“Jade.”
She looks past me, unable to meet my eyes. “The day after I got here, Ralston found me. She offered me a job if I helped her. I…” She looks down again, then squares her shoulders, steeling herself. When she meets my eyes this time, she’s dreadfully serious. “I couldn’t turn it down.”
The words slam into my chest as if they’re a purse full of stones, and I take a step back. Jade was the constant—the one who warned me in the beginning. She was the one I counted on to help me in the end. The one I didn’t doubt.
I guess trust has always been my weakness.
“Helped her how?” I demand. When she doesn’t answer, I go on. It doesn’t even matter. “She bought your silence. After everything she did. After all this time. And you let her.”
She swallows but doesn’t deny it. “I don’t owe you an explanation. We aren’t friends.”
Inside me, a wall is crumbling. It’s a wall I didn’t even realize I’ve been leaning on all these years.
“We don’t have to be friends to protect each other. I wasn’t your friend back then either, and you tried. You warned me. What happened to sisterhood?”
A flash of sorrow crosses her face. “Sisterhood.” She says the word softly, as if it’s something she hasn’t heard in a long time. As if it’s a vague memory she’s trying to bring back. “Sisterhood is a lie, Lila. They wrap all the shit we go through as women in pretty paper and give it a gentle name to sell it to us as something special. They’re salesmen, and it’s about time we stop buying.”
Her words slice me like blades. I can’t say anything, can’t even think straight. The wind bites my cheeks, and bitter tears line my eyes. “You’re just giving up. Worse, giving in.”
“I’m accepting reality. You want to believe there’s a clean way to fix this. That we can just cut her out like a tumor, and the institution—the world—will be healthy again. But it’s all rot underneath. Bone-deep. Terminal. You can scream until your throat bleeds, but no one’s going to burn it down for you. Not for me. Not for anyone.” She shrugs.
I draw in a shallow breath. “I’m not asking anyone to burn it down for me. I just want someone to listen to us. To care.”
She presses her lips together, looking away. “Look, I was wrong back then. Warning you about my experience with her was stupid. Blame it on being young and headstrong. Still hurting. I had no idea how life really works. Ralston had it right all along. How life works. How the system works. She figured it out a long time ago. If you can’t beat ’em, you join ’em.”
My throat aches with sobs I’m refusing to give in to. “Is that what you’ll tell your daughter someday? Is that the lesson you want her to learn? We have to fight now so they don’t have to. So she doesn’t have to.”
She studies me, and it’s as if I’m a child asking her to go on an adventure when she has work to do. As if she’s only tolerating me, when she’s the one who woke the beast in my chest in the first place. “I’m sorry, Lila. Really, I am. I wish I was still that woman, that girl in the classroom who believed her story mattered.” Her voice cracks, eyes glistening with sudden tears. She looks down and dries them quickly, sniffling. “But that girl believed in a world that doesn’t exist. One where good always wins, and bad guys see justice rather than win campaigns and appeals and confirmation hearings. Ralston may be our monster, but she is not the only monster. Fighting her solves nothing. It just drains us.”
Somehow, her words cut deeper into me, into previously untouched flesh. With another small, regretful smile, she turns to go. I can’t move, so I stay, rooted, until I lose sight of her in the crowds of students laughing, shouting, phones out, earbuds in. The world around us keeps moving, even though everything has stopped for me.
The moment lingers, her words repeating in my head, hardening in my chest like frost.
Sisterhood is a lie.
I think of the other women Ralston hurt, the ones who left without a word, invisible. We don’t know their names, don’t know how many of us there were. Then I think of the professors who stood by and watched it happen, the dean who protected her over us. Silence grows like mold in these halls—patient and destructive. It can outwait any of us.
But Jade was wrong about one thing—fighting Ralston does solve something. It prevents the next girl from going through this. It tells those who will listen that we don’t have to keep quiet.
I should’ve fought back then, but I didn’t have it in me. I do now. And so I have to pick up the torch Jade dropped the moment she gave up. I still believe in a world where good wins, and even if she’s only one monster, she can be one less monster in the world.
Someone has to stop her, and even if I have to stand alone, maybe that someone is me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I don’t go directly back to the dorm. Instead, I stop by the Prism Gallery, where today’s event is being held. It’s an art exhibit calledShe Rewrote Our Story.
I couldn’t have come up with a more fitting title if I tried.
A lilac poster sits atop an easel, welcoming everyone. Behind it there’s a line of women—students, faculty, and alumni—all dressed in varying shades of purples. They sip cucumber water from stemless glasses being passed out by passing waiters and talk in soft tones.
Inside the atrium, the gallery space glows with clear adoration for the woman we’re all here to celebrate. From one artist, there are paintings of women with mouths open in song. From another, there’s a series of black-and-white photographs showing typewriters with various objects resting on the keys—the points of heels, the smashed end of a tube of lipstick, a broken bottle of perfume, a half-burned bra, an IUD.
Another installation features a looped projection of a woman’s silhouette joined by others—dozens at first, then hundreds and thousands, as it slowly dissolves into handwritten notes about society’s expectations of women and girls. A smallcrowd gathers next to this one, watching. I catch a bit of conversation near it:
“She said this piece was inspired by Professor Ralston’s ‘Letter to My Young Sisters.’ It’s devastating, isn’t it?”
Each placard, each quote, each breath in this place is devoted to her, honoring and thanking her for everything she’s done for us—hersisters.
