Colt shook her head.

“Kids aren’t getting educations in what’s important, these days. She stood up for women when they needed it and she was put in a hole forever as punishment. What her followers were saying sounded good, ’cuz I was angry at my daddy that I’d never seen and would never know if I saw him, and I was angry at the boys in town, and the people who let those boys be the boys they were. We joined up. Not that different from this. We had a good role model in Lustrum. Nothing better than a martyr, you hear?”

“Did you get your teeth fixed?”

Nailbiter smirked, showing her teeth. The smirk distorted slightly because her lips stuck to the metal where it was cold. “Stupidest question I’ve heard from you yet. You can see the fix. Third go I’ve made at it.”

Colt swallowed and nodded.

“We split up. I tried the sapphic shit and nah. My sister had a relationship that turned into a ball of drama that was bleeding into everything else in the group, so we moved on. Stayed with our friends in that group. We were on the road, half the group making music and the rest of us robbing the occasional asshole to make ends meet. We realized we were a stone’s throw away from our hometown. Our mama was gone. Dead.”

“I’m sor— That fucking sucks.”

“It did. It does. But the boy who caved my face in wasn’t dead or gone. We tracked him down. Caught him drunk and alone. Decided we’d corner him, I’d fight him. Get my own.”

“Did you?”

“I wasn’t strong enough. I blame being vegan and eating a meal every other day, looking back, but I didn’t think about that then. I just knew I was hitting him and he wasn’t hurting.”

“If he was drunk, that’d be part of it, right?”

“I didn’t know that either. I thought it’d make him sloppy. He managed to land a hit and it hurt me enough that the others all jumped to my side and he was able to run for it. I came to, realized what was up, and couldn’t sort it out in my head. A couple years then of thinking we were invincible, I was strong, we had the answers. The thoughts in my head twisted up in my stomach and in all that twisting, I came out different. I had a cause of my own and it was getting my brand of justice. Him. The people giving him pats on the back the same time my jaw was getting wired shut, because I was just a bastard fucking child with a slut mom…”

Nailbiter drew in a sharp breath, the sound hissing through teeth.