The Dirty Ones

No one was looking at her hair, I’ll tell you that right now. You couldn’t just look at one thing when you caught a glimpse of Antoinette. You had to see the whole package.

Kiera is so much her mother. And I mean that in a good way. All the good ways.

“Who cares, anyway?” Kiera says, still in the conversation. “I don’t. I don’t need that house.”

“It doesn’t matter if you need it. It’s just… yours.”

“We have bigger problems right now. So just drop it.”

“I want to look at the will. You think it’s in the attic?” I stand up, but she grabs my hand and tugs me back down.

“We’re not looking for that will tonight. Just…” But she stops talking. And I’m dying to know what she wants me to just do.

“Just what?” I ask.

She tugs her legs up to her chest, wraps her arms around them, and plants her chin on her knees, staring at me. “I don’t want to think about it.”

The timer dings on the oven. We both look over at the small kitchen, then look at each other. She smiles at me. “Pizza rolls, Connor. If you go up into my attic you’re gonna miss pizza rolls.”

Then she jumps up and walks over to the kitchen, puts on some black oven mitts, and pulls the cookie sheet out of the oven.

I watch her get plates and forks. Study the way she carefully slides the spatula across the cookie sheet, scooping up the little bits of food, and then places them on the plates.

I like what she’s wearing. Little fluffy shearling shorts that peek out from under her long creamy white t-shirt. She’s got on red, knee-high slipper socks with white snowflakes on them.

She could be that girl back in school. She looks the part. Untouched by the years. Still very youthful in the face. Her too-pale eyes still tricking me into believing they’re blue, then green, then yellow.

I asked her once what color they were and she just shrugged. Very much like the way she shrugged off the fact that she has no idea who her family estate actually belongs to.

Kiera Bonnaire has never needed things. Not a big house or special eyes. She just accepts what the world offers. I always admired that about her. How detached she could be from everything around her. It’s a skill I never mastered. Probably never will, we’re just different like that.

But I wish I was more like her and less like me. Have wished that since the day she ended up in the tower with the rest of us.

“So,” she said, standing at the top of the stone stairs all those years ago. “What the hell are we doing here?”

She didn’t look around. She didn’t take it all in the way Sofia did. She didn’t pull back from it like Camille, who thought the whole place was creepy and disgusting. She didn’t fall back against the stone walls like Emily, trying to disappear. She didn’t place her hands on the walls looking for secret passageways like Bennett, endlessly curious and desperate to solve riddles, or furiously try to open the shuttered windows like Hayes. Who is as subtle as a fucking bull.

She just accepted that she was there and moved on.

What are we doing here?

Little did we know.

“You lost in time or something?” she asks now.

I blink the past away and stare up at her outstretched hand. Take the plate, fork, and napkin, then set it back down on the rickety white coffee table in front of the couch.

“You’re not hungry?” she asks.

“How can you be so calm about this?”

“About what? Someone found our story and decided to make money off it. That’s all I see.”

“That’s not what this is.”

She forks one of her pizza rolls, blows on it, then pops it into her mouth, chewing fast like it’s too hot. “Who cares what it is?”

“I care, Kiera. And so should you. They could be back.”

“Why would they come back now?”

“I already told you—”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, popping another too-hot pizza roll into her mouth. She chews and swallows. “I get it. You’re Mr. Important these days. But come on, Connor. You’re not that important.”

She tries to hide her smile. Because it’s a joke. An old one too. She was never impressed with us. She’s not into money, or power, or things.

And we all kinda hated her for that. For a little while anyway. Soon enough it became clear we couldn’t afford to hate her. We needed her.

And she did need us, even though she never admitted it. She did. We were a team. We were the Dirty Ones. The buddy system. And we were in this together.

For nine whole months we were inseparable. Sometimes, in that last semester when class schedules all lined up and things were… comfortable, for lack of a better word, we’d all have lunch together. And we did things at night too. We’d all get together and drink. Hayes would be smoking pot, of course. Camille would dance in the middle of the room to the music only in her head and drag Bennett into her dream. And I’d read to them. Kiera and Sofia, but mostly it was to Kiera.