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WHEN VIOLET WALKS INTO SCHOOL on the first day of April, the skin around her wrists sting with fresh cuts lined up in neat little tally marks. New additions on stretches of skin that haven't seen sunshine since middle school. She's pale, ice pale and deathlike underneath the long sleeves and the cold-to-the-touch charisma.
Kids sidestep, wheeling and carving clear paths out of her way. It's not just because her father is old money and is connected enough to know people who know people who can destroy their parents' careers so by default, Violet inherits all that ammunition too, or the fact that she's left chokehold bruises on a girl's throat before, and aforementioned girl can't look at her without flinching anymore. It's something else. It's in her eyes. In the ice and the steel-blue you see a girl who knows how to damage, who knows where to hit. A girl with a politician's gait and her father's smile who knows how to wield her power, a girl whose eyes have inventoried every flaw of yours to pick at and unravel the moment you step into the same room, who's already calculated the weak points in your armour and knows exactly how much pressure she must exert to break you.
One look at her and you'd never be able to tell that this is the house that monsters built. Marble and ice and barbed wire, a fortress as painful to look at as is her presence disorienting, this juxtaposition between this image of a stereotypical, laid-back skater who thrives off adrenaline and tearing themselves open on the concrete, and the tapered, put-togetherness of an All-American political candidate who could map out all your strengths and weaknesses and has no qualms about giving you a rap sheet on how to be better, how to get on her level, how to stop begging for scraps.
Just last week Violet had managed to charm her way out of a detention for punching a boy in the crotch so hard he'd had to be carted off to the ER to be monitored for signs of a concussion. It wasn't her fault; he was the one who thought he could get all up in her space without facing ramifications. Violet didn't even need to drop her father's name to shake off any form of punishment. That was a last resort. She was precocious and frightening and intense, the kind of girl who got away with everything, thanks to good genes and rapier wit.
So they stay out of her way. It's rumoured that she carries knives, too.
April Fool's has always been less of an occasion and more of an inconvenience. Nobody's ever really coordinated anyway. Some kids take their jokes miles ahead. Some kids have been sitting on the eggs of pranks for months. Some kids half-ass their shenanigans. Some kids don't bother showing up at all. Half the school is empty. Nobody thinks about playing practical jokes on Violet. They've TP-ed the classrooms, and stuck embarrassing baby pictures all up on the walls missing person and WANTED poster style. Some doors to the classrooms in the humanities block were cracked open three inches, and if Violet had to guess what lurked behind, sit would be buckets filled with water or diluted paint or food dye balanced on top of the door, ready to fall over and splash down on the unsuspecting moron who opened the door without checking.
