Sunflower Girl

Chapter Four: CravingChase

Whitmore kissed like he was being watched, even when nobody was.Kayla noticed that about him early on and decided not to mind it.

He was gorgeous in the specific, engineered way of boys whose families paid for orthodontia and personal trainers before puberty even hit — the kind of handsome that photographed well from every angle, which mattered to Kayla more than she liked to admit.

Being with Chase meant something at Westbrook. It meant tables cleared themselves when you walked over. It meant party invites arrived before you asked. It meant, for a few hours at a time, that Kayla Ashford wasn't a girl who ate dinner in silence next to two parents circling divorce like sharks who hadn't decided to attack yet."You're quiet," Chase said, driving her home after a party that Friday, one hand on the wheel and one drifting to her knee.

"Just tired.""You're always tired lately.

"He wasn't wrong. She was tired in a way sleep didn't fix, the kind of tired that lived in her chest instead of her eyes. She looked out the window at the houses blurring by, each one lit up gold and warm from the inside, each one probably hiding something too, though Kayla only ever really believed that about her own."Stay over tonight," Chase said. "My parents are in Aspen till Sunday.

"Kayla had done this before — not slept over exactly, but the version of intimacy that came with being someone's girlfriend at seventeen, someone's arm candy, someone's photographed date to every event that mattered.

She let him kiss her in the driveway before she went inside, let herself lean into it a little too long, chasing the particular numbness that came right after — the few minutes where she didn't think about report cards or slammed doors, where being wanted felt like the same thing as being loved.It wasn't the same thing.

She knew that, somewhere underneath the parts of her that needed it to be true.

She'd started dating Chase the same month her parents had started sleeping in separate rooms, though she'd never connected those two facts out loud, not even to herself. It was easier to think of Chase as a want instead of a need.

Wants were things you chose.

Needs were things that chose you, and admitting to a need meant admitting how much you were missing.Inside, the house was dark except for the kitchen light her mother always left on.

Kayla climbed the stairs and found Sienna's name in her head again, uninvited, the way splinters find their way to the surface days after they go in.

She opened her laptop. Pulled up the group chat with Bree and two other girls, Marissa and Tess — the inner circle, the ones who mattered.*ok but has anyone actually talked to the new girl,

* Tess wrote.

*she's so weird. eats lunch alone in the library every day*

*she probably thinks she's better than everyone bc of the grades thing,*

Marissa added.Kayla's thumbs hovered over the keyboard. She could feel something ugly rising in her chest, something that wanted an outlet, wanted to be someone else's problem instead of her own for one single night.

*she is kind of weird tbh,*

Kayla typed.

*have you seen what she wears*The replies came fast — laughing emojis, agreement, a screenshot someone had saved of Sienna's outfit from the first week.

It felt good, that fast validation, that easy cruelty passed around like a lighter at a bonfire, everyone taking their turn.

It felt good the way picking a scab feels good. Which is to say: not good at all, but impossible to stop once you'd started.

Kayla closed her laptop a little after midnight, chest lighter than it had been all week, and told herself this was nothing.

Girl talk.

Nothing that would actually go anywhere.

She didn't yet understand that cruelty, once it finds a rhythm, rarely stays small. It was already looking for its next beat.