He Said He Didn't Want Me

The first time I saw the thread, I was sitting cross-legged on Grant Hollis's bed with his laptop balanced on my knees. He was in the shower, water hammering the tile, and his phone kept lighting up on the nightstand. Not messages. Notifications. Aldercrest Confessions, the anonymous account that had gotten half our grade suspended last spring. I didn't read them. I'd never been the girlfriend who went through his phone. That was one of the reasons he stayed with me longer than three months, or so I told myself. The screen went dark. Then it lit again. Two hundred and forty likes. Three hundred and ten. The numbers climbed while I watched, and something ugly turned over in my chest. I picked up the phone. No lock code, because Grant never thought anyone would dare. The post was a photograph, badly lit, of a girl stepping off a train in a cream coat, her hair the kind of blond that costs money twice a year. I knew her face before I read the caption. Everyone at Aldercrest knew that face. Sloane Ramsey. Grant's first. Grant's always. The caption read: The queen returns. How long until Hollis drops the seat-filler? I set the phone down exactly the way I'd found it. The shower stopped. Grant came out with a towel low on his hips and his hair dripping onto his shoulders, and he looked at me with that lazy half-smile that had made me forget my own name for nine months. "You okay?" he said. "You look like you saw a ghost." "Just tired." I handed him back his phone. "History paper." He kissed my forehead and didn't look at the screen. If he had, he would have seen the post. He would have seen that I'd seen it. Instead he dropped the phone into his gym bag and pulled on a shirt, and I sat there trying to remember how it felt to be the girl who wasn't worried. The bonfire was that Friday. Aldercrest sits on a bluff above a town called Marlow Bay, all stone and ivy and tuition that would buy a small house. The bonfire was the unofficial start of fall term, held on the beach below the bluff, and everyone came, even the kids who pretended they were above it. I went with my roommate Priya, and we'd barely stepped onto the sand before I felt it. The way people looked at me and then away. Priya noticed too. She squeezed my elbow. "Don't." "Don't what?" "Don't do the thing where you pretend you're fine and then go cry in the car." "I'm not going to cry. He's been with me nine months. Nine. That's three times his record." "Record," Priya repeated, and made a face. "You sound like you're talking about a swim meet." She had a point. Grant was by the fire, laughing at something Tyler Brandt had said, his profile cut gold by the flames. He was beautiful in a way that made people forgive him things he hadn't apologized for. When he saw me, his face did the thing it always did, that slow softening, like he was genuinely happy I existed. I'd built nine months on that look. Then Sloane Ramsey walked down the path to the beach. I watched him see her. It was fast, maybe half a second, but it was enough. His laugh cut off. His whole body turned, the way a plant turns toward light. She didn't come to him. She went to the drinks table and stood there laughing with Colby Vance, and Grant watched her do it, and I stood ten feet away pretending I couldn't see what I was seeing. Priya whispered, "You want to leave?" "No," I said. "I want to stay." I walked over to Grant and slid my arm around his waist. He didn't flinch. That was the thing about him. He never flinched where people could see. He pulled me close and kissed my hair and said, "There you are." "Here I am," I said. Sloane looked over at us then, the way you look at a pair of shoes you're considering buying, and smiled at me with her whole mouth. I smiled back. I was raised by a mother who taught me that losing your temper in public is how you lose everything on the back end. So I smiled, and I held on to Grant, and I told myself the thread was wrong. When I got back to my dorm, I opened the Confessions account again. There were two new posts. The first was a screenshot of an old photo: Grant and Sloane at a summer party two years ago, her head tipped back laughing, his hand on her hip. The second was a single line, no image, four hundred likes. Nine months is nine months too long. He's cleaning house before Thanksgiving. I put the phone face-down on my desk and stared at the wall. My mother's voice in my head, calm as a doctor's: Keep your face. Keep your face. But my mother had never been dumped on a river bluff in front of two hundred people by a boy whose white shirt still smelled like my shampoo. The next morning, I walked into the dining hall and the room went quiet for a beat before it filled back up with noise. I got my coffee. I sat down with Priya. I did not look at Grant's table, where he was sitting with Tyler and Colby and, two seats down, Sloane Ramsey, who had somehow already become part of the scenery. Priya leaned in. "You're not eating." "I ate." "You're not." I put a piece of toast in my mouth and chewed. Across the room, Grant laughed at something, and I felt the sound land in my chest like a stone. Then he looked up, found me across the room, and raised his coffee cup in a little salute, as if nothing had changed. As if he hadn't spent last night watching another girl from across a fire. I raised my cup back. I could feel Priya watching me. "You're going to handle this, aren't you," she said. It wasn't a question. "The way I handle everything," I said. "Quietly." But quietly didn't mean doing nothing. I went to the library after breakfast and opened my laptop. I had a scholarship file, a mother who worked doubles at the hospital in Marlow Bay, and a boyfriend whose family had owned half the waterfront since before the town had a name. I had exactly one advantage. I knew how to read people, and I knew how Grant Hollis worked. I had spent nine months learning how he looked when he was happy, when he was tired, when he was lying. Learning that hadn't been love, not entirely. It had been insurance. I opened a document and began, for the first time in nine months, to make a list of everything I knew about Grant Hollis that he didn't think anyone knew. I was on my third item when my phone buzzed. Grant: Where are you? Grant: Library? That's depressing on a Saturday. Grant: Come over. I want to see you. I looked at the messages for a long moment. Then I typed, with my mother's calm voice in my head and a cold little fire in my chest: Me: I'm coming. I closed the laptop. My hand was steady. That was the first sign, though I didn't know it yet, that this was not going to be a story about a girl crying on a beach.