Found in the pool of Elle Whitfields blood

**Billie pov** The tile was cold beneath me, but I didn't feel it. Not really. Not with Elle lying there, three feet away, her dark hair fanned out like she'd arranged it herself for some photoshoot she'd never wake up to see. Even dead, she was hot. Sexy. Untouchable. That was the cruel joke of it — that Elle Whitfield could die on a hallway floor in her graduation gown and still look like something out of a magazine, while I sat beside her, still, silent, doing nothing at all. I don't remember how long I'd been there. I don't remember deciding to sit down. I only remember the quiet — how loud it was — and the way I couldn't make myself move, couldn't make myself scream, couldn't make myself do a single thing a normal person would do. Then the doors burst open, and the world became sirens. Red and blue light sliced through the hallway windows, stuttering across the walls like a heartbeat that wasn't mine. I heard boots. Radios crackling. Someone's voice, sharp and official, telling me to step back, then telling me to *stay right there*, and I realized — slowly, the way you realize you're dreaming — that they weren't talking to a witness. They were talking to a suspect. "Hands where I can see them." I lifted my hands. They were shaking. There was blood on them — hers, not mine — and I watched the officer's eyes catch on that detail and harden. I didn't explain. I didn't defend myself. I just let them look. The cuffs were cold. Colder than the tile. They clicked shut around my wrists with a sound so final I felt it in my teeth, and I let them pull me up because my legs didn't seem to belong to me anymore. Everything about me had stopped being mine the moment I wanted to be one of them. Outside, the morning had turned into a circus. Graduation day. The whole school had been standing on that lawn twenty minutes ago, gowns and flowers and parents crying happy tears. Now it was ambulance lights and police tape, students filming with their phones held high like this was content, like this was a story they'd tell at parties for years — *I was there the day Elle Whitfield died.* Parents pressed against the barricade, hands over their mouths, whispering to each other in that particular tone people use when they're horrified but also, secretly, thrilled to be close to it. I scanned the crowd for a face that might be looking for me. A parent. A guardian. Anyone. There was no one. There had never been anyone. That was sort of the whole tragedy of my life, wasn't it — even now, cuffed and dragged out into the worst moment I would ever live through, I was still, completely, alone. Then I heard him. "What did you do to her." Jared's voice cracked down the middle, grief and rage fused into something that didn't sound human anymore. He broke through the line of onlookers, eyes wild, chest heaving, and for one long second I thought he might actually get his hands on me before the officers closed around him. "Look at me. *Look at me.* What did you do." The cameras loved that. Phones swiveled toward him, toward me, toward the two of us like we were the final act of a play everyone had paid to see. I kept my face still. I didn't know how else to survive it except to go somewhere very far away inside myself and watch it happen to a girl who only looked like me. They walked me to the car with a hand on top of my head, folding me into the back seat like I was already something less than human. And as the door shut and the sirens dropped to a low, mournful whine, I turned and looked back through the window. They were all watching. Every single one of them — the girls who'd never learned my name, the boys who looked through me in hallways, the teachers who'd only ever seen me as the scholarship kid who didn't quite fit the uniform right. All of them, finally, looking at me. I almost laughed. It bubbled up dark and wrong in my chest. *This* was how God decided to answer me. Every night since freshman year I had prayed, quietly, pathetically, to be noticed. And here it was. Every eye in that crowd, finally, on me. Handcuffed. Accused. Alone. Careful what you pray for, I thought, and looked away. --- The police station smelled like burnt coffee and old paper. They walked me through the bullpen with my wrists still cuffed in front of me, and I kept my eyes on the floor because I couldn't stand to see the way people looked at me — like I was already guilty, like the verdict had been decided somewhere between the hallway and the parking lot. That was when I saw him. A stranger. A man near the front desk, mid-thirties maybe, in a suit that had seen better years, filing some complaint that no one behind the counter seemed interested in. He had the tired, worn-down look of someone used to being ignored. But when the door burst open and they brought me through — cuffed, disheveled, streaked with mascara and someone else's blood — he stopped talking mid-sentence. He stared. Not with judgment. Not with the hunger of the cameras outside. Just stared, like he was trying to work something out, like a piece of a puzzle had landed in front of him that didn't fit the picture everyone else had already drawn. He didn't ask my name. Nobody did. I was just the girl in cuffs, the one they were already calling a killer before I'd said a single word in my own defense — and something about the way he watched me disappear through that door made me feel, for one strange second, like maybe somebody in this building didn't already have their mind made up. Then they pulled me through, and he was gone from view. I had no idea yet how much that would matter. --- *Two weeks earlier.* The front doors of Westbrook Academy burst open the way they always did at 7:45 — a flood of noise and perfume and laughter, Elle Whitfield walking through the center of it like the hallway had been built specifically to frame her. She had that effect on people. The whole school seemed to hold its breath a little when she walked in, the way a room does when someone important arrives. Her friends flanked her — Reese with her sharp tongue, Ivy with her camera always half-raised, and Jared trailing behind with his letterman jacket and easy grin — and together they moved like something out of a film, golden and untouchable. I was already at my usual spot by the vending machine, invisible the way I always was, when I saw the opening. Elle liked her mango juice from the café down the block, and I'd learned — because I noticed everything about her, the way you notice everything about a person you're desperate to matter to — that she never had time to grab it herself before first period. I'd bought two that morning. Told myself it was a coincidence. It wasn't. I stepped forward before I could talk myself out of it, holding the bottle out like an offering, my heart slamming so hard I thought she'd hear it. "Good morning," I said, my whole face arranged into the brightest smile I owned. "What can I do for you today?" Elle turned. Her eyes found mine — really found them, for maybe the first time in three years of sharing hallways — and something flickered behind that perfect face. Something that wasn't quite a smile. "You," she said slowly, like she was only just now deciding I existed, "are going to be very useful to me." I didn't know it yet, but that sentence was the beginning of the end of my life as I knew it.