“Hey.” I try to keep my smile in check and fail.
Alec stands immediately. I can tell he’s happy to see me from the way his ears go pink.
Adele rises, taking her teacup. “Well, I guess I’ll let you guys catch up. I’m headed back to my apartment.”
I smile gratefully, and she points to another cup on the table. “Chamomile, Bette.”
“Thanks,” I say, then she leaves.
I sit across the coffee table from Alec, who’s still grinning and blushing, although he probably doesn’t realize it. I’m a safe distance, so I can trust myself not to let my hands roam over those familiar shoulders, that buzzed hair. From here I can absorb him without scaring him off.
“How have you been?” he asks, taking a sip, which clearly scalds. He doesn’t drink a lot of tea. “You, uh, you look great.”
Now I’m blushing, which is silly, and makes me feel like we haven’t had a million moments like this. It’s Alec. I’ve known him my whole life. “Thanks. Private ballet lessons. You know how it goes.”
“Yeah, I do.” He looks at me. “So is it okay being back here with—” He nods his head up toward the ceiling where my mother’s bedroom is.
The way he looks at me then, that mix of worry and pity—and maybe, just maybe, still a touch of love—unravels me.
Just like that, I’m crying. All the things I’ve been holding in—the hurt, the loneliness, the stress, the struggle to prove myself innocent, the need to be back at school, the fear that I have no ballet career to start—all of it comes gushing out in a cascade of sobs. He’s only really seen me cry a handful of times. I don’t like showing him this tiny broken piece of me.
He immediately crosses the small space between us and wraps his arms around me.
I inhale his familiar scent and let him just hold me for a few minutes, the tears soaking his new sweater, although he doesn’t complain. He rests his head on top of mine, the weight of it comforting. I could tilt my head up right now and be kissing him in a minute. He tightens his arms around me more. I take it as the answer to my unspoken question. He misses me.
“I was worried about you,” he whispers, so soft, the words landing in my hair. I want to close my eyes and fall asleep there in his arms.
“I missed you.” I sit up.
“So.” He shrugs. “Gigi told me you all settled it.”
The sound of her name stings. “Yeah, it’s over.”
“Does that mean you—”
I stand and move closer to the fireplace. “I didn’t push her, Alec. And I don’t think you’d be here if you really thought I had. I admit to doing some awful things,” I tell him, trying to stop the bleeding before it starts. “Like the lipstick and the naked pictures of us. I wanted to scare her, to psych her out. Honestly, if I thought she deserved to be there—”
His face flashes with emotion—anger, sadness, frustration.
I take a deep breath, trying to find the right words. The words that will make him believe me. Because he has to believe me. “Honestly, I never meant to hurt anyone—not Gigi, and definitely not you.”
He just stares down at the floor, and I can sense I’m quickly losing whatever goodwill he’d managed to build up for me.
“Then why did you do it? And why’d you have Will drop Cassie?”
The question heats me up more than the fireplace at my back. Over the summer, the lawyers asked me this same question a thousand times, and I snapped back with quick answers about how they were just pranks and I didn’t mean anything serious by them. But coming from Alec, it finally has weight.
“I—I—” I stutter, like the words are stuck on the roof of my mouth and I can’t quite scrape them out. The word jealous bubbles up from my stomach, but I’m too proud to say it.
“Why did you do any of it?” He starts to repeat more slowly, like I’m not processing what he’s saying.
I sit back down in the chair next to him. I pull my knees up onto the seat, trying to get comfortable. How do I explain everything to him in a way that might make sense—inside my head and out? I smooth the hair along the sides of my bun, even though no hair is ever out of place.
It’s just Alec. But that’s the problem. It’s Alec.
“I got caught up in it all. I got nervous that I wasn’t good enough anymore. Not in contrast to Gigi or Cassie.” The words sound disgusting out in the air between us.
“So you messed with her, instead of working harder. You—”
He starts to stand up, and I grab his arm—catching a handful of that too-large sweater. He doesn’t pull away, but he doesn’t sit down again either. “Alec, you know me. Do you really think I’m capable of hurting her? I didn’t push Gigi—you know I didn’t. With Cassie, I asked Will to just mess up the lift a little. Not to drop her so hard that she needed surgery. I might not be perfect. But I wouldn’t do something like that. I wouldn’t try to permanently injure someone, and I certainly wouldn’t try to kill them.” I jump up.
“I came over here for answers.” He seems torn—between the lies and the truth, between me and Gigi.
“Alec,” I whisper up to his ear, on my tippy toes. “I’m sorry.” I repeat it until the words become only a rhythm of breaths. I want him to know that I’m still the same Bette and he’s the same Alec.
He shushes me. “Things haven’t been the same at school.”
I pretend he’s said that things haven’t been the same without me.
“It’s all a mess,” he says. “We’re all a mess.”
I can hear the pain in his voice, see the cracks beneath the brave face he’s put on. He pulls away from me, a bit of a blush still warming his cheeks, and sits on the sofa across the way. He looks down at his hands, the ones he just had wrapped around me. “It feels off that you’re not there, Bette. You’ve always been there.”
I walk toward him. Before I can touch him again, though, he gets up and walks straight out of the room. The front door slams a little behind him.
In the hall, my mother’s grandfather clock strikes midnight. I grab my laptop and open my bedroom door. Moonlight pours through the large window across from my mother’s door. I know it’s locked. She’d always made sure neither my sister nor I could get in, not even when lightning rang out or thunderclaps shook our windows, and we wanted to climb into her sprawling king-size bed.
I go into the dining room and turn the lights up just a little. I turn on my laptop and pull up the camera app site, but Gigi’s room is empty and dark. I scroll through the backfeed quickly to see if there’s anything relevant, but it’s just her and Will giggling, or her and Alec kissing—and I don’t want to torture myself with that.
Closing the tab, I open another and search online, typing in the key words—ballerina, ballet, ABC, Gigi Stewart, taxi, accident, SoHo.
Several dozen of those trashy articles pop up—“Ballet School Scandal,” “Killer Competition,” “Bullying Ballerinas Shock ABC Sponsors.” I make sure my eyes don’t zone in on any that could mention my name. Girls from other ballet schools have created get-well memes and pictures for Gigi. A knot hardens in my chest. People love her, now more than ever.