Josh wasn’t real. Bennett had made it all up. This went beyond teasing and high school politics. This was cruel.
I wanted to disappear. I wanted the ground beneath me to open and just swallow me up.
The first firework went off with a whistle. I flinched as it exploded into the sky, soaking us in red.
The whole group of Bennett’s friends were laughing. People who laughed at me already for reasons I had either learned or pretended not to care about. I wasn’t actually rich? My mother workedfor the Graves family? She was the help? I refused to be embarrassed by that.
But this—this… I was trembling with anger, tears spilling with every blink.
“Josh!” people started calling. “Josh! Josh! Josh!”
It was turning into a chant. A taunt.
“Hey, Clover,” Valerie cooed. “Were you waiting for someone?”
I looked to Bennett, hoping to find an answer there on his face, but his gaze was trained on the ground, staring at my discarded shoes as he shook his head softly.
I could practically hear his thoughts in my head.You need to go.
So, I finally did. I ran down the steps and through the dance floor.
“Clover!” someone called. Sydney, possibly.
Fingers wrapped around my arm, tugging me back.
Bennett stood, shocked, like he hadn’t expected to catch me. Like he had no plan for what he might actually say to me.
“Why?” I asked through a sob as every secret I’d shared—big and small—raced through my head.
His brow softened, and the words were there, waiting to be spoken. Words that could never justify but maybe explain.
Then he stumbled forward as his friends—Valerie in the lead—came to a halt behind him, still laughing obnoxiously and crooning, “Josh! Oh, Josh!” back and forth to each other.
Bennett’s expression hardened into something careless. Indifferent. “Because I could,” he said. “Because you werethatdesperate.”
It was me against them in that moment. People who had been born into privilege and opportunity and me, a girl who had dared to live among them. And then there was the boy—the boy I’d once called my closest friend. The boy I’d fallen in love with over a lifetime and then all at once.
“What’s going on here?” my mother shouted, parting the crowd of cruel teenagers.
The fireworks continued overhead as she put the pieces together, her eyes wild and full of anger and disappointment.
“Did you send him pictures, Clover? Did he ask you for anything like that? Baby, you have to tell me.”
I stood there frozen just as Sydney joined us, her arm coming around me, and my mother took my silence as an answer.
Mom turned on Bennett, the closest person she’d ever had to a son, and drilled a finger into his chest. “Predator!” she shouted and despite the music and the pyrotechnics, the word echoed.
Sydney’s arm dropped away from me as she stepped toward Bennett and then in front of him.
Something irrevocable passed between the two women.
Mom took me home immediately. I never went back for my shoes. A valet drove us home and we went straight to the guesthouse.
She held me for hours as I sobbed into her chest until I fell asleep in her bed.
I woke up the next morning to the news that we would be moving out by the end of the week.
Sydney offered to continue paying my tuition, but Mom declined, and it was the only relief I felt for quite some time, knowing I would never have to return to that place.
