I shake my head.
“Stay home today.” She disappears, and I think that’s it. Minutes later I hear the beep of the microwave; Ashley returns with a hot beanbag that smells like lavender. She hands it to me and I press it into my abdomen.
Staying at home isn’t that simple. Ashley stays with me, and even though she swears Paula can manage the café on her own, I feel like shit about it. I fall asleep on the living room couch for a couple hours; when I wake up again, my textbooks and shoulder bag are on the coffee table.
I’m so behind on my work, even though it brings a fresh pang to my gut to admit it. I’m basically a prisoner—Ashley sits at the kitchen island on her laptop so she has a view of the living room—and without any new developments online about Bailey’s case, I really have no other choice but to get started.
I dig out the prompt for my essay due tomorrow; getting down three hundred of the seven-hundred-and-fifty-word minimum is more painful than my uterus imploding. I’m so mired in it that I jump when the doorbell rings around two-thirty.
Ashley leaps up to answer it. I hear Val Diamond’s pleasant, parent-approved voice: Just bringing Kacey some work she missed.
“That’s so thoughtful,” Ashley says. “Why don’t you come in for a hot chocolate?”
I pad into the kitchen, where Val stands awkwardly by the kitchen island, peeling off her gloves. The bizarreness of the scene settles over me: Val Diamond is in my house. Val Diamond, who barely looks at me during Spanish class, brought me my homework.
Ashley starts setting up the kettle on the stove. “Wasn’t that sweet of Val to bring you your homework?” Ashley says. Her smile is tight, though, as she looks me up and down. “Are you feeling better?”
“Not really,” I say. “Do we still have that extra-strength Tylenol?”
I know it’s upstairs, in her bathroom, where all the medication is. Ashley nods. “Keep an eye on the kettle?”
Val’s gaze skitters over me as Ashley ducks out of the kitchen. “I really did bring your Spanish homework.”
“Thanks.” I sit. Val takes the stool across the island from me. She’s actually doing this—staying for hot chocolate.
After a beat of silence, she opens her mouth. “The other day, at the café. I’m sorry Bridget was so rude.”
“Is that why you’re really here? To say sorry for her?” I feel my eyebrows knit together. Bridget being nasty is a day-to-day occurrence and hardly a reason for showing up at my house.
Val’s mouth forms a line. “I just…can’t imagine this being easy for you. I know how Bailey can be.”
She’s dancing around something; I wonder what Val knows. If it’s something bad enough that she felt the need to come here and tell me.
“Look,” I say. “I know that Bailey did some…terrible stuff behind my back.” I can’t bring myself to say the words: She brought my little sister to a frat. Not when I don’t even know how to confront Lauren about the party.
A rattling sound upstairs, as if Ashley couldn’t find the Tylenol and dumped the entire contents of the medicine chest.
“It wasn’t just you,” Val says. “She did the same kind of stuff to me in middle school. We were really close. Like, we had matching outfits when we were little. Then one day she just stopped talking to me and I started hearing people say she was calling me a two-faced bitch.”
Val’s eyes are glassy. I wonder how long she’s been waiting to tell this to someone who would believe her. Val is popular, Val’s best friend is Bridget Gibson—of course you’d look at her and Bailey and assume that Val was the one doing the dropping.
“I’m really sorry,” I say, and I mean it. “I’m sorry I always ignored you just because she did.”
A tear snakes down Val’s cheek. She wipes it away. “I’m not even mad at her anymore, that’s the sad thing. I don’t even believe she wanted to drop me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bailey had so many friends before she met Jade. When Jade moved here, Bay just started discarding them, one by one. I always thought that Jade had something to do with it. Like, if Bailey was hearing rumors about me talking shit about her, Jade was probably the one who started them.”
The kettle starts to whistle on the stove, and I jump up and remove it from the heat. As I turn back around, I catch Val wiping a tear from her cheek.
I hand Val a napkin. She blows her nose. “Sorry. I’m being ridiculous,” she says. “It’s just, I just think you should be careful. About who you trust.”
“You mean Jade.”
Val starts tearing the dry edge of the napkin into strips. And that’s how I know: she didn’t come here to give me some vague warning. She heard something: something she’s afraid to tell me.
“Val. What are people saying?”
Val looks up. “I— Nothing specific. Just…rumors.”
My patience is unspooling. “What kind?”
“About you and Andrew.”
The cramp deep in my belly twists at the suggestion in her voice. I don’t need her to elaborate. “He’s my stepbrother. Who the fuck would say something like that?”
Val looks at me from below her lashes. They’re clumping together, her mascara wet from her earlier tears. “This summer—at senior service day? Bailey kind of said something to me.”
Of course it was Bailey. I feel like a dumbass for even asking. “I didn’t know you guys were talking again.”
“We weren’t,” Val says. “But when we were pulling weeds, we both saw you and Andrew painting the gazebo.” Her face goes red. A flicker of a memory—the way Andrew had swiped paint on my nose with his brush. It makes my toes curl.
Val’s face is apologetic. “Bailey looked at me and was like, ‘Are you supposed to flirt with your stepsister?’?”
I nod, stupidly, like a broken bobble head. “Thanks for telling me, I guess.”
Val’s lips pinch together. “I thought she was just jealous. And then today, I heard people saying you two…you know.”
I’m thankful I’m sitting. Is that what Tyrell was holding back from me the other day—that he’d heard the rumors about Andrew and me? Because accusations like that—me sleeping with my stepbrother—it would be enough to make either one of us want to kill Bailey.
It finally hits me, how stupid it was to leave things off with Jade the way I did. I should have known she’d turn on me—she started turning on me the moment Ellie Knepper told her that I suggested Bailey might have run away.
The floor above us trembles, and Ashley comes into the kitchen, breathless. “There’s only one Tylenol left. You want me to run out and get more?”
I shake my head. When Ashley’s back is turned, Val touches my hand and whispers, “Just be careful, okay? Jade scares me. Both of them scare me.”
Senior Year
November