Chapter 7 #2
I muted the call so you’d hang up. So Logan never fell asleep talking to me. That was the reason I could never hear his sleepy breathing—he simply muted his phone and pretended. Waited until I hung up first. That was another giant blow, hitting me square in the chest.
My mouth actually hung open, because the world had been so clear. The sky had been blue and the grass had been green, but it was like he stood there, telling me that the grass was actually what was blue. I couldn’t even reconcile it.
He was so perfect. He was sweet and funny and easily flustered. He was a football player, and he was cute.
All the perfections fell apart now, a betrayal of the highest order.
I actually had to take a step back.
Logan still had yet to look at me since we stepped into the alley, but I could see his eyes dart to the side, as if he was considering bolting.
He felt like a stranger in Logan’s skin.
The sweet, funny boy I’d spent the last few weeks getting to know had vanished, and in his place was someone I didn’t recognize—flat, distant, unfeeling.
Enemy.
“So, what?” I demanded, surprised by how thick my voice had become in a few moments of silence. “Get a Brentwood cheerleader to fall for you while you laugh about her behind her back?”
“You didn’t fall for me.”
“You don’t know how I feel.” My voice was a snap, and the next part was almost impossible to speak aloud. “None of it—none of it meant anything to you?”
Logan’s lips parted, but for a second, he didn’t speak. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it—”
“It doesn’t,” he said, softer now, like he was trying to convince himself. Logan still couldn’t look at me, that beautiful blue-eyed gaze directed almost stonily at the mouth of the alley. “Even if I told you that—that I started to care about you—it wouldn’t change anything.”
I imagined slamming his back into the alleyway wall. “It would change everything, Logan.”
“Would it?” Logan’s gaze swiveled at last, snapping to mine, and it was like a lightning strike.
Stormy, relentless, with something alive and dangerous stirring in those blue depths.
My chest tightened as if the air between us had thickened, and I felt it in my stomach first—a sick twist I couldn’t fight. “You’d choose me?”
You’d choose me? The words echoed in my head, innocent on their own, traitorous within context.
My eyes drifted down to his varsity jacket, where the JH stitching on one side of his chest, and a bulldog baring its teeth on the other.
“The captain of Brentwood High’s cheer squad choosing the Jefferson quarterback?
” I muttered with a scoff, but I felt rattled to my core.
“Exactly.” He gave a small, almost unconscious nod. “You say it like it’s against the law.”
“You—you don’t even know.” It definitely was against the law—at least Brentwood High law. Definitely Top Tier law. I’d be dethroned. I’d be lucky if they let me keep my head. Jade would… never forgive me. “I’m in the Top Tier. I’m not just some nobody. I’m not—”
“You are so caught up in it all,” Logan murmured almost sadly. “You’d never choose me over your school spirit. Even if you actually liked me.”
Logan’s words hit me almost like actual blows. “I do like—”
“You don’t know me, Madison.” His emphasis was strong, shaking his voice.
He looked smaller than he had in weeks, not the confident, easy smile I’d grown to adore—just a boy weighed down.
“You just liked the idea of me. A boyfriend new to the school to hold your hand when you walked down the hall. A popularity boost.”
I could feel my cheer shoes slipping on the shaky ground beneath me. He knew. Somehow, he’d always known. All those daydreams—the next power couple, him looking cute on my arm, the silent approval from the Top Tier—it had been there in my mind, and he’d known it all along.
“You liked the optics of me, but you didn’t like me,” he went on, almost a whisper. “So it doesn’t matter… if I like you.”
Optics. A word so familiar to me, one of the Top Tier’s commandments, now tumbled out like a curse from his lips.
But immediately, the urge to deny it rose within me.
I wasn’t sure where it came from. Logan wasn’t wrong—I had fantasized about how great we’d look in the Brentwood halls.
But even though I’d looked forward to flaunting him to the student body, I’d looked forward to our private phone calls all the same.
Even though I couldn’t want for everyone to see his smile, I’d treasured his laughs that were just for me.
And even now, there was an undeniable tug in my chest, the same one I’d felt the day we met, accompanied by a stab of pain. And the pain didn’t feel like guilt, nor disappointment over not getting what I wanted.
It felt like heartbreak.
Even still, I lifted my chin. “You’re pointing fingers at me for being loyal to my school, but you’re no better.
You—you went into Brentwood to mess with someone’s head.
It was a test. A game. A joke.” The alleyway suddenly felt so cold, the sun hidden by the brick buildings, leaving goosebumps along my skin.
“You were there on a dare. You’re no better than me. ”
Logan flinched again, like a dog caught in the rain, posture shrinking. In fact, he was worse. Way worse. He made it out to sound like I was the shallow, superficial one, when he was the true puppet master in all of this—setting me up while knowing exactly how this would end.
Logan tipped his head down so a lock of hair fell into his eyes. In the shadows like this, he looked more like the boy I’d grown used to—quiet, soft-spoken, almost harmless. It made it worse. “No,” Logan quietly agreed. “I’m no better.”
And that was it. No excuse, no rebuttal, no defensiveness. I hated the sight of his sad puppy-dog eyes, but couldn’t bring myself to look away. I couldn’t bring myself to walk away, either, knowing that if I turned my back now, it’d be well and truly over.
Logan’s hand stretched out suddenly, as if his control slipped in that final moment. He reached for my hand where it curled into a fist, stopping just short of grabbing it.
His fingertips grazed my whitened knuckles, and despite everything, it caused energy to race up my arm. “I’m sorry that I went along with this,” Logan murmured as he dropped his hand back to his side. “And I’m sorry I wasn’t more careful with your heart.”
You wear your heart on your sleeve, he’d said. You should be more careful with it.
Will you break it? I’d asked.
Logan hadn’t smiled. Hadn’t laughed. Hadn’t said yes or no.
Because he knew he would.
“I thought something about you was off.”
Jade stepped into the alley, eyes snapping with superiority. She came to a stop right beside me, but her attention was fully dedicated to smiting Logan down with her glare. I should’ve been relieved at her presence, but instead, the alley only felt colder.
“You messed with her feelings on a dare? Leading her on? That’s pathetic.”
Logan’s expression hardened again, as if her appearance cooled things off for him, too. The darkness between the buildings slowly began to swallow me, and all at once, my snapping anger vanished. Had Jade been listening in this whole time?
“You took her on her first date, gave her free coffees, called her before bed—was it fun, playing with her feelings?”
Somehow, when Jade rattled them off, the little things I’d been obsessing over the past two weeks sounded so trivial.
“It was fun.” Logan’s voice was flat, no hesitation, though his eyes flicked to me for half a heartbeat.
My lips parted. “More fun than I ever thought it could be. More real. She showed me that not everyone at Brentwood is rotten to the core. Some hide it better, sure. But some of you?” He looked back to Jade. “You wear the ugliness like a crown.”
Real. Logan admitted to Jade what he couldn’t to me. It was real?
“Careful.” Jade huffed on a breath to feign nonchalance. I could tell she was bothered, though. When she was affected, she refused to break eye contact, trying to assert dominance, and she held Logan’s steadfast. “We’re obsessed with popularity? Says the quarterback of the football team.”
“You don’t get quarterback by being popular. That’s why your boyfriend wasn’t picked.”
Jade’s jaw locked.
“Being the talk of the town might be cool now, but five years from now, who’s going to care? Who’s going to remember, except the people you stepped into the ground?”
In the midst of my world falling apart, I thought about Maisie Matthews, the girl I couldn’t even look in the eye.
But Logan wasn’t finished. He had yet to deliver the killing blow. His voice was soft, almost pitying. “Girls like you peak in high school, you know.”
The weight of his words was just like the ones he’d said the other day.
Don’t stay stuck in high school. These made me feel just as icky on the inside, as if he’d managed to throw mud all over my cheer uniform.
He wasn’t looking at me as he said it, but they rang within me all the same, as if they’d had no other intended target.
Finally, Logan turned to me one last time, blue eyes searching mine. “I am sorry, Madison,” he said, and that was it.
Without another word, Logan edged around Jade and headed back out of the alley, leaving us behind. I turned and watched him round the corner, something in me tugging once more, the same urge that had drawn me out of Expresso’s to begin with. The toe of my sneaker scuffed on the gravel.
Jade’s hand clamped down on my wrist. “Madison.”
My chest rose and fell fast as if I’d just completed a tumble twist, leaving me out of breath. I couldn’t break away, not from staring out the alley nor from her grip.
“You cannot go chasing after a freaking Bulldog.” Now it wasn’t just her voice that snapped, but the fire in her eyes, too. “I already had to lie to everyone at the table. It’s a wonder Riley didn’t blab the second you left. If you go after him now, they’ll never let it go.”
Her words echoed in my ears. A warning of her own, but Logan’s was louder. Girls like you peak in high school, you know.
I stood there staring at her for a moment.
In the alley, a shadow covered half of her face, making her strangely menacing.
The second she’d shown up, everything had shifted.
She’d stepped in, taken ahold of the reins of the conversation and steered it in her direction.
And I’d let her. I’d taken the backseat in my own argument, letting Jade fight the battle with Logan for me.
And with Logan gone, it didn’t feel like a battle she’d won, but one we both lost.
“Unless you want to run after him.” Her voice was strange. Not a question, and not an accusation. As if she genuinely wasn’t sure what I’d choose.
“No,” I said, but the word was almost instinctual. Absent-minded. So I added, stronger, “Of course not.”
Jade’s stare on me was heavy. I stayed quiet and still, knowing I needed to sweep the betrayal under the rug, to forget about it, but I couldn’t get Logan’s words to stop repeating. Girls like you peak in high school.
“Come on, then.” Jade dropped my arm, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “Let’s go finish the Most Likely To list.”
She didn’t wait for me to reply, but headed out the alley in Logan’s footsteps, assuming I’d follow.
I looked down at my cheer uniform, at the bedazzled royal blue and beautiful gold. A band of gold stretched across my chest underneath the Brentwood High logo, distinctly different from the rest of the squad’s. The captain’s uniform. One that every Babe dreamed of, but one I’d been chosen to don.
When I’d seen Logan on Monday, his words had been gentler. Don’t stay stuck in high school.
And with Jade, he’d wielded them like a weapon. Girls like you peak in high school.
I crouched down in the grit, balancing on the balls of my feet. Each of Logan’s kind words warred with the ugly ones. It was a dare went head-to-head with It was real. My mind couldn’t wrap around it, couldn’t see which was the truth. Maybe they both were. Maybe neither of them were.
All I knew was that I’d been blindsided by the enemy, and everything I’d envisioned all came to a crashing halt. The buzzer was sounding on the game of our relationship, and even though I wasn’t totally sure Logan won, I knew that I was the loser.
I stayed in the alleyway for a long time, crouched to the ground, hugging my knees. I expected Jade to return eventually and tug me back into Expresso’s, but she never did. No one ever came to find me, leaving me and my hurt all alone.