Riot Rules (Crooked Sinners)

by Callie Hart

To an outsider, I must look like I’m one of them—just another disenfranchised youth with too much time on his hands, too scared of the future to admit that he feels lost. On the inside, I couldn’t be more unlike these rejects. I’ve never felt lost a day in my life. Uncertainty is a foreign concept to me. I’ve always known what the future holds. My education and my subsequent career as an estate manager was laid out for me like a red fucking carpet on the day of my birth, roped off to the left and the right to prevent any thought of deviating off course. I am a Lovett. Lord Lovett. One day, I will be Duke Lovett.

I know my friend; he’d rather loosen a few of Shorty’s teeth with a right hook than participate in this kind of dumb, machismo bullshit. We have a pretense to maintain, though, and that means we have to play along. I can do it. Wren can do it. Pax is physically incapable of pretending anything. He wouldn’t be able to play-act convincingly if his life fucking depended on it. He stalks off into the crowd, abandoning us to our fate like the unconscionable bastard that he is. I film the idiots sucking on their beer cans, absently wondering if they’ve had their tetanus shots.

“Sorry, boys. We need to find our friend. He has an anti-social behavior disorder. He’ll nail someone to a wall if we don’t keep him in check.” The crowd swallows us. Two seconds later, we’re on the other side of the kitchen and our new friends are nowhere to be seen. “Jesus fucking Christ, I need a shower,” I hiss through clenched teeth. “I hate faking that shit. I need to wash myself off me. Myself, Jacobi. You made me not like myself, and I always like myself. It’s one of the many things that I’m skilled at.” “Quit griping, dude. Your seventeenth century manor house in the English countryside is showing.” No one can deflate a guy like Wren Jacobi. Except me, when I really put my back into it.

I give him a dour look, rolling my eyes. “You ever been cathed?” “Cathed?” “Yeah. Had a catheter jammed down your dick hole. It really sucks, dude. Hurts like a motherfucker. That’s how I feel right now. Like I’ve been cathed with barbed wire and I’m pissing razor blades. And that’s only when I’m standing still. When I walk, it feels like someone’s shoved broken glass down my urethra and they’re using a bottle brush to really wedge it down there good—” “Oh my god, what the fuck is wrong with you? Stop!” His eyes are legit watering. “You look like a Grecian fucking god. We’re at a party full of half-naked, liquored-up girls. Find someone to kiss it better. I’ll grab Pax and take care of this. Be ready to bounce in thirty.” He melts into the sea of writhing bodies, which is perfect and also really fucking sucks at the same time. People make assumptions about me. They assume I’m a good boy. They assume, because of my heritage and my upbringing, that I’m a gentleman, and they couldn’t be more wrong. I, ladies and gentlemen, am a fuck up. I like to scheme. I like to fuck. I like to set things on fire just to watch them burn. Nothing would make me happier than heading upstairs to join the boys in the next level fuckery they have planned, but I really am in a serious amount of pain. I comfort myself with the knowledge that I’ll hear all of the details when I get back to the House.

I throw up a middle finger at the group of idiots who have gathered to watch me work and then get back to it. I’m no Picasso, but I step back from my masterpiece when I’m done feeling rather proud of myself. The Edmondson kids aren’t the only ones who like to draw dicks on things, and the one I’ve drawn on the photo of my father is a veiny, hairy monster, aimed right at the dipshit’s mouth. “There we go.” I toss the Sharpie over my shoulder, grinning. “Take that, fucker.”

Mara never misses a party, regardless of where it’s being held. The two kind-of-hot guys Pres and I have been playing beer pong with elbow each other, laughing under their breath as an icy wind blows against my back, making me shiver. The wind isn’t real. It’s just Mara’s frosty mood. “What in the actual hell, Carrie?” I spin around and face her, already cringing. Mara, with her long, jet-black hair, her bright blue eyes, and her impossibly high cheekbones, is extraordinary to look at. She’s beautiful in the same way that avalanches and hurricanes are beautiful: impressive and awesome from a distance, but incredibly dangerous up close. She was curvy and cute when we first became friends, her button nose and her over-sized manga cartoon eyes making her seem a little childish. Her puppy fat burnt off two years ago, though, and her features became angular. Sharpened. Her eyes, once innocent and full of curiosity, took on a more predatory look. Now, she’s a straight up smoke-show.

I should have let her know we’d arrived right away. Sometimes, Mara can be a little intense at these things. Boy hungry. It used to be charming, but after a while it just became exhausting. Honestly, I needed a moment to chill with Pres before we tracked her down.

Oh, I don’t doubt it for a second. When you’re in Mara’s debt, you’re really in it. She’ll wake you up in the middle of the night and drag you out of bed to drive her across the state, because she wants to take a photo of a rock formation at dawn for her Instagram account. She’ll make you turn down a date with the boy you’ve been crushing on for the past six months because he’s not suitably cool. Then she’ll go out on a date with the guy and screw him herself, because she’d never actually noticed how good-looking he was until you brought him up. But what can a girl do? She’s my friend.

Mercy Jacobi, star of the theater department. Star of two note-worthy Broadway shows, too. Also, Wren Jacobi’s twin sister. In all good stories, one twin is good, the other dark. One good, the other bad. Two sides of the same coin. Mirrored reflections of each other. Not so with Wren and Mercy Jacobi. They’re both bad. Like, really, really bad. And once you’re on one of their shit-lists, congratulations, you’ve just made it onto the other’s by default. I’ve done my best to steer clear of Wren since day one at Wolf Hall. It’s been harder to avoid Mercy, though. We were in the same dorm together, freshman year. And now our rooms are both on the third floor of the girls’ wing in the main house, I get to listen to her gripe about the lack of hot water in the bathrooms every morning. I keep my mouth shut, though. I keep out of her way, because the girl is a nasty piece of work.

Opinionated. Fiery. Reactive. Impulsive.

Ohhhh boy. Strap yourselves in, ladies and gentlemen, we are in for one rough ride. Sure, Mara said she’d love to take a shot at Wren a few weeks back, but I never thought she’d actually do it. I just stare at her. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” “What? Why? People are always giving him such a bad rap, but he’s not a bad guy, okay. He’s just mis—” “If you say he’s misunderstood, I’m going to flip this table right now, tear off all my clothes and run around this party, naked and screaming.”

She pops up to sit on the edge of the wood, swinging her legs as she accepts Pres’ fireball again and takes a deep swig. When she’s done drinking, she hands the bottle to me, flashing me a smile. “It sounds stupid but he’s not as terrible as everyone thinks he is. I’ve only seen him make one person cry since I fell in love with him, and that guy deserved it.”

“You’re not in love with Wren Jacobi. You were in love with Joshua Rathbone last week,” Pres reminds her. “A lot can happen in a week. I have a tender heart. I feel things very deeply. It might take you guys so long to fall for someone that your cunts grow dusty and fill up with sand, but I was blessed with an accelerated emotional intellect. I need constant stimulation.” Constant stimulation? Hah! That sounds about right. Mara tires of her infatuations every three or four days. In this instance, that personality trait actually bodes well. This foolish infatuation with Wren will be over before it truly even begins. Even so, I can’t really believe what I’m hearing. Mara falling for Wren is tantamount to a field mouse falling in love with a rattlesnake. She’s going to scamper up to him with cartoon love hearts in her eyes. He’s going to take one look at her, sink his fangs in, pump her full of venom and swallow her down in one bite. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen it happen. Mara’s been reckless before, but I’ve never known her to be plain fucking stupid. Wren Jacobi is never a good idea. “You can stop looking at me like that now, Carrie. You’re hardly one to talk. I know you’re hot for blondie.” Mara’s eyebrow crooks up into a challenge. Shit. I haven’t hidden my little obsession as well as I’d hoped. Mara’s daring me to deny it, when she knows full well I can’t. So, I don’t.

“Ooooh! Dashiell!” she croons. “Dashiell, Dashiell, Dashiell. You’ve practiced that, you little slut. Oh, Dashiell!” She throws her head back, rubbing her hands over her chest, moaning indecently. “Fill me up, Your Lordship. Make me come all over that beautiful English cock!” Blood rushes to my face. I’m suddenly very, very hot. There must be steam coming off my cheeks. I grab Mara’s hands, trying to pin them to her sides, to stop her from molesting herself as she acts out me getting plowed by Dash, but she’s covered in some sort of glittery moisturizer that reeks of coconut and she keeps slipping out of my grasp. “Dash! Holy fuck, Dash! Fucking give it to me!”

Pres…Oh shit, poor Presley. Her face has gone sheet white. She takes a step back and sits down hard. Miraculously, by some stroke of luck, there’s a chair there to catch her ass. “Pax. You’re here,” she mutters. “Look, Carrie. It’s Pax. He’s here.”

Pax casually surveys the three of us, his steely, unreadable gaze bouncing from me, to Mara, to Pres. He lands on Mara again with a vicious smile slowly spreading across his handsome face. “He’s around here somewhere, y’know. I’m sure he’d help a girl out.”

Pax blinks. Shifts his weight onto his right hip. Cants his head to one side. “I didn’t want anything. I was minding my own business, when I heard some sex starved pussy cat purring my friend’s name like he was shafting her in public.” He shrugs. “S’cuse me for wondering what the fuck was going on.”

I saw on the National Geographic channel once that you should always make eye-contact with a bear or a wolf if they’re about to attack. Make yourself as big as possible. Make as much noise as you can. Do not turn and run. Seeing as I’m only five foot five, and Pax is six foot fifteen or something stupid, I doubt I’ll scare him off with my slight frame. I’m not going to start screaming in front of a bunch of strangers, either. That would be insane. But I can stand my ground. I can look the bastard dead in the eye and refuse to back down. “We were messing around, that’s all. No harm, no foul. You can leave now.” Laughing breathily down his nose, Pax runs a hand over his shaved head, rubbing his palm against the base of his skull, like he enjoys the way it feels. “Dismissing me, Carina Mendoza? Didn’t think you had the stones to pull off that kind of attitude. I always thought you were more of a ‘head down’ kinda girl.” “What? Now you have something against quiet girls, Pax Davis?” I weaponize his name the way he weaponized mine; the two words come out hard and unfriendly, which makes him laugh even harder.

“Far from it. I like ‘head down’ girls. Usually makes ’em ‘ass up’ girls. They know when to hold their tongues. What I don’t like is when a quiet girl suddenly turns out to be a loudmouth. That,”—he shakes his head—“I am not a fan of at all.” Mara’s recovered from the shock of Pax finding her fake-fucking Dashiell Lovett the Fourth amongst a sea of beer pong cups. She folds her arms in front of her chest, angling her chin up at Pax defiantly. “Who let you off your leash, anyway? Ar...

Those mercurial, winter-storm eyes narrow again. “Presley Maria Witton-Chase…has the hiccups?” He doesn’t sound convinced. “Poor Presley. D’you need a fright?” He steps closer to her. “You need a good scare? You should try me on for size, Red. I guarantee you’ll be terrified.” I’m pretty sure the only other time Pax has spoken directly to Presley was when she handed him a worksheet in English class. The terse, ‘thanks,’ he threw at her has been sustaining her for the past two years. Such a slew of words from him now, all of them directed right at her, six whole, if short, sentences, sends her into a complete meltdown. She covers her mouth with one hand, sobs randomly, blushes beet red, then gathers up her purple tutu in her arms and bolts from her seat to the front door like a hare streaking across a field. Pax watches her go with a placid, completely unperturbed look on his face. “Well. That was weird.” “Just leave us alone, for fuck’s sake,” I mutter, shoving past him. “Hey! Carrie! Where the hell are you going?” Mara yells. She shouldn’t need to ask; she witnessed Presley’s freak-out and subsequent disappearing act just like I did. Halfway to the door, I see Wren strolling down the wide, carpeted staircase to the right, wiping something red from his hands on what looks like a washcloth. Some dark-haired, pale-skinned wraith. Some ghost. Some wickedly beautiful, heartless god. His eyes skate over me like I’m nothing. Like I’m less than nothing. He’ll be within view of Ma...

“PRESLEY! PREEEEEEEZZZZ!” The path that leads down to the side field where all of the cars are parked is narrow and rocky. A girl would have trouble navigating it safely in sneakers without falling ass-over-tit and winding up with a mouthful of gravel. In wedges, it’s basically a broken ankle waiting to happen.

Why did he have to be such a prick to her? She’s been besotted with the evil piece of trash for so long. God knows why, but he’s all she eats, sleeps and breathes. And in such a short span of time, he managed to be so unbelievably cunty to her. What a fucking asshole.

“Steady on, love,” a polite voice warns. “Wouldn’t wanna scratch the paint.” I’ve studied that English accent at great length. I know the cadence of it. The rise and the fall. The subtle upward inflection that implies condescension rather than enquiry. It’s sheer, dumb luck that I’d run into him again, for the second time in one week, out here, in a dark field. I look up, and bam. He’s lounging across the hood of a Charger that I recognize as Pax’s. The beaten-up Firebird Alderman bought me for my sixteenth birthday is only a couple of cars down. The Charger wasn’t here when we arrived earlier; I would have noticed it if it was. If Pax could see how Dash is lying on his pride and joy right now, his back resting up against the windshield, his legs crossed at the ankles, the heels of his sneakers sitting neatly right in the very center of the Charger’s hood, he’d probably have an embolism. I couldn’t give a shit about the car. All I can see is the boy sitting on top of it. Sandy blond hair turned to burnished gold in the dark. The strong jawline, and an arrow-straight nose in profile. Eyes dark, roving over the sea of cars as he looks off toward the house, huffing gently. He's wearing…wow, he’s wearing jeans and…a bomber jacket over a t-shirt? I’ve never seen him out of his crisply pressed shirts and dress pants. Apart from at the hospital the other day. Then, he’d been naked aside from a pair of boxers and a blood-soaked tea-towel, pressed up against his junk. I won’t be fo...

“One of them has dark, wavy hair. Looks like he might have been sent to end the world. The other one looks like he just escaped from a prison camp. But…y’know. The good kind, where he was well-fed and worked out all day.” “I know who Wren and Pax are,” I say slowly. “We’ve been over this once already this week. I’ve been going to school with you for nearly three whole years, Dash. You think I don’t know all of your names? You think there’s a single student at Wolf Hall who doesn’t know your names?”

guess we have made quite the impression, haven’t we.”

I just look at it. “You’re offering me booze?” “Someone ought to take it away from me. I can’t feel my face anymore. Do your worst, Carina Mendoza.”

“So. You seriously didn’t know my name until four days ago,” I say. Without a trace of shame or embarrassment, he replies immediately with a, “nope,” that makes me want to scream. “Wolf Hall’s a big school. I’m not about to learn the names and faces of every single student in attendance. I have a very limited quantity of fucks to give, and my father’s made it very clear that they have to be cashed in on my assignments.” His words are so bitter that they bite.

“So what if I did? What’s the point in making connections with people who won’t impact your life in any way? Sounds like a waste of time and energy to me.” “Wow. That’s…really depressing.” “I tend to have that effect on people,” Dash agrees. “See. If I were making friends with everyone at Wolf Hall, the entire student body would be miserable. I’m doing you all a service by forgetting you. Here.”

He’s trying to help me up onto the hood. To sit up there. With him. Beside him. Holy shit. I can’t move.

“It’s not catching, y’know. The melancholia. This level of deep unhappiness stems from well over a decade of pressure, neglect and intense judgement. Doesn’t transfer with a little skin contact.” “I didn’t think that taking your hand would turn me into a pessimist.”

He considers himself an outsider. A tourist, observing the rest of us as we go through the motions of getting an education, eating, sleeping, breathing, getting good grades and bad grades, missing home, and getting our hearts broken. He thinks he’s above all of it, like none of it is happening to him at the same goddamn time.

You acted on impulse and got yourself into this position, sweetheart. Now you have to deal with the consequences. Damn it, even his fake voice in my head has a highly annoying, sexy-as-hell English accent.

He doesn’t seem offended that I’ve revealed myself to be a space nerd.

“I just don’t like rude people. I don’t like people who think they’re better than everyone else. And that’s how you come across, Lord Dashiell Lovett the Fourth.”

Alderman would flip his shit if he could see me right now. If I’d just stayed the course and walked past him at the hospital, this insanely attractive panty-wrecker still wouldn’t have a clue that I existed. And that would have been safer. That would have been much safer than this.

“That’s the problem, though, isn’t it?” he says, laughing. Oh crap. Did I say that out loud? No. No way. I’m not that stupid. “What is?” I squeak. He sits up straight, rolling back his shoulders and clearing his throat. “Lord Dashiell August Richmond Belleview Lovett the Fourth. When you’re born with a name like that, all people do is tell you that you are better than everyone else. When that kind of narcissism is drilled into you from such an early age, there’s only one thing you can become, pretty little Carrie Mendoza.” I’m a human torch. Living, breathing, aching flame. Pretty little Carrie Mendoza… “What?” I whisper.

Dashiell’s eyes lock onto my mouth. He’s going to look away any second now. Aaaany second now. “A narcissist,” he murmurs. “It’s one of my many faults.” “Then…why don’t you just change?” The words tumble out all breathy and nervous. Inside, I cringe at how pathetic I’m being, just because a hot boy is studying my lips like he’s imagining what they’d feel like mashed up against his own. Seriously, though. It’s hard to maintain a cool head when it’s Dashiell Lovett who’s doing the stari...

“How can you like yourself just the way you are?” “That’s just what narcissists do. They love themselves more than anything or anyone else. Hate to let you down, but I fit the stereotype magnificently. I’m an underperforming, useless, disappointment.” There’s that bitterness again. There’s so much resentment in his words that I get the feeling he’s stewing on something that has nothing to do with me or my criticism of his behavior. “You’re top of nearly every class. Easy on the self-deprecation there, buddy. Why are you trying to convince me that you’re such a dick?” I reach for the vodka, taking it out of his hand just as he was about to take a drink. He lets out a surprised bark of laughter but relinquishes his grip. “Because you have that look in your eyes, darlin,’” he says. “That, ‘Will I get a title when I marry him? Will our children have cute little accents?’ look. And I’m sitting here telling you that I’ll never marry anyone, and I’ll never have kids, because I’m physically incapable of ever loving anyone more than I love myself.”

I’ve wondered this for a long time. In my head, when I’ve fantasized about the day Dash finally notices me—a day much like today—I’ve wondered if he’ll be able to see how desperately I like him just by looking me in the eye. I’ve spent weeks practicing the perfect poker face in the mirror. It’s actually been more like months. I thought I’d nailed the whole calm, cool and collected exterior, but that belief has just been crushed in Dashiell Lovett’s palm. He sees it, and me just fine. I hate that I’m that obvious. “You’re a pig, you know that? What gives you the right to make assumptions about people you don’t even know. You might love yourself, but you assume that everyone else is in love with you, too? That’s just—urgh!” I thrust the bottle of vodka at him, using way too much force. The hard-rimmed bottom of the bottle digs into his ribs, but Dash barely moves. He snatches the bottle away, hurling it into the grass on the other side of the car, and then his hand is wrapping around my wrist, his other hand clamping around the back of my neck.

He moves quick, closing what small gap there is between us, pulling me forward to meet him so that our faces are three tiny, insignificant, inconsequential millimeters apart. His eyes are on fire, his breath hot and fanning my face as he growls, “I’ll kiss you, then. Stop me if you don’t want it. Just say the fucking word.” A split second ago, my heart was a functioning, healthy muscle. Admittedly, it was laboring a little under the pressure of this strange encounter, but it was still doing its job. The moment Dash’s fingers make contact with the back of my neck and his roug...

What…? What the fuck am I supposed to do now? “That’s what I thought,” Dash rumbles. And then his mouth is crushing down on mine, and his fingers are tangling in my hair, and the stars overhead are wheeling, and I can’t remember how to breathe. His lips—lips that look so full and soft when he speaks, or cracks the world wide open with a smile—are forceful and demanding. This isn’t the tender, loving kind of kiss I’ve daydreamed about in our English classes. This is a searing, ravaging, soul-eating brand of a kiss, and it’s hot...

Am I supposed to feel like this? Like a small part of me has been off out of balance my whole life, but it just clicked into place the second his tongue slipped into my mouth? Like all of the things that haven’t made sense up until this exact moment in my life suddenly come into focus with a crystal clarity? What are you doing, Carrie? What did I tell you? No boys! This is dangerous territory and you’re walking in blind… Alderman’s warning paralyses me. This is precisely what he would say if he knew how reckless I was being. I should stop this now. I should push ...

I kiss him back. What else is a girl going to do, when the guy she’s been besotted with for the longest time kisses her so deep and so hard that sh...

Cold. Flat. Void. “And just like that, the mystery’s gone,” he says. Ducking down, bending at the waist, he rummages around in the tall grass and then stands erect with the vodka bottle in his hands. He holds it up, inspecting it, but even I can see from my stunned position on the hood of the car that it’s empty. “Fucking perfect.” He launches the bottle over the fence this time, hurling it with all his might, and the thing spins before disappearing into the darkness, landing god only knows where.

I can’t move. I want very desperately to pop down off the car and sprint away from this hideous moment, but my traitorous limbs won’t comply. Half of me is still dumb on endorphins, still feeling his hands on my skin and in my hair, his tongue in my mouth, his frantic breath fanning my cheeks. The other half of me is mortified by the way he just brushed me off so easily. And just like that, the mystery’s gone. The words ring in my ears. I’ll be hearing them on repeat until my thirty-fifth birthday. The past five minutes will officially go down in history as the very best and the very worst moments of my life.

“It’s not that I don’t think you’re hot.” His tone is colder than the grave. “We’re just not cut from the same cloth, Carina. There’s nothing to be done about it. Go on. You should go.”

“God no. We need to get back to your room and break out the secret chocolate stash. I’m declaring this a state of emergency.” I nod grimly as I start the car and throw it into reverse. “Couldn’t agree more.”

“Carrie?” “Yeah?” Presley slides down in her seat, covering her face with both hands. “He knew my name. Presley Maria Witton-Chase. He said all four words. Out loud and everything.” Oh, lord. Beneath her hands, I think she’s grinning.

It turns out the Dashiell who was so rude to me on the hood of that car and the Dashiell I watch in the orchestra room every weekend are two very different people in my head. The Dash who kissed me was brash and awful. He broke something inside me and it fucking hurt. The Dash who plays piano in the dark is a silent ghost. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t mock. He stirs me to life the way he did outside the party, yes, but he has never rejected me afterwards. He simply plays. I simply listen. So I have to go. I’m still smarting from the way he dismissed me last night as I pad along the corridor on my tiptoes. It’s stupid that I’d even want to see him so soon after what he said to me, but this weekly pilgrimage is a ritual that I haven’t broken in so long. It would feel wrong to do so now.