“We’re fine,” I said. “Mind your own business.”
“It’s okay, Coop,” Sadie said, taking his hand. “It’s just my ex.”
“Yeah, I know who he is,” the guy said, staring me down. He was actually a little bigger than I was, but I still thought I could take him. My eyes kept dropping to his and Sadie’s hands entwined together. What the fuck?
“Who the hell is this, Sadie?”
She rolled her eyes. “None of your business.” Then she grabbed the front of the guy’s shirt, stood on her toes, and kissed him. He deepened the kiss until it was borderline inappropriate for public viewing, and I saw red.
“Get your fucking hands off my girlfriend,” I yelled, stepping towards him.
Sadie pulled away. “I’m not your girlfriend anymore. Come on, Cooper. Let’s get out of here.”
With that, she turned and started walking away from me, holding hands with the guy who’d apparently taken my place. I felt like my world was crashing down as I watched her choosing someone other than me.
“Please, Sadie!” I called after her. “I love you!”
She didn’t even look back.
Chapter Fifteen
Sadie
I’d been so thankful that Cooper hadn’t outed me for using him in front of Harrison. Cooper was just my study partner, and had a boyfriend who usually studied with us, too. I’d taken full advantage of him, though. Having the chance to make Harrison feel even a tenth of the misery I had felt when I’d first seen that video? It was priceless. I’d thanked Cooper profusely, and he told me he’d been happy to do it.
If only everything could have turned out like that.
I’d thought I would be able to handle the rest of the residual problems caused by the breakup, but I was wrong. It just got worse and worse all semester. The videos went viral on social media. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram… they were everywhere. There was no escaping them. There was also no escaping that I was the Sadie captioned in all the videos.
It didn’t matter that Harrison tried to file charges against Aubrey. She said he wanted the videos to be taken, and it turned into her word against his. The original posts were taken down, but it was too late. They’d already gone viral and been shared hundreds of thousands of times. There was no way to get them back under control and off the web. They were out there forever.
It was the same thing with my social media accounts. Even though I’d deleted them, my picture, name, and everything I’d ever posted had been shared countless times before I could doanything about it. And once it was out there, just like the videos, there was no getting it back.
It was awful. Random people said awful things to me and tried to film my reaction to it on a daily basis. I even had requests for interviews from TMZ and other shows like that. It was horrible.
And I had to go out and cheer my ex-boyfriend on each Saturday as he had another perfect season. If he’d been treated like a god before, it had exploded beyond that this year. Not only was he cheered for his football prowess, but also his ‘performance’ on the sex tapes. He was celebrated for it, while I was mocked. People would yell ‘Sorry, Sadie’ at me while I tried to cheer. They were mostly strangers. People who didn’t know me, had never met me, yet they felt the need to bully me relentlessly. My cheerleading coach had people removed from the stadium, but she couldn’t do it every single time someone yelled something at me. There were times I had to retreat to the locker room so I could cry in private. People are cruel. I’d known that on some level, but nothing cruel had ever happened to me. It’s only after it does that you can truly understand the level of cruelty some people will stoop to.
I was dealing with both the cruelty of my boyfriend cheating on me with a girl I’d warned him about, and the casual cruelty of strangers. It wasn’t long before it really started to affect me. I lost weight, I struggled with not wanting to leave my room at the sorority house, it was difficult to go to class, and I wanted to hide from the world. I often cried myself to sleep at night, and I was glad that I didn’t have a roommate. As much as I loved Melinda, Carrie, and Blair, I didn’t want them seeing just how badly I was doing.
I tried to put on a brave face.
At least I didn’t have to see Aubrey since she’d been kicked off the cheerleading squad and was booted out of the sorority.She even left school. Of course, that wasn’t before she’d had the chance to get in the last word. She’d sought me out after she’d been kicked out of the sorority and was moving her things out. She’d found me alone in my room and laughed at me, saying that she’d enjoyed breaking Harrison and me up. “Guess what you had wasn’t so ‘special’ after all, huh?” she’d said, throwing my words back at me. I knew she’d been trying to bait me into a fight or something, so I’d just stared at her, silent. I didn’t want to let her know she was getting to me, and sometimes silence is a more powerful weapon than any words can be.
I was just glad she was gone. Somehow, she got those breast implants she’d wanted so badly. Then she became a cheerleader for a pro team in Atlanta. The organization apparently thought her internet fame was great as long as she stayed away from the players. I figured that wouldn’t last long. She also was asked to pose on websites and in certain magazines. Posters of her went up all over campus. She didn’t appear to feel the least bit of remorse.
Harrison did.
He tried to reach out to me for weeks, but I’d blocked him in every way possible. I wouldn’t go near him anywhere on campus, either.
But that didn’t mean he gave up.
One Friday night, after all the parties were over across campus and people were sleeping, he snuck onto the lawn of my sorority house, found my window, and held a cell phone in the air playing “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel. It was a pathetic attempt to recreate a scene fromSay Anything, one of my favorite movies.
I yelled at him to go away, or I was calling the cops. Then I had to deal with about thirty girls from my sorority talking about how sweet he was and telling me I should forgive him.
The next day he was at it again. At the end of the football game, which we barely won due to his poor performance, he refused to go back into the locker room. Instead, he harassed me some more.
“Please!” he hollered from the sidelines. “Please just listen to me!”
