Page 96 of Nowhere to Hide
I am so tired of being the story instead of the person the story happened to.
The sound coming out of me is raw and graceless, and I press my face into my knees to muffle it, but I can still hear myself. It lasts long enough that my throat hurts and my sleeves are wet.
Loud enough that I don’t hear her coming.
I hear the bag hit the ground first: the unzipped, overstuffed Ivy Hale tote going down on the grass beside me with a thud, and the small avalanche of its contents — a water bottle, her keys, a crumpled receipt, and lip balm rolling into the wet grass.
Then her, dropping down next to me, one hand on my back, firm and warm even through the hoodie. “Hey, Sloane,” she says. “Hey.”
I lift my head, and I know what I look like — swollen, blotchy, my nose running, mascara probably halfway down my face — and Ivy doesn’t recoil from it. I love her all the more for it.
“I walked out of class.” Her hand rubs my back. “Jess from Sterling saw you running across the lawn and she was worried. Are you — okay, you’re not okay.”
I shake my head, but I don’t even try for words.
I hold up my phone, and Ivy starts scrolling, her thumb moving fast. As she reads, she goes still and her jaw sets. Her thumb stops, then moves again, faster. She sees the post and the comments and the screenshots from my old school.
“Fuck,” she says, low, and then she lowers the phone and stares at it for another second and lifts her head and says it louder. “Fuck.”
Somewhere on the path behind us, a guy in a frat quarter-zip has slowed down to look at us. He’s got his phone in his hand, angled wrong, and it’s happening again, and I want to stand up and scream at him.
Ivy turns her head. She doesn’t stand. She doesn’t yell. She just looks at him, and whatever her face does is enough, because the guy with the phone puts it away and walks off like he just remembered something urgent.
“Okay,” Ivy says, voice full of fury. “I need you to tell me who did this, but first, tell me it wasn’t my fucking brother.”
I shake my head, but I can’t talk yet. So Ivy sits beside me and puts her arm through mine, her hand finding my hand and gripping hard. We sit there for maybe a minute, maybe three, but it helps me start to breathe again.
“Come on,” she says after a while. “You’ll freeze.”
She stands, pulls me up, and we start walking. I put my hood up, because the old instinct is back — become smaller, less visible. But Ivy walks close enough to make it clear I’m not walking alone and she’s not shying away from me.
She doesn’t try to make me talk, and she doesn’t try to make me feel better. Good thing, too, because now I’m thinking about how many people on this campus have seen the post and whether they’ve seen the photos.
They weren’t part of the post, or linked to it, but is it only a matter of time?
We cut through the lower quad toward Sterling, and we’re almost to the courtyard when I see him — Mason, sitting on the low wall near Sterling’s west entrance with two of his Pi Sigma friends, like he timed being exactly here at exactly this time.
He’s got a coffee in one hand, his jacket collar turned up, and he’s leaning back on his palms with his legs stretched out. When one of the other guys says something and Mason laughs, easy and open, he tips his head back, and that’s when he sees me.
He grins.
But it’s not the lazy half-smile he gives everyone. It’s wider and slower, and when his eyes find mine, he lifts his coffee in my direction like a little salute. It’s a small gesture, but it’s enough to tell me he’s responsible for all this.
“What?” Ivy says, following my eyes.
“It was him, Ivy,” I say, quietly. “It was Mason.”
She looks at Mason on the wall, still watching us, still grinning. “How?—”
I start talking, and it all comes out like someone reading a police report about their own life. I could stop, I could swallow it the way I’ve swallowed it for a year now, but the Halden Girl already broke once today and I’m too tired to rebuild her.
So I tell her everything as we keep walking away from him.
I tell her about Harrison — the photos I sent him because I was eighteen and I trusted him, and how fast they stopped being mine. I tell her how the story rearranged itself until I was the embarrassment and he was just a boy who’d made a small mistake.
“Sloane,” she says. “I?—”
But I keep going, like a force of nature. I tell her how my parents packed the whole thing into boxes labeled “fresh start” and drove me three states from it, and how I built the Halden Girl so no one here would ever look at me the way that board did.
