“She’s Lane’s. Those guys are dead.”
He said it.
“What’s going on here?”
I sagged back against the locker when a teacher finally showed, my knees buckling, except I couldn’t fall. That guy was still holding me upright. More of his friends came to stand around him, all grim, and all focusing on him as they were inspecting me with their eyes.
“What happened?” The same teacher’s voice got louder. More firm. “Hello. Anyone going to fill me in? I was told two boys were fighting out here. Where are they?”
“Uh . . .” Someone spoke up.
The guys by me whipped around. One took a threatening step toward the speaker. “Don’t say a word.”
The voice belonged to a girl, who gave him a nasty look. “They have cameras. It’ll be on video.”
He took another intimidating step her way. Fear flashed in her eyes, but she jerked her gaze away from him. “Will Proguesly and Hector Smith were fighting. They knocked into her.”
“And where are they now?”
She hesitated again, sinking away from completely narcing on the rest because what I found out later was that when I got hit, Creighton’sguys were notified. They were in another hallway. They tore into the fight, beating the crap out of the two guys.
I was in seventh grade, but everyone already knew. No one went against Creighton Lane.
I had a black eye and bruises all over, but I was fine. Will and Hector had mostly just knocked the wind out of me, but them—Hector’s elbow was what had given me the black eye. He came to school a week later without a hand. And Will, he was the one who was blamed for the fight in the first place.
Will never came back to school.
Will never came back at all.
His face went up on a missing persons flyer, but everyone knew what happened to him.
Creighton killed him.
Chapter Nine
Blake
A pile of books dropped beside me on the table.
I jumped from the suddenness of it, and at the same time two chairs pulled out from the table.
My guy roommates both dropped down into the chairs. I still hadn’t met the girl who lived on the main floor of the townhouse. Niko. That was her name, but Marshall and Heath, I’d met them my second day there. They’d originally met each other because they came from the same fraternity, which was also how they met Palma because she was in the sorority that they partied with a lot. Marshall beamed at me while Heath glowered from across the table. And this summed up how they viewed me.
Marshall liked me.
Heath very muchdid not. I didn’t know what his problem was. I thought maybe that was his default setting.
It wasn’t.
He was gentle with Palma.
He was friendly with Marshall.
I hadn’t witnessed him with anyone else, so as far as I could tell he had a problem with me. Or maybe new people? I hadn’t spent alot of time with my roommates because turns out, being graduate students, they were busy. They were really busy. Between my own studies and looking for a job, the time when I’d been at the house had been spent alone. I heard Palma come home a couple times, but our paths rarely crossed during the day. And none of them had been around last weekend.
“So.” Marshall whistled. “I think we need a housemate hangout. You’ve been living with us for two weeks now, and we’ve barely seen you. Come out with us tonight.”
“I don’t know,” I started to say.
