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Cole waves this off and refocuses on his laptop.
I shrink back from the open door, trying to calm my anxious heart. Seeing him two days in a row turns my stomach, yanks me back in time. Because now I’m picturing his hands on me, the way he laughed that Monday afterward, morphing what we did into something cheap. Something tawdry, even.
Lucie, though, is cackling into her sweater sleeve, as though we’ve gotten away with something much worse than a vague projector-based threat.
“That was wild,” she says. “I can’t believe we just did that!”
“Yeah,” I say flatly. “Me neither.”
She readjusts her shoulder bag. “I think that was enough espionage for me today. But I’ll see you back at Olmsted later?”
Lucie might be done, but I’m just getting started. When she heads to her freshman seminar, I beat Cole to the Dawg House, where I’ve taped another note to the paper wrapper of the burger he orders.
Bruises aching, head swimming from the Tylenol that wasn’t strong enough, I wait a few booths away from the one he’s sharing with some friends.
ENJOY YOUR LUNCH, CW.
His brow furrows as he reads it, and then he huffs out a laugh. “Some lunatic is fucking stalking me or something,” he says, tossing the note into the center of the table.
“Ex-girlfriend?” one of his friends asks.
“Probably.”
Another guy, someone I vaguely recognize from high school, says, “You gotta stop breaking hearts, man.” And they all laugh.
Apparently, I can’t even do revenge right.
I spend the rest of the afternoon plotting my grand finale, and once Lucie goes to Zeta Kappa, I make my way to the quad for Groundhog Day. A movie that Cole really loves, which I learned yesterday while he and his friends talked too loudly on a UW logo-printed blanket.
What the person operating the projector turns out to really love: cold hard cash.
I’m watching from behind a cherry tree when the words COLE WALKER: 0/10 STARS IN BED, WOULD NOT RECOMMEND appear on-screen, stark white against a black background, the whole crowd erupting into laughter. He can’t possibly ignore this one.
On a picnic blanket a few yards away, his friends nudge him, howling. “You really pissed someone off,” one of them says, and Cole pretends to hide his face before laughing right along with them.
My message disappears, replaced by the movie’s opening credits. A too-peppy song.
I grip the tree so tightly, I’m shocked I don’t snap a branch in half. The fury simmers inside me, filling me up until it boils over. Like hell this is happening.
I march over to where he’s sitting, plant my feet on the fleece blanket. “Cole.”
He swivels his head toward me, a blond curl hanging over one eyebrow. I watch as his face registers the shock. “… Barrett? What are you—”
“I need to talk to you.”
“I’m kind of in the middle of something,” he says as Bill Murray reports the weather.
“This is important,” I say, and there must be something in the timbre of my voice that convinces him to get up. I keep a good half-dozen feet between us as he follows me to the other side of the quad, toward Red Square, not loving the idea of sharing so much physical space with him.
I hug my sweater, his eyes growing wide as they track my hands. “Holy shit. Are you preg—”
“No.” Deep breaths. No consequences. I can’t meet his gaze, not when the way he hovered over me is playing over and over and over inside my head. So instead I focus on the tip of his left ear. “I need to talk to you. About what happened. After—after prom.”
“You’re still hung up about that?” When he folds his arms over his chest, I don’t understand how it makes him seem bigger. I’m doing the same thing, and yet in this moment I feel microscopic.
It’s almost funny, the way Cole and a weeks-ago Lucie have been so dismissive about high school being so long ago. I thought I was eager to leave it all behind too, and yet it’s so etched in my memory that it’s impossible to move on.
The lingering pain from the car accident mixes with the static electricity in my brain, and the force of it is so intense, I feel myself start to sway. Hands clenching at my sides, breath uneven. This might be my only chance. The only time I have the courage to confront him, when everything in me is screaming to run.
