Chapter 12 - Catherine #4
The implication sits in the air like smoke. Burke stares at him. Kaiden stares back. The standoff lasts about four seconds before Burke turns to the board and resumes teaching with the particular rigidity of a man who knows he’s lost and is choosing to pretend the last five minutes didn’t happen.
Under the desk, Kaiden’s hand finds mine. Squeezes once.
Behind me, Penny leans forward. “You just made a grown man rethink his career choices with long division,” she whispers. “I’ve never been more attracted to a human being in my life.”
“It was factoring, not long division.”
“Marry me.”
Kaiden tugs my ponytail. One quick, playful pull. I feel it all the way to my toes.
“Anything for you, Kitty Cat.”
Whispered. Just for me. The nickname landing like a match on gasoline.
I stare at problem five and see nothing but the ghost of his hand on my thigh and the sound of thirty students laughing because I corrected a teacher’s math while he was busy telling me my future was a wedding ring.
Burke doesn’t look at me for the rest of the period. Good. I was running out of answers to give him.
Sixth period ends and I’m walking toward my locker when the hallway shifts.
I feel it before I see it—the particular disruption in foot traffic that means something is happening at a specific location and people are either moving toward it or away from it.
The energy of a crowd forming around a spectacle, phones already in hands, the predatory hum of teenagers scenting blood.
Then I see it.
Red paint. All caps. Three feet tall. Dripping at the edges where it was applied too thick, running down the locker in thin rivulets that look like something out of a horror movie because that’s what it’s supposed to look like.
Whoever did this wasn’t just defacing property. They were staging a scene.
SLUT.
Below it, taped to the metal in a neat row: printed copies of the photos.
My body. My scars. The burn tissue across my ribs and stomach.
The thin lines on my wrists. Red marker scrawled across each one with words I won’t repeat because giving them space in my mind is giving them space in my life, and they don’t deserve either.
I stand in front of my locker in the middle of Edgewood Preparatory Academy and I feel the ice princess hold.
Don’t cry. Don’t flinch. Don’t touch the paint.
Don’t touch the photos. Catalog the damage.
File it. The hallway is watching—forty, fifty students, phones angled, the red recording dot visible on a dozen screens.
Let them watch. Let them record a girl who doesn’t break.
Add it to the collection of things Catherine O’Farrell survives without flinching.
Inside, I’m falling. But inside is where I keep the falling. Nobody sees the inside.
Except the inside is getting very, very full.
Because it’s not just the locker. It’s the locker on top of the photos on top of the hallway on top of the thing I said to Jon this morning—the thing I can’t take back, the thing that is right now multiplying through the student body like a virus, mutating with each retelling:
I’ve killed a man. With my own hands. In my own house. While it was on fire.
I said that. Out loud. In front of thirty students with phones. To Jonathan Pennington, in a hallway with marble acoustics that carry every syllable like a cathedral.
And now—standing in front of a locker that says SLUT in red paint, with my scarred body on display for the second time in two days—the full weight of what I did this morning lands on me like a building collapsing floor by floor.
You told them you killed someone.
Someone has already posted it. Has to have.
It’s probably on GlossX right now, in a text thread, in a screenshot of a screenshot—“did you hear what the ice princess said to Pennington?” And it’s only a matter of time before it reaches someone who doesn’t go to this school.
A reporter. A blogger. Someone building oppo research on Thomas O’Farrell’s gubernatorial campaign.
Your father’s campaign.
The thing my parents spent two years burying.
The sealed records. The NDAs. The carefully constructed narrative that the fire was tragic and the shooting was self-defense and the family has moved on and there’s nothing to see here.
Two years of legal work and political maneuvering and the slow, deliberate erasure of the worst thing that ever happened to me—and I just blew it open in a hallway because Jon Pennington called me a name and I wanted him to feel afraid.
I wanted him to feel what I feel. And now my father’s career might burn for it.
The irony is so complete it’s almost funny.
Almost. I saved my parents from an actual fire and now I might destroy them with a metaphorical one.
The girl who killed her abuser to protect her family might be the thing that ruins her family.
The universe has a sense of humor, and it’s pitch fucking black.
Kaiden appears beside me. I feel his presence before I see him—the shift in the air, the warmth, the particular gravity that his body generates. His voice is low.
“Don’t look at it. Look at me.”
I don’t look at him. I look at the locker. At the word. At the photos of my body taped to the metal like evidence in a trial I didn’t agree to stand for.
“Cat.”
“I told the entire school I killed someone this morning,” I say.
My voice is flat. The operational voice.
The voice that keeps the feelings at arm’s length so the body can keep functioning.
“And now my scars are on display for the second time. And that word is on my locker. And someone in this building is recording all of it.”
Kaiden’s jaw tightens. His eyes scan the hallway—quick, tactical, the way he reads every room he enters.
“Xander,” he says. Not looking away from me. “Maintenance. Now. Every photo in this hallway, gone.”
Xander is moving before the sentence ends. Danny follows. I hear them but I’m not really here—I’m somewhere else, somewhere inside the spiral, running calculations I don’t want to run.
How long before a reporter picks it up? How long before someone connects “I’ve killed a man” to the sealed records in North Jared? How long before my father’s phone rings?
Kaiden steers me away. His hand on my back—the spot that’s become his, the place between my shoulder blades where his palm fits like it was measured for.
Down the hallway. Through the side exit.
Outside, where the October air hits my face and the sky is grey and indifferent and doesn’t give a shit about red paint or sealed court records or a girl who can’t stop detonating her own life.
We sit on the bench. The stone is cold through my skirt.
“My dad,” I say. “If this gets out—what I said to Jon. If someone digs into it. The fire. The shooting. Everything they buried—”
“Cat.”
“His entire campaign. Everything he’s worked for. Because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut in a hallway.”
“Cat.”
“I’m so tired.”
The words come out before I can stop them. Not dramatic. Not a breakdown. Just a statement, flat and true, delivered to the grey sky and the cold bench and the boy beside me.
“I’m so tired of hiding it. All of it. The scars.
The fire. Jack. The shooting. The therapy.
The pills. I’m tired of long sleeves and cover stories and performing ‘fine’ for everyone who asks.
I’m tired of my body being a secret my family is ashamed of.
I’m tired of protecting everyone else from the truth of what happened to me while the truth eats me alive from the inside. ”
I’m not crying. I’m past crying. I’m in the place after tears—the dry, hollowed-out place where the pressure has been released and what’s left is just exhaustion. The bone-deep kind. The kind you feel in your teeth.
“And you know the worst part?” I say. “I don’t regret saying it.
To Jon. In the hallway. I don’t regret it, Kaiden.
I’m terrified of the consequences, but I don’t regret it.
Because for five seconds, I wasn’t hiding.
For five seconds, I was the thing they made me, and I let him see it, and he was afraid of me instead of the other way around. And that felt—”
I stop. Swallow.
“It felt like breathing,” I say. “For the first time in years. It felt like breathing.”
Kaiden is quiet. He’s not trying to fix it.
Not offering solutions or reassurance or the hollow architecture of “it’ll be okay.
” He’s just sitting beside me on a cold bench, his arm around my shoulders, his thumb making that slow circle on my upper arm that I’ve come to associate with “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere. ”
“Fuck the campaign,” he says eventually.
“Kaiden—”
“No. Listen to me.” He turns on the bench.
Faces me. His eyes are serious in a way that has nothing to do with the king or the bully or the boy who slow-clapped a teacher into submission an hour ago.
“Your father is running for governor. That’s his dream.
And I respect that. But if his dream requires his daughter to hide her scars and swallow her truth and perform ‘fine’ until it kills her—then his dream is too expensive.
And at some point, he needs to hear that. ”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It’s exactly that simple. It’s just not easy. There’s a difference.”
I look at him. At the boy who bullied me three weeks ago and is now sitting on a bench outside our school telling me that my truth matters more than my father’s political career. At the boy who has his own sealed records and his own buried past and his own three days that nobody talks about.
“You’re one to talk,” I say. Not meanly. Softly. “You’re hiding things too.”
He doesn’t flinch. “Yeah. I am. And it’s killing me the same way it’s killing you. But I’m not going to let that be the reason I tell you to keep burying yours.”