Page 30 of Hostile

The video was already playing.

It took my brain a full second to make sense of what it was seeing. It has spent every year since trying to stop. The beach house bedroom. Saturday. The position Wyatt had asked me to try, both of us laughing, his mouth against my shoulder. From that angle, you couldn’t see his face at all.

You could see all of mine.

“Look at you, riding him like a pro. I have a couple of questions, though. From this angle, we can’t see Wyatt’s face, so this may not even be him. We can only see you. Granted, it’s all of you, but maybe Wyatt caught you cheating on him. My other question is, do you have a rodeo career we don’t know about?”

People were gathering. That was the next thing I understood—not as a thought, but as data. A loose ring of bodies, phones already out, laughter with that wet, feeding sound a crowd makes when it has decided someone else is the meal. Someone catcalled. Someone whooped.

We all got this text from him late last night.

My stomach turned over once, decisively, like a lock.

I don’t remember pushing through them. I remember the bathroom door, the stall door, my knees on the tile, and my body emptying itself of the weekend—the sun, the sand, the laughter, all of it, gone into porcelain while my phone buzzed in my coat pocket. And buzzed. And buzzed.

Numbers I didn’t know. Numbers I did.

I crouched on the floor of a campus bathroom and did the only thing I knew how to do, which was work the problem. His phone. It came from his phone. Late last night. Late last night, he’d been texting me about a professor, a meeting, and love. I tried to build a version in which both things were true, and someone else was holding the phone. I want to be honest about this, because I was honest with myself about it for ten years afterward: I couldn’t build it. I was eighteen. I didn’t yet know that the simplest explanation is only the likeliest when nobody has been paid to construct it.

We all.

Every trust-fund kid on that campus had a video of the most private thing I had ever given anyone, and they were sharing it with anyone who wanted to watch it.

I rinsed my mouth out at the sink. I looked at the girl in the mirror—white-faced, red-eyed, still wearing the sweater he’d pulled over her head Sunday morning with his lips at her temple—and I made her stand up straight.

I had to find Wyatt.

I opened the bathroom door in the middle of a conversation happening in the hallway just outside.

“That wasn’t you, man?” Billy laughed, holding up his phone for the crowd to see.

“No, that’s not me,” Wyatt replied angrily.

Four words.

My heart didn’t tear apart at that moment. It wasn’t that clear-cut. It simply stopped beating in my chest—quietly and completely, like a building shutting down floor by floor.

He looked up and saw me standing there. The guilt on his face confirmed everything. He’d seen me. He knew I’d heard him. And he just—stood there, in the middle of Billy’s crowd, with my ruin playing on a loop eight inches from his hand.

I registered the rest of the hallway in a single sweep, because that’s what I do, even when dying. Billy, delighted. The crowd, hungry. And at the edge of it, arms crossed, Blair Aldridge—the only calm face in the corridor. Not shocked. Not embarrassed for her brother. Just watching, with the mild attention of someone confirming a delivery.

I filed it. I didn’t look at that file again for ten years.

It was the oldest reflex I had. Blair had been a fixed hazard in my landscape since the first grade, and her malice was background radiation—too constant to be read as signal. That was the genius of what she built. She hid within her own pattern.

I ran.

I don’t remember deciding to. My legs simply went—out of the building, across the quad through the pointing and the laughter, off campus entirely, down streets I didn’t know, until my lungs quit and my knees hit a Cambridge sidewalk and my stomach emptied itself all over again, though there was nothing left in it but the morning.

I don’t know how long I stayed there. Long enough for the cold to seep up through the pavement. Long enough to realize I had nowhere to go—not the dorm, where my roommate had a phone; not the dining hall; not a single building on that campus that didn’t have a screen in it.

Long enough for Camille Prescott to find me.

I’d met her three weeks into my first semester. She was a junior, two years ahead of me, the kind of person who moved through Harvard’s social landscape with the easy authority of someone whose grandmother’s name was on a building. She had no reason to befriend a freshman on a scholarship from Savannah, Georgia. She did it anyway, which told me everything I needed to know about who she was beneath the Prescott name.

She didn’t ask any questions. She crouched down beside me on that sidewalk in her camel coat, took one look at my face, and said, “Come on. My car’s around the corner.”

Nobody said a word to her as she walked me back across campus. Nobody would. You didn’t cross a Prescott, and everyone on that quad knew it. She walked half a step ahead of me the whole way, unhurried, her chin at the exact angle of a woman daring the world to try her. I understood—dimly, through the wreckage—that I was watching a lesson I would spend the next ten years learning.