Page 113 of Tis the Season to be Bullied

“We are so fucked,” Silas says, hands in his hair as he paces through my living room. It’s just my two siblings and us, and I don’t expect them to be out of their rooms anytime soon. My folks are at the Cinderhart Academy Reunion, same as Nim Winter’s.

People in Cinderhart take it really personally if you leave town—I’ve never heard of outsiders like Nim’s parents being invited to come back, especially to a reunion.

Winters...why does that name sound so familiar? They’re not one of the elite families—those names have been branded into my mind since early childhood.

I’m too tired and sore to figure it out. We got back about an hour ago, and it’s taken us that long to burn all our camo gear in the barbecue outside. I’m aching all over, especially my nose. I still can’t believe that little bitch broke it. Thankfully Knox could force it back into place, and the water that runs through Silverash is cold enough that the makeshift compress I made out of my shirt brought down the swelling before we’d carted Lorenzo’s corpse back to my Escalade.

I’m not even this sore after three hours of football practice.

All that fuckinghacking. Lorenzo was an average-sized man, but it’s like his bones were made out of fucking titanium. I never realized it would be so different to hacking up a cow or a pig. My family’s slaughterhouse provides all of Cinderhart’s meat, and when I was a kid, I spent several summers in the abattoir. My parents are of the opinion that you can’t run a place like that and not know what happens at every level.

Intimately.

They don’t call my dad the Butcher of Jig Street for nothing.

Knox’s tall frame is folded into my room’s bay window. He’s smoking a cigarette, dawn’s frigid air blowing hints of tobacco smoke deeper inside my room before he can aim it out the open window.”We are not fucked,” he says, calm as ever. The snooty tone of his voice doesn’t go unnoticed—Silas spins around to face him.

“She’s a witness,” he says, throwing out his arm. “If she goes to the cops?—”

“If she goes to the cops,” Knox cuts in, “they’ll politely tell her to fuck off back where she came from.”

Silas holds up his hands. “All we need is one nosy cop who’snotin your pocket, and we’re spending fifteen to life in Lavender Valley Penitentiary.”

I heave myself off my bed, groaning when that sends a dull ache through my face. My room is on the west wing of the Bennett mansion, my brother Trevyn to the right and Efa, my sister, to the left. I’m the eldest, so I get the largest room, but I doubt I would have chosen this one if it had been up to me. Sometimes I feel lost—not just in my enormous room with its own private sitting room, en-suite bathroom, and balcony, but in this massive house.

“Fuck this,” I mutter. “I’m getting breakfast. You guys want?”

Silas cuts me off with a growl, throwing an angry look over his shoulder. “How can you eat?”

I let out an easy laugh. “Mom and Pop taught me when I was yay high,” I tell him, holding my hand a few feet off the ground. “I’ll ask them to show you how when they’re back.”

Silas flips me off, and Knox watches me with a rueful smile as he takes another long pull at his cigarette. If I’m not mistaken, he got that pack off Lorenzo before we began dismembering him.

Macabre? Maybe. Fucked up? I guess. But I’m more shocked that he didn’t keep Lorenzo alive long enough to put out some of those cigarettes on the man’s testicles.

I wander through a silent house. Trevyn is still asleep. He won’t wake up until his drugs wear off. Efa keeps to her room most of the time anyway, so I doubt I’ll see her until breakfast.

That’s why we chose my house to clean up in. Silas has three brothers in his tiny house, so there’salwayssomeone within snooping distance. More so at the moment because his father is on sick leave.

Again.

Knox’s manor was our first choice, but with the reunion this weekend, they had a full house too. Knox told his mother he was sleeping over at my house for the weekend, like when we were kids. She probably thought it was adorable. She likes me.

I make Knox and Silas some coffee anyway, if only so the smell of dark roast will fill up this vast kitchen more than usual. While I’m heating up some pop tarts, I head outside and fetch Dad’s paper. It takes me a few minutes—the NFL would draft our paperboy in a heartbeat if he could toss the Littlerock Gazette all the way to our front door. I skim the front page as I start the trek back up the drive.

Halfway there, I stop walking.

Then I start running, despite how that makes my nose throb.

Knox and Silas both turn to look when I burst into my room. I almost slam the door closed, but manage to grab it at the last second and ease it shut so I don’t wake Efa.

“Nim isn’t going to be a problem,” I say, storming over to the window.

Knox frowns, his red slash of a mouth forming a slanted line. The cigarette dangling from his lips barely has two drags left. “That’s what I said.”

I shove the paper in his face. “As in ever again.”

Silas comes over and leans past my shoulder, the three of us staring down at the article on the front page.

---