I blush a little, and I can’t help but smile even though Dom didn’t talk to me all day. I don’t know if she means as a friend or more, but either is fine with me.
“He’ll come around,” she says. “Just give him a little time.”
THE RUMOR
When I walk into school the next day, everyone is staring at me.
I know I’ve been more paranoid about a lot of things since I lost Layla, afraid that the whole world could turn against me at any moment because my best friend did. That’s why I’m not sure I can trust my heart around Dom. That’s why I don’t always answer Jase’s, Sydney’s, and now Willa’s texts right away—I’m still a bit afraid of letting any of them get too close. But I don’t think I’m hallucinating when I say everyone is staring at me.
I want to think it’s because I’m wearing a new sweater over my uniform shirt. It’s tighter than the things I usually wear, and bright white against my eggshell-brown skin, in sharp opposition to my normal black hoodies. My boobs look great, if I say so myself. And my nails are painted white too, or “Love, Lilly,” as Sydney read off the bottle before letting me borrow it. She said she’d only wear the color in summer but she thought I could pull it off year round. “You need to lighten up,” she’d said. “Figuratively and literally.”
So I try to ignore the looks, or chalk them up to my new clothes, my bright nails. I open my locker like everything is normal.
The truth is, the stares and whispers remind me of the day everything between Layla and me started to go really wrong—when Sloane called me a bitch and Layla didn’t seem to care. And when I get to homeroom, people are still staring, and it’s harder to ignore in a small classroom than it was in the long, wide halls. I notice something else too: Layla and Sloane are sitting side by side again. I never did find out what happened yesterday to briefly pull them apart.
Mr. Yoon takes attendance and when I raise my hand and say “Here,” it feels like the whole room goes silent.
I stare at my book. At my white nails against the pages, which have yellowed with age, and I read the same line of Othello over and over and over:
Men should be what they seem. Men should be what they seem.
Dom is late. He comes in a few minutes after the attendance has been taken, and though I look right at him, he avoids my gaze. He sits a few feet away, despite the open seats on either side of me. I gave him his space all day yesterday, so today I planned to apologize. I wore my cute sweater and painted my nails and hoped it would make me brave. But with everyone staring and him still keeping his distance, I lose my nerve. He doesn’t want to speak to me, just like Layla. I swallow and look down at my desk, pretending to read the words on the pages in front of me, until I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket. When I look down at it, it’s a text from Sydney.
Meet me in the second-floor girls’ bathroom, like NOW.
Why?
I’ll tell you when you get here.
I raise my hand and ask Mr. Yoon for a hall pass, and as soon as he gives me one, I walk quickly to the bathroom to meet Sydney.
I push open the door and she’s pacing, arms crossed, her crazy-curly hair everywhere.
“Holy shit, Cleo,” she says. She doesn’t stop pacing. “Holy freaking shit.”
“What?” I ask.
“Have you noticed anything weird today? Like are people treating you differently?”
I don’t want to talk about everyone staring at me, when yesterday I was invisible. I don’t want to say Yes, of course, how could I have not? I shake my head. Then I kind of shrug and nod, because I’m not sure I want to know why.
Willa bursts into the bathroom a second later. She reaches out and pulls me into a hug and her armful of bangles are cold against my neck. “It’s so awful,” she says. And Sydney gently pulls her away from me.
“I didn’t tell her yet, Will.”
“Tell me what?” I ask, officially freaked all the way out.
“You know what everyone’s saying, right?” Willa whispers, and I instantly feel shaky and all wrong inside. My sweater feels too tight; my nails a little too white.
“No…?”
Willa storms through the bathroom like a whirlwind, knocking all the stalls open, making sure we’re alone. Once she’s confirmed that we are, she crosses her arms like a bouncer at a club and nods at Sydney. I can see that they have the kind of connection Layla and I used to—they can communicate without any words at all. It makes my chest ache in a peculiar and lonely way.
“Someone sent around a text…about your dad,” Sydney says.
I frown. I was expecting it to be something horrible about me: about how I skipped so many days the last two months, or that someone saw my mom riding the train with me, dropping me off like I’m a little kid. I even thought that maybe it would be some lie about me and Dom, since he’s sat at lunch with me a few times and anyone who saw us could have decided to tell the world that we were secretly dating or something worse. But my dad?
“He doesn’t even work here anymore,” I say.
“Yeah, that’s what everyone is talking about. Look, I don’t believe it, okay? I want to make that clear first. I don’t think it’s true.”
“Me either,” Willa says. She rolls her eyes and shakes her head. Her choppy hair swings. “It’s totally ridiculous.”
“Sydney,” I say, stepping closer to her. “You’re freaking me out. What are people saying about my dad?”
She takes a deep breath and nervously flips her hair. She looks down and up and all around. And just before I’m about to scream at her to just tell me, she does.
“They’re saying that the reason he doesn’t work here anymore is because he…” She squeezes her eyes shut. “He hooked up with a student.”
I lose my breath. I blink a half-dozen times. And then Willa is beside me, with her arm wrapped around my shoulder. It feels like the weight of her is the only thing keeping me from splitting apart.
“What?” I ask, and my voice comes out almost as a whisper. “What the hell? Why would anyone say that about him?”
Sydney opens one of her eyes, and I guess I look calm enough because she opens the other and shrugs. “No idea, dude. It’s also kind of weird that’s it’s happening now, right? Almost two months after he quit. Like, if this was going to be a rumor, shouldn’t it have started a long time ago?”
I can’t think straight. I can’t even really see—I’m that unsettled. I push Willa roughly away. I lean against the wall and close my eyes, and I desperately want to scream. At anyone who believes this horrible lie; at Sydney for telling me about it; at the monster who could invent a rumor this cruel. But more than anything, I want to disappear.