January 28th, 2013
Winter’s car was nearly out of gas by the time we reached Jake’s house. I’d tracked down his address in the white pages, holding my phone above the paper as my only light source, on the way. It was then she realized how low on gas we were, slamming the steering wheel with her palms.
“Fuck!” She exclaimed, grimacing. She pointed to the fuel gauge, “How far away is Jake’s house?”
“According to this,” I muttered, tracing a line from his name to his address slowly. “He lives on Central, which is just a few minutes away.”
“Alright,” She muttered under her breath, chewing pensively on her lip. She stared straight ahead when suddenly, a smirk twitched at her mouth, “I’ve got an idea.”
❄
“Why do you even have a funnel in your trunk to begin with?” I asked as she parked right in front of the Gavin household. She ignored me, though, and opened the door quickly, headed for the rear of the car.
“For situations such as these,” she explained, retrieving the funnel and hose from the trunk. She closed it quietly, her eyes flickering up to the old Tudor house.
I slipped out of my seat, careful not to make a sound. I looked at her meekly, “And how often do you find yourself in these situations?” I whispered, grimacing.
“Shh, shut up!” She demanded, suddenly clamping a hand over my mouth. Her entire body stood perfectly still for a moment and I did too, frightful of what she might to do me if I didn’t. After a second, I could see a light flicker on on the second floor of the house. Deftly, Winter pushed me closer towards her and ducked behind the car, keeping absolutely stagnant, as if she were not human at all, but a statue left on the road. She felt cold like a statue, too, and I might have believed she were one if I couldn’t hear her heavy breathing so well and have felt it so hot on my neck.
After about a minute of silence, I moved her hand slowly from my mouth, “Winter, I—”
“Shh!” she snapped again, moving her hand back over my mouth. She pushed me a little, as if to finalize her statement. I did as directed, though rather obstinately. After a moment, she gingerly removed her hand, turning my face towards her. Her index finger hovered over her mouth as she muttered, “Be. Quiet.”
I nodded in agreement, though she didn’t look so assured. She slowly peeked over the hood of her car, looking up at the grand old house with wide blue eyes. After a moment or so passed, the light flickered off, and, quickly as could be, she sprung back up to her feet. It took me a minute to catch up to her in the back of the car where she retrieved the funnel and hose again, as well as an empty, red gasoline jug.
I stuck close behind her as she headed towards the driveway where Jake’s familiar 65 Camaro sat placidly, undisturbed. Winter turned back around, narrowing her eyes at me through the dark, “You got the stuff?”
I gestured to the canvas bag hanging over my shoulder with a curt nod, speechless. I felt antsy walking up to the stranger’s driveway with Winter, vandalism on our mind. She’d gotten me to sneak out, she’d gotten me to skip school, and now, she was getting me to destroy this boy’s car. It wasn’t that it wasn’t entirely of her own volition and that I had no part in it, but Winter was certainly the backbone at the heart of this operation.
“Here—I’m gonna siphon the gas out of this car. You’re gonna bang the windows out. Quietly as possible. Got it?"
I looked at her, wondering how one could act so calm in such a petrifying situation. My mouth ajar, I moved my lips to form a rejoinder, but nothing came to mind, and only hot air escaped my worried lips.
“Oh my god!” She suddenly exclaimed, calling me back to reality. She was looking inside the car when she pulled a lock pick out of her pocket and opened the car door with a suspicious amount of ease. She reached inside for a small object, and when I got closer, I found that it was his wallet. She opened it and looked inside, grinning when she pulled out a ten-dollar bill.
“This kid is cheap, only ten bucks,” she muttered in annoyance. A moment passed when a huge smile came across her face, and she pulled out a pocket-sized photo, “Oh my God! Look at this,” she exclaimed, handing me the picture.
I studied it under the darkness, adjusting my glasses to see better a photo of Jake, passed out atop a bottle of beer cans and dirty party plates, dressed in nothing but a pair of white briefs. But that wasn’t the focus of the photo.
“Oh, shit,” I muttered, looking back up to Winter with wide eyes. She tore the photo back from me, and I felt almost a little uneasy with it resting with her.
“Lil’ Jake is actually really little,” Winter speculated, turning the photo in several different angles, almost to get a better look.
I frowned at her, “Well, stop looking at it.”
“Why?” She asked with a raise of her eyebrow, her eyes never leaving the photo. “You jealous, Book Boy?”
I felt my face turn an unspeakable shade of red.
“Why does he even have that?” I asked after a moment, trying to change the direction of our conversation.
“One of his shitty friends probably shot it at a party, and he took it from them,” she said with a shrug.
“What kind of friend would do something so mean to you?”
She frowned, and I thought I might’ve seen her flinch. Her voice was solemn, “A bad one.”
After a moment of silence passed, she spoke. “I’m gonna hang on tight to this,” she said, shoving the photo in the back pocket of her jeans. Smiling, she bent to the ground, picking up a sizably large stone and placed it securely in my hands as if it’d fall without her assistance. “Now do your part,” she told me.
I frowned, shaking my head. “Winter…I don’t know if I want to go this far—”
“—Oh, come on, live a little,” she said with a resounding sigh. She knelt down to Jake’s car’s fuel door’s cover, attaching the hose to it, siphoning the liquid from the car with ease. I wondered if she’d done something like this before. I wondered if she’d done lots of things I didn’t know about before. She took a moment to look back up at me, giving me a spark of reassurance. “Look—this guy deserves whatever he’s got coming to him, and you know that. I’m not gonna let him toy with poor Hattie’s heart, and neither should you.”
“Of course I know that,” I snapped indignantly. “I’m just a bit…weary of this whole situation.”
“Well,” she said after a moment, standing up to dust off her pants and palms, placing a hand on my shoulder, “all I know is how grateful Hattie would be if she knew her big brother did something like this for her.”
I looked up, meeting her frosty eyes instantly, “I don’t want Hattie to know this was us,” I told her. I thought of my little sister, her big, wide eyes, puffy and red from crying, her droopy frown and how I could easily turn it into a smile. I looked down at the stone in my hand, feeling a sudden sickening lurch in the pit of my stomach, “I just want her to feel happy.”
Winter looked at me, the edges of her mouth turning upwards into a smile. Her hands covered mine, rolling my fingers over the stone, securing it even more tightly in my hand. Her eyes glinted with mischief, the way they had when she first led me out of the school doors and out into the cold, free air.
Her voice was a whisper. “Then do it.”
I looked at the rock, weighing my options carefully in my head. On one side, this wasn’t like me. I wasn’t the person that did all these crazy, rebellious things and treated them as if they were nothing. But on the other hand, I did want revenge, whether it was healthy or not. And at such a point, it wasn’t my own conscious that needed clearing.
Eventually, I looked up at Winter and nodded my head. “Alright, alright, I’ll do it,” I told her.
Her eyes glimmered, and she gave me a quick hug. When she pulled away, she retrieved the gasoline jug, now filled nearly to the brim. She tapped it with her hand, satisfied as she whispered to the air. “Thanks a million, Jakey.”
❄
January 29th, 2013
The next morning, the school, for the first time in ages, felt alive.
I walked in through the doors, side by side with Hattie. It was the first time I’d driven her in months, since her usual mode of transport was alongside Jake, and our mother was at work early. She didn’t speak to me on the ride over, and I didn’t think she was going to, either. When Hattie fell into a spell of silence, she stayed there until she felt it was fit to come out and greet the world again.
But upon entering, I could instantly feel the energy pulsing through the school. In the North Western reaches of New York, during the dead of winter, the schools seem to hibernate like all the wildlife around us. The fights are few and less frequent, the people are less chatty, and the homework is heavier. The students have no reason to explode from happiness like when the first shot of spring is introduced and they feel warmth linger on their skin.
It was like all of that had been effaced and instead, the school flooded with energy all over again. People were chatting in the hallway; hushed tones mixed with explosive laughter. Hattie looked startled, the purple half moons under her eyes making them look even wider with confusion. For once, she spoke.
“What’s happening?” She wondered quietly. I didn’t know if I was supposed to answer, but I did anyway.
“Not sure,” I fibbed. I figured the day before that word would travel quickly. It wasn’t too bid of a school, and I’d learned that Jake was too big of an influence for such a thing to go unnoticed.
“People are crowding Jake’s locker,” she suddenly remarked, her mouth falling open. She looked into the distance where, by the office, I could make out Jake’s shaggy head of blonde hair, surrounded by an overwhelming company. I smirked to myself, shoving my hands in my pockets. I could only imagined how he’d reacted to the smashed out windows, the near empty gas tank, and the little message Winter had left for him.
We have to make sure there’s a little bit of gas left for him, Winter had told him. We want him to get halfway to school before he notices his car is going to stop completely.
I’d asked Winter why he wouldn’t just take one of his parents’ cars. She’d answered that by deflating their tires. When I asked her if it was necessary, she’d called them casualties of war.
I chuckled under my breath at the thought of it and wondered how long it took him before the car broke down.
“What’s happening?” She asked, turning towards me, as if I held all the answers. I looked down at her. She was still so short compared to me, I could hardly imagine she was in high school. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously, “Did you do something, Henry?”
“What? N-No, of course not,” I said, stunned. I sounded surprised, but my eyes must’ve betrayed me, because Hattie crossed her arms, looking at me like our mother would at us.
“Henry, I know when you’re lying—”
I shook my head, “But I’m not—”
“Hattie!”
I shut up halfway through my sentence when I found my words cut off, and suddenly, a third shadow was cast between us. I looked to my right, and feet away stood Jake, surrounded by classmates. His arms were crossed, his hair mussed, and his skin was red from the bitter cold.
Hattie glowered at him, unamused, “What the fuck do you want?”
“I want you to explain what the hell happened to my car!” He exploded, his eyes fiery with annoyance.
She crossed her arms, taking an opposing stance. “I have no clue what happened to your shitty car. I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“Oh, of course you do, don’t lie,” he barked. “My windows were shattered, my tank was near empty, and someone spray painted “ASS FUCK” on my hood. What does that even mean?”
I found myself trying to hold back my laughter. I wasn’t aware of that finishing touch Winter must’ve added when I was loading the gear back in the car.
But Jake seemed to have heard the small, stifled laugh just squeak past my lips, and he looked at me like I had a death warrant. I was a year his senior, but he was at least a head taller than me, and much, much stronger. “Do you think that’s funny, dickface?”
I peered at him strangely. “Dickface? What does that even mean?” I asked him. I looked at the crowd behind him, gesturing to myself with a shot of spontaneous confidence I didn’t remember receiving, “Do I have a dick on my face? Why did nobody tell me? Hattie, did you know about this?”
A few giggles escaped a few lips, but Jake was far from entertained. He narrowed his eyes at me, taking a heaving step forward, “I bet you think you’re funny. It’s almost sad, really. It’s gonna be even sadder when I smash your face through your own car window.”
“What’s really sad is your massive inferiority complex,” a newcomer piped up as a figure of white passed in between my sister and me. Winter narrowed her glassy blue eyes at him, “Is that why you feel the need to fuck anything that moves, and damn the consequences?”
Jake seemed petrified for less than a moment, lost in her frighteningly icy eyes. He scowled at me, gesturing to her, almost as if he were too afraid to confront her himself, “Who is this bitch? Does she fight your battles for you, Carson?”
I was about to speak up when I grabbed Winter’s arm, but she beat me to it.
“This bitch,” Winter hissed, her eyes ablaze, “has a name. And you can bet that it’s not bitch.”
He faltered with his speech, “Well, I—I don’t give a damn. And this doesn’t concern you, so you might as well just fuck off—”
“You know, Jake,” she said, emphasizing his name like it hurt her to say it. Her hand went to her pocket, pulling out a small, rectangular image. She smirked to herself, watching as the blood drained from his face. He knew exactly what it was. “It seems so strange that I know so much about you, yet you know so little about me. So I’ll tell you something you should know,” she said, taking a step closer, her brace clacking against the linoleum floor. “I don’t like it when people threaten my friends. Especially my best friends. It puts me in an emotionally compromising situation, you see, and I’d hate to have to retaliate.”
He looked at her like a frightened puppy when he asked her in a shaken voice, “Where on earth did you get that?”
I saw her lips twitch into a smirk. “I’m glad I got your attention,” she said quietly. She bent in closer, whispering loud enough to hear. “Ass fuck.”
The dominos seemed to begin to fall in Jake’s head, the dots reconnecting themselves, and suddenly, his eyes were aflame again. But he didn’t dare yell, or even speak out of term. Her smile was every bit as demeaning as the expletive written in hot pink on his car.
Quickly, Jake snatched the photo from her hands, taking less than a second to rip it to shreds. He looked at her nervously before, but it’d changed to a smug grin on the dime. He laughed, “That was almost too easy,” he told her.
I nudged her, “Winter,” I muttered. “I hope you know what you’re doing…”
She didn’t respond, but she didn’t have to. She crossed her arms, her smirk never fading. And that seemed to worry him. She laughed right back in his face. “Don’t worry. I’d never make it that easy for you,” she told him. His face fell and she spoke again.
“I have plenty of copies waiting back home.”
Jake’s face contorted into a twist of horror and anger. His fists balled at his sides, he lost in, and lunged forward as his crowd fought to hold him back. I pulled Winter out of the crosshairs when he yelled, “You bitch!—”
“Enough!”
The whole word stopped to spin for a moment as everyone turned their heads to see Ms. Calloway standing but a few feet away from the crowd. Her arms crossed, she stood obstinately ahead of us, her eyes focused on us three.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Jake pointed at Winter accusingly, “She vandalized my car and smashed my windows—” he started, but she wouldn’t let him finish.
“Smashing windows is vandalism, dipshit,” Winter rebuked with a roll of her eyes.
Ms. Calloway ignored them both and looked at me, “Henry, what is happening?”
I frowned at her, feeling compromised. I didn’t want to lie to her, but I couldn’t betray Winter’s trust. “…Jake…he, um, tried to attack Winter.”
“And why did he do that?”
I chewed at my lip apprehensively. I could almost feel Winter and Jake staring at the back of my head, “I…I don’t know. She didn’t do anything to him.”
He shouted out. “She wrecked my car—!”
She scowled at him, “I did not!”
“Did too!”
“Not!”
“Did Too!”
“Stop it, both of you!” Ms. Calloway hushed, rushing to break it up between them. “Everyone, return to class. I’ll let it go now, but if you start this again, you’re all headed to the principal’s.”
Jake and Winter shared one last glare before Jake gave a reluctant grown and spun on his heel, rushing away from the scene as the crowd followed in tow. I grabbed Hattie and Winter by their arms, almost like I wanted to protect them from Ms. Calloway. But they needed no protection, because she was looking directly at me.
She frowned at us three and nodded her head, “You’re free to go, guys.”
Slowly, we nodded back, but I found myself staring longer at her. Behind her glasses, her eyes were sad. And as Winter tugged me along, I heard her say some things I couldn’t quite make out. I floated through the rest of my morning until the bell rang, unable to forget that sincerely awful look of disappointment.
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dedicated to mizeroangel for her wonderful and thoughtful message last chapter! thank you so much!