Chapter 8
eight
SLOANE
The pool is mine between six and seven in the morning.
That’s the deal I made with myself during the first week at Halden, when I couldn’t sleep one morning and the aquatic center sat empty. I ended up doing fifty laps, signing up for the swim squad, and afterward I sat on the cold tile and felt like myself again.
Not the Halden Girl.
Not here.
The deal has held, although my broader aquatic commitment hasn’t. I never attended a single squad practice, but nobody’s revoked my access. I consider this a personal triumph of bureaucratic negligence and I am committed to enjoying the benefits for as long as I can.
Because six to seven every day is something I can manage. There’s no mask or acting required — just the water and the wall, the water and the wall, until my arms burn and whatever I walked in carrying dissolves into the chlorine.
I have been dissolving a lot into the chlorine this week.
The toga party was three days ago, and I’ve spent every morning since trying to leave it on the bottom of the pool. It hasn’t worked. But at least the pool doesn’t judge, or look at me the way Ivy has since Saturday night, or ask if I’m okay.
Because I’m not.
That night scrambled something inside me. It showed me I’d chosen wrong with Mason, and that, even if he’s the type of guy a good Halden Girl should want, he’s intolerable to me. And that would be fine, in isolation.
I could avoid boys. Enjoy the year. Keep the mask up.
Except the thing I can’t outswim is Rowan and how he made me feel.
I keep telling myself I’m angry at him, but the anger keeps springing leaks. Because I remember his hand on my arm, his thumb finding my pulse like he knew where to look, and the moment my whole body leaned into it.
And for a traitorous half second, I didn’t fight it. Then I pulled away.
Because I can’t enjoy it, not with someone who so clearly sees through my defenses.
Because leaning in — feeling and trusting and loving with all of myself — is how I got hurt last year. It’s why there are photos of me out there, sent to exactly one boy, and no way of knowing whose phones they live on now.
Frustrated, I pull myself out of the pool at 6:58, towel off, change, and walk back to Sterling House with my hair still dripping. When I get there, Ivy is still in bed, duvet pulled up to her chin, phone in hand. She’s staring at the screen, and she looks up when I come in.
“He still hasn’t texted back,” she says, eyes puffy, telling me she hasn’t been awake long.
I hang my wet bag on the hook. “And a very good morning to you too.”
“Three days, Sloane.” She drops the phone face down, then she catches my look. “I’m not obsessing. I’m… confirming my phone works, which it does, so the problem is him.”
“Tell me about it,” I say, taking advantage of the opportunity to work the wide-tooth comb through my hair, because this is going to take a minute.
The story so far, for those keeping score: Sebastian Kade, the Ravens’ enforcer and a third-year history major, wore Ivy’s drink for approximately forty-five seconds before peeling his shirt off with the calm of someone who has survived worse.
“He was so calm about it, not a wince and not a word,” she says, with a note in her voice that might just be attraction. “It’s crazy, or hot, or crazy hot. Who does that?”
“A sociopath or a saint,” I say. “It’s hard to know.”
“I know!” She huffs. “But he hasn’t responded to my text.”
“Maybe he’s busy?”
“Nobody is three-days busy. The president isn’t three-days busy.”
I knew she texted him a few days ago, but I didn’t know she was obsessing this much. She holds her phone face out, like I haven’t seen this screen every morning for three days, but I take it anyway and confirm the absence of a response.
Ivy: hey it’s ivy, sorry you wore my drink, lmk if i owe you a shirt
Read receipt, three days ago, and that’s the whole thread.
“Maybe he’s chill about it?” I shrug. “Maybe he didn’t like the shirt anyway?”
“He read it,” she says. “I literally gave him the chance to ask me out, and… nothing!”
“Did you think about asking him out?”
She stares daggers at me, then she groans like a wounded animal and buries her face in the pillow. Because the truth is, Ivy seems used to putting herself out there and guys drooling over her enough to achieve her desired goal.
Then she resurfaces, quieter. “Anyway, he’s dead to me. Banished.”
And that word snags on someone else who was banished.
I remember Mason’s hand at my waist, then the little slide south and the squeeze that said mine without asking. Then Rowan crossing the room, putting his hand on my arm, his voice going quiet in a way that made Mason’s hands disappear.
They were two different touches, and my body knew the difference before I did. That’s the part I can’t swim away from. Not what happened, but how I responded, and the look on his face when I put him in the same sentence as Mason.
“You’re spiraling again,” Ivy chimes in. “Who is it this time, Mason or the mystery man?”
“Neither, and I am not,” I say, refusing to look at her as I move toward my bed, glad she hasn’t put two-and-two together about the mystery man being her brother.
“Liar,” she says, shaking off thoughts of Seb with visible effort. “Time for the postmortem. Go.”
I sit on my bed, uncap my moisturizer, and smooth it across my cheekbones, my forehead, and down the bridge of my nose. “It was a party. There’s nothing else to analyze.”
“It was a party,” she repeats, like this is a new show she’s excited about. “And how are we feeling about the party?”
“Fine.”
“Sloane.”
“I’m fine, Ivy.”
She points at me. “You have your real fine voice, and that wasn’t it. That was fine.”
I look at her, and she looks at me, neither of us trying on the next word.
I know she’s waiting for me to speak.
But I can outlast Ivy.
“Okay, but can I ask you something?” Ivy huffs, and her voice is different. This is the other Ivy, the quiet, caring one. “Are you okay?”
I keep my face exactly where it is. “I’m okay.”
“You’ve refused to talk to me about it, but I saw what Mason did…
and then Rowan stepping in… and then I saw you get upset and leave.
” She’s watching me carefully. “And I totally get it. He’s a bull in a china shop.
But that’s just what he does. He goes where the problem is and fixes it. He’s done it since we were kids.”
“Ivy.”
“And I’ve been talking about Seb for three days because you let me,” she says, like she’s talking about the weather, “which means you didn’t want to talk about whatever—”
“Ivy.” I say it pleasantly, which is the version that means stop. “I’m fine. I’m good. Can we eat? I did fifty laps and I’m dying, okay?”
She holds my eyes for one more second, looking for the crack.
I don’t give her one.
“Okay,” she says, then she pulls out her phone to order breakfast.
But Ivy’s words are doing something I didn’t ask them to. When I replay the party now — his hand on my arm, the way he stepped back the second I pulled away — he wasn’t trying to own the moment, he was trying to end it.
But there’s no time to figure it out, because Ivy’s phone rings.
She answers it, and I know immediately that something is wrong.
“Mom, hi — wait, slow down, what—” She’s off the bed in one motion, pacing. “What do you mean cardiac? When did she — okay, okay, which hospital?”
She’s overwhelmed, trying to track everything at once while figuring out what to do. And when she hangs up and stands in the middle of the room, phone at her side, she looks at me, stricken.
“Ivy?” I look at her, unsure whether I should go to her and wrap her in my arms, or if she wants space.
“She’s okay,” she says, like she’s reminding herself. “My aunt. She’s okay, they said she’s — it was a cardiac episode, not a — she’s stable.”
“Come sit down,” I say.
“I don’t know if I should—”
She’s cut off by a knock at the door.
I open it and find Rowan standing in the hallway holding three coffees. He has rain in his hair — the first cold rain of the season, fine as static — and he looks past me toward Ivy’s side of the room. He catalogs where his sister is and the state she’s in with a glance.
Then he looks at me.
He’s braced, like he’s waiting for me to say something sharp, and part of me still wants to. Three days ago I put him in the same sentence as Mason, and I’m not ready to take it back. Hell, I’m not even sure I was wrong to be angry.
But the anger thins out the second I look at him, and I can’t get it back.
I give him the smallest smile. “Hi,” I say.
His shoulders drop. “Hey,” he says. “Got you coffee.”
He holds out a cup to me, and I can smell it before I take it. Oat milk latte with honey. We were in the same crowd at a coffee shop, and I ordered while he was talking to other people. Yet, somehow, he remembered my not-so-simple coffee order like it was nothing.
Something in me eases, just a little, and I step back and let him in. “Come in,” I say.
He sits across from his sister and puts his coffee down. I make myself busy, and Ivy fires up about how scared she is. And through it all, he doesn’t interrupt, and he doesn’t say I’m sure she’s fine in the way that means please stop being upset so I can feel comfortable again.
He waits until she’s done, absorbing the whole tsunami of emotion that is Ivy on any given day. “Dad called me before Mom got through to you. I came straight over,” he says.
“I… I just don’t know what to do, Ro.” Ivy sighs, blinking back tears and looking up to the ceiling. “I don’t know if we should go there, or not, or—”
“We shouldn’t do anything yet,” Rowan says. “Dad is managing the situation. If you call now, he’ll have to also manage you.”
Ivy blinks. “That’s—”
“It’s true.” He says it without heat, and slides closer to her, wrapping an arm around her. “I’ll call in an hour and see what they need, okay?”
I’ve given up all pretense of doing other things, and now I’m sitting on my bed, opposite them. I wrap both hands around the coffee and watch him work.
Ivy stares at him — the bright, grateful, slightly undone stare of someone being handled competently in a moment when they cannot handle themselves. And in that moment I get the feeling that this is how it’s always been for them.
“I’m ordering food,” he says. “You haven’t eaten.”
“How do you know—”
“Educated guess?” One eyebrow goes up. “Based on a lifetime of history?”
“Fine,” Ivy says, very quietly. “Noodles.”
He types the order into the campus dining app with the look of someone spending the last of their reserves on staying calm, and I wonder what else he’s carrying right now. Because, every time I see him, he looks tired and weighed down.
Everyone leans on him.
But who does he lean on?
Mason would never have shown up before he was asked, taken Ivy’s whole flood of panic without flinching, or ordered noodles because she hadn’t eaten. And he’d never have let himself look this tired while everyone else came apart.
When Ivy drops her attention to her phone, his hand slides off his knee and presses flat against his own thigh, fingers spread wide like he’s bracing. I look away before he catches me seeing it.
“She’s going to be okay,” he says.
“You don’t know that.”
“No. But she’s stable, she’s conscious, she’s talking, and apparently she’s already complaining about the hospital food. That’s a lot of okay.”
Ivy exhales.
He puts her coffee in front of her, and she wraps both hands around it. They sit like that while he watches something on his phone and she stares at nothing, and the room is quiet in the way it gets when the crisis has downgraded from emergency to wait.
“I’ve got to go,” he says to Ivy. “But I’ll check in with you later, okay?”
She nods and smiles at him.
As he stands and heads to the door, I find myself standing to open it for him. Then he stops, like there’s something else he wants to say to me and has to consciously decide not to.
“Thanks for stopping by,” I say, breaking the weird silence.
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “If she spirals later, text me.”
He recites his number, and I type it in before either of us can make it mean anything.
“It was good of you,” I say. “Thanks, Rowan. For Ivy. For the coffee.”
“Bye, Sloane,” he says, and goes.
The door clicks shut, and I stand there with both hands around a coffee, more confident than ever that he’s not the villain in my story. But that doesn’t make him safe, because I felt the warmth of his grip, and when I pressed in, he didn’t pull away.
And, just like at the Lantern, the moment only broke because I broke it.
That makes him dangerous.
Because a boy who holds still and lets me lean is a boy I’d want to stop performing for. And I know exactly what happens when I stop performing, and I cannot afford the guy who won’t let me hide behind the mask.
Shaking off the thoughts, I go back to Ivy. “You okay?” I say.
She nods and goes quiet for a while. The noodles arrive. We eat on her bed, and she gets another call from Rowan: Aunt Margaret is stable, and their parents are at the hospital. Ivy works through all of it in the way she does, which is in spirals and out loud.
“He’s so annoying,” she says, around a mouthful of noodles. “He had a whole plan before he even showed up here, and it’s just… handled.”
“It’s a good problem to have, Ives,” I say.
“Whatever,” she says, shaking her head. “Sometimes I wish he’d just let me process and combust and figure out my own path. Like, when I broke my collarbone in fourth grade, he just showed up, took me to the nurse, and sat with me. He was just… there. He always is…”
“Doesn’t sound so bad, honestly,” I say, setting my chopsticks down. “I’m not sure he even realizes he’s doing it.”
She stops.
“I have never once thought about that,” she says, her eyes going bright again. “What the fuck?”
I’m quiet for a long time. Then I say, “Has anyone ever asked him if he’s okay?”
She stares at me, then shakes her head and looks down at her noodles.
But am I any better?
Mason grabbed and claimed, Rowan helped and steadied, and I called it the same.
It wasn’t.
So I pick up my phone, open the thread with Mason, and type.
Sloane: We’re not going to work.
I send it.