Found in the pool of Elle Whitfields blood

useful

**Billie pov**

*You are going to be very useful to me.*

The words followed me out of that hallway and into every hour since, turning over and over until they'd worn a groove into my skull. Useful. Not *nice to have around*. Not *fun*. Useful — like a tool, like something you keep in a drawer until you need it and forget the second you don't.

I told myself it didn't matter. I told myself a lot of things that week.

Elle found me by my locker two days later, trailing her crew like a comet dragging its tail, and before I could brace myself she'd hooked her fingers around my wrist and pulled me out of the current of students like I weighed nothing at all.

"Come here," she said, already walking, already certain I'd follow. I did. Of course I did.

Reese raised an eyebrow. Ivy lifted her phone like she might document whatever this was. Jared didn't even look up from his own reflection in his locker mirror. Elle didn't explain herself to any of them — she never had to — and when we reached the girls' bathroom at the end of the science hall, she pushed the door open, pulled me in after her, and let it swing shut behind us.

I heard the rest of them peel off down the hallway, their laughter fading, leaving me alone with her and the smell of drugstore perfume and the low buzz of a flickering light overhead.

Elle turned the lock. The click of it was very loud in that small tiled room.

She spun to face me, arms crossing, eyes narrowing like she was studying a stain she couldn't quite place. "People staring at me, I can take," she said. "I was built for it. But that weird little smile you keep giving me — the way you *look* at me like I'm something you're trying to memorize — I can't."

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

"So," she said, tilting her head, hair falling perfectly even though she reached up and adjusted it anyway, like it had dared to be anything less than flawless. "What do you want?"

What did I want. I had rehearsed a hundred versions of an answer to a question I never thought she'd actually ask me, and every single one of them evaporated the second her eyes landed on mine and stayed there.

"I just want—" I started, and then, because there was no version of this where I got to lie to Elle Whitfield's face and survive it, I told her the truth. "I just want to be—"

Before I could finish, her whole expression cracked open into something bright and startled and almost delighted, like I'd handed her the punchline to a joke I didn't know I was telling.

"Are you into girls?"

The question landed somewhere in my chest and just sat there, glowing, and I realized with a kind of horror that I didn't actually know the answer. Not for certain. Not in a way I could say out loud in a locked bathroom to the one girl in this school who made my pulse do something strange every time she looked at me.

"I just want to be friends," I said instead, because it was easier, because it was safer, because some truths you're not ready to hand to someone who might drop them.

Elle looked at me for a long moment. Something behind her eyes shifted — amusement folding into something colder, more assessing, like she'd just recalculated exactly how much of her time I was worth.

"I don't do friends." She said it flatly, reaching into her bag, rifling past lip gloss and a crumpled hall pass until her fingers found something else — a small waxed pouch, powder catching the fluorescent light as she turned it over in her palm like it was nothing, like it was gum. She popped something small and sugar-dusted between her teeth without ceremony, chewing like she was bored. "You're pretty," she added, almost as an afterthought, pointing a finger at me while she tried, visibly, to remember my name and failed. "Just — be you. That's probably enough."

*That's probably enough.* Like being myself was a consolation prize.

She turned for the door, already halfway gone, already back to being the girl who didn't do friends, and something in me — something stupid and desperate and starving for one more second of her attention — reached out and caught her shoulder.

It wasn't hard. It wasn't meant to be anything. But her bag slipped from where it hung loose on her arm and hit the tile floor, and everything inside it scattered across the bathroom like the room itself had decided to expose her.

Lip gloss. A crumpled receipt. A hairbrush.

And bags. Small, clear, carefully weighed bags, each one taped with a tiny paper price tag, handwritten in blue ink. *Molly — $40. Coke — $80.* More of them than I could count in the first frozen second, spilled out across the floor between us like a hand of cards nobody was supposed to see.

I looked up at Elle. Elle looked down at the floor. And for the first time since I'd known her — since I'd worshipped her from three lockers away for three straight years — I watched every ounce of golden, untouchable perfection drain out of her face.

It wasn't just that she used. That wouldn't have surprised anyone; half the school did, quietly, in bathrooms exactly like this one.

It was the price tags.

She wasn't just taking it. She was selling it.

For one long, suspended second, neither of us moved. The overhead light buzzed. Somewhere down the hall, a bell rang for a class neither of us was going to make. And Elle's eyes — usually so warm, so performed, so built for an audience — went cold and flat and still, fixed on me like she was already calculating what I was worth to her now.

Not useful anymore.

Dangerous.

---

The interrogation room didn't have windows. Just four gray walls, a table bolted to the floor, and a detective across from me who looked like he'd learned everything he knew about questioning suspects from a rerun he'd half-watched once, years ago, and never bothered updating.

He had a folder in front of him he hadn't opened. A pen he kept clicking, over and over, like the sound of it might wear me down before his questions did. His eyes crawled over me slow and deliberate, the way you'd look at something you'd already decided was guilty and were just waiting to prove it.

"I'm going to keep this simple," he said, leaning back, arms folding over his chest with the kind of satisfaction that belonged to a man who thought he already knew how this story ended. "Why did you kill Miss Whitfield?"

He said her name like it still meant something in this room. Like it was supposed to make me flinch.

I lifted my head and looked him dead in the eye, and something in me — something that had been cracking quietly since a bathroom floor two weeks ago, since a locked door, since price tags scattered across white tile — finally broke all the way open.

"Why won't I".