Page 30 of Riot Rules
Wrong choice of words. You don’t wanna play any games withme.
Most of my classmates would argue about being charged with this task, but I don’t make a peep. I get up and head to the front of the class, giving Fitz a cold, distant smile as I position myself right next to him. With us all sitting on comfortable couches or in the moth-eaten wingback armchairs, it must be so easy for Fitz to feel like he’s in control. At six feet tall, he must feel like a giant as he towers over us all. Well, I’m standing right next to him now, and he ain’t got shit on me.I’m might be half your age, but I’m six-footthree, motherfucker, and a hell of a lot broader than you, too.
Fitz clears his throat. He makes his way over to his desk and perches on the edge of it, folding his hands in front of him with an expectant look on his face. “Well? Do you have a debate topic in mind? Have you even read the book, Dash, or… are you just standing up here, wasting everybody’s time?”
The claws are coming out, are they? Poor bastard doesnotlike that I’m giving him a hard time. Likely, he’s afraid of what he thinks I know, and he’s trying to bully me into behaving myself. Well, I’m not one to be cowed. Maybe it’s about time Wesley Fitzpatrick figures that out.
I face him down, a loose smile forming at the corners of my mouth.“You want a debate topic? How about the concept of inevitability in the book? I think that it’s inevitable that Edmond’s enemies will eventually succumb to his wrath. Edmond was scattered before he was locked away in that cell. But once he found himself trapped, he had nothing better to do than plan his revenge. His circumstances were such that he had nothing better to do but focus on that one, desperate urge.Misfortune is needed to plumb certain mysterious depths in the understanding of men,”I quote.“Pressure is needed to explode the charge. My captivity concentrated all of my faculties on a single point. They had previously been dispersed, now they clashed in a narrow space; and, as you know, the clash of clouds produces electricity. Electricity produces lightning…and lightning gives light.”I pin him down with a frosty stare. “Should I keep going?”
Fitz massages his fingers into his temple, laughing with a little too much enthusiasm. “Well, damn. Very impressive. I should have known better than to challenge a man of your breeding over his knowledge of the classics. You had the entire works of Alexander Dumas memorized before you were six, didn’t you?” He shakes his head, still grinning like an idiot. “I actually feel bad for you. You probably didn’t have many friends when you were a kid, huh?”
Ooh. Passive aggressive? Ill-advised, friend. Ill-advised.I flash him teeth.“Guess I didn’t. I s’pose that’s why my friends are so important to me now. I’m fiercely protective over them.”
My threats aren’t even veiled anymore. I chose that quote fromThe Count of Monte Cristo for a reason;myattention wasn’t focused before. Wasn’t focused onhim, but now that it is, it’ll only take the smallest nudge to spur me into action.The clash of clouds produces electricity. Electricity produces lightning…and lightning gives light.His actions will have consequences, and I am a consequence he doesnotwant to have to deal with.
“God, Lovett, what the hell are youdoing?” Mara Bancroft, loudmouth extraordinaire, is sitting on a flower-print sofa next to Carina.“You’ve given us the topic. Sit down already. None of us signed up for a hallmark,‘Gee golly gosh, I just love my friendssoblinking much,’ moment from you.”
The fake English accent she parrots is offensive. For starters, it’s a cockney accent, which sounds nothing at all like the BBC accent my father had drilled into me when I was a child. Going off Mara’s impression, she doesn’t know the difference between a distant member of the royal family and an extra in the cast of fucking ‘Oliver.’ I’ve never given her existence a moment’s thought before, but I do now…and I decide very quickly that I wouldn’t piss on her even if she was on fire.
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself with a hep-infected dildo, Bancroft?”I enunciate to make sure she can understand me through my thick fucking English accent.
All hell breaks loose. Mara’s jaw drops. She holds her hand to her chest, a scandalized look on her face, and the girls sitting on the front row all start squealing.
“Oh my god! Fitz! You can’t let him say that! Oh my god!”
Moreoh-my-godsfollow. A couple of ‘that’s-sexual-harrassment!’s and ‘what a sick thing to say!’s are thrown in for good measure. The guys just laugh and elbow each other, catcalling and hurling balled up pieces of paper at Mara.
Wren’s sitting up now, hands casually interlocked behind his head like he’s sitting on a beach recliner, waiting for the Piña Colada he ordered five minutes ago to arrive. There’s a tiny, amused smirk on his face. Pax’s glee is more overt. He’s lying flat on the ground, pointing finger guns at me like I just made his entire goddamn year. “Savage, Lovett. Fuckingsavage!”
“Yeah, thatwasfucking savage.” Fitz sighs dramatically. “Alright, your Lordship. I’m a liberal guy most of the time but come on. That was a little much. You should apologize to Mara.”
“Thank you for the offer, but I think I’ll decline.”
Fitz looks surprised. “No apology?”
I shake my head. “Nope.”
“Alright then.” He walks around the other side of his desk and takes a bright pink pad out of the top drawer. The class mutinies as he scribbles away, tosses his pen down, rips the top sheet of paper from the pad and hands it over to me. “Congratulations. You are now the recipient of the first official detention I’ve had to issue all year. I hope you’re proud of your accomplishment.”
I accept the piece of paper, bowing with a flourish. “I’m fuckingecstatic.”
15
CARRIE
“What anasshole.Can you believe he said that to me? And what the fuck was Wren doing, anyway? He just sat there, smiling like a madman. He should have knocked him out or something. That’s what any normal guy would have done.”
Lunch is almost over, and Mara’s still ranting about Dash telling her to go fuck herself with a hep-infected dildo. The only time she’s stopped ranting about it is when she’s jammed some of her Waldorf salad in her mouth and she can’t talk because she’s chewing.
I sip on my O.J. wishing with all my might that she’ll change the subject but knowing for sure that she won’t. “Wren isn’t normal though, is he? That’s the point. None of them are fucking normal. Dash is rude as hell and thinks he can say whatever the hell he feels like. So, yeah.” I nod for emphasis. “Yeah, Icanbelieve he said that to you. Because he’s a shit. And Wren is a shit. And Pax is a shit.”
“Pax what?” Pres’s eyes are wide as she sits down next to Mara. You’d think she’d have had her fill of Pax Davis after the way he spoke to her at that party, but nope. She’s just as besotted with him now as she ever was. Even overhearing his name in the academy dining hall has her ears pricked and her pupils dilated.
“Pax nothing. We’re not talking about Pax,” Mara snaps. She sounds like a child, testy and petulant. “We’re talking about Dashiell Lovett, and how absolutely detestable he was to me in this morning’s English class. Where were you, anyway?” Mara sends an accusatory glance Presley’s way, like she’s personally offended that she wasn’t in class to defend her honor.
Presley’s cheeks color. “My mom’s in town. She took me to the doctors and…” She’s crimson. “She put me on the pill. She hacked into my email account and read some of the fanfic I’ve been sending to my friend back home.”
I say, “Fanfic?”
