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She stands and crosses the room.

“Bea,” she says, “did you know they were releasing a new album soon?!”

She shows me the phone; there’s a black screen with a waveform crawling across it, and Cal’s voice coming from the speaker.

The girl in the white coat fixed me up, she’s so hot.

She taught me ‘bout my body and damn I feel free.

The caption underneath says:

NEW ATLAS FALLING DEMO JUST LEAKED AND I AM NOT OKAY

Two hundred and forty thousand views. Posted four hours ago.

* * *

I read everything the next morning.

I don’t mean to. But I am weak.

So I read everything.

Apparently, the demo is on everything now. It’s been ripped and reuploaded and slowed down and sped up and laid underneath footage of couples I have never met. Someone has already made a version with rain sounds over it.

The comments are all a variation of the same question.

Who’s the girl in the white coat?

They haven’t figured it out. Not yet. There are guesses—Violet Marlowe, of course, an actress he stood near at an awards thing in 2023, a girl from a music video, somebody’s cousin. They’re all wrong, and every wrong guess makes my chest a little looser and my stomach a little tighter, because they are looking, and they are very, very good at looking.

Bile rises in my throat, but I swallow it down.

He wrote down the most private thing between us and leaked it. He said he loved me. Did he mean it? Or is it just good lyrics?

The sick feeling doesn’t go.

But what else did I expect?

A small part of me has been waiting for this the whole time. I suppose I never fully believed it could work. He belongs to stages and cameras. I belong in a classroom and then, hopefully, a hospital. For a few months, we pretended those things could work together, but who are we kidding?

I put the phone facedown again and tuck into my bedsheets.

There’s a knock on my door.

Then Sydney walks in without waiting for an answer, Gianna behind her with two coffees.

They look at me.

“You saw it all,” Sydney says.

I nod.

She picks it up, scans the screen, and immediately says, “I’m going to kill him.”

“After breakfast,” Gianna says, handing me a coffee.

“Obviously. I’m not an animal.”