Adam: Trust me, he won’t. By the time he gets home, it’ll be 9:30, and the last thing he’s gonna do at 9:30 on a Friday night is check his student emails or college apps. He’ll either call the Princes and invite them over here to hang out, or he’ll go out somewhere.
Me: Probably the first option – he told me he’s going to stay at home in case I need to call him.
Adam: Wow, you must’ve done a really good job at the fake seduction stuff ;) Anyway, I’ll wait until he’s asleep/passed out later, and then I’ll grab the phone from you and sneak it back into his room.
Me: Okay. See you in a few hours.
While I waited for Adam to send the essay, I looked through the rest of Hunter’s phone. At first a sick sensation twisted my stomach, and my skin crawled with the urge to toss it away and never look at it again, because I knew it was wrong to go through other people’s private things.
But this was what I wanted. As well as sending through the fake application to Alton, I was meant to dig for any other dirt I could possibly find. Secrets that could hurt Hunter as much as he’d hurt me over the last month.
He deserved it, didn’t he?
I let my mind cycle through the bad memories from my time in Royal Falls so far; everything Hunter and his nasty pack of bullies had put me through, seemingly for no reason beyond me being a poor scholarship student.
Yes. He deserves this,I told myself, steeling my jaw.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much damning stuff on his phone in the end. Lots of nudes and sexts in his inbox from RFA girls, but no response from him to any of them.
I let out a snort of amusement at that. I couldn’t imagine being so hot and popular that practically everyone threw themselves at me, day in and day out, until I became so jaded that I didn’t even care when my inbox filled with sexy pictures and fawning messages from people who would do anything to be with me.
Must be nice.
I rolled my eyes and kept scrolling through Hunter’s texts. I thought I might find some messages about me, discussing what I’d allegedly done to deserve the blacklist, or at least some bullying-related stuff—where I was, what the next plan to hurt me was, how and when they were going to do it. But there was nothing. Hunter was obviously smart enough to delete any incriminating messages just in case anyone ever happened to gain access to his phone. Like me.
Oh well.The fake early application essay was our trump card, and we had that in the bag.
I was about to exit the texts when I saw that there was a message sitting in the draft folder. Curious, I clicked into it and read it with wide eyes.
It was a message to Lindsay Connery.
In it, Hunter talked about how much he missed her, and how so many things he saw every day reminded him of stuff they did as kids. He mentioned her star-gazing hobby and said he still went up to their rooftop garden sometimes to look at the night sky, because it made him feel like she was there again, sitting next to him with her little telescope and pointing out all the different constellations.
It ended with him saying how sorry he was for his last words to her, and how he wished it never happened. How it tortured him endlessly at night as he lay in bed, remembering everything he said and wishing he could go back in time, pluck those awful words right out of the air, and comfort her instead of hurting her.
A lump appeared in my throat as I read through it. Earlier, I thought Hunter might be a psychopathic monster with zero capacity for emotion or empathy, but it was clear from this message that he was more than capable of profound guilt and sadness. His sister’s death had obviously sheared a massive hole in his world, filling it with cold darkness, and he’d been suffering ever since.
I put the phone down, chest tightening.
As much as I wanted to destroy Hunter, I couldn’t help but feel as if I’d violated him by reading this message. Now the first seeds of doubt were sowing themselves in my mind.
Had Adam, Trina and I gone too far with our plan? Was it really worth hurting Hunter so much when he was clearly in pain already?
I closed my eyes and replayed the memories of what he’d done to me, and then I decided I hadn’t gone too far at all.
In fact, maybe I hadn’t gone far enough. Hunter couldn’t hurt me just because he was hurt. That wasn’t fair.
Ten minutes later, Adam finally sent the essay to Hunter’s student email, and I downloaded it and attached it to his online application on the Alton portal. My finger hovered over the ‘submit’ button for three whole minutes, and then I took a deep breath and hit it.
An automated email appeared in Hunter’s inbox a moment later. Thank you for submitting your early application to Alton University.
I deleted the email along with the fake essay, and then I breathed a sigh of relief and stashed the phone in one of my desk drawers, not wanting to see it again unless I had to.
Adam finally showed up close to midnight.
“All done?” he asked as he stepped into my room.
I nodded as I handed Hunter’s phone to him. “I sent the application in two hours ago.”