Eric and Jessica had their backs to me. They didn’t notice as I weaved between people by the packed concession stands. Instinct had me pulling my phone out of my back pocket. I wasn’t close enough to hear them yet, but I started recording anyway. They veered to the right, toward the games on the midway. Maybe they planned on setting up a camera or meeting up with a news crew early? But they passed right by the milk jug toss, and there were no cameras, no one who looked like a reporter or blogger, and no one who took any interest in Eric and Jessica. Huh.
Still, I kept pace with them, far enough back so they wouldn’t see me, until they got to the end of the games row.
When they turned and went behind the tents, I crept to the side. The air vents and generators masked my steps, but they also made it hard to hear. I risked peeking around the corner, where they had their backs to me, both looking down. I held my phone, still recording, and thanks to all the background noise, they had no idea.
“Are you sure she’s even going to show?” Jessica asked.
“If she doesn’t come by 2:05, text this to her,” Eric said. They must’ve had their heads bent to look at his phone. I couldn’t see what it was she was supposed to text me. “I’ll send you the picture and her number. She has me blocked, so I can’t do it.”
“I’m worried this is going to make things worse for us,” Jessica said.
“It can’t get any worse.” The bite in Eric’s voice nearly made me take a step back. “Listen, I just need to see her, and I can get her back on track. I had Macy eating out of my hand before; I can do it again.”
“If I threaten her though?” Jessica’s voice got lower, and I chanced another step closer to make sure my phone picked up every word. “People already hate us. If she posts that text—”
“Don’t text anything but the pictures,” Eric said. “What is she going to do with those?”
My blood boiled, making the very air around me hot and tight. I’d heard enough. I didn’t even care whether I had enough ammunition recorded. This was going to end now.
“Aren’t you two just the cozy couple?” My voice had gone as soft as death. “What pictures are you planning to share without my consent this time?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
JESSICA AND ERIC SPUN around, both with their eyes bulging in a cartoonish way.
“We’re not a couple,” Jessica sputtered. “He’s young enough to be my son.” Which hadn’t stopped her from adding a bunch of heart-eye emojis to his shirtless picture. “We’re friends, and we’re both here to see you.”
“Macy, you’re a little early.” Eric smiled, smoothly transitioning into game mode, like he hadn’t just been plotting to threaten me. “I’ve really missed you.”
“You can drop the act,” I said. “I have you blocked. This isn’t a happy reunion.”
Eric’s earnest expression flipped to vicious in an instant, like he could turn his looks on and off at will. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to us?”
It hit me then, how little I knew about Eric outside his interest in baseball. I had no idea about his state of mind or what he could be capable of. He was just some guy I’d sat next to at a baseball game. If he’d bought his ticket a day later, maybe he would’ve had a different seat. If Jessica had possessed a shred of decency, she wouldn’t have tweeted those pictures. The three of us didn’t belong in each other’s orbits, but here we were, and the collision was about to get ugly.
“There is no us. Please tell me you haven’t become that delusional,” I said.
“Not you and me. I mean us.” Eric pointed between him and Jessica. “Ever since you deleted your tweets and videos, we’ve been going through hell. The entire Internet thinks I did something to you to make you shut down our interactions, and Jessica is being dragged harder than ever for creating that thread. We’re both getting death threats.”
“Spare me your tears,” I said. “Where were either of you when I got dragged for supposedly having sex in a bathroom? When strangers showed up at my house?”
Eric narrowed his eyes. “I set the record straight on that. Twice.”
“How much later?” I asked. Eric looked away, dismissing me completely. “That’s exactly what I thought.” I turned to Jessica. “Are you proud of all this? Did you feel good when you followed us to the bathroom after you encouraged us to go together? Did those likes and retweets fill that empty place where your soul should be? Why did you do it?”
Jessica’s lip trembled. “I didn’t mean for it to get so out of hand. At first I just meant to take that picture of you spilling your food and drink on him for laughs, but then I saw the way you looked at him when he took off his shirt, and—”
I held up my hand to cut her off. “Don’t you dare put this on me. Back up and think really hard about how you want to frame this story.”
“I screwed up, okay?” Her nostrils flared slightly. “I thought it would be a cute and fun thread, and I thought blurring out your faces would keep you anonymous. I was wrong.”
“When did you decide you were wrong?” I asked. “Just now? When Twitter turned on you? At any point when you took pictures of strangers and lied about them?”
Jessica opened her mouth and Eric put a hand on her shoulder to stop her. “We can go around and around on this all day,” he said. “It’s not like you’re innocent either. We all got caught up in the fame game and we lost. We just want you to help us make it right. If you log back onto Twitter, say things are going great with us, you’re not mad at Jessica, you’re just more of a private person and that’s why you deleted everything, this will all go away.”
“You can’t be serious.” Every single tweet I’d read in a cold sweat in the middle of the night boiled inside me. “I’m not doing either of you any favors.”
“I told everyone we didn’t have sex in the bathroom so they’d leave you alone,” he said. “Why can’t you do this so they stop harassing me?”
“Because I didn’t have sex with you in the bathroom!” I threw my hands in the air, careful to keep my grip on my phone. “You don’t get a fucking cookie for telling the truth.”
“We don’t want to start the Baseball Babe stuff again,” Jessica said. “We just want it to die. If you make it clear that you’re not a victim, then people will stop treating us like perpetrators and it ends there.”
“I’m not doing it.” I held my phone tighter, praying it was still recording, and that Eric and Jessica could be heard over the generators. “You made your bed. Lie in it.”
“Macy, please. We need you.” Eric switched back to sad dog. He had so many masks, I had no idea which was real. Forget blogging. He really should’ve gone into acting.
He reached for my hand. It happened so fast, I barely had time to flinch away from him.
Paxton stepped up beside me. Rage rolled off him like a relentless summer storm. He grabbed Eric’s wrist, and Eric’s fear tinged the air as he tried to yank his arm away.