Page 2

Please keep walking.

I eat alone, and I like it that way, which nobody believes. I like the quiet. I like that for forty minutes nobody needs anything from me. What I don’t like are the looks the blonde girls at the center tables send down the room whenever they think he’s talking to me. Sharp little looks. Measuring. Like I’ve taken something off a shelf that wasn’t mine. Like I asked for it. Like I did something.

I didn’t do anything. That’s the part none of them would understand. I’ve spent four years in high school doing nothing as carefully as a person can.

In a way, Rafe’s already destroyed my life, and it wasn’t in one loud moment. If it had been loud, someone might have noticed. It was the slow kind. The kind where you stop raising your hand in class. The kind where you learn every stairwell in the building by how likely he is to be in it, and you plan your day around them. The kind where you stand in front of the bathroom mirror at night and hate the girl in it, because if she were prettier, or blonder, or louder, or anything at all, maybe he wouldn’t loathe her this much.

I’m basic. I have brown eyes and brown hair. Every girl he’s ever touched has been blonde. The one he actually dated had green eyes, like his, and I’ve spent more hours than I’ll ever admit thinking about how perfect they looked together.

He hasn’t moved from my table.

My eyes are down, but I can feel him there. A person that size changes the air around you. And I make the mistake again. I glance up.

For less than a fraction of a second, I see straight through him.

It happens sometimes. A face will slip, just barely, the way a curtain moves when a door opens somewhere else in the house, and for an instant, I can see the room behind it. With Rafe, the room is very small. There’s a boy in there. He’s insecure with no control over anything, not one single thing in his whole gold-plated life, and he’s furious about it in a way that has to go somewhere.

I see him. All of him.

Then the curtain drops, and his eyes go dark, and he’s mean-mugging me like I’m the easiest thing in the room to hit. Which, to be fair, I am. That’s why he’s here.

But here’s the thing Rafferty doesn’t know: he isn’t my first bully, and he won’t be my last.

Maybe that’s the draw. People look at me and see something thin and quiet and breakable, and they line up for it, one after another, like I’m a ride at a fair. Not one of them has ever understood that every time they come at me, they’re laying a brick. Four years of him. Nine years of the ones before him, so many that I’ve stopped remembering their faces and only remember what they taught me.

My walls are taller than anything he’s got. He just doesn’t know he’s standing outside them.

I watch the anger move behind his eyes, and I know this is going south.

“Stand up,” he says.

I stand calmly because calm is the only thing in this cafeteria that belongs to me, and I’m not handing him that, too.

I leave my food. I hold my bag against my chest with both arms, and the center tables watch me go.

He walks ahead of me and doesn’t look back once because it doesn’t occur to him that I wouldn’t follow, and I hate that he’s right. I hate it the whole way out of the cafeteria and down the pavilion, his shoulders moving ahead of me, his jaw working on his gum. I hate it across the field, where the grass is still wet from the sprinklers and soaks straight through the canvas of my shoes. These are the only shoes I own, and now they’ll be wet until sixth period, and he’ll never know that, and he wouldn’t care if he did.

Then he goes up into the east stairwell, where the teachers have a long-standing arrangement with themselves not to come unless someone’s dying.

“Tessa Canten.” He says my name like it’s something he found on the bottom of his shoe. “I fucking hate that name.”

I stop at the landing of the stairs where it turns and look at him.

“Don’t look at me.”

My eyes drop to his grey shirt. It looks soft and expensive.

“I heard what you did.” He says it like he’s nauseous. Like the information physically got into him somewhere and now it won’t leave. “How you applied to Woodbury. Now why the fuck would you go and do that?”

I say nothing.

I’ve been told once already. Last summer, at a party I shouldn’t have gone to, in front of people, I was told that if I went to Woodbury, I’d regret it. I nodded then, too. And in November, I submitted the application anyway, at two in the morning, with my heart going like I’d stolen something.

The wind comes through the stairwell sideways and throws my hair across my face, and underneath it, I get his cologne. I hate that I know it. I hate that I’d know it anywhere, in a crowd, with my eyes shut.

“I know it’s because you’re obsessed with me.” He steps toward me. “Look at me.”

I don’t.