“Fuck your father.” Her voice was acidic and full of rage, and he gasped, choking on air. “I’m sorry to be so crude. But fuck him right down into his grave.” She clasped Theo’s shaking hands. “I should have been braver, Theo. I should have left him. I should have given you a better life. You will have to do better than I did.”

“I don’t think I have ever been brave, Mom. Not really.”

“Well, then.” She laughed a little and gave his hands a final squeeze. “Now is the perfect time to start.”

He felt as if the world were ending—he was old enough to realize it was just his little corner of the world that was burning down, but young enough to feel like he’d never recover.

Prom night, Genni on his arm, Phillippe with a flask of absinthe, Tom stress-eating at the buffet, and he was riding high on the knowledge that this night would never happen again—and that everything his father had done would wreck every future night he thought he would ever have.

His father was a criminal. Genni’s and Tom’s fathers were complicit.

And their parents had fucked them over.

Other kids—whose families had been so thoroughly swindled—cursed at them in the halls.

Theo wished that, if his father had really needed to be a felonious megalomaniac, he’d done it someplace else.

They had already had so much money. Why had his father needed more?

Prom, and the absinthe, was thrumming in his veins, and he felt like Rimbaud and Verlaine and Oscar Wilde, sharply dressed and stunning and reviled. Genni on his arm in vintage Dior, tottering (mostly gracefully) in five-inch spikes, black hair sleek and shining.

They may have been universally hated, but they looked damned good doing it.

“Come on!” Genni pulled him up the stairs to the bell tower. Downstairs, balloons and gauze and fairy lights cocooned the dance hall in a soft purple glow. Theo climbed the stairs, melting into the shadows, and his patent leather opera pumps reflected snatches of light.

They hadn’t bought new clothes. So much of the money was frozen, accounts put on hold, and they had ended up digging through all the closets in their houses to find something that didn’t make them look—

Look like the peers they had mocked for so long.

So they were like Louise Brooks and Rudolph Valentino and it was good, and dazzling, and no one needed to know. His hair was perfectly styled, and Genni’s skin was slick with sweat and body oil, and they sparkled. It was an act, but it was a good one.

“Hell yes.” Genni grinned as she saw the bell tower was empty.

They were alone.