Chapter 24 Chapter 24

Chapter 24 Chapter 24


I found out by accident that is the thing about the truth, it never arrives in the way you plan for it. You build yourself up for one kind of landing and it comes from a completely different direction.

It was Tuesday. After school. I had gone back to the classroom to grab the jacket I'd left behind during last period and the door was slightly open and the voices inside stopped me before I could push it all the way through.

Chloe's voice and Liam's.

I stood in the corridor with my hand flat against the door and the after-school noise of the hallway behind me and I listened.

"She's getting weird," Chloe was saying. "I don't know what's going on with her but she's not telling me something."

"She's fine," Liam said. "You know how Sienna gets. She goes quiet when she's stressed."

"This is different." A pause. "She smelled like his cologne, Liam. The same one he wears."

Silence.

"You're overthinking it," Liam said.

"Am I?" Chloe's voice was quiet but sharp. The voice she kept behind the warmth for the things that actually mattered. "Because I went along with all of this. I did what you asked. I went after Jax because you said it would keep Sienna distracted. I'm the one who has to look her in the face every day and smile." Another pause. "I never signed up to be the one who loses her best friend at the end of this."

The corridor hummed around me.

My jacket was still on the chair inside that classroom.

I was not moving.

I went after Jax because you said it would keep Sienna distracted.

The words arranged themselves in my head slowly. Not because I didn't understand them. Because understanding them meant accepting a shape to the last few months that was much larger and much uglier than the shape I had been living inside.

"You're not going to lose her," Liam said. "She doesn't know anything."

"She knows something. I can feel it."

"Chloe." His voice dropped to the easy, managing tone I knew from the garden. Smooth. Reassuring. The voice he used when he needed someone to stop asking questions. "You've been a good friend to her. You've kept her busy, kept her focused on other things. When this is done I'll talk to my dad's manager and get you that internship slot like I promised. It's handled."

Silence.

"An internship," Chloe said slowly.

"The one you've been wanting for two years. Media company. You said it would change."

"I know what I said."

"Then we're good."

Another silence. Longer this time.

"Yeah," Chloe said finally. "We're good."

I stepped back from the door.

One step. Two. Quietly, the way I had learned to move when I didn't want to be heard.

I walked back down the corridor.

I did not get my jacket.

I sat in the girls' bathroom at the end of the B-wing for eleven minutes.

I want to be clear about that, what I Just heard. I sat on the closed lid of the far cubicle with my school bag in my lap and my hands flat on top of it and I sat there with what I had just heard and I let it settle.

Because that was what it needed. It needed to settle before I could look at it clearly. Before I could see the whole shape of it.

Liam had needed Sienna distracted.

Distracted from what? From the cheating, clearly. From Mia. From the cracks that had been showing in the perfect image. He had needed me looking somewhere else and Chloe had been the tool he had used for that. Not cruelly, maybe. Maybe she had told herself it was harmless. Maybe the internship had looked big enough to justify it.

Go after Jax. Keep Sienna busy. Keep her looking at something new and shiny.

And Chloe had done it.

She had sat in my bedroom with her feet tucked under her and her eyes bright and asked me can I have him? and I had said yes because I trusted her and I wanted to be the perfect one.

She had sat on my bed and told me about the diner date and the hand-holding and the text that said you were shivering for twenty minutes and I had swallowed glass and smiled for her and she had known.

She had known why it hurt.

And she had kept going anyway because Liam had offered her something she wanted more than she wanted to protect me.

I sat in the cubicle.

My hands were still flat on my bag.

The bathroom door opened once, girls came in, left, the door swung shut again.

I thought about the window-knock. The trellis. Ten years of come to my window and you're my person and my person doesn't do complicated things without telling me. Said with warmth. Said with the specific warmth of someone who knew exactly what she was doing and had learned to make guilt look like love.

I thought about the dare. Mika and Leo and the table and two fifty if you make him fall for you and who had been the one who jumped in first to raise the prize? Me. The one Chloe had been performing for.

I stood up.

I picked up my bag.

I unlocked the cubicle and walked to the sink and ran cold water over my wrists the way I always did when I needed to feel something real and physical. The cold hit and I breathed through it.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

Not the assembled Sienna. Not the costume. Just me. Standing under fluorescent lights in an empty bathroom having just lost two things at the same time, the boyfriend who had called her boring and the best friend who had decided an internship was a fair price.

I was not angry yet.

The anger would come later. It was already forming somewhere beneath me, I could feel the edges of it, solid and growing.

Right now I was something quieter.

I was done.

Done with the performing. Done with the careful management of other people's comfort at the cost of my own. Done smiling at things that were pointed directly at me.

I dried my hands.

I left the bathroom.

I pulled out my phone and typed one message to one person.

“I need to go somewhere. Tonight. Can you drive?”

The reply came in less than a minute.

“Where do you want to go.”

“Anywhere that isn't here,” I typed.

“I'll pick you up at seven.”

I put my phone in my bag.

I went home.

I did not call Chloe.