Josh had insisted Ivy couldn’t be behind this, but had anyone ever suspected that Ariana had killed Thomas? Hadn’t we all been sucked in by Sabine’s innocent act? If I was going on history here, it had to be Ivy. Somehow, the people that I thought were my best friends, always turned out to be my worst enemies.
Part of me wanted to bang on the wall. Part of me wanted to just walk in there and shake her, demand to know where Noelle was. But I kept stopping myself. Because what if I was wrong? I didn’t think I’d be able to live with myself.
By three o’clock in the morning I was pissed and pacing my tiny cell of a room. Why had I done all of this? Why had I made Upton fly to France? Why had I risked getting arrested in Sweet Nothings and humiliated myself in front the entire school and broken up with the love of my life? Why? For what purpose? Was it just some kind of game to these people? Were they out there somewhere just laughing at me?
Was Ivy sitting in the next room right now, laughing at me?
By five a.m. I was desperate, talking to the phone as if I could make it text me itself. “Come on, you stupid thing. Where is she? Tell me where Noelle is! Just effing tell me!”
Shockingly, that didn’t work.
So now, here I was, sitting in the library, my head heavy, my eyes even heavier, but my heart pounding as if I’d just sprinted a marathon. I had thought that getting out of my room would help. That it would distract me from my misery and despair, but I was wrong. Sitting at the end of a wide oak table, some history books open in front of me for show, I was just reminded of how low I had sunk. All around me, life went on. Study groups poured over notebooks and projects. Students tapped away at laptops. A couple of girls flipped through the latest gossip magazine, laughing over stars and their cellulite. Over in the corner, Marc and Kiki smooched in a study carrel, pretending no one could see them, all flush and gooey with the stink of new love.
I just wanted to rip my heart out and throw it at them.
Everything was just as it was supposed to be. This was the way Easton Academy had appeared to me in the catalog a year and a half ago. The glossy, autumn-hued catalog that had seduced me into applying, that had practically guaranteed a better life. I had envisioned a world where beautiful people strolled cobblestone paths, debating politics and laughing over the events of the day. I saw huddles of kids hanging out in the library, analyzing poetry, defending their theses, celebrating new discoveries. I had even conjured up images of me and some gorgeous, preppy boyfriend, walking hand in hand after winning our respective soccer games, chasing windblown leaves down the hill as we headed for dinner with our friends at the dining hall.
And maybe I’d had a few of these spare moments since I’d been here, but they had been few and far between. And they had always ended in misery.
Everyone around me was living in the Easton Academy from the catalog. They were living the dream. But me? I was living a nightmare. Over and over and over again. Full of death and near death and stalking and backstabbing and kidnapping and pain. I just wanted things to be normal. I just wanted all the drama to stop.
I simply wanted my friend back, safe and sound.
And still, my phone was silent on the table. It looked like the nightmare was never going to end.
My hands shook as I held my hands under the steaming hot water in the Pemberly bathroom that night. The water in there had exactly two temperatures: arctic bitter and scalding hot. Tonight was definitely a night for scalding. The temperature outside had dipped well below freezing and the wind chill was in the single digits. Besides, cold water wasn’t exactly going to stop the trembling, which I was more than frantic to stop. It couldn’t be healthy for one’s entire body to be as frenetic as mine had been for the past twenty-four hours.
I dipped my head forward and splashed my face with the hot water. As I stood up straight again, my phone, sitting on the small silver shelf in front of the mirror, beeped. I snatched it and it slipped right out of my wet hand, crashing to the floor.
“Frak!” I said through my teeth.
At that moment, Ivy walked into the room. She took one look at my dripping face, then grabbed the phone up off the floor and handed it to me.
“You okay?” she asked.
I snatched the phone and took a step back. Was her appearance at that moment just a coincidence? Had she just sent a text about Noelle from the hallway then walked in here to gauge my reaction?
I looked down at the screen. It was a text from Constance. My heart ricocheted off in a whole new direction. Constance was texting me again? It read:
Sry bout U + Josh. Hope everythings ok. X C
I pressed my lips together to keep a whole new wave of emotion at bay. Tossing the phone back on the shelf, I grabbed my towel and dried my face, taking an extra moment to breathe in the Tide-scented softness. When I lowered the towel again, Ivy was staring at me.
“What?” I snapped.
I turned to look at myself in the mirror. Water splotches dotted my Penn State sweatshirt and my skin was the color of pea soup. All of these things with Ivy … they couldn’t all be coincidences. They just couldn’t. Standing there with her breathing over my shoulder, my frustration mounted and mounted and mounted, like hot lava rising up inside of me. Any second, I was going to blow.
“Nothing!” Ivy said, clearly offended. She dropped her basket of toiletries on the shelf and turned the water on over the sink next to mine. “Could you be any more on edge?”
“Oh, please,” I blurted. “Don’t give me the innocent act.”
Ivy glanced at me in the mirror. “What are you talking about?”
“I know what you’re doing, Ivy,” I said, shoving my toothbrush and toothpaste back into my own toiletry kit shakily. “And you’re not going to get away with it.”
Ivy turned to look at me, her dark eyes wide. “What am I doing, Reed? Seriously. Tell me. Because if you’re going to suck me into one of your paranoid delusions, I think I have the right to know the details.”
“I’m not paranoid!” I shouted, trembling from head to toe.