Page 58 of Riot Rules
ME: Dash! That’s extortion!
LDL IV: BRIBERY. In its very mildest form. I helped Chloe. She helped you. No harm, no foul.
Urgh. How am I supposed to feel about this? Poor Chloe’s family is struggling, and Dash took advantage of the fact. Then again…without this little deal that they struck, Chloe would have to leave Wolf Hall and go to another school?
LDL IV: I can hear your moral outrage halfway down the mountain.
ME: It’s hard to feel good about benefitting from someone else’s misfortune.
LDL IV: Talk to Chloe in the morning.
And that’s all he says.
I get ready for bed. I go and wash my face in the fourth-floor bathroom, debating the ethics of this boon. Somewhere between brushing out my hair and brushing my teeth, a wrinkle of guilt forms in my mind, like the rucks in my new rug that just won’t lie flat. I keep tripping on it as I navigate my thoughts, and it won’t go away. My reaction was ungrateful. When I get back to the unfamiliar room and climb into my very comfortable new bed, I message Dash one last time.
ME: Thank you. It’s beautiful. I love it.
He replies one last time.
LDL IV: I picked the loudest, ugliest colors they had, just for you. Night, Stella.
24
DASH
TWO MONTHS LATER
I hear them howling.
Smoke. Shadow. Snow. Ink. Rasputin.
I never intentionally named them. Their names just emerged in my head over time, like they were planted there by someone else. I don’t think that Wren and Pax know about the wolves. I’ve never mentioned them. I don’t mind sharing most things with the boys, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to share the wolves. The first time I saw them, I was getting high down by the lake. Then by the cemetery. Sometimes, I see them on the fire road that winds around the back of the mountain. Once, I found Rasputin actuallyinsidethe maze, all by himself. Rasputin, with his rough, steel-grey coat and silver-tinged muzzle, is the oldest member of the pack, I think. Half his left ear is missing. His eyes are clouded over with rheumatism.
Last winter, he trailed behind the others when they ran along the border of the forest, favoring his right hind leg, injured somehow, and I worried. I kept waiting for him to not be there the next time I saw them. But even if he came a couple of minutes after the others, limping and staring balefully out of the trees at me from a healthy distance, he always came.
Rasputin is the ugliest of the five sleek animals that haunt the woods surrounding Wolf Hall, but he is also my favorite.
They hunt lower down the mountain at night, which is why, perhaps, no one at the school has really noticed them. I’m always alone when I encounter them. To my knowledge, no one else has ever seen them. Apart from Carrie.
Two months pass, and every night I sneak up to Carrie’s new room to see her. We talk. We fuck. We lie twisted in each other’s arms, and we breathe in the dark. And every night I run back down the fire road to the song of wolves howling.
They’re restless, hungry, and I know how they feel. My feelings mirror theirs as I climb the stairs of Riot House every night and collapse into my bed. When Pax hammers on my door in the morning, I still get up and run. I’m exhausted. I find the energy, though where the fuck it comes from is a mystery.
I’m getting more sex than I ever have in my life. I should feel at peace, but I’m not. I prowl the corridors of Wolf Hall, roiling in my skin, climbing the goddamn walls. I’ve never experienced anything like this before; when I’m not with Carina, I spend every moment looking for her. I scan the sea of students’ faces as they pass me by, waiting for one of them to finally be hers.
When we pass each other in public, we ignore each other at first. That becomes insufferable after a while. I do it first: reach out and graze the back of my hand against hers. Sometimes, it’s a finger. Our arms brushing up against each other. It’s a dangerous game to be playing, since I’m nearly always with Wren or Pax, but I can’t bring myself to stop.
I’m restless, knowing that she’s so close and not being able to kiss her. I’m hungry for more of her. I know the curves of her body intimately now. I know what every part of her tastes like. I’m an addict, feening for their next hit. Every drawn-out moment is sheer torture.
“Jesus Christ, Lovett. You look like shit, man. You need some sleeping pills or something? I got a guy.” This, from Pax, does not come as a shock. Of course he has a guy.
“Sure. That’d be sweet.” If you want to maintain a lie, you have to accept the fact that it will consume you. It requires feeding at all times. You can never forget that there are supposed to be other explanations for your absence, your tiredness, or the fact that you’ve been distracted for weeks on end. The lie I’ve told Pax and Wren is a believable one, thankfully. I’ve told them that my father’s ramping up the pressure, urging me to do better in my assignments, whichistrue. I haven’t been burning the midnight oil to make my old man happy, though. I’ve been tiptoeing out of the house like a fucking loser to see a girl.
“I used to have night terrors,” Pax admits. He chucks his house keys at me, then gets out of the car. I drew the short straw to go with him into Mountain Lakes for supplies. This party’s been in the works for a long time now. Pax volunteered himself as Master of the Hunt. As Master of the Hunt, he could have come up with any number of fucked-up, bizarre party games for us all to suffer through. Wren insistedhetake charge of the festivities this time, though. Under normal circumstances, I would have warred for the title myself, but I’m glad Pax and Wren wanted it. Means I can fade into the background and stay out of trouble. I’mhopingthat’s what happens, anyway.
“They were pretty rough,” Pax continues. “Meredith tried to put me in therapy.”
“Hah! How did that go?” I can just imagine it now: Pax, waiting for his psychologist to step out of the room, and then holding a lighter to the curtains and burning down the whole building.
