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“I don’t want anyone killed,” I murmur.

“Fine. We’ll humiliate him.” Sydney starts pacing. “You wear a sexy outfit. We go out. You dance with someone offensively attractive.”

“I don’t want to go out.” I groan.

“Then we stay in and get drunk.”

“I don’t want to get drunk.”

“We order food and talk shit about him?”

I look down at the coffee.

Gianna sits beside me. “Did he tell you any of this was happening?”

“No.”

Sydney stops pacing. “Oh, he’s dead again. Second death!”

“It might not be what it looks like,” Gianna says carefully.

Sydney stares at her. “Gia, there’s a lyric about her in a lab coat. It’s obviously about her.”

“That is quite specific.” Gianna winces.

“Specific? He might as well have shone a light on their relationship and said hey everyone! I’m in love with the sexy pre-med!”

A laugh catches painfully in my throat.

Sydney drops onto the floor in front of me. I tighten my grip on the coffee cup. Gianna gently takes it before I crush it.

“Bea,” she says.

My face crumples, and Sydney is on me immediately, wrapping both arms around my waist. Gianna presses against my side, one hand rubbing slowly between my shoulder blades.

For a minute, I let them hold me.

Then I wipe my face with the sleeve of my sweatshirt and stand.

“I have a seminar.”

Sydney looks horrified. “You cannot go to class after being publicly betrayed by a pop star.”

“Watch me.”

“Bea—”

“If I stay here, I’m going to keep reading all the conspiracies.”

Neither of them argues with that.

I make fresh coffee, wash my face, and go to my eight o’clock seminar.

Then I take notes with the focus of a woman who desperately needs her hands occupied.

This notebook has never been so fucking annotated.

* * *