𝗠𝗔𝗬 𝟭𝟵𝟵𝟭

No one moved.
Not a single one of the five girls that were crammed into the car made so much as a noise, not even a whimper. Muscles hardened, they’d all become statues. Frozen in a beaten-up car with a thick splash of fresh blood running down the windshield.
As though all the liquor and coke had suddenly been sucked out of them, they were rigid and silent in their seats. The sobriety of the body lying limp a few feet ahead on the road hit them all.
They all just… stared.
𝘋𝘳𝘪𝘱,
𝘥𝘳𝘪𝘱,
𝘥𝘳𝘪𝘱.

The only sound that broke the silence, the silence so thick that it was fast becoming suffocating, and Billie struggled to breathe. Lightheaded, she listened to the drip, drip, drip: Blood, she assumed, falling from the smeared hood onto the road.

𝘋𝘳𝘪𝘱,
𝘥𝘳𝘪𝘱,
𝘥𝘳𝘪𝘱.

Then, finally, someone moved. And it wasn’t the body ahead on the road with a puddle of blood starting to pool around it.
It was Kate.
The passenger seat creaked as she leaned forward.
Billie flinched, blinking out of her daze. The burn of nausea started its crawl up her throat. She swallowed down the bile-burn and watched her closest friend twist towards her.
Kate’s hand should have been shaking as she reached for the driver’s side, but it somehow was steady, something that Billie noticed even in her stupor.
Billie’s seafoam-blue eyes watched Kate’s delicate brown fingers grip the end of the wiper stick with a pinch of her manicured fingers then tug it down.
Billie flinched.
Behind her, the twins—Gigi and Tonya—gasped in a hushed unison. The faint slap of a hand on a mouth came not a second after; Carmine muffling her own groan of disgust mixed with a burpy-retching sound.
It was… nauseating. The sight of fresh, thick blood hit over and over with a wiper, spreading out into something brownish and streaked.
“I can’t.” Billie’s whisper was so deafening in the car that it might as well have been a shout. “Kate…”
She turned to face her friend next to her. The weak pallor of Billie’s complexion matched with the numbness of her freckled face made her look sicker than if she was on her deathbed. “Please…”
Kate knew.
It was written all over the change in Kate’s angular face. Understanding. The shift from blank numbness, shock, and disgust…
Kate’s hard brown eyes and Billie’s watery blue ones, locked in a stare that seemed to last an eternity. A silent conversation, unspoken communication. Utterly in sync with each other.
Setting her jaw, Kate yanked the doorhandle and booted the door open.
Then a second screech of a door came.
Billie twisted around in the driver’s seat. Her glassy eyes landed on Carmine in the backseat as she clambered out of the wagon, right behind Kate, shaking like a leaf in a storm. She might have just blown away at the slightest gust of wind.
Behind Billie, the twins stayed in place. The three of them stayed planted in their seats, none willing to move, none willing to join the others now treading up the road.
They watched, instead. Watched as Carmine and Kate linked hands, fingers entwined, and treaded their way over to the crimson puddle spilling over the gravel… over to the lump on the road. Each step they took was hesitant and uneasy, like they were forced to trek across a minefield.
Billie felt that was exactly where she was. Planted right in the middle of a minefield. And in just a heartbeat or two, the whole place was gonna blow.
She was waiting for it. Heart hammering in her chest, pumping blood beneath the translucent pallor of her skin, glass-blue eyes empty of everything but fear and tears.
All she could do in her frozen state was… watch as they reached the body.
Kate and Carmine just stood there. Toes of their boots at the edge of the blood puddle—the puddle that had stopped growing.
A pulse seemed to hit Carmine. She jolted forward, head flopping just once before she was ready to sick up her dinner all over the body—
Kate acted fast.
Whatever decisions she’d come to, she kept in her actions only and shared with no one. She snatched Carmine by the head, clamping her hand to her mouth to stop the sick—and she rushed her back to the car.
Billie had not even a moment to jerk back as Kate threw Carmine through the open passenger door. That did it—that was the longest Carmine could hold back the sick. It spewed from her all projectile-like the moment her gut hit the edge of the seat.
Billie braced herself. Arms crossed over her turned head, her face twisted, and she felt it splatter all over her thigh.
Before she could even whine her complaints or fully acknowledge the sympathetic retching bursting into harmony from the twins behind her, Carmine coughed once, twice, then sucked in a sharp inhale.
“It’s him.” The breath had been sucked right out of Carmine, leaving it only a wispy pathetic excuse for a voice.
Kate’s jaw was likened by her tone, harder than stone, “Henry Maxwell.”
Tension whipped around them. It came in the form of silence.
Billie knew her own thoughts. If it had to be anyone, Henry Maxwell was one she wouldn’t miss. But it also spelled a whole lotta trouble for each one of the girls.
Henry Maxwell was rich for this town. Not wealthy for the city where the elites live most of the time. He was a prep. Not among the elite of Dosserport, not a wasp, but so fucking close to them that he might as well be called an untouchable.
Henry Maxwell was a golden boy.
And them? The girls? They were from the other side of town, on the other side of the tracks.
Then came the real hit when Kate confirmed, “He’s dead.”
Billie knew what she meant by that, how to read into Kate’s warning.
All five of the girls knew the words that weren’t spoken:
‘𝗪𝗲 𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗵𝗶𝗺.’



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