Already, there are nasty comments by people who met me once at Halden or knew someone who met me once at Halden or who decide they don’t like me based on a photo. In one comment, someone asks for a link to the photos the article refers to.
That comment has forty-seven likes.
I put the phone face down on the table and my hands are shaking. I try to take a sip of coffee, but I feel more eyes on me, and I last about four seconds before I pick the phone up again. Because not knowing has always been worse for me than any specific terrible thing.
The replies keep growing. Someone has linked the old article from the Westchester paper, the one my father’s lawyer got taken down, but it’s the internet and nothing disappears. It’s the one that got me branded as a slut and a liar.
Not here, I think, fast as a flinch.I moved states, I changed schools, I did everything they told me to do, and it wasn’t supposed to follow me here.
I think about my parents getting wind of this again, and it becoming the talk of the country club. I think of Owen, who’ll have to carry it again the way he carried it last time, when he put his fist through a wall and told our parents he tripped.
There’s a new comment every few seconds and each one lands in my chest, like someone finding a bruise and pressing it again and again. But I know it’s going to get worse, because no one has yet made the one connection I’m afraid of.
But then someone makes the link.
She’s Rowan Hale’s GIRLFRIEND?!
I put my head in my hands, because everything collapsing on me is one thing, but him being burned by my secret is another. I tried to contain Mason and the blast and now he’s been caught in it anyway.
I stand up and walk out of Benny’s with my head down and my cheeks burning. And each step I take collects more eyes on me, more whispered comments about me, and more phones pinging.
Once I’m outside, I run.
It’s ugly and uncoordinated and I don’t care who sees. I just need to be away from the eyes and the whispers andeverything— and I make it to the far side of the main lawn before I have to stop, panting.
I sit on the lawn, which is wet from overnight rain, and the cold goes straight through my jeans. Only then do I realize that I’ve ended up at the same place where I crossed the field to take Rowan’s hand, throwing off the Halden Girl mask for good.
Or so I’d thought.
The campus stretches out in front of me: gray sky, bare trees, students walking between buildings, all of it looking the same as it did twenty minutes ago when I was a girl with a warm bagel and a plan to text Ivy about it.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I don’t look at it. It buzzes again.
Rowan.
Does he know already?
And now I’m thinking about Rowan, really thinking about him, because even if he hasn’t seen it yet it’s only a matter of time before someone sends it to the team group chat, or tags him, or just shows him.
And I know what he’ll do.
I’ve known since the night in the kitchen when Mason told me what he was holding over me: Rowan will go to war with Mason to destroy the threat against me, and he won’t stop until it’s done.
But that’s the problem. Mason is on his team, and Rowan will tear the whole thing apart to get to him. The captaincy, the season, the team he’s been killing himself to hold together, his professional future — he’ll burn all of it, and he won’t even hesitate.
And that’s what I’ve been trying to prevent since the start.
I wassocareful. I didn’t tell Rowan, I didn’t confront Mason, I kept quiet and started to distance myself from Rowan and the guys. But now Mason has dropped the bomb on me anyway.
Was it because he’s bored and cruel?
Or was there a moment I missed, some tiny shift in the power balance?
Either way, something happened somewhere I wasn’t, and I’m the one paying for it.
I pull my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them, shivering from the cold that’s seeped through my jeans. Then I start crying, the ugly kind, the shoulders shaking, snot and tears mixing, cheeks flushed kind.
I’m crying for the girl who sent photos to a boy she thought she loved and had her body turned into social currency, and for the girl who thought she’d found herself again, with Rowan and Ivy and Professor Moreno, before she stepped into that kitchen with Mason.
