Chapter 35 Eyes Forward
Elias POV
Ivy finds me at lunch.
She drops her tray across from mine with the particular energy of someone who has been holding something in all morning and is about five seconds away from losing the battle. Her hair is in its messy bun. She has paint on her left wrist. She looks at me the way she always does when she has news she does not know how to frame gently.
"Show me your phone," she says.
"Hello to you too."
"Elias. Phone. Now."
I slide it across the table. She unlocks it like she owns it, which honestly she practically does after three years of knowing each other's passwords, and pulls up something I had not seen yet. A screenshot. She turns the screen toward me.
It is the photo from yesterday. Me and Noah on the quad, close enough that no one could read it as casual. Someone has reshared it with a caption that I read once and do not need to read again. Below the reshare, there is a string of replies. Some of them are laughing. Some of them are worse than laughing.
The account belongs to someone on the soccer team.
I look at it for a few seconds. Then I hand the phone back.
"Okay," I say.
Ivy stares at me. "Okay? That's it?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"I don't know. Something. More than okay."
I pick up my fork. "It was always going to be like this, Ivy. You know that. I know that. Noah knows that."
She is quiet for a second. I can see her working through it, the way she always does, running it through the part of her brain that needs things to be fair before she can rest. "It's not right," she says finally.
"No. It's not."
"You haven't done anything wrong."
"I know."
"Neither has he."
"I know that too."
She watches me eat for a moment like she is checking for cracks. I let her look. There is nothing there she has not seen before.
The thing about being visible is that it comes with a tax. Not a small one. You walk through the world the way I do, wearing what I wear, existing the way I exist, and you sign some invisible agreement that says: people will have opinions about you, and some of those opinions will be delivered without your permission, in spaces you are not in, in tones you cannot control.
I made peace with that in my first year. It was not quick or clean. It was the kind of peace that takes a while to stop feeling like surrender and start feeling like survival. But I got there.
What I had not accounted for was being half of something public. Being someone whose name now gets said alongside another name. That part is newer. That part has edges I am still learning.
Because it is one thing when people talk about me. I am used to that. I know how to stand inside it without breaking.
It is a different thing when they talk about Noah too. When the cruelty is not just aimed at me but at the thing between us, at what he chose, at what we built in private that is now exposed to everyone with a phone and an opinion.
That part I have not worked out how to be numb to yet.
After lunch I go to my two o'clock lecture and sit near the back, which I never normally do. Not hiding. Just needing a wall behind me today. The professor talks about structure and narrative and the way a story changes depending on who gets to tell it. I write down everything she says.
My phone buzzes twice during the lecture. I leave it in my bag.
When class ends I sit for a moment while everyone else files out. The girl next to me pauses on her way up.
"Hey," she says. "I just wanted to say. The photo. You guys look good together."
She says it quickly, like she practiced it and wanted to get it out before she lost her nerve. Then she is gone, backpack bouncing, lost in the crowd moving toward the door.
I sit with that for a second too.
The kindness of strangers is a strange thing. It does not erase the cruelty of other strangers. But it makes a different kind of space. One worth noting.
On the way back to the dorm I take the long route without planning to. Past the athletic center, past the stadium. I do not go close enough to see the practice field but I can hear it, faint shouts and the particular sound of cleats on turf that carries farther than you would expect on a quiet afternoon.
I slow down without meaning to.
There is a screenshot saved in my phone now that I will probably not look at again but that I also will not delete. Not because it hurts me. Because it is information. Because I want to know, exactly, what we are walking into. What he is walking into.
Because when Noah and I talked yesterday about what comes next, we talked about it in the language of feelings. I want this. This is real. I am choosing you. All of it true, all of it necessary.
But feelings do not live in a vacuum. They live on a campus where people have accounts and screenshots and the particular kind of cruelty that disguises itself as humor.
I need to know what we are dealing with.
I need to know if he knows too.
My phone buzzes again. This time I check it.
It is not from Noah.
It is Ivy, sending me a second screenshot. Same account. A new post. This one has more replies. This one has names in it.
I stare at it for a long moment on the path outside the stadium, the sound of practice drifting over the wall, the afternoon light going gold and long across the grass.
I save this one too.
Eyes forward, I tell myself.
But eyes open.