Chapter 1: Hunger
The scent of stale bleach and decades-old fried food clung to the beige cinderblock walls. Theo Davies shouldered his backpack, the strap digging into his shoulder as he navigated the after-school exodus. The hallway was a river of denim and chatter, flowing around him like he was a stone. He reached his locker, a dented metal door in a long, echoing canyon of them, and began the familiar twist of his combination.
“So I’m telling her, the die is literally named after the number of sides,” his friend Marcus was saying, his hands animated. “It’s a d20, Stacey, not a ‘doe-twenty’—”
A hand slammed into the locker next to Theo’s head with a sound like a gunshot. The metal vibrated.
Marcus’s sentence died in his throat. Theo flinched, the sudden silence pressing in on him heavier than the noise had.
He didn’t need to turn his head to know who it was. The air changed. It got thicker, charged. He caught a whiff of something clean and aggressively floral cutting through the cafeteria stench.
Slowly, he looked.
Rebecca Matthews—Bex, never Rebecca unless you wanted to find your textbooks in a toilet—loomed over them. She was leaning one arm against the lockers, her body cutting off their section of the hallway like a fallen tree. The buzzcut, the sharp cheekbones, the dark liner around her storm-gray eyes. Today she wore a tight black tank top under an unzipped red hoodie, the school’s colors. The fabric strained across her chest in a way that was frankly architectural. Theo’s brain, always running on a problematic dual processor of academic curiosity and teenage hormone, immediately flagged the silver barbell piercings visible at the neckline of her top. He forced his gaze upward, meeting her eyes. It was like looking at a cliff face.
“Marcus,” she said. Her voice wasn’t loud. It was flat, smooth, and it somehow carved through the hallway din. “Fuck off.”
Marcus didn’t hesitate. He looked at Theo, a micro-expression of profound apology and self-preservation flashing across his face, and he melted back into the crowd, his argument about polyhedral dice forgotten.
Theo was alone with her. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird in a cage. He adjusted his glasses, a nervous tic. She was so tall he had to tilt his head back slightly. He could see the fine, pale scar through her left eyebrow, the adamant set of her jaw.
Then, something impossible happened.
The hardness around Bex’s eyes softened. The line of her mouth, usually a slash of displeasure, quirked up at one corner. It wasn’t a smirk. It was something smaller, private. A smile Theo had never seen on her before, not directed at anyone, certainly not at him. It made her look her age, which was somehow more terrifying.
“Hey, Theo,” she said. Her tone had changed. It was lower, almost hesitant.
“Uh. Hey. Bex.” His own voice sounded thin and reedy.
She shifted her weight, the movement drawing his eye down her lean, powerful frame to the low-slung jeans that hugged her hips. He snapped his attention back to her face, heat flushing his neck. She noticed. The half-smile widened a fraction.
“You walking home?” she asked.
“Usually. Yeah.”
“Thought so.” She pushed off from the locker, standing to her full, imposing height. She took a half-step into his space. Theo instinctively leaned back, his shoulder blades pressing into the cold metal of his locker door. Her scent enveloped him—that sharp floral shampoo, clean cotton, and underneath it, something warm, something like heat itself.
She reached out. He froze, expecting a shove, maybe a textbook knocked from his hands.
Her fingers, surprisingly deft, slipped into the front pocket of his baggy cargo pants. He felt the brush of her knuckles against his thigh through the thick fabric, a brief, shocking point of contact. She deposited something small and stiff—a folded square of paper—and withdrew her hand.
“I want you,” she said, the words delivered with a blunt, terrifying clarity. No games, no coyness. Just a statement of fact, like announcing the weather. “I want you so bad it’s stupid.”
Theo’s brain short-circuited. Syntax error. Could not compute.
She leaned in again, her lips almost brushing his ear. Her voice dropped to a husky whisper he felt in his stomach. “My number’s on that. Text me. Tonight.” She pulled back, her storm-gray eyes holding his, seeing right through the lenses of his glasses, through his skull, into the scrambled mess of his thoughts. “Or don’t. But you will.”
Then she turned and walked away, cutting through the thinning crowd. Heads turned to watch her go, a few people skittering out of her path. She didn’t look back.
Theo stood there, nailed to the spot by the ghost of her presence and the physical weight of the paper in his pocket. His mind raced, a blur of conflicting images.
Bex Matthews. Throwing a lab stool through a window last year during a chemistry final she was failing. Bex Matthews, pinning some junior varsity linebacker against a urinal wall in the boys’ bathroom for, allegedly, looking at her friend wrong. Bex Matthews, with her army of formidable friends, ruling the school’s social strata with a combination of sheer physical presence and a willingness to escalate anything, anytime.
And then, superimposed over those memories: the unfamiliar softness in her eyes just now. The startling confession. The note in his pocket, which felt like it was burning a hole through the fabric onto his skin.
His hand crept down and touched the small bulge. It was real.
A cold, rational part of his brain screamed that this was a trap. An elaborate, cruel joke. She’d get him to text something embarrassing, screenshot it, and plaster it everywhere. She’d lure him somewhere and her crew would be waiting with phones and laughter.
But another part, a part he usually kept on a very short leash, replayed the look on her face. The vulnerability that had flashed there, so fast he almost doubted he’d seen it. The raw want in her voice. That part remembered the whispers, too—the legendary stories about her appetites, about her having older boyfriends, about her being too much for most guys. That part of him also lived with a secret of its own, perpetually hidden under layers of loose-fitting jeans and oversized hoodies, a secret that made him feel like a freak, an impostor in his own skin.
Maybe she saw something. Maybe she knew.
The hallway was almost empty now. The final bell had rung ages ago. He fumbled his locker open again, stuffed his books inside on autopilot, and slammed it shut.
He walked home in a daze, the world muted. The note was a live wire in his pocket. Once inside his room, door locked, backpack dropped, he pulled it out. It was a torn piece of notebook paper, folded with crisp, precise edges. He opened it.
A phone number was scrawled in bold, black ink. Below it, just two words:
BEX. TEXT ME.
He sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the note. The aggression was a shield. It had to be. No one that terrifying actually walked up to someone and said that unless they were desperate, unless the feeling was so big it couldn’t be contained by the usual rules. He thought of her parents, whom he’d seen once at a football game—a sweet-looking, smiling couple handing her a giant foam finger. The cognitive dissonance was staggering.
He was scared. Deeply, fundamentally scared. But underneath the fear was a spark of something else, something that had been dormant for years: curiosity. And a grim, practical understanding. If Bex Matthews wanted something, she got it. Saying no to her publicly had not been an option. Saying no to her now, privately… might just delay the inevitable, and make it worse.
He picked up his phone. His thumb hovered over the screen.
Out of necessity. That’s what he told himself. It was purely logistical survival.
He tapped out a message, his hands unsteady.
Hey. It’s Theo.
He stared at the words for a full minute before adding, as if it mattered.
From school.
He hit send. The whoosh sound felt final. He dropped the phone on his comforter like it was hot, half-expecting the world to end.
It didn’t. Thirty seconds later, the screen lit up. Three dots appeared, pulsed, and vanished. Then a reply came through.
Bex: Knew you would. My house. 2237 Grove. Don’t be late.
No question. An instruction. A destination.
Theo lay back on his bed, the phone resting on his chest. He had just agreed to walk into the lion’s den, alone, after dark. He closed his eyes, the image of her half-smile etched behind his eyelids. The fear was still there, a cold knot in his gut. But wrapped around it now, warm and insistent, was a thread of electric, terrifying anticipation.