Broken Pretty Things by Amber Faye
Chapter 50
JJ Waller has grown.He’s packed on so much muscle it’s hard to believe he’s only seventeen years old. He’s almost bigger than Cole was.
My stomach twists when I realize he’ll be older than him in less than a year. Older than he ever got to be.
As soon as we get to the middle of the staircase, it’s easy to see why everybody in the party is screaming, tripping over each other to run away. But it looks like he barred the front door without being noticed before he pulled out the gun. He waves it around. Dark circles under his eyes and messy hair, it’s hard to recognize him.
It’s like looking at a ghost.
An angry, sleep-deprived, trembling ghost.
He really has become some kind of abhuman specter of vengeance.
“Oh my god,” I whimper when his eyes lock on me and he raises the gun. This is actually happening. I didn’t take it seriously, even after he broke into my house. And now somebody could get seriously hurt.
But this isn’t just my fault. Gunnar and Ransom have been sheltering him, keeping him from getting into trouble with the law, hiding his wrongdoings and begging me to do the same.
“Andie,” he says, his voice hoarse, and deeper than I remember.
It’s hard to be mad at Gunnar right now when he’s stepped in front of me, holding me still behind him. “JJ,” he says. “Let’s talk about this.”
“Come here,” he says, using the barrel of the gun to point to me and then the ground in front of him.
“We will,” Gunnar says carefully. “But put the gun down, OK? We can talk. We can talk about whatever you want.”
“The gun can stay,” is all JJ says, keeping it trained on us. “I want that talk.”
“OK, we’ll talk,” Gunnar says. He pulls me down the stairs, making sure his body is between us. I pull out of his grip and try to walk beside him, but he yanks me roughly back. “Just stay calm. If somebody gets hurt, I don’t think I can protect you.”
JJ lets out a surprised bark of a laugh. “Thanks so much for trying, Prez. Just like you protected Cole from her?” He sweeps the gun through the air in my direction and the crowd of partiers ducks and screams.
“Let’s talk,” Gunnar just says again. “Stay calm.” I don’t know if he thinks repeating words and phrases is going to help, but I also don’t know what else he could do.
“I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time,” JJ says when I’m in front of him — behind Gunnar — in amongst the silly Halloween decorations of the Rayne manor’s foyer. His voice cracks and he reaches up to rub at his eye with his free hand. “No matter what I said I wanted, and no matter how much everybody fucking hated you, nobody would let me talk to you, Andie. How unfair is that?” He takes a sidestep to get a better look at me. Gunnar takes one too. “I thought we were friends?”
“We were friends,” I say, pulling my arm out of Gunnar’s grip. “I have been wanting to talk to you, too, but so much got in the way.”
He laughs again. “Oh, yeah? Planning for prom? Getting your hair done? What the fuck got in the way?”
He lowers the gun a few inches, as if actually wanting an answer, so I step out from behind Gunnar and push away his grabbing hands. “Well, first of all, I think your threatening messages to Barkley really freaked everybody out. Your threats to kill me.” I gesture at him right now. “You know you’re better than this.”
“I’m not,” he grinds out. “This is me now.”
“JJ,” I say. There’s a silence. His hands are shaking hard.
“JJ, just put the gun down,” Gunnar warns.
“It’s OK,” I say. “We’re talking. We’re just going to tell each other the truth. The real truth. Oh god.” I press the back of my hand to my mouth. I’m actually going to do this. “Do you want to talk in private?”
“No,” Gunnar says firmly, throwing his arm in front of my chest.
“No,” JJ agrees. “I want everybody here. I want everybody to hear your fucking lies.” But he just doesn’t sound like he has that much conviction. “My so-called best friend isn’t around to keep me away from you anymore.” He swallows, and I watch the tightly controlled motion in his throat. “You should be scared.”
I know I should be.
But I’m not.
I know this kid. I held this kid tight the night he found out Gina Monroe was cheating on him. I know his favorite soup is carrot, and I brought it to him when he had the flu. I played drinking games with him, and Nintendo games with him, and one time I made him laugh so hard when he was drunk that he literally puked. We grew up together. I can tell him the truth.
“It’s not my truth to tell,” I say, “but I feel like it’s time for you to hear it.”
I take a deep breath, and he stares at me. His eyes are shimmering, not with tears, but with something else. He’s not sober, and his legs are unsteady, but it’s more than that. He’s running on rage, a person warped into something else by the need for revenge. The need to make everything make sense. The need to right some wrong.
“Your brother was the most amazing guy I knew,” I start, and it’s the wrong thing to say, because he raises the gun at me and pulls in a stuttered breath.
“Fuck you, fuck you,” he whispers over and over again. “The fucking note. You had his heart, his life, and you knew that. And you threw it away.”
“I can’t explain the note,” I admit, hating that the lump in my throat is clear in my voice. It makes me sound weak, and pathetic, but I have to get this out. For my own sanity, as well as JJ’s. “But your brother … he wasn’t my boyfriend.”
“Let her finish,” Gunnar explodes when JJ starts to visibly twitch with anger.
“He was gay,” I say, and then swallow. “Cole was gay, and he was waiting to graduate, to get away from your father, to come out. That was what he wanted.” I wince, waiting for something, some reaction, but it doesn’t come.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” JJ chokes out. “That doesn’t make any sense.” He looks around as if for support, and people murmur to each other.
“It’s true.” Very slowly, carefully, his hands up at his shoulders, Chris Barkley walks to my side. “He was my boyfriend.”
“You do not have to do this,” I whisper.
“I do,” he says, loudly. “I was dating Cole Waller. I was in love with him, actually. And he loved me.” People whisper, mumble, and it ripples through the crowd. Tears fill Barkley’s eyes so suddenly that he seems shocked by it, and when he tries to blink them back they spill down his cheeks. “Shit.”
JJ looks rocked, literally. He’s swaying on his feet. “No,” he says. “What about the … the texts.”
“I can explain that one,” Gunnar cuts in. He jerks his chin behind JJ at Aurelia who audibly gasps. “Our good friend Aurelia overheard Andie tell Barkley that she was going to leave Cole for me. She didn’t want that to happen, I guess, so she made up the cheating thing. She wanted me to fall out of love with Andie. And the texts were about ending her fake relationship with Cole for me.” He looks at me. “Right?”
“She didn’t expect Cole to be found hanging a few hours later, but I guess she was pretty lucky, in a way, that it fit into her lie,” I say. “But that lie made everything so much more complicated, because when a suicide note was found in Cole’s house, it blamed an event that never happened.”
“Oh my god,” Barkley says, holding onto my arm for support. His breath is strongly vodka-tinged, and I can’t help but hope he doesn’t regret the decision to support my story tomorrow.
“You were dating my brother?” JJ asks, hushed. “For real?”
Barkley nods, looking down at the ground.
“So he lied to me?”
“We …” I struggle to say, because I hate that it’s true. “We all lied, to everybody, yes.”
JJ looks absolutely wrecked, and I don’t blame him. The wind of revenge has been taken from his sails, and there’s nothing holding him up anymore. “Why did you do that?” he asks me. “What for?”
I open my mouth to apologize. Tell him I don’t know. But instead, I do something I never have before. I try the whole truth. “Cole was the biggest guy in school,” I say. “I was assaulted. Hurt. Humiliated. And I didn’t think it was going to stop happening. I was scared, and I didn’t think there was a downside. After that happened to me, I didn’t think I was ever going to want to date for real, anyway.”
“Is that really true?” This time it’s Logan that speaks. He’s dressed like Luigi, but his hat is twisting in his hands. “Was it Dom McMahon?”
“Yeah,” I say. My mouth is dry, and my head is swimming. “And then all of his friends, too.”
Gunnar nods, takes a breath. “Well, if everybody’s doing it … I beat the shit out of him. Then my father paid everybody off so it was like it never happened.” He looks sideways at me, then right at JJ. “I’m a hypocrite.” He opens his arms wide and addresses the whole room this time. “I’m sorry, everybody. I know I’ve, well, hurt a lot of you. I took it upon myself to be some karmic force, while hiding from consequences myself. And now my brother has to suffer for that.”
I stare down at the ground. He’s right. There’s nothing I can say or do to make that any better, because it’s true.
“In fact, this whole fucking thing …”
Gunnar is still going, hands in his hair and looking around at everybody — once he starts a speech, once he has an audience, it can be hard to get him to stop. But I need to know what he has to say, so I make no move to stop him.
“This party, I was planning on using it to make Aurelia feel shitty. She’s in love with me, and I’m in love with somebody else, and I wanted her to see she’d failed and for it to hurt.” He stares at JJ, wide-eyed as if looking into some funhouse mirror version of himself. For the first time, he can see what he was so close to becoming. “But revenge isn’t good for anybody, is it? It doesn’t bring anybody back from the dead. The wrong people get hurt over and over.” He takes a step back. “I’m sorry. To everybody. But especially to Andie. For once, we could have just had some kind of event, some celebration, without turning it into a fucking teachable moment that I would never be forced to understand, myself.”
I don’t make eye contact because the tears are threatening to spill over. Because I’m angry and confused and scared. Gunnar Rayne just told the whole school that he loves me, and I should feel something. But instead, looking at Aurelia as her beautiful face crumples into helpless tears, as Cady and Cassidy give her awkward glances and do nothing to comfort her, I just feel awful.
“Is it over?” Barkley asks, sounding broken. “Is all of this over now?” When JJ drops the gun to the floor, bringing his hands to his face, Barkley pulls me into a hug. “I’m sorry. And thank you. It’s over.” I know part of him is speaking to himself now. “It’s over.”
“If only this town didn’t need to be held at gunpoint to stop lying to each other,” I say to the room over his shoulder.
When he releases me, I walk over to JJ. I think about that night, outside the warehouse, blue lights flashing. The two of us had held each other so tight I had fingertip bruises on my arms and on my back the next day. We’d held each other, barely able to stay standing, as the paramedics came, and the cops came, and person after person tried to speak to us. It must have been hours.
I hug him again now, and he goes limp in my arms so readily that we both almost fall to the ground, but Gunnar is at my side and keeping me up.
“I just don’t understand,” I admit in a whisper as JJ shakes against me. All the power of revenge is draining from his body, leaving nothing but the ache of grief. It has to hurt like hell. “If you finally came here to find me because Ransom isn’t keeping tabs on you anymore … what was the deal with you sneaking into my room at night?” JJ reels back. “Why didn’t you just come back and, you know, talk to me? Or hurt me? Whichever this was supposed to be?”
He studies my face. Sirens scream outside, blue lights sweeping across the driveway, and for a second, holding onto each other’s arms like this, I feel like we both flash back to that night.
When he wrestles himself back to the present, though, he says something I could never have guessed he would. Something that makes even less sense than everything I just had to explain to him here tonight.
“Andie,” he says, clarity briefly lighting his blue eyes. “I have no fucking idea where you live. I’ve never been in your room.”
I turn around, looking around at all the panicked, relieved people. Some I know, some I don’t. Fear pricks at my skin. Pure fear. I remember the lingering scotch scent of my intruder. The tall, lean frame. JJ is currently built like a brick shithouse, sturdy and wide.
Gunnar’s dark eyes drill into me when I meet them. The breath leaves my lungs in a rush, and then his intense stare cracks into a smile. My best friend pulls me gently away from JJ and into a hug of his own. I lean my head on his chest and listen to his steady heartbeat. “It’s over,” he says, his breath tickling my hair.
I should feel better than this. I should feel some kind of relief. But I don’t.
Somebody is still lying.