Chapter 28
twenty-eight
SLOANE
Professor Moreno reads the last page, sets it down on the desk, and takes off her glasses.
Her pen hasn’t moved since page two, and even there she only circled one word — testimony — with a line drawn to the margin, where she’s written something I can’t read from here.
As she gathers her thoughts, I sit with my hands in my lap, looking around. Her coffee mug says WELL-READ WOMEN ARE DANGEROUS, and I stare at it because looking at her feels like watching the jury from the defendant’s box.
I wrote it over the weekend. Saturday night into Sunday morning, after I ended it with Rowan and he left and I stood in my room with nothing louder than the silence except my own voice looping in my head.
I meant every word, but the room after he walked away was the loudest empty I’ve ever stood in. Because his absence sat on the end of the bed where he wasn’t, in the quiet where his voice should have been. I’d told myself sending him away would feel like taking something back.
But it just hurt.
I had good reasons, but it hurt.
Nina was right about you.
I said that to him, and it broke him, and I still don’t know if it was cruelty or honesty or some combination I haven’t found a word for yet. Because he couldn’t stop clearing everything out of my path.
All of it done for me and none of it done with me.
Because most of all I’m tired of being handled, of being the target of gossip and innuendo, of being punished for one poor decision. Harrison weaponized what I gave him, and Mason used it to hurt me too.
I love Rowan, and he’s different — better, far better — but he hurts in a different way, and the question I keep turning over is whether the hurt that comes from someone who actually sees me and the traits about himself he can’t seem to change is a hurt I can live with.
I was still turning it over when sleep wouldn’t come, so I sat at my desk and wrote.
My truth.
The first version was angry and the second was sad and neither one was totally the truth. The third version was, and I almost called it “Testimony,” but that felt like too much, so I wrote the word into the third paragraph instead.
I wrote it the way Moreno asked me to months ago. It’s furious and personal, the argument threaded through the experience instead of floating above it, and when I was done I had six unfiltered pages of my own voice.
As Moreno puts her glasses back on, her eyes are wet, and she’s not hiding it. “Is this true, Sloane?”
I nod.
“First, I’m sorry this happened to you,” she says. “And secondly, this is the best piece of freshman writing I’ve read in a decade.”
“Thank you,” I say, so ungracefully grateful that something has fallen my way this week that I can’t hide my relief or my happiness.
“The woman at the center becomes the evidence for her own mishandling.” She reads my own sentence back to me, and in her voice it sounds like an argument instead of a wound. “If you want to build on this, I’ll support your application for a summer grant.”
I take a breath and let it sink into my lungs, relieved and content and at peace in a way I haven’t been since before I walked into the kitchen that night at Ironwood House. Because that sentence is proof that I can win at something, and it has nothing to do with them.
Not Harrison, not Mason, not Rowan.
This is mine.
It’s proof that my mind works, that my pain is legible, and that I belong.
I don’t need to be the Halden Girl.
Just Sloane.
“I’d like that,” I say, and my voice cracks on the last word, and Moreno pretends not to notice, which is how I know she’s good at this.
“The application’s due in a week.” She squares the essay against the desk and slides it into her folder. “And Sloane? Don’t make it smaller, okay?”
I nod, pick up my bag, and make it to the hallway before my eyes start to sting. This crying is different from the last time I left this office. That day, she looked at my mask and told me it was bullshit. But today, she saw me and said I belonged.
I take a minute to compose myself, still flushed but in a kind of sad-happy way, still mourning what it seems I’ve lost with Rowan even as I celebrate what just happened in that office with Moreno.
Outside, the quad is full of the usual late-afternoon traffic, and I notice something I haven’t let myself notice in days: nobody’s watching me. Not the careful, half-beat-late not-looking of a week ago.
The gossip has gone quiet.
The post came down — Luca just said give it a day and looked pleased with himself, and nobody would tell me more than that — but stuff like that doesn’t disappear entirely, and I’ve decided I have to learn to live in a world where that’s true.
It’s part of why owning it with Moreno’s piece felt so good.
Across the quad, Luca clocks me and his whole face opens into a grin, and he lifts a hand like I’m someone it’s good to run into. I lift mine back. And I know why. Luca’s a Raven, and standing close to the team is its own kind of cover.
I pull out my phone and call my mother before I can talk myself out of it.
She picks up on the second ring.
“Sloane,” she says. “I was going to call you this afternoon like usual.”
“I know.” I smile and half-sob. “I’m calling you.”
There’s a pause, and I can hear her recalibrating, because I don’t initiate these calls. She calls, I answer, she manages, I comply. The choreography has been in place for a while now, and if there’s one thing Elise Avery doesn’t like, it’s surprises.
“How are you?” she asks.
“I’m fine, Mom,” I say. “A professor just said she loved something I wrote, and she wants to put it forward for grant funding to build it out…”
“That’s wonderful,” she says, like she’s doing something else as she speaks to me. “What’s it about?”
I pause, because I know I’m about to set a trap, and I hope like hell she doesn’t walk into it. “It’s about what happened with Harrison.”
Silence, one beat too long. Then she steps into it. “Is that wise, Sloane? Putting all that business in writing?”
My mother hears that I’ve written about the worst thing that ever happened to me, and her first instinct is containment and control, not listening to my voice. I shouldn’t be surprised, but some part of me hoped it’d be different.
“My professor thinks it’s good, Mom,” I say. “She called it the best freshman writing she’s read in a decade.”
“Just be careful, dear,” she says, and the warmth in it is so thin I could snap it with my fingers.
I sigh, and try again anyway. “Mom, things have been hard here. There was a boy, and it didn’t work out, and some of the Harrison stuff came back.”
Silence again. She’s choosing the response carefully, when all I want is for my mother to hear the unedited draft of me and find a way to be okay with it. Because I tried it her way — the Halden Girl way — and it just hurt more.
“I’m sorry to hear that, sweetheart,” she says, finally, in the measured voice she uses when she’s buying time. “But you’re okay?”
I know what happens if I tell her I’m not okay: the right people will get the right calls, my family will manage the crisis the way we managed the last one, and nobody will ask what I actually need.
But I’m done with that.
“I’m fine, Mom,” I say.
“Okay,” she says, relieved.
The wall goes back up on both sides, and we are back to normal again: composed, fond of each other in ways that never quite survive the translation from feeling to language, but still keep up appearances.
We hang up, and I stand in the quad with my phone against my thigh thinking about the two conversations I just had. Moreno read six pages of my worst moments and said this is worth building on. My mother heard three sentences of the same truth and asked if it was wise.
The thought comes over the wall, and it brings the rest: the door closing soft, his face when I said Nina was right, and how he didn’t argue, just stood there searching for a response that wasn’t another solution.
His voice, quiet, after he said he loved that messy version of me and I answered I know — two words that had nothing to do with managing and everything to do with seeing, and I threw them back because I couldn’t separate the boy from his biggest tendency.
I told him he would carry me the way my parents did, and I meant it, and I was right about the pattern. But standing here after Moreno’s office and my mother’s voice, I notice something I didn’t expect.
My mother heard the crack in my voice and rebuilt the wall. Rowan heard the crack in my voice and stayed. He got it wrong, going to Franklin, submitting the complaint, the whole response built for everyone except me — but he was trying to help.
Now, I need to know if he can understand, because Rowan’s version of wrong was closer to right than anyone else has managed.
Ivy doesn’t ask if I want to go out.
She just puts my jacket in my lap and says, “We’re leaving this building because it smells like sadness,” and by the time I’ve formed the beginning of an objection, she’s already pulling on her boots and telling me we are above moping in a dorm room.
The bar on Thurston has sticky floors and a jukebox that only plays if you hit it at a specific angle, which means the music cuts out every four songs until someone smacks it back to life. But it’s loud enough to drown out your thinking about your life.
And tonight, that’s perfect.
Ivy orders a dark beer because she has opinions about IPAs the way other people have opinions about politics — loudly and without invitation — but I stick with a Coke because my fake ID isn’t as good as hers.
I give her the version of today I can manage: Moreno’s office, the validation that landed a year too late but also felt just in time, and the call with my mother. I leave out the musing about Rowan, because I’m still working it out.
And then the booth fills without warning.
Two girls from one of my classes — Margot and Priya — slide in, all smiles and perfume and the energy of people who have decided I’m worth knowing again. It’s like a piece of choreography.
The arranged warmth.
The casual arm-touch.