Is that what I should expect? That, slowly, the entire town will know? Doesn’t matter how progressive the world is getting, there will always be people who don’t understand or approve of it. Will I have to constantly read the expressions of others before approaching them? Will I have an aura around me that screamsgay? I’ve heard of “gay-dar.” Is that something I should worry about now?
I pencil those anxieties away for another time.
Because most people will look at me right now and only notice the greenish-purple shiner that surrounds my eye. But,fuck it, I just drink my beer and try to let the noise of the room do the work of emptying my head.
I’m working on my second beer when I hear my name.
I look around and notice it’s just someone a few stools down, talking to a girl next to her, not paying attention to who else is in earshot. She’s leaning over the bar, clearly drunk, yelling at her friend.
“—obsessed. I’m telling you. It’s been weeks. Every single day, it’sRhett thisandColt thatanddid you see what Rhett did. I can’t even. She literally has a folder, Sarah. On her phone. Screenshots of everything.”
I set my beer down very slowly.
“A folder?” the other girl asks.
“A whole folder—pictures, texts. I don’t even know what half of it is, but she showed me some of it last week, and I was like, Molly, this is…this is not normal. You need to…”
I turn my head.
The girl talking is Jessica Pruitt. I’ve known her since third grade. She and Molly have been inseparable since middle school, and right now she’s three sheets to the wind, talking to Sarah Coleman about her best friend, and she has absolutely no idea who is sitting two stools to her left.
I watch her for a moment—let her keep going.
“—the texts thing. She thinks I don’t know, but I saw her setting them up once on this other phone—this little burner thing she had—and when I asked her about it, she got so weird and cagey and I just…I don’t know. It felt wrong, you know? Like, it’s one thing to be upset about a breakup, but this is…”
It was Molly.
All summer. Every text. Every time I felt watched and exposed and unraveled, it was Molly, with a burner phone and a folder full of screenshots, sitting in the dark, manufacturing thedoubt she needed to keep me second-guessing everything and everyone around me.
She watched us.
She was there that night.
She knows what happened, and she’s been holding it over both of us since.
I think about Colt showing me that text. I think about what I said to him. I think about the punch I threw and the look on his face when he saidI fucking quitand drove away.
I pick up my beer, finish it, then set the bottle down.
“Jess.”
Jessica Pruitt turns mid-sentence and looks at me, and I watch the exact moment she realizes who she’s been sitting next to. The color drains out of her face so fast it’s almost impressive.
“Rhett…” She says it like she’s hoping she’s wrong about what she just said in my presence. But she’s not wrong. “I didn’t—I wasn’t?—”
“Where is she?”
A beat. “She’s…she’s here. She came in about an hour ago. She’s with?—”
I’m already off the stool.
I find Molly in the back corner, the place she always gravitates toward in loud rooms. She’s with a girl from her school, both of them leaning over a phone screen, laughing at something. She looks easy and unbothered and pretty in the way she always has, and for a moment, I just stand at the edge of the room and look at her, cataloging all of the things I now know.
She feels me looking before she sees me, her eyes finding me as her face transforms into a complicated expression. A flash of guilt covered fast by something more constructed.
She says something to the girl beside her who glances at me before taking her drink and finding somewhere else to be.
Smart girl.
