4. Sloane
Sloane
Ididn’t want to come to this party.
I want to be clear about that, for the record, because in approximately forty-five minutes I’m going to want to be able to say I told you so to three people, and I need the record to reflect that I said it first, here, internally, before everything went sideways.
Wren got the text from Cash at nine-thirty.
Raven House. First week thing. You’re coming.
This is how Cash Rourke communicates — declarative sentences, no punctuation, the grammatical style of someone who has never once in his life considered that the answer might be no.
Wren, who has a complicated history with Cash that she describes as “we tolerate each other” and which the rest of us understand to mean something more layered than that, stared at the text for approximately four seconds before saying, “We should go.”
Margo was already finding her shoes.
June looked up from her book and said, “Is this a good idea?”
None of us answered her, which was its own answer.
So here I am.
The Raven House is the kind of house that’s good at being a party — big enough to absorb a crowd without feeling institutional, old enough to have character, the kind of porch and open layout that means the whole thing breathes.
I’ll give it that. The living room flows into the kitchen and flows into the back porch, and someone has done the thing where you move the furniture to the walls and suddenly there’s a dance floor where a coffee table used to be.
The music is loud but not aggressive. The kitchen smells like beer and, inexplicably, something that might be good pasta.
I’ve been here for an hour and twenty minutes.
I’ve spent forty of those minutes in the kitchen, which felt safe, and which has now stopped feeling safe for reasons I’m going to get to in a moment.
The other forty minutes I spent watching something unfold in the hallway between the kitchen and the living room that I was not trying to watch but could not entirely avoid, because the hallway is narrow and I was in the kitchen and the kitchen has a direct sightline to the hallway and nobody thought to close a door.
A girl in a white dress — dark hair, green eyes, the posture of someone who came here with a plan — cornered a tall blond guy I couldn't fully see and proceeded to make a scene that was trying very hard not to look like a scene.
I know the girl. Bella Hastings. She's been a fixture of the Whitmore athletic social ecosystem since freshman year in the way of someone who treats proximity to athletes as a competitive sport — which is exactly how I know her and don't know him.
Bella runs in Evan's circle; I've spent three years watching her hold court at the edges of football parties I got dragged to and never wanted to be at.
The hockey crowd is a different country.
I've never been to a game, never set foot in the Penalty Box, never had a single reason to learn the faces of the Whitmore Ravens.
I keep to the theater building and the bookshop, and the bookshop's the one place the worlds might've overlapped — except its owner's grandson is apparently allergic to the place, because in two years of shelving Margaret's books and listening to her talk about him I have somehow never once been in the room when he walked in.
So I know the girl in the white dress. The guy she's cornering is a stranger.
I didn't catch all of it.
I caught enough.
The blond guy kept his voice low for most of it, and then it stopped being low — not loud, exactly, but past controlled — and he said something about his own house and a party she wasn’t invited to, and Bella said something quiet and precise that I couldn’t hear, and then she left through the front door in a cloud of perfume that made it all the way to the kitchen.
Dramatic.
The guy turned around, and I moved my attention back to the drink I was pretending to be interested in, and that was the end of that.
Except now it’s past eleven, the kitchen has refilled with people I don’t know, and I want nothing more than to collect my roommates and go home to the Sailmaker and drink tea and not be at this party anymore.
I’m almost to the hallway when the front door opens.
The football team streams through it like they own the place, which is a bold choice for a group with a three-and-eight record last season and no visible path to improvement.
I count six of them before I stop counting.
They have the energy of people who go to parties as a unit because the unit is the point, filling the entryway with noise and shoulder-checking and the kind of easy volume that comes with being large and twenty and not yet aware that neither of those things is permanent.
I mutter, “Shit,” under my breath.
Because at the back of the group, unmistakable even at this distance, is Evan.
He hasn’t seen me yet. He’s laughing at something one of his teammates said, head tipped back, the laugh I used to think was genuine and have since revised my opinion on.
He’s wearing the grey Whitmore Athletics quarter-zip he wears to every party, the one that I told him once looked good on him, which I now regret on a cellular level.
The new urgency to find my friends is not subtle.
I turn away from the door and scan the living room.
Margo is on the makeshift dance floor with June, which is — I’ll admit, reluctantly — a good visual.
Margo dances the way she does everything, with complete physical commitment and zero self-consciousness, her blonde hair loose, laughing at something June said.
June is doing the thing where she’s half-dancing and half-conducting a conversation, which is June’s version of letting herself have fun, and it is genuinely very sweet, and I will appreciate it later when I’m not trying to use them as a human shield.
Wren is near the far wall with a small cluster of guys I recognize from the hockey team, and her body language is the kind of upright that means she’s not having a pleasant exchange.
Arms crossed. Weight shifted back. The expression she wears when she’s deciding how many words it’s going to take to make her point.
One of the guys is gesturing in the loose, imprecise way of someone who’s had three drinks and thinks volume is a substitute for reasoning.
I make a note to circle back to that.
Margo and June first — they’re closer, and they’re not in an argument.
I’m three steps into the living room when a hand closes around my bicep.
I don’t have to look.
The grip is familiar in the way of something your body remembers before your brain catches up — the pressure of it, the angle, the way it always landed like a question that assumed the answer would be yes.
I stop.
“Sloane.”
I turn around.
Evan is looking at me with the expression he uses when he wants to seem reasonable, which involves a kind of careful openness around the eyes that I used to read as sincerity and now read correctly.
He’s not drunk. That’s the first thing I notice.
Drunk Evan is loud and sloppy and easy to navigate. Sober Evan has a plan.
“Let go of my arm,” I say.
“I just want to talk.”
“Let go of my arm, and then I’ll tell you what I have to say.”
He lets go. Barely. His fingers loosen but his hand stays close, hovering at the edge of my space in the way he has of maintaining proximity without technically making contact, which is a distinction I’ve thought about more than I’d like to admit.
“I’ve been trying to reach you.” The hovering hand drifts an inch closer.
“I know.”
“You haven’t responded.”
“Also something I’m aware of.”
His jaw tightens. Not drunk, and not calm either — there’s something running underneath the reasonable expression that I recognize as the thing that comes before the reasonable expression stops working. I’ve seen it before. I know the sequence.
“What you saw today—” he starts.
“Evan.” I keep my voice even. “I don’t have anything left to say to you. We’re not together anymore.”
“You didn’t give me a chance to explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain.”
“Sloane—”
“There is genuinely,” I say, with the precision I use when I mean every word of a sentence, “nothing you can say to me that I need to hear.”
He steps closer.
The music is loud enough that the people immediately around us probably can’t hear us, but they can see us, and I’m aware of that, and Evan is aware that I’m aware of it, which is the part that makes my shoulders go tight.
He’s always known that I don’t make scenes.
He’s always known that I’ll manage my own composure before I’ll let a situation become public, and he has used that knowledge before, and I can see him using it now.
“You walked in without knocking,” he says, louder. “You didn’t even give me a chance—”
“You asked me to come over for dinner.” My voice stays where it is. His doesn’t. “At seven. It was seven o’clock.”
“That doesn’t mean you get to just walk in and—”
“You gave me a key.”
“I’m not talking about the key, I’m talking about—” He stops. Recalibrates. The reasonable expression makes another attempt. “I just need ten minutes. Come outside with me, let me explain, and if you still feel the same way then fine, but at least—”
“No.”
He moves closer again, and his hand finds my arm a second time, and this time the grip is different — not hovering, not a question. The fingers press into the muscle of my bicep with the pressure of someone who is past asking.
“Evan.” Flat. Quiet. The volume drop. “You’re hurting me.”
“I’m not—”
“You’re hurting my arm.”
He doesn’t let go.
There are people watching now. I can feel it the way you feel a shift in a room — the conversations going slightly quieter in our immediate radius, the attention tilting toward us without quite landing. Evan doesn’t register it or doesn’t care, and I’m not sure which is worse.