Chapter 7 #2
“So?” Clementine repeated, aghast, like I’d personally offended the entire concept of teenage romance. “Ainsley. Do you know what happens when you put a hundred girls in the same building as boys from a rival school for the first time in months? Chaos. Beautiful, delicious chaos.”
I was saved from having to answer by the warning bell.
I shut my locker harder than necessary and swung my bag onto my shoulder, turning to start down the hall—only to be blocked by a crowd of students refusing to move at all.
It took me a second to realize what was happening—heads turning, a ripple of whispers moving down the corridor like wind through a field, a couple of girls near the trophy case going up on their toes to see over the crowd.
I followed everyone else’s gaze toward the front entrance, and there they were—a cluster of maybe eight or nine students filing in through the main doors, unmistakable even from fifty feet away, because Parkhurst ran blue and silver down to the piping on our socks, and Crofton Academy apparently believed the loudest possible red and gold said prestigious rather than football mascot.
They had that same easy, too-comfortable posture Rhys always had, like hallways belonged to them regardless of which building they were currently standing in.
And there, unmistakably, near the back of the group, hands shoved in his grey pants pockets, looking exactly as unbothered as he had looked cornering me against his bedroom door two nights ago, was Rhys.
My stomach dropped so hard I thought I might be sick.
“Oh my gosh,” Clementine breathed, grabbing my arm hard enough to leave a mark, her whole face lighting up like Christmas had arrived four months early and dressed in a blazer.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to be this excited about this when you have a boyfriend who is a world-famous superstar,” Nora told Clementine, but I didn’t miss the way her eyes were tracking the boys too.
Even Imogen was watching them out of the corner of her eye as she gathered textbooks for her class.
“Okay, this is exactly what I’m talking about!” Clementine squealed, ignoring Nora’s words. “Look at them, just walking in here like they own the place—”
“I have to go,” I interrupted. I pulled my arm out of her grip and turned the opposite way from the Crofton students.
“Your first class is the other way,” Imogen said.
I obviously couldn’t say yeah, but I can’t risk walking past Rhys Montgomery right now, so instead I blurted, “I forgot something I need for my first class.”
And then I practically booked it down the hallway, ignoring Imogen as she yelled after me, “You were literally standing in front of your locker!”
I was not ready, at eight o’clock on a Monday morning, to deal with the horror of Rhys Montgomery in my school hallway.
I knew—with absolute, deep certainty—that the second he spotted me, he was not going to simply ignore me.
He was going to find some way to make this my problem, in public, with an audience, and enjoy every second of doing it.
The rest of the morning was a fever dream of absolute paranoia.
Every time a door opened, every time I caught a flash of maroon down a corridor, my chest seized up.
I dodged Clementine at break, bypassed my usual route to French, and spent fourth period staring blankly at a whiteboard while my brain ran endless survival simulations.
It was a low-grade dread that made it almost impossible to focus on anything.
Every time a door opened at the wrong angle, every time I caught a flash of red and gold at the far end of a hallway, my whole body went on high alert, bracing for the moment Rhys decided to make my life difficult in front of literally everyone I knew.
By the time lunch rolled around, I still hadn’t run into him directly, which felt like a small miracle right up until I turned a corner near the science wing and nearly walked face-first into his chest for the third time in exactly as many encounters that had started this entire disaster.
And then, the boy had the audacity to say, “Hey, girlfriend.”
Panic exploded behind my eyes. I grabbed him by the lapels of his stupid maroon blazer, hauled him sideways, and kicked open the nearest door, dragging him inside before the hallway could catch us.
I grabbed him by the sleeve and hauled him sideways into the nearest door before he could get another syllable out, shoving it open with my shoulder and yanking him through by the front of his blazer with a strength I didn’t know I had.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” he teased, his voice all amusement and humor and absolutely grating to my nerves. “Do you think there will ever be a time we meet and don’t end up locked in a small room together?”
“Shut up,” I hissed back.
The door swung shut behind us, and it took a solid two seconds for me to register the pink stalls, the mirrors, the little basket of complimentary tampons someone’s mum had donated to the PTA fund, before the reality of where I’d just dragged him fully landed.
Rhys looked around, unhurried, hands still in his pockets, taking in the sinks and the stalls and the giant poster about proper hand-washing technique with the calm interest of someone touring a museum exhibit.
“So,” he said. “This is a girls’ bathroom, huh?”
“What are you doing here?” It came out sharper than I meant it to, mostly because my heart was still going twice as fast as it needed to be and I was blaming all of that on adrenaline and none of it on anything else.
“Here?” he asked, his voice all too nonchalant.
“At my school. In my hallway.” My hands were flailing about, my bracelets clanking together loudly. “Existing where people can see you.”
“Technically you’re the one who dragged me into a bathroom, so if anyone’s existing somewhere they shouldn’t be, it’s currently both of us.
” He leaned back against the counter between two sinks like he’d done this exact thing a hundred times before, completely unbothered by the pink walls or the fact that we were, in fact, standing in a girls’ bathroom in the middle of a school day.
He glanced around casually. “Nice acoustics in here, by the way. Very echo-y.”
I crossed my arms. “Rhys.”
He raised a brow in response. “Ainsley.”
This boy was going to be the death of me.