Undead Girl Gang(70)
And now we all could die here.
“Xander!” Riley says, wrapping her arms around her stomach. It’s hard to tell since she can’t actually turn colors, but she seems queasy. “What are you doing?”
What’s left of the cabinets in the kitchen crackles and pops as the fire starts to eat up the walls. Herb brushes and twig pentagrams that I strung together hiss before they catch fire and fall to the floor. Dayton, June, and Aniyah rush away from the flames, knocking over some of the empty Gatorade bottles in their wake.
“Mila,” Xander says evenly, as though he can’t taste the greasy smoke. “You need to get out of here. Now.”
“Where am I supposed to go?” I yell. “You just lit the motherfucking kitchen on fire!”
“And you’re trapped here, too!” Dayton says, putting herself between me and Xander. She thrusts her hands on her hips. “Do you hate us that much?”
He examines her face, almost surprised that she’s there. “I don’t hate you. You don’t exist to me anymore.”
Sweat builds in my palms and pools in the small of my back. For now the heat is bearable, making Yarrow pleasantly warm, for once. But it won’t take long for the living room to catch. This whole place is a stack of kindling. Smoke is starting to gather against the swollen ceiling like slimy brown ghosts. It’s being sucked upstairs to the window that Riley pulled the boards off of.
The window that is now the only way out.
“I should have done it sooner. I shouldn’t have wasted so much time. There would have been less cleanup before. Before the scholarship and the attention. Before we had friends to lose,” he says, shaking his head. He runs his fingers through his hair, making his mushrooms flex. “It was never going to stop. All they did was cause pain. Undermining and cutting everyone down. Hurting so many people.” He looks over at Riley, not seeming to care that her skull is glistening in the candlelight and her white eyes are leaking tears onto her gray skin. “I had to stop them. It was killing you, Ry.”
She shakes her head, a hand coming up to cover her mouth. “No. Oh God, please, no.”
Aniyah takes a step back, toward the kitchen fire. I can see my own need to run reflected behind her glasses. I catch her eye, make her look at me for long enough to see how very serious I am about getting her out of here alive. I jerk my head toward the stairs. Her mouth slants up on one side to say, Are you fucking serious? I widen my eyes—because, yes, this is the most serious I have ever been in my life—until she takes a breath and starts to inch away.
“Every time you thought it was going to get better, it started all over again,” Xander says to Riley. “The ballet lessons you couldn’t take and the parties you weren’t invited to. Even when your name was on the shortlist for the Rausch Scholarship, Dayton started telling people that the committee wouldn’t vote for you because they’d be too scared of what you’d pick as the theme. She said maybe you’d choose witchcraft or dead bodies.”
“I heard Dan Calalang say it first!” Dayton protests.
“Then maybe he needs to be next!” Xander snaps. The vein in his neck throbs, a balloon close to bursting. He stares daggers at Dayton, and when he speaks again, his voice quivers. “We have a family business here. We provide a service that everyone needs. We’re supposed to live here forever. I’m supposed to take over the business from my dad. But how can we survive living across the street from people like you? Trying to live our lives when people like you will always whisper about us in the grocery store and keep us out of the PTA and make sure that everywhere we go, people know that we’re freaks. Because no one was ever going to stop you. They didn’t stop you when you had Riley kicked out of ballet. They didn’t stop you from having your parents change my Rausch gala theme from science to luau.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Aniyah freeze in fear, her foot about to reach the first stair.
June must see her, too, because she folds her arms over her chest and gives a theatrical scoff, flipping her hair so hard that it makes her neck bulge on one side.
“Science was too nerdy,” June says loudly. “People had so much fun doing limbo. You can’t blame me for giving people what they wanted.”
In a blur of movement, Xander has her face in his hand. His nails sink into her cheekbone hard enough to make his arm shake. Her lips pucker like a fish in his palm. But while his grip stays firm, his face slackens. Tears glaze his eyes, and finally his voice breaks. “I tried with you, June. I tried to be nice. I tried to be a good boyfriend. I tried to get you to stop. But you wouldn’t let me fix you. You wanted me to change. You treated my life like it was trash that you were sorting through. You made fun of my family. Letting you get close to me just made it easier for you to hurt us. It was a mistake. I gave you too much ammunition. And then you cheated on me with Caleb Treadwell. You couldn’t stop humiliating me. What did you think would happen at the end? How much did you think you could hurt people before they hurt you back?” His thumb digs so deep into her cheek that I’m scared it’ll break the skin. Before it does, he moves away from her in disgust. Tears slide down his cheeks. “Hanging was too good for you. You two were everything wrong with Cross Creek.”
I know that June and Dayton were those people. Snobby and elitist. Narrow-minded and shallow. But there’s so much more to them than that. There’s laughter and compassion and hope and love and a joy for lives they can’t live anymore. And no matter what they said about Riley and Xander, they didn’t deserve to die. I’ve seen them grow in just one week. The June in Xander’s story isn’t the same girl who would cause a distraction so that Aniyah could creep up the stairs. The Dayton he’s painted as exclusionary isn’t the girl who let me sleep in her lap. They never got a chance to show people how capable of good they were. And now they never will.