Satisfaction - Vinyaya - Veronica Mars (TV) [Archive of Our Own] (2024)

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 sh*t. 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 sh*t 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 sh*t.”

Assault was bad, and battery was worse, and violence was not to be condoned under any circ*mstances, 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

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 basem*nt, 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 basem*nt 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 basem*nt, 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 blowj*b 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 co*ke 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 co*ke 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 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 f*cking 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 their table, 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 sh*t 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 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 slu*t 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 sh*t 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 slu*t, 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 bullsh*t, 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 slu*t? 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

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 bullsh*t. 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 bullsh*t. 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 amusem*nt. 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 bullsh*t, 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 bullsh*t 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 slu*t 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 bullsh*t, 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 sh*t?”

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 sophom*ore. 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 sophom*ore 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 sophom*ore 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 gangb*nger 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 bullsh*t, 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 sophom*ores 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–”

“f*ck 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 testicl*s 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 bullsh*t 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 amusem*nt. 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 sh*tty 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 slu*t? 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 bullsh*t 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

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 have 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 sh*t, 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 bullsh*t, 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 co*ke 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 co*ke 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 f*cking 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 affect 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 f*cking 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

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 sh*t 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 bullsh*t 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 amusem*nt 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 amusem*nt 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 sh*t?” 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*ck 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 f*cking 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 f*cked 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 f*ck 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 f*cking 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. Batsh*t f*cking insane. And I don’t need this crap from the f*cking 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 co*cked 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 two 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

Chapter Text

On wrongs, swift vengeance waits.

Alexander Pope

It had been the weirdest f*cking day, and Weevil truly didn’t need this sh*t. 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 f*cking 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-f*cking-gain. He’d thought about it, maybe, last year. Played some pathetic fantasy where she realized what a piece of sh*t her boyfriend was and showed up at his house crying, which was f*cking 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 gangb*nger 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 sh*t 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 f*cking 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 sh*t with a ten-foot pole. It was clearly some kind of trap, not that he had any f*cking 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 sh*t 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 bullsh*t was happening to him.

The day had started out sh*tty and just gotten weirder and more f*cked 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 co*ke out of the fridge, so it didn’t look like he was running away when he headed upstairs.

Danny and Alex were playing some f*cked-up soldier game on the stairs, and they nearly hit him in the face with some Nerf bullsh*t Chardo’d bought them right before he got sent up for his f*cking 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 f*cking bullsh*t.

He stared at the ceiling for a while, untouched co*ke 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 sh*t like his bike.

Weevil sat up and cracked his co*ke, 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 f*cking 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 co*ke and stared moodily at the half-size 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 f*cked-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 sh*t 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 co*ke 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 sh*t 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 sh*t, and even if it was annoying it reminded him just how f*cked 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 sh*t,” 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 sh*t ex had told her that if she cried, La Llorona would come take her away, and then burned her with f*cking 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 sh*t 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 sh*t 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 sh*tting 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. “Motherf*cker’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 sh*t 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 f*cking puss*-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 sh*t, 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 f*cking 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 sh*t 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. “f*cking 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 f*ck 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 masoch*stic 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 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 f*ck.

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 sh*t 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 bullsh*t. “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

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 amusem*nt 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 co*cked 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.

sh*t, 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 f*cked 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 sophom*ore 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’ basem*nt. 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 f*ck 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 p*rn, 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 p*rn 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 cl*t, 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 circ*mstances, 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 cl*t 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 cl*t 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 cl*t – 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 cl*t, 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 f*ck 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 f*ckable. 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, “f*ck!” 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 f*cking 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 f*cked 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 slu*ttier.

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-f*cking 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 circ*mstances. 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 circ*mstances, 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 sh*t 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.

Chapter 8: Her Own Wounds Green

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 bullsh*t 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 f*cking 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 f*ck 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 f*cking 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 sh*t, 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.

sh*t. 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 f*cked 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 f*ck 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 bullsh*t 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 f*ck 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 sophom*ore 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 f*cking 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 p*rn?”

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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking stupid, man, aren’t you eighteen next month? That sh*t 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 sh*t, 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*ck, 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. f*ck.

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… vagin* 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 f*cked-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, but if Lilly decided to read into the specific lyrics, 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 nor 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 bullsh*tting.

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 co*ckily 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

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 “slu*t!” 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.

slu*t, 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 slu*t for breathing, anyway, at least in high school. By the end of today she was going to be a slu*t and a bitch – what would she need to get bingo? whor*, 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 slu*t. ‘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 f*ck 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 bullsh*t – 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 sophom*ore’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 co*ke 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 f*cking Veronica–”

“Um, what the hell is going on?” Veronica asked. She went so far as to set her co*ke 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 slu*t 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 f*ck? 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 amusem*nt. 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 bullsh*t 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 co*ke 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 co*ke 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 co*cked 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 slu*t for the guy she’d really had sex with than for a bunch of lackluster blowj*bs 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 basem*nt, 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 slu*t-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 sh*t.” 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 f*cked 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 circ*mstances.”

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 co*cked 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. “sh*t!”

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 f*cked-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 amusem*nt, 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 vagin* 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 cl*t, 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 f*cked 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 cl*t 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 cl*t 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 cl*t 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 cl*t, 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 cl*t 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 vagin*, 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 cl*t.

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 cl*t, 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. org*sm… 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.

Chapter 10: Private And Personal

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 co*ke? 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 f*ck 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 f*cking 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 f*cking door on all that bullsh*t 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 three 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 f*ck 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 gangb*nger 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 f*cking, or weren’t f*cking, 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.” sh*t. 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 f*cking 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 blowj*b I ever gave, okay? This is about you dragging Veronica into your stupid stalker bullsh*t.”

He laughed at her – deliberately, but with real amusem*nt. “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.

f*ck.

“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 co*ck 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 f*cking 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 f*ck 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 slu*t 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 slu*t 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 f*cking 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 f*ck 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 f*cked 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 cl*t, 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 cl*t, 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 cl*t 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 org*sm 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 org*sm; 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.

Chapter 11: Live Through It

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 f*cked-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 sh*t. “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 sh*t, 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 bullsh*t 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 f*ck 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 f*cking 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 sh*t about f*cking 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 sh*t,” 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 sophom*ore.”

“You never regretted making time for me when I was a sophom*ore.” He leered at her, neglecting the fact that she had also been a sophom*ore 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 f*cking 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 sh*t was simple. They hook up, they don’t, they date, they don’t, whatever. No weird tangled bullsh*t 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 f*cking 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 f*cked 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 f*ck 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. II 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 great 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 amusem*nt. “Are you high or something?” he asked.

“At school?” Veronica asked derisively.

“So what the f*ck 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 f*cking 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.

His mouth 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 f*ck 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, “f*ck,” 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 cl*t 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.

Chapter 12: Probably Worth Doing

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 amusem*nt, 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 argument 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 ‘slu*t’?”

“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 slu*ttier 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 slu*ts.

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 amusem*nt 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 circ*mstances, 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 p*rn 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. She caught him by the neck and dragged him down in return, 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 cl*t, 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 cl*t, 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 vagin* 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 cl*t 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 org*sm 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 bullsh*t. I had to listen to a bunch of sophom*ores 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 slu*ts 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 blowj*b 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 p*rnographic 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 org*sm 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 slu*ttier?”

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 f*ck 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 sh*t. 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 sh*t. I’m not just f*cking 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 sh*t.” 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 bestial*ty, 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 sh*t.”

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. “f*ck 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 amusem*nt, 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 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 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 slu*t! You called me a slu*t!” 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 slu*ttitude 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 blowj*bs 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 slu*t 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 slu*t.”

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 slu*t 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 slu*t or something.”

That got an actual smile. “Thanks, Veronica.” Meg hesitated. “I don’t think you’re a slu*t.”

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 slu*t-sneezes at me…”

“slu*t-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 bestial*ty 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 slu*t table. Only slu*ts can sit here.”

“Wait. You’re saying I can’t sit here because I’m not enough of a slu*t?” He played the confusion even bigger – Charlie Chaplin would have been proud.

Veronica shrugged. “I’ve never heard anyone slu*t-sneezing at you.”

Meg made a tiny noise of amusem*nt 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 slu*t. 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.”

Chapter 13: A Little Less Pain

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 bullsh*t 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*ck with me, Enrique. You know the f*cking 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 sh*t anymore; all he does is work that crappy convenience store job and watch TV on the couch. He won’t even do his f*cking laundry.”

“I don’t care if he’s cooking his own meth in the basem*nt – 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 sh*t.

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 sh*t, 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 sh*t – 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 sh*t 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 f*ck 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 sh*t.” 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 sh*t?” 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 f*cks with anyone who lives in this house?”

“No.”

“So do you get to have a f*cking 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 f*cking 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-f*cking-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 No f*ck 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 sh*t 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 bullsh*t, and then up it popped again like a f*cking 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 sh*t.”

*

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, like 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 sh*tty 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, just patted Alex on the shoulder and said, “Finish your homework before you go out, all right? I’ll give you some money for the movie.”

“Do not waste it on f*cking 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 f*cking 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 sh*t 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 f*ck-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 p*rn. 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 f*cking 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 sh*tty 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 slu*tty 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 sh*t. 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 circ*mstances. 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 blowj*bs 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, 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

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 blowj*bs?” 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 blowj*b is, so that might help.”

“Please stop saying ‘blowj*b’,” her dad said, looking pained.

“It’s not true. I’ve actually never given anyone a blowj*b.” 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 co*ckeyed 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 bullsh*t, 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 ejacul*tion – 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. 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 really get a chance, 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 whor* 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 ever 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, an 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 actually 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, 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-pater 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 her 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 bestial*ty 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- 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 and to rely 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 org*sm 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 org*sm 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 org*sm 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 cl*t 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 cl*t 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 cl*t, 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 p*rn) 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.

Chapter 15: It's Natural

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 masturbat* 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 f*cked, 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 unf*ckable. 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 circ*mstances. “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 Danielle 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.”

Danielle, 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 amusem*nt. “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 sophom*ore 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 sophom*ore 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 f*ck 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 should 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 sh*t.”

“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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking rich blonde girls, man? Do you all sign a f*cking contract to pull this sh*t?”

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 Danielle always sit here, right?”

“It wobbles,” Danielle 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 circ*mstances.”

“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 bullsh*t is about? Why didn’t you just f*cking 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 sh*t.” 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.”

“f*ck 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 org*sms 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 co*cky 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

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 f*cking 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 sh*t 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 f*cking 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 sh*t 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking anything to make sure her eight-year-old son wasn’t the one who found her? Danny would be about thirty percent less f*cked-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 f*cking 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 sh*t, 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 through her folds up to her cl*t, 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 her 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 cl*t 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 cl*t.

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, “sh*t,” 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 cl*t 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.”

sh*t. 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 – f*ck, 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 circ*mstances. She was only operating with 40% brain function, after all.

“Like this?” he said, and pressed on her cl*t. “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 cl*t until it felt like she was twitching under his fingers.

Weevil was still talking, like he thought they were in p*rn 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 f*cked her a little faster, and said something about how she was always wet for him but he still knew she was close, and oh f*ck f*ck f*ck –

Veronica mewled and twitched her way through the org*sm, her entire being, as far as she could tell, centered on her cl*t. 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 vagin* 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, ad 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 on 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, amusem*nt 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 larger 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 her 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 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 f*cking 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 masturbat* quite as much as she might have, otherwise, so it was hard to say. Maybe she’d just been thinking about sex constantly 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 f*cking 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 a little 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.

“f*ck,” 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 vagin* and she bit back a noise of surprised pleasure, enjoying the look of outrage on his face.

“Get the f*ck 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 f*cking 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 org*sm, 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 cl*t, 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 puss* 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 c*nt.”

It was, actually, probably the first time she’d ever said the word out loud, but he didn’t need to know that.

“c*nt,” 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 cl*t, 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 org*sm.

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.