THE VELVET KILLERS II

(6) THE CONFESSION, PART I

MAPI

Special one-pov flashback chapter

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The office was quite illuminated when I started saying:

"Here it goes... If you really wanna understand the whole story, then we need to go back to the very beginning: first year of High School.

Let me be very clear: to survive in a small town like Saint Ives when you're a Spanish immigrant, you gotta make yourself respected, make a name for yourself. When I first got there, I didn't realize what was going on behind the curtains of this seemingly small and quiet town - it was only when I got to high school and met a couple of people that I started to understand. 

There were four of them: Ada Hegerberg, the brains of the school, most valuable player of the soccer team, and true diplomat. When I first met her, I immediately felt something sketchy going on on her part. We started hanging out, and that's how I met Sam Kerr, an Australian exchange student that was quite dumb but good in business, Pernille Harder, the town's star, and Jenni Hermoso, my best friend at the time. The five of us did not have many things in common: some of us were from poor families, other from wealthy ones ; we did not have the same interests, neither did we have the same tastes for pretty much everything. 

I'll always remember the first time we really met: it was after a school riot, where the four of us have been held accountable, and our teacher put us in the school for one day straight as a punitive act, during which we had to clean the whole gym room. We spent the first hour in silence, until Sam and Ada started arguing... 

"What's wrong, you're not used to being punished, process?" Sam aggressively asked, visibly quite mad about something.

"Dios Mio, we're gonna be here all day and all you wanna do is fight?" Jenni exclaimed, as we exchanged a mocking look. While Pernille just looks up from what she's doing, the dark-haired adds: "I know we're not exactly friends in real life, but right now, we gotta bear with each other. Can you do that, uh?"

Both Sam and Ada nodded, and while the rest of the day went on by quite rapidly, as we started talking to each other, with no regard of our differences. When the punishment ended, we still went out for a drink.

It became tradition: each Sunday night, we would meet up near the yellow wall of our school, and just drink some beer and talk about our lives. Pernille would always complain about her absent father ; Ada about her parents that would always push her too far ; Sam about her adoptive parents who treated her like shit ; Jenni about her junkie mother ; and I about my twin sister, who was always trying to impress others more than me. To be honest, my relationship with Alexia was never a loving one - don't get me wrong, we loved each other, but we didn't really like each other. Either way, after months of hanging out together, the five of us expressed the desire to leave the hell out of Saint Ives before that town eats us alive. 

The idea came from Ada: I mean, she was approached by some random Argentinian tourist, and at the time we didn't realise what it meant. We started out small: we would produce our own drugs in Jenni's dead father's abandoned garage - we were like fucking pros, growing the shit out of those plants with artificial lights and everything. We started selling to kids from our blocks - to be honest, the five of us were coming from such different parts of the town that we covered it whole in a matter of weeks. The Argentinian guy was giving out orders at first, but then he eventually went back to his country, sending us some money from time to time, in exchange of us selling under his name.