“What happened?” she says, leaning forward in anticipation of hearing the story.
I roll my eyes. I don’t want to tell her, but she’s family. I hold up a finger and give her a threatening glare. “If I tell you, you don’t say a word to anyone.”
“Promise,” she says.
I fall back on my bed, staring up at our vaulted dorm room ceiling. “I don’t even know where to begin. Everyone is rude. Or they just ignore me. I don’t know what’s worse. The teachers aren’t too nice either. And then I got stuck with a pity lab partner.”
“A what?” Belle says. I see her from the corner of my eye, sitting rail straight, absolutely captivated by everything I’m saying. Her long dark hair is twisted into twin braids that fall down her shoulders, but they’re all fuzzy and slept on. She needs to rebraid them before she goes anywhere.
“A pity lab partner,” I repeat. “It was awful. He only agreed to partner up with me because no one else wanted to.”
“Declan’s nice like that,” Belle says.
I sit up, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling. “How do you know it was Declan?”
“Knight Watch.”
She rotates her laptop screen and I see what looks like a social media feed, refreshing every few seconds. “What is that?” I say, although I realize what it is a few seconds later. Declan told me about Knight Watch on our tour yesterday.
“They post people’s chem partners on there?”
Belle shrugs. “Someone mentioned that you were in class and had partnered with Declan.”
“How was it posted?” I ask, eyeing her computer screen even though it’s too far away to see from where I’m sitting. “Was it like, ‘Sophia Brass is here, Declan is so lucky to be her friend’?”
Belle’s expression tells me the answer before she speaks. “Not really.”
I roll my eyes and fall back on my bed. “I hate this school. I hate the people. I hate the classes. And I hate these stupid uniforms.”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I try to imagine I’m lying in my bed at home—or better yet, on a yoga mat at our country club back in Malibu.I’m taking a calming yoga class, I’m back home. I’m where I belong. Everyone adores me. I am totally happy…
“I wish I could tell you it’s not so bad, but…I can’t.” Belle’s voice pulls me from my daydream, but it’s just as well because I can’t actually relax right now. My brain is too smart. It knows full well that we aren’t in a yoga studio in Malibu.
I open my eyes. “Is this why you do your schoolwork online?”
She gets all fidgety, biting her bottom lip and examining her fingernails. That kind of gives her away, but eventually she says, “Yes.”
“What happened?” I sit up and walk over to her side of the room for the first time. It feels a little weird, like I’m getting in her personal space or something, but she is my cousin after all. We were friends as kids. And she looks like she’s hurting right now.
I sit at the foot of her bed. “Did someone hurt you?”
She swallows, still looking at her hands. “No.”
“You can talk to me.”
Her brown eyes look up at mine. She looks so fragile, and so sad, and it makes my heart hurt. Then, I get angry. “Who made you this way? Was it a guy? One of those bratty girls? I’ll put them in their place—”
“No, Sophia. It was no one. It was me. I’m the problem.”
I release the breath I’d held in, disappointed that I can’t direct my anger onto someone who hurt my cousin. “It was you? What does that even mean?”
She nods. Swallows again.
“It was freshman year. I was… I was walking to class and…” Her chest rises with a deep breath. She pulls her straggly braids over one shoulder and then tosses them back again. Her eyes meet mine, and then she looks away.
I can tell this is hard for her to talk about, but holy crap I am intrigued. I want to screamjust tell me already!But I hold back. I wait for what feels like an eternity, and then she clears her throat.
“I don’t know what happened. My body freaked out. My brain freaked out. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. I felt like I was dying. Like, literally, seriously, dying.”
