Orson and I tumble back into the comfort of his room after the wake. It's a Monday and it's a pretty grey February day in New York so we just ended up chilling by his balcony. None of his parents are around so we end up smoking weed. I hate weed because it makes me hungry and craves junk food and grease. A craving I always give in to when I'm stoned, then I'll have to deal with the consequences of what it does to my waistline.

Nonetheless, by the time evening rolls around, we end up having sex in his room. It's more passionate and less rough this time — probably since we're stoned. We ended up cuddling right after. Only one round and I could tell Orson's not in the mood for more, something I pick up on and point out.

"What's up?"

I'm resting in his arms with his Frett duvet over my body and he rustles about, looking at me with my question. "What do you mean?"

"I don't know, you seem down today."

"Well, I mean we just attended Georgina's funeral," There's a loud exhale, "And the wake."

It's hard to be the cruel, cold couple we're known for. Because in moments like this, cruelty becomes psychopathy.

I nod quietly, "Yeah, I know," and there's a weird inflection in my throat. I know what he's wondering, wondering if cruel, cold Amory Scout feels bad about Georgina. I mean, to his knowledge, it's not like I'm the one who drugged her and had an accomplice push her out into oncoming traffic. I'm just the girl who humiliated her on her birthday.

But I let myself imagine what it's like for Georgina- to die like that, run over by a car while your body and brain is slow and gushy from the pills I snuck into her champagne. I visualize being there when the push happened- hearing the ear-popping crack, head clacking against the hood of the car. Spleen splattered. Legs like barrettes bent back, her body matchstick-snapped. I close my eyes and make it go away.

"It's just..." Orson draws a long sigh, "I still can't believe we're only two-thirds through the school year. It feels like it's been an eternity."

I nod. I can barely remember a time when I'm not playing this character. When I can be myself. Quiet computer-geek Bronte Emerson. Hadley and I sneaking into Le Noir to get a drugged-out Luciana into our bed seem like forever ago. Fuck, Luciana seems like to be a world away.

"Yeah, got to admit- New York has been really crazy. But it's been good," I sigh, "I had fun, made memories I'll definitely never forget."

"Better than LA?"

"LA...is just," I pause, "I would even say more toxic than here."

Orson's hand is playing with the ring on my finger, "How come you moved here?"

I swallow, playing up my vulnerability. "My parents passed away last year." Sometimes, a grain of truth in the lie makes the lies easier to tell.

"Oh, shit. I'm sorry."

"Yeah, car crash," I confirm for him and search his face for a reaction. He grimaces. I catch the expression and prod, wondering if he'll talk about it, that night my parents were killed.

"There's a reason why I get a chauffeur to drive me everywhere I go," He says, staring numbly at the wall. "Back...back in 2013, I was kind of going through this phase of racing cars."

Here we go. "Yeah?"

"I didn't even have a license at the time but I wanted to be a part of it. Some of the Dalton boys got me into it. And it was right after Georgina had broken up with me and I had this rivalry with Colton Nigel."

I remember this. It was back in middle school but Orson used to have a Parker-Carmen type rivalry with the lacrosse captain, Colton Nigel. I think Colton started having it out for Orson since Georgina was his ex and it soon became a dick-measuring contest of epic proportions. They start to match each other in beers drank, keg stands done, and drag-racing illegally. And I know drag racing sounds juvenile, but it's not your typical kiddle race. I mean drag racing as in driving super-fast sports cars through the streets at night, getting into huge wrecks, and damaging millions of dollars in property along the way. All the kids from other private schools would bet on the race, staking million dollars against each other. However, it all came to an end when Orson crashed his limo into my father's car, ending the life of my parents and resulting in a massive cover-up.

I nod along, clueless as I've never heard of it. "What happened?"

"Well, the first crash was bad enough. I was in Dubai. There were two girls in the Ferrari with me. One girl survived and she managed to pull through but the other was..." He takes a deep breath, "She was paralyzed from the waist down." So Orson's recklessness did not only end the deaths of my parents but incapacitated another innocent girl as well.

"Shit."

"But... I still didn't stop. Of course," he admits bitterly, "Because...I don't know. I'm reckless, I guess, I keep doing shit to..."

"To what?"

"Feel something," he laughs darkly, and he says it tensely like it's the first time he has ever discussed this aloud without someone other than himself. "Have you ever done that?"

I blink, surprised. I'm finally getting into the recesses in what makes Orson tick. I'm seeing beyond the portrait of the cold, cruel man, and I'm confused with what I've found so far.

"Done what?"

He stares blankly ahead of him. He shakes his head and tightens his grip over my hand. "I just...I don't know. All I know is every time I think I've hit a rock bottom, it turns out you can hit a rock bottom further down than rock bottom."

"Fuck," I kind of laugh uncomfortably, "That's dark."

"But you can handle it, can you?" He asks me quietly. "That's why you were in Georgina's room today."

An out. I nod, "I guess so...I just, I don't know, I was looking around to see if she wrote or said anything about me, or have something on me I didn't understand why she never told her mom the truth, about what happened," I swallow hard, "But I don't feel bad. Just because she died, it doesn't change how I feel about her or the situation."

Orson looks at me and even though I'm showing him a mask, his gaze meets mine and for some reason, for a moment, I feel understood.

-

Meet me at the restaurant near the bodega on Halsey Avenue in Bed Stuy at 6 pm for the cash.

I'm staring at the last text message I've sent out and looking at the time on the clock. It's almost six-thirty. Where is she?

I anxiously look around at the restaurant for a moment—the red vinyl booths held together with duct tape, the grimy fluorescent lights overhead. There are two construction workers by the bar, drinking black coffee.

"Refill?" The waitress asks me when she approaches me with the pot of hot coffee. I nod speechlessly and pull the hood further up my head even though I'm wearing a brown wig, a pair of glasses, and different coloured contacts.

The person I was supposed to meet is my accomplice that has helped me with the texts being sent to Orson, the ones that are pretending to be from Carlotta. She has also helped me get rid of Georgina. Don't get me wrong, I did most of the legwork. She wouldn't have pushed Georgina so easily onto oncoming traffic if I haven't incapacitated Georgina with the sleeping pills and alcohol, a death which has been ruled as an accident, and I was the one who came up with content for the messages but she's the one who did most of the dirty work. Which was insanely expensive- ten thousand dollars for every text message sent, and two hundred thousand dollars to shove an intoxicated Georgina into oncoming traffic.

I've already given her the first hundred thousand but she had requested the other half of the two hundred thousand not to be transferred electronically; she wanted the other to be cash. The cash has been relatively difficult to obtain since I needed to make an appointment with my teller to withdraw a hundred thousand dollars in cash- she asked me a lot of complicated questions like why and what do I intend to use the money for but eventually the bank relented. You would think that kind of money would make a dent in my financials but it doesn't.

You see, back when my mother and father were alive, they didn't really give me an excessive allowance or a credit card with no spending limit like Carmen or Parker. I think part of the reason why was that they didn't want me to become spoiled and indulgent with no concept of money. My father had grown up in a relatively new money family whose parents had always taught them the value of working for their own incomes unlike Orson and Parker's families, who had been rich since the early 1800s, quietly amassing their wealth for centuries.

However, it didn't mean my parents never invested in me and Atticus. My parents bought us houses in a way that other parents might buy their children candy bars. Over the years, they had purchased so many houses for me and Atticus that by the time they had passed away I was already in possession of a staggering real estate portfolio. And of course, when Atticus committed suicide, I come to get his share too. There was the bungalow in Westchester, the row of houses in Albany and Upstate New York, and numerous other luxury condominiums scattered throughout the island. And that's just in New York.

I have land holdings in Scotland, a flat in London, condos in Dubai, a house in Sydney's exclusive Point Piper, and another in Diamond Head, Honolulu, and the Maldives. Just the rental income alone for a year is enough to feed the nation of Senegal for a month. And back when my parents were alive, it was all quite meaningless since the properties weren't really mine.

But of course, that all changed when my parents died and I sat down with my parents' business managers and they divulged to me that I was about to become one of the largest privately held real estate portfolios in the nation. And since then, every year I notice that my personal accounts will always increase in value, sometimes to an absurd degree, no matter how much I've splurged.

I hear the bell by the door ring and promptly look up. The person coming in is a petite, blonde girl. She's wearing New Balance sneakers and a hoodie. I wave at her and she approaches my booth. She slides in the seat opposite of me and looks at the waitress, "Ice tea, please?"

"Sure thing, sweetheart."

The minute the waitress heads off. And I grit my teeth at her. "You're late."

She pops the gum in her mouth as she stares at me, uncaring. "Sorry, the subway was delayed. Do you have the cash?"

"The rest of the deal, as agreed." I hand over a thick brown envelope towards her.

She opens it up and checks it, counting through the bills. Eventually satisfied that I haven't cheated her, she grins up at me. "Damn, probably the easiest two hundred grand I've made. Just needed to send a few weird text messages and shove a girl out to oncoming traffic," she smirks at me, "Better than sucking old man's dick."

I smile at her. "Did you bring the phone?"

She nods and using the sleeve of her hoodie, she carefully extracts the burner phone I've purchased for her to text Orson pretending to be Carlotta and pushes it over to me on the restaurant table. With a gloved hand, I retrieve it and put it into my duffel bag.

"Thank you."

"You know, I didn't know the girl I shoved was some rich bitch," the girl snorts quietly, "Is it like some weird bitch fight or something?"

"Sweetie, part of the reason why I paid you two hundred thousand is because you don't ask questions and you keep your mouth shut." I drink the rest of my coffee and proceed to stand up. "But it was good doing business with you."

She salutes me. "Good doing business with you too."

-

It's five in the morning on a Wednesday afternoon, I'm behind on calc homework and the moon stares in through the glass, even though it's barely past dusk. I'm groaning in frustration as I struggle to figure out how to plant the text logs from the burner phone into Georgina's iPhone, which I've already swept through. I've erased the evidence of texts exchanged with her Westwood friends from LA, the ones asking about whether I attend their school and the calls going out to the school, but it doesn't change the fact that the idea of Georgina is not completely eradicated from Orson's mind.

The conversation we had in his bedroom after the wake proves to me he's still not completely over her. To me, it seems Georgina reminds Orson of a time he wasn't a monster. They dated throughout middle school, from the caterpillar days of thirteen to fifteen. When Georgina fled to London, Orson had become the man we know him as today, a philandering wreck. After Georgina, Carlotta died, Atticus killed himself and my parents were in that car wreck caused by Orson's reckless drag-races. After Georgina, Orson becomes this substance-addicted, severely depressed, and incredibly lonely man on the top of the world, whose downward spiral just comes from living with the guilt of being... himself. 

His repertoire of sins begins with the abandonment of Georgina. But maybe, I figure, it can't be all Georgina, right?

One person can't do all that damage. I don't know where it started but I assume Georgina was the beginning of the end. And when Georgina came back, it was already too late. But Georgina represents this idea to Orson- that he can be full of light and gold like he used to be. And he still craves the idea of Georgina, even though she's six feet underground. This is why I need to destroy the idea of Georgina, the one he keeps alive in his dark, narrowed mind, and latch onto me.

Feeling stumped, I hit my desk and curse when my toe starts throbbing. Shit, shit. I run through my drawers, looking for uppers- cocaine, Adderall but I'm out. Shit, shit.

It's whatever. I tell myself to calm down. I'll figure it out tomorrow after school or something. Shit, no. I can't. I agreed to go shopping with Parker. Fuck. I look at my drawers and notice all the empty orange bottles, the baggies of loose white powder. I'll ask Orson for more drugs tomorrow at school.

Orson's really so well-connected with all dealers. And I know he'll always have pills for me. I know I should stop. Addiction's a slippery slope and it's one I've been on before. It's not gonna be long before I'm balancing all the stress and pressure with a mix of cigarettes, pills, diets, pain meds, and tiny salads. 

I retreat back into my bed and I pop a sleeping pill to help me sleep. It's not long before I'm drowsy and the all-black consumes me.

The next morning, I wake up and head to school feeling like absolute shit. I woke up with barely fifteen minutes to spare to get ready and did my makeup in the car on the way- some YSL concealer, lip gloss, and mascara- but I still looked tired and dead inside. When I arrive at school, Parker proceeds to point out to me the top button of my white t-shirt is undone. She snickers at me, "Did you get dressed half-asleep?"

I take out the books from my locker and yawn into my mouth. "Just tired, I didn't sleep properly."

Parker looks concerned as she closes the locker door. "Oh shit, how come-"

"Hey," Orson greets, interrupting Parker as he stops by my locker. He notices how ruffled I look and it's like my off-day is sniffed out by the hounds. They can tell when a hair is out of place. "Whoa, you look rough."

"Yeah, just couldn't sleep. Had a nightmare," I lie easily.

"Oh shit."

"Yeah, and now I have to go listen to Mr. Roberts for double-period calc."

Orson's hands rub my shoulder blades. "Shit. Hey, why don't we skip?"

"And do what?"

There's that devious-boy grin everybody loves and obsesses over. "Why don't we grab breakfast?"

I try not to freak out. Grabbing breakfast is unusual for us; most of our relationship took place in bars long after dark, the kind of publicly clandestine meet-ups of the woefully mismatched. We only ever really get breakfast after sex. This is like...a real date, like what normal, ordinary, healthy couples do. It's a step in the right direction and I'm getting closer to making him fall for me.

"Is that like a secret password for skipping school to head to your place to fuck?"

"No," he laughs, "Is it hard to believe that I want to just hang out with you during the day?"

"Yes," I say automatically, "But sure, let's get breakfast. Anything's better than staring at Mr. Robert's mole for two hours."

Parker's forehead scrunches and I see a pleading note in those cerulean eyes of hers. "But Amory, we're supposed to go to Barneys after school."

"Oh shit, I totally forgot," I groan, "Could I possibly take a rain-check? Why don't we do it tomorrow?"

"Um..." There's clear disappointment in Parker's eyes; disappointment that goes far beyond a friend canceling on plans. And that's when the puzzles for Parker click for me- holy shit. Does...Parker like me?

"Sure."

I feel like another emotional grenade has landed on my lap and my hands are itching to make use of it.

"Okay sweet, I'll see you tomorrow."

-