Chapter 56 Pep Rally
POV: Carly
She cried in a bathroom stall for ten minutes.
Not the polished kind of crying where you maintain some dignity and blot carefully at the corners. The ugly kind. The kind that came from somewhere deep and had nothing to do with mascara preservation.
She let it run its course and then she stood up and washed her face and looked at herself in the mirror and did what she always did.
She rebuilt the expression.
Smile. Shoulders back. Eyes clear enough. Good enough.
She walked into the gym.
The noise hit her immediately. The band warming up. The squeaking of sneakers on the court. Her squad calling to each other across the floor with the specific energy of girls who had been looking forward to this all week.
She clapped her hands twice and got to work.
Going up and down the rows. Correcting Sierra's split. Straightening the banner. Checking the rolled t-shirts stacked by the bleachers for crowd throwing. Moving through her checklist the way she always moved through her checklists, efficiently and with purpose, and not thinking about the quad or the bench or the way his voice had sounded on those last words.
Her phone buzzed in the waistband of her uniform.
She ignored it.
It buzzed again.
She pulled it out.
Unknown saved as: Niko
Niko: I'm sorry for what I said. About last night. I didn't mean it.
She stared at the screen for a long moment.
Then she put the phone back and kept moving and told herself she would deal with that later.
She was almost convinced she was fine when someone tapped her on the shoulder from behind and she nearly levitated off the gymnasium floor.
She spun around.
Katy was standing there with her arms crossed and that smirk and Carly exhaled so hard it was almost a groan.
"You have got to stop doing that." Carly said.
"You have got to stop being so easy to sneak up on." Katy said pleasantly. "You're a witch. Shouldn't you have like a radar or something."
"It doesn't work on people I'm not expecting." Carly said.
"Concerning." Katy said. She tilted her head and looked at Carly's face. "You've been crying."
"I have not." Carly said.
"Your left eye is slightly more swollen than your right." Katy said. "Also I can smell it."
"I hate you." Carly said.
"No you don't." Katy said. "Come on."
She nodded toward the gym doors and Carly looked at her squad who were managing fine without her for thirty seconds and followed.
The corridor outside was blessedly quiet.
Katy turned to face her with her arms still crossed. "So. How did it go."
Carly looked at the wall.
Katy's eyes narrowed. "Carly."
"I didn't break up with him." Carly said.
The silence that followed had a specific quality to it.
"You didn't." Katy said.
"He started talking about how sorry he was and how much he wants to work on things and how he sees a future together after graduation and I just." Carly pressed her lips together. "I couldn't do it."
"That." Katy said carefully. "Is an excuse."
"It's not an excuse it's just." Carly stopped. "I didn't have it in me to hurt him right then."
"So your plan is to what. Keep hurting him slowly instead of quickly." Katy said. "Because that's what you're doing. The slow version is worse. You know that."
"I know." Carly said miserably.
"And Niko." Katy said.
Carly's face did something she could not control.
Katy saw it immediately. "What happened."
"He was there." Carly said. "He heard the whole thing. And then we fought about it and he said something awful and I said something back and then he recited something at me that absolutely broke my heart and then he left and I just got a text from him apologizing."
Katy stared at her. "He sent an apology text."
"Yes." Carly said.
"Niko Monroeson sent an apology text." Katy said again. Like she needed to hear it twice.
"That's what I said." Carly said.
Katy was quiet for a moment. "Okay that is actually significant and you need to not mess this up."
"I know." Carly said.
"Do you." Katy said. "Because from where I'm standing you are doing an impressive job of messing it up."
"I know that too." Carly said. "Katy I know everything you're about to say and you're right about all of it. I just didn't have the courage today and now Niko thinks I'm never going to actually choose him and I feel terrible about everything."
Katy looked at her for a long moment.
"Who are you more upset about right now." She said. "Tommy or Niko."
Carly opened her mouth.
Closed it.
The answer was immediate and effortless and she was not going to say it out loud because she did not need to.
Katy read it off her face anyway.
"Yeah." She said. "That's who you fight for then."
She turned and walked back toward the gym doors.
Carly watched her go.
"Katy." She said.
The brunette paused.
"Thank you." Carly said. "For coming."
Katy looked over her shoulder. "I didn't come for you." She said. "I've never been to a pep rally and I was curious."
She pushed through the doors.
Carly almost smiled.
She stood in the corridor alone for a moment and looked at her phone.
Then she typed back.
Carly: I know. Me too.
She sent it.
She put her phone away and pushed through the gym doors and went back to her squad.
Fifteen minutes.
She just had to get through fifteen minutes.
POV: Katy
She found a spot in the bleachers near the top where she could see the whole gym and settled in with her arms crossed and watched the chaos below organize itself into something resembling an event.
It was loud. Significantly louder than she had anticipated and she had anticipated loud. The band was enthusiastic if not technically precise. The cheer squad was running final checks with the kind of focused energy that suggested their captain had drilled them to within an inch of their lives.
She watched Carly move across the floor below with her clipboard and her rebuilt expression and thought about the corridor conversation.
She had meant what she said. Whoever Carly was more upset about losing was the answer. And the answer had been on Carly's face before she had even opened her mouth.
Katy turned the conversation over and looked at the parts of it she had not said out loud.
She was not going to pretend she was doing this out of pure altruism. She was nosy and she found the whole situation genuinely interesting and Carly McPherson was proving to be significantly more complicated than her first impression had suggested and complicated things held Katy's attention.
But she also was not going to pretend there was nothing else in it.
She thought about what Carly had said in the room this morning. The part about trusting someone for the first time. About feeling like you finally had somewhere you could say the true thing.
Katy knew what that felt like.
She was not going to examine how much she knew what that felt like right now in a loud gymnasium surrounded by screaming students.
She looked around the bleachers as they filled in around her.
The vampire group came in through the far door in a loose cluster. Enzo first. Then Marcel. Then Aurora with her red hair catching the gym lights. Then Niko at the back looking like someone who had been talked into being here and was managing it barely.
She tracked him as he found a spot against the wall near the exit.
Then her attention drifted as the crowd shifted and Whitney Salem came through the main doors with a group of coven girls and took a spot two rows below Katy.
Katy's eyes moved over her automatically the way they always did in any room. Cataloguing. Filing.
She stopped.
She looked again.
Whitney was laughing at something one of the other witches said and her hair was moving and she was completely ordinary in every visible way and yet.
Katy's nose did something it rarely did in a room full of known quantities.
It caught something it did not expect.
Not witch. Not entirely.
Something underneath it. Something layered and complicated and almost familiar in a way that Katy could not immediately place.
She looked at Whitney Salem more carefully.
Whitney looked up at that exact moment and their eyes met briefly and Katy looked away first.
She sat with that quietly for a moment.
Filed it away.
She would think about it later.
Right now the band had started playing and the crowd was losing its mind and Carly was running onto the floor with her squad and Katy had a pep rally to observe for the first time in her life.
She could think about Whitney Salem later.
Author's Note:
Katy smelled something she was not expecting on Whitney Salem and filed it away and I need everyone to understand that the most dangerous person in this gymnasium right now is the girl sitting quietly in the top row of the bleachers noticing things nobody else notices. Drop a like and tell me in the comments, how long before Katy figures out what Whitney is?