Tossing away the rest is like a pitchfork to the heart.
It doesn’t get better from there. It turns out that Sugar Voss has made an impression on my friends. Everyone is pissed at me. The Playthings. The Devils. I’m met with cold shoulders and hot glares everywhere I turn. If I thought my boys would have my back, then I’m just shy of being mistaken. Unlike the Playthings, they don’t look like they want to rip my balls off.
They also don’t look like they want to defend me much, either.
And they shouldn’t, is the thing. It hurts, having to cast them all aside—knowing if I didn’t, they’d do it for me. But knowing that Sugar’s carved herself out a place here, has inspired their loyalty after only a few months…
I’m glad she has that.
She deserves it more than I do, anyway.
Even Dr. Ross, who I swear knows more about the inner workings of teenage drama than she’d ever admit, gives me a dark look when I enter the classroom the next morning.
Sugar’s already in her seat, and I’d been preparing myself for this all night—if getting wasted in my room again can count as preparing—but it’s still like feeling a knife buried into my chest, just seeing her sitting there. Without a word, I walk down the aisle, passing her desk, and drop heavily into my own.
She jumps at the sound of my seat squeaking on the floor, but visibly clenches tight, pitching forward.
The whole class is like that.
I still get all these wild, nagging impulses to reach for her hair. I’ve spent the last couple weeks playing with it in class, even having halfway learned to do a braid while Elana looked on, snickering at how lumpy and twisted it looked.
My knee bounces throughout the lecture, and I wish I could just get all these hard parts over with. Seeing each other in classes, the halls, pretending like we aren’t both being singed from the inside out.
Sugar begins packing her bag long before the bell rings, and when it does, she’s out of her seat like a bolt of lightning, not even waiting for the other girls at the door. I take my time, listlessly shoving my shit into my bag and sliding from my chair.
Reyn doesn’t even wait around for me.
The rest of the week goes like that. I go to class, people glare at me, Sugar avoids me, I eat lunch with the lacrosse team, I go back to my dorm and get drunk until three in the morning, when I finally manage to nod off to sleep, only to wake four hours later and do it all over again.
On Friday, I’m on my way to lunch, cutting through the Arts wing, when I pass the weekly art exhibit. The twins are adjusting a piece on the display, bickering and huffing like they always do. I slow my roll, because let’s face it, it’s been a hard few days, and getting a little love from my biggest fans would help a lot. I stop to inspect the photo being hung—a closed eye covered in glittery eyeshadow and thick, rainbow-colored eyelashes.
“It needs to go up on the right,” Micha says, hands on his hips. Michaela shifts the frame up and down. “Nope, too high. Now it’s too low.” He throws his hands up. “I’ll just do it myself.”
“I can adjust a frame,” Michaela snipes, rolling her eyes at her brother.
The move forces her to look over his head, locking eyes with me. I give her a grin, expecting a smile in return, maybe a little blushing, but instead I get a hard glare.
“I think it looks great,” I try, digging my hands into my pockets. “Who took this? Michaela?”
“Oh,” Micha says, whipping around, eyes narrowing, “it’s you.”
“Yep. Just admiring your work.”
The twins exchange a knowing look, then turn back to the frame.
“Do you need any help?” I reluctantly ask.
“No, we’re all good,” Micha says, waving his hand at me dismissively.
Awkwardly, I reply, “Okay, cool. Well, I think the photo looks great—whoever took it.” Neither of them look at me, and I think maybe for the first time in my life, I’ve been rejected by a freshman. That didn’t even happen to me when I was a freshman.
Ouch.
“Well, good luck with the exhibit. I know you guys worked hard on it.”
“Mmhmm,” Michaela says, using her thumb to adjust the picture again.
Clearly not getting anything out of those two, I start to walk off.
But then Micha calls, “Hey!”
I turn. “Yeah?”
“I thought you were different from your brother,” he says, lips pressed into a tight line, “but I guess I was wrong.”
Double ouch.
I continue on my way, letting the insult settle around my shoulders. I never thought I was like Heston. The idea was laughable. But the school, the Devils, even the twins all think I’m a manipulative asshole who’ll do anything to get in a girl’s pants and then break her heart.
Maybe I’m a better actor than I thought.
Resigned to another night of getting shitfaced alone in my room, I enter the dining hall and grab a tray. I pretend I don’t feel the laser beams on my back as I carry it across the room and sit with the other guys on the lacrosse team. I keep acting like the food I’m shoveling in my mouth doesn’t taste like ash, and the wise-cracking jokes I share with the guys aren’t a cover-up for the fact I feel like shit.
And I know Sugar’s not feeling great. Every time I manage a passing glance in the hallways, in Dr. Ross’s class, I can clearly see she looks like hell. It’s not just the purple smudges under her eyes or the fact I haven’t seen her smile in days. It’s in her hunched, defeated shoulders, and the way she sits with an empty chair between her and the others. It’s how she wraps her arms around her body and keeps her hair loose, using it to shield her face.
It’s in the way that, when she sits in front of me in Dr. Ross’s class, she tries to make herself disappear. That wall I broke down is firmly back in place, but this time even more fragile than before. I thought when I punched her that night, when I heard her scream, it was the worst thing I’d ever seen or heard.
I was wrong.
This? The silence?
It’s so much fucking worse.
I want her to fight back. Kick me in the balls. Shove that knife in my heart and end me.
“Fuck,” Michael Watts says, looking at his phone. “Coach added an extra scrimmage tonight.”
Peter Norton groans. “My arms are still sore from yesterday.”
The guys start bitching, but the screech of a chair dragging on the cafeteria floor, and then a figure dropping into the empty seat next to Sugar, draws my attention to the Devils' lunch table. Carlton eases himself in the chair and gives Sugar a small grin.
My first response is what the fuck? My second is to sit back and watch Sugar pull out her blade and castrate him in front of the room. He leans into her and says something way too low to hear. I wait for her to tell him to fuck off.
She doesn’t.
She ducks her head for a moment but then grins at him. She fucking grins. And then she nods her head in approval of whatever it is that asshat is saying. Since when does Carlton say anything worth smiling over?
For the first time in days, something penetrates this shell of gnarled numbness I’ve become, and I barely even think about what I’m doing. I push back my chair, plotting the ways I’m going to make him pay for even looking at my—