Because this was personal. That was the only explanation. This was not about money. This was about me and Noelle. About punishing us. It was the only explanation.
Just do it, Reed!
A little voice in my head shouted—a voice that sounded a lot like Noelle’s.
Just do it and get it over with.
I swallowed hard and took a step back. Cold air rushed between us like a wall of ice.
“Actually, everything’s not okay,” I said loudly. They had, after all, said I was to do this in public. It wouldn’t be very public if no one noticed.
Josh blinked, understandably confused. One second I’m clinging to him so tightly I’m leaving finger marks in his skin. The next I’m backing away and unnecessarily shouting.
“What is it?” he said, his voice considerably softer than mine. He closed the gap between us and reached for my hand. “Is it Noelle?” he asked. “Have you heard something?”
Tears stung my eyes. He was so caring. So unselfish. We’d promised this night would not be about the Noelle drama, but here he was, bringing it up, just because he thought it was upsetting me.
“No,” I said, yanking my hand away. “It’s not that. I . . . Josh, listen. I’m sorry,” I said, raising my voice again. “I’m sorry to do this on Valentine’s Day, but it’s over.”
All the color washed right out of Josh’s face, but he still eyed me dubiously. A few people around us stopped dancing. The whispers began, starting in the center of the room and whooshing out to all corners, like ripples in otherwise calm waters.
“You’re joking, right? This is some kind of prank.” He looked around as if waiting for a clown to step out and hit him in the face with a whipped cream pie.
“No,” I said. “No, I’m not.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked with a strained smile. “You can’t—”
“I’m talking about us,” I interrupted. “We’re over.”
The smile dropped away and his face started to grow red. All I wanted to do was grab him and tell him he was right. It
was
a prank. That it was all going to be fine. I couldn’t bear that I was doing this to him.
“What?” Josh blurted.
Tiffany and West backed up a little, giving us space, as if they thought Josh was going to wrestle me to the ground.
“I can’t . . . I just can’t be with you anymore,” I said.
From the corner of my eye, I saw someone approaching. I was so surprised to see someone moving toward us rather than away, I must have flinched, because Josh turned around to see what I was looking at. It was Sawyer. He had just emerged from the crowd, and he couldn’t have picked a worse moment. The second Josh saw him he let out a strangled sort of laugh.
“Is this about him?” he asked, his jaw set as he turned to face me again.
“What?” I said, my voice cracking. “No. Sawyer and I are just—”
“Then is it that Upton guy?” Josh demanded. “I saw that note he sent you. Does he always go around calling other guys’ girlfriends ‘beautiful’ and signing his letters ‘love’?”
Actually, yeah, he kind of does,
I thought automatically. And how the hell had Josh seen that note? But then my brain remembered I was in kind of an end-of-my-world drama here.
“Josh, I’m sorry. I just—”
“I can’t believe this,” Josh said, glancing around wildly, as if he couldn’t even look at me for a second longer. He pushed both hands into his hair, holding it back with his palms to his temples, as if he were trying to keep his brain from exploding. “You’re not really doing this.”
He dropped his hands again and looked at me imploringly. I said nothing. I couldn’t. There was nothing in me to say. Then he blinked and for a split second my heart caught. He knew! It was right there in his eyes. He knew why I was doing this. He knew it was all a ruse. He knew the kidnappers had set me up.
But then he covered his face for a moment and when he looked at me again, his face was red and he was fuming. I realized with a sinking sensation that I had just imagined it. Wishful thinking.
“You’d better be really sure about this, Reed,” Josh snapped. “Because if this is it, this is really it. You do this right now and I’m done. For good.”
My hands were shaking. My knees quivered beneath me. Every cell in my body cried out for me to take it back. To step into his arms. To let him hold me. I loved him so much, my body was physically revolting against my words. I felt like I was going to throw up, crumble, pass out, die.
But then I saw Noelle in my mind’s eye. Panicked. Bleeding.
Possibly even dying. This was just a breakup, but she really could die. If I didn’t do this, they would kill her.
“Is this what you really want?” Josh demanded.
I looked around at the crowd. It seemed as if the entire school was watching. If the kidnappers wanted public, they were certainly getting public. I saw my friends huddled together—Tiffany, Portia, Rose, Vienna, Kiki, Lorna, Astrid, and Amberly—all of them watching us, gaping, baffled. Only Ivy was alone, off to the side, her expression completely unreadable.
Is this what you wanted?
I thought, glaring at her.
Well, I hope you’re enjoying the show.
I wanted to storm over there, grab her by the hair, and wrest her to the floor. I wanted to make her tell me what she knew. Make her suffer the way Josh and I were both suffering right now. But I was not going to give her the satisfaction of cracking.
Still, I swore to myself at that moment that if she did turn out to be the kidnapper, I was going to make her pay for this. Big-time.
“Yes,” I said firmly, looking Josh in the eye. “This is what I really want.”
Josh’s face was slack. He was nothing but a gray, sagging mask of his former self. After everything I’d put him through, that crap with Dash, the shooting, everything, this was clearly the worst thing I could have done.
I expected him to scream at me one last time. To tell me off. To call me a whore or a bitch or a psycho. Any one of these things would have actually made me feel better.
But instead he simply turned around and walked away.
Right, so, where the hell was Noelle? I’d done everything these jackasses had asked of me. Four assignments set, four assignments complete. Didn’t that mean I’d won? Didn’t that mean I was supposed to get some kind of information on Noelle’s whereabouts? I’d been up all night, sitting straight up on my bed with my phone in my lap, waiting. Waiting for the information on how to save my friend. I’d even changed into jeans and boots and a black sweater, packed an overnight bag, and charged my phone, primed and ready for a trek through the snow or a train trip to Boston or a flight to Siberia. But nothing had come. It was all silence. All night long.
Every once in a while, I found myself staring at the wall between my room and Ivy’s, my jaw clenched, my fingers curled into fists. I couldn’t stop thinking about the expression on her face as she watched me break up with Josh. At first I hadn’t been able to place what it was. I’d been so wrapped up in my own pain, my own regret,
my own despair. But the more I thought about it, the more it looked like . . . satisfaction. Like pride over a job well-done. Like she’d been expecting it to happen, just waiting to revel in the end result.
Josh had insisted Ivy couldn’t be behind this, but had anyone ever suspected that Ariana had killed Thomas? Hadn’t we all been sucked in by Sabine’s innocent act? If I was going on history here, it
had
to be Ivy. Somehow, the people that I thought were my best friends, always turned out to be my worst enemies.
Part of me wanted to bang on the wall. Part of me wanted to just walk in there and shake her, demand to know where Noelle was. But I kept stopping myself. Because what if I was wrong? I didn’t think I’d be able to live with myself.
By three o’clock in the morning I was pissed and pacing my tiny cell of a room. Why had I done all of this? Why had I made Upton fly to France? Why had I risked getting arrested in Sweet Nothings and humiliated myself in front the entire school and broken up with the love of my life?
Why
? For what purpose? Was it just some kind of game to these people? Were they out there somewhere just laughing at me?
Was Ivy sitting in the next room right now, laughing at me?
By five a.m. I was desperate, talking to the phone as if I could make it text me itself. “Come on, you stupid thing. Where is she? Tell me where Noelle is! Just effing tell me!”
Shockingly, that didn’t work.
So now, here I was, sitting in the library, my head heavy, my eyes even heavier, but my heart pounding as if I’d just sprinted a marathon. I had thought that getting out of my room would help. That it
would distract me from my misery and despair, but I was wrong. Sitting at the end of a wide oak table, some history books open in front of me for show, I was just reminded of how low I had sunk. All around me, life went on. Study groups poured over notebooks and projects. Students tapped away at laptops. A couple of girls flipped through the latest gossip magazine, laughing over stars and their cellulite. Over in the corner, Marc and Kiki smooched in a study carrel, pretending no one could see them, all flush and gooey with the stink of new love.
I just wanted to rip my heart out and throw it at them.
Everything was just as it was supposed to be. This was the way Easton Academy had appeared to me in the catalog a year and a half ago. The glossy, autumn-hued catalog that had seduced me into applying, that had practically guaranteed a better life. I had envisioned a world where beautiful people strolled cobblestone paths, debating politics and laughing over the events of the day. I saw huddles of kids hanging out in the library, analyzing poetry, defending their theses, celebrating new discoveries. I had even conjured up images of me and some gorgeous, preppy boyfriend, walking hand in hand after winning our respective soccer games, chasing windblown leaves down the hill as we headed for dinner with our friends at the dining hall.
And maybe I’d had a few of these spare moments since I’d been here, but they had been few and far between. And they had always ended in misery.
Everyone around me was living in the Easton Academy from the catalog. They were living the dream. But me? I was living a nightmare. Over and over and over again. Full of death and near death and
stalking and backstabbing and kidnapping and pain. I just wanted things to be normal. I just wanted all the drama to stop.
I simply wanted my friend back, safe and sound.
And still, my phone was silent on the table. It looked like the nightmare was never going to end.
My hands shook as I held my hands under the steaming hot water in the Pemberly bathroom that night. The water in there had exactly two temperatures: arctic bitter and scalding hot. Tonight was definitely a night for scalding. The temperature outside had dipped well below freezing and the wind chill was in the single digits. Besides, cold water wasn’t exactly going to stop the trembling, which I was more than frantic to stop. It couldn’t be healthy for one’s entire body to be as frenetic as mine had been for the past twenty-four hours.
I dipped my head forward and splashed my face with the hot water. As I stood up straight again, my phone, sitting on the small silver shelf in front of the mirror, beeped. I snatched it and it slipped right out of my wet hand, crashing to the floor.
“Frak!” I said through my teeth.
At that moment, Ivy walked into the room. She took one look at my
dripping face, then grabbed the phone up off the floor and handed it to me.
“You okay?” she asked.
I snatched the phone and took a step back. Was her appearance at that moment just a coincidence? Had she just sent a text about Noelle from the hallway then walked in here to gauge my reaction?
I looked down at the screen. It was a text from Constance. My heart ricocheted off in a whole new direction. Constance was texting me again? It read:
Sry bout U + Josh. Hope everythings ok. X C
I pressed my lips together to keep a whole new wave of emotion at bay. Tossing the phone back on the shelf, I grabbed my towel and dried my face, taking an extra moment to breathe in the Tide-scented softness. When I lowered the towel again, Ivy was staring at me.
“What?” I snapped.
I turned to look at myself in the mirror. Water splotches dotted my Penn State sweatshirt and my skin was the color of pea soup. All of these things with Ivy . . . they couldn’t all be coincidences. They just couldn’t. Standing there with her breathing over my shoulder, my frustration mounted and mounted and mounted, like hot lava rising up inside of me. Any second, I was going to blow.
“Nothing!” Ivy said, clearly offended. She dropped her basket of toiletries on the shelf and turned the water on over the sink next to mine. “Could you be any more on edge?”
“Oh, please,” I blurted. “Don’t give me the innocent act.”
Ivy glanced at me in the mirror. “What are you talking about?”
“I know what you’re doing, Ivy,” I said, shoving my toothbrush and toothpaste back into my own toiletry kit shakily. “And you’re not going to get away with it.”
Ivy turned to look at me, her dark eyes wide. “What am I doing, Reed? Seriously. Tell me. Because if you’re going to suck me into one of your paranoid delusions, I think I have the right to know the details.”
“I’m not paranoid!” I shouted, trembling from head to toe.
“Is this about Josh?” Ivy said, turning off the water. “Because whatever happened between the two of you, I had nothing to do with it. Gage and I are back together, so you can just stop thinking everyone wants what you’ve got.”
“Oh, really? Gage is your new boyfriend now? Not Tattoo Guy?” I demanded, my chest heaving.
Ivy’s eyes narrowed. “What are you, spying on me now?”
“Who needs to spy? You’re the one parading that freak show around campus all the time!”
Ivy took a deep breath and jutted her bottom teeth out for a second, as if she was steeling herself. “Okay, first of all, KC is not a freak show. He’s one of my best friends from home and he’s been hanging around here because his dad is on a permanent bender and he needs me,” she snapped. “And secondly, where do you get off walking around here like the entire world revolves around you? Like you can say anything to anyone and then act like everything’s fine? Well, guess
what, Reed? It’s not fine. You can’t just suddenly start treating me like shit and then expect me to be your friend again the next day.”