Page 37 of Riot Rules
This is the deepest conversation I’ve had with Pax. Ever. We’ve lived together for nearly three years now and we’ve baited each other, taken the piss out of each other, wailed on each other, fought, and then fought some more for the hell of it. We’ve never reallytalked, though. Surprisingly, it isn’t all that awkward.
“I think he’s being an idiot, too. But he hasn’t told us what he’s up to, so it’s not like we can say anything.”
“’Course we can. We can sit that fucker down and have an intervention,” Pax points out.
“Oh yeah?” I take out the sniper that was about to kill Pax in the game. “And what would you do if we sat you down and confronted you about a secret you’d been keeping? Not just any secret. A secret like this.”
He snorts. “I’d knock both of your front teeth out.”
“Exactly.”
“Fair.” Rocking his head from side to side, Pax explodes forward, hammers on the controller, cursing through his teeth at the game on the TV. “This isn’t about the fact that it’s a guy,” he says. He’s firm about this. He says it clear and loud, so that I can hear him over the surging music and the rattle of gunfire. “I don’t care about that. I just want to make that clear. I’m not a fucking homophobe. I just don’t likehim.”
Pax is a hard person. Angry. Standoffish. Prone to aggression. He gets mad at the drop of a hat and has firm, aggressive opinions on a lot of things, but I never for one second thought he would be weird about Wren being with a dude. That never even occurred to me. I’m stoked that he’s of the same mind as me where Fitz is concerned, though. It’s a relief to know that I’m not on own there. “Wren can screw RuPaul if it makes him happy. Fitz is bad news, though. No two ways about it. He just…”
“Creeps you the fuck out?”
“Yeah.”
“So then…what?”
I think about it for a while. Doesn’t take me long to come up with an answer. “We send him a warning. We make sure he understands that there’ll be consequences if he fucks with our friend. Come on. Put some clothes on, heathen.”
Pax pauses the game. “What, rightnow?”
“Yeah. Now. We’ve got work to do.”
Pax grins like a pirate.
* * *
Black hoodies. Leather gloves. We look like we’re about to rob a goddamn bank.
We take the muddy backroad so that we won’t cross paths with Wren coming back down the mountain. We go on foot—the engine on Pax’s Charger is aggressive as fuck and loud enough to wake the dead. If we came screaming up the hill with that thing choking and snarling in the dark, the entire student body would be out of their beds and at their windows by the time we hit the fucking driveway. We’re used to negotiating the backroad on foot, though. This is the way we come running every morning. We know every hairpin and switchback, every rock and every tree. Even in the dark, we make our way up to the academy without so much as placing a foot wrong.
As usual for this time of the morning, the main school building is in complete darkness. There are no lights at the windows. No suggestion of life inside. I can barely make out the imposing shape of the structure as we approach through the darkness, but I can feel its looming presence. It has a life of its own, Wolf Hall. The crenelations along the eaves, much like battlements, and the towers on the eastern and western wings, cast ultra-black shadows that could harbor any number of nightmarish creatures. The ivy that’s slowly consuming the exterior stonework, usually a wash of bright, jade green and firetruck red during daylight hours, looks like the tentacles of some hideous monster that’s trying to crack the building open and force its way inside. Atop each of the flying buttresses that run down the sides of the building, gargoyles perch, their claws gouging into the stonework, leering down at us as we hurry through the rose gardens and approach from the west.
“Come on, then,” Pax rumbles in the dark. “How many ways do you know of to sneak into this place after hours.”
“About a fucking hundred,” I reply.
He laughs. “Good man. The laundry?”
I nod, agreeing. “The laundry.” It makes the most sense. The laundry’s on the ground floor, and the grate they installed last year to vent the steam and condensation from the dryers was never bolted down. John, the school’s resident custodian slash handyman, usually does a good job with things like that, but for some reason he overlooked that one small detail. Lucky for us, really. When we reach the rear western corner of the building, Pax clambers through the undergrowth that’s sprouted up since I last came back here, holding it back so I can follow him. He has the grate off the vent and he’s shimmied in through the two-foot by two-foot opening seconds later. I’m right on his heels.
The laundry smells pretty much the way you’d expect it to smell: detergent and bleach, underpinned by the faint whiff of starch. Unlike most boarding schools, the machines aren’t coin operated. A lot of Wolf Hall’s students come from exceedingly wealthy families and have parents who’d cringe at the thought of their child doing something so pedestrian as feeding loose change into an industrial top loader. The rows of washers and dryers here are top of the line, sleek-looking things with flashing lights, programmable from an app. The blue glow they cast off provides some light as Pax and I make our way out of the laundry and into the hall.
We’re at the wrong end of the building right now. A syrupy silence hangs in the air as we tread carefully down the steps, past the night guard’s office. I hold my breath, waiting for Hugh to come storming out of the little room where he watches SNL all night. I grab Pax by the scruff of his shirt, mouthing for him to wait, which he isnothappy about.
I need to listen. I need to hear…
A spluttered cough; A snort; The dry catch in someone’s throat, just before they begin to snore: Hugh is sleeping on the job.
“Get the fuck off me!” Pax hisses.
“Just move.”
We jog as quietly as we can toward the entrance of the building, to the room on the right where we attend our English classes. The door’s locked. Can I pick said lock? Yeah, sure I can. I’m nowhere near as proficient at it as Pax, though, so I leave that up to him.
