for someone her age to be married. On purpose, and everything. Although Veronica supposed Yolanda could be pregnant – it hadn’t even occurred to her until now, too flabbergasted about everything else to even consider that. It would explain not waiting for graduation, but for Yolanda’s sake Veronica hoped she wasn’t. That was too much all at once.
It shouldn’t have been such a plausible theory in the first place, but a really surprising number of people acted like it was still the nineteen-sixties and you would spontaneously combust if you had a baby with someone and then got married… later.
Veronica tried to imagine marrying somebody, anybody, as soon as next year, but she couldn’t. Not even if things had stayed perfect with Duncan or been as good as she’d thought they’d been with Troy. She couldn’t imagine anyone marrying Jeremy, which felt like it should be an indictment, but also, they were teenagers. It wasn’t that bizarre. You were supposed to grow up and become the adult version of yourself before that was even on the table. How did Yolanda think she was there already? How could she feel like she was there? Veronica wasn’t even sure how to feel like she was ready to have a boyfriend again.
Hashing it over in a dozen different ways wasn’t going to help her with anything – it was just weird, and it was going to stay weird until she got used to it. Veronica levered herself off her bed, intending to take Backup for a real walk to make up for disappointing him yesterday, and winced at the foreboding twinge in her abdomen. Great, she was going to be early this month – she’d definitely better take him now, before the cramps really started.
Maybe she should just try not to expect anything good out of life until finals were over. Next semester would be less insane; after all, it wasn’t a high bar to clear.
*
Weevil was surrounded by his typical complement of assorted flunkies when she got to school on Monday, which wouldn’t have been an issue, because they rarely talked before school – except that Veronica had made plans with him on Friday, and now if she wanted to avoid another misunderstanding she had to announce that she had her period in front of a bunch of teenage gang members she barely knew.
Not happening.
Still, if she waited until lunch to beg off, he’d be annoyed, and she didn’t want to deal with that, so she made a couple changes to the script in her head as she adjusted her path in order to walk past the spot he’d staked out next to the parking lot. The one upside was that not using the actual word period gave her a fifty percent lower chance of blushing, which would have been hard to live down.
Most of the bikers were engaged in what was either an argument or a very interactive story about someone’s dog, but one of them noticed her coming and called out, “Hey, what’s Duncan Kane keep in his glove compartment? Worth our time?”
Weevil cuffed him casually over the head. “Why don’t you take out a full-page ad and leave it on the steps of the sheriff’s department, dumbass?”
The other boy lurched forward, giving Veronica time to compose herself and pretend the casual reference to Duncan hadn’t surprised her with how deep it still cut. “Come on,” he protested, “what’s he going to do, arrest his own daughter?”
That earned a disgusted eyeroll, but apparently Weevil didn’t think it was worth a debate. He turned to Veronica instead. “Regretting the raincheck, huh? I know the weekend must have been hard for you, but you’re four hours early.”
“About that,” she said, and he raised his eyebrows at her and pretended shock.
“What, you get a better offer?”
“The opposite, actually,” Veronica said, trying to ignore the boys who were half-listening to them. The kid she thought was named Hector was still telling some story that most of them were paying more attention to, thank god for small mercies. “Closed for business until further notice. Check back later.”
Weevil laughed. “Aw, don’t be like that, baby.”
If his friends weren’t around, she’d be tempted to thwack him for not getting the point, but she didn’t think he’d let that slide with people around to see. “I see zero babies around here. In fact, I have hard proof that there aren’t any.” She stared at him intensely, trying to beam the meaning of what she was saying into his head, but he just raised an eyebrow at her.
“And here I thought you were the kind of person who keeps your commitments.”
Veronica smiled at him with aggressive cheer. “I’ll commit to anything that you like as long as it directly involves your Algebra textbook.”
One of other boys, taller and thinner than Weevil with the same haircut, snorted at that and got an elbow in his ribs for his trouble.
”Catch you later, then,” Weevil said, not even flinching as his friend swore at him. “Lunch, right? Autoshop.”
Veronica hesitated. “You want to study in the autoshop classroom?”
He winked at her. “Who said I wanted to study? You want to get textbooks involved, I can get creative.”
Reflexively, she made a grossed-out face at him, her skin prickling in instinctive anticipation at his tone even as her stomach sank. How much more explicit did she have to get? “Do you understand what closed for business means?”
Her terseness just amused him. “Do you understand how negotiations work?”
“This is not a negotiation, it is a public service announcement.”
“Oh, yeah? I don’t think anyone else heard, want me to get their attention?” He braced a hand on the concrete barrier behind him like he was actually going to climb up on it.
“Goodbye,” she said vehemently, as if she could convince either one of them that her choice to speedwalk away wasn’t an out-and-out retreat. Weevil laughed at her as she escaped into the school.
What an asshole. She hadn’t been going to have sex with him anyway, but now she didn’t even want to.
Actually, that was a lie, because she could use a good time right now and knowing that she couldn’t have sex was just making her hyper-aware of what she was missing and irritatingly prone to being turned on because of it, but right this second she wanted to very pointedly not have sex with him more than she wanted to have sex with him. At least being on her period meant she couldn’t give in and succumb to temptation, despite the part of her that was tempted to call his bluff.
Because he had to have gotten the idea, right? At least by the end of the conversation? He might be more blasé about menstruation as a subject than the guys she was used to being around, but that couldn’t mean he actually wanted to do anything – just because not every guy was as immature as Jeremy or Dick didn’t mean they were immune to being freaked out by it once sex was in the mix, or even anything approaching sex. She’d told Duncan once that she wasn’t up for an especially intense make-out session that day because she had cramps, and while he’d been decent about it, it had basically killed the mood stone dead. He’d been sweet, but he hadn’t even wanted to kiss after that.
He’d bought her ice cream, though. It hadn’t entirely assuaged her disappointment, but it had certainly proved he wasn’t going to shrivel up and blow away at the very mention of the subject. Not that it mattered now.
The smart thing to do would just be to not show up. Then she wouldn’t have to find out whether Weevil was bluffing or oblivious, wouldn’t have to fend him off if he turned out not to be bluffing. Showing up in autoshop at lunch was more or less tacit acquiescence to whatever he was up to – which might have been only yanking her chain as a prelude to studying, but she didn’t want to enable that, either. He already got away with too much chain-yanking.
The other danger to showing up was – well, there was one very obvious thing they could do that wouldn’t be affected by what was currently going on. Veronica had spent more than one encounter braced for him to get up off the floor and say, “Okay, your turn,” and while she’d more or less relaxed at this point and decided that he probably just had no reason to advocate for a blowjob when she was entirely willing to have actual sex with him, now that sex was off the table it was impossible to forget that they were on very uneven footing when it came to oral sex.
It wasn’t like she had a good reason for being so apprehensive about it. They were already worlds away from the last time she’d met him in the autoshop classroom, so much so that it was almost strange to remember how much of a point she’d made of having Mace on her, even though it had been a reasonable precaution at the time. If she ended up having to tell him straight-out that it was off the table, the worst he’d probably do was yell at her and storm off. Which was something she had trouble picturing, but guys did; Lilly had told maybe one or two sex-related tantrum stories over the years, but there had been more than that from other girls over the last few years, overheard in the locker room or at a party, quietly absorbed during slumber parties at the Kane house, thrown out laughingly over the histrionics taking place on someone’s TV. A good half of those girls hadn’t expected their boyfriends to blow up at them over a blow-job or an early night.
Veronica didn’t want to be yelled at, but she was almost more afraid that he would make fun of her. Not that he didn’t do that anyway, but it felt different – different even from how it had been at the beginning, when they’d actually been trying to hurt each other at least part of the time. These days it was more about scoring points than drawing blood, but for the subject to be something she was actually, however stupidly, insecure about was less a daunting prospect and more one that actually stung.
The thing about sex was that it didn’t take skill, not on her part. She thought she was pretty decent at it by now, but all that was really required was that she not do something ridiculous and ruin it. A blowjob was different – it felt like there were a lot of ways to screw it up, and nothing at all to distract from it if you did. The last thing she wanted was to retroactively validate those stupid rumours Jeremy had started about her.
And on top of that, she just didn’t want to. It seemed potentially gross in a way sex didn’t, and way too intimidating. What happened if you choked? It wasn’t like the high school gossip mill was an entirely reliable form of sex ed, but it wasn’t hard to understand why most girls talked about it like it was a chore.
Reina Cardenas got up to turn in her practice quiz, and Veronica blinked, redirecting her attention to the paper in front of her. She wasn’t quite halfway finished, and she shook her head before reapplying herself. She didn’t usually expect to finish before Reina, but she should have been a lot closer to done, and she definitely shouldn’t have been behind because she was analyzing sex strategies. There was an easy solution anyway – she would just not go, and then when they picked up again next week she would distract him with her vagina.
Ms. Fediuk spent all of second period going over course review and test strategies with them, which was easy enough to pay attention to, and Mr. Johanson’s Ethan Frome recap was unexpectedly enjoyable, particularly the part where he paused in the middle of a sentence so Ric Fernandez could add a swear word on his behalf (Veronica wasn’t sure whether that surprised her more or less than the fact that Ric didn’t abuse the opportunity by saying motherfucker and instead obliged with a middle-of-the-road douchebag) – but Mrs. Galloway was on her usual excruciating form in fourth period, leaving Veronica nothing to do but repeatedly talk herself into and out of showing up to meet Weevil.
The thing was that she’d gotten a little too used to that suggestive tone being a prelude to a solid fifteen or twenty minutes of heat and a guaranteed orgasm, and as off-putting as the current circumstances were, no one had given that memo to her skin or to the spot in her stomach that was always the first place to start heating up, and every time she thought she’d put the idea to rest, she’d get another little tingle of anticipation or temptation.
It didn’t matter, because nothing was going to happen, but that wasn’t a message that was sticking when sent to her lower brain functions. Honestly, if he managed not to be too annoying, the idea of getting a little hot and heavy over the clothes seemed appealing, but was that even something you could do in a casual arrangement? It seemed a little too boyfriend-y, when you’d already had sex.
And what if he was messing with her on purpose, and he really did want to study? Mostly she was inclined to scoff at the idea, but screwing with her head for fun was hardly out of character, and she did want him to pass Algebra, because as relatively unobjectionable as the tutoring had been so far, she didn’t feel like getting roped into it next semester as well.
She also just… wanted to know. Damn her curiosity. It was hardly worth abandoning Meg to sit by herself, no matter how little Veronica wanted to guiltily watch Gabrielle eating lunch alone at the wobbly table that had used to belong to her and Yolanda.
Although now she thought about it, she hadn’t seen Meg in first period, or in Precalc. At least that provided an easy an easy answer on what to do with her lunch; as soon as Mrs. Galloway wrapped up her lecture, Veronica retrieved her phone from her locker and found a semi-quiet spot near the bathrooms to text her friend.
Are you absent? Or should I meet you?
The response was quick enough that she could guess what it said – Meg was pretty much a rule-follower when it came to leaving her phone in her locker during class.
just the world’s worst cold
I didn’t get kindapped. or married. I promise <3
I think grace brought it home from her art camp this weekend but I really thought I’d be better today. did I miss anything?
Practice test in English lit, Veronica told her. Just test prep in precalc.
:( mrs miller is marking that pretest right?
It wasn’t much of their grade, not compared to the actual exam, but Meg was a good student, so instead of pointing that out, Veronica responded, I bet she’d let you take it tomorrow – it’s not a real test. Try and feel better though!
yeah I will
my dad said this was god punishing us and I thought that was insane but he might be right actually
Veronica had no idea how to reply to that. She texted Meg </3 and guilty hoped there wouldn’t be a response, then retreated back to her locker to at least pick out the most portable items in her lunch. Maybe a single strawberry hard candy wasn’t much of a second course, but as frustrating as verbally going in circles with Weevil had the potential to be, it at least beat sitting alone with her cheese sticks or hiding in the library.
*
The autoshop was mostly empty by the time Veronica got there, so at least she didn’t have to come up with an excuse for her presence, but Weevil was still there, lounging against one of the worktables and talking to Ric Fernandez from her English class. He didn’t appear to have anything with him at all, unless the alternator sitting on the corner of the table was something he was planning on taking to his other classes.
“Hmm,” she observed dubiously. “I do not see an Algebra textbook.”
“Ric, take off,” Weevil said without looking at him, and the other boy huffed with annoyance, turning to go with something that was almost a flounce.
“There wasn’t any point in doing that,” Veronica said. “I’m not going to change my mind.”
“Closed for business, huh?” He moved closer to her, and she rolled her eyes. “I’m not convinced.”
“You got the subtext, right? Because if I have to explain–”
“Yeah,” he said, crowding her slowly up against the nearest table. Veronica strongly considered pushing him away, but her weaker side won out. “And I can count to four, too. I just don’t get the problem.”
“Uh, the problem is I’m on my period.” It still felt weird and awkward to say it out loud to a boy, let alone one she was having sex with. To say it in a conversation about sex, even if it was only oblique, felt like a bridge too far, but being squeamish didn’t fit with who she was trying to be now.
Only, she usually didn’t really have to try anymore, and she hadn’t missed this unsure, out-of-her-depth feeling.
“So?” He slipped his hands around the backs of her thighs and hefted her onto the table, making Veronica squeak and grab for his shoulders. She kicked him in the knee, mostly on purpose.
“You asshole!”
Weevil just smirked at her, bracketing her with his arms.
“Not happening,” Veronica said. She couldn’t really believe that he was serious, but her hyper-awareness of his proximity didn’t make it any easier to think. “You’re just bluffing, anyway. You wouldn’t actually have sex with me right now.”
“At school?” He shrugged. “Nah, too messy. But there’s more than one option here.”
This was closer to what she’d been afraid of, and she couldn’t risk ambiguity just to be diplomatic. If he really was expecting her to give him head, she’d have to refuse in no uncertain terms, and she wasn’t sure she could get out of that conversation with her dignity intact – not in the face of the double-barrels of ‘I don’t feel ready’ and ‘I don’t know what to do’. Not very devil-may-care of her, no matter how hard she spun it as ‘I don’t feel like it’.
There was also the nagging feeling that maybe she kind of owed it to him. She couldn’t quite manage to forget that things were already pretty uneven in that department.
But he would have had to let her off the table for that, and he wasn’t. He was messing with the button on her jeans, pretending to undo it but leaving it just barely half-fastened, and grinning cockily at her. Veronica wasn’t sure if the point was to be an obnoxious tease or just to make sure he didn’t step too far out of bounds, but she was both annoyed and grateful, so it all came out the same.
“I have a tampon in,” she said, staring fixedly at his eyebrows and hoping he’d take it for eye contact. Against her will, she felt herself blushing.
“Not going to be a problem,” he said, flicking the button the rest of the way and moving on to play with her zipper.
“Weevil…”
“Come on, V, you’re telling me you want to wait a whole week?” He pressed forward a little more, so she could feel the heat of his body. The sensations she’d been trying to ignore intensified. “I got you, don’t worry.”
Veronica rolled her eyes. “How generous of you.”
“Yeah, I’m a real philanthropist.” He pulled the zipper halfway down, then went back to flipping it back and forth. Veronica shivered, trying and failing to ignore the rush of arousal caused by his fingers so close to her cunt. She was definitely wet, but under the circumstances, she wasn’t sure if that was encouraging.
She didn’t want to wait a whole week – had been actively disappointed when she realized she’d have to, even though obviously it wasn’t going to keep lining up conveniently with breaks when they didn’t see each other anyway – but she didn’t want him to touch her like that while she was on her period. It was too embarrassing. Besides, what if he was just talking big? If it freaked him out, he’d probably just cut his losses; it would be a lot easier for him to find some other way to get laid than for her.
“I thought you wanted to get a lower score on that test,” he coaxed her, and Veronica groaned. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that it was convenient for him, she was probably never going to hear the end of that.
“That was a one-time thing, and I cannot believe you’re bringing it up now.”
Weevil just raised his eyebrows at her as if to say Well?
She didn’t say yes, for the sake of her pride, and for the sake of looking less fickle if he got her pants down and she immediately panicked, but she didn’t pull his hand away as he slid her zipper the rest of the way down, or protest when he hooked his fingers into the sides of her waistband and dragged her jeans down past her knees.
He pressed closer, pinning her in place, her half-discarded clothing caught between his body and the flat side of the shop table, and started kissing and sucking at the place where her shoulder met her neck. Veronica groaned again, for very different reasons. She didn’t know if she was more turned on than usual or if it was just that she was so hyper-conscious of everything that was happening, but she could feel the pleasure and heat radiating out from his mouth through her entire body. For a second she forgot about his hands, but then his fingers were sliding into her underwear, stretching it away from her body, and Veronica tensed. She was too wet, and she wasn’t sure if all of it was arousal, or –
“Uhhh!”
He touched her clit, and it was like she’d just been dunked right into a hot tub that was somehow full of lightning. Her head fell back and she grasped clumsily at him, not even realizing her eyes were shut until she tried to open them. She hadn’t known she was this turned on, too used to ignoring it at this time of the month, and she hadn’t realized she was this sensitive, that when he smirked against her neck the movement of his lips would nearly make her moan more embarrassing noises into the dry air of the autoshop classroom.
He rubbed slow little circles that had her panting, edging the fingers of his free hand under her shirt with teasing lack of hurriedness. Veronica gasped for breath, her mind ricocheting between the overwhelming sensation between her thighs and his practiced, methodical attack on her shoulder and the heat of his palm against her stomach –
With a distinct effort, she pushed his face away from her neck. “No marks,” she mumbled, losing the last couple consonants in a high whimper.
“What, you afraid people might see?” His breath was hot against the skin he’d left damp, and the way it cooled immediately only to heat again under the next word made her shake. His left hand was still creeping further up under her shirt, even though the other one had stilled, and it was hard to think.
“Yeah, my parents,” she panted.
“Note for the future,” he said against her neck, working his fingers under the tight band of her sports bra. “The sheriff is not sexy.”
“What,” Veronica gasped – she’d known her breasts got more sensitive during her period, but it had never occurred to her that it could be anything other than irritating – “you don’t like handcuffs?”
He leaned back, fingers jostling her clit with the movement and forcing her to bite back a moan. “Seriously. Don’t say that.” The perturbed look on his face made her laugh, but only for a second, because it dissolved into whining little gasps at the way the motion moved her body against his hands, and that made him grin and lean back in to suck his way across her collarbone, actively working her clit again. His other hand slid just a little higher, enough to roll her nipple between his fingers, and for a second she would have sworn that felt just as good.
“Oh, god,” she mumbled helplessly, squirming against him. Her voice was higher than it should have been, and she hadn’t even meant to say anything, but none of that seemed important. Weevil dragged his mouth lower, somehow using his chin to nudge the collar of her shirt out of the way. It was rucked up so much already that now it was more like a sash than a shirt, contorted into an awkward diagonal that might have been uncomfortable if she’d cared about that at all.
She was making ugly little noises, Veronica realized, inelegant uhh, uhh, unh sounds that should have been laughable outside of bad porn, and trying to rub herself against his fingers, but Weevil didn’t seem to care. He made an attempt at peeling back the top of her bra with his teeth, but the elastic was too tight, the fabric stretched too far from the way he was fondling her breast, and he couldn’t get it. He’d barely brushed her skin, but Veronica shivered convulsively. She didn’t want him to bite her, but she suddenly understood why it was a thing people did.
Thwarted, he kissed his way back up to her neck, licking and sucking so lightly that there wasn’t much chance of leaving a bruise. It felt delightful and she hated it.
“Sex version of tickling,” she gasped, pinching his left arm because it was the easiest thing to both see and reach, and he made a weird noise into the skin of her shoulder.
“What the fuck.”
Veronica couldn’t figure out a way to answer, and she knew it was a losing proposition to call him a tease when he was probably about two minutes from getting her off, so she just arched into his hands as thoroughly as she could. Her breast was aching under his touch, her nipple throbbing between his fingers so sharply it was making her dizzy, the other one so desperate from neglect that it sent a completely different ache rippling through her body, and every time she squirmed in frantic anticipation it made the amazingly delightful things he was doing between her legs ratchet up a notch. It would have been too much even without his mouth and his breath alternately hot on her shoulder, which shouldn’t have been so good, she didn’t know how any of it could be this good –
“Oh, god,” she gasped, “oh, god–” Almost, almost, she was so close, if she could just get her hand between them and touch her other breast, if she could, if he would just, just –
Then he pinched gently at her nipple and the circles he was rubbing against her clit went from slow to firm and fast, and the waves of heat coming from everywhere he was touching her collided into one giant breaker that had her falling apart, thrashing against him as she came so hard her ears were actually roaring. He didn’t stop, either, and it just kept going and going for what felt like minutes, until she thought she might pass out – not until she somehow got a hand inside his elbow and pulled weakly. Then he slid his hand carefully out of her underwear and out of the way before he let her flop forward against him.
“Jesus Christ,” she told his shoulder. “What the fuck, you sadist.”
He snorted in surprise, almost laughing. “If you think that’s sadism, never go to a kink club.”
“Ew.” She made a face into the strap of his shirt. “I don’t want to know.”
“My cousin–” Weevil started.
“I said I don’t want to know!” She shoved away from him, feeling wobbly. “Especially if your cousin is involved.”
“I gotta wash my hands,” he said, smirking at her, and she realized with a resigned sinking feeling that he had definitively won the argument and was probably never going to stop rubbing it in.
Veronica stayed on the table while he cleaned up; she was almost entirely sure she could get down without having her legs folding up on her, but the small chance she was wrong and the thought of how insufferable he’d be about it had her hedging her bets. She fixed her shirt instead, unable to keep from caressing the breast he’d neglected, which was still aching, through her bra. She couldn’t stop herself from moaning at the unholy combination of relief and stimulation, but she managed to keep it quiet enough that Weevil couldn’t hear her over the water. It was way too soon to go again, even if it felt like it might actually work for once – and besides, he hadn’t come yet, so it felt like that would be selfish on top of losing her whatever shrinking ground she still had.
“Come over here,” she said instead, watching him dry his hands on some vaguely greying shop towel.
“My cousin Marlena’s a bartender at this club,” he said, sauntering back. “For the record.”
“Still don’t want to hear it,” Veronica said, examining him for signs of disgust or annoyance. Had he told her to meet him in the auto shop because it had a sink? It wasn’t nearly as secure as the abandoned art classroom, especially at lunch. “We should have locked the door,” she said, thinking out loud.
“Wouldn’t have mattered,” he said, pulling her to the edge of the table, close enough to feel that he was definitely not disgusted. “Basically every guy in shop has the keys.”
“What?” She whacked him in the shoulder with the back of her hand. “So you pick the one classroom in the building that students want to go to outside of class? You didn’t even warn me!”
“No one came in, did they? It’s fine.” He shrugged, shutting his eyes momentarily as the movement rubbed their bodies together just slightly. “Half the autoshop class is my guys anyway; they won’t bother us.”
“Must be nice to be king of the PCH,” she grumbled, undoing his belt. “Whole classrooms at your beck and call.”
“Hey, it’s better than the bathroom,” he pointed out. “And there’s a sink.”
“You’re very smart,” Veronica said sarcastically. “Shut up.”
Weevil laughed. “Don’t be bitter, baby. Are you going to tell me that wasn’t worth it?”
“Is ‘shut up’ too hard for you to understand, or…?”
But he didn’t take the bait, opening his jeans and backing up just enough that she had room to get him out of his underwear. “Ah. Yeah.”
“Yes, it’s too hard for you to understand?” she asked, pretending that it didn’t affect her to be touching him like this. She’d had his dick in her hand before, but it had always been a prelude to the main event, and he’d had a condom on. It made her giddy, feeling his skin under her fingers, strangely soft in a way that made her still-half-interested cunt twitch.
“Do you ever stop talking?” he asked with affected weariness, swallowing a groan as she wrapped her hand more efficiently around him, and braced an arm on the table next to her.
“No,” Veronica said, tightening her fingers slowly so that she wouldn’t go too far. When he groaned and leaned his forehead against her shoulder she decided her grip was firm enough, and started moving her hand up and down his length instead, fascinated by the way the skin slid over it. It didn’t feel like anything else she could think of.
He was already more than hard, no further encouragement needed, and that was both hotter than it should be and gratifying in a completely different way: no matter how much he bitched about her and regardless of whether she always knew what she was doing, he wanted her enough to risk getting her actual period on his fingers – wanted her so much that that wasn’t even a turn-off.
Weevil shifted to put his weight on both arms, leaning into her. It was almost the same position they’d been in a few minutes ago, but it felt completely different, except that his breath against her half-bare shoulder still made her shiver. Then he lifted his head, just enough to look her in the face, and grinned, because he was a smug bastard. They were close enough to kiss, but they didn’t.
She moved a little faster, and felt heat bloom inside her when his eyes fell shut. She already knew she liked it when she could tell she was turning him on, but it wasn’t just that; so close together, without him looking at her anymore, it was suddenly easy to pinpoint that his desire itself was appealing. This close, she could see his eyes moving under their lids, his long, fine eyelashes flickering against his skin, could see and feel his breath speed up and come harder the more she touched him. He was objectively attractive, if you liked that sort of thing, though Veronica had never thought she liked that sort of thing. Even when he’d started blowing her mind on a regular basis, she’d somehow assumed it was despite the fact that she wasn’t attracted to him, or maybe by now just that she was attracted to him despite the tattoos and the shaved head and the macho swagger, but in this moment it was blindingly clear that there was no despite. She wished he’d taken off his shirt so she could watch the muscles move under his skin, and she wanted to lean forward and lick the spikes of the cross on his shoulder while she jerked him off, and she didn’t know what to do about it. Actually doing any of it felt like losing somehow, like giving up control.
The skin on her breasts and the inside of her thighs tingled at the way he groaned when she stroked him with more vigour. She’d had him inside of her, and knowing that made her ache, which truly sucked, because that wasn’t happening again until at least Thursday and right now that felt honestly catastrophic. Her internal walls clenched in protest, but there was nothing of substance for them to hold on to.
“Hang on,” he muttered, and Veronica’s rhythm stuttered for a moment, because he wasn’t seriously going to try for a blow job now, was he? She tried to keep going, but he caught her wrist and said, “Hang on,” again, more clearly.
“What?”
“Just…” He fumbled for his pocket, which was halfway down his leg, and came back up with a condom.
“What do you think you need that for?” she asked him quellingly.
Weevil huffed something in the general vicinity of a laugh. “Just playing it safe.” When she frowned, he elaborated, “Better than making a mess. Don’t want to be late for class, right?”
There was truly never a situation in which he wouldn’t make a joke at her expense. “Watch it. Is this really a time you want to piss me off?”
“You need to learn when to quit,” he said, ripping the package open.
“Oh, well, in that case…” She made as if to slip off the table and he blocked her with his body. He didn’t usually give her such blatant openings, and Veronica wondered with a thrill if maybe his brain was at least a little bit as melted as hers had been earlier.
“You are not going anywhere,” he said firmly, and it occurred to her that if she’d heard that a month or two ago it would have scared her. Any time before that, it would have made her knee him in the balls and scramble for the door. But now she only snickered.
“Someone told me to learn to quit,” she told him, as seriously as she could manage.
She could see him struggling to find something clever to respond with as he slid the condom on, just as easily as she could see that he had trouble keeping his hands from lingering when he did so. It was more exciting than it should have been, and when he quite transparently just gave up on the enterprise entirely, it made her swallow hard.
“Learn it tomorrow,” he said, half-growling, and pulled her back into the center of the table’s edge. Veronica wrapped a hand around him again, resting the other one on her thigh. It was a little disappointing not to be able to feel him the same way, but he was still hot and heavy in her hand, and once she got going, his hips moved in sporadic, involuntary jerks that made her mouth go dry. She rubbed her other hand hard against her leg, not quite willing to touch herself even though she really, really wanted to. She couldn’t, not with him right there, and anyway she never did that when she was on her period.
Did it turn him on this much, getting her off? He always seemed to have the wherewithal to make fun of her and keep up the smart comments, like he was doing it mostly to prove a point or something, but he’d still inevitably be more than ready to go once she came. He definitely talked a good enough game about it whenever she was close that it felt safe to say he was invested.
None of that was anything she could say to him, though, and she wouldn’t know where to begin coming up with her own version. It wasn’t even real dirty talk, but it was so far outside of Veronica’s wheelhouse that she cringed internally at the idea of trying.
Unless… maybe it was the kind of thing she could say to him, if she handled it right; she never turned down the chance to fuck with him a little. Weevil had braced his hands on either side of her again, head low as he panted against her shoulder. She leaned a fraction closer to him and lowered her voice – not enough to be an actual parody of his, just into the deepest register she could still sound natural in – and said, “Come on, baby, just like that, yeah. Come for me, you can do it.”
His cheek actually brushed against hers as his head jerked up in surprise – and then he leaned forward and bit her shoulder!
She yelped, even though it didn’t really hurt, and instinctively tightened her grip. Weevil grunted heavily into the flesh of her shoulder, his teeth releasing, and Veronica jerked her hand away, mortified apologies fighting each other for the chance to spill from her mouth. He caught her wrist before she could squirm away, pulling it back down, but she couldn’t look at him until he put his fingers over hers and wrapped them back around his erection, almost as tightly as they had been a second before. Even then she avoided his eyes, still embarrassed even if she hadn’t hurt him, but he just dragged their hands up and down the length of his dick, once and then again, until the heady rush of touching him that way, of touching him together, overwhelmed her humiliation.
It was like he could tell, because that was when he sped up, and Veronica groaned, and then flushed, because neither of them was even touching her, except for his fingers on hers.
For once he didn’t make a smart remark, but something about the catch in his breathing sounded pleased, and she decided not to read into it, to just keep going and not fight it. She could come, she thought, half convinced, half desperate. They probably wouldn’t have time, but if there had been, it wouldn’t even take that much. Veronica ground the heel of her free hand into her thigh, wishing she was brave enough to do the same thing between her legs instead.
He was pressing down just a little more on her fingers at the end of every downstroke, she realized – release a little at the top, then tighter again close to the tip. Something about that made her head spin.
“Is this – is this what you – ?” she asked, without any idea what she was saying.
“’S how I like it,” he rasped, his breath hot against the shell of her ear, and she shuddered almost violently.
“Uh-huh,” she murmured meaninglessly. God – did he do this a lot? She couldn’t help picturing it, in more detail than she ever had before, and her stomach lurched with an almost violent arousal at the idea. Maybe in the shower, which seemed to be where guys usually picked. Maybe lying on his bed? His fingers looked so good touching himself like that, felt so good on top of hers. Did he ever think about her while he touched himself? Veronica wanted to ask, because she was already dizzy just from the possibility of a yes and if he actually said so out loud it would probably turn her on so much that she’d never feel normal again, but the humiliating possibility of no kept her from saying anything.
His breathing got rougher and more ragged, and she shivered as heat washed over her. She could feel it radiating off of him, his legs warm where they brushed hers, his breath against her cheek, his fingers hot over hers and his dick hot under them, his arms pressing against her sides, her skin prickling with it. She could smell him over the stale engine oil smell of the room, sweat and vestiges of slightly questionable cologne, every sensation intense and all of them together so overwhelming it made her head spin – she could hear her own breath in the gaps of his, hear it hitch. Feel the calluses on some of his fingertips. Taste the remainder of that candy, still sweet. Her mouth was dry with want, and there was the cool-hot flow of his breath against her skin, the ache between her legs tightening in and in towards her clit, the familiar latex of the condom under her fingers.
“Fuck,” he groaned against her cheek, voice so tense he could barely get the word out, and his hand loosened on hers as he jerked in her grip. She’d never felt him come so intimately before, and Veronica gasped a little, mouth open in a desperate bid to get more oxygen, her cheeks so hot they felt almost sunburnt, like her skin was venting desire instead of excess UV.
Weevil groaned again, just noise, and slumped against her, his forehead pressing into her shoulder as he caught most of his weight on his hands. A small part of her was grateful he hadn’t let it fall on her, but mostly she was too consumed for rational thought. She licked her lips and tried to swallow, tightening her muscles to resist the shiver working its way up her spine.
“Fuck,” he repeated after a moment, mumbling into her shoulder. Veronica concurred. They’d done a lot of stuff that felt amazing, but it had never gotten her out of her head like this. Or into her head? She wasn’t sure. The whole back-and-forth of the constant contest between them was fun, but if this was what teamwork felt like, maybe she was going to have to start being nicer to him. Or maybe it was just the unexpected relief when she hadn’t been expecting any, the way that he’d dragged her into letting him do something she would have been fastidiously repulsed by until recently.
She was going to have to cool down somehow before class. God. This was why she never tried to get off twice in a row – even if she’d thought for a minute it might have actually worked this time. Maybe if she’d had the guts to really go for it, but some things were just a bridge too far. All the period stuff aside, touching herself in front of Weevil would have been way too exposing, the idea alone making her feel hot and squirmy, embarrassed and turned on and uncomfortable all at once.
“Okay,” she told him, trying not to sound like she was still catching her breath, even though right now it felt like she wouldn’t have it all the way back for a day or two. “Get off.” She shoved at his shoulder and he made an irritable grumbling noise, but after a reluctant second or two he pushed himself more upright, the sudden space between their bodies inviting a rush of cooler air that made her shiver.
“If that’s closed for business I gotta come back when you’re open,” he commented, and Veronica rolled her eyes and pushed him farther away from her with her foot, feeling unexpectedly grateful to him for grounding them back in something familiar.
“You couldn’t get in when I’m open,” she told him. “Very exclusive clientele. Do up your pants.”
“Not very slutty of you,” he commented, disposing of the condom while Veronica tried to wriggle down from the table and simultaneously correct her own jean situation without also falling flat on her face. This was why she usually wore skirts. “Besides, I thought I was the hooker in this relationship.”
“I might be induced to pay you to stop talking, does that count?”
“Is it going to take you two weeks again?” he asked, grinning, and she made a face at him.
“Like you could keep your mouth shut for two weeks.”
He just laughed and stretched. “Baby, you’d be sad if I kept my mouth shut for two weeks.” The ostentatious wink that accompanied the statement left no room to interpret it wholesomely, no matter how stubbornly you tried to miss the point. Veronica felt herself colouring slightly.
“Don’t call me that,” she said, ignoring both his innuendo and her own reaction as best she could, and wondering if it was worth it to try and sneak a shower in the locker rooms before fifth period or if she should just wash her hands at the autoshop sink and splash some cold water on her face. The obvious downside was that in the latter case Weevil would see – but on the other hand, she had spare clothes at school but not a towel. “And I’m not doing this again – check back on Thursday.”
“Whatever you say,” he told her, lips twitching infuriatingly. “But I’ve got a test on Thursday, so…”
“See if I ever help you with anything again,” Veronica muttered, trying not to envision just how thoroughly she’d been helping him five minutes ago. “Fine. Library, Wednesday at lunch. Bring your textbook and keep it in your pants.”
“You want me to keep my textbook–”
There were other places she could wash her hands. Veronica sneered at him and ducked out the door before he could finish mocking her grammar.
*
Veronica’s body was still warm and her skin tingling when she got to fifth period, her mind pleasantly fuzzy even after bullying herself into a marginally sharper state and dragging the desks into position for the Death Match study session. She would be off her game for it, probably, but she decided not to care. She was good at this kind of studying, she knew the material, and she had plenty of teammates who hadn’t temporarily lost their reflexes to make up for any potential slowness to the buzzer. The Children of the Industrial Revolution had this win locked down, and between how much she always enjoyed the game and the intensity she was still coming down from, she was pretty sure there was no ruining her day at this point. It was a turn-around she wasn’t planning on looking in the mouth.
That feeling lasted until about fifteen minutes later, when Carrie Bishop killed every remaining trace of her buzz by announcing to the entire class that she was sleeping with Mr. Rooks, and capped off her earth-shattering speech about not being pregnant by throwing the keys to his house at him.
Veronica didn’t want to believe it, but she couldn’t help but notice that he caught them.
Not that it meant anything. Hadn’t she just finished freaking out about something that was a false alarm? Carrie was a notorious gossip, and it wasn’t like she’d never passed bad information before, or targeted someone for malicious reasons – Veronica could attest to that personally.
But it seemed like a stretch to say that Carrie would be willing to put herself so squarely in the firing line. Mr. Rooks was a popular teacher, and you could be branded a skank for a lot less, which Carrie had to know when half the time she was the one doing the branding.
She was hovering, Veronica realized – still in the classroom despite the early dismissal, but not quite willing to approach the teacher. She felt guilty about it. No way, right? Not Mr. Rooks.
But if Yolanda could carry on a clandestine romance under everyone’s nose, why not Carrie?
After another moment, she pulled herself away, compromising with a brief, regretful smile in the teacher’s direction. She nearly knocked into one of the kids on her team on the way out, jumping back with an apology before she recognized him.
“Sorry,” he echoed her, glancing back into the classroom. It was the boy from the Sac-n-Pac, the one who’d been nice to her in the aftermath of Jeremy and Lilly. Veronica couldn’t remember his name, just that he’d sold her a lanyard to get her hair out of her face and nailed the slave labour question right before Carrie’s choreographed production.
“You don’t really think it’s true?” she asked him, and he shrugged.
“I mean… maybe? Why drop a bomb like that if it’s not true?”
“Why drop a bomb like that if it is true?” Veronica countered. “It’s not going to make things any easier for her just because she’s not – hypothetically – lying. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this high school is slightly hellacious.”
“I actually did,” he said, faintly ironic, and she remembered, somewhat guiltily, that he’d been the one who got taped to the flagpole in September. “None of the teachers at my old school were hooking up with the students, but there was a lot of stuff that didn’t happen there.”
“Like total basket cases asking you for hair ties?” she asked him, and he blinked, as if just remembering.
“Yeah, hey. You seem better.”
“I got massive, disproportionate revenge,” she told him cheerfully, mostly thinking of Jeremy and his dad’s sports memorabilia. Even now it was hard to think of anything she’d done about Lilly as being disproportionate.
“Cool?”
Veronica laughed, slightly cheered by the fact that he hadn’t hissed slut! at her and run away. “Oh, I’m very cool. See you tomorrow, I guess. If we still have history class.” It was hard not to wince as she said it, but – if Carrie was telling the truth, what had happened was illegal. She was junior like Veronica; it was almost impossible that she was eighteen already, let alone whenever… whatever had happened had first started.
And if she wasn’t telling the truth – well, why would Mr. Rooks want to stay somewhere where he got accused of stuff like this?
Veronica’s stomach sank just that little bit more. She liked some of her other teachers okay – Mrs. Canning, Ms. Fediuk, Miss Araujo from last year, Mr. Carey who she at least had next semester – but Mr. Rooks was the only one whose class she looked forward to on a regular basis. One of the only ‘fun’ teachers who it was also easy to respect. If she respected him, shouldn’t she be sure he’d never do something like this? Especially when all she had against him was the word of someone like Carrie Bishop?
But Carrie wasn’t the only student who’d orchestrated a dramatic public confrontation this year and deliberately trashed her own reputation in the process. Veronica had done the exact same thing only a few months ago, and while she hardly thought she was on the same level as Carrie, she knew what the other girl was letting herself in for, and Carrie must have too. Would she really have risked putting herself through that for anything less serious than the actual thing she was accusing him of?
It wasn’t like Veronica could do anything about it one way or the other, and heaven knew that she wasn’t exactly eager to get her dad involved after what had happened with Yolanda – not that she’d need to; there was no way Carrie’s parents were as negligent as the Hamiltons, but the idea of talking it over with him the way she might have normally felt dangerously close to the line, given… everything.
But what if Mr. Rooks was innocent and she was judging him for something he didn’t do? Of all the teachers in the school, he probably deserved it the least.
She was going to be late for Biology, Veronica realized, early dismissal from History notwithstanding. It had only been a few minutes anyway – she could hardly blame Mr. Rooks for not wanting to spend any more time futilely trying to keep the class in order. She aborted the trip to her locker and just headed straight for class, gambling on not needing her textbook for whatever they were reviewing today.
And she’d thought it was going to be hard to focus on school before fifth period.
*
“Hi, honey. How was school?”
Veronica slid into the nearest seat at the prep table, dropping her bag on the floor next to her like she was a Rockwell painting of school days. “Do you want the nice answer or the real answer?”
Her mom turned to look at her without closing the fridge, a plastic container of yogurt still in her hand. “Is the nice answer true?”
Veronica shrugged. “Meg was sick, but class was mostly review for finals. Jeremy got yelled at in Biology. Lunch was good. Pretty average.”
Lianne put her free hand on her hip, the half-put-away groceries abandoned for the moment. “And why don’t you want to tell me the rest of it? It’s not about Lilly again, is it?”
Tracing a pattern of circles on the tabletop so she wouldn’t have to afford the conversation the seriousness of eye contact, Veronica shrugged. “A girl I hate accused my favourite teacher of sleeping with her.”
The yogurt went down on the counter; the fridge door closed. “Oh, honey–”
“I just can’t believe he’d do something like that,” Veronica burst out, the guilt and the anger rising to the top now that she’d said something out loud. At home, away from all the layers of high school nonsense, it all seemed much more black and white. “Carrie tells lies all the time, anyway – she said all kinds of stuff about me after –”
She bit back the rest of the sentence, but it wasn’t enough to spare her a sympathetic look, so she rephrased grimly. “She said all kinds of stuff about me and Duncan – she basically just repeats whatever’s catty or exciting. Or makes it up. There’s no way I’d believe her over Mr. Rooks.”
“Did he say it wasn’t true?” her mom asked carefully. Her tone got Veronica’s attention – it had been a long time since Lianne had talked around her like that, managing the conversation, trying to steer it around certain subjects or land a particularly delicate point. So often now it was the other way around, and the feeling of being patronized rankled even as Veronica couldn’t help feeling like she’d missed it being that way.
“I didn’t go up and talk to him after,” she said, throwing a little teenage attitude into her tone for good measure. “But he told Carrie he didn’t know what she was talking about. Not that anyone heard – they were too busy being scandalized.”
“It’s a pretty upsetting thing.” Her mom leaned on the edge of the table, eyeing her seriously. “I had a friend that happened to in high school, did you know?”
Veronica’s eyes jerked up. “No.” She was too astonished to put any emphasis in her reply. “Why didn’t I know that?”
Lianne shrugged. “It was her business. But it was awful. People said a lot of horrible things about her. Even people I thought wouldn’t.”
“Okay, but Carrie is the kind of person who does that to other people.” Like Mr. Rooks, right now, Veronica thought, but she knew saying it would just make her look stubborn and unreasonable.
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t take advantage of her.” Veronica opened her mouth to argue, but her mom raised a hand. “I don’t know – what happened here, exactly. I’m just saying… it’s a lot more common for girls to try to keep this kind of thing quiet even when it does happen, than to say it happened when it didn’t.”
“Carrie wasn’t trying to keep it quiet,” Veronica argued, even though her stomach was sinking. Hadn’t she thought some of this herself. “She threw ‘his’ keys at him in the middle of class and told him she wasn’t pregnant.” She made air quotes around the possessive pronoun even though… he had caught them. Hadn’t let them fall on the floor, hadn’t set them carefully on his desk to be examined by school authorities. She was fairly sure he’d put them in his pocket once no one was paying attention.
“Well, my friend did get pregnant,” Lianne said quietly. “And the teacher just… ignored her, like it never happened. There were no consequences for him.” Her mouth tightened. “Not ever.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone, then?” Veronica demanded.
“Because she begged me not to,” her mom told her gently. “She was scared. She wanted to protect him. And the one time I did try to tell someone, they just spread gossip about her and it made everything worse.”
“Okay, but I bet your friend wasn’t in the habit of making up stories about people, and Carrie is.”
Lianne took her time with that one, chewing it over until Veronica had to work at it not to fidget. “Okay. Maybe. I don’t know her. But maybe that’s why he picked her, honey. That’s what men like that do – they find a girl who no one will believe, maybe because people don’t like her, or maybe because she’s vulnerable and won’t tell, or maybe because she’s…” she hesitated over the next word, finally selecting, “disadvantaged.”
“I just don’t want to believe he’d do something like that,” Veronica said, her voice smaller than she’d meant it to be.
There was a careful pause. “Do you have any classes with this teacher next semester?” her mom asked finally.
Veronica tried not to bristle. “No. Only History. And I don’t think he’d take advantage of me, but if he tried I wouldn’t let him, Mom! I’m not one of those girls who thinks something like that’s okay – seriously?”
“I’m glad you’re not, but I don’t want you sitting in class for another six months with a man like that. And your dad wouldn’t either.”
“What happened to innocent until proven guilty?” She put a little extra bitterness into the words to cover up how plaintive they felt leaving her mouth.
“Veronica, that’s for the courts, not for protecting your children.”
“Well, I hate that. I hate all of this. And even if it is true, I still think Carrie’s terrible, but if it’s not, she’s going to get the best teacher in school fired.”
“You don’t have to like her, sweetie. But that doesn’t mean she’s lying.” Lianne paused. “And you know what, if she is, I bet it won’t be hard for them to find out. The kind of people who tell lies like that – they’re not well, you know? Something’s going on with her either way, probably. So it should be easy to figure out.”
Veronica didn’t know if she believed that. She wasn’t even positive whether her mom believed it, or if it was just an attempt to placate her. “Well, if he is innocent, I’m going to hate myself for believing it, even for a minute.”
Her mom put a hand on her shoulder, and she fought not to shake it off. “There’s nothing wrong with being careful, honey.”
“The groceries are getting warm,” Veronica pointed out. The dodge was transparent enough that it earned her an extremely parental look, but when she kept her face blank, her mom sighed and opened the fridge again.
“Don’t tell Dad?” Veronica added as off-handedly as she could manage. “It’s not like anyone called the police, so –”
Lianne turned sharply, visibly offended. “Veronica! I am not going to keep things from your father, and certainly not something like this!”
“I’ve dragged him into enough drama already,” Veronica protested, which was a decent chunk of her motivation. She fessed up to the rest of it while she was at it. “And I don’t want another lecture. I’ll be careful around Mr. Rooks, okay?”
Her mom considered for a long moment before she set the yogurt down – inside the fridge, this time – and came over to hug her around the shoulders. “Veronica, you did the right thing with all that… insanity about your friend. I happen to know for a fact that your dad is proud of you.” She squeezed a little. “And I know you’ll be careful. You’re too smart to fall for something like that.”
Veronica relaxed into the hug, just for a moment, and her mom caught her off-guard with a stern look.
“But there is no chance on earth that I am not telling your dad about this.”
Notes:
Content warnings: Two main ones: period sex (no penetration) and pressure to engage in sex acts.
In the latter case, I've done my best to show that Veronica's reservations in this chapter are more culturally inculcated than about her not wanting to have sex, and that whatever Weevil says he's still waiting for at least a nonverbal go-ahead before he really does anything - essentially they're teenagers who are prioritizing banter and emotional armour over good consent practices, which is not something I recommend! They know each other well enough at this point that they can get away with reading certain things between the lines, and no one is actually unwilling, but the encounter still essentially opens with dialogue to the effect of her saying, "This isn't happening," and him going, "Yeah, but I know you want it."
There's also a brief moment where he tells her to stop and she doesn't - he wants her to stop for logistics-based reasons and isn't upset, but again, not great practice.
Chapter 26: Hurt You Back
Notes:
This one is a couple days late because I had to add some things and push some already-written stuff back, so sorry about that! (On that note, more Weevil in the next chapter, I promise. Listen, he's studying.) No warnings outside of canon-related topics.
Chapter Text
If you hurt me, I wouldn't cry. I would hurt you back.
Holly Black
School was buzzing the next day even more than it had after the revelation, and Meg caught Veronica outside first period with a few minutes to spare.
“You have Mr. Rooks’s fifth period History class, right?”
“You sound awful,” Veronica told her, legitimately distracted. Meg winced, rubbing a hand over her red eyes and pressing the heel of her palm into the bridge of her nose.
“I know. I didn’t want to miss anything else. In class, I mean – although Lizzie’s getting sick now too and she keeps arguing with our parents, so it’s not like I’m going to get any rest at home anyway.”
“Your life sounds exhausting,” Veronica said, putting a little lightness into her voice even though it wasn’t really a joke.
Meg made a congested noise that was probably supposed to be a polite laugh. “Honestly, you’re not wrong. The only person who’s not driving me at least a little nuts is Grace. But can we talk about what happened yesterday? Because I heard Carrie told everyone in your class she was pregnant with Mr. Rooks’s baby, but –”
Veronica was caught somewhere between wincing and laughing; she wasn’t sure what her face was doing. “Actually, she told everyone in class that she wasn’t pregnant with his baby.” Reluctantly amused in the face of her friend’s confused expression, she elaborated, “And that he could keep his abortion money. And the keys to his house. Although she could really have been throwing the keys to anything at him, honestly.”
“That’s so crazy,” Meg said, stepping closer to Veronica to let someone past. “I mean, if Carrie was saying it about anyone else, I’d say it was just gossip, but she wouldn’t make something like this up, right? It’s not like she could have misunderstood, if it happened to her.”
“She could still be blowing it out of proportion,” Veronica said, but she winced as she said it. The specific details that Carrie had mentioned didn’t leave a lot of room for nuance – either she was lying outright or Mr. Rooks was guilty. “I don’t know. I want to think she’s lying, but why?”
“There’s no way she thought it would make her seem cooler or anything. I mean, maybe if she told people she was having an affair with him? He’s young and not bad-looking for a teacher, and everyone likes him. But trying to take him down… it seems like they’re mad.”
“I’m mad,” Veronica said. “Carrie told everyone I’m a gold-digger last year. And lately, also that I’m a slut, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she helped Jeremy’s stupid blowjob thing get as much mileage as it did. And I like Mr. Rooks. But…”
“What if it’s true?” Meg finished. “Yeah. I’m supposed to have him next semester, and I don’t know what to think. It’s not like stuff like that doesn’t happen, you know?”
Veronica opened her mouth to mentioned what her mom had told her, then reconsidered. They were going to be late for class. “I guess we’ll see. I just hate not knowing what to think.”
“The school will investigate,” Meg said, lowering her voice as they took a couple desks at the back. “They have to, right? And then we’ll find out whether it really happened.”
Veronica wasn’t sure about that – Carrie’s parents had a lot of money, and Mr. Rooks was just a teacher. It wouldn’t shock her if he got thrown under the bus just to make things less awkward for Principal Moorehead. But maybe that was her being cynical – teachers had unions, right? She remembered asking her parents in eighth grade why the school didn’t just fire Ms. Ripley when all she did half the time was put on Garfield cartoons in Spanish for them to watch and getting a thorough explanation about unions and tenure when all she’d wanted was to complain, but the details were pretty hazy by now.
It was so unfair that she couldn’t even get a week of breathing room between Yolanda and this – couldn’t Carrie have waited until after finals? She was practically done with Mr. Rooks’s class anyway, so wouldn’t it have made more sense to keep her head down, maybe even blackmail him for a good grade or test answers or something, if her story really was true? It couldn’t have been clearer that her only goal was to ruin his life.
It all seemed suspect, but if he really had thrown some money in Carrie’s direction and told her to ‘take care of it’ when she thought she was pregnant… it was hard not to see why she would want to ruin his life, if it were true. It was a big if, but Veronica couldn’t forget that she’d set out to ruin someone’s life for less, that she’d thought Lilly was pretty fantastic too, until she’d been handed irrevocable evidence otherwise.
There had been red flags with Lilly, though, in retrospect, a hundred things that were equal parts vexatious and endearing in the moment, but which had taken on a new light after Jeremy. There were none with Mr. Rooks, not that Veronica could think of.
Mrs. Murphy saved her from going in endless circles about it by handing back their practice tests. Veronica covered hers with a hand, symbolically. “Mrs. Murphy, Meg was sick yesterday.”
“Yes, I know,” the teacher said. She eyed Meg like she thought the girl should maybe have stayed home today too, but all she said was, “You do good work, so I’m all right with simply removing this assignment from your grade. Just piggyback off Veronica for the review – it’s more important to get the takeaway from going over it as a class than to make up the test.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Murphy,” Meg said, the gratitude in her tone clear even through her congestion. “Don’t worry, Veronica, I won’t breathe on you.”
“I have an iron immune system,” Veronica told her, affecting exaggerated nonchalance. “I’m not worried.”
The faint smile Meg gave her in response just looked sad juxtaposed with the other girl’s red nose and air of exhaustion, but Veronica declined to comment on that.
*
First period honestly wouldn’t have been too bad if it wasn’t for everything going on, so of course they left the classroom and nearly ran straight into Gabrielle.
“Sorry,” Veronica said reflexively, then winced internally, wishing she’d said oops or whoa or anything that didn’t feel like it had extra meaning. But Gabrielle echoed her, and they both moved to the same side to get out of the way, which put things on a semi-cordial footing even if it was horrendously awkward.
“Hey,” the other girl said finally, her gaze darting around like she found the possibility of looking at Veronica unpleasant.
“Hey,” Veronica echoed, forcing a too-cheerful smile. There wasn’t really anywhere she could go from there, besides repeating an apology she’d already given, or opting for a more comprehensive one that she didn’t really mean. Maybe Meg would save them.
Although Meg’s opening gambit wasn’t exactly in the words Veronica would have hoped she’d choose. “Does it really have to be like this? We can still sit together, can’t we?”
Veronica winced, and Gabrielle’s mouth tightened. “I warned you because I didn’t want to screw up your life,” Veronica added, figuring she might as well throw it out there before things deteriorated. What did she have to lose? “It’s not like I was trying to mess things up for you.”
“It might not be the same as being stabbed in the back, but that doesn’t mean we’re cool.” Gabrielle hesitated for a moment. “Look, I get it. Yolanda told me what Bryce did. It’s not your fault it was all for nothing, but it still was, and Jamie won’t even talk to me anymore.” She crossed her arms over her chest, looking miserable. “I can live with being grounded, but…”
Veronica thought about all the things her mom had said the night before, and about what Gabrielle’s boyfriend was probably afraid of – righteously angry parents at best, statutory rape charges at worst – but she didn’t say anything. She’d never met Jamie, and it wasn’t like he was a teacher, after all.
“I get it,” she said. Gabrielle gave Meg a faint, regretful smile and disappeared down the hall.
“She’d probably still hang out with you,” Veronica told Meg, fighting the urge to toss off a witty quip instead.
Meg shrugged. “I’ve known you longer. And I’m on your side, anyway – that guy was bad news, or he wouldn’t have dropped her like that when her parents found out, but even if he wasn’t, Yolanda was more important.”
“Too bad she wasn’t really kidnapped,” Veronica said, which earned her an eyeroll. “So much for building up some kind of girl posse, I guess.”
“I don’t mind it being just the two of us,” her friend said loyally. “And Jasmine, I guess?”
“Yeah, Gabrielle wasn’t a very good slut anyway.”
“Veronica.” But Meg was laughing. “Well, neither was Yolanda; she ran away to get married.”
“Fair point,” Veronica said. “Very fair point. Slut card revoked.” She paused. “Do you think Lizzie would want the slot?”
“No,” Meg said instantly. “And don’t ask her. She’ll just get mad at you.”
That seemed a little rich, considering the front Lizzie generally presented to the world, but then again, she also spent most of her time projecting a fair bit of prickliness. Veronica wasn’t sure how that meshed with promiscuity – although she supposed she had solid evidence that being tetchy with guys didn’t necessarily put them off.
“Mm,” she said. “Well, I’ll think about it.” She steered them down the hall toward Precalc.
“Aren’t you kind of missing the obvious choice?” Meg asked, sniffing to try and clear her voice. “If you’re really going to turn this into some kind of slut club, I mean?”
“I am not inviting Weevil to sit with us. He’s insufferable.” More pertinently, he would use any capitulation on her part to be even more insufferable, and she’d done enough capitulating yesterday.
That was a distracting enough thought that she almost missed Meg’s dubious headshake. “No, Veronica, Carrie.”
Veronica stopped walking. “What? No way. There is no one in school I want to eat lunch with less than Carrie Bishop.” As soon as she said it, it felt over-dramatic; there was always Lilly, and the choice between Carrie and Madison Sinclair was a tough one. “Well, top three, anyway.”
Meg shrugged. “I’m just saying – everyone in school is calling her a slut, or worse.”
“It’s the slut table, not the sociopath table,” Veronica said, trying not to show how uncomfortable she suddenly felt at having that pointed out.
“That’s kind of harsh. Carrie’s not my favourite person either, honestly – I don’t even really know her that well. And we don’t have to eat lunch with her. I was just saying. But I mean… if we did, maybe she’d say something, I don’t know, relevant?”
“Remember what happened when I got all Nancy Drew about Yolanda?” Veronica pointed out. “Because the end result was what just happened, and in the interim, I made myself look like an idiot, nearly got her brother arrested, and just about gave my dad hypertension from calling in the actual FBI unnecessarily.”
“Her brother kind of deserved to be arrested,” Meg said. “But okay, you’ve got a point. What if they do prove she’s telling the truth, though? Carrie, I mean.”
“I tell you what,” Veronica said, gambling that she’d never have to follow through. “If Carrie asks to sit with us, I will give her slut qualifications the same serious thought I gave Weevil’s and Jasmine’s. But I am not inviting her.”
“That’s fair.” Meg winced as they approached the door to Ms. Fediuk’s classroom. “The test is tomorrow, right?”
“You’re safe,” Veronica confirmed. “It’s Thursday.”
“Thank God. My brain’s still, like, half broken.”
“Spanish written is today, though,” she warned as they took their seats.
Meg winced. “Yeah… that’s the other reason I came to school. I think I can handle it, I just wish it wasn’t last period.”
“You certainly look like someone who could get away with going home at lunch time.”
“Thanks, Veronica,” Meg said drily.
“Hey, I tell it like I see it.”
Her friend only smiled, organizing her binder and pencils in front of her. “So if it’s just the two of us, are you going to stick around for lunch more often?”
“I stick around for lunch!” Veronica protested. “Usually!” But she couldn’t help an ironic smile as Ms. Fediuk called the class to order.
“So no.”
“I make no promises. But not no.”
After all, there was always after school.
*
Lunch today Veronica had no intention whatsoever of skipping. For one thing, she wasn’t interested in being gloated at, and for another, the whole Mr. Rooks thing made the concept of having sex at school more uncomfortable than it otherwise would have been. And she still had her period, anyway.
Not that she would have ditched Meg, regardless of any of that, not under the circumstances. They staked out a table far enough away from Gabrielle to avoid any lingering, uncomfortable glances, and Veronica stubbornly set up the flag, which she’d been neglecting lately, with Yolanda gone.
“What are you going to do when that breaks?” Meg said. “I mean, I know it’s wood, but it won’t last forever.”
“Maybe I’ll get a banner,” Veronica said. “I bet if I ask in just the right way, Madison will make us one.”
That made Meg snort, and immediately grope desperately for a kleenex. Veronica looked away to give her privacy, biting back a smile.
As if she’d been summoned by the flag, Jasmine bounced up to the table, her hair rising and falling with the rhythm of her steps until she swished it behind her with a practiced flick of her head as she sat. “Hey! You heard, right?”
“I’ve heard a lot of things,” Veronica observed drily. “Is this about Yolanda or Mr. Rooks?”
“Why, what happened to Yolanda?”
“She got married in Vegas.” It was easier to skip the details of the fake kidnapping.
“No. Way.” Jasmine leaned over the table, her unrestrained shock and glee bringing a reluctant smile to Veronica’s lips. “To who?”
“This guy she used to know before she moved here, I guess,” Meg said. “But she didn’t tell anyone, so then her brother pretended she’d been kidnapped, and Veronica reported it and the investigation made Gabrielle’s boyfriend dump her, so now she’s mad at us.”
It was sweet of her to lump herself in with Veronica when she’d done absolutely nothing to Gabrielle, so it seemed mean-spirited to clarify that Gabrielle’s boyfriend had dumped her because her parents found out. “His name is Ben Bloom,” she told Jasmine. “I guess they grew up together and now there’s some family feud or something.”
“No way, that’s so juicy.” Jasmine jerked the zipper of her lunch bag open and closed a few times in a fit of energy. “So it was a like a big secret? That’s insane.” She glanced consideringly at the flag propped up at the center of the table. “It’s not very slutty, though.”
“That’s what I said!” Meg exclaimed, delighted, and the other girl leaned over to high-five her, apparently unconcerned about germs.
“It’s pretty good,” Jasmine said. “Married. Is she knocked up?”
“I don’t think so,” Veronica said, even though she’d wondered the same thing. It still felt like she owed Yolanda more loyalty than Jasmine.
“Nuts.” Jasmine started unpacking her lunch, which appeared to consist of a sandwich, some chips, and a very non-lunch-sized bag of candy. “Totally nuts. What about Mr. Rooks though? You heard, right?”
“Veronica was there.” Meg took the jujubes Jasmine was handing her and passed over a couple Oreos in exchange, but Veronica demurred.
“I just have leftovers.”
“It’s cool,” Jasmine said. “I have lots.” She dropped the candy on the ziplock containing Veronica’s cutlery. “You were there? So what really went down?”
“He called on Carrie and she told him she wasn’t pregnant,” Veronica said reluctantly. “Then she said he offered her money to ‘take care of it’ and threw the keys to his house at him.” She made a face. “She says they were the keys to his house.”
“So you think she’s lying?” Jasmine seemed equally interested in either possibility.
“I don’t know. I mean, why? People aren’t exactly–” She glanced up to track Carrie’s whereabouts, and caught a snatch of ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’ as she looked. There was Carrie, pointedly ignoring the singers from a solitary table. The singing itself was coming from some of Pam’s student council friends Veronica didn’t know, mostly seniors, but she caught a spiteful his car is warm and dry and winced, looking away. “Well. She had to know this would happen. But I just can’t believe that Mr. Rooks…”
“He’s cool,” Jasmine agreed through a bite of her sandwich. “Aside from he gave me a C this year. But you never know.” She glanced at Meg. “What do you think? I’m just hoping if it’s true we all get As on the final automatically. I never test that good and I can’t let my grade go lower.”
Veronica couldn’t help snorting at the sentiment. Meg chewed over her answer, pausing with an apple slice halfway to her mouth.
“Veronica’s right,” she said finally. “I like Mr. Rooks, and he never tried anything like that when I had him last year, but what’s the point of lying about something like this? The only thing I can think of that would make her mad enough to want to ruin his life and get him fired is… if he actually did it. And nobody does things like that for no reason, right?”
That wasn’t quite what Veronica had meant to be saying, but she didn’t have an argument for Meg, besides her petty, if justified, conviction that Carrie was terrible.
Instead she just offered a noncommittal, “You’d have to be pretty unhinged, I guess.”
“I read this book where a girl said her teacher was molesting her when actually it was her dad,” Jasmine suggested, and Veronica shuddered. “But she was an impulsive liar, I think, because first she said he was having an affair with one of his other students, or something? It was a couple years ago.”
“That would officially be way worse,” Veronica said. She thought Jasmine meant compulsive liar, but it didn’t seem worth nitpicking. “God.”
“I mean, I know a girl that happened to,” Jasmine added, as if it was no big deal. “She didn’t make it her teacher’s problem or anything, though.”
“That’s awful,” Meg said, looking genuinely shaken. “My dad’s been… hard to deal with, lately, but he would never.”
“Psycho, right?” the other girl agreed cheerfully.
“My dad’s told me about cases like that,” Veronica said. It wasn’t like she’d never gotten a bit of a thrill from knowing the details of the serious or macabre stuff, but Jasmine’s unbothered attitude still took her aback. “I don’t know if that was one of them, but it definitely happens.”
“No,” Jasmine said, “it was in Mexico. That’s why they came here, to get away when her mom found out.” Her tone slid out of its conversational register, toward serious. “But you hear stuff, you know? Sometimes the mom just lets it happen or whatever.”
Meg worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “I don’t get it,” she said finally. “I mean, spanking and stuff, even the kind that gets out of control, I can see how someone could convince themselves it’s discipline, you know? But how could you just let someone hurt your kids like that? I mean, sexually?”
“They usually decide the kid is lying, I think,” Veronica said. It killed the conversation, so she added, after a moment, “I don’t think any of this has anything to do with Carrie, though.”
“Probably not,” Jasmine agreed. “But if nothing like that’s going on, why would she lie? I mean, she’s rich, so I guess this won’t tank her grades, but still.”
“What do you mean?” Meg frowned. “What does her being rich have to do with it?”
The other girl laughed. “If I said I was having an affair with a teacher, they’d drop all my grades down ‘cause of them probably being received unfairly or whatever. Bet that’s not happening to her, though.”
That hit Veronica harder than she expected it to. She chewed it over for a minute while Meg expressed her doubt that that would ever happen and Jasmine insisted that it would. Her instinct was also to argue too, but…
“Okay,” she said. “That’s – I mean, you’re probably right, no way would Carrie’s parents let that happen to her, but neither would mine, and we’re not rich. Wouldn’t your parents just come down and argue with Clemmons or Moorehead until they undid it? The school doesn’t want a big hassle from the rest of us either, even if they give concessions to the rich kids.” She made an apologetic face at Meg.
“My parents don’t speak English,” Jasmine said matter-of-factly, which took Veronica by surprise. The other girl sounded like a native speaker. She had… well, maybe it was a slight accent, but Veronica had just been thinking of it as – as the way some Latino kids talked, like a subculture thing, not a language thing. A seed of shame took root in her stomach. It sounded so ignorant spelled out like that. “My dad knows a little, I guess? But it’s mostly work things, you know, safety and construction stuff. And he has two jobs, so when would he even come in?”
“They couldn’t fail you for being, I don’t know, targeted, though,” Meg protested.
Jasmine laughed. “Aw,” she said. “You’re sweet. Don’t worry, nothing like that will ever happen to you. Still don’t sleep with teachers, though,” she added, before Meg could respond to either the affectionate condescension or the actual sentiment. “It’s never good.”
“That seems accurate,” Veronica muttered. “None of this helps me figure out how handle next period.”
“It sucks, right? This morning was weird. I should have tried to get Mrs. Brent for History instead, but I figured Mr. Rooks would be more fun.” Jasmine made a face. “I’m going to be so distracted on the test. I still think we should all get As.”
“It would be easier if I hadn’t frontloaded all my humanities into this semester,” Veronica agreed grimly.
“Maybe they’ll get her to take the classes? There’s got to be an investigation or something, right? Maybe they’ll clear him, but shouldn’t someone else finish the semester for him?” Meg asked, but Jasmine shook her head.
“I think the other senior class is fifth period, so there’s no way. Unless she can clone herself or something.”
“That would be very Harry Potter of her,” Veronica observed. “But it doesn’t help us.” She made a face. “If the school board or whoever is looking into it, they’ll tell us if he’s guilty, so I’m not going to treat him like he is until then.”
Jasmine considered. “Makes sense,” she allowed, but Meg still looked doubtful.
*
Weevil’s grandma was on the phone with his sister when he got home. He could tell it was Claudia because Leticia wasn’t phrasing her need for babysitting as a request. He didn’t get the nice polite ask the neighbours did either; when it was other grandchildren she was applying to, it was always more of a demand.
He caught her eye and raised his eyebrows, then pointed at himself. Not that he was eager to sign up as the house referee, especially when he’d planned on actually studying tonight, but if he was in the house anyway, there was no point in Claudia catching two busses from work and dragging Ofelia with her.
But his grandma shook her head at him, even as she waved him closer, more urgently when he didn’t move fast enough for her. Claudia’s tinny voice echoed weirdly as he let himself get pulled into a tight hug, something about her shift starting at two.
It was already almost four, so he had no idea what that was about; she wasn’t allowed to use her phone at work.
“Okay, m’ija – no, no, Eli will be back by then,” his grandma said as he extracted himself from her embrace.
Weevil frowned at her and pointed at himself again, more firmly, feigning offence when she flapped a hand at him in dismissal. He waited until she hung up to say, “What, do I only exist when it’s convenient for you?”
She tsked at him. “I need you to take your bisabuela to her appointment on Saturday.”
“Okay,” Weevil said. His stomach was sinking – slowly, rather than in one surprised swoop – but he wasn’t going to say no.
She seemed surprised at the lack of pushback, but he tried not to let that bother him. “Okay?”
“Yeah, I got plans, but I can move them.” When did he ever say no about stuff like this? “I guess you need me to drop you off at work first?”
“You’ll need the car,” she agreed. Like he was going to take Abuela on his bike. Although if he figured out how to say that to her, she’d probably think it was funny. “You’ll move your plans?”
“Don’t I always?” He tried to hold back the annoyance in his tone. He hated how drastically things always changed every time he saw his great-grandmother, and the hospital was even worse, but he wasn’t going to fight about it.
His grandma just pressed her lips together in a thin line. It wasn’t like he didn’t know she thought he should go see her mom more. This time it had been something like two months, unless you counted Christmas, which she probably didn’t.
It was why she was having him do it instead of Claudia, even though that would have had less moving parts – he wasn’t stupid. Shouldn’t he at least get some credit for not complaining about that?
He didn’t want to get into a fight about it, especially when she wasn’t exactly wrong either, so he pulled out his phone instead, to text Felix that they were going to have to move their plans. They could handle the first part without him, but even once he got back it sounded like he was going to be stuck babysitting until his grandma got home, and he didn’t want any of the more impulsive guys getting impatient with the rest of it. moving things this wknd – meet at 4 instead. spread the word
“Eli,” his grandma said, exasperated, and he looked up. “What are you doing?”
The disapproval in her voice made it clear she thought he was ignoring her or screwing around or something, despite the fact that his phone did exactly three things: texted, made phone calls, and took extremely shitty pictures. “Changing my plans,” he said, leaning on the words a little. He didn’t want to actually make her feel bad, but an apology might have been nice.
He didn’t get one, but she sighed and clucked in a way that was meant to be a stand-in, and he got distracted by Felix’s return message before he could tease her about it.
bizzy doing THINGS???lmao
is things rel8d to the SHERRIFF
Like he was going to hook up with Veronica Mars outside school. The whole point of the thing they were doing was that it was low-effort; he wasn’t about to start scheduling it.
watchu just say abt my ggma?
lol Felix wrote back, followed by sorry man.
Weevil shook his head and put his phone away. “What’s the deal with dinner?” he said. He got a sternly raised eyebrow for it and rolled his eyes in response. “I gotta study, I have an Algebra test tomorrow.”
“I thought you had your final last week,” his grandma said suspiciously, like he was trying to get something past her.
“No,” he told her with exaggerated exasperation. “That was a freaking unit test. The final is tomorrow. The teacher hates us or something. I’m just saying, if you’re making some big thing I’ll come down, but if it’s just pasta I’m grabbing something now and taking it with me.” He jerked his head toward the stairs.
“There’s chickpea salad in the fridge,” she told him. “Leave enough for your cousins.”
“What, like I’d take it all?” He fluttered his eyes at her in innocence, and she swatted at him.
“I know you.” He might have escaped the swat, but he didn’t protest as she pinched his arm fondly. “Take an orange for later.”
He took two, and a glass of water because Coke wasn’t exactly a palate cleanser, and headed upstairs to see if Veronica’s annoying preachy homework help would be more useful on this test than the unit final. He had taken a solid shot at two or three questions he would have had to guess at before, which wasn’t nothing given how badly he always bombed at the graphing stuff, but that didn’t mean he was sure he’d gotten them right.
Ariana was lying on the floor at the top of the stairs, playing with the Barbie he’d gotten her for Christmas, and he nearly stepped on her – and then nearly spilled his water all over himself trying not to. “Jesus fucking Christ!” As he tried to juggle everything without falling down the stairs, she wiggled a fraction of an inch away and squeaked in offence. “What the hell are you doing? Get out of there!”
“‘M doing things!” she whined at him, hunching her shoulders.
“You can’t lie on the floor like that! Don’t be stupid.” He nudged her with his foot in annoyance, and when she stubbornly refused to budge, he slid it under her and flipped her over. Ariana squealed in indignation. “Go do that in your freaking room, and stop being such a brat.”
She whined at him aggressively, no words, just high-pitched hostility, and Weevil shoved her just a little more with his foot for good measure before he retreated into his room.
If the prospect of studying hadn’t thrilled him before, he had absolutely no desire to do it now.
The salad was a decent excuse to put it off for a bit, so he ate with one hand and flipped through the stupid art murder book with the other, trying to figure out where he’d been and if he cared enough to finish it, and whether there was any more fucked-up sex in it, although it was hard to say whether that would be a plus or not. Weird sex magic was a lot less interesting when it involved somebody’s grandfather.
He flipped to the end while he finished the chickpeas and skimmed over the last page. It seemed like it was supposed to be deep and meaningful, but it was mostly just kind of annoying. Nothing worth slogging through a bunch more weird conspiracy theories for, when the only real twist left was which one of the characters was related to Jesus, so he closed it and took a swig of his Coke to brace for the Algebra practice test Vaughn had given them.
Working through it was weird, because while he’d been too focussed on the test to think much about the informal tutoring beyond trying to remember how to do the problems, going through this was like having Veronica Mars behind his shoulder, huffing and rolling her eyes and saying, “Don’t just guess!”, and he couldn’t even stab her with a pencil because she wasn’t really there.
The faintly sexy aspect to her trying to boss him around was also gone, because he hadn’t lost his mind enough to see her, so he probably should have minded more than he did. It wasn’t like he wasn’t annoyed, but he caught himself rolling his eyes and smiling a couple times when the nagging voice in his head stopped him from skipping a question.
If it helped him finally pass this freaking class, he wasn’t going to complain about it too hard.
*
Despite the horrendous awkwardness of fifth period History, it wasn’t Mr. Rooks that Veronica kept coming back to throughout the day. She hadn’t been able to talk to Meg in Spanish because of the test, but she’d caught herself looking over more than she should have, enough that Sra. Hockley had raised a pointed eyebrow at her.
Spanking and stuff, Meg had mentioned, as if it was no big deal. The kind that gets out of control.
It should have been unexceptional, given what they were talking about. It probably was. It was just… everything. All the faintly uncomfortable, mostly unexceptional things that had added up to make Veronica uneasy when Meg talked about her parents, none of which really meant anything on their own. The stuff with Lizzie. How worried she’d been about her parents finding out about those phone calls, even if they’d mostly taken her side when they did. The uber-cold being a ‘punishment from God’.
It was ridiculous to be so worried when she pretty much already knew what the deal was, that the Mannings were just really religious. She already knew Meg went to church every week, that her parents were conservative enough to be secretly but more than moderately racist, that they had questionable ideas about how to deal with their middle daughter acting out. Wanting your fifteen-year-old to line up a husband for immediately after high school was certifiably insane, but it wasn’t illegal. It wasn’t like they were forcing Lizzie to get married; even Meg hadn’t been worried about that.
Even knowing she was probably just overreacting, after everything with Yolanda, Veronica had almost asked Meg about it after school. But she hadn’t been able to find the right words, and Meg had been so obviously tired, and so relieved to be done school, talking cheerfully about how she thought she’d managed to do okay on the test, and how glad she’d be to get home and take more cold medicine, that it had all suddenly seemed even more silly and unnecessary.
Veronica didn’t exactly want to be the girl who cried wolf on all her friends’ parents, but now she couldn’t help wondering if she should have said something after all.
The front door opened and closed, and she wondered if it was her mom back from wherever she’d gone, and if she was going to find out where that was, or if she even wanted to. It didn’t seem worth it to get up to find out, so she went back to staring blankly at her English Lit practice test until her dad’s voice got her attention.
“I have some news you might enjoy hearing, if you’re sure you can keep it under your hat.”
Veronica glanced up from the kitchen island, where she’d been toying with her pencil. “My hat is huge. I can keep anything you like under there.”
“Well, you seem like you could use a pick-me-up, and in my experience there’s nothing like a little schadenfreude to give one a new lease on life.”
Veronica adopted an exaggeratedly eager expression, pushing her thoughts to the back of her mind. It wasn’t like she could raise any of them with her dad, especially after the fiasco with Yolanda – she had nothing real, just bad feelings, and anyway it felt like betraying Meg’s confidence, even if there hadn’t been any actual confiding. “I glory in the misfortunes of others. Spill.”
“Tony Lasky came in today with his son,” her dad began, in a measured tone. If Veronica had to guess, she would have said he was half-pleased, half-ready to abort if the mention of Jeremy upset her – but she was too busy arranging her face into a ‘listening politely’ expression and preparing the required surprised reaction for when he got to the meat of things to be thinking about much else.
Since he’d started with I have some news you might enjoy and not How dare you be party to petty theft, she had to assume that Jeremy remained too scared of Weevil to cop to the real truth, if this was about what she thought it was about.
“Apparently,” her dad went on, “Tony collects baseball memorabilia, and Jeremy has a penchant for borrowing it to show people.”
”Yeah, he used to do that,” Veronica said, making an effort to sound nonchalant. “His dad’s fancy new phone or Blackberry or whatever, his latest gaming collectible, his dad’s baseball cards… but mostly his dad’s baseball cards.”
“Well, his dad’s baseball cards have vacated the building,” her dad said with slightly malicious cheerfulness. “Or in this case, his car, which he did not lock.”
“Ooh.” Veronica winced, but it resolved itself into a grin. “Ouch. Were they worth as much as he always said?”
“Mr. Lasky needed the police report for his insurance. He was very unhappy.” Her dad shook his head. “I’d ask how the thief knew they were that valuable, but apparently they were in some kind of fancy photo album with all the information next to each one.”
Veronica hadn’t known that – Jeremy had saved that particular brand of posturing for the 09er boys – but it made sense. Mr. Lasky was meticulously organized, and his son was perpetually convinced nothing could happen to him. Giving in to the PCHers without argument was probably the smartest thing Jeremy had done in a while. “They have all these individual display cases around their house. I think Mr. Lasky likes to swap them out.”
“Well, he may have swapped in his most expensive ones recently, which is fortunate for him, but Jeremy cost him several thousand dollars, and he is in serious trouble.”
Veronica adjusted her previous thought from ‘petty theft’ to ‘grand theft’ with an internal wince. She was barely a party to it, she told herself. Purely informational. Absolutely not an ‘accessory’.
Aloud, she said, “And let me guess – he wasn’t supposed to have them in the first place, either.”
Her dad pointed at her in a silent bingo and Veronica shook her head. Jeremy had nearly gotten busted sneaking some new gadget back into his dad’s office, when they’d first gotten together, and at the time it had been a rush to cover for him, giggling in the basement later and feeling like they’d gotten away with something. Now she just felt disgust – mostly for Jeremy, more than a little for her former self for falling for his immature bullshit, even for Mr. Lasky for being such a caricature of a distant, authoritarian father. Anything for my son, unless he inconveniences me!
“So they just took them right out of the glove box?” Veronica asked. “Or was he stupid enough to have them on the passenger seat?”
“The glove box,” her dad said. “Not that it makes much difference when you leave your Hummer parked at the mall without locking it. I’m honestly surprised the car was still there when he came back.”
“It’s an H2,” Veronica corrected wryly. “You can tell because the badass metal loops,” she dropped her voice to a manly growl for a moment, “on the front just lift up and can’t hold any weight.”
It was almost painfully apt, but that wasn’t what made her shy away when she otherwise might have gone on cheerfully dunking on her ex’s choice of car – it was that Lilly had once said something terribly similar about him.
“The car thieves in our town appear to be as fastidious as you are,” her dad said, matching her tone, which made Veronica snort for reasons that were different from what he probably imagined.
Although maybe she’d ask Weevil if he’d ever be willing to steal an H2. He’d probably just refuse to answer and make fun of her, but her bet was that he wouldn’t risk taking something that was both distinctive and useless.
“Well, you’re right,” she told her dad. “I definitely don’t object to hearing about the possibility of Jeremy being grounded for seventeen years.”
“He wasn’t very happy to see me, either,” Keith added, raising an eyebrow. “He only met me once or twice, so I don’t think it occurred to him that I might be the one they would actually be talking to.”
It probably should have been lame and embarrassing to have a dad who deliberately intimidated her ex-boyfriends, but instead Veronica felt warm. “I didn’t think it was common practice for the sheriff to fill out a basic theft report.” She raised her eyebrows to get the point across properly, but her dad just laughed.
“Oh, Tony asked for me specifically. He seemed to think he had an in.”
“Of course he did,” she muttered, thinking about the entitled rich and their insufferable power plays. Then she processed what the rest of it meant.
“Wait,” she said, her slow-moving glee almost certainly as evident in her face as it was in her voice, “did Jeremy… not tell his parents we broke up?”
“Apparently he was reluctant to get into any of the details, so he declined to mention the subject at all.”
“Yeah, his mom’s really up in his business.” Veronica paused thoughtfully. “I don’t know how she didn’t ask where I was.”
“According to Tony, he told them you were ‘sick of watching him play video games’.”
Veronica stared at him for a long moment – then she started to laugh. It built more than she expected it to, until she was leaning over the counter with tears in her eyes. “Oh, god. You were right. I needed that.” She shook her head in cheerful disgust. “It would have been nice if he’d figured that out while we were dating.”
“Teenage boys aren’t known for their sense of self-awareness,” her dad observed. “I’m glad the irony is at least funny to you.”
“Until I have to come to terms with the fact that I actually dated someone that useless.”
“Oh, honey. Everyone makes mistakes in high school. I’m sorry this one was so rough for you, but I promise you, as lapses in teenage judgement go, it’s pretty minor.” He jostled her shoulder affectionately. “Particularly as it involved neither Vegas nor Tijuana.”
“I promise not to run off to Vegas until I’m at least twenty-one,” she told him solemnly. “Going before then defeats the purpose, anyway.”
“Don’t say things like that,” he told her, warning and amusement comingling in his voice. “You’ll turn my hair grey.”
“You say that like it’s an achievement,” Veronica said, biting back a smile, and he clutched his chest in mock hurt.
“‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth!’ – is that how it goes?”
“We’re Macbeth, dad. I’m pretty sure Lear is reserved for college.”
“Ah.” He considered for a moment. “‘How sharper than a murderous thane is an ungrateful child!’”
“I’m grateful,” Veronica argued, grinning. “Who else is going to bring me detailed reports on the downfall of my ex-boyfriends? We’re two for three at this point.” She maintained the smile with a slight effort, not wanting to derail the conversation by acknowledging that it still gave her a pang to throw the subject of her breakup with Duncan around so casually.
“I’m only sorry I couldn’t arrest more than one of them,” her dad responded with studious seriousness, which made her laugh a bit.
“You’ll have your chance,” she assured him. “Jeremy’s bone-headedness is going to have to cross over from dumb to illegal at some point.”
“May we live in hope.” He crossed to the fridge and started poking through it. “What are you feeling for dinner?”
Veronica shrugged. “I don’t know. Spaghetti? Hamburgers? Mama Leone’s?” She let her voice perk upwards hopefully on the last suggestion, and Keith laughed and shook his head.
“I think you’ve exceeded your manicotti limit for the year.”
“It’s January.”
He shot her a pointed look. “Indeed.”
Veronica shook her head, laughing, and went back to her English Lit prep. She probably didn’t need it – she’d gotten a 95 on the practice test – but she had two tests tomorrow besides the Spanish oral, and History was not especially appealing just now. They’d spent all of Precalc doing review again, so that one she could pass in her sleep.
She was just finishing looking over the second question she’d missed when her mom’s car pulled into the driveway. It wasn’t all that concerning at first, but when she heard how hard the door closed and the force of the footsteps in the hall, her heart sank – until Lianne appeared in the kitchen doorframe, and it became apparent that she was angry, not drunk.
“Everything okay?” her husband asked carefully, and she shook her head dismissively, forcing a smile.
“Just – it’s fine. Can you pour me a drink?” He reached for the orange juice, but Lianne shook her head.
“There’s lemonade in the back.”
She sat down catty-corner to Veronica as he dug for it, letting out a long breath as she ran a hand through her hair.
“Mom?” The lemonade was encouraging, but Veronica still wanted to know exactly what had happened – something obviously had. She raised an eyebrow at her mother. “What’s going on?”
“Just… went to see someone I shouldn’t have lost touch with.” Lianne took the glass of lemonade Keith offered her and knocked it back so quickly Veronica resolved to make sure that it really was lemonade in the bottle. “Thanks, honey.”
“Stir-fry and hash with onions?” he asked her, not commenting on the drink. “Was this Mary you went to see?”
“Yes,” Lianne said, running a finger around the rim of her now-empty glass. “Oh, sure. Stir-fry sounds good.” She pushed herself to her feet with an effort and pulled the cutting board from one of the shelves underneath the island countertop. “Toss me an onion. I could stand to chop something up.”
Veronica opened her mouth to demand to know what was going on, but her dad beat her to the punch – although he clearly had more context than she did. “She said no?” He fished an onion out of the crisper and rolled it across the kitchen island; Lianne fumbled but caught it.
“She says it was a long time ago and she doesn’t want to cause trouble. She says what’s the point. Besides, she thinks she could lose her job, and she’s worried about whether it might affect–” She broke off, glancing at Veronica, but Veronica was not having it.
“No way. You can’t be all cryptic in front of me and then withhold the actual goods. Spill.”
Her mom sliced both ends off the onion and then stared down at it for a long moment. “The teacher I told you about, from when I was in school, he’s still teaching – or something like that, anyway. I should have done something a long time ago, but I promised Mary I’d keep quiet, and then…”
“Lianne,” her dad said. “You were a teenager. It was even harder to get someone like that to face consequences back then. It’s not your fault.”
“It’s been nineteen years,” she retorted. “I should have said something. Our daughter goes to that school, Keith!”
“Wait, wait,” Veronica interrupted, as her mom visibly realized she’d said too much. “Your friend, who had an affair with the teacher – he still works there?” Her mind churned, trying to figure out who was old enough. “Oh, my god, is it Mr. Clemmons?”
“No–” her mom started to protest, and then cut herself off at Veronica’s second question to say, much more emphatically, “No!”
“Maybe you should go do your homework in your room,” her dad suggested, but Veronica only shot him an incredulous look.
“Are you serious? No way. And it’s not homework anyway.” Something occurred to her. “Wait, do you think this guy did it again, with Carrie, and she’s only saying it’s Mr. Rooks to protect him?”
It was the only answer to the question of why Carrie would have lied that made sense, and she felt hopeful again, suddenly.
Lianne seemed taken aback. “I – honey, I don’t –” She bit her lip, giving the question serious consideration. “I guess it’s possible…” She glanced at her husband in supplication, but he shook his head.
“I can’t reasonably pursue a statutory rape charge in a situation like this unless the parents or the victim come to the police about it, which they haven’t. I understand they’ve gone to the schoolboard, and they’re probably waiting until after that to decide about prosecuting. Unless they do, this is none of my business, professionally.”
“But if he’s innocent –” Veronica protested.
“Honey, we don’t know that he is.”
“Well, Al’s guilty no matter who was involved this time,” her mom said. “And I’m going to that schoolboard meeting on Thursday and I’m going to…” She deflated suddenly. “I can’t make things hard for Mary. But I’m going to look him in the face. He shouldn’t get to just forget about it.”
She sliced the onion definitively in half and started cutting it into half-rounds. “Now you know more than you should, Veronica, so go upstairs, please.”
Veronica went. But it was mostly because her mom definitely hadn’t realized just how much ‘more than she should’ encompassed, and she was reasonably sure she’d be able to find a list of the school’s faculty somewhere online, or, failing that, at school the next morning. Maybe if she could find ‘Al’ she could figure out for sure whether Carrie was lying.
*
The school district’s website had turned out to have a very comprehensive list of Neptune High’s sporting programs and coaches, but no list of teachers, comprehensive or otherwise. The school would have a list of teachers, but with three different tests, Veronica put it out of her mind as firmly as she could manage for all of Wednesday. It wasn’t too difficult; Meg was mostly better, but she spent all of their final Precalc review period whispering Spanish verbs under her breath, apparently worried she’d bombed the written, and was so preoccupied cramming at lunch that she barely noticed Jasmine complaining about her English final from yesterday.
“I think I failed,” she said at one point. “Again. If I can’t graduate this year, my parents are going to kill me.”
That sparked something in Veronica’s mind, Weevil and Jasmine, Weevil and Algebra, and she glanced up from the Roman Empire dates she was half-heartedly trying to focus on. “How many times did you take it?”
“I failed last year,” Jasmine said glumly. “If I didn’t pass this time, then I can’t take senior English next semester, and I can’t graduate. And I’m no good at all that Shakespeare stuff, it just doesn’t make sense.”
“Everyone feels like they failed right after the test,” Veronica told her, even though she was very confident she’d done well on her English Lit final a few hours earlier. “Try not to worry until the grades come in. Your boyfriend’s good at English, right? I bet he’ll help you with senior English too.”
“He’s only a sophomore,” Jasmine told her, which took Veronica by surprise. Had she known that? “Or like, half a sophomore. He’d still do better than me, though. I wish he could have taken the test for me. He’s not my boyfriend, though, not really. We’re just kinda…” She wiggled her hand. “It would be cradle-robbing anyway. He’s basically a freshman in, like, advanced classes.”
Veronica considered the hand-wiggle. “So, like you and Weevil?” The other girl blinked at her and Veronica copied the gesture, but Jasmine laughed.
“No way. Me and Weevil weren’t anything. It was just fun.”
“So,” Veronica made the hand-wiggle again in lieu of trying to find a word for it, “is a relationship?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Jasmine smiled, a touch of self-irony in the expression. “He likes me, you know?”
“You don’t like him?” Veronica asked cautiously, erasing an AD in her notes that definitely should have been BC and writing in the correct date.
Jasmine shrugged. “Sure. He’s cute. And he’s not a bad kisser. But he’s kind of jealous. Like, I can’t help the guys I hooked up with before, and I wouldn’t anyway. I like to have fun.” She pouted. “But he just turned fifteen. I can’t sleep with him.”
It was surprisingly responsible, even if the outlook felt alien. “That’s probably a good call.” Veronica snapped her notebook closed. “I’m getting another piece of pizza.”
The History test wasn’t as bad as it could have been, although between the tension in the classroom and the teacher’s obvious distraction, Veronica wasn’t confident she’d done as well as she would have liked. She did smile at Mr. Rooks as she handed in her test, and he seemed heartened, so instead of spending Biology appreciating the way Mrs. Canning cracked down on every instance of goofing-off or mentally running Spanish conjugations, she let herself spend it thinking of ways to get that list of teachers. The yearbook committee would have one, but given her current social status, she might have more luck just applying to the office. After all, they wouldn’t know what she needed it for.
For that matter, she could probably just tell them she was on the yearbook committee. It wasn’t like they were going to check.
She shelved the idea, though, because there was still a Spanish test to get through, and other things to worry about on top of that. She still wasn’t sure if she was going to try and get Meg alone after class, or if she just needed to get over herself. Maybe she’d just wait and see how they both did on the final; a heart-to-heart would land better in an atmosphere of hooray-that-that’s-over than one of oh-god-I-failed.
The test went all right, in the end – Meg froze up on a couple vocabulary words, but she conjugated flawlessly, and the only thing that tripped Veronica up was the gender of tree suddenly vacating her mind. (It was a tree, after all. They were on a different paradigm, so gender felt a little unnecessary.)
“Four down,” she said on the way out of the classroom, “Four to go.”
“That’s eight,” Meg said, and then immediately shook her head. “Right. Two for Spanish.”
“What do you have left?” Veronica asked her.
“Precalc tomorrow, Computer Science on Friday, but the test for that one is kind of a joke. There’s no test for Textiles.”
“Lucky,” Veronica commented.
Meg smiled briefly. “And Health is tomorrow too, but I’m not so worried about that one. What about you?”
“Precalc,” Veronica echoed, following Meg to her locker. Neither of them had much in the way of school supplies to offload after the oral exam, and that seemed like her best chance to get a private word before Meg had to go home, since she usually gave her sister a ride. “American History is tomorrow too, but it’s straight out of the textbook; I probably could have taken it two months ago and passed. And Bio and English on Friday. Bio’s not a big deal, though, most of our grade is from the labs.”
“I can’t believe the semester’s basically over,” Meg said. “It’s been the longest one ever, but it’s like everything happened in the last few weeks. Wasn’t it Christmas, like, yesterday?”
“So much for easing into the new year.” Veronica took a deep breath as the other girl adjusted a few textbooks and hefted her bag, tried to keep her tone light. “Do you have a second? I wanted to talk about something, but I know you have to drive Lizzie home…”
Meg shook her head. “She’s still sick. My parents are not happy, but…” She shrugged. “Anyway, I have rehearsal. But I have twenty minutes until it starts.”
“Cool,” Veronica said, jerking her head in the direction of a less densely-populated part of the hall. “Want to sit in my car or something?”
“There’s a bench outside the theatre,” Meg suggested. “Do you want to get your stuff?”
“I will later.” Meg’s locker was near one of the side doors, so Veronica waited until they were outside and had at least a little breathing room before she said, “Listen, this might be totally out of line, but with everything going on lately, I have to ask…”
Meg nodded as if that made sense, looking over at her with attentive curiosity, and Veronica bit the bullet. “I keep thinking about what you said yesterday, about spanking?”
“Okay?”
Her friend’s mild confusion seemed sincere, so she pushed ahead. “Your parents don’t do anything like that, do they?”
Meg shrugged in apparent unconcern. “I mean, they spanked us when we were younger. I’m not a fan, but it wasn’t anything extreme.”
“So they stopped?” Veronica tried to keep the clarification casual instead of anxious, but she still got a strange look for her trouble.
“Um, yeah? It would be super weird to spank a teenager.”
Super weird instead of super messed-up seemed like it indicated the spanking really hadn’t been all that bad, although Veronica couldn’t really comprehend what that would be like. Her mom had hit her all of once as far as she could recall, slapping her hand when she wouldn’t stop trying to grab something dangerous. She didn’t even remember whether or not it had hurt anymore, or what it had been she was trying to do – it was her mom’s fear that had made the impression. And her dad? Never.
“Okay. I mean, I figured it was probably nothing, but, you know. I guess with everything going on with Lizzie I got worried.”
Meg’s eyes widened, like she finally realized the real intent of the conversation. “Oh, God, Veronica, don’t worry about that kind of thing! I wish they would stop fighting with her all the time, but they’d never do anything like that. They don’t even spank Grace anymore.” Despite the apparent sincerity of her words, a troubled look flitted across her face. “They just make her pray when she does something bad.”
“Does it work?” Veronica asked, trying to strike a more cheerful tone without being outright irreverent.
“Grace is a really good kid anyway,” Meg said. “But I guess it doesn’t hurt anything, I mean, it’s praying.”
She sounded strangely unconvinced, but Veronica wasn’t qualified to take on a crisis of faith. She wasn’t even qualified to take on abuse, but at least there was a playbook for that. “Definitely sounds better than the alternative, but I’m still glad my parents opted for the send-her-to-her-room method.”
That made Meg smile, and Veronica added, “Your mom seems really nice – I don’t want you to think I’m, I don’t know, badmouthing your parents. I’m just paranoid, I guess.”
“No, I get it,” Meg said emphatically. “With everything going on? Secrets and weird stuff – I mean, Yolanda had a whole secret husband!”
Veronica laughed, at least as much from legitimate amusement as relief. “Something like that. Anyone could be hiding anything at any time. Speaking of which, I should go to the office before the secretaries clear out. I have to find out all the teachers’ first names so I can prove Mr. Rooks is innocent.”
Meg blinked in surprise. “Wow. Well, you better hurry, because my dad says the schoolboard hearing is tomorrow night.”
Chapter 27: One Hell of a Motivator
Notes:
The opening scene is for pianotforte, and I'm only sorry it's all I can offer. <3
No major warnings for this one, unless you're intrigued by the telenovela plot I mention, in which case I regret to inform you it's not real. The named shows are, but I haven't seen them, and I wasn't about to take an opinionated stance on a show I haven't watched.
Chapter Text
As it turned out, spite was one hell of a motivator.
Kayla Krantz
It turned out that Veronica didn’t actually need a cover story, because the office aide was the kid who sat behind her in History. All she had to do was tell him she thought she had a way to prove that Mr. Rooks was innocent and he dug around for a bit and found her a slate of all the teachers that they used to make up the schedule.
“Thanks,” she told him. “You seem like a very convenient person to know.”
“For two more days,” he told her, cocking an ironic eyebrow. “Office aide is a one-semester gig. I was supposed to be scuba diving.”
“In January?” Veronica shuddered, carefully folding the piece of paper he’d given her. “Yeah, this is a better deal.”
He shook his head. “Man, you California kids are weak. Fifty-five-degree weather on a good day and you’re complaining. You would not make it in Ohio.”
She could have been offended, but his tone was light and jovial, so she just shot back a bright, “Why would anyone want to make it in Ohio?” on her way out of the office, and gave him a jaunty wave as the door closed. He shook his head, smiling faintly, which was nice. She wasn’t exactly counting on casual interactions with other students coming out positive anymore.
There were no obvious Als, she discovered when she got home and took a longer look at it – although Mr. Wu’s first name was Alfred, which seemed entirely incongruous. It wasn’t relevant, since he was too young to have been a teacher when Veronica’s mother was in school, but it was still weird to think about.
She had to be organized about this, though. Veronica dug through her mom’s things in the office until she found a highlighter-tipped pen that was still dark enough to obscure the text, then went through and crossed out all of the female teachers. Goodbye, Ella Popham, Deborah Hauser, Mallory Dent.
It eliminated over half of the names on the list, which was good, but Veronica hesitated before she whittled it down any further. She didn’t want to get tripped up by something that would be obvious in retrospect, and in a movie there would always be a twist, or something. After all, if she’d had to guess Meg’s full name a couple months ago, she probably would have gotten it wrong – nicknames and middle names made the whole thing murkier.
Nicknames seemed unlikely, unless the guy had been a huge Simon & Garfunkel fan, but middle names she could be careful about. Veronica went through the list again carefully, eliminating anyone she knew for a fact was too young and anyone with a listed middle initial other than A. While she was at it, she starred the first names that did lend themselves to ‘Al’, aside from Mr. Wu’s. There was an Albert Zebrowski in the sciences, an Alexander Fulton in languages, and Mr. Johanson turned out to be another Albert. She marked a Thomas A. Yount for further investigation too, before she tried to chase down the middle names of half the male teachers at Neptune High.
She didn’t have all that much time to figure this out, though – the schoolboard meeting was tomorrow night and she had two tests each tomorrow and Friday. She could skip studying tonight, since she was doing well in Precalc and Mrs. Galloway’s tests weren’t exactly difficult, but she’d probably end up cramming for Biology tomorrow night, regardless of how blasé she’d been with Meg earlier.
It would be worth it, if Mr. Rooks really was innocent. Veronica started with Mr. Johanson, who she knew for sure was old enough to have been teaching when her mom was in school, and flipped open her computer so she could find his number in the online phonebook.
“Hi,” she said when someone picked up, pitching her voice a little higher than usual. “Is this Mr. Johanson’s house?”
“It is,” the woman confirmed. “Let me get him–”
“Oh, no!” Veronica told her. “Please don’t. It’s a surprise.” Taking advantage of the moment of hesitation, she went on, “I’m in his class this year, and a few of us were thinking of doing, like, a big fancy card for him – you know, the really big kind? We wanted to include a few personal details, so I was just hoping…”
“Oh, sure!” The reply was pleasantly surprised. “I bet I can help you – I know Bert would love that.”
Bert. Darn. Well, that didn’t mean no one called him Al.
“Great!” Veronica told her. “We wanted to make kind of a nod to all his years as a teacher, so I was wondering if you could tell me when he started? What year, I mean.”
“I sure can!” the woman said. “My sister was one of his students, that’s how we met. It was 1978.”
Well within the parameters, and it felt like it mattered that his wife was connected to one of his students – not a smoking gun, but a telling boundary to cross.
“That’s so sweet!” Veronica gushed. “And was that here, at Neptune High?”
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Johanson said. “That would have been back in Oregon. He didn’t move down here until Patti died, about six years ago.”
Pop went Veronica’s bubble of triumph. “Oh… that’s so sad.” She didn’t especially want to beat the subject into the ground, but the persona she’d chosen was fairly clueless, and it wouldn’t hurt to know a bit more. “Was Patti your daughter?”
The woman laughed in surprise. “Oh, honey, no. Patti was Bert’s wife.” Then she made a noise of realization. “Oh, I see what happened. I’m not married to your teacher, sweetheart, I’m his sister-in-law. Bert’s the one who introduced me to Gary. Although I am still Mrs. Johanson.” She chuckled pleasantly.
“Wow,” Veronica said, adding a little extra sugar to her voice to cover her grimace. “That’s so embarrassing!”
“Don’t worry about it – was there anything else you wanted to know?”
Veronica pitched her a couple more small questions so she wouldn’t get suspicious, then made an excuse and got off the phone. So much for that one. Next name.
She found Alexander Fulton’s number next, only to be thrown when his young daughter answered the phone. From the girl’s voice, she was about seven, and Veronica’s heart clenched when she called, “Daaaad! It’s for you!”
By the time she’d reminded herself firmly that if he was sleeping with students it was his own fault if his family broke up, it was too late to stall.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” Veronica said, glad she’d never taken his class. At least he wouldn’t know who she was. “Sorry to bother you at home, Mr. Fulton, but my name’s Madison, and I’m doing a piece for the Neptune Navigator about Mr. Rooks…”
“A good reporter works all hours,” he agreed. “But given the subject matter, maybe you really shouldn’t be calling your teachers at home?”
“I completely understand,” Veronica assured him. “Unfortunately we’re rushing to press so I can’t wait to talk to everyone at school – but I’ll make it quick. We’re mostly comparing statistics, so would it be all right to get the date you started teaching and how long you’ve been at Neptune High?”
“I don’t see why not,” he said thoughtfully. “My first student teacher assignment was in 1991–”
Veronica scratched him off the list.
“–and I started at Neptune High in 1999. I’ve been the Latin teacher for five years as of this September.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Fulton. That’s all, unless you’d like to comment.”
“I really can’t,” he told her, although she thought she heard a hint of a smile in his voice. “But don’t let that discourage you. I’m sure Ms. Dent appreciates the dedication.”
Veronica thanked him and hung up.
Albert Zebrowski answered the phone himself, but Veronica kept her head and calmly asked for Mrs. Zebrowski, then gave her the same story she’d fed Mr. Johanson’s sister-in-law, with similarly disappointing results – the man had apparently been teaching at Neptune High his whole career… which had started in 1987, just barely too late to be any use.
The man who answered her fourth call turned out not to be Thomas Yount, but Thomas Yount’s boyfriend, who started laughing when she asked for Mrs. Yount, told her he wasn’t interested in buying anything, and hung up on her. Veronica scratched them off the list too.
That just left everyone without a middle initial listed as possible Als – much less encouraging than an Albert or even an Alexander, but still worth a look. Maybe she could even make use of the telemarketer misunderstanding. Back to the top of the list she went.
Calling and asking for Mr. John A. Smith, as tailored to each teacher, got her some success, although a few people she suspected were lying to her because they didn’t want her to try and sell them insurance, which was a pitfall that should have occurred to her. One son and one wife confirmed to her that the man in question had a middle name that started with A, but that he was out, and an unidentified man told her that ‘Phil’s middle name is Andrew, I think, so hang on’ and called the teacher in question over to the phone, leaving Veronica to hang up, flustered, and hope they’d think it was a bad connection.
She wrote probably not? next to Philip Vaughn’s name and moved on, without any more distinct luck. A few times the phone just rang through, which she should have expected but didn’t have a plan for.
In the end she’d eliminated most of the faculty, with a few follow-ups needed: Frank Dalton, Ed Casey, and Ryan Pierce, who hadn’t answered the phone, Charles Vanbrugh and Michael Platten, who had middle names that started with A, and Alfred Wu, just in case he was somehow much older than he looked.
Theoretically, she could probably track them all down tomorrow, but that didn’t leave her very long to confront Carrie and convince her to tell the truth. Veronica sighed and looked up Mr. Casey’s number again. She could go down the shorter list one more time.
*
Veronica had knocked two more teachers off her list by the end of the night, which only left her four more to check. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do if none of them fit the parameters. Nothing, probably. It wasn’t like she could confront Carrie without a name.
Or she could, but she’d look like an idiot, and it wouldn’t accomplish anything.
Being on time for English Lit wasn’t a massive priority, since it wasn’t worth Mrs. Murphy’s effort to crack down on them when the final was already over, so Veronica detoured to Mr. Wu’s classroom before first period, fed him the same story she had the Latin teacher the night before – only without mentioning Mr. Rooks – and came away with the information that he’d been teaching at Neptune High for fifteen years.
Meg looked up curiously when Veronica slipped into her seat thirty seconds before the start of class, and raised an eyebrow when she unfolded her short list of names to strike Mr. Wu’s off it. “What’s that?” she murmured, keeping one eye on Mrs. Murphy.
“Shortlist of people Carrie might be covering for,” Veronica muttered back. “My mom said there was a teacher who slept with a student when she was in school, and he’s still here.” She pulled a quick, wry smile. “Not that I was supposed to hear that part.”
“You really think it might be Mr. Wu?”
Veronica shook her head, but she couldn’t explain in detail, because Mrs. Murphy was starting the usual just-because-the-final’s-over-doesn’t-mean-you-get-to-stop-paying-attention-in-class speech and it was extra embarrassing to get dinged for talking in the middle of that. Instead she just mouthed Later at Meg and folded the paper back up.
“I’m trying to find someone named ‘Al’ and there aren’t a lot of them,” she said in low voice when the teacher paused before introducing today’s mostly-educational fun activity. “He was my last one, so I’m on to middle names. Have you ever had a class with Mr. Vanbrugh or Mr. Pierce?”
“No, but I’m pretty sure Lizzie had Mr. Pierce this semester. He went on leave or something after a month – I think he has cancer or something like that.”
Veronica winced. “Maybe I can rule him out, then.” It occurred to her that cancer and health insurance might be an additional reason for Carrie to protect him, but a month was a short time to kick off an affair – and why reveal anything now, in that case? Why reveal anything at all? “Thanks.”
Mr. Vanbrugh she was going to have to track down herself, but that was all right – she only had one other name to check and it wouldn’t take long.
Fortunately, because the idea of waiting until lunch made her twitchy, she caught sight Weevil in the hallway after her Precalc test. Veronica pulled a one-eighty to talk to him, which made him raise his eyebrows and the tiny version of his usual posse that was surrounding him crack up.
“You have Mr. Dalton, right?” she asked, without wasting time on introductions.
One of his eyebrows inched higher. “Oh, yeah, I keep him in my pocket.”
She huffed an annoyed breath, ignoring the snickers in the background. “You have Autoshop, right? During one of the periods you actually bother to show up for? Isn’t Mr. Dalton the Autoshop teacher?”
“And?” Weevil slouched against nothing in particular, hands oh-so-nonchalantly in his pockets, shooting her a challenging smirk
“And I need to know some stuff about him, do you have his class this semester or not?”
He snorted. Veronica suspected that if his friends hadn’t been there he would have just laughed outright, but you had to keep up appearances, she supposed. “Like what?”
“Like how long has he been teaching here, and if it’s more than eighteen years, what’s his middle name?”
“What?” He stared at her, one eyebrow rising by increments. “I don’t fucking know.”
“Well,” Veronica said, several shades too patiently, “what period do you have Autoshop?”
“Before lunch,” he said, presumably meaning fourth period – although it being Weevil, she wouldn’t put it past him to annoy her by using ‘before lunch’ to mean one of his earliest classes. Either way, it wasn’t like he couldn’t make an excuse to double back to the classroom.
“So ask him,” she told him, pleasantly patronizing. “I’ll find you later.”
She turned and left before he could say anything else, smiling to herself when she heard someone mutter, “What the fuck?” and Weevil answer, “Don’t even bother, man, she’s crazy.”
She struck out with Vanbrugh between third and fourth period, American History final be damned – he looked too young to be teaching at all, let alone for twenty years – which left Frank Dalton as her only viable suspect.
It wasn’t impossible, but she felt like it would have been a lot harder for someone who taught Autoshop to kick off an inappropriate affair with someone like Carrie Bishop compared to a teacher like Mr. Wu – or Mr. Rooks. Veronica’s heart sank a little at the thought. It had seemed like such a godsend – a way for Carrie to be lying that made sense, a way out of the tangled cluster of thoughts and feelings she had to grapple with when ever she thought of Mr. Rooks, and a long-denied victory for truth and justice on top of it to make her feel a little less selfish. And now she had almost nothing; she couldn’t confront Carrie without the name of the person she thought the other girl was protecting.
“You look glum,” Meg said. She’d braved the commissary, although her pizza didn’t look especially appetising. Then again, Veronica wasn’t being especially appetized by her own lunch, which was an actual meal, so maybe it wasn’t the food that was the problem. She reluctantly pried open her bean salad. It was definitely supermarket bean salad that her mom had transferred into a tupperware, but the fact that she’d bothered with the change of container probably meant it wasn’t a red flag. Lianne could cook better than Veronica’s jokes tended to imply, but it was hardly her passion.
Plus, the tupperware meant that it hadn’t leaked all over the rest of Veronica’s lunch the way the supermarket plastic always tended to, so that was nice.
“Just convinced myself I was going to crack this and Mr. Rooks would be vindicated.” She stabbed a single green bean with her fork and ate it with grim determination. “I don’t know if he’s innocent and I’m letting him be railroaded, or if he’s guilty and I’m stupid for not believing it. All I do know is that there is a teacher here, somewhere, who got a student pregnant once and got away with it, and that I wasted all of last night phoning teachers and pretending to sell insurance when I could have been studying.”
Meg blinked, probably trying to figure out where to start. “You could study now, if you want? I’ll be quiet. Or I could quiz you.”
“I don’t have any more tests until tomorrow,” Veronica told her. “They were both before lunch. But thanks.”
Her friend considered, regarding her pizza thoughtfully. Veronica offered her some of the bean salad, but Meg shook her head. Finally she said, “I think it’s good that you try to help people. It gets easy sometimes to just… go with the flow. I mean, I always thought that I put myself out there – I cheer, I do drama – but when things get complicated, I think I just end up hoping they work out. My parents fight with Lizzie and I just wish they’d both chill out. Or sometimes Cole’s friends would say things I didn’t like and I’d argue, but when my friends did, I just…”
“Smile and nod?” Veronica suggested, demonstrating with a tight, awkward smile. Meg winced. “Yeah. I let Lilly ice out Yolanda last year even though I knew she didn’t do anything wrong, so don’t think I’m some kind of hero.” It was the big one, but… “And Duncan’s friends used to say all kinds of stupid stuff I should have argued with and didn’t.”
Duncan had, though. At least sometimes. He’d gotten Dick to lay off a kid who sat at their table at least once, rolled his eyes more than once and told those guys to shut up when their edgy talk about girls got a little too gross. Maybe because the people he was telling to shut up had been more Logan’s friends than his, although they’d been best friends for so long that the line wasn’t all that clear – but he’d bought Cole’s garbage, maybe because Cole was more his friend than Logan’s.
Still. Veronica hadn’t argued with Dick at all, that she could remember, and she hadn’t been friends with him at all. She was probably being unfair, since she’d hadn’t exactly done better than Duncan, until she’d had no choice – more like worse. And neither of them had ever said anything to Logan, when he was the one going too far. Meg’s compliment burned in the back of her throat.
The other girl was stubborn, though. “Yeah, but you do things. I feel like it’s easy to just be like, ‘I don’t know what to do, someone else will handle it’.”
“I haven’t really done anything, though.” Veronica ticked off items on her fingers. “I never figured out who took that test and lied about you. Nothing I did about Yolanda mattered, because she wasn’t really kidnapped. And I’ve completely failed to prove Mr. Rooks innocent, and now I can’t even decide if he is. Again.”
“You got Cole to leave me alone,” Meg insisted. “And if Yolanda had been in trouble, you were the only one trying to help her. No one else is trying to help Mr. Rooks or even Carrie, they’re just gossiping about it. Sometimes it’s better to do something than nothing.” She gave Veronica an ironic smile. “Even if you’re wrong. I could never ask someone if their parents were hitting them – I’d just wonder and feel bad about it.”
Veronica made a face, and Meg huffed impatiently. “I cared that you were trying to help me. I bet it mattered to Yolanda that someone cared about her enough to go to the police, even if her parents didn’t. I’m just saying.”
That was impossible to argue with without being an asshole. Veronica smiled ruefully, trying to find something to say in response, but she didn’t end up having to, because Weevil climbed over the bench and sat down next to her. Extremely close to her, which judging by the smug smirk on his face was entirely deliberate. Veronica shoved him in the side, which moved him less than half an inch.
“How many times do I have to tell you that you’re not allowed to sit here?”
“You’re a couple sluts short of an orgy,” he pointed out, which to Veronica’s extreme annoyance was actually funny. “Jasmine told me one of ‘em ran off and one bailed. Guess you wish you’d processed my application faster now.”
“That’s not how it works,” Veronica said, wracking her brain for how it did work. This was the problem with making up a bunch of fake rules just to mess with him; she had no idea how membership in her accidental club functioned anymore.
“Yeah, well, if you want to know all that random crap about Mr. Dalton, it does now,” he shot back, infuriatingly smooth, like he’d just been waiting to work that in. He probably had.
“That depends on how good your intel is.”
“Are you even allowed to have an official slut meeting if you don’t have a quorum?” he wondered aloud, shooting a wicked smile at Meg, who looked like she couldn’t decide whether to roll her eyes or hide inside her sweater until he stopped looking at her. “If only you’d inducted more people as official sluts, maybe you’d be able to–”
“Okay, we get it, this is the slut table, not the table at which one sits if one swallowed a dictionary.” Veronica stepped up her formality a little to compete with him, but she couldn’t actually think of a good vocabulary word to work in off the cuff – at least not until she’d finished talking. Now she could think of several. Chagrin. Devoid. Perpetuity.
“And we don’t need a quorum,” Meg added, which probably should have been Veronica’s first response. “This isn’t the government. You can’t just make up random rules – you’re not even a real slut.” She edged subtly away from him at the last sentence, like she thought it might be too provoking.
Yeah, Veronica thought. Only I get to make up random rules.
Aloud, she interrupted the beginning of his response with, “Yeah, this is an association, not governing body. And you’re still not part of it, so tell me about Mr. Dalton and go away.”
Weevil was unfazed. “I think you mean or.”
It would have been smarter to agree with him, but Veronica doubled down instead. “I mean, tell me about Mr. Dalton. And then. Go away.”
His mouth twitched. Faintly, and immediately supressed, but Veronica saw it. She wasn’t surprised, exactly, but – wasn’t there some kind of unspoken agreement to only admit they were having fun when they were winning? She could appreciate a particularly good comeback on his part a lot more than she had back when they’d started all this, but it wasn’t like she was going to admit it.
“Why would I tell you anything if you can’t make it worth my while?” he countered, but Veronica was ready for him.
“I guess you’ll never find out if you don’t tell me.” She tipped her head to the side, half-shrugging until her shoulder met her hair, and gave him her very sweetest smile.
Weevil shook his head disgustedly, but when she made no move to capitulate or argue with him, he shot her a challenging look. “I want you to admit I’m a slut.”
“You can be an affiliate slut,” she conceded. “Like Yolanda. Since she’s the one who left. I’m not giving you Jasmine’s seat.”
“You don’t even sit at the same table every day,” he argued, but Veronica shook her head in dismissal. She hoped Yolanda had been the affiliate slut. Maybe it had been Gabrielle. It was too late now, though – she just had to sell it. Weevil probably didn’t remember the details any better than she did, and if she was confident enough it wouldn’t matter if she was wrong.
“Take it or leave it,” she told him.
He made a sour face at her, but she could tell he was enjoying himself anyway. “I forgot if you said how long he’s been here or how long he’s been teaching, but he said nine years and fourteen years.” His mouth curled smugly. “And his middle name is Vincent.”
Veronica ignored the final twinge of defeat in her stomach. She’d already known Dalton was a long shot. “I only needed one of those pieces of information.”
“Why?” he asked her, leaning forward to emphasize the word. He was already too close, so Veronica shoved him away again.
“None of your business.” She paused. “How did you even find out what his middle name was?”
“None of your business,” he parroted, somewhere between smug and whiny.
“If you don’t have anything else to say, then you can go away,” Veronica told him, trying to hide her annoyance for fear of him thinking he’d scored a hit. Her tone didn’t come off quite as blasé as she wanted.
“If I’m an affiliate slut, how come I can’t sit her?” Weevil shot back.
“I have to process your membership,” Veronica bullshitted coolly. It was a good thing no one else was going to want to sit with them, because she was never going to keep all of this straight in the future, and she just knew he would be waiting to jump on her at the first inconsistency.
Apparently she didn’t even have to wait. “You didn’t have to process Jasmine’s membership.”
Veronica scrambled for a way to play that off, keeping her face impassive. “Jasmine wasn’t an affiliate,” she said. “She’s an actual slut. So…”
She gestured for him to see himself out, truncating the gesture because if she’d actually extended her arm she would have smacked him across the chest. Weevil looked disgruntled, but he glanced over her lunch as if to make a definitive exit by stealing her food, apparently decided he wasn’t willing to stick his fingers in supermarket bean salad, and got up.
As soon as she relaxed, he doubled back and stole Meg’s orange, ignoring their simultaneous “Hey!” with a self-satisfied grin.
“Don’t worry,” Veronica said, ruefully, when her initial burst of outrage subsided. “He won’t actually start sitting here, he just wants to win. Sorry about your lunch.”
Meg considered for a moment, then shrugged. “It’s okay. It doesn’t really go with pizza, I just figured I should have something healthy.” She picked up the pizza in question and took a bite.
“Better than it looks?” Veronica offered, only slightly sardonic.
“I mean, it usually is.” Her friend chewed for a moment. “Are you sure he won’t sit here? I know you said he doesn’t actually like you – which I kind of get now, I guess – but if he’s not flirting than he sure does like pulling your pigtails.”
Veronica snorted at the metaphor. “At least it’s a step up from theoretically tying my hair to things.” But she gave the question some actual consideration, taking a few bites of bean salad to give her time to think. The sharp, tangy dressing always took a minute to get used to, but then it was pretty good.
“I guess I might have to chase him off a few times,” she acknowledged finally. “But he’s got more macho things to do.” She nodded to the biker table, where the required amount of back-slapping and shoulder-punching was taking place. “I can try and shake him if it bothers you, but honestly it’s probably easier to just put up with him for a few minutes once or twice a week. He’s – I mean, he’s not harmless, but he’s not that scary if you know what you’re doing.” She almost said if you know how to handle him, but after Monday the double-entendre felt a little too embarrassing – and besides, she was never sure which of them had the upper hand. There was distinct chance Weevil thought he was handling her.
“I’d kind of hope so, if you’re locking yourself in a room with him every other lunch hour.” Meg ripped the crust off what was left of her pizza – although being Meg, she then proceeded to eat it first, before the final few bites.
“He’s not going to hurt me,” Veronica said – which was hopefully apparent by now, but maybe hearing it would make Meg feel better. “We’re not friends or anything, but he’s like… my knock-off friend. For when you’re not around.”
The other girl looked unimpressed. “You could just hang out with me, you know.”
Veronica paused her response to consider whether she was willing to really go there, and decided that if she wasn’t, she should be. For her reputation. “If you decide to start handing out orgasms, let me know.”
Meg choked on her apple juice. “Veronica!” she managed once she could breathe again, her strangled voice not quite hiding her scandalized amusement.
“I’m not saying I’m interested, I’m just saying if you want to be competitive you should step up your game.”
The helpless laughter was playing at least as much of a part in turning Meg’s face bright red as her embarrassment was; she hid her face behind her hands, wheezing. Veronica grinned, pleased with herself.
“No wonder you get along,” Meg managed after a minute, voice slightly strangled. She took a breath that turned hallway into a gasp, but the oxygen evened her out a bit. “Or whatever bizarro version of it you were just doing. You’re as bad as he is.”
“Offence,” Veronica said, unoffended. “How dare you.”
Meg shook her head, taking a few more breaths to get her equilibrium back, and cleared her throat. Veronica couldn’t help her mouth twitching in amusement – but fondly.
“So!” the other girl said, her too-loud voice a clear sign she was about to change the subject. “What are you going to do now? About Mr. Rooks.”
Veronica sighed, her good mood ebbing. “I guess I give up.”
*
Veronica didn’t go to the school board hearing, in the end. She waffled up to an hour before, but ultimately she didn’t want to see her favourite teacher go down in flames, even if he was guilty, and she couldn’t show up to support him without being positive he was innocent. Her mom went, though, and she came back steaming.
“They let him slide?” her dad asked in surprise, when Lianne appeared in the living room door.
“What?” She blinked. Veronica turned the volume down on the TV. “No. He was definitely guilty. They fired him.”
Veronica’s heart sank. She’d still been hoping there would be some last-minute exoneration, some proof that Carrie was lying, even if her own idea had failed to pan out. She opened her mouth to ask what ‘definitely guilty’ meant, but her mom didn’t even notice.
“He didn’t even show up,” she said, pacing halfway to the couch and then stopping herself short. “I mean, you’d think–”
“Mr. Rooks didn’t show up?” Veronica echoed incredulously, but her dad shook his head and her mom winced and gave a half-apologetic shrug.
“No, he was there. He said it never happened, but she had texts, and this diary. Apparently the charges on his credit card line up – the parents hired a private investigator or something.”
“Let me guess,” her dad said drily. “Vinnie Van Lowe.”
Despite her annoyance at being left out of the conversation, Veronica couldn’t help circling back to that name. “Isn’t that who Yolanda’s parents hired?”
Her dad glanced back at her with a fond expression. “He’s the only game in town, but they would have been better off with a professional outfit from L.A.”
“Well, he nailed that teacher to the wall, anyway,” her mom said. “This isn’t even the first time he’s been fired for being inappropriate. But–” She broke off and shook her head. “I’m interrupting. We’ll talk about it later.”
“It’s just junk TV,” Veronica said quickly, but all that got her was simultaneously patronizing looks from both her parents. So much for gleaning a little information on the long-ago lech. Maybe it wouldn’t help Mr. Rooks anymore, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t curious. Had her mom expected ‘Al’ to show up? Why?
The only thing she could think of was that Lianne agreed with her theory that the man who got her friend pregnant was the same one Carrie had really been having an affair with… but that didn’t make any sense, because her mom clearly believed Mr. Rooks was guilty. Which did make sense, if something like this had happened before – suddenly, all her late-night phone calls and list-making felt naïve at best.
“I’ll go wash the dishes,” her mom said, exchanging a meaningful glance with her husband – Veronica knew that one, it was the we will discuss this later when she can’t hear look, and it was as infuriating as it was unsurprising – and disappeared back into the hallway. It didn’t take long before they could hear her dumping the pans into the sink a little too aggressively.
“So–” Veronica started, because her dad was showing signs of turning the TV back up. “If Mr. Rooks really slept with Carrie, does that mean you’re going to investigate?”
He inclined his head thoughtfully. “Honestly, I would have expected to hear something from the parents by now. They may have decided not to press charges.”
“But why wouldn’t they? Unless Carrie was lying.”
Keith’s expression became serious. “Honey, I know you liked this guy. But if they really had all that evidence, I don’t think being on the fence is a valid position anymore. I know it’s hard to accept, but if he’s got hotel charges for all the same dates she says she was with him, that’s not just solid evidence for the school board, that’s evidence we could take to court. As far as why not – they may think that getting this guy fired is worth the fuss of going to the school board, but not want to put their daughter through the stress of a prosecution. Maybe she wants him fired but is conflicted about sending him to prison. They may be planning to sue in civil court – you can do both, but people don’t always understand that, or they might be prioritizing it.”
“Carrie’s parents are loaded,” Veronica said, rolling her eyes. “Her dad has a record company or something. They can afford as many lawyers as they want.”
“They might have a good reason, honey – like not wanting their daughter’s name in court records about this. County school board proceedings are a lot harder to track down or to accidentally stumble across. Or they might have a bad reason that isn’t suspicious. People make all kinds of questionable decisions about when to pursue charges and when not to, and a lot of the time it’s just down to bad judgement.” A faint line of very bad cop dialogue edged into the gap in the conversation, and he reached for the remote and muted the show properly. “For what it’s worth, I think they’re wrong. It’ll be harder for him to get hired at a different school now, but not impossible. A record would mean a lot more for making sure this doesn’t happen again, even if he didn’t get any jailtime.”
“What about Mom’s friend?” Veronica tried, feeling uncomfortable and faintly guilty on the subject of Mr. Rooks. “The guy who slept with her is still teaching, right?”
“Veronica, I can’t press charges for something that happened twenty years ago unless it’s serious enough that there’s no statute of limitations – which you know. I can’t take action based on hearsay that the victim themselves won’t confirm – which you know. If I thought you were coming in to regular contact with someone dangerous, I would have talked to you about how to keep yourself safe, or even sent you to school somewhere else – which I certainly hope you know.” He paused, meaningfully. “Twenty years of law enforcement experience might not have equipped me with the powers to magically arrest all the bad guys in the world, but it definitely means I can tell when my seventeen-year-old daughter is fishing for information.”
She gave him a lackluster eyeroll in response. “Well, can you blame me? This guy might be at my school, still – wouldn’t you want to know?”
“There are other people involved, Veronica. Your mom’s right to let her friend decide for herself what to do. The last thing anyone needs is a bunch of gossip starting up.”
“Who am I going to gossip with?” Veronica asked him, playing up her mystified aggravation just slightly. “Yolanda skipped out on high school to get married; it’s literally just me and Meg at a table asking each other the same question back and forth. I guess the latest one’s answered,” she added cynically. “I guess Meg doesn’t have to worry about having Mr. Rooks next semester. Which is going to suck, for the record. At least I only have to suffer through whatever boring pinch-hitter they scrape up for a day.”
Her dad patted her shoulder. “I’m sorry you’ve been let down.”
“Yeah, I wonder what it would be like to be let down by someone you have faith in,” Veronica muttered. She was thinking mostly about Lilly, maybe a little about Duncan or even Logan, but her dad went very still. He had too much self-control to stiffen outright and give the game away, but if Veronica hadn’t immediately realized what her words sounded like, the sound of her mom still aggressively washing dishes in the kitchen would have brought it to the front of her mind anyway.
It was such a low blow when things were going okay again.
Veronica couldn’t walk it back, not without acknowledging what it was she’d accidentally implied, but she tried to do damage control. “But hey, fifteen more months and I’m done with this insanity forever, right? Not that I’m counting down or anything.”
“I think your math might be off there, honey.” Keith’s tone was carefully normal, his posture just a fraction more relaxed, but the tension in the air hadn’t quite dissipated.
“Summer doesn’t count,” Veronica told him. She reached for the remote. “I know we like to mock, but how about watching something actually good? Maybe we can even lure Mom back in here, make it a popcorn-style event.”
“You know, I did rent The Cowboys,” he said, and she groaned.
“Not again. I definitely need Mom for backup.”
That prompted Backup, who had been dozing on the carpet next to her end of the couch, to raise his head and whuff softly. Despite herself, Veronica laughed.
*
Her English final went fine, but Veronica was regretting blowing off studying for Biology by lunchtime. It wasn’t that she hadn’t had a good evening with her parents, but the whole experience felt much more like it could have been put off a day now that she was staring down the barrel of the exam. She’d at least been able to review the big items during fourth period, but that had made her realize that while she remembered the main points of taxonomy and was probably okay on evolution, she was shakier on microbiology than she’d thought after so long covering plants and animals. Without knowing who was covering her History class, she couldn’t count on being able to study through it, so she shot Meg an apologetic wince and dived back into her textbook, not resurfacing until someone shoved an apple under her face.
“What?” When she looked up, blinking, Weevil was there. He wasn’t actually sitting down, just leaning over the table on his elbows. “What are you doing?” She glanced at the apple. “Is this code for something?”
“It’s code for ‘I passed Algebra’,” he said, which almost made her wonder if he’d vanished after Monday because he was actually studying for exams instead of because of whatever self-conscious reason her brain was throwing out. “Why, you want something better?”
Veronica rolled her eyes at his unconcealed lasciviousness, even though she was slightly tempted. “Something less trite, maybe. And some of us still have to study.”
He raised an eyebrow, but she went relentlessly back to her viruses, half-prepared for him to keep needling her.
Instead he turned to Meg. “What about you?” The words were accompanied with an unambiguous jerk of his head toward the school that Veronica could see in her peripheral vision, and she nearly choked.
Meg laughed nervously. “I’m – another sandwich,” she mumbled, scrambling up from the table. She shot an apologetic look at Veronica and fled.
“Leave her alone,” Veronica told him, trying to sound dangerous. She was pretty sure he was fucking with Meg because he thought it was funny, at this point, and not because he was actually trying to scare her, but if she’d be a bad friend if she didn’t crack down on it. Besides, her indignation on Meg’s behalf was slightly stronger than the part of her that did find it a little funny. “Or I’ll come over there and proposition your friends.”
Weevil laughed. “I’m not stopping you. Beef up your rep a bit. If I work really hard, maybe I can even find one you didn’t fuck yet. In the court of public opinion,” he added, falsely solicitous.
Veronica flipped him off. She was enjoying the conversation more than she should have, but she really needed to study before sixth period, and an abbreviated response might make him lose interest.
She really should have ignored him entirely, but it was too late for that, as evidenced by the fact that he proceeded to sit down. Not next to her, or across from her – on the table. Veronica yanked the corner of her textbook from under his thigh.
“Get off my microbial classifications.”
He just smirked, and she tried to focus on her notes for a few more minutes, but Weevil stayed put, being highly distracting by dint of his sheer presence and probably scaring Meg off from coming back. She could feel the smugness radiating off him.
Finally she couldn’t take it anymore and slammed her binder shut. “What do you want.”
He raised his eyebrows at her in response, and Veronica growled lightly under her breath., trying to refocus on the material “It’s not happening. I have half an hour left to study and two chapters to review.”
“Yeah, it sucks when you’re trying to figure out how to pass an exam and then someone shows up to bother you.”
She glanced up, wary at his too-conciliatory tone.
“Then they’re all, spy on your teacher for me, find out how long he’s been here, what’s his middle name when you’re trying to remember how functions work.”
Veronica made a frustrated noise. “I was trying to find out what teacher slept with a student when my mom was in school. She won’t tell me who it was.”
Weevil made a dubious noise. “But you know his middle name?”
“I ruled out everyone whose first name could have been it. Actually, I ruled out absolutely everyone, and it doesn’t even matter, because Mr. Rooks was guilty anyway, so Carrie was telling the truth. She’s still the worst,” she added. “But I guess she wasn’t lying.” He took a moment to process this, and Veronica couldn’t help herself. “How did you even find out his middle name, anyway? I figured you’d just come back with the dates, even if you bothered.”
“I started talking about how my cousin doesn’t have a middle name because his dad was from Mexico,” he said. “And they fucked up the birth certificate so that his middle name is Morales, even though his whole last name was supposed to be Morales Navarro. It’s not even the right parent’s name they ended up using, but it comes last, so who cares, right? What’s your middle name, anyway?”
“Ann,” Veronica said automatically, before she realized he was still demonstrating the technique, and he laughed at her. “Fine, you’re very devious. Now will you go away?”
“I’m busy after school,” he warned her, which did give her pause for a moment, although she tried not to show it. The new semester started on Monday, and they couldn’t be guaranteed that the art classroom would be a safe place to hook up after that. Veronica wasn’t eager to switch to the autoshop classroom.
“I’m devastated,” she told him, trying to sound bored. “Get lost.”
Weevil laughed, but at least he got off her Biology notes.
*
Claudia was early on Saturday, which at least meant their grandma stopped worrying about being late for work, but also meant that instead of just Alex and Danny tearing around the house yelling and grinding cereal into the carpet, Ofelia and Ariana were racing back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, pooling their Barbies and trying to share Ariana’s eggs without ‘touching spit’.
“Sit down at the table when you’re eating,” he told them sharply, but even though Ariana looked down repentantly, Ofelia was unmoved.
“I already ate breakfast,” she told him, like it was some kind of trump card.
“Then you don’t need eggs,” he said, reaching for the plate – but Ariana yelped and acted like she was going to start crying, so he didn’t actually take it, just raised his eyebrows sternly at her.
The noise got Claudia’s attention, of course. She broke off from what she was saying about her shift later, and said, “Eli!” like she was their mom now or something.
“I thought you were supposed to be watching them.”
She shot him a nasty look, but Leticia clicked her tongue warningly before they could really get into it. “Ariana, you stay at the table until you’re finished eating – you know that.”
Ariana squirmed under her stern look. “But I wanna play with Ofelia,” she whined, her pitch climbing.
“Then be finished,” Weevil suggested, cutting in before Claudia could tip her all the way into a meltdown by telling her not to be such a baby. Ariana stared at her remaining eggs, bottom lip trembling noticeably.
“I don’t wanna,” she said, perilously close to her baby voice. Weevil pretended not to notice. “Better eat fast, then,” he said easily.
That seemed to appeal to her more, and after another brief moment of staring forlornly at the eggs as if they were going to be cruelly snatched away, she switched gears and started shovelling them into her mouth with abandon.
“Nice, Eli,” Claudia said.
“Do you want her to have nice table manners or do you want them to stop dropping eggs on the living room carpet?” He managed not to point out that she was the one who was going to have to clean it up, but from Claudia’s sour expression she’d worked that out for herself.
“Just let it be this time,” their grandma said, despite the way she pursed her lips in disapproval. It actually seemed kind of unfair, when the boys had broken the cardinal sin of taking their food away from the table, but whatever. She was probably just relieved they’d gotten everybody up and sorted out by seven-thirty.
“Ready to go?” Weevil asked her, as Ariana plaintively declared that her eggs were cold and shoved the plate away.
His grandma sighed. “Yes, let’s go. I’d like to be there before the kids get up so I can keep them from destroying the living room.” She cast a baleful glance in the direction of her own living room. “Last week they got syrup all over the couch. Do you have everything?”
“Yeah, Grandma, I know the drill.”
Claudia snorted at that, and he glared at her. “When was the last time you took Abuela to one of her appointments?”
“At least I visit her,” she said.
“So, never.”
“Stop fighting with your sister,” their grandma said. “Claudia, leave Eli alone, he more than pulls his weight around here.”
Haven’t gotten anyone pregnant, either, he thought, but he bit his tongue to keep from saying it. Some blows were too low, and Claudia wasn’t really the forgiving type. Besides, he liked it when his grandma said things like that about him. He didn’t want to instantly prove her wrong.
He waved to Claudia instead, only half-sarcastically, and called a general threat for the kids to behave themselves before following Leticia out to the car. She settled into the passenger seat with just a little bit of satisfaction – she never admitted it, but he was pretty sure she liked having him drive her around. He put on a station she liked for once, instead of hunting down the reggaeton that was their usual compromise between her schmaltzy 70s hits and the rap music she wouldn’t let him play, since he knew she would have liked to see her mom more than she did. He wondered if it was ever a relief for her to miss an appointment like this, or if it just made her mad that she had to work so many hours, raise so many kids even though she’d already done her time that she couldn’t take her own mother to the hospital.
But she was in an okay mood when he dropped her off, nearly fifteen minutes early and everything, so he didn’t ask, and he tried not to wonder any more than he had to.
Weevil had to double back nearly all the way to get to his great-grandmother’s apartment, but it was okay; her appointment wasn’t until ten. It was good to be early, because she’d want to feed him and tell him how much she hated every single one of his tattoos and interrogate him about whether he had a girlfriend before they left, and she didn’t move so fast anymore. That was also the reason he had to wait by the intercom for a solid two minutes while he waited for her to answer the buzzer, and he got resentful and suspicious looks from three different people before it had been long enough that he could ring again without being rude. He ignored the white lady and the old Asian guy, because he was pretty much used to it from people like that, but the Latina mom giving his tattoos and shaved head the stink-eye got his best sneer, and she pulled her kid away pretty quick, probably deciding to go in the other entrance.
He had a key to the building – it was on his grandma’s keyring – but it was better to do the whole theatre of waiting to be buzzed in, because the last time he’d just walked into the building, someone had called the cops on him. It was the trouble of living right on the edge of the neighbourhood: the building was low-rent and almost affordable on her budget, but it meant you weren’t exactly among friends. Even Margarita Galvez wouldn’t have called the cops on him unless he was stealing her car with her in it.
Finally she buzzed him in, and he waited by the door to her apartment for a much shorter time until she let him in, fussing over him in Spanish about how he’d lost weight. He hadn’t, but she had, even since Christmas. A lot, since the last time he’d had to help her get to an appointment. He hated seeing it, even though he knew it was shitty and selfish to stay away, when he probably only had another year or so of chances to see her, and he’d hate himself for wasting them once they were gone.
Then she had to give him a hug, like always, and as usual her unreserved pleasure in seeing him just made him feel like shit. If he saw her more often, maybe the changes wouldn’t hit him so hard each time too; maybe at least he could stop always thinking of her the way she’d been when he was younger and she’d always been in motion, always doing something. It was different now with her hip. She couldn’t even go down to do her laundry without needing the whole day for it, but she was still too stubborn to use a cane.
He squeezed her back, gently, while she complained that he was working too hard and needed to do something nice for himself.
“I came to see you, didn’t I?” he asked her, winking, and she swatted his arm and called him ‘travieso’ like he was still six years old.
It felt like she was patting him, the touch was so soft, but Weevil tried to pretend that didn’t bother him.
“I’ll fix you something to eat,” she told him.
“I had breakfast already.” He answered her in English, like always. “You should sit down, let me get your stuff together for you. The appointment’s in an hour, and you know there’s never any parking.”
He was rounding down pretty hard, because they had almost two hours, but he wasn’t the only one who couldn’t get used to how slow Abuela was these days, and she was too stubborn to admit it if he reminded her. They needed the buffer.
“We have time for you to eat something,” she told him, still in Spanish. Weevil could remember her speaking English more often when he was little, mostly to his mom, but she’d pretty much stopped by the time her granddaughter died.
Ann Marie had told him once that without her grandfather to help translate, her grandmother had gotten more self-conscious about her English until she stopped using it outside the family, and now she never got much practice. He’d been about four, and mostly confused about how someone could understand a language they didn’t speak, which was pretty freaking ironic now.
“You think Grandma doesn’t feed me?” he asked, raising an eyebrow gently.
She tsked and didn’t answer, moving painfully down the hall. Weevil looked away, so he wouldn’t have to watch. She’d be offended if he tried to help – he had no idea how his grandma always seemed to be able to bully her into accepting it. He tidied the clutter on the hall table to keep from pressing too close behind her, wincing at the neglected tangle of mail. He should sort through it, make sure she hadn’t missed anything important.
“You want me to help put your hair up?” She’d clearly managed to have a shower, because the grey hair falling down her back was even darker than usual – damp – and less flyaway than it too-often was these days. It was easier for her to do stuff with her arms than to walk around, but her joints got tired fast, and holding her arms up for a long time probably wasn’t worth it anymore.
He got a look for that. “You?” she said in English. “My hair?” She shook her head and switched back to Spanish. “Why would I want strangers to see my scalp? You stay away from the razors.”
“I know how to do hair!” he protested. “I can do Ariana’s hair! I can do Ofelia’s hair!” Claudia had never in her life let him touch her hair, which had probably been a good decision, but he wasn’t seven anymore. “I’d do Grandma’s hair if it was longer, too.”
Abuela shook her head again, disapproving. “It’s not feminine,” she said, even though her daughter hadn’t had long hair in decades. Or maybe it was more like not ladylike – the people he talked to didn’t use femenino a lot.
“It’d be a lot easier to manage if you cut yours, though,” Weevil pointed out, and her hands flew up to protect her hair in such a reflexively horrified way that he couldn’t help but laugh, even though the physical slowness of the gesture yanked sourly at the inside of his collarbone.
“You’re a bad boy,” she told him, which just made him laugh.
Then of course she opened the fridge and started looking for something to feed him, while he protested that he’d had plenty of breakfast.
He probably could have eaten again, especially when they were going to be sitting around the hospital for however long, but her monthly cheques barely paid the rent, and you could only make one food bank run a month even if getting around was easy. He wasn’t going to drop his seventeen-year-old metabolism on her.
“What about an apple?” he said, since there were a few on the counter and he could just take the smallest one. “I could go for an apple. Or are you just trying to get me to cook you something?” He raised a teasing eyebrow at her when she glanced back at him. “Did you eat breakfast?”
She waved him off, which he didn’t like. “I’m an old lady. These things don’t matter anymore.”
“What do you mean, ‘no importa’? Importa! Abuela, you’re gonna see a doctor in an hour and a half! You think he’s not going to ask if you’re eating right? It’s importa!”
“Importante,” she corrected him, adding, “No es importante.”
“Es importante.” He shook his head when she tried to dismiss that. “Not important, doesn’t matter – I don’t care what the difference is, because they’re both bullshit.”
She gasped – maybe pointedly, but still mostly a sincere reaction – and turned to stare him full in the face with all the disappointment she could muster. Weevil forced himself to remain unrepentant.
“I said what I said. Do I have to tell Grandma you’re skipping meals? She’ll worry.”
“She should wash your mouth with soap,” Abuela told him, like he’d come up with some truly foul Frankenstein uber-curse, instead of saying ‘bullshit’.
“Waste of soap,” Weevil told her. He didn’t double down, even though he could have – being willing to play dirty was one thing, but he wasn’t going to bully his own great-grandma.
“Come on,” he said instead. “You gotta take care of yourself. Por favor.” She always liked it when he tried a little Spanish, even when his grammar was terrible.
And sure enough, she softened. “We’ll both eat breakfast,” she told him. “What do you want?”
“Oatmeal,” he suggested, because it was fast and easy. “You always used to give me oatmeal when I was little.” Always was a stretch, but it wasn’t a lie or anything. “I can cut up some fruit for it and everything.”
Mostly he didn’t want her going to the effort, but it also gave him something to do so he didn’t have to watch how slowly and painfully she moved around. At Christmas she’d been sitting down in the living room the whole time, and the last time he’d been here a few months ago – it had been worse than he wanted to see, but not this bad.
He was a piece of shit for not showing up more often. She never even complained about it.
“What flavour?” she asked him, shuffling to the left-hand cupboard and opening it. Weevil caught a glimpse of a green box on the shelf she was gesturing to – good enough.
“Apple cinnamon,” he said, plucking a couple pieces of fruit out of the bowl. You could probably put apples in a different flavour without it being too weird, but why take the chance?
The knives were still in the same big block she’d always had, but he could never remember where the cutting board lived now; in her old place it had been next to the stove, and even though she’d had to sell the house about five years back he could never seem to store the new location of anything in his brain. Back then it would have been real oatmeal too, from scratch, none of this instant stuff. Not that there was really enough room in the tiny kitchen to cook together – if you got a chair in here for a kid to stand on, there wouldn’t be space for anything else. Definitely not for Claudia to read a book on a stool on the other side of the kitchen, pretending she was mad at everyone until she got pulled in by the cookies or the hand-made tortillas.
“They’re growing,” Abuela had told his mom once. “You have to feed them good food.” They’d had casserole for a week after that, but only because she’d sent them home with a couple.
His mom had never minded advice like that from Abuela, even though she hated it from her own mother. Maybe because Abuela had never been about tough love. She’d let Ann Marie cry herself to sleep on the couch in the middle of the day before those afternoons in the kitchen, fed and hugged all three of them even when his mom was jittery and erratic instead of the fighting that had always ensued at Leticia’s.
The cutting board was in the third drawer he looked in, wedged in there pretty good so that it took him a minute to get it out. More evidence that Abuela wasn’t doing much cooking anymore, which he tried not to think about even as it curdled in the pit of his stomach. She was still filling the kettle when he got it free and started chopping, but Weevil refused to go down a rabbit hole about it. This wasn’t the right kitchen, and there were a hundred other things out of place to niggle at him, but he didn’t get many chances to cook with her anymore, wasted or otherwise, and he wasn’t going to sulk his way through it.
“You watching anything good lately?” he asked, and she scoffed, balancing a hand under the kettle as she moved back over to the counter. It was probably a good idea – she’d filled it pretty full – he still flinched internally at the reminder that she couldn’t manage it one-handed anymore.
“I’m not telling you anything if you’re just going to report it to your sister,” she told him, and Weevil laughed.
“Like I’d ever tell on you. Is she back on some kind of anti-telenovela crusade? Don’t let her bully you, those romcoms she watches are just as trashy half the time.”
“Qué es trashy?” she said, eyes twinkling.
“Aw, come on, cut me a break. I didn’t say they were bad. But they’re not winning any Emmys either, right?”
He half-expected her to keep pretending she didn’t know what it meant, make him really squirm, but Abuela always went easier on him than his grandma did.
“I found a good one,” she told him, slowly pulling down a couple bowls from the cabinet. He didn’t miss that she put three packets worth of oatmeal in his, and he kept a pointed eye on her until she added a second one to her own bowl as well. “Not just exciting, the acting is pretty good too. Watch what you’re doing so you don’t cut off your fingers.”
“We’re going to the hospital anyway,” he told her, making a show of brushing it off, and she clucked and smiled and shook her head. Weevil took advantage of her distraction to peel the slices he’d produced without getting chided for ‘throwing away all the good parts’. “Tell me about the show,” he said, sweeping the peel out of the way and chopping the rest into smaller pieces.
It was a historical show, apparently – nothing like the Mexican Revolution or maybe its aftermath to add a little spice to the plot – and it was about the bastard son of an American officer who’d been raised half in the States and half in Mexico and had a mysterious illness that left him periodically bedridden with no other symptoms (he was definitely going to tragically and spontaneously die of it at some point), and an ambitious guitar-playing best friend. He was married to a devout woman who hated her husband’s best friend… or she did if Weevil was keeping the characters straight. Maybe she hated her husband, although he wasn’t sure why, unless it was the guitar-playing – which was a little extreme, but weirder things happened in telenovelas. He laid even odds she became a nun at some point.
“And then Esteban had to walk all the way back from Ciudad de México with Diego’s guitar, to tell Maria he’d died, and when she saw him coming down the road, Lucia thought it was her father and she ran out to greet him, but as soon as Maria realized who it was, she knew Diego must be dead.”
“So I bet she hated him even more after that,” Weevil said, but Abuela shook her head.
“No,” she said as the kettle went off. “She took him inside and gave him something to eat. I think she knows he’s the only one who can understand her grief. And also I believe he’s secretly in love with her.”
That checked out, he thought, forcing himself not to help her pour the water, even though the kettle was too hot to brace and even with two hands on the handle her hold looked precarious. Although if Esteban really was the only one who could understand Maria’s grief, that sounded more like he was in love with her husband – something Weevil decided not to point out.
“I bet he’s not really dead,” he said instead, tipping the pieces of apple off the cutting board and into the bowls. “She’s going to marry Esteban, and then Diego comes back and she’s so guilty she becomes a nun – and then Esteban dies of his tragic illness.” It could happen the other way around, too; more likely, there would be three or four cycles of every dramatic combination before one of them finally died and left the show for good, or it ended on the most melodramatically tragic note it could manage. Probably both.
“You always think everyone’s going to become a nun,” Abuela told him. “Maria has a young daughter, she’s not going to become a nun.”
Weevil took his bowl and got out of the way so she could go sit down at the table in the tiny connected living room/dining room. “But you like it?”
“It’s not as good as Bodas de Odio,” she said. “But it’s better than Amor Real from last year. That was just Bodas de Odio over again, anyway.”
“I bet you had fun watching it, though. You always say they don’t do enough historical stuff.”
“If I wanted to see people in regular clothes behave like lunatics, I’d go outside,” she told him, eyes twinkling mischievously as he snorted so hard he nearly choked on his first bite of oatmeal. “That’s why I don’t watch the American soap operas, even though I wouldn’t have to find new ones so often.”
“I thought you stopped watching English soap operas because Mom caught you letting us watch One Life To Live and had a fit,” Weevil said drily.
That earned him an annoyed wave. “Eat your breakfast.”
He did, grinning.
*
They got out of the house almost on time, mostly because he managed to do the dishes before Abuela could insist on doing it, and that left her nothing to do but start to collect her things. (And criticize the tattoos on his forearms, even though she’d seen them at Christmas. He’d had to bite his lip so he looked subdued when she complained that ‘Soulja’ wasn’t even spelled correctly, instead of bursting out laughing.) The ride to the hospital was quiet, even though he’d offered to put on music – she said no, and she never liked to talk in the car, so she closed her eyes and leaned her head back, and Weevil tried not to glance over every thirty seconds.
“Grandma was afraid I was going to take you on my motorcycle,” he said, when the quiet got to be a little too much, and Abuela opened her eyes, smiling in surprise.
“I always wanted a handsome young man to take me on an exciting ride like that,” she teased him, and Weevil snorted and rolled his eyes, secretly pleased. When she called him handsome it made him feel about eight years old, but somehow that was kind of nice. “Do you have a girlfriend yet, Eli?”
“No, Abuela,” he said, exaggeratedly patient so she’d know he thought the question was annoying.
“You should grow your hair. You have such a nice face, if you grew your hair out just a little, all the girls would want you.”
“I thought I was already handsome.” He shot her a distressed look without taking his eyes off the road. “And who says all the girls don’t want me already?”
He didn’t have any illusions about the fact that the girls who were all over him – with the exception of Veronica Mars, who didn’t really count – would throw themselves just as hard at Dante or Felix if they were the ones in charge. With a sick lurch of his stomach that also carried a thread of vindictive triumph, it occurred to him that he could pretty much say the same thing about Lilly. He tried not to imagine just how shocked she’d be to be compared to Gus’s leftover groupies – he wasn’t ever going to talk to her again, so it didn’t matter. He didn’t care what Lilly thought anymore, anyway.
That wasn’t true, exactly. But he was working on it. He’d cared a lot more a few months ago.
Abuela had closed her eyes again, and he thought he was off the hook, but as he turned off towards the hospital, she said, “If all the girls want you, why don’t you have a girlfriend?”
“I’m too busy trying to pass Algebra,” he told her, mostly to make her laugh. It wasn’t like he could give her a real answer. You didn’t tell your great-grandmother that you were more interested in hooking up than going steady, and he was absolutely not going to tell her about getting his heart stomped on, or about wondering what the point even was, when he was probably going to end up in jail sooner or later, anyway.
“You’re still doing good in school?” she asked him, pretending she wasn’t anxious about it. Like he didn’t know that she never kept a conversation going this long when they were driving.
“Doing okay. Think I finally passed, but now I have to do the harder one. I might graduate this year, though.” He hadn’t meant to say it – he tried to avoid giving her false hope – and it wasn’t until the words came out of his mouth that he realized how badly he wanted to. Not just finally to be done with school, which he never had any trouble admitting, but so he could actually say he did it. No one in his family had graduated since his grandma, unless you counted Tio Victor, which you shouldn’t because he was a piece of shit. Nobody was expecting Weevil to be the one to buck the trend – except Abuela, and even that didn’t really count. She’d been sure Chardo was going to graduate this year too.
“Or next year,” Weevil amended, to be safe. “But I’m – you know, I’m going.” Abuela had been heartbroken when Claudia dropped out, even though everyone else had been busy flipping out that Dave had knocked her up.
“You’re a good boy,” she told him.
“Tell Grandma that sometime,” he said, half-distracted by pulling into the parking lot and looking for a good space. “Or all the time. You know.” There wasn’t anything good, so he pulled in by the curb right out front. “I’m gonna have to meet you. Let me get all your stuff.”
He got out to help her out of the car, which meant he could also hand her the stuff she needed, at least the things that weren’t already in her purse. “Meet you inside, okay?”
By the time he parked and got back to the main doors, she was gone, which made him slightly anxious, even though it was a good sign. It would have been worse if she hadn’t even been able to make the elevators in that time. He caught up to her easily on the third floor, because the waiting room they needed was pretty far away from the elevators for some stupid reason.
“We’ve still got fifteen minutes,” he told her, which of course resulted in being informed that he’d been worried about nothing, as if he wasn’t the one who’d been busting his ass to get them here with time to spare. “Abuela, why don’t you get a cane or something, huh?” He pretended not to see her upset expression. “Then you could hit people with it when they get in your way.”
That cushioned the suggestion enough for her to pretend she wasn’t upset, and Weevil played along, even though he could see right through it. “Come on,” he added gently. “We gotta tell ’em you’re here so they don’t give away the appointment the way they like to.” It was bullshit when being on time just meant they’d have to wait forty-five minutes, but it wasn’t like he could do anything about it. “Go sit, I got you.”
The duty nurse, or the receptionist, or whoever she was, eyed him suspiciously as he came up to the counter, and Weevil ground his back teeth to keep from telling her that he could get drugs twice as easy on the street as he could trying to steal them from a hospital, and that he was pretty sure most of the people stealing painkillers were nurses anyway.
“Paloma Contreras,” he told her, forcing himself to smile nice as he inclined his head towards Abuela. “For Dr. Rogorzinski.”
“Patients need to check in themselves,” she told him.
“She doesn’t speak English,” Weevil shot back, which was even true. He hadn’t said can’t. “She’s here about her hip and you want me to make her stand up and walk all the way over here? She already had to walk way too far because this hospital is designed like shit.” He forced himself to keep his voice under control, so the words came out tight and fake-polite instead of loud and pissed-off, but there was only so much rolling over he could bring himself to do.
The woman gave him a dirty look, but she checked her little list or searched up Abuela’s chart or whatever the computer was for. “Dr. Rogorzinski is running late – you’ll have to wait.”
“Big fucking surprise,” he muttered, but at least she wasn’t giving him anymore trouble, so he mustered up an insincere smile and retreated to where Abuela was sitting.
“I hope you brought a book to read while we’re waiting,” he told Abuela, and she shook her head.
“So disorganized,” she told him. “It’s like this every time. I don’t know why they don’t just make the appointment later. It’s inconsiderate.” The old lady sitting a few seats down glanced up with an expression like she’d just stepped in dog shit. It was because of him, he knew – when Leticia brought her mother to appointments, they both spoke Spanish and only the real assholes cared. Weevil always got used to the English-Spanish rhythm of their exchanges until something like this happened, and then he remembered that it pissed people off a lot more when they figured you could speak English but you weren’t.
He stretched, letting his sleeves ride up to really expose the tattoos on his arms, and shot the woman a toothy, unfriendly smile until she looked away. Then he rolled up his sleeves, just to really make the point, and kept looking at her as he responded in English. “Yeah, they are, aren’t they.”
Maybe he didn’t usually bully grandmas, but this bitch wasn’t his grandma, and he felt entirely satisfied when she got up and moved several more seats away from them.
“The last time I was here, this woman kept calling me Pamela,” Abuela added. “Your abuela had to say, ‘Will Pamela be paying for it?’” She shook her head. “I already had to change my last name when we moved here because of the forms, I’m not changing my first name.”
“Really fills you with confidence,” he said, snagging a pen and a pan of paper from the mess of magazines on the nearest table. “So since we gotta wait – hangman, or tic-tac-toe?”
Chapter 28: Liable To Error
Notes:
Guess who's back on schedule? :) No big warnings this time, although there are some allusions to canon-typical heavy subject-matter happening offscreen.
Chapter Text
All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.
John Locke
Veronica had been steadily ignoring the upcoming dance. Not so much out of stubbornness, just because it had largely seemed like it couldn’t possibly affect her. When the posters had gone up, she’d been too focussed on the twin distractions of finals and Carrie’s accusations to care or even notice much, but now the new semester was starting, there was nothing to drag her attention away from it.
Her initial impulse had been to mock it relentlessly – what kind of weak theme is 80s, anyway? It’s been less than fifteen years since the end of the eighties and most of them were born in that decade, so it’s a little early to start using it as a theme. The seventies, maybe – but Meg had looked so disheartened by her opening quips about shoulder pads and big hair that she’d dropped the subject pretty quickly.
They’d had to go to class before she decided whether to say anything of more substance, anyway. It was a bit of a drag – Veronica had gotten used to starting the day with at least one friendly face, and now she didn’t have any classes with Meg until after lunch, and it was only one, not three. The only upside was that she had Computer Science first, which gave her a little extra time to wake up before the real science demanded her attention. She’d always found it less forgiving of a half-engaged brain than English was.
Not that there was all that much engagement going on. Maybe she hadn’t noticed all the dance talk for the same reason she hadn’t paid attention to the posters until now, or maybe her classmates had also been too busy studying – or gossiping – to really devote themselves to the full high school experience of anticipating a dance. Either way, Veronica found herself alternately interested and exasperated by the buzz around her, particularly in Physics, where she was trying to actually pay attention to Mr. Saunders and the syllabus.
It wasn’t that much better in her other classes, although she cared less, at least for academic reasons. As surprised as Veronica had been by Meg’s reaction that morning, a few hours’ relentless exposure made it hard not to feel a twinge. Jeremy had been very much a rebound from Troy – she felt safe saying that now – but even a useless boyfriend waiting in the wings was worth having for the giggly prep time in someone else’s bathroom, the days or even weeks of back and forth about boys and shoes and whether you should go dress shopping together. A dance was even better than a party for that, and the fact that Veronica had no particular interest in the dance itself beyond a faint wistfulness for how things were three boyfriends ago didn’t make it sting any less that she didn’t have anyone to trade shoes and jewelry with anymore.
Meg would, of course. She was great, and she was definitely the best friend Veronica had right now. But there was a difference between having a best friend, and having a best friend. It felt equal parts disloyal and pathetic to miss it, when she’d a thousand times rather have Meg than Lilly, and yet…
But regardless, Meg wasn’t going to the dance any more than Veronica. Who would ask either of them, anyway? Veronica enjoyed defying expectations as much as anyone, but showing up stag solely to be ignored and mocked all night was not her idea of a good time.
They could always try to scrounge up dates, of course – maybe Meg could ask Corny, and Veronica… maybe Veronica could ask a freshman, and dazzle him into submission with her worldliness. She snorted to herself at the image; it wasn’t easy for her to find a guy who was shorter than her, but that was one thing that might just do it, so the pictures would be interesting. Or even better, she could bring Backup. For her own amusement, she made the picture more ridiculous by imagining Corny in a suit over a T-shirt with a marijuana leaf on it. Meg’s parents would love that.
It occurred to her suddenly that maybe Lizzie was going. It would be a lot harder to ignore the dance or blow it off as a waste of time if you lived in the same house with someone who was doing all those same silly, frivolous girly things you missed.
By the time lunch rolled around, she had something of a plan.
“Do you want to come over on Friday?” she asked Meg. “Spend the night if you want. I haven’t had a sleepover since… well, not for a while. We can watch movie musicals and make popcorn, and I promise to mock only upon request. Dance talk strictly off-limits.”
Meg gave a sighing half-laugh. “Am I really that pathetic?”
Veronica shrugged one shoulder. “I actually thought maybe I was being a bit insensitive this morning. Also, I miss having classes with you. I didn’t realize it helped to be able to look around the room and see a sane person.”
That got her a brighter laugh. “Yeah, me too. What do you have after lunch?”
“Civics, Psych, and Foods,” Veronica said immediately.
“I should have taken Foods,” Meg reflected. “I wish I’d taken History last semester.” She frowned. “Although then I guess I would have been taking it from a creep.”
“He was a really good teacher, though,” Veronica told her regretfully. “Maybe Clemmons won’t be too bad. I mean, he used to be a teacher.”
“I bet he won’t feed us, though.”
Veronica laughed. “Seriously, though – Friday. My house. I’ll feed you.”
Meg pressed a hand to her heart. “I do like a provider.”
“What’s going on?” Jasmine plopped her tray down on the other side of the table. “Seriously, give me something else to think about.”
“I was just trying to convince Meg to come over for a girls’ night on Friday,” Veronica told her. Good manners prompted her to add, “You should come too – I don’t know if you like movie musicals, but–”
But Jasmine just laughed. “You don’t have to invite me.” She waved off Meg’s protest. “I know you guys are, like, tight. Anyway, there’s a party on Friday. Cervando wants to go together together.” She winced. “And I gotta keep him happy, because I have Daniels for English again.”
“Oh, no.” Meg leaned in, concerned. “You didn’t pass?”
“No, I did!” Jasmine’s bouncy relief only faded slightly as she added, “I thought I was going to have Dunne for senior English, but I’m stuck with grumpyguts again.”
Veronica snorted at that description, which seemed to please the other girl, but Meg still looked troubled. “If you want help with English, I bet I could help you. Or Veronica. You shouldn’t have to date a guy just for that.”
Jasmine shrugged, her cheeriness undented. “Honestly, I kind of like Cervando. He’s cute, you know? I just like things casual, and he’s all about tryna lock everything down.” She winced. “I think I’m his first girlfriend – like, not the first girl ever, but he’s all over getting serious and it’s like, we’re not getting married, right? Calm down, you’re not even fifteen. Which I kind of feel weird about too, but he’s so smart, it’s kind of like he’s older, right?” She toyed with the plastic fork in her macaroni. “I keep thinking I should cut him loose, ‘cause he’s younger or when he gets jealous, but then he does something nice or gets me alone and I don’t want to.”
“He looks older than fourteen,” Veronica offered, although she was only about seventy percent sure the guy she was thinking of was Cervando.
“Yeah, at least his birthday’s soon. Then it’ll be a little less weird.”
“You’re not… actually having sex, though?” Meg asked tentatively, sounding like she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer either way.
Jasmine shook her head, curls bouncing, which was faintly surprising to Veronica, albeit something of a relief. “No way. Strictly handjobs only until he turns fifteen. I’m not a creep.”
Meg choked on her own tongue and Veronica found herself shocked into helpless laughter. She was pretty sure she was rapidly turning red.
“What?” Jasmine asked, with a combination of feigned innocence and real surprise that was weirdly charming. “This is the slut table, right? Are you saying we don’t talk about handjobs here?”
“I wasn’t – expecting–” Meg choked out, as Veronica wheezed. Meg looked between her and Jasmine like she wasn’t sure who to remonstrate with, then gave up on words entirely and made a creditable attempt at hiding in her lunchbox. Jasmine laughed.
“What, like you never gave one,” she said. Veronica sucked in a deep breath, dwelling on the embarrassment she still hadn’t quite shaken over her misstep during the one complete handjob she’d ever given, and tried to regain her composure.
“Meg isn’t that type of slut,” she told Jasmine, voice only marginally strained. Meg ignored them both in favour of focussing very intently on the mini cinnamon buns in her lunch.
“You’re kidding?” The other girl sounded genuinely surprised. “But it’s so easy! I mean, if he wants to do it back, you have to train him to do it right – most guys think all girls like the exact same thing, I swear – but–” She cut herself off, apparently realizing she was getting farther away from their experience the longer she talked. “You guys need, like, slut tutoring or something.”
“I’ve given a handjob,” Veronica said, aiming for dignified nonchalance, even though saying it out loud made her uncomfortable. She kept her gaze aimed at the air between the other two girls. “For your information.”
The experience didn’t quite line up with what Jasmine was saying, even though it was also the prevailing view – handjobs were a favour, a bridge when sex was off the table for whatever reason and you were too classy for a blowjob, a way to get your boyfriend off your back when you didn’t want to sleep with him but weren’t quite willing to break up over it. The girl wasn’t typically assumed to get anything out of it, bar the kind of reciprocation Jasmine was talking about, but even with the awkwardness and embarrassment that threaded through her memory of the week before, it was impossible to forget how intensely hot the encounter had been. It had been top of her mind over the weekend, once exams were finished and the hearing was over and her period had no longer prevented her from dwelling on it in a more active way. But she wasn’t saying that to anyone, and as enjoyable as thinking about it was, she wasn’t sure she wanted to repeat it in a hurry. That level of intensity was… a lot.
“I don’t want to know this,” Meg said. She stared fixedly at her lunchbox in a way that contained at least a little self-directed humour. “I don’t want to know this, I don’t want to know this, I don’t wa–”
Veronica shoved her shoulder.
“A handjob? Like one?” Jasmine’s eyes flashed devilishly despite the innocent tone of her clarification, and Veronica raised her chin, putting on as much dignity as possible as she declined to answer.
“I don’t want to know,” Meg said. “Do not tell me.”
It was still tempting to clarify, because Veronica did not want to encourage the idea that she’d done that kind of thing with Jeremy, and tolerating speculation about her physical relationship with Duncan made her feel vaguely ill… but getting more specific would come perilously close to admitting out loud just how limited her sexual experience was. Troy, she decided. She could let them think it was Troy. It wasn’t like she was actually lying about it.
“I won’t – I won’t tell you,” she said, adding the emphasis when Meg pretended to cover her ears. “I just want to say that it wasn’t Jeremy.”
Jasmine laughed, even though Veronica wasn’t entirely sure that she knew who Jeremy was. “Look, I’m not judging. If the guy didn’t complain, you’re good. But, you know, if you want tips…”
Veronica felt herself flushing. He hadn’t complained, she reminded herself. She also didn’t want tips from Jasmine at all, especially in front of Meg – maybe it would be different if they didn’t all know she was going to use them on a guy Jasmine had actual personal experience with, but also maybe not. A little titillated giggling with your friends was one thing, but she’d never been one for explicit play-by-plays. Even Lilly had thrown a careless layer of strategic vagueness over some things, but Jasmine didn’t seem to feel it necessary to draw a veil over anything.
“If I want tips, I’ll buy Cosmo,” she said.
Meg snickered. “Lizzie used to get Cosmo,” she explained when Veronica looked at her. “Dad banned it from the house after the summer. I’m not sure if it was because of the thing at camp or if he just, you know, read an issue and realized what was in it.” Misgivings aside, Veronica couldn’t help snorting at that image. “I’m pretty sure she still buys it,” Meg added. “She’s just hiding it in her pillowcase. But she didn’t tell on me when I hid muffins in my closet and forgot about them until the ants showed up, so I’m keeping my mouth shut.”
“How did your dad not know?” Veronica asked, smirking. “The covers say stuff like ‘Sex He’ll Go Wild For’.” Lilly had also been an avid subscriber of Cosmo.
“I don’t think he was really looking at the covers, just going ‘oh, it’s a girl magazine’ and fishing Insight out of the mail. Also he may have mixed it up with Cosmogirl.”
“Very different,” Veronica observed, grinning.
“All girl magazines are the same, apparently.” Meg sighed. “The hot topic at home right now is if she should still be allowed to get Seventeen or if it’s a corrupting influence or something. I don’t know why they think making her only read Brio and Ignite Your Faith is going to do anything other than make her hate them. It would make me mad, and I like Brio.”
“The sex tips in Christian magazines must be fun,” Veronica observed. Meg gave a strangled, surprised laugh and Jasmine cackled.
“I could write some,” she offered. “‘If you’re going to confess, better make it good – how to keep the boys coming back even after they repent. Step one–‘”
She stopped, probably because Veronica had nearly choked on her sandwich. She mostly looked pleased with herself, but Meg patted Veronica on the shoulder, her expression caught between concern and amusement.
“Maybe they’ll put it in the school paper,” Veronica suggested, her voice only slightly strangled.
Jasmine laughed. “That would be great. Can you imagine?”
“As long as they don’t make me read it on the announcements,” Meg said drily. She considered for a moment. “I’m pretty sure Protestant sex tips would just be – one: don’t do it; two: if you do it, don’t plan it; three: don’t enjoy it.”
That made the other girl shriek with delight and lean across to high-five her. “You’re really fun, you know? You should come over sometime. Really confuse my parents.”
“It’s not too late to come over on Friday,” Veronica offered, more sincerely this time. Being mildly scandalizing seemed to perk Meg up at least as much as being mildly scandalized. “If you’re not going to the dance anyway…”
Jasmine just laughed at her. Veronica wasn’t sure there was anything she wasn’t willing to laugh about. “A school dance? Yeah, right. People like me don’t go to school dances – they’re for rich kids and richie-rich wannabes. Anyway, the music’s always lame. I told Cervando I’d go to the party, though.” She made an apologetic face. “It’s not your guys’s scene or I’d get you in – Miguel never cares who comes to his parties, but he’d notice if you two showed up.”
“I go to parties,” Meg interjected, mildly offended. “Well, I did before I was a social pariah. I’m not that much of a killjoy.”
Veronica tried to think of a diplomatic way to communicate the difference between the kind of parties they were talking about, but Jasmine beat her to it – minus the diplomacy.
“Yeah, but white people parties, right? Like maybe you slummed it outside of the 09 but you weren’t coming to our parties before.”
She didn’t sound mad, but Meg flushed and subsided, murmuring an apology. Veronica was suddenly reminded of what she’d said about her parents, and James Van Zyl, and Yolanda. It was hard not to suspect that people who wouldn’t take kindly to the idea of their daughter dating a black man also had certain opinions on immigrants.
“I heard that people actually stopped inviting Meg to parties because of the spontaneous showtunes,” Veronica said, tipping her head in mock-serious acknowledgement. “So you’re probably making the right call.”
Everyone laughed at that, and Meg threw her empty Clif bar wrapper at Veronica – very ineffectively. It fluttered back down to the table immediately.
“I don’t do that!”
“I could believe it,” Jasmine said, grinning. Veronica let the two of them bicker amicably while she rechecked her schedule, as if her Civics teacher would have changed in the last hour. No such luck.
“I should go,” she told the other two. “I have an appointment to be bored to death. I say we meet back here on Friday to decide whether Clemmons or Galloway is more boring. I don’t know who you have,” she told Jasmine apologetically.
“Daniels is my worst teacher,” the other girl said promptly. “But he’s not boring, he’s a hardass. I don’t have anyone as bad as Galloway for that.”
“It’s a plan,” Meg said. “I sort of thought I was going to see you before Friday, though.” She raised her eyebrows meaningfully, but Veronica ignored the implication.
“Probably,” she said, “but no teacher-talk until Friday. I can only face so much when I’m staring down a seventeen-hour monotone lecture every fifth period.”
Meg laughed and granted her that much, and Veronica made a mental note that she needed to find out who was using the extra art classroom this semester, and when. Not that it would have mattered today; so far she hadn’t been able to spot Weevil anywhere. Who skipped the first day of the semester? It wasn’t like most of the teachers were going to make them do actual work today anyway.
Her analysis on that issue ended up being accurate, with the sole and painful exception of Mrs. Galloway, who did indeed subject them to her usual monotone lecture. The structure of the class meant she had to interrupt herself more often to let them do work or answer questions, but Veronica had underestimated how much worse the woman’s dry teaching style would be on material that didn’t have a narrative. Fortunately Psych was both lighter and more interesting, and in seventh period Ms. Terry just gave them a safety lecture and then let them have the rest of class to pass their ‘I can be trusted around a hot oven’ written test.
It might not have been quite the cap on the school day Veronica had been hoping for, but casually walking through the hall she was pretty sure Weevil’s locker was in hadn’t borne any fruit, and at least it was better than ending with Civics. If she’d had it seventh period, there was no way she’d have been able to pay even a modicum of attention, and she’d probably have ended up with a C or something.
It was good enough, anyway, even if she was halfway regretting giving up her free period for Gym. But it wasn’t like she could have stayed on the pep squad, and at least she hadn’t had to go toe-to-toe with Ms. James again. Despite her not-quite-bluff last semester, she really did not want to drag her parents into anything messy, especially since she knew they were relieved that the Lilly drama was over and that things were going okay for her again – as far as they knew.
Not that things weren’t going okay. She was hardly devastated or anything, anymore. This was just… a dip, and once the rest of her brain caught up to the part of her that knew she didn’t care about some dance, or any of the trappings, or good memories that still stung because she’d made them with the wrong person, she’d forget she’d even been concerned about it.
*
It was also Book Week. Veronica had forgotten, because the dance posters were far more prominent, but when her shortcut past the library made her nearly late for first period on Tuesday, it didn’t take her long to realize why. She couldn’t say that the crush of people lining up to flip through stack of books on cramped tables made the prospect of finding something new and cheap to read all that appealing – but of course they couldn’t set up in the gym! That was for the dance!
Maybe she’d stop by after school, though – if she wasn’t otherwise occupied. Right now the more pressing question was whether they’d started setting up for the dance yet and if her class was going to be booted out of the gym on the second day of the semester.
Actually, scratch that, the more pressing question was why didn’t her Computer Science class have assigned seating? She’d noticed yesterday that she was stuck in another class with Jeremy, but he’d been all the way on the other side of the computer lab and (as far as she could tell), still suitably chastened after the baseball card incident. But today he’d switched seats after about five minutes so he could talk to Braden Patterson, and Veronica’s carefully chosen spot in the back, which was supposed to get her away from everyone else, just meant she was boxed in. Not to mention that being barely three computers away from him meant she had to hear both of them whining about video games for the entire class, which was something she was supposed to have escaped when the relationship ended.
Both of them were clearly taking the teacher’s instructions to check out the design of their favourite websites a little too liberally, but Mr. Rafferty didn’t seem inclined to police them. Veronica couldn’t be too surprised; he was also her gym teacher, and she imagined he was just glad no one had asked any difficult questions yet.
She tried blocking them out as she skimmed through a couple shopping websites – not that she did much online shopping, but this was prep for the ‘designing a website’ project they were starting with, and that kind of website felt like an easy way to fulfill the assignment requirements. But, predictably, the harder she tried not to listen, the more their voices wormed their way into her head.
Jeremy was complaining about not being able to get the new Resident Evil game because his dad was still mad at him, and what had been the point in even hanging on to his GameCube, seriously, by the time his dad got off his back it would be out on PlayStation. Veronica felt a very strong urge to shake him back and forth until his neck snapped and his head fell off, but she stared determinedly at her computer screen while they started in on Gran Turismo 4 and how unfair it was that Jeremy would probably still be grounded when it came out. Reading between the lines, she surmised his dad had taken all the game systems away – much more efficient than trying to keep him out of the den or collect all the individual games. Knowing that was a little satisfying, but it wasn’t worth listening to him whine.
The shopping websites were probably a bust anyway – they all had filtering mechanisms that Veronica wasn’t sure how to recreate on the program they were going to be using. She wasn’t even sure if it could do that, but either way it felt like too much work. Maybe she’d just do a movie review site; that would make it easy to have multiple pages that hyperlinked to each other. It wouldn’t be too much trouble to write the reviews, and she didn’t mind having an excuse to channel her inner Roger Ebert.
Braden and Jeremy had moved on to discussing upcoming releases and how long it was going to be for the next GTA game, interrupting her focus, and Veronica decided she’d had enough. She did a little surreptitious searching until she found a music site that streamed audio, dodging the school firewall’s prohibition on downloading it, and turned up the volume so that if she was to accidentally hit play on a song, it would be as loud as possible.
Maintaining her innocence meant that she couldn’t turn to make sure she saw the look on Jeremy’s face when his next sentence was cut off by the sudden blaring of Run-D.M.C.’s You Talk Too Much, but he was still half out of his chair in shock when she glanced up, feigned concern in Mr. Rafferty’s general direction and said, “Oops!”, so she still got a decent look before she had to turn round and fumble to turn it off. It made it slightly harder to hide a smile as she pretended she couldn’t find the volume control.
“Sorry,” she told Mr. Rafferty once she finally deemed it necessary to shut the song off. “I didn’t know it was going to start playing like that.”
He winced in her general direction, but appeared to decide that she was telling the truth. “How about we all take this as a reminder to check our volume settings. I’m going to go around and get you all to tell me what you’ve been noticing about the website design.” He lowered his voice to a regular volume. “Veronica, why don’t you start.”
“Sure.” He came over and bent down to look at her screen while she explained that the filter and search functions on shopping and music websites seemed too hard to replicate, so she was looking at review sites.
“They’re not selling something, so the branding is different,” she said, pointing to the top of the site she was on. She had no problem pulling something out of thin air to make it seem like she’d been working harder than she was, but she suspected Jeremy and Braden would have more difficulty. “On the review sites and blogs they can have more complicated stuff because it doesn’t have to stick in your mind the same way. I think people remember the name and not the logo.”
It was good enough for Mr. Rafferty, who nodded and told her to look at some more blogs and review sites, and moved on to Braden, who was closest. A quick glance told Veronica that he was not impressing.
More importantly, they’d stopped talking incessantly, and she still had forty minutes left of class to surf movie and music review blogs with explicit permission from the teacher. Game, set, and match to Veronica.
*
Weevil was on the point of wishing he hadn’t come to school today, instead of yesterday. Sure, he’d had the world’s biggest bitch of a hangover yesterday, but today was shaping up to be an even bigger headache than that was.
“The fuck would he do that?” he asked Ric, even though he knew exactly why. “Is he stupid?”
Ric only shrugged. “Same reason he did it last time? I just know what Pepe said. He said you’d want to know.”
“That I got a guy doing down for shit like this? Yeah, I need to know about that.” He slammed the side of his fist against the nearest locker, giving a nearby freshman who looked like he was going to protest a look so nasty the kid squeaked and ran off.
He couldn’t tell Ric that this was a lot worse than last time, because anyone could get into a fight if you ran into your ex and her new boyfriend and the backbiting escalated into throwing hands, but premeditation gave things a different cast. Even worse, Red was still on parole for that; even worse, this was a different new boyfriend, so it was an obvious pattern instead of maybe just a beef with one guy; even worse, he wouldn’t be surprised if this finally pushed Francisca over the edge into getting a restraining order. Red had been in before even Gus, which carried a lot of weight, and Weevil didn’t want to deal with the repercussions of cutting him loose, but if he didn’t do something he was going to have problems with more than one of the guys, because Francisca’s cousin was good at getting people on his side. And on top of that, this was the kind of bullshit that turned people against you, because nobody cared if guys like them beat the shit out of each other, but the guy Francisca had been dating was some kind of assistant manager somewhere. Weevil needed a certain amount of the ambivalent leeway the community granted as long as the club was doing more good distracting the cops and coming down on guys like the one who’d put Francisca in the hospital than they were frightening to their neighbours.
Maybe he could have mentioned a couple of those things, carefully selected, to Felix, or even to Chardo (with strict instructions to keep them to himself), but he couldn’t spill that kind of detail to Ric or Dante or even Hector. Instead he said, “Bootsy’s going to be pissed.”
Ric, who’d seemed both uncomfortable and disinterested until now, straightened up, his eyes widening. “Oh, shit. They’re related, right?”
Weevil tipped his head in acknowledgement. “He didn’t love that shit from before, but going at a guy in public is different than beating his head in ‘cause he caught you tearing his car apart.”
The worst part is that if Red had just stolen the car, instead of going all creepy stalker on it, smashing the headlights and tearing up the seats and whatever else he was doing, he could have had his petty little revenge without crossing the line. Probably without getting caught, too – Angel’s guys could have had the car apart and scrubbed by tomorrow, if it was a rush job, and all Weevil would have had to do was okay them a higher cut.
But he might have wanted the guy to catch him, just to get an excuse to beat the shit out of him, and he had no business skulking around Francisca’s apartment like that anyway. Either way Weevil was going to have to come down hard on him, because all the cred they’d gotten from handling that methed-up creep was gone, now, and Red was the one who’d pissed it away.
It might be better for everyone if he got busted hard for this. Weevil wouldn’t have to actually kick him out, the club could distance themselves from him without the hard line of beating him out, and it might mollify Francisca – Weevil might have to go talk to her personally; this wasn’t something he could leave to Bootsy. But it could be managed.
“They pick him up already?” he asked Ric.
“Pepe says no, but Francisca already told the cops he did it.”
“That’s fine,” Weevil said. “We’re not coming down on her for that, she’s good. Make sure the guys know about that, if they’re talking about this.”
“Pepe keeps his mouth shut pretty good,” Ric observed. “He’s not like Felix. But Bootsy might be talking about it already, I don’t know.”
“You’re right about Pepe,” Weevil told him, nodding in agreement. Ric was wrong about Felix, who actually could keep his mouth shut about the important stuff – but he sounded off about every thought that went through his head otherwise, half the time, so Ric wasn’t the first to get that wrong. People always forgot that Felix grew up in the same house as Gus. And a little approval at the right time made things go smoother, especially when it came to Ric. “Just make sure they’re mad at the right person, I don’t care if they pick Red or the cops or even the fucking boyfriend as long as it’s not Francisca.”
Ric nodded, puffing up a little as if Weevil had given him actual responsibility and not just told him the same thing he was going to tell everyone else, and disappeared towards third period, or maybe to smoke behind the gym. Weevil didn’t care, except that they’d be more likely to get caught skipping if they went in the same direction, so he headed the opposite way. He needed to call Pepe, and to make at least a token effort to get a hold of Red. Just because it would be more convenient for him to go to jail didn’t mean Weevil could get away with not doing his best to run damage control – that would go down very badly if anyone found out about it.
He checked himself when he realized he was headed in the direction of the empty art classroom that he always ended up using to hook up with Veronica Mars in. It wasn’t his default hideout for when he was sick of class or had to handle something while he was at school, but going in this direction had apparently turned on some kind of autopilot. It seemed like something not to encourage, mostly because it was faintly embarrassing, but also because he had no idea if it would still be empty anymore. The last thing he wanted to do was show up if there was a teacher in there, or worse a whole class, especially if they’d noticed that missing paint. He wouldn’t normally be a suspect for something like that, and the last thing he wanted to do was put himself on anyone’s list.
He doubled back instead, until he found that supply closet that Lilly had used to drag him into sometimes, and slipped inside. It was strange, off, but he broke the weird familiarity by sitting down facing the door, which wasn’t a view he’d ever had when they were hooking up.
Then he texted Pepe, bit the inside of his cheek to fight the desire to fob Red off on text as well, and finally called him, like he fucking had to.
Red didn’t answer, which he’d half-expected. He might just be busy, ducking the cops, or even ditched his phone, but Weevil would have bet even odds he was being ignored.
Pepe said he had fifteen minutes – probably on his break – so Weevil called him. “José,” he said when the man picked up. “So you got details for me?”
“Did the kid remember to tell you everything?” Pepe asked, like Ric wasn’t the same age as Weevil. “He’s a pain in the ass.”
“You could’ve called me yourself,” Weevil pointed out.
“I was already on the clock, man. Anyway, he comes in all the time, checking up on his brother or some shit.”
“It’s because they live a block away,” Weevil said, although he made a mental note of that. It was possible Ric was checking up on Manolo – but if Manolo had found himself another hookup, it was also possible he’d talked Ric into running product for him again. They should both know better, but Manolo was stupid and Ric was stubborn, so it wasn’t impossible. Something to look into, but that one he could give himself a minute to figure out. Take care of this clusterfuck first.
“Well, anyway, I saw him last night, and he told me what went down. Said he got out of there when he heard Francisca coming, so she probably didn’t actually see him, but–”
“Who else is going to be trashing her boyfriend’s car and beating his face in?” Weevil finished sourly.
“Yeah,” Pepe agreed, his voice dry, “and I guess he left his knife behind.”
“That stupid motherfucker,” Weevil said, disbelief dripping from his tone. “No way they don’t get prints off a pocket-knife.”
“Could have been worse – at least he dropped it before he went at the guy.”
That was more than Weevil wanted to think about, but he forced himself to anyway. Nothing good came out of hiding from unpleasant ideas. “Yeah, well, if he doesn’t get his shit together he will be going down for manslaughter next time. No wonder Francisca’s had it.”
There was a rustling on the other end, probably Pepe shrugging. “She shouldn’t have dumped him,” he said, unconcerned. “Anyway. I should get back.”
“You could’ve called me yourself,” Weevil told him again, letting just a hint of steel creep into his voice. “Last night.”
“Man, it was two in the morning and I was at Sylvia’s. I only stuck my head out ‘cause I thought I recognized who was swearing at the elevator. I always forget they live in the same building.” Pepe sighed. “I get it, okay? But I didn’t realize how bad it was until this morning, and I was late for work.”
“I don’t like being left out of the loop,” Weevil said grimly, keeping an even tone. It was an understandable fuck-up, honestly, but it wasn’t the kind he could start tolerating. “Next time you call.”
“Yeah.” Pepe let that sit for a moment, to make it clear he was taking the order to heart. Then he said, “Don’t you have class to go to?”
“Fuck you,” Weevil told him, a little more cheerfully, and hung up.
Nothing from Red. He scowled at his phone. It was bad enough to be big-picture dumb enough to ruin your life over some girl, let alone a girl like Francisca who didn’t deserve to have to deal with all this crap anyway. It was a completely different thing to be so goddamn stupid about basic fucking things that you left your personal belongings at a motherfucking crime scene.
He called again, mentally weighing the benefits of a text versus a voicemail if it rang through a second time – which it did.
“Motherfucking prick,” Weevil muttered, without caring if the voicemail picked it up, and ended the call. He opened a text instead, settling on call me NOW motherfucker as the least possible to ignore or wilfully misinterpret.
That was his due diligence – the trouble Red got himself into after ignoring it was on him, not Weevil. He’d missed the first part of Algebra, which he’d actually wanted to go to, or at least not wanted to end up behind in already. Yesterday there wouldn’t have been anything important anyway, but today there might be, and he didn’t need to make the teacher hate him any more than she probably already did.
Showing up halfway through class seemed worse than not going at all, though. At least if you didn’t show up you could say you got sick or something, but walking in after fifteen minutes was like waving a banner that said I Don’t Care About Your Stupid Class. He’d done that on purpose more than a few times, but if he aggravated anyone into failing him this semester, he wouldn’t graduate.
He slipped into the boys’ bathroom before he could get busted for roaming the halls, but he couldn’t exactly kill half an hour in there – although he did overhear an interesting conversation between Luke Haldeman and some 09er hanger-on he didn’t really know. They were cagey about the details of what the other kid was buying, even in private, but everyone knew Haldeman had gone down for smuggling steroids back in September. Weevil made a mental note to see if he could get him busted for this somehow – it pissed him off that the kid had been back in school in less than a month with some stupid deal about probation and community service. Maybe there’d been a fine his parents had paid.
If someone like Weevil or Dante, record or not, got caught smuggling steroids from Mexico –
Whatever. He couldn’t get in his head like this right now. He had things to deal with, and working himself up about the same shit that always happened wasn’t going to do any good.
First problem: this thing with Red. He could use lunch to get everyone in order, make sure they knew to call him if Red showed up, not to talk to the cops but not to go out of their way to hunt him down and hide him either. To cut Francisca a break while they were at it. He needed to know when Red got picked up, too – if the guy was smart, he’d skipped town already, but it had been pretty well fucking established that he wasn’t. After school Weevil could go see Francisca, although it might be better to wait until Red was in custody.
It chafed him a little, waiting. This was the kind of situation where he suspected that Damien would have indulged in a little under-the-table tip-off to the cops, but Weevil didn’t cross that line. It was bad enough to do that at all, let alone with people who trusted you to watch their back, and it never stayed secret – if Damien hadn’t given himself catastrophic brain damage in that accident, he would have lost the club soon enough anyway, because the fault lines had already been showing.
No matter what you said about Gus, he’d followed his own rules as strictly as he’d enforced them, and turning someone in was the cardinal sin, worse than anything you could do to piss the cops off. Everyone had been better off after he took over.
Second problem: Ric and Manolo. He couldn’t afford to alienate anyone right now, but once Red was in jail, or out of town, he was going to have to look into it. If it was nothing, great. If it wasn’t… Ric had had a second chance, and it was more than he would have gotten from Gus or Damien. Besides, Weevil didn’t need the headache or the rep of having his guys dealing meth, and he couldn’t afford to tolerate someone blatantly ignoring his orders like that any more than he could afford to be perceived as competing with the Fitzpatricks.
That was Red gone, one way or another, and maybe Ric too. With Chardo in jail and Phuong still in juvie for at least a month, he was getting dangerously close to short-handed. Maybe it was time to recruit anyway, since a few of the old guard were starting to slip away. Pepe was still in, but he was always working, and he was going to either knock his girlfriend up or marry her one of these days, and then he’d probably slip away the way people usually did, pick up a gig with Angel or one of the guys he sold to if he couldn’t pay the bills on that shitty convenience story wage. Maxi was already out, Pidgeon had taken a nasty accident and wasn’t riding anymore, and Oscar and La-Z-Boy were both doing hard time. Gus was gone, Damien was dead, and Benny already had a kid, so who knew how long he was going to be around for.
Third problem: Weevil fucking hated recruiting. Most of the time, guys came to him, and he already had a general idea of whether they were a good investment or not. But he’d always been pickier than Gus or Damien, and while it was better for the club when it wasn’t full of fucking thirteen-year-olds, it meant he didn’t have a bunch of expendable kids to pick up the slack at times like this the way his predecessors had. He could take a look over the eager hopefuls and see if any of them had come up to snuff since last year, but just because he’d been a full member at thirteen didn’t mean he was going to start drafting a bunch of goddamn freshmen.
Which left him trying to decide if it was worth giving anyone he’d rejected over the last two years another chance, as if he hadn’t had good reasons for it, or trying his luck with the dropout and already-graduated crowd, which always left him at a disadvantage. It wasn’t that still being in school was a disadvantage, exactly – it even made it easier to pick up new guys in the usual one-at-a-time kind of way – but it made it harder to play off the disadvantage of still being a kid where outsiders were concerned. Even if they didn’t really see him that way, they got a better shot at the upper hand by pretending they did.
Jesus. When he got up this morning, his biggest problem had been figuring out the best way to annoy Veronica Mars over lunch. Now he was going to have to wait until tomorrow at least, which might undermine his use of sitting at her table as a stick to metaphorically poke her with, but even so it still didn’t even rate on the list of issues he needed to deal with.
It was too bad, though, because he was figuring on meeting up with her after school, and now he was going to have to use that time to handle all this other shit. The one day he could use some goddamn stress relief.
Tomorrow, maybe. It had been like a week already, and finals were over. It was past time he started having some fun again, as long as he could get this goddamn nonsense in order.
*
Apparently life had decided to cut him one very small break, because everyone who was actually at school today got with the program pretty quickly, and even though Bootsy was indeed pissed, he accepted Weevil’s proposal to wait and see.
“Red’s in shit with me,” he’d said. “Bad enough to screw up like this and get the sheriff breathing down our necks for God knows how long, but here I am trying to sort this out and he’s ignoring me.” That had won over the ones who were hesitating. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to giftwrap him for the cops, but it’s going to take a fucking miracle to save him at this point.”
Hector had chimed in with, “Yeah, everyone knows you don’t fuck around until you’re off parole!” and that had gotten enough laughter and agreement that it hadn’t been hard to take it from there. There was even enough time left when they wrapped up that he might be able to get some actual food during lunch. They had chilli on offer today, and at this point it wasn’t so much hot as vaguely warm, so it wasn’t entirely a saving grace, but it was still better than going the entire school day on nothing.
Weevil parked himself against the wall just outside of the commissary to eat, where Veronica took notice of him a few minutes later when she was throwing out her trash in the nearby bins.
“So you are still in school,” she commented. “I thought maybe you failed Algebra again and just decided not to come back.”
“I passed Algebra,” he said, not entirely able to kill the triumphant note in his voice. Maybe it was a dumb thing to be proud of, but he’d still done it, and at least he was finished with that entire fucking class. Only the existence of Algebra II marred the achievement.
“You’re welcome,” she told him sweetly, and Weevil didn’t have a comeback for that so he just sneered at her. “I can’t help but notice you’re not taking advantage of that seat you were fighting so hard for.”
He balanced his spoon in the bowl so he could press a hand to his heart. “Aw, V… do you miss me?”
He was pretty sure what she actually missed was the chance to get off a few times a week and maybe the opportunity to semi-regularly sharpen her claws on him, but he wasn’t going to hold that against her. That was pretty much what he was in it for too.
“Not so much,” she told him drily. “It’s just, you go to all this trouble to get a seat at the table and then you don’t even show up.” The look that accompanied the words was both sugary and venomous, and Weevil almost smiled.
“Sure sounds like you miss me.”
She ignored him. “You know, if you’ve realized you’re not as qualified as you thought you were, there’s no shame in admitting it.”
“As it happens,” Weevil said, dignified, “I have things to do. The initiation ceremony is going to have to wait.”
Veronica rolled her eyes. “There’s no initiation ceremony.”
“Well, there should be.” He feigned scandalized offense. “What kind of outfit are you running?”
“The kind where I have better things to do with my time than plan initiation ceremonies.” She huffed at him impatiently. “If you want one so badly, you plan it, and bring it forward at the next meeting. If you can be bothered to show up.”
She said that like it would be work, but as it happened, Weevil had actually given a great deal of thought to what a slut initiation ceremony would involve, mostly while he was in the shower – although he was pretty sure that alluding to those thoughts in front of Veronica’s friend Megan would probably give her a heart attack. She was the most buttoned-up cheerleader he’d ever met, even if she seemed like a better sport than most of them, and in real life she didn’t even do him the favour of making out with the other supposed sluts.
“See, it just sounds more and more like you miss me,” he said. It would be fun to run some of his idle orgy-related fantasies past Veronica and see if he could make her blush (she so clearly hated it when he made her blush), but out in the middle of the hallway with a high chance of teachers passing by, he should probably keep it somewhat below X-rated. Soft R, at the most.
He could save the rest of it for later.
“What I miss is the peace and quiet before you decided to cause us a bunch of bureaucratic problems,” she shot back. “All this covering for your cold feet is getting old.”
Weevil scraped out the last remnants of chilli and tossed the bowl and spoon neatly into the trash, then stretched lazily. “If you wanna check my credentials again, I’m busy today. I could do tomorrow, though.” He shooed her. “Don’t want to be late for class.”
It very clearly annoyed her not to be able to get in the last word, but he watched her cycle through possible responses and realize that they all sounded petty. “You too,” she said after a second, compensating for the lameness of the material by brightening up her tone to parody-level perkiness. “Wouldn’t want to backslide!”
He considered pointing out that this didn’t make sense, but it was hard to find a snappy way to do that, so instead he just smiled at her with as much smug cockiness as he could muster until her façade of unconcern cracked for a few seconds and she walked away a little faster than she’d probably meant to, probably to hide the fact that he’d gotten under her skin.
Weevil watched her ass as she left. She wasn’t working with as much as some people, but the energy in her step wasn’t exactly doing her a disservice.
He needed to piss her off more often.
*
Veronica was still crunching the second of her three allocated chocolate chip cookies when she passed her locker, which she chose to use as a very flimsy excuse not to stop. She’d already been thinking about scoping out the art classroom, but sometimes you just needed that extra bit of plausible deniability.
The cookies were pretty good, despite being slightly over-burdened with chocolate chips. She hadn’t bothered telling Jack Trent to go easier on them, since no one in her group seemed enthused about being stuck with her, and starting out as the ‘less chocolate’ girl wasn’t going to endear her to anyone. Except maybe Arianna Carpenter, who’d loudly announced from the other side of the classroom that she was a vegan and she wasn’t going to touch anything with milk in it. Foods wasn’t going to be fun for her, but given her snotty attitude, it was going to be even less fun for everyone stuck with her. Veronica had to wonder why she’d even taken the class.
But now wasn’t the time to be considering the pitfalls of spending the rest of the semester baking with a randomly-selected group of three other people who had expected to be able to pick their own partners. Now was the time for reconnaissance – and perfectly tolerable cookies, even if they did inspire the wish for a little more cookie to the chocolate chip.
No one was in the classroom, Veronica noted on her first pass, which didn’t mean there wasn’t one in there during seventh period, but which was still a hopeful sign. She did an about-face and risked peaking in the window, toward the desk – no teacher either.
Which was a good thing, because she was suddenly remembering very clearly that one interlude that had involved the large desk at the back. It was one thing to know in a vague, objective way that at some point in the future there would be someone teaching a class from it, but another thing entirely to see an open gradebook and an assortment of pens and straight-edges scattered across it and be vividly aware that someone had bent you over that same desk like you were in an unimaginative porno.
Despite the edge of embarrassment that came with it, the memory was still more titillating than anything. It wasn’t like she didn’t remember the drawbacks of that particular incident, or the fact that she’d felt more than a little uncomfortable to begin with, but somehow that provided absolutely no roadblock to being turned on by it now.
The first time had been like that too – very unpleasant at the time (well, that part was different), but weirdly hot to look back on. She wondered if that was normal, or if it was some kind of failure in her brain, an inability to retain the reality or something. Although she definitely could still remember all the things that had sucked the first time around; she just preferred not to, because it was hard not to cringe at her own awkwardness and unpreparedness. Buying lubricated condoms seemed so basic now, even if as a rule she needed them at least somewhat less desperately.
It was also a reminder that, even if it had worked out pretty well for her the second time, she didn’t actually want to have sex in the autoshop classroom again. Veronica glanced around as casually as possible, but even though it was in use now, the classroom was in an out-of-the-way hallway and relatively clear of teachers, so she risked fishing out the keys – and then stopped.
She tried the handle, feeling mildly foolish when it opened but less stupid than if she’d actually tried to unlock it. Besides, now she bothered to think, if it had been locked, she wouldn’t have been able to afford being caught in there by a teacher who would probably remember for sure that she shouldn’t have been able to get in, whereas this way she could just say she’d wandered in.
Veronica wandered, purposefully. Her main idea was to take a look at the stuff on the desk and see if she could work out exactly when there was a class in here, although if she felt like taking a risk she could always go through the drawers too. But whichever teacher was in charge of Art this semester had been almost ridiculously helpful: no actual grades or names were entered yet, but the class lists folded and tucked into the beginning of the book she’d seen had Third Period and First Period clear and bold beneath the grade and the name of the class.
Not bad, she thought. That would leave the classroom probably unattended at lunch and likely to be unattended after school – they could probably risk continuing to use it. Which was a card she was definitely playing if Weevil tried to shift things onto his turf again. Oil and table height aside, she was not having sex with him somewhere that anyone who’d ever taken the class could walk in. Besides, he’d probably have trouble justifying being in there in the first place, since he wouldn’t be in it this semester.
Realizing that she was already marshalling her arguments for a battle of wits that might not even take place, Veronica sighed and rolled her eyes at herself, then replaced the class lists exactly as they had been and slipped out of the classroom.
She was supposed to get dinner with her dad – all the family time without fraught undertones was great, but apparently they’d been neglecting their daddy-daughter time as a result – so it was probably better that she wasn’t going to be late home, whether or not her mom noticed, and that she wasn’t showing up with her head full of extremely recent memories of doing something that would give him a heart attack. And besides that, it would be both weird and dumb to be disappointed that Weevil hadn’t spontaneously shown up when he’d outright told her he wasn’t going to be there.
Good thing she wasn’t.
Chapter 29: Lust and Hunger
Notes:
Heyyy, sorry I missed an update. My excuse is that I got super obsessed with one of feeisamarshmallow's fics and then my internet went out. So.
I'm also about to take on some temporary responsibilities at work that'll keep me busier than usual (on top of some stuff I was already doing for our special events this month), and I'm not sure yet whether that will affect my chapter turnover rate/writing output, so I'm going to be a bit lenient with myself about deadlines this month. BUT, the next chapter is one I have been eagerly anticipating for a while, so I'm optimistic. (It also includes things people have been asking me about off and on since the early chapters, so... tune in. :) )
Chapter Text
The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger.
Joseph Addison
Veronica could tell as soon as she walked into the station that something was going on. No one was ranting or throwing things or weeping in front of the duty officer, but the atmosphere just felt – serious. Maybe it was shallow of her, but her first thought wasn’t oh no, what happened but oh great, I came down here for nothing.
Then she remembered that in the last year and a half they’d had a serial killer, a little girl murdered, and that shooting her dad had responded to in the middle of dinner, and felt ashamed of herself.
“Dad’s busy, huh?” she asked Inga when the woman reappeared from the back room, a folder in her hands.
“Oh, Veronica!” Inga said. “Maybe a little – he’ll be done soon, I think?” Her tone sounded more hopeful than certain, but Veronica smiled anyway. It wasn’t like she was going to just leave.
“If you think there’s anything you can get away with telling me…” she tried, not expected much.
Inga clucked. “It’s just a bad situation. Never get involved with a criminal, Veronica. It always ends badly.”
“I don’t think I’m likely to,” Veronica told her drily, gesturing to the station at large. The words were out of her mouth before she even realized they were a lie.
She tried not to interrogate that realization. It wasn’t like she’d become the kind of person who was going to date a drug dealer or something – she’d always pictured herself as too savvy, too raised-by-law-enforcement, to fall into any of the pitfalls that she’d been hearing about second-hand her whole life: don’t ignore your gut, don’t stay in an abusive relationship, don’t date a gang member.
Neither her dad nor her preconceived idea of herself had thought it was necessary to specify that having semi-regular no-strings-attached sex with a knock-off Hell’s Angel was still a violation of the spirit of that particular directive.
She slid into the bullpen area and sat down on one of the chairs off to the side, trying to maintain a reassuring expression for Inga’s sake. It probably said something about you, to think that you were too smart to do something, do it anyway, and then decide that because you were too smart to do it, it didn’t count that you actually had. And there was no universe in which that something was flattering.
It wasn’t exactly a wonderful time to have an existential crisis, so Veronica shoved it into the back of her mind, ignoring the uncomfortable knot in her stomach. She couldn’t help remembering how blasé Lilly had been about those letters, and how naïve Veronica had thought she was.
She did her best to find something less loaded to think about, mostly with middling success, until her dad emerged from his office. He winced when he saw her, which was not an encouraging sign – she considered asking if he wanted a raincheck, but he immediately pigeon-holed one of the deputies about something and she didn’t want to interrupt. She pretended to read a poster on the effects of illegal drugs instead, one that she’d probably had memorized by the time she was twelve.
Her dad looked like he was about to finish up and come over to her – although probably to tell her he’d be a while, or even that they’d have to reschedule – but before he could, in sauntered Deputy Lamb, sporting a substantial chip on his shoulder.
“I went back to the girlfriend’s,” he announced. “Since she didn’t stick around at the hospital. And guess who was there.”
“Kevin Federline?” Veronica muttered under her breath. No one heard her, which was probably for the best.
“Tell me you didn’t get into it with the cousin, Don,” her dad said, a resigned sigh in his voice. “We don’t have anything to indicate he was involved.”
“Yeah, ‘cause she’s covering for him, even with her boyfriend in the hospital,” Lamb said, making a disgusted face. “And it wasn’t him, anyway.”
“Feel free to share with the class,” Keith told him drily.
“She was having a nice little powwow with Weevil,” the other man said, which made Veronica blink in surprise. “So I’m sure she’s going to be real useful going forward.”
“I hope you didn’t let that that stand in place of actually interviewing her.”
Deputy Lamb shrugged. “Lot of I’m not sures and I didn’t sees.” He sneered disdainfully. “Everything’s about five degrees more foggy than before he was there.”
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” Deputy Marr observed from where he’d paused on his way to do whatever her dad had been talking to him about. “We’ll have fingerprints. No way they don’t come back as Paredes.”
The hot deputy from Christmas was frowning at them from the duty desk. “Wait, this is one of the guy’s gang friends? Are we sure he wasn’t threatening her?”
Veronica felt a knee-jerk denial that was immediately followed by her stomach sinking straight down to ankle-level. What, Weevil couldn’t have threatened some girl because that would be inconvenient for her to deal with? Because she didn’t like the idea? That was absolutely not how the world worked, but it was certainly proof that she should be worried about her judgement. Especially when she was pretty sure she’d lifted files from a computer currently in her sightline that clearly documented him doing similar things in the past.
Lamb didn’t give it much weight. “She was a lot friendlier to him than she was to me,” he said, with an annoyed twist of his mouth. “I’d put money on her sending the cousin after Paredes if she does anything at all.”
“Not while we have him in custody,” Keith said decisively. “And she’s the one who gave us his name, so we don’t need to pre-litigate every piece of witness testimony. If he’s smart he’ll plead out anyway.”
Veronica wished she had a book. It would have been a lot easier to pretend not to be eavesdropping than by rereading the same poster three times. Her dad must have noticed her attempts to be unobtrusive, because he ushered the rest of the conversation back into his office, which made her wish she had a book for more ordinary reasons.
She could’ve cozied up to the duty desk and fished for information, but that felt a little bit too… icky; one too many dimensions of deception, or of mercenary intentions, or maybe just the inherent moral dubiousness of flirting with a guy (even if it was mutually understood that it wouldn’t go anywhere) to get information on another guy (even if her interest in him was strictly prurient and her interest in the information was safety-related). Or maybe it was just a little too close to what Lilly would have done.
So even though he looked like he wouldn’t have minded if she came over and talked to him, Veronica only smiled vaguely in his general direction and moved on to read one of the other posters several times. This one was about phone scams.
It was only another five or ten minutes before her dad finished up whatever he was talking about with Deputy Lamb and came back out, but Veronica tempered her smile of greeting in case he had to delay dinner or cancel. It was a drag, but she didn’t want him to feel bad.
“Hi, honey,” he said, sure enough. “I’m sorry about the wait – can you hold on another couple minutes? McCormack is being a thorn in my side, as usual.”
“You love it,” Veronica retorted. Her dad and Cliff McCormack were hardly ever on the same side of any given case, but she had about five years of proof that he had a lot of respect for the other man. “You hate lazy defence lawyers.”
“I hate having to go back to trial because someone appealed on grounds of inadequate counsel,” he faux-agreed. “Shouldn’t be too long; the case is serious but it’s straight-forward.”
“Tell Cliff I said hi!” Veronica called brightly.
Keith shook his head at her, and Veronica pulled out her phone as he left, deciding that even if it was stereotypical it was a much better distraction than reading the various flat surfaces around her ad nauseum. She didn’t so much have anyone to text – Meg was great for actually discussing things with, but they hadn’t exactly gotten to the point of texting nonsense to each other whenever one of them felt like staving off boredom, the way she used to with Lilly.
It wasn’t an enjoyable thing to contemplate, any more than the fact that if she scrolled past Meg and her parents, Lilly and even Jeremy were uncomfortably close to the top of her text history, little ‘blocked number’ flags and all. Logan was there too, she realized; the top half of his name was visible at the bottom of her screen, which gave her a brief feeling of guilt – but it was hard to tell what for.
Because she had thrown him under the bus, but he’d been the one who decided to play in the road in the first place. It wasn’t her fault if he’d ended up regretting picking the wrong side, and anyway, it had been months. If he’d wanted to talk to her, or confront her, he’d had plenty of time to do it. Looking back at all the other drama, it seemed like their friendship might never have been destined to survive away from Lilly and Duncan, even if he hadn’t thrown it away and she hadn’t responded by turning around and setting it on fire – she was probably only thinking about this now because he was in her Civics class this semester.
What was harder to dismiss, less pleasant to consider, was just how many of the other things she felt guilty for, the uncomfortable realizations about stuff she’d ignored or even participated in when she’d still been granted access to high school high society, involved Logan in some way or other. Neither Duncan nor Lilly had clean hands, but Duncan had said something to the kids around him when they were being cruel, and what Lilly had done about Yolanda might not have been okay but it had at least been provoked, and you couldn’t say as much for Logan in either case. Shouldn’t that have bothered her more, back then? Shouldn’t all of it have bothered her more?
It wasn’t a pleasant subject to dwell on, but at least it presented something else for her to think about, and she texted Yolanda a catch-up text – Just wanted to say hi, hope everything’s going great for you! and then resolutely deleted Jeremy’s number, blocked Logan’s, and scrolled down farther, wincing, to block Duncan’s. It was both painful and embarrassing to think about how long she’d stared at it last year, hoping desperately for some kind of explanation or apology or closure, even more so to have to admit that she’d never taken him out of her contacts. It wasn’t like any of them were going to text her anyway, but the action was long overdue.
She should delete the text history too, probably, both of theirs and Lilly’s too, but she couldn’t shake the idea that if she did, she might end up needing it. It was a little late to be expecting retaliation from any of them, but you never knew what was going to happen, and it seemed like a good idea to hold onto the solid evidence she had of everything incriminating Lilly had ever texted her. It didn’t feel like an excuse, but she hovered for a long moment, still undecided.
And there was her dad, with perfect timing; Veronica tucked her phone away and raised an inquiring eyebrow.
“Nothing that can’t be passed off to the underlings,” he told her airily. “Ready to eat your weight in manicotti?”
“Oh, please,” Veronica told him, tamping down her curiosity. If Weevil hadn’t been somehow involved, she would have asked, but she didn’t want to sound like she was interested in him specifically, and that was a danger because of their past conversations. “I’m ready to eat your weight in manicotti.”
*
It wasn’t the only time Veronica had taken a second look at the illicit files sitting two camouflaged folders deep in her computer, but it had been long enough that she didn’t really have any of the details to mind, with the exception of Weevil’s altercation with his brother-in-law. She rolled her eyes at herself for forgetting what was in there, because it obviously hadn’t changed: plenty that could be of concern, but nothing else that was actively disturbing.
Of course, stalking victims didn’t always report it, and if you were threatening people to try to shut them up, of course that would be underreported. But on the other hand, Lamb was kind of whiny, and she knew he held a grudge; wasn’t he the one who’d screwed up that arrest a little while back? It probably just galled him that Weevil had walked.
And she knew Jasmine, didn’t she? He obviously didn’t have a habit of following around girls he’d hooked up with and sending them scary letters, because Jasmine hadn’t had any problems with him at all. They were practically friends. Besides, while the details on what exactly had happened between him and Lilly were sparse, she knew enough to assume it had been some kind of relationship. There was that stupid tattoo, for one thing.
They were all legitimately solid points, but it was hard to shake that sudden lightning bolt of comparison. Did she seem to Meg like Lilly had seemed to her, blithely dismissing an obvious threat, hopelessly naïve in her belief in her own sophistication? It was different – of course it was different, without the obvious red flags or the cloak and dagger act, when she was aware of the risks and willing to take a calculated gamble instead of just blowing them off entirely. But it’s just different! did not exactly inspire confidence in your own clear-sighted maturity.
It wasn’t even like she was suddenly afraid he’d do something to her – she was just afraid of being stupid.
Veronica wished she’d managed to get copies of those letters, or asked Lilly more questions about how, exactly, they’d broken up, or cozied up to Deputy Leo, scruples be damned. She wondered if any of the things she’d been so worried about over the summer would look different now that she knew the guy who’d written them, or if it would be a pointless endeavour to revisit that.
She could always ask him, about Lilly or the letters or the incident Deputy Lamb had been talking about, although the odds of getting a helpful answer were too small to really be worth risking the possibility of negative response. Especially since she wouldn’t be asking so much because she desperately needed the information as because she just wanted to feel less stupid and hypocritical.
Veronica paged idly through the non-violent charges, wondering what Weevil’s reaction would be if he knew she had his entire file – up until July, anyway. There was a distinct possibility that he’d think it was funny, but it was hard to say when some of the stuff bordered on personal. Maybe he’d be mad. She paused for a second, struck by something. Maybe it would freak him out.
She couldn’t help smiling at that, even though the idea of him telling everyone that she was a stalker actually stung slightly once she thought about it for more than a second. Either way, it would be possible to slide a little information in here or there without admitting to exactly how she’d gotten it; he’d probably just assume her dad had told her. Maybe she’d test the waters tomorrow – not come at any of those things straight out, but build herself a bit of a bulwark to ward off any recurring doubts, something she could say to Meg if they ever ended up back on the topic, or to herself if she ever needed to.
Or she could call it off if something did raise a real flag, she thought glumly, ignoring the part of her mind that was blithely insisting there was nothing to worry about. It was a drag, because she’d gotten used to having sex on a regular basis, but… she still had those batteries somewhere, right? Maybe she’d even get up the nerve to use them eventually.
The whole thing left her weirdly unsettled, even after she closed out of the folders and joined her parents downstairs – maybe it was the half-overheard details, or maybe it was the realization that she even had a bias towards Weevil to reckon with, or maybe it was just that fishing around in the depths of her phone and finding a past that was at once painfully familiar and yet strangely ill-fitting had thrown her entirely off. She’d told Meg not too long ago that she’d let a lot of things pass without doing anything that she shouldn’t have, and it was true, but it was hard to imagine doing that now, even if she’d somehow been in a position where Dick or Logan would care if she objected to a crack about sexy maids or a punchline that was just a conga-line of immigration stereotypes. And that shouldn’t have mattered, because she didn’t want to go back, and she’d put in some real effort to be different after what had happened with Jeremy, so it should be a good thing that she felt different, shouldn’t it?
Only, she’d made herself tough and ruthless on purpose, and at least half by faking it. It was one thing to look back and think that you’d been weak and naïve; it felt different to look back and wonder if she’d been… well, not racist, but…
At a certain point it didn’t matter if you were vaguely uncomfortable with the jokes your friends were making, if you still didn’t say anything. Veronica wasn’t entirely sure where that point was, but she had an uncomfortable feeling that she’d left it behind somewhere in sophomore year without ever really noticing.
She helped herself to another handful of popcorn to try and refocus on the movie they were watching, although it was hard to get invested in Adam Sandler, especially when she was watching with her parents. Maybe she should have saved this one for the sleepover.
“Maybe we should have watched Hidalgo,” her dad said, as if he hadn’t been pushing for it the whole time. Veronica elbowed him, smiling; on her other side, her mom shook her head.
“Shh!”
“Or what, we’ll miss the penguin in peril?” Veronica glanced at the screen and winced. She estimated only a small chance the movie would actually let Drew Barrymore pancake the adorable bird with her car, but still wasn’t the kind of suspense she enjoyed. “I can’t believe you picked this over Ladyhawke.”
Lianne leaned forward to wave her off. “I’ve seen that tons of times. And you don’t like to watch classic romcoms with me – I was trying to update things!”
Predictably, the car zoomed right over the tiny penguin, disarranging his neckfeathers and cute jacket but leaving him unharmed. Veronica rolled her eyes. “It’s just that this is less a popcorn-and-parents movie and more of a sleepovers-with-too-much-licorice movie.” She tried to get some of the popcorn into her mouth without dropping it all over the couch; it had been an over-ambitious handful. “Speaking of which, I invited Meg over on Friday. We’re going to take over the living room.”
“Sounds like a plan, honey,” her dad said. “Let me guess – you don’t want us crashing to watch Hidalgo.”
“Movie musicals only,” Veronica told him, with a mix of smugness and regret. “I promised.”
“What about the dance?” her mom said suddenly, frowning. “Isn’t the dance on Friday?”
Right. Veronica always forgot how involved she got when she wasn’t drinking. Not that she minded, exactly – even when she did, there was a secret pleasure to regular teenage annoyance – but right now there was enough of her school life that didn’t bear explaining that she couldn’t help wincing internally at the prospect of trying to talk around it.
“Neither of us is thrilled about the idea of showing up and standing around in a corner while people snicker at us,” was what she opted to go with, her voice dry. “I don’t really care, but she’s kind of bummed about it, so I thought we should hang out. Anyway, it’s eighties-themed. I don’t have the energy for that.”
Her dad laughed, and her mom just shook her head with faint disapproval. “Maybe we’ll talk about this later?”
Ugh. Veronica did not have the words to communicate just how disinterested she was in boys and boyfriends and school dances at this point, and even if she had, she doubted they were words her mom would believe. “So… Meg can’t come over?”
The deliberate misunderstanding was dirty pool, but it worked; her dad said, “Of course she can,” and her mom sighed in agreement and went back to paying attention to the movie. Veronica gave up on manners and crammed the rest of her popcorn into her mouth, then took another, slightly smaller, handful. From the side of her vision, she caught her dad tipping her a subtle wink, but aside from smiling at little as she focused on the TV, she pretended not to notice.
*
It hadn’t been clearly established whether they were meeting at lunch or after school, although Veronica was in favour of the latter, because it seemed safer in terms of not being caught. She wasn’t entirely sure how to convey this to Weevil, short of happening to pass him in the halls, which she wasn’t lucky enough to do, so in the end she decided she’d just have lunch as usual and if he ended up waiting around for her then it was his own fault for not double-checking. She’d probably get a hard time about it later – there was a joke somewhere in there she might be able to use, actually – but maybe it was worth testing out how he reacted, if only to reassure herself that it would be more or less what she was expecting.
Of course, it all became academic when he helped himself to the seat next to her about five minutes into lunch, squeezing in between her and Meg even though there was plenty of room on her other side. Veronica didn’t even have time to roll her eyes before he propped an elbow on the table and said, grinning, “So when’s the orgy?”
“What orgy?” Veronica asked flatly, refusing to grant him a reaction, even as Meg protested, “There’s no orgy!”
“You said I could plan my own initiation ceremony,” he said, not putting much effort into hiding his smugness.
Veronica could have smacked herself in the face with a textbook, if she’d had any of hers with her. Of course he would take that in this particular direction – how had she not seen it coming?
“I said you could bring it forward,” she told him repressively, her mind racing for a way to talk her way out of this. Not that she would have gone along with it if she hadn’t found a way – she wasn’t that crazy. She just would have had to shut him down in a much more embarrassing way. “I never said you had carte blanche. Honestly, it’s very presumptuous that you think we’re going to have a whole orgy for you when you’re not even a full slut. As an affiliate, it would be reasonable to expect… a cake, or something.”
“Then I want a cake,” he told her, after what appeared to be a brief, intense consideration of which particular way he wanted to make her life difficult. She was surprised he’d gone in the cake direction, but maybe he thought he could actually get one.
“‘Bringing forward an idea’ is not the same thing as saying ‘I want a cake’,” Veronica told him. “Come back with an actual plan.” She stuck an elbow in his side – mostly for the hell of it, although he honestly wasn’t giving her a lot of room to unwrap her crackers.
“We could do cupcakes,” Meg suggested, and Veronica tried to shoot her a glare of betrayal – unfortunately, Weevil was in the way, so she just ended up sending a shocked look at his bicep. “Slut cupcakes?”
The other girl edged a little farther around the table so that she could see Veronica properly. “Like for a bachelor party?” Veronica responded dubiously, playing along even though she felt grievously undermined. “Seems like it would be hard to fly under the radar with that.”
“I was just thinking, you know, regular cupcakes but we stick letters in them to spell ‘slut’,” Meg said.
Weevil feigned offense. “Is it too much to ask for a little effort in my initiation ceremony?”
“Yes,” Veronica told him off-handedly while Meg did her best not to giggle. “And I’m not making you cupcakes.” She raised an eyebrow at the other girl, who cheerfully admitted, “I was going to buy some.”
“I guess I can’t stop you.” Veronica feigned regret. She turned to Weevil. “You can have ‘U’. It’s the sluttiest letter, and you need all the help you can get. I haven’t heard one rumour about you at school except that car-jacking thing.”
Meg flushed slightly at that. She widened her eyes at Veronica, clearly trying to convey something to the effect of You told him about that?
“Maybe you’re talking to the wrong people,” he said, flashing her his best meaninglessly-suggestive expression. Veronica rolled her eyes.
“Well, Jasmine told me you have groupies. She also told me you don’t sleep with them, which is actively unslutty. You’re lucky we’re even considering cupcakes. Frankly, I think it would make more sense to reconsider your membership, but…”
Weevil plucked the flag from where it was balanced at the center of the table and poked her with the fabric end. “Says the girl who shut down an orgy. Who’s unslutty?”
“That’s official equipment,” Meg said chidingly. Looking slightly shocked at her own nerve, she reached out and took it out of his hands. “You can’t use it like that.”
“Oh, trust me,” he told her, mixing a little menace into the heat in his voice. It was so off-handed that Veronica couldn’t take either of those things seriously. “I know how to use my equipment.”
“Well, that’s our equipment,” Veronica said sternly, so that Meg wouldn’t have to reply. “And if you don’t have anything better to do than go around poking girls with flags then you’re clearly not applying yourself properly.”
“Oh, I’ll apply myself.” He leered at her. Annoyingly, even though it was for show, her breasts and inner thighs tingled. Veronica put a little extra exasperation in her voice to cover it up.
“Great – I’ll be more than willing to take that into consideration after school. Now go away. We have to have a conversation that’s for full members only.” She glanced at his complete lack of lunch. “Why don’t you go buy your own food for once?”
Predictably, he immediately reached over and stole two of her crackers, pulling away quickly enough that she couldn’t do anything about it. She smirked internally, feigning half-hearted outrage as he absconded with them. A couple crackers was an acceptable price to get rid of him, and more than acceptable for the proof that she could successfully manipulate him as long as she paid enough attention and didn’t get too cocky.
“You’re right,” Meg said. “It’s annoying how he does that.” She looked more than a little pleased with herself, probably for managing to stick it to Weevil without flinching.
Veronica shrugged. “He didn’t take any cheese. If he wants to have two plain crackers for lunch, that sounds like a problem for him.”
Her friend laughed. After a moment, she added, “I do sort of want cupcakes now, though.”
“What even was that?” Veronica demanded, smiling. “How could you undermine me like that?”
“I just didn’t want him to start talking about orgies again,” Meg said with a half-apologetic shrug. “We could make him a cake or something, right? If it gets him to go away?”
“I’m not getting him a cake,” Veronica grumbled. “No one else got a cake.” She stopped abruptly, an idea coming to her. She gave it a minute to see if it became insane once she’d examined it properly – it definitely felt like a lot of work. But it would also be a lot of cake, and who was complaining about cake?
“Veronica?”
“You know what?” she said, not fighting the unusually large smile spreading across her face. “I think the rest of us deserve a cake.”
“He’ll just steal it,” Meg pointed out. “If you get one and tell him he can’t have it.”
“He can eat it,” Veronica said. “I don’t care. It just won’t be his cake. I actually think we should each get one.”
“That seems involved,” the other girl said, which was true.
“Well, I can’t get an everyone-except-Weevil cake,” Veronica told her, quite reasonably, in her opinion. “It’s too on the nose. And if I make you a cake but not Jasmine, that’s mean. It is a lot more work than I’d put in just to bug him with anything else, but… I mean, it’s cake.”
Meg laughed. “I feel like I’ve said this before, but for someone who’s not invested, you sure like pulling his pigtails.”
Veronica took a moment to enjoy that image. “If I’m being honest with you, I just really want cake.” She looked down at her perfectly serviceable lunch and pulled a face. It just wasn’t the same. “We could make one on Friday, if you want.”
“And bring it to school on Monday?”
“Okay, maybe we make it on Saturday.”
Meg considered. “I’m not much of a baker, but I guess it could be fun.”
“I did baking all the time for pep squad,” Veronica said confidently, even though that baking had usually been cookies and she had an inkling that a cake would be somewhat more complicated.
After a few more moments’ thought, her friend capitulated. “Okay. But you have to keep it at your house. I have no idea what my parents would do if I brought home a slut cake, and I don’t want to find out.”
“I’ll get a box or something for it,” Veronica decided. “I’m not worried about what my parents would do, but I really don’t want to explain it to my dad.”
Meg giggled helplessly. “I mean – is it going to say ‘slut cake’ on it?”
Veronica thought for a moment. “What about… #1 Slut?”
She couldn’t quite keep a straight face as she said it, imagining her dad peering at her dubiously over an open box containing a cake with calligraphied icing, but that was fine. She was long past taking herself seriously. (And so, apparently, was Meg, who had just choked on her apple juice.)
*
Veronica had considered balancing herself on one of the desks to cultivate a certain devil-may-care appearance, but given when and how she usually ended up on top of them, it didn’t exactly scream ‘hold up so I can ask you some pointed questions’. She rejected the possibility of sitting on the teacher’s desk for similar reasons, and of sitting at one of the desks as being, frankly, pretty stupid, so she was in the process of figuring out the best stretch of wall for nonchalant leaning when Weevil appeared at the door.
“It’s not locked,” she told him, which made him raise his eyebrows.
“Seems like that could be a problem,” he commented as he slipped into the classroom.
Veronica shrugged. “There are only two classes in here and they’re both before lunch.” She paused, trying to find the best way to use the opening. She couldn’t think of anything good, so she went with something obvious and slightly ham-handed. “You’re not wrong, though. It might be a good time to call it.”
He blinked at her. Perversely, her eyes tracked his eyelashes. “What – like you’re done?”
“There isn’t really anywhere good at school,” she said, not wanting to overcommit when she was ninety percent sure she was going to walk this back in a minute. “And I’m not exactly looking to meet up outside of that, you know.”
“Did you seriously make plans to meet me here literally so you could stand me up in person?” he asked, visibly annoyed. “Yo, I’m over it is four words. Learn to text.”
“Hey, you’re the one who’s afraid to hook up here,” Veronica said. “I did reconnaissance – if you don’t appreciate it, you can go have sex with someone else.”
“I can go have sex with someone else anyway,” he pointed out. “I might do that anyhow, because you’re being annoying.”
Veronica shrugged. “Okay. Cervando might be around somewhere – Jasmine says you’re wrong about him putting out, by the way. Maybe your grades were never good enough.”
Weevil’s mouth twisted like he wanted to laugh at that but wasn’t letting himself. “I bet he gives better head than you do.”
Veronica laughed, forcing herself to brazen it out, even though there was a tiny bubble of panic rising in her stomach that was harder to ignore than the residual sting of all Jeremy’s stupid rumours was. “You’re not finding that out regardless,” she announced, staring him directly in the face. “So I guess it’s up to you.”
He shrugged, his ease less artificial than hers. “I don’t have time to train you not to use your teeth, anyway.”
She flushed, flashing back hard to last week in the autoshop classroom, the memory sparking both arousal and humiliation in a way that was probably going to give her a complex. Not that either of those things stopped her from wanting to squawk in outrage over the word train. “Is that a common problem you have, girls wanting to bite your dick off? Because it might be a symptom of something.”
Weevil rolled his eyes. “Most people aren’t as violent as you.”
The irony nearly made her choke, but she didn’t want to get into a serious conversation about reputations. Changing tack, Veronica leaned her shoulder casually against the wall.
“I heard you stole Lamb’s girlfriend.”
At least it caught him off-guard. “What?”
“Deputy Lamb? Classically handsome and slightly too aware of it, always seems like he has something better to do?”
“I know who he is,” Weevil said tetchily. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
She stretched with pretended unconcern. “I was meeting my dad yesterday, and he showed up complaining that whoever he’d been talking to liked you better than him.”
To her surprise, he snorted in disgust once he realized what she meant. “Yeah, well, maybe Francisca would have liked him more if he hadn’t basically called her a whore when she got mugged last year.”
Veronica opened her mouth to say something clever, but drew a complete blank on what. She didn’t have any context on what he was talking about, and she didn’t want to sound like an idiot – besides which, shooting off her mouth about something like that felt like a good way to be an asshole, and not in the vein that she usually indulged in. The only thing that came to mind was insinuating that Weevil had been involved in this mugging, which seemed tone-deaf at best.
“And,” he added, “if he’d been her boyfriend, I’d be a lot less pissed that Red put the guy in the hospital.”
Presumably ‘Red’ was the guy the deputies had been discussing, Pereira or something. No, wait – Pereira was Weevil’s brother-in-law. But it had started with a P, she was pretty sure.
It was about the only thing she was sure about, because the more details she got about this situation, the blurrier the big picture became. If Weevil was mad about this assault, then why would the sheriff’s department think he was threatening the victim’s boyfriend?
She was clearly missing something, but it didn’t seem worth it to pursue any more details. “I’ll be sure to tell Deputy Lamb you were thinking about him,” she told him, falsely considerate.
“For someone who said you didn’t know any rumours about me, you’re sure a liar,” he said, and Veronica winced internally, barely keeping it off her face. She’d gotten cocky. Damn it. “What’s next, stealing someone’s girlfriend isn’t slutty either, somehow? Your agenda is showing.”
“If I promise to take off my underwear, will you stop talking?” she deflected.
His eyebrows went up in a way that said very clearly that he was wise to her, but he didn’t comment, maybe because she’d pushed away from the wall and shrugged out of her sweater. His eyes were on her chest and not her legs, despite the miniskirt – would wonders never cease.
“You’re gonna have to take off more than that,” he told her, and Veronica wasn’t winning the conversation definitively enough to want to continue it, so she shrugged and yanked her top off into the bargain.
He grinned and closed the distance, edging her back towards the wall. “I mean, it’s better…”
She took her bra off too, but she rolled her eyes to make sure he didn’t think he was in charge of anything. Weevil didn’t look particularly impressed, but he didn’t say anything, so it caught her entirely by surprise when he reached out and hefted her upwards more firmly than she was expecting.
Veronica yelped, trying to steady herself on his shoulders, just like she always seemed to end up doing. He’d pressed close enough to pin her to the wall, just – higher than she was expecting, her shoulders about even with the top of his head.
She wrapped her legs around him anyway, because it felt more secure than leaving them dangling. He also probably couldn’t see her glaring at him, so there was no point in trying to maintain frosty disapproval.
You couldn’t fault him for not being direct, she thought, when he adjusted her slightly and applied his mouth immediately to her breasts. The detached tone didn’t do much for actually keeping her detached; the novelty of the way their bodies were lined up made her hyperaware of every detail of how and where they were touching, and her head was already going fuzzy with the pleasure of his tongue circling her nipple. The sensation of his mouth stroking and pulling had her clit aching in deprived sympathy within a minute, and it was impossible not to feel the heat of his stomach and sides against the inside of thighs.
There was nothing for her to hang onto, Veronica thought helplessly. Except him, and she couldn’t really do anything; everything except his head and shoulders was too far away for her to touch – normally she’d be trying to participate more, to pull her own weight or to keep some control over the situation or both, but she couldn’t be blamed for just letting this happen, right?
It wasn’t that it didn’t feel good – it felt really good, and there was something about the sudden sense of helplessness that she liked more than she was willing to admit – but she still had to do something.
Veronica slid her hand from his shoulder to the back of his neck, appreciating the shiver that provoked, although he was still spending all his focus on one of her breasts, and the other one was aching for attention.
She should have touched his head before, she thought, trying to muster up some annoyance and failing. It only felt like a big thing now because she hadn’t. She’d used to stick her hands in Duncan’s and Troy’s hair all the time – even held on to it sometimes (gently, of course). It couldn’t be that different.
It was… different. His skin was warmer than she’d expected, which was probably silly, because his skin was always warm. It was smooth under her fingertips, soft even though she was extremely aware of the firmness of his skull under the skin.
Weevil exhaled hot against the damp skin of her breast as she slid up past the ridges bordering the path where his neck became his head, to slide over his scalp. Some faint part of her wondered how often he had to shave; there was no stubble under her fingers and it was strangely addictive to feel all that warm, taut skin.
It was hard to tell if the change in his breathing, in the increased pressure and speed of his mouth against her skin, was from surprise or because he liked what she was doing, but the second option was more gratifying, so she decided it was that.
The absence of hair meant she didn’t have anything to use as a handle, and she didn’t want to dig her fingernails into his head by accident, so Veronica hesitated. But she didn’t have any other options – squirming against him was so far failing to communicate what she wanted, and with the angle their bodies were at, she couldn’t even get close enough to rub against him in a way that would have provided some relief. Taking her other hand off his shoulder would have destabilized her, so she slid her fingers around to the left side of his head and sort of… pushed at it.
Weevil snorted against her chest, and Veronica made a face, even though it was only air. “Get a move on,” she said, before he could decide to start editorializing.
Futilely, of course, because there probably wasn’t a force on earth that could stop him from running his mouth.
“Does Her Majesty have any other decrees I should know about?” he asked, moving his head just far enough over that his breath hit the skin of her other breast as he talked, making her shudder at the inconsistent sensation. It was impossible to kick him with her legs wrapped around his torso, so instead Veronica slid her hand behind his head again and just shoved him forward.
It wasn’t very graceful; his nose ended up jabbing her in the fleshy no-man’s-land that was neither shoulder nor breast, and he grunted in annoyance in a way that even her over-eager libido couldn’t make sexy.
Weevil shot her a baleful glance at her – it looked very strange at that angle – and bit her breast in revenge. It wasn’t hard enough to hurt, and Veronica tried and failed not to shiver at the feeling, utterly unable to muster an appropriate amount of outrage. Her response seemed to cheer him up, because he bit her again, gently, and then actually deigned to even things out a little, his mouth working against her nipple as she made a mostly-futile attempt to get her breath back.
She put a little pressure on the back of his head to remind him that he wasn’t in charge, and the view of that was disturbingly hot. It was honestly a shame that the classroom limited their scope so much, because she was getting the idea that, however nice being pinned against a wall was, she would really enjoy shoving him around a bit more. Maybe have sex on a chair again, if there’d been a sturdier one available. Why should he get to do all the manhandling?
This seemed like a good moment for dirty talk, at least, since he still usually had the upper hand there, but she couldn’t think of anything she could say with confidence. He was already prone to laughing at her, and all she’d ever really managed before was either a deliberate mockery of him or sarcastic in some way. If she told him ooh, yeah, suck it, baby, he’d die laughing, and she couldn’t think of anything else to say that wasn’t about how good he was making her feel, which was off the table because then he’d get unbearably smug. She arched into his face instead, palm still pressed against the back of his skull, and tried not to moan when he took that as a cue to redouble his efforts. It looked really good, too, scratching some kind of itch in the back of her brain she couldn’t even articulate, even though it still felt vaguely embarrassing to just look when she wasn’t doing anything. Maybe she’d start watching more when he went down on her too, but not today, because today she wanted to get to the main event too badly.
She squirmed against him in aid of that, both relieved and irritated that the angle meant he wouldn’t be able to tell how wet she was.
Weevil just laughed into her chest, which was annoyingly audible even though she couldn’t feel it. It was definitely a perk of the desks versus the wall that she could kick him from the desk. He spent a little more time on what he was doing, presumably to make the point that he did what he wanted, then pulled back enough to raise his eyebrows at her. “What, you got something to say?”
“This fully-clothed thing you’re doing isn’t working for you,” Veronica told him, as airily as she could manage, and he snorted.
“Yeah, that’s what you’re concerned about – my image.”
“I just tell it like it is,” she commented, wriggling against him. He rolled his eyes and stepped back, nudging her legs away and smirking as she bit back a yelp at the sudden drop. He caught her by the waist before she fell more than an inch or so, looking very pleased with himself. Veronica glared at him, honestly somewhat surprised she’d managed to avoid hitting her head on the wall.
“You can stand,” he said, dumping her onto the floor from the lesser height, although he waited until she had her legs under her. “I’m not carting you around while I do everything else.”
Veronica had two or three acerbic responses tangling on her tongue, and she couldn’t separate them enough to articulate something that made sense, so she settled for the dirtiest look she could muster while he produced a condom, stripped efficiently, and put it on.
“You’re just going to leave your shirt on?” she asked, making up for her previous lack of response by hitting the judgement as hard as possible. Weevil rolled his eyes, but he pulled his shirt off over his head, which gave her time to shuck her underwear.
Then he picked her up again and pinned her against the wall, his skin warm and delicious against hers from her stomach to her shoulders. Her clit pulsed at the contact and she fought the urge to squirm against him just to feel more of it.
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” he told her, falsely solicitous. “This is just to keep you from talking.”
Veronica didn’t have time to find something to toss back at him before he was kissing her, a little sloppier than usual and the perfect excuse not to have to waste her brainpower on repartee, so she wrapped an arm around his neck for balance, hitched up a leg, and helped him slide in, groaning into his mouth at the stretch. She’d definitely come around on this size thing. There were benefits.
She bit his lip a little, though, so he wouldn’t think he could get uppity. The noise he made suggested he was into it, which she couldn’t quite categorize as a backfire when hearing it half-melted her spine.
She hiked her other leg up so she could squeeze him closer to her, kissed him back aggressively, and ran one hand a little way up his neck, to the back of his head, because why not? She didn’t run her hands over it as much as she wanted to, because she could only imagine what he’d say about that later, but his scalp still felt good under her fingers, taut and warm and just waiting to be explored further once she could find a plausible excuse. His hands were hot and solid under her thighs, and the drag of his chest against her damp nipples, the alternating sensations of warmer skin and cooler air against her breasts, made her almost dizzy with the heady rush of it all combined.
Veronica dragged his face closer with her hand, his hips closer with her legs, and didn’t think about anything other than the push and pull of fucking him and the taste of his mouth until he came and she realized she still had to get herself off. Desk sex had spoiled her. Although it was possible she was only thinking that because she was hormone-drunk.
Weevil didn’t set her down immediately, whether because he still found some kind of enjoyment in rubbing their bodies together or because he thought it was funny to keep her trapped or just because his brain hadn’t turned back on yet she wasn’t sure – but while his hands were occupied holding her up, it was just possible to worm one of her own in between their bodies and get it in the right spot. He made a noise that might have been a laugh when he realized what she was doing, shifting a bit so she had better range of movement.
Then he used his hands to spread her thighs father apart and Veronica made a noise of sheer outrage, hoping it would hide just how much that turned her on.
“‘S kind of hot, actually,” he muttered into her hair, his breath brushing the top of her ear and setting a couple of loose strands to tickle the edge of her cheek.
“If you’re not going to help, shut up,” she told him, eyelids fluttering despite herself as she got a better angle on her clit. “Ooh –”
That had not been supposed to be out loud.
Surprisingly, Weevil didn’t immediately pounce on it. Instead he said, “Yeah, I’ll just let go then.” It wasn’t delivered as acerbically as she would have expected, and he didn’t pretend to actually drop her. Maybe the orgasm had filed off some of his edges temporarily.
Veronica shut her eyes tightly as her own approached. It helped her focus better, and also she was pretty sure he was watching, and that was hot but also embarrassing, so it helped if she didn’t know for sure. She sped up, her fingers stuttering at the orgasm hit her, head falling back against the wall, the physical presence of another person, warm and solid against her, intensifying even the familiar sensations of masturbation.
Then he dropped her.
Veronica was too shocked to make a noise, but she flailed and smeared… well, her hand drew a shiny curve on his chest. Which served him right. Then she shoved him for good measure, turning the fingers on that same hand away at the last second so she was only shoving with the heel of her palm, because marking him up with her bodily secretions on purpose was too far.
Weevil didn’t even look that bothered, which made sense given that he’d probably done all kinds of gross stuff, or advanced stuff, or whatever, but was still hard to wrap her head around. If he’d gotten… similar stuff on her, she would have been beyond grossed out.
He just snickered at her instead.
“Fuck off,” Veronica told him succinctly. She fished her clothing off the floor – her bra was actually under his shirt – and left him to sort himself out.
Still, she was in a good mood by the time she got home, all things considered. It was annoying that the people who said getting laid was good for your mood were right, but that wasn’t going to stop her taking advantage of it, and she felt better about whatever was going on with… whoever it was going on with. And she wasn’t going to try to find anything else out about it, because she was already slipping at keeping things siloed. She’d decided ages ago not to know anything she didn’t have to about Weevil’s extracurriculars for a reason.
Maybe they should be meeting up somewhere else, though, she considered as she hunted through the fridge for a yogurt cup that wasn’t blueberry – she’d been sure there was one left. He definitely had the advantage in all of the limited options they had in the art classroom, and she wanted more of the upper hand. She didn’t want to put too much effort into figuring it out, though – maybe they could make something work with the teacher’s chair, although she felt weird about that now that someone was actually sitting in it every day.
Her mom cut in on her thoughts from her seat at the kitchen island. “Veronica, why do you smell like Drakkar Noir?”
Ice trickled sharply into Veronica’s chest, but she tried to play it off nonchalantly. “Because teenage boys are walking chemical contamination incidents?”
When her mom frowned at her with something that was not quite suspicion, Veronica huffed and rolled her eyes. “I have Gym this semester, remember? Because I dropped pep squad?”
“Didn’t you get to shower after?” Lianne asked, but she sounded more concerned than anything worse. Hopefully she wouldn’t realize at any point that Veronica had Gym before lunch.
“For all the good it did. I think it got into my pores.” Veronica made a face for good measure. “Do you know how much body spray teenage boys use? I’m never shadowing the other team that closely again, I don’t care if they score. So not worth it.”
Lianne laughed. “Be careful. You don’t want to ruin your GPA by failing P.E. It’s hard to get makeup work.”
Veronica smiled, half-laughed to really sell it. She fished out one of the blueberry yogurt cups, even though she didn’t like them and there was still supposed to be peach left somewhere. “I’ll run that one by Mr. Rafferty. I’m sure he’ll be in stitches.”
Then she fled, before her mom could notice anything else, like that she’d only done a cursory job of putting her hair back in order before she drove home.
Scratch all the potential changes. She needed to be more careful.
*
Veronica had made sure to rent a variety of movie musicals for Friday, because the ones she had at home were mostly old Disney VHSes. She’d drawn the line at Annie, but between Moulin Rouge and the new Phantom of the Opera movie, it felt like she had most of the obvious high-school-girl musicals covered, and she’d picked up Grease for a classic option, and Evita just to keep things interesting. Maybe it would even make Meg think she was sophisticated – although truthfully Veronica had never been much for musicals.
She was forced to reconsider that stance when the first words out of Meg’s mouth were, “I brought Cannibal! The Musical. You like South Park, right?”
“And here I thought I was tapping the dark side of musical theatre by renting Phantom of the Opera,” Veronica said, stepping aside to let her in.
Meg paused halfway through the door. “Veronica, you know I’m currently in a musical about Nazis, right?”
Veronica blinked. “I thought Cabaret was about a night club or something.”
“Yeah, in Berlin,” Meg said. “In the forties.” She slid her shoes off and set them neatly beside the front door as she closed it.
“Is this a trend or something?” Veronica wondered. “The Sound of Music had Nazis in it too.”
“Somehow I doubt they’re going to do The Producers next year,” her friend said, grinning. “Oh, this must be Backup, right? Hello, yes, hi.” She bent over to scratch Backup’s ears as he wandered up, grinning the way only pit bulls could.
“He loves musicals, but he can’t carry a tune in a bucket,” Veronica said. Meg laughed.
“I’ll teach him some tricks,” she offered.
“My parents will be thrilled.” Veronica patted Backup a couple times to bely her dry tone. “They love it when he practices scales in the middle of the night.”
“Aw, are they mean?” Meg scratched the dog’s head firmly and he lolled his tongue out in delight. “Are they mean to you? I know you’re a good dog.”
“Sabotage!” Veronica proclaimed, grinning. “Why are you so against me getting a good night’s sleep, huh?”
Meg only laughed.
After managing to pry her away from the dog, Veronica ushed the other girl into the living room, displaying her own selections with more self-deprecation than she’d originally planned.
“I love Grease!” Meg exclaimed, seeming entirely sincere. “We should start with that, it’s such a great sleepover movie.”
“I have makeover stuff,” Veronica said. “Well, I have nail polish and hair accessories.”
“That sounds perfect,” Meg told her, with pure enthusiasm. Even in earnest, Veronica would have still injected a little irony into the sentiment, but Meg was a better person than she was.
“It’ll give everything time to dry before we break out the popcorn,” she agreed.
Meg had opinions about the popcorn, it turned out – specifically that it should be eaten during Cannibal! because ‘it’s too gory to eat anything else’. So they stuck to candy and nail art during Grease, which was probably for the best, given how many times Veronica’s mom had threatened to make a really big dinner.
“They’re just glad I’m not a complete social pariah,” Veronica confided, as they sorted through the DVDs and VHSes to decide what to watch next. “She asked me three times what kind of food you liked.” She paused for effect. “Although that might be because I kept saying, ‘I dunno, ice cream’.”
Meg giggled. “I never have anyone over for dinner,” she admitted. “I mean, I’m allowed, and sometimes people stay longer than they meant to or something and it’s not like I kick them out! But my parents are so strict about grace and only having full-table conversations – I’m used to it, but then when someone else is there, it starts to feel weird. Plus, one time I had Sheila over, from cheer? And she didn’t want to say grace and it got really awkward.”
“Oh!” Veronica blurted out, because she’d been trying to figure out why Meg’s parents were strict about her little sister. After that she had to clarify, even though it was embarrassing. “Grace like – amen. Not Grace like their daughter. Gotcha.” She shot Meg with finger guns, because her dignity was already gone anyway. Might as well move on to comedy.
Her friend tried valiantly not to laugh at her. “Right. That kind.”
“What was with Sheila, anyway?” Veronica asked, eager to move the conversation along. “It’s not hard to, you know, fold your hands and fake it.” She felt faintly guilty practically admitting that was what she would have done, but the other girl didn’t seem fazed.
“I guess she’s Jewish.” Meg shrugged. “I don’t know why they had to be so weird about it.”
Ah, from embarrassing right back to uncomfortable. “Your parents are pretty… intense, I guess.” Veronica said carefully.
Meg sighed, setting aside the two movies she was deliberating between. “I don’t even know anymore. Like – sometimes I wonder, you know? They’re not the most up to date on some stuff, and sometimes I hear myself saying things and I’m like… no wonder everyone’s looking at you funny.” Veronica winced apologetically. “But then I feel guilty – like my parents would never wait a whole week to report one of us missing! And Lizzie really does take things too far, even if they’re kind of hard on her for it. I mean, it’s not like they hit us or anything,” she added, shooting a gently wry look in Veronica’s direction.
“Yeah… I’m sorry about that.”
Her friend shrugged. “I think I get it. Not being able to figure out whether you should be worried or not.” She sighed. “But it’s like – every time I’m thinking maybe they should back off Lizzie and it’s getting a bit extreme, she starts screaming at them, or she sneaks out on purpose just to stick it to them. I guess they don’t really have any choice except cracking down at that point.”
“It sounds rough,” Veronica offered. She wished she had something better to say, but it felt like all she had when it came to serious issues was uncertainty. Yolanda, Carrie, Mr. Rooks… she wasn’t exactly the best person to help Meg find some kind of definitive answer, no matter how decisive she pretended to be.
“I started phasing out my crop-tops,” the other girl said wryly, rolling her eyes. “They haven’t said anything to me, but it seemed like a good idea.” A little more seriously, she added, “Especially after the whole test thing. Plus, it doesn’t make Lizzie like me any more than she already does when I get away with stuff they don’t let her do.”
“I thought your parents were on your side with the test,” Veronica said, shuffling around two of the movies Meg had brought so she’d have something to do with her hands.
“They were at first? Then my dad started asking all these questions, like was I sure I never slept with Cole, and why would he say all that stuff about me if I didn’t, where did everyone get those ideas. And I tried to explain about the test, and he wanted to know who would have taken it as me, and why, and how they knew people would be able to buy the results. And I don’t know, because I still don’t know who even wanted to do that to me, so…” She sighed, toying with the edge of Newsies now it was closer to her.
“I bet it was Kimmy,” Veronica muttered uncharitably.
That made Meg snort and then immediately look faintly guilty. “Or maybe it was Cole,” she said, an uncharacteristic edge in her voice. “It makes this kind of horrible sense looking back, but who knows. Maybe it was Shelly gunning for my spot on the squad. Or maybe Alyssa really wanted the lead this year, and she’s only been pretending to be decent to me.”
The latter suggestions were clearly intended to be light-hearted, but Meg didn’t manage to dismiss them entirely. That was the problem – if someone was willing to do this to you, and if at least some of the people who were supposed to care about you were willing to sell you out, then any ugly revelation was possible.
The subject wasn’t doing them any good, though. “When is the play, anyway?” Veronica asked. “I meant to keep an eye out, but I keep forgetting.”
“First week of March,” Meg said promptly. “Fifteen dollars a ticket.”
“Not bad for a night out,” Veronica commented. She might not be a big musical theatre person, but she’d gone to school plays with her parents before and usually enjoyed herself – it was a nice family thing to do together. The least she could do was show up to support Meg. “Are your parents going?”
“They always go,” her friend confirmed. “And they make Lizzie go. Usually they bring Grace, but I’ve been trying to hint maybe not this year? It was fine when we were doing The Sound of Music, and I think she was just bored at Anything Goes, but she’s definitely too young for Cabaret. I’m pretty sure it’d be confusing and disturbing when you’re eight.”
“I was going to go anyway,” Veronica said. “But now I’m legitimately intrigued.” She glanced at the movies scattered over the floor in front of them. “Is there a movie, or am I crazy?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t bring it. I mean, if you’re going to go see it soon anyway…” Meg trailed off cheekily, and Veronica laughed at the suggestion that she could be manipulated into going to a high school play.
“Okay, sure. So Newsies or Jesus Christ Superstar?”
The other girl laughed, a little awkwardly. “So… I don’t actually want to watch Jesus Christ Superstar. I was just hoping you’d hang on to it for me. And Cannibal!. I mean, I figured we would watch Cannibal!, but… I’m just kind of worried my parents might get rid of them. My dad’s been kind of on a tear about ‘inappropriate material’ since the Cosmo thing.”
“Oh.” Veronica bit her lip. “I mean, sure. But are you sure everything’s okay?”
“It’s just the ideological version of when my mom decides she’s going to ‘spring clean’ and throws out anything she thinks we’re not using. It’s fine if you’re home and can stop her, but, you know. Hide your stuffed animals when you’re at school.” Despite the breezy tone, there was a flicker of something less sure on Meg’s face, but then it was gone and Veronica didn’t know how else to ask. “If your parents are going to crash after dinner, we should save Newsies,” the other girl went on, decisively. “It’s a good family movie.”
“They better not crash,” Veronica said, taking refuge in ordinary teenage concerns. “Can you say ‘embarrassing’?” She held up the VHS. “I propose Newsies now, Cannibal! after dinner to scare them away.”
Meg reached out to swap a couple things around. “Newsies now,” she said. “Moulin Rouge after dinner to scare your parents away – it’s a total sapfest but I love it. Then popcorn and Cannibal! once we’re not on full stomachs.”
“Is it really that bad?” Veronica asked, raising an eyebrow.
Her friend shrugged. “Everyone says I’m a wimp about horror movies. But it’s a lot.”
She was right, of course – Veronica probably shouldn’t have doubted her. The violence had a bit of a slapstick edge and even when people started biting each other she probably could have rolled with it, but the effects were better than she’d originally anticipated, and the unflinching shots of the actual cannibalism probably wouldn’t have gone down well immediately after dinner, especially when accompanied by one of the characters puking onscreen. But it was still a good time, and more her speed than the other movies they’d watched, although she’d enjoyed those too. The fact that there was aa apparently shapeshifting horse named Lianne in it just added an extra layer of bizarreness that made everything funnier.
But after, when Meg slid the tape onto their little shelf near the TV instead of back in her bag, it was impossible not to say something. She didn’t know what there was to say about the movies, so she tried something easier.
“Is your dad still…” she fished for words that weren’t loaded, “on your back about those rumours?”
Meg shrugged. “My mom convinced him I was telling the truth. Mostly. I think it helped that the guys who kept calling our house got bored and stopped.”
“Count your blessings, I guess.”
“One: Veronica Mars,” Meg said, grinning. “This was way better than sitting at home pouting about the dance. What are the chances I can get you to watch Evita tomorrow before I go home?”
“Oh, no,” Veronica told her, noting the change of subject but letting Meg have it anyway. “Tomorrow you are helping me bake a cake.”
Chapter 30: Not The Way Life Is
Notes:
I have been SO excited to write this one and it involves something that some of you have been predicting/anticipating (one way or another) since early on, so I'm even more excited to get it up - I hope you enjoy!
Chapter Text
People don't like the idea of consequences. They want to be able to live their life freely and do what they want to do without any consequences. And we know that's just not the way life is.
Charles Stanley
The cake was sunken in the middle, which Meg was obviously expecting, since she’d helped make it, but Veronica had iced it last thing on Sunday (and taped the box securely shut before getting permission to keep it in one of the Foods classroom fridges), so the only slightly sloppy #1 SLUT that had been carefully drizzled in red over the thick white frosting made her friend clap with delight and turn slightly pink.
“Wow,” Jasmine said, leaning over to get a better look. “I didn’t know we got cake.”
“Only on Mondays,” Veronica told her. “And only when we have a new member. New full member,” she added, with a meaningful raise of her eyebrows that got Meg to laugh even as she rolled her eyes. “We’re just working on a bit of a backlog for… administrative reasons.”
“Ooh.” Jasmine looked actually interested. “What administrative reasons?”
“That I only thought of it last week,” Veronica admitted baldly, which made the other girl cackle.
“You guys are so funny!” she said. “None of my other friends are this funny. I guess I never thought smart kids would be,” she added reflectively, which Veronica wasn’t sure how to respond to.
“Enough talking,” she deflected. “Cake cutting time!” She handed Meg the pie server she’d brought from home. “You kind of have to slice it with the edge,” she added apologetically. “I didn’t want to try bringing a knife to school. Even if they do have them sitting around in Foods.”
“I can do that,” Meg said determinedly. She applied the pie server to the cake with a care and seriousness that Veronica couldn’t even laugh at, and it went in almost smoothly. The cake might have been lopsided, but the texture wasn’t too bad. Veronica knew that because the top had been bumpier before she sliced it off with a knife to even it out a little, and she’d eaten the sliced-off bit, but it was still impressive when the first piece came out scarcely ragged at all.
Jasmine held out one of the Styrofoam plates that Veronica had filched from a cupboard when she was picking up the cake, grinning eagerly. Veronica rolled her eyes. “It’s Meg’s cake. She should get the first piece.”
“But I’m cutting it!” Meg protested, transferring the slice delicately onto the plate. She took another plate off the stack and set it next to the cake before she cut another piece and very pointedly slid it over to Veronica.
She didn’t get a chance to say anything about it, though, because an arm stretched deftly over her shoulder, leaving her staring at the dark OU in front of her face, and hooked two fingers neatly under the edge of the plate.
There was plenty of cake left, but Veronica slapped Weevil’s hand anyway. “That’s Meg’s cake.”
“This is supposed to be my initiation ceremony,” he said, pretending affront.
“Says who?” She tugged the plate away from him. “Meg never got one.”
He leaned over a little farther to look at the cake itself, examining the still mostly-legible icing. “Number-one slut? Her? Are you kidding me?”
“I’ll thank you not to question my sluttiness,” Meg said primly. She poised the pie server as if to cut another slice – a too-generous one, Veronica thought with disapproval. “Or I won’t give you any cake.”
“Where’s my cake?” he wanted to know. “You’re just stealing my idea. You’re a plagiarist.”
“Maybe Social Distortion will write a song about it,” Veronica said sweetly.
To her surprise, he actually stumbled over whatever his planned retort was, flushing slightly. Jasmine, who’d been digging into her cake, snickered, and he shot her an ugly look that she blithely ignored.
“This cake is really good,” she told Veronica earnestly. “I didn’t know you could cook too. I’m going to be a slut with you guys more often. Sofia never brings me cake.”
“Why don’t you go be a slut with Cervando?” Weevil asked her, an annoyed edge to his voice, and Jasmine blew him a kiss.
“You should be nicer to people who you want favours from.”
“What favour? You stole my spot.” Veronica might have thought twice about getting a look that hostile from him – at least she might have if their entire association hadn’t been deliberately adversarial – but Jasmine remained unfazed, licking icing off her fork insouciantly. It was clearly intended to be provocative, but Weevil only rolled his eyes.
“You have to sit down if you want cake,” Meg told him, ignoring the three-way bickering match as she slid another piece of cake onto one of the plates. Veronica tugged her own cake a little closer to her, protectively. “No walking around and choking on it.”
“Or I get a timeout?” he asked, widening his eyes in fake earnestness.
“Or you get no cake,” Veronica told him.
“Yeah,” Jasmine added, “she just said.”
He shot an aggravated glance at Veronica, then Jasmine, as if he couldn’t decide which of them he was more annoyed with. But he sat, and Meg sliced off another piece for herself as he took ownership of the one she’d just cut. Veronica watched him assess his piece, then the one she’d reclaimed from him, and then very consciously smirk at her as soon as he was sure his was bigger.
Well, the joke was on him – Veronica had made the cake. She could have as much as she wanted.
“Make sure to eat the Slut part first,” she told him sweetly – Meg had given him most of the t. “Meg’s taking the leftovers home, and it’s better if it just says #1 by then.”
“How come she gets a cake when it was my idea?” he demanded petulantly, mouth full. Veronica made a disgusted face, but Jasmine just rolled her eyes almost fondly and leaned over so she could thwack him on the arm.
“I was here first,” Meg pointed out. Her tone was logical rather than taunting; Veronica wasn’t sure if that was because she was still a little leery of Weevil or just because she was nicer than Veronica.
“Plus she’s a real slut, not just someone who nagged her way to affiliate status,” Veronica added, waiting until her mouth was empty, thank you very much.
“Don’t make me laugh,” he mumbled around another mouthful of cake.
Jasmine flicked a bit of icing at him. “Leave Meg alone. You’re just mad because she’s the only one here who’s never slept with you.”
Meg turned red, and Veronica made a valiant effort not to aspirate her cake. She cleared her throat, wishing she’d thought to get a drink. “Plus I’m pretty sure her purity test score was lower than yours.”
Weevil didn’t fact-check her, which was fortunate, because while she didn’t remember the actual numbers off the top of her head, she suspected Meg hadn’t quite drawn even with him in reality – even before allowing for the fact that almost everything about her results had been fabricated. Those criminal activity questions had lost him a lot of points. But he just smirked and said, “She probably cheated. Like you did.”
“Wait,” Meg said, more confused than offended. “You bought his purity test results?”
Belatedly, Veronica realized what that sounded like. “No!” she said, as Jasmine started to snicker. “I was there when he took it.”
“You took a purity test?” Jasmine asked Weevil, apparently happy to be an equal-opportunity mocker.
He rolled his eyes. “It was under duress, for your information. And she cheated on hers.” This was accompanied with a jerk of his head towards Veronica. “She paid me five bucks to have sex with her just so she could say yes to the prostitution question.”
Meg actually gasped and Jasmine shrieked so loudly with laughter that heads turned three tables away. Veronica struggled to keep an unconcerned expression. It felt a lot more embarrassing in retrospect, her savage desire to flip people’s taunts on their heads seeming juvenile out of context.
“Five dollars!” Jasmine gulped for air. “You’re such a cheap whore!”
“I put out for cake,” Weevil said, pushing his plate back toward Meg. Reflexively polite, she started to cut him another slice, but Veronica reached out and stopped her.
“Maybe don’t give him any, then.”
Her friend blinked, blushed again, and handed Veronica the pie server, which sent Jasmine off again right when she’d started to get her breath back. Weevil snickered.
Whatever. The cake currently said #1 SL, so they should probably pare away some more of the last word. She mangled another piece onto his plate with a haughty expression and ignored all three of them in favour of finishing her own slice.
“At least now I can tell them it said ‘Number One Student’,” Meg commented, closing the box before Weevil could demand thirds. “This was… weirdly sweet, Veronica. Thanks.”
“Even if I did make you help me bake your own cake,” Veronica commented, scooping up one last neglected blob of icing with her finger. Weevil’s eyes tracked her as she licked it off, even though she hadn’t actually meant anything by it besides being able to eat the icing. “But I thought you deserved recognition the most, since you’ve been here the longest.”
Jasmine nodded cheerfully; Weevil, of course, snorted in annoyance. He was so predictable.
“It’s too bad Yolanda left before we started doing this,” Meg said thoughtfully. Veronica only hmmed noncommittally in her general direction – three cakes made more of an impact than two.
“Didn’t she get knocked up?” Weevil asked indifferently, well into his second piece of cake.
“No!” Meg said indignantly, but Jasmine appeared to consider the question.
“Who told you that?” Veronica’s voice was scornful, even though she’d privately wondered the same thing once or twice.
He shrugged. “People.” He ate another bite before glancing up. “I heard she dropped out to become a rapper, too, but that’s fucking stupid.”
“She got married,” Jasmine told him, and Weevil nodded wisely.
“Knocked up.”
“Her parents had some stupid feud with her boyfriend’s family,” Veronica corrected him haughtily. “She’s not pregnant, I talked to her last week.”
Well, they’d texted. And Yolanda hadn’t explicitly said she wasn’t pregnant, but by this point she’d probably mention it if she was, right? There wasn’t much point in hiding it.
Meg looked vindicated, Jasmine thoughtful, but Weevil remained unconvinced. “Yeah, girls always drop out of school and skip town five months before graduation to get married when they’re not pregnant.”
Veronica rolled her eyes. “Sure. I’ll be godmother to her imaginary baby. Whatever.”
He finished his cake and got up, shrugging. “I don’t give a shit. You better have a cake for me tomorrow.”
“What am I, a bakery? If you want cake, show up on Mondays.” Seeing an obvious opportunity to start something that she’d left him, she clarified, “Cake only on Mondays, not every Monday.”
“Don’t push me,” he said, accompanying it with a mock-threatening look. Veronica ignored him, and Meg actually rolled her eyes.
Jasmine watched him walk away, though. She winced. “I gotta go.”
“You don’t think he meant it, though?” Meg asked her, amused and skeptical. “I mean, he’s not going to rough someone up for cake.”
“No, but Cervando doesn’t like it when we hang out.” Veronica followed Jasmine’s gaze to where one of Weevil’s vaguely-familiar friends was indeed glaring at them. Weevil said something to him, and he responded, but sulkily.
“Oh,” she said. It was hard to figure out the right response – resentful jealousy in guys was always a bad sign, but on paper Jasmine’s history with Weevil made it seem pretty justified. Actually seeing them interact should have reassured anyone who needed it that there weren’t any deep feelings there, but how old was Cervando again? Fifteen? If he hadn’t been leathered up within an inch of his life to play the macho tough guy, she would probably have already been cutting him some slack based on that.
“I better go let him catch me at my locker,” Jasmine said, getting up. “If I go over there he’ll just decide it’s about Weevil and get bratty.” She waved at them cheerily and headed inside.
Meg sighed. “Boys,” she said regretfully.
“Yeah,” Veronica agreed absently. She’d never thought much about the fact that Weevil usually only came over when Jasmine wasn’t sitting with them – if it had crossed her mind, she’d assumed he didn’t want to hang around with his ex. But they clearly didn’t have a problem with each other, to the point of even being able to bicker good-naturedly. Had he just been trying to avoid causing trouble for her with her boyfriend?
A few months ago the idea would have seemed laughable, but now she wasn’t sure. She could tease him about going soft, and that might get her an answer, but it seemed a little bit too mean if he really was just trying to make things easier on Jasmine or avoid making his friend jealous. It was weirdly thoughtful.
Although apparently he was only thoughtful until free cake was involved. Which seemed about right, actually.
*
Going straight into Mrs. Galloway’s class after lunch was always rough – despite herself Veronica missed Mr. Rooks – but going from cake and unbridled hilarity to having to partner up with one of her classmates in her least favourite class was a special kind of torture that should probably be illegal.
Meg had History fifth period, and there was no one else that Veronica would be enthusiastic about pairing up with – or who would be enthusiastic about pairing up with her, for that matter. As everyone scrambled to find a decent partner, the nearby students pointedly ignoring her, she inadvertently caught Logan’s eyes from across the classroom.
Yeah, she wasn’t risking that. Veronica raised her hand. She didn’t wait to be called on; Mrs. Galloway never paid attention to them if she didn’t have to. “Mrs. Galloway? I can do the project by myself, since there’s an odd number of us.”
This was a blatant bluff, since she had no idea how many kids were in the class besides more than twenty and less than thirty. But she was willing to bet that Mrs. Galloway didn’t know off the top of her head, either, and she was almost positive the woman was too lazy and disinterested to check. There was at least one kid absent today anyway, so if there was another leftover student, she could always claim that was why.
Mrs. Galloway glanced up and blinked at her. “You’ll still need to do the whole project.”
“That’s fine,” Veronica said. “I’ll do the Twelfth Amendment.”
She’d scanned through the list for one that was straight-forward enough to be easy, but not one of the obvious popular ones that everyone would want, so there were a couple groans but not too much protest. The nice part of being alone – aside from the obvious perk of not having to work with her classmates – was not needing to come to a consensus. She could just pick the best one and get to work.
It would be easy to explain, and she hashed up a rough summary of the change from runner-up vice presidents to same-party vice presidents while everyone else was getting their groups sorted out and bickering over which Amendment they wanted. There was a lot of competition for Prohibition, from what she could hear – unsurprisingly, half the class wanted to talk about Al Capone. Everyone else seemed to be gunning to get the other big ones or the easy ones; it wasn’t exactly a chore to explain how changing the voting age to eighteen impacted you personally on top of how it affected the country. All well and good if you wanted a B, but Veronica was expecting an A at least for her planned ‘here’s what our lives might look like if Al Gore was Bush’s VP right now’ sidebar.
At least they’d get computer lab time to work on it. It wasn’t due until next Monday, but Veronica was confident she could knock it out by Wednesday and spend the rest of the week fine-tuning her fake website for Computer Science and surfing the internet.
It was always better to do these things alone, anyway. Even when you got a partner who actually pulled their weight, you still spent half your time arguing over how to structure the PowerPoint.
Too bad Meg hadn’t taken History last semester instead. She wouldn’t have been stuck with Clemmons, for one thing.
Veronica had the rough outlines of what she wanted to do for each section sketched out before they even left for the lab, and by the end of class she’d pretty much knocked out the explanation of the Amendment and the specific changes it had made as well as a chunk of the historical comparisons she was going to make. She emailed it to herself before the bell rang, so that she could finish it off that night if she felt like it. She just had to develop the Cheney vs Gore bit for the ‘how it affects you’ section, and she could probably lead into the history stuff from that with a ‘then again, without this amendment, Gore might not have run, because he might not have been Clinton’s VP’, and after that all she’d have to do was put it into the PowerPoint and find a few good pictures. The project wouldn’t be too bad, after all – if nothing else, it was a break from Mrs. Galloway’s droning.
Psych was fine, Foods was okay, even though it was impossible to escape partnership in that class, and it was warm enough for once that she even considered putting the top down on the way home, although she didn’t actually follow through. She was in a good enough mood that she offered to help her mom clean the living room when she found her in the middle of it, but Lianne just smiled and told her it was fine. “You can swap the laundry from the washer to the dryer for me, though,” she said, turning the vacuum off briefly.
“Sounds good,” Veronica said. “I’ll take Backup for a walk and when we get back I’ll even fold it for you.”
“A delightful daughter,” her mom proclaimed, “if I do say so myself.”
The walk was nice enough – she didn’t bother driving anywhere, just took Backup for a brisk half-jog around the neighbourhood – although by the time they got home she was glad she’d worn a heavier jacket than the one she’d had at school, and her mom had finished vacuuming in the meantime, so Veronica dragged the laundry basket into the living room and put the TV on while she folded. She flipped through channels one-handed until she found an old rerun of Bewitched. It was a little light and campy for her taste, but it lured her mom back in even faster than she’d expected. Maybe she’d mostly wanted an excuse to hand off the more embarrassing of her parents’ undergarments, but it was pretty nice, just sitting there together, folding and laughing at least as much at the actors’ overdramatic shock responses as the jokes while Backup panted and pounded his tail from the doorway to the hall where he’d been temporarily exiled.
“How was school?” her mom asked at the first commercial break.
Veronica shrugged. “Fine. Except for Gym. I should have come up with a diabolical way to make Lilly quit pep squad, instead of dropping it.”
Lianne laughed. She folded the shirt in her lap very precisely, lining it up with an unusual amount of care. “You’re seventeen. It’s appropriate for gym class to be the worst thing in your life.”
“Something which will comfort me up until 9:40 AM tomorrow,” Veronica responded drily.
“Enjoy it while you can,” her mom suggested. She went on meticulously matching seams up, and Veronica frowned.
“You don’t have to be such a perfectionist, you know.”
The sentiment seemed to take Lianne by surprise. “What do you mean?” When Veronica nodded at her mom’s much smaller stack of scrupulously neat clothes, she just laughed. “I just don’t want them tipping over.”
“It sounds like you’re calling me sloppy,” Veronica said, letting the faint sense of unease float away. Her mom tsked fondly as the show came back on, and they went back to seeing how many different ways the writers could find to get Darrin’s name wrong.
*
Between her Computer Science class and the actual period they had to work on it, Veronica finished the main thrust of her project on Tuesday (wanting it out of the way because she had better plans for after school than doing homework) – which was lucky, because Mrs. Galloway was out on Wednesday, and no matter what any of them said, the sub could not be convinced that they were supposed to work on their presentations, not give their presentations. When he reached the point where he was threatening to send kids to the office if they kept arguing with him, she resignedly put up her hand and offered to go first.
There was some expected grumbling and muttered accusations of brownnosing and snobbery, but a few of her neighbours shot her thankful glances, and Corny Cornwall actually made a non-hostile hand gesture at her that Veronica thought was meant to indicate that she was a stand-up dude. Maybe because of that, she dragged it out a little more than she had to, embroidering a little on some of the background and adding an entire illustrative sidebar about how Wanda Varner would be vice-president of the student counsel if the elections had used the pre-Twelfth Amendment model. It ate up enough time that, after the time wasted on the arguments at the beginning of class, they could only squeeze two more presentations in after hers. Neither of them was as good, and Veronica took a little vindictive pleasure in watching Ashley Banks stumble over which rights were enumerated in the Constitution and why it mattered. The other girl had been one of the ones hissing at her, and Veronica would much rather watch her struggle than Corny.
It put her in a good mood for Psych, where she could at least grin at Meg from across two aisles, even if Miss Ambrosio had insisted on assigning their seats when the semester started. Presumably the schadenfreude wouldn’t say anything glowing about her from a psychoanalysis perspective, but they were still on the broad overview of humanism and behaviourism, so she could neatly avoid reckoning with that.
She put her foot down in Foods regarding the amount of cheese in the quesadillas – they should not be twice as much cheese by volume as they were tortilla – drove home with the top up but her window partway down, and did her Chemistry homework in the kitchen while her mom prepped a batch of macaroni salad for her and her dad to have for lunch tomorrow. It was nice, which wasn’t entirely new or novel; lots of things had been nice lately. But it also felt normal, which was a kind of deep-seated relief she’d forgotten to wish for. That feeling made her enthusiastic to help when her dad got home to make dinner, which left her mom in charge of the music as always.
“Cabaret starts soon,” she said as he turned the oven on and handed her a bagged salad to make less bagged-looking in the fancier bowl. “I’m going because Meg’s in it, but I thought maybe you guys would want to come.”
“I like a good musical,” her mom reflected. “When is it, honey?”
“A couple weeks.” Veronica attempted an artful scattering of croutons. “I’ll grab a poster or something. I just figured it was worth mentioning.”
“I like a night out nearly as much as your mom likes a musical,” her dad said cheerfully, which prompted Lianne to swat his shoulder affectionately. “Sounds like a plan to me.”
Maybe all that normalcy should have made her think twice when Weevil happened to pass her locker while she was grabbing her gym strip and raised his eyebrows, but it didn’t. The only thing that gave her pause was the riskiness of spending lunch period in the usual classroom now that there were pre-lunch classes in it.
“Too risky,” she told him regretfully after a moment. “It’ll have to be later.”
He shook his head, raising an eyebrow at Katie David as she hovered nearby until she scurried off without getting into her locker. “I’m busy after school.”
“I think I can get out of fifth period,” Veronica said, before she could think too hard about it. At worst, she could pretend that she’d gotten her period unexpectedly and had to go to the nurse about it, but if Mrs. Galloway was back, she probably wouldn’t even have to do that. It wasn’t technically skipping class to have sex if you’d been excused from class, but she wasn’t planning on making a habit of doing that kind of thing. She just didn’t want to amend her plans for the day, when she’d made an effort to dress conveniently.
Weevil raised an eyebrow at her, giving her a long, scrutinizing look. Inexplicably, Veronica had to fight not to flush. “Yeah,” he said, “I can do fifth period.”
In the end it wasn’t even difficult – Veronica just went to Civics early, told Mrs. Galloway she’d given her presentation yesterday and could she go to the library instead, and slipped back out with full permission while the rest of the class was still complaining loudly about the substitute. Then she dropped her stuff in her locker and took the extra time she spent waiting to make sure she had everything in order today – hair up, bra that unclipped in the front, underwear on the nearest desk instead of the floor.
Check and check and check again.
“You don’t waste time,” Weevil said as he let himself into the classroom.
Veronica debated really getting into a battle of wits with him, but that wasn’t her priority at the moment, so she let him off easy with a glib, “Well, I didn’t know how much time you were going to waste. Eight minutes feels like a lot.”
It took considerably less than eight minutes for her to feel well-rewarded for her efforts; in less than two Weevil’s mouth had just gone from being hot and wet against hers to being hot and wet against the side of her neck, and the solid heat of his body as he pressed her more and more firmly against the wall was even more delightful than usual.
She’d gotten his belt undone already, but the button on his jeans was being stubborn, which wasn’t helped by the fact that he was trying to undo her bra and their arms kept knocking into each other.
“Get out of the way,” he groused. Veronica shivered at his breath on the damp skin of her neck.
“What I’m doing is more important,” she retorted breathlessly. “You get out of the way.”
He growled and went back to kissing her, which Veronica was fine with, and they kept on tangling each other’s shirts in a way that made her almost want to laugh into his mouth.
They both missed the click of the handle turning until it was too late, but some instinctive response to the sound led Veronica to unlock her legs from around Weevil’s waist. She felt him start to frown, but he hadn’t even managed to pull away from her mouth when the door slammed loudly and they immediately jerked apart. Veronica was unable to stop herself from sliding back to the ground with a jolt, Weevil still close enough that their bodies dragged against each other as she did. It was titillating in a horrifying way, because she was equally aware of his erection pressing against her and of Mrs. Hauser’s surprised and disgusted expression.
Weevil still had his shoes on and Veronica didn’t, so for a brief moment she was able to hide from that expression behind his shoulder. But Mrs. Hauser must have gotten enough of a look at her, because she snapped out, “Veronica Mars!”
Veronica edged out from behind Weevil – on the side of him away from Mrs. Hauser, not that she thought it would do much good. Another teacher might have just given them detention or even sternly sent them back to class, but there was no chance of that happening here.
Weevil turned in the same direction she was going, his back to Mrs. Hauser, and Veronica paused for a moment before she realized he was trying to do up his belt without being seen.
She didn’t know how much good it would do. Her brain and stomach had finally caught up to how much trouble they were in, and the latter was still sinking with no sign of stopping.
Her dad was going to kill her. If she was lucky, he’d do it fast, so she didn’t have to see how disappointed he was.
“Get over here,” Mrs. Hauser snapped. Veronica winced expressively, but she went; there was nothing to be gained by dragging her feet at this point. She tried to step surreptitiously back into her shoes as she went, but the way the teacher’s expression soured even further made it clear she hadn’t managed to hide it.
Her underwear, she realized with another horrible jolt. It would have been one thing if they’d only been caught kissing, but her underwear being on the desk was a dead giveaway, and they were in so much more trouble than she thought.
“There are some students who I expect to find skipping class,” Mrs. Hauser said with a disdainful sniff. “And there are some who I do not.”
“Mrs. Galloway said I could leave class because I did my presentation already,” Veronica said, striving for a politely even tone. It seemed like a losing proposition to point out that technically she hadn’t even been doing anything against the rules – not that Mrs. Hauser knew about, anyway. The shoes and the underwear would make her intentions plain enough that arguing about timing wouldn’t get her anywhere, and it was all semantics anyway.
“Leave class and go where?” Mrs. Hauser snapped, to which Veronica winced and declined to answer. She could hardly claim she’d gotten lost on her way to the library. It was in a different building.
“You know, of all the things I would have expected of you…” Mrs. Hauser shot a nasty look at Weevil, as if this was all his fault. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption, but Veronica resented it anyway. She was perfectly capable of corrupting herself. “This is certainly not one of them. Your mother is going to be so disappointed.”
That was probably true, and Veronica’s heart and stomach both sank at the prospect, but it still felt like small potatoes compared to her dad. As unfair as it probably was, his good opinion meant more to her – and was going to take the much steeper nosedive. She braced herself as Mrs. Hauser snapped at Weevil to ‘get over here and stop skulking by the desks!’, ready for everything to get much more serious as soon as his body was no longer blocking the teacher’s view of Veronica’s discarded underwear – but the explosion never came. She glanced over at the desk, and then had to stop herself from staring, because it was empty.
Her gaze snapped back to Mrs. Hauser as the woman cleared her throat, obviously annoyed that neither of them was displaying what she deemed an appropriate level of shame. “If you can’t find an explanation for me, let’s see if you can dig one up for Mr. Clemmons.”
Veronica forced a tight, fake smile. “Yes, Mrs. Hauser.”
“Let’s go.” The woman held the door open imperiously and Weevil slid out into the hall first. Veronica followed him, trying to catch his eye without Mrs. Hauser seeing. The underwear, she mouthed, afraid someone would find it on the floor or something and circle back around to accuse them.
Weevil scrupulously avoided looking at her, oh-so-casually patting the left pocket of his baggy jeans, and Veronica nearly collapsed with relief and embarrassment. He was really saving their bacon – first with his belt and now with this– but that didn’t change the fact that he had her underwear in his pocket.
Mrs. Hauser strode up between them, her shoes clicking on the floor, and put a firm hand on the back of Veronica’s shoulder to propel her forward. She held her other hand vaguely behind Weevil’s shoulder-blade, apparently reluctant to actually touch him, but he took the hint and got moving.
The walk to the office gave Veronica time to think about how she should play this. Rebellious or contrite were her main options, and neither one felt great – the former would get her (and probably Weevil) in much worse trouble with her dad, and the latter would probably mean throwing him under the bus with both her dad and the administration, which felt less practical and more quisling.
Not to mention a betrayal of whatever she’d been trying to do, or be, over the last few months.
There was one option Weevil had bought them, though: claim innocence. Okay, they were skipping class – him definitely, her sort of. And they had been kissing, but that was all. Mrs. Hauser hadn’t had a chance to see his undone belt or Veronica’s discarded underwear, and they could gamble that she hadn’t seen anything specific before they broke apart. Veronica having her shoes off didn’t prove anything.
Technically, that wasn’t even worth calling her parents over. Kissing at school wasn’t against the rules. Doing it when she was supposed to be in class, or at least the library, would get her a detention, but if she played it right… If there was any chance of keeping her dad from finding out about this, she had do her best to take it. Hooking up with a known criminal was bad enough, but one he’d specifically told her to stay away from? It took physical effort not to shudder at the thought.
The identity of her co-defendant was the exact thing that was going to pose a problem, though. For one thing, he undoubtedly had enough prior infractions that the school was unlikely to let him skate by with a slap on the wrist, and that would make her offence look worse by association – and Veronica suspected that regardless of that, Clemmons would be inclined to go harder on her than he would if she’d been caught in the same situation with Duncan or Troy.
It wasn’t looking great, anyway. Especially not for Weevil – but maybe he’d get lucky and there’d be some privacy policy that said they couldn’t tell her parents who she was illicitly making out with at school. She could keep her mouth shut about his identity if she had to, even if it would make things even more unpleasant at home for a while.
Being in trouble was bad enough, but Veronica’s heart sank a little further at that thought. Her dad had explicitly told her to stay away from Weevil. She was going to be grounded forever, and what was worse, he was going to be angry, and disappointed, and she was going to have to look him in the face with absolutely no explanation for why she’d lied to him and then blatantly defied him.
She’d known that, already, but the idea of having to live with it for the rest of the school year, for what seemed right now like the rest of forever, felt crushing. Was he ever going to trust her again? Would it even matter whether the other person complicit in her specific offence had graduated or not, when it came to that?
Mrs. Hauser ushered them into the office with a combination of affronted self-righteousness and smug judgement that made Veronica want to smack her, just a little. She didn’t really have a leg to stand on, righteously speaking, but the woman’s officiousness made it hard to shake the feeling that they had the moral high ground. Veronica had always gotten along fairly well with Mrs. Hauser, although she hadn’t had her as a teacher since her first semester at Neptune High, and she’d always thought the polarization of opinion around her was a bit much – like how people hated Mrs. Canning just for being strict. But maybe she’d been wrong about that.
Weevil shot her a look behind Mrs. Hauser’s back that fell somewhere between wry amusement and baleful resentment – Veronica responded with a purse-mouthed ‘what can you do’ expression, then jerked her gaze away as their escort turned her disapproving glance on them.
She shooed them into seats on opposite sides of the small table against the wall, as if they might start groping each other in front of the receptionist if not separated. Veronica rolled her eyes.
“I wouldn’t give me that look if I were you, missy,” Mrs. Hauser said, catching it. “You might think this is a joke, but let me tell you, you are starting on a dangerous road and it is a lot harder to get off than you may think. When I call your mother–” She broke off, tsking viciously, but all Veronica could think was, Missy? She’d never heard a teacher talk so much like the stock villain in a TV movie.
Weevil rolled his eyes disgustedly ceilingward, and Mrs. Hauser sniffed derisively at him – apparently, he was too far gone to be worth lecturing, something Veronica envied him for at the moment. She forced herself to paste on a tight, faux-receptive smile, which didn’t even win her much leeway, and then dropped it as the woman stalked away.
At least her mother wouldn’t have any specific reason to focus on Weevil. Mrs. Hauser seemed likely to give her a full and probably gleeful rundown of his entire less-than-savoury history, but maybe Veronica could steer things in the direction of focussing on the infraction and not the boy she’d been infracting with. It would probably only keep her dad off the scent for so long, but it was the best shot she had right now.
They had to say it was a one-time thing, obviously. There was no way to communicate that to Weevil without drawing the secretary’s interest, especially when she was already peering at them over the semi-circular desk, but he had to be thinking the same thing, didn’t he? They’d run into each other, they’d gone to the art room to talk, they’d ended up making out. It was dubious, but not disprovable, and more importantly, it was the kind of story that two kids who’d definitely planned their assignation but hadn’t intended to do more than make out might tell. Forget specific details – how did she communicate to him to stay quiet and let her do the talking?
Because life was determined to kick her in the kidneys, Madison Sinclair waltzed into the office while she was contemplating that prospect, her usual haughtiness sliding into an ugly sneer when she put together at least some of the details of why they were both sitting there. She mouthed the word Trash at Veronica, who pasted on a sickly-sweet smile until Madison looked away.
At least her presence distracted the secretary, which gave Veronica a chance to lean slightly to the side and mutter, “I have a plan. Just try not to say anything too… Just try not to say too much.”
Weevil raised his eyebrows in a manner which in no way signalled agreement, but before she could press any further, the door to the vice principal’s office opened, revealing both Mrs. Hauser and Mr. Clemmons, who looked spitefully pleased and resigned, respectively.
“Eli,” Mr. Clemmons said, tone and expression markedly unimpressed. “I wasn’t able to reach your grandmother, so I’ll be calling her once we’ve had a talk.”
Weevil stretched, making a show of insolent unconcern. “She’s at work.”
“Hmmh.” The vice principal’s face slid from stoicism into disappointment. “Veronica.”
Veronica got up carefully, giving him a small, apologetic smile and keeping her knees as close together as possible. She opted to ignore Mrs. Hauser – there probably wasn’t anything that she could say to the woman that would make any sort of helpful impact. “Let’s talk in my office.”
So much for managing the situation. She’d just have to hope that Weevil kept his mouth shut out of self-preservation.
“Mr. Clemmons,” she said as soon as the door closed behind her. “Is it really necessary to get parents involved? I know I should have gone to the library like Mrs. Galloway suggested, but it’s not really skipping when I was already excused from class, is it? And aside from that, I haven’t done anything against the rules. I know I’ll have detention,” she added, trying to look appropriately penitent. “But Mrs. Hauser seemed – really mad, like I offended her personally, so I’m just not sure all this is… fair.”
Clemmons sat down behind his desk, eyeing her carefully. “Well, Veronica, that’s debatable. While I understand that you weren’t in violation of as many rules as your partner in crime out there–” Veronica winced at the turn of phrase, “–your choice of… company is concerning.”
Veronica didn’t sit. Her skirt was short enough that being involuntarily commando was a definite liability. “It’s not against the rules to talk to other students,” she pointed out. She knew the verbiage was a mistake as soon as she said it, but it was hard to think of another way to say it that wasn’t unhelpfully inflammatory.
“Mrs. Hauser tells me you were doing a good deal more than talking,” Mr. Clemmons responded drily.
Capitulation was necessary here. “Okay,” Veronica said. “Sure. I mean, ‘a good deal’ feels like an exaggeration – I think she’s just making assumptions because I took my shoes off, which was before… well, before we got busted, by the way – but you’re right. But it’s not like we were skipping class together or anything. I just ran into him and we got talking, and…” She raised one shoulder, trying out her best innocent what-can-you-do expression. “You know how it goes sometimes, right?” Teenage girl, swept away by hormones and embarrassed about it, she thought, wondering if she could make herself blush if she tried hard enough.
Clemmons didn’t look impressed, but he also didn’t look like he was going to call her bluff. “Veronica, I’m not entirely unaware that you’ve had a difficult year.”
She hoped to god he meant Troy, that Jeremy’s terrible-head rumours and the somewhat stretched truth about what had happened with Lilly hadn’t made its way all the way to Van Clemmons.
“…important it is to make sure that you’re not putting yourself in jeopardy,” he was saying, when she shook off the horror of that idea. “I’m not just lecturing you, I hope you understand that. You have never been a frequent visitor to my office, and while I would hate to see that change, I would hate it even more if you were to put yourself in a situation where something bad were to happen to you.”
Veronica nodded, wincing internally. “I understand. This was a one-time thing, I swear.”
It was even true. She’d never been in the habit of skipping classes.
Mr. Clemmons straightened some papers on his desk. “You are correct that you will have detention, starting tomorrow. A week should be sufficient, but I would strongly encourage you to find time to have a chat with Ms. James as well.”
Veronica nearly choked. She did her best to school her face, but Clemmons clearly caught her consternation, judging by his expression of disapproval. She hoped it read as typical adolescent resistance to being head-shrunk, rather than the distress of someone who had blackmailed the counselor he wanted her to see into changing her schedule.
But… she could go and just refuse to say anything, if it came to it. “Okay,” she said, forcing some sincerity into her voice. Clemmons still looked dubious. “Detention until next Wednesday, and I’ll go see Ms. James.” He was still frowning at her with some gravity, and Veronica hesitated. “Wait, is it detention until next Friday? Because that’s fine, I’ll go, I just misunderstood.”
“We’ll call it Wednesday,” he told her sternly, as if to emphasize that this didn’t mean she was getting away with anything. “Now, as far as your parents go…”
Veronica took a breath, trying to look mildly hopeful rather than entirely desperate.
“Your mother has already been contacted,” he said. “She’s on her way here now, so we can discuss this further. Then I think it might be best if you go home for the rest of the day.”
Veronica considered protesting, but she wasn’t devastated over the prospect of missing Psych or Foods, and her stomach was so firmly rooted in the bottom of her shoes that it would have been hard to care regardless. At least they hadn’t called her dad, but that wasn’t much comfort. He’d know soon enough.
It couldn’t be normal practice to send someone home for skipping class, and she wondered hollowly as they stood up if Clemmons was just trying to keep her away from Weevil. Or maybe it had been Mrs. Hauser’s idea, or even something her mom had insisted on when they called her.
Mr. Clemmons held the door for her. “Why don’t you have a seat, Veronica, until your mother gets here. Think about ways that you can show better judgement in the future.”
Veronica didn’t answer, too caught by the plate on the office door opposite Clemmons’s. She’d looked at it any number of times while they were waiting, even actively read it once or twice, but the connection hadn’t twigged in her brain until just now, until she was standing here being lectured about illicit sexual encounters.
Alan Moorehead.
“Holy shit,” she mouthed to herself.
“Veronica?”
“Sorry. Just… thinking about how I can show better judgement.” She slid back over to the chairs, passing Weevil as Clemmons ushered him into the office in turn. It was probably nothing. How many Alans went by Al, anyway? Had Principal Moorehead ever even been a teacher, or was he just a principal? And even if he had, that didn’t mean he’d been teaching here when her mom was in high school.
But if he had, and if she had somehow stumbled across the mysterious Al – the one who hadn’t attended Mr. Rooks’s hearing, even though her mom had expected him to – maybe, just maybe, it would be enough of a distraction to keep her mom from spilling every detail to her dad, or from following up on them with Clemmons in the first place. She couldn’t be sure how much good it would do – if she was even right – but she had to give it a shot.
She considered a few different approaches, partially to keep herself from wondering what Weevil was saying in there and whether it was going to backfire on them, or even just on her. Technically, he wouldn’t be wrong to blame the whole thing on her, but she had to believe that he was smart enough to leave out the necessary context that would make that believable, even if he was willing to sell her out. One illicit encounter could be brushed off; months of them not so much.
After a few minutes, the office door opened again and Clemmons ushered Weevil out, pointing him firmly toward the bank of chairs. He didn’t look pleased, and Veronica thought better of trying to catch Weevil’s eye while he was still watching them.
“Deborah,” he said, nodding to Mrs. Hauser where she was still standing smugly off to the side, sniffing every now and then with an air of superiority, and they held a whispered conversation from his open office door, presumably the better to keep an eye on juvenile delinquents. Weevil making a point of sitting next to Veronica probably hadn’t done them any favours there, although she could understand why he’d felt the need to throw a spiteful look at Mrs. Hauser.
“How’s your plan?” he muttered sardonically out of the side of this mouth. Veronica eyed him carefully, also sidelong. She wondered if he assumed she’d thrown him under the bus to save herself, if Clemmons had blamed him for this and he figured Veronica was behind that. It was impossible to say if he was angry with her or just pissed off in general.
“No good,” she said under her breath, pretending not to look at him. “They called my mom already. We just have to play it down, I guess.”
“Yeah, right.”
He wasn’t wrong. They were still screwed. Individually screwed, screwed as a unit – the only way they weren’t screwed was literally, which didn’t feel as lucky as it had fifteen minutes ago. Sure, the relative PG-ratedness of the encounter meant they weren’t turboscrewed, but at a certain point the degrees stopped mattering very much.
There wasn’t anything else to say after that. Veronica could have asked if they’d managed to contact his grandmother or whether he was getting sent home too, but it didn’t feel like any of her business. She wondered if he lived with his grandparents because his mom was dead, and what the deal was with his dad. It wasn’t like she’d ever especially cared before, but there was something about knowing you’d probably never talk to someone again that made all the things you didn’t know about them bubble up to the top of your mind. Or maybe it was just something to think about that wasn’t how utterly doomed she was.
The only saving grace was that Mr. Clemmons sent Mrs. Hauser back to her classroom – to do what, Veronica wasn’t sure, because she clearly didn’t have a class this period, but at least it got rid of her. The vice principal disappeared back into his office, but he left the blinds on his window raised all the way, and Veronica could see him looking up regularly to keep an eye on them.
Her mom arrived before the end of fifth period, so it was easy to hear her shoes approaching the office. Veronica’s heart sank at the hesitation in her footsteps. She’d gotten in trouble before, but never, ever for something that had made the school call her parents in.
Then Lianne made her entrance into the office, and Veronica’s insides jolted and fell away in something that there weren’t any convenient metaphors for.
She should have known, she thought. The laundry. The unsteady steps. The fact that she’d dared to think she could breathe again.
Her mom had clearly made an effort to look presentable – she’d put on flats instead of running shoes and covered her shirt with one of her nicer sweaters – but it was impossible not to notice that her collar was crooked and the eyeliner she rarely wore was sloppy in a way that did the opposite of distracting from how bloodshot her eyes were.
Weevil’s eyebrows went up instantly, sparking a crawling sense of embarrassment inside Veronica’s skin. At the same time, she felt frozen and distant. She was numbly glad that at least Madison wasn’t there to see, because she’d pranced out with her photocopies while Weevil was still in Clemmons’s office, but it wouldn’t take long for –
“Veronica!” Lianne’s voice was slurred in a way she could probably have blamed on whatever she had in her mouth, but it was the volume that left no one in the room in doubt that something was wrong. The secretary was all eyes immediately, and Clemmons got up and opened the door to his office.
“Mrs. Mars,” he said, maybe giving her the benefit of the doubt or maybe thinking that the wall between them hadn’t obscured as much of the noise as it actually had. “Thank you for coming down.”
“This is really unacceptable,” Lianne said, moving her candy or whatever it was around in her mouth as she spoke. “Veronica just does not behave like this, so we’ll be taking it… extremely seriously.”
Her tone and cadence wandered between confidential and dignified, but despite the fact that there was no way everyone in the room wasn’t now one hundred percent sure she was drunk off her ass, Lianne seemed to think she was pulling it off. It would have been even more embarrassing than the drunkenness itself, if Veronica hadn’t already wanted to claw her skin off and die. She felt small and ugly and diminished inside, and she couldn’t look at any of them. All she could do was clench her fists and try not to cry, while her face burned and hot tears welled up behind her eyes. Staring at her bare knees just reminded her how ridiculous she was for thinking she could turn herself into someone who wouldn’t get hurt. She wasn’t any less of a pathetic little girl; she was just a pathetic little girl who was also kind of slutty and delinquent.
Mr. Clemmons cleared his throat. “Well… since it’s a first offence, I don’t think it needs to go on Veronica’s record as anything besides a detention. But I think it’s worth a discussion at home, so it might be better if…” He hesitated, finally realizing what Veronica had known from the beginning but which now brought a fresh wave of horror – that Lianne had driven here.
“Yes, absolutely.” Lianne’s teeth clacked against the thing she was still sucking on. “It will not happen again, I can promise.” She overshot ‘emphatic’ and landed on ‘ridiculously grandiose’, and Veronica cringed. It shouldn’t have been possible for her to be any more humiliated than she already was, but instead of being immune to further embarrassment she felt over-sensitized, like she was made entirely of raw skin.
“With Veronica normally being a good student and fairly well-behaved, in this case I think we can call it case of choosing the wrong company,” Mr. Clemmons said. He kept his tone even, but Veronica could still sense that he was uncomfortable. She watched him shoot a glare at the secretary, who was openly gawping, and felt a hint of something that might have been gratitude if only she was capable of feeling anything beyond mortified.
Weevil, who she would have expected to fire back some crack at the slur to his character, said absolutely nothing. Veronica couldn’t bring herself to look at him, not even his shoes and the legs of his pants, which was all she could stand to see of her mother or Mr. Clemmons. Lianne turned to him anyway, reminded of the existence of a second party to Veronica’s offence, and recoiled.
“Him?”
Something coiled up tight in Veronica’s chest. If her mom said something racist, she was going to cry.
But it was somehow worse. Lianne wavered slightly, her arms wobbling in the air in front of her as she tried to stabilize herself without making it obvious. “Veronica, he doesn’t even have hair!”
She couldn’t take this anymore. Veronica stood abruptly, nails digging into the fleshy part of her palms until the pain gave her focus. “We better go,” she bit out mechanically, eyes fixed on Mr. Clemmons’s suit-clad shoulder. “I’m really sorry. Thank you for everything.”
It didn’t make sense, but it got her out of there. Mr. Clemmons made some throat-clearing acknowledgement that Veronica barely heard as she did her best to hustle her mother out of the office while Lianne tried to pretend she was the one escorting her daughter.
“Veronica,” she said sternly as Veronica tried to pick up the pace, to get them out of all possible sightlines from the office. “Just a second, young lady – we need to talk about this–”
As she stumbled a little closer, Veronica finally figured out what she had in her mouth. The smell of rum wasn’t completely obscured, but the antiseptic scent of peppermint was a lot stronger.
Breath mints. She’d gotten wasted, driven to Veronica’s school, and popped two or three breath mints like she was a teenager trying to sneak back in after curfew.
The miserable humiliation evaporated, replaced with a bubbling pool of dull rage. “We’ll talk about it,” Veronica said, voice low and vicious. “Give me your car keys.”
“You are not in a position to be making demands–“
“Give,” Veronica hissed, so emphatically that Lianne flinched back and nearly lost her balance, “me your keys.”
Her mom stared at her dumbly. Veronica met her eyes with unflinching fury, and Lianne’s gaze fell away, skittering along the wall as she lowered her head like a resentful child. Eventually she pulled the keys to her Honda out of the pocket of her jeans and handed them over. Veronica took them, grabbed her mom’s arm, and marched them both toward the doors as fast as she could. She was too angry to do anything else, but she was also horribly aware that the bell was going to ring for sixth period any minute now, and if the whole school –
“Ouch – Veronica – stop it – Veronica!” Lianne stumbled after her, but it wasn’t until they were finally clear of the building and halfway to the parking lot that she finally cried, “Stop it!” more emphatically and wrenched her arm free. She rubbed it affrontedly. “What is wrong with you?
“With me?” Veronica laughed, a bitten-off sound of mirthless derision. “Get in the car. I can’t talk to you right now.”
Her mom tried to protest, to act like everything was still about the skipped class, the boy she’d been kissing, but Veronica wouldn’t hear it. She turned away putting her back to whatever cheap imitation of parenting Lianne was intending to do, and stalked toward the parking lot. Even from a distance she could see her mom’s car was crooked, taking up a space and a half.
She couldn’t stand to look in it, so she got into the driver’s seat and waited. Behind her, the bell for sixth period went off faintly.
By the time her mom got into the passenger side, she’d figured out she should stop talking. Veronica turned the car on and pulled out, setting her jaw to discourage any more attempts at discussion. If she tried to talk, she’d scream. She didn’t turn on the radio.
Maybe Lianne had sobered up a degree or two by the time they got home, or maybe she’d just spent the drive working herself up, but when Veronica parked and got out, her mom was right behind her. “If you think we are not going to have a discussion about what happened today, you are mistaken, young lady,” she said, with the over-articulated dignity only possessed by intoxicated.
“I don’t think you want to have this conversation on the lawn,” Veronica told her flatly, focusing on the door to the house. She wanted to get them out of sight of the neighbours, she wanted a wall between herself and anyone who could see her, she wanted to escape this nightmare and run, even if it was only to her room. She still had her mom’s keys; she’d left all her stuff at school.
“Deborah,” her mom said meaningfully as Veronica unlocked the front door, “told me that that boy is a… a criminal. And he looks – how old is he, anyway? He looks like a drug dealer. He’s probably a drug dealer. If you think you’re going to date some, some heroin addict–”
“I’m not dating anyone,” Veronica snapped, so furious she’d circled back to nearly being in tears. “He’s seventeen. And he’s not a drug dealer, you’re just a racist.”
Lianne looked offended. “This is not – that is ridiculous.”
“You always say crappy stuff about black people when you drink,” Veronica said, unable to stop. The words kept on bubbling over. “Or Asian people. It’s like you think it doesn’t count because you’re not being mean, but everyone at that nail salon thinks you’re a racist. And a drunk.” She’d thought nasty things about her mom before, but she’d never said anything like that out loud. She’d barely even used the word as an adjective, and hearing herself say it so baldly – a drunk – made her faintly dizzy. “You think the principal and the teachers and anyone who saw you today is judging anyone except you? You think your friend Deborah couldn’t tell you were wasted on the phone? Breath mints, Mom?”
“Don’t try to make this about me, Veronica.” Her mom stumbled on the edge of carpet as she tried to draw herself up and had to catch her balance on the wall. “When I tell your father–”
“If you tell Dad, I’ll tell him you were drinking in the middle of the day,” Veronica snapped, fed up beyond belief that Lianne thought she could preach to her about appropriate behaviour. “And that it still didn’t stop you from driving there when they called you. That’s illegal as hell. Not very good for the sheriff to have a wife who flouts the law quite that blatantly, don’t you think?”
“Veronica!”
“Next year’s an election year,” she added, quietly vicious. “How’s that going to play for the voters?”
Lianne’s face paled, and she staggered slightly as the words hit her – although Veronica told herself spitefully that it was hard to tell, considering. The viciousness kept her strong.
“Go sleep it off,” she spat. “And keep Dad out of it, or I’ll tell him everything, I’m not covering for you ever again.”
She didn’t stick around to have a fight about it, stomping furiously past her mother and up the stairs without a backward glance, where she dumped the keys to the Honda on her nightstand and her jacket on the floor before slumping resentfully onto her bed – only to straighten up and glance down at her phone in surprise as it went off.
you get home ok?
She frowned at the unfamiliar number for a second. No name, no text history, just that one question. No one would be texting her something like that other than Meg, whose number she already had in her phone, and who would also still be in class, even if she was probably be realizing by now that Veronica wasn’t going to make it to sixth period.
There was really only one possibility and she was reluctant to confirm it, because that had the potential to be very embarrassing if she was wrong, especially since there was no reasonable way for him to have her number – but she had to be sure.
Weevil?
The response came back quickly: do u text alot of guys that u want 2 bend them over the nearest flat surface nd fuck them raw?
Oh God. That was right. She’d somehow completely forgotten about that little exchange. Just because she’d deleted her text history didn’t mean he had.
Why do you text like a 12-year-old? she asked him, trying to even things out, to not think about what he’d seen half an hour ago.
we cant all afford fancy keyboard phones V
She was trying to figure out if that signalled annoyance or if he was just needling her when another text came in.
just making sure yr alive
That sat raw and sour in the pit of her stomach, peeling off the last tender skin of plausible deniability from the situation. He’d known about her mom already, more or less, but that didn’t really ease the sting of having it out in the open. But he cared. That was nice, she guessed.
Don’t worry, I drove.
If she was lucky, it read as a worldly blasé-ness instead of a bitter retort. Veronica wasn’t even entirely sure which way she meant it.
She wasn’t going to know how he took it, because the response that came five minutes later ignored what she said entirely.
Im suspended :)
She rolled her eyes at the smiley face. How nice for you?
I know how much u pine after me when Im not there
That was both completely untrue and slightly accurate, because she was definitely going to notice his absence. How long are you suspended for?
week
Presumably that meant one. The effort of hitting an extra two keys to make that clear would have killed him, probably, so it was entirely understandable that it was so vague. Veronica rolled her eyes again.
That’s not really an issue for me.
sure its not
lmk when u start going out of yr mind
Unlikely. But I can get you your algebra homework.
His only response to that was a series of cry-laughing faces. Veronica smiled reluctantly.
I have probly 3 hrs to live when yr dad finds out nd u want me 2 waste it on algebra??
yr a very sick person
She was trying to figure out a response to that that didn’t give too much away but that still at least kept him from looking over his shoulder compulsively for the next week, but a follow-up text came in before she could. For someone typing on an old-fashioned phone where you had to scroll through the letter options, he was annoyingly fast.
u should go 2 therapy 4 yr math addiction
You’re the one who keeps texting me numbers., she replied, and then added, belatedly, Don’t worry about my dad. I took care of it.
u MURDERED him?????
She choked.
badass
u need a shovel bc I have a shovel
Is that a euphemism? Veronica texted him. It was hard to resist.
Yyyy r u always implying I have a hardon 4 yr dad? very creepy
just 4 that u can make yr dog dig the grave
To be VERY CLEAR, she wrote back, heading this off, if not at the pass as she should have, at least before it quite made it down to the valley, I did not kill anyone. He’s just not going to find out.
And then, because it was driving her a little crazy, How do you even know I have a dog?
u told me
‘I have a pitbull nd hes scarier than you’
Had she said that? When had she said that? And why on earth had he remembered it?
categorically untrue btw. nobodys scarier than me :) :) Im terrifying
You’re a NERD, she told him. Backup could eat you no problem.
no way dogs lovvve me
Why, because you’re dog for life?
The only response she got to that was a long string of smile emoticons, topped off with a winky face.
It was entirely pointless and stupid, but somehow she felt just slightly better, marginally less raw, her insides a fraction less torn and jagged. She still felt hollow and awful once the distraction ebbed, but… it was something, and she’d take any relief she could get.
Chapter 31: A Surefire Recipe
Notes:
Look, I know this is late (it's the usual person's fault), but it's also 2K longer than anticipated, so maybe that makes us even?
Minor warning in the endnotes just in case.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Vengeance is the act of turning anger in on yourself. On the surface it may be directed at someone else, but it is a surefire recipe for arresting emotional recovery.
Jane Goldman
It was upsettingly easy to manage her dad when he got home. She told him her mom was napping, threw out a sop about how Backup had dragged Lianne halfway around the neighbourhood and worn her out, and dismissed her own less than chipper demeanour by complaining about school and the Amendment presentation. He was too sharp not to wonder, but he wouldn’t be wondering about what had actually happened. Let him think she’d come home to find her mom sleeping one off, let him think they’d argued, as long as he didn’t start asking questions about school.
He did ask where her car was, but Veronica had a prepared answer for that one. “It wouldn’t start – Meg gave me a ride home. The autoshop teacher said he’d have his class fix it for me if I waited until today; apparently he’s been looking for a chance to demonstrate something or other and they already have the right part.” Then she threw him a wry grin and said, “Mom says I have the best worst luck,” because her leverage wouldn’t last if she didn’t provide Lianne with at least some plausible deniability.
Covering for her mom made her skin crawl. She was used to that resigned, sinking feeling that she always tried so hard to ignore whenever she made up a story or tabled a worn excuse, but this time all she could feel was disgust. With Lianne, with herself, with every time she’d let things slide and told herself that this was different, that this was a one-time thing, that nothing would be helped by causing trouble and anyway maybe her mom was just tired.
Her dad looked relieved for a moment, although she knew he was going to keep an eye out anyway. Hopefully her mom would be smart enough not to blow her chance by being obvious, but Lianne wasn’t famed for her self-control.
“Do you need a ride to school tomorrow?” he asked her, but Veronica shook her head.
“Meg’s going to pick me up.”
It was true enough, although they’d established that when Meg had texted her to ask where she was, rather than on the fictional car ride home. Meg, who was at least as unsuspicious by nature as Keith Mars was suspicious, had let her put off all the details for the moment, once Veronica had assured her she was okay.
Not that she wouldn’t be curious, but she was much politer than Veronica.
“I’m thinking leftovers tonight,” she suggested to her dad, utterly unable to tolerate the idea of faking her way through a family dinner and more than a little worried that Lianne’s self-preservation instincts wouldn’t hold up in the face of faintly-hungover outrage. Better to let her cool off before they all had to sit around the same table.
“I suppose I can cosign that,” he agreed. “Want to watch the news and despair over the state of the world?”
Veronica hid her wince. “I think it would just be despair over the state of journalism,” she responded, which earned her an appreciative chuckle. “And no, actually – I want to get two weeks ahead in all my homework so if any of my other teachers get substitutes, it won’t matter if they decide change our deadlines with no notice.”
“Academic excellence through spite,” he agreed. “I knew we were raising you right.”
That hurt in a way Veronica didn’t want to think about. She smiled, hoping he’d attribute the tightness of the expression to sarcasm. “I’m going to passive-agress my way to Harvard, see if I don’t.”
“Far be it from me to stand in the way.” He squeezed her around the shoulders and opened the fridge to find something to eat. Veronica accepted his offer to heat up some leftover chicken for her alongside his own, and then escaped upstairs.
The smart thing to do would be to call it. She’d escaped permanent consequences by the skin of her teeth, and she was still being preserved from disaster by little more than an extremely unstable bit of blackmail. She didn’t have any illusions about her threat being rock solid, when Lianne might end up blurting out the damning information while drunk, or getting so angry she told her husband about it anyway, or even getting busted so hard she decided she didn’t care about admitting to a little drunk driving on top of everything else. Even if that didn’t happen, Veronica couldn’t risk getting into any more trouble at school, and the art classroom was off the table entirely.
But it felt like letting her mother win to even consider it. Or maybe like letting Lilly win, like making concessions to proper behaviour would validate her old reputation, even after everything. Lianne’s drug dealer crack was still rankling her on top of everything – not that she had any specific reason to think Weevil wasn’t involved in that kind of thing on top of his clear sideline in less-than-petty theft, other than one off-hand comment about his mother, but that didn’t make it any less infuriating when she had full-on dated an actual drug dealer and her mom had found him uniformly charming, told her she’d found a good catch, and helped Veronica make sirloin so they could have him over for dinner.
It wasn’t hard to guess why Troy had been miraculously above suspicion by comparison with Weevil, and it didn’t have anything to do with the length of their respective records. The knowledge tasted bitter, but without any of the satisfaction that usually came along with indulging her cynicism.
Being comforted by the fact that her dad had run Troy’s record once he’d been to the house, that it was in fact the reason he’d caught Troy on the way out of town with twenty pounds of steroids, would have seemed absolutely impossible to her a few months ago. As it was, it was a cold comfort, but she’d take what she could get.
The reminder that disappointment could go two ways hardened her – not her resolve, since she hadn’t resolved on anything yet, but maybe her decision-making process. The near-miss had brought home just how much she was risking if her dad found out, but it had made her so disgusted with pretty much everyone else whose disapproval might once have mattered that most of her felt like keeping things up out of spite.
Still. She was hardly inclined to float the idea of meeting up outside of school. It read like investment, which was the last thing she wanted to project. Being the girl who got clingy about no-strings-attached-sex was one reputation she still very much cared about avoiding, but that meant ignoring the possibility unless he brought it up, and pretending she didn’t care much either way if he did. Which was fine, since she was used to that type of careful balance by now, but if he didn’t care to make a suggestion like that – and honestly he might not be willing to risk her dad’s wrath, considering his barely-joking comments about having hours to live – then she was out of luck; it was celibacy or trying to find someone else to hook up with.
The latter possibility felt almost gross, which was probably a blow to her slut credentials. But the whole process was both unappealing and exhausting even as a thought exercise – first she’d have to find someone who was willing to sleep with her (while just sort of… hoping he would be good at it); eliminate the complete assholes, or at least the ones whose assholery would be directed in an unacceptable way, like telling the whole school she had a weird vagina or something; find somewhere to meet – and then actually have sex with him, which would probably mean looking him awkwardly in the face the whole time, or kissing someone she barely knew, which she wasn’t morally opposed to, obviously, but which felt extremely uncomfortable. She hadn’t exactly set out to find a long-term hookup partner so much as stumbled into it by having spite-motivated sex with someone who happened to know what he was doing, and the prospect of having awkward, unpleasant sex was a lot less tolerable now that she had actual expectations, so she really didn’t feel like trying her luck again.
Keeping the current arrangement going with a few tweaks meant a guarantee of quality, if nothing else, plus however antagonistic their encounters sometimes got, at least she knew Weevil well enough that she didn’t have to have any awkward negotiations with his tongue, and he’d already seen her naked, so it wasn’t like there would be any surprises.
Besides, whatever else you could say about him, at least he was moderately discreet. Getting busted hadn’t been his fault, although it may have slightly been hers.
Veronica left her laptop closed and picked up her phone instead. She skimmed through the texts Weevil had sent her, then reopened her conversation with Meg.
hey, it started, just want to make sure everything’s okay – you weren’t in psych?
Long story. Tell you tomorrow?
you're okay though?
Well… I’m short on a ride to school tomorrow.
I can fix that :)
You’re an angel.
There were a few more back-and-forths, since Meg had required more robust assurance that everything was all right, but the rest of the conversation was equally wholesome and reassuring. It wasn’t a bad thing – it was just that Veronica didn’t feel very wholesome at that moment.
It was one of the overlooked benefits to being friends with Lilly, that no matter what rule she broke or how dysfunctional she felt, she’d always had an example to hand of something worse or more extreme. Not necessarily a recent one, but there was always something. Sometimes it had served to make her look good by comparison with parents or teachers (although it had also carried a risk of backfiring by association, and her dad had always been too smart to fall for that anyway), but mostly it had just shored up her idea of herself as a good, responsible person. That image should have been incompatible with the jaded, worldly, tough-girl persona she’d been leaning into for months, and yet somehow they’d coexisted uneasily until now, not quite touching, like her extra-curricular activities had no bearing on who she was at home, with her straight As and close relationship to her parents and propensity for walking the dog without being asked.
It was a house of cards, of course. Maybe it had been even before they’d been caught, another flimsy layer added every time she covered for her mom, or pretended to serve as the voice of reason with Lilly and her brat pack about something she really did want to do, with the full intention of being talked into it.
If she’d ever tried to reconcile that contradiction, instead of ignoring it, she would have liked to think that the truth was balanced somewhere between those two opposing ideas – not a perfect responsible daughter or a stereotypical teenager acting out, but a girl who was smart but savvy, didn’t let anyone tell her what to do but didn’t cut her nose off to spite her face either. It was easy to flatter yourself that way until you got pulled up short, but it was hard to argue for savviness when she’d been dumb enough to get caught doing something that could blow up her life.
So, she thought, striving for the wry, detached tone she’d mentally adopted for so much of the last few months, don’t get caught.
Even in her head, it came out furious instead. Red-hot and barely in control was better than curled up crying would have been, but she needed – she needed – to find something more temperate. She was going to (probably) keep hooking up with a guy who was a reliable source of orgasms and entertainment, because she wanted to. She was not going to specifically and deliberately fuck a boy who appalled her mother just because she was angry and hurt and disgusted.
If you had both those reasons, which one counted more?
Veronica shoved herself forcefully away from her desk, then stood there at a loss for what to do next. It felt like far too on-the-nose a metaphor for everything going on in her life, and she clenched her fists in impotent frustration.
She would have taken homework, at this point, both as something to do and as a bit of threadbare comfort that she wasn’t technically lying to her dad, but all her things were at school. She should put something together for the morning, she thought, so that it didn’t look suspicious if her dad saw her – but it was hard to find the motivation. Finally she forced herself to shove a couple novels into an old bookbag, top them with a half-used pad of lined paper from the office that her mom had probably used for abandoned soap-making notes, and shoved it forcefully into the jointure of floor and wall next to her door.
It was a good thing it was almost the weekend, because she was in no mood to go to school tomorrow, but she didn’t know how she was possibly going to handle two and a half days alone with her parents.
*
Veronica didn’t sleep well that night. She missed her alarm, and her mom must have thought better of trying to wake her – or maybe she just hadn’t noticed – so it was Meg’s I’m outside! text that woke her. She dragged on the nearest clothes as quickly as possible, completely forgot about her subterfuge bag, and was in Meg’s passenger seat in three minutes, eyes crunchy with sleep and hair still disorganized.
“Don’t ask,” she told Meg, trying for humour and missing.
The other girl looked concerned, but she was too polite to pry. She only said, gently, “Um, I think you forgot your backpack…?”
“It’s at school,” Veronica said grimly. It was sweet that Meg had reserved the front seat for her – although she was sure that Lizzie, consigned to the back, wasn’t thrilled about it – and later she’d probably feel guilty for not appreciating it properly. “Let’s just all be glad my dad left for work early and isn’t here to notice I don’t have it, and move on.”
She assumed that was why his car was gone, anyway – not that it was all that early. Her initial worries had been predicated around the idea that she would be eating breakfast.
“I didn’t get up half an hour early so I could be late for homeroom,” Lizzie complained, slouching against the passenger side door. Veronica could see her in the mirror, albeit at an awkward angle.
Meg just rolled her eyes. “You didn’t get up any earlier than usual. And you’ll survive shaving fifteen minutes off your makeup routine.”
“That’s a joke,” Lizzie shot back, although her anger didn’t seem to be directed at Meg specifically. “Mom took all my lipstick again.”
“She’ll give them back,” Meg told her sister, hitting a tone somewhere between comforting and dismissive. “Dad would have thrown them out.”
“What, so I should be grateful?” Lizzie huffed and adjusted her hair, then turned to the window, apparently deciding to ignore them, and Meg shrugged an apology at Veronica.
“So what happened with sixth period?” she asked as she navigated out of Veronica’s neighbourhood. “You didn’t miss anything huge in Psych – it was mostly thought-provoking YouTube videos, and I bet you can get the links from Miss Ambrosio so you won’t miss any test questions later. But I thought maybe you got sick.”
Veronica didn’t want to talk about it – not the painful, humiliating details, at least – and while she owed Meg at least the broad strokes, she was reluctant to say anything with Lizzie in the car.
“As far as Miss Ambrosio is concerned, I had a family emergency,” she said, taking some grim satisfaction in the fact that in a backward, convoluted way it was even true. “As for the rest…” She cast an eye toward the back seat, but it wasn’t like word wouldn’t have gotten around already – it wasn’t likely that Weevil had hidden the reason he was suspended from his friends, and anyway, what did she care about being judged by someone like Lizzie Manning? Pot, kettle, et cetera. “I got busted.”
Meg frowned. “Doing what?” But when Veronica raised her eyebrows meaningfully, she got it. “Oh my god. How much trouble are you in? Oh my god – oh my god.”
“It must have been something really bad,” Lizzie chimed in, her voice bored. “To make her take the Lord’s name in vain three times in a row.”
“Shhh.” Meg flapped a hand at the back seat without looking, one eye on Veronica and one on the road. “Seriously, Veronica, how are you not suspended or something?”
“We weren’t – okay, whatever you’re imagining, you can dial it back. Everyone had clothes on.” Meg actually did relax a little, and Veronica even managed a tiny smile, seeing it. “That hammer came down on somebody else,” she added, wincing meaningfully.
“Okay, well… that’s good, but still! How mad are your parents?”
“Mad,” Veronica said, leaving out so many details she was almost lying. “I’m handling it, though.”
“I can’t believe they took your car away,” Meg added, which made Veronica laugh in surprise.
“They didn’t; it’s at school. Clemmons called my mother down to the school to get me – I guess he thought it would teach me a lesson.” She maintained a dry tone so that my mother sounded ironic, but the truth was that she just couldn’t manage to say my mom right now without her face crumpling up in disgust and hurt. Maybe when she’d been awake for more than ten minutes. “I wasn’t exactly up for grabbing all my stuff – tell me we didn’t have any overnight homework?”
“For Psych? No, you’re good. And what do you have seventh period, again? Civics? No–”
“Foods,” Veronica said. “Although I would have been happy to miss Civics. I have Galloway.” Reluctantly, she started trying to get herself in order. She didn’t have a hairbrush or elastics, but she could at least clean out her eyes and try to get her hair to lie more or less flat.
“Oh, that’s right.” Meg winced sympathetically. “Well, I think you’re okay on both counts, then.” She put the windows up so that Veronica’s hair wouldn’t blow around as she tried to pat it into place, and Veronica shot her a grateful look. “It could be worse, right?”
“At least I have a ride to school,” Veronica agreed. “Thank you so much, by the way. I owe you lunch. At least. If I’d had to get my mom to drive me, I would have spontaneously combusted.”
She let Meg think she meant of embarrassment.
*
Veronica soldiered grimly through her early classes, still tired enough that Physics was impossible to get her head around. She was reduced to scribbling random things down in her binder so Mr. Saunders would think she was paying attention. Gym woke her up, a little, but it wasn’t worth the price, even if she could concentrate a little better in fourth period. The only real bright side was that Jeremy hadn’t said anything to (or about, as far as she could tell) her during Computer Science, which meant that word of what had happened yesterday hadn’t spread around the school yet. Or maybe that he was just too afraid she’d play music at him or sic Weevil on him to snigger about it in her earshot, which was pretty acceptable too.
There was some pointed tittering from the sidelines when she headed to her locker before lunch, though. Veronica traced it, even though she was of two minds about whether it was worth it; she didn’t want to be seen caring what other people thought. Then she caught sight of the source and realized what had prompted her to look in the first place – the girl giggling behind her hand from the door of Mr. Wu’s classroom was unpleasantly familiar.
“Kimmy!” Veronica exclaimed with false cheer. “Latched onto someone else? Good choice, Madison is too full of herself to realize you’re trying to single-white-female her.” Kimmy’s smirk faltered, but she tossed her hair behind her sweater-clad in less-than-convincing unconcern, not quite acknowledging Veronica. Like the rest of her clothes, it could have come straight out of Madison Sinclair’s closet, so it felt like a safe bet where she’d gotten her gossip from.
Veronica lowered her voice, adopting a sympathetic tone. “I don’t know if I’d stick with it, though. She didn’t tell you why she was in the office, I’m guessing.”
“She was doing something for Mrs. Donaldson,” Kimmy snapped. “She’s her aide, you know.” But there was a momentary flicker of doubt on her face, so Veronica pressed forward.
“I mean, if that’s what she’s telling people. It’s not even creative.” She shrugged. “But then, if Madison had more creativity, she’d be the top junior cheerleader, wouldn’t she? She has gumption, at least – unlike you. But Meg has character, and she’s actually talented. Too bad for Madison.” Kimmy was clearly groping for a response, so Veronica pretended to come to a sudden realization. “You didn’t think you were in the running, did you? I mean, you can’t even flub an audition without quitting the whole drama program. If I was Mrs. Kinard, I wouldn’t even want you at the base of the pyramid, because, well…” She pulled a tight, faux-sympathetic smile as Kimmy sputtered. “If you can’t hold up under pressure, you’re more of a liability than anything.”
She picked up her pace and disappeared around the corner before the other girl could find a retort. So much for her reprieve, although if she could start a little trouble for Madison in return, she wouldn’t be sorry. Optimistically, she hoped that whatever Kimmy’s imagination managed to come up with would be worse than anything Veronica could have told her outright.
Or maybe Kimmy would just run off and cry in the locker room, like Meg had last semester. Veronica was fine with that too. About time it happened to someone who deserved it.
She stowed her things and caught Meg about to line up at the commissary. “Um, what are you doing? Didn’t I say I owed you lunch?”
Her friend laughed. “Today? I was thinking I could cash in for something a little more exciting than cafeteria chicken nuggets.”
“Hey, I’m on a budget,” Veronica said. It felt a little strange to acknowledge out loud – not that she couldn’t afford anything better than cafeteria food, because that was only a joke, but that Meg had a much higher disposable income than she did. She’d never made off-handed comments like that to Lilly, even though whatever else you said about her, Lilly had never made a huge thing about their vastly differing amounts of pocket money, other than occasionally calling Veronica boring and responsible for not wanting to buy thirty-dollar lipstick. She’d never been sure how aware Lilly had even been of why she was really making those decisions, and back then she hadn’t wanted to draw attention to it.
Meg only laughed, though. “I guess you might not have weekends free for a while anyway,” she guessed – which would have been true under any reasonable circumstance. Veronica had cared more about keeping her dad from finding out what had happened than anything else, but she wasn’t sad not to be ubergrounded. “I’ll take the nuggets.”
“Plus, this way you don’t have to stand in this horrible excuse for a line.”
“Veronica, would you like a ride to school every day?”
It was Veronica’s turn to laugh. She handed Meg her mostly-empty lunch bag and shoed her away before forcing a path through the disorganized throng of people, eschewing a tray because if she couldn’t get everything on it, it would just make it harder to carry. Instead she wedged the Cokes between her upper arm and side, carefully balanced one bowl of nuggets (cup of dipping sauce perched against the top-most nugget) between her other arm and her chest, the other bowl held by the edge with overburdened fingers, and then used her remaining hand to pinch the stems of both apples for dear life.
Somehow she managed to get out of the commissary and out to the seating area unscathed, and was just setting down her careful constellation of precarious food items when her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she nearly dumped their lunches wrong side down on the table.
“Urgh,” she said to express her frustration. Meg, who’d made a valiant effort not to laugh at her, gave in and did.
Veronica balanced an elbow on the table to help her set everything down, rolling her eyes good-naturedly. “It’s not my fault you’re the only person who texts me anymore.”
“So who is texting you?” Meg asked. Veronica deposited the final Coke can on the table and checked her phone.
miss me yet?
She rolled her eyes. “Definitely nothing important.”
Meg raised her eyebrows. “Your parents?” she said knowingly, and Veronica laughed.
“Not even close.”
She set her phone face down on the table, wondering idly if Weevil had only just gotten up, or if he was harassing her because he was bored. You’d think his motorcycle would be a more appealing prospect.
“I wish they’d hire a new history teacher,” Meg said. “I mean, Clemmons is okay, I guess, but whatever he taught before he was vice principal, I’m guessing it wasn’t history. We had a sub yesterday so he could do vice-principal things and I suddenly remembered what it was like to enjoy history class.”
“Clemmons was here when my mom was a student,” Veronica offered. She very much did not want to bring Lianne into the conversation, but the subject had reminded her of her suspicions about Principal Moorehead, so maybe it was worth it, or would be in a week or two. “I could ask–”
Her phone buzzed, twice.
Veronica frowned in surprise, but she finished her sentence before flipping it over. “…her if you want.”
i cant believe i took the fall for u and yr ignoring me
no 1 likes a girl who plays hard 2 get
She knew she should ignore him, but it was so tempting to respond. It might be hard to carry on a conversation with Meg if her phone wouldn’t stop going off, but she knew replying would only encourage him. Still.
Good thing I’m not interested in being liked, she told him.
thats a bold thing 2 say 2 some 1 who still has yr underwear
Veronica choked.
“Are you okay?” Meg asked, cutting herself off in the middle of telling Veronica not to bother her mom – which was probably for the best, no matter how much she needed neutral topics of discussion for after school. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Veronica said, trying not to squeak.
“Are you sure? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing happened. Just stuff from yesterday.” She fumbled the phone hastily into her pocket.
“Are your parents losing it?” Meg asked, wincing.
“I convinced my mom not to tell my dad,” Veronica said, opening the homemade fruit salad that was the only thing she’d had the wherewithal to make the night before. The apple had browned, a little, but it was better than going too hard on the lemon juice. “She’s hoping it doesn’t have to be a big thing – probably that this will scare me straight or something. She’s mad, but I’m mad at her too, so I don’t care.”
Meg nodded. “Sometimes I can get my mom to be reasonable even when my dad’s… not,” she agreed.
That felt harsh to Veronica, applied to her own father (not to mention far too generous to her mother), but she was the one who’d deliberately left out roughly sixty percent of the relevant information, so she could hardly argue.
“I’m just hoping it’ll blow over,” she said. “My mom’s got other things on her mind right now, so… you know.” She shrugged as vaguely as possible.
Meg looked like she might be willing to press a little, but they were both distracted by another noise from Veronica’s phone. “So… who’s texting you?”
Veronica made a face, relieved she could just be annoyed instead of something more complicated. “It’s Weevil. I forgot he had my number for… this stupid thing a while ago. He ended up with something of mine when we got caught and now he’s being a jerk about it.”
“What kind of jerk?” Meg asked. From the look that had passed briefly over her face, she didn’t want to ask what he had of Veronica’s. She didn’t need to worry, though – if she had asked, Veronica absolutely would have lied.
“The kind that won’t stop texting me when I’m trying to eat lunch.” Veronica sighed and flipped her phone over. The last text from him was do u require photographic evidence? bc u never no when that kind of thing mite get out
This she definitely had to nip in the bud. I want those back so I can burn them.
whatll u give me?
How about: saving your life by keeping my dad from finding out what happened.
The response was instant. u did that 4 u
Does that make you less alive? No.
so tell him
Veronica pulled a face. Where did he get off trying to call her bluff? “One second,” she told Meg, absently dipping one of her nuggets in the honey mustard and making a face when it turned out to be more honey than mustard. “I underestimated how long it was going to take me to deal with this.”
If you’re really that desperate for underwear, I’ll take you to Walmart and get you some. Hanes will fit better anyway.
She’d meant to shame him a bit, jab him in the machismo, but all she got back was several cry-laughing emoticons. Veronica had another unsatisfactory bite of chicken, trying to figure out what approach to take, but then he sent another text.
but Im so sexxxxxy in these XD XD XD
Right. She’d made an obvious mistake: he had no shame. And she was being rude to Meg, so time to fall back on brute force instead of witty repartee.
I cannot believe I’m saying this, but in all seriousness – if I have sex with you, will you stop texting me?
o ya? when nd where???? Im here 4 yr money not yr mouth
Ouch. Although he obviously wasn’t talking about literal money, so maybe mouth wasn’t a veiled reference to how she’d drawn a hard line on blowjobs – maybe she was just being oversensitive. About a booty-call bluff check. How had she ended up in this position, exactly?
Sunday, she sent, pulling it out of the air solely because she thought her mom might be too uptight about her going out randomly tomorrow. An extra day might help. Just pick somewhere we won’t get caught!!!
Then she set her phone down, facedown, and resolutely ignored the final notification ping. It wasn’t followed by a bunch of others, so that would have to count for a success. “Okay. Mission accomplished. Parents and boys banished from the conversation.”
“Which leaves?” Meg said, polishing the apple Veronica had gotten her.
“Classes?”
“We talked about teachers already.”
That was true. Veronica thought for a moment. “Your upcoming big performance?”
Meg snorted. “I hate to break it to you, but I’m in the ensemble, Veronica, remember? My big moment is when I get to double as ‘Chanteuse’.”
“That doesn’t sound very German,” Veronica remarked. At this point she might have gone to see the play even if Meg wasn’t in it, just to find out what the hell happened in it.
“It’s French for singer. She doesn’t have a name or anything.” Meg brightened, semi-seriously. “My Kit Kat girl is named Lulu, though.”
“You could say anything about this musical and I’d probably believe you,” Veronica said after a moment of consideration, making the other girl giggle. “It’s going good, though?”
“Yeah, I’ll be sad when it’s over. They’re nicer at rehearsal than cheer practice.” Meg reflected for a moment. “Ms. Popham is stricter about that kind of thing than Mrs. Kinard but I think it’s mostly that Alyssa’s been nice to me the whole time. Pretty much everyone’s friends with her, so it spills over.”
“Plus, cheerleaders are famously so accepting,” Veronica said.
“Hey!” But Meg was laughing. “Yeah, I mean, drama’s less about image. At least that way. There’s still lots of weird stuff going on. I was in this community production of A Christmas Carol when I was younger and the wardrobe lady practically got in a fight with Mr. Regina at the middle school because he kept borrowing costumes from her and not giving them back. I didn’t have a costume for three months because we were supposed to reuse one from some creepy Victorian play they’d done two years before, but he hadn’t returned it and she just refused to make another one. It started drama with the board of the theatre or something, and I think someone started putting up flyers that were somehow related?”
“That took a lot of turns I wasn’t expecting,” Veronica said. “In about thirty seconds. Impressive.”
“I’ve actually been thinking I should get back into community theatre once Cabaret is over,” Meg said. “It has weird stuff, obviously, but the good part is that nobody cares what’s going on in high school. They just care about whether you can hit your cues – and who’s sleeping with who, I guess, but unlike in high school you’re not competition so they leave you out of that part.”
Veronica couldn’t help snorting at that. “Hey, as long as it works for you. I just don’t get why you’re still in cheer.”
“Because I like cheerleading and I’m not going to let them run me off,” Meg returned smartly. “It’s not as bad as it used to be, anyway. Or maybe I got thicker skin, I don’t know. Most of the girls just ignore me now. Kimmy ignores me really pointedly,” she added, rolling her eyes. “But I don’t even care. If she wants to act like we’re twelve, that’s her problem. Anyway, it’s really only Pam and Madison who are actually nasty, at this point.”
“Yeah, about that. I told Kimmy to shove off today because she was getting in my face. And I may have made a point of saying you were way better than her, so if she gives you a hard time today… um, sorry.”
Meg shook her head ruefully. “You never pick the easy way to do things, do you, Veronica? It’s not the end of the world if you give yourself a break once in a while, you know.” Veronica opened her mouth, not sure if she meant to defend herself or apologize more thoroughly, but Meg waved her off. “I’m pretty sure I can handle Kimmy. It’s not a big deal.”
“Well, I’m sticking around after school, so feel free to sic her on me if you need a break.”
It took Meg a minute to work out why, but after a little thought her confusion cleared. “Oh, right. Detention?”
“A week of it,” Veronica confirmed, sighing. “I’m just hoping it’s with anyone but Mrs. Hauser.”
*
She should probably have known better than to tempt fate.
Veronica had never had detention before, but Lilly had, last year, when she’d finally ended up with a teacher who she couldn’t charm into letting her off with a little extra work or a promise not to do it again – and Logan had, a few times, usually with Dick Casablancas. So she’d known the torture-level was heavily dependant on the teacher, that sometimes it was nothing more than a designated homework hour, and sometimes you were expected to stare at a wall for sixty minutes. But she’d been hoping that since Mrs. Hauser hadn’t technically been the one who assigned the punishment, that she’d get off with Mr. Clemmons as her detention supervisor. But no. Of course not.
Instead, she got to spend an hour copying out the school code of conduct onto looseleaf, while trying and failing to ignore Mrs. Hauser’s disapproving sniffs and supercilious glances. It was infuriating, and the sole bright spot of finding multiple errors (two punctuation and one typographical) in the handbook was hardly amusing enough to carry her through. Veronica had meant to go home and maintain a well-behaved, innocuous appearance until Sunday, nothing that might make her mom think she was up to no good and prompt her to reconsider the deal Veronica had strong-armed her into – but truthfully she wasn’t sure she could stand it after this. Maybe she’d say to hell with it and drive down the highway for a bit, or find a nice beach to walk along until she felt less like screaming.
Mrs. Hauser cleared her throat, clearly displeased with Veronica’s writing speed, but then the clock ticked over to four fifteen and Veronica decided to risk a display of near-defiance. It clearly wasn’t possible to get on Mrs. Hauser’s good side anyway, so why bother trying?
She dropped her pen in the middle of the sentence she was copying and practically jumped to her feet. “Great. See you Monday!”
“Now just a minute–” Mrs. Hauser said sharply, but Veronica shot her a patently insincere smile from the doorway.
“Mr. Clemmons said detention was an hour. And I really have to get home. Unless you want to explain to my parents why I missed the deadline they set?”
It was a bluff she very much did not want called – the only thing worse than Mrs. Hauser talking to her mother was Mrs. Hauser talking to her father – but the woman was so busy twisting her face up into something Veronica assumed was meant to indicate her current opinion of Lianne that it was easy to escape at that point.
She took the long way across campus, since she had her things already and didn’t need to go back through the main building to get to her locker. She skirted it instead, getting a faint glimpse of the tail end of cheerleading practice as the field came into sight between the tennis courts and Building C. They were throwing someone up in the air – not Meg, a brunette – and she watched the girl flip and then manage to land with only a slight stumble. Veronica would have been impressed, but she didn’t want to risk being impressed by Pam, or that girl Amy who’d been one of the ones harassing Meg in the beginning.
Practice looked like it was breaking up as she made her way to the parking lot, so she didn’t leave entirely. There was always the risk Mrs. Hauser would see Veronica on her own way home and realize she’d been lying, but she still wanted to catch Meg, so she pulled out her phone and pretended to be texting her parents while she waited, leaning against the front of her car. It gave her a chance to read Weevil’s last message, which was just the name of an unpopular beach and the words ‘rest stop’.
Doable, she supposed. As long as she could keep her mom off her case. She could always pretend to be walking Backup, but the idea of leaving him tied up outside while they had sex in her car made her cringe. That was definitely on the list of things she was not willing to do.
Meg calling her name from the edge of the parking lot pulled her out of her thoughts, and Veronica waved, tucking her phone into her pocket. “How was practice?” she called as the other girl jogged over, still in her uniform.
“Interesting,” Meg told her, meaningfully. “Madison told everyone you got suspended for getting caught buying drugs at school.”
Veronica choked. “What? I’m not suspended! Drugs?”
“Yeah, Kimmy said that, actually. She said she saw you and why would you be at school if you were suspended. Then Madison snapped at her and she nearly died.”
That was satisfying to imagine on multiple levels; unlike Meg, Veronica didn’t even try to hide her enjoyment of it. “Why does everyone think Weevil’s a drug dealer? I’m pretty sure the worst he’s ever done is smoke pot.” Her friend gave her a dubious look and Veronica amended, “The worst drug thing, come on. I’m not stupid.”
“Well, Madison said he ripped off her car for drug money. Which doesn’t even make sense if he was dealing, right?”
“Wait,” Veronica said. “When did Madison’s car get stolen, and how did I miss that? I always want to know when bad things happen to people I don’t like.”
Meg shook her head, smiling faintly. “I don’t know what she thinks ‘ripped off’ means. I guess she thinks he stole her hubcap in October.”
Veronica paused. It wasn’t impossible, she supposed. It would be pretty ballsy – verging on stupid – to pull something like that at school, which she assumed was the implication, but that had been essentially what happened to Jeremy. It didn’t seem unlikely that Madison had managed to piss Weevil off in a similar manner to whatever he’d done.
“So I asked her why he wouldn’t take all of them,” Meg went on. “And she just huffed and tossed her hair a lot, but that just seems really stupid.”
“Wait – you literally meant one hubcap? Like she thinks he took one hubcap for drug money? She thinks anyone would take exactly one hubcap?”
“I don’t even know. And anybody should know you wouldn’t be buying drugs anyway.” Meg shook her head. “I just figured you should know. The good news is that they were all too distracted to be nasty to me.”
“This is insane. I mean, I guess I don’t care what any of those people think. I just assumed when Madison saw us in the office that she’d figure out the real reason.” Veronica paused for a moment. “What does she think I was buying, anyway? Like, E? Or crack or something?”
“She didn’t say exactly, but I think more like the second thing. Tori actually asked me about it but I told her no one on those kinds of drugs has straight As. I think she wanted something juicier, though; she seemed disappointed.”
“I’ll work on that for her,” Veronica said drily. It was just supposed to be an off-handed crack, but then she realized it might be true. She still hadn’t decided how hard she was going to poke the Moorehead question.
Meg laughed. “Listen, I better get home. But we should hang out this weekend, if you’re allowed – get your parents off your back, maybe? Or just your mom, I guess.”
Veronica felt momentarily guilty that she’d already made plans on Sunday – but then Meg was usually busy on Sundays anyway. Mentally, she readjusted a few things. “Come over tomorrow,” she suggested. If she didn’t leave the house, she wouldn’t be spurring in inconvenient suspicions. “We can give each other cheap makeovers or watch one of the movies you stashed at my place.”
“I won’t force you to watch any more musicals,” Meg told her. “Well… not until after you come see Cabaret. But some girl time sounds fun. After lunch?”
“Sounds like a plan.” Veronica waved as the other girl headed to her own car. She didn’t leave immediately – for all her good intentions about not raising alarms in her mom’s mind, she didn’t exactly want to be alone in the house with Lianne, either. It was tempting to stall until her dad would be home from work.
She had homework to distract herself with today, she told herself firmly. No more excuses.
*
The worst part was, it was almost easy. The pained, uncomfortable tension that existed in every exchange with her mother didn’t even feel unfamiliar, and it wasn’t nearly as difficult to find the right things to say to her dad, the right kinds of smile or shrug to allay concern, as it should have been. He might have had certain suspicions, but nothing that took him down a different road than the one they’d all been down a hundred times, and if he addressed them with her mom, he did so in private.
She tried not to wonder. Lianne hadn’t done anything obvious over the weekend – whatever she’d done or hadn’t done on Friday, she’d been normal by the time Veronica got home, and she managed to even pull off gracious when Meg came over on Saturday, although it hadn’t stopped Veronica from dragging them both up to her room the first chance she got. She’d only ever lost one friend over drunken parental antics, but one was enough, no matter how many years ago it had been.
But they both acted as normal as possible, smiling over the dinner table with only a hint of tightness, so that Keith didn’t see. It put them almost in the same boat, which Veronica didn’t like. In the past, even when she’d kept things from him about her mom, about her mom’s drinking, it had still been the two of them on one side of the gulf and Lianne on the other. They both wanted the same things, were afraid of the same things. But now it was Veronica and Lianne who were two of a kind, both with a glaring, ugly secret they were desperate to keep from him. Veronica had wondered more than once what he’d be angrier about – Weevil, or the blackmail. And Lianne was probably wondering the same thing: would her husband be most infuriated by the drunk driving? Or by her giving in to the blackmail?
It made Veronica feel nauseous and unsettled in a way that even the idea of her dad finding out she’d been having regular sex with a felon didn’t, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it – besides come clean, which was never happening.
She told her dad she was going to go to the mall, making sure her mom was in the room to hear so she wouldn’t be blindsided later and say something that tipped him off, like you let her go out? She could hardly argue without giving a reason, so Veronica grabbed her purse and the cloth shopping bag in which she’d buried the plastic bag wrapped around her condoms and extra underwear beneath two novels, a towel, and a jacket, and escaped the house before anyone could ask too many questions.
Her mom might be suspicious if she came home without anything to show for her shopping trip, but her vague plans to run to the grocery store after and pick up some baking supplies would probably take care of that. She still owed Jasmine a cake, after all, even if the luster had mostly dulled on that particular gag over the last few days.
When she parked in the farthest corner of the parking area from the road, she was the only one there. It made sense – there were only eight stalls, the turnoff was shabby and poorly signposted, and there was public beach access that didn’t involve hiking down a steep hill barely a quarter-mile away. Weevil clearly knew his hookup locations. Or maybe he’d been in the habit of doing other things here that he wasn’t supposed to be doing – she wasn’t exactly going to ask.
Even better, there was a tree that was starting to encroach on the lot, maybe an oak. The branches were sweeping out so that they nearly divided the corner space from the next one over, taking up some of the latter. It provided an obscuring, if incomplete curtain along one entire side of the car, and the trees were close enough to the edge of the parking area that there wasn’t much chance of discovery in front or to the other side. The path down to the beach was even on the other side of the rest stop, next to the entrance.
Veronica hadn’t really been expecting Weevil to be there yet – she was about twenty minutes early from the time she’d given him the day before, after he’d rejected the earlier one she’d offered on Friday night. She’d mostly just wanted to stop sitting around at home, waiting. She thumbed open their conversation in the meantime, trying to think of a good name to give him, if he was going to stay in her contacts. Her parents weren’t in the habit of going through her phone, but she could imagine a hundred scenarios where she left it on the kitchen table or it started ringing in her jacket while she was upstairs, and her dad caught sight of the telltale Weevil on the screen, so his real name was right out.
Not that Weevil was his real name, she reminded herself. But Eli wasn’t much better, and it also seemed weird. Aside from the assortment of police reports sitting on her computer’s hard drive, the only times she’d heard it used were by her dad and the vice-principal., which was bad enough, but it also seemed strange to think of him that way at all. Weevil was a known quantity, if occasionally a volatile one. He existed at school, and occasionally at the police station, and his main purposes were sex and annoying her. His hobbies were pretty much the same, alongside ‘stealing things’ and ‘intimidation’.
He was a real person, obviously – she knew that; she wasn’t Lilly. He had a sister and a dead mom and a grandma, and she thought he’d even mentioned a job that wasn’t stealing cars. He even had an ex who still liked him, which was no small feat in high school, despite the fact that she wasn’t exactly an ex-girlfriend. But none of it was so complicated that it required re-evaluating the place he occupied in her mind, at least not since her early, embarrassing assumptions that he was stupid.
Eli was uncomfortable to think about. Somehow using it herself, rather than hearing it pointedly employed by authority figures, made her wonder all sorts of things. They’d started calling him Weevil at some point, but she’d never questioned why, exactly, or who he’d been before that. A little kid, probably. It was hard to picture, like imagining him with hair, but the concept still made her feel… uneasy. Weevil was inherently part of the PCH in her head, with all the implications and extrapolations that came along with that, even if he defied a stereotype on occasion. Throwing his real name around was a shortcut to the uncomfortable realization that his life and his personality extended outside of that, in ways that weren’t about hooking up in random classrooms.
It wasn’t that she particularly wanted to throw light on all the parts of his life that she didn’t know about. It was just that she’d been perfectly content not to think about them at all.
So both names were out, anyway. There was always a stupid pun or something – put him in as Alfred Noying so her phone dubbed him A. Noying, or something equally juvenile – but not only was that too immature to be appealing, it was still too attention-getting if someone who wasn’t supposed to happened to see it.
Finally she dubbed him Brad (school) and decided that if it ever elicited questions, she’d throw together an excuse about a long-ago school project and a number she’d never bothered to delete, to be adjusted as necessary.
Veronica was about to swap her phone for one of the books she’d brought, even though they were more for disguise than anything, but the growl of a motorcycle turning into the lot made it unnecessary. She fished the plastic bag out from underneath it instead, then dropped her larger bag to the floor in the front seat and opened her door to get out. At the last minute she turned back and pulled the towel out, too. It seemed like a good idea to have something down in the back seat.
It seemed like something Weevil would have opinions about, even if those opinions were just that it was a good excuse to make fun of her, so she opened the back door and laid out the towel while he was still parking, dropping the bag of supplies on the seat while she was at it.
“Early, huh?” he said when she came around the back of the LeBaron, hanging his helmet on the handlebars of his motorcycle. “I knew you couldn’t get enough of me.”
“Maybe I just get up before noon on the weekends,” she shot back. “We could’ve ironed out all the details hours ago if you hadn’t needed to… do we call it rescheduling?”
“Screw you,” he said, almost smiling. “I was working.”
Even though she knew he had some kind of real job, hearing him mention it still threw her. It just seemed so bizarre that he’d pick up shifts at Woody’s Burgers or somewhere in between beating people up and stealing cars.
Not that she thought for a second the job was actually at Woody’s Burgers. The hilarity of Weevil in one of those 50s-style faux sailor hats that came with the uniform was about commensurate with the complete impossibility of him ever being willing to put one on.
She wasn’t sure if making a joke about that would get her an annoyed eyeroll or if it would be insensitive in some way that made her feel small and ignorant, like when she’d blundered into the subject of his mother’s death, or when Meg hadn’t realized why they’d stick out at the kind of parties Jasmine went to. Instead, she gave him a skeptical eyebrow-raise and said, “At least this is better than your last choice of location.”
“Excuse me? You’re the one who got us busted.”
“I promise you, we would have gotten busted way sooner if we were using the autoshop classroom all the time.
“Since you brought it up – what happened to I’m not really looking to meet up outside of school?”
He was way too sharp. Veronica made an annoyed sound, rolling her eyes. “I only said that to see what you’d do.”
“That’s messed up.” He approached, getting too close so that she was forced to back up, unwittingly clearing room for him to lean against her car. “You got issues.”
“My main issue is my missing underwear, so give it to me.”
“I’m wearing it,” he said glibly, which made her want to snarl. “Why – are you pathologically attached to that particular pair?”
After some quick mental calculus, she decided to push the issue later. Getting her hands on his underwear probably wouldn’t be much leverage, but maybe she could nab his jacket. “Do you want to talk about my issues some more, or do you want to do this?”
Weevil stretched his legs out in front of him, putting most of his weight on the car. “Hey, you’re the one talking about sorting out details. I came ready to go.”
“Great,” Veronica said. She really didn’t want to get into any logistics questions at the moment, anyway. Nothing that might involve mentioning her parents. “Then move.”
She climbed over the cement curb at the edge of the lot to give herself room to get into the back. To her mild surprise, he followed her, instead of finding a way past the encroaching tree branches on the other side; to her much greater surprise, she felt weirdly uncomfortable about it.
She’d gotten used to the classroom, she thought – to a limited set of circumstances that she’d learned to navigate. Now that they were out of it, she suddenly felt inexperienced again, like she was about to be caught not knowing something that should have been obvious.
The fact that Weevil snickered when he saw the towel didn’t help. Veronica ignored him as best she could while she tried to slide across the seat without rucking it up, which just made him snort. He didn’t make any similar effort.
To forestall the expected obnoxious comments, she plucked a condom out of her bag of necessities and passed it to him.
Weevil took it, but he made a demurring noise through his nose. “I know you were heartbroken to cut things short before, but I’ve got conditions.”
Veronica stopped short in shrugging out of her sweater, which was more difficult that she’d thought it would be in the confines of the back seat. “What do you mean, conditions?”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “I’m taking my life in my hands, here. If you don’t at least tell me how you got this one past the sheriff, I’m out of here.”
She wanted to snap at him for that, but he had something of a point – and that point was strangely validating. After all, he was still here. Whatever he said or did or jibed her about, the sex was at least good enough for him to go somewhere he wasn’t already going to be in order to get it. That shouldn’t have been as gratifying as it was, and Veronica tried not to think about it too hard. This might not be the classic path of chasing after unsuitable boys to get attention, but it felt close enough to be pathetic.
“I know things my mom doesn’t want my dad hearing about,” she said finally, tersely even though she tried to avoid outright defensiveness. “Okay? Now put up or shut up.”
He took that on board for a moment, and just when she was getting worried he flashed her a brilliant grin. “You really are desperate, aren’t you? So what were you doing before I got here?”
Veronica ignored the insinuation. She hit him flatly with the truth, because for once it was funny. “Just thinking about you in science metaphors.”
He blinked. “I can’t tell if that’s flirting or an insult.”
“Neither. And don’t insult me, I would never flirt with you.” She finished extracting herself from her sweater, emerging to see him keeping an appreciative eye on her chest as she contorted to keep from banging her arms on the ceiling. It sent the usual warm shiver down her spine, but that didn’t entirely make up for the fact that he was still fully dressed. More dressed than usual, even, with his jacket and boots on. “Aren’t you a little behind the game?”
Weevil rolled his eyes at her, shucking his clothes more effectively than she was, although he fell afoul of the front seat when he tried to get his boots off.
“For a second I thought you might have done this before,” Veronica said with mock regret the second time he accidentally kicked it. She was choosing to believe it was an accident, anyway. If he was kicking her front seat on purpose, she’d have to kick him out of her car, and she didn’t feel like navigating that right now.
“I haven’t,” he said, surprising her with the admission more than the information. “Why would I have sex in a car? I don’t own a car.”
“You steal cars all the time,” she pointed out.
Weevil paused mid-boot to shoot her an incredulous look. “And you think I pull over to the side of the road to get my rocks off? With who? Cervando? I know you like to imagine that, but it ain’t happening.”
Veronica flushed, despite herself. “I don’t imagine – you’re the one who brought it up when – see if I ever help you with math again.”
“Yeah, well, if I was ever to hypothetically steal a car, I wouldn’t be leaving special DNA evidence for the sheriff.”
That made her wrinkle her nose, for multiple reasons. “Fine. Point taken. Hurry up.” She undid her bra, which neatly prevent any smartass remarks, and decided to get rid of her skirt as well as her underwear. She’d worn it for the usual reason, but it seemed silly for that to be the only thing she kept on.
Weevil got his other boot off and stripped off his jeans, thrusting his hips into the air in order to get them down. It was a disturbingly appealing display of physicality – not that that was a bad thing at the moment. Between the logistics and the apprehension she was less revved up than usual.
He was not, thankfully, actually wearing her underwear, just the usual boxers, but she saved the dig about that for later. “You’re pretty good at stripping for someone who’s never had sex in a car before. Are you used to doing that on stage or something?”
The barb completely failed to land, but he didn’t rub that in, for whatever reason. “I’ve changed in a backseat before. You’re gonna get rug burn from that towel, you know.”
“Is that how we’re doing this?” Veronica tried to sound air and unconcerned instead of unsure, but she didn’t think she quite pulled it off.
“Unless you want to come over here.” He indicated his lap, a prospect complicated by the half-mast erection he was sporting.
“You’re going to have to do better than that if that’s what you want,” she told him, feeling on firmer ground.
“You could help, you know,” he told her.
Veronica considered, tipping her head to one side to make it seem calculated, rather than anxious. “More help? I took my bra and my underwear off.” Actually, maybe she should move her underwear. She had a spare pair, but she didn’t want him making off with a second set just to bug her.
“So get over here and put your tits in my face.”
Veronica choked. Which must have been what he wanted, she realized, taking in the immediate smirk. That was a gross way to talk about breasts, she told herself weakly. And she was not so insecure about hers that hearing him say that turned her on. No way was she getting on his lap now.
“Maybe you should be the one putting more effort in,” she told him, leaning awkwardly back into the corner between the seatback and the door. It was probably impossible to regain her dignity while she was completely naked, but she had to try somehow. “And I’m not doing that pre-condom, I’m not stupid.”
“What do you think I am?” he asked, sounding legitimately offended.
Veronica didn’t have a good answer for him, so she rolled her eyes and tried to figure out what to do with her legs. One off the edge of the seat and one hiked up? It made her feel like she was imitating cheap porn – now all she needed was some basketball-sized boobs to rub while she panted heavily – but Weevil didn’t seem to object. He was fondling himself in an absent-minded way, halfway between maintenance and recreation, but his eyes were definitely splitting time between her chest and her crotch.
“Hurry up,” Veronica told him, trying to cover her own awkwardness. Once they got going she’d feel less weird about it all.
He stopped, presumably out of spite, and she debated trying to kick him despite the uncomfortable angle.
“That’s not gonna work unless you want to bang your head against the window the whole time,” he told her. “There’s nowhere for me to put my knees anyway. And if you’re putting on a show, I expect a better one.”
“What I want is what I didn’t get on Thursday,” Veronica said, ignoring the fact that he was probably right. She did slide down a bit, though. The towel immediately rucked up, rough under her bare thighs.
Things had apparently moved far enough along that the condom was employable – she couldn’t see as well from her current position, but the sound of the package tearing was unmistakeable.
She didn’t really have any concern that he would lie about putting it on, she reflected – not for a while. Her concern had been more about the possibility of getting carried away. But it still said something that he was actively offended by the idea.
Weevil pulled her forward by grabbing her by the legs and yanking, which startled a yelp out of her. He’d clearly done it just to provoke a reaction, because the way their bodies were lined up now, her butt would be using his knees as a ramp, and yeah, there was no way this was going to work unless he lay down on top of her, which she didn’t want – the seat was not wide enough for him to support his own weight.
“Fine,” she told him with bad grace, trying to wriggle away. “Okay? Fine. Get off, we’ll do it your way.”
“This was your idea,” he sniped back, but he moved back into a regular sitting position without arguing. Veronica reorganized herself until her legs were under her, nearly kicking him twice in the process, then edged half into the space between front and back seats as she tried to straddle his lap without banging her head on the ceiling. It wasn’t especially hard, but hitting it with things wasn’t good for it.
“Doesn’t the roof go up?” Weevil said, shooting her a meaningful look.
“I am not doing this where anyone can see,” she told him, finally settling down on his knees. It felt strange, a lot more cramped and claustrophobic than the only other time they’d been in a similar position. He’d still had his jeans on then, too, and his bare legs under her thighs was weird too. He’d been fully naked once or twice, Veronica realized belatedly, but she never had. Usually she still had at least a rucked-up skirt on. And socks.
He got his hands on her waist, helping her up enough to get over top of his erection. At that point she did hit her head on the roof, but she just winced and went with it. Once they got settled it would be better. Probably.
She slid down on to him, which felt reassuringly good. She’d forgotten how that particular position felt, like it was opening her up in a shiveringly delicious way. Weevil grunted – in approval, she was pretty sure. He’d gotten a close-up eyeful of her breasts while they got into position, so he was already having a better time than she was. With his help, she eased up – and the roof was a problem again, diluting the pleasure of sliding back down onto him.
When it happened again, she moved her feet, the better to not push with, and forestalled him with a hand on the front of his shoulder. “This isn’t working. Maybe if…”
She tried to turn their bodies so she was angled toward the gap between the front seats, thinking she could lean back a little if he supported her. Weevil huffed with annoyance, but he slid a hand up to help her balance and tilted his hips in the right direction. She lifted up again – and whacked her head on the driver’s seat.
“Ouch!” She jolted, he jerked in surprise, and she almost fell, jamming her neck in an uncomfortable position as she tried to stay upright. Weevil grabbed her, belatedly, groaning half in annoyance as her body shifted around him.
“What the fuck,” he said flatly.
“Shut up,” she told him. “How is it my fault you’ve never had sex in a car.”
“Seriously?” She went to lift off him and he grabbed her wrist to stop her – something that had Veronica ready to spit until she realized he was getting a grip on the condom with his other hand, so it didn’t come off. “Come on.”
“Yeah, well – I’ll figure something out.” She surveyed the inside of the car from her awkward position hovering over him. “Maybe we can lie down? At least you’re not tall.”
He looked increasingly unimpressed, which was making her feel increasingly stressed. How bad did it have to be before he just bailed? It wasn’t like she couldn’t take care of herself if she had to, but she really didn’t want their whole arrangement to fizzle out with poorly-planned car sex. Maybe she should have just called it off entirely?
“Just get on the seat.”
Veronica did, trying to smooth the towel out under her as she lay down and having absolutely no success. She hiked her leg up again, pressing it into the back of the seat to get it out of the way while Weevil positioned himself over top of her. He held on to the top of the seat for balance, sliding his other hand up the too-narrow strip left beside her until he was leaning over her. She almost thought it was going to work, but then his hand slipped, and he came down on her hard.
“Ow!” Veronica cried as his chin hit her in the shoulder. Weevil swore incoherently, trying to find leverage to sit back up again and kneeing her in the thigh instead. She shoved ineffectively at him in frustration, but all that happened was that his weight shifted to crush her lungs more thoroughly than before.
Finally he dragged himself upright with his free arm, glaring at her like this was her fault. Veronica sat up too, because it was less humiliating than trying to find another way to make it work. They stared at each other, stalemated, her defensive, him frustrated.
Finally Weevil sighed impatiently. “Just turn around,” he said.
“What?”
“Turn. Around. Why do I gotta solve everything? Put one leg on the floor if you have to.”
“That didn’t work before,” she muttered, but she did, trying to figure out how exactly this was supposed to be feasible.
She got her answer when he put both hands on her hips and yanked them into the air. Right. All fours. Okay. It might work, and at least they wouldn’t be staring each other in the face the whole time.
Of course, it also meant she couldn’t see him, so she felt extra exposed when he spent a minute… staring, presumably, probably to try and find the best angle. Then he adjusted her more, stretching her body out so she was lower to the seat, pushing her down do instead of her hands and knees – hands and knee – she was on her elbows. It felt undignified, but she was too stubborn to give up, and she wanted this over with.
Then he leaned over her, his knee nudging the back of hers until she managed to somehow make room for him, his arm pressing almost against her face so that it wouldn’t slip off the side of the seat again. She thought he had one leg off the seat too, but however he’d arranged it, the angle was decent enough that this time he slid in without too much trouble.
It wasn’t bad, exactly – she wasn’t very turned on anymore, honestly, but she was still wet enough that it wasn’t actively uncomfortable. It was just hard to get into it after all the climbing around and frustration, and her chest still aching a little where his chin had hit it, and his arm pushing against her cheek while she tried not to go cross-eyed reading single letters of the tattoo there. The towel was bunched up under her knees, and she was hyper-aware of how much the car was moving with the motion of his thrusts. There was no one to see, but it still seemed embarrassing.
Everything seemed to take a lot longer, too, although she wasn’t sure if that was because he needed time to get back into it, or if it was just that she wasn’t as distracted as usual. Once they’d really gotten into the rhythm, it felt good – just not spectacular. Like a shoulder rub. You wouldn’t turn it down, necessarily, but you also might not care if you didn’t get the whole thing.
After a while, Weevil worked his less load-bearing hand around in between them, correcting for the mildly uncomfortable angle before he found her clit. That was nice, too, in a more specific but not really stronger way, like an echo or a teaser of what it might have been like if she was more into it. Only she wasn’t, and hearing him breath roughly right above her ear wasn’t turning her on like it usually did, so all it really was was a preview of something she wasn’t getting.
Finally he grunted and thrust into her with more finality, shuddering to a stop, and Veronica pushed his hand away.
“Forget it,” she told him. “It’s not happening.”
He huffed a little, but he got off her, flopping back against the seatback on the other side of the car. Veronica pushed herself upright and started fishing her clothes off the floor. One of her socks was missing, and her underwear had tiny rocks in it, for some reason, even though she’d vacuumed the carpets a couple weeks ago.
The door opened across from her, and Veronica’s head jerked up in surprise, but he wasn’t getting out, just disposing of the condom. As glad as she was he wasn’t about to go wander around in the nude, she couldn’t help making a loud noise of protest.
“Did you seriously just throw that on the ground?”
“What do you want me to do with it?” he shot back, which stymied her. There had to be a garbage can around here somewhere, right? For the beach crowd? Only, she didn’t exactly want him putting the used condom down in her car while he got dressed to go dispose of it.
“Whatever,” she returned, since a weak response was better than none. “I guess it doesn’t matter, since we’re not coming back here anyway.”
“Oh, we’re not?” There was a nasty edge to Weevil’s voice, like he wanted to pick a fight. Well, fine.
“I’m not the one picking sub-standard locations,” she told him, more sharply than strictly necessary.
“No, you’re just a prude. I never said we should have sex in your car.”
“You’re the one who’s terrified of my dad,” she snapped back, actually pissed off now. “You want a mutual public indecency charge? Because he’d definitely get wind of that.”
Weevil didn’t say anything; he just bent over to get his jeans and underwear. Veronica got to work on turning her bra right-side out – she could take a hint.
She still watched him get dressed out of the corner of her eye, feeling weirdly deflated. The mediocre sex was annoying, but it was the stupid sniping that bothered her. It wasn’t like they hadn’t had sub-standard encounters before – although admittedly not since it had gotten good. It shouldn’t be that hard to collaborate on improving their odds for next time, instead of biting each other’s heads off and leaving things undecided, at best. But even if she’d been able to swallow her pride, she didn’t have a better solution for next time. There was school, which was a no-go; there were random public places, which she was never going to agree to; and there was her car, which clearly didn’t work.
“I want my underwear back,” she said, all in a rush, as he grabbed his shirt and jacket and went to get out of the car.
“Don’t have it,” he said curtly, pausing to throw his jacket over the edge of the roof and pull his shirt over his head.
Veronica focussed on the shadow it made on the canvas. “So where is it, exactly?”
“At my house,” he told her, still not making eye contact.
“Yeah, well, that’s a problem, because I want it back.”
“Guess you better come get it,” Weevil replied, like it was a perfectly normal thing to say – and then he shut the door and walked away, leaving her gaping at it.
When his motorcycle engine started, she realized she should probably close her mouth.
Notes:
Veronica makes a semi-joking reference to not trusting certain pre-sex activities without a condom, which is interpreted as her suggesting he'd bait-and-switch her about wearing one. Neither one of them acknowledges that doing that is assault, but he's offended and Veronica does acknowledge (mentally) that she doesn't actually believe he'd do something like that.
Also, the sex is just not good today. They don't have a good time. That's not the kind of thing I'd usually warn for, but sorry if I got your hopes up.
Chapter 32: Pulling Back
Notes:
Apologies (again) for the delay - this required more editing than usual (of the beating-my-head-against-it variety), but also a bunch of what I tried to write for this chapter ended up belonging in the next chapter, so. I'm at least hopeful that that one will not get pushed back, anyway.
Chapter Text
We really only have two choices. Play it safe, or take a chance. For me, pulling back because of fear has always made me feel worse.
Gail Sheehy
He was so motherfucking stupid.
Getting suspended wasn’t the end of the world – Weevil didn’t care about school. His grandma was pissed, but whatever; it was only for a week. Catching up in Algebra was going to be a bitch, because he already didn’t know what the teacher was saying, but he’d missed way more school than that before and still figured it out. It probably would have been an in-school suspension if Clemmons hadn’t learned better than to give him those after he’d used it as an alibi while everyone else ripped off Moorehead’s car a couple years back.
Some cubings were just deserved.
But getting busted was supposed to be a wakeup call. He was going to be eighteen in less than a month, and after that he’d be in way deeper shit if the sheriff caught him with his underage daughter. He couldn’t run the club from Chino the way he halfway could from juvie, which would be bad news for everyone even if he did manage to get the reins back after, and he didn’t need a sexual misdemeanour on his record, not when no judge or prosecutor for the rest of his life would care that the girl was about six months younger than him.
But no, first he’d had to go and feel sorry for her, because apparently whatever the sheriff had going on was way worse than his wife being a little too eager to get trashed on weekends, and then he’d had to get carried away texting her because going back and forth with someone who could keep up was weirdly fun even when it wasn’t getting him laid, and now he was hauling his ass up to Damien’s old rest stop for sex that wasn’t even worth the trip, let alone the time that might come with it. The fuck was wrong with him? He should’ve ditched out, but no.
Instead he was dragging this crap home with him. Not that it was probably going to happen. Girls like Veronica Mars didn’t come to his neighbourhood, and they sure didn’t come to his house. He’d known that, with Lilly, but somehow, he’d gotten to halfway thinking that Veronica was his friend or some shit, just because he didn’t have to keep seven different balls in the air around her – which was only because she didn’t know anybody whose opinion he cared about, anyway – and he’d actually fucking forgotten. The same way he’d forgotten that there was nothing to fix if she was mad at him, that she wasn’t some neighbourhood girl he had to smooth things over with to keep the peace before he made his exit.
It was extra stupid because he could have just kept texting her without fucking her, and it would have been a lot safer. Kind of a pity, because she was actually pretty hot once you got her going, but it wasn’t like he’d die. It had been kind of a shame to stop fucking Jasmine, too, but he’d been busy after Gus disappeared, and nobody had gotten fucking depressed about it. He still could have texted her after, or at least he’d be able to if Cervando would chill the fuck out, the paranoid little shit.
He even had a ready-made reason for texting Veronica, if it ever raised any eyebrows, which was that he felt kind of bad for her still. His mom had shown up to get him from school strung-out sometimes, or way too on edge when her supply ran out, but she’d always tried to keep her shit together, even if people could tell something was up – and she’d been fucking ashamed of it, like you should be. Of course using that excuse would mean spreading it around, which felt pretty cheap when he really had just wanted to make sure she got home okay at first (no way was Mrs. Sheriff Mars taking the goddamn bus like Ann Marie Navarro had had to), to tip her off that he wasn’t going to be a jackass about it – but he didn’t have to give up all the details, and it wasn’t like anybody who spent time in bars or knew people who did didn’t already know the sheriff’s wife was a lush.
There was a big difference between weekends and one o’clock on a Thursday, though, Jesus.
None of it really mattered, though, because did he really think Veronica fucking Mars would text him back if there was nothing in it for her? She didn’t spend all her time trying to keep seventeen different balls in the air with only two hands and not being able to afford to so much as wince – and he highly doubted she needed an outlet for all her quick comebacks so bad that having one would matter to her either way if she wasn’t also getting laid.
Not that his performance had been worth coming back for either. Cars were the goddamn worst for this shit, as far as he could tell. Even changing had been a bitch – way harder than when he’d had to do it regularly, although you’d think there’d be more room in the back of a car no one was living in. But then he’d been smaller when he was seven. But one sub-par encounter wasn’t that big a deal; you brushed off your ego and keep moving. It was the rest of it.
There was something so much worse in trying to set a cute little trap to get a girl over to your house so that you could fucking hang out with her or something. Sex, fine. Getting all spun out ‘cause you had feelings for her – not great, sucked balls worse than anything other than getting stabbed in the back or somebody dying, but it happened, everybody got like that once or twice. Yeah, he’d gotten pathetic over Lilly, and it still hurt, even if the twinge of pain he still got when he saw her in the hall was more of a supplement to his anger than the main event anymore. The sheer, clawing sense of desperation had faded almost entirely, although he could remember it all too well. But it happened to everyone – you got stupid over a girl, you dealt with it, you got over it. And no matter how bad it got, there’d be someone out there handling it worse, like Red – or Chardo – so you kept an eye on that to keep from getting too pathetic.
But he wasn’t looking for any of that heartbreaker shit from Veronica – apparently he just wanted to bat some insults back and forth like she was his freaking bro or something, when what he should have been doing was walking away. He’d been going to! He’d spent the entire time trying to convince himself it was worth it to keep taking a risk like that, and it fucking hadn’t been. That was the verdict: cut your losses.
And then for some reason he’d opened his stupid mouth
He did actually still have her underwear, if only because he wasn’t sure what to do with it. He couldn’t throw it out – or throw it in the laundry – without his grandma noticing, and regardless of who it belonged to, after three days that kind of thing definitely stopped being even marginally sexy and became just ‘dirty underwear that he didn’t want to carry around’, so he couldn’t pitch it somewhere else. Mailing it back to her house, maybe even directly to the sheriff, like he might have risked doing a year ago, was obviously off the table, although he wasn’t even that sorry about it, since actually freaking her out wasn’t something he’d gotten kicks out of for a while now. The smart solution would have been to pitch it at school once he was out from under Clemmons’s nose, but he’d had other shit on his mind on Thursday.
Of course, he had the week off school, so he could always offer to do the laundry himself – that was probably the best way to handle it. It would win him points with his grandma, too, which he needed right now.
Not tomorrow, though. He hadn’t told anyone he was suspended yet – most of the club probably thought he’d skipped on Friday. That meant he could use Monday to check up on Ric without anyone suspecting. No foul if Ric really was keeping his nose clean, and if he wasn’t, neither he nor Manolo would be expecting a visit from their friendly neighbourhood head-cracker.
The maybe he’d swing by Claudia’s. If she was there he could see if she needed anything, groceries maybe, but she’d probably be working, which meant he could say he’d come over to see her and instead spend some time making Andre uncomfortable. Outright threatening the guy would buy him more trouble than it was worth, especially if he wanted to see Ofelia again this millennium, but he could hang around for a while, ask a bunch of questions about the guy’s ‘job’, smile even toothier than usual. The idea cheered him up a little.
He'd already lined up another full shift at Angel’s for Tuesday, but he could go to the laundromat the next day. Halfway through the week was about when his grandma always started to get snappy about him being suspended, anyway. If it didn’t take too long, he could vacuum or something too, maybe keep her off his back. Not that it’d be up to her standards, but he wasn’t a professional, so it never would be.
Someone had stalled at the corner of Adams and Vicente, and Weevil came to a stop while they tried to get the car going again, rolling his eyes. Normally he would have just gone around, and to hell with it if he had to break a couple traffic laws, but this close to home the odds were too high someone would bitch about it to his grandmother, so he braced the bike and idled, annoyed.
Someone on the other side of the road heckled the driver, but it wasn’t anything clever, just general jeering, so Weevil snorted and looked away. It was late enough in the day that he’d missed the after-church crowd and he wasn’t sorry about it, but there were still one or two stiff-backed citizens to sneer at the heckler for being drunk on a Sunday.
That just made him think about Mrs. Mars again, which wasn’t an overly cheerful prospect. The sheriff was a pain in his ass, but in some ways the guy was pretty decent, at least when he wasn’t kowtowing to Neptune’s monied overlords. It had been funny to think of his wife getting plastered on the weekends, partying it up a little too much for the 09 set and hitting a bar for the evening instead, maybe spilling a beer on herself. Showing up a drunk mess in the middle of the day was different, and it made something inside Weevil squirm that he knew about it. A guy like that was supposed to have a picture-perfect family, like in the photo he kept on his desk (turned away, of course, so that he could see it but potential criminals couldn’t). Mom, dad, daughter. Nice house. Maybe a few little quirks in the execution, but overall – right out of a commercial.
That was one of the reasons he’d enjoyed nailing the guy’s daughter, in the beginning. Crinkling up that perfect picture a little. So it was idiotic to be going all weird about it. It wasn’t like he didn’t know a dozen people off the top of his head who had worse shit going on, too.
He’d been sort of staring off, thinking about it, not really paying attention to the woman who was coming down the sidewalk on Vicente, loaded up with grocery bags, but his head was turned that way, so she must have thought he was staring at her. As she turned up Adams toward him, she paused, staring back, and Weevil realized with a shock that it was Sofia Reyes.
His eyes skittered away instinctively, before he could think that everyone’s probably did, that she must be sick of it – but the helmet hid it, so he turned them back again, to see how she looked. He couldn’t read anything, though; she just looked quiet. She’d always been quiet, kind of thoughtful, maybe. It was hard not to wonder what she’d been thinking when she took all those pills, even though the answer was so obvious. What would she have been thinking about, except Marisol?
He raised a hand, not a wave, just an acknowledgement, and Sofia looked at him for another long moment before she nodded, just slightly, and kept walking. He wondered if she could tell who he was, or if he was just some guy on a motorcycle to her. If she’d been to church earlier, or if she stayed the hell away. If it had been him, he would have never shown his face there, but it was hard to say if it would be out of shame or anger.
It was a long walk from the nearest store – maybe she’d wanted an excuse to get out of the house. Away from her mother, or her husband. Or maybe she’d only gone because no one else could, and she hated leaving the house; he knew they didn’t have a car anymore. Weevil didn’t think he’d seen her since she got out of the hospital, and that was a while back, now.
The rustbox ahead of him finally got its engine going again properly, enough to swing a sloppy turn onto Vicente and get the hell out of his way, and Weevil shook off the pointless questions and got going. He couldn’t do anything about Marisol or her mother, or Veronica Mars and the giant question mark she was turning into, or her mother, and he had shit to do.
*
Jasmine’s cake came out better than Meg’s had, probably due to Veronica’s recent practice. In keeping with the theme, she iced it to say Slut of the Year, which felt like a fair compromise between Jasmine being the closest thing to an actual slut who’d ever sat at their table, and the fact that she was still somewhat loosely attached.
Her dad came in while she was icing it, which nearly gave her a heart attack, but he only made a cursory attempt at reading it upside down. Veronica was glad she’d attempted cursive, even though it was a little smudged in a couple places – less fancy script probably would have been legible even from that perspective.
“Another cake?” he asked, feigning mild shock.
Veronica half-smiled, her heart still settling down. “If I did one for Meg and not Jasmine it would be very rude.”
He furrowed his brow thoughtfully. “Jasmine. Do I know Jasmine?”
“She sits with us at school – most of the time,” Veronica told him, wishing she’d bothered to find out Jasmine’s last name. “At least since Yolanda’s gone. She’s nice.”
“One of Yolanda’s friends?” He considered for a moment. “Gabrielle Pollard I remember.”
“Gabrielle doesn’t like me anymore because I tipped the cops off,” she nodded in her dad’s direction, “to her college-age boyfriend while Yolanda was missing.”
Keith winced at her sympathetically, and she shrugged one shoulder back at him, adding a few swirls along the sides of the case and under ‘Year’ that would hopefully distract him from trying to read the main part of the decoration. “I don’t remember how Jasmine started sitting with us,” she added, since she didn’t want to be on the hook later for explaining how Jasmine and Yolanda would have known each other. They could have had a class together, but it just seemed better not to have to maintenance a lie – another lie. “She’s nice, though – really funny.”
“I’m glad things are going better at school, honey,” he said, coming around to her side of the kitchen island so he could pat her shoulder. Veronica tried not to wince at the prospect of him getting a better look at the cake. “And I’m sure she’ll appreciate the cake, especially since you’ve put so much…” He trailed off, frowning at it. “Does that say Shit of the Year?”
It was possibly the only thing he could have said that could have gotten Veronica to actually correct him. “It says Slut of the Year,” she said, voice strangled. “And it’s a joke, and she’ll think it’s funny.”
Her dad did a double-take, then shot her a highly dubious look. “I certainly hope that’s true, because if your school calls me in due to cake-based bullying, I will not be pleased.”
Veronica forced herself not to cringe at the idea of her dad talking to Mr. Clemmons, and tried not to think at all about what she’d been doing only a few hours ago. “I’m pretty sure that even if someone did call Jasmine a slut in a mean way she’d think it was funny. That’s why we’re friends.” She iced one last swirl at the very top, for emphasis. “Besides – would I put this much effort into an insult?”
Her dad just looked at her, his eyebrows inching steadily upward. Veronica strove not to laugh.
“Okay,” she said, “fine. But it wouldn’t be a real cake, then, it would be an iced sponge, or have a whole cannister of paprika in it. And it doesn’t!” She gestured behind her, where all the evidence of her actual baking was stacked up next to the sink. “You can lick the bowl for proof, if you want.”
“Thank you, honey,” he said drily, “but I’ll just take it on faith this time.”
“Your loss!” Veronica told him brightly. “I’ll be out of the way in a minute, if you were going to start dinner.”
“I was going to make goulash, but that’ll depend on how much paprika we have in the house,” he told her, accompanying it with a hard look that made Veronica smile.
She waved at the spice cabinet. “See for yourself! Completely unpillaged. Garlic bread?”
“Of course.” He watched Veronica box up the cake and tape it all securely closed. “Dare I ask?”
“I have to keep it refrigerated and the Foods teacher might not get the joke,” she told him archly. “Plus you can’t trust teenage boys not to steal any given food item.” That made her think of Weevil, briefly, and she wondered if it would get back to him that she’d made Jasmine the cake. The other girl probably wasn’t hanging out with him outside of school, but maybe it would pass through Cervando – or maybe not, because why would Jasmine’s boyfriend talk to Weevil about a cake? It didn’t really matter, since her original plans to hold the cake tauntingly over his head didn’t appeal to her anymore the way they had before Thursday; it just felt strange for that entire aspect to be off the table entirely.
“Do you need any of those?” she asked her dad, indicating her stack of baking dishes with her head as she opened the fridge with her elbow. She could hear him humming consideringly as she made room for the cake.
“For the goulash? No, I think I’ll stick with the contents of the cupboards.”
“Then into the dishwasher!” Veronica shut the fridge with a flourish and opened the dishwasher with a similar one. She wouldn’t have minded scrubbing a utensil or two clean of batter if necessary, but she wasn’t going to do it if she didn’t have to.
Her dad puttered around in the other half of the kitchen, getting one or two things out but mostly waiting until she was done loading up the dishwasher so he could get at everything else without them being in each other’s way.
“Want a hand?” Veronica offered, not sure whether she wanted him to take her up on it or not, but her dad shook his head.
“I think you deserve a reprieve from the kitchen,” he told her. “I took Backup out while you were shopping, but I bet he could use another quick walk before dinner.”
Veronica eyed him knowingly – a do-your-business walk always meant that he’d just spent some time picking up all the half-hidden and previously missed doggy deposits in the backyard and was going to spend a day or too futilely trying to keep it clean – but she didn’t argue. She could use a walk, and she didn’t feel like pretending to get along with her mom, who she could hear coming down the stairs. “I suppose I could accept payment for my dog-walking services in goulash, as long as it was fantastic goulash.”
Her dad feigned surprise. “Payment? I thought we arranged for an indentured servant.” He pretended to consult imaginary paperwork. “Here it is – one daughter, bound in servitude for no less that eighteen years. Duties include dog-walking, dish-washing, and cleaning the gutters twice a year.” He frowned. “You’ve been shirking.”
Veronica started to roll her eyes, then stopped as her mom entered the kitchen and changed tack. “Dog-walking, you say?” she asked him hastily, as if she thought he would really make her clean the gutters. “Sounds good!”
She slipped past Lianne with a cursory, meaningless smile and escaped into the hall.
*
She didn’t sleep well on Sunday night, and Monday dragged, but lunch was a bright spot. Veronica had seen Jasmine in the hall on her way to third period and made a point of mouthing lunchtime, and the other girl’s response had been an expression so bright it had actually managed to cheer her up. By the time she was slicing away the layers of tape from the box, she was almost in a good mood.
On a whim, she snapped a picture of the cake before she disposed of the sharp knife she’d used on the tape and snagged a butterknife instead. It would cut more easily than the pie server had last week, but still hopefully wouldn’t get her flagged by a teacher. The last thing she wanted to do was explain Slut of the Year to Mr. Clemmons.
Jasmine and Meg were already set up when she got outside, although Veronica didn’t spot them at first, because they’d had to take a table near the wall; the basketball team had commandeered one of middle ones where they usually sat, and given the boisterous laughter, she could guess the reason the nearby tables hadn’t been appealing.
Meg laughed when she saw the box Veronica was carrying, and Jasmine bounced in her seat, her hair repeating the motion with even more enthusiasm. (Other things bounced, too, but it seemed rude to notice.) “You’re gonna make me fat,” she said, grinning.
“Wait to thank me until you see it,” Veronica said drily. The icing was pretty good for her first attempt at cursive – better than on Meg’s even though that had been a much more straight-forward prospect – but there were still smudges and a few weird wobbles in the lines. None of that seemed to matter to Jasmine, who actually clapped, laughing with delight when Veronica slid the box in front of her and opened the lid.
“Oooh, it looks so classy!” She flipped her hair behind her shoulder. “Because I’m a classy slut.” That was followed by a cascade of giggles, but she seemed genuinely touched when she added, “I can’t believe you did all this! I just sit here sometimes.”
“All sluts deserve recognition,” Veronica said, sitting down and arranging her small stack of plates and assorted utensils for ease of cake-cutting.
Meg leaned over to see better. “I guess we know who the weak link was last time!” she said, smiling. “I didn’t know you were this much of a baker.”
“I used to bake for pep squad.” Veronica shrugged. “It was mostly cookies, though – it’s a lot harder to tell when those are lopsided.” She’d had to cut the top off this cake, too, although it was much more effective because it hadn’t sunk in the middle this time.
Jasmine giggled again, fishing for the butterknife underneath the plastic forks Veronica had brought. “Weevil’s missing out. Too bad for him. No cake if you skip!”
“He’s suspended,” Veronica said, too surprised that Jasmine didn’t know to consider whether she should or not.
The other girl took it in stride without even asking why. “Sucks to be him, then!” She dug into the cake with the knife, showing more gusto but somewhat less skill than Meg had last week, and Veronica, encouraged by the comments, fished her phone out of her pocket and sent the picture she’d taken to Brad (school).
She dithered briefly over adding a follow-up text, deleting three different openings before settling on You’re missing Jasmine’s recognition ceremony.
Then she put it away again, not sure whether she should be relieved or offended that there was no immediate response, and accepted an enthusiastically mangled piece of cake from Jasmine.
“This is really good!” Meg said. “I wasn’t expecting chocolate.”
“I didn’t want to do the same thing every time,” Veronica told her, getting a carefully portioned forkful that was half-icing. The cake was good but the icing was really good, if she did say so herself.
“What’s every time?” Jasmine asked through a mouthful of cake. She’d shamelessly cut herself a piece twice the size of the other ones, which made Veronica smile. “You making Weevil a cake too?”
That wasn’t worth dignifying with a response beyond a disdainful expression. “Yolanda never got one. We’ll have to eat it for her, but…” Veronica shrugged. “That’s what she gets for getting married.”
“Total betrayal,” Jasmine agreed cheerfully, licking her fork. Meg didn’t say anything – she was too polite to talk with her mouth full, and apparently unwilling to stop eating cake. She’d abandoned the apple she was eating before Veronica arrived.
“We have to recruit more sluts,” Jasmine said indistinctly after a minute, cutting Meg a second piece almost before the other girl had finished her first. She wasn’t stingy, Veronica would give her that. “Keep this thing going.”
“Maybe Veronica doesn’t want to bake a new cake every week,” Meg tried to temporize, but she took the plate back with alacrity.
“Veronica enjoys eating cake,” Veronica pointed out, finishing her own piece. “So she wouldn’t necessarily object. But she’s not letting in mere skanks just to have an excuse to make one.”
Meg snorted into her cake. “As long as I don’t have to take them home. The last one was good, but my parents made me share it with Grace when I got home and I felt so weird giving her some when I knew it used to say ‘number one slut’.”
That made Jasmine dissolve into giggles again, and even Veronica smiled.
“Lizzie didn’t want any,” Meg added, “but – oh, she’s over there, actually. Lizzie!” She waved briefly at her sister. “But she’d change her mind if she knew how good it was.”
Lizzie didn’t look entirely thrilled to be hailed, but she dragged herself in their general direction with only a moderate display of reluctance.
“Veronica made another cake,” Meg told her sister once she was within reasonable earshot. “This one’s even better, since I didn’t help her with it.” That caught Veronica by surprise; she snorted harder than she meant to and hurt her nose.
“Cool,” Lizzie said, her bored tone only rising enough at the end to make it clear she didn’t know why she was being told this.
“You can have some if you want,” Jasmine offered, cutting Veronica another slice without being asked.
“I’m good,” Lizzie told her.
“Or you can sit with us,” Veronica said, belatedly realizing she’d left her pencil case in her locker and didn’t have the flag. “At the slut table. Then you’d get your own cake.”
“Veronica!” Meg bit her lip. “She didn’t mean it like that,” she told Lizzie.
“I definitely did,” Veronica said, although she wished Jasmine hadn’t started cackling. It drove the point home with a little too much emphasis.
“It’s cool,” the other girl said, reeling in her laughter. “We’re all sluts here.” She held up a hand for a high five that Veronica, after a moment’s consideration, returned.
“Meg’s not a slut,” Lizzie told them, rolling her eyes. She almost made the statement sound like an insult. “She’s practically a virgin.”
“Lizzie.” Meg grabbed the back of her neck in frustration, creasing her curtain of smooth hair.
“How can you be practically a virgin?” Veronica asked, although she suspected that there was, in fact, no ‘practically’ about it.
Jasmine was more interested in correcting Lizzie. “You can be a slut and a virgin,” she said.
That diverted Veronica’s attention, even though she really should have been rescuing Meg, who was turning red. “How?”
“Blowjobs,” Jasmine said, Lizzie, still trying to sound bored, only half a beat behind.
Meg covered her face, trying desperately to pretend that they hadn’t made her laugh.
“Whatever,” Lizzie said, tossing her head. Despite her feigned indifference, Veronica thought she saw a flash of interest cross her face. “If you think Meg’s the virgin blowjob queen of Neptune High, you’re delusional. She’s the least slutty person I know.”
“That’s not what Cole thinks,” Meg muttered through her fingers.
“Am I supposed to care what Cole thinks?” Lizzie rolled her eyes, adjusted her hair, and flounced away.
“You know what?” Veronica said, watching her go. “She grows on you.”
She expected Jasmine to express a similar sentiment, but the other girl was busy whispering “Virgin blowjob queen” to herself in delight.
Meg took a large bite of her apple, as if to make some kind of point, but then she went back to her second slice of cake. Veronica could see how they wouldn’t go too badly together. Maybe she’d do an apple cake next week, if she could find a good recipe.
*
Pepe was working, it turned out, which made things even easier for Weevil: he camped out in the back alley for about twenty minutes, until the man took one of his brief unauthorized smoke breaks – he’d mentioned more than once that they were necessary to keep from killing the customers – and got the guy to let him in the employee entrance so Manolo wouldn’t see him come in. Then he browsed, keeping at least one shelf between him and the counter and picking up at least enough things that it looked like he really might buy something, for the benefit of the other customers.
Manolo wasn’t doing much of anything, which fit with what Ric had said a while back, but also fit with him not caring about his shitty job except as a way to hide his deals, if he was back at it. Mostly he stood behind the counter like a zombie until someone came up to buy something, or ask for the key to the bathroom. It was kind of depressing to watch – you could tell the difference between when someone was phoning it in because they didn’t give a shit about their job and when they were zoning out because they didn’t give a shit about their life, and this felt like the second one. When Pepe came back and told him to, he started rearranging the lighter display so that half of them weren’t fallen over anymore, but so slowly it set Weevil’s teeth on edge.
Some guys got like that, after they got out, just stopped caring, but it read more like Manolo was out of it for another reason. Of course, maybe Weevil was biased – he’d never gotten the people who just shut down. His mom had been on fucking fire when she got out, desperate to turn things around, and even the people who went a little nuts made sense – you spent a year, five years, ten years in a box, of course you wanted to fuck and drink and jump off a cliff into the ocean, climb the nearest building and scream just because you could. When Benny had done three months last year, all he’d been able to talk about when he got out was seeing Monica (she’d been pregnant, which was part of it, but still). Weevil even knew a guy who’d turned around and gotten a dog first thing after he got out. But everyone who gave up like that just ended up living like they were still in prison, and he didn’t fucking get it.
Pepe caught his eye in the mirror mounted at the end of the aisle to help catch shoplifters, and Weevil met his resigned expression with grim acknowledgement. He probably wouldn’t have approved of the idea if it had been mentioned to him ahead of time, but Pepe was a realist even if he was a little too flexible about extracurriculars sometimes – but his idea of a side hustle was sliding his cousin a couple boxes of ‘damaged’ stock without cutting the club in, which was a lot easier to overlook than meth was. Anyway, Weevil was already here, so he’d go along, and he’d keep his mouth shut. What was that called, a fait accompli?
It took Ric a while to show up, so that Weevil was forced to read the back of a bunch of different cans of chilli just to keep from drawing attention. He’d actually started to wonder if he’d come too late, even though Ric never got up before noon if he could help it, or if the other guy had decided to go to school after all despite getting wasted with Camila and Martina last night, so when he got a text he actually checked his phone, in case it was about Ric somehow.
It wasn’t – it was a picture of a cake, which confused him for a second, until he scrolled up and realized it was from Veronica Mars. He hadn’t called her anything in his phone, but the text history was hard to mix up with anyone else.
He couldn’t waste time thinking about that shit when he had a job to do, so he just put his phone back in his pocket, prepared to ignore any other texts, which was a good thing because otherwise he might have missed Ric.
It was bad news from the drop, because the way Ric hovered outside the door, like he was waiting for something, or checking for observers, didn’t signify anything good. Weevil slid deeper into the grocery/household supplies aisle, where no one ever went unless they were desperate and didn’t have a way to get to the grocery store, and put on the stupid fucking hat he’d brought with him. It was one of Danny’s baseball caps, and even at the widest setting, the plastic buckle of the strap dug into the back of his head – but it made him less obvious.
The other boy headed straight to the back, for the refrigerated section – fortunately around the side, instead of down one of the aisles. Weevil bent his head over a bag of overpriced sponges, keeping an eye out even as he hunched his shoulders to get a little more cover from the bottles of spray cleaner. Sometimes it was helpful not to be too tall.
Ric grabbed a Gatorade – of all fucking things – but he didn’t head up to the front. He cast a suspicious eye over the aisles, and Weevil set down the sponges, trying to find something that he could conceivably be thinking about buying. He couldn’t afford to actually hide, but he’d rather not be noticed if he could help it. There were avenues he could take to exploit Ric’s shock at seeing him that would probably get the job done just fine, even if they weren’t as good as catching one or both of the Fernandezes in the act, but there was absolutely nothing he could do to salvage his leverage if he got caught crouched behind the Chef Boyardee like a kid spying on his parents.
The oblique angle made it tough to be sure, but he didn’t think Ric was looking for him though, specifically or in the form of someone who might catch him doing something he wasn’t supposed to. He didn’t look jumpy or cautious enough to be looking out for trouble – more like he was thinking of starting something. He shifted a few aisles over, missing Weevil in his hat and long-sleeved shirt, and stared past several racks of candy at the counter, bottle dangling haphazardly from his fingers. Manolo hadn’t noticed him, Weevil saw when he glanced that way himself; Pepe had.
They kept it up for a while – Ric watching Manolo, Weevil watching Ric watch Manolo, Pepe (whenever he wasn’t in the stockroom) keeping half an eye on Ric while he watched Weevil watch Ric watch Manolo, like they were in a bad fucking joke. Every few minutes Ric would shift his position, grab the neck of the Gatorade with the other hand instead, and slouch against a different part of the fridge door. It was just the water section, so he wasn’t in anyone’s way – or if he was, they didn’t want a bottle of uncarbonated nothing that once touched a raspberry for five seconds badly enough to confront a scowling gangbanger – but Weevil couldn’t figure out what he was trying to do, aside from warm up his drink to make it more disgusting.
Another customer came in, and Ric went stiff, his jaw coming up in something that might have been resentment. Weevil didn’t see anything about the man to merit it – he could have been anybody’s uncle or brother-in-law – but he very much did see that Manolo noticed this guy, when he’d barely been paying attention to anyone so far.
Their new friend spent some time browsing through the magazines and newspapers at the front, seeming in no hurry at all, until Pepe finished restocking the shelf he was working on and disappeared back into the stockroom, when the man suddenly seemed able to make a decision.
Weevil couldn’t see all of what happened, but he didn’t need to – one of Manolo’s hands was under the counter, and then it was inside the newspaper as he slid it back across the counter. Nothing obvious, easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it, just like the way the customer tilted it once he had it, so that whatever had been left inside wouldn’t fall out.
The store wasn’t big, so even though no one was speaking loudly, Weevil could just hear the guy say, “Keep the change.”
No way he’d paid with a ten.
It was good that Ric wasn’t the runner, but he was about to create a whole new set of problems if Weevil didn’t catch him first. No matter how credible any of Ric’s threats might be, Manolo wasn’t going to be afraid of his little brother.
But Ric wasn’t going for Manolo – he dropped the bottle of Gatorade on the floor and went after the other man like a bulldog. Shit. Weevil slid out of the aisle and toward the door, fast but not fast enough to attract any more attention. Behind him he could hear Manolo saying something surprised, maybe including his brother’s name, and the lady who’d been picking through the pre-wrapped muffins squawking that he’d stolen something.
He caught Ric halfway down the block, three feet from the guy, grabbed his arm and pulled him backward. Ric swung on him, but Weevil had been expecting that; he kept right behind Ric’s shoulder, turned with him without letting go of the other boy’s arm. “Cigarettes,” he said, quietly and emphatically. “Cigarettes, dumbass.”
Ric stopped. “What?” He sounded more confused than relieved, but Weevil had to gamble that Ric’s vantage point had been worse than his, because Manolo had used his opposite arm for the handover.
“It’s cigarettes,” Weevil told him. “He’s slipping his friends something extra without paying.” When Ric blinked at him, comprehending but slowly, he added, “I was there longer than you were, all right?”
The penny dropped, although it wasn’t the one he’d been hoping for. “What were you even doing there?”
Weevil let the hostile tone slide. “Checking something out.”
“Checking me out, you mean,” Ric told him angrily, but Weevil had an out for that. He snorted.
“What your brother does in my neighbourhood affects me, genius. You were supposed to be in school.”
That knocked Ric back for a minute, and Weevil could see him chewing it over, wanting to believe it. “Yeah? I mean – I told you – we’re cool–”
“Yeah, maybe, but keeping out of that shit doesn’t mean designating yourself your brother’s fucking babysitter.” The exasperated tone seemed to do the trick – Ric’s shoulders came most of the way down from around his ears. “And I know what you thought was going on, because he’s not doing himself any favours acting suspicious as fuck, but I don’t care about a couple cartons of lifted cigarettes, and neither does the club. We’re already a man down, so if you get caught bashing in some idiot’s face in broad daylight over some Marlboros, that is my problem.”
“Pepe told you he was up to something,” Ric muttered.
“Pepe doesn’t know what he told me, because he doesn’t notice anything that’s not Sylvia,” Weevil shot back, which seemed to disperse the last of the tension. Ric snorted. Weevil let go of his arm, since he didn’t look likely to take off again, and anyway Manolo’s buyer was already out of sight.
“I just like to keep an eye on him,” Ric said, his tone equal parts relief and bravado. “But that guy, he comes in all the time, and he never buys shit from Pepe.”
That was the problem, wasn’t it – Ric could be bull-headed to the point of idiocy, and he wasn’t as observant as Weevil, but he wasn’t stupid, either. He’d be pissed if he found out Weevil was lying to him, even if it had stopped him from getting slapped with an assault charge and probably one for possession too. The sheriff’s department wouldn’t care about the details – they’d only care that there were drugs and two Latinos with records in the same one-block radius. Weevil would’ve been able to get out of there, probably, but there was a decent chance Manolo and Pepe would’ve gone down for it too, depending on how lazy the deputy who drew the call was.
He was going to have to handle Manolo carefully, so that Ric didn’t find out. There went the rest of his Monday – not that he had anything better going on.
“Look, take off,” he said. “Go for a ride, catch fifth period, whatever. I got shit to talk to Pepe about – real shit.”
“Yeah, fine,” Ric said. He rubbed the back of his neck. “It was really nothing?”
He wanted to be reassured, that was obvious, but he also didn’t want to feel stupid. Weevil shrugged casually. “Don’t think his boss would say that. And I had a better view than you did. But listen, you want trouble?” He grinned wickedly. “I got all kinds of things I need done – just say so.” That got the other boy to laugh, so he knew he’d pulled it off. “You don’t have to go around borrowing it.”
“Yeah,” Ric said. “Yeah. Okay.” He shot Weevil an abbreviated salute that was more a wave, and headed down the street. Weevil watched him to make sure he turned towards his house, then took off the stupid fucking hat and slipped back around to the employee entrance at the back.
It didn’t take that much longer for Pepe to reappear, and he made a resigned face when he saw Weevil leaning against the wall.
“When’s his shift over?” Weevil said quietly.
Pepe made a face. “Man, he’s not in the club. Whatever’s going on you didn’t bother to tell me about –”
“I don’t answer to you,” Weevil reminded him.
“Doesn’t mean I like getting jerked around.” Pepe fumbled out a cigarette, regarded it sourly, then put it away again. “How’s it any of our business?”
“How’s it my business when some jackass is dealing meth out of my neighbourhood, under one of my guys’ noses, living in the same house as a club member and probably cutting into the business they’re doing at the River Styx? Are you fucking kidding me?”
The other man looked surprised enough that it was clear he hadn’t known exactly what was going on, even if he’d had suspicions that there was something. “Meth? For real?”
“Don’t act stupid,” Weevil said, but dismissively, rather than harshly. “You know that’s what he was in for.”
“Yeah, but didn’t they bust a whole bunch of people? Manolo’s not cooking it himself.” The sentence wiggled a little at the end, not quite a question.
“On his mom’s couch?” Weevil allowed. “No. But you think anyone’s going to believe Ric’s not involved in whatever he’s doing? That you’re not? The cops are the least of the issue, and they’re not a small issue, so I’m just going to have a little conversation with him.”
Pepe winced, but he didn’t argue. Weevil could have assured him that he wasn’t going to do any permanent damage – that after his conversation with Ric, he wasn’t even planning on leaving bruises anywhere obvious – but he didn’t. He wasn’t accountable to José Arroyo, and it was time for a reminder. “I’ll get him out here once he finishes. Another hour.”
“Grab me something to eat while I’m waiting.” When it looked like Pepe was about to protest, he narrowed his eyes and observed, “It’s not like it would be the first time something went mysteriously missing outta here, is it, José.”
There was entrepreneurship he could forgive, and entrepreneurship he couldn’t, and Pepe’s side-hustle fell mostly into the first category, but some people didn’t understand the distinction, and then they got ideas. He was going to have to crack down a little regardless, but if Pepe wanted to be a little bitch about it, he could always crack down a lot.
But Pepe wasn’t stupid, and he liked to keep his head down more than he liked to make trouble, so he winced and nodded begrudgingly and came back with a two-litre of Coke and some off-brand twinkies – and more importantly, he took the point. Weevil would’ve rather had a hot dog than the twinkies, but that wasn’t the important thing.
He examined the text from before while he waited. The cake was for Jasmine – that made sense, then, or at least it did as far as it was Veronica tweaking his nose about that dumb initiation ceremony joke. He was surprised she’d bothered to text him about something like that, after yesterday – maybe surprised she’d text him at all – but he couldn’t quite bring himself to ignore it.
RECOGNIZED Jzz plenty 2 yrs ago, he settled on finally. It was close enough to playing along, but it didn’t commit him to anything. Talking about the fact he used to hook up with a different girl wasn’t something he couldn’t walk back when he inevitably came to his senses and bailed after all, wasn’t something that made him look more invested in the conversation than Veronica was.
There was no immediate response, but whatever. Class had probably started again, so there wouldn’t be one anyway, and it wasn’t like he would have sat around staring at his phone regardless. Still, the mention of Jasmine had given him an idea. It might be the best way to handle his other, annoyingly minor, problem, actually, and if it meant giving up some of his leverage… he shouldn’t be using leverage to keep things going anyway. He should be calling it. At some point she’d realize that she wasn’t going to get laid anymore and stop texting him, and that would be fine, because at least he wouldn’t be in freaking jail.
But that could all wait until Wednesday – he had Manolo to deal with first.
*
School was weirdly quiet without Weevil, which didn’t even make sense, because Veronica had zero classes with him and only saw him at lunch a few times a week. She hadn’t devoted all that much conscious thought to him outside of the relevant occasions – or at least she thought she hadn’t – but apparently he’d taken up more of her mental real estate than she’d thought he had. Or more accurately, the question of when, where, and whether to have sex with him had been occupying a much larger portion of the background than she would have guessed.
Now that the answers to those questions were ‘who knows’, ‘not in my car again, that’s for sure’, and ‘…no?’, respectively, there was a bigger gap left in her everyday thoughts than she’d anticipated.
It wasn’t bad – Tuesday was fine, and Wednesday was fine, even though Civics remained a thorn in her side. Detention with Mrs. Hauser sucked as much as expected, although some of the woman’s momentum had faded by Tuesday, probably because Veronica refused to respond to any of her lectures and leading questions with anything other than a sweet smile and a bit of plausibly deniable sarcasm. Jasmine mostly ate with her other friends, but Meg was more cheerful than usual, looking forward to the play debuting, and on Wednesday Lizzie just happened to wander past their lunch table in order to drop a couple arch but surprisingly unbarbed comments which were actually amusing – Veronica suspected that she’d suddenly realized they were interesting.
That or she’d changed her mind and was angling for cake.
But it just felt a little… bland. She’d considered responding to Weevil’s text on Monday, which at least was in tone with their usual exchanges – he didn’t sound mad, but she also couldn’t tell what his deal was right now. There hadn’t been any natural responses to what he’d said, though, aside from something like ‘oh, I bet you did’, which looked suddenly catty instead of sardonic once she saw it written down.
Then she’d considered texting him about getting her underwear back, but what was she even supposed to say? She couldn’t actually go to his house. For one thing, it was an incredibly bad idea, and while the audaciousness of showing up and calling his bluff appealed to her, the last thing she wanted was to be entangled in his actual life. For another, she didn’t have his address. Asking him for it would no doubt get her mocked ruthlessly, and there were multiple Navarros in the phone book. It seemed relatively safe to say that the grandmother she thought he might live with wasn’t named Michael, but she could be Leticia or Angel or the mysterious ‘D. Navarro’, and that was assuming they had the same last name, which was hardly guaranteed since Veronica knew nothing about his dad. Assuming he didn’t live with his dad, or a heretofore unmentioned relative.
He probably didn’t even have the underwear anymore – he was probably yanking her chain. And even if he did, it wasn’t worth stressing out over. Sure, no girl wanted a teenage boy to have possession of her underwear, but given everything that had already happened, it didn’t make sense to worry about the possibility of what was really only a moderate amount of perviness. The thing that was actually bothering her was that it was a loose end, an unsatisfying dangling thread. Not that she’d be all fine and dandy with the anticlimactic fizzle that was currently taking place if only she’d gotten one specific pair of underwear back – if nothing else, she was getting increasingly more sexually frustrated, and it hadn’t even been a week. (Well – a more than a week since she’d had good sex. But still.) Getting yourself off, while still very much worth doing, just wasn’t the same, especially once you knew what you were missing – and that was even clearer now that she was staring down the barrel of it suddenly being her only recourse.
But every time she wavered in the direction of trying to work out some compromise or solution or overture, she was reminded that there was just no feasible plan. Hooking up at school was too risky, having sex in some unsecured outdoor location was absolutely off limits, and the car had been a disaster. She was hardly going to go to a hotel – they weren’t having an affair. After some consideration, she’d decided that Weevil had probably been messing with her when he implied they could meet his house, and anyway, that seemed like a leap she wouldn’t have been entirely comfortable with even before the debacle on Sunday. This was probably just how these kinds of arrangements ended: not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Veronica made a face at the unintended entendre. Cringe-worthy puns aside, given how bad the explosion would have been in the other scenario, it was probably for the best… but she couldn’t help feeling faintly cheated.
Thursday should have been a bright spot – it was her first day without after-school detention – but Meg was late to meet her at lunch, so Veronica was hashing it all over again, momentarily regretting how quickly she’d consigned everything to the ‘unworkable’ column and reminding herself that it had definitely been too long for her to send a text without seeming weird about it, when Jasmine plopped down next to her, holding a little gift bag.
“I have something for you,” she said.
Veronica blinked. “For me?”
The bag was just a tiny one, green and shiny – less than a buck at the dollar store, where you might buy it to use for the cursory present you’d been obligated to get a small child you didn’t know well – but she still felt surprisingly touched. Jasmine was fun, and she would have been happy to partner up in gym class or sit together on a field trip, or hang out if they ran into each other at the mall, but she hadn’t expected the other girl to think they were the kind of friends who gave gifts. The cake had been a gimmick, very much not something she expected reciprocation for in kind.
But Jasmine shook her head. “I’m just supposed to give it to you.” She put the bag on the table, shrugging. “I didn’t look in it. Well, I did, but all I saw was tissues.”
Veronica frowned, pulling the top of the bag slightly more open. Jasmine hadn’t misspoken – instead of tissue paper, the bag appeared to be stuffed with actual Kleenex. “What,” Veronica asked flatly.
They looked like clean tissues, folded more than crumpled. She flipped open the tiny little address card that was attached to the string handles of the gift bag. There was writing on it, but all it said, in boxy block letters, was TOP SECRET.
“What,” she muttered again, pushing some of the tissues aside, then pulling them out entirely so she could see… light blue fabric?
Then she caught a glimpse of elastic, the first two letters of Hanes very clear on it, and shoved the Kleenex back in, her face burning far more than it had any right to.
Jasmine frowned, pausing in the middle of tearing open her tube of yogurt. “What is it? If I’d known it was this exciting, I would have made him tell me.”
“It’s a stupid joke,” Veronica said, trying for a light tone. Her voice stayed remarkably even, despite her embarrassment. “I just have to go to my locker – one second.”
She left her lunch and tried not to rush on her way inside, holding the bag gingerly by the handles. It wasn’t like it would be dirty even if the contents were – and they probably weren’t, right? Even your average teenage boy grossness didn’t stretch that far… but she also had a hard time imagining Weevil washing her underwear.
It was impossible to completely ignore the surreality of the situation. Suppose Mr. Clemmons happened by and she had to explain to him why she had underwear in a gift bag full of Kleenex. Suppose she had to explain to herself back in September that she would be standing by her locker, trying to figure out whether, having received her own underwear back in a Kleenex-filled gift bag from the ex-hookup of her ex-hookup, it had been laundered by an aspiring teenage crime kingpin, and if so, did that require reconsidering the prefix on hookup?
The sheer ridiculousness of the premise helped her shake some of her embarrassment, but she still buried the bag as deep in her backpack as she could manage. Then she walked back to the lunch area slowly, meaning to give herself extra time to think of something to say to Jasmine – but instead she ended up hashing over the last week of Weevil’s behaviour.
He hadn’t been thrilled to be caught, but neither had Veronica; she’d thought they had some solidarity or common cause, even when he’d gotten terse with her – he hadn’t jumped down her throat for getting off lighter than he had, which she felt pretty sure he would have if they’d been in that position back in November.
She hated thinking about what he’d seen of her mom, but texting her to check in was almost… okay, as incongruous as it was to apply the word, it had been kind of sweet. Like something Meg might do, although definitely more irreverent. The texting had seemed almost normal, even after that when it was just about logistics, falling into the usual rhythm of jabbing harmlessly at each other. But on Sunday he’d seemed annoyed, she thought – or maybe it just seemed that way in retrospect because everything had been so frustrating. It wasn’t just the sex; somehow the usual almost-collaborative oneupsmanship had soured pretty quickly, turning into ill-natured sniping even when she hadn’t really intended it to. She’d been ready for a biting remark about how none of it was worth the effort, and instead he’d, however sarcastically, invited her to his house.
Then, this week, the response to her exploratory text had been mild and almost perfunctory, but he’d apparently turned right around and sent her a gag gift of her own underwear.
And did that mean that he wanted to make sure she didn’t show up at his house for them? She would have thought so, but the effort involved in making it so much of a sparkly joke felt more like investment than disengagement.
This had been so much more straight-forward when they just flatly disliked each other.
Meg was there when she got back, already talking to Jasmine. and Veronica slid gratefully into her seat. At least she wouldn’t have to make any explanations.
Jasmine would know where Weevil lived, she realized as she picked up her sandwich. Not that she had any reason to go over there now. She’d probably know who he lived with, too, and there didn’t seem to be any subjects that she found strange or off-limits, so she’d probably cough up any information Veronica asked her too.
But there was no reason for her to ask, so she didn’t.
Chapter 33: Nothing Exactly Like It
Notes:
Back on schedule! This one is longer than anticipated, too. :)
Chapter Text
Some things are better than sex, and some are worse, but there's nothing exactly like it.
W. C. Fields
Veronica’s dad came home on Friday with tickets for Cabaret.
She couldn’t blame him – she’d told him she wanted to go. She’d even probably said something about making it a family outing. It wasn’t her dad’s fault that the idea of sitting cheerfully between her parents while Meg sang about not telling Mama or about Nazis or whatever it was made her gorge rise. It wasn’t even his fault that she couldn’t tell him that; that one was all on her.
She’d managed to avoid not having to say too much to her mom for most of the week, doing her best to draw her dad into conversations over dinner so he wouldn’t notice, or shot a couple normal-sounding responses Lianne’s way without ever quite looking at her, but that could only hold for so long. At least by now it felt less risky – it had been long enough that her mom had to realize that coming clean wouldn’t achieve anything except making herself look worse, so Veronica was less worried about saying the wrong thing and prompting and angry (or guilty) confession.
But that didn’t make it any easier to stomach.
“That’s great, Dad,” she told him. “Now I can even get some flowers or something for Meg without breaking the bank.”
“I thought we could all grab dinner at Mama Leone’s beforehand,” he told her, looking pleased with himself. “A nice night out for the Mars family.”
The worst part was that a week and a half ago Veronica would have agreed with him. She half-shrugged, half-smiled, not wanting to give him any insincerity to latch on to. “I’m excited to see if Alyssa is really as good as Meg says, or if she’s just trying to prove she doesn’t have sour grapes.”
“You suspect the latter?”
“Meg’s not capable of sour grapes,” she told him. Her mom had made an appearance from the living room, and Veronica forced herself to turn and put on a sunny smile. “Dad got tickets to Cabaret!”
“Sounds like fun,” Lianne said. She wasn’t exactly unsteady, but her voice betrayed her, her tone and intonation just sloppy enough that it was impossible to ignore. Veronica’s heart sank, even though there was no reason for it – she was hardly surprised.
It was just that Lianne was more of a risk when she drank, that being unpredictable might prompt her to let something slip after all. Veronica kept her smile up as best she could, not looking away because she didn’t want to see her dad’s face fall.
“Before I forget,” she said, trying to sound as if it had just occurred to her instead of like she was abruptly changing the subject in an attempt to stave off a crushingly awkward, or worse, hostile, conversation. “I have to take another cake to school on Monday and I’m pretty sure I’ll be getting the leftovers this time. Any votes on what kind? And before you get too creative, remember who’s making it.”
“Isn’t this getting ridiculous?” her mom asked. “How much homework can they even give you for Foods class. It’s Foods. All we ever had to do was a, a calorie sheet.”
“It’s not for class, Lianne,” her dad said, quietly. If he’d used that tone with her, Veronica would have been afraid she was in trouble – or that there’d been a death in the family. Her mother was still sober enough to notice; she was immediately offended. “They’re for her friends.”
“Well, excuse me,” her mom said huffily. “How was I supposed to know that, and why does she need so many cakes, anyway?”
Veronica couldn’t keep her cool in the face of that. “Wow,” she said, “okay. I’m leaving.”
Lianne looked confused as Veronica brushed past her, dodging her dad’s outstretched hand and placating, “Honey…” She knew he was just trying to comfort her, but right now it didn’t feel anything but patronizing.
“Veronica,” her mom said in bewilderment as she stalked toward the stairs, refusing to rush. She wasn’t throwing a tantrum, she was just – leaving. It wasn’t like her mom had said anything she didn’t know.
Lianne must have worked it out, because she added with some distress, “No, honey, I didn’t mean–”, but Veronica ignored her, trying not to stomp like a five-year-old as she hit the landing. No matter how hard she tried to tune it out, though, she could hear her dad saying something sharp and quiet to get her mom to stop talking, her mom protesting that surely they could all eat one cake, that was all she meant, it wasn’t…
But reaching the top of the stairs finally gave her the distance to let it all fade away. Veronica let herself into her room quietly, forcing herself not to jerk the door open or slam it shut, not to throw herself dramatically on the bed or admit that tears were pricking her eyes. It would be such a silly, middle-school thing to be upset about even if she did care what her mom said, even if she’d been surprised or upset that her mom had been drinking, which she wasn’t.
She got her phone out and texted Meg, even though the thought that she was trying to prove that she had friends nagged at her as she typed.
Guess who scored tickets to opening night?
Veronica even jazzed it up with an excited face before she sent it, but all her determined resolve disappeared once she did. She sat down on the edge of the bed, letting herself slump slowly backward until she was staring at the ceiling.
They’d been through a lot together, her and that ceiling. Sleepovers with Lilly, giggling up at it, sure the world was exciting and carefree and theirs. Numbly curling around a pillow, staring unseeing at the white swirls as she finally admitted to herself that Stella was never going to come over, or probably talk to her, ever again, after what had happened with her mom. Late nights in the dark, wondering if Duncan liked her as much as she liked him, if she was going to bomb her fifth-grade science presentation, if she’d get the thing she really, really wanted for Christmas.
Multiple types of personal sexual exploration that were extra awkward to think about now that she’d lightly personified the ceiling.
Meg’s reply saved her from becoming either more maudlin or completely ridiculous; Veronica sat halfway up when she heard the alert and propped herself on her elbows.
you make it sound like we sold out the Gershwin!
Veronica smiled.
The answer is my dad, by the way. He’s very excited.
Meg texted her back a heart.
your dad is adorable, she sent a few seconds later, which was not a way Veronica had ever conceptualized her father. he's so much fun.
Veronica hadn’t spent enough time around Meg’s parents to respond with a flattering opinion of them, since the only direct impression she had of Mr. Manning was that he was sort of old, and her indirect impression weren’t especially favourable. Watch out, she said instead. Because Thursday is going to be a nonstop comedy routine when you get off stage. We’ll see how adorable you think he is then.
That earned her a laughing face. sounds great!
Veronica had mostly been bantering when she’d mentioned getting flowers earlier, but actually she thought she would. She didn’t think it was too weird to bring flowers for someone who didn’t have a starring role, at least not in high school, as long as she resisted the urge to throw them at Meg’s feet during the boys like an old-timey opera fan. She might even go big, spring for something fancier than chrysanthemums.
Some people were just worth the money, worth the effort. Lilly hadn’t been, but Meg was.
Veronica didn’t put anyone else on those metaphorical scales, but she couldn’t quite convince herself that that wasn’t a choice.
*
Her mom was contrite and solicitous for the rest of the weekend. Veronica didn’t know whether it was her own guilt or whatever her husband had said to her that was the motivator, but she seemed to be always hovering, ready to swoop in with a snack or an offer of a trip to the mall or the used bookstore downtown, voice apologetic and eager, like she was desperate for absolution.
She seemed sober, but Veronica couldn’t give her what she wanted. She felt old, much older than Lianne, who seemed like a naughty child looking for forgiveness.
But she let her mom help her with Yolanda’s cake, because it felt like too much effort to find a tactful way to refuse. She wasn’t interested in picking a fight this time – she wasn’t even resentful, just tired. Anyway, it meant she could let Lianne pick up the bill for the ingredients, so she sprung for the fancy icing and a stencil you could use to make the letters neat.
Lianne got really into the process, putting on music and exclaiming enthusiastically at each completed step, and shooting little looks at her daughter for approval. Veronica ignored it all and tried to smile, to maintain a normal level of enthusiasm, to sing along with the radio so she wouldn’t have to make too much conversation.
Her dad came home from walking Backup as they were finishing up, the cake already in the oven, and stood watching them as Veronica checked the icing and her mom rinsed out all the bowls and measuring cups they’d used. He had a strange look on his face, wistful and resigned and one or two other things Veronica couldn’t name, and it made her chest ache, so she pretended not to see him.
“Seems like a productive afternoon,” he said once her mom shut the dishwasher on a nearly-full bottom rack and an over-full top one.
“Oh, well,” Lianne said, her tone light but her hands fluttering nervously around her waist. “You know I’m not exactly a baker, but Veronica’s so good at these things!” There it was again, that little darting look – did you hear? is it okay now? Veronica couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge it, but she gave a dutiful smile and shrugged modestly.
“Third time’s the charm.”
Her parents both smiled back, her mom’s expression eager but tremulous, her dad’s smaller but sincere. “I admire your dedication. Lianne, do you have a minute?”
“Sure.” The acceptance was easy and bright, but Veronica watched her mom’s hands, which were worrying the hem of her shirt.
She set the kitchen timer once she was alone, for five minutes before the cake was meant to be ready, and her phone alarm for ten minutes before that, and went upstairs. She didn’t try to eavesdrop on her parents as she passed the living room, as she might have anxiously done a few years ago, and she didn’t stretch fretfully on her bed and devote all her energy to not thinking about what they were saying, as she might have a few months ago. She fired up her laptop instead, tooled around some music sites, listening to a couple songs by Five For Fighting, Paula Cole, Maroon 5, without enough focus to put on a whole album. She downloaded a couple of them, glanced through some celebrity news, did some unsatisfying window shopping until her alarm went off.
Her parents were not immediately in evidence when she went downstairs, which was what she’d hoped for, so it was aggravating that she couldn’t help worrying about it.
The cake had turned out great, though – the top was even flat. She’d shut off the kitchen and oven timers as soon as she came down, so no one interrupted her. Not, she realized belatedly, that she could ice it now anyway, so her precautions to avoid her parents snooping into how she decorated it were premature; the cake had to cool first.
She ate a yogurt while she waited, checking her phone idly even though she didn’t expect any texts.
There was one, though – not from Meg but from the fake name she’d assigned Weevil.
i like tedddy bares
Veronica stared at it. What the hell? Was this a messed-up come-on? A joke that made absolutely no sense? A weird kink thing with his new hookup that he’d sent her by accident?
Teddy bares?
Maybe he was high or something. Eyeroll-worthy at the very least – but less alarming somehow than being drunk at 2 PM on a Sunday.
Veronica didn’t care to take that train of thought any further, so she considered her options for a response. The sheer incongruity made her curious enough that she didn’t feel like ignoring it, even though that might have been the best call – but she couldn’t rule out the possibility that that might be the point, that he might just be fucking with her. A solid ‘what the hell’ was called for if he wasn’t, but it needed to be mitigated with an eyeroll, in case he was, and those didn’t translate well over text. Modifying it with a ‘not to be rude’ might have worked with someone else, but Veronica didn’t want to risk him thinking she was trying to be polite – especially right now, when they were in some weird limbo and all she wanted was to avoid seeming more invested than he was. A few isolated question marks was a tried and true way of getting the point across, but that seemed almost too informal, erring in the opposite direction to the same result.
Finally she settled on What is wrong with you?, turning the first two words into a contraction and back again several times before deciding they conveyed the tone better separately.
The response was surprisingly fast, but all it said was ariana.
Veronica frowned at it. that cleared up absolutely nothing. Was he trying to text someone named Ariana? It wasn’t exactly a shock that he might be making time with other girls – she’d never been sure who else he might have been hooking up with, besides briefly considering and then rejecting the idea of Jasmine. And it would hardly be the first time a guy put on a sensitive act in order to get laid. But it seemed beyond odd for Weevil to decide to take that specific tack – especially about teddy bears. The idea he’d say something so glurgy made her feel uncomfortable, like she was watching someone humiliate themselves in public.
And that still wouldn’t explain why he’d suddenly forgotten how to spell. He always texted in abbreviated shorthand, but it wouldn’t have taken any longer to spell bears correctly.
This is Veronica, she sent back, and then followed it up with You should really keep girls’ names straight. Maybe Ariana goes all mushy for teddy bears but that’s really not my thing. Just a tip!
It was tempting to add a smiley-face at the end, but that was too much, tipping it over into passive-aggressive instead of mocking, when she was very much trying to mock him. It would be easy to sound like she had some kind of an issue with him chatting up a new prospect (or an ongoing one), instead of just being truly repulsed by his manner of going about it – and it was not acceptable for her to be the subject of ridicule when he’d texted her, and presumably this Ariana girl as well, ‘I like teddy bears’.
Veronica checked the cake, which had cooled enough to transfer. She saran-wrapped it before she put it in the fridge, annoyed with herself for not factoring cooling time into her plans earlier. It was a lot longer than with cookies, but she still had enough baking experience that she should have remembered that there would be a delay – no matter how preoccupied she’d been.
She read the latest text on her way up to her room – txting felix not u.
Presumably that meant Felix Toombs, who was in her Civics class and kind of a tool. It shed zero light on any of the things that actually needed it – if anything, Veronica was even more confused. Why was he texting Felix about teddy bears? Who was Ariana? How had he looked at their recent logistics, which consisted of hookup logistics and a saucy cake picture, and thought for a second it was Felix Toombs he was texting.
Was Ariana a teddy bear?
Veronica imagines a big tough biker room, with posters of skulls on the walls and dirty clothes and tequila bottles all over the concrete floor… and a sweet little teddy bear named Ariana perched against the pillow on an otherwise spartan bed, a pink bow on its head. She snorted.
The only thing she could think of to explain the mix-up was that they were both under stupid nicknames in his phone – Felix meant ‘lucky’, didn’t it? Maybe he was ‘Good Luck’ and she was ‘Get Lucky’, or something like that.
It didn’t explain nearly enough for her satisfaction, but she wasn’t sure texting back was a good idea – and it might just result in even more confusing nonsense. She certainly wasn’t going to call him.
There was no reason not to just drop it, of course – she knew that. It didn’t really matter, but if she didn’t get an answer it was going to niggle at her. So much for gracefully letting things run their course.
Still, actually approaching him at school was a bridge too far, given the weird, unsettled state of things. But it was Monday tomorrow, and she had cake – if he bothered to come back to school, there were at least reasonable odds that he’d end up at their table for a portion of lunch, and then she could drag a straight answer out of him.
And if he didn’t, well, that was information she could work with, and she could delete his number and stop chewing over the subject.
*
Weevil was not having a good day.
He’d dragged himself over to Abuela’s with firm intentions of being good grandson, maybe even taking her to church if she was feeling up to it, only to find that his grandma had told her that he was suspended from school. no amount of protesting that it was only for a week and that he was going back tomorrow, no, literally tomorrow, had stopped her from sighing and giving him sad eyes and asking over and over why he wanted to throw his future away.
Leticia had been unimpressed with his indignation when he got home. “Then don’t get suspended,” she’d told him, like that was a reason to make her mom worry.
It was Veronica Mars’s fault that he was suspended anyway, but he knew how much ice saying that would cut.
As if all of that wasn’t enough for one day, while he was arguing with their grandma, Ariana stole his phone and decided to text embarrassing things to all his contacts. He’d known he was always going too easy on her, but no way was he letting her get away with this – neither of the boys would have dared, because they knew they’d get their asses fucking beat.
(He was probably lucky it had been Ariana, because she’d just told everyone he loved hugs and teddy bears. Alex probably would have gone with ‘I like to fuck teddy bears’, and Danny’s new obnoxious thing was asking everyone if they liked to suck toes, which was… worse. But that didn’t make him feel any more charitable.)
She’d been hiding in the upstairs closet with it, giggling like he wouldn’t be able to tell that that had something to do with his phone was suddenly missing, and she’d yelped when he’d flung open the door and snatched it back from her, but then she’d managed to crawl through his legs and by the time he realized what she’d done exactly and caught up with her, she was in the boys’ room hiding behind Danny. Who of course proceeded to be a little bitch and shove her away while he split. Not that it didn’t piss Weevil off that Alex immediately tried to get in his face about scaring her, but at least the kid had guts.
It was Ariana, though, so he shoved Alex forcibly out of the way so that he fell onto Danny’s bed and then dragged her out into the hall to put the fear of God into her, but he still kept his threats to exaggerated shit she’d know he wasn’t going to do – with just enough shaking to make sure she took him seriously anyway.
Of course, then his grandma was pissed he’d said he was going to tie her into knots, but as far as he was concerned, with Ariana the line was whether the yelling and pity-crying turned into real crying and thumb-sucking, which it hadn’t. So she could get off his back – it wasn’t like he didn’t know better than to threaten Ariana with anything her psycho mom might have been willing to actually do to her.
So now everyone in the house was mad at him, except Danny, and he was mad at everyone in the house, including Danny, and he had to do damage control on all the people who wanted to know why he was texting them about fucking teddy bears. By the time his grandma was done reaming him out and he got a chance to look at his phone, Felix had already sent him three texts making fun of him. The last one was just seven laughing faces.
fuck off, he sent back. At least with Felix it didn’t matter how he handled this. not me obvsly
He was still getting texts – Bootsy thought it was hilarious, Hector wanted to know if he was drunk (and, belatedly, if he was ‘cool’, because apparently he was worried Weevil was having a breakdown about hugs), and while he was trying to answer them, Thumper sent him a message just saying wtf is this shit.
Thumper was easiest – Weevil pretended to correct ‘hugs’ to ‘thugs’, added a quick u ever listen? to make it sound like a song or a band, because randomly texting people ‘I like thugs’ would still be fucking weird. He was still getting a text a minute from Felix, which was making the order of his most recent contacts swap around like crazy, who stole ur fone bro??? being the first one Weevil saw.
His grandma was yelling at him again from downstairs, probably about Alex this time – half seriously, mostly exasperated – which pulled his attention away for a few seconds before he shook it off, fired off the answering text from the top of the stairs and then shoved the phone into his pocket and stomped up the last two to make a point.
He stopped short of slamming the door, which would have just made his grandma madder, opting instead to sprawl sourly on his bed to check the remaining texts he had to do damage control on.
Which was when he saw that he’d somehow managed to text Veronica instead of Felix.
Fuck. Fuck. This was what he got for leaving her number unlabelled in his phone.
It wasn’t like it really mattered – he knew that. It was just that this was a shitty fucking day and he was already pissed off. But throwing a tantrum over a misplaced text wouldn’t help no matter how gross Veronica’s tongue-in-cheek advice made him feel. It wasn’t like it meant anything – she didn’t know shit about Ariana. But seeing his cousin’s name in a sentence about hitting on girls made him want to scrub his skin completely off.
He sent a terse correction because he couldn’t managed anything better even if it wasn’t really her fault, then knocked the rest of it off quickly – told Bootsy to laugh it up, then pointed out that the bullshit he sent them when he was drunk was a lot worse and maybe he shouldn’t be pointing fingers; just told Hector the truth; made up a fake Spanish band to answer Thumper’s unimpressed reply to his first text (he always said Weevil had terrible taste in Spanish music, so he probably wouldn’t go looking for it). Scrolled through his recent texts to see who else Ariana had gotten.
Dante, shit. But Dante never checked his old messages, just read whatever was at the bottom, so Weevil sent him a few more, until the incriminating message was no longer visible. Then he turned off his phone and shoved it under his pillow in annoyance.
Like he needed any of this now. Going back to school after a suspension always sucked. Yeah, he’d only been gone for a week, but that just meant all the teachers would expect him to catch up immediately, like algebra and fucking poetry rules weren’t enough of a pain in the ass already.
It wasn’t like not knowing what was going on in Algebra was a new experience. He never knew what Ms. Laramie was talking about anyway. He’d probably just fail, and spend the next three years trying to pass Algebra II, until he was the sad uber-supergrad still showing up to high school parties, only worse, because instead of parties it was actual school.
Why the fuck had he convinced himself he was going to graduate on time? How had he convinced his abuela he was going to graduate on time? That had never even been the goal – it was graduation, period. He knew better than to shoot too high.
He picked up the nearest thing that wasn’t a book and hucked it at the wall, to vent his feelings. It was a sock he’d put there on Wednesday because he couldn’t find a pair for it, so neither the throwing nor the impact (with the floor, because it didn’t make it all the way to wall) was very satisfying.
Maybe he should just skip. Going to school on Monday meant he was slinking back as soon as he was allowed, but if he waited until Tuesday then he wasn’t coming back until he felt like it. It wasn’t like missing one more class would matter – either he’d pass or he wouldn’t, and if he was this far out to sea a month in, what was the point in trying?
He could still see Abuela giving him the sad eyes, though. Fucking shit. He might as well have gone to church; even if it was a waste of his fucking time, it would have wasted less of it.
There was still some stuff from last semester on the table, because he’d never gotten around to pitching it. He’d scraped up an almost-decent grade on his Algebra I final, which didn’t even fucking matter, when it was the third time he’d taken the class, so what the fuck was the point in hanging on to it, anyway – but it was still there, and so was some of the practice shit he’d done when Veronica had decided to help him for some reason. He’d been pretty sure it was a power play, but weirdly she’d been more interested in forcing him to actually learn stuff than in lording it over him.
It wasn’t what they were doing now, but maybe if he went over it and remembered how the hell this shit worked, the stuff in class would get five percent more intelligible.
*
Veronica took the picture at home, so that she’d have time to get a good one, since she’d spent so long making sure the icing looked good – but she didn’t send it to Yolanda until the next day, when she could accompany it with a quick snap of Meg and Jasmine squeezed into the frame on either side of her, holding up forkfuls of red velvet and grinning.
We’re having cake in your honor. (Belatedly.)
She was still waiting to see if Yolanda would respond when Weevil leaned over one of her shoulders and said, “There is something wrong with you.”
Veronica managed not to jolt in surprise. He meant the cake, presumably – all three pieces had been cut out of the beginning of her big loopy ‘Congratulations!’ so that now it said ‘ulations!’, which wasn’t too hard to figure out, and left the smaller, carefully-stencilled ‘Your slut card has been revoked’ completely untouched.
“Why?” she asked him sweetly. “Because I don’t like teddy bears?”
His face twitched, and Veronica hid a smile. “Fuck you.”
At the complete failure to deliver a pithy retort, she let herself smile, broadly. “You’re going to have to get your logistics in order if you want that to happen.”
“Ew,” Meg said, then looked surprised at herself. Jasmine laughed, although who it was at was up in the air.
Then she started cutting Weevil a piece of cake, which he seemed to take as a signal that he should sit down. Veronica didn’t protest – the original object of the cakes had been to rub them in his face, after all. And to eat cake. She may have actually been underestimating how much getting to eat cake had been a factor in her decision, because she was already a little sad that this was the last one.
Maybe they should try to recruit Lizzie.
“Did Yolanda say anything?” Meg asked, and Veronica checked her phone reflexively even though she hadn’t heard it go off at all.
“Not yet.” She tucked the phone into her pocket so she wouldn’t be tempted to check it repeatedly. “She’s probably busy doing married people stuff.”
“Sex?” Jasmine offered through a mouthful of cake.
“Vacuuming,” Meg put in sagely.
“Getting some kind of high school equivalency so she can audit her husband’s college classes,” Veronica clarified, both amused and exasperated with both of them. “Or finding a place for them to stay for the summer. And since when is sex something only married people do? Slut demerit points for you.”
Jasmine, always cheerful, just laughed.
There was a beat, where Veronica realized she was waiting for a snide comment from Weevil, but that he was too busy shoving cake in his mouth to make one.
Or she assumed that was why. It felt unsatisfying, not having anyone bat the conversation back at her like a tennis ball when she’d been half-expecting it. She could have tried to bait him into saying something, but that seemed ridiculous, especially when she hadn’t made the original joke for his benefit in the first place. Besides, scoring a point felt hollow if he wasn’t going to even play.
“How come you always have cake over here?” Jasmine’s boyfriend had staked himself out a bit of concrete a few feet from their table, his arms crossed belligerently as if he was willing to fight a battle to defend it. Veronica couldn’t help rolling her eyes, but she pointed her face away from him so as not to cause trouble for Jasmine.
“She’s like a psycho baker,” Weevil said thickly, nodding toward Veronica. He swallowed a couple times, mouth working – he hadn’t been smart enough to bring a drink with him. “Manic. A manic baker.”
He’d had to sit down opposite Veronica – she was between Meg and Jasmine, and they were still close enough together after the picture that there was no room – but he slid slightly and surreptitiously to the left, covering it by tilting his plate to better scrape up some icing. Towards Meg, away from Cervando, away from Jasmine, all while redirecting the other boy’s attention toward Veronica and probably also reminding him that she was the one Weevil was hooking up with.
It was actually pretty impressive.
“They’re recognition,” Veronica informed Cervando brightly. “We sluts have to stick together.”
He bristled. “Jasmine’s not a slut!”
Veronica thought she saw Weevil rolling his eyes, and she looked away so she wouldn’t smile.
“Cervando.” Jasmine huffed and flicked her hair back. “Stop embarrassing me. If I cared about people calling me a slut, I would’ve fucked less guys.”
Meg choked on her apple juice, or maybe she’d still had cake in her mouth – either way, she wheezed concerningly in a way that instantly banished Veronica’s momentary amusement. She didn’t have a chance to help, though, because Weevil was already slapping Meg on the back. The other girl coughed violently into her fist, then gasped in relief at being able to get enough air. “Thanks,” she croaked.
Weevil, who Veronica was just starting to think was being surprisingly decent, stole Meg’s apple juice in payment, so she decided to ignore him. “You okay?” she asked her friend in an undertone.
Meg nodded a couple times, clearing her throat as if testing it out. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Oof. I’m okay.”
Veronica handed over her half-finished chocolate milk, but Meg shook her head.
“No backwash, I promise.”
“I believe you, it’s just I almost killed myself the last time I tried to drink something.” A final throat-clearing seemed to satisfy her. “The cake is really good, but this is probably a sign. I have a history quiz after lunch, anyway. I was going to do some last-minute studying.”
“Don’t you have to eat your actual lunch?” Veronica protested, but Meg just shrugged, laughing.
“I knew there was going to be cake so I didn’t bring much.”
“Are you telling me I’m predictable?”
Her friend smiled, then winced as Jasmine and Cervando’s argument intensified. Veronica had been successfully ignoring it because it wasn’t loud, just vehement, but whatever they were saying to each other was involving increasingly more hand gestures and arm-waving.
“It’s not my fault if you thought you were going with the Madonna,” Jasmine snapped. “I thought you were supposed to be smart.” She added something in Spanish, asking, as best Veronica could tell, if Cervando had thought the Virgin Mary was the one who…
She didn’t understand the last part, but whatever sex act Jasmine was describing must have been sufficiently graphic that Weevil looked up from Meg’s apple juice and raised his eyebrows.
Veronica half-expected him to do something about it, although she didn’t know what, but he stood instead, cut himself an excessively large second piece of cake, and announced loudly, “Well, I got what I came for.”
And then he walked away with it, leaving Veronica alone with Jasmine and a spluttering Cervando, and one less fork to return to the Foods classroom than she’d borrowed.
“Logistics!” she called after him, coming up short on another way to express her annoyance. She hadn’t even found out what the teddy bear stuff was about.
Weevil didn’t turn, but he raised a hand, the angle wrong for Veronica to be able to tell if he was waving or flipping her off. Well, she’d supplied the car and the art classroom. If he wasn’t going to put in the effort, she wasn’t going to chase him – which would make things nice and easy for him if he really was done. At least this was the last week she’d planned on actually baking; if he wasn’t going to keep putting out, she was not supplying him with cake.
Maybe she’d stick with her planned punchline next week. It might even be funnier if they weren’t having sex anymore.
It seemed like maybe Weevil had been trying to defuse the argument, because either his departure or the repeated reminders that he had non-Jasmine things going on seemed to have taken most of the wind out of Cervando’s sails. He was pretty young, Veronica reminded herself. It made sense that this might really just be about being jealous of Weevil. It was too late, though, because Jasmine was pissed now, and she was letting him have it – still in Spanish, and too fast for Veronica to follow, although she did catch when Jasmine insisted… either that she was a whore or that she wasn’t a whore. Veronica hadn’t learned that word in class, but you didn’t live in California your whole life without learning what a puta was.
“Do not give him any cake,” she told Veronica indignantly, her hair flying as she turned sharply away from Cervando.
“I don’t want cake, bitch –”
“I know you didn’t just–” Jasmine cut herself off, raising her shoulder to block him out as she started piling all her lunch items back into her lunch kit, motions jerky with anger. Veronica couldn’t blame her; she thought the kid was just trying to sound tough, but that didn’t exactly make it land better.
“Hey!” he said, but Jasmine swooped up her things, extricated herself from the table, and stalked off. Cervando wavered and then followed her, shooting a glare at Veronica before he left as if she had anything to do with any of this.
“And history repeats itself,” she muttered, dragging the remainder of the cake – just slightly less than half – back over to her. She’d been planning to take the leftovers home anyway, but it felt depressing to do it just because she was the only one left.
Not that she couldn’t handle sitting alone. The flag just felt silly when she was the only one there. Veronica twisted it around by the stick, not quite willing to pull it out on purpose, but half-hoping she’d accidentally dislodge it.
“Looks like your boyfriend scared everyone off.”
Veronica jolted in surprise. She forced herself not to whirl around, but her fists clenched reflexively; she hated that she’d given Lilly even that much of a reaction.
She turned slowly, keeping her face schooled and her voice as bored as she could manage. “He’s Jasmine’s boyfriend.”
Lilly tilted her head thoughtfully. “The biker girl? I thought she was dating that other guy.”
“She’s not a biker girl,” Veronica snapped. Jasmine didn’t wear leather or boots or throw down in the parking lot – she was just Latina. It was hard to know what was more enraging, that her boyfriend was apparently all that mattered about her, or the knowledge that Lilly wouldn’t have said that about a white girl dating a PCHer, but that there was no way to prove that or argue the point.
It was even possible Lilly would have been offended. Veronica would have, if someone had suggested she was racist, and six months ago she might have called Jasmine a biker girl – but not Wanda Varner, even though she dressed a lot more like one these days and had apparently dated a few non-girl bikers.
She was so mad about it, the faint, squirming sense of shame making her even angrier, that she didn’t put together the fact that it was Weevil Lilly had originally been talking about until it was too late to say anything. It made her uncomfortable, but she couldn’t go back and squawk about it now; it would make her look ridiculous and maybe defensive – and besides, the last thing she should do was engage. She hadn’t spoken to Lilly in months, and she wasn’t going to encourage her.
Lilly wouldn’t have meant it seriously, anyway. She was just trying to get under Veronica’s skin.
Despite that, or maybe because of it, Veronica’s anger bounced right off her; she shrugged lightly, as if it didn’t matter. “Why does she even sit with you? Like, Meg I get. She’s sweet, I guess. Although…” Lilly pursed her lips, trying to seem thoughtful. She was up to something, Veronica could tell, just as easily as she could tell that whatever it was had been a spontaneous decision.
After all these years, she could have choreographed Lilly’s expressions for her.
“Maybe not if you’re her boyfriend,” Lilly added, as if she actually believed Cole’s stupid bullshit. Maybe she did – maybe she really believed everyone was like her. “And she kind of does have a habit of collecting stuff her friends want, doesn’t she? I heard Kimmy had a breakdown about it, but she’s kind of pathetic, anyway.” She threw the last comment in casually, like it didn’t really matter, then added, abruptly, “Duncan has a crush on her, you know. Meg.”
Rage left Veronica breathless. How dare Lilly come after Meg? How dare she act like Veronica would turn on her friend – in a lot of ways her only friend – over a boy who didn’t even want her? How dare she think that she could still manipulate Veronica, that all Lilly had to do was twitch the strings and she’d jump, even now?
And how dare she throw Duncan in Veronica’s face like that?
“Actually,” Veronica told her, so much venom in her voice as she stood up that Lilly’s expression of breezy unconcern actually faltered. She didn’t know what the expression on her face looked like, but it felt as ugly as she did. “Duncan’s been defending Meg because I blackmailed him into it. You’re not the only one with secrets.”
All expression dropped off Lilly’s face, a desperate bid to keep her emotions to herself, but despite that the staring set of her eyes broadcasted horror. What was she imagining Duncan had done? It wasn’t Veronica’s problem if it caused trouble between them – she was hardly going to admit that she’d actually threatened him with believable lies, not with revealing some nasty truth.
“And Meg sits here because this is where the sluts sit, and people like you made her into one. You really can’t stand for anyone to be better than you, can you? You just have to drag everyone down to your level, or rip them to shreds if they won’t go. You’re all like that. Well, some people aren’t like you.” She wasn’t thinking just of Meg anymore – Jasmine was irreverent, like Lilly, and boy-crazy, like Lilly, and she got around at least as much, but she did it without lying or cheating or taking other girls’ boyfriends, and she’d never once lorded her experience over her less worldly friends. “Meg isn’t like you, and Jasmine isn’t like you, and Yolanda wasn’t like you.”
Lilly smiled. It was a good effort – if Veronica had known her less well, it would have looked sincere. “I don’t think you’re a slut, Veronica.”
“Well, this is the official slut table.” Veronica shot her an ostensible smile that was really more of a grimace and jerked her head at the flag. It still felt a little ridiculous with only her there, but she didn’t care, if it gave her another way to shut Lilly down. “So you’d be wrong about that.”
To her aggravation, the other girl took that in stride. “Maybe you should let me sit there, then.” There was an odd tone to her voice, like she couldn’t decide whether to try for confrontational or friendly. Both those options pissed Veronica off. She didn’t need Lilly in her face, but she’d go full-on nuclear if the make-Veronica-be-my-friend-again campaign started back up.
“It’s the slut table,” she said cuttingly, giving Lilly a tight, nasty smile. “Not the sociopath table.”
Lilly laughed, brittlely. “It takes one to know one, Veronica.”
Veronica’s jaw tightened. “You can say what you want, but I don’t go after people who’ve done nothing to me. Like Meg,” she added, venomously. “Maybe you can justify what you did to Yolanda, and Logan – I mean, it’s bullshit, and I somehow doubt he’s the one who cheated on you first. Or Madison. I doubt Weevil did anything to make you think it was funny to break his heart, but maybe he talked to the wrong girl, or didn’t kiss your shoes enough. But what did I ever do? When did I ever not have your back? Huh? What did I do to deserve the knife in my back?”
She stopped, chest heaving. She hadn’t yelled, although her voice was louder than she would have liked. And she was still angry, thank god. She wouldn’t have recovered from sliding into pathos, but she’d delivered the last question just as viciously as the first.
Lilly swallowed, blinking. With shock, Veronica realized that she was crying.
“Nothing,” she said, all the attitude and pretense knocked out of her. “You didn’t do anything.”
Veronica tried not to show that the display of emotion had rattled her, tried to work out what play this was in service of… but Lilly didn’t press her advantage. She just – left.
And Veronica was once again sitting there with a semi-ironic flag and half a cake that said ‘Your slut card has been revoked’. Which she was going to have to take home to her parents’ fridge.
She wished Weevil had stuck around. Maybe his presence would have warded Lilly off. Or Jasmine, who probably would have been completely impervious to whatever Lilly threw at her. But it was okay – Veronica hadn’t been the one crying at the end, which meant she’d won. Right?
The whole thing had just left her unsettled. Enough so that while she got everything packed up without leaving her cake or her Civics textbook, she was almost in class by the time she remembered to check her phone.
She had three texts – two from Yolanda: you’re so sweet veronica and kinda weird but very sweet, and one from Weevil.
logistics – 447 alvarado st
Veronica considered for a long moment. She wanted to find out the reason behind yesterday’s weird texts, and she didn’t want to go out on a low note, but she wasn’t going to kid herself that those were the real reasons. It had been more than a week, and she missed having sex.
She texted him back a checkmark, and added After school.
*
Weevil’s house didn’t look like Veronica was expecting. To be fair, she wasn’t sure exactly what she was expecting. She hadn’t even been positive she’d end up at his house and not some abandoned warehouse or an equally unsavoury location.
She pulled up at the back, because he was only a block ahead of her by the time she got there and that was where he parked his bike, so maybe that had something to do with it. The small backyard was sparse, more dirt than grass, but it was tidy, only a bicycle leaning against the fence on the other side.
Veronica hesitated for a moment after she locked the car. The neighbourhood she’d driven through to get here had been more what she’d expected, broken windows and shady characters, and she was having second thoughts.
“No one’s going to steal it,” Weevil said, raising his eyebrows challengingly.
She flushed. “I wasn’t–”
But he wasn’t offended; he was laughing at her. “You’re parked outside my house. Anyone tries that, they’re taking their life in their hands.”
That was both concerning and reassuring, as was the fact that he might even be able to get it back for her if someone did steal it. Although probably not quickly enough to save her from having to explain to her parents exactly where and how her car got stolen, so maybe better to hope his reputation was really as scary as he thought it was.
Externally, she shrugged, slipped the keys into her pocket, and caught up with him as he opened the gate. “Is anybody home?” He’d never really mentioned his parents, apart from repeatedly implying his mom was dead, and she didn’t want to make assumptions, so it seemed like the best way to find out tactfully. He had mentioned a grandmother and an uncle a few times, but not in a way that made it clear if he lived with them or not.
To her dismay, he said, “Yeah, kids’ll be,” without betraying any real concern.
“By themselves?” Veronica said automatically, not sure what kids he meant or how old they were, but very uncomfortable with the idea of having sex while other people were in the house.
Weevil snorted. “Yeah, well, if they burn the house down, they know what’s coming to them.”
That provided no clarification or reassurance whatsoever but it was a bit late to back out now, so she followed him inside, where they were greeted by yelling. Weevil seemed completely unfazed, even though to Veronica that level of noise would have signalled a party, an emergency, or an especially embarrassing episode from her mother. “I’m upstairs,” he told her, and when someone let out an ear-piercing shriek he bellowed, “Be quiet!” and went back to hanging up his jacket like it was no big deal.
The hall fed directly into a cramped but cozy living room, where a girl who might have been about six was playing with one mermaid Barbie and one naked Barbie.
“Alex took Julie’s clothes,” she told Weevil in a plaintive, accusatory tone.
“Well, take ‘em back,” he told her.
“He said she looks better naked!”
Veronica half-expected him to say something gross, but instead he responded, “What am I, the fashion police?”
The girl pouted, until she saw Veronica behind him. “Who’s that?”
“She’s from school. Go play in your room if you don’t want Alex to bug you.”
The girl’s eyes stayed fixed on Veronica, who waved, feeling awkward. After a long pause, Weevil’s – sister? Cousin? Niece? – waved back. “Is she your girlfriend?” she asked.
“No,” he told her, before Veronica even had time to get embarrassed.
“I’m his math tutor,” she added, when he seemed disinclined to elaborate. The girl giggled.
“I can do math,” she said.
“Yeah, well, they expect me to do the kind with letters in it. Quit blocking the whole floor.”
She scooted over obediently, leaving a sliver of carpet between the armchair and the wall for Weevil to squeeze by. “Math doesn’t have letters.”
“Why do you think I need a tutor?”
Before they could get into the weeds on that one, the shouting and thumping moved from probably-upstairs to definitely-approaching. Veronica edged closer to the wall so she wouldn’t be caught in any impending stampede.
“Give it back!” a boy yelled, and then a wiry kid made a break from what must have been the bottom of the stairs, nearly knocking the girl over. Weevil grabbed him before he could shove past Veronica, fending off the shorter, heavier boy pursuing him with the other hand.
“Cut it out!” he said loudly, his voice mixing with the second kid’s tearful swearing and the little girl’s outraged complaint of, “Alex, you kicked me!”
“Get off the floor!” he retorted, but Weevil shook him a bit, stuck a threatening finger in the other boy’s face and said, ominously, “Cut it. Out.”
He’d actually lowered his volume, but the kids must have known he meant business, because they still shut up immediately. Veronica was actually kind of impressed.
“Give it,” Weevil said to – Alex? When the boy seemed reluctant he shook him again, gently enough, and although the kid pouted, he produced what looked like a Gameboy.
“He held me down and took it!” the other boy alleged, glaring at everyone in turn.
“Yeah, and now neither of you get it,” Weevil said. He let the older boy go. “Get lost. I don’t want to hear any more of your bullshit.” He jerked his head at Veronica, and Alex’s eyes widened in surprise, like he’d seen her but hadn’t really noticed her.
“Fucking bullshit,” the other kid muttered. The girl pursed her lips and shot him a snotty look.
“Danny, you’re not supposed to say that.”
“Don’t be such a useless little baby,” he snapped back, and she threw her mermaid Barbie at him. He kicked it right back at her, and Veronica winced as the tail hit her right in the eye.
There was a frozen moment where no one moved, and then all at once the girl started bawling, the eldest kid broke free and ran for the door, and Weevil locked eyes with the Barbie-kicker and said, “Danny. You’re dead.”
Then they were both thundering through the living room and up the stairs, leaving Veronica alone with a sobbing kindergartener.
“Uh–” she said, immediately stalling out. The girl kept crying. “Hey, it’s okay. Do you want some water?”
That just escalated the crying into a plaintive wail. Veronica looked around, mildly desperate. A hug wouldn’t help; she was a stranger. The kid wasn’t young enough to be distracted by shiny things or sing-songs. There was no older or smarter or more-related person to put this off on.
What did kids like? Puppies? Unhelpful. Candy, but she didn’t have any. Playing pretend, maybe, but grabbing the Barbie and doing a funny voice felt like adding insult to injury. Clowns, allegedly – magicians, fireworks, maybe Barney? No, too old for Barney. And she didn’t know any magic tricks.
“Do you want to see a science trick?” she asked, wishing she knew the girl’s name.
Big brown eyes blinked at her, wet and overflowing, but the wailing eased back into regular crying, so Veronica kept talking. “You can be my assistant, if you want – I’ll pay you.” She had to hope that six or eight or whatever was still young enough that the random change in her wallet would be appealing. At least she’d brought her purse in, not wanting to leave it visible in the car.
“Here.” She held out a hand. “Let’s, uh, go into the kitchen and I’ll show you.”
The girl let Veronica pull her to her feet. She was still crying, but she shoved her forearm over her cheek to dash the tears away (only succeeding in smearing them all over her face) and sniffed heartbreakingly. “I want Gramma.”
“Uh… I bet she’ll be home soon?” It wasn’t an actual promise, so it was probably okay, right? “Where’s the kitchen?” It probably wouldn’t have been hard to find – it wasn’t a large house – but it seemed like a good distraction. Kids liked showing grown-ups stuff, and she was almost a grown-up.
She was right about both of those things, apparently: the kitchen was just off the hall/living room, but leading Veronica there still slowed the tears a little more.
“Okay, we need a cup. Or a bowl.” She frowned, trying to remember what her mom had used to show her this when she was little. Both would probably work, but a cup would look more impressive.
But Weevil’s sister (maybe?) had already pulled out a drawer and extracted a bowl from the stack inside, clanking the ceramic loudly. “Um, um – this one?”
“Yeah, sure.” Veronica took the bowl and filled it at the sink, noting how neat and cozy everything was. Also not what she had expected – she would have put money on at least one box of leftover pizza sitting on the counter. While she was at it, she grabbed one of the matching dish towels from the handle of the oven door and wetted one end of it. “Here – uh, you always need a clean face and hands to do science.” She did a fast, perfunctory handwash to lend herself credibility while the girl obediently wiped at her cheeks, still sniffling.
“Perfect.” Veronica set the bowl on the table, then thought better of it and put the dish towel underneath it, damp side up. She hesitated for a moment. “Are you Ofelia?” She was a little surprised she could still remember Weevil’s niece’s name, but apparently that line from the police report had stuck in her head – I had to get him out of there, man, Ofelia was there.
“No,” the girl said, pouting and tearful. “She’s little.”
“Oh.” Knowing how close she’d come to committing the cardinal sin against children, Veronica added, “I’ve never met her.”
“She’s five,” the girl mumbled, still sounding offended. “I’m seven.”
“I didn’t know how old she was,” Veronica said, although she could have worked it out from the ages and dates she had. “That’s good to know.” Now she thought about it, it wouldn’t make sense for this girl to be Weevil’s niece, because then her grandma would be his mom, who Veronica was still reasonably sure was dead. And not his niece, unless he had older siblings she didn’t know about – which was possible. “Okay, let’s get started. I am the magical – no, wait.”
The mistake was at least half-real, but it made the girl giggle, so Veronica ran with it. “I am the Scientific Veronica, and this is my assistant, the lovely…”
“Ariana!” Weevil’s maybe-sister finished after an awkward beat.
Hm. Not a teddy bear, but very definitely a possible answer to some of Veronica’s questions.
“The lovely Ariana, who likes teddy bears,” she added, just to test her theory. From the way Ariana broke into hearty giggles, only sniffing a few times, she was barking up the right tree. “And she is going to help me demonstrate the scientific principle of… surface tension!”
The girl nodded eagerly, so Veronica fished her wallet out of her purse and rummaged in the pocket until she had a decent handful of coins. When her mom had showed her this when she was little, they’d used pennies, but it should still work with nickels and quarters mixed in. She hoped.
“So first I need you to observe the water in the bowl,” she told Ariana. “Is it to the top?”
Ariana did, pursing her lips out in thought. “Um, yes.”
“All the way to the exact top?”
“No, ‘cause then it would spill.”
“But I got it pretty close, right?” The girl nodded, and Veronica went on. “So your job is to put these coins in, one at a time, until the water is at the exact top of the bowl, lined up with the veeery edge. Like this.” She slid one in by the edge to demonstrate, starting with a quarter because if they were too large it wouldn’t matter until the main part of the trick, so she might as well use one up. She handed most of the coins to Ariana. “Can you do that?”
That got her another, very solemn, nod. Ariana frowned ferociously at the edge of the bowl after every coin she slid carefully into the water. It didn’t take that long. “I did it!”
“Great,” Veronica said. She wondered if she should have made it sound extra enthusiastic, but that felt too weird – she was just going to keep using her normal voice. “Okay, now do another one.”
“It’ll spill.”
“That’s why we put a towel down. Just put in a dime, it’s little.”
“But I got it all the way to the top,” Ariana protested.
“It’s a science trick, remember? Just put it in.”
The water didn’t spill, of course. Veronica coached the girl through putting in several more coins, despite her resistance, until the water was visibly over-reaching the edge of the bowl.
“Why doesn’t it spill?!” Ariana demanded in confused excitement. “It came over, why’s it still there?”
“That’s the science,” Veronica told her. “It’s called surface tension – it’s because all the little, um, particles of water–” the word ‘molecule’ probably wouldn’t be helpful, “–like each other, so they hold on to each other, even once the water gets really high. If it goes too high, it’ll spill, but if you just get it higher a little bit at a time… it does this.”
As Ariana lined up her eyes with the edge of the bowl, staring at it, Veronica noticed Weevil leaning against the doorframe at the edge of the kitchen, his arms crossed.
“That’s cool!”
“You want to know what else?” Veronica asked, and Ariana nodded eagerly. “If you can get the coins out without spilling the water, you can keep them.”
“What if it spills?” the girl asked anxiously.
“That’s why there’s a towel,” Veronica told her, since there was no way to get the coins out without that happening and she’d half-expected to be called on the joke. “And as long as you make sure it all gets cleaned up, you can still keep them.”
“And then you’re gonna play in your room, right?” Weevil added, making Ariana’s head jerk up. “Instead of lying on the floor?” He raised his eyebrows at Veronica, who felt unaccountably embarrassed. She glanced around the kitchen, trying to find an excuse not to look at him.
“Did you thump Danny real good?” Ariana demanded with surprising bloodthirstiness.
“Yeah,” he told her, almost off-handedly.
Veronica could sort of understand why, but it still made her feel weird. “That’s child abuse,” she observed, her tone bone-dry. Hopefully it sounded… ironic, maybe?
To her surprise, Ariana huffed in exasperation. “Danny’s not a child, he’s a brat.”
Weevil snorted. “You might want to be careful with that one.”
“I’m not a brat!”
“You wanna try that again?” He accompanied the words with a stern glare that made Veronica want to step in front of the little girl, or at least tell him to lay off – but while Ariana was thoroughly cowed, she seemed more chagrinned than afraid.
“Sorry I stole your phone,” she mumbled.
“Where you going to go after this?”
“My room.”
“Yeah, you better.” As soon as his attention was off her, Ariana went back to eagerly examining the bowl for a way to get the coins out without spilling the water, and Weevil jerked his head at Veronica.
She rolled her eyes, because she couldn’t acquiesce without some kind of protest, but she followed him. Veronica didn’t hate kids, or anything, but rounding up a cheerful group of them whose parents were in the same building anyway, or saying something nice to a friend’s younger sister, was about as far as her experience stretched. And if a kid started crying at some event for the Sheriff’s Department, she handed them right back over to mom or dad.
“The hell was that?” he asked, pausing at the bottom of the stairs to lean against the wall, blocking her way past him. Technically she might have been able to squeeze by, but not without a substantial amount of indignity.
He always made an effort to project control and unconcern, but he looked especially at home, hiding a smirk while obstructing access to the stairwell – which Veronica realized was an inane thought as soon as it crossed her mind. This was his home. She just hadn’t expected it to be so… normal, or so different from what she was used to, which was stupid on multiple levels, not to mention contradictory.
“It was a science thing,” she told him tersely, feeling more defensive than she should have. Okay, maybe she wasn’t amazing with kids, but she didn’t threaten them or ‘thump’ them either. “It stopped her crying, didn’t it?”
“You saw a crying seven-year-old and thought, you know what’ll make this better? Science!?”
“I don’t know any magic tricks,” Veronica snapped, even though her shoulders were coming down from around her ears. Mocking she was used to – she just hated the idea of him looking down on her. Or at least of him doing it on legitimate grounds. “Are we going upstairs or not? I had to leave half a cake in the fridge at school for this, and if Ms. Terry sees how I iced it I’m going to be in serious trouble.”
“Which is my problem how?” he asked, but he got out of her way and led the way upstairs. The hall was narrow, with two doors off it on one side, and a closet behind them, and another at the opposite end, where the hall was shorter. He headed for the room next to the closet, on the opposite side from the stairs, and Veronica followed.
Weevil’s bedroom didn’t look anything like she’d expected. It was already the third or fourth time she’d thought something like that, but it was justified this time: he was a teenage boy – they weren’t supposed to be neat.
It wasn’t hotel-pristine, like Duncan’s room used to be after the housekeeper went over it, but the bed was made, and not sloppily either; the half-open closet had a laundry hamper shoved into it that was actually mostly full of dirty clothes, instead of them being on the floor; and the carpeting wasn’t even dusty. There was a chest of drawers on the opposite side of the room, and bookshelf against the near wall, with a table that looked like a makeshift desk shoved into the corner. There were even two or three books stacked haphazardly on the nightstand, which surprised her again – Weevil had never seemed like a big reader.
She sort of wanted to know what they were, but that seemed perilously close to showing interest in him, so she raised her eyebrows instead and said, “Wow, it’s almost livable in here.”
“I changed my sheets for you and everything,” he said sarcastically.
Veronica fluttered her eyelashes and pretended to press a hand to her chest. “For me?”
“Yeah, I usually only do it once a year.”
She knew he was making fun of her, but Veronica couldn’t help grimacing at the idea. She stepped on the back of her shoes to get them off quickly, then nudged them into something resembling order near the door, ignoring the way his lip curled. She was probably living down to all his expectations, but that was the point, right? She wasn’t looking to impress him with her open-mindedness, just to get down to business.
“So?” she said, not quite willing to just get on his bed. Lying down seemed like it might make him laugh at her, sitting too much of a girlfriend thing. If the car incident had reminded her of anything, it was that they weren’t even friends, which was even more important to keep in mind after those almost-sympathetic texts and the weirdness downstairs with the kids. Unusually intimate acquaintances, maybe. Maybe even ones who more or less liked each other, sometimes. But not the kind that could climb nonchalantly onto each other’s beds.
“So, what?” He stripped off his shirt, dumping it in a clump over the back of the wooden chair that was tucked into the table. “Take off your clothes or don’t. I babysat enough of your weird hangups already, I’m not doing it any more.”
“Babysit is not a word that encourages me to get naked,” Veronica shot back acerbically, trying to hide her real discomfort with the kids being in the house. He’d basically sent Ariana to her room – was that upstairs too? Was she going to hear them?
Weevil smirked. “You should just be glad I don’t have to share with Danny anymore.”
That threw her, although it shouldn’t have. There were clearly enough kids running around that sharing bedrooms made sense, but it had just never been something Veronica considered. She’d always had her own room. Most of the families she knew, or her parents knew, only had one or two kids, and the ones with more, like Meg’s parents, had big enough houses that sharing a bedroom would have seemed cruel and unusual. In fact, the handful of times Veronica had been to the Mannings’ house she’d barely even seen Grace, or even Lizzie.
Of course, if she had thought about it, she would have assumed that kids sharing a room would be a lot closer in age. If you put a teenager and a ten-year-old in together, what happened when the teenager brought home his recreational sex partner?
That sounded awful, Veronica thought, trying to cover her confusion with a disdainful eyeroll. Like something a forty-year-old swinger would say. Oh yes, this is Helen, my recreational sex partner.
She could at least take her jacket off, she decided, setting her purse on top of her shoes. Normally her instinct would have been to drape anything she took off over the chairback, but Weevil’s shirt was there, so after a second’s consideration she just folded her jacket in half and left it on the seat.
The floor looked pretty clean. It wasn’t the end of the world if her clothes ended up on it, as long as she could find them again.
Weevil certainly seemed to feel that way, because he shucked his jeans and left them there, leaving Veronica with a decided sense that she was overdressed. It was an ironic inversion of how awkward she’d felt in the beginning, she thought wryly, giving in and stripping off her shirt, when she’d been standing in the autoshop classroom with no pants on.
The interlude with Ariana hadn’t done much for her libido, but it had been a week – more, if you counted the attempt at car sex and the interruption as frustrations instead, which was probably more accurate – and being partially naked in close proximity to him was reminding her body of just how many enjoyable things she couldn’t do when she was alone. Weevil had occupied himself in going through the drawer of his bedside table for some reason, so she took the opportunity to take off her socks without looking completely stupid.
Her jeans, too, after some consideration; she hadn’t dressed for a hookup today, given everything, and it was just faster. Bra and underwear she kept on, since she didn’t want to seem more eager than he was.
The bedside table had condoms in it, apparently – Veronica wasn’t even surprised. It was so typical. About time something was, honestly. If she kept running into things she didn’t expect, she was going to start wondering about his life, which was just setting herself up for conversation, since she wouldn’t be able to ask any questions without making things weird, and there was no way he’d satisfy her curiosity anyway.
She did get a look at the top book on the nightstand, which was some kind of thriller or detective novel. Veronica couldn’t decide if that was ironic or not.
“Well?” he said, shooting her a challenging look. He’d gotten rid of his own socks at some point, which she was relieved to see. Socks were not sexy, especially when you were otherwise naked.
“What do you mean, well? You’re not even naked.”
That received an eyeroll in response, but he set the condom down – on top of the detective novel – and peeled off his underwear. They hadn’t really done anything yet, and she wasn’t even fully naked, but he was still at least halfway to being hard, which sent a thrill of satisfied heat running up her spine. Obviously it wasn’t just that he thought she was hot, because he’d probably been as hard up as she had over the last little while, or he wouldn’t have risen to the bait and sent her his address, but… she still liked it more than she should, having proof positive that a guy was into her, however superficially. Sometimes especially superficially.
Plus, she was getting increasingly eager to get things going.
Reciprocity was only fair, so she ditched her own underwear, trying to nudge it in the direction of her other clothes, and quickly stripped off her bra. It was a sports bra, so there was no doing it sexily, but Weevil didn’t seem to care.
He was definitely waiting for her to do something, though – she just wasn’t sure what. Was she supposed to go over there and get on the bed? Even though it meant going past him? Or should she get closer and… what, shove him down on it? Kiss him? Take the condom and put it on him herself?
She wasn’t exactly confident about any of those, but if push came to shove – oof, bad pun, Veronica – the first option seemed best. She still wasn’t great at wrangling the condom, although it always ended up where it was supposed to be, and kissing in his bedroom seemed weird in a way that making out at school never had, especially since they were already naked.
“Are you going to sit down?” she asked him. “Or…?”
Not that they couldn’t fuck against the wall, or at least the door – there wasn’t a lot of free wall space. It just seemed like a bizarre way to do it when there was a bed right there.
“Sure, if that’s how you want to do this.”
He was still eyeing her, the usual appreciation second to some kind of unmet expectation, so Veronica had to come up with something. She shrugged, her skin warming as his eyes tracked her breasts. “It’s not my bed. I’m not rude.”
It barely made sense, but Weevil was pretty used to that for her, or so he usually said; he made a huge production of rolling his eyes, but he sat, swinging his legs onto the bed and grabbing the condom off his bedside table. Veronica let him get it on before she approached the bed.
Getting on it felt surprisingly awkward, maybe because he was so close to the edge and she didn’t want to plant a hand or a knee in his kidneys, but at least the bed itself was fairly low, so it was easier than it would have been on her bed to swing one leg over both of his and plant her knees on either side of him.
Then she hesitated, remembering the failed attempt at a similar position in her car. This was closer to that than it was to that time with the chair in the art classroom, and she didn’t have anywhere to put her legs, which changed how she had to arrange her body. Weevil sighed loudly and leaned forward enough that he could grab her hips and reposition her, then dropped one hand to line himself up, like he didn’t trust her to do it. “You know how up and down works, right?” he asked her with exaggerated earnestness.
Veronica’s annoyance overcame her uncertainty. “Shut up,” she said, lowering herself onto his erection.
The angle wasn’t quite right, although it was better than it would have been if he hadn’t moved her around; she had to lift up and try again, the drag as he slid out a horribly enticing tease. The second time everything lined up, and she slid down with a stifled groan. Okay, that was good. Really good, when they weren’t sniping at each other – at least, not more than usual. And as much as she hated not being sure of herself, it was exciting to be in the driver’s seat.
She levered herself most of the way off of him, only semi-successfully compensating for the difference it made having her legs folded under her, but staying close enough to where she was supposed to be that it wasn’t hard to slide back down onto him, her eyelids fluttering at the thickness of him inside of her. This time he groaned, which she was definitely into.
Encouraged, Veronica tried tightening her muscles before she raised up again, and that made his head fall back against the headboard and his hands tighten almost painfully on her hips. Not that she was complaining, although she couldn’t help wondering vaguely whether it had hurt. Probably his head was harder than hers, so maybe not.
She kept on going, watching the muscles tense and relax under his skin and the way the tattoo on his stomach shivered with the movement, revelling in the smooth slide of him inside of her, the extra oomph that gravity gave it every time he slid home. It wasn’t entirely smooth, though: she still wasn’t used to the logistics of how their bodies worked in this position, and she had to concentrate and occasionally reposition herself to keep things from getting misaligned. Every time she had to pause, Weevil opened his eyes and glared at her, which made her want to pinch him. As good as it felt (and it was way better than anything they’d managed to do in her back seat), there was no way she was going to get off this way, so he could get over himself and act more appreciative.
What she should have done was convinced him to go down on her first, but she hadn’t been thinking about that beforehand, and now it was too late.
“Come on!” he groaned when she hesitated again in order to put her knees back where they needed to be, and Veronica pinched him for real, on a fleshy part of his side.
Weevil’s eyes shot open, and she had a split second to consider that oh, maybe that was stupid as well as mean, before he sat up abruptly. They were already close together, and her breasts went from nearly brushing his chest to being nearly crushed against it, but she didn’t have time to assess the situation, because then he was gripping her hard by the waist and tipping her right over, somehow keeping their bodies connected even as he did so – and then she was on her back and he was coming down heavily on top of her, the momentum turning the motion into a shockingly deep thrust that knocked the breath out of her.
It felt shockingly intimate, much more so than being pinned against a wall, even though they were pressed together in most of the same places. “Gravity,” Veronica gasped without meaning to.
“What?”
“Nothing – just–” She wriggled without meaning to, overloaded by the sudden sensation of so much of his skin against hers, her breasts, her stomach, her thighs –
“Just you being a bitch,” he agreed, breathing at least somewhat easier than her because he hadn’t had a whole person fall on top of him. “Careful, or I’m going to start pinching you.” He shoved a hand roughly between them and pinched at her clit. Veronica gasped, and shivered, because for some awful reason she liked that.
Weevil could tell, too, which made it worse; his expression went from annoyed to smug. “Still trying to pretend like you didn’t miss me?” He levered himself back and thrust in again, with absolutely none of the issues Veronica had been struggling with up until a second ago. His breath was hot on her ear. “Not a lot of point, baby, when I know exactly how wet you are –”
“I’m not your baby,” Veronica panted, belying herself by trying to lock her legs around his waist. Now that she didn’t have to focus on the mechanics, she was highly conscious of just how turned-on she was, and having him on top of her like this, running his mouth the way she hated to admit got her going, was escalating her arousal exponentially. “And I didn’t miss you. There’s exactly one part of you that I care about.” She made an effort to flex her muscles the part in question, although she wasn’t sure it would be as effective in this position – it must still have worked, because when he laughed at her, his breath stuttered in the middle of it.
Then he braced himself and started fucking her in earnest, and Veronica decided that keeping up a level of banter was no longer one of her priorities. He was hot over her, and under her hands and thighs as she grabbed at him, eagerly pulling him back down, and heavy in a way that it turned out she really liked, and the bed smelled like him, even the hints of the annoying cologne he sometimes wore reminding her of sex and sex with him and the fact that they were having sex now and it was so good that her head was going fuzzy.
“Oh, god,” she gasped when he bottomed out with an exceptionally fierce thrust. “Oh, god.”
She’d had a specific reason for staying quiet, she felt like, but it was too hard to think right now, and it seemed kind of late to start kissing, so she attached her mouth so his shoulder instead, with only the faintest hint of teeth so that she wasn’t really biting him, just muffling herself. He tasted faintly salty, and even though she knew it was sweat, Veronica wanted to lick him all over, to see if his back and his chest tasted the same and swipe her tongue over his tattoos because she was insane, she was losing it, who wanted to lick a picture of a dog in a fedora –
Weevil groaned above her, speeding up and dislodging her, but Veronica didn’t care about being quiet anymore, because she knew what that meant and it was suddenly imperative that she come right now, it would still be good later but she wanted it like this, with him pounding into her hard and fast and thick, even if she had to do it herself.
She didn’t want to do it herself, though, so instead of sparing a hand from where they were filling themselves with his shoulders and back, she choked out, “Can you – please–”, only to realize that he wouldn’t be able to spare a hand without throwing himself off balance.
“After,” he gasped, dropping his forehead against hers like his head was too heavy to hold up. His breath ran alternately cold and hot against her nose, but it wasn’t distracting enough to deter her, so Veronica peeled one of her hands off him and worked it in between them until she could reach her clit properly. The contact made her moan, even expecting it, and shudder, and rather than being annoyed Weevil seemed gratified by it, his thrusts getting more urgent as he shifted to hiss in her ear, “You just can’t wait, can you – you want it so bad –“
She lost track of what he was saying after that, the rapidly building heat inside her overwhelming anything that wasn’t a physical sensation, but the words echoed in her head as she rubbed at herself almost frantically. Her technique was lacking, but it didn’t matter – it kept on building with her movements and his thrust and every half-heard word and every place their bodies brushed against each other until the tension snapped hard, leaving her shaking and gasping for longer than she was used to while Weevil finished himself off inside of her.
It didn’t take very long.
Beds were dangerous, it turned out. Because usually, when you got yourself off in a bed, you could go to sleep after, and Veronica’s body didn’t understand that she couldn’t do that here, especially considering how hard her orgasm had hit her. After a minute, she had to force herself to sit up just to make sure she wouldn’t pass out. That she would never live down.
Weevil had rolled off her once he came – a convenience to the bed, to balance things out – and although he hadn’t proceeded to do anything else, he stirred just enough as she got up and started to get her clothes together to reassure her that he hadn’t fallen asleep. That would have just been awkward.
“Where’s your bathroom?” she asked him, since she was going to have to wash her hands.
“Downstairs,” he said, without making a move to get up.
Veronica bent down to get her underwear and had to brace herself on the edge of the bed when her legs turned out to be more wobbly than she’d thought. She glanced at Weevil, but he didn’t seem to have noticed, so she risked sitting down on the bed to put most of her clothes on, awkwardly one-handed. She didn’t even attempt her bra – it could just go in her purse.
“Okay,” she said as she collected her jacket, not sure of exactly how she should make her exit. “So this definitely works better than my car. I’ll… see you at school.”
“Not if I see you first,” he told her, without moving.
Veronica snorted. At least that made things easy. “You think you’re cute but you’re not,” she informed him, and let herself out into the hall before he could get the last word.
There were no kids running around, thank god, but Veronica didn’t want to risk blundering into the middle of them, so when she wasn’t positive which door down the hall from the stairs was the bathroom, she went into the kitchen instead and washed her hands there, thinking a silent apology for the inappropriateness of it. Then she escaped out to her car before she could be discovered by a child, or worse, a grandparent, and just sat there in the driver’s seat for a minute, very aware of how sensitized her skin still was. Several bits of her were still tingling – her nipples, her palms, the back of her neck – and it was hard not to clench down on the memory of Weevil’s dick inside her.
She’d almost called this off. What a completely stupid thing to do.
Chapter 34: Stubborn Things
Notes:
A little late again, but I've posted two other fics since my last update so I'm going to let myself get away with it, especially since one of them was the reason I've been pushing back some of my deadlines lately and it is FINISHED. :)
Chapter Text
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
John Adams
Veronica was more on edge than she expected to be at school on Tuesday – she kept glancing up as if Lilly was about to appear out of thin air, even though none of her classes were near Lilly’s locker, and even now, as far as she could tell Lilly wasn’t even eating outside today. Duncan was, though, and her gaze kept snagging on him whenever she reflexively checked for his sister, everything Lilly had said yesterday going through her head again, until she shook it off and went back to her lunch.
The third time, Meg asked if she was okay. Veronica tried to hide her wince.
“Lilly showed up after you left yesterday and she made me so mad it’s like she back-doored a way into my head. Which I hate. She doesn’t matter. How was your quiz?”
“I think I did okay,” Meg said, belying her look of concern. “What happened?”
“It’s nothing. I don’t want to talk about it. She’s just trying to take up real estate in my head, and I’m not going to give her the satisfaction.” Veronica hesitated. “But – look, has…” with an effort, she wrested herself away from the topic of Duncan, “has anyone, like, talked to you recently? Been friendly, I mean, like Jasmine, or Gabrielle?”
“Gabrielle did say hi to me the other day,” Meg said thoughtfully. “I asked if she was going to the play, and she said no but she hoped it went well. Alyssa’s always nice to me. Um – James, I guess? We’re not lab partners anymore, obviously, but he’s in my Physics class and the teacher put us in a group together last week; he told Rebecca to stop being so catty to me.” She shrugged. “People are less… ugly now, I guess? My friends – well, you know. Cole’s friends.” She made a chagrinned face. “They’re still pretty nasty, and Pam and Kimmy are still freezing me out like we’re in elementary school. Even though I have cheer with Kimmy every Friday. But it’s not as bad as it was. The Carrie thing really took up all the gossip, I think. That helped.”
“Yeah,” Veronica said. “I guess it did.”
Carrie. She hadn’t thought about that whole thing in a while, at least not in depth, not directly. Maybe because it still stung that she’d been so wrong about Mr. Rooks – one more bad judgement for the pile. Maybe because it reminded her that she was sitting on a lead about who the teacher was from that much older case, when finding out for sure would mean talking to her mom about it.
But never finding out whether she was right or not would nag at her, she knew, even though it shouldn’t have mattered. Mr. Rooks was long-since proven guilty and whatever had happened to her mom’s friend could hardly be fixed now. But none of that stopped her from wanting to know.
And, okay, so lots of people were named Al – she knew that firsthand. But Principal Moorehead checked a lot of other boxes, especially if he’d really been at Neptune High all this time. The problem was, if she found out that he had been, if she explored all possible informational avenues and couldn’t rule him out, then that left her right back where she started – next step, talk to Lianne.
“Is something going on?” Meg asked. “Like with Lilly, or Carrie, or…” She bit her lip. “You don’t have to worry about me, Veronica.”
“Oh, trust me, I know you can handle yourself,” Veronica said drily. “I’d be stupid not to by now.” She hesitated. Was there any point in telling Meg what Lilly had said about Duncan? She didn’t know what Lilly had been basing it on – and that was only if it wasn’t completely made up. What was the point in introducing a source of friction, which was exactly what Lilly had been trying to do, for no reason?
But maybe she just wanted an excuse not to mention it. What if Duncan did like Meg? She was eminently likeable. Maybe being coerced into sticking up for her had made him realize that. The idea made Veronica faintly sick. It wasn’t like Duncan was such a prize, she told herself – not given his penchant for dumping girls without telling them it had even happened.
It felt like a feeble justification for not saying anything – but what was the point in saying anything? What would it do besides make Meg feel awkward, and obliged to tell Veronica she wasn’t interested in him, whether it was true or not?
“Listen, can I ask you something?” she said finally, barely waiting for Meg to nod before she continued, “If there was a boy who might like you – but the only source saying he did was unreliable… would you want to know?”
Meg blinked in surprise, but after a moment to process she appeared to give it some thought. “Well… I guess it would depend.”
“On what?”
“On if I liked him back.” Veronica winced, since that was both the obvious answer and something it was impossible to know without having already put the information out there. Meg wasn’t finished, though. “On if he was awful to me back when that stupid test happened. On… I don’t know, on what kind of unreliable source it was?”
“One with an ulterior motive,” Veronica said. “Definitely capable of lying. Also definitely capable of telling the truth just to cause trouble.”
“Um, yikes,” Meg said. “Well, I don’t need a boyfriend that badly. It’s not like I’m looking or anything.”
That should have let Veronica off the hook, so why didn’t she feel relieved? “That’s probably smart. I don’t really know what I’m talking about anyway.”
Meg bit her lip, looking uncharacteristically squirrelly. Finally she said, slowly, like she was trying to stop herself from speaking, “I mean – if you weren’t already thinking about that stuff, then you should just ignore it. I know it’s easier said then done, like you can’t un-know it, but if it might not be true anyway…”
“Right,” Veronica said blankly, before it twigged that Meg thought she was asking for advice, not feeling her out. She cleared her throat. “Right. Um. I definitely haven’t changed my mind about dating, at least not unless Orlando Bloom calls. But – okay, listen, you already know this is about Lilly. She might have said something about you, and I just… I don’t want to hide things, but also, the, uh, person she mentioned might happen to someone who I sort of… pressured into sticking up for you back when everything first got messy, so even if she’s not lying she could be wrong.” She winced. “And like I said – either way, she was probably just trying to get under my skin.”
“Oh,” Meg said, blinking several times. “Okay – so this isn’t about…” She bit her lip and redirected, which made Veronica curious, but not enough so to prolong the current awkwardness. “You know what, never mind. What does pressured mean?”
Veronica did her best to adopt an innocent air. “I may have told – someone – that I’d spread some really nasty rumours about him if he didn’t find a way to make Cole shut up.”
“Veronica!” Meg’s nose wrinkled, but instead of criticizing the unscrupulousness of Veronica’s tactics, she said, “I would never be interested in Jeremy. Come on. Give me some credit for learning my lesson. And besides, after everything? I’d never go after your ex.”
Veronica laughed, half from awkwardness and half in relief, trying to pretend she was less touched than she was. “Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend it. But that would be a pretty dismal failure if I’d been trying to get Jeremy to stick up for you.”
“I didn’t want to say anything,” Meg confided, as she really thought that might be a sensitive topic. “But I can’t think of anyone else who you’d have that kind of leverage on.”
“Look at you, all devious all of a sudden,” Veronica said, and her friend laughed. “Jeremy probably wouldn’t have cared anyway. But, uh. Duncan did.”
“Oh,” Meg said. She took that in slowly, and after a moment Veronica saw her face fall. Damn it.
No, that wasn’t strong enough. Fuck.
She’d handle it, somehow, if Meg was interested in Duncan. She’d just have to find a way to never be around him. The idea of sitting there while they – she firmly refused to picture anything but flirty conversation, but even that sat like acid in her throat – was intolerable, but she couldn’t just throw a tantrum about it. She had to be fair to Meg.
The other girl tried to smile. “I… I guess that makes sense,” she said. “It’s not like I’ve talked to him lately, or anything. I just thought, you know, when he – that maybe someone actually believed me.”
Veronica felt like the world’s biggest heel. “Maybe he does now?” she tried, even though she had a nagging feeling that she should just apologize. “I mean, Duncan’s not stupid or anything, and he’s pretty decent overall – or he likes to think he is, I’m not even sure. He probably did realize Cole was full of shit once I forcibly removed his head from his ass.”
Meg laughed, quick and surprised. “It’s silly – I mean, it’s not like there aren’t other people. You believed me. And James and Alyssa, like I said.” She paused. “Oh, and Doug, I guess. Although I don’t know if he actually does or if he just doesn’t care. Or didn’t notice.”
Her good cheer was slightly forced, but Veronica chuckled obligingly anyway.
“You’re probably better off with Corny,” she said, hoping it didn’t sound too contrived, too insincere. She did mean it, and yet… “The thing about Duncan is that he’s not exactly reliable.”
“Mm.” Meg forced a smile. “I guess I never really knew why you two broke up.”
“Tell you if I ever find out,” Veronica said acerbically, before she could stop herself. “Look – you’re great. I’m not going to tell you what to do, you know, maybe you could land Duncan. Lilly only said it to mess with me, and because she thought I’d turn around and be a bitch to you about it, but it might still be true. And I’m not going to do that. So I’m just going to say this once and then shut up: if you’re going to take a shot, I think you should pick James, not Duncan. Even if your parents are weird about it. Like you said – you deserve someone who was on the right side of things from the start.”
Meg’s face softened. “She’s jealous,” she said.
“What?”
“Lilly. That’s why she’s trying to mess with you, you know that, right? She’s jealous of me because I still get to be friends with you.”
Veronica had known that, to some extent, but she never would have presented it so baldly, with so little nuance, like Lilly and Meg were fighting on the playground over which one of them was her best friend. It shouldn’t have lit up a little part of her chest to hear Meg say that, shouldn’t have softened the awkward, tangled sting of the things Lilly had said quite as much as it did. To play it off, she said, “Or she’s just trying to ruin all my relationships because I torpedoed her default boyfriend and messed up her reputation.”
“Wouldn’t she have picked Weevil, then? To mess with your head about?” Meg pointed out. “I know you’re not dating him, but Lilly, boys…”
Veronica snorted at the delicate jab, despite her discomfort. “She tried,” she said, recalling the fact with slight surprise. “First she tried to tell me that he was dangerous and unstable, then she tried to, uh, bribe him – he told me.”
“Bribe him with what?” Meg seemed slightly embarrassed by how avidly she’d asked the question, and she leaned back again, trying to play it cool.
Veronica considered whether she wanted to be sufficiently vulgar enough to say pussy and decided she wasn’t. She really hated that word. “Apparently – and I’m not saying he wouldn’t be willing to exaggerate this a bit, but still – apparently she told him could cash in for sexual favours.”
“And he said no?” Meg asked dubiously, which made Veronica laugh.
“Yeah, well… he really doesn’t like her.” She hesitated for a moment. It wasn’t like Weevil was the one who’d shown her those letters, so she didn’t have any obligation to him to keep quiet about them – she hadn’t made any promises, and he hadn’t revealed any confidences. But it felt callous beyond what she was striving for these days to just use it as gossip. “She left him hanging, I guess, at least that’s what she made it sound like.”
“And you… lured him back… with more sexual favours?” Meg asked hesitantly, like she didn’t want to know the answer, or like she thought Veronica would be offended.
But that just made her laugh. “I mean, not really. He just wanted to keep pissing her off.” It was Veronica’s turn to hesitate. Did it mean anything that she’d gotten that text from him right after Lilly had been over at their table talking to her?
Not that it mattered. It just hadn’t occurred to her that it might be because of Lilly.
“Anyway,” she said. “I don’t care what she says, I just didn’t want to… keep a secret, or something.”
“Well, I don’t want a boyfriend right now anyway,” Meg said stoutly. “And I bet she was lying about Duncan. Did he really not tell you why he wanted to break up? I hate that it’s not you, it’s me stuff.”
“He didn’t even tell me that he wanted to break up,” Veronica said grimly. “I came to school one day and he just wouldn’t talk to me.” She was proud of herself for maintaining an even, disdainful tone, even though the memory still stung, but Meg’s horrified gasp still felt validating in a way that none of her mom’s sympathy back then had managed to be.
“What? That’s awful! I had no idea, I thought you guys were just, like… being private.” The other girl shot a dark look across the lunch area in the direction of where Duncan was sitting with a couple of his less offensive friends, and Veronica’s chest warmed. “It’s too bad Pam never got with him; they deserve each other.”
Veronica burst into half-shocked laughter. “That might be the meanest thing I’ve ever heard you say!” Somehow Meg managed to look simultaneously abashed and proud of herself, and Veronica shook her head, not wanting to make her more uncomfortable. “Okay, this is depressing. Got any better gossip? Drama with the drama kids?”
It had been meant as a joke, but Meg’s eyes lit up. “Not with the play, but James told me something – you didn’t hear?”
Veronica didn’t know what kind of dishing James Van Zyl would be likely to be doing, but maybe there’d been a steroid scandal on the wrestling team. “I don’t think so, what?”
“Somebody stole the mascot.”
“Stole…” Veronica’s eyebrows went up. “The parrot?”
“Yeah. I guess some of the guys think it’s Pan High, but James says he thinks it’s those animal activist girls, because one of them got in trouble last year for vandalizing the wrestling equipment to say that keeping Polly was like slavery – he was pretty mad about that still.”
“Well, yeah,” Veronica said, “because that’s insane.” She paused. “I never thought about how all those animal rights girls are white before. I definitely noticed they were all girls. But I never thought about that.”
“I think animals should have rights,” Meg said. “Just not as many as humans, and I don’t think having pets is evil. But I kind of hope it wasn’t them, because what if they let her go? This isn’t her habitat.”
Veronica considered that for a long moment. “Yeah, no kidding. I’m in Foods with one of them and she’s so preachy about being vegan. Like, what exactly does she think got killed for butter?”
“Why would you even take Foods?” Meg asked, diverted. “If you don’t eat butter?”
“In order to be a pain, as far as I can tell,” Veronica said. “But none of that is my problem. Or yours. Aren’t you glad?”
*
Veronica’s grand plans to avoid being alone with her mother for any extended period of time fizzled out on Wednesday, because she’d carefully timed her return downstairs to be just before dinner, only to find out that her dad had called and said he was going to be home late.
“Nothing to worry about,” her mom assured her. “Just something he has to tie up. I made stir-fry and lemon scallops.”
That was majorly unfair; Veronica loved lemon garlic scallops. Her dad’s were slightly better, but it was the difference between being handed a Tiffany heart necklace or a Return to Tiffany bracelet: you didn’t say no either way.
She tried to give in with good grace, pasting on a serviceable smile and responding, “Great!”, although from the drop in her mom’s expression that Lianne immediately tried to hide, she’d gone a little too chirpy. Still, she escaped to the bathroom to wash her hands and gamely decided she’d go on the offensive – if her mom was trying to ease things on to a steadier footing, that meant she felt too guilty to still be properly mad, which was good for Veronica. Finding a safe subject, one that might distract her mom from the fraught undertones and that would give Veronica something else to pursue, keep her from slipping too easily into forgiveness or getting angry and blowing their precarious deal.
“This looks great,” she said politely when her mom served her the scallops, the flourish a little less marked than Lianne’s usual habit. It was true; they smelled amazing too. “Dad’s missing out.”
“Oh, I can make them again this weekend,” her mom said. Like Veronica, her friendly tone was just a little too studied. “I bought a lot of scallops; they were on sale. I thought I could try a couple different recipes, but we have enough to do these again first.” She smiled, and Veronica tried not to wonder how many of those recipes called for a glass of wine.
“What if,” she said, forcing a cheery tone that came too easily, that wanted to be sincere, “I give you my stir-fry in exchange for extra scallops?”
Lianne laughed, genuinely pleased at the tired humour, and Veronica felt guilty and angry and stupidly happy about it. “I thought we were done with the eat your vegetables conversation. Besides, you like red peppers.”
“It’s a benefit analysis,” Veronica said. “But sure, let’s have a different conversation.” She let the alarm really spark in her mother’s eyes before she went on, calculating that Lianne would let her guard down if she was relieved. “I can’t stop thinking about Mr. Rooks and, well, Carrie, I guess. And your friend. Was she, you know… okay?”
Her mom exhaled, the anticipated relief nearly turning it into laughter. “Oh, well – it was hard on her. But she’s doing fine now. We lost touch eventually, but… well, you know, it’s a small town. I still see her sometimes, which is nice.”
“How old is the baby now?” Veronica asked, adding in response to Lianne’s surprise, “Didn’t you say she got pregnant?”
“Well, I shouldn’t have.” Lianne seemed more chagrinned than upset. “But yes. She… didn’t keep it.”
That made more sense than it should have, when Veronica remembered how her mom had mentioned telling someone and having them gossip about it. She’d assumed the gossip had been about the teacher’s involvement, but maybe it had been about the pregnancy, period. But she didn’t know how to ask whether didn’t keep it meant adoption or abortion without her mom telling her that it was none of her business – and it wasn’t. It wasn’t even relevant to the things she was trying to find out, and the fact that she wanted to know anyway made her feel guilty and sordid.
“Did she graduate, though?” she asked instead. “At least?”
“Oh, yes,” Lianne said. “Barely, but not because of that. The school was supposed to provide – she was supposed to get certain kinds of help, but mostly she didn’t. So it was hard.” She made an ugly face. “She told me he got to her in the beginning by offering to help her catch up.”
Disadvantaged, her mom had said, back before Mr. Rooks was fired. She’d been talking about Carrie, and how maybe he’d picked her because she was a known gossip who people tended to only half-believe, and Veronica had been so full of righteous fury that she hadn’t looked any deeper. But it made a horrible kind of sense, if the girl from back then had been learning-disabled or something. Her mom, no matter how mad Veronica got, was a nice person, the kind of woman and probably the kind of girl who went out of her way to be kind to people who needed it – surly wallflowers at her husband’s work events and the awkward preteen children of friends and even guys who yelled at the air near bus stops. She was the kind of person who stopped and made a point of saying hi to homeless people when she gave them her change; Veronica could very easily see a young Lianne going out of her way to make friends with the girl everyone else thought was slow, although that probably wouldn’t have been the word that got used.
“That’s messed up,” she said, quietly, vehemently angry. “That’s so messed up. I can’t believe he got away with it.”
“I hated it too,” her mom told her. “But it was more important – I had to do what Ma – what my friend wanted.”
Veronica wasn’t sure that was true – what if there had been other girls, after? Wasn’t it more important to stop that from happening than to keep someone’s secret? It had been the right thing when Yolanda was missing; her mom had agreed with that. But at the same time she didn’t know if she would have been able to do it, if Meg had been begging her to keep quiet. Not that it was easy to picture Meg having an affair with a teacher. Even Lilly – well, maybe Lilly would go that far, if the teacher was young and hot and single, but even then Veronica wasn’t sure. Sleeping around with high school boys, even dating a college guy, was different from putting yourself in that kind of situation. And if nothing else, guys that old who tried to get with teenage girls were gross.
“What did he teach?” she asked. It was relevant enough to what they’d just been talking about that she could probably get away with it, and if she was on the right track, her mom might not see the harm in answering. If Lianne refused to answer, she’d know she was probably wrong.
But the answer didn’t help her much. “Oh, he wasn’t her teacher,” her mom said, scowling. “He just took an interest.”
“Yikes,” Veronica said. She wasn’t sure why she was so surprised – she wasn’t the first stop on the gossip totem pole, but the grapevine had hinted that Carrie had told people her affair with Mr. Rooks had kicked off when he gave her a ride, not because of something that happened in class.
What she really needed was a yearbook. She could always call Moorehead and do the same thing she had before, tell his wife or whoever answered the phone that she was doing something in recognition of his years at Neptune High – but that wouldn’t give her the identity of her mom’s friend. And she couldn’t ask about Lianne’s old yearbooks without raising suspicion, even if the idea of asking for something from her mom at all didn’t make her feel weird and gross, like she was handing over some form of undeserved control. But the yearbook committee might have old ones – sometimes they did retrospectives, like in her freshman year when there’d been a spread on the drama department because one of the teachers was retiring – and she remembered seeing a shelf of outdated yearbooks in one of her classrooms last year, which admittedly was a more appealing idea than having to talk to the committee.
“This is really good,” she said, a blunt attempt to shift the topic, and stabbed up a couple more scallops before they got entirely cold. She’d had all the conversation she could handle – half of her felt offended and vaguely ill at having to play nice with her mom, and the other half was growing increasingly needy and desperate, eager to throw herself into pretending everything was fine in a way that reminded her of nothing so much as Lianne’s perpetually anxious attempts to paper over her latest slip, whatever it was. “What are you going to do with the rest of them?”
Recipes she could take another ten minutes of, even if it meant she didn’t end up having seconds. She almost always did, so her mom would know that was a slight, or an escape attempt.
But what did she expect?
*
Veronica dressed it up a bit for school on Thursday. She didn’t feel like going home to change after school, and regardless of how complicated her feelings were on making a family event out of it, her social life wasn’t so hopping that she couldn’t appreciate a night at the theatre, so there was no point in not making the most of it.
“I have big plans tonight,” she told Meg when the other girl complimented her beaded sweater. Her friend sighed and flapped a hand, but she was smiling.
“You’re the most aggressively supportive person I know,” she said, which made Veronica laugh.
The idea of buying Meg flowers had been half a joke when she’d made that comment to her dad, but Veronica was glad she’d decided to do it after all. Sure, there was an over-earnest middle-school quality to it all, but who cared? She wasn’t auditioning for anyone’s approval anymore.
“Just wait,” she told Meg, and sailed away to Gym without elaborating. Her classmates were less enthusiastic, probably because one of them was Madison. Presumably she’d been repeating the cocaine story in the locker room; Veronica was getting enough glares that she stayed back and swapped her clothes to another locker, just to be on the safe side. No one had messed with her stuff yet, but Lilly’s reappearance had made her paranoid, and she liked this shirt.
Gym itself was intolerable in the usual way, although Veronica kept herself amused by comparing the differences in Mr. Rafferty’s demeanour when he was teaching a subject he actually knew about. It didn’t quite make floor hockey bearable, but you did what you could.
High school is something you just have to get through, her mom had told her once. At the time, one of her longer sober stretches, Veronica had applied it to the usual drama – catty girls and unavailable boys, and her hopeless and regrettable crush on Andrew Vaesen in freshman year. To gym class. But after their recent conversation the sentiment felt a lot less superficial and straightforward. For all her current disappointment and her resentment of adult Lianne, it was hard not to feel teenage Lianne, struggling to do the right thing, to show up for her friend and survive to graduation without spontaneously combusting from sheer outrage. It was hard not to wonder what that version of her mom would have thought of Veronica, whether they could have been friends or allies if they’d somehow been at school at the same time.
It felt weirdly bittersweet – although the weird part might have just been because she had to dodge an out-of-bounds ball while contemplating it; they were supposed to stay on the floor, but Thom Lemky was both enthusiastic and careless. Maybe because it felt like a cycle of disappointment – young Lianne would probably be disappointed at the thought of having a daughter who was so harsh and uncompromising, Veronica was disappointed in her mom, and even adult Lianne was disappointed in her teenage self for not doing more about Moorehead (or some other Al). Or maybe it was just the knowledge that the girl Veronica had always imagined she would have been friends with had grown up into someone she couldn’t quite bring herself to respect, even when it broke her heart. Would she be looking back in twenty years, knowing she’d let down the person she was now? Would her daughter be wondering what happened, what went wrong?
Someone managed to get their hockey stick under the ball and launch it into the air, interrupting her thoughts as she followed the play back and forth. Veronica yelped and ducked, then gamely chased after it, the hard plastic of her stick thwack-zzhhhing along the floor.
It was heading for Madison, who aimed her stick at it and missed completely as the ball bounced neatly over her swing. Veronica might have enjoyed that moment, if she hadn’t been too busy trying to avoid taking Madison’s hockey stick to the shins. She was forced to do an awkward hop-skip over it, and Madison, who thus far still had plausible deniability, yanked her stick upwards with malicious force.
Because Veronica was already dodging it, it completely failed to sweep her legs out from under her, but the blade hit the bottom of her shoe, and even though the plastic bent on contact, it was enough to throw her off so that she staggered, landing off-balance. She was just about to make an awkward but swift recovery, impressing herself and the teacher if no one else, when her momentum took her staggering directly in front of Thom, who was looking over his shoulder and promptly slammed into her so hard they both went over sideways. Veronica slammed her elbow on the bench in front of the bleachers, narrowly avoiding hitting it full-on as she twisted away and cursing as Thom’s foot hit her hard just below the knee.
He swore too, much more loudly, his weight driving her harder against the boards of the gym floor as he bounced off of her. “Ow,” Veronica muttered resentfully, pushing herself off the floor as Mr. Rafferty told Thom off for his language. “Great.”
It wasn’t that bad, aside from her upper calf, which was smarting sharply from Thom’s semi-accidental kick. Her knees and elbow hurt, but mostly she just felt thoroughly jarred. It might be worth playing up just to get out of the rest of the period – field hockey was never appealing, but even less so now – but Madison’s smirk as she called out, “So graceful, Veronica,” to a chorus of supercilious titters, put paid to that idea.
“Better get checked for herpes,” one of the boys called out to Thom, and Veronica gritted her teeth as she climbed back to her feet. Classy. No one had ever made that joke before.
“Okay, enough,” Mr. Rafferty admonished sternly. “How are you doing, Veronica? Okay?”
“I’m fine,” she told him, forcing herself not to limp. It wouldn’t actually make her leg hurt less, anyway; she just had to walk it off.
“Okay, great. So the ball went out of bounds off of, uh – Marco. So blue team takes it.”
Fortunately, someone other than Veronica stepped forward to do that, and she fell back so they wouldn’t pass to her, not that she really expected anyone to. Her general strategy was to run up and down the court just fast enough to look like she was really participating and hope that taking a few swings at the ball when it came near her was still enough to get her a B, so it wasn’t like her teammates were relying on her.
By the end of class, her knees and elbow had stopped hurting, but her leg was still sore where Thom had kicked her, so she let herself take a little extra time getting to the locker room. The more nonsense she could dodge the better, and even though Mrs. Canning was strict, being late to fourth period once wouldn’t be the end of the world. Mr. Carey would have been more lenient, but he was on some kind of sabbatical, so they’d swapped all the science teachers around.
Madison was gone, at least, by the time she was done showering, and her clothes were untouched, although there was a suspicious sniff from behind her when she opened her replacement locker which made her wonder if someone had gone through the first one.
Maybe not so paranoid, then.
She made it to her next class with about twenty seconds to spare, which raised Mrs. Canning’s eyebrows but didn’t inspire comment, and settled down to work herself into a thoroughly bad mood. Gym class might have been a blight, but Chemistry wasn’t her favourite either. She also had to sit next to Shandi Alexander, who seemed intent on spending the entire period drawing some kind of Sailor Moon character. It shouldn’t have mattered – any other day she wouldn’t have found it so distracting – but she kept losing track of what the teacher was saying and it made her want to hiss something mean and irrational in Shandi’s direction.
She didn’t, but still – it seemed like a good idea to put off talking to the yearbook committee until tomorrow.
Meg at least was easy not to snap at. She was bubbling over about the successful dress rehearsal – apparently there had been just enough issues that it was good luck, but not so many that everyone was dreading the performance – and from the way she oh-so-casually mentioned that a couple of the other ensemble members had made a point of asking in the hall whether she was going to the cast party, her day was going much better than Veronica’s.
“It’s about time somebody appreciates you,” Veronica told her. “Noted – drama kids, smarter than cheerleaders.”
Meg laughed. “I feel like I should be offended by that,” she said. “But I’m not. You look really pretty in that, by the way.”
“What, this old thing?” Veronica said jokingly – although the sweater was actually one she’d had for a while, and she wasn’t sure where it had come from. Probably a gift from her aunt, who thought she still had a ten-year-old’s sense of style when it came to fancy clothes. Not that there was anything wrong with it – it looked pretty good with the slacks she’d worn, and the sparkly beads dotted across the front kept her from looking like a total goth. But it was very full-coverage, like every piece of clothing Sheryl had ever sent her. “I just pulled it out of mothballs, since I’m going to the theatre.” She pronounced the last word with an exaggerated British accent, which made Meg smile.
“You could probably come to the cast party, if you wanted,” she said, which left Veronica blinking at the apparent non-sequitur. “You can be my date.”
She was still groping for a way to tactfully decline – bringing her as a plus-one wasn’t exactly going to bolster Meg’s fledgling social recovery, and just because theatre kids were better than cheerleaders didn’t mean she wanted to throw herself on the mercy of their good graces for multiple hours, even if it did mean she got to cut the parental part of the evening short – when they were rudely interrupted.
“You’re going on a date?” Weevil draped himself over the table as he sat, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “Can I come? Don’t worry,” he added in mock reassurance. “I’ll just watch.”
Veronica half-expected Meg to choke on her salad, but a concerned glance in her friend’s direction told her that the other girl had frozen instead, fork halfway to her mouth as the cherry tomato on top tilted with increasing precariousness. It finally fell off and bounce-rolled across the table and Veronica snatched it up and ate it before Weevil could make some awful joke about getting Meg’s cherry – only to realize with dawning horror as his smile widened that she’d played right into his hands.
“Classy as ever,” she said before he could get started, her snippy tone mostly an accident of haste. “I somehow don’t think you’d blend at the post-Cabaret party.” She waved judgementally at his sleeveless state – which it was still not warm enough for, in her opinion. Her sweater was heavy, and she’d worn it over an undershirt so it didn’t start feeling scratchy where the beads were attached, but she wasn’t exactly overheated.
“You look like you’re going to a Christmas party for accountants,” he said.
Veronica rolled her eyes. “I’m not taking fashion advice from someone who’d probably show up to a funeral in a tank top.”
“It’s not a tank top,” Weevil hit back immediately, vehemently enough that apparently she’d touched a nerve. He’d joke about wearing her underwear, but calling a sleeveless undershirt a tank top was over the line? Whatever. “And how many funerals have you even been to?”
“Four,” Veronica said, although it was a stretch to count either of her dad’s parents; she’d been so young she didn’t really remember. She was wishing belatedly that she’d chosen a different formal occasion to reference, graduation or court or – well, maybe not a wedding; too awkward. But something with fewer hot buttons, or at least ones she didn’t feel guilty about jumping on. She wasn’t going to blink first, though. “And how is it not a tank top? I literally have a shirt exactly like that.”
“Oh, yeah?” Weevil tugged at the center of his neckline, dragging it down so that his dog tattoo went from partially visible to more than half-visible, and leered. “I’d like to see you wear this.”
Despite herself, Veronica flushed. If she’d been a little bolder she might have called his bluff anyway, told him to take off his shirt and then just put it on over top of the one she was wearing. But that felt too much like flirting, and anyway, it was probably sweaty.
Although the idea of getting to stare at all that bare skin for a while made her own skin tingle. He looked good without a shirt, but this wasn’t the time or place!
“Well, what would you call it, then?” Meg interposed in a reasonable tone, probably deciding that now she’d recovered, it was Veronica’s turn to be flustered and needed rescuing.
“It’s a wifebeater,” he said, which made Veronica wince automatically. Meg, surprisingly, just rolled her eyes.
“Okay, Stanley Kowalski,” she told him.
“That’s T-shirts,” Weevil said, making Meg blink at him in shock.
“Have – are you – have you seen A Streetcar Named Desire?”
“My grandma likes old movies,” he said dismissively, which tickled something in the back of Veronica’s brain. Hadn’t he quoted Casablanca at her once? Early on, when anything he did that wasn’t a thuggish stereotype still shocked her?
“I mean, Brando’s good,” Meg said, still seeming shocked. “It’s not my favourite Tennessee Williams play, but that’s probably just because I did a monologue from The Glass Menagerie in middle school.” She frowned. “Which may have been concerning judgement on Miss Lensky’s part.”
“It’s stupid,” Weevil said. “Blanche sucks. He should have kicked her racist ass out on the street.”
“I mean, I think there’s nuance,” Meg started, like she thought they were going to have an earnest debate about the merits of a movie that was older than both their parents.
Well. Older than Veronica’s parents. She couldn’t vouch for Weevil’s, although she might have gambled on it still being accurate, but Meg’s were definitely on the older end of the spectrum.
Weevil wasn’t having it, anyway. “It’s stupid, and she sucks,” he repeated. “It’s supposed to be all tragic, but she’s terrible, so who cares?”
“But if you know about his sister,” Meg said, “then you can kind of see how characters like Blanche and Laura are about her, that’s why he makes them so sympathetic.”
“So he’s a shitty writer, why’s that my problem?” He shook his head, ignoring Meg scoffing at him. “Forget it. No amount of vicarious lesbianism is worth conversations like this.”
“Take the win,” Veronica advised as Meg opened her mouth – whether to take belated offence at the provocative implication or to defend Tennessee Williams she wasn’t sure. The other girl paused, then acquiesced, although her next bite of salad was faintly vicious.
“What I’m getting here is that not only is there no cake, but I gotta find some other way to amuse myself after school?” Weevil complained, because he was entirely ungrateful.
Veronica was, for a moment, tempted. His shirt was still exposing a decent amount of smooth, warm-toned skin, the ink setting it off in the sunlight so perfectly that she wanted to bite it, a little bit. But if she went all the way over to his house, she’d have to go home and change, or at least shower, which defeated the purpose of picking out her clothes this morning and might raise either of her parents’ suspicions – her dad because he was sharp, and her mom because she already had reason to be assessing Veronica for signs of inappropriate extracurricular activity. Besides, that might not leave her with enough time to go to the store and still be on time for their early dinner reservation.
“You’re going to have to provide a better incentive than your own entertainment if you want me to ditch my dad,” she told him, thinking better of throwing in a follow-up jab about his family. She’d been intending to twit him about being too cool to have fun, but given the patchy details she had on his home life, it would probably land harder than intended.
Weevil just bared every single one of his teeth in something that was technically a smile. “Tell him I said hi,” he told her.
Veronica full-body shuddered in horror, which appeared to be enough of a victory to satisfy him. He smirked, stood up, and seemed to think better of snagging a handful of Meg’s salad before he sauntered away. Veronica’s cafeteria pizza had presumably been equally unappealing, or just equally difficult to make off with.
“Does Weevil know your dad?” Meg asked with hushed incredulity. Veronica found herself at a loss for how to answer that.
“Uh, well, yeah,” she stammered, trying to find wherever she’d misplaced her dignity. “Dad’s – you know… arrested him.”
Meg’s eyes widened and her mouth opened in a soundless Oh. Then she seemed embarrassed, either on her own behalf for being naïve or on Veronica’s for being so awkward, and cleared her throat, looking down and vigorously reorganizing the remains of her salad.
“Never for carjacking, though,” Veronica added lightly, hoping it seemed cheery instead of passive-aggressive. Luckily, Meg recognized it for the hail Mary it was; she laughed ruefully.
“It’s a pretty stupid crime, I guess,” she said. “I mean, the person you’re robbing sees you, and they know they’ve been robbed right away, and it’s super traceable.”
Veronica didn’t comment on what crimes she thought Weevil was and wasn’t stupid enough to commit, since she didn’t foresee that conversation being much fun for either of them. Instead she asked, drily, “Contemplating a life of crime? You could deal cocaine at school – divert attention by making it seem like I’m buying from someone else. Madison’s already helping you out.”
Meg snorted. “Oh no, my evil plan,” she deadpanned. “How will I make enough money for the cheerleading competition now?”
Veronica blinked. “I’d say you’ve been watching too many made-for-TV movies, but I don’t even know what kind that would be. An unholy mixture of Lifetime and the Disney Channel?”
The other girl grinned. “I mean, pretty much. I’ve been trying to spend more time with Lizzie, and she actually likes all those corny teen movies. Sometimes she pretends to make fun of them, but I can tell she really likes them. And I can have fun with that, since she hates musicals. But Mom’s big into the Lifetime stuff, or those painfully earnest Christian movies, you know? Anything where having sex leads to a swift slide into ruination and sometimes death.” She laughed, but Veronica couldn’t help wincing.
“Speaking of movies,” she said, before Meg noticed. “Have you seen American Pie?” Her suspicion was that a sex comedy wouldn’t exactly fly at her friend’s house, but there were always sleepovers and that sort of thing. It wasn’t like the other girl hadn’t surprised her before.
But Meg shook her head. “Definitely not on the approved list,” she confirmed. “And I don’t really like that kind of humour. Why?”
“Well, I’m done with making cakes, at least until we pick up a new slut,” Veronica said. “But I want to rub it in Weevil’s face a bit more. And I don’t want you to think we’re actually going to eat the pie.”
“I hope that means you’re rubbing the pie in his face,” Meg said, pulling a fastidiously distasteful expression. “Because anything else would be gross. I don’t know why the movie’s called that, but I feel like it’s not about the song.”
“More gross than the conversation he started ten minutes ago?”
That bought Veronica a shrug of smiling acquiescence. “I think you should wait, though,” Meg said. “Give it a week in between. Much better.”
Veronica eyed her narrowly. “Why do I feel like you’re up to something?”
Meg polished off her last crouton. “Me? When would I have time to be up to something? I have a whole play to worry about. I know I’m not the lead, but that just means I’m an extra pair of hands anytime the stage manager needs one.”
“Uh huh,” Veronica said. “Sure. Keep your secrets. I can wait a week.”
Somehow that made Meg giggle. “I better get to class,” she said. “See you in sixth period?”
“With bells on,” Veronica promised, despite the fact it didn’t really mean anything. She took a large bite of her pizza as Meg waved and headed inside. They’d spent so much time talking that she’d neglected her food. That seemed to happen a lot lately, more often than when she’d sat with Lilly. Although that was probably because it had almost never been just her and Lilly, and hadn’t been since middle school. There were always Lilly’s other friends – or frenemies – or Duncan’s friends, who had turned into Logan’s friends once he became a fixture any time he and Lilly hadn’t just broken up. She’d never thought of herself as being quiet back then, but she’d already reconsidered so many parts of those memories, what was one more?
She might have been a lot more confident of being nice, back then, and more secure about being a good person, but she still liked it better now – annoying biker-shaped interruptions and social shunning and even gym class. As awful as some parts of it were, she wasn’t sure she’d trade it for Casablancas-style shenanigans and a bustling lunch table and pep squad’s P.E. credit, even if Lilly was removed from the equation. It was just hard to know what that meant, exactly.
*
Her parents were late for dinner.
It was an early reservation, sure, and Veronica was already there so it wasn’t like they were going to lose it – a reservation at Mama Leone’s was more of a formality, anyway, unless it was a holiday; if they hadn’t needed to be sure of being finished by seven they probably wouldn’t even have made one. But it wasn’t like them to be late, especially her dad, and Veronica was starting to worry that something had happened at work (something serious, to make them forget to call her), when he finally showed up.
Alone.
Somehow, even with everything, it didn’t twig right away. After all, this had been on the books for more than a week; it was the kind of thing you could plan for. Veronica was gearing up to prod him about the delay, expecting an answer like parking the car when she said, “Where’s Mom?”
Then she saw how tired he looked, like it had seeped into all the lines and cracks of his face.
“She’s not feeling well,” he said. “Looks like it’s just you and me tonight, honey.”
Veronica looked at him for a long moment before finally forcing a smile. “Right,” she said, wishing he’d tell her the truth, just say it for once – although she didn’t know what the right words for that were, couldn’t think of any way he could have said it that wouldn’t have made her start to cry. “I say we scalp the extra ticket and split the money.”
“Seems like you’ll need it,” he said with a pale shadow of his usual verve, nodding at the tulips she hadn’t wanted to leave in her car.
Veronica couldn’t muster the will to quip about it. “All the carnations were really depressing, and these were surprisingly affordable.” She dredged that smile back up. “For your information.”
This was better, she told herself. At least her mom had gotten drunk before dinner; the last thing they needed was a repeat of the steakhouse incident. And it was probably cheaper to shotgun a bottle of Jack than to order eight cocktails.
Sometimes, taking that acerbic, even nasty tone in her own head helped to bolster her, but tonight it just brought her perilously close to tears.
“Am I allowed to order manicotti again?” she asked her dad as a distraction.
“Can I stop you?” he returned, making it a little easier to fall back into their usual pattern, even if it all felt too bright and insincere. It was better than the alternative.
“I don’t know if you want to admit to being unable to control your own daughter,” Veronica said, as the waiter reappeared to top up their water and presumably inquire about drinks. “It undermines your standing in the community.”
“‘I can either run the city or I can attend to Veronica’?” her dad asked, misquoting Teddy Roosevelt, and Veronica’s smile in response felt almost real.
“Coke,” she told the waiter. Normally she got one of the Italian sodas, but there was no point in her dad spending extra money and her spending extra effort to drink something she was in no mood to enjoy. Coke was easier.
“O’Doul’s for me,” her dad said, even though there was no reason he couldn’t get a real beer. Veronica chose not to notice.
“So,” he said when the waiter was gone, “how was school?”
She put some effort into animating her response, which was mostly a dramatic denunciation of gym class, and he put some effort into listening attentively and commenting at the appropriate openings, and then they swapped and he told her about Deputy Lamb’s latest ridiculous pet peeve and how it reminded him of a funny case from when he first joined the department, but they were both relieved when the food came and they could stop trying so hard. For once, there wasn’t much comment on anything other than the food, which was excellent as usual. Veronica tried to appreciate it.
“Meg invited me to the cast party,” she told her dad in the car, trying to build up the atmosphere before the play started.
“That’s great, honey,” he said. “She’s a nice girl. Are you going?”
She probably could have still changed her mind, but even though she wasn’t exactly excited to go home after the show, the idea of pretending enthusiasm at being surrounded by excited thespians had gone from not her scene to excruciating. Besides, she knew her dad had walked up from the station when he realized Lianne wasn’t coming; she wouldn’t be leaving him stranded, exactly, but it would be awkward for him to get home. Her mom had driven him to work that morning, because of their plans. It would have been ridiculous to take three separate cars.
“I’m not exactly one of the theatre crowd,” she told him. “But you’re right. She is nice.”
It was for Meg’s sake that she tried to focus on the play, but she had limited success, and almost none when her friend wasn’t onstage. For all her bravado about the extra ticket, she was hyperconscious of the empty seat next to her, of the fact that the theatre might not have been sold out but was still very close to full. There were only a handful of others, and even though she knew no one else would pay attention, or care if they did, it felt like an advertisement of all her private business and emotions – of all her dad’s, which was almost worse. She tried to look like she was enjoying herself, for his sake. It had been sweet of him to get the tickets, just because her friend was in the play. If he’d only bought two, if it had just been supposed to be the two of them, she’d probably be having a great night right now. But he hadn’t known to take precautions like that, because Veronica had covered for Lianne to protect her own secret.
At least her mom hadn’t tried to drive down anyway. Veronica wondered if she’d thought better of it, if maybe the jabs about hypocrisy and election years had managed to lodge in Lianne’s brain thoroughly enough to not be shaken loose by alcohol, or if she’d just passed out and failed to show up, but she didn’t ask her dad whether he’d actually talked to her mom or not. She spent intermission talking about how good Meg’s German accent was instead.
It was good, and her friend delivered most of her lines with a saucy confidence that felt so unlike her usual demeanour that Veronica couldn’t help but be impressed, no matter how miserable she was. Meg had been right to tell her parents not to bring her little sister, though – Veronica was missing most of the context for the plot, which did indeed seem to be turning increasingly Nazi-heavy throughout the second act, but she definitely hadn’t missed the fact that Meg’s character was a hooker, and the other girls in the nightclub ensemble probably were too. She couldn’t have said much more about what was going on, except that Alyssa Irving really was pretty good in the role of… whoever the main character was. Sally? Her voice was good, anyway.
When the lights went up, Veronica pasted a smile back onto her face, but she must have been too slow, because when she looked over at her dad he was frowning at her, a tinge of sadness behind his furrowed brow. For what felt like the thousandth time, she pretended not to notice.
“Come on – I want to give her these before she gets overwhelmed with bouquets and they’re not impressive any more.”
Her dad smiled dutifully and followed her down into the hall outside the green room, where the friends and family crowd was milling around, waiting for the cast to come out. Veronica caught sight of Mr. Manning with a highly displeased look on his face and winced. She said something pat to her dad and worked her way closer to the door so that she could get to Meg first, start things off on a high note instead of a low one. Maybe if she was loudly enthusiastic enough, she could shame her friend’s parents into appreciating her.
Accordingly, she exclaimed, “You were great!” as soon as she got a glimpse of Meg behind Alyssa and the senior boy who’d played the other lead, and Meg immediately wiggled through the half-blocked door and hugged her.
“Oh my gosh, you shouldn’t have!” she said, since Veronica wasn’t even trying to hide the tulips. “Veronica!”
“You deserve them,” Veronica said, meaning it. For a second she felt almost okay. She might have zoned out for most of the play, but having something good to be completely sincere about eased some of the tightness that had been taking over her chest and her throat and face ever since her mom had failed to show up. “You were amazing. I didn’t know you could sing in German.”
Meg laughed, reaching out for the tulips despite herself and stroking one of the petals in a way that made Veronica want to both laugh at her and hug her again. “My voice teacher always used to make me learn songs in other languages, it’s not hard if you’re used to it.”
“Like I said,” Veronica told her. “Amazing. You were right, though,” she added, “Alyssa is really good too. Almost as good as you.”
That made Meg laugh again, but it also earned them both a surprised and pleased look from Alyssa, who Veronica had made sure was within earshot. “I’ve never played Sally, so I think you’re being a little over-confident, but I’ll take the compliment.” Meg buried her face in the tulips and inhaled. “These are so wonderful, thank you so much. Are you sure you don’t want to stay?”
“I’m my dad’s ride home,” Veronica told her, grateful for the excuse but faintly wistful. She wished she did want to stay. Or that she didn’t really, but was going to anyway, for support and to be a good sport and have something to laugh about later. But even a few minutes reprieve from the gnawing hole in her stomach didn’t make her capable of that. “He loved the play, by the way.” She assumed that was true, but even if it wasn’t he wouldn’t mind her saying it.
“Okay. I’ll see you at school, then. You’re an angel.” That made Veronica laugh, surprised and a bit ugly, but real. “Have a good night!”
Meg’s mom slid in to take Veronica’s place as she backed out of the crush of congratulations, and whether the pointed compliments had worked or whether Mrs. Manning was just less uptight than her husband, she sounded only slightly pinched when she told Meg she’d done a good job.
“You’re a good friend, honey,” her dad said, putting an arm around her shoulders.
Veronica swallowed, her throat closing up, although she didn’t know specifically why. “I try,” she said. It was supposed to be ironic, but it didn’t come out that way. Her dad squeezed her shoulders.
“You succeed,” he said. “Come on, let’s go home.”
Chapter 35: Hardly Ever
Notes:
Mild warnings in the endnote for this one (besides the blanket canon-typical themes that applies to the fic as a whole, I mean).
I'd also warn you that this chapter is also where I start alienating my reader with my controversial takes - well, with Weevil's controversial takes, at least - but honestly I don't think there's anything I haven't hinted at already.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Sex is hardly ever just about sex.
Shirley MacLaine
After Monday, there were a few different ways Weevil had thought things might go. Getting a booty call reservation text from Veronica Mars at 10 PM on a Thursday was not one of them.
I’m assuming you’re not busy after school.
Tomorrow, she’d added, like he might be going to night school or something.
It was weird to make appointments a day in an advance just to hook up, but weird was the name of the game with her, so he didn’t bother reading into that. But he couldn’t think of a reason why she’d be texting him tonight instead of tomorrow morning – or why she couldn’t just talk to him at school. It wasn’t like she didn’t have his address; all that really needed to be communicated was yes/no.
There was always the obvious one, but he found it hard to imagine her horny-texting him in the middle of the night – well, close to it, anyway. Although if he had imagined it, scheduling sex for fifteen hours out instead of just saying something like thinking of you ;) was kind of what he would have expected.
He debated just ignoring the text until tomorrow – he wasn’t on reserve for her – but he was already ignoring Danny and Alex bickering in the kitchen, and Ofelia sniffing with calculated pathos because Ariana had accidentally elbowed her in the shoulder, and Ariana’s increasingly unsubtle bids for him to play Barbies with them. They were all still alive, which was all he cared about, but he could only ignore so many people at once, and Veronica was the lowest maintenance. Which didn’t mean he was just going to roll over for her.
u no what happens when u assume
A moment later, he realized the unintentional implications, and added (because why not), r u trying to tell me smth?
What are you talking about?
u r the one who brought asses into the conversation
There was no response to that one for a long time, which wasn’t a surprise. Maybe he’d finally scared her off – if not for good, then at least for the moment. It was kind of a pity, because he didn’t have plans tomorrow after school, not until the evening, but picturing her face right that second almost made up for it.
The girls had started bickering, so he had to go deal with that, and promise them he would fix the TV so they could watch an episode of Powerpuff Girls if they just cut it out. It would be easy enough, because it wasn’t even broken; he’d just unplugged one of the cords so that all four of them wouldn’t start screaming at each other about whether to watch Mulan or play video games. By the time Veronica responded he’d pretty much forgotten about her.
Don’t be stupid.
“Hey, cut it out!” he yelled, when rattling from the kitchen suggested the argument in there had gotten physical. The last thing he needed was them throwing shit. “Don’t make me come over there!”
He needed a good response to that, but the joking ‘can’t help it’ that was the obvious reply would mean she scored a point, and anyway, he wasn’t in the habit of opening himself up that way anymore. A few years ago he could have said something like that to Felix or Javi and laughed about it, but not these days. Chardo had been the only exception, because blood was the only thing that could override his position, and Chardo had more than a year left on his sentence.
Something smart could work, like he was jokingly complying, but then he’d have to think of something that was obviously smart, over the top, and that was hard to do with half an argument in one ear and an animated birthday party being attacked by supervillains in the other. A Shakespeare quote or something, but he couldn’t come up with one off the top of his head. He could have used something from that movie her friend liked, which was kind of literary, but the only thing he could bring to mind was “Hey, Stellaaaaaaaaa,” which did not exactly translate. ‘E=MC2’ would be facile.
“Bedtime after this,” he reminded the girls. Ariana just pouted at him in her usual exaggerated way, but Ofelia looked distinctly unimpressed.
“But Uncle Eli, you said we could watch a whole one.”
“Yeah, and when it’s over you’re going to bed.”
“But,” she explained, with the patient deliberateness of a five-year-old with an agenda, “one is two. ‘Cause, um, ‘cause, on TV, there’s always two. Even if you look at the TV guide it always says two stories for an episode.”
“Oh, really, you been reading the TV guide?”
“Yes,” she told him, her chin jutting out defiantly, even though ‘reading’ in this case definitely meant tracing down the paper with her finger and making stuff up, with help from the one or two words she recognized. Probably Claudia read her the descriptions.
She wasn’t wrong, either, despite the blatant attempt to manipulate him. It was a kids’ show, so all the episodes were short and aired back to back with another one. But that didn’t mean he was buying it – he’d already let them stay up too late, but with they boys running around the house and making noise constantly, they never would have slept anyway, and trying to get Danny and Alex to cut it the fuck out when they’d been alternately best friends (and loud about it) or fighting all day would have ultimately just meant no one could sleep because of him yelling at them
“One means one,” he told her. “It doesn’t mean two. Or you can watch half an episode and miss the rest of it because you’re arguing with me.”
Ofelia made a face that would have been accompanied by an eyeroll if she’d been much older, but she turned back to the TV, so he didn’t tweak her about it. She’d given him something worth saying, at least.
currently being manipulated by a 5yo. achievable goals
The reply that came back was just a smile emoji, snide in its simplicity. But she couldn’t resist following it up with Maybe she can teach you some science.
Weevil winced at the mistake. Normally he’d chalk up something like that to whoever said it not knowing much about kids, but Ariana didn’t always act seven.
He didn’t have time to figure out a good reply, because the episode of Powerpuff Girls ended, and he had to jump up and pause the TV before the second one started so that he didn’t end up with a matched pair of tantrums on his hands. “Bedtime,” he told them both sternly. “Who wants to brush their teeth first?”
“Not me!” Ofelia exclaimed, Ariana a half-second behind her.
He knew how to deal with that, though. “Whoever isn’t brushing their teeth gets their hair brushed.”
Ariana rushed to volunteer to brush her teeth, while Ofelia hurried to assure him that she liked getting her hair brushed, as he’d expected. It was in braids anyway, so it wouldn’t be too tangled, whereas Ariana’s had gotten snarled from running all over the place. Not that she would’ve wanted him to brush it anyway; it didn’t take a genius to guess that her mom had always yanked.
He brushed Ofelia’s hair and redid her braids while Ariana did a much thorougher job on her teeth than she usually did, then shoved Ofelia into the bathroom with a stern admonition not to miss any spots and coaxed Ariana into letting him brush out her hair. He was as careful as usual, and she even let him put it in a ponytail – maybe to look mature in front of Ofelia. Then he got them properly situated head-to-feet in Ariana’s bed, mock-threatened them with dire punishments for not sleeping until they got their giggles out, and put Ariana’s nightlight on.
Ten-thirty. Not amazing, but honestly it had been ridiculous tonight and he’d like to see Claudia do better. It was Friday tomorrow anyway – there wouldn’t be anything in school worth paying attention to, and they could nap on the bus anyway.
Danny and Alex had moved from the kitchen to the living room, lured by the suddenly functional TV, and Weevil ejected the video game they were playing abruptly. The volume was too high and it pissed him off.
“The girls are in bed,” he growled at them when they squawked in outrage, dropping the disc back into its case. “And you better be too, or Grandma’s going to find out.”
“She’ll kill you too,” Alex told him, smarmily self-satisfied. “You were supposed to make us go to bed.”
“Aaaages ago,” Danny added, just as insufferable.
“And what do you care, when you’ll be too dead to attend my funeral? Get your asses upstairs, and if you make any noise on the way I won’t feed you tomorrow.”
This seemed like enough to give Danny pause, but Alex rolled his eyes. “I know where the cereal is. And Grandma’ll be home after school.”
“She sits at the hospital all night with her mom and then goes right back to work and you’re expecting her to cook for you? The fuck, man.” He leaned on the words to really drive the point in.
It was Danny’s turn to be unmoved; he blew a raspberry. But Alex had the grace to look a little ashamed of himself. “It’s just tests, though,” he said, his uncertain tone belying the stubborn jut of his chin. “Right?”
Weevil raised his eyebrows and let that do the talking as the moment stretched out, until Alex shrugged and grumbled and looked away. Getting him to capitulate was what mattered; Alex was the reasonable one (as much as there could be said to be a reasonable one), but he had more backbone than Danny, who could be bullied into compliance if necessary.
“Get upstairs and brush your teeth,” he told them, clipping Danny lightly over the back of the head when he snorted and chuckled. Not hard, just a reminder. “You think Grandma has money for the dentist? I’m not paying for you to have your cavities filled.”
“Whatever,” Alex said. “I’m going to bed anyway. There’s no point if you won’t let us play video games.”
Weevil ignored his confrontational tone. The kid could save face if he wanted. “Get upstairs,” he told them dismissively.
He should probably go to bed too – he had to be up earlier than usual to make sure everyone got to school okay, and by the time he had everything sorted out it was going to be nearly midnight – but he held off on doing anything obvious until Danny and Alex were both in their room with the door shut. Whether they went to sleep or not was their problem, at that point; all he cared about was that they didn’t make noise.
He didn’t bother texting Veronica back. It was late, and he didn’t know how tired he was going to be tomorrow. It wouldn’t hurt to make her wait a little.
*
Being left in a weird limbo that may or may not have been about anal sex was probably Veronica’s punishment from the universe for planning to have sex as a fuck-you to her mom, but that didn’t make her feel any less weird about it. Especially since even thinking the words anal sex made her want to squirm.
Not that she wasn’t ninety percent sure Weevil had been yanking her chain about that. It had been easy to picture the smirk on his face when he typed out that message – it just would have been more reassuring to actually see it and know he was full of shit.
Either way, she hadn’t slept well and she needed a distraction, so after some deliberation she grabbed a skirt she could shuck easily instead of the plaid pants she’d set out last night, checking quickly in the mirror to make sure it didn’t clash with her shirt. She’d waffled for long enough that she was going to have to grab breakfast on the way out the door; she didn’t need to waste any more time.
Her dad hadn’t left for work yet, and when she leaned into the kitchen to grab an apple or a piece of toast, she realized that he’d made waffles and her stomach turned over with guilt. But she didn’t have the time to run back up and change, or an explanation for why she would need to, and she’d be late for first period if she sat down and had a proper breakfast.
“Should have gotten up the first time my alarm went off,” she told him, smiling ruefully.
“Don’t worry about it, honey.”
As if he’d done this for any reason but to make her feel better. Veronica grabbed a plate and snagged two of the waffles onto it with her fingers, then added a third after a moment of consideration. She’d have to wolf it down, but she could eat one now and take the rest with her. Her dad, maybe intuiting her plan, handed her the whipped cream, and she liberally garnished the topmost one. “Thanks.”
He helped himself to another one – by the syrup on his plate he’d already started his own breakfast, which made sense, since he had to be at work soon. “Some waffle with your whipped cream?”
“Har de har,” Veronica said. She attacked the waffle in question with the knife and fork he’d set out for her. “I have gym this semester. I need a reason to get through the day.”
“And whipped cream is the best we’ve got to work with?” Keith shook his head sadly. “Better add some more, honey. I’d be sad if you didn’t come home from school.”
Veronica laughed, ignoring the twisting in the pit of her stomach. In fact, she made it worse. “I might not – I mean, right away. I’m going to see if I can make plans with Jasmine.” She couldn’t use Meg as an excuse, since he’d obviously know that Meg was getting ready for tonight’s performance.
Her dad nodded slowly, and she knew he was assuming she was avoiding her mom, but he didn’t say anything about it. “Right, your new friend. What was her last name?”
It was only her guilt that made Veronica suspicious of that – she forced herself not to flinch. It was normal for her parents to want to know her friends’ names and families. They’d always known Lilly’s parents, Logan’s parents, Jeremy’s. He wasn’t going to do a full background check like he had on Troy, and if he happened to, nothing would come up. Probably. Jasmine didn’t seem like she’d been involved in any real bike club stuff, beyond the guys in it. She swallowed her two-large bite of waffle and whipped cream. “I don’t actually know,” she told him, shrugging to compensate for how shrill and awkward she felt. It was true, so there was no reason to be weird about it. “She’s a senior.”
“You should ask,” he told her – but mildly. Veronica rolled her eyes, trying to hide her relief.
“Because that’s not awkward at all.”
She jammed a final forkful into her mouth, snagged the remaining two in one hand, then circled the kitchen island to drop her plate and cutlery in the sink and turned the tap on and immediately off in a desultory attempt to rinse them. “Thanks for breakfast.”
Keith stood, which made it easier to give him a half-hug on her non-waffle side. “Any time, honey. Try not to choke.”
“You mean you don’t want me giving myself the Heimlich on the steering wheel?” She met his mild exasperation with a smile, then slipped out of the kitchen with the rest of her breakfast before she could start regretting or confessing anything. Not that she would have told him what she’d been doing – but there was a real danger she might tell him how she was feeling or what she was thinking, and not only would that shatter whatever tatters of equilibrium their family was still clinging to, but there was a distinct chance that she’d say the wrong thing and inadvertently do the former as well.
The first bite of her second waffle didn’t taste so good.
Still, it was waffles, and it was a lot better than grabbing something small and unsatisfying, so Veronica got over herself in time to enjoy about half of it and all of the third one. At least first period was Computer Science; it was never an especially rigorous class, since Mr. Rafferty didn’t want to risk giving them assignments he didn’t understand. Better than last semester, when she’d had to jump into the school day firing on all cylinders.
Better than having first period with Meg, and having to pretend to be cheerful, or be asked what was wrong. Even the distraction of a successful opening night wouldn’t be enough to distract Meg if she seemed downcast. It felt strangely familiar. Whenever things took a bad turn with her mom, she’d had to duck around the subject with Lilly, too, although Lilly’s interrogations had been more likely to be prompted by feeling she wasn’t getting her due of attention than by concern.
At least, that had been her angle of approach. Even now, there were moments Veronica couldn’t quite force herself to believe hadn’t had some real feeling in them, but maybe she was just stupid.
Helloooo, earth to Veronica! Despite all the effort she’d put in, she could still hear the exact tone of voice. It wasn’t a memory, exactly, or if it was it was an amalgamation of memories – that one time she thought she’d bombed her English final, the suddenly-caring-when-Duncan-was-shirtless incident, a handful of memories pulled from the bad times when her mom stopped trying. Usually she’d lied about it; sometimes she’d talked about a recent incident like it was a one-off. My mom got way more drunk than usual on her birthday and totally embarrassed us. Mom missed my presentation, but she was sick, so I should get over it. Sorry, just tired.
On at least one of those occasions, Lilly had rolled her eyes and said, “Embarrassing? Please. Celeste tells people I’m the family disappointment at dinner parties. You have nothing to worry about.”
The truth was, Veronica had never really known whether Lilly could read between the lines or not, the same way Veronica knew that being run down like that hurt Lilly more than she admitted – never known how successful she’d been at keeping her secret, especially when sometimes it faded away and other times it wanted to burst out of her. She’d never known if the glib responses she got were calculated to make her feel better without exposing her, or if they had only been what they seemed on the surface, but Lilly had almost always managed to make her feel better without ever quite taking any of it seriously.
It was hard to reconcile that with the way everything had fallen apart.
She didn’t get much work done in first period, but Mr. Saunders was out so Mr. Wu was subbing for him, and you could not get away with zoning out in his class so Veronica didn’t even try. She was at school; she should worry about school. If she saw Weevil in the hall, she could take the opportunity to get a straight answer out of him about later – even she didn’t quite have the temerity to show up at his house uninvited.
If he decided to be a pain, she’d just find something else to do. Go sit on a beach and watch the waves. Walk around the mall. Maybe she’d tell her dad she was going to a movie and buy a ticket to see Cabaret again, so she could pay attention this time.
None of it felt very appealing. There was something about a solidly physical distraction that was more effective, took less effort. She was even relieved to go to gym class, for once, despite the fact that her embarrassingly obvious bruises from the crash the day before were plainly visible. She’d worn one of her longer skirts, but her gym strip wasn’t as forgiving.
You knew things were dire when you were grateful for floor hockey, however faintly. Not that she wasn’t also grateful that this was the last day of floor hockey. Badminton was up next, and as ridiculous as it felt (and looked), at least there was pretty much no chance of getting tackled.
Still, she survived, and by the time lunch came she was capable of mustering a mostly-sincere smile and paying proper attention to all the praise Meg had to heap on her castmates and the lighting tech and the stage manager. Apparently there’d been some kind of wardrobe malfunction for Sally in the second act, and the sophomore who was running the show backstage had managed to fix it in less than a minute with only whatever she could grab nearby.
“I didn’t notice a thing,” Veronica said truthfully. “But I was paying more attention to you than Alyssa anyway.”
Meg flapped a hand as if to say oh you, and segued into a compliment to Alyssa. She didn’t mention how her parents had reacted to the show, Veronica noticed, but hopefully that just meant they’d kept their disapproval of the material to themselves. And that they’d listened to Meg and left Grace at home.
Jasmine didn’t join them, although Veronica saw her sitting with some of her friends down by the grass, and Weevil was apparently absent. Possibly from school, or just from that particular area. She could always check his locker, provided she was correctly remembering where that was, but she wasn’t sure it was worth being seen to put in the effort. Maybe she’d just text, provided she could think of something appropriately disinterested to say. The only trouble with texting was you couldn’t claim it was a coincidence, and she’d already sent the most recent one.
She’d gone to the trouble of constructing an alibi, though, so once Meg had decided to go get the brownie she’d initially decided against from the cafeteria, she texted him About to make plans with Jasmine…
The response was much quicker than last night: can i watch
Of course. She should have anticipated that. Veronica raised her eyes skyward, contemplating a reply.
Didn’t think shopping was your thing, was what she settled on. But I guess I can buy you those underwear you so desperately need.
Then she tucked her phone away because Meg was back, but when she snuck a glance at it before fifth period he’d responded twice: first with a pair of laughing faces, and then with i have a better idea.
That worked, then. Everything had lined up nicely.
*
Veronica hadn’t really considered that the kids at Weevil’s were going to be a problem. Or, she had, but she’d assumed it would be the same stuff as before – fighting, getting hurt or needing things, maybe tattling to their grandparents. Generally being present and therefore an uncomfortable obstacle to having sex.
She hadn’t prepared to herself to have Ariana run up to her before the door even shut, calling enthusiastically, “Hi! Can we do another trick!?”
“Uh,” Veronica said.
“Get lost,” Weevil told Ariana, not even looking at her. He was taking his boots off – he must have arrived only just before her – but it still felt harsh. Veronica didn’t exactly want to hang out with his little sister, or whatever, but Ariana was little, and cute, and it seemed mean to blow her off like that.
She pouted and stomped her foot, which was somehow also cute. Maybe it was the braids. “I want to do science with Veronica! She’s scientific!”
Weevil straightened, his eyebrows going way up. Veronica tried not to turn red, even though there was no way he knew she was the one who’d called herself that and no particular reason for her to be embarrassed about it.
“So you can dump water all over the table again?” he asked, after giving Ariana a solid ten seconds to stew in his disappointment.
“I cleaned it up!”
“Yeah, and you left a soaking wet towel lying on the table.”
Veronica winced. She could have double-checked on her way out, but it hadn’t even occurred to her.
“But I cleaned it up!” Ariana whined.
“She’s not your fucking science fairy – quit it.”
Before Veronica could react to ‘science fairy’, the little girl stuck her lips out defiantly and then declared, “You’re not supposed to say that word to me, Eli.”
Veronica choked back a laugh, not very convincingly, and Weevil glared at her.
“Beat it,” he told Ariana with threateningly precise articulation. “Before I beat you.”
She pouted and huffed off in the direction of the living room, leaving Veronica unsure if she should laugh or intervene or just try to get things back on track. How to do that she wasn’t quite sure, since if she remembered properly they had to go through the living room to get to the stairs.
“So, what?” Weevil demanded, apparently deciding he needed to go one the offensive before she made fun of him for having his language scolded by an elementary schooler. “You’re some kind of math wizard now?”
“You know what, she was crying –” Veronica started hotly, but he was already talking over her.
“We’re not even at school anymore and you’re still brownnosing, it literally shouldn’t be possible –”
“I don’t hear you complaining about passing your classes last –”
“Danny broke my easel!”
That was the kid from the other day – Alex? Probably. He was standing in the edge of the narrow hall, rigid with fury.
Weevil ground his teeth. When the boy failed to disappear, he said, “Why is that my problem?”
“He took off ‘cause he’s a little bitch,” the kid seethed. “I’m gonna kill him dead!”
Veronica wondered what Danny’s life expectancy was. So far someone had been compelled to murder him one-hundred percent of the times she’d been to their house.
Weevil ground the heel of his hand into the bridge of his nose. “I don’t have time for this shit.”
“So mermaid-kicking is a worse offence than easel-breaking?” Veronica asked, her desire to stay the hell out of his weird family stuff overpowered by the urge to rub his face in this complication.
But Alex, while immediately offended, didn’t take issue with the double standard. “I’m not a little kid,” he said disdainfully, glaring at Veronica. “I can handle my shit.”
“So handle it,” Weevil suggested, kicking his boots viciously into line near the door.
“He’s hiding like a little bitch.”
He didn’t have a very extensive vocabulary of insults, Veronica thought.
Weevil glanced around, like he was trying to assess how big of a problem this would become. She had to admit that it seemed likely he’d get in some kind of trouble for letting his cousins literally murder each other while he was busy getting laid, but mostly she was torn between amusement at his frustration and mild consternation that her plans were being derailed.
“If I fix your fucking easel,” he said with a weary, put-upon air that would have put a single mother of six to shame, “will you only kill him halfway dead?”
Alex considered this, apparently not wanting to seem like an easy sell. “You can’t fix it,” he said finally, a note of doubt in his voice.
“Is it smashed into splinters?” Weevil asked, impatient.
“No.”
“Then I can fix it.”
Okay, that was – Veronica hated to admit it, but that was kind of hot. She might not be the most objective, since she’d spent four periods half-imagining having sex with him, but she still wouldn’t have expected to find that so appealing.
Alex was less impressed; he huffed and crossed his arms over his chest. Weevil stared him down – Veronica couldn’t tell if it was an actual family resemblance she was seeing, or just the effects of grotesque amounts of stubbornness on your average face.
“Or you can spend the rest of your life leaning shit against the wall. Which should be fine, because when Grandma finds out you laid hands on her favourite grandson, she’s gonna kill you.”
Alex sneered. “Danny’s not her favourite grandson.”
“Who is, then?” Weevil shot back snidely.
That stymied the younger boy, presumably because the only other two options were standing in the hall, and listing either of them would have opened Alex up to ridicule.
“Fine,” he muttered after a long struggle to find a comeback. “It’s upstairs.”
“I know where your room is,” Weevil told him acerbically.
Veronica followed them, for lack of any better option. Ariana wasn’t in the living room, but she’d left toys all over the floor; Weevil grumbled under his breath and swept the mermaid Barbie out of the way with the side of his foot.
Upstairs, he headed for the door on the other side of the hall from his own. It seemed too uncomfortable to go into his bedroom without him, so she leaned against the doorframe of Alex’s room as he examined the easel.
It was barely bigger than Weevil’s room, even though there were clearly two people sleeping there: two beds, two tiny bedside tables, a closet on one side and a small chest of drawers wedged against the other wall, barely any room between it and the nearest bed. Presumably Alex and Danny shared. Must be fun for them, Veronica thought. She wondered why Weevil would have shared with Danny in the first place, and why he didn’t anymore. Had this used to be his room too, and he moved into the other one when someone left? Had it been his mom’s?
The easel, near the closet, had come loose at the top, and on one side of the crossbar, so that instead of forming a frame, there were just a bunch of loose pieces of wood sticking out at all angles.
“Get the shit from under the sink,” Weevil told Alex, who sighed heavily but complied. Veronica moved out of the way, and he actually paused and gave her a half-smile before taking off down the stairs.
“Your brother has better manners than you do,” she told Weevil off-handedly, testing a theory.
He made a face at her, holding part of the easel together with one hand while he tried to straighten the crosspiece with the other. “He’s not my brother.”
Veronica raised a pointed eyebrow, but he was too focussed on the easel to pay attention. “And you’re just not going to elaborate on that?”
“He’s my cousin,” he said shortly, which made a cerain amount of sense, although it shed no light on the room situation.
“And Ariana–”
“Also my cousin.” He shot her a glare that she thought was performative. “What, you thought all Mexicans have seventeen kids?”
Veronica rolled her eyes. A retort about how she could have made assumptions about broken families instead flashed through her head, but she wasn’t going to actually say something like that. she ignored him instead, finding a place to lean against the wall so she wasn’t blocking the doorway.
When Alex returned – she could hear him running up the stairs, but he’d adopted an unhurried, nonchalant demeanour by the time he got to the bedroom – the thing he’d gone to fetch proved to be a toolbox of some kind. Weevil took it and started digging through it, giving the task of holding the pieces in place to his cousin.
There were too many hands in the way for Veronica to tell exactly what he was doing, but it appeared to be a judicious combination of clamping, screwing things back in, and hammering a pre-existing bracket back into place, and both the confidence and the competence were hotter than she liked to admit. The fact that he clearly knew what he was doing brought to mind all kinds of cliché associations to do with deft hands and firm touches; Veronica wanted to roll her eyes at herself even as heat built in her stomach and began rising.
It was easy to imagine the way his muscles were moving under his skin right now, despite the fact that she couldn’t be sure it would actually look the same as during sex. She opened her mouth to tell him – half-mockingly, of course – to take his shirt off, then shut it again. Alex was right there, and he was… maybe nine? What was wrong with her?
She tried to think of something snappy to say, but in true Murphy’s Law fashion, all that she could come up with were lame cracks like telling him he should be a handyman, which also felt (however unintentionally) racist, or really terrible innuendos, like asking him if he’d always been good with tools or was he sure he was hammering the right thing. There was no world in which she was saying any of that, mockingly or not.
“There,” Weevil said after another minute, raising his eyebrows pointedly at Alex. “Just watch out for that screw sticking out in the back – I’ll fix it later. I got shit to do. Don’t bother me.”
That was a little too baldly obvious for Veronica; she fought not to turn red. Alex just rolled his eyes, but it seemed from the combined eagerness and hesitancy he tested the easel with that he was pleased, even if he didn’t say thank you. Weevil didn’t appear to expect it, anyway; he spiked his eyebrows lasciviously at her as he headed into the hall, and she tried not to look too flustered as she followed him.
“I’m starting to think I should have gone shopping,” she said as she closed his door behind her.
“No one’s keeping you here,” he told her – but he sounded smug, not defensive, so Veronica relaxed, rolling her eyes more because that was the formula they followed than because she felt an especial need.
She wasn’t sure what to do next, though. He gave her a sardonic look from where he stood next to the bed. “And here I thought you had intentions on my virtue.”
That made her laugh, taken by surprise. “Alex is right over there, though.” She nodded at the wall as if he didn’t know.
Weevil seemed unbothered by this, which she couldn’t comprehend. “Guess you’ll have to be quiet, then.” When she couldn’t muster up a response to that beyond an incredulous look, he shrugged. “Or you can leave.”
It wasn’t barbed like a suggestion that she wanted to bail usually would have been – like the one from thirty seconds ago had been, even. Apparently he meant it. He wasn’t even overtly mocking her, although she was sure that was in the cards for later.
But Veronica was too stubborn to leave now, and anyway, while she wasn’t so crazed with lust that she could ignore the fact that his cousin was across the hall, the simmering state of arousal that had been slowly increasing since lunch didn’t make the idea of going home without achieving her goal very appealing.
Besides, her mom was at home, and she wasn’t sure she could deal with that right now.
The thought increased her determination, so she shot him a challenging look. “It sounds like you think I can’t be quiet.”
It was his turn to laugh, darkly enough that she hid a shiver. “Guess we’ll find out.”
Veronica stepped out of her shoes with alacrity, wishing there was a dignified way to do the same with her socks. If they were going to end up on his bed, it seemed strange to keep them on, and there weren’t a lot of alternatives, beyond the chair or maybe the wall. All Weevil had to do was sit down, since the bed was right there; she took a moment to lightly resent him for it. He had okay feet, though, she couldn’t help but notice – clean, and he actually clipped his nails. Not too much hair. It felt like a weird thing to notice. She was used to finding bizarre things attractive, at this point, but his feet weren’t sexy, they were just… pleasant.
Or simply not unpleasant, she decided, shaking off the thought. The low, low bar that applied to teenage boys struck again.
Weevil had moved on to his belt, so she decided to dispense with dignity and just get naked as quickly as possible, leaving her socks for last and stripping them off by hooking her thumb in as she stepped out of her skirt.
Then she looked up, equally prepared for a joke or a lascivious comment, to see that he was absolutely furious.
“Why,” he spat out with a controlled rage that made Veronica shiver in a very different way, “do you have bruises?”
It had been a long time since she’d felt actually afraid of him, but the sudden tension in the air, the fact that she couldn’t help being intimidated, made her voice smaller than she’d intended as she stumbled over a response that was meant to be cavalier.
“Um – because I got bodychecked into the bleachers by Thom Lemky?”
It half-sounded like a lie, even though it was an exaggeration at most, and Veronica forced herself not to wince at the thought, since that would not help. She wasn’t positive what exactly he thought – if she’d been kicked in the thigh on purpose, surely she’d be in much worse shape over all, since she’d probably have had to have been on the ground for that to happen? – but it was nothing good.
He wasn’t looking at the bruises on her knees and thigh, though, despite the fact that they were bigger and more obvious; he was looking at the one on the front of her elbow, from where it had hit the floor. She didn’t know how to make sense of that. Maybe he was thinking about his sister, since it was hard to forget the incident she’d read about over the summer when he had that kind of look on his face – but who would he even think was hurting her? It wasn’t like she had a boyfriend, obviously.
“If you want to start a petition to make gym class illegal, I’ll sign it,” she added, achieving something closer to the tone she wanted. “But I don’t know if now’s the time. Unless this ruins it for you?” she added with a twist of mock cheerfulness, trying not to pay attention to the flat, hard look he was still giving her. “I didn’t think your sensibilities were so precious, but I can put my clothes back on if you –”
“Just shut up,” he said, not sharply but so decisively that Veronica obeyed automatically. She shot him an unimpressed look to make up for it. Having his eyes on her naked body was discomfiting – it was one thing when it was about sex, but this clearly wasn’t, and the fact that he was less naked than she was didn’t help. His eyes flitted over her other bruises, then back to her arm, his mouth tight.
“Are you done freaking out?” Veronica asked after a few more moments of silence. “Go harass Mr. Rafferty about it if it bothers you. Tell him his curriculum is turning you off. I don’t know how much ice that’ll cut,” she added with sarcastic solicitude. “But if it gets me out of floor hockey I don’t even care.”
After a moment of suspense, the line of his shoulders dropped, less rigid. “Fine. Whatever. Get over here.”
Charming. But that was what she was here for, so she rolled her eyes pointedly and crossed to the bed, trying not shiver, this time just because of the temperature. It was comfortable when you had clothes on, but now she was missing her long sleeves.
Weevil shucked his remaining clothes and dragged her onto his lap, suddenly all business. He didn’t pull her down, though, letting her stay kneeling up while he applied his mouth to her breast without comment or lead-in. Veronica squeaked, the remembered what he’d said about being quiet and the proximity of other people and clamped her mouth firmly shut.
It felt good – not that it ever didn’t. Her mind might need some time to catch up after being disconcerted like that, but her body was still ready to go, so it wasn’t hard to arch into him and focus on the soft insistent pull of his mouth and the warmth of his tongue pressing against her. She could worry about his conniption fit later.
Since they were definitely past the point of being polite, she slid her hand in between them, bracing the other on the warm skin of his shoulder, in order to play with the nipple that wasn’t currently in his mouth. The contrasting sensations sent heat prickling over her skin, or maybe under it.
There was something so much more intense about doing this completely naked. It wasn’t like they never had, especially if you discounted minor things like socks – she’d certainly had plenty of opportunities to run her hands all over his chest and back the way she was tempted to do now, if only she had more of them – but clothes had always been a factor, one way or another, an obstacle or a safeguard or a bit of plausible deniability that she was very conscious of not having even when they had been naked. The sudden uniformity of skin on skin felt like a change, even an escalation. Her thighs brushed against his sides, her calves pressing against his thighs, all of it warmer and more tactile than it should have been. She was hyperconscious of the bedspread under her knees, too – it was soft, even on the bruises.
They didn’t hurt that much – she might not have been particularly aware of any change in sensation if he hadn’t made such a big weird deal about them – but the skin there felt more sensitive, and she shuddered as Weevil’s fingers brushed over the side of her thigh where Thom had kicked her.
He pulled back, and she pressed her lips even more tightly together to avoid making a noise of protest. He had better not be planning on kicking up more of a fuss –
But then he smirked at her, that same hand sliding between her legs so that she was forced to swallow a squeak, and said, “You’re so fucking into that, it’s like some kind of Deep Throat for tits.”
Veronica felt herself flush – not just her face, but her whole body, her throat and the tops of her breasts going particularly hot as she tried not to show her embarrassment in her expression. She did like that more than she should, for reasons she didn’t like to think about too hard, and having him say it out loud was beyond embarrassing – almost humiliating, except that you couldn’t call a feeling that made your spine arch and your cunt clench humiliation.
She didn’t know how to handle any of those feelings, so she shoved him hard at the shoulders and he fell back, despite the awkward angle that truncated her force. His fingers dragged against the lips of her vagina on the down, and she shuddered.
Then she had to climb off him, because she wasn’t sure where to get a condom, and she couldn’t reach his bedside drawer without risking falling.
“Running away?” Weevil asked drily. He didn’t seem bothered; he’d probably let her push him over on purpose.
“Maybe you should be more prepared,” she returned, glad for an excuse not to look him in the face without being obvious. The box of condoms wasn’t hard to locate in the top drawer, but the opening wasn’t at a great angle to get her hand in it and it took a minute. There was an irony in that, but she didn’t have the patience to find a clever way to articulate it.
She got one out eventually and dropped it on Weevil’s chest, ignoring his unimpressed expression. This was possibly a mistake, she realized a moment later – probably better to deal with the awkwardness of putting it on him inexpertly herself than to get them into a standoff where her current inability to make eye contact would be much more obvious. But she couldn’t pick it back up without looking ridiculous, so she said, “For example,” in her most condescending voice.
“There’s lube over there too,” he told her, tone deceptively neutral. “In case you need help getting your hand out.”
Veronica made an annoyed noise in her throat that sounded more like a strangled cat than anything. It didn’t do much to hide the fact that she was flustered, but Weevil heaved himself up on his elbows anyway, collecting the condom from where it was sliding in roughly the correct direction before he sat the rest of the way up. He ripped the packet open expertly and got the job done much more efficiently than she could have, at which point Veronica pushed him over again, to vent her feelings.
This time he grunted in annoyance but she climbed on top of him before he could complain, or make another too-sharp observation, only to be stymied when he said, “Get off.”
He sounded serious, not like he was complaining for the sake of it, so after a moment’s hesitation she did, making a face in order to ameliorate her capitulation.
Weevil shifted around so he was lying lengthways on the bed, instead of across it, his head not quite level with the pillows. It made sense – this way his legs weren’t off the bed – so Veronica refrained from searching for a sarcastic comment. He didn’t sit back up, which she took as permission to straddle him again. It was too bad she couldn’t shove him down a third time, though. It was kind of fun.
It did mean she was left on her own initiative now; he seemed content to watch her, one eyebrow raised, no doubt ready to become sarcastic if given any ammunition. She was too high up at first, more aligned to sit on the large letters that crossed his stomach than anything, so she shuffled backward a bit, trying to be nonchalant about it. Once she was at a better angle, she reached down and got a hold on him, trying not to show the jolt of arousal when his dick jumped in her hand. Weevil’s eyelashes fluttered, not closing but still a noticeable reaction, and she ran her thumb around the head just to make him shudder a little. The latex was rubbery under the faint gloopiness of the lubrication, but some warmth still seeped through.
She wasn’t especially interested in dragging things out, so she lifted up a little higher without further fanfare and slid carefully down onto him. Weevil’s hands came up to wrap around her thighs, but he didn’t hold on as tightly as she was used to, maybe because of the bruise, maybe because he was at no risk of dropping her when they were in this position. They were just warm, and solid, and present.
It was easier in this position than sitting in his lap – the bed was a solid foundation to brace herself on, instead of something getting in the way of her legs, the way it had in her car and the last time she’d been here, and it meant she didn’t feel as much like she was working out as that time with the chair, and she felt confident enough to speed up sooner than she’d expected. Seeing him stretched out underneath her was satisfying, too, although she couldn’t have put words to exactly why. He was nice to look at – smooth brown skin, lighter at the seam of his neck, dark ink, arching a little as she came down onto him, his jaw tense with control. Veronica wanted to make him arch a lot. His stomach rippled and moved as – he wasn’t really fucking her; was it as she fucked him? A smug, snide part of her liked that, but it still sounded weird in her head – as they came together and apart, and Veronica reached out and put her hand over the i in Ride, her palm covering the elaborate swirl from the R. She could feel his muscles flexing and moving under the skin, but his stomach was much softer than when she did the same with his shoulders or back. She liked it. It was tempting to put both hands there while she moved up and down on him, but if she lost her balance she’d be funnelling all her weight into his stomach, which wouldn’t be a good outcome for either of them, so she pulled her hand away reluctantly and focussed on the feel of him inside of her, on the right timing to squeeze around him so that he stifled a groan and shivered with the effort.
“Who can’t keep quiet, exactly?” she asked him, panting only slightly.
Weevil grunted softly as she came down swiftly on him again. “I’m quiet,” he said, although from the way he slammed his mouth shut as fast as possible, he must have been at least a little worried he’d have trouble staying that way. His eyes were on her breasts, when they were anywhere, she noted, with a hot, traitorous rush of gratification. She wanted badly to reach up – she could spare one hand – and play with them, roll the nipple that was tightening under the coolness that air against his saliva, squeeze and pull the one that was crying out that it hadn’t had his mouth on it, fondle the sensitized skin around them… but that felt too exposing. She braced herself on her thighs as she sped up just a little, her fingers overlaying his thumb, and his eyelids fluttered.
Veronica was on the point of considering all the awkwardness about rooms and easels worth it, but she still wasn’t used to taking this much of the reins, and for all her enjoyment she suspected it required a bit too much concentration and focus for her to be able to get off this way – at least without a little help, which Weevil didn’t seem driven to provide, uncharacteristically. She could decide if she was hoping he was planning on turning the tables again, or if she resented the idea. She was enjoying herself enough that she really didn’t want to stop what they were doing, and the fact that they weren’t pressed tightly together was a welcome respite from the heightened intensity that seemed to come along with all the changes in circumstance compared to the art classroom at school, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t easier to let go when she was only responsible for fifty percent or less of the action.
By the time his head tipped all the way back and his fingers started tightening on her thighs, she’d decided it was better, after all, that they’d kept going at they were. She should have let him get her off first, but it wasn’t the end of the world when he could do it after. She could just sit on him and refuse to get off until…
The thought, and the accidental pun, made her laugh. She choked back most of the sound, but that didn’t stop her from shaking, and Weevil groaned louder than he had yet and thrust up against her, his hands going so tight that it actually did hurt over the bruise. His body rolling under hers was surprisingly appealing; watching him lose his compose as he came was equally appealing, if not surprising, although he wasn’t loud enough that she would really be able to mock him about it.
After his hands went loose against her legs, it took him a moment to get his breath back, but his eyes flickered open when she raised up off of him. “All right,” he said, still breathing hard. “Come here.”
Veronica shot him a sardonic look. “I am here.”
He hooked his hands behind her thighs again and half-pushed, half-pulled her until she knee-walked up his body, confused and first and then faintly shocked. It wasn’t really all that different from the ways he’d already done it, but she was still somehow surprised when he pulled her directly down onto his face.
She sucked in a far-too-large breath when his tongue touched her, only belatedly thinking to grab for the headboard, where she hung on increasingly tightly as the reality of what was happening reached her brain stem and turned her brain fuzzy. Theoretically she was pretty sure she’d known this was a thing people did, but she’d never imagined doing it. Or that the idea would turn her whole spine molten even before the physical sensation.
It was the same and different as having him go down on her from his knees, his mouth still warm and wet but placed differently, teasing at every fold of skin, his lips so much more active and apparent than she was used to. She was already more than wet and she would’ve sworn she could feel herself getting wetter, a faint embarrassing awareness that she must be getting his face wet nearly erased by the sparks of his nose brushing against her clit. That couldn’t be normal, it couldn’t be on purpose, but it was all she could do not to start rocking against his face like some kind of depraved… something, and when it happened again she had to shove her mouth into the crook of her elbow so she didn’t scream or mewl or do something worse.
Weevil’s hands were at her thighs, nudging and pushing, and she tried to lift up, thighs shaking. He probably needed to breathe. But they were encouraging her forward more than up, like she was supposed to move against him – against his whole face –
There was probably no amount of self-consciousness that could have stopped her, because even as she told herself she shouldn’t she was already rocking against him, panting and whimpering and trying to muffle herself, because she was very much losing whatever contest they’d been having, and had he had this planned from the beginning, and did she even care, because he was sucking at parts of her she’d never thought were possible and the sparks when she rubbed herself shamelessly against him were fast turning into lightning.
It came to a head at once, every individual feeling and remembered sensation and erotic thought zeroing in and in like a black hole and then exploding outward in sharp, overwhelming pleasure so intense she didn’t even know if she’d cried out, or if she was going to be able to stop shaking.
Weevil helped by pushing him off her, presumably because he needed air. Veronica managed, after a long moment, to remember how her fingers worked, and unlocked them from his headboard, which let her swing her leg over so she wasn’t awkwardly straddling him. Then she just kept going, without any real intention of doing it, and slithered off the other side of the bed onto the floor.
She just sat there, staring at his dresser, her mind buzzing emptily for what felt like a decent stretch of time. She didn’t know why she’d thought she should be on the floor, but she couldn’t get up anyway. Her legs were still quivering. Actually her arms were quivering a little bit too.
“Don’t know if I’d call that quiet,” Weevil said after a minute. He sounded pleased with himself, though not as smug as he probably would have been if she’d screamed – but she had to make sure, even if he mocked her for it.
“You don’t think they heard, right?” Her whole body was still buzzing enough that the thought was only moderately disturbing, but she knew it would be a horrifying prospect once the endorphins wore off.
Weevil made a negative noise, not bothering to articulate it, and the relief gave her just enough of a jolt that she could galvanize herself to get up. Not stand. That was not happening. But she got up on her knees and crawled around the end of the bed, each movement feeling perilously shaky. She managed to reach her clothes without incident and started doing her best to put them on while sitting down.
She gotten past her shirt and socks (the easy part) and even her underwear without comment, so she started to imagine she’d escape without commentary, but then Weevil leaned over the edge of the bed as she was hiking up her skirt and asked, “What are you doing?”
There were a number of quippy retorts to that, and even after being knocked for a loop she could think of a couple of them – getting dressed and what does it look like being the obvious ones – but for once she didn’t feel like putting up a front, so she just said, “I don’t know.”
He must have wiped his face, she realized, still too pleasantly jazzed from her orgasm to feel as embarrassed as she usually would have. It was less shiny. Probably while she was zoning out in the general direction of his bedroom furniture.
Weevil flopped back down on the bed, mumbling, “So weird,” but more to himself than her. One day, someone was going to explode his brain until he couldn’t walk, and then he’d be sorry, she thought, her mind still feeling vague and loose. It would be nice to think it would be her, but she didn’t think there was anything she could do that would have a comparable effect. Unless she asked Jasmine for tips, maybe.
That reminded her, so as she stood, gripping the bedpost nearest his feet while she tested her stability, she asked him, “What’s Jasmine’s last name?”
Weevil laboriously dragged himself up on one elbow, then blinked at her, rubbing a hand over the top of his head. “Why?”
“I told my dad I was hanging out with her.” Begrudgingly, not sure why she was including the information when she was usually perfectly happy to leave him in the dark, she added, “Meg has theatre stuff.”
“Carrera,” Weevil said. Veronica waited for a biting addendum, but it didn’t come.
“Okay,” she said, biting back the urge to thank him for the information. It was only polite, but she didn’t want him to think she meant… everything. He’d gotten off too; that was the thank-you.
He didn’t say anything else, so she shrugged on her sweater and stepped shakily into her shoes, and then left. No one appeared from the opposite bedroom to accuse her of corrupting minors or violating noise laws, so she made her way downstairs, slipping out the front door so as to avoid whichever one of the kids was making noise in the kitchen.
Even if she’d achieved walking successfully, it seemed prudent to wait a few minutes before she tried driving, so Veronica sat in her car for a little while, thinking about noses and cousins and bruises until the awkward and embarrassing parts floated away and left her with only the concerning ones. Now that she wasn’t face-to-face with someone she had to respond to, in a situation where she had other objectives, it was easy to think of reasons why Weevil might overreact to her gym class souvenirs – reasons like his brother-in-law. It was still weird, because while she couldn’t say she would have expected him not to care, that flash of cold fury still seemed like overkill. It wasn’t like they were so close he had some kind of responsibility to her, after all; she didn’t live in his neighbourhood or date one of his friends or have any other connection to him besides school and sex. And he had to know she didn’t have a boyfriend, so what exactly he would have been assuming –
The thought broke over her on the tide of that offensive comment she hadn’t made about broken families. Did he think her parents had done this?
Veronica’s first instinct was outrage. Her dad would never. Her mom was far from perfect, but she would never, ever hit a child, never hit her child, not ever. But then she took a deep breath. Whoever Weevil’s grandparents were, they had four grandchildren who didn’t live with their actual parents. She didn’t know how many siblings were in the mix here, but that was at least two, maybe three distinct sets of parents who didn’t have custody. If he had made that assumption, it probably hadn’t been about her family; it had probably been about his. Maybe even about his parents.
She wondered if that was why he never mentioned his dad. She couldn’t imagine it was his mom. It wasn’t like she didn’t know these things could be complicated, but did people get abusive parents’ names tattooed on their body?
And besides, he’d ever had that kind of reaction to her bringing up his mom. Sarcasm, run-of-the-mill anger, even exasperation, but nothing that had looked like the way he’d been earlier. The only time she’d seen him go hard and dangerous in quite that way was when she’d brought up Lilly, in the beginning.
The thought made her pause, mid-reach for the ignition. If she hadn’t already been thinking so recently about Lilly and mothers and secrets, maybe it wouldn’t have, but everything she’d been chewing over was still close to the surface. Celeste Kane’s visible dissatisfaction with her daughter had gotten more obvious as they’d grown up, and there were a lot of times when it had made Veronica uneasy, or downright uncomfortable. But it was hard to imagine her putting her hands on one of her children. Hard, but not impossible. And Lilly liked to provoke her.
Would Veronica have known? She wanted to say yes, but she’d never told Lilly about her mom’s drinking, not really. Would Lilly have told her if Celeste was hurting her? Would she have told anyone?
But Duncan would have known, surely. He would have known, and he would have done something – he and Lilly were so close, and Veronica had seen him stick up for her countless times, even when it would have been a lot easier not to, even when he was also mad at his sister. It was an unsettling thought, but not likely.
She didn’t try to put it out of her mind – it would just fester. She started the car and pulled out, letting her brain chew on it, instead, until it had exhausted all reasonable dead ends and she could remind herself that none of this was any of her business and it was probably based on some bit of Weevil’s family drama that had nothing to do with her or with anyone she knew.
She was almost home when she remembered, suddenly, how hard Logan had grabbed her arm that day she’d orchestrated the fight between him and Lilly, the way he’d squeezed so hard she’d wondered if it was going to bruise. He grabbed Lilly’s wrist that day, too – and Weevil hadn’t liked it.
The thought sat sick in her stomach. She and Logan hadn’t parted on good terms, but they’d been friends, and she’d liked him and Lilly as a couple, before everything went to hell. They’d matched each other – or she’d thought they had, back then; both irreverent and fun and a little too worldly. He’d been crazy about Lilly, even taken her back when he had to know, deep down, that she’d cheated on him, and in a much more serious way than the thing with Yolanda. He wouldn’t have hurt her. Veronica would have known.
Lilly never would have put up with it, either. Veronica could hear her dad in her ear, telling her that anyone could be in an abusive relationship, but she couldn’t really believe it – not Lilly. She wasn’t the kind of girl who let guys get away with things, even little ones, so she’d never have stayed with someone who… well, there was just no way. She was being crazy. And they were broken up anyway, so it didn’t matter, but ultimately there was no way.
She would have known.
She had to focus on the road, Veronica reminded herself. She hated that she was even thinking these things, especially when this was obviously about Weevil’s baggage. Not that she was criticizing; at least he had his priorities straight. If there was a tactful way to ask about it, she could have planned to, and stopped circling over these thoughts obsessively, but they didn’t exactly have that kind of relationship. And she couldn’t exactly ask anyone else about it – anyone he knew would laugh in her face and then tell him she’d been asking nosy questions, and her dad would have been suspicious, or at least had questions she didn’t want to answer.
Or. Actually. She knew one person who might be willing to spill the beans on Weevil’s family without making her work too hard. The only sticking point was whether she was willing to manipulate a small child.
Whether she was willing to manipulate a small child and if she could think of any more science experiments.
Notes:
Some of the narration takes a cavalier attitude to consent (specifically, Weevil tells Veronica to get off him, and she does, but implies that if he didn't sound serious she wouldn't). Given the situation, this is not really dangerous to him or anything, but it's bad practice.
Chapter 36: Passionately Curious
Notes:
I'm sorry this is so late - but aside from some general boring life stuff (okay, most of it's boring... I also won a hot wings competition at work), I also had a faintly demoralizing experience which didn't help, and about which there is some housekeeping below. Otherwise, I hope to be back on track after this!
Now, the housekeeping: around the time I was originally planning to finish this chapter, I got a spate of nasty bot comments on this fic and others. I honestly found this funny at first (the robots are out here accusing me of writing Eli/Jade for ATTENTION, how could you not), but by number five it had gotten pretty wearing, even though they were patently generic and clearly not personal - if you want a sense of this, you can see the first two here, along with me mocking them; the others were pretty much of a piece. (Whoever's behind it also likes to pose as real authors by leaving these reviews as a guest but under someone's actual penname - I've deleted them for that reason, but if any more show up, please know the name they're posted under does NOT reflect who's actually leaving them.)
That said... I've really resisted archive-locking my fics, because I want anyone who wants to to be able to find and read them, but between this and the repeated AI scrapings that keep being revealed, I'm starting to think I need to. So if anyone's reading this who doesn't have an account, I would strongly recommend getting on the invitation list, both because there's lots of great archive-locked fic and because I am seriously considering archive-locking my own work, and there's a bit of a wait to make accounts. (On that note, if you don't have an account and this fic suddenly disappears - it's not gone! It's just harder to access. And if you're worried or have questions or can't make an AO3 account for some reason, you can always reach out to me on tumblr.)
Chapter Text
I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
Albert Einstein
Veronica’s period was late.
She realized this by getting it, so her moment of panic was retroactive, which should have been impossible but wasn’t, apparently.
It hadn’t even occurred to her to worry – she was never so regular that she knew exactly what day she was going to start, although at least her immediately post-puberty experiences of skipping a month or two and then having two periods in three weeks were solidly over. But when she realized why the water was tinted red, she had to shut the shower off and sit down on the tile to silently freak out.
Even though it wasn’t like there was anything to worry about – she was careful. They were careful. And this was literally proof that there wasn’t anything to worry before. She’d been late by a several days before, plenty of times.
It hit you differently when you knew you were having sex.
She forced herself back to her feet before her parents could find her sitting there like a soap opera heroine having a breakdown. It was fine – she just had to distract herself until the remnants of weird irrational panic faded. And maybe buy some more tampons.
Fortunately, she thought, having washed her hair and made sure she had at least enough supplies to get through the weekend, she had more than one potential focus to her energy.
Not that she felt quite as urgently compelled to find answers to her questions about Weevil’s family as she had yesterday. With a little more sleep, it had been easier, if galling, to admit that she’d been so thrown by even the potential implication of misconduct in her own family because she hated thinking that Weevil had actual cause to judge her when it was supposed to be the other way around, even if he’d taken it in a completely unexpected direction. She’d spiralled about Lilly for the same reason – if something awful had been going on and she hadn’t known, then that was a failure as a friend. Not that it was an excuse, not that it justified anything Lilly had done, but it had still thrown her, because Lilly was supposed to be the bad friend, the unalloyed villain of the situation.
Because she was twelve, apparently.
She was still interested in Weevil’s baggage, mostly because it was impossible not to be nosy once she’d been inside his house, been personally confronted with all kinds of minor confusions that she couldn’t help wanting answers to no matter how little she was supposed to care – and a little, still, because his reaction hadn’t stopped nagging at her, once she’d remembered all those little bits of the confrontation in November that hadn’t seemed significant until now. She’d never know for sure if he’d drawn kneejerk conclusions from some minor incident with Lilly like he had with her, or if she’d lied to him the same way she’d lied about him, or if Veronica really had missed something important, but it would be easier to put aside if she had evidence suggesting the first option. But it was off the table either way until next week, or until probably Friday, anyway – which meant it was time to think about Principal Moorehead again.
Talking to her mom wasn’t appealing, and her dad would be suspicious if she started asking him about an incident he wasn’t even around for, even if he did know the details. But she’d have to wait until Monday to hunt down an old yearbook –
Or not.
Because she’d been so focussed on avoiding her mom, she’d missed the obvious, which was that her dad probably had old yearbooks, and that would be good enough to confirm whether Moorehead had been at Neptune High back then. If he wasn’t in them it didn’t necessarily rule him out, because her dad was a few years older than her mom… but one thing at a time.
Her dad was in the back yard when she got downstairs, mowing the grass, so she scratched out Tampax, med on the list on the fridge and grabbed herself an apple while she waited for him to finish. Just happening to be in the kitchen might or might not fool him, but she would never convince him this was a momentary whim if she sought him out specifically to get a yearbook, especially if she skipped straight to the staff page instead of forcing him to stick around to listen to her mocking his 80s fashion choices.
It was always interesting to see who she might recognize, too – it wouldn’t be hard to fake it for a few minutes. Sometimes she might not recognize the people, but their names were still familiar, the dad or aunt or cousin of someone she went to school with.
The lawn took longer than her apple did, so she threw the core away and started reorganizing the dishwasher to be full in the back instead of the front. It was gross and she wouldn’t normally have put her hands on other people’s dirty dishes, but she needed an excuse to be hanging around, and she didn’t feel like anything more substantial. It was probably at least half psychological, but she was sure she could feel cramps coming on.
Her dad came inside before she had to resort to anything drastic and obvious, like mopping the floor, but not before she’d finished with the dishwasher, so he found her wiping down the counters.
“They felt tacky,” Veronica said in response to his questioning look, then wetted the cloth and started on the stovetop, because she might as well get things really clean while she was at it.
“My countertops are the height of fashion,” he countered absently, crossing to the sink so he could wash his hands and splash water on his face.
“When have you ever been the height of fashion?” she asked with fond scorn, seeing a perfect opportunity.
“Oh, there was a time,” he assured her, with a firmness of conviction that could only be intended as a joke. “At some point. Allegedly.”
Veronica laughed. Then, seizing her opportunity, she countered, “I demand proof.”
“And if I refuse?” Her dad put one elbow on the counter and raised an eyebrow. Veronica leaned around him to thwack the cloth more or less over the tap.
“Come on, don’t you have some old photos or a yearbook or something? I want to see what original flavour Keith Mars looked like.”
“Like a baby,” he told her drily. “What’s your agenda?”
“Mockery,” Veronica said baldly, smiling sweetly at him. “You wouldn’t deny your only daughter, your favoured girl-child, a moment of entertainment, would you?”
That got her an incredibly dubious look. “Favoured girl-child? No more classic literature for you.”
“Mrs. Murphy will be devastated,” she told him. Although if she’d still had English this semester (Lit or otherwise), it would have been fun to see Mrs. Murphy’s response to being told that she couldn’t complete the assignment because her parents had forbidden her from reading Ethan Frome. Maybe she’d try it out on her teacher next year, for Pride and Prejudice or whatever they ended up being forced to read.
“Hmm.” He took the cloth off the tap and handed it to her. “Laundry. Do not wipe up bacon grease with this and then put it back in the dishwashing zone.”
“Sorry.” Veronica took it dutifully, hesitating for a moment in case he added anything more productive, but he didn’t, so she dragged her feet out into the hall and around to the laundry room to chuck it in the bin for general household dirty laundry, then went back to the kitchen to wash her hands, because it was pretty greasy.
Her dad was stirring a glass of iced tea when she came back. “Seriously,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant. “The yearbook committee put some old ones up in the hall last week, but they were from longer ago. It’s fun looking at a bunch of old haircuts, but it gets old a lot faster when you don’t know anybody. Or at least swing me some old pictures. What did Keith Mars wear to prom?”
“Ooh, baby.” He set his glass on the counter and geared up for a bit. “Powder blue tux, white boutonniere, the smoothest side-part you ever saw, and Janet Murphy in a drop-waist dress with more frills than you’ve ever seen on my arm. She was the most bodacious girl in school.”
“Please never say ‘bodacious’ again,” Veronica interrupted, shuddering. She wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth about the rest of it – making otherwise accurate and mundane details sound ridiculous would be right up his alley, but so would a blatant lie for amusement’s sake. Either way, now she actually did want to see pictures. “I don’t believe you, and I think I need therapy.”
Well, she believed he’d gone to prom with someone named Janet Murphy. That was the only thing she was willing to accept at face value.
“My own flesh and blood,” he said, not putting much effort into the tone of shock and betrayal.
“Don’t we have a bunch of Gran’s photo albums somewhere? Not the baby ones?”
“In a box, in the garage?” he offered with a shrug. “You could try your mom’s craft room, there might be one or two hiding behind some old workout equipment in there. Or you can try and excavate the Mars family records from underneath last year’s summertime accessories and all your Grandma Reynolds’s things. But you’re on your own – I did my big, frustrating home maintenance task for the weekend already; all I’m going into the garage for is my car.”
“Mm… about that – I think the front lawn needs mowing, too.” Veronica ducked his half-hearted attempt to shake her by the shoulder, grinning, and snagged another apple out of the fridge before she headed upstairs.
“Bring them down if you find anything!” her dad called after her, and she made an inarticulate noise of assent in the general direction of the kitchen.
The office wasn’t as likely to yield anything as the garage – but that went for spiders and five-year-old dust bunnies just the same as yearbooks, so it was still a more attractive starting point. Veronica set the apple down on the first reasonably clean spot she found, since it was mostly just an excuse rather than something she actually wanted to eat, and started organizing all the loose office supplies so that she’d have a pen-free flat surface to put boxes on, then got to work, ignoring the ache steadily growing in her abdomen.
*
Veronica didn’t find anything upstairs, which was probably to be expected, since there were only three or four boxes wedged behind the rowing machine that no one ever used. She left the garage for Sunday, since it required higher amounts of Midol and patience than she had available, and on Sunday she considered putting it off until next weekend, but her mom wanted to watch a movie – one of the romcoms she’d apparently rented – and it was easier to say she’d promised her dad she’d reorganize the garage and escape into the task.
Lianne didn’t put up a fight. She even moved her car onto the street, so it would be easier for Veronica to move things around. It was considerate, so Veronica forced herself to smile at the jokes about her dad outsourcing his chores to her. She even made one back, about how soon she’d be catching shoplifters for him. It felt familiar, but at the same time it felt awkward and wrong.
The awkwardness and wrongness felt familiar too.
Dragging boxes around was cathartic for about three and a half boxes. It might have been more, but the second box got gross clumpy dust all over her, which put a serious dent in the emotional benefit of moving it around. It was full of broken sprinklers, which was not conducive to uncovering the sordid past of lecherous principals. Neither were the two of semi-obsolete summer supplies – chalk and old beach balls and other things that were only broken out ironically these days.
The fourth box disgorged the half-expected spider, and Veronica dropped the whole thing hastily on top of her stack before it could climb over the edge and get onto her. So much for appreciating the task.
But it was something to do, and she was at least a little interested in getting a chance to look through her grandma’s old photo albums even aside from her purpose in finding the yearbook for less frivolous reasons, and she’d already stuck a bunch of boxes in the empty space where her mom’s car would usually be, so she kept on going – more cautiously, with all but the heaviest boxes held out from her body so they weren’t touching her chest.
Most of the other boxes were fine, more or less, although one had honest-to-god spider architecture in it, more a reinforced web-dome covering a whole corner of the box than a traditional spiderweb. That one she dumped outside on the lawn, on its side, before beating a hasty retreat. Nobody needed any of the stuff in it anyway.
She did find some photo albums, on the highest shelf at the back, rather than the ones along the side, which for whatever reason were more dusty but less prone to be inhabited. Most of them were childhood and family photos from when her dad was little, which as more or less expected straddled the line between funny and disconcerting when she flipped through them, ending up somewhere in the vicinity of interesting. She appropriated that box – this might be mostly a pretext, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t fold in some legitimate activity of a dutiful daughter, and scan them as well as looking desultorily through them. Her dad might like to have more photos of his parents available without having to dig through the whole garage.
That seemed like the sum total of useful finds, though – at least of the stuff she’d already gone through – so Veronica moved a couple boxes in the back so it would be easy to tell what she’d already looked at and what she hadn’t. Not that she was going to scrub through every single box when she could just talk to the yearbook committee, but there might be more photo albums, or some of Grandma Reynolds’s old things they should probably sort through. And then, while she was absently shifting some old VHSes, which might be home movies or mislabelled exercise tapes, she caught sight of the hacky old version of Neptune High’s mascot, back when it had been an actual cartoon pirate, instead of the objectively less wince-worthy parrot.
What had happened with that stolen mascot situation, she wondered briefly.
But that wasn’t important right now, and it wasn’t her problem anyway. Veronica jammed the VHSes up with one hand and tugged at the yearbook until the box stopped fighting her. She could look through it later, check the other ones underneath it for anything interesting, but right now she just wanted to know one thing.
She flipped to the faculty page, and there it was, right at the top: Vice Principal – Alan Moorehead.
*
Veronica wasn’t quite sure what to do with the information, although it was a foregone conclusion that she had to do something. Probably she’d need to figure out who Mary was before she could take any outright action, but she had the yearbooks to help with that, and cross-referencing with some of her moms’ would help, since her parents had only overlapped their high school stints by one year.
It still felt like a victory, like she’d subverted parental authority in a way that was worthwhile, less juvenile and more justified than sneaking around to have sex with a guy they wouldn’t approve of – and in a way that proved the fallibility of adults, the artificiality of following the rules. Probably if she interrogated the feeling it boiled down to ‘it doesn’t matter that I got caught having sex at school because the principal is a creep’ but irrational or not, it made her feel better about the spiders and the dust and the ache in her abdomen, so she didn’t waste time on analysis.
She did leave the photo albums on the table for everyone to look at later, maybe even together, as if anything was fine – even specifically sought out her mom to tell her she was finished and Lianne could move her car back if she wanted, which made her mom perk up in a way that turned to curdling guilt in Veronica’s stomach – but she kept the yearbooks to herself.
There were several freshman Marys during her dad’s senior year, none of them separated out in a way that might have indicated a special needs program. Which in some ways was a relief, because sorting through the details of how that would have worked twenty years ago would probably have been depressing. It didn’t help her narrow it down, though, and that was even assuming the other girl had been in the same grade as Lianne.
She made a note of them anyway, Parker and Demmings and Mooney, etc., so she could check to see if any of them mysteriously vanished before graduation, forever or just for a year, so that if anything else jumped out at her about the regarding the name Demmings or Sillitoe she’d be able to recognize it as the last name of one of her possible victims.
One of Moorehead’s possible victims. Ugh. Veronica shuddered – having nearly-solid proof in front of her that he was the guy her mom had been talking about made the whole thing feel so much more gross. Especially since he’d already been the vice principal; she’d thought it had just been a teacher offering to help, maybe with his own subject even if the girl hadn’t been in his class. But a vice principal – who probably knew about her struggles because it was his job to intervene when kids might fail out, et cetera…
Gross, gross, gross.
And then what? she asked herself, the question she’d been diligently avoiding for a while. What kind of consequences came after nearly twenty years? Even if she found proof, and found a way to make it public without screwing over the girl he’d had the affair with, what did she think was going to happen?
Something, Veronica thought. Something had to happen, because right now – for a long time – the answer had been nothing, and that was unacceptable. Her mom was right, one hundred percent right, about that. Maybe she could ask the woman what she wanted, if she managed to track her down; maybe she could tailor her plan of action to Moorehead’s reaction. Maybe she could just blackmail him with the information, since that was apparently the kind of thing she did now – at least it would make his life miserable.
First she had to find Mary, though, and that meant tracking down more yearbooks at school tomorrow. She could do it at lunch, probably.
It was a plan that required revising, because before she could try to track down the appropriate classroom, yearbook committee representative, or overly involved staff member, she passed Meg’s locker, where the other girl was removing a very cake-shaped container from a refrigerated bag.
Veronica stopped in her tracks, all thoughts of yearbooks and delayed justice vanishing. “Tell me you didn’t bake Weevil a cake.”
Meg blinked in surprise, turning. “Oh! No. Um…” She pulled a rueful face, caught out. “This is for you.”
Veronica was more touched by that than she wanted to admit. She covered the squishiness in her chest with something more exaggerated. “You baked a slut cake? For me?”
Meg laughed when she pressed an exaggerated hand to her heart. “Well… baked is probably an overstatement. It’s from mix. But it came out pretty good, I think!” She shut her locker and turned toward the exits. Veronica fell in step, mentally relegating her errand to after school or lunch tomorrow.
“What are you going to do now that the play is over?” she asked. “Just take your rehearsal time to the mall? Or the beach, since it’s almost warm enough?”
Her friend smiled. “Well, I still have cheer. Although… it’s been pretty grim lately. Pan High creamed us last game.”
“Wait, again?” Veronica had never been as engrossed by the school teams’ activities as some people were, but pep squad had always provided a general awareness of what was going on. “I heard we had a good team this year!”
“Wallace Fennel sat out because whoever stole Polly said they’d kill her if he played.” Meg’s face fell for a moment. “But maybe they’ll give her back now? I haven’t heard anything yet, though.”
“That’s sick. Who threatens a parrot?”
“Pan High, I guess.” Her friend made a visible effort to brighten. “But he’ll be playing in the next game, so I’m sure we’ll win; he’s really good.”
“I’ll cross my fingers for you,” Veronica said as they slipped through the doors behind a pair of sophomores. “It must be depressing to cheer when you’re getting massacred.”
“It’s a skillset,” Meg admitted, taking possession of the first unoccupied table they came to and setting the cake down.
She didn’t open it right away, which seemed only fair; Jasmine at least deserved a piece of the cake and she tended to show up on Mondays even if her presence was unpredictable the rest of the week.
“How long have you been planning this?” Veronica asked, thinking of Meg asking her to put off her pending joke about Weevil.
The other girl shrugged. “A little while. I sort of figured you weren’t going to do anything for yourself, so…”
Veronica had to laugh. “You really are too good for any of us.”
Meg shook her head. “No – you’re such a good friend, and Jasmine is really sweet, actually –”
“I meant any of us at this school.”
The dryness of her tone had them both laughing when Jasmine appeared, sliding into a seat at the other side of the table with an enthusiastic, “Ooh, cake!”
“Don’t act so surprised,” Veronica told her, almost at the same time that Meg warned, “I made it, not Veronica, so don’t get high expectations.”
“It’s still cake, isn’t it?” Jasmine asked, so brightly that Veronica couldn’t help laughing.
Meg shrugged. She lifted the lid of the container to reveal an angel food cake. “I’d say I made this because Veronica is like… the angel that started this –”
Veronica made an inarticulate noise of protest.
“–but it was just the kind of mix we had in the house.” She paused so they could snicker. “I couldn’t do anything fancy on top, but, um…” Was she blushing? “There’s a hole in it… and I made the icing pink, so…”
Jasmine, catching on a scant half-second before Veronica, hooted. Veronica rubbed her hands over her face, embarrassed and amused and wondering, against her will, what kind of angle you’d have to be looking at a vulva from before it looked like the top of an angel food cake.
“Definitely the sluttiest cake,” she managed to say, choking back helpless laughter until her voice sounded strange, which just made Jasmine laugh harder. “Good job. Let’s, um…” She’d been about to make a half-serious joke about how they needed to get rid of it so she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore, but there was no avoiding the inevitable. “Eat it.”
Jasmine cackled so hard she nearly choked, while Meg shot Veronica a rueful, half-apologetic smile. “Here you go.” She slid it over, then hesitated. “Okay, wait.”
“I don’t think I can take anything more,” Veronica said, but Meg just smiled. She produced a container of toothpicks which looked like it was lined with paper, and fished out the paper and one toothpick, which she used to create a tiny version of the slut flag – only this one had an exclamation point. She stabbed the toothpick into the cake.
“Now it’s perfect.”
It was cute, which Veronica chose to focus on because the other option was to make a joke that would turn the conversation into a riff on her private parts being stabbed with toothpicks. “I don’t know if I should ban you from all baking-related activities or put you on the shortlist for planning my bachelorette party.”
“I thought about using the real one, but I couldn’t figure out how to sanitize the end without getting soap in the cake or something,” Meg said, ignoring the fact that she was still slightly pink. Veronica wouldn’t have been surprised if they both were.
“I left it in my locker anyway. I was going to go find some yearbooks, but…” She bit her lip, staring at the cake, which looked pinker every time she looked at it. “This is better?”
Jasmine snorted so loudly that it sounded painful, and they both turned to look at her. “What? This is the best thing that’s happened to me in ages.” She snickered to herself. “I wonder who else has said that about –”
“Okay!” Veronica interrupted loudly, trying to hide her amusement so it wouldn’t be taken as encouragement. “Angel food! Everyone likes angel food. Let’s go.”
”Bet it’ll taste good,” Jasmine added, grinning, and Meg put her face in her hands.
“I regret this,” she said, and Veronica couldn’t help grinning too.
It did taste good, if you aggressively ignored the symbolism. Both the cake and the icing were pretty standard, but who didn’t like angel food? Aside from Weevil, who hadn’t put in an appearance – which was definitely for the best, Veronica reflected as she dug into her second piece. He would have had a field day. No American Pie reference she could make would create a comparable amount of embarrassment to him as she would have had to suffer through if he was here.
Jasmine cleared her throat, smiling in a way that made Veronica suspect she had dodged the bullet as thoroughly as she’d just been thinking. “So… can I tell Cervando I ate your pussy?” she asked, seemingly in earnest.
Veronica felt somewhat staggered, but also very conscious of the fact that she did not want to be caught in their drama. “Please don’t do that,” she said, voice squeaking. Meg giggled helplessly.
Jasmine took another bite of cake, sucking on her fork suggestively as she pulled it out of her mouth, and shot her a wicked grin. “Can I tell Weevil –”
“Don’t call it that,” Veronica said hastily, before she had to hear the word pussy again.
“Well, can I?”
She examined the remains of her second piece for a moment. It would be funny. “You know what, knock yourself out.”
This was apparently too scandalous for Meg. “Veronica!”
“What? It’s your fault she can even say that.” Veronica stabbed a last bite of angel food, regarded it philosophically, then shrugged and popped it in her mouth. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate this,” she added once she could talk without being rude. “But you’re enforcing a pretty high price for it.”
Meg bit her lip, shrugging in rueful acknowledgement. “I was just trying to be… you know, on theme.”
“Do I have to bring a cake now?” Jasmine wanted to know. “I don’t cook.”
“You can if you want,” Veronica said. “But we’re not having any more official cakes unless we get a new member.”
“Weevil doesn’t count?”
“No, he doesn’t, and you’re not allowed to make him one.”
Jasmine snorted. “Like that would go well. Cervando would lose it.”
Meg winced. “Are you guys… fighting, or…?”
“You got into it pretty good last week,” Veronica observed.
“He’s just being a tool.” Jasmine rolled her eyes. “He’s so fifteen, you know? I like him, but I’m kind of over it. Like, I’m never going to have not banged one of his friends, you get me?” She paused and thought for a moment. “Okay… I think it’s like, two of his friends. But he doesn’t know about Javi, and that was just at a party last year. Or something. I don’t know, I forgot. The point is, what’s to freak out over? I never dated them, or any of the other guys I can tell he’s working himself up about, and they didn’t, like, want to, anyway. I didn’t either! I wouldn’t tie myself down for just anybody, you know? But I’m not going to act all sorry and pretend to be a nun. I had fun with Weevil – you know,” she interrupted herself, nodding at Veronica, who blinked in surprise but couldn’t argue, even though she felt a little weird. “And I liked being a free agent. Guys are all about that stuff – you’d think he’d get it, or at least get over it.”
“Boys can’t even handle another guy being into you,” Meg said, more bitterly than Veronica had expected. “Some guy hits on you, then somehow that means you’re into him too, and then that somehow means you cheated, and then you’re at the slut table.” She encompassed it with a smooth wave, then forced a smile, maybe seeing that Veronica, at least, was taken aback. “At least we have cake.”
“We do have cake,” Veronica said, snagging the container and appropriating it, which made the others laugh. She couldn’t have another piece without making herself feel sick later, but tradition so far implied she got to take the leftovers home. “And all complaining aside, I think Meg did an excellent job sluttifying this one without doing anything her parents would object to.”
Meg shuddered. “Oh my gosh, can you imagine?” She paused. “Actually, let’s not imagine.”
Jasmine laughed and Veronica snorted, and she couldn’t help but think that this might be weird in about seven different ways, but it was pretty okay, too.
*
He was not having a great day. First he got kept back at lunch because Mr. Kramer wanted to talk about his latest essay – did the guy not get that as far as Weevil was concerned, a C+ was good? He didn’t want an opportunity to resubmit the assignment or a lecture about how his basic ideas were good, he wanted to pass – and now he was stuck doing his freaking Creative Writing homework until he heard back, because they needed to know Maxi wasn’t going to screw them.
The assignment was ‘write about the future’, which inherently pissed Weevil off. Still, if Ms. Mills had been less insufferably earnest, maybe he would have knocked out some shitty one-page story about aliens and hovercars. If he’d had a teacher with an actual sense of humour, he would have written something about school getting out for the day, and risked a D.
But they didn’t make teachers with a sense of humour at Neptune High, and nothing gave Ms. Mills a bigger thrill than having an excuse to put a hand on his arm and widen her eyes and say, “Eli, are you okay? Really?”
She was an easy grader, though, and he needed the B – and they wouldn’t let him take Autoshop again.
I’m going to a place where the tough guys go, he wrote, and come out even tougher. They’ll say I’m being punished – they’ll say I’m being reformed. But some day I’ll return.
It was a larger chunk of lyrics than he’d usually use, but she’d never caught him before. It had started as a way to pretend he wasn’t embarrassed, sophomore year, after that fucking loser had ratted on him, but she’d failed to catch so many by now, even after that, that at this point it was just funny. He might run out of Social Distortion lyrics this year, but he had more left than he would have if he hadn’t spent half of last year cribbing from Another State of Mind and So Far Away to write poems he pretended weren’t about Lilly.
It Coulda Been Me, too, which reminded him that he could use pieces of that one for this while he was at it. He scratched out a few sentences of meaningless implication to bridge the sections, never actually saying the word prison, then finished the freewrite with You know these things happen, that’s just the way it’s supposed to be.
Wait. Yeah. One last paragraph, half a line. And I can’t – no. But I can’t help but wonder…
He marked the last trailing dot with a flourish. Teachers ate that shit up.
Too bad he hadn’t managed to use that line about being colder than a pimp’s heart, but he had a whole semester of Creative Writing, so he’d find another opportunity to shock her with that.
Normally he might have been tempted to heave his homework out on the table, as long as the kids weren’t being too much of a menace – proof he was doing it. He didn’t really want his grandma seeing this one, though, even if it was a big gotcha and he had every intention of playing innocent when Ms. Mills asked why he was so sure he was going to prison, and pretending it was about the army or something to make her squirm a little.
There was a yelp from the living room, and he shoved himself up from the table, ready to yell at whoever needed it – but it was just Alex pinching his own finger trying to move the side table. Weevil told him to put it back and headed upstairs.
He dumped his school stuff on the table and slouched onto the bed, digging his phone out of his pocket. Felix still hadn’t responded to his last text about tonight. He’d been AWOL all weekend, too, except for Saturday – and he hadn’t done more than smirk and shrug when Javi’d asked what he’d been up to. Hector was convinced he’d been off with some girl, but Weevil didn’t buy it. Not only did he have doubts about Felix’s ability to pull off something like that when his mom always needed someone to keep an eye on Jenifer, but if he really had managed to cue up some kind of weekend of sin, Felix would never have shut up about it. He’d probably forgotten to keep his phone charged and just wanted them to think he’d been with a girl.
It was still fucking annoying. Especially since he couldn’t give the go-ahead on tomorrow’s plans without knowing if Felix had talked to Maxi yet, and there was no point in laying the groundwork for something that wasn’t happening.
He fired off a desultory order to answer yr gd texts, then set his phone down. Then he picked it back up, because he had other options. He could always cancel if Maxi came through after all.
wyd tmrw?
The response came surprisingly quickly. Classy. He snorted. It was tempting to follow up with some fake fancy language, maybe some ostentatious capitals and punctuation, but she hadn’t actually answered yet and he didn’t want to get derailed.
Maybe she was expecting a reply, though, because it took long enough before her next text that he was thinking of picking up a book.
Closed for business.
I mean it this time.
It took the second text for him to stop feeling kind of mad about the first one. Not that it was a big deal for her to tell him to get lost, but he expected either an outright fuck you, which he could roll with, or some kind of context.
But no – she was just being fucking weird about her period again. It was extra stupid, because being able to handle more complicated logistics was literally the tradeoff for the extra effort it took to plan meeting up at his place. As long as they were here, all he had to do was put a towel down.
At first he just meant to roll his eyes in response, but then he realized he didn’t know how to make that kind of face on his phone, so he settled for the obvious.
relax. bring a towel
The only response he got was an angry face, which made him laugh – although he checked it, without really being sure why. It wasn’t like there was anyone around to ask awkward questions.
The lack of surety on two different fronts made him antsy. Yeah – he was getting out of there. Danny was at a friend’s or something, which meant Alex would be less psycho, but he waited until the last minute to say anything, just in case.
“You’re in charge,” he called into the living room before he grabbed his boots. “Be nice to Ariana. No fucking with the oven.”
Alex yelled something back, but Weevil was out of the door too fast to understand it, which meant it wasn’t his fault if it was ‘no way’ or something. He couldn’t be blamed for what he didn’t really hear.
It was warming up a little, but not to the point yet where he was glad of the wind even on the highway instead of being glad his jacket warded off the worst of it. Pushing the speed limit until he got there made it chillier, but once he was on the PCH, he didn’t care.
It was impossible to feel restless when it was just you and the road, not when you weren’t fenced off from it in a car, where you could still get into your head. Even better when you didn’t have anywhere to go, so you could focus on the pavement in front of you and the wind against your helmet and the bike, doing what you wanted, going where you wanted, purring when you handled it right.
And every asshole with a sports car or a minivan who thought they didn’t have to keep the speed limit on corners, but nothing was perfect. Weevil kept back enough of his attention to look out; he hadn’t been pancaked yet.
It wasn’t until he was heading uphill, his view of the beach vanishing behind increasingly taller trees, that he realized where he was: this was the old handoff spot, after Gus had branched out and before he’d paid the price for it – also known as the location of what should have been his last hookup with Veronica Mars.
Even though he was annoyed with himself, he pulled in anyway, got off and leaned against his bike for a minute, looking at the trees. Someone had some by and cleared out that overhanging branch, although he wasn’t sure whose job that would be.
He checked his texts, since it seemed like an appropriate time and place to see if she’d had a change of heart. Nothing from Veronica, but Felix had finally texted him back – and with something useful. Perfect. Now they could get this thing off the ground.
He replied, then sent Bootsy and Thumper each a text about where and when to meet. They didn’t want everyone for this, but four people would be about right to lay the groundwork. He’d worry about Veronica Mars later.
*
Digitizing the old Mars family photo albums proved to be more enjoyable than Veronica had expected. Besides the pictures of her dad riding his first bike or posing with an almost unbelievably wholesome golden retriever like a send-up of the American dream, it was actually pleasant to put on a CD and spend forty-five minutes here and there scanning and naming files and sliding photos in and out of their places. Her Grandma Mars had had terrifyingly elegant handwriting, but every now and then she’d flip a picture over and get her grandpa’s scratchy script instead: Pati with the girls or first day at the lake.
He'd liked the kind of fishing you couldn’t really do on the ocean. Veronica knew that, like she knew a collection of other facts about him – lifelong smoker, spent ten years as a security guard before going back to school to become an accountant, used to call her mom Lee which Lianne didn’t mind but which his wife and son both hated – but she’d been so young when he died that her impressions had mostly been grey hair, skinny arms, and the otherwise unfamiliar smell of cigarette smoke. She’d never known that he’d liked to take gimmicky photos with his son where they dressed almost identically, or that he’d spelled her grandma’s name Pati instead of Patty.
Grandma Mars she remembered only a little better, but still enough to trace the resemblance in her younger self to the woman who’d given her fruit roll-ups and let her watch cartoons on the crackliest old TV Veronica had ever seen. It was strange, but also far more interesting than she’d bargained for, and she barely even regretted the lack of pictures of her dad in a powder-blue tux.
She still had some material to tease him with, though: apparently he’d named the dog that appeared in two different albums ‘Beef Jerky’.
“He’s a golden retriever!” she pointed out over dinner on Tuesday. “It might have been funny if you’d had a pit bull back then, or maybe for a Chihuahua…”
“The dog liked beef jerky,” he replied with implacable calm, only to crack a brief smile. “And she wasn’t a he.”
“That’s even worse. I can’t believe you named a girl dog Beef Jerky.”
“I heard what kind of names you thought were appropriate when you were seven,” he told her. “It’s a good thing we waited – poor Backup would have ended up being named Anastasia.”
He wouldn’t – technically, Backup had been a gift for her mom, and her dad had named him; Veronica’s contribution had been petting the new puppy’s ears when Lianne could be persuaded to put him down – but there had definitely been a list of fictional characters she wanted to name a dog after, so she swapped back to her first method of attack. “You could call a pug Beef Jerky. But a golden retriever?”
“You would have preferred ‘Buddy’ or ‘Champ’?” he asked, with no small amount of irony. “I’m sorry to dash your Newberry Award hopes, but mostly she chased sticks and shook water all over your grandma no matter how many precautions we took against it. There were no crucial sled races or bold stands against rampaging Californian wolves.”
Veronica helped herself to more salad, rolling her eyes, but she didn’t reach for any sarcastic observations, even when her mom started telling one of her stories about the dog next door from when she’d been a kid and not allowed to have her own.
She did say, when there was a lull in the conversation, “I could use some more hard drive space, if I’m going to digitize all our family photos. We might have some Reynolds photo albums kicking around too.”
“Delete some things,” her dad suggested, which Veronica met with her most patented teenage eyeroll.
“It might not be urgent, but I have a birthday this summer, I’m just saying. I could use an upgrade.”
“And in the meantime, you’re going to bring up this spontaneous digitization project every chance you get?” he asked, mock-agreeably.
The words formed in Veronica’s head and she reeled them back, because she couldn’t say them as if everything was normal. Then she forced them out anyway, because her end of the deal was to pretend that everything was normal. She tipped her head and fluttered her eyelashes, smiling sweetly. “What can I say? I learned to guilt-trip from the best.”
The sentiment felt bitter in her mouth instead of playful, but she must have hit the right tone, because her dad smiled. Her mom didn’t.
“I know how it is,” he said. “This year it’s old photos. Next year it’ll be ‘but I need a new laptop for college!’. Then the year after that it’ll be ‘this new laptop won’t hold everything I need to double-major in business and law!’.”
“It will not,” Veronica said, voice very dry. “Because I will major in business the day you take up knitting. Besides,” she added, “I wouldn’t want to be breaking in a new laptop in college anyway. You want something you know the ins and outs of when you’re starting something like that.”
“One you’ve had for about a year, is that it?”
Veronica shrugged and smiled innocently, trying not to notice the glaring silence from her mother. It wasn’t unusual for only two of them to be talking – her parents discussing things she wasn’t interested in, she and her dad bantering back and forth, her mom steering the conversation in the direction of ‘girl stuff’ – but that lack of participation felt huge and obvious to her just now.
“I will say,” she commented with her best shot at careless unconcern, “this casserole looks like it tastes a lot better than the ones in some of those pictures. I would’ve been sticking to turkey at Thanksgiving.”
“Are you impugning my mother’s casserole?”
“Me? Impugn Patricia’s casserole? Never. I’m impugning the seventies.”
“It’s a new recipe,” Lianne commented. “But the cookbook was around in the seventies.”
Veronica let her dad take that one, since he could reply sincerely, without having to divert all his energy into a pleasant façade, and faded back out of the conversation, aside from a honest, “Well, it’s good,” inserted into an appropriate pause. She’d had some faint idea that this would all be easier once she wasn’t constantly, incandescently furious, but it wasn’t.
Better make it worth it, she thought with grim humour, and then just barely stopped herself from wincing, since she didn’t want to answer questions about what she was unhappy with, exactly.
Her dad still trusting her was supposed to be what made it worth it, along with not being grounded until she was ninety and skipping what would have been the worst conversation of her life. And it was, from the angle that made the most sense – it was worth lying, it was worth feeling a little guilty and ashamed, it was worth making her mom mad at her.
But from another angle, none of it was worth it at all, if it was this horrible sick strangeness – only refraining from lying and blackmail and illicit activities that would have changed the way her parents looked at her if they even knew half of it wouldn’t have prevented it, because this was just another permutation of something that she had never quite been able to escape, no matter how many times she earnestly believed that this time would be different, or shut her eyes and refused to open them, or found some metaphorical way of chewing off her own leg to get out of the trap.
Veronica finished the last few bites of casserole, polished off her salad, and made an excuse she wasn’t really paying attention to, homework or her photo project or web-surfing that ‘wasn’t going to do itself’, and slipped back upstairs before her parents were finished eating.
She fished her phone off her bedside table and opened her texts back up. The latest exchange, maybe unsurprisingly, was with Weevil – he’d texted her a picture of a towel, which he must have taken at home and then saved to send during fifth period just to be obnoxious, and then followed it up with a single question mark, and she’d replied NO, hoping he wouldn’t guess that she’d nearly laughed when she saw it.
She wasn’t planning on taking him up on it. That would be ridiculous. There was no way she was having sex while she was on her period, even somewhere with a more readily available bathroom. But if she was optimistic…
Friday, she sent, before she could change her mind. There was no immediate response, but he was probably busy. Having dinner, maybe.
It was weird to imagine him sitting down to an actual family dinner, weirder still that she could technically picture it – she’d been in his kitchen, and she knew who roughly eighty percent of the people at the table would be. If she’d ever given it any thought, she would have imagined pizza, a sandwich on a plate eaten over a sink, maybe some microwaved taquitos. But the kitchen had been so neat and organized, and there had been placemats stacked in the middle of the table, so she had to assume they had at least semi-regular dinners. On Sunday, maybe.
Did Weevil go to church? It felt like a weird thought, but he had at least one religious tattoo, and he wore a cross necklace sometimes. On the other hand, he was apparently able to work some kind of shift on a Sunday morning and then meet off the highway to hook up, so maybe not.
That was an unhelpful thing to contemplate, though, since she wasn’t likely to every get an answer – as someone who rarely thought about religion one way or another, acknowledging it to other people always felt vaguely embarrassing, unless they’d brought it up first, and Weevil needed practically no excuse to make fun of her. She reopened her laptop and flipped the current photo album open. It would keep her from checking her phone incessantly, and it was more appealing than her Civics homework, which wasn’t due until Thursday.
*
Every now and then everything lined up just right.
Weevil was hardly going to be Kieran Fitzpatrick’s best man if the guy ever found someone stupid enough to marry him, but right now he was tempted to send the guy a thank-you card. Burning down your ex-girlfriend’s house? Stupid, fucked-up thing to do. Trying and failing to set your ex-girlfriend’s house on fire, setting her car on fire instead, calling in a bomb threat to her work while standing next to the burning car, and trying the flee the cops by heading back to your family’s hangout where forty percent of the patrons had current warrants out… that was Darwin Award territory.
Doing it the same night the PCH was cracking open two different assholes’ unattended multi-car garages to knock some items off Angel’s wishlist? Now that was a good turn. The Sheriff’s Department got to fill up their cells and throw their weight around about the arson like they were the big leagues, and they wouldn’t be interested in a couple irregularities being reported by the regular staff or the security company, if whoever had replaced Maxi’s guys had even noticed anything off, when they were strictly outside patrol. It gave Angel more time to unload everything, it gave any potential eyewitnesses time to get confused over what day and time, exactly, they saw this or that, and it would probably keep Sheriff Mars distracted, which was the most important thing, half the time. No way he wouldn’t be giving the arson his full attention, no matter how much some rich dumbasses whined about how their fancy cars weren’t gathering dust anymore – especially when they were whining long-distance, because one of them was on vacation and the other one was in D.C.
He'd been sitting on the bookmaking money from the basketball game, but now that he had a real payday coming up, he could afford to ease up a little, put it towards something other than insurance for an emergency or the medical bills his grandma never asked for help with.
He was over due for a new tattoo, maybe on his side if he could narrow down the design, but that could wait. It wasn’t hard to come up with the cash for one-off shit like that when he needed to. But maybe he could pay up front for Abuela’s next appointment, if the hospital didn’t decide he needed the cops called on him for having too much money – they wouldn’t be the first – or get someone to come in and help her out with something. Not cleaning, though, because that would offend her and his grandma. Maybe there was a laundry service or something. And the kids always needed something or other, new clothes or shoes, or a dentist or whatever.
But none of the kids would ask where he’d gotten the money, and neither would Abuela. Leticia might, but she was realistic about this stuff, and she’d rather take help from him than Angel, even if it was Angel’s money he was getting paid with. His sister, on the other hand, very much would, and as much as he didn’t want to subsidize Andre, he didn’t want Claudia picking up the slack by herself either, especially when Ofelia might end up being the one feeling the pinch – which meant that the smart thing to do was to take advantage of being able to truthfully say that the way he’d gotten it was only technically illegal.
The good mood that had carried him through most of the day dipped a bit when he thought about how to handle that, though. He debated using Ofelia as a way to broach the subject – but Claudia could get defensive if you asked about school supplies (like he didn’t know how fast kids went through markers) and if she got her back up she’d go straight for ‘I’m not like Mom’ and then they’d fight.
After a moment’s consideration, he decided casual was the way to go.
how r u doin for groceries?
As soon as it was sent, Weevil regretted the text. It felt phrased all wrong once he couldn’t change it, and Claudia was touchy – maybe it would just end up being you think I can’t feed my kid? instead of you think I can’t buy her pencils?
Well, if it did, then it didn’t even matter, he told himself. If she got mad, she would’ve found a way to be mad regardless.
The thought didn’t stop him drumming his fingers on the arm of the couch. He’d rather get it over with, but texts were more of a ‘sometime today or tomorrow’ thing with Claudia – which was hard to fault when she had a job that didn’t let her check her phone and a kid to raise at home. She might not even see that he’d sent anything until after she put Ofelia to bed.
Alex appeared in the doorway, crossing his arms over his chest. “I wanna play football.”
“Fuck off,” Weevil told him, after a split-second pause to make sure Ariana wasn’t in hearing distance. “I’m watching this.”
He wasn’t really – it was just some shock-jock wipeout show, and he could get into those sometimes, but he wasn’t exactly in the mood. But he didn’t want to move, and the idea of sitting around watching Alex play video games was incredibly unappealing.
Besides, that one was a two-player, and it wasn’t worth playing against anyone who wasn’t Chardo.
Alex snarled at him, but with no one to look tough in front of he didn’t bother arguing. Some guy on screen tangled up his skis and bit it in the most painful-looking split possible – Weevil couldn’t help snickering, and Alex huffed and stalked off, like a miniature version of their grandma. Normally Weevil would have called something quippy after him about it, but he decided not to.
Still no response from Claudia. He knew it was a bad idea to send a bunch of texts back-to-back, but he risked one more. if yr sick of takin the bus I can borrow the car 4 u
Then he levered himself off the couch to pick a video game. Football was out and he didn’t feel like GTA, but he could go for a couple rounds of Need For Speed.
Maybe he should spend some of that money on a video game he didn’t have to remember playing with Chardo, something he could tell his cousin to keep his fucking hands off then he got out and came slinking around again. The thought felt more depressing than definitive.
His phone chimed right when he was about to win the first race, and while he managed to pause the game before he crashed and burned entirely, his car did not have a promising angle to it. He shrugged it off when he saw Claudia’s texts, though.
were good
do you want to come over thurs tho
i have to work on sat
sorry
He stared at them for a long moment. Whenever he managed to work himself into a state of indifferent annoyance, she went and did something like this. She probably really was sorry, even though he hadn’t expected her to do anything – his grandma would make dinner and bully his cousins into being nice to him, but he’d already talked her out of making a big deal about it, and he had a shift at Angel’s that day anyway.
What was there to really celebrate, anyway?
yeah me too :P he returned. i can come over whenever. thurs is good. u want me to get ofelia from school?
i have a helmet 4 her, he added, before she could bite his head off.
She said no like he’d expected, but she didn’t flip out. He considered pushing his luck and asking if Andre would be there, but in the end he just said, u no u dont have to do anything right? im good just hangin w u 2.
come after 5, she told him. Weevil wasn’t sure if that was because she wanted time to get rid of Andre, or if she was trying to do some kind of dinner-on-the-table thing, which she seriously didn’t need to, but he didn’t argue or comment, just sent her a thumbs-up and unpaused his game in time to salvage his spinout but still take an ignominious third place.
He’d bring a little cash, he decided. He couldn’t stop her from spending too much to try and cook something nice, if that was what she was planning, but he could offset it. Maybe she wouldn’t take anything from him, considering the circumstances, but it wouldn’t be the first time he slipped a few bills into one of Ofelia’s books or her pencil case – she knew what to do. Claudia might suspect, but she’d never brought up to him any of the times her daughter had mysteriously ‘found’ a few twenties or a fifty. Another time he might have left his niece out of it, tucked the money between a couple of Claudia’s videotapes or in one of kitchen drawers since he knew better than to mess with her purse, but if Andre found it first… yeah, he wasn’t fucking around with that shit.
The game whirred, reminding him that he hadn’t started another race yet. He’d told everyone to lie low for a week or so, which was as good an excuse as anything to sit around playing video games. He hadn’t planned it that way, but his one last hurrah before the real consequences kicked in was over, and apparently he wasn’t going to get that much time to himself this week, between Claudia on Thursday and everything on Saturday and the fact he had an assignation penciled in for Friday, so he should probably enjoy the break while he could.
Chapter 37: Healthy Exercise
Notes:
So I was all set to finish up some time last week and put in a cheery author's note about how my schedule (work and personal) is going to be a bit atypical for the next month or two, and I'll still try and get a chapter up every two weeks but I'm going to be a bit lax about what specific day it goes up... but then I had a rollercoaster of a week (temporarily changed my schedule at work, got great feedback on something, found out my dad died, booked vacation, had a birthday - within five days). So I guess it is what is! (And don't worry, I'm okay, he wasn't part of my life anymore and I was expecting it - it just turns out he died in OCTOBER so it's been... weird. Bet that makes your family nonsense seem either less concerning or less of an outlier!) It doesn't help that one of the scenes in this chapter grew a lot and pushed a bunch of stuff I'd already written into the next one, but that's pretty much my life and I should stop being surprised. I did still manage to drop the sock I was planning on, though, so I hope pianonotforte is happy with it. :)
Brief warning in the endnote as usual, but also be aware that the jokey 2005-era cisnormativity in this chapter is not endorsed by the author.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Sex without love is merely healthy exercise.
Robert A. Heinlein
As Fridays went, Veronica had had worse. Computer Science continued to be a gimme, Foods made up for the obnoxious kitchenmates by way of producing cheddar drop biscuits, and best of all, the fire alarm went off five minutes into Civics, so she’d barely had to listen to Mrs. Galloway drone on at all.
What’s more, her gamble had paid off, and she didn’t have to awkwardly cancel her after-school plans, which was good, because Weevil was already way too comfortable mocking her about that. She was half-tempted to ask Jasmine if they’d ever –
Well, that was going too far, but it was still hard to believe he didn’t see it as an obstacle. Jasmine hadn’t sat with them at lunch aside from Monday and Tuesday, so at least she hadn’t blurted out the question in a moment of low impulse control. Knowing Jasmine, she would have just laughed, but even if it didn’t come with a helping of judgement, Veronica didn’t want to spend an entire lunch period talking about – well, periods. She groaned internally at the almost-pun.
She passed Meg on her way out, headed to cheer practice, and gave her one of the biscuits. “In case you need it,” she said. “Or even if you don’t. I wouldn’t share my cheesy biscuits with just anyone, you know.”
Meg laughed and took it. “They must miss you on pep squad, Veronica.”
“I took all the pep with me when I left!” she called as she backed down the hall facing Meg, dialing her smile up to ‘manic’ for effect before she turned around to avoid running into anyone.
She could’ve run into as many people as she wanted, it turned out, because someone’s car had broken down exactly in the exit of the parking lot, so she was stuck between Caz Truman and a girl who might have been in her Psych class driving a mint-green Volkswagen, not even able to repark and do her assigned reading for Civics while she waited for the traffic jam to clear. She swapped CDs as the wait dragged on, pulling out Paula Cole in favour of a mix of tracks she’d burned, then flipped around trying to find one that didn’t make her antsier.
Her success was limited, but finally the injured Honda managed to limp out of the way so that the rest of them could escape the parking lot, but she was still surrounded by the resulting artificial profusion of her classmates until she turned left off of Sheffield Way.
Maybe unsurprisingly, motorcycles didn’t seem to be subject to the same difficulties. Her guess was that Weevil must have been home for ten or fifteen minutes by the time she got to his place, because when she let herself in she was greeted by the two younger boys staring at the door. She hoped they weren’t trying to kill each other again.
“Who are you?” Danny asked. Veronica opted not to answer.
“ELI!” Alex bellowed, without taking his eyes off Veronica. “Your girlfriend’s here!”
That prompted sounds of scraping and huffing from behind them, but it wasn’t Weevil. “She’s not his girlfriend,” Ariana said, with all the self-righteous snottiness of a younger kid who knows better than the older ones. “She’s his math teacher.”
“Tutor,” Veronica corrected hastily, lest she be tarred with the same brush as Mr. Rooks and Principal Moorehead. “I’m his math tutor. We go to school together.”
Ariana didn’t seem to care about the correction. “Can we do science?”
Oh, geez. “Uh… only if you have the right supplies.” Veronica tried to think of something that would work as a good excuse – it seemed mean to say they needed Bunsen burners or something. But not only was this not her plan, but she didn’t know any other science experiments, at least not ones for little kids. Her dubiously ethical information-gathering plans hadn’t gotten to the point of looking anything up.
Then it hit her, as Ariana demanded, “What equipment?”
“Uh, for the next trick we need baking soda and vinegar–“ they might have those, “–and a lot of sand.”
“I’ll look!” Ariana darted off to the kitchen and Veronica called after her, “When you get them we can do it next time,” even though she knew she might be writing a cheque she’d have to cash.
Weevil still hadn’t made an appearance, but she was going to have to get past Alex and Danny somehow.
Stepping forward had the required effect, at least in part. Danny gave back into the living room, giving Veronica room to slip past Alex. She wasn’t home free, though; the older boy turned and followed her into the living room, and even through it, to the foot of the stairs. Veronica considered saying something to him, but she didn’t know what. What did he think she was going to do, break his easel or something?
Ariana appeared in the back hallway before she had to make a real decision. “We only have vinegar,” she said, crestfallen.
“Next time!” Veronica told her cheerfully. “If you can get the rest of it.” She would probably have to live up to the promise, but maybe she could use it to get some of the details she’d been wondering about.
Alex followed her up the stairs, lagging a few steps behind, but Ariana at least stayed put. It was still a relief to escape into Weevil’s room and shut the door on his cousin, even if he was probably going to his own room rather than snooping.
Weevil was sprawled on his bed, feet at the headboard, reading what looked like a thriller. He barely glanced up. “You’re late.”
“I’m not late. I said Friday, it’s Friday – on time.” She considered mentioning the traffic jam at school or the one his cousins had caused in the hall, but the opportunity for mindless snark was too tempting. “Are you reading?”
He shot her a desultory glare. “You think I can’t read?”
“I don’t know, are there pictures?” She took a couple steps closer to the bed, pretending to try and peer over the top of his book.
“Yeah,” he agreed, falsely cheerful. “They love selling books full of pictures of guys blowing up.”
“Have a lot of people blown up yet?” Veronica asked dubiously; it didn’t look like he was very far into the book.
“They better,” he said, going back to it like she wasn’t there specifically to have sex with him. “I’m still pissed about that John Grisham guy for promising me a bunch of jurors getting bumped off one at a time and making me read a bunch of cultural pontificating and a five-page description of cornbread instead.”
Veronica was only vaguely aware of John Grisham as the guy who wrote famous legal thrillers, but she felt faintly affronted. Wasn’t his stuff supposed to be the classy genre fiction that everyone liked? You didn’t complain about lack of explosions in those – they might be dad books, but they were good dad books.
But she’d never actually read one, and saying any of that out loud would have made her sound both shallow and ridiculous, so she decided to make a play for his attention instead and took off her shirt.
It wasn’t as focus-grabbing as it could have been – she was wearing another one underneath because the top one was too light to be a sweater but too deeply cut to be worn alone, and she had to hold the second shirt in place so it wouldn’t ride up and make her look stupid – but it was still clothing removal.
He pointedly ignored her, despite the fact that the movement at least should have caught his eyes, and turned a page. Veronica considered how to break his concentration without resorting to demeaning herself by doing a striptease for his attention.
She folded her shirt and set it neatly on the chair, then peeled off her actual top and did the same before wandering over to his bookshelf, as if she stood around in boys’ bedrooms in her bra all the time.
“What is this?” she asked, sounding as skeptical as she could manage as she tipped a slim volume back by the top corner. “Is this from middle school?”
Most of the books on the shelf were clearly for adults, but she wasn’t going to pass up a chance to mock him, even if he had just casually thrown the word pontificating into a sentence, correctly.
Sure enough, he looked up, annoyed. “Yeah, I ripped off the library in seventh grade. Send me to jail.”
She’d been trying to insult his reading level, but this worked. “Almost as stupid a reason for going to jail as stealing luggage from the mall.”
Weevil put the book down hard enough that it made a flopping noise, although he left his finger in it. “What the fuck.”
Veronica merely raised her eyebrows at him, as if her intent hadn’t been deliberate provocation. After a moment, his lips thinned. “You gotta stop talking to your dad about me.”
She laughed in surprise, even though it was a reasonable assumption for him to make. “You think I only have one source? I know all kinds of things about you.”
He seemed to be considering whether to be mad for real, but the eventual narrowing of his eyes seemed more like he was playing ball than getting pissed off. “Oh, yeah? Like what?”
Veronica gave it a moment’s thought. She didn’t want to make it obvious that most of her more surprising information came from a stolen criminal record file, and she also didn’t want to risk making incorrect assumptions – that would be hard to recover from.
“You have a niece who’s five,” she said, pausing so that she could arrange everything most effectively. Weevil didn’t look surprised, exactly, but she definitely had his attention. “You had gym second semester last year. You and your friends got a bunch of time in juvie for roughing up a college student on East Cordoba a couple summers back.”
“Piece of shit rich kid trying to buy crank,” Weevil protested, but he seemed somewhat taken aback and not entirely able to hide it. “He came looking for trouble.”
“So you threw it in for free?” Veronica responded, her voice sugary. “How sweet.”
“I don’t sell that shit,” he said sharply, and she thought that might be the one thing he was actually offended by. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”
“I have my ways,” she told him archly, ignoring the undercurrents. She hadn’t actually meant to imply he was dealing hard drugs – the quip had gotten away from her – but she didn’t imagine he’d react well to learning Lilly had used him as an excuse to change her schedule either, and the rest was mostly from his arrest record (with a little help from Ariana). She’d just phrased the first item to leave out the crime part.
“Your ways are getting in the way of me finishing this chapter,” he said with mild irritation, although neither that nor whatever surprise or annoyance he still felt kept him from glancing over her shoulders and stomach with appreciation.
Veronica shrugged. She chose a random non-middle-school book from the shelf and moved to sit down on the edge of the chair, feigning unconcern while trying not to plant herself right on top of her shirts. Opening the book with one hand, she started peeling her socks off with the other, ignoring him. Or pretending to, anyway. The book she’d grabbed turned out to be The Da Vinci Code, which raised several questions and which she wasn’t willing to devote any of her actual attention to.
To her faint chagrin, Weevil actually did open his book again, but he seemed to be having trouble concentrating – maybe because, unlike her, he was actually trying to read it. Which was incongruous, but somehow vaguely endearing because of it – in the same way as a cute puppy carrying a really big stick, or a kid in formalwear.
For her part, all she had to do was pretend to read, which was a lot easier, and he broke first, snorting with disgust and tossing the book onto the floor next to the bed as he sat up. “What are you doing?”
Veronica put on her most confused face in response to his annoyed tone. “I’m reading this, what do you think I’m doing?”
“No you’re not,” he said. “That’s trash.”
She happened to agree with him on that. “It’s your book.”
“Yeah, and?”
The sheer inexplicable audacity of this response made Veronica stumble. “It – uh –” Now he was smirking at her. “Presumably you spent actual money on it–”
“You know what they say when you presume,” Weevil observed smugly. Ugh. Of course he’d stolen it or something. That still left a big flashing Why??, but maybe he hadn’t realized how dumb it was until he’d tried to read it.
“It makes a president of you and me?” Veronica suggested brightly, and he snorted out a surprised laugh before trying belatedly to school his face. “Seriously, are you going to keep pretending to ignore me, or…?”
“Excuse me for wanting to finish the chapter,” he said, with such an off-handed eyeroll that she thought he actually meant it. Huh. That was pleasantly surprising, although it shouldn’t have been either of those things, since she’d seen multiple books next to his bed before, and there was no particular reason to be pleased that he was actually a bit of a reader.
It wasn’t really relevant, though, so Veronica expedited things by reaching behind her and undoing her bra. Weevil laughed.
“How would you like it if I laughed when you took your clothes off?”
“That doesn’t happen to me,” he said, supremely arrogant. Veronica rolled her eyes, which he didn’t take any particular note of. “Come here.”
“I get it now,” she told him, standing up but staying just out of reach. “You’re lazy.”
She’d been expecting a reaction, if not one quite so quick or extreme, so she was prepared enough to jump back when he lunged at her, but not to actually get quite out of his reach – one of his hands got a solid hold on her side, the other only skimmed over skin, and she managed to bruise her heel on the chair in the process. The end result was that he yanked her toward him, but unevenly; by the time he got a better grip on her, her side was already pressed into his chest.
Veronica thought she’d managed not to yelp.
“Oh, well done,” she said. “Really amazing. Now we both look stupid.” She elbowed him in the stomach, but not very hard – which was good, because he was laughing, and the movement made it land with slightly more force than intended. “Take off your tank top. That’s the only way to salvage this.”
“It’s not a tank top,” he said, hitting a less vehement and more long-suffering tone than the last time they’d had that discussion. More importantly, he took half a step back and stripped his shirt off. Veronica dutifully ogled him.
He let her, but when he decided it had been long enough he raised his eyebrows at her. Veronica raised hers back, pointedly.
“You could at least give me a compliment,” he said primly.
“Your room’s cleaner than I expected,” she told him.
Weevil blinked at her. “What? Who cares?”
That merited her best patronizing smile. “It’s a compliment.”
He groaned. “Like hell. ‘Nice tits’ is a compliment.” He made a point of staring at hers.
Veronica refused to let him see how much she liked that. “Nice tits,” she deadpanned, willing herself not to turn red. To really sell it, she reached out and patted his chest. “Are you going to put out, or do I have to say you have pretty eyes, too?”
He made a noise in his throat that she suspected was an effort not to laugh, then reached out and yanked her toward him, more successfully this time. She’d only felt mildly chilly, sitting around with no shirt on, but it was enough to make full contact with his bare chest shockingly warm.
“I’m not that kind of girl,” he said.
Pressing both hands against his chest, splayed wide to touch as much skin as possible, was definitely something she would have done anyway, but he didn’t need to know that. “Hmm… you feel like that kind of girl.”
This time he did laugh. He also reached in between them to start undoing her jeans, which Veronica could approve. It was more than time to get down to business. She returned the favour, but only with one hand, because she wasn’t quite willing to stop touching his chest.
She wasn’t as fast as him, of course, but she had a better angle once she got his zipper down, and it was hard not be smug at the sharp in-drawn breath when she got her hand around his dick, even through his underwear.
“On the other hand, this complicates matters,” she suggested, trying to keep a straight face, and he groaned.
“Stop being such a fucking comedian.”
“Pretty hard to be a celibate comedian at the moment.” It wasn’t her best effort, but she was distracted. In Veronica’s opinion it wasn’t so bad he needed to reach down and disentangle them, or roll his eyes nearly so hard, but since he followed it up by hoisting her up and backing her into the door, she didn’t bother making a complaint.
She half-laughed instead, grabbing his shoulders, but she still couldn’t help feeling slightly thwarted. She pinched him between the neck and shoulder, not very hard. “How come you get to drive?”
“You said I was lazy,” he pointed out, leaning his full weight on her as retaliation. It wasn’t painful, but it did make it harder to breathe. Veronica tried not to let on.
“The condoms are over there,” she said, puffing a bit harder than she liked as she jerked her head in the general direction of his bedside table.
He paused, visibly recalculating, then groaned when he apparently realized he didn’t have any on his person, dropping his forehead dramatically against the door behind her. His ear brushed against her cheek.
“Get off me,” Veronica said, her lungs protesting. Other than that she honestly didn’t mind being squished, but she was highly conscious that the situation wasn’t going to go anywhere unless they moved. “You weight three hundred pounds.”
He leaned on her a little more, making her grunt. “You watch it. I’ll take you to my uncle’s place and show you what three hundred pounds actually is.”
Veronica blinked as he pulled back and let her slide unceremoniously to the floor. “I’m not actually sure what you’re threatening me with.” The one or two possibilities she could make out were pretty nasty, but it seemed only fair to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially since he sounded more exasperated than upset.
“I’m saying I’m going to drop disarticulated cars on you and leave you there,” he said. “I weigh half that, you just think everyone who’s not itsy-bitsy like you is an elephant or something.”
Veronica had been planning on asking him whether he knew what hyperbole was, but she was too affronted to follow through. “Itsy-bitsy?” Despite being genuinely offended, she had to fight not to sound amused. She whacked his shoulder ineffectively; he was already backing away.
Weevil grinned widely. “Teeny-tiny,” he added. “Pint-sized.”
“I’m short,” Veronica said, biting the inside of her cheek to help her sound hostile. “Not five. And you’re not standing on a high enough podium to say anything about it, Mr. Five Foot…” she waved a hand, deliberately estimating low, “Four.”
“I’m five-five,” he told her smugly, still backing up toward the bed and supremely unbothered. Why didn’t he ever have an ego about normal stupid teenage boy things? “And you’re teeny-weeny.”
“You’d know about teeny weenies,” Veronica snapped, fallaciously, because she couldn’t think of anything better to puncture him with. It at least stopped him; he froze a couple inches from the bed, mouth half-open.
He recovered quickly, though. “Hey, even if you’re not looking, you see what you see, and I have to take gym every year. I have a very good sense of scale.”
Damn it. Veronica was too petulant to allow him the victory, even if she risked making herself look ridiculous. “Well, you have the smallest dick of everyone I’ve ever had sex with.”
Weevil stared at her for one more second, then burst out laughing. It wasn’t quiet, either; Veronica couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder, even though the door was closed and for once it wasn’t exactly an issue if anyone heard them.
“Yeah, sure,” he said, finally gasping to a halt, still greatly amused, “but doesn’t that also make me the tallest guy you’ve ever fucked? Spoke a little too soon, huh?”
“Oh, shut up,” she said irritably.
“Palest,” he added with immense enjoyment. “Least tattoos. Richest. Shortest criminal record.”
An eyeroll didn’t do much for maintaining her threadbare dignity, but it was the best she could do under the circumstances. She could hardly complain about him not having a chip on his shoulder for once.
Weevil couldn’t resist one last dig. “Smartest,” he said, smirking.
Clearly as long as talking was involved he was going to keep the upper hand. Veronica crossed the gap between him and made to shove him down to sit on the bed, but he caught her arms and dragged her down, twisting so she ended up underneath him. There was a flurried moment of confusion, not aided by the fact that they both had their jeans undone but still on, and then he had her pinned down underneath him, his weight resting mostly on her legs and stomach, his wrists crossing hers just below the elbow as he pressed her into the bed. She flexed her fingers uselessly – with her arms bent, up on either side of her head, she didn’t have any leverage.
“You making claws at me?” he asked, entertained. Veronica fought the urge to stick her tongue out at him.
She felt considerably less squished this way. It was almost pleasant, like a warm, exceptionally tactile blanket, except for her feet sticking off the edge of the bed – and blankets didn’t smirk smarmily at you. Maybe she should bite him. It was concerning that that seemed hot.
“You’ve made this a lot more logistically complicated,” she informed him, meaning their pants. It wasn’t like he could take them off without letting her get her hands free at least.
“Whose fault is that?”
“Yours,” she said, and Weevil let himself settle over her more thoroughly, his smooth, warm skin pressing against her bare stomach and breasts with heavy solidity. It did shut her up, but not for whatever obnoxious reason he expected; Veronica had to fight not to moan and let her eyes flutter closed.
“You really only have one trick,” she told him instead.
He raised his eyebrows, which gave her a second of warning, and then let up on her arms and propped himself on one elbow so he could shove his other hand between them and tickle her.
Veronica was only moderately ticklish, but she still yelped and tried to squirm away – the former from surprise and the latter equal parts a natural reaction and an attempt to stop the indignity. Weevil thought this was very funny, but he’d miscalculated; she had more room to move now and they were very close together, so it was only a couple seconds before she hit, mostly accidentally, on a movement that made him groan and shut his eyes for a moment, and she instantly capitalized on the distraction.
With both hands free it wasn’t that hard to work one into the front of his jeans, which had been dragged down a little by the friction anyway. She didn’t have a great range of motion, so she could only press her advantage as far as awkwardly palming him, but since it produced further guttural sounds and made him noticeably less coordinated, she decided she could work with it, especially given that having him in her hand was making parts of her vulva twitch that she’d hadn’t especially thought could twitch. She clenched around the feeling, half-instinctively, half-deliberately, and tried to curl her fingers a bit more. She was still more rubbing than stroking, but he didn’t object, at least not for another long moment.
Then he propped himself up at a better angle and reached down to carefully pull her hand away. For a second their fingers intertwined, and it was such a strange feeling, the sides of his fingers against the sides of hers, that Veronica blinked and forgot to say something snarky.
He rolled off her and immediately started shucking his jeans, which was gratifying enough that she didn’t need to comment. Veronica sat up and slid to the edge of the bed in order to ditch her own pants, not willing to do the undignified arch manoeuvre he seemed content with for the sake of expediency. At least not in front of anyone.
It had been a good idea to take her socks off, she thought, when he had to sit up anyway to get rid of his. Good thinking ahead, Veronica.
“Well?” Weevil said, raising his eyebrows at her, and she rolled her eyes for form’s sake and got up on her knees to get a little closer to him more easily. “You got plans, or are we just going to do whatever?”
It was obvious that he just wanted her to start touching him again, but Veronica didn’t bother calling him on it. If she did, they’d just end up rolling around half-wrestling, and as appealing as that sounded, she was more interested in making him twitch and groan some more first than in speeding things up.
She jerked his underwear down as best she could – it didn’t go farther than his thighs – and wrapped her fingers around him much more successfully, enjoying the warm slide of him in her hand and the noise he made in the back of his throat.
Veronica shifted position, trying not to jostle her hand. It was easier this way not to awkwardly stare at his face, to focus on the gratifyingly obscene view of her hand on his dick, the feeling of his skin shifting slightly under her fingers, moving up and down his shaft, the rising heat and sensitivity of her own skin – her thighs, her breasts, her neck. Her nipples ached, even though nothing had touched them but his chest.
Now that there were no desks involved, she didn’t need her other hand to hold onto anything, but she wasn’t sure what to do with it. She didn’t have the focus or coordination right now to attempt some kind of sexual rub-your-belly-and-pat-your-head type manoeuvre, and if that went wrong it could go really wrong, so she rested it on his thigh while she tried to come up with something better. The minute trembling of his muscles was definitely rewarding, and when she found herself tempted to pause in order to rub a thumb over the head of his dick, it was a way to do that without actually stopping, but it still felt like there was more she could be doing to take advantage.
Her thoughts must have shown on her face more than she thought, because Weevil cleared his throat and said, “You can – like a tunnel.”
The roughness of his voice sparked a hot, spiky satisfaction at the base of her spine, but it was slightly marred by the fact that she had no idea what he was saying. “Uh. What?” she said, that full beat behind that always seemed to come with the drugging lustful heat of being both turned on and close to him. Well – being turned on and mostly-naked with a boy, more likely; she remembered experiencing a less-potent cousin of that type of stupefaction several times with Troy and at least a few with Duncan although she hadn’t realized back then how much of a dampening effect the presence of clothing had had on it.
Weevil groaned, his hips flexing, and Veronica realized she’d stopped moving her hand. She slid it back up until she was circling the seam of his shaft and head, just above the foreskin, with her finger and thumb, and he grunted, then managed to convert it into the beginning of a sentence. “Just – here –” He reached down to pull her hand away, leaving her blinking in mild surprise, then resettled himself higher up the bed and opened the drawer where he kept the condoms.
Veronica was mildly disappointed for a moment – she was more than game, but she’d been expecting to be able to draw out the current phase for a little longer, since he usually managed to when he was doing it to her – and then she was mildly shocked, because he’d thrown something at her. She caught it before realizing what it was. A thing of aloe?
She opened her mouth to say, “What the fuck?”, realized she was holding a bottle of lube, and shut up before she could make herself look like an idiot. She’d literally just had a boy’s penis in her hand; it was insane to be embarrassed by the existence of lube. To prove that she wasn’t, she squirted some onto her hand, surprised by how cold it felt when she’d just had her hands on another person, and snapped the cap shut with her other hand. It wouldn’t have been hard to warm it up, but she decided he didn’t deserve it.
Weevil had been making himself comfortable against the pillows, and by the looks of things fishing out a condom for later to make things easier – very forward-thinking, she approved – so he didn’t realize until she touched him that it was still cold. Veronica didn’t try very hard to hide her smirk when he sucked in a shocked breath, and he glared at her, but he didn’t push her hand away.
“You’re a bitch,” he said.
“Don’t throw things at me.” This was way more lubrication than the condoms provided, and there was something delightfully enticing about the easy way her hand slid up and down now, the wetness between her fingers. Like he’d just been inside her, she thought, and then tried to forget she’d thought it. Given how sharply her cunt had clenched with arousal at the idea, she didn’t have a lot of success.
He liked it too, obviously; his eyelids fluttered way more than they had before, even though she got the impression he was trying to keep quiet. She still didn’t have anything to do with her other hand, though, but apparently Weevil focussed better while distracted than she did.”
“Start at the – top, yeah,” he managed, after a minute, “and follow it down like – unh – like a waterfall.”
Veronica thought she maybe half understood him, but she slid her hand down his shaft, then followed it with the other one, awkwardly pausing to let go with the first one and make room.
Okay, that couldn’t be right.
Weevil opened his mouth, probably to tell her how much she sucked at sex, but Veronica countered by initiating her second attempt faster than she’d planned to, and whatever he was starting to say turned into a choked-off grunt.
It didn’t seem pained so much as surprised, but she loosened her grip slightly before she got back to business, just to be safe. This time she managed to keep her hands more or less in concert, but she fumbled at the end, when she realized the point was to bring the first hand around, like leapfrog, before the second one quite reached the base of his shaft. His use of the word tunnel was starting to actually make sense, now she could see what she was doing, so despite the judgemental groan at her loss of rhythm, she kept at it, sliding one hand down, then the next, letting go and bringing the first hand up and around…
It took a few tries for it to seem natural, too much awkwardness and stopping and starting at first, but then she got it. It was hard not to feel smug when he dropped his head back against the headboard, so she didn’t really bother trying.
“So,” she said, once she thought she could talk without screwing up what she was doing, “is this some kind of never-ending vagina fantasy for you?”
Weevil made a noise in his throat that was hard to categorize. “Do you like being fingered because you have a tiny dick fantasy?” he asked, his breath coming too hard for her to take his irritable tone seriously. “No, so shut up.”
Veronica squeezed a little tighter just below the head as she brought her lower hand up to the top again, the way she remembered he liked, conjuring a reaction that she would have thought meant he was in pain if she couldn’t see his face. She almost laughed, but the sound came out far more like a moan than she’d expected. Would it be rude to suggest he pass her the condom now? Not that she cared about being the regular kind of rude to him, but there was rude rude and there was… sex rude. There was a difference between being a bit of a jerk on purpose and demonstrating blatant ignorance of hookup etiquette.
“Fuck,” Weevil said clearly, his hips jerking, and she decided she could keep going for a little longer. She had to shrug her hair out of her face because she’d forgotten to put a ponytail in, but the fact that she hadn’t noticed it enough to be bothered until now certainly said something.
A moment later, he groaned, louder than she’d been expecting, and his dick jerked in her hand. Veronica froze, finishing her last downstroke on autopilot alone, when she realized what was happening. Was she supposed to keep going? What if –
What if it got on her, she’d been about to think, but it was already too late. She’d brought her spare hand up again right before it happened, and now there was… stuff on it. It had barely been a second, and his shaft was still pulsing against her fingers, the ejaculate coming out in pulses instead of one long spill like she’d half expected. It was simultaneously arousing and distasteful – watching him come was hot, with a little more distance so she could see properly, but as much as she’d liked the feel of his skin under her hand, she was wishing they’d used a condom for this part now.
It wasn’t quite as gross as she’d expected – more of a translucent white than straight-up milky – but she still didn’t want to touch it, she thought, pulling back as he went limp and sagged back against the pillows and headboard. There wasn’t as much as the half-remembered porn she’d once made fun of with Lilly tended to suggest, and it was mostly on his stomach, but there was still more than enough to make her hands all sticky and unpleasant, especially the left one, which had been at the top.
She let go and pulled back, too late. And too abruptly; she knocked one of her hands against her thigh and – now she had – god, she was being so immature. She had ejaculate smeared there too. She needed a shower or something. This was not what the plan had been.
Veronica very firmly clamped down on her urge to screw up her face like a child having a tantrum and say an emphatic yuck, but she couldn’t keep her distaste off her face entirely. Weevil didn’t care, though. He had his eyes shut and was completely indifferent to the mess which she was inclined to blame entirely on him – both literal and metaphorical, because how was she supposed to clean up? She couldn’t touch her clothes like this, and she couldn’t go wandering around naked looking for the bathroom.
“Oh my god,” she muttered under her breath.
There wasn’t anything she could really do besides sit there, looking around with forlorn resignation for a box of Kleenexes or a miraculously-appearing container of wet wipes, neither of which were in evidence.
“What?” Weevil said, opening his eyes. He looked perfectly self-satisfied, his tone too languid for any real inflection.
“What do you mean, what?” She leaned into the tetchiness to hide how uncomfortable and off-balance she felt. “You could have warned me. How am I supposed to clean this up?”
“Bathroom’s downstairs,” he said lazily.
“I can’t put my clothes on,” Veronica said between clenched teeth.
He laughed at her, which made her angry even though she’d expected it. “Jesus. You’re nuts. Do you need remedial sex ed or something? This is what happens.”
Last time it had taken longer – but Veronica didn’t say that. The last thing she needed was to be even more embarrassed than she already was. She just glared at him until he groaned and pushed himself up enough to slide his legs off the opposite side of the bed and complain himself into a standing position.
“You got a condom out,” she told him, having finally formulated a response that wasn’t an invitation for another cheap shot. “Excuse me for assuming you were planning on using it.”
“Who says I’m not?” He flipped a couple things around in his closet – no, Veronica realized with a disbelieving wince, his laundry basket – before coming up with a grey T-shirt that he tossed over the bar at the end of the bed. “Besides, I thought you wanted to drive.”
She ignored the jab. “Are you serious?”
Weevil had found another apparently acceptable piece of dirty clothing to clean himself up with. “It’s fine. It’s just from yesterday.”
Veronica tried to kill him with her eyes. “You are so close to getting arrested for trying to steal my car.”
It was out of her mouth before she realized it might be over the line, but after a moment of obvious surprise, he laughed. “You can go to jail for perjury, you know.”
“Stop being a smartass and find me a real way to clean up,” she snapped. “I’m not rubbing your sweat all over me, and even if that was clean I’m not touching my clothes until I’ve washed my hands!”
Weevil’s lack of similar qualms meant he’d gotten himself more or less in order, and he stretched ostentatiously, ignoring his nudity with an easiness she couldn’t help envying. Veronica tried not to watch his tattoos shift with the movement, but she couldn’t help notice how smooth and shiny his skin was, especially in contrast to the ink. His bedroom light was brighter than the classroom fluorescents.
“Are you threatening me with a perpetually naked girl taking up residence in my bedroom?” he asked, flashing her a toothy grin. “’Cause that sounds like a good time to me.”
She’d walked right into that one. In her defence, it was hard to focus on witty comebacks when you were caught between disgust and arousal. “Or maybe I’ll walk out of this house naked and let you explain that to my dad. Get me something to get this off my hands!”
“Jesus,” he said, sighing like she’d just asked him to take the garbage out. “Don’t have a cow.” But he located his jeans and pulled them on, so Veronica settled for eyeing him narrowly without saying anything.
She was so focussed on glaring him out the door that she only belatedly realized that she might be visible from the hall, and by then the door was shut, so she just had to hope she hadn’t given any of his cousins an eyeful.
It felt like an eternity before he came back, but he had a wet washcloth – which of course he threw at her – and a slightly damp one she could use to make sure all the residue was gone, which was surprisingly considerate. His stomach looked faintly damp, Veronica realized as she got up to drop the cloths in the laundry. The I and D of his tattoo glistened faintly. He must have taken the time to clean up properly, despite his nonchalant attitude.
She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do now – she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, either. Leaving wouldn’t exactly be making a point, but she wasn’t sure she was up for anything else anyway, and she didn’t know what the protocol was. Would insisting he repay her tit for tat be a power move, or would it just seem ridiculous?
For a second she hovered between the bed and the chair with her clothes on it, before half-instinctively turning toward the latter just because she was so aware of being naked. Weevil made a tiny noise in his throat; she thought maybe he was scoffing at her.
“What, you came all the way over here for that?”
“Not exactly,” she said, trying to sound snarky instead of disappointed.
He raised an eyebrow, his tone changing from taunting to challenging. “But you’re just going to bail?”
“You haven’t been very cooperative,” she quipped.
To her surprise, he laughed. “Aw, baby, don’t be like that. C’mere. What do you want?”
Nonplussed by the sudden lack of resistance, Veronica arched an eyebrow to buy herself time. “I want to stay clean, for one thing.”
“Don’t worry,” he said over-earnestly, grinning, “I promise not to sweat on you too much, since you mind that all of a sudden.”
That stymied her, until she remembered rejecting his shirt. The only appropriate response to that was a groan. “And here I thought the lack of mold on the floor meant you were more developed than the usual variety of teenage boy. Are you really going to make me explain the difference between regular sweat and stale sweat?”
She’d never had this much time to just look at him naked – or shirtless, since he hadn’t taken his jeans off again yet. It was rapidly tipping her back in the direction of the bed, but there was no way she was going to let him know that, especially since he seemed annoyingly confident of his own powers of attraction, judging by the way he kept happening to stretch or move his arms in a way that emphasized his muscles or made his more prominent tattoos jump. If it wouldn’t have given too much away, she would have told him he didn’t need to bother because she was mildly appreciative of his musculature but currently much more interested in licking his skin.
But then she would have sounded deranged. Because that would be deranged.
“If you’re going to revoke your compliment I want a different compliment,” Weevil said. “Go or stay, but pick one, I gotta make plans.”
“You’re so needy,” she said, but she climbed back onto the bed, kneeling up until she’d assessed where exactly she was going and what she was doing.
“That’s not a compliment,” he pointed out. “For real, what are we doing?”
Veronica considered. She’d never had to really discuss this before, beyond blunt ‘floor or wall’ type decisions that had seemed so explicit in the beginning but relatively oblique now, and one or two brief, blushing ‘this isn’t going to be sex’ conversations with Duncan or Troy. Pushing someone into a certain position felt different from asking outright.
Practically speaking, getting fingered without actual sex in the offing felt like setting herself up to be faintly dissatisfied, and while she wasn’t entirely turned off or anything, she wasn’t at the level of thrumming physical arousal where having him focus entirely on her clit would be effectively satisfying – at least not very quickly, and figuring out where to look and what to do would be awkward without that insulatingly urgent heat. It felt like he’d been going down on her a lot, though – not that he seemed to mind. But even though she’d made it clear enough that she wasn’t going to reciprocate, she couldn’t seem to shake the perpetual consciousness that they were out of balance, and besides, what if it was too much – what if she was crossing the line into ‘too obsessed with oral sex’?
Like any guy would get made fun of for seizing an opportunity for a blowjob. Veronica shrugged. “Fine, here’s one, then – you’re good with your mouth when you’re not talking.”
He rolled his eyes at her, but not very seriously. “Anyone ever tell you you have an ego problem?”
“There’s this saying about pots and kettles,” Veronica said with patently false thoughtfulness, knee-walking towards him. “What was it?”
“Oh, shut up and lie down,” Weevil said, but he was smiling.
She’d been picturing him on the floor and her on the edge of the bed, but that felt like looking a gift horse in the mouth, so Veronica shrugged and arranged herself with her head next to his pillow. It smelled like him, she couldn’t help noticing.
The bed wasn’t large enough that this was an easy situation to line up – although it also wasn’t tall enough to make her original idea particularly easy – but Weevil didn’t seem to have too much trouble contorting himself into a reasonable position, after annoyingly nudging her hips several inches to the left.
Without wasting any more time, he applied his mouth to her stomach, just above her belly button, and proceeded downwards. He took his time, teasing at her skin with his tongue – she wondered if he was trying to write something; did boys get told that trick too? – and nipping gently at her inner thighs. Veronica shuddered involuntarily.
Okay, maybe she could get over it. But in future the condom was going on first thing.
It was still a novelty to be lying down, and she’d never really been able to do that when he went down on her before. It felt dangerously luxurious, not needing to hold onto anything or find a way to signal her participation or be aware of the edge of a desk digging into her thighs. Something about lying back the same way she did when she masturbated was tickling delightfully at the base of her brain, so that she almost wanted to shiver, just to feel it more acutely.
Having her hands free was good, though; it meant she could muffle herself once he stopped playing around and really got down to business, licking his way along the sides of her cunt before focussing all-too-briefly on her clit and then sliding his tongue back down again. She probably would have been able to keep – mostly – quiet by exertion of willpower, but it was a relief to have the insurance.
The skin of his back was warm under her heels, the seam where the comforter ended noticeable but not uncomfortable under her shoulders, her skin hyperattuned to every brush of air. Veronica thought about reaching down to play with her breasts, since touching herself further down would get in the way – but she hesitated, because even picturing the knowing look Weevil might give her if he saw made her flush hot.
It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant feeling, but it was still… exposing, so she thumped her head back firmly into the mattress and stifled a groan by pressing her lips together. Weevil was still making enticing passes over her clit with his tongue, but it never lasted long enough, and the distinction between frustration and arousal was starting to blur in that strangely delicious way he was so – frustratingly – good at.
Veronica had made up her mind not to give him the satisfaction of complaining about his teasing, but the next time he moved up to her clit she pried her hand away from her mouth to say, “Harder,” and pressed more firmly on his back with her foot for emphasis.
It was more productive than she’d expected, because he did apply more pressure but he also stayed put. Veronica couldn’t help moaning, a sound that was breathier and softer than she’d expected. It was too late to keep Weevil from hearing, but then Veronica remembered the kids and dutifully remuffled herself.
God, it was good, but she missed the touch against the rest of her vulva. Maybe fuck the fact that she’d be sorry later, when all her body wanted would be actual sex – he could at least use his fingers on the outside without the lack of something larger to follow up leaving her dissatisfied, right? Probably?
She absolutely did not have the words to communicate something that specific without sounding like an idiot, and it was very hard to calculate whether or not it was worth sounding like an idiot when her spine was all shivery and the sharp, aching pleasure he’d been coaxing to higher and higher levels was reaching an intensity that was hard to cope with. Screw later. She didn’t care.
“Touch me,” she gasped, barely caring that it sounded needy, and without letting up he did, brushing his fingers against the sides of her, then rubbing with increasing firmness below where his mouth was already occupied. Veronica groaned into her palm.
The added sensation got her within reaching distance of orgasm – Weevil increased the pressure from his tongue again, and Veronica had only a few seconds to realize she’d unconsciously been pressing him down again before the pleasure sharpened so much it was almost painful and she shook as she came in a way she was only vaguely aware of, because for a long second she couldn’t feel anything but her clit. Even when the sharpness ebbed and he pulled back to get some air and wipe his mouth, it still felt like it was throbbing.
Weevil climbed up to her hips, straddling her as he rose onto his knees, which suited Veronica fine because it was a decent excuse to keep lying there for a bit. She couldn’t get up if he was in the way, which he was, even as he leaned over and did something she didn’t pay attention to.
She didn’t close her eyes, because that seemed like a bad idea, but she was content to lie there and sort of float in the pleasant lethargy that came after a really good orgasm, so even though she had a general idea he’d lain down on one elbow, the first thing she really noticed was when he started running his hand over her side. It felt like a caress, which should have raised an alarm, but Veronica hadn’t really turned her brain back on, so all she thought was that it was kind of nice.
Then he slid it over the curve of her ass and down her thigh, and around her thigh so that he was nudging her legs apart, and embarrassingly it took that long for her to realize something was going on.
“Um, I’m good,” she said, too generally satisfied to make it sound bitchy. “What are you doing?”
He raised his eyebrows at her in a way that was impossible to mistake, but it still took her a moment to believe she was reading it right, because didn’t it take longer than that? It literally took her longer than that. But maybe if they started fooling around again it wasn’t too soon enough to get things started again? All her thoughts felt disorganized.
“Wait,” Veronica said, feeling muzzy, “really?”
Weevil paused. “For real? You don’t–” He groaned, then pushed himself up into a sitting position. She blinked up at him, confused.
“I don’t what?” Had he expected her to do something specific? She’d already executed that part of the encounter, hadn’t she? It seemed unlikely that he was expecting her to pull some kind of inspirational sexual trick out of nowhere to help him bounce back farther. “I was just asking.”
“What?” he said, voice flat with a twist of annoyance.
“What?” Veronica felt like she was in a bad comedy skit. She blinked, trying to get her brain working at full speed again. “You don’t have to get all offended.”
“What?” he said again, and she would have thought he was screwing with her except he sounded confused this time.
Enough was enough; she sat up. “What is with you? Use your grownup words.”
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s fine. Get dressed or whatever.”
“Okay,” she said slowly. “Why were you feeling me up, then?”
He made a face at her. “Hey, you can’t blame me for thinking you were up for it. You didn’t exactly rush out of here.”
“I’m up for it,” Veronica said automatically, her mouth responding to the perceived challenge before she’d really processed his words.
“You told me to stop,” he pointed out, like she was the one being unreasonable.
“I did not!” She made a face at him.
“Wait,” he said, in falsetto, leaning far too much on the second word, “really?”
“Excuse me for thinking you might not be… up for it again already,” Veronica said, starting to get actually annoyed. Her floaty buzz was fading and it was his fault; she could have held on to it a while longer if he hadn’t started arguing with her and made her sit up.
The lingering annoyance on his face faded into a smirk. “Oh, is that what you think?”
She really didn’t want to tell him that she’d assumed the prevailing attitude of ‘teenage boys, fifteen minutes’ was hyperbole – although for that matter she probably couldn’t hazard a decent guess at how long it had been, between her own distraction and not being sure of how long he’d spent downstairs. She didn’t feel like admitting that, either.
Slumping back down on her elbows seemed appropriately noncommittal. “Oh, there it is.”
“There what is?”
“Your ego. Some light got past it, so I was worried, but now it’s blotting out the sun as usual.”
He actually laughed. “That doesn’t even make sense. We doing this, or did I just completely waste a condom?”
Had he already put it on? Veronica glanced over and, yeah, he had, he was already completely hard again, despite the distraction of the last couple minutes. She was reluctantly impressed.
Also, he must really like going down on her, which could hardly be considered shocking, at this point, but – something to remind herself when she started feeling awkward about not reciprocating. Maybe he secretly felt like she was doing him a favour.
The thought amused her, but not enough to open the can of worms that would be precipitated by saying it out loud. “Yeah, whatever, I don’t have any plans,” she told him. Weevil settled back over her body, muttering performatively, but he hadn’t especially bothered to hide his smile.
Most of the pleasant buzz had faded away, but she still felt contented enough that it seemed like the to lie there and let him run his hands over her sides and down her legs, the brush of his fingers against her skin lazily arousing; enjoyable, but not urgent. Then he nudged her thighs apart – this time she let him – and slid a finger through her slick folds, making her shiver agreeably at the glide and the muted spark of pleasure when his fingertip brushed her clit. Veronica widened her legs a bit to make it clear he could just go ahead as soon as wanted.
He was happy to take her at face value, shifting position to slide into her, and she sucked in her breath at the sudden satisfying fullness. God, if she’d known it wouldn’t just be teasing herself, she would have gotten him to finger her properly.
It was nice in a passive kind of way, her arousal muted but not entirely extinguished by her recent orgasm, her mind clearer than it usually was during sex. That meant she was more conscious than usual of all the little details that went unnoticed or easily dismissed in the heat of the moment, some of them awkward – the faint grunting sounds he made as he thrust into her, the slight roughness of one of her heels catching on the comforter, the occasionally embarrassing squelch. The proximity of their faces was hard to ignore, but she had no intention of reconsidering her prohibition on kissing him after he’d gone down on her, so Veronica decided to find something else to do. On her back as she was, she didn’t have a great angle to do much, but his neck and ear were both nearly as easy to access, and she already knew he liked having someone tug on his earlobe with their teeth. She wondered if he’d be into it if she did it to the top of his ear instead, and since there was no point in not finding out, she leaned in enough to close her teeth carefully around the curled tip.
He jolted, the motion dragging her mouth over his skin until it was more the side of his ear she had custody of, and groaned heavily. Veronica risked dragging her tongue lightly against the tip of the outer ridge. She’d never understood people who wanted to actually stick their tongue into someone’s ear – or vice versa – but she was high enough that she should be safe from earwax.
Weevil shuddered, the motion of his hips becoming arrhythmic, and she grinned against the shell of his ear, pleased with herself, before she let her head fall back to the bed.
“You really only got one trick, huh?” he forced out, but his voice was strained and his arms were trembling, so it barely dented Veronica’s self-satisfaction. Still, she couldn’t let that stand, so she looked for something else to do – other than hooking a leg around his waist, which felt like too much work.
“It’s not my fault if you’re easy,” she told him smugly, and instead of replying he just groaned and dropped his head into the juncture of her neck and shoulder, licking and nibbling at the skin there until it gave her an involuntary pleasurable little shudder.
Veronica was pretty sure she was out ahead, but she wasn’t planning to rest on her laurels. She trailed her hands over his back and then, because that felt too soft and gentle, dug her fingernails in a little.
He grunted, his hips coming flush with hers more emphatically than his previous rhythm. “Fuck, baby, yes.”
She’d half-forgotten how inexplicably sexy that was, but the words crawled hotly up her spine. It was too soon for her to get off again, so it was a mistake to let herself get worked up, but arching up against him, her nipples dragging against his chest as she lightly scraped her fingernails over his back – that felt good, and it was a calculated risk.
Weevil’s hands were sliding over her sides, less intense and frantic than usual but achingly thorough, and Veronica was forced to immediately reconsider her thoughts. She was distracted by the sensation, by the inescapable rhythm of sex, by trying to catalogue every sound she managed to drag out of him with her nails or fingertips, or mouth once he raised his head again and exposed his neck, so she didn’t immediately realize what he was doing when he raised up and freed a hand, only enjoying the feeling of his fingers ghosting over her stomach. When he slid them further down, she felt a shock of mild surprise, but also the sudden impression that she should have expected it.
He was wasting his time, and Veronica searched for a dignified way to tell him that, but she couldn’t find one. A growing part of her didn’t want to, glorying in the pleasure of her slickness against his fingers, around his dick, even though she knew she was only setting herself up for intense frustration.
It wasn’t like the encounter was born from a series of good decisions, she justified, closing her eyes to better feel Weevil’s muscles clenching and releasing under her hands. And if worst came to worst she could go home, and shower, and get herself off again once it had probably been long enough.
The sensation of his fingers on her clit was both sharper, with a faint bite because she was overstimulated there, and duller, because she’d already come, the lightning strikes of pleasure muted into a series of pleasant sparks. But it still felt good – really good, heightened by the novelty that always added something to the experience even when it was only a small change from what she was used to. Veronica bent her knees, sliding her feet higher up the bed and forgetting to bite back her moan when that had a delightful impact on the angle of him inside her.
The rhythm settled into that long, regular push-and-pull that made it hard to tell the difference between ten seconds and ten minutes, broken up only by the occasional hissed comment in her ear, or by Veronica changing the position of her legs every so often. They were both sweating, and that would probably be gross later, but right now the slickness of their bodies against each other, the smell of him overwhelming the inescapable hints of Drakkar Noir, the heat it generated and underlined – all of it seemed sexy, pushing her temperature hotter and hotter until her head was swimming.
She hiked the leg she’d thrown over him a little higher, groaning as it let him slide even deeper, and then, suddenly, she was choking on her own involuntary gasp as his fingers and their consistent pleasure on her clit suddenly threw her into the reverberating shock of another orgasm.
It wasn’t the best or most intense she’d ever had, and it was over quickly, but it left Veronica gaping like a fish underneath him, barely pulling air into her flabbergasted lungs.
She’d spent hours, when she’d first started masturbating in earnest, chasing the promised compensatory multiple orgasm everyone joked about women getting, first hopefully and then with increasing frustration, until she’d had to admit that it just wasn’t going to happen for her without taking at least an hour to cool off, that she’d better make it last the first time if she wanted to savour the experience. The utter surprise barely left her the faculties to make an incoherent noise of satisfaction and clumsily push Weevil’s hand away.
He seemed to get the picture, anyway – there was a flash of a smirk on his face, or maybe a real smile, and then he braced himself more securely with both arms and drew into himself, chasing his own orgasm with intense focus. Veronica didn’t mind. She was still trying to get her breath back.
It was probably for the best, she thought, realizing that her hands were just sort of lying on his back and making an effort to do something with them. If she’d had a little more oxygen, she might not have been able to keep from blurting out How did you do that?, which she didn’t think she would have ever lived down.
Weevil groaned, his weight dropping onto her for just a moment before he levered himself up enough to roll over. He really had pretty decent sexual manners, especially if the things she’d heard about your average teenage boy were true – it was his regular manners that sucked. All things being equal, Veronica preferred that to reverse.
She lay still for a few moments, then sat up, using her wrist to push her hair out of her face, since her hands felt too sweaty. She should have saved a fold of the washcloth – or at least remembered to put her hair up; it was a mess.
A shower would have been ideal, but she could make herself look, if not feel, presentable as long as she had a mirror and a sink, she thought, still feeling slightly buzzy and unreal. She could worry about the curveball he’d just thrown her later.
“The bathroom’s off the hall to the kitchen, right?” she asked, more for something to put a period on their interaction than because she was worried about not finding it. Weevil grunted an assent, and she took that as permission to grub around for her clothes and leave.
*
Veronica had thought she might have to dodge Ariana again (although she ended up only having to step over her), maybe make some awkward excuses to Danny or Alex. She was not prepared to step into the short hall from the living room and nearly run smack into Logan’s housekeeper.
She half-skipped backwards, thrown completely off. “Uh. Hi.”
The woman blinked at her. “Veronica?” she said, and Veronica realized only now, her heart sinking guiltily, that she’d never been entirely sure of her name. Was it Lucy?
“Hey.” She hesitated. The logical assumption was that this was Weevil’s grandmother, although she’d never thought they might know each other – but the woman didn’t seem old enough to have grandchildren, and certainly not ones Weevil’s age. Her solid-black hair could be dyed, of course, but her face was mostly unlined and she’d always seemed active and efficient, even if she was a bit heavy. She did have a full-time physical job; Veronica wouldn’t have been surprised to learn she was under fifty. Maybe she was Weevil’s aunt? “Um… sorry.” She half-winced at how feeble that sounded, then caught herself and did her best to cover. “Weevil said it would be okay if I came over? I’m helping him with Algebra.”
That was what he’d told his cousins, so she had to hope it would be his default excuse, or they’d get busted, and even if that might be less disastrous than at school, it was still something she was desperate to avoid.
Wait, crap, should she have called him ‘Eli’? She couldn’t imagine his grandma – or whoever – was a big fan of Weevil.
The woman inhaled in realization, half-nodding, and the confusion on her face faded, although she still looked wary. “Nice of you to come here.”
Veronica bit back a joke about Weevil and her dad not getting along. It would have been a bad call even if she wasn’t so off-balance that it would probably have come out high-pitched and obnoxious. “There’s a lot going on at school on Fridays. It gets distracting.” She cued up a joke about Weevil staring at the cheerleaders, in case she needed to back that up.
But Logan’s housekeeper – it was very weird thinking of her that way in this context, but it was the only thing Veronica could be entirely sure was accurate – nodded, seeming mostly convinced. Veronica risked a polite smile.
“And she’s teaching me science!” Ariana piped up from where she was lying on the living room floor with a colouring book. “We need sand, though.”
“I just thought we could do the volcano thing,” Veronica explained, feeling awkward. “Since she’s interested.”
Wherever the conversation was going to go after that, they were spared it by the boys, who came thudding down the stairs and into the living room. They managed to stop shorter of a collision than Veronica had – although that may have been because they were heading for the TV and not the hall.
Alex stopped and stared at her, but it was Danny who said, “Is she eating here?”
“No,” Veronica said hastily. “I actually have to get home, so…”
“Are you coming tomorrow?” Alex blurted out, then glared at the floor. Oh god, had he heard something? Or seen something? She’d traumatized an elementary-schooler.
“We mostly study after school,” she said, dividing her words between Alex and… Lucy, she was just going to hope she was right and it was Lucy. “Why?”
Before she could regret the question, Ariana spoke up, eyes still on her colouring book. “It’s his birthday.”
“It’s your birthday?” Veronica repeated, baffled. Alex refused to meet her eye, turning a dull red.
Ariana giggled. “Weevil.”
Veronica blinked in surprise. She must have known when his birthday was – it was on his record, and she could remember that back in July she’d been calculating how old he was during various violent crimes – but unlike some of the other information, it hadn’t stuck in her brain. “I don’t think I’m invited,” she said, trying to make it sound like a joke, and added, “No one wants to do math on their birthday.”
“I do!” Ariana said, and Alex, in clear revenge for something or other, snapped out, “That’s because she’s a freak.”
“Alejandro!” Lucy said sharply, as Ariana stuck her lower lip out farther than should have been possible.
“I’m officially making you my deputy,” Veronica told her, before she could be privy to an awkward family scene. Watching an adult telling someone off was always so much worse than kids fighting with each other. “If Weevil wants to do math tomorrow, you have to make him some problems, okay?” She shot a quick, friendly look their – relative, it felt safe to say relative – relieved to see a smile directed her way. “I’ll see you next week sometime – if we can’t make a volcano maybe we can… do some more surface tension experiments. I mean, tricks.”
“That’s very nice of you,” Lucy said, her voice so meaningful Veronica half-expected to get called out on why she was really there.
But the real purpose became apparent a moment later, when Ariana said, in the dutiful voice kids used when they were quoting an adult verbatim, “Thank you, that’s so nice of you.”
With an effort, Veronica did not laugh. Instead she said, “Sure, any time! I have to get home, though, so I’ll…”
She abandoned see you later to languish unsaid, because she could hear Weevil coming down the stairs. He was good at rolling with the punches, she reminded herself. He wouldn’t blow it. He wouldn’t have invited her to his house in the first place if his grandma was a worse prospect than Mrs. Hauser. None of the stern mental reminders kept her from wishing desperately that she had gotten out of there before they had to feign casual acquaintanceship in front of somebody’s parent.
He blinked when he saw her, but didn’t seem particularly distressed. “Why are you still here?” he asked, stepping over Ariana. His tone was casual but, Veronica thought, calculatedly so.
Lucy made a disapproving tsk noise, but Veronica was hardly going to be bothered by him being rude to her. Besides, she had a tactical advantage if she went on the offensive. “You never told me it was your birthday.”
Weevil groaned loudly and rolled his eyes. “Who cares?”
Well, Veronica cared, if only because it was making her feel slightly guilty about the gimmick she had planned for Monday. She opened her mouth to quip that her dad would care, since he was eighteen, then shut it again. It would be appallingly stupid and also inconsiderate to say something like that in front of his cousins and (probably) his grandma, but their presence also made the idea feel solid, real, instead of a quick joke, and that made her feel guilty for real. He probably would go to jail eventually, unless he was planning to drop out of gang activity when he graduated, which probably wasn’t as easy as it sounded. And there was a good chance that her dad would be the one putting him there.
She forced a smile and shrugged one shoulder. “Your cousins, apparently. They invited me.” His answering look got more incredulous the higher she dialed up the brightness, until it was easier to laugh and say, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to crash your family dinner. I’ll just come up with some cake-themed algebra questions for next week.”
“X is zero,” he said, “because I ate the cake while you were making up math problems.” Ariana giggled. “Get out of here and stop torturing me.”
“You’re the one who suddenly decided you want to graduate,” Veronica said, aiming for a more good-natured tone than she usually used in their back-and-forths. She risked an assumption. “It was nice to see you, Mrs. Navarro.” Nobody corrected her, so at least she was right about them having the same last name. She could afford to try personalizing her goodbye a little. “I hope everything’s good on Primrose.”
Weevil stiffened, and Veronica felt slightly offended. Did he not want her knowing his grandmother was a housekeeper? Like she was going to judge?
But Lucy smiled tightly. “I don’t work for Mrs. Echolls anymore,” she said, voice strained, but polite.
Veronica tried and failed not to wince. “Oh. Uh, sorry.” She forced a puffing laugh. “I… Okay, confession time – I guess I’m out of the loop.” She had to say something – there couldn’t be a positive reason for the change. She’d seen the same housekeeper at Logan’s house for years; something must have happened. Besides, it was clear she’d stepped on something sensitive. There was nothing for it but to show her own scraped, sensitive parts, even if she’d rather hide them. “The thing is I’m not really friends with Lilly anymore, so I haven’t exactly been around either.”
Lucy (why had Veronica never learned her name properly, over all those years?) softened. “She wasn’t always the most considerate. But you two were so close, I’m sorry it went sour.”
“Me too,” Veronica said with exaggerated but not insincere emphasis. “I should get out of your hair, though.” She was about to slip past into the hall, but then she remembered that she was supposed to be a normal high school tutor, so she turned back and told Weevil, “Happy birthday,” even though it felt weird.
He made a face, which wasn’t that strange, and didn’t make even one joke about how she had to make him a cake now, which kind of was. She’d thought he was just whining about the conversation for the sake of being difficult, but was he actually unhappy about having a birthday?
Jokes aside, it did mean he was eligible for adult sentencing, Veronica reflected as she finally managed to politely extricate herself from the house. But she couldn’t help wondering if there was some kind of childhood trauma. If this was a TV show, his mom would have died on his birthday. Or if it was a crime show or a hospital show, he’d complain for most of an episode about not wanting a big deal about it and then have a heart-to-heart or a breakdown where he confessed that he’d never had a birthday party when he was young and after too many disappointments he’d stopped hoping for it. Of course, on that kind of show it would probably have been because of workaholic parents or a divorce, not the kind of deeply distressing things she could easily, if vaguely, imagine coming along with a parent who was seriously addicted.
She couldn’t stop her mind moving on to the inevitable next subject: her mom had never, as far as Veronica could remember, missed one of her birthdays, although she’d been embarrassing at them once or twice – acting ‘silly’ at her sixth in a way Veronica had already known the other adults weren’t supposed to see, getting increasingly loud and exuberant at Disneyland on her eleventh until Keith had dragged her into the closest thing to privacy he could find and had a quiet and vicious argument that Veronica had pretended not to hear, joking around with Lilly and Veronica about boys at her fourteenth while Veronica kept an anxious eye on the perpetually fluctuating level of her wine glass.
Lianne had missed her own birthday, though, last year. Presents, party, dinner – she hadn’t come home until nearly one, and her husband had been so furious that Veronica hadn’t even been able to pretend she didn’t hear them fighting, even though she’d been upstairs and they hadn’t.
And then Lianne had cleaned up, and Veronica had somehow convinced herself that if was for real this time, that either her dad’s anger or the way he’d said, “I don’t know how much longer you expect me to take this,” had shaken her mom enough to make an impression. It was hard not to wonder how many similar disappointments she might stumble on if she kept poking the subject, but mostly it was strange that that had never really occurred to her before. She’d only ever thought of Weevil’s mom as a wound she’d accidentally jabbed her finger into, a hazy collection of Lifetime movie trends and pathos. It was actually a little embarrassing, how many stock images had taken shape in her mind without her realizing: tangled black hair, filthy carpet in a rundown house, tinfoil – which was meth, anyway, wasn’t it? As far as she knew, Weevil’s mom hadn’t been taking meth. He would have mentioned that last semester instead of morphine if she had; it was pithier.
Veronica winced. That was too cynical and unkind, even for her. She was only thinking that way to get her mind off her own mother, anyway; she knew that even if she didn’t want to admit it. Some habits you couldn’t help becoming aware of, after long enough, no matter how hard you tried to pretend they were insignificant.
But awkward bursts of guilt and uncomfortable associations weren’t enough to discourage her from poking around the edges until she satisfied her curiosity. Her search for Marys had so far not been very productive – although maybe that was for the best, since she still had no idea what her game plan was once she narrowed it down – and she wanted to avoid raising any flags with Weevil’s grandmother, so she could just kill two birds with one stone and kick her other fact-finding mission into gear instead, by way of science experiment.
The only step she needed to take right now was hosing down one of the shallow plastic tubs she’d seen when she was reorganizing the garage and throwing it in the trunk of her car, so the ease was definitely part of the appeal. If the dirt in the Navarros’ back yard wasn’t suitable for volcano construction, maybe they could use flour or something. Or maybe one of the kids had some playdough they wouldn’t mind sacrificing.
She worked out a rough list as she fiddled with the hose, since conversation seemed to get derailed around young kids – which wasn’t entirely uncommon, but she’d never had it happen as relentlessly as it did at Weevil’s house. It would be good to have a firm idea of what she was planning to ask, as well as being willing to jump on any opportunities that presented themselves. If nothing else, it would make it easier to be subtle; Veronica might not spend a ton of time with kids, but she definitely knew that they tended to become perceptive at the worst possible moments. She wanted to slide in inquiries about his parents, maybe any stepparents who might have predisposed him to overreact to hidden bruises.
Although calling them ‘hidden bruises’ made it sound like less of an overreaction.
And she also wanted to know if he had some hidden trauma about birthdays or if he was just whiny – though put like that it seemed obvious: she knew he was whiny.
Veronica snickered to herself, albeit somewhat darkly. She’d probably be sorry once she actually went digging around for details and no doubt found something really unpleasant, but being irredeemably bummed out seemed like a better prospect than perpetually unsatisfied curiosity. That was probably a character flaw, but it was one she felt more than willing to take over her previous propensity to stick her head in the sand.
That made her think of baking soda volcanos again. She’d have to brush up on the details of what caused the baking soda/vinegar reaction so she could explain it properly. Maybe in Computer Science. She never had to do all that much work, and they were in the lab anyway. It was too bad none of this tutoring was official – or real, in Weevil’s case. It could have been good on a college application. Maybe she could use it in a personal essay – nothing actually fabricated, just enough details left out that it bore no actual resemblance to real life.
Then she realized how that would probably play out, ‘tutoring an at-risk classmate’, ‘providing science enrichment for underprivileged children’, and felt gross. Probably better to shelve that one unless she lost her mind and decided to become a teacher.
Her dad got home just when she was finished spraying down the bin and had turned it upside down to dry, and he raised a quizzical eyebrow as he got out of his car. “School project,” Veronica said, ignoring the twinge of dishonesty. It was education-related; close enough.
“I hesitate to ask for details,” he said drily, and she rolled her eyes and laughed.
“Would you believe me if I said I was going to make a baking soda volcano in it?”
“I always believe my darling daughter.” The irony kept it from being as big of a guilt trip as it could have been, but Veronica hastened to change the subject.
“How was work?”
“Besides the two different grand theft cases reported an unknown time after the fact, which I have been assured require my personal attention? Just great.”
“Oof,” Veronica said. “Want to talk about it?” Honestly, she hoped he didn’t.
But fortunately he shook his head. “Nothing interesting enough to make it worth hashing over. I’d rather hear about your school project.”
It was time for some judicious misunderstanding. “Well, in Foods today we made cheese biscuits.”
“Did you bring me some?”
Veronica finished coiling the hose and dusted her hands on her jeans. “Nope.”
“Ah!” He clutched good-naturedly at his chest. “A serpent in my bosom.”
“Don’t say ‘bosom’,” she told him, wrinkling her nose even as she stepped closer so he could put an arm around her shoulders.
“The only thing that could prevent me from saying ‘bosom’ is cheese biscuits,” he informed her loftily, “but alas–”
The smell of what was almost certainly pork chops met them as Veronica opened the door, derailing the conversation. Must be a good day, she thought – but even in her head, it was wistful instead of barbed.
“Okay, truce,” she said.
“Not unless I’m first at the pork chops,” her dad said, and Veronica took one moment to wonder if he felt that same painful wistfulness before she put her swagger back on and pretended to race him to be the first to wash her hands.
Notes:
The only real warning for this one is that there's an awkward situation involving ejaculate, in case that grosses you out.
Chapter 38: More Than One
Notes:
I feel like all I do is apologize for the wait, but lately I have had: my union go on strike (not all of us - it's slowly escalating so *I'm* still at work, but it's a hell of an experience!), my roommate go halfway off the deep end, and due to the previous, I'm apartment-hunting. I swear, my life didn't used to be this interesting, and it was much better for my word count - but on the plus side, this chapter is a bit longer than usual. :)
No warnings for this one but I did put a fun science fact at the end.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
Mary Kerr
Like it hadn’t been bad enough to have Ariana pestering him to tell her about Veronica (when was she coming back? did she have any brothers or sisters? was she going to be a teacher? – he’d only managed to put her off by way of equally endless disinterested ‘dunno’s), or Danny cackling about him having a giiirl over because Danny thought everyone else was nine too, now Weevil had his grandma on his case.
She’d been giving him looks all through dinner, the kind that meant she was onto him about something and was considering what to say and how to say it. On balance, he hoped as well as expected that it was about Veronica – they did not need to be dancing around his sudden influx of cash right now – but that didn’t mean he was looking forward to it.
Sure enough, he wasn’t even halfway to clearing his plate when she observed with the kind of casual mildness that had a barely-hidden sharp edge, “Veronica Mars is a nice girl.”
He shrugged, taking another bite of broccoli and talking around it. “Sure, I guess. I’ll look good on her college application.”
He got a narrow look in response. “You didn’t tell me you were being tutored.”
Weevil shrugged again, swallowing. “Ms. Laramie said I should get one. I’m done with this stupid subject. It’s just this and History since I passed English, and I can graduate. Nothing else matters as long as I have enough credits.”
She didn’t take the bait, though. “And that’s a reason to have girls in your bedroom?”
Weevil rolled his eyes. “Where else we gonna do it? Down here? With these assholes running around breaking everything?” He gestured at the kids, and Alex threw a piece of broccoli at him, earning himself an immediate slap to the back of the head from Leticia. Danny made an inarticulate protest as well, but since his mouth was full of half-chewed chicken and rice, it was drowned out by a resounding “Ewwwww!” from Ariana.
“What do I gotta do?” Weevil asked, seizing the opportunity the momentary chaos presented. “I fail a class, you yell at me. I get a D, you sigh at me. I try and pass, I get the third degree. What do you want? I could drop out,” he added, as if it was a concession, and her face dropped in immense disapproval. “Kinda late to be worth it, but if you really want me to–”
“Cállate la boca!” she snapped at him. “You want to talk like this in front of the children? Be quiet!”
He shot her a baleful look – like any of their parents except Danny’s useless dad had finished high school. Like Alex didn’t know full well there was no chance Chardo was going to re-enroll when he got out. Like all three of them didn’t have some kind of idea where he went and what he did when he wasn’t home. Alex at least, and maybe Danny, wasn’t ignorant of the fact that it helped pay the bills.
But no. He made one fucking joke about dropping out and that’s the problem.
He didn’t pick a fight about it, though. Instead he muttered, “Like I’ve never had a girl in my bedroom before.”
Danny started snickering and didn’t stop until he started choking on his food, but Alex – for whatever reason; Weevil wasn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth – didn’t add his own two cents.
She shot him a disapproving look, but didn’t say anything. He knew she’d decided a long time ago that that particular battle wasn’t worth picking, but sometimes he had to throw out a bit of a reminder.
“How come Veronica isn’t coming to your birthday party?” Ariana asked, and Weevil groaned.
“I’m not having a birthday party,” he said tetchily, trying not to snap. “It’s just my birthday. I’m not a little kid.”
He didn’t need to celebrate it. Not that it hadn’t been kind of nice to have dinner with Claudia on Thursday, and to be presented with the handmade card and the second-hand racing game his sister swore was entirely from Ofelia, but what was he even getting out of turning eighteen? Goodbye to juvie, hello to Chino. He couldn’t drink, and he already had a driver’s license, so what was the offset? Voting, and legal cigarettes. What a fucking scam. He even still had to keep going to high school.
“I heard girls let you do it up their butt on your birthday,” Danny said smugly, delighted by his own smirking audacity. Weevil was so surprised – where did the kid come out with this shit? – that he couldn’t find a ready answer, but Alex punched Danny in the side before their grandma could even put aside her shock to muster outrage.
“Shut up, you pervert!”
Danny turned, but before he could do anything back, Leticia stood, her chair shoving back as she bellowed, “Daniel Victor Navarro!”
Danny froze, so Alex took the opportunity to punch him again. For once, he wasn’t reprimanded for it.
“Well, I heard it –” Danny started sulkily, slapping at Alex’s fist. Weevil could have told him not to make it worse, but he was still too taken aback to manage any thoughts more complicated than what the fuck.
“If you ever say that kind of filth in my house again,” Leticia told him, still so loud that Ariana, who hated grownups yelling, put her hands over her ears. Their grandma’s eyes flicked pointedly to the wooden spoon in the holder by the sink, and Danny shrank in his seat. Weevil was pretty sure the only one of her grandchildren who’d ever really gotten more than a swat on the arm from it was Chardo, that time he dropped Alex off the porch when he was a baby, but he knew she’d used it on her kids. “And in front of your cousin!” She nodded sharply at Ariana, who was cringing, her hands still over her ears. Weevil suspected she hadn’t understood what Danny’d said, though; she hadn’t been upset fast enough or made enough of a fuss for that. Although he understood why Alex must have been worried about it.
Weevil poked her in the side and made a face to distract her while Danny tried to whine his way out of punishment and ended up banished to the porch with a smacked hand, and the promise that if he moved a muscle before Leticia came to get him he’d learn what hurt meant.
Then he put his face in his hands and muttered, “Jesus.” He had really never wanted to know that much about Tio Victor’s bedroom habits. At least they had to hope Danny had heard that one from his parents.
“She’d never let you do that anyway,” Alex said, his tone uncertain like he couldn’t decide whether to be questioning or decisive or disgusted. Weevil flicked a bit of broccoli head at him for form’s sake even though he was probably right.
“We are not discussing this at the dinner table,” their grandma said sternly.
“We’re not discussing this at all,” Weevil said, and she shot him a look like she was surprised and grateful for the support. Did she seriously think he wanted to talk anal sex in front of a bunch of elementary school kids? Maybe he and Chardo had used to egg each other on a bit, but never that much, and it had always been all implication, anyway.
Alex was shovelling his remaining broccoli into his mouth, a sure sign that he was uncomfortable, and Weevil kind of wanted to get away from the table too, so he reapplied himself to his dinner and tried not to listen to his grandma trying to coax Ariana’s hands away from her ears. He wondered if she regretted making him do all this birthday crap yet.
Finally Ariana was assured that no one was mad, a lie she seemed to believe, and that she did have to eat her broccoli, which she was less inclined to accept, and Alex had already bolted down his dinner and been excused, so Weevil stood up and started collecting dishes. He opened the garbage with his foot and held Danny’s plate over it, raising an eyebrow, but his grandma shook her head, so he left it on the counter. If she wanted to keep it for the little brat, she could do the saran-wrapping.
He rinsed off everything that needed it, not sure whether it would be worth actually starting on the dishes when two people were still eating, especially when he didn’t want to be interrogated again. Escaping to his room was appealing, but the bonus points he’d get for at least scrubbing the colander and pots might be a better bet in the long run. Besides, Leticia looked tired.
The sink was plugged and water running into the growing fountain of soap bubbles before he even really decided to do it, which at least settled the decision. He dumped the pots in first and scooped some bubbles into the smallest one, half-listening to Ariana sniffle about how she wanted more rice even though she hadn’t finished her broccoli. He couldn’t tell if she was genuinely still upset or if she was just milking it for the pity factor, but either way he could have told her it wasn’t going to work.
He'd worked his way through most of the breakfast dishes by the time Leticia wrapped up Danny’s plate and the rest of the leftovers and came over with her own plate and Ariana’s, and the dish the chicken had been on, and he glanced briefly sideways, one eyebrow raised in query. He wasn’t sure he could dig up words for it that didn’t belabour the point, besides We good?, which would just annoy her. She hated it when he spoke to her like one of his ‘gangster friends’, and she wouldn’t listen when he told her she had to pronounce it gangsta.
Apparently they were, because she gave him a small smile, tight but sincere, as she slipped the dishes into the water. He wasn’t positive whether she’d bought his deflections or just decided it wasn’t worth fighting over, so he mentally resolved to step carefully. His grandma wouldn’t outright obstruct his extracurricular activities, he knew, whether they involved girls or the club, but he didn’t need to spend the rest of the school year getting glared and sniffed at.
In the interest of seeming innocent, he didn’t head upstairs after he finished the dishes. Ariana had retreated to her bedroom, and Alex was set up in the living room, shamelessly coopting one of Weevil’s video games and pretending badly that he couldn’t hear the faint sounds of Danny getting chewed out on the porch, so Weevil stayed put in the kitchen. He wasn’t going to towel off all the dishes when they’d just drip dry anyway – he did not get his grandma’s insistence on drying the dishes; why make extra work for yourself – but he got a dishcloth and wiped down the stovetop and counters, which didn’t really need it, and the table, which did.
That made him remember the sopping mess Ariana had left him a couple weeks ago and he made a face, not sure if he wanted to grit his teeth or sigh. He wished Veronica would stop stringing Ariana along – she just got more and more excited the more she was put off, instead of taking the hint, and she wasn’t Ofelia; she couldn’t handle harsh realities. Smacking face first into them just made her more sensitive and upset instead of getting her used to it. She and Danny were both like that, although at least Danny had learned not to get his expectations up. Weevil wished he’d toughen up, instead, but it seemed unlikely.
He had never been like that – even Claudia hadn’t – but Chardo had. He’d spent birthdays and holidays and random Saturdays moping around for years, even after he was old enough to know better, as if this time Tania would actually call. And it wasn’t just his mom; he’d actually believed his prissy little 09er girlfriend was going to run off with him, and what – get married or some shit? Drop out of high school together? Weevil had made a fuckton of bad decisions about Lilly, but he’d never kidded himself. Or at least, he’d known he was kidding himself, and even in his wildest, most pathetic fantasies, he’d never descended anywhere near that level of delusional optimism.
The thing was that he kind of liked Veronica – he could admit that, even if he would never say it to her (or anyone) and get his nose rubbed in it. At some point all her weird bossy crap and her weird incongruous squeamishness and her general weird everything else had gotten to be kind of funny, and he barely even minded her being annoying anymore. But that just meant it was even more galling to be reminded that poor brown kids were just playthings to girls like her, no matter how different she was from Lilly. It was fine for him – he knew what he was doing, and he was getting his money’s worth anyway – but Ariana was just a kid, and she couldn’t handle adults flaking on her. She still cried every time Angel cancelled plans, whether he had a good reason or not.
A few angry words from the porch, more intelligible than the rest, reminded him of what Danny had said, and he lobbed the cloth across the room into the sink and sat back down at the table, pulling a face. He’d really been completely happy with not ever running the numbers on how various girls would react to being propositioned for anal, but now it was in his head. Which was extra annoying because he wasn’t even really interested in that. It was never as good as you thought it was going to be, and neither of the girls he’d done it with had really liked it, which kind of ruined things anyway. (Although Cristina had pretended to, which was even worse.)
Lilly would have let him, though. He shook his head angrily, hating that it even mattered, pissed off because it was just more evidence that he’d always known she was only in things for the thrill and he’d gone and been stupid anyway. He’d never been special to her; he was transgressive, with a record that wasn’t going to vanish when Daddy leaned on the cops and the tacky kind of tattoos. And he’d walked right into it anyway, wasted a year of his fucking life pining after a girl who only cared that it was daring to fuck a guy who came darker than beige.
Whatever uncomfortable motives Veronica might have, he didn’t think that was a factor for her. She wasn’t much like Lilly at all, even though if you’d asked him before this year, he would have said becoming a shitty clone of Lilly was her main goal in life. She’d always been such a pale imitation that he’d honestly only thought they were the same in superficial ways – although still maybe the ones that mattered the most: privileged white girls who never questioned their own righteousness or superiority. It wasn’t until Veronica had shown some fire that he’d started to think maybe they were similar, that maybe there’d been more to their friendship than Lilly keeping a little pet.
He'd been wrong about that too, at least the first part. Maybe they both had more than a little fire, but Lilly was fireworks – exciting and flashy and good at taking your breath away, but when you forced yourself to pay attention, you realized it was basically the same thing over and over again. Veronica was definitely not fireworks. A fire-eater, maybe – a little strange, a little uncomfortable, but almost impossible to look away from once you started paying attention.
Or maybe he was thinking of a sword-swallower.
Okay, so it wasn’t a perfect metaphor – Lilly had sure held his attention, he just hadn’t been able to keep hers – but whatever. This wasn’t English class. He wasn’t going to waste his time workshopping it.
Leticia must have finished yelling at Danny, because his thoughts were interrupted by the front door opening and shutting. Weevil levered himself up. He didn’t want to deal with any more of Danny’s crap, or worse, an awkward enforced apology.
Alex apparently hadn’t dared to start up again with their grandma right there, but from the look on his face as he glared mulishly at the pause screen, he was still pissed. Weevil wasn’t sure why, but he figured the kid had other stuff going on or something. Sometimes you just needed an excuse to get mad.
Although right now, Alex looked like what he really needed was an excuse to go up to his room, since he was too stubborn to admit he wanted to avoid the whole clusterfuck of a subject more than he wanted to yell at Danny some more. Weevil obliged and told him to clear off and free up the TV. Alex complied with only a token protest, confirming his suspicions, but then he turned at the doorway.
“What?” Weevil said impatiently after several seconds of silence.
Alex shuffled and mumbled and finally looked away and muttered something like, “didn’t really,” so it took him a second to put it together, and another one to find a response that didn’t sound like some protesting-too-much shit.
“Is that what you fuckin’ think Algebra is?” he demanded, injecting some casual disgust into his voice, and fighting the urge to point out that Veronica hadn’t known it was his birthday, and that anyway, Alex was probably right – she’d never. “God help us when you get to high school.”
Alex flipped him off, completely failing to hide his relief, and then scaped upstairs. Hopefully he was just being weird the way kids were sometimes, and not sneaking around spying through the cracks on doors or having some kind of misunderstanding that needed remedial sex ed. The last thing Weevil needed was another ongoing headache, and that went twice for their grandma.
He messed around with the remote for a minute, but there wasn’t anything on worth the effort it would take to focus, and he didn’t feel like going to the trouble of a game or a movie, so he just turned the TV off. His grandma appeared a moment later, probably trying to let Danny eat his cold chicken and broccoli in peace now he’d been appropriately chastened, and he picked the remote back up.
“You wanna watch something? I can find an old movie…” There was usually one playing somewhere, although she liked to watch them from the beginning, even if that meant waiting for the next one to start and then staying up late. He’d watch it with her, as long as it wasn’t Streetcar – he didn’t need his brain running commentary courtesy of Meg fucking Manning.
But Leticia shook her head, easing herself slowly down onto the couch.
“No, no.” She jerked her head toward the kitchen. “I have to keep an eye on that one anyway, make sure he doesn’t get too big for his britches.”
Weevil couldn’t help laughing. “Too big for his britches?”
His grandma half-smiled. “Where’s Alex?”
“I sent him upstairs.”
She nodded approvingly, and he felt a tiny spike of happiness that he tried to ignore. “That’s good. I just have to hope they won’t fight if they know everyone’s in bed.” After a moment, she added, “It’s good you’re taking school seriously, Eli.”
Weevil, who’d been about to say that he didn’t care if Danny and Alex killed each other as long as they did it silently, wasn’t sure how to respond to that. He shrugged. “I just want to be done with it, that’s all.”
Leticia nodded, but didn’t say anything else, and after a minute or two of silence he couldn’t help asking, even knowing it wasn’t exactly the wisest thing to raise the subject, “Why would it even matter, though, if that was just some – thing I told the kids? It’s not like I’ve never had a girl over before. And I will again,” he added to throw her off the trail, raising his eyebrows meaningfully.
He got a look for that, or maybe for the unsubtle word-swap to be less vulgar, but she pursed her lips like she was going to give him a serious answer. “I just think you should be careful, is all.”
“You think I should be careful of her?” Weevil couldn’t help but be entertained by that, and he dialed it up a little, since he figured his grandma thought Veronica was a lot more innocent than she really was.
“She’s a nice girl,” she said, this time cautiously instead of pointedly. “Nicer than most of Logan’s friends.”
He blinked. It was easy to buy that Veronica was nicer than most of Lilly’s friends, especially to his grandma – she wouldn’t exactly be used to having servants to order around at home like the rest of them did. But it was weird to hear her described as Logan’s friend, even if that’s how his grandma would have known her. He’d never thought of her being anything to Logan Echolls but an accessory to his girlfriend, or maybe one of the 09er girlfriends in general, since she’d used to date Duncan Kane.
It pissed him off mote than it should have, to think that she might have ever thought of Logan as her friend, a bridge farther than all the casual history she had with the careless and nasty rich kid coterie in general. Logan, with his smart mouth and his racist quips he thought were funny and his fingerprint bruises on Lilly’s arms, Logan who ruined carpets and upholstery with his parties and then let the staff take the brunt of Aaron Echolls’s temper, Logan who consistently made up for his humiliation in the fall by insinuating loudly that he was going to get Leticia deported any time he passed Weevil in the hall at school–
It was so fucking stupid to think she should have been above that, seen through it somehow, when she’d never seen through Lilly, or ever even wanted to before Lilly pissed her off personally, but apparently he had, for some reason.
“But she’s…”
“I know she’s the sheriff’s kid,” Weevil said, since he assumed that was her main objection. “I just didn’t think it mattered for math.” He also figured Veronica would keep her mouth shut if she overheard anything – not that the kids shouldn’t know to keep their mouths shut and not that they knew anything important, but you couldn’t be too careful with that kind of thing – but he couldn’t exactly tell his grandma about the time she’d helped him rip off Jeremy Lasky. And maybe he should be thinking harder about those kinds of assessments anyway. Not assuming stuff just because he couldn’t help liking her.
Leticia gave him a sharp look. “And you better not be planning on trying anything just to upset her father, Eli.”
Weevil rolled his eyes, like that hadn’t been half the reason he’d agreed to keep their thing going after the first couple mediocre encounters. “Relax. I’m not stupid.” She sighed but didn’t argue, and he added drily, “Thanks.”
She flapped a hand at the air in between the couch and his chair. “We both know you act a lot less smart than you are, m’ijo.”
It was hard to do anything other than laugh. “This still sounds like a reason you should be warning her off me,” he teased. “‘Oh, Véronica, let him do it alone, he’s not as stupid as you think.’”
Leticia made a scoffing sound in her throat at his half-hearted falsetto. “I don’t have an accent.”
She didn’t, mostly, since she’d been here since she was six – fuck you an extra time, Logan – but it wasn’t like he could tease her about pronouncing ‘Chardo’ so Spanish anymore, so he had to take his opportunities where he could. “Hmm…”
“You act tough if you want, Eli,” she said, ignoring his attempt to bait her. “But I mean it. It’s not just about the sheriff. That girl is going to college, and she’s not coming back. She’s not rich enough to stay for the perks, she’s not poor enough to have no choice, and she’s not stupid enough to do anything else. Don’t think she’s going to be looking back, not at anything in this zip code.”
Weevil blinked. It wasn’t like anything she was saying was surprising, even though he’d never thought that hard about what Veronica was doing after high school – it seemed more important that he’d be done with high school even sooner than that, assuming he managed to graduate, and they probably wouldn’t see each other after that. It was more that she was saying it that was surprising. “Well, yeah. But why do I care about that, exactly?”
Hi grandmother regarded him for a long moment, frowning. “M’ijo, I don’t want you getting your heart broken again.”
Weevil turned to stare at her, entirely shocked. “What?” He tried to pull himself together, but it was too late to feign nonchalance. “‘Again’?”
“You think I don’t see things?” she said. “You think I don’t know my own grandson?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, completely unable to meet her eyes. “I’m just trying to pass math.”
She’d never said a goddamned word to him about Lilly. Which was what he’d wanted, since he’d gone out of his way to make sure she never found out about it. To make sure that no one did, not even vague details with a different name attached. He’d spent months drowning, afterward, trying to pretend to everyone he could still breathe so they wouldn’t ask why – had she known the whole time?
She couldn’t have, not that it was Lilly. But she must have known more than he thought she did.
“Trust me, I’m good,” he added, a little more convincingly. “I mean, do I look like someone who’s gonna make the same mistake twice?”
It felt more dishonest than it was, even though Lilly and Veronica were hardly in the same category. Maybe because Lilly and Veronica were hardly in the same category. He wasn’t fucking around to get his heart broken, at least not the way his grandma meant, but she wasn’t entirely wrong either – hadn’t he gotten smacked in the face with his own baseless preconceptions two minutes ago, preconceptions he’d only had because for some reason he liked the girl? Veronica might not be able to break his heart, but at some point she’d become capable of disappointing him.
“I guess you know what you’re doing,” his grandma said, in a tone that was meant to communicate she thought no such thing. Ordinarily Weevil would have smiled at that, but he was still too staggered and humbled to feel like it. How long had she known? He hadn’t even considered that yet. It wasn’t hard to imagine that he hadn’t hidden his misery as well as he’d thought, but had she known even before that? She couldn’t have known it was Lilly – surely she would have said something, called him an idiot much sooner – but had she known, or guess, there was someone? Or had that only come after there wasn’t, anymore?
It was somehow both a bitter pill and a twisted vindication that she hadn’t had the faintest idea about Caitlyn.
“I’m trying to pass math,” he said, adding a bit of a sigh to it and forcing himself to look her in the face. “If I’d known you’d make such a big deal about it, I’d’ve told you the first time she came over, all right? Ariana’s the one who’s obsessed with her,” he added off-handedly. “Maybe you should have a talk with her.”
Leticia clicked her tongue and shook her head, but she didn’t entirely hide her faint smile.
Resisting the urge to get up and go upstairs, where she couldn’t look at him anymore, wasn’t easy, but Weevil forced himself to sit and act unconcerned by the silence for a couple moments before he said, “You sure you don’t want to watch anything?”
“Oh… all right,” she said finally. “For a little while. Just find something you like.”
He turned the TV back on and jumped around a bit until he found something he thought she’d like, an old episode of one of his Abuela’s telenovelas that was so full of gasping and dramatically overexplained reveals that you didn’t need to know what had already happened. His grandma rolled her eyes – maybe at his complete lack of plausible deniability, maybe because she always tried to pretend that she didn’t find her mom’s shows comforting – but she settled back against the cushions, and Weevil resolved to keep an ear out for Danny in the kitchen so she didn’t have to get up. His Spanish wasn’t entirely good enough to follow the dramatics, anyway.
*
Weevil’s plan – to spend most of Saturday hiding out at Hector’s or Javi’s once he finished his early shift at Angel’s, or at least sleeping late and then heading out to spend a few hours cruising the PCH before dinner – failed before it even started, because his grandma had apparently made her own plans to actively sabotage him. It wasn’t enough that he had to watch the kids while she ran errands after work – no, she picked up her mom on the way back from getting groceries, and then he couldn’t bail on her family afternoon plans without hurting Abuela’s feelings.
Not that he minded a chance to spend time with Paloma, he was just already sick of all this birthday stuff. But he pretended not to mind it for her sake, and at least the kids mostly left them alone, since only Ariana understood enough Spanish to really follow more than his half of the conversation. Leticia had done her best with Alex, but when he’d realized that neither of his cousins spoke it, he’d refused to learn either, and neither of Danny’s parents had really spoken much Spanish at all; Irene had never learned and Weevil knew Tio Victor had always gotten away with things no one else in the family could, and he’d never bothered to get good at the language the way his sisters and brother had had to. Weevil could understand well enough, but otherwise it was mostly just Chardo and Ariana – the oldest and the youngest, aside from Claudia.
Not that any of that stopped her from clucking over the kids and telling them how big they were and asking about school, with just enough English thrown in that even Danny couldn’t pretend he didn’t understand – although he tried, at one point, before Weevil grabbed his arm and translated her question with his most threatening smile. But mostly he had her to himself.
She wanted to know if he was still doing good in school (yes – she didn’t need to know about Algebra) and what plans did he have for his birthday (just this; he already had dinner with Claudia on Thursday) and was he excited to be eighteen (he straight-up lied about that one). It was fine, except for the part where his grandma dropped off another round of snacks apparently for the sole purpose of having an excuse to tell her mother that he’d gotten himself a math tutor. Weevil glared at her while Abuela was getting excited about it – he didn’t want her hopes raised any higher than they were – and then fended off the inevitable questions by talking about how boring it was.
Great. Now he was going to have to get Veronica to come over when his grandma was home and actually teach him math. Not that she was terrible at it, even though she was a hardass, but that was very much not what he was in this for.
It was Alex’s turn to get interrogated about school, so he gave himself a couple seconds to remember the way her hair had gotten all over the place the day before, little pieces of it half-floating in the air because they were so light. It probably should have looked stupid – he was pretty sure she’d had to wet it down in the bathroom to look less like she’d been in a hurricane; actual sex hair never looked as artfully tousled as it did in skin mags – but instead it had been hot. Plus he liked that she’d forgotten to put it up. Too busy trying to get him to pay attention to her.
He still had no idea what happened on the last three or four pages of that chapter, since he hadn’t really been in the mood to reread them and pay better attention the day before. He made a note not to forget to – and not to forget that he hadn’t finished the chapter, either. The best way to screw yourself was to skip bits of a murder mystery, especially chapter-end stuff where they liked to drop those little stinger shocks.
He dragged his attention back to the conversation before his thoughts could trend back towards Veronica, since it was hardly the time to be thinking about her squirming underneath him, or her hands –
Jesus, not the time! It was not the time!
To seal the self-recrimination he forced himself to pay attention again and throw out a casual comment about how Alex did okay in most subjects but was somehow failing gym – it was an exaggeration, but he was constantly in shit for shoving people and throwing balls too hard, so Weevil was pretty sure he had a D – and let himself be distracted by poking at his cousin’s outrage and redirecting Abuela’s indulgent concern. He even, magnanimously, quoted some praise by Alex’s art teacher that their grandma had made a big deal about a while back, and while something about the expression on Paloma’s face made him suspect that she might have heard it from her daughter already, she gushed over Alex without letting on. Weevil made it even more flowery when he translated, winking at her until she was hard put not to laugh. Alex was too busy puffing up his chest and pretending not to turn red to notice.
“She says you’re gonna be the next Frida Kahlo,” he added in his most bored drawl, just to see how Alex would reconcile the comparison to a famous artist with being indirectly called a girl. Sure enough, his cousin turned a much deeper shade of red, but once he made sure Danny hadn’t heard, his voice was only slightly strangled when he said, “Um, thanks, Bisabuela. I mean, gracias.”
Paloma patted his shoulder while Weevil tried not to crack up. It was way harder to keep looking bored than it was to maintain an active deadpan. Then Alex made an excuse to escape, and he stopped trying. Abuela poked him in the shoulder as he snickered.
“You’re a bad boy,” she said, still in Spanish.
Weevil adopted his best who, me? expression and pressed a hand to his chest, just to see her try not to laugh.
Ariana came bouncing over to show off her Barbies, which got him off the hook – not that he’d really expected anything harsher. He helped himself to another cookie as they chatted in – admittedly basic – Spanish, feeling faintly guilty that he wouldn’t have even been able to put together a sentence about Jewel Barbie and her adventures with the mermaid, who was Ariel again this week.
“Go get Abiela some more atole,” he told Ariana when he couldn’t stand anymore ‘and then, and then’ storytelling about sharks and treasure. “She shouldn’t have to get up.”
That earned him a mildly chastising look from Paloma, but Ariana jumped up from where she was sitting on the floor. “Okay!” she said cheerfully, thrusting the Barbies into his hands so she could grab the mug, and dashed into the kitchen.
“And tell Grandma to come out here and sit down,” he called after her, knowing full well Leticia would be able to hear him.
Abuela shook her head, smiling. “You always pretend you’re being bad when you’re good, and that you’re good when you’re being bad,” she told him.
“Maybe I’m all swirled up like a cinnamon bun,” he suggested, which made her snort with laughter.
They could hear Ariana in the kitchen, urgently beseeching Leticia to come sit down, and Weevil couldn’t help smiling. He was a little annoyed she’d decided to spend all afternoon in the kitchen, when he hadn’t asked for a big fancy dinner or two kinds of cookies (although she’d made the cookies at work and left a token few for the family, which he approved of; those assholes could afford the ingredients ten times over without even noticing, and they never went in the kitchen anyway). He would have been happy with just pizza or something. Maybe a get-out-of-nagging-free pass for skipping church tomorrow. But if she was going to, then it was practically an obligation to start bugging her to sit down, and Ariana would be harder for her to blow off than he was. Nobody was more annoying than a seven-year-old with a mission.
Sure enough, when his cousin reappeared, carefully balancing Abuela’s mug in her hands, their grandma followed her. She had two more, one of which she gave to Alex, and one of which she tried to hand to Weevil, but he shook his head. “Give it to Danny.”
“But don’t you like atole, Eli?” Abuela asked. He’d drunk it more than once when she made it, just to make her happy, although it never really tasted right.
“He only likes champurrado,” Leticia said, also in Spanish, as if he was a little kid who’d only drink the version with chocolate in it. Weevil felt his annoyance rise back up through his stomach into his chest.
“I like the kind with brown sugar and no vanilla,” he said, a little too sharply. Maybe it was inauthentic, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t born in Mexico, he could like what he liked.
His grandma pursed her lips. “That’s because your mother never made it right,” she said.
He would have shrugged that off, normally, but something about the specific words set him off, too close to some of the things he’d overheard Ann Marie say about her mom when she thought he couldn’t hear.
“Nothing else she ever did was good enough for you,” he said before he could stop himself. “You think Angel knows how to make atole? But you’re not jumping down his throat about it.”
It wasn’t exactly fair – Angel was the only one of her kids who was still around, with Tania gone and Victor only calling every few months to whine to the answering machine when he was sure Danny would be in school. But it wasn’t fair that his mom was dead and she was still getting the same shit that had made it so hard for her to stay clean, that even back then Angel had been in jail three times and yet it was Ann Marie’s single six-month stint that got her treated like a pariah.
“Daddy can make sandwiches,” Ariana said defensively, missing the sudden tension between them, the pained way Paloma looked away, but clear on the fact that he’d taken some kind of shot at her dad. “And popcorn.”
Jesus. Even Chardo could do better than sandwiches and popcorn. Weevil pressed his lips together tightly so he wouldn’t say anything else, but he couldn’t help shooting his grandma a pointed look. Her expression tightened, and she turned away to give his drink to Danny.
“Who wants tamales?” she said, to general enthusiasm. Weevil couldn’t bring himself to join in the agreement, but he didn’t object, either. As if she could tell what he was thinking, Abuela patted his arm gently.
As snarled-up as his stomach was with guilt and resentment, this at least was straight-forward. “Sorry,” he muttered. But she shook her head, and he knew what that meant. He didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t a good idea to apologize to his grandma, even if he could bring himself to – that it was never a good idea to get onto the subject of his mom in the first place, and they’d both screwed up doing it and didn’t need to make it worse. He just put his hand over hers instead, and after a minute she took it away and started trying to get Danny to tell her whether he had any friends at school.
Weevil could have told her that he didn’t, but he kept his mouth shut.
*
Dinner was good, although he wouldn’t have expected anything else. The kids had either forgotten about or not noticed the argument earlier, and the rest of them were pretending it hadn’t happened. His grandma had disappeared back into the kitchen afterwards, but after an hour she’d softened enough to come back out with a mug of hot chocolate for him – not champurrado, regular hot chocolate, from the mix in the cupboard – and then Claudia had dropped Ofelia off, which made it hard to hold a grudge unless you really wanted to, which he didn’t.
Ofelia had wanted to know what presents he’d gotten – probably to know whether he liked hers the best; at five she was tactful enough not to say so but not tactful enough to remotely hide her motivation – and Weevil let them argue for a while about whether to keep that for after dinner or not (adults in favour, kids against), before agreeing with his grandma as a token gesture even though he didn’t care either way. There’d been a modicum of pouting, but then Ariana had actually let Ofelia have the mermaid Barbie for once, and she’d forgotten all about it. They were still talking about mermaids, even though Leticia had forcibly confiscated the toys before dinner; they’d even somehow roped Alex into the discussion about how fast you had to swim to get away from a shark.
Weevil kept half an eye on Abuela as she listened to the kids, because he knew she wouldn’t like to ask for help serving herself more food, helping himself to another half-serving of posada or chiles rellenos whenever he thought she might like more and ignoring Danny’s stinkeye for taking ‘too much’ food, because all the kid noticed was that he was adding more to his plate every five minutes, and not that he was only taking a little bit each time. Besides, there was plenty – posada didn’t exactly travel well, but even with Danny and Ofelia pigging out on empanadas, there should be at least a few left to eat tomorrow or take to school on Monday.
His grandma could tell what he was doing, though – he knew because he’d caught her about to do the same thing a couple times. It was a little awkward when their eyes met, but… he’d still take it. At least she approved of him sometimes, even after he’d been a prick.
“Leave room for cake,” she told Danny as he reached for yet another empanada. “It’s not a contest to see who can explode first.”
Ofelia giggled and Alex, who must have realized he hadn’t been contrary enough tonight, took another empanada.
“You can’t blame them, Letícia,” Abuela said. “Not when the food is so good.”
Weevil made a noise of general agreement – at least to the last part – and took another ladle of pozole, raising his eyebrows at her until she clicked her tongue and nodded.
“On my birthday I wanna have pork chops,” Ariana announced. “And Chinese food.”
“Pork chops or Chinese food,” Weevil corrected her, even though he knew that wasn’t what she meant.
“No, pork chops and Chinese food!”
His grandma intervened before he could wind Ariana up any further. “We’ll see – it’s Eli’s birthday, so we should be talking about that, not anyone else’s.”
Like he cared – but then Ariana said, “So can he open presents?”, bouncing slightly in her seat like she wanted nothing more than for him to get presents, and Weevil decided it would be a good idea to finish off his soup before he got dragged bodily into the living room.
Ariana’s present, it turned out – as usual – was a card and a bunch of homemade coupons for things like ‘Go Away’ (which made him wince a little; he wasn’t that mean to her, was he?) and ‘My Dessert’, and one where she offered to do his math homework, which he was half-tempted to actually use. The card was good enough, honestly; she’d spent a ton of time drawing his bike on the front and it looked almost good.
“Now Ofelia!” she insisted, but he shook his head.
“She gave me hers already.”
“What was it?” Danny asked, pretending to sound bored. Weevil wasn’t sure if he had ulterior motivations or if it was just because of the way kids got all excited about presents even when it wasn’t them getting them.
“A video game.”
Ariana looked massively impressed, so he didn’t mention the obvious fact that Claudia had paid for it. “Who’s next? Gotta get this over with.” Abuela gave him a disapproving look and he amended, “I demand more tribute!”
Alex snorted, but he nudged a sloppily-wrapped box in Weevil’s direction. It didn’t look like a painting, which was interesting, so Weevil took it readily, tearing the paper even though his grandma like to save it. He’d buy her a roll of it or something. “Books!” he exclaimed, half-ironically, because it was what everyone would expect. Alex shrugged one shoulder, but he didn’t look bothered. “They’re not new or anything,” he said, tone too-casual.
One of them was another of those murder books by Ann Rule, which meant Alex had been snooping at his bookshelf, but this once he gave it a pass. The other one was something called The Kite Runner, which he thought he might have vaguely heard of. The cover made it look like serious modern literature, the kind of thing nobody ever expected him to read.
“Thanks, man,” he said, meaning it more than he’d expected to.
Abuela leaned forward with her card as he set the books down on the floor next to his feet. “Here, Eli,” she said in English.
He took it, but he said, “You know you didn’t have to get me anything.” There were a lot of them, even with Chardo out of the picture, and he didn’t want her spending her money on presents. Even cards added up, between her kids and grandkids and great-grandkids and Ofelia, even if there weren’t a ton of the first two still hanging around.
She tsked dismissively, which he’d expected, but she didn’t meet his eyes, either. The reason became obvious when he opened that card – it was one of those wholesome ones with a little sentiment inside that didn’t rhyme but felt like it wanted to, and a much longer message she’d written in Spanish on the facing side, but he barely noticed that. There was a fifty-dollar bill inside.
“You’re only eighteen once,” she told him while he tried to get his face under control. Alex smiled in polite incomprehension but Danny rolled his eyes at not being able to understand; Leticia nudged him firmly with her foot from her seat next to Weevil on the couch. Her lips were pursed.
He closed the card before any of the kids could see the money, and forced a smile. “You’re gonna make me tear up, Abuela,” he said, ignoring everything but what she’d written. “You have to think of my dignity.”
The girls giggled and Danny made a face at him, and Weevil stuck the card firmly under his thigh and beckoned imperiously for his next present. He’d deal with it later.
Danny gave him some cheap plastic motorcycle that looked like it had come out of a goody bag and a random handful of candy that was at least wrapped, and his grandma had gotten him a new pair of earrings and a nice shirt that he knew she wanted him to wear to church even though she didn’t say so. He thanked everyone, made a big deal about all the kids’ presents, winked at Ofelia to acknowledge hers was the best, punched Alex in the shoulder because that was probably the one he’d actually liked the best, and hugged Abuela before making his excuses to put everything in his room.
He killed a little time flipping the books over to read the backs – the crime book was about some guy who’d killed his ex-girlfriend, the other one was about kids growing up in Afghanistan – and clearing some space for everything on his table, and then he just stared moodily at the wall until he figured it had been long enough.
As expected, Leticia was already in the kitchen, cleaning up, when he went downstairs. She glanced up as he slipped in from the hall and started transferring the leftover tamales into the plastic container she’d put out, but her token protest that it was his birthday and he should go back out to the living room, but quietly. She already knew what was coming.
He rinsed his hands once she’d finished at the sink and waited for her to finish putting away the last of the leftovers before he handed her the fifty. “You have to give that back to her.”
“She won’t like it,” she hedged, not quite taking the bill, even though he could see she didn’t like it anymore than he did.
“She can’t be doing this.”
His grandma pursed her lips, turning back to the sink. “You give it back to her.”
Weevil knew she was trying to make a point, but seriously. “You know I can’t. And she won’t listen to me anyway. You have to talk to her.”
It felt like it was about more than the money, once he said it. Like the cane Abuela was too stubborn to use or even buy, or the fact that he knew she started getting upset if Leticia brought her too much easily-reheated food. But that was too big to talk about, and he had no right telling his grandma how to handle any of it, so he narrowed the focus back to what it was supposed to be. “She can’t be giving me money. If I need money, I can get it.”
His grandma’s shoulders slumped, but she only paused momentarily in stirring up the dishes that had been sitting to soak. “You ever think maybe she knows that? Maybe she’s trying to tell you something.”
“I’m not taking her money,” Weevil repeated stonily. She’d think less of him if he did, so why couldn’t she just agree? It wasn’t like he didn’t know she did, really – she was just refusing to say it. “Put it in her purse or something.” He laid the bill on the table.
“Eli…” He braced for something unfair, but she said, “I can’t tell her what to do.”
“You tell everyone what to do.” It felt like maybe there’d been something profound in the statement, but he couldn’t reach it. She was always bullying her mother into taking more help than she would otherwise, even.
Leticia sighed. “I’ll take care of it. Maybe her cheque can have a little extra this month.”
He hadn’t realized she was handling Abuela’s banking, too. “Just make sure she doesn’t say anything about it to the tax people, or whatever.”
She snorted. “Are you joking? Those people at the benefits office, they never speak Spanish, even when they’re supposed to be able to.” She took another round of dishes as he offered them, rinsing out the atole mugs as she refilled the sink with soapy water, then gave him a stern look. “It’s your birthday. Get out of the kitchen.”
“You didn’t have to do all this, you know,” he said half-heartedly, wishing he could tell her to save her money. All it got him was a wssht! and a soapy shooing.
“Buy yourself something and say it was that,” she told him as he rolled his eyes and complied, nodding at the table and the fifty-dollar bill on it, like he wouldn’t have done that anyway.
He didn’t protest, though. He didn’t want to fight, and tense half-arguments where they were both disappointed in each other were worse. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”
*
Weevil almost didn’t go to school on Monday. He’d made up for playing happy family on Saturday by going out with Felix and Javi on Sunday, and he was hungover and tired and his eyes and throat were all dried out like sometimes happened when he smoked too much weed. Or maybe just when it decided it didn’t like him. But he’d never gotten a real answer to his text to Veronica yesterday about studying to maintain their cover, and he needed to talk to Hector, since apparently the cops had dragged him in for a few hours yesterday about the big jobs they’d pulled, so he got himself out of bed and to school almost in time for second period, and tried to tune out Clemmons reading him the riot act in the hall and making him even later. At least it meant he had a good excuse for Mr. Hepner when he finally made it to class.
He wasn’t in the mood to be jabbed and good-naturedly teased about turning eighteen (or in general), but he couldn’t sit by himself for no reason, so in the end he opted for Veronica’s table as the lesser of two evils. If Jasmine was there, she’d help Veronica gang up on him, but she might be, and maybe if he looked pathetic enough, Meg Manning would take pity on him and distract them. At least none of them would make jokes about going to Chino or looking out for the cops.
Veronica had a box next to her, and he wondered if she’d broken down and made him a cake. He hadn’t even thought to leverage the birthday thing.
The idea felt more weird than anything, though. He’d have to complain if it was an actual birthday cake and not a slut cake. It felt too awkward to accept, otherwise.
But it wasn’t a cake. He’d started to figure that out as soon as he sat down and Veronica gave him a frankly frightening smirk, and by the time she finished her smug little speech about how he was only an affiliate member – was that different from associate? He had no idea how she organized this nonsense in her head, so he couldn’t tell if he should be protesting or not – and he didn’t deserve a real cake, he was starting to be afraid she might be planning to smash his face in something, and then he’d be forced to do something to her; people would see, and he couldn’t afford to let that stand. His apprehension only grew when he saw was it was a pie, but it was apple, not cream, so maybe she just thought she was going to clown on him by providing substandard dessert.
Joke was on her, he liked pie.
“I even warmed it up for you,” she said sweetly, which was a danger sign if he’d ever heard one. “You know what to do with it, right?”
It took him a second, between the lingering hangover and the self-imposed misdirection, but he didn’t actually need her to add smugly, “Or there’s a movie I could–”
“I’ve seen it,” he said, trying to keep his mouth from twitching. He refused to give her the satisfaction of making him laugh. Veronica was looking at him sidelong like she half-expected him to be pissed off, like the implication that he might fuck a pie was the worst thing she’d ever said about him.
“Where was this last week when I needed it?” he said instead, and she choked, flushing. God, she was too easy sometimes. The flush was only obvious on her face, but a rosy tinge rose in the skin above the neckline of her shirt, and he wondered how far down it went. If he made her blush hard enough, would her tits start to turn pink? He hadn’t paid enough attention to that the last time she’d been naked.
Something to investigate, he thought, smugly taking ownership of the pie. Veronica’s friend looked confused, so he capitalized on his advantage. “Do you like American Pie?”
“Sure,” Meg said, to his surprise. “My dad’s always liked Don McLean.” Then, when he was choking on an unexpected incredulous laugh, she grinned. “I haven’t seen the movie, if that’s what you mean.”
Veronica, who’d managed to recover, reached over to high-five her, while Weevil cleared his throat and tried to pretend he hadn’t noticed that he’d made one or two uncomfortably high-pitched noises.
“Neither of you are getting any of my pie,” he said, encircling it with his arms. “Fuck off and leave us alone.”
“You don’t think,” Veronica said, her voice strangled by suppressed laughter, “Maybe you want to go somewhere more private for that?”
“Wait, what?” Meg shot a quick look between them, going from confused to suspicious. “What do they do with the pie in that movie? Veronica?”
Veronica bit her lip, but it was too late – her friend was clearly realizing what the answer had to be. Weevil pulled the pie a little closer to himself, smugly.
The thing was store-bought, but she really had warmed it up. Wild.
“Ew,” Meg said, her face scrunching up, and he fought not to laugh.
“Okay,” Veronica said, clearly not sure whether to laugh or squirm or find an excuse to get mad at him. “I’ve recognized all the members, former members, and affiliate members.” She accompanied the last couple words with a pointed glare at Weevil. “There will be no more baked goods.”
“Me and my pie don’t care what you do,” he told her.
“Why don’t you take your pie to the second art classroom and leave us alone,” she suggested. Meg’s face crumpled in disgust, but she didn’t say anything.
“If you were a real slut, you’d want to watch,” he told her, noting with satisfaction that she immediately choked on her sandwich.
“Okay,” Meg said loudly, not leading into any particular sentence. Weevil winked at her, and she half-smiled and then looked mad about it. “I’m going to go find – an excuse to not listen to this. Like a bottle of milk. Or literally anything.” She got up, leaving her lunch behind, and speed-walked toward the door to the commissary.
Veronica was still trying to clear her throat, so Weevil pondered the pie. It was good, on the one hand, because he hadn’t brought a lunch, and shaking down a freshman for money felt like a lot of work. But on the other hand, he didn’t have any way to eat it, and unless he managed to consume the whole thing in the next half-hour, he had nowhere to put the leftovers.
There were worse problems. He broke off a piece of the crust, then changed his mind. If he was only going to eat part of it, why waste his time on the least tasty part? “You brought this whole thing and no fork?”
Veronica shrugged, making transparent effort to pretend she hadn’t completely lost her composure. “Do you really need a fork for the intended purpose?”
“You don’t know what I’m into,” he told her. She’d had to intend on someone eating the pie, right? So she had to have a fork somewhere.
“I’m not a sex toy store,” she told him with an excellent attempt at equanimity, but Weevil couldn’t help noticing that she was still faintly flushed. “Go find your own… cutlery.”
The tone in which she said cutlery was such a perfect combination of distaste and understated innuendo that he couldn’t help laughing. “You gotta keep this for me until after school,” he said, dropping the bit for practical reasons. He had to imagine she didn’t want Meg Manning knowing she’d been going over to his house.
“Oh, I gotta?”
“You think they’re going to put it in the fridge for me?”
She frowned at him, some of her insouciance fading in favour of genuine exasperation. “Do you think I have an in with the teachers’ lounge or something? I just have Foods last period.”
Weevil had Foods first period, but he’d never have been able to get away with skulking around the fridge, let alone taking something out of it even if it was his. He didn’t bother to say so.
“Anyway,” Veronica added, poorly suppressing a smile, “what are you going to do, take it on you motorcycle?”
“Did you seriously not get my text?” It was a rhetorical question; she’d sent him back a thinky-face, but nothing else. It could have meant algebra, or it could have meant she was thinking about it. “You need to come over, sell the math thing.”
He expected pushback – she wasn’t exactly inclined to let him tell her what to do, generally – but instead she looked surprised, maybe faintly embarrassed. “Oh – right. Yeah, I was… busy, yesterday.”
Not too busy to respond at all, apparently – just too busy to remember the exchange. He wondered briefly if Mrs. Mars was hitting the liquor cabinet again. Not like it was any of his business, but you couldn’t help thinking about it. “Well, my grandma’s home for an hour and a half before she has to go back to work, so come over and throw some numbers around before she gets suspicious.” He couldn’t imagine she was going to hang around for the full time, but if he was wrong then he wasn’t opposed to getting laid today. “And bring the pie.”
Veronica rolled her eyes, but she didn’t bother arguing. “Okay. Fine. But only because I’m sick of driving around with a giant Tupperware in my trunk.”
He had no idea what the fuck that meant, but before he could try to find out, Meg was back. She looked slightly relieved that he was still there, which wasn’t exactly what he’d expected, but maybe she was thinking that if he’d been gone she’d always have to wonder at least a little if he was actually redoing American Pie in an empty classroom. She set a chocolate milk down next to her own lunch and slid another one towards Veronica. “I thought you might need this?” she said, holding something out to him.
It was a fork. Weevil shot a victorious look at Veronica, who rolled her eyes, and then winked at Meg. “I knew I liked you.”
She half-laughed, shaking her head like she didn’t know what to do with him and then turned pointedly toward Veronica to talk about some class they had together. That was fine with him – his headache was easing up a bit and he was hungry.
*
Transporting a half-eaten apple pie on her passenger seat and a not-yet-assembled science experiment in her trunk was not what Veronica had envisioned when she’d embarked on a reckless affair with a dangerous criminal, but at least it was novel. She just had to make sure she didn’t become some kind of taxi for random objects. If Weevil wanted to be able to bring pies back and forth from school, he could buy a car.
…Okay, the buy part seemed unlikely, but it was the principle of the thing. If you wanted to look all tough on a motorbike, you had to live with the consequences.
He was apparently too busy looking tough on his motorcycle to keep his appointments, because she didn’t see it when she pulled up, and when she went around the front to knock, it wasn’t there either.
Unfortunately she already had knocked, and before she could decide to go sit in her car until he showed up, or even just leave (although that really would have made her a pie taxi), Alex opened the door.
“Um,” he said. “Hi.”
It was too late to change her mind now. “Hi,” Veronica said, hefting the pie a little higher. “Do you have a fridge I can put this in?”
“We have a fridge,” he said, his sullen tone making her wish she’d been less jokey about her phrasing – but he stepped aside to let her in.
“Weevil didn’t want to bring it on his bike,” she said, feeling some explanation was necessary since Alex hovered nearby as she popped off her shoes. It conjured a brief image of Weevil driving his motorcycle with one hand and spinning the pie with the other like an old-timey pizza seller. She bit back a smile, since Alex probably wouldn’t find her explanation funny.
He tailed her into the kitchen without really saying anything else, which made Veronica faintly edgy. She sidestepped Danny, who was ignoring what looked like geography homework in favour of tilting his chair dangerously, and slipped the remains of the pie into the fridge, then looked around.
Still no Weevil in evidence, and she didn’t feel like hanging out awkwardly in the kitchen with hos older, less friendly cousins. She knew how to talk to boys even less tan girls, especially at their age. “Is Ariana home?”
“She’s in her room.” Alex seemed to find it necessary to escort her there, even though it was just down the hall past the stairs and Veronica could have found it for herself. She wondered what he expected her to do – steal stuff? Break things? Maybe he’d just taken parental – or grandparental – admonitions about good hosting extremely literally.
He didn’t knock or call his cousin – sister? she couldn’t remember if Weevil had ever specified – so Veronica did both. “Ariana? Do you still want to –”
The door opened abruptly in the middle of her sentence, the words ‘…do science’ overwhelmed by Ariana’s exclamation of “Yes!”
“Great,” Veronica said, slightly off-balance from the force of the girl’s enthusiasm. “I have some equipment in my car. We just need baking soda and vinegar. And a shovel,” she added.
“We have that!”
Alex followed them a step and a half behind while Ariana bobbed around the kitchen showing Veronica where to get what they needed. “Why don’t you take this out to the back yard and get a shovel, and I’ll get everything else from the car,” Veronica told her, assuming Alex would follow Ariana. Maybe he’d caught wind there would be a simulated explosion involved.
But he didn’t go with Ariana – he followed Veronica instead, all the way to the gate, where he stood and waited as she retrieved the plastic bin. He still hadn’t said anything else, and Veronica was starting to feel on edge again. “Do you want to do the science experiment with us?” she asked as she hefted the empty container in one hand and headed back.
That seemed to offend him, because he stiffened. “No,” he said emphatically. “I’m not a little kid!”
Veronica wasn’t sure if maybe she should apologize, but he was already heading inside and she didn’t really want to stop him. She turned to Ariana instead. “All set?”
The girl nodded emphatically. The shovel she’d procured was a little blue plastic one, but Veronica guessed it would work if the ground wasn’t too hard. “Okay,” she said. “We’re going to build our volcano in here so it doesn’t make too much of a mess.”
“It is a real volcano?” Ariana asked, eyes wide.
“It’s a pretend volcano, but we’re going to use a science trick to make it look like it’s exploding. Do you know what an acid is?”
“You didn’t introduce yourself,” Ariana said.
“What? Oh…” Veronica tried to remember what she’d done last time. She felt less willing to embarrass herself when she wasn’t confronted with a crying kid, but she smiled gamely and tried to muster up some showmanship. “Um, I am the Scientific Veronica, and this is my lovely assistant, and we will be demonstrating an acid-base reaction.” She did a tiny little bow, flipping her hand, then straightened up immediately. “Okay, let’s get started.”
“Is that the base?” Ariana asked, pointing at the container.
“Huh? No. Oh, actually – kind of. We’re going to build the volcano in it. But this is about chemistry, and in chemistry a base is the opposite of an acid.”
“Does it unmelt you?”
“Uh…” Veronica hesitated, not wanting to confuse things by telling her that strong bases were just as corrosive as strong acids. She couldn’t bring herself to give inaccurate information, though – what if it caused issues for Ariana in school at some point? “Well, acids and bases are the opposite, but too much of either can be sort of nasty. So if something has a lot of acid in it, it can burn you, you’re right, but if it has a lot of base in it, it can also burn you. But most things just have a little bit of one or the other, which is fine. We eat vinegar, right? And it’s acidic.”
“That’s why it tastes bad,” Ariana informed her knowingly, and she had to bite down on a smile.
She explained a bit more about the pH scale, feeling like she was going a little overboard given Ariana’s age but not sure how to segue into the chemical reaction, especially when Ariana got sidetracked by insisting that water should be zero and acids should be negative.
Veronica couldn’t really justify the middle of the scale being seven, so she just told Ariana she was smarter than the scientists who came up with it and moved on to explaining that acids and bases reacted with each other, and they were going to hide the vinegar in the volcano to make it explode. She was helping Ariana build up crumbling earth around the empty water bottle she’d brought when the girl’s grandmother came out.
“Alex said you were out here,” she called.
Veronica stood, feeling faintly awkward, and brushed her hands off on her jeans even though she’d mostly just been steadying the bottle. “Weevil was late,” she said, immediately cursing herself for not remembering to use his real name. His grandmother didn’t seem to mind, though; she frowned slightly, but not at Veronica.
“I’m Veronica’s assistant!” Ariana called. “We’re going to make an explosion!”
Veronica winced, but Lucy – she really didn’t think that was right, actually, maybe it was Lucia? Or was she just thinking stereotypically? – only raised her eyebrows. “Just what I need,” she said drily, a hint of fondness under the words. “Another grandchild trying to blow things up.” Veronica was reminded so sharply of Weevil that she blinked, and Lucia raised her voice and said, “Wash before you come in, m’ija.”
Ariana nodded happily and went back to piling dirt around the bottom of the bottle. It wasn’t holding together very well, but once they had enough built up Veronica guessed it wouldn’t matter.
The volcano was only half-built when she heard the tell-tale rumbling of Weevil’s motorcycle. Veronica paused and looked up, but Ariana didn’t bother. He pulled up in the back, behind her car – it was hard to say if that was his usual habit or if he just wanted to park next to her vehicle to make a point, whether to her or to potential car thieves – and Veronica refocussed on the project taking shape before he could see her looking for him, waiting until the gate creaked to say, raising her voice so it carried, “You’re late.”
“I had to talk to Hector,” he said, unapologetic, but when she deigned to look at him he didn’t have the expected provocative expression on his face. He wasn’t even looking at her – he was watching Ariana pile up dirt with an expression she couldn’t quite parse.
“Well, we’re making a volcano, so you’re just going to have to wait,” she said, dialing up the superciliousness. That dragged his attention to her properly, although his only overt reaction was to roll his eyes.
“Yeah, like I was chomping at the bit for math.” He crossed to them and looked over the volcano, ruffling Ariana’s hair absent-mindedly. “It’s falling apart.”
“It’s not my fault your soil’s substandard,” Veronica said, then immediately winced. She didn’t know how Ariana might take that.
The girl didn’t pay them any attention, though, pushing Weevil’s hand away and trying to pack down the dirt some more.
“You need water,” he said. Veronica blinked at him, but he didn’t elaborate, just stepped around Ariana and headed inside. She’d just about managed to refocus on the experiment – or trick, whatever – when he came back out again with a tall glass.
She got what he meant, she just hadn’t thought he was planning on helping – but Ariana tried to push him away when he went to pour the water over her loosely piled earth. “No! You’ll wreck it!”
“It could be good, actually,” Veronica said, trying to soothe her. “It’ll all stick better if it’s wet, and then we can make it look better. More like a volcano.”
Ariana frowned at her cousin suspiciously. “Veronica should do it.”
Weevil rolled his eyes, but he handed her the glass of water without putting up a fight. “See if I ever help you again.”
Veronica opted not to get in the middle of their mutual annoyance, so she poured the water silently, trying to wet the earth down evenly. “Okay, try now,” she said, and Ariana leaned in to pat at it with the back of the shovel. To Weevil, while the girl was distracted, she said, “Now she’ll just get dirtier. Your grandmother won’t like that.”
“She put out water to clean up with,” he said easily, which answered how Ariana was supposed to wash up before she came inside; there was no obvious hose anywhere.
“Sounds like a plan,” Veronica said after a moment, mostly because lack of response felt rude. He wasn’t labouring under any such impression, apparently, because he didn’t say anything else until Ariana had finished building the volcano up to the bottle’s mouth and Veronica was walking her through all the steps they’d taken. Bottle, check. Baking soda, check. Volcano, check.
“So we just need the vinegar,” Veronica told her, but Weevil made a faint noise of objection.
“Don’t you need food colouring?” he said.
She blinked, waiting for the sarcasm or smugness to hit, but apparently he meant it. It took another moment to realize he was right – red food colouring would probably really elevate the effect, even if it didn’t have any real scientific merit.
“Okay, Scientific Weevil,” she said, putting a bit of attitude into it out of habit. “Go get some, then.”
“I’m Scientific Eli,” he told her, with a sort of mock-sincerity that was very different from his usual variety. It was the kind you used on kids, she realized as Ariana giggled.
“I don’t care who you are, I already have a lovely assistant,” she replied, which prompted more giggling.
He made some exaggerated faces at her, mostly pouting, but then he disappeared back into the house and came out a minute later with red food colouring, so she didn’t bother thinking of something cutting to say.
“We add the red food colouring,” she told Ariana, extra serious to prove he wasn’t the only one who could be good with kids, and tapped out what was probably a too-generous number of drops. “And then…”
“VINEGAR!”
Veronica had forgotten how loud kids could yell when they were excited. She managed somehow not to flinch. “Yep. Stand back.”
Ariana took a giant step backward. Veronica had only meant she should lean in so much, in case she got foam on her shirt or something, but she bit back a smile and didn’t say anything, just carefully poured in the vinegar. It sloshed a little, not spilling but dispensing more than she’d intended, and the bright red foam gushed out of the top immediately.
It didn’t look much like lava in Veronica’s opinion – more like angry cherry Jello – but Ariana seemed impressed. She even half-whispered, “Wow,” so Veronica dispensed the one and only volcano fact she had to hand.
“You know, when it’s inside the volcano it’s magma, but once it comes out it’s lava.”
“Is lava an acid?” Ariana asked, her eyes wide and earnest.
Veronica opened her mouth and stalled out. It wouldn’t matter if she got it wrong – none of Ariana’s teachers were ever going to ask her a question about the pH of lava – but it took Weevil’s snickering to break her from her paralysis. “Um… it’s… both. Because there are lots of different rocks in it. Some of them are acidic and some of them are basic.”
“And that’s why vinegar and baking soda makes lava!” Ariana exclaimed. Veronica didn’t argue.
“Yep, because it’s both. Ours isn’t real lava, though,” she added, feeling a twinge of conscience. “Real lava’s really hot.”
“I know,” Ariana said, still peering at the volcano. Veronica handed her the bottle of vinegar.
“If you add a little – just a little,” she emphasized, “it might explode again.” If Ariana dumped the whole bottle on it, she’d buy the Navarros a new one, she told herself. But she was completely out of relevant science facts – she had to cut this off now.
Weevil was arching a pointed eyebrow at her, and Veronica rolled her eyes. “The food colouring was a good idea,” she admitted, her begrudging tone still somewhat good-natured.
“You need a step-by-step guide,” Weevil said, grinning at her. “I’ve got a copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook I could lend y–”
“No,” Veronica said firmly, tacking on, “Thank you,” for the benefit of the kid.
Ariana looked up from where she was cautiously tipping the vinegar over the top of the volcano, a fraction of an inch at a time, the rim nearly touching the top of the half-hidden water bottle. “Is that science for cooking?”
“No,” Veronica said, while Weevil cracked up quietly behind her. She attempted some damage control. “It’s science for losers.”
That didn’t even put a dent in his amusement, but Ariana shrugged and went back to the volcano. “Remember to wash up before you come in,” Veronica reminded her, and escaped back into the house.
Weevil followed her, obviously. He snickered when she dipped her hands in the basin of water his grandma had put by the back door – but Lucia was using the sink, what was she supposed to do? At least the rest of her was still clean.
“Stop laughing and start solving for X,” she told him sternly as he evicted Danny from the kitchen table and sat down.
“Why, did you lose track of how many you’ve got?”
Puns were the lowest form of humour, Veronica reminded herself, annoyed that the quip still stung slightly. “I left Xs behind a long time ago,” she told him superciliously. “I passed Algebra in middle school.” She hadn’t taken Algebra II until she was a freshman, but that was beside the point.
Weevil raised his hands in mock-surrender. “Can we just get this over with?”
He’d already put his textbook and lined paper on the table, she realized. Either he really wanted to make her help him with Algebra again or he was very serious about selling the cover story. In aid of the latter, she said, “Tell me you remember what an integer is.”
“Yeah, it’s a fucking normal number.”
That earned him a disapproving noise from the sink. “Eli.”
He rolled his eyes, but didn’t respond. Veronica dragged the textbook toward the middle of table so she could read most of the page upside down.
“So where are you?” she asked, then remembered she was supposed to have tutored him last week as well. “In class, I mean – we can’t just keep reviewing basic stuff.”
It could have been more tactfully worded, especially in front of his grandmother, but Weevil didn’t react. “Graphing shit,” he said. “It’s like… Vs now, instead of lines but it’s the same crap as last semester, basically. You showed me that already.”
Veronica forced herself not to shoot a glance at Lucia to see if the woman read anything into that statement.
“But I pretty much flunked this imaginary numbers unit,” he went on. “It doesn’t make any f – goddamn sense.”
It took her a moment to respond – the self-censorship for his grandma’s sake was unexpectedly sweet, and she had to recalibrate for half a second. “Okay, so… what don’t you understand about imaginary numbers?”
“They don’t exist. How am I supposed to do math with numbers that don’t exist?”
“Are you seriously going to be a pain about this again? Do you want to pass or do you want to complain about how you think math should work?”
Weevil jabbed his finger at the textbook. “It doesn’t make any sense! They want me to do math with the square root of negative sixteen, which doesn’t exist, so how is that supposed to tell you anything? It’s pretend! Nobody’s making you do imaginary history with fake presidents, or imaginary chemistry with fake elements.”
Okay, maybe he was actually having trouble and not just making trouble. “Right, but they just want you to pretend the number exists, so maybe learn how to do that so you don’t fail.”
He made a fist and shoved the knuckles into his opposite palm, twisting his hand in frustration. “But it can’t exist. It’s not like – we can’t find it, like the end of pi or whatever. It’s literally impossible, so how can the answer be right?” He glowered at the book. “You should be getting nonsense.”
Veronica blinked a couple times. He was in danger of giving her a headache. “Okay, how about we look at this from the angle of telling your teachers what they want to hear?”
Weevil gave her a mulish, resentful look for several long seconds, then sighed, the tension in his shoulders dispersing. “Yeah, I can do that. Just like Ms. Mills, huh?”
“Sure,” Veronica said, blinking at the sudden memory that they’d had Creative Writing together her freshman year. Second semester – she’d and Duncan had finally gotten together halfway through it, and she didn’t remember much from that class that wasn’t cuddling or flirting with him, besides the plagiarism incident.
She wondered if Weevil had ever noticed her. Probably not; aside from getting slightly too cuddly with her boyfriend, she hadn’t been very noticeable. Which was good, because that was weird to think about.
“Okay,” she said, and started an explanation of the superficial ways he could get better at imaginary number operations. They kept on the subject until Weevil’s grandma finished the dishes she was washing and left the kitchen, and Veronica paused.
“What?” Weevil said.
“What’s the plan here, exactly?”
“You stick around long enough to sell this, then take off.” He paused, waggled his eyebrows. “Or you can hang around until she goes to work, if you want some privacy.”
“I’ll pass,” Veronica said drily, although it wasn’t as if she wasn’t tempted. But if she didn’t get home until after five, her parents might have questions. She lowered her voice slightly. “I meant – after this. Am I supposed to spend an hour and a half teaching you math every time I want to get laid? Because that is not worth it.”
“You seemed like you were having a good time when I got here,” he said, presumably just to argue. Veronica rolled her eyebrows.
“I keep my promises. I’m not a babysitter.”
“Harsh,” he said without heat. “And nah. We can keep it to five minutes, then the kids’ll get in the way and we can go upstairs.”
She still didn’t love the idea of having sex in the same house as someone’s parent (more or less, anyway), but they’d had sex in a building full of teachers, so that didn’t seem like a good argument.
Besides, what were they going to do, go to her house?
“Okay, sure,” she said. “So – are you going to simplify those numbers? It’s pretty much the same as basic algebra, so you should be able to handle it.”
“I’ll handle you,” he said, flashing her a toothy grin that was supposed to be scary, and Veronica snorted so hard she almost choked.
“We’ll see about that when I check your work,” she told him, and when he bent back over the problems he was doing his best to hide a much less artificial smile.
Notes:
Warnings for this chapter: getting a headache because of science questions. XD
By which I mean: perhaps you are, like me, curious about the answer to Ariana's question about whether lava is a base or an acid. And the answer to that is... a mess. I looked it up myself, just to see, maybe to drop a fun easter egg in my notes, thinking there were three possible answers: acid, base, or 'no one has ever been able to get the pH of lava'. Yeah, not so much.
Among the many conflicting answers I found, I have gleaned the following:
*The pH of lava, in the chemistry sense, probably varies depending on the specific composition of the molten rock (so Veronica's answer is not entirely incorrect). But I also couldn't figure out how they measured this, or if anyone ever HAD or maybe this answer was just deductive rather than proven.*Geologists classify rocks as 'basic' or 'acidic' but it has NOTHING TO DO WITH PH FOR SOME REASON??? It's about how much silica is in them. Apparently this is a holdover from before science understood pH, or something? I haven't thought about pH since high school so I'm not well-set-up to understand all this.
*It turns out (maybe unsurprisingly) that I -am- shameless enough to be willing to ask one of our geotech people at work about this - but I also didn't see any of them on Friday so that didn't help.
All that said, I guess we can give Veronica a tiny but of a pass for fudging it.
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