“If you do, then we’re going with Plan B.”
“Go.”
She narrows her eyes, and there’s actual menace in them, then heads out. The door shuts behind her, and the room goes quiet, and for about forty-five seconds I stand there staring at the bed.
It takes a lot of willpower to resist the urge to sleep, but I sit at my desk and get to work instead. An hour later, I’m back on the work for Moreno, feeling a little more in my groove, when my stomach reminds me that coffee is not food.
The girl from this morning is still under the duvet, calling to me. I decide not to be her. I pull Rowan’s hoodie back on, this time over the green sweater — Ivy would call it a crime against her styling — and take myself out for lunch.
The walk over is ten minutes, and when I get to Benny’s Bagels it’s warm and crowded and smells as welcoming as it always does — bagels, burnt coffee, and the faint sweetness of whatever cinnamon thing they baked this morning.
I stand in line and let the noise wash over me, because the spark Ivy lit this morning hasn’t gone out yet. I’m starting to feel human again, and when I reach the front and order an everything bagel and a coffee, the girl behind the counter calls me “hon.”
And I almost cry.
I take my coffee and the brown paper bag and find a two-top by the window. Outside, two girls walk past in matching scarves,laughing at something on one of their phones, and a guy in a Halden crew jacket jogs across the street with a golden retriever.
I want to climb into that scene and stay there, because it looks like what I felt before the kitchen with Mason. But at least now, while I’m not okay, I’m starting to think I could be okay eventually, and this morning I wasn’t sure about either.
I take a sip of the coffee. It’s hot, but I drink it anyway, glancing around.
The table near the door has four girls I recognize from Sterling House, not by name but in the nod-in-the-hallway-and-maybe-even-smile kind of way. One of them is the redhead who always props the back door open for her boyfriend at two in the morning.
I don’t know her name, but she’s on her phone, and when I glance over she happens to look up at me. I offer the tentative half-smile of recognition, but I don’t get it back, because her body seems to tense up before her eyes drop back to the screen.
Weird.
I pull my bagel out of the bag and take a bite, and it’s good, and I’m thinking about whether to text Ivy to see if she wants to join me after her class when the table next to me goes quiet — not gradually, but all at once.
Two guys and a girl are gathered around a laptop. They were talking, and now they’re not. The girl’s eyes flick to me and away, then one of the guys angles the laptop screen toward himself, and the other picks up his phone.
My hand stops halfway to my mouth.
Across the room, the redhead’s phone lights up. She tilts it toward the girl beside her. They both look at me, then away, fast. Then there’s a flash of a phone camera somewhere to my right.
Not again…
I know before I know, because my body remembers this. The gravity of a room shifting around you. The way thirty secondsago you were just a girl eating a bagel, and now you’re something else to everyone in the room.
I put the bagel down and pull out my phone.
There’s three notifications.
Seven.
Twelve.
The number keeps ticking up as I watch, and my thumb is moving before I’ve decided whether I want to see it. But I click, and I end up at an account called @HaldenGoss that I followed because Ivy told me to.
It’s the kind of campus account everyone follows and pretends they don’t, the kind that should have been shut down two years ago but won’t be. Because even the people it hurts keep watching.
People like me.
The post went up eleven minutes ago and has already been shared 214 times. It has my name — my full name — and my high school and the version of the story where Harrison Tisdale is the charming senator’s son and I’m the cautionary tale.
The embarrassment.
The scandal.
