Tessa moved to the settings menu. Her finger skimmed past Mute this time. She eyed the other options. Block, perhaps? Or should she hit Report and call out this Taylor person for abusive language?
Taylor: But if he does exist, I feel sorry for him because you’re kind of a shitty girlfriend.
Tessa’s eyes flew back to the message thread, and the last remnants of oxygen left her lungs. Her mind could barely put together a coherent thought. Really? Like…really though? OK, no. No way. The Report button wasn’t good enough for this creep. With a burst of adrenaline, Tessa leaped to her feet and texted back.
Tessa H: You have no idea who I am or what I’m dealing with!
Taylor: Oh let me guess. Are the cool kids mean to you at school? Boohoo.
Tessa H: For your information, I’m on Twitter a lot because I have a condition called She stopped herself in midsentence. It was none of this loser’s business. Tessa quickly deleted the words from her message bar and wrote something else instead.
Tessa H: You know what? I don’t owe you an explanation. You’re the one with the problem. Maybe you should go take a good long look in the mirror.
Taylor: Hmmm like Eric? He loooooves taking good long looks in the mirror LOL
Tessa’s chest heaved as she sucked in the air, in full fight-or-flight mode now, texting too fast for Taylor to get a word in edgewise.
Tessa H: So according to you, Eric sucks. And I suck. And basically everyone sucks except for you. Do I have that right?
Tessa H: You know there’s a word for that. It’s called projection.
Tessa H: You should look it up sometime.
Tessa H: Or are you too “super busy” attacking random strangers?
She paused after the last message, clutching her chest with outspread fingers as she struggled to catch her breath. The whole exchange had brought to mind a Tumblr quote that she saw once. Tessa liked to save them to her camera roll sometimes—little quotes and sayings she could go back to and recite to herself whenever her anxiety level started to rise. She knew the one she wanted, and she scrolled through the endless sea of Eric Thorn pics to bring it up:
Tessa added the image to her message bar, with her finger poised to fire it back the moment Taylor responded. She stood stock-still, ready to spring, like a sniper waiting for her prey to wander between the crosshairs. The seconds ticked by as she held back.
Silence.
Was it over? Had she won? She had the distinct impression that Taylor had left the conversation. Off to find a new victim, perhaps.
The Tumblr quote still remained, and Tessa hit Send before shutting down her phone: a punctuation mark on the end of her victory.
8
BE KIND. ALWAYS
Tessa lay in her darkened bedroom, staring up at the ceiling. It was almost midnight, but she knew she wouldn’t get much sleep tonight. Her sleep schedule was completely out of whack—one of the lovely side effects of staying cooped up inside twenty-four hours a day. She hadn’t seen the sun in weeks.
Circadian rhythms were the least of her problems though. She’d taken a dose of her anxiety meds, but she still felt the grip of barely suppressed panic weighing on her. She could see the ugly messages every time she closed her eyes, like they were imprinted on the inside of her eyelids.
Taylor: You know what kind of animal Eric Thorn would see, if he ever noticed you existed?
Eric. Eric Thorn. Eric one…Eric two…Eric three…
It was no use. Breathing exercises had their limits. Tessa rolled over in bed and reached for her phone. She knew she shouldn’t look at that DM thread again but, honestly, what difference did it make? She couldn’t stop thinking about it. She’d probably spend the next month dissecting every word.
She should be proud of herself, right? She handled herself well. Someone had come after her, and she’d stood her ground. She’d fought off her attacker. She didn’t turn and flee. Not like she had in June…
Tessa brushed a hand in front of her face to shoo away the memory. She didn’t want to face it. Not yet. Probably not ever. Better to obsess over this Twitter conversation, as awful as it was.
She lowered her eyes to the Tumblr quote that marked the end of the thread. Something about it kept bugging her. Maybe it was those three words at the end:
Be Kind. Always.
Not: Be Kind. Sometimes.
Not: Be kind. Unless the other person is mean to you first.
That was what bothered her most, she realized. Not that she’d been attacked, but that she’d struck back. She’d been so busy defending herself that she hadn’t even stopped to think why the other girl might be coming after her. Everyone you meet is fighting a battle… What kind of battle was Taylor fighting to make her act that way? She might be dealing with mental health issues of her own. Maybe undiagnosed, untreated. Maybe she just needed to talk to someone.
Tessa closed her eyes for a moment, and the panicky tension in her chest loosened its grip. She’d gotten to the bottom of it. She knew what she needed to do.
The DM thread stood open on her phone. With a resolute nod, Tessa entered one more message.
? ? ?
Eric slouched down in the backseat of the limo and rubbed his bleary eyes. The car ride from the poultry farm back to the hotel would take a little over an hour. He should probably grab some extra shut-eye, but he had a feeling that sleep wouldn’t come easy. Not after the hellish day he’d had.
He’d been on edge all day, waiting for his publicists to find out about his morning Twitter escapade. By some miracle, his selfie slipped by them unnoticed. They must have written it off as a fan’s twisted Photoshop edit—no different from the usual crude filth they tweeted about him all day long.
Eric tried to summon some righteous indignation, but he knew it was pointless. He couldn’t blame the sick feeling in his stomach on anyone but himself.
He gazed through the limo window at the darkened landscape passing by, but his mind remained fixed on the topic that had occupied his thoughts all day. Bits and pieces of that DM conversation kept coming back to him. He couldn’t shake the memory or the ever-deepening sense that he’d done wrong.
Eric scrubbed a palm down the length of his face, trying to force his mind onto some less depressing train of thought. Maybe he should call someone, he thought. Maybe his parents? He hadn’t talked to them all week. Maybe it would help, just to hear familiar voices.