Nero: Made Men novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Boathouse
Chantal and her friends lock Mona in the school boathouse to film her; she throws Chantal's phone into the bay, and a stranger tears the door off.
The boathouse door slammed behind me, and I heard the bolt slide home.
"Say it to the camera, Mona," Chantal Calvert said.
She stood on the cracked concrete in a cream cashmere coat, holding up her phone.
Four of her friends stood around her, and all four had their phones up too.
Chantal was eighteen, a senior at Harlow Academy like me, and so were all four of them.
The red lights blinked at me from every side.
The old boathouse smelled like harbor mud and rotting rope.
It had been closed since before my first year at Harlow Academy, and nobody came out here after dark.
That was why she had picked it.
"Say what you did," Chantal said.
"I grade lab reports for the chemistry teacher," I said. "I graded yours."
"You called it plagiarized."
"It was plagiarized. You copied two pages from a thesis, and you left the footnotes in."
One of her friends laughed, and Chantal shot her a look that stopped it.
For six weeks Chantal had been paying me back for those two pages.
She had posted a picture of my face on someone else's naked body to the whole school group chat.
She had emptied my locker into the fountain, and a girl had shoved a full cafeteria tray into my chest in front of two hundred people.
I had reported all of it, and the headmistress had told me those things were hard to prove.
Now I stood in a locked boathouse with my wet braid sticking to my neck.
"Dump it on her," Chantal said.
A girl in a white puffer coat tipped a bucket of harbor water over my head.
It was so cold I couldn't breathe.
My sweater turned to ice against my ribs, and the bay stink ran down my face.
They laughed, and every light stayed on me.
I had two choices, and I had been making the same one for six weeks.
I had been quiet, and quiet had gotten me a bucket.
So I stepped forward, hard, and ripped the phone out of Chantal's hand.
"Hey!" she screamed.
I ran for the broken slats at the end of the dock and threw her phone as far as I could.
It flashed once in the dark and went under without a sound.
For a second nobody moved.
"You stupid little scholarship bitch," Chantal whispered.
Then all five of them were on me.
Somebody got my braid and wrenched my head back.
An elbow hit my ribs, and my knees hit the wet boards.
I got one hand free and clawed down a cheek, and Chantal shrieked.
"Hold her! Hold her still!"
A heel came down on my wrist.
I tasted blood where I had bitten my lip.
I thought, they can do whatever they want to me, and not one of them will ever say it happened.
Then the bolt on the boathouse door snapped.
The whole door tore inward off its hinges and crashed flat on the concrete.
The sound was so loud that all of them froze.
A man stepped over it.
He was tall and wore a black wool coat, and he walked.
He had short black hair and dark eyes, and a pale scar ran across the knuckles of his left hand.
He did not hurry.
He looked at the girls, and then he looked at me on my knees in the water.
His expression went completely cold and still.
"Let go of her," he said.
His voice was quiet and flat, and it did not need any help.
The girl holding my braid let go so fast she fell on her back.
Nobody said a word.
He crossed the dock, crouched in front of me, and took my chin in his bare hand.
His thumb pushed the wet hair off my cheek.
It left a line of warmth on my skin.
"Can you stand?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Then stand."
He took my elbow, and I rose, and he took off his coat and put it around my shoulders.
It smelled like cedar and cold air, and it was still warm from his body.
He turned to Chantal.
She had blood on her cheek from my nails, and she was holding it like she wanted someone to notice.
"This was filmed," he said.
"It's a prank," she said. "We were only..."
"Delete it."
"I can't, you don't know who my father..."
"Delete it," he said, "or I'll learn."
One by one the phones went down.
I heard the thumbs tapping, and I heard Chantal's friend crying.
He did not raise his voice once.
"Get out."
They ran.
The white puffer coat left a shoe behind in the water.
I stood there in his coat, shaking so hard my teeth clicked, and I watched Chantal stop at the edge of the doorway.
She turned and looked at him, and the color had gone out of her face.
"Oh my God," she said to nobody. "That's Nero Bellandi."
She ran after the others.
I looked up at the man beside me.
"You came in late," I said.
His mouth moved, barely.
"I was in the parking lot for an hour," he said.
"An hour?"
"I wanted to see what you would do."
I stared at him, with harbor water running off my chin.
"You watched them put a bucket on my head."
"And then I watched you take her phone," Nero said.
He looked at the dock where it had gone under, and then back at me.
"That's when I came in."
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