From the middle of nowhere. There's no way you could have said no to her."
I checked his expression for any trace of sarcasm or bitterness, but there was none. To him, this
was just an accepted fact. Girls under Noelle's thumb didn't have the use of their own free will. Did
everyone at this school know that?
"Here it is," James said as a window popped up in the center of the screen.
I leaned in and he hit play and there they were. Marc Alberro, his dark hair slightly longer than it
was today, standing in the center of another common room, while Cheyenne read him the riot act.
Her hair was longer than shoulder length, as it had been last year, and she seemed shorter than I
remembered her. Smaller somehow. She was midsentence when the videographer had started to
capture the scene.
"--think this was going to impress me? Fourteen-in-Fourteen?" she shouted shrilly, tossing half a
dozen pink and red roses at Marc's feet. She crushed them under the toe of her Louboutin boot.
"I've received better presents for Arbor Day."
Marc looked so pale he could have fainted on the spot. Around the room, guys chuckled and
nudged one another. At least two dozen of them sat around on the floor, on chairs and on
couches, watching Marc's misery unfold. They must have been holding some kind of party,
because there were plastic cups and soda bottles everywhere, along with bags of snack food.
"Enough is enough already," Cheyenne said. "I am not interested in you. So you can stop texting
me, you can stop leaving little presents
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for me to find all over the place. I already have a boyfriend. I don't need a stalker, too."
Marc opened his mouth to say something, but all that came out was a loud squeak.
"Sorry for the interruption," Cheyenne said with a nasty smile, glancing around the room. "You can
all get back to your pathetic video game tournament now."
Then she turned and walked out of the room. The videographer zoomed in on Marc's devastated,
humiliated face for a split second--the laughter bubbling up in the background--before the feed
went black. For a long moment I couldn't even move. My brain was ever so slowly processing
everything I had just seen and heard. Stalker? Leaving little presents for her to find? That sounded
eerily familiar.
"Guess you Billings Girls are really into the public breakups, huh?" James said wryly, reaching over