Chapter 25
twenty-five
SLOANE
The phone buzzes twice — two texts, one after another — then stops.
I know it’s Rowan because that’s his pattern. Two texts, then nothing for twenty minutes while he paces the room and thinks, then another text once he gives in to his impatience and texts again.
I’ve watched him do it and laughed at him for it, but now the buzzing is happening against the wood of my nightstand, and I can’t make myself reach for the phone. Because, right now, I don’t have anything to say back.
The room is dim and the blinds are half-drawn, letting in a stripe of gray morning light that falls across the foot of the bed and makes a pale rectangle on the floor. Ivy’s bed is already made, which means she got up early and is planning something.
Ivy only rises before noon for class or conspiracies.
I pull the hoodie tighter around my shoulders. It’s Rowan’s, a navy one with the fraying cuff on the left sleeve, and I stole it three weeks ago from the back of his desk chair because I was cold and he was in the shower and it smelled like him.
Now it just makes me miss him — and us — from before all this shit.
More texts make my phone buzz, and I press my face into the pillow and don’t let myself think about his kitchen. If I do, I have to think about the other kitchen, the one at Ironwood House, and what Mason knows.
I am not doing that and I am not burdening Rowan with this.
No matter how many texts he sends.
I’m still in bed when the door opens. There’s no knock, just the click of the latch and then Ivy’s voice, bright and sharp and entirely too loud for whatever time it is. And then she’s on me like a hurricane.
“Okay. I tried the quiet version of the ‘let’s support Sloane through whatever this is’ approach.” She shuts the door behind her. “It didn’t work, so now we’re doing this my way.”
I don’t move.
“I brought you coffee.” She sets something on the nightstand. “Because any intervention needs coffee.”
I say nothing.
Ivy sits on the edge of the bed, and the mattress dips. “I’m not taking no for an answer, Sloane. You smell bad, and I can’t have a bestie at college who smells bad.”
“I showered yesterday.”
“I’m not negotiating. I’m a Hale. We don’t negotiate. We just stand around being annoying until you do what we want.”
That almost gets me, because it fits both her and her brother to a tee. My mouth twitches, and she notices, because her expression softens, just briefly, before she clamps back down into the bit.
She doesn’t yank the covers off dramatically, the way I’m expecting. Instead, she pulls the duvet back, one corner at a time, slowly, the way you’d unwrap something that might break, and my eyes sting so hard I have to close them.
“I love you,” Ivy says quietly. “But you look like shit.”
“Thanks.”
“Shower and then wear the green sweater. You look less dead in green.”
I stand without further protest and head for our small bathroom, where I assess the damage in the mirror. I’m wearing Rowan’s hoodie and a pair of shorts, and my hair resembles a nest.
Yeah, I look like shit.
I shower, afraid of whatever Ivy is plotting while out of sight, and when I emerge wrapped in a towel, she holds the coffee out to me. “Drink.”
“I don’t want coffee.”
“Drink it anyway, Sloane,” she says, making me take the cup. “Because you’re getting dressed and staying vertical.”
“Ivy.” I sigh. “I don’t—”
“I’ve got class at ten. So here’s the plan: you get dressed, you stay out of that bed, and tonight I’m ordering Thai food and we’re watching something stupid and you’re going to eat and complain about the casting and act like a human being for two hours.”
I look at the floor. “And if I say no?” I say.
“Then we try Plan B.” She shrugs, like she’s thought this all the way through. “That involves me sitting on top of you and telling my worst jokes until you tell me what’s going on with you, with my idiot brother, and with you and my idiot brother. A is better. Trust me.”
“Okay,” I say. “Plan A.”
“Okay.”
She stands and opens my closet, pulling hangers aside with the efficiency of a woman who does not trust me to dress myself, which is fair. She throws the green sweater at my head, then a pair of jeans, then some underwear and a bra and some socks.
I take a sip of the coffee and start getting dressed, Ivy talking the entire time. She narrates a relationship in her studio section that may or may not exist, and then gushes about Seb and how he’s giving her nothing.
Once I’m dressed, Ivy looks me over once, twice — like I might have hidden pajamas under the sweater — then points at the bed. “Do not get back in that bed.”
“I won’t.”
“If you do, then we’re going with Plan B.”
“Go.”
She narrows her eyes, and there’s actual menace in them, then heads out. The door shuts behind her, and the room goes quiet, and for about forty-five seconds I stand there staring at the bed.
It takes a lot of willpower to resist the urge to sleep, but I sit at my desk and get to work instead. An hour later, I’m back on the work for Moreno, feeling a little more in my groove, when my stomach reminds me that coffee is not food.
The girl from this morning is still under the duvet, calling to me. I decide not to be her. I pull Rowan’s hoodie back on, this time over the green sweater — Ivy would call it a crime against her styling — and take myself out for lunch.
The walk over is ten minutes, and when I get to Benny’s Bagels it’s warm and crowded and smells as welcoming as it always does — bagels, burnt coffee, and the faint sweetness of whatever cinnamon thing they baked this morning.
I stand in line and let the noise wash over me, because the spark Ivy lit this morning hasn’t gone out yet. I’m starting to feel human again, and when I reach the front and order an everything bagel and a coffee, the girl behind the counter calls me “hon.”
And I almost cry.
I take my coffee and the brown paper bag and find a two-top by the window. Outside, two girls walk past in matching scarves, laughing at something on one of their phones, and a guy in a Halden crew jacket jogs across the street with a golden retriever.
I want to climb into that scene and stay there, because it looks like what I felt before the kitchen with Mason. But at least now, while I’m not okay, I’m starting to think I could be okay eventually, and this morning I wasn’t sure about either.
I take a sip of the coffee. It’s hot, but I drink it anyway, glancing around.
The table near the door has four girls I recognize from Sterling House, not by name but in the nod-in-the-hallway-and-maybe-even-smile kind of way. One of them is the redhead who always props the back door open for her boyfriend at two in the morning.
I don’t know her name, but she’s on her phone, and when I glance over she happens to look up at me. I offer the tentative half-smile of recognition, but I don’t get it back, because her body seems to tense up before her eyes drop back to the screen.
Weird.
I pull my bagel out of the bag and take a bite, and it’s good, and I’m thinking about whether to text Ivy to see if she wants to join me after her class when the table next to me goes quiet — not gradually, but all at once.
Two guys and a girl are gathered around a laptop. They were talking, and now they’re not. The girl’s eyes flick to me and away, then one of the guys angles the laptop screen toward himself, and the other picks up his phone.
My hand stops halfway to my mouth.
Across the room, the redhead’s phone lights up. She tilts it toward the girl beside her. They both look at me, then away, fast. Then there’s a flash of a phone camera somewhere to my right.
Not again…
I know before I know, because my body remembers this. The gravity of a room shifting around you. The way thirty seconds ago you were just a girl eating a bagel, and now you’re something else to everyone in the room.
I put the bagel down and pull out my phone.
There’s three notifications.
Seven.
Twelve.
The number keeps ticking up as I watch, and my thumb is moving before I’ve decided whether I want to see it. But I click, and I end up at an account called @HaldenGoss that I followed because Ivy told me to.
It’s the kind of campus account everyone follows and pretends they don’t, the kind that should have been shut down two years ago but won’t be. Because even the people it hurts keep watching.
People like me.
The post went up eleven minutes ago and has already been shared 214 times. It has my name — my full name — and my high school and the version of the story where Harrison Tisdale is the charming senator’s son and I’m the cautionary tale.
The embarrassment.
The scandal.
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.