“Hilary, you have to get out of here. Fast. I can help you. But I need the gun,” David said. His tone was sharp, but he needed to cut through her hallucinations.
Hilary jolted from his words. For a moment, she looked scared. Her gaze danced across the surrounding crowd. She began to withdraw the gun from David’s head, and he reached one hand up to take it. Hilary swatted his hand back down and cracked the gun against his face plate again.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Sam?”
David stayed still. He tried to keep his voice gentle. “I’m not Sam,” David said. “You’re seeing things, Hil.”
She shook her head. Her trigger finger twitched.
“No, you’re jealous, ’cause you lost Varsity and now they’re mine. This whole school belongs to me. And if you want a piece of it, you better get on your knees and start kissing my feet!”
Hilary had David down on his knees. Whatever he had just said had really pissed her off, and Lucy was beginning to realize that getting David and Will out of school alive might come down to her. It was an awful thought.
She was going to fuck it all up, just like she’d fucked up everything in her life since the moment she’d decided to stab Gates.
She looked across the commons from her hideout. She had tucked herself into the fold of one of the stage curtains that the Geeks had hung to create a storage space hidden under the staircase. Lucy locked her sight on Will, who sat on the floor with his hands secured behind his back. His masked head was bowed in shame. A white leash led from his neck up to the blackened hand of Bobby, who stood beside him, amid a mixture of Freaks and Varsity, watching the action on the dance floor. Lucy felt a surge of emotion, seeing Will again. She hated seeing him humiliated. She couldn’t deny that her feelings for him were strong. They’d been through so much together. They’d lost their virginity to each other. Everything came back to her in a rush. The snuggled-up morning after in the plant room. She saw him telling her he loved her under the deep red lights of the Slut lounge. She saw him lifting away from her as the raindrops splashed on her face. She felt the ache of their last kiss being stolen from them by the tug of the crane.
A hand reached out from behind Lucy, grasped her over her mouth, and pulled her back through the curtains, into darkness. The music became muffled. A thin wheezing breath replaced it. Lucy tried to scream, but her captor’s grip was tight.
“I saved you,” said a crackly, Southern voice.
Lucy turned, and the hand let her go. Bile stared back at her. He wore a glow-stick necklace that made his spectral face look as if it were floating in the blackness.
“Why’d you run away?” he said.
“I … I had to go.”
“Go where?”
“With my friends.”
“But I’m your friend.”
“I know that, but we only just met. These friends are … everything I have.”
“But … I love you.”
“You don’t,” Lucy said. “You just think you do.”
“I LOVE YOU,” Bile said and thrust his face into hers. His mouth was pocked with sores. His breath was salty and bitter like his insides were rotting.
“Well, I don’t love you,” Lucy snapped back.
Bile shrunk away from Lucy. He looked frightened of her, and for some reason, that only made her more upset.
“What do you think we would do, Bile? Go back to your place and get high? Forever?” she said, her temper flaring.
“M-my name’s Kyle,” he said.
She sighed when she saw how much her anger was hurting him. “I can’t live like you do,” she said, “wishing you were dead or whatever you’re doing to yourself. You don’t deserve it.”
Bile’s eyes welled with tears.
“I don’t deserve it either. I want a happy life. I’m sick of being afraid all the time. Of hiding. I don’t want to do that anymore. I’m going out there, and somehow I’m going to get that gun, and then I’ll leave this shithole once and for—”
Bile pushed Lucy out of his way, whipped a curtain aside, and was gone.
Lucy stared at the curtain, slowly closing. She stuck one hand out to stop it, and stepped through, back into the commons. People were shouting. A few were on the floor. They’d been pushed by Bile as he muscled through the crowd.
“Bile!” Lucy let slip.
She jumped over a fallen Skater and hurried through the field of bodies. When she reached the empty dance floor, David had been knocked down and was trying to get his footing. Bile was grappling with Hilary, who was screaming at the top of her lungs. The gun swung ’round, still in Hilary’s hands, but with Bile’s fingers working their way under them. Kids in the crowd hit the deck. Lucy lurched to a stop when the barrel’s path crossed hers. Bile stomped Hilary’s foot, and the couple fell to the ground.
A cracking BOOM punched the air. Bile and Hilary stopped moving. No one in the commons moved. A sweet harmony crested out of the sound system. Bile pushed off Hilary, who lay still on the floor. He stood and turned. He clutched the pistol in his right hand. Smoke slithered from the gun’s nose. He raised it for the crowd to recognize and fear. They stayed frozen.
Bile’s other hand was on his belly. Red spilled over his fingers and down the back of his hand. He was covering a gurgling hole. He stepped toward Lucy and stumbled.
“Oh no,” she whispered.
He lumbered toward her, walking a drunken zigzag until he was only a foot away.
“You shouldn’t be afraid,” Bile said.
He placed the bloody gun in her hand, and dropped.
His breathing stopped. The blood puddle spread underneath him. He’d died so she’d have a chance to live. Or he had killed himself. Or both. It was too much to bear. She felt like the room was closing in on her. But it wasn’t the room. It was the circle of people around her, closing in, step by tentative step.
Lucy looked to the gun in her hand. Bile’s blood made it slip as she squeezed her fingers around it. She held the gun up, just as Hilary and Bile had done before her. It seemed to press pause on the crowd’s advance.
“Back up!” Lucy shouted.
“We have to get out of here,” David said from somewhere in her periphery.
She breathed for the first time at the sound of his voice. She moved toward him, keeping her eyes nimble.