Not Like Other Girls: Chapters 18–22

Tess returned from her desk without a word about Justin Lloyd or that teal folder, then treated me to an iced coffee, so now I’m both anxious and very, very caffeinated.

“It backfired on Maddie, so you get some justice, Hudson.”

“Do you have other brothers? The anniversary of the comeback game is next month, and I’m working on a retrospective with the major players. I need the MVP.”

The Culver Eagles were a middling team on the cusp of sectionals Lee’s freshman year.

I look up at him, but his eyes are downcast, fixed to a pothole in the pavement.

We’ve never broached the college thing outright.

“Yeah, but I was held back for, uh. Truancy. Our building flooded, so housing was kind of unstable for a few months.”

“The bad news,” he says, “is that your dad’s weed is potent.”

I’m not being facetious.

“I don’t know. I hate feeling like charity. Or like I’m an imposition. Ideally, I’ll get my own apartment with—”
“Shit, the scholarship money,” I say.

“Then when I was in fifth grade, my mom got acute bronchitis. Viral. My grandparents took her to the ER, but she hadn’t hit her deductible yet. She made them take her home.”

He relents with an eyeroll.

“Then bore me.”

It’s crowded, too, teeming with loud nerds hitting up the happy hour and, honestly, I’m too high for this.

Hudson cranks the wheel, hard, and his car careens around a corner, crashing straight into a fire hydrant.

I mumble a paltry apology.

She punctuates it by slamming the door.

“It’s not a consolation, but I never...like, I didn’t...I knew those weren’t for me, you know?”

I’d hitched a ride with Cody, which meant hitching a ride with Miles so that Cody could get obliterated on blue-flavored vodka.

“It’s right on the bay. He said I can use it whenever I—”
“How nice,” I deadpanned, and dug a Starburst from the seat.

How I stole a handle of vodka and stormed down the beach, far from the Birds fluttering around Maddie; far from Cody, who stood at the outskirts of the bonfire, on his phone; far from all the assholes who saw what I did to Maddie without knowing what she’d done to me first.

Her words reverberate, just like her other words—you goddamn liar—in my head.

“Geoff called the station after the note came out”— again, where is that note?—“and he said this is a personal matter and he’d appreciate our discretion. He worries what this will do to her reputation.”

“But if he’s trying to suppress the story, why does her mom want to talk?”

He tells me this, too, like I’d know cardinal directions.