It’d be even better if I got into a room with Mason. Because then, I could make certain that only one of us walks out of that room alive.
“Fuck,” Hael curses, gritting his teeth as he releases me and stands up. “Wait until Vic hears about this.” He turns away from me abruptly and heads for the front doors, shoving open the glass and calling out to Victor.
By the time I join him, I can already see that he’s filled Vic in on the situation.
“It isn’t happening,” Victor tells me, but I just return his dark stare with one of my own.
Evil deeds done in the dark, that’s our thing.
I’m already imagining all the ways that I could get Mason before he even realized what was coming.
There are coffins and caskets all around me, a sea of satin and mahogany, a virulent reminder that death waits around every corner. The one I’m looking at in particular has a red-lined interior, just like the one we buried the Thing alive in. Staring down at it now, I relive that entire moment in my head. The ground, opened up and gaping, me in my dress, the boys in their suits. Masks, masks, masks. The grinning maws of skeletal faces.
“You’re disappearing inside your head,” Oscar whispers from over my shoulder, stirring my hair and making me shiver. There’s just something about the Lucullan sumptuousness of his voice that gets to me. It’s like, he developed that voice so the world wouldn’t see how dark and damaged he is on the inside. “You know how he did it? He tried to strangle me. And now it’s become a fetish of mine. How fucked-up is that?”
I shiver again, stepping back from the coffin in front of me as Oscar’s confession about his father takes root in my mind. He stays where he is, my body bumping up against his. Long, inked fingers curl around the pink sleeve of my leather Havoc jacket.
“Let’s just pick one for poor dear Stacey and get out of here,” he purrs, releasing me suddenly and stepping aside as the funeral director hovers in one corner, sweating and nervous and clearly uncomfortable at having two members of Havoc inside his place of business. “What does it matter anyway?” Oscar pauses and runs the palm of one hand down the side of a black coffin, closing his eyes like he, too, is trapped in some sort of nightmare or memory.
“No.” I glance over at the overweight man in his dark suit and somber perturbance. “Get out.”
The man hesitates for about half a second before he drags his simpering ass out the door.
I turn back to Oscar and find him watching me through yet another new pair of glasses. These ones are black, rectangular, so sharp and austere that they may as well be barbed wire, protecting his eyes from the soul searching they so desperately need.
“Do you guys use this place …” I trail off, just in case there are cameras or something. I don’t have to finish that sentence for Oscar to know what I mean: do you guys use this place to dispose of bodies? I mean, we’re standing in the only funeral home located in all of the Prescott neighborhood, one that’s so familiar with our gang that they immediately opened their doors and let us in after-hours.
“No, too easy to track,” Oscar explains, his tie a jewel-toned purple that pairs well with the charcoal black color of the jacket and slacks. He taps his fingers against the side of another casket, watching me with those full moon eyes of his, just two silver discs in a well-mannered face. So well-mannered, in fact, that you’d never know the darkness that lies beneath.
He taps his fingers against the shiny black surface yet again as I pause next to another casket, a white one with a pink interior. It’s sitting on the ground, open. I know that in some places, the funeral homes have fancy displays where you can see casket color, shape, interior lining, all that stuff. But this is Prescott. We have coffins, sure, but they’re just haphazardly strewn about. Most of them are dented or scratched and, legally, are probably not fit to be sold. Again, south Prescott. It’s pure privilege to assume that everybody lives and exists and functions just the way you do. Sometimes, there are economic, cultural, or legal barriers.
I climb into the casket and sit down while Oscar scowls at me.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asks as I lie back and cross my arms over my chest, staring up at a water-stained drop ceiling, my heart racing, eyes closing. So this is what being dead feels like—irrelevance in a world that never stops. I open my eyes again to find Oscar staring down at me, mouth creased into the most perfect frown.
“You’re so pretty, you know that?” I tell him, and he just sneers at me some more. But I haven’t forgotten what he said to me just days ago: I’m in love with you. Desperately so. Those words weren’t said lightly. They were laced with truth and thrown around me like a lasso, drawing me in so deep I have no hope of ever escaping. “If you’d wanted to get out of Prescott, you could’ve been a model or … something.”
“Or something,” Oscar says, his voice dark as he stares down at me. “Now, out of the casket.” He extends a hand, one that’s literally dipped in ink. There are black crosses and crows, people without eyes, gravestones and a crescent moon. I look at his hand, but I don’t accept it.
“Stacey deserves the best,” is my response when, really, I could and should say something profound here. “I want her to have a nice place to rest.” Usually, I’m a fan of natural burials or cremation, but … this is what her crew wants, so it’s what her crew will get.
“That doesn’t mean you have to test it out,” Oscar hisses, kneeling down beside the casket and curling his fingers around the edge. His eyes blaze with a fury that’s difficult to understand, so … I decide to do the grown-up thing and ask him the fuck about it.
“What’s the matter?” I sit up, pushing the curtain of my hair back so I can look at him properly. “This isn’t triggering for you, is it? Because if it is, I’ll get out.”
Oscar stares at me for nearly a full minute before responding. But that’s okay. It’s better when somebody actually thinks about the words that leave their mouth before they blurt them out—not that I don’t do my fair share of blurting.
“I don’t like the idea of you being dead,” is what he tells me. We stare at each other, and that heartbeat of mine that was racing so fast before picks up speed until I feel like I might get dizzy. He may as well have just told me that we’re soul mates or something. There was that much romance in his weird, stilted sentence. Sometimes, with broken people, you work with what you get, you embrace it, and you love them for what they can do.
I look back down at my lap, at the jeans with the holes in the knees, the ones that I wore through all on my own—no pre-ripped denim for this bitch. Not judging, just saying. If you don’t have enough trauma and bullshit to rip your own jeans on the day-to-day, you can buy ‘em, but you’ll never be south Prescott.
“I’m processing,” I tell Oscar, rubbing my hands against the pink satin interior. Why does it have to be so pretty and so comfy, just to put a corpse in? My throat constricts as I think about my sister, about her beautiful corpse wrapped up in blankets with a bottle of Pam’s pills on the nightstand … White flickers take over my vision and I scrub both hands down my face.
To say that I haven’t fully processed the idea that my mother murdered my sister is an understatement.
Neil raped her.
Pam killed her.
Oscar’s hand reaches out, tentative but steady, and falls across my own as they sit in my lap.
“Don’t force it. Sometimes, it takes years.”
I glance over at him, thinking about all the things he said about his father, how he tried to strangle him, how he killed his mother and siblings. That’s a lot to process. And, apparently, we have a lot in common.
“Your hair …” I start, removing one of my hands from underneath his and reaching up to finger the silken black strands. He flinches, but just barely, putting his tattooed hand back over mine and pinning it against his skull in a way he never would’ve done before. “You dyed it again.”
The door opens at the far end of the room and Aaron appears, pausing when he realizes he’s just walked in on a moment steeped in intimacy and connection.
“You guys are okay?” he asks because, really, we’ve been in here a long time. We were supposed to walk in, pick out a coffin, and pay the bill for Stacey’s funeral with the money I dug up from Pam’s backyard. That’s it. Instead, here I am, sitting in a coffin and talking about Oscar’s blond-to-black dye job. Even as a child, when we met at age eight, he had black hair which means that somebody dyed it for him. Who? Why?
“We’ll be out in a minute,” I say, and Aaron withdraws, heading back outside to wait with the other boys. Pretty sure Vic sent Oscar and me in here on this errand on purpose. He does nothing in half-measures and, despite his jealousy and his need to possess me, he’s done everything in his power to try to get me and Oscar to get along with one another.
“Why is your hair black?” I ask, and Oscar shudders, but even when he drops his hand from mine, he lets me play with his hair. I have the strongest urge to kiss him right now. It’s so bad that my mouth literally aches as my gaze drops to that razor-thin line, a rapier sharpened and ready to spill blood. “Even as a kid, it was the color of ravens. Tell me.”
He stares at me and then turns away, glancing toward the door where the funeral director left from. If the guy is smart, he’ll leave us alone in here for as long as we need.
“My mother used to dye it,” Oscar explains, sounding reasonably tired. A gang war, a school shooting, a new relationship … that’s all hard enough. But admitting your trauma, allowing yourself to be vulnerable, that takes energy that comes from the very depths of a person’s soul. “She didn’t want my father to find out that I wasn’t his.”
I just stare at him, blinking through the surprise.
“You weren’t his?” I query back, and he shrugs one, perfect, genteel shoulder. A model or … something. He could’ve been a social media sensation. Shit, he still could be. He could open up an OnlyFans page, flash that pretty inked and pierced dick of his, and rake in a goddamn fortune.