She winced. “It’s all over social media. Aubrey posted it to all of her accounts. She tagged you and Harrison in each video.”She looked grimly around the restaurant. “You need to get out of here while you still can. I don’t think many people realize that you’re Sadie yet.”
“What do you mean?”
She held the phone back up and showed me that I’d been tagged in every single video and each video said #SorrySadie in the captions. “Um… if you listen to the first video with sound, you can hear Harrison saying, “Sorry, Sadie” after he cheats the first time.”
That’s why people were saying that to me. I put a hand on my stomach. My brain felt detached, numb. I couldn’t even process just how horrible this betrayal was.
“Sorry, Sadie,” a guy said as he pushed past me, laughing. He looked back at me, though, and seemed to have a brief moment of regret when he saw my face. Then his friends joined him and they were suddenly all looking at me and laughing. “We’re available, honey,” a couple of them called out.
My God. I wasn’t just going to be a laughingstock between Aubrey and Harrison, or even the whole campus. From what I could see, the hashtag and videos were already going viral. I needed to get somewhere safe and delete all my social media since she’d tagged me.
I didn’t even realize I was standing back by our table until the girl patted me on the shoulder and said, “I’m really sorry. I hope you find someone who actually deserves you.” Then she walked off and disappeared in the crowd.
“What the hell?” Harrison looked pissed. “Why would she say that?”
I just stood there in a daze, the people in the diner moving around me had become a blur. I’d worried about Aubrey and Harrison being friends. But I’d decided to trust him. I’d had suspicions, of course, especially lying in my bed at night after he wasn’t texting me. But I thought they might have kissed orbecome very close friends. I didn’t realize he was capable of… the level of cheating in those videos. It was so much worse than I could have ever anticipated.
Without a word to my friends or Harrison, I pushed my way out of the diner. I got as far away as I could before becoming violently ill in the bushes. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. It wouldn’t be long before everyone recognized me from my pictures on social media. I just wanted to get away from all of this. It didn’t even feel real. It was like a waking nightmare.
I started jogging. It was three or four miles to my sorority house, but that was no big deal. As part of training for the cheerleading squad, we had to log a certain number of miles a week. I was glad I’d worn tennis shoes. And the physical activity would help clear my head. It would also help with the anger starting to wash over me. How could he have done this? It was one thing to cheat on me. But to take part in something this horrible? It was as if he’d wanted todestroyme.
What had I ever done to him except love him? Had this been his way of getting me back for not staying at Carruthers this summer?
The skies opened suddenly, and the rain fell in sheets. I didn’t care. In fact, it felt right, like I was being cleansed of something ugly, something horrible.
I couldn’t believe that Harrison, the boy I’d loved, the boy I’d devoted years of my life to, the man I’d planned to marry one day… had hurt me in such a horrible, public way. But I was afraid if I thought about it too much, I’d end up just lying in a field along the side of the road and crying myself silly. So, I pushed the thoughts down and just jogged. In the rain. Towards a sorority house that Aubrey also lived in.
Chapter Thirteen
Harrison
“What the hell?” I watched as Sadie, looking as if she’d just found out someone died, pushed her way out of the diner and ran off. What was going on?
I saw Carrie holding up her phone while the rest of our friends stared at the screen, horror on their faces.
“What is it?” I was looking around the packed restaurant, noticing that everyone was on their phones. They were all looking between their phones and me. Most of them were laughing, but some looked disgusted. What the hell was going on?
“That’s the way to get it, brother!” a couple of frat guys came over and fist bumped me. “Nice!”
I smiled but was confused.
Drake leaned forward looking angrier than I’d ever seen him. “Look at your fucking phone, Harrison.”
I pulled my phone out. “What am I looking for?”
“Oh, you’ll see.”
And I did. I had notifications all over my home screen where I’d been tagged in videos. Feeling apprehensive, I pulled one up. It took me a moment to register what I was seeing. When it dawned on me what I was looking at, I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.
“No.” I stood up. “No, no, no, no, no.” This couldn’t be happening. I looked around the room, furious, hoping to see one particular person. My eyes landed on her.
I pointed at her and yelled, “What thefuckdid you do?”
Aubrey paled in the face of my rage.
The restaurant got quiet. People were either filming my reaction or watching to see what was going to happen. “You fucking videoed us? Why did you do that?Why?” I was caught between wanting to cry and wanting to kill her. How could she do this to me?
I watched as she hurried from her table, pushing through people to get away from me. I vaguely registered that all my friends from home had also left the building. I stood there for a moment, stuck, feeling as if my world had just fallen apart.
