Blake looked confused. “No! I would never do something like that.”
Alex really wondered where he thought he was drawing a line. An ache had started to
throb in her right temple. That had to mean the Starpower was going to wear off soon.
And she just wanted to get out of here. The house made her skin crawl, as if it had absorbed every sad, sordid thing that had happened within its walls.
She looked down at the phone in her hand, thought of Blake’s girls lined up in their galleries. She wasn’t done just yet.
“Come on,” she said, glancing back down the hall to the open door of the bathroom.
“Where we going?” Blake asked, his lazy grin spreading like a broken yolk.
“We’re going to make a little movie.”
16
Winter
Lauren had given Mercy an Ambien and put her to bed. Alex stayed with her, dozing in
the darkened room, waking in the late evening to Mercy’s snuffling tears.
“The video is gone,” Alex told her, reaching down to clasp her hand.
“I don’t believe you. It can’t just be gone.”
“If it was going to break it would have broken.”
“Maybe he wants to hold it over my head so that I come back and … do things.”
“It’s gone,” said Alex. There was no real way of knowing if Mike’s ritual had worked.
The Full Cup was meant to build momentum, not drain it, but she had to hope.
“Why would he pick me?” Mercy asked again and again, searching for logic, for some
equation that would make this all add up to something she’d said or done. “He could have
any girl he wanted. Why would he do that to me?”
Because he doesn’t want girls that want him. Because he grew weary of desire and developed a taste for causing shame. Alex didn’t know what lived in boys like Blake.
Beautiful boys who should be happy, who wanted for nothing but still found things to take.
When night fell, she climbed down from her bunk and pulled on a sweater and jeans.
“Come to dinner,” she begged Mercy, squatting by their beds to turn on a lamp.
Mercy’s face was puffy from crying. Her hair gleamed in a black slash against the pillow.
She had the same thick, dark, impossible-to-curl hair as Alex.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Mercy, you have to eat.”
Mercy buried her face in her pillow. “I can’t.”
“Mercy.” Alex shook her shoulder. “Mercy, you’re not dropping out of school over
this.”
“I never said I was.”
“You don’t have to say it. I know you’re thinking it.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I do,” said Alex. “I had something like this happen to me back in California. When I
was younger.”
“And it all blew over?”
“No, it sucked. And I kind of let it wreck my life.”
“You seem all right.”
“I’m not. But I feel all right when I’m here with you and Lauren, so no one gets to take
that away.”
Mercy wiped her hand across her nose. “So this is all about you?”
Alex smiled. “Exactly.”
“If anyone says anything—”
“If anyone even looks at you wrong, I’ll take his eye out with a fork.”
Mercy put on jeans and a high-necked sweater to cover her hickeys, the outfit so restrained she almost looked like a stranger. She splashed water on her face and dabbed concealer under her eyes. She still looked pale and her eyes were red, but no one looked
great on a Sunday night in the dead of a New Haven winter.
Alex and Lauren bracketed her, looping their arms through hers as they entered the dining hall. It was noisy as always, filled with the clink of dishes and the warm rise and
fall of conversation, but there were no hiccups in the tide of sound as they entered. Maybe,
just maybe, Mike and Manuscript had succeeded.
They were seated with their trays, Mercy pushing listlessly at her fried cod as Alex guiltily bit into her second cheeseburger, when the laughter started. It was a particular kind of laughter Alex recognized—sneering, too bright, cut short by a hand placed to a mouth