Broken Pretty Things by Amber Faye

 

Prologue

When the bassymusic comes to a stop and is replaced by bad guitar-playing and even worse crooning, the entire party stops dancing and collectively groans.

“Who the hell let Doyle queue up his own music?” someone yells. Laughter flits through the crowd on the lower floor of the warehouse. I lean over the mezzanine barrier and catch Gunnar’s eye from across the room. He moves through the dancers with purpose, one hand in his dark hair, his tailored jacket rolled up to the elbows.

“Don’t worry, everyone. We’ve got it,” he announces from the mezzanine, and the crowd erupts into cheers. He grabs the mic, even though he doesn’t need it — his voice comes right from the pit of his stomach — and whips the cord around in his hand. “Palace rules,” he adds: “Only Andie and I touch the fucking music.”

They’re chanting his surname. Whistling. I don’t want to picture how disappointed Doyle must look right now. It’s hard to look away from Gunnar’s amber eyes anyway, twinkling from some combination of the strung up fairy lights, alcohol, and his ridiculous, innate confidence.

Everybody loves Gunnar. I feel like everybody at school, even in town, likes me a lot more by default because he does. Cole too. I feel a rush of adoration for my two best friends. For this amazing party everybody helped us throw for Logan.

I’m at the speakers now, and I set the music back to the party playlist we painstakingly created together. Logan’s 17th. It had to be here, at this empty old warehouse on the edge of town nicknamed the Palace where teenagers have come to get drunk and raise hell for at least two generations.

The Pendulum song starts to play and the crowd whistles and whoops and gets back to grinding on each other.

I shoot him a look and he meets it, jaw twitching from the effort not to grin in triumph. “Only Andie and I touch the fucking music,” I half-mock, and his face splits into something sunshine-bright. Those smile crinkles by his eyes are so genuine, so gorgeous, I almost want to reach out and brush my thumb over them.

“Sshh, the drop,” he says. We both pause, and then start to dance when the bass kicks in. He’s exaggerating the movements, but he’s always been a damn good dancer. It’s hard to look away from Gunnar when he’s moving like that, even as a joke. The way his muscles move under his fitted clothes. It’s mesmerizing. After a second, he leans in, breathing heavier. It tickles the hair at my neck. He smells like sweet, woody bourbon, and something else. Something dizzying and incomparable. “Drink?”

“I should look for Cole,” I say over the music. His face drops, though he tries to hide it, and my heart hits my stomach. “I haven’t seen him since I went to talk to Barkley.”

“What were you doing with Barkley, anyway? Fraternizing with the enemy’s quarterback?” Gunnar jerks his thumb over his shoulder. Chris Barkley could be any one of the dancing figures in the dim-lit warehouse below. Most people here are from Torrent Bay Academy, but a few are from Westerley, our rivals. If they don’t cause trouble, we let them stick around.

I make a pretend worried face, holding up my palms, as if he caught me. He rolls his eyes. “You don’t want a rep, Andie,” he warns, and something low in his voice stirs in me. “If people think you’re cheating on the king of Torrent Bay, you’ll be a pariah.”

I have no idea why he would bring something like that up. Even though we’ve never — ever — discussed why, the topic of Cole is a sore spot between us. The whole school thinks we’re a golden couple.

But nobody knows even a fraction of the truth.

I’m trapped in a lie with no way out. No way to explain it to anyone else. At first, there weren’t any drawbacks to everybody thinking I was dating Cole Waller. I got invited to everything, nodded at in the hallways. People gave me fond nicknames, high fives, unironic finger guns. Everyone knew my name. Best of all: boys knew to leave me alone.

But somewhere along the way, I started realizing there might be a downside to this lie after all. And I’m looking right at him. My best friend.

The music changes to something slower, more sensual, and people are finding partners and clinging to them. I look up and Gunnar is staring at me, his sharp features a dark and impenetrable mask. I always thought he looked like he could have been a movie star. I used to joke that I was the only girl in school immune to him. His piercing golden eyes. The commanding tenor of his voice. There’s a reason people joke that he is going to end up being President one day.

For a long time I truly was immune, too.

Somehow, even though he’s been a staple in my life since I can remember, I never saw Gunnar Rayne coming.

“Andie,” he begins, his voice gentle but firm. In public he has the presence, the tone, of a seasoned speaker, but when it’s just the two of us, it’s different. It’s always been different. His hand swings forward from his hip and he links his pinkie around mine. “Promise me that if—”

He doesn’t get to tell me what to swear to him.

There’s no doubt in my mind that I would have agreed.

Screams rip through the crowd, and people start to run. Trample each other. Someone zipping past us catches his foot on a cord and goes flying, and the music turns off with a thud. There’s only shrieking. “There’s no way,” a guy yells, shoving his way past me to the doors and prompting a sharp, “Watch it,” from my friend.

Gunnar picks out Larissa and pulls her close, and with one of us in each arm he heads away from the stampede of drunk, panicked teenagers.

“There’s a dead body!” someone is screaming. I suck in a breath, and Gunnar hooks his arm around my waist and leads me down the rusty stairs to the ground.

People are screaming, crying out, and it’s almost incomprehensible. “Oh, God, I saw it. I saw it. He was dead.” This is ridiculous. There can’t be a dead body — this is our friend’s seventeenth birthday party. The worst problem we have tonight is that we completely forgot his favorite type of cake.

“We have to get out of here!” someone suddenly cries, the clarity in their voice cutting through the panic. “Everybody out!”

“What the hell is going on?” Gunnar yells. When we push our way outside, into the cool spring-scented night, I recognize JJ, Cole’s younger brother. The kid is standing, one hand resting lightly on his cheek, staring out into the dark woods. Gunnar grabs his shoulder and wheels him around. “JJ, what’s happening? What’s wrong?”

JJ turns. His features are so much like his brother’s, though he hasn’t quite grown into them yet. He has the same slate-colored eyes, the same ash-blond hair, but his cheeks are rounder and pinker. It takes him several seconds to register Gunnar. His hands are shaking. “I saw him,” he mumbles, the words thick in his mouth. “That was Cole.”

“Where? Where is he?” I ask, grabbing JJ’s wrist.

JJ’s eyes have filled with tears, but he hasn’t blinked them away. They have collected in his eyes, shimmering dully. He points to the side without catching our eyes.

A figure dangles from a tree like a heavy sack, a stark silhouette, and when I realize what I’m looking at, a scream rips from depths I didn’t know I had.

“He’s dead,” JJ says helplessly. “Cole is dead.”