Chapter 25 #2
But then someone makes the link.
She’s Rowan Hale’s GIRLFRIEND?!
I put my head in my hands, because everything collapsing on me is one thing, but him being burned by my secret is another. I tried to contain Mason and the blast and now he’s been caught in it anyway.
I stand up and walk out of Benny’s with my head down and my cheeks burning. And each step I take collects more eyes on me, more whispered comments about me, and more phones pinging.
Once I’m outside, I run.
It’s ugly and uncoordinated and I don’t care who sees. I just need to be away from the eyes and the whispers and everything — and I make it to the far side of the main lawn before I have to stop, panting.
I sit on the lawn, which is wet from overnight rain, and the cold goes straight through my jeans. Only then do I realize that I’ve ended up at the same place where I crossed the field to take Rowan’s hand, throwing off the Halden Girl mask for good.
Or so I’d thought.
The campus stretches out in front of me: gray sky, bare trees, students walking between buildings, all of it looking the same as it did twenty minutes ago when I was a girl with a warm bagel and a plan to text Ivy about it.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I don’t look at it. It buzzes again.
Rowan.
Does he know already?
And now I’m thinking about Rowan, really thinking about him, because even if he hasn’t seen it yet it’s only a matter of time before someone sends it to the team group chat, or tags him, or just shows him.
And I know what he’ll do.
I’ve known since the night in the kitchen when Mason told me what he was holding over me: Rowan will go to war with Mason to destroy the threat against me, and he won’t stop until it’s done.
But that’s the problem. Mason is on his team, and Rowan will tear the whole thing apart to get to him. The captaincy, the season, the team he’s been killing himself to hold together, his professional future — he’ll burn all of it, and he won’t even hesitate.
And that’s what I’ve been trying to prevent since the start.
I was so careful. I didn’t tell Rowan, I didn’t confront Mason, I kept quiet and started to distance myself from Rowan and the guys. But now Mason has dropped the bomb on me anyway.
Was it because he’s bored and cruel?
Or was there a moment I missed, some tiny shift in the power balance?
Either way, something happened somewhere I wasn’t, and I’m the one paying for it.
I pull my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them, shivering from the cold that’s seeped through my jeans. Then I start crying, the ugly kind, the shoulders shaking, snot and tears mixing, cheeks flushed kind.
I’m crying for the girl who sent photos to a boy she thought she loved and had her body turned into social currency, and for the girl who thought she’d found herself again, with Rowan and Ivy and Professor Moreno, before she stepped into that kitchen with Mason.
I am so tired of being the story instead of the person the story happened to.
The sound coming out of me is raw and graceless, and I press my face into my knees to muffle it, but I can still hear myself. It lasts long enough that my throat hurts and my sleeves are wet.
Loud enough that I don’t hear her coming.
I hear the bag hit the ground first: the unzipped, overstuffed Ivy Hale tote going down on the grass beside me with a thud, and the small avalanche of its contents — a water bottle, her keys, a crumpled receipt, and lip balm rolling into the wet grass.
Then her, dropping down next to me, one hand on my back, firm and warm even through the hoodie. “Hey, Sloane,” she says. “Hey.”
I lift my head, and I know what I look like — swollen, blotchy, my nose running, mascara probably halfway down my face — and Ivy doesn’t recoil from it. I love her all the more for it.
“I walked out of class.” Her hand rubs my back. “Jess from Sterling saw you running across the lawn and she was worried. Are you — okay, you’re not okay.”
I shake my head, but I don’t even try for words.
I hold up my phone, and Ivy starts scrolling, her thumb moving fast. As she reads, she goes still and her jaw sets. Her thumb stops, then moves again, faster. She sees the post and the comments and the screenshots from my old school.
“Fuck,” she says, low, and then she lowers the phone and stares at it for another second and lifts her head and says it louder. “Fuck.”
Somewhere on the path behind us, a guy in a frat quarter-zip has slowed down to look at us. He’s got his phone in his hand, angled wrong, and it’s happening again, and I want to stand up and scream at him.
Ivy turns her head. She doesn’t stand. She doesn’t yell. She just looks at him, and whatever her face does is enough, because the guy with the phone puts it away and walks off like he just remembered something urgent.
“Okay,” Ivy says, voice full of fury. “I need you to tell me who did this, but first, tell me it wasn’t my fucking brother.”
I shake my head, but I can’t talk yet. So Ivy sits beside me and puts her arm through mine, her hand finding my hand and gripping hard. We sit there for maybe a minute, maybe three, but it helps me start to breathe again.
“Come on,” she says after a while. “You’ll freeze.”
She stands, pulls me up, and we start walking. I put my hood up, because the old instinct is back — become smaller, less visible. But Ivy walks close enough to make it clear I’m not walking alone and she’s not shying away from me.
She doesn’t try to make me talk, and she doesn’t try to make me feel better. Good thing, too, because now I’m thinking about how many people on this campus have seen the post and whether they’ve seen the photos.
They weren’t part of the post, or linked to it, but is it only a matter of time?
We cut through the lower quad toward Sterling, and we’re almost to the courtyard when I see him — Mason, sitting on the low wall near Sterling’s west entrance with two of his Pi Sigma friends, like he timed being exactly here at exactly this time.
He’s got a coffee in one hand, his jacket collar turned up, and he’s leaning back on his palms with his legs stretched out. When one of the other guys says something and Mason laughs, easy and open, he tips his head back, and that’s when he sees me.
He grins.
But it’s not the lazy half-smile he gives everyone. It’s wider and slower, and when his eyes find mine, he lifts his coffee in my direction like a little salute. It’s a small gesture, but it’s enough to tell me he’s responsible for all this.
“What?” Ivy says, following my eyes.
“It was him, Ivy,” I say, quietly. “It was Mason.”
She looks at Mason on the wall, still watching us, still grinning. “How—”
I start talking, and it all comes out like someone reading a police report about their own life. I could stop, I could swallow it the way I’ve swallowed it for a year now, but the Halden Girl already broke once today and I’m too tired to rebuild her.
So I tell her everything as we keep walking away from him.
I tell her about Harrison — the photos I sent him because I was eighteen and I trusted him, and how fast they stopped being mine. I tell her how the story rearranged itself until I was the embarrassment and he was just a boy who’d made a small mistake.