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Shit.
I had to get Lens out of here. But where? I tended to stay to myself. With the exception of a single close girlfriend, I didn’t have a lot of friends. You couldn’t trust that they were there for you, and not your family’s money and connections. Things like that tended to bring out the fake in people.
I guess for the night we’d go to a hotel. I’d contact Mom, and we’d come up with something more permanent in the morning.
Rising, I held out my hand. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.” Eleanor looked at me doubtfully. “Trust me, Lens. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Two
Jude
EleanorandIweregetting settled into a suite at a nearby hotel—no big feat, considering we had no luggage—when a text came through from Jason Lancaster.
Jason:I’m looking forward to our date tonight.
“Shit,” I muttered. “I forgot about that.”
Eleanor looked up from where she was putting together a delivery order from a superstore. Toothbrushes, toiletries, underwear and other basics…everything we’d need until I figured we could safely go back home and grab our things. “Forgot what?
“That guy Jason asked me out today. We were supposed to go out for Thai food tonight and hang out.”
“Jude!” Squealing, she dropped her phone and lunged across the sofa to grab my shoulders and shake me. She knew how long I’d been waiting for him to man up. “This is amazing!”
In spite of our circumstances, I smiled. “It is, isn’t it? I don’t want to tell him I can’t go now.”
Eleanor frowned. “What do you mean, you can’t go? Of course you’re going.”
“Lens…” Flopping back against the couch, I covered my face with my forearm. “This stuff with Dad…it changes everything.”
I felt her fingers picking at the fabric of the sofa beside my thigh. It was a nervous tic she had, always picking at something. I placed my hand over hers, stilling the movement.
“I don’t see why you can’t go on a date. He may not even find out before you go. It’s tonight, after all,” she muttered.
I was quiet for a minute, processing. She was right. It was early days yet. There was a chance it didn’t blow up. A chance it blew over, instead. That Dad produced everyone’s money, and everyone just went away happy.
Maybe it was the pessimist in me, though. Somehow, that wasn’t what I saw happening at all.
“I think you should trust him,” she continued. “There’s a reason you like him. He’s a good guy. A good person. Even if everything does explode with Dad, I bet he’s decent enough to stay. That’s what good people do.”
Lowering my arm, I regarded her with a troubled gaze. “I wish that’s how it worked.”
She opened her mouth to argue, seemed to think better of it, and closed it again. Standing, she moved back to where she’d dropped her phone and picked it up and resumed her order. “Just think about it,” she said after a few minutes.
I thought about it. And then, after a deep breath, I tapped out a response to Jason.
I’m looking forward to it, too.
The Thai restaurant Jason chose was near Columbia’s campus. I’d eaten there before but it was different tonight, seated across a tiny table from a guy I liked.
Jason was a little on the short side, but cute, with wavy brown hair and blue eyes I’d always thought of as kind. I’d figured out that his initial shyness had in fact been extreme caution. Jason had been burned by a past girlfriend and took his time, he said, with new girls. He wanted to be sure of someone before he spent any time with them.
“But isn’t that how you get sure of someone?” I asked, genuinely curious. “By spending time with them, getting to know them?”
He reached across the table and took my hand, turning it over in his and running his thumb across my palm. “Yes, of course. But I spend a lot of time trying to know them on social media and watching them in class and with our mutual friends and stuff like that, first. You know…just trying to see if there are any big red flags.”
I nodded, pursing my lips. “Okay, I guess I understand that.” I leaned forward a bit and pushed my plate aside. “Give me an example of a red flag.”
He grinned. “Putting me on the spot.” Tilting his chin up, he pretended to think. “Let me see…if a girl posted on her Insta account all day, every day, for example, that would be a huge red flag. It would indicate she might be really self-absorbed, or into that kind of superficial attention.”
