Layla turned her entire body in her seat to glower at him. “If they dropped me, then you’d better believe they dropped you first.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“’Course it does. If you think I say crazy shit, then you say just as much crazy shit as I do.”
By objective standards, no. No he didn’t. But Hunt, Griffin, and I had long ago learned not to get in the middle of the two of them until they started throwing punches.
Regardless, I waded right in. “Come on, you two. We have really important stuff to figure out.”
Brady crossed his arms over his chest and really settled into the glare-a-thon. Layla imitated his posture, making him snort and dip his head haughtily.
“Just ’cause you think you’re hot shit doesn’t make you any less of a steaming, stinky, wafting turd,” Layla snapped.
They were rapidly devolving into the kind of insults we’d endured years ago.
To be fair, pretty much every one of our classmates at Ridgemore High probably did think Brady was hot shit, and not the smelly kind.
Brady’s smirk grew, and Layla huffed, her cheeks growing pink as she became flustered. Letting Brady best her was top of her list of dreaded things, along with asparagus, which she inexplicably despised, nails across a chalkboard—understandable—and dying, which lost some of its dooming threat when its finality had grown so dubious.
“You know just as well as I do that Griff would eat up the sight of Joss’s tits,” Layla said combatively, as if somehow proving a point.
My breath froze in my lungs so abruptly that I couldn’t tell if I’d been mid-inhale or exhale.
“What thefuck, Layla?” I growled. Then, before she could defend her statement, and she would—oh, she most definitely would—I added, “Could wepleasefocus already? All of us but Griff literally just died. I don’t know about you guys, but that’s rattling the shit out of me. I’m not okay. Not okay at fucking all. We’re possibly trapped with a filthy rich lunatic who had no problem setting a fucking school full of kids on fire, and who sent actual hitmen into said school after us, for fuck’s sake. Our phones don’t work, and I’m assuming there are no landlines.” Hunt shook his head in confirmation. “Our parents are probably losing whatever was left of their sanity right now as you guys argue over … well, whatever the fuck it is you’re actually arguing about!” I threw up my hands in case they’d missed my growing agitation, and winced when that movement pulled at my IV line and injuries. I was guessing my chest wounds weren’t as far along in their recovery as my friends’.
Layla’s eyes glistened as she redirected her glare at me. Right then, with how pink they suddenly were, her eyes appeared more blue than their usual gray. “Why do you think I’m spewing so much bullshit?” she asked in a high pitch.
“Because you usually do?” Brady suggested.
She whipped her glower over to him, but the next second it was back on me. “I’m losing my ever-loving shit over here too, you know.What the fuck?I mean, WHAT THE FUCK?We all just got gunned down at school.Gunned the fuck down. How … what … how does that even happen? What the fuck is happening with our lives?”
Her tone was getting increasingly squeaky. Hunt reached over to pat her forearm, and Brady’s shoulders slumped.
“Not only did they kill me,” she went on, “but they messed with the people I fucking love the shit out of. I am gonna murder the motherfucker responsible the very second I set eyes on him, and then I’m gonna pray he somehow comes back to life just so I can do it all over again. And then I’m gonna piss on him, boy style. I’m gonna stand right over him and splash all over his stupid face. And then maybe I’ll set him on fire. I dunno. I’m still deciding on that last bit.”
“Hell, yes,” Brady growled. “That man’s got no idea who he messed with.”
“He messed withfamily,” Hunt snarled in that stoically quiet way of his that carried so much strength despite a low volume. “My family.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Griffin said in a rolling grumble of menace. “I had to watch you all die,” he seethed. “Every single one of you. I had to watch it happen, knowing I couldn’t stop it.” He shook his head. “You were all lying there, dead, dead, dead, fucking dead, and I was the only one left. Just me. I willneverforgive him for that. He’s gonna pay in flesh.”
“Right on,” Brady said. “We’ll make him pay together.”
“Together,” the remaining four of us chorused as if it had been planned.
“We’re always in it all together, through thick and thin. Now, even through death,” Griffin echoed before opening his mouth as if to say more. He stared off into space for several beats, then glanced over at me.
Oh no. His eyes were as intense as I’d ever seen them.
Turning from me, he looked from Brady to Hunt to Layla. “Actually, that’s why I have to say something. Now that Lay brought it up in her special way.” He chortled.
“Damn right,” Layla interjected.
“There’s something I’ve gotta tell you all.”
No, no, no, no, no. He wasn’t about to say something about him and me, was he?No, no, no. He couldn’t mess things up, especially not now when we had a billionaire mofo to murder. Talk about some group bonding.
“Griff,” I warned, unsure there was reason to. Though his expressions were as familiar to me as my own, maybe I was reading him wrong this time.
