Page 97 of While You Were Trending

His eyes crinkle at the edges as he smiles at me. “Okay.”

“Stop laughing.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“You’re smiling.”

“I’m glad you’re breathing.”

“I realize you don’t think this is a problem, but you didn’t grow up being told to do everything from steal an orange from the grocery store to being grounded off camera for refusing to key a car in a parking lot on camera.Someone is setting me up.”

Two thick arms are suddenly around me, my face pressed against a wall of muscle with a solid, beatingthump thump thumpin my ear while a furry body leans so hard on my legs that my knees almost buckle.

“I won’t let anyone set you up,” Declan murmurs. “You didn’t do this. You just found it. It’s okay. You have me, and Mabel, and Cricket, and Dori, and Olivia, and Samantha, and Pip, and Heath. We all know you didn’t steal this.”

“But—”

“We’re your defensive line. No one’s getting through us.”

Flow whines louder and pushes harder on my legs while I realize I needed that reminder to breathe.

“I got arrested once for real,” I whisper. “My mom wanted it to air on the show, but the producers refused. Because I was a minor.”

“You’re not getting arrested today. It’s a donation. Someone wants you to have that.”

“I—I stole a pack of condoms and lube from a pharmacy. The cameras weren’t on me. Ten and Caro were having a fight about candy and I went to another aisle and I was fifteen but very, very sheltered, and I didn’t even know what condoms and lube were. I just knew it looked like something I shouldn’t have.”

He hugs me tighter, and I give up the fight and let Flow push me all the way into him, letting him hold me up.

“I thought—I thought it would be good for ratings for me to show Ten later, but one of the employees saw me and called the cops for real because he knew—he knew who I was. He knew what I did. On camera. That’s when I started to hate the show. When I realized that what we were doing wasn’t normal.”

Declan strokes my back, his grip an iron vise on me. “You deserved a normal childhood.”

“At first, I knew it made me special. But the cops—they scared the fuck out of me. I thought they were going to take me away from my mom and from Ten and Caro, that I’d have to go to jail and my family would travel on to the next town without me, and it was very,veryclear that my family wouldn’t be staying in jail with me. The show’s crew either. I couldn’t understand why the police didn’t see that my mom was right. That it wasn’t real. And that’s when I started to understand that maybe my mom wasn’t right. That she wasn’t right at all.”

“Hard thing to do at fifteen.”

“I was studying societies. How they function. People’s roles. And everything we did—everything we did on the show made mebelieve we were better than everyone else. Except that didn’t fit with my studies. There was no class of society that was supposed to be the class that got away with anything they wanted. Not even for the entertainment of the others.”

My teeth are chattering and my heart is pounding, eyes squeezed shut against the world. “I don’t want to get arrested again,” I whisper. “I don’t want to put my needs above someone else’s if this was a mistake.”

“You trust Mabel?”

“With my life.”

“We’ll take it to her. Tell her what we found. Let her decide what to do.”

A roll of thunder rattles the windows, and rain erupts against the roof.

I shiver harder.

Declan holds me tight.

“I should be on camera,” I whisper. “I should be on camera with all of you. It would be—it would be good for—for?—”

I stop, unable to force myself to say the words.

“Absolutely fucking not,” he growls.