My butt was starting to hurt from sitting on my lumpy tote bag as I scrolled through grainy shots of the crowd. I knew Tess was looking over my shoulder because she was breathing her coffee breath in my ear, and so I scrolled as angrily and as slowly as I could scroll, lingering over every picture in fake-y consideration before double-tapping it to make the heart appear, until—
“Hey,” Tess coffee-breathed into my ear. “Is that . . . us? Who took that picture?”
It was—the selfie Tess had taken in the taxi. Tess looked amazing, even while completely drunk, the purple-haired girl looked impossibly cool, her nose ring just barely glinting, and I looked . . . awful. Supremely weird. To the extent that I was even visible in the dark taxi backseat, anyway. If I squinted, I could see my hair, all puffy from the humid concert air, and my eyeshadow melting down my face.
“You did,” I said shortly. I went to scroll away—not giving this one a heart—when I saw the caption beneath it.
literally actually ran into #NATALIE last night!!! freakin out y’all #younglungs #vivianviolet
“What?!” I said, loud enough to scare the pigeon again. Tess screwed up one eye.
“Jesus, Nattie, don’t yell, my head is—”
“That girl from last night.” My heart was skittering in my chest. “With the purple hair. Did she tell you what her name was?”
“What? No. I barely even remember her. Why?”
I held the phone half an inch from Tess’s nose. “Look at her username.”
“I can’t freaking see—oh.”
“Oh?!” Oh was an infinite understatement. The picture was posted by vivianviolet, and it had 1,893 likes. And the little hearts kept on coming.
“New Jersey Transit train to Trenton, now arriving on track seven west.”
“That’s us.” Tess grabbed my elbow, but I didn’t get up. I double-tapped into my browser and thumb-typed in Vivian Violet’s blog address as fast as my shaking fingers would let me, frantically paged down, and there it was.
BREAKING FREAKING NEWS
Posted by V. Violet at 1:24 a.m. EST
Are you sitting down, kittens? Auntie VV has THRILLING gossip. As we’re all aware, I and the rest of Cool America have a massive aural hard-on for precious hipster rockers the Young Lungs and have been dying to know WHO the heartless heartbreaker behind their infectious earworm “Natalie” could be. I’d just about written off Natalie as a figment of studly singer/guitarist Sebastian Delacroix’s imagination when I LITERALLY MET HER IN PERSON.
There in the middle was our photo again, which I skipped over.
Now, obviously I didn’t get a huge interview in with Miss N., but we did talk enough to confirm that she and SebDel were high-school sweethearts—in fact, she’s still in high-school. #Jailbait much? Still, a source close to Natalie describes her relationship with Mr. Delacroix as “true love.” No word yet on why she broke his heart, heart, heart, though. Hopefully she’ll come forward soon with a statement and put an end to our misery!!
“Nattie,” Tess said. “The train?”
I shook her off. My heart was beating so fast it felt like it had whirred right out of my chest. It was like I was empty, floating a few inches above my backpack, and not in a dreamy, romantic way. In a ghost way. A dead way. A way that made me feel like I might barf up my bits of bagel.
“This is bad,” I said robotically. “This is very bad.”
Tess squinted at my screen for two seconds as people started streaming around us. “Okay, so what. So there’s a girl out there named Natalie who Sebastian wrote a song about? That’s the same as before.” She shrugged. “You’re making a big deal out of nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” I tapped back to Pixstagram. “It’s at over two thousand likes.”
“So? It’s a terrible picture of you.”
She was right, ish: between the low light levels and the weird Pixsta filter, you could barely tell I was human, let alone me.
“Come on.” Tess held out one hand to me, and used her other hand to root around for her phone, which was in her pocket and now buzzing. “You’re not mad at me, right?”
“No.” I gritted my teeth.
“Good. And don’t cry, Nattie. We’re in the middle of New York.”
I wasn’t going to cry. If anything, I was going to scream. I clenched my phone in my hand. Then I set it down again. Then I picked it up again. Then I looked at Tess, who was not running for the train but instead yelling into her phone.
“What? No. I don’t even know—”
And then she went pale, a pale that was paler even than hungover or pissed off about bad coffee.
“Shut up,” she said into her phone, and jammed it back into her pocket.
“Now boarding, track seven west, train eight thirty-seven to Trenton.”
“Um, let’s go,” said Tess. She sounded nervous, which was not something Tess often sounded like.
“What?” I didn’t move. “Who was that on the phone?”
“Remember how you said you weren’t mad?”
“I’m not,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think I am.”
“Remember how I’m your loyal best friend who shepherded you around New York and took you to find an awesome dress to wear to the Big Gay Dance Party and supported you after the Almost Kiss and—”
“I remember, Tess,” I said. “What happened?”
“I think I kind of, um, gave Vivian Violet my phone number.”
“You what?”
A woman pulling a rolly bag glared at me from under a beret. Tess didn’t even blink.
“Look, when she finds you, just—”
“When she finds me?” I cried. “Why would she be able to find me?”
“Don’t be dumb,” Tess said. “There aren’t a lot of Tess Kozlowskis with a two-six-seven area code. One Whitepages search and a cross-reference with the schools in the area—”
“You put your last name in her phone?” I was still catching up. “How did you even manage to spell it?”
“It’s a Polish thing,” Tess said. “I guess I did it before I found you. Back when I was still at the bar.”
“Of course,” I said. “Of course you were at the bar.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you abandoned me to get drunk!” I threw my hands into the air. “And now all this stuff is happening.”
“I didn’t abandon you to get drunk,” Tess spat. “You told me you wanted to go by yourself, remember? And I didn’t know who she was. I just thought she was some cute Brooklyn girl. Do you know how often I get to talk to cute girls outside of OWPA? Outside of a place where everyone knows who I am? Not very fucking often.”
“Now boarding, track seven west—”
“Let’s just go,” Tess said. “We’ll deal with this later.”
“Deal with this? How can we possibly deal with this?”
“We’ll make a plan. Operation—”
“No. No way.” I buried my face in my arms. “I don’t want to make a plan right now. Honestly, I just kind of want to scream.”
“Don’t scream.” Tess glanced around at the crowd of commuters. “God, do not scream.”
“Well, I sure as hell don’t have anything to say!” I looked up. “I can’t believe this. You sold me out to the press.”
“V is not ‘the press,’” Tess said hotly.
“Oh, so she’s still V, huh? So should I start calling you the source close to Natalie?”
“Come on, Nattie.” Tess tugged on my arm. “It’s not like there’s going to be paparazzi hiding in your dad’s woodshed—”
“Yurt.” I didn’t move. Tess let go.
“Okay.” Her voice was a little higher now. “Okay, Nattie, I get that—”
“No.”
But Tess didn’t even listen and blew right on by.
“I get that you’re feeling bitter. And that’s understandable. But listen to yourself—”
“I am listening to myself,” I said
. “Actually, for the first time, I’m listening to myself, and not you.”
“Oh, so this is my fault? Please.” Tess fluttered her eyelashes, which irritated me for some reason. “You’re the one who broke Sebastian’s heart.”
“But I didn’t!” I was almost yelling now. “I drove around with him one night, one time, and he touched my face, and that was it. Then you made me dress up for that show at Ruby’s, and you dragged me to New York, and now—”
“Nattie, look, I get it, okay?” Tess interrupted. “I know better than anyone what it’s like to be made famous for something you’re not proud of, but—”
“Are you serious?” I couldn’t believe it. “That stupid billboard? News flash, Tess: that was six years ago. And nobody cares. Nobody ever cared. You just can’t see that because you think the whole stupid world revolves around you and your plans and your dumb dance.”
Tess’s mouth fell open. Then she shut it and pressed her lips tightly together.
“That’s great.” She laughed mirthlessly. “I’m the selfish one.”
I should’ve said I was sorry. But I wasn’t sorry. I hadn’t realized that was the truth until I’d barfed it out like that, but now that I had, it felt like the first thing to make sense in weeks.
“Let me ask you something,” Tess went on. “Did you even ask Sebastian about the dance last night? Or were you just trying to grab a piece of his indie-rock ass?”
The image of the band guys in the greenroom came flooding back. Seb’s probably gonna take her to senior prom or something. My stomach twisted. I looked at the ground, but Tess was still talking.
“You know, I’m not just your quirky lesbian sidekick, Nattie. I don’t exist just to make you feel better about all the dumb mistakes you make. I have stuff I want, too. And I’m actually working hard at something over here, for—yes, for myself. And yeah, I made you come up here for one thing, one stupid small favor. I guess I’m sorry that I relied on you. I’m sorry that I thought my friend could support me. God, I should’ve known better.”
I looked back up, and she gave me a shove. That was it—just a real shove.
“Good luck, Natalie.”
Tess turned and pushed away, and the train-station crowd surged into the space where my best friend used to be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Tess was gone. Tess, who knew how to take the subway and who wasn’t afraid to shoulder-check people to get on an escalator and who thought I was a terrible friend, was gone. Very gone. I immediately broke out in panic sweat. I had missed the train, and the next one wasn’t for an hour because apparently no one wanted to go to Trenton on a Saturday, which meant I wouldn’t get back until three—and that was before I took the train from Center City to Wister. Penn Station was filling with people coming back from Thanksgiving, pulling industrial-sized suitcases, looking bleary or angry or both. The overhead voice echoed against the tiles with a reminder not to approach or pet police dogs. In my stomach, the bagel felt like a hunk of lead.
Okay. If I was going to barf up bagel bits, I at least didn’t want to do it onto a leather-jacketed New Yorker with fancy luggage. I gripped the strap of my tote bag and pushed through to the side of one of the staircases, next to an Amtrak touchscreen. For $104, I could get to Philadelphia by 11:20 a.m. Except that I did not have $104. I had seventeen crumpled dollars and a concert ticket stub and—shoot—Bethany West’s old ID. I ran my finger along the edge of her PA driver’s license and contemplated my wallet. Technically, in there, I had a credit card, but Mom and Dad had said it was strictly For Emergencies Only.
The bagel-block lurched within me.
Right. What was this if not an emergency? If swiping away that $104 into this touchscreen swiper-thing meant I would return on time and my parents would never suspect I’d been on a stealth trip to the cultural capital of the eastern seaboard, well . . .
I ran the card before I had a chance to reconsider, took my printout ticket to the track, and fell asleep in a train seat.
An hour and a half of trundling through New Jersey later, I bolted up the stairs at 30th Street Station, ignoring the siren call of the cinnamon-scented pretzel booths, and dashed for the regional rail platforms. I made it onto the 11:23 local to Wister with literal seconds to spare. The train was eerily quiet, with everyone else plugged into earbuds, but I turned my phone off, terrified that I’d be tempted to look at Pixstagram otherwise. Once I’d finally found a seat, I allowed myself to catch my breath. The fizziness in my stomach had spread to my chest, and I hadn’t even had anything to drink the night before. And Tess was gone and mad at me and I was alone and mad at Tess and I wasn’t even trying to do anything wrong. It was all so unfair.
I put my head between my knees and started to cry, right there on the 11:23 local.
If there was one thing I was good at (besides being weird), it was self-flagellation, and in between tears I berated myself with gusto. I’d been a terrible friend. No, even worse, I’d been selfish, when all Tess was doing was trying to help. I hadn’t done anything to help Operation Big Gay Dance Party. But worst of all, and worst that this was still what I cared about the most, I hadn’t gotten to ask Sebastian anything about me. About us.
God. I couldn’t even get the pronouns right in my head. I let out a sob and smeared my face on the knee of my jeans.
“Miss?”
I jerked my head up. A white-shirted SEPTA conductor was peering down at me, his hand on the back of my seat.
“I’m sorry, miss, but this is the quiet car.” He pointed to a sign by the window. “No, uh, noise.”
“Right.” I sniffled and scrubbed at my face. Quiet car notwithstanding, I shouldn’t have been crying on the 11:23 local to Wister anyway. This poor nice conductor in his little round hat shouldn’t have to deal with me. The only really acceptable place to cry is home.
So I held it together until the Wister stop, and then climbed up the rickety wooden steps from the platform to Evergreen Street. I could already see the roof of the McCullough-Schwartz enclave, which made the fizzing in my chest settle a little. The house was still there, and somewhere inside, so was my family. I rubbed my eyes, smoothed my hair, and practically ran for it.
“Hello?” I called as I creaked through the squeaky front door and into the hallway. “Is anyone—”
“Natalie McCullough-Schwartz.”
The sound of my full name sent an electric shiver down my spine. Mom and Dad leaped up from the kitchen table at once, Mom livid and still in her pajamas and Dad just quiet and sad. Behind them, Sam Huang peered out from his desk, ashen-faced.
“What?” I stopped short, so short that the kitchen door slapped me on the butt. “Ow.”
“Where,” Mom said, “where have you been?”
Oh no.
“Tess’s?” It was more of a squeak than a confident answer. Mom folded her bathrobed arms.
“Don’t lie to us, Nattie. We know you weren’t at Tess’s.”
“I was,” I insisted, pathetically. “We just, um—”
“New York, Nattie G?” Dad shook his head. “What were you thinking?”
My heart plunged into my stomach. For two agonizing seconds, no one said anything.
“I’m sorry,” I said, at last. “I know the card is just for emergencies. . . .”
But something about my words wasn’t registering. Dad frowned at Mom. Mom clicked her tongue. Sam Huang quietly got up from his desk chair.
“Never mind,” I finished.
“You weren’t answering our texts,” Dad said. “We got worried.”
“I’m sorry. My phone . . .” I pulled it out of my pocket. “I left it behind, and then it was off—”
Mom made a tzzp noise and snapped her fingers in the air. “We’re not interested in any more lies, Nattie.”
“But I’m not lying!” The phone part had been the truth, at least.
“Aren’t you? I’m not sure I can trust you, Nattie.” She closed her eyes for a long moment, then breathed out, har
d. “No answer to our texts. No one answering at the Kozlowskis’ house. Do you know how scary that is, Nattie? Not to know where your baby is?” She swallowed. “If we hadn’t seen evidence that you were still alive . . .”
“Evidence?”
Silence, except for the sound of Sam Huang shutting his computer. And then I realized.
“Sam Huang?” I cried. “How could you?”
Sam Huang shifted in his desk chair. “Anne and Robert asked me where you went, and I said I thought you were out with Tess, and then . . .”
“He showed us that picture someone posted,” Mom said. “You and Tess.”
“Blitztograph, or whatever.” Dad nodded somberly.
I clenched my hands into fists.
“How could you, Sam Huang? You know, if you hadn’t said anything, I would’ve come back and everything would’ve been fine.”
“I’m sorry, Nattie,” said Sam Huang.
“No, Sam, don’t apologize,” Mom said. “You did the right thing. Sam told us the truth because he was worried about you, Nattie. Because he wanted you to be safe. And thank God he did.”
“I wasn’t not safe. I was fine. So yeah, thank God he got me in trouble when I wasn’t even in danger or anything.” I threw my tote onto the ground and jabbed my phone into the charger by the toaster, suddenly feeling very, very ugly.
“That’s it, young lady,” Dad said. “You’re grounded. No dance whatsoever.”
“Fine.” I threw my hands in the air. “Great. Thanks, Sam Huang. You know, I’m so glad you came to live with us.”
The words tumbled out before I even realized what I’d said. Sam Huang blinked, once, twice, and then grabbed his sweatshirt from his chair and slipped up the back stairs. Mom gaped, her face flushed, but before she could say anything my phone started to buzz.
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