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I was the biggest coward I knew. That was all.
I woke up Monday morning after seeing the news report about Beckett the night before with every intention of skipping class and going straight to the police department to give them my statement, but…yeah, I couldn’t.
Seriously, how did you confess to complete strangers the most embarrassing thing you’d ever done?
I had no idea, that’s why I didn’t do it.
Instead of driving to the station or even class, I’d found myself at a beauty salon, and the next thing I knew, I was getting my hair dyed a pale blonde and then asking the lady to put some curl
in it. Which was why I suddenly wanted a scarf to cover my head as I entered my apartment that afternoon. Not that my new do looked bad. It was actually kind of cute; totally Bailey approved. It seemed to make the contours of my face seem more cheerfully adorable than the chubby round blob they usually felt like. I should’ve tried curly blonde ages ago.
But it was also a dead-giveaway that something was bothering me.
While some people redecorated or ate or cleaned in times of great distress, I dyed my hair. Like in the tenth grade, for example, Chrissy Jackson called me a fat bitch and got all her friends to call me one too until someone had scratched it into my locker door. And my hair went pitch black with a streak of red. Then, during the summer between my junior and senior year, I lost my virginity—horrid event—so my hair suddenly became an array of brown, black, blonde, red, and mahogany of every shade. Then seven months ago, I learned my mother hadn’t actually died when I was too young to remember her. I’d been seven when she had passed and I’d just been so traumatized by the whole event that I’d pretty much wiped all memory of her from my existence. Learning that doozey had prompted me into dying my hair every freaking color of the rainbow.
The reason why I dyed my hair during these times wasn’t that complicated. I just needed an extreme change to deal with my own overwhelming emotions, because I really couldn’t deal with them at all.
Paige might not be quite so tuned in to the hair-dyeing aspect about me since she hadn’t even known me a year and half yet, but Tess, yeah, Tess would know something was up. Tess had known me my whole damn life. She’d figure it out immediately.
Oh, who the hell was I kidding? All of them already knew something was up. But now I’d just gone and proven them right with blinding pale ringlets of blonde wrapped around my head.
Holding my breath, I tiptoed up the steps where I could already hear the television and murmured voices of more than one of my roommates in the front room, hanging out.
“Holy wow,” Tess was saying, but I hadn’t cleared the landing yet, so I knew she wasn’t talking about my hair.
“What?” Jonah asked her.
“I think this rape thing is going to blow up to be bigger than either the shooting or the theater burning down,” she answered.
Hearing the word rape made me hurry up the steps just in time to see her curled on the couch where she was cozied next to her boyfriend and was shifting the screen of her laptop around to show him what she’d been seeing.
“Just look at all the memes they’ve made already.”
Forgetting my hair, I dashed behind them to peer over their shoulders for a glimpse of the screen myself, and my mouth dropped open as I saw all these pictures of Beckett with messages below and above him, damning him for all eternity as they called him evil, vile things.
My stomach surged with unease. A great big guilty unease.
Tess shook her head. “Granton’s going to have the worst reputation of any college in the history of ever.”
I nodded mutely. Our poor university really did have enough to contend with already. At the beginning of last year, some eerie strange kid who’d lived in our dorm building and I’d met a handful of times had gone on a shooting spree and killed eleven students. Then, last semester, protestors had accidentally burned down the Performing Arts Theater, which resulted in the deaths of three more people. Now this was being talked about everywhere. It seemed as if every time Granton University was mentioned on the news, something awful had happened.
“And it looks like we made the national news again,” Paige spoke up from the love seat, where she was watching the television. She lifted the remote and turned up the volume just as a CNN reporter mentioned Beckett.
“Hilliard, a senior at Granton, had his arraignment this morning, where the judge lifted his bail to seventy-five thousand. After he pled innocent, Judge Gudrun set his trial to take place in late spring.”
My mouth fell open. His bail had been raised? This made no sense. None of it. I shook my head, wondering how this could be. He was innocent. Why had they raised his bail? Why weren’t they setting him free?
“Great,” Logan muttered from next to Paige. “I can just hear enrollment numbers drop another twenty percent. I bet they’ll raise tuition again to try to make up the difference.”
“Fuck tuition,” I exploded, gaping at the national news reporter who was detailing all of Beckett’s allegations as if they were freaking fact. “They’re crucifying his poor reputation.”
How would he ever recover from this?
A stunned silence followed my outburst as everyone turned to gape at me. Then Tess screeched, “Oh my God! Your hair.”
“And fuck my hair.” I motioned toward the television. “Why are they doing that to him?”
Four pair of eyes blinked dumbly. Then the two couples shot each other confused glances before Paige discretely cleared her throat and hedged, “Umm, because he’s a rapist, maybe?”
