“Please don’t say that.”
“Help me, Lucy.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“What’s going to happen to me?”
Violent moaned through a raspy throat. She held out her arms to Lucy. She wanted Lucy to hug her. Lucy hesitated from the shock, but as she went to hug her, Violent collapsed. She slumped facedown on the floor.
“I need help!” Lucy hollered.
The door whipped open and Sophia shot in. Sluts piled into the small room. They pulled Lucy away from Violent. Lips got ahold of Lucy and shoved her toward the door.
“Out,” Lips said. She stared at Lucy with murder eyes.
Lucy ran out of the room, to the cafeteria dining hall. Black eyes, bloody lips, and scraped tits all around her. None of the girls was happy to see her. Lucy hung by herself in the corner.
It was only twenty minutes later that Sophia came shuffling into the dining hall. The bruising around Sophia’s broken nose was purple and black, and her cheeks puffed out from the swelling, stretching her skin until it was shiny. Sophia blinked as she stared at Lucy, and when she spoke, her voice was cold as a gravestone.
“Her heart stopped beating,” Sophia swallowed. “We couldn’t get it back.”
Everyone lost it, Lucy included. There was no Slut bravado, only grief. Girls started hugging, some dropped to the floor in agony. Lucy spotted Raunch and went in for a big hug. Raunch straight-armed her, palm to the chest. Raunch’s tears soaked into the bandage for the severe gouge that now split her cheek. There was no love in her eyes. Lucy wandered to some of the other girls, but no one in the cafeteria would hug her. The picture was clear. Lucy didn’t deserve a place in this mourning. She snuck off to the bathroom to cry alone.
“You sleep out here tonight,” Lips said later, when it was time for bed.
The rest of the Sluts retired to the kitchen to sleep together, swaddled by the heat of the ovens. Lucy lay on a foldout table in the wide, empty room, where every creak of the table echoed, and she wished she had a blanket. The only thing that kept her company was her anguish over Violent, and one nagging question. If Violent’s confidence had been fake all this time, if she was just as vulnerable and scared as the rest of them, what hope did Lucy have?
The thought kept her up for hours.
In the morning, Lucy made sure to get up before anyone else, stow her table away, and do some general chores before the rest of the girls woke up. She knew she had a lot to make up for.
When the Sluts filtered out of the kitchen to start their day, they ignored her and the work she had done. Things puttered to life as if she weren’t there. Pots and pans clanged as Samantha prepared breakfast. Girls stowed their mattress men away, then trudged to the bathroom to take sink and bucket showers. Their faces were grim, but they went about their chores with a sense of purpose, like they’d been given a pep talk in the kitchen before they’d emerged. Raunch swept the cardboard wrestling mat where self-defense training would be commencing shortly, and paused to clean her prescription basketball goggles with her shirt. Lucy wondered if she should go over to help. She was afraid to talk to Raunch, to any of them.
Lips emerged from the kitchen with a full trash bag in her hand. Her other arm was in a sling made out of a pair of jeans. She looked at Lucy, and the look wasn’t hate-filled like Lucy expected. Lips’s poor excuse for a mouth, that crack in her face, wasn’t frowning as usual, or pinched up in disgust either. It was a flat line. She walked up to Lucy and held out the heavy trash bag.
“Take this out,” Lips said.
Lucy could suddenly breathe again. This was a good sign. She’d do their chores for weeks, if that’s what it took.
“Thanks,” Lucy said.
“Just do it, fuckhead. No talking.”
Same old Lips. Best not to push it, Lucy figured. She took the heavy black bag, opened the cafeteria door, and carried the trash out to the pile in the hallway outside. As soon as she swung the bag into the pile, she felt a wave of loneliness rush through her, and she started to cry. About Violent, about Will graduating early, about no one wanting to hug her, and all her friends shunning her, and a tiny bit because crying felt good.
She had to stop. She knew that when she opened the door to the cafeteria and walked back in, she had to show them that she was a Slut, and unafraid. Those girls still lived by Violent’s persona, whether it had been real or not. She’d never tell any of them what Violent shared with her last night. Violent wouldn’t want that. Lucy wiped her slick cheeks.
“Pull it together, what the fuck,” she said.
She let her breathing slow down. She turned to face the cafeteria doors and assumed as confident a posture as she could manage. She grabbed the door handle.
It was locked.
She pulled again. It wouldn’t budge.
“Hey,” Lucy said loudly.
She knocked. Silence.
Lucy paced. “Very funny,” she hollered.
She was greeted again with a longer silence. She knocked harder. Again, there was no response.
Something caught Lucy’s eye in the trash pile.
The cardboard sheath she’d made for David’s machete, the one she’d had with her when she’d joined the Sluts, poked out of the trash bag that she had just thrown into the pile. Lucy rushed to the bag and pulled out the sheath. The words THE LONERS were still written across it in silver thumbtacks, just like she had made it. She recognized something else in the garbage bag, her old, dirty gray sneakers. Lucy pushed them aside and began rifling through the bag.
It was full of everything she owned.
4
HILARY WAS FILTHY. SHE DIDN’T KNOW HOW long she’d been down in the basement, knee-high in the school’s trash. Everything seemed like a blur since Lucy had flushed her tooth down the toilet. Maybe she shouldn’t have dragged this Freak girl down to the basement and yanked out her tooth. Maybe she had gotten a little carried away. Just thinking about Lucy now had her grinding her jaw. She had to calm down.
She paced amid the garbage. Something jabbed through the sole of her flats and poked her heel. She jumped and lifted her foot. A giant piece of glass had sliced through and ruined her shoe.
“Shit!” she said.
Why was this happening to her? She couldn’t go back to the gym with ruined shoes, a filthy dress, and stinking like a gutter person. She’d already lost people’s respect when Terry had taken away her privileges, like her private bedroom and her solo swim. The Pretty Ones would laugh at her. And once they started laughing at her instead of fearing her, she would never get them back under her thumb.