Without pausing, she tells me she’ll put Brendan on the phone to get directions to where I am. They don’t ask any questions. All I hear is the shuffle of her gathering her things in the background.
Once I hang up, I know I can’t just stand here and wait. I feel too awful to stay in one place, but I also don’t want to wander too far from the spot I directed her to. So, instead I pace back and forth along the same couple of blocks over and over until her car finally slows down beside me.
I burst into tears the moment I get in her car and can barely hear her persistent questioning over my sobs. There are a million things I wish I could tell her, but it’s all untrue. I wish I could say I had been drinking or smoking, that I was being irresponsible and having fun. But what actually happened is too heavy to even begin to explain.
“I don’t know what is going on with you lately!” She finally snaps into tears. “I keep trying to give you space and let you figure things out on your own. But you won’t tell me anything! How can I help you?”
“You can’t!” I scream. “That’s the whole problem! You can’t possibly help me!”
“How do you know if you don’t try?” she pushes. “I wasn’t born yesterday, Ophelia. I know things about the world. Probably more than you think. I work in a hospital! I see all kinds of things. Not to mention what I’ve been through myself. Please…Just talk to me.”
I shake my head and look out the window through my tears. “Tell me about you and my dad,” I murmur, needing to say it for myself, but I hope she doesn’t hear.
“What?” she demands. “I didn’t hear you.”
“I can’t talk about it right now,” I finally sob. “Tomorrow, maybe.”
She forces herself to stop hounding me and drives. Once we’re home, she rushes out of the car to wrap me in a long hug the moment I step foot onto the ground from the passenger’s side. Her embrace sends me right back into an eruption of tears. Only one other time have I been so grateful to see our house standing there just a few feet away, and that was when I was finally coming home from the police station after everything happened with Emmett and our fathers.
She doesn’t ask me any more questions as we go in, and instead leaves me be to retreat to my room. I toss and turn in my sleep, dreaming of Emmett’s t-shirt. The way it feels over his hard chest as I cling to it with my fingers. The way it smells like his cologne, sweat, and the salt of his skin. The warmth of him that rests beneath it. I want to bury my face in his shirt again. I don’t want that to be gone forever.
Eventually my dreams fade into a deep sleep. So deep that I sleep through my alarms the next morning.
I catch Brendan in the kitchen when I finally wake up and pull myself together. He drives me to school on his way to work, also not prodding about what happened the night before. I can only assume my mom asked him not to until I was ready to talk about it.
I stop outside the front doors of WJ Prep, feeling that same familiar sense of foreboding as I apprehensively make myself push forward with a deep breath, clutching my bag to my side. I walk into a familiar scene. I’ve already missed first period, but regretfully caught the rush in between classes. Everyone stares and snickers as I pass. They’ve all seen the doctored photo of Malcolm and me. I don’t know if this is better or worse than the time a nude picture of me was printed onto hundreds of flyers and spread around the school.
I keep my head high despite the strange, pitying looks that I have grown used to. The whispers of my name that put me on high alert. I’ve done this walk before. At least this time I know what the offense is. Everyone thinks I’ve fucked Malcolm, and no one knows what to do about it. The hierarchy of things is completely thrown. Before the Elites were taken down, an offense like this would have made me instantly blacklisted. But Emmett hasn’t commanded his old position of power since he came back, and now no one knows how to feel.
As I approach my locker, I don’t notice the strange gleaming substance smeared across its surface until it’s too late. I pull my sticky hand back from the lock and realize the whole thing is slathered in lubricant.
“A girl like you fucking two guys at once could use a little lube,” some random kid jeers as he pushes past, shoving me straight into the sticky surface.
I almost chase after and pounce on him, but my focus turns to getting this stuff washed off of me. I head for the bathroom, laughing to myself as I realize something like this doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it would have before. I guess the joke’s on them. It seems someone took it into their own hands to decide how to handle the news about Malcolm and me. Even without the Elites commanding everyone, it’s still the nature of high schoolers to bully or be bullied. And I guess my crazy life has given everyone more than enough ammunition.
Straightening my back, I hold my head high and breeze past everyone. They’re not the ones I’m worried about. I only have eyes for two people. Emmett, in hopes that I can somehow convince him of the truth, or Malcolm, so that he can help me fix this.
But the day carries on without any sign of either one of them. I don’t see Emmett in the halls or in any of his classes, and Malcolm isn’t in his hiding spot come lunchtime. By my last class, I am crawling in my skin. I had hoped I could have fixed things at some point during school, but it quickly becomes obvious I have no hope of doing so until I can get out of here.
With the ring of the last bell, I fly through the double doors and decide I have to skip practice. As much as I would love to run right now, I can’t focus on anything until I have found some way of making things right. I pull out my phone and call Malcolm.
“Why hello, beautiful,” he says as he answers. I am amazed by how quickly his kind voice has flipped. Now it just sounds creepy and gross to me.
“I need to talk to you,” I huff urgently as I walk to my car. “Are you at home?”
“Yeah…” He yawns. “I played hooky today. I was pretty worn out from last night.”
“I’m coming over,” I insist, hanging up before he has a chance to respond.
It feels good to reunite with my own car again, restore some sense of control. My music blares as I swerve around corners, relishing in the acceleration. It makes me feel like I am doing something. I am taking action, even though the situation with Emmett feels completely hopeless. I speed away from school towards Malcolm’s, losing all sense of how fast I’m going until the flashing blue lights appear behind me just a few miles from his house.
“Shit,” I mutter as I pull over to the side of the road. I’ve never been pulled over before. In fact, the only contact I’ve ever had with the police was when I gave my statement about Thomas Jameson’s claimed suicide.
“License and registration, please,” the officer says as I roll down my window with shaking hands. I nervously mumble something as I dig through my bag to collect everything. “Do you have any idea how fast you were going?”
“I’m so sorry.” I blush. “I’m…I’m late for meeting a friend and I…I just lost track of my speed, I guess,” I offer anxiously as I hand him my information.
“‘Ophelia Lopez’,” he reads off my license. “I know you. You’re Theodore Nickelson’s girl, aren’t you?”
My hand grips and twists the steering wheel, wishing more than anything that wasn’t how people knew me. I am not his girl. I’m my mom’s girl. Brendan’s girl. Theo can’t claim any part of me beyond the role of sperm donor and recent life-ruiner.
“That’s my biological father, yes,” I answer with a tight smile.
“Ah.” He grimaces. “You heard anything from him lately?”
“No,” I lie. “Why?”
His eyes cut into me as he leans over my window. His stare is questioning, like he’s waiting to see if I’ll crack and say more, but I keep my lips clenched tight. Finally, the corners of his mouth turn up in an insincere smile. “Alright, well…this all looks in order,” he says, to my surprise, without even returning to his car to look up my information. “I’ll let you off with a warning. Just be sure to drive slower, okay?”
“Yes, of course, Officer,” I promise urgently, ready to get the hell away from him. “Thank you.”
I am shaking by the time he walks back to his car and watches me drive off. I am on high alert, driving as slowly and carefully as possible, hoping he won’t come after me again.
Great—now on top of everything else, the police seem to still be convinced that I have ties to my father. I worry that sooner or later, it will come out that I met with him recently, making me look guilty of something because I lied about it. I knew that little meeting would come back to bite me in the ass. I should just run and tell the police everything I know about him, but of course I can’t without telling them that Emmett struck a deal to have his father murdered. Also, if the police could be trusted, then this whole ordeal with Bernadette wouldn’t be so complicated.
I have no way of knowing if I can make things right with Emmett. I won’t know until after I talk to Malcolm, but I obviously can’t get there any faster than this. And without him, the only thing I can think to do is call my father and come clean about the cops questioning me about him. I don’t know what he can do to fix it, but if I can’t be honest, then he at least needs to tell me what lie I’m supposed to tell.