CHAPTER 33
Lila
I knock on Oliver’s door so hard, I’m surprised I don’t bust it down.
It’s so pathetically obvious he’s behind all this. I still remember his words from the day he asked me for a second chance—how he thought I was sleeping with Reed and how he warned me that rumors spread like wildfire on campus.
My ex is as good as dead right now.
“I’m coming, I’m coming. Holy shit.”
When he yanks open the door, his eyes widen comically.
“Lila? What are you doing here?” he asks with such confusion that I almost think it’s genuine.
“I came to ask you what the fuck you think you’re doing,” I blurt out, anger rising in my throat. “Taking pictures of us, Oliver? Really? And emailing them to the dean with false accusations? Are you kidding me right now?”
He blinks once, twice. “Are you…okay?”
My hands start trembling. “Answer me.”
Oliver glances over his shoulder to check on his roommates and shuts the door. Once we’re alone in the hallway, he tells me, “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. Why did you just bang on my door like that?”
Am I going crazy? Is that what’s happening right now?
I wrap my arms around myself, fighting the urge to scream and cry. “The pictures. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“I really don’t.”
I take a deep breath. “Oliver. Be honest with me, just once. The last time I was here, you accused me of sleeping with my professor, Reed Abner. Remember?”
He rolls his eyes. “Yeah.”
“You warned me that rumors spread quickly on campus,” I add. “And now you’re telling me you have nothing to do with the fact that Dean Russo has just failed my internship because someone sent her pictures of us together?”
“Wait.” His confused frown looks too convincing. “What do you mean, you failed your internship? You really fucked that guy?”
I groan into my hands. “Did you do it or not, Oliver?”
“What? Of course not. I have nothing to do with this.”
“You lied to me for months when you cheated on me,” I point out. “Why should I believe you now?”
“Good point.” My ex reaches into the pocket of his gym shorts to grab his phone. As he starts scrolling, he tells me, “You said someone emailed the pictures to Russo, correct? Here are all my email accounts. Feel free to check my messages—even the deleted ones.”
I shamelessly search every corner of his three inboxes but come out empty-handed. Still, I’m not convinced he’s innocent.
“You could’ve deleted the emails from the bin,” I suggest, thinking out loud.
He shrugs. “Search my camera roll, too. I have nothing to hide.”
If he thinks I won’t agree, he’s very mistaken. For the next ten minutes, I conduct another FBI type of search on his camera roll and, once again, get nothing.
Something feels very wrong right now. A part of me wants to find Oliver guilty and move on from this mess. He’s the obvious answer, the expected culprit.
But what if he’s telling the truth?
Oliver takes his phone back once I’m done. “Look, I know I said some pretty harsh things the last time we saw each other, but I was high and angry and sad, and I didn’t mean any of it. I’m in therapy now, and I’m doing better. Despite what happened last year, I wouldn’t do this to you. I don’t have that much free time now with my job, and I also don’t care what you do in your personal life anymore. No offense.”
Maybe this makes me the stupidest girl on the planet, but I believe him. There’s something in the way he says it that tells me he isn’t lying. After all, I’ve known him for years. He might have fooled me before, but I’ve learned to look for the signs.
Most importantly, though, I’ve learned to trust my gut—and it’s telling me Oliver didn’t send those pictures.
But if he didn’t do it, who the hell did?
***
“All right, Li. Relax. That vein in your forehead is about to pop.”
I keep pacing my best friend’s apartment back and forth, just like I’ve been doing for the past twenty minutes. Karla is meeting a friend for coffee, which only leaves Mariah as a witness to my meltdown.
“Riah, don’t you get it? My career is over .”
The worst part is, I deserve it. I was careless, put my feelings before my goals like I promised I wouldn’t do, and now my worst nightmare has come to life.
“Those are some intense words,” Mariah says. “I won’t deny that the situation you’re in sucks, and I understand why you’re freaking out, but your career is far from over. It hasn’t even started.”
“And now it won’t.” I don’t wipe the tears rolling down my cheek. I can’t be bothered to anymore. “I’ll forever be the student who fucked her professor for a good grade.”
“Lila,” my best friend starts, far calmer than I am right now. “You may have fooled around with him a little bit—a brush of the lips hardly counts—but you certainly didn’t do it for a grade.”
I didn’t.
I did it because I was falling in love with him.
Because I still am.
I shake my head, willing the thoughts to go away. They hurt too much.
“That doesn’t matter,” I argue, my anger slowly leaving my body to make room for self-deprecation. “When they find out about this on campus, I’ll be done for. I can’t even graduate.”
“Yes, you can.” She shakes my shoulders, no doubt trying to get me out of my head. It doesn’t work. “You may not graduate this month, but you will next year. How’s that the end of the world?”
“My parents will be so disappointed,” I mutter, feeling my lower lip tremble.
She pulls me into a hug. “Your parents will always support you. They won’t care if you graduate this month or next year. I promise.”
They may not, but I do. The last thing I want is to disappoint them. Not like this, of all ways.
I’m supposed to be the easy child, the one they don’t need to worry about. Maddie went through so much, even in her adult years, and she didn’t deserve any of it. I love her to death, and I don’t blame her for any part of my life at all, but I can’t deny the truth—after all the drama that went down with her when I was a child, I made myself into the quiet, easy daughter so my parents could take a break after all the ups and downs they’d been through.
Getting good grades, being at the top of my class, not partying or getting drunk, never breaking the rules—that’s my thing.
But the role of the perfect child has consumed me. I’ve been living the life of someone else, someone I’m supposed to be, but I’m not. Not fully.
Because sometimes I wanted to be able to underperform at school without feeling like a failure to my parents. Sometimes I wanted to stay out late with my friends instead of studying for an exam that, in the grand scheme of things, was never going to make or break my future. Sometimes I wanted to be a little rebellious and go boy crazy like my friends did instead of burying my face in my textbooks.
There’s no point in regretting my choices now, but at the same time, I can’t help but feel that I’ve never allowed myself to be authentic. I’ve never allowed myself to be anything other than the perfect child, friend, student. And for what? For my future to go down the drain anyway—and now I’m left without an identity.
I let my grades and accomplishments define my self-worth, and now I don’t know who I am outside of my education.
“Mariah…” I let out a shaky breath as the realization dawns on me, bulldozing everything in its wake. “I… I don’t know who I am.”
“What do you mean?” She frowns.
“I don’t know who I am outside of this… this person I’ve created to please everyone else.” She takes my now-shaky hands in hers, walking me to the couch so we can sit down. “All my life, I’ve only paid attention to what others wanted and expected of me. I’ve neglected myself. I’ve put all my value into my studies, my career…but now I have none of that. And I don’t know who I’m supposed to be.”
She dries my tears with her sleeve. “We’re young. We still have time to learn who we are.”
I shake my head. “I don’t have a life . Not even a hobby. What do I enjoy doing outside of studying and working? My dad likes working out, my mom’s escape has always been ballet, and my aunt loves drawing. But me? I don’t enjoy any of those things. I don’t even know what I like .”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it. You’ve been working your ass off all this time, and that isn’t a bad thing. You’ll have plenty of time to try out new hobbies when you graduate,” she says, attempting to calm me down. “Let’s just do something fun today, get your mind off things. You can sleep here if you don’t want to see your parents.”
God, my parents. I’m not ready to become their biggest disappointment.
And Reed? I’m getting sick just thinking what my dad will do to him when he finds out.
Stop thinking about him.
“I don’t want to do anything,” I breathe out.
“I won’t let you sit here and feel bad about yourself,” she argues, patting her pockets. “Shit, where’s my phone?”
“Well, I happen to want to do just that.”
Ignoring me, she grabs Karla’s laptop from the coffee table and leans back on the couch. “I’m grabbing us some tickets for the bowling alley tonight, okay? Fair warning though—I’m kicking your ass.”
But I shake my head again. “I’m not in the mood.”
My best friend rolls her eyes. “That’s what you say now, but wait until we—”
When she doesn’t finish her sentence, I nudge her with my foot. “What?”
“I… I think you have to see this,” she says, not looking away from the screen.
There’s a weird edge to her voice that makes my stomach drop. Slowly, I peel Karla’s laptop from her grip. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
She doesn’t add anything else—she doesn’t have to. Because only a second later, I understand exactly what’s going on.
I’ve taken so many blows today that I convinced myself nothing could possibly make me feel worse.
I was wrong.
As I look at Karla’s screen—my longtime friend, a trusted confidant—and I see an email with the pictures sent to Dean Russo from her account, it’s like the ground beneath my feet shakes and then opens wide.
“She sent the pictures,” I breathe out, scanning the screen again to make sure this isn’t a joke. The more I scroll, the sicker I feel. “She wrote she was concerned about an abuse of power between Reed and me. What the actual fuck? ”
“I’m texting her right now,” Mariah says as she rushes to her room. She reappears a moment later with her phone. “I’ll tell her there’s a leak or something in her room so she doesn’t run away, that coward.”
I’m unable to look away from the email. “Why would she do this? What have I ever done to her?”
Mariah shakes her head. “Between you and me, she always seemed a bit…off when it came to you. To me, too, honestly.”
“What do you mean?” I frown. “I thought we were friends.”
She hesitates like she doesn’t want to say the words.
“Mariah,” I warn her. “If something is going on, I want to know.”
A beat passes before she lets out a long sigh and admits, “She makes some weird comments sometimes, like how I have it easy at my job because my dad is my boss, so I don’t have to work hard for a paycheck.”
“Wait, what ?” I sit up straight. “Riah, why have you never told me this?”
“Because I don’t give a shit what anyone says about me. I do my own thing. And she’s also your friend, so I didn’t want to make things weird between us,” she says. “We live together, but we’re not super close. Not like the two of us are.”
“What else has she said to you?” I press.
“Lila…”
“Tell me.”
Defeated, she gives me a sorry look and says, “She looks down on me sometimes because I didn’t go to college. Like, when we get the water bill and such, she says she’ll look at it because I can’t understand it or whatever since I didn’t go to college. I thought I was overreacting, that she didn’t mean it like that, and it was all in my head, but now with the pictures…”
“Don’t listen to her, Riah. You’re a powerhouse, and she’s clearly not okay,” I reassure her. The last thing I want is for my best friend to feel inferior in any way. For all intents and purposes, she’s like a little sister to me.
It hits me then. “She told me she’d applied to the Youth Counseling Expo in Chicago. I got accepted, but she didn’t. Do you think that’s why she did all this?”
“I wouldn’t put it past her,” she muses.
I’m about to suggest something else when the door opens and a worried-looking Karla walks in.
“I was just on my way back. Are my clothes ruined?” she asks, alarmed.
I’m fully expecting Mariah to start a fight, so instead, I take the lead.
“Can you explain this?” I ask my so-called friend, showing her the laptop screen with the email on display.
She freezes, all color draining from her face. “What are you doing on my laptop?”
“It was on the coffee table, and I wanted to look something up because my phone was charging in my room,” Mariah chimes in, not a single trace of friendliness in her voice. I don’t have it in me to feel bad for Karla. “It’s not the first time we’ve borrowed each other’s laptops.”
“You had no right to go on my email.” Her voice raises, getting defensive. “That’s illegal .”
“We didn’t do shit.” My best friend—my only friend in this apartment—rolls her eyes. “Your inbox was the first thing I saw when I opened your laptop. You can check your history if you don’t believe me, but do it after you give Lila an explanation for why you did such a shitty thing.”
Karla huffs. “I don’t have to explain myself to you. I did what I had to do.”
“You didn’t have to accuse me of having an affair with a professor,” I throw back. “What have I ever done to you, Karla? You owe me an explanation. You can’t just do something like this and expect me to be okay with it.”
“I don’t care if you’re okay with it or not,” she snarls. There’s a mean edge to her voice I’ve never heard before, and it slices me up like a knife. “You’ve always thought you were better than everyone, but I knew there was foul play. Your mommy’s friend giving you an internship only proved my point.”
“How did you even take that picture at the bar?” Mariah asks her, stealing the words right from my mouth. “You were with us the whole time.”
“I paid some random frat boy ten bucks to do it,” she says, like it means nothing to her. Like ruining my career is an insignificant achievement. “I knew the dean wouldn’t believe me if I didn’t have proof, so I accidentally bumped into you, and you fell into his arms. I had instructed the guy to snap the picture when that happened.”
“And the other pictures?” I ask.
“You’d told us about the field trip, so I just showed up. You guys made it easy for me, being glued to each other every goddamn second. So, thank you for that, I guess.”
“And the one leaving Reed’s house?” I press.
She shrugs. “A guy I was hooking up with lives on that same street. I happened to be doing the walk of shame at the same time you did. A fun coincidence, if you will.”
I ignore her walk of shame comment because my blood starts boiling in a rapid, surely unhealthy way. “Karla, why ? Do you know what this could do to my reputation? To Reed’s? All because you’re a bitter, jealous loser?”
“I don’t care what happens to either of you,” she snaps. “Stop looking at me like that—we all know you have feelings for him, so it’s not like my setup was much of a setup in the first place.”
“So, you’re admitting it,” Mariah chimes in. “That it was a setup. That you weren’t concerned with any abuse of power; you were just jealous. You made everything up.”
“I just wanted to get back at you for taking my spot at the Youth Counseling Expo. At the youth center, too,” she admits, venom in her voice and eyes as she pins me down.
“Wait, what?” I frown. “What do you mean, the youth center?”
“I wanted to work with Reed, but somehow you got the internship instead.” She rolls her eyes. “I wonder why.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know exactly what I’m talking about, Lila. Do I think you have a pathetic crush on your mommy’s little friend? Yes. Do I know for a fact you’re together? No. I don’t care either.”
I can’t believe she’d stab me in the back after so many years of friendship. Was it all a farce for her?
“You know what the sad thing is, Karla?” I start, my heart beating a thousand miles an hour. “Ruining my reputation won’t get you any internship opportunities because you don’t have what it takes. You could be the only student applying, and they still wouldn’t accept you. They were recruiting several interns at the youth center, you know? There wasn’t just one spot. They were looking for several students, yet they still rejected you—that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with your poor academic performance. Same goes for the Youth Counseling Expo.”
Karla’s ears have turned red, a telltale sign that I hit a sore spot. “It’s not like your academic performance got you that internship either. Who knows, maybe your mommy’s friend has a sick crush on you, too, and that’s why he hired you.”
Despite the pang of hurt in my heart, I roll my eyes. Karla knows better than anyone how hard I’ve worked to get here, even before Reed came into the picture, which makes her betrayal even crueler. “Whatever helps you sleep better at night, Karla. I’m not wasting any more of my time with you.”
“I am ,” Mariah interjects. “Because I still have questions—namely, how you were planning to explain yourself if we ever found out. Did you really think we wouldn’t?”
“You weren’t supposed to,” she argues.
I can’t help it as I say, “So you were just going to pretend to be my concerned, supportive friend while my life fell apart because of you ?”
“You need serious help.” Mariah shakes her head when Karla only shrugs. “This isn’t normal behavior, Karla. You’re sick in the head.”
“And what are you going to do about it?”
“Kick you out, for one,” Mariah says easily. “This is my uncle’s apartment, so you can pack your things and leave before the day ends, or I’ll throw your stuff in the street myself.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” she seethes.
“Don’t test me, you psycho.”
“Whatever. I don’t need either of you.” She storms inside her bedroom, slamming the door closed before she starts speaking on the phone to someone—or maybe she’s pretending to do it; I wouldn’t put it past her—saying how crazy her roommate is and that she needs to move out immediately and file a restraining order.
Mariah rolls her eyes. “Her rich parents spoil her; she’ll be fine. It’s not like I’m kicking her out onto the streets.”
I rub my tired eyes with the heels of my palms and try to take a deep breath, but it becomes a near-impossible task.
It happened again. Just like at school, another friend betrayed me for something I didn’t do. What am I doing wrong? Who am I supposed to become so this doesn’t happen again?
“Her confession changes nothing,” I mutter, not wanting Karla to hear. “The dean already knows Reed and I got involved at some point. We admitted to it. My career is still ruined.”
Mariah gives my arm a comforting rub. “She said she had to speak to the board, right? And Reed is like a celebrity on campus, from what you’ve told me. His research brings a shit ton of money. If nothing else, they’ll listen to him for that reason—he’ll protect you.”
Her words don’t make me feel better. I’m still stuck in my self-destructive loop. “This shouldn’t have happened. I should be graduating this month.”
“Yes, but…” Mariah hesitates. “Okay, maybe it’s not the right time to bring this up, but allow me to play devil’s advocate for a second. You clearly have feelings for Reed, and I’m pretty darn confident he feels the same for you. Everything’s already ruined, as you say, and you’re going to have to pay the price for being together. So why don’t you just…be together? If nothing else, at least love will win.”
But I’m shaking my head before she’s done. “Love can’t win, Mariah. Not this time. Getting into a relationship would destroy my reputation even further, and his. People talk, especially when it’s something illicit.”
Illicit . The word tastes bitter in my mouth, wrong , because I have never felt more like myself than when I was with Reed.
But none of that matters now.
Karla’s high-pitched voice filters through her bedroom door as she keeps screaming to the poor soul on the other side of the line.
“All right. I get where you’re coming from. I’ll just grab the tickets for the bowling alley, yeah? Let’s get your mind off things,” Mariah offers gently.
“I love you, Riah. I’m so grateful for you right now, but I want to be alone.” Wrapping my arms around her, I give my best friend a hug goodbye. “I’ll text you later. Tell me if you need help with this whole mess.”
“Where are you going?”
The word gets stuck in my throat. “Home.”
Even though seeing my parents is the last thing I want right now, I need their safety and comfort. And if they want to kick me out after what I’ve done…well, Mariah has an empty bedroom now.
The drive to my house goes by too fast. It’s almost dinnertime, so I know both of my parents will be waiting for me inside.
This afternoon alone has felt like a thousand lifetimes. Its weight presses down on my shoulders as I grab my keys and wipe off the remainder of my tears, mentally preparing myself to become my parents’ biggest disappointment.
My phone buzzes then, and I make the mistake of checking who it is.
Reed: I’m so sorry, Lila. I’ll fix this. You’re graduating this month. Whatever it takes, I’ll do it. I promise.
I don’t answer.
Instead, I use up the little courage I have left and walk inside.
My parents are making dinner in the kitchen, laughing with each other, and I hate that I’m about to crush their happiness.
I’ve ruined everything.
My grip on my bag slips, and it drops on the floor, the tears running freely now. The sound echoes through the house and turns their alarmed heads in my direction.
“Lila,” my mom gasps. “Sweetie, what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
Say goodbye to your old life, Lila.
“I… I have to tell you something.”