“What are you talking about?” he asked with a strained smile. “You can’t—”
“I’m talking about us,” I interrupted. “We’re over.”
The smile dropped away and his face started to grow red. All I wanted to do was grab him and tell him he was right. It was a prank. That it was all going to be fine. I couldn’t bear that I was doing this to him.
“What?” Josh blurted.
Tiffany and West backed up a little, giving us space, as if they thought Josh was going to wrestle me to the ground.
“I can’t … I just can’t be with you anymore,” I said.
From the corner of my eye, I saw someone approaching. I was so surprised to see someone moving toward us rather than away, I must have flinched, because Josh turned around to see what I was looking at. It was Sawyer. He had just emerged from the crowd, and he couldn’t have picked a worse moment. The second Josh saw him he let out a strangled sort of laugh.
“Is this about him?” he asked, his jaw set as he turned to face me again.
“What?” I said, my voice cracking. “No. Sawyer and I are just—”
“Then is it that Upton guy?” Josh demanded. “I saw that note he sent you. Does he always go around calling other guys’ girlfriends ‘beautiful’ and signing his letters ‘love’?”
Actually, yeah, he kind of does, I thought automatically. And how the hell had Josh seen that note? But then my brain remembered I was in kind of an end-of-my-world drama here.
“Josh, I’m sorry. I just—”
“I can’t believe this,” Josh said, glancing around wildly, as if he couldn’t even look at me for a second longer. He pushed both hands into his hair, holding it back with his palms to his temples, as if he were trying to keep his brain from exploding. “You’re not really doing this.”
He dropped his hands again and looked at me imploringly. I said nothing. I couldn’t. There was nothing in me to say. Then he blinked and for a split second my heart caught. He knew! It was right there in his eyes. He knew why I was doing this. He knew it was all a ruse. He knew the kidnappers had set me up.
But then he covered his face for a moment and when he looked at me again, his face was red and he was fuming. I realized with a sinking sensation that I had just imagined it. Wishful thinking.
“You’d better be really sure about this, Reed,” Josh snapped. “Because if this is it, this is really
it. You do this right now and I’m done. For good.”
My hands were shaking. My knees quivered beneath me. Every cell in my body cried out for me to take it back. To step into his arms. To let him hold me. I loved him so much, my body was physically revolting against my words. I felt like I was going to throw up, crumble, pass out, die.
But then I saw Noelle in my mind’s eye. Panicked. Bleeding. Possibly even dying. This was just a breakup, but she really could die. If I didn’t do this, they would kill her.
“Is this what you really want?” Josh demanded.
I looked around at the crowd. It seemed as if the entire school was watching. If the kidnappers wanted public, they were certainly getting public. I saw my friends huddled together—Tiffany, Portia, Rose, Vienna, Kiki, Lorna, Astrid, and Amberly—all of them watching us, gaping, baffled. Only Ivy was alone, off to the side, her expression completely unreadable.
Is this what you wanted? I thought, glaring at her. Well, I hope you’re enjoying the show.
I wanted to storm over there, grab her by the hair, and wrest her to the floor. I wanted to make her tell me what she knew. Make her suffer the way Josh and I were both suffering right now. But I was not going to give her the satisfaction of cracking.
Still, I swore to myself at that moment that if she did turn out to be the kidnapper, I was going to make her pay for this. Big-time.
“Yes,” I said firmly, looking Josh in the eye. “This is what I really want.”
Josh’s face was slack. He was nothing but a gray, sagging mask of his former self. After everything I’d put him through, that crap with Dash, the shooting, everything, this was clearly the worst thing I could have done.
I expected him to scream at me one last time. To tell me off. To call me a whore or a bitch or a psycho. Any one of these things would have actually made me feel better.
But instead he simply turned around and walked away.
Right, so, where the hell was Noelle? I’d done everything these jackasses had asked of me. Four assignments set, four assignments complete. Didn’t that mean I’d won? Didn’t that mean I was supposed to get some kind of information on Noelle’s whereabouts? I’d been up all night, sitting straight up on my bed with my phone in my lap, waiting. Waiting for the information on how to save my friend. I’d even changed into jeans and boots and a black sweater, packed an overnight bag, and charged my phone, primed and ready for a trek through the snow or a train trip to Boston or a flight to Siberia. But nothing had come. It was all silence. All night long.
Every once in a while, I found myself staring at the wall between my room and Ivy’s, my jaw clenched, my fingers curled into fists. I couldn’t stop thinking about the expression on her face as she watched me break up with Josh. At first I hadn’t been able to place what it was. I’d been so wrapped up in my own pain, my own regret, my own despair. But the more I thought about it, the more it looked like … satisfaction. Like pride over a job well-done. Like she’d been expecting it to happen, just waiting to revel in the end result.