Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

if i can’t have you, no one should

Outside the school auditorium, Nate tells her it’s over and it feels like her world is imploding.

Lexi has ruined everything. Her stupid play and need for attention has destroyed the one thing that really mattered in Cassie’s life, the one thing she had left. Maybe this was Lexi’s plan all along — maybe she had become so jealous of her that she wanted to ruin the happiness Cassie had found with Nate.

Because she was happy. She really was.

Nate takes care of things, takes control. When she’s with him, she doesn’t have to worry or fret or really think about anything. She doesn’t need to worry about Maddy and her other friends not speaking to her, or the fact that her grades are abysmal because of the stress she’s experienced this year. She doesn’t even need to think about what she’s going to wear to school the next day. He’ll handle everything for her.

But now it’s over. A pile of her clothes and belongings on his front lawn when she walks to his house and a front door locked shut so she can’t get inside.

The look on her mother’s face when she returns home makes Cassie want to scream. There’s been a near-constant rage simmering inside of her since she left the play and it threatens to reach its boiling point when she witnesses the pitying, closed-lipped smile Suze gives her.

“I’m not staying in that room with her,” she spits as she tosses her duffel bag onto the hallway floor, clothes spilling out.

Her mother rolls her eyes. “Then you’re sleeping on the couch.”

It infuriates Cassie that despite everything Lexi has done — how much she has humiliated her — she’s the one sleeping on the couch. But Cassie can’t argue with her mother; she has nowhere else to go right now.

“Fine,” she snaps, and stomps upstairs to the bathroom to shower and scrub away the blood and tears that have dried on her face.

-

He reels her back in and it’s embarrassing, how easily she falls back into his orbit.

I miss you, his text reads. Meet me at the Motel 6 tonight at 7.

In the weeks following the play, she’s been sleeping in the den, holed up in the room and as far away from her sister as she can be. So it’s easy for her to sneak out to meet Nate without her mother noticing.

When she arrives, he’s waiting for her inside the room he’s rented, an entirely neutral expression on his face when he opens the door.

“I’m sorry,” she immediately blurts out. Tears fill her eyes as her bottom lip wobbles. “I’m so, so sorry. I had no idea she—”

“Shhh.” He shushes her softly, his large palms reaching up to cup her face. “We’re not talking about that right now.”

He kisses her, his tall frame dipping down to meet her lips with his. And then he’s dragging her inside and pulling her clothes off and pushing her down onto the bed, her face pressed into the scratchy motel sheets.

It feels like love, she thinks, as he fucks into her, his palm pressed to the back of her head. This is how he shows his love.

-

There’s a voice, in the back of Cassie’s head, that tells her that he’s using her. But there’s another voice, larger and louder, that tells her she’s wrong and that Nate doesn’t do anything he doesn’t really want to do. So he must want her.

He texts her almost every other day, asking to meet, and that counts for something.

They don’t talk at school. He passes her in the hall and it’s like she doesn’t exist, his eyes focused straight ahead as his body brushes past her. It feels like those early days, when they were sneaking around and Cassie was waking up at 5 a.m. to groom herself for him. She’s still waking up early, but now it’s because she can’t sleep, her anxiety never allowing her to get a good night’s rest.

School is lonely. She doesn’t have any friends, nobody to talk to. The cheerleading squad kicked her out on the Monday following the play. She goes to class and hardly pays attention, and spends lunch locked in a bathroom stall, scrolling through her phone.

But she doesn’t cry. She won’t give anyone the satisfaction of seeing her cry. She’s cried enough over the last few months.

Being at home is lonely too. Lexi and her mother are as thick as thieves, giggling in the kitchen as they make dinner and watching tv shows together in the living room. Cassie sits on the periphery, not getting involved. (Even though a tiny part of her wants to.)

There was a weird tension in the house, immediately following the play. A tension that wasn’t caused by their fractured relationship. Lexi seemed tense, worried, frantically checking her phone and borrowing their mother’s car to leave late at night. Now, she seems brighter, sadness only shadowing her face when they run into each other in the house and Cassie brushes her off before Lexi can attempt to speak to her.

Lexi is out a lot too. If Cassie cared, she’d question where Lexi’s newfound social life has emerged from and if she’s made amends with Rue. She sees them together at school sometimes. (But Cassie doesn’t care about Lexi anymore, so she doesn’t think about any of those things.)

Cassie’s loneliness only dissipates when she’s with him. Nate calls and she comes running, always meeting in the same motel room or, on occasion, his father’s abandoned construction site.

(He doesn’t talk about his father or his arrest. He doesn’t talk to her about anything, really.)

They fuck in the motel bed or over the cheap desk or up against an exposed beam, Nate’s hands firm on her body and always a little rough. Sometimes, more than a little.

“Such a good little slut for me,” he murmurs as she sucks his thumb into her mouth, down on her knees, looking up at his towering form.

He’s so big, so powerful above her. When they first began their affair, she loved that power and how, despite his physicality, sometimes when they fucked it felt like she could steal the power from him, if only for a moment. It still thrills her to be at his mercy, her belly flipping when she does what he asks and he quietly praises her. But there’s something else there now, another emotion, lingering at the back of her mind.

(If she had to name it, she’d call it fear.)

He doesn’t stay long after they’ve fucked. Some nights, she’s still in the bathroom, cleaning up between her legs, when she hears the motel door slam shut.

She misses his affection, his gentle touches. Before, he was surprisingly sweet when they were alone, tactile and gentle. His fingers would comb through her hair or stroke her face, and Cassie would remember why he was worth it. Betraying her best friend didn’t matter if she could have this.

He doesn’t do any of that now. No gentle caresses or kisses pressed to her temples and cheeks. Just rough hands and slaps to her ass that turn her skin pink and sting even when his palm leaves her flesh.

If that’s all he’ll give her, she’ll take what she can get.

-

Their clandestine motel room meetings have been happening for almost three weeks when she notices him staring at Maddy.

Senior year is almost over and graduation looms ahead. People are making plans for the summer, and prepping for college or whatever lies ahead following school. Cassie can’t participate in any of these activities. She didn’t apply to many colleges and hasn’t received any acceptance letters, and she doesn’t think her grades are good enough anyway.

Instead, she spends her time trawling job sites and watching Nate whenever he’s in her vicinity.

He’s not subtle, or maybe he just isn’t trying to be. Lexi’s play seems to have had little effect on his social standing. The football team still surrounds him and girls still frequently approach him to ask if he’ll be at the party that weekend. Nate looks disinterested in them all, as per usual, his social interactions always on his terms.

There’s only one person Nate seems to deem worthy of his attention. He doesn’t talk to Maddy, doesn’t ever approach her, but his eyes give him away. That dark gaze seeking her out in the hall and following her as she struts past him until she’s out of sight. (Cassie knows that Maddy’s aware of him, even if she appears aloof.)

The jealousy is so potent that Cassie feels like she could vomit.

When they meet, she wants to scream at him. What’s wrong with me? What does she have that I don’t?! But she worries that he’ll actually give her an answer.

Jealousy of another kind also eats at her.

She eventually discovers why Lexi is so happy all the time, always disappearing after school and returning home with a giddy smile on her face.

She’s in love, she tells their mother.

She forgets to mention that she’s in love with the local drug dealer.

When Cassie first overhears a guy in her English class talking about Lexi Howard and Fezco, she thinks it’s a joke. A bizarre rumor started by her bored classmates who had no drama to gossip about now that the fallout of the play had died down.

She doesn’t confront Lexi. Nothing will make her break her silence, not even the possibility of her little sister dating a violent criminal. But one night, as she leaves the bathroom and pads past the slightly ajar door of her former bedroom, she hears her sister on the phone.

“I miss you too but we’ll see each other tomorrow.” Silence, and then a scandalized giggle. “Fez! Stop!”

It’s sick. It’s wrong. It’s not fair that Lexi is this happy when she’s completely miserable, and she doesn’t know why she seems to be the only one who is baffled by their relationship. In no universe did they make sense.

Nothing makes sense to Cassie now. Not her sister or her mother. Not Nate and his ability to turn his back on what they had. She’s given up so much, sacrificed so much, and this is what she gets?

A week after they go public, Lexi and Fezco are already old news. Everyone is moving onto the next thing. But Cassie is stuck, bitter and twisted up inside, and as the end of Friday approaches, her breath is coming thick and fast as she locks herself inside a bathroom stall. She can’t steady her trembling hands or her pounding heart, or overcome the dizziness that has suddenly taken over.

Minutes pass before she calms again and Cassie has no idea what just happened to her.

After, she splashes her face with cold water and pulls her hood up over her head as she makes a swift exit from the building.

Outside, lingering by the edges of the parking lot, is Nate. He’s in the middle of a group, his teammates encircling him as he towers over them. The bright, afternoon sun shines behind him, a halo around his head, lighting him up and beckoning people to him.

Cassie slows slightly as she nears him, pulled into his thrall. She listens in on his conversation.

“But she was fun though, right? The crazy ones always are.”

“I guess,” Nate shrugs. “Maddy knew how to use the crazy. Blew my mind every time we fucked.”

Cassie sinks her teeth into her bottom lip, hard. But she doesn’t speed up, lingering back to hear the rest.

“And Cassie?”

“Wrong kind of crazy,” Nate laughs. “But she made up for it by being a little whore who came whenever I called.”

Cassie bursts into tears as the guys snicker and cackle, the cruel sounds following her as she hurries away from the school grounds.

-

Nate doesn’t text her that night. She doesn’t know what she would have said if he did.

(That’s a lie. She knows she would have gone to him… a little whore who comes whenever he calls.)

That evening, Lexi is out and her mother is asleep on the couch, a half-full bottle of wine abandoned on the coffee table. Cassie grabs it as she settles into the recliner in the living room. She drinks deeply from the bottle as she scrolls through Instagram, observing her classmate’s Friday night activities.

She has finished the bottle and is opening another when she spots Nate in the background of BB’s latest post.

He looks handsome, as always, in a gray sweater. He stands taller than everyone, his head visible over the crowd of people stuffed inside their classmate’s living room, a red solo cup held to his mouth as he stares ahead of him.

She glugs from the wine bottle as she reads through the comments and goes in search of other photos from the same party. Before, she would have always known who was throwing the next big party and would arrive at their house in a too-short dress with a wine cooler in hand. Now, she was no longer privy to that information and had to resort to stalking her classmates’ social media to gain clues.

Her life is so fucking depressing.

It doesn’t take long. By the time Cassie has finished the bottle of wine, she’s got her sneakers on and an Uber on the way. She doesn’t bother to change out of the baby pink sweats she’s worn every day this week. Nate doesn’t want her and there was no one else there for her to impress.

-

The house is packed full when she arrives, bass-heavy music spilling from the open door and people scattered everywhere as they drink from red cups.

She stumbles as she approaches the house and is too far gone to see the looks people throw her way or the things they mutter into their drinks. It doesn't matter. She already knows she isn’t welcome here.

(She’s not sure why she came. She just has to be here. She has to make them all — make Nate — see that she won’t be ignored.)

As she pushes her way through people and into the living room, she vaguely registers BB and Kat out of the corner of her eye.

“The fuck is she doing here?”

She vaguely registers a hand on her shoulder and then her bicep but she shrugs it off, moving deeper into the crowded house. In the dining room, she grabs a shot from the table and winces as the alcohol hits her tongue and burns on its way down her throat.

In the corner of the room, she spots Lexi and Rue, leaning up against a wall and murmuring between them, conspiratorial smiles on their faces. Then, Fezco appears from seemingly nowhere, one solo cup in his hand and another that he passes to her sister. Lexi’s smile grows wide and adoring as she takes it from him. Cassie turns away from the scene and stumbles out of the room as she tastes wine crawling back up her throat.

This house is unfamiliar to her, the home of a junior that she never got to know. She follows the hallway blindly, leaning against the beige walls for support. The lights are dim and her eyes are unfocused, and she’s only aware that she’s found a door when her hand bumps into a round handle. She jiggles it, hoping it’s a bathroom with a clean toilet that she can hunch over.

“Gimme a fucking second!” a voice shouts through the door and Cassie pauses. Nate.

She rattles it again.

“Fuck off!” he shouts this time, and then there’s another voice, muffled behind the wooden door.

Her already roiling stomach swoops low and she quickly rushes down the hallway, looking for a place to hide. If Nate’s in there with Maddy, she has to see, with her own eyes, but she doesn’t want him to know she’s here.

She finds another door, unlocked, and slips inside, half-hiding behind the door frame with the locked door still in her eyeline.

Minutes pass and then the door swings open, bright light flooding the hallway. Someone steps out, too tall and blonde to be Maddy, and slaps at Nate’s hand as he reaches for them.

“Why can’t you just fucking leave me alone?” Jules cries. She pushes Nate away forcefully and roughly scrubs her hand across her tear-stained cheek.

She stalks away before Cassie has time to comprehend what she’s seeing, disappearing down the hall and back into the throng of their classmates. Nate leaves seconds later, his posture tense and his hands clenched into fists. Cassie flattens herself against the doorframe, out of his sight, and listens carefully for the sounds of his footsteps dying as he walks away.

Her head spins, both from the alcohol and her confusion over what she just witnessed. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen Jules and Nate interact before. What could he possibly have to say to her? Why were they alone together?

The base of her throat burns and then sourness rises up. Cassie covers her mouth and runs to the now vacant room, relieved when she discovers it is in fact a bathroom. She crashes to the floor, on her knees, and wretches into the toilet bowl.

She’s still there, a few minutes later — vomit now sticking to the ends of her hair and tears streaming down her face — when Rue finds her.

“Oh, shit,” she mutters. “Hey, Cass, you okay?”

Cassie groans pathetically, pressing her cheek to the cool toilet seat.

“Imma go get Lexi,” Rue declares and is rushing out of the room before she can protest.

The events following that are a blur, spotty in her drunken memories. Eventually her arm is thrown over someone’s shoulders as she leans heavily against them, and she’s pushed into the back of a car she doesn’t recognise. Her head is cradled in someone’s lap, a gentle hand stroking through her hair, and the perfume in the air is so familiar to her.

“She good?” she hears someone ask.

“She’ll be okay,” someone responds gently. “Thank you for helping me.”

“Course, baby. You don’t even gotta ask.”

-

Cassie can’t be so bitter towards Lexi after she took care of her at the party. She’s still mad at her but the rage is a light simmer now, no longer a boil.

The morning after the party, she thanks Lexi for taking her home and asks her to thank Fezco too. Lexi says she will. And that is that.

That same morning, Cassie vows to channel all of her anger towards Nate.

Her hangover has cleared by Sunday but her humiliation has not. She wants him to fucking know how he’s making her feel, how much it hurt when he cast her aside and started looking at Maddy again and acting like their relationship meant nothing. She wasn’t a whore, here for his entertainment. She was a fucking person, a human being with real feelings, and she would make him acknowledge that.

It shocks her how quickly he responds to her request to meet at the motel. He thinks she comes whenever he calls but this time he was going to come to her. This would be on her terms.

She dresses for the occasion, how she wants to — curls her hair, applies make-up and puts on her nicest floral dress. After their time together, she knows she isn’t dressed to his tastes, but he still looks her up and down hungrily when she opens the door to the motel room.

“I was kind of surprised when you texted me.”

She looks up at him, doe eyes and a soft smile. “You were?”

“Yeah,” he shrugs. “We haven’t really hung out lately. Kinda thought this was over.”

She hates the sting of rejection she feels at his words.

“Oh,” she murmurs. She swallows and rolls back her shoulders, pushing down the hurt. “So you don’t wanna do this?”

He smirks. “I didn’t say that.”

His hands grasp her waist, grip tight as he dips down to kiss her and she’s so, so tempted to lean in, to rise up on her toes and press her lips to his.

But she didn’t come here to be sucked back into the hold he has over her.

She presses her fingers to his lips before he can make contact and says softly, “You can kiss me after you tell me what’s going on between you and Maddy.”

His thick brows furrow and he draws back immediately, hands leaving her body. Standing over her at his full height, his jaw tightens, the muscles jumping beneath his skin.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You heard me,” she snaps, grateful that her voice doesn’t waver. “I’ve seen you looking at her. You can’t keep your fucking eyes off of her.”

“Are you for real?” He laughs, loud and short and condescending. “You sound so fucking stupid. And so what if I was looking at her?” He shrugs. “She’s hot.”

“Fuck you!” Cassie yells in his face, losing all composure.

He chuckles again, amused by her show of emotion.

“Do you realize how pathetic you look right now?” He leans in closer, an ugly little smile on his lips. “You’re not my girlfriend, Cassie. When will you get that into your dumb—” he taps his fingers against her temple, hard, and she flinches, “—fucking head?”

Tears well up in her eyes before she can hold them back and her nose burns with the effort of not outright crying.

“Fuck you,” she snaps again, meek and broken this time. Sadness quickly shifts into rage and she feels a surge of confidence. “You think I’m pathetic?” she cries. “You’re simping over a girl who doesn’t even want you! Or maybe it’s two girls?”

He narrows his eyes. “What?”

“I saw you with Jules on Friday,” she hisses. “You really love cornering girls in bathrooms, huh?”

He looks impossibly large and imposing as he leans into her space. She cowers, fearing the next words to come from his mouth.

“I don’t know what you think you fucking saw but you need to stay out of my fucking business and keep your mouth shut.” His lip curls. “God, you really are pathetic. Junkie dad, sister who got all the brains, no fucking friends. The only thing you’re good for is spreading your fucking legs.”

She stumbles backwards, taken aback by his harsh words and the venom in his voice. Tears blur her vision and she sees red as her biggest insecurities are thrown in her face.

“I’d rather my dad was a junkie than a pedophile!”

Nate’s grip on her is painfully tight as he grabs her shoulders and slams her up against the wall. She struggles against his hold as he pins her in place, his fingers digging into her skin.

Her tears finally spill over as she looks into his eyes, so dark they’re black, his pupils blown and his teeth gritted.

She wonders if this is the face Maddy saw when he put his hand around her throat.

“Don’t ever talk about my father!” he yells.

He jerks her hard against the wall, her head and shoulder blades colliding with the plasterboard, and she whimpers, more tears spilling down her face. She fears the worst — that he’ll choke her this time, that he won’t stop. But with a final shove, he releases her and she crumples to the ground, sobbing.

“You’re not pretty when you cry,” he spits at her, and she doesn’t look up to watch him leave, the door slamming behind him.

-

She doesn’t go to school for the next two days. Instead, she moves back into her room, if only to curl up in her bed and weep beneath the covers. Lexi and her mother try to coax her out, with promises of ice cream and shitty reality tv, but she ignores them.

Two days after she met him at the motel, Nate texts her.

Haven’t seen you at school

What happened on Sunday was fucked up

You hurt me Cass. But I miss you

She’s like a puppet on a string and he’s controlling her every movement.

After she replies, he calls her. She picks up.

He tells her again and again how much he misses her and that he hates how things went down in the motel, his low voice rumbling over the line. (It makes her stomach twist and turn, and she tells herself it’s a pleasant buzz in her stomach, the same kind of buzz that she got when she caught him watching her in his car on New Years Eve.) He assures her that there’s nothing happening between him and Maddy and the thing with Jules was just a misunderstanding.

“I literally don’t think about any girl but you, Cass.”

She has to believe him. If he’s lying then what has all of this been for? All of the pain and embarrassment and heartache.

“Are you going to meet Nate?” Lexi asks, watching Cassie slip into her sneakers.

She hesitates before answering, “Yes.”

Lexi sighs and drops her pen onto the textbook in her lap.

“Seriously?”

Cassie swallows. “What?”

“I don’t know what happened the last time you saw him but you’ve been a mess ever since. Seeing him isn’t good for you, Cassie.”

She resorts to old habits.

“Oh, really,” Cassie scoffs. “You’re in one serious relationship and suddenly you’re an expert?”

Lexi chews on the inside of her cheek and Casse thinks she may be holding herself back.

“I’m just looking out for you. I don’t want him to, like, lovebomb you and then break your heart again.”

“Lovebomb?” Cassie rolls her eyes. “You’re making shit up now.”

She borrows her mother’s car to drive to Nate’s house. (Thankfully his mother isn’t home — she wasn’t Cassie’s biggest fan following the play.) As she drives into his quiet, upper class neighborhood, she feels a little like she could throw up, and almost drives away before she musters up enough courage to knock on the door.

He answers with a soft smile on his face, his dark eyes intense as they look her over. He immediately dips down to kiss her, his mouth pushy and too dry.

“Missed you,” he murmurs against her lips, before dragging her inside, his fingers clenched tight around her wrist.

-

He doesn’t use a condom despite her asking him to — she didn’t want to deal with the messy clean up. When she emerges from his bathroom, he complains about how long she spent in there and shoulder checks her on his way inside.

An icy chill settles in, and the bad, bad feeling she’s been experiencing since she drove over to his house intensifies.

He had been so sweet and affectionate when she entered his house. He had undressed her slowly, kissed her neck and breasts and the ultra-sensitive skin of her inner thighs. He had made her come before he pushed inside and it made the lack of condom feel kind of okay.

Now his affection has gone, and with it, any glimmer of goodness that she felt.

The bathroom door closes behind him and Cassie’s eyes dart to his phone. There was one way that she could confirm if he was being honest with her. Nate wasn’t as sneaky as he thought and she had seen him type in his passcode more than once.

His phone unlocks after two attempts to remember the code and as soon as she has access, she navigates to his messages. She’s careful not to look at anything unread but the text thread she’s interested in has already been opened, the most recent message sent by Nate two days ago.

Thinking about you

Maddy hasn’t responded. She hasn’t responded to the last ten messages he has sent to her.

Cassie’s bottom lip wobbles and she bites down hard to hold back the sob that wants to burst out. Seeing the evidence that she’s right — that she isn’t paranoid or pathetic, and Nate is still pining after Maddy — hurts so much she loses her breath. She’s in this guy’s bed, his come seeping into her underwear and his handprint still stinging on her ass.

She feels like the biggest fucking idiot.

The masochist in her has her returning to his messages one more time. Her eyes flicker to the still-closed bathroom door and then back to his phone.

She scrolls through the list of individual contacts and group chats, searching for Jules’ name. It isn't there but she pauses when she sees a contact titled, J. A gut feeling, a sixth sense, whatever you want to call it, tells her that this is Jules.

The text thread is filled with messages from Nate, all vague and sometimes bordering on threatening. Jules responded once, months ago — to Nate’s request to meet him in his car — and never again.

He hasn’t only lied to her about Maddy, he has lied about Jules, too. She has no idea what the nature of their relationship is — if anything, their texts leave her more confused than ever — but it was a lot more than a misunderstanding.

Her gaze lingers on his last messages to Jules.

I don’t care that you hate me

You can’t deny me forever

We’re both meant for more than this town

I’ll see you in New York

The bathroom door handle squeaks and Cassie hastily closes the messages app and tosses Nate’s phone onto his nightstand.

As he re-enters the room, he stretches his arms over his head and yawns loudly.

“I’m gonna go to sleep. You can drive yourself home, right?”

Cassie swallows down the bitter taste in her mouth and gives him a wobbly smile.

“Sure.”

-

She feels like she’s losing it.

Nate asks her to meet up a few times but it’s not as often as he used to and he leaves the motel as soon as they’re done.

Cassie doesn’t even know why she goes to him. In the moment, he is only focused on himself and his own pleasure, and she feels cold as soon as leaves her body. She struggled to find a word to fully describe how she feels; all she could come up with was used.

Because he is using her, utterly and completely. He’s taking what he wants from her and brushing her aside as soon as it’s over, and she goes back again and again.

Any time she isn’t with him, she’s thinking about him. She spends her evenings scrolling through her classmate’s social media for any sign of him and looking back at posts he’s made. Her brain won’t shut off, analyzing and dissecting every moment they’ve ever spent together and trying to determine where exactly it all went wrong. When did he stop caring about her? Did he ever truly care for her?

She knows he’s going to a lot of parties. On Mondays, she listens to the incessant chatter about what transpired over the weekend, her ears perking up at any mention of him. He’s hooking up with other girls — that’s a detail she hears frequently — and she soon begins to realize that he’s only calling her when he can’t find anyone he likes at that weekend’s big party.

The skin around her nails is torn, ripped and broken, bleeding at the edges. She takes anti-nausea medication to deal with the frequent dizziness she experiences and becomes accustomed to steadying her breaths and counting down from ten when she feels overwhelmed. Her skin has broken out and she’s lost weight, and she only bothers to wear make-up on nights when she visits him.

She is definitely, undoubtedly, one hundred percent losing it. But she doesn’t know what to do about it.

The school year is almost over. She has just over a month left before her class graduates and Cassie hopes and prays she has done just enough to get her diploma. And then it will all be over — the hallways filled with people who hate her, the overworked school gossip mill, the frequent exposure to Nate.

She doesn’t know what he’s doing for college and she hates that she still aches at the thought of him leaving and being so far from her. It seems like the wanting him will never end, no matter what he does to her and how much she hates him.

Because she does hate him — he’s hurt her so many times, has made her feel so worthless and weak, and Cassie doesn’t recognize the person she’s become around him.

Her whole life has gone to shit since that fateful New Years Eve.

She still spends her lunch breaks locked inside the bathroom. She doesn’t eat, finds that she has no appetite, so spends her time scrolling through her phone.

The bathroom near the school entrance is her chosen spot. It’s far from the cafeteria which means she’s usually left alone. So she’s surprised when she hears the creak of the door swinging open and a cacophony of voices, a group of girls all talking over each other.

Cassie vaguely recognizes their voices — girls younger than her but still familiar. She can hear the clatter of backpacks and make-up being dropped onto the counter, and the distinct sound of someone vaping followed by a sickly-sweet scent.

She draws her knees up, feet balanced on the edge of the toilet seat, and stays quiet. Unnoticeable.

“Are you finally gonna tell us what happened with Nate?” one of the girls asks and they’ve got Cassie’s attention.

“It really wasn’t a big deal,” someone replies. “We made out in a guest room and talked for a while. He was so fucking drunk. He kept telling me how much he missed Maddy. I honestly just felt bad for him. Their break-up seriously fucked him up.”

Cassie bites at her bottom lip and breathes through her nose.

“She'll never take him back,” another girl interjects. “After everything that went down with Cassie he’s, like, dead to her. I mean, her best friend? That shit is low.” A snapping of a compact and another drag on a vape. “Besides, I heard she’s moving to LA after graduation so they won’t even see each other.”

“Love that for her.”

“Right? If I was betrayed by my boyfriend and my best friend, I’d lose my fucking shit. I know she went crazy at the play but I think she’s really held it together.”

“For real,” someone else agrees. Then, with a giggle, she asks, “Do you think she always knew Cassie was a crazy bitch? Was their friendship, like, a pity thing?”

Cassie’s eyes burn with tears and she squeezes her eyes shut.

“Probably,” another laughs. “Nate talked about her a little. He said she was still so desperate for his dick, even after everything that happened at the play. I mean, where is her fucking self-respect?”

“She doesn’t have any. We’ve all seen her nudes and the sex tapes. That girl will do anything for attention.”

“Desperate slut.”

Cassie snaps, her face heated with rage, cheeks burning and her lashes wet with the tears she won’t shed. She pulls the cubicle door open and it slams harshly against the wall.

All four girls turn to look at her, eyes wide and mouths parted in shock.

“Yo, what the fuck?”

“Yeah, I’m in here. I heard everything you fucking said,” Cassie hisses.

One of the girls takes a step back, as if backing away from a feral animal.

“You were listening that whole time? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know!” Cassie shouts. In that instant, she feels her grip on her sanity slip through her fingers. “Okay? I don’t fucking know! I’m a slut, I’m a whore, I’m a shitty friend, I’m pathetic!”

The girl with the vape snorts. “Uh, yeah. We know.”

A scream tears from Cassie’s throat and she runs at her, yanking the vape from her hands and launching it across the room. She lunges for her, ready to grasp her hair and pull, but she’s grabbed from behind before she can make contact.

“Psycho bitch!” one of the other girls yells, as they tug at Cassie’s hair and drag her away from their friend.

She struggles against her hold, shame flaring through her as the other girls watch and laugh, cackling at her embarrassing display.

“Stop! Stop!” she cries. “I’ll leave, just let me go!”

The grip on her hair is loosened and Cassie stumbles but finds her balance before she can fall to the floor. She grabs her backpack from the stall with shaking hands and flees from the bathroom, their laughter following her.

-

The sounds that leave her mouth are foreign and harsh. Dry, heaving sobs, her breath hitching with every inhale.

Her reflection in the mirror is the physical manifestation of the humiliation she feels. It’s reminiscent of her bedraggled appearance after Lexi’s play — no blood dripping from her nose, but her hair is a knotted mess atop her head and the shadows beneath her eyes are so dark she looks like she hasn’t slept in a year.

(Truthfully, she can’t remember the last time she slept peacefully. Before New Years Eve. Maybe even before the abortion.)

There’s an overwhelming feeling of self-loathing inside of her. No one has ever loved her, not really. She wasn’t enough for Nate, for McKay, for her father. Maddy and her friends may have loved her once but her actions had ensured that was no longer true. Lexi and her mother only tolerate her out of a sense of responsibility.

She picks up the bottle of vodka she placed on the counter. It was one of two in the kitchen but she knows her mother won’t notice. Wine was her poison of choice — she only resorted to the hard stuff when life really got to be too much.

(Like mother, like daughter.)

The vodka burns as she takes a huge gulp and she coughs and sputters before taking another smaller sip. Drinking straight liquor always looked so much easier in movies.

A few hours later, the bottle is half-empty. School was over by now — she heard Lexi come home and call out her name. Cassie didn’t reply. Her head feels heavy and lying on the couch in the den doesn’t require as much effort as speaking to her sister.

She’s seeing double when she picks up her phone and messages Nate. She needs to see him. Not to cry or beg him to take her back. Cassie has just spent too long being a pushover and letting him dominate her life. The only way she could ever get over him was if she confronted him.

Can we meet?

Can’t. Busy tonight

She chews at her lip, belly knitting up as she types out her response. It was a lie — a big one — but it would get his attention.

Please. I think I’m pregnant

Nothing for ten long minutes and then, finally, he responds.

Meet me at my dad’s old site

She throws a hoodie on and hides what’s left of the vodka in the back of the pantry.

As she waits for her Uber to arrive, her mind wanders back to the last time she tried to confront Nate. He had been terrifying as he shoved her up against the wall, so quick to turn violent when she upset him.

She takes a knife from the block beside the stove — one of the smaller knives but hopefully big enough to scare him off if he got physical with her. She slips it into the front pocket of her hoodie and heads outside to wait for her Uber on the sidewalk.

-

He’s already there when she arrives, hidden in the shadow of the frames of abandoned houses, his arms folded across his chest. His jaw is locked tight when he approaches her and Cassie feels instant regret.

She shouldn’t have drank so much. She shouldn’t have come here.

“Took you long enough.”

“I had to get an Uber,” she replies, and even she can hear how she’s slurring her words.

He narrows his eyes at her. “Are you fucking drunk?” He scoffs and shakes his head. “Pregnant for five minutes and you’re already ruining the kid’s life.”

“I’m not pregnant!” she snaps. “I just said that so you’d meet me.”

His irritated expression transforms into something awful, disgust and fury plain on his face.

“Are you fucking serious? I thought you had ruined my fucking life!” he screams at her. “Do you know what I’ve been going through since I got your text?”

“Do you know what I’ve been going through for months?!” she yells back. “You’ve ruined me, Nate. You’ve treated me like I’m nothing.”

“You are nothing,” he hisses and Cassie cowers away from him.

And there it was. Proof that she wasn’t good enough for him to love, barely good enough for him to fuck.

He storms off into the frame of the house, pacing across bare floorboards as he rakes his hands through his hair.

“Never should have fucking touched you,” he mutters to himself. “Fucking crazy bitch.”

She scrubs away the tears on her cheeks and storms off after him. He glares at her.

“Don’t come near me!” he shouts. “Stay the fuck away from me!” He bursts out a sad, humorless laugh. “What was your fucking plan here? Were you gonna cry in front of me until I took you back?”

“No,” she retorts, voice harsh but wet. “I don’t want you anymore.”

“Right,” he scoffs.

“I don’t,” she insists, feeling meek beneath his patronizing gaze. “I just wanted to tell you how much you’ve hurt me. I want you to apologize!”

“For what?!” he cries, arms stretched out either side of him. “I didn’t make you do any of this shit. You made bad decisions and now you’re blaming me?”

“You used me! You hurt me! You made me love you!” she accuses, stepping closer to him. Tears slide over her lips and into her mouth, hot and salty. Snot drips from her nose. “You said you loved me!”

“How could I love you? You’re a fucking mess.” He shoots her a look of pure revulsion. “You look disgusting right now.”

A harsh, ugly sob tears from her throat. She doesn’t know how much more of this she can take.

Her stomach roils, filled with alcohol and no food. She thinks she’s going to vomit and leans her body against a wooden beam for support.

“You’ve got nothing to say now?” He stalks towards her. “Huh? Brought me all the way out here and now you’ve got nothing to say?”

He grabs at her, taking advantage of her physical weakness, but Cassie isn’t going to let him do this again.

She quickly draws the knife from her pocket, brandishing it in the air.

“Don’t,” she hisses. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

He immediately backs away but then his eyes fall to the blade in her hand. He laughs.

“What the fuck are you gonna do with that thing, Cassie?”

The knife shakes in her hand. She wraps her free hand over her wrist, attempting to steady herself but she’s trembling too hard.

“Stop you from hurting me!”

“Hurting you?” He squints at her like he thinks she’s an idiot. “I’m not the one who brought a knife with me.”

She glares at him. “I fucking hate you.”

“Trust me, the feeling is mutual.”

He lunges for her, one hand gripping the base of her throat and the other wrapping around her forearm. She gasps against his tight hold on her neck, unable to catch her breath. He attempts to wrestle the knife from her but she fights back, struggling against him.

His build and weight are too much and he gains the upper hand, pushing her back into a wooden beam. There’s a horrible thud as her head makes contact with the wood and pain splits through her skull.

“Give me the fucking knife, Cassie!” he demands. His face is crimson and his eyes are hollow black pools of nothingness. Fear courses through Cassie’s body and she cannot fathom how it all came to this.

“Stop!” she chokes out, trying to kick at his legs.

“Give it to me!” he yells, twisting at her wrist, the point of the knife now aimed at her face.

“No!” she screams, adrenaline pumping through her as terror takes hold.

She twists her hand, attempting to release herself from his grip, and it isn’t until she sees the blank look of shock on his face that she registers what she has done.

Both of their gazes drop to Nate’s chest and the knife now plunged into it. Blood spreads around the knife, dark and fast, staining his gray sweater. Cassie immediately lets go of the handle, her mouth open in horrific surprise.

Nate’s grip on her neck loosens as he stumbles back, knife protruding from his chest. She greedily gasps for air, her throat painful and sore. She can only watch as Nate falls to the ground, his back hitting the floorboards with a sickening heaviness.

She rushes to his side, hovering over him on her hands and knees. His eyes are rolling back as color drains from his face. Tears drip from her face and onto his sweater. Cassie’s hands are still trembling as she reaches for the knife’s handle.

“No,” he gasps out, voice so weak it’s almost non-existent.

There’s a moment of hesitation. The knife was small but she had hit something so vital — his heart. There was little chance of him surviving this. In her mind, she reasons that removing the knife will end his suffering.

Her fingers fold around the handle and she watches, in a strange kind of trance, as the blade slides from his body, slick with vermillion blood.

A rattle leaves his chest, life slipping away from him.

He was always so handsome, in a cold, untouchable kind of way. She thinks he looks just as handsome like this, his skin white and stone-like, face too slack to hold any dour, serious expression.

She doesn’t know what comes over her. Something rotten and possessive.

On her knees, she plunges the knife into the other side of his chest, then his belly, and finally his neck. Blood spurts up, hitting her face, and she watches as it pools across his torso, seeping from all of the wounds she’s inflicted.

The knife falls from her hand with a clatter as she runs from the house frame, from Nate’s body. She hunches over in the dirt and throws up the contents of her stomach.

-

The phone rings three times before she answers. It shakes in Cassie’s blood-stained hands.

“Hey, Cass. Everything okay?”

“Lexi,” she sobs out. “I need your help.”

Chapter Text

rather be in hell than alone

Lexi is running out of Fezco’s car as soon as they pull into the work site. Cassie is sitting on the ground, head buried in her knees, her hair stuck to her tear-slicked face.

Nate’s body is behind her, inside the house frame. She can’t look at it.

“Are you okay? What the fuck happened?” Lexi cries.

Fezco follows closely behind her, his brows pulled in tight with confusion as he takes in the scene.

“He’s in there,” Cassie sobs.

“Who’s in there?” Lexi questions. “Cassie, look at me please. Who’s in there?”

She finally raises her head to look up at her sister and Lexi blanches at the sight of Cassie’s distraught face.

“Nate’s in there.”

Fezco seems to catch on quicker than Lexi and places a hand on her forearm, pausing her before she can run into the house.

“Stay here. I’ll go look.”

His footsteps crunch against the uneven ground of the work site and she hears the change as he steps up into the frame of the house, wooden floorboards now beneath his feet.

“Oh, fuck,” she hears him mutter and Cassie’s stomach bottoms out. A harsh sob escapes her, tearing at her raw throat.

“What is it?” Lexi demands, following Fezco before he can stop her. A gasp and then, “Oh, god. Is he dead?”

“Don’t look, baby.”

Cassie’s entire body is trembling with a horrifying mix of shock, adrenaline and fear. She’s killed someone and she’s going to go to prison; this is the end of her life as she knows it.

Nate always had to have the last word.

She feels someone kneel down next to her and then an arm settle around her shoulders. Lexi kisses the side of her head.

“It’s gonna be okay, Cass,” she assures her. “We’re gonna help you.”

Cassie can’t respond. It was so far from okay. How could Lexi not see that?

In the distance, she can hear Fezco on the phone.

“We got a situation. Be ready to go when we get home.”

The trembling subsides into numbness as the reality of what she has done settles in. She wants to bat Lexi’s fingers away as they comb through her hair. She didn’t deserve Lexi’s affection or comfort; she was poison.

Fezco comes to a stop in front of them and sighs heavily.

“Cassie,” he says firmly and she snaps her attention to him; her savior, although she isn’t aware of it yet. “We’re goin’ back to my place, aight? And then we gon’ figure this out.”

-

Standing in Fezco’s dated, ‘70s-beige bathtub, Cassie dips beneath the shower spray and watches the water turn pink as it slides from her body and into the drain.

She hasn’t been able to look at her reflection in a mirror but she knows there’s more blood than she initially thought. It covers her hands — she scrubs harshly beneath her nails and around her nail beds — but there are spatters on her face, arms, neck, even her hair.

Nate’s lifeblood splashed across her, like some fucked-up art piece.

She scrubs at her body and hair until her hands feel raw and welcomes the chill of the room as she turns off the water. The cold is sobering but also brings back the mounting dread.

Her clothes have been taken by Fezco, who plans to burn them. She’s left with a thick, fluffy robe that kind of smells like old lady and Cassie is pretty sure it once belonged to Fezco’s grandmother.

Bundled in the robe with her wet hair dripping onto the material, she steps out of the bathroom and re-enters the living room. Fezco and his little brother are gone but Lexi is still there, face pale and withdrawn as she sits on the couch.

She looks up at Cassie and offers her the weakest smile she’s ever seen.

“Come sit,” she says, patting the couch cushion beside her.

It’s warm in the living room but Cassie is shivering, tremors wracking through her body. She doesn’t know if they will ever stop.

“I called mom. I said you got too drunk at a party and you’re crashing at Fezco’s house with me. She wasn’t happy about it but she let it slide.”

Cassie nods. A party on a Thursday wasn’t totally unreasonable and their mother never did ask many questions.

“Do you have your phone?” Lexi asks.
Cassie nods again. “I need you to show me the messages you sent to Nate tonight.” Her voice is quiet, cautious, like a mother trying to placate a scared child.

Cassie’s fingers shake as she unlocks her phone and navigates to their text thread. She passes the device to Lexi.

There’s a beat of silence and then the audible sound of Lexi swallowing.

“Cassie, are you—”

“No,” Cassie rushes to confirm. “I’m not. I just said that so he would see me.”

Saying it out loud makes Cassie cringe. In the moment, her anger and desperation had outweighed any rational thought. Now she sees how insane it was to lie to Nate like that.

But hindsight is twenty-twenty.

“Okay,” Lexi sighs but it doesn’t sound like relief.

She taps at Cassie’s phone, deleting the messages she’s selected and when Cassie looks at the screen again, their conversation ends with Nate’s, Can’t. Busy tonight.

“Will that even work? Can’t cops get access to anything that’s been deleted on your phone?”

Granted, her knowledge did come from the police procedurals that her mother liked to watch but it didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility.

“They’ll only take your phone as evidence if they suspect you.” Lexi levels her with a look. “But you’re going to keep your cool and not give them any reason to think it was you, okay?”

Cassie gulps. Her sister is strangely scary in that moment.

“Okay.”

Suddenly, there are footsteps leading down the hallway and a feminine voice calling out, “Hey, Lexi! I’ve got a whole pile of shit for her to try!”

Cassie startles at the sound. The only other person she was aware of in this house was Fezco’s grandmother and she was in a fucking coma. Who was this person?

She jumps as a skinny blonde enters the room but Lexi calms her with a hand on her forearm.

“It’s okay. This is just Faye. She’s helping us.”

Us. It was kind of comforting, knowing she wasn’t alone in the worst thing she’s ever done.

Faye’s thick, pink lips pull into a forced smile. In one hand she holds a pile of clothes and she raises the other in a tiny wave.

“Hey. I’m Faye.”

Lexi rises from the couch to take the clothes from Faye and begins sorting through them.

“Try this on,” she says, thrusting a pair of sweatpants and a large t-shirt in Cassie’s direction. “I think they’ll fit.”

Cassie takes them from her. She’s pretty sure they belong to Fezco.

“You can change in Ash’s room,” Faye offers. Then, her smile turns sympathetic and she slowly blinks her round blue eyes. “Sorry to hear about your ex. My ex died too. It sucks.”

Her stomach somersaults and she thinks she’s going to vomit.

Instead, she croaks out, “Um, thanks.”

-

She has no idea what time it is or how many hours have passed. Lexi forces her to drink some water but she doesn’t eat any of the food she puts in front of her. She doesn’t think she could keep it down.

After more awkward conversation, Faye goes to bed, leaving Cassie alone with her sister while they wait for Fezco and Ashtray to return.

There’s a child currently helping to cover up the murder she committed. Her life is so fucking weird.

Lexi is stroking her hair again as Cassie rests her head in her lap. Tears pour from her eyes and slide onto the fabric of her sister’s skirt. She feels like she’s been crying for an eternity with no end in sight.

“I killed him,” she murmurs. It’s the first time she’s said it out loud. “I’m a murderer.”

“Shhh.” Lexi brushes her hair back from her face. “Don’t say that. You said he was choking you. It was self-defense.”

“I took a knife there, Lexi,” she hisses through her tears. “It was me! I did this.”

Lexi shushes her again but it does nothing to drown out the sound of Cassie’s sobs.

“When Rue and I started talking again, she told me a lot of stuff about Nate. Awful stuff that I had no idea about. And you know that he choked Maddy, despite what she told everyone.” Lexi sighs heavily. “I know you think you loved him but the facts are — Nate wasn’t a good person. And there’s things that you didn’t know about him.”

She appreciates what Lexi is doing — she really does. But there was no need for Cassie to be in denial. She had done enough of that over the last year.

“Maybe not,” Cassie agrees, another hot tear spilling down her temple. “But that doesn’t mean he deserved to die.”

-

At some point, Cassie falls asleep. It’s surprisingly dreamless, her unconscious floating in dark nothingness. She had been convinced that Nate would haunt her there too.

She doesn’t sleep for long, awoken on the couch by the sound of Fezco and his brother trudging through the front door. It’s almost dawn. They look sweaty and exhausted, and Fezco gives a weary sigh as he scrubs his hand over his head. Lexi is immediately at his side, hugging him close and talking to him in near-silent whispers that she can’t make out.

Ashtray meets her gaze as he passes through the living room. He nods at her once before he slips into his bedroom and firmly closes the door behind him.

“You can crash here tonight,” Fezco tells her.

“O-okay. Thanks.”

Fezco nods. “Imma get you a pillow. Gimme a minute.”

He walks off down the hallway, seemingly into his bedroom. Lexi kisses her forehead and bids her goodnight before she follows him.

When Fezco returns, he has a pillow and a crocheted blanket in his hands. He holds them out to her with an entirely neutral expression on his face.

“It’s all gonna be fine,” he says, voice firm and steady.

She wants to believe him.

“Thank you,” she murmurs back.

-

For everything to be fine, you had to pretend everything was, in fact, fine. And it was a lot harder than it looked.

Cassie goes to school the next day.

She and Lexi return home early in the morning. While Lexi organizes her backpack and makes herself presentable, Cassie stands in front of their bathroom mirror and meticulously covers up the bruises that are visible on her throat above the collar of her hoodie. Oversized sweaters and hoodies will be her uniform until the purple outline of Nate’s fingertips fade away.

At school, she keeps to herself and interacts with other people as little as possible. It isn’t hugely different from her normal behavior at school. Only now she sought out the isolation, instead of being pushed into it.

Two days after that awful night, the first missing poster goes up.

Nate’s mother is on the local news that morning, flanked by Nate’s brother. There are tears in her eyes as she begs for information on the whereabouts of her son.

“It isn’t like him to leave without a single word,” she cries. “He’s a good man, respected by his peers. He was going to NYU in the fall. He wouldn’t just leave like this.”

Cassie cries silently as she watches the screen. Her mother wraps a comforting arm around her shoulders.

“Oh, honey. I'm so sorry.”

Stupidly, the first thought that comes to mind is that Nate didn’t tell her he was going to New York.

-

At school, the following day, Cassie is hiding in the bathroom during lunch. The student body was too abuzz with the news of Nate’s disappearance to focus on her but she still craved the relative privacy and silence that the bathroom gave her.

There was a vigil planned that afternoon and she knew she had to go to keep up appearances. Pretending, once again.

As she’s scrolling through her phone — reading the various news articles on Nate’s disappearance through tear-filled eyes — the bathroom door swings open and two sets of footsteps enter. She hears Kat’s voice first and then Maddy’s.

Cassie covers her nose and mouth, not wanting to alert them to her presence.

“I have another joint in my bag, if you need it,” Kat says. “We can sneak around the back of the old science building.”

“Ugh, no, I’m good,” Maddy replies. “I’m just, like, exhausted. Being the ex-girlfriend of a missing person is hard work.” She sighs. “And the cops want to talk to me tomorrow.”

A spike of fear shoots through Cassie. She knew the police would likely want to talk to anyone who had been close to Nate but this felt like confirmation that they would be coming to her soon.

“That’s rough,” Kat sympathizes. “How are you holding up?”

There’s a moment of silence and Cassie holds her breath.

“At first I was devastated,” Maddy responds, and Cassie can hear it in her voice. “I hate him but he was also a huge part of my life, y’know?

“But now… now I feel fucking relieved to know that he’s not around.” She laughs softly, humorlessly. “God, does that make me a horrible person?”

“I don’t think so,” Kat replies softly.

-

The vigil is held on the quad, their principal up front next to the picture of Nate that someone had stuck to the exterior wall of the main building. It’s surrounded by flowers and notes, football jerseys and candles.

Some students cry as the principal asks people to pray for Nate’s safe discovery and return. Cassie frowns as she watches them, faces red and tears glistening on their cheeks. Most of them didn’t know Nate and of those that did, Cassie knows he didn’t have a high opinion of them.

Nate believed he was better than everyone but still obtained the adoration of those he looked down upon. Even in his absence, he was still adored.

While the principal closes his speech, her eyes drift across the crowd and land on Maddy. She looks up, their gazes meeting, and there’s a long, intense moment of eye contact before Maddy locks her jaw and quickly looks away.

As students disperse, Cassie lingers behind, arms folded over her chest as she looks down at the collection of items laid down for a guy that would never return. Her gaze travels up to the photograph on the wall — a portrait from last year’s yearbook, Nate handsome and smiling as he posed for the school quarterback slot.

Cassie can’t look at the picture for too long. It feels like his dark eyes are truly on her, scrutinizing her from the page.

“Hey.”

She jumps and quickly turns to find Jules standing beside her. She smiles at Cassie, small, barely-there.

“Um, hi.”

“How are you doing?” she asks.

Cassie shrugs. “I don’t really know. Okay, I guess?”

“Yeah,” Jules sighs as if she really understands. And then she remembers that Jules may understand more than Cassie initially realizes.

Jules is staring intently at the photograph when Cassie says, “I know there was something going on between you two.”

Her wide, panicked eyes snap to Cassie’s face.

“I, uh, saw you fighting at a party once,” she explains. “Nate didn’t tell me anything.”

Jules’ chest physically deflates with relief.

“Are you okay?” she asks and Jules looks surprised by her question.

“I think so?” she replies but it sounds more like a question. She sighs. “It’s complicated. I hated him but… he made me feel like he really saw me sometimes. Like I mattered.” She scoffs and shakes her head. “Sorry. That sounded so dumb.”

“No,” Cassie murmurs. “It's not dumb. I get it. He made me feel like that, too.”

She recalls a text on Nate’s phone, talk of them being meant for more and seeing Jules in New York.

“Did you know he got into NYU?”

“Yeah.” She frowns. “You didn’t?”

“He didn’t tell me.” Cassie swallows. “There was a lot that he didn’t tell me.”

“He liked to have his secrets,” Jules replies, an edge of anger in her tone. “He found out I got into the New York School of Design. He had this crazy idea that we were going to hang out in the city and, I don’t know, be together?”

She lets out a short, bitter laugh.

“In this town, he couldn’t accept that he wanted me, but apparently everything was going to work out on the other side of the country. Of course, he didn’t even ask me how I felt. What Nate wants, Nate gets.”

Cassie wonders just how many secrets Nate held, how many lives he was leading.

Fezco had destroyed his wallet and his phone with his body — Cassie wasn’t sure exactly how — and his car was taken to a scrapyard to be broken down and crushed. There were now very little traces left of the person Nate was. But a part of Cassie wishes she could have held onto them, if only to have a chance to pick apart the enigma of Nate Jacobs.

That being said, Cassie wasn’t sure there really was a Nate Jacobs. Maybe he wasn’t ever a real, fully-formed human being. And in his phone, she may have only discovered more lies.

“Well that’s not true,” Cassie argues. She smiles gently. “He obviously wanted you but you stood firm and never let him have you. You’re stronger than me.”

Jules mulls over her words as they stand in silence, looking over the quasi-shrine in front of them.

“You’re talking about him as if he’s never going to be found. Do you really think he’s gone?”

Tears burn at the back of her eyes but Cassie holds them back.

“I don’t know,” she lies, forcing her voice to remain steady. “But if he did decide to leave, I hope he never comes back.”

-

That night, the local sheriff calls Cassie and asks her if she could come to the station the next day. As she was legally an adult, her mother couldn’t come into the interview with her, but she insists on hiring Cassie a lawyer.

“Mom, is that really necessary?” Lexi questions.

“Look, hon, I’ve seen enough crime shows to know that you don’t speak to cops without a lawyer present,” their mother retorts.

Cassie is too busy wrestling with her nausea to argue.

The following morning, she’s overcome by dizziness and her fingertips tingle with the prickle of pins and needles. Her breathing is too fast as she crouches down next to her bed and she works hard to focus and slow it. She’s done enough googling now to know that she’s having an anxiety attack.

She’s full of nervous energy as her mother drives her to the station with Lexi in the backseat. Cassie picks at the skin around her thumbnail until it bleeds and her mother scolds her when she notices the wound.

“Stop it,” she hisses, batting her hand away.

The lawyer is waiting for them in the parking lot and greets her with a wide smile.

“You’re my third client this week,” he tells them as they enter the station. “There’s a lot happening in East Highland.”

And it’s all because of her.

-

The interview is short but feels like the longest thirty minutes of her life.

They ask her about her whereabouts on the night of Nate’s disappearance.

“I was at home with my sister and then we both went to her boyfriend’s house. We stayed over. I slept on the couch.”

It’s a rehearsed response, a variation of what she and Lexi have discussed over and over again.

“Boyfriend’s name?”

“Oh, um… Francesco O’Neill,” she answers. It sounded so foreign coming out of her mouth. She had almost laughed when Lexi had told her his name.

One of the officers scribbles his name into his notebook, lips pursed with what she thinks is disapproval. There was no way they didn’t know who Fezco was.

“What is the nature of your relationship with Nate Jacobs?”

“He’s my ex-boyfriend.”

“A recent break-up?” the other cop interjects, eyeing Cassie.

“Um…” She presses her lips together as she decides how to answer. “A few months ago.”

“And have you been in contact with Nate since your relationship ended?”

“Yes but not all the time. We, uh…” Her eyes flicker to her lawyer who nods at her, encouraging her to go on. “We would meet up occasionally to, um… to have sex.”

Cassie’s cheeks warm as she makes eye contact with the cop. He breaks it to scribble down more notes.

“How often was this?”

“Only once or twice in the last month. We don’t see each other as much as we used to.”

“Was that your decision or his?”

A lump forms in her throat and she knows this is where she could be caught out. They could brand her as the crazy, jealous ex who finally snapped and hurt Nate because she’d had enough of him toying with her emotions.

It wasn’t untrue, exactly, but she didn’t want them to know that.

“Mutual,” she answers with a light shrug. “It just fizzled out.”

“So you didn’t have any contact with Nate in the week leading up to his disappearance?”

She licks her lips. Beneath the table, her palms begin to sweat.

“I texted him that night,” she says.

Both of their gazes shoot up to her.

“The night he disappeared?”

“Yes,” she confirms. “I asked if we could meet and he said he was busy. He didn’t tell me what he was doing. And that was that.”

The officers exchange a look and Cassie thinks she may throw up on the tabletop.

“Mrs. Jacobs said you had a…volatile relationship. Is that true?”

Cassie tries to play it cool and shrugs off their question.

“I don’t know. We fought sometimes. But that’s normal in relationships, right?”

“Did you ever get physical with each other during these fights?”

Her stomach twists, the cheap police station coffee gurgling in her stomach.

“N-no—”

“Are you going somewhere with these questions?” her lawyer interjects and Cassie has never been so relieved. “My client has told you where she was on the night of Mr. Jacobs’ disappearance. This is a voluntary interview and she has provided you with more than enough information. Need I remind you that my client is not under arrest here.”

She’s definitely going to throw up.

“We’re just trying to get a full picture of Nate Jacobs’ relationships and who he spent his time with.”

“Then I suggest you conduct a formal interview.”

They ask her a few more questions, mostly around Lexi and Fezco, and whether they’d be willing to corroborate her story. Her mother and sister are waiting for her when she leaves the room and she hopes she doesn’t look as stricken as she feels.

Before they leave the station, the cops tell her that they’ll be in touch if they have any further questions. Cassie nods, not trusting her voice.

She’s quiet on the journey home, replaying the entire interview in her head, wondering if she fucked up in some way.

When they enter the house, she heads straight for the staircase.

“Where are you rushing off to?” her mother asks.

She pauses on the top stoop. “I need to pee.”

Inside her bathroom, she locks the door and pulls her hair back into a claw clip. Then, she kneels on the floor in front of the toilet and empties the contents of her stomach into the bowl.

-

After dinner, she excuses herself and retreats to her bed. It’s been a draining few hours, pretending she feels fine in front of her mother. Every forced smile, forced laugh, forced assurance that she was okay tasted like ashes in her mouth.

In her bed, under the covers, she doom-scrolls on TikTok for what feels like hours until Lexi enters their bedroom. She feels her weight at the end of the bed and squints against the light when her comforter is harshly pulled back from over her head.

“Hi.”

Cassie exhales through her nose. “Hi.”

“Are you okay?”

She snorts indelicately. “Really?”

Lexi sighs. “Right. Stupid question.”

Cassie can tell that she wants to talk so she slips her phone into her pocket and sits up straighter in bed.

“I just wanted to say that… I’m sorry.”

She frowns. “What?”

“I’m sorry. About the play.”

“Oh my god, Lex. Do you really think that matters now?”

“I know, I know,” she replies. “But I’ve felt bad about it for months and I need to get this off my chest.”

Cassie really didn’t want to have this conversation. Everything that happened after the play fucking sucked — and everything she saw in the play fucking sucked too. She didn’t want to relive all of the ways her sister was embarrassed of or disappointed in her. But she also knows Lexi won’t drop the subject until she’s said her peace. She was stubborn like that.

Cassie sighs. “Fine. Say what you need to say.”

“Okay.” Lexi takes a deep breath before she begins. “I’m sorry that I didn’t talk to you about the content of my play. I think I was using it to tell you — and mom — some things that I’ve wanted to say for a long time. I was too scared to just talk to you about them and that’s cowardly. So I’m sorry.”

“Lex, it’s okay. I mean, you weren’t wrong. I’m a bad sister, I get too obsessed with boys, I betrayed my best friend because of a boy. I’ve been really shitty. I get it.”

“But that’s not it,” Lexi argues. “We all have good and bad sides to us. I wasn’t trying to only point out the bad, even though it might have felt that way. Because you’re also sweet and fun, and you were so good to Maddy when she was staying with us. A lot of people wouldn’t have begged their parents to let their friend stay with them.”

Cassie chews on the inside of her cheek and blinks back the tell-tale sting of tears. Maddy was still a sore subject for her; she thinks she always will be.

“And you’re not a bad sister! You’re just a little self-centered sometimes.” Cassie’s eyes snap to Lexi. “I am too!” she adds defensively, hands raised in the air. “I didn’t think about the consequences of my play at all. I was just obsessed with making my vision a reality.”

There’s a lapse of silence. Lexi looks at her with round, pleading eyes and it’s clear that Cassie accepting her apology means a lot to her.

“Well you did a great job. It was, like, a Broadway-level production. I mean seriously, where did our school get the budget?” Both sisters laugh softly. “And I’m sorry too. You have no idea how sorry I am. I know I haven’t always been good to you… to a lot of people. I just make really, really stupid choices sometimes.”

An image of Nate, bloody and lifeless, flashes in her mind.

“Thank you,” Lexi murmurs as she reaches out to take Cassie’s hand. Her gaze falls to their joined hands and a sad smile pulls at her lips. “Y’know, I was so scared for you when I found out about you and Nate. I knew he would hurt you in ways you wouldn’t ever fully recover from.”

It feels like ice has been shot through her veins. A part of her knew — even before that awful, awful night — that Nate had left a permanent mark on her. Some part of her would always be bruised by him. But it stung to hear it aloud, especially from Lexi.

It was impossible for her to truly be rid of him. Even before she took his life.

“It was scary to watch. You’ve always been… vulnerable—” Cassie winces at the word, “but when you were with him you weren’t yourself, Cass. And I wish I had done more to intervene but I didn’t know how to get through to you.”

A tear slides down Cassie’s cheek and she hadn’t even realized she was crying. She brushes it away.

“Maybe I’m not the person you thought I was,” Cassie replies quietly. “Maybe the person I was with Nate is the real me.” She swallows the lump in her throat. “Because the Cassie you thought you knew wouldn’t have killed someone, right?”

“Cass…” Lexi murmurs.

She wipes at her face and sits up straighter.

“Can I ask you something?” Lexi nods. “Why did you hate him so much? Was it just because of Fezco?”

“That was part of it,” she answers, “And there was the stuff that Rue told me. And then I saw what he had done to you and to Maddy.”

A defiant anger settles over Lexi’s face and she tightens her jaw.

“Nate created chaos and hurt people wherever he went. And he was always only going to get worse. I’m not sad that he’s gone and you shouldn’t be either.”

Is she sad that he’s gone? She supposes she is — the pathetic, lovesick, self-loathing person that exists inside of her will always mourn their relationship and now the man himself.

“One day… when I’m ready… I want you to tell me everything you know about him. Okay?”

Lexi squeezes her hand. “Okay.”

Cassie exhales a deep, heavy breath.

“I don’t know how to move past this. I don’t know… how to become normal again.”

Lexi’s eyes soften with sympathy.

“I don’t think you’ll ever be normal again. I know I won’t be,” she answers, and Cassie’s already overwhelming guilt only intensifies. “But we need to find a new normal. Because otherwise this was all for nothing.”

And that is the crux of her problem.

Some days, Cassie just wants to end it all, to rid herself of this misery and everyone else of her presence. But so many people had been implicated now — her sister, Fezco and his brother, their spacey roommate, even her mother to some extent. She owed it to the people who had helped to protect her, to stick around. She doubts she will ever do something great with her life but she couldn’t leave them all to deal with it alone.

“I don’t know how to tell you how grateful I am for what you’ve done for me.”

Lexi smiles and leans in to press a kiss to her forehead.

“Family is supposed to take care of each other.”

one year later

Nate’s love made Cassie crazy. Nate’s death makes her completely and utterly depressed.

Carrying the weight of her guilt around was debilitating. She knew she was too thin, too quiet, too anti-social. She had started taking anti-anxiety medication a month after Nate died, in an attempt to get a handle on her increasingly frequent anxiety attacks. The meds work, for the most part, but the depression that threatens to consume her is a whole different beast.

Lexi suggests she talk to her doctor about antidepressants but Cassie has no desire to take them. She can’t explain it but she wants to wallow in the depression. It feels like her punishment, her penance, for all the things she has done. She killed a man — the least she could do was feel fucking horrible about it.

She graduated high school by the skin of her teeth, her grades just enough to get her diploma. It sits in her mother’s armoire in their dining room, collecting dust. But she isn’t going to college. She didn’t have a high enough SAT score and it requires a level of social interaction and motivation that she doesn’t think she’s currently capable of. Instead, she got a job at West Highland’s Walmart. Sure, she had to speak to customers, but most of them were people she didn’t know and answering mundane questions about which aisle items were located in was easy.

This is her life now. She goes to work, she comes home, she goes for a run, she picks at her dinner, she watches trashy TV with her mother, and then she goes to sleep and prays the nightmares don’t come. It’s a boring life but it’s the one she’s got. She doesn’t see anyone on the weekends or go out with her co-workers when they invite her. The most social interaction she has, outside of her family, is when Fezco — and occasionally Ash — come over to see Lexi.

It’s easier this way.

She knows her mother and Lexi are worried about her. They stopped telling her around six months after Nate disappeared — when the heat died down and the cops stopped asking questions and Nate became another missing persons statistic, branded a ‘runaway’ in the news, despite there being no signs of his running away. His mother occasionally appeared on the local news, still pleading for information, but she left town a few months ago so Cassie no longer needs to worry about crossing paths her.

Cassie was always looking over her shoulder but the fear of her actions being uncovered grew smaller with every passing day.

Despite them no longer voicing their worries, she still received concerned and pitying looks from her mother and sister, and they frequently asked her if she was eating enough. She wishes she could offer them something, anything, to soothe their uneasiness but she just doesn’t have it in her.

A year after that fateful night — when she spilled Nate’s blood and fundamentally changed who she was, forever — Cassie is not doing well. But she knows that this is what she deserves.

-

Fezco comes over for dinner once every two weeks, upon her mother’s insistence. It’s the only time she really talks to someone that isn’t her family or her co-workers and it’s fine. It really is. She had initial misgivings about him dating her sister but she likes Fezco — and not just because he helped cover up the terrible crime she committed.

She doesn’t talk to him much but Fezco doesn’t seem to mind; he’s a man of few words. The only time he seems chatty is when he’s alone with Lexi, his low voice constantly rumbling through the other side of their closed bedroom door.

They have dinner and Cassie eats as much of her chicken and mashed potatoes as she can stomach. After, she washes the dishes, while Fezco and Lexi dry, and then they retreat to the living room to watch a movie. Her mother checks out halfway through, the wine she drank at dinner taking effect. She bids them all good night twenty minutes into the second movie and heads upstairs to bed.

Cassie’s gaze flickers from the TV to Fezco and Lexi, cuddled up on the couch across from her. Lexi is curled into his side, her head on his shoulder and her eyes closed as she also drifts away into sleep.

“She asleep?” Fezco asks. She nods. He sighs and tightens his arm around her. “Been workin’ too hard lately. Always studyin’. She’s got her AP finals comin’ up.”

“I don’t know why she’s stressed. She’ll do great. She always does.”

“We know that,” he replies. “But for some reason, she don’t.”

Lexi has been accepted into Berkeley in the fall. Cassie doesn’t know what she and Fezco are planning to do when she moves upstate but she does know they will try their hardest to make it work.

Her gaze shifts back to the TV, where pageant queen Sarah Michelle Gellar is screaming as she watches her boyfriend get hacked to death. Cassie grimaces. Maybe I Know What You Did Last Summer wasn’t the best choice.

She looks back to Fezco, who is now stroking his fingers gently through Lexi’s hair.

“Fez?”

His eyes shoot over to her, clearly surprised that she’s initiating conversation with him.

“Yeah?”

“What did you do to him that night?”

She already knew some of the details. That night, Lexi had told her Fezco’s vague plan, when it was just the two of them huddled up on his couch. And whatever he and Ash did must have worked because the cops never found a trace of Nate.

But hearing the full, grisly details is something that she has wanted to know for a while. She just couldn’t muster up the courage to ask him.

Until now.

Fezco blinks rapidly, face blank with shock, but he recovers quickly. She imagines he’s used to masking his emotions in his line of work.

“Um… you wanna know, like, everything?”

“Yeah,” she responds. “I want to know what happened.”

She needs to hear this.

“Uh, well, we went back to the site and ripped up any floorboards that had his, uh, blood on ‘em. We put ‘em in my car and drove north for a couple of hours until we found a deserted area. No people around, just trees and mountains.” He scratches at his beard and eyes her apprehensively. “You sure you wanna hear this?”

“I do,” she insists. “Please. I can handle it.”

He doesn’t look convinced but presses on.

“We burned his body and any shit we found in his pockets or in his car. Burned your clothes and the knife and the floorboards too. It was just a fuckin’ pile of ash when we were done. Prolly swept away by the wind.”

A fuckin’ pile of ash. That’s what Nate had been reduced to because of her.

“Then we drove back to town and took his car to the scrapyard,” he continues, and she thinks this is the most she’s ever heard him speak. “I wore a black hoodie and Ash hid in the backseat so we wouldn’t be seen in Nate’s car on any cameras. Din’ have to worry about the yard — it’s owned by my grandma’s old friend, a real shady dude. But he don’t ask no questions, you feel? Destroyed the car, no problem.”

It was an extensive process. Fezco and his brother had been out all night, returning just before the sun rose, and they had gone to great lengths to cover up what she had done. They had thought of things that wouldn’t have even occurred to Cassie and had made it impossible for the police to find any evidence. Without their help, she knows she’d be in prison right now, incapable of effectively cleaning up her own mess.

“How did you know how to do all of that?”

He shrugs. “We din’. I mean, I’mma criminal but there’s no fuckin’ manual on hidin’ a body. We just tried to cover all our bases and not make the same mistakes as before.”

She frowns. “Before?”

He freezes, clearly having revealed too much. Then, he nods. “Yeah, before.”

Cassie doesn’t pry any further. It’s not like she’s in a position to judge.

“Nate’s never gon’ be found, if that’s what you’re thinkin’ ‘bout.”

She’ll never be completely convinced that something won’t be uncovered but she does believe the chances are extremely slim. Especially knowing what she knows now.

“Why did you do all of that?” she asks instead. “Lexi and I weren’t talking back then. I was being a total bitch to her. So why?”

He looks down at Lexi, now nestled into his chest as she sleeps soundly, her heavy breathing tapered off into quiet snores. Cassie has witnessed plenty of affection between her sister and her boyfriend, but she’s never seen the softness that appears on his face as he looks down at her in that moment.

“I wanna be around for a long time,” he says, voice low. He glides his fingers through Lexi’s hair again. “For as long as she’ll have me.”

She suspects that Lexi will have him for the rest of her life.

“I knew how much she loved you but she’d also seen too much. I did it to make her happy, to keep her safe. S’all I care about.” He lifts his gaze to Cassie and all softness is gone, expression now cold and unflinching. “And I hated that motherfucker.”

To both of their surprise, Cassie laughs, a short, sharp sound that escapes her before she can contain it.

“Yeah,” she sighs. “I kind of did too.”

He squints at her. “Only kind of?”

She smiles sadly. “A small part of me also loved him. That was the problem.”

Fezco slowly shakes his head in disbelief. It was probably hard for him to understand that there was anything about Nate to love.

“How you doin’, Cass?” he asks gently. “For real.”

She laughs again, humorless this time.

“Fucking terrible,” she admits.

He simply nods in response. No sympathetic smile or pitying gaze and Cassie is grateful for that. Fezco didn’t bullshit anybody. His straightforwardness and honesty were things she admired about him.

“Can I tell you something? Something I haven’t told anyone?”

He hesitates then says, “‘kay.”

She exhales a long, shaky breath.

“The first time the knife went in, it was an accident. I only had the knife to scare him and it was still in my hand when he came at me and I tried to fight him off.” She swallows thickly. “But the other times… I don’t know what came over me. I looked down at him on the floor, bleeding and dying, and I’ve… I’ve never felt anger like that.

“I stabbed him three more times.” She meets Fezco’s gaze. “And I meant to do it.”

-

After her talk with Fezco, Cassie thinks a lot about the past year. She had thought abandoning any semblance of her former life was what she had to endure, to pay the price for what she had done. But now she wonders if it’s selfish to be so detached and simply going through the motions.

Did she owe it to her sister to try and do something with her life? With her freedom?

It’s an interesting question but not one that she has an answer for. She doesn’t think her guilt will allow her to truly embrace her freedom. Sometimes she kind of hopes the cops will find something and arrest her, just so this whole ordeal can be over. But she also doesn’t want Lexi to hate her because she thinks she’s throwing it all away.

Nothing in Cassie’s life has been simple since she took that ride with Nate to Virgil’s party.

A week after her talk with Fezco, she decides that she finally needs to hear everything that her sister knows about Nate.

“I’m ready,” she tells her firmly. “I want you to tell me.”

Lexi looks concerned. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Sitting on Lexi’s twin bed, she listens as Lexi relays what Rue had told her. The messy, twisted story of Nate and Jules and Rue and Fezco. All four of them had been intertwined in a complicated web that had started with Nate’s initial betrayal of Jules.

He had hurt so many people. Catfishing Jules and making her fall in love with him, blackmailing her in some misguided attempt to protect his father, snitching on Fezco — who he frequently bought from — in retaliation because he warned him not to harass Rue and Jules. And what had any of it been for? His father still went to jail and Nate had implied that he played a part in that.

All of his actions only seemed to appeal to some strange vendetta Nate had against each individual. He had created a domino effect that messed with so many people’s lives.

And then there is Maddy’s side of it all. At the height of Cassie’s infatuation with Nate, she had convinced herself that Nate didn’t hurt Maddy, despite seeing how in denial Maddy was and knowing the Tyler story didn’t add up. But she had to believe it, because sleeping with your friend’s ex-boyfriend is fucked up, but sleeping with your friend’s abusive ex is unforgivable. Cassie didn’t want to believe that she could be that person.

She knows there are other details, pieces of the story that are missing as it was passed from Jules to Rue to Fezco, and finally to her sister. The worst kind of game of telephone, recalling all the times Nate was a piece of shit.

She’ll probably never know the complete story. Nobody wanted to admit to the full extent of the terrible things they had done for Nate; she understood that. But what she did know was enough. Nate really had created chaos wherever he went. He thrived on it and his ability to manipulate and control those around him. Cassie had no idea who she was truly messing with when she entered that bathroom with him on New Years Eve.

Still, knowing all of this doesn’t clear her conscience. There were plenty of psychopaths in the world who didn’t end up with a knife in their heart.

“Imagine what shit he could have done after high school,” Lexi reasons. “Nate was a fucking scary teenager. Thinking of him as an adult sends a shiver down my spine. He would have gotten so much worse.”

“Well, we’ll never know,” Cassie replies flatly. “I made sure of that.”

“Cassie, come on.” Lexi’s tone is short with an edge of scolding. “Are you gonna do this forever? Just sitting around being guilty and sad?”

She shrugs. “I guess.”

“I really think you should talk to someone, see a therapist.”

“Oh, okay,” she scoffs. “And tell them that all my problems start with that time I stabbed my ex?”

“We both know your problems started way before that,” Lexi teases, and it does make Cassie snort and smile. “But I’m serious. It could help you. You can talk about dad and what happened with McKay. And you don’t need to go into detail about Nate. Just talk about how he made you feel.”

She rolls her lips together, contemplating. She meets Lexi’s gaze. “You really think it’ll help me?”

Lexi shrugs. “It’s worth a try. Everyone could benefit from a little therapy.”

She supposes that’s true.

“I know you want to be sad and depressed forever but I won’t let you,” Lexi says firmly. She nudges Cassie’s shoulder with hers and smiles. “Okay?”

The corners of Cassie’s lips twitch up into something like a smile. “Okay.”

-

Lexi guilt trips her into attending a graduation party with her and Fezco. It’s a house party thrown by one of Lexi’s classmates and the first party Cassie has been to since the night she caught Jules and Nate fighting.

She’s freaking out to say the least.

“It’ll be fun!” Lexi insists. “You can hang out with us and you don’t have to get drunk.”

She doesn’t know why she agrees but she quickly finds herself squished into the back of Fezco’s car, between Ash and Rue.

“Can’t remember the last time I saw you at a party,” Rue comments. She looks her up and down and smiles. “You look good.”

She knows Rue is lying. She’s wearing the only dress in her closet that isn’t too big for her and the most make-up she could manage without her unpracticed hands fucking it up.

Still, “Thanks.”

The house is packed full of people when they arrive — not just Lexi’s classmates but also some of her own, people presumably returning home from college for the summer. Her stomach lurches as she pictures running into BB or Kat or Daniel, or anyone else who hates her.

Lexi grabs her hand and tugs. “Come on. It’s gonna be okay.”

-

The party isn’t nearly as bad as she expected. A few people stare at her and whisper to their friends as she passes them by, but for the most part she is left alone. Although she wonders how much of that is because Fezco is glaring at anyone who looks their way.

Their small group gathers around a sectional couch, joined by Ethan and Bobbi. Cassie sips at her wine cooler and makes small talk when spoken to and pointedly avoids looking at Kat and BB who are standing at the far corner of the room.

Her behavior in high school really is old news now. She knows people still look at her and think of her as the girl who dry-humped a carnival ride or the one who screamed on-stage in the middle of her sister’s play. Some reputations just stuck. But high school drama is a beast, always churning out new gossip and incidents for people to obsess over. She was just another in a long line of people who had embarrassed themselves.

It felt kind of nice to be just another loser.

As the night continues, her sister gets drunker and louder, and she and Bobbi wander off to find the other theater kids. Cassie is feeling overwhelmed, like she needs some space, so she takes her opportunity to sneak away without Lexi there to watch over her.

She grabs a bottle of white wine from the kitchen and slips out to the pool. There aren’t many people out in the yard — only small groups of smokers and people passing joints around — and the pool is empty.

She removes her sneakers and takes a seat at the edge of the pool, her legs dangling in the cool water. The wine is acidic on her tongue as she takes a sip, cheap and nasty, but she doesn’t mind.

Her eyes scan around the yard and land on a group of girls. They don’t look old enough to be seniors and they seem self-conscious in their tiny skirts and dresses.

Not too long ago, she would have viewed those girls as potential competition. Catching the interest of the guy she wanted stood above everything else. It was the most important thing to her — especially at parties — and whether she was having a good time often hinged upon receiving the attention of the guy she was then infatuated with.

Her therapist says it’s the result of low self-esteem and self-objectification. Internalized sexism that makes her prioritize how she appears to men in the hopes of gaining validation from them.

Other people just call her a pick me.

She knows she isn’t fully opening up in her therapy sessions. Fear of being found out has her always holding something back. But she does think they’re working and helping her to find some light in her life after such an intense period of darkness.

Cassie will be forever changed by what she did; she has accepted that. But her existence didn’t have to be miserable. She’s been looking for other jobs — something more stimulating that would force her to socialize with others — and has also applied to the local community college. When Lexi invites her out to things and more often than not she says yes — hence her presence at this party — and she has twice attended after work drinks.

It’s slow progress but it is progress, and that’s what matters.

She takes a bigger gulp from the wine bottle and is wiping her mouth with the back of her hand when, out of the corner of her eye, she sees someone take a seat at the pool. Her gaze snaps up and her mouth parts in shock when she makes eye contact with Maddy.

Her brown-glossed lips pull into a hesitant, close-mouthed smile.

“Hey.”

Cassie swallows back the sudden lump that has formed in her throat.

“Hi.”

“How are you?” she asks, casual.

“I’m okay,” Cassie replies, trying to keep her voice level. “How are you?”

“I’m good. Really good.” Her fingers flex around the solo cup in her hands. “I saw you out here alone and I wanted to, um, clear the air.”

“Oh, um, okay.” Now that she has her opportunity, she can't stop herself from blurting out an apology. “I’m sorry,” she rushes out. “About everything that happened. And I know I didn’t say it before so… I’m sorry.”

Maddy blinks a few times in shock and then inhales a deep, steadying breath.

“Thank you.”

“No problem,” Cassie murmurs. The silence between them quickly becomes awkward so she attempts to push through. “So, um, what have you been up to?”

“I’ve been in LA,” she answers. “Do you remember Samantha? I was nanny-ing for her? Well she set me up with some contacts and I’ve been working as an assistant stylist.”

“Wow,” Cassie breathes out. “That sounds amazing.”

“What about you? Did you go to college?”

“Uh, no.” She winces internally. “I haven’t done a whole lot.”

Maddy presses her lips together and nods.

As they lapse into tense silence again, Cassie finds herself desperately wanting to bring up Nate. They never talked about what happened when he disappeared. Other than what she overheard in the school bathroom that one time, Cassie has no idea how she feels.

Against her better judgment, she asks, “Do you ever think about Nate?”

Maddy sighs heavily and closes her eyes. “More than I like to.”

“Were you sad?”

“A little,” she shrugs. “Honestly I didn’t know how to feel. It was all so fucked up.”

Cassie nods sympathetically.

Their eyes meet across the water and Maddy asks, “Do you ever think about what might have happened to him?”

Stupidly, impulsively, she replies, “I know what happened to him.”

Maddy frowns, her thin brows pulling together. “What do you mean?”

“I-it was an accident,” she stammers. “W-we got into a fight and I… I was trying to fight him off but I— I killed him.”

A loud, sharp laugh bursts from Maddy. “Yeah, okay.”

“No, I’m serious, Maddy. I did it. I killed him.” She inhales, her chest rising, and then blows out a large breath. Tears spring to her eyes and a watery laugh falls from her lips. “God, it actually feels kind of good to tell someone. I don’t think I even care if you go to the police.”

It wasn’t really true but the damage has been done. She would face whatever consequences would come her way.

“Fuck,” Maddy mutters. She stares at Cassie with wide, alarmed eyes. “You’re fucking serious.”

“I really am.”

A pregnant pause and then Maddy starts laughing, high-pitched hysterical giggles that Cassie has never heard from her before.

“Ho-ly shit,” Maddy gasps. When she looks at Cassie again, her dark eyes are glistening with tears. “I can’t believe it. So he’s really not coming back?”

He was scattered across the California wilderness. There was no way he was coming back.

Cassie shakes her head. “No.”

As her laughter dies down, she inhales a shaky breath.

“Are you gonna tell someone?” Cassie asks, her voice meek and cautious.

Maddy narrows her eyes. “Fuck no. Do I look like a fucking snitch?”

“Maddy, come on. Be serious.”

“I am, bitch. I'm not gonna say anything.” She smiles ruefully, gaze focused on the still pool water. “I’m kinda jealous I didn’t do it myself.”

That is the last thing Cassie expected her to say.

“What?”

A shadow passes over her face.

“When you guys were together, Nate found out I had some dirt on his dad. It was a CD. I stole it from his house when we were dating.” Her eyes shine with unshed tears. “He came to my house,” she continues. “He snuck in somehow and he was waiting in my bedroom. I had no idea.”

“Maddy,” Cassie murmurs, fear settling like a stone in her gut. “What did he do?”

“He threatened me until I gave him the CD. Put a gun to my head and played fucking Russian roulette like a lame supervillain.” Tears track down her cheeks. “I thought he was gonna hurt me for real. Maybe even kill me. And I froze up. All I did was cry,” she spits, anger now creeping into her despair.

Cassie can’t believe what she’s hearing. She knew Nate would do crazy things to get what he wanted but this was a new extreme. It terrifies her to know that during the time she was devoting her entire existence to him, shaping herself to be exactly what he wanted, he was doing something so heinous.

Every time she peeled back a new Nate Jacobs layer, she found nothing but rot and horror beneath.

“Maddy,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry…”

“He was a fucking psycho and I’m glad he’s gone,” Maddy hisses. Her voice is more controlled now, conviction in her tone.

“I am, too,” Cassie confesses. “I hate who I became when I was with him. I… I ruined myself to be with him.”

Maddy scoffs. “Trust me, I know more than anyone how crazy he makes you. I was not a good person when I was with him. I did some really fucked-up shit. And the worst thing is, he didn’t even make me do it. I just wanted to please him, to make him happy. It was sick.”

It was so weird to hear the things she had felt during her time with Nate articulated by someone else.

She doesn’t know if Nate had any intention of physically hurting — or even killing — Maddy that night or if he just wanted to scare her. But hearing how close he came to it, how he held a gun to her head and then returned to his normal life as if nothing had happened, makes some of Cassie’s guilt lessen. The weight in her chest doesn’t feel quite as heavy and oppressive.

“Turns out we could actually get over Nate. I just needed to murder him.”

Their eyes meet across the pool and for one long moment neither of them says anything. Then, both girls burst into laughter, obnoxious and carefree in the quiet of the yard.

“Good riddance,” Maddy declares and holds out her solo cup in Cassie’s direction.

Cassie knocks her wine bottle against it in a morbid toast. “Cheers.”

They both take long sips of their respective drinks. Their legs float around in the water, skin lit up by the glowing pool lights, turned blue by the reflection of the mosaic tile.

“So… um, are you in town for the rest of the summer?”

“For two weeks,” Maddy replies. She grins at her, wide and genuine. “We should hang out.”

The weight of her guilt becomes even lighter. It will always be there but maybe it didn’t have to consume her.

Cassie smiles back. “I’d like that.”