Sometimes your body knows before your mind does.
My skin tingles all the way to the school café at lunch, even though I can’t place a finger on why. On the surface, everything is the same: the crisp chill in the air, the students lining up outside for warm bagels and hot chocolate, blowing into their hands and wrapping their blue- and- white scarves tighter around their necks while they wait.
But something’s different. Something’s changed.
“Do you feel that?” I ask Abigail as we join the back of the line. The sun has climbed higher in the sky, throwing wide swaths of golden light over the courtyard.
“Feel what?”
“I don’t know,” I murmur, glancing around me. My eyes lock with some girl from a lower year level. Her gaze lingers on my face a beat, as if in confirmation, before she twists her head away and whispers something to her friend, her hand covering her mouth. It’s not about you, I tell myself. There’s literally no reason why they’d be talking about you. But a sick feeling spreads over my rib cage. “I just . . . feel like people are staring.”
“Maybe it’s because of how gorgeous we are.” Abigail tosses her glossy hair over her shoulder. “I would stare at us too.”
“Your confidence is inspiring,” I say, “but somehow, I doubt that’s it . . .”
We shuffle forward, and it happens again. Another girl catches my eye, then pointedly looks in the other direction.
“Well, darling, you are school captain,” Abigail says. “People are going to notice you, right? I thought you’d be used to it by now.”
And people do notice me. It’s why I campaigned so hard to be elected school captain in the first place, why I’ve thrown myself into delivering speeches at assembly and sending out mass reminders about fundraising events and conducting student surveys the principal only pretends to read. Well, that, and because I knew it would look great on my Berkeley application, and because I’d heard that Julius was running for captain, and anything he did I had to do as well. But right now people are doing more than noticing. In my peripheral vision, I see someone I’ve never spoken to before point straight at me.
“Okay,” I say, my uneasiness growing. “Maybe I’m being par-anoid, but I seriously think—”
“What the hell?”
I whip around to find Rosie, of all people, storming up to us. No, to me. Her eyes are narrowed, her phone gripped in one hand. She’s only five foot one, so tiny that our classmates sometimes like to lift her up for fun, but there’s nothing small or delicate about her as she plants herself firmly to the ground in front of me.
My mind goes blank. All I can think is: What is happening?
“Is there, like, something you want to say to my face?” she asks, her voice hard, accusing. “Do you have a problem with me, Sadie?”
“What?” I stare at her. The gears in my head are still turning frantically, trying to produce a single reason why Rosie would go from calling me a saint to acting like I’ve just run over her dog within the span of two classes. Is this about the notes? Had she wanted them earlier? But it can’t just be that. Up close, her lips are quivering, all the muscles in her jaw clenched . “I don’ t— of course not. I don’t have any problem with you—”
“I thought you were nice.” She’s speaking louder and louder, her features animated with rage. “And even if you did have beef with me, you should’ve told me in private before blasting it out to everyone.”
A hush has fallen over the courtyard, heads turning to watch.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” I tell her, half pleading.
Acid churns in my stomach. I hate it when people are mad at me. I hate it, I hate it, I can’t stand it. “I swear, it’s probably a misunderstanding—”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’m not—”
“Are you really going to pretend it wasn’t you?”
“Hey,” Abigail snaps, stepping before me, her arm raised to block my body. But even then, I’m shaking, my teeth chattering so loudly I can feel the echo reverberating in my skull. I want 36
to fold in on myself, disappear into the ground. Don’t be mad, I want to say, as pathetic as it sounds. I don’t know what’s going on, but please just don’t be mad. Because it might be Rosie standing here now, but in my head it’s someone else. Footsteps storming out the living room and the slam of the door, like a thunder-clap, the rumble of the engine, then the horrible, crushing quiet.
That’s what happens when people get angry. They leave, permanently, and they forget you, and there’s no going back.
“Did you or did you not,” Rosie says, holding her phone up close to my face, “write this?”
With difficulty, I take in the email loaded onto the screen, and the world falls away from me.
I can hear my own ragged breathing, my blood pounding in my ears.
I can recognize every word, because I did write it. I can even remember where I was, slumped against my bedroom wall and fuming. Rosie had sent out a mass email to everyone in the year about throwing a party to celebrate winning the science fair.
Guess you can all call me a nerd now, she’d joked. And next thing I knew I was typing out a reply faster than my fingers could keep up. This reply:
If you’re going to steal someone’s project, and take all the credit, you could at least have the decency to not flaunt it around like you actually had anything to do with it. Since when did you even care about science? Since when did you care about any of your subjects at all? You spend most of class texting people and online shopping and watching videos of cats and then when the assignment actually comes around, you decide you can just leech off my work? Just because I didn’t say anything at the time doesn’t mean I didn’t know—
“Well?” Rosie demands.
“It shouldn’t be there,” I whisper, my fingers tingling. My whole body feels numb. It shouldn’t be there. It shouldn’t. It can’t be. The email was meant to be in my inbox, for my eyes only.
But the truth is staring me in the face. For god knows what reason, my draft was sent out, and not just to her. It was sent via Reply All , which means everyone included in her original email— everyone in the year level— would have received it.
And then a new, terrifying possibility dawns on me.
It’s so terrible that my heart shuts down. My blood runs cold.
Oh god—
The crowd shifts, and the last person I want to see right now appears. He doesn’t even have to push his way through; he simply walks forward, his head lifted, and everyone parts for him, offering up all the space he needs.
Julius brushes past Rosie and Abigail like they’re not even there and stops before me. His eyes blaze black, but the rest of his features are pure ice. And all at once, my worst fears are confirmed.
“Sadie,” he says, his voice more a rasp than its normal drawl.
He says my name like it’s poison, like it costs something from him. “Come with me.”
Then he stalks off, without even glancing back to check if I’m following.
I do follow.
I don’t want to, but it’s either that or stay behind and let Rosie yell at me while everyone stares.
My face feels raw when Julius finally slows down in the school gardens. We’re a good distance away from the café and the basketball courts, and there’s nobody else around. It’s pretty here, I observe through my panic, with ivy crawling over the fences and winter roses blooming in the background. There’s even a small pond, glittering amid the greenery. When the school first built the gardens, they’d brought in a duck as well, but then a fox snuck in at night and killed it, and people were so upset that we held a funeral. Everyone attended, and one of the boys in my year level wept, and the duck ended up being buried in the grass.
Actually, I think the duck might have been laid to rest right under the spot I’m standing.
“I’ll have you know,” Julius begins, low and furious, “that I was not named after a Roman dictator.”
I’m so disoriented, so shaken still, that I can only say: “You weren’t?”
“Absolutely not.”
“What . . . were you named after, then?”
“A printing company,” he says, then pauses, like he regrets volunteering this information. “But that’s beside the point.”
It takes me a moment to realize what he’s referring to. A Roman dictator. My emails. In one of the many angry emails I’d written to him, I had mocked his name. Your parents must be so proud, I’d said. You’re really living up to your namesake.
“No,” I whisper, my stomach swooping low. “No, no, no, no.
No. No—”
“How long have you been planning this?” he asks, pressing in with both his voice and his body. He leans forward. I shift back, the bristles of a low thornbush scraping my spine. But I would gladly let the thorns pierce my skin if it could hide me from this mess. None of this should be happening. “There were forty- two emails addressed to me. The earliest dated back to nine years ago.”
“You read all of them?” Suddenly, I would like to trade positions with the dead duck. “ I— how? When?”
“You’re asking me?” he demands. “You were the one who sent them. Imagine my surprise when I open my laptop at the start of physics class and my inbox is flooded with emails from you. If I missed out on crucial content because I was preoccupied with your many insults to my character, I hope you know that you’re entirely to blame.”
“No,” I’m still trying to say, repeating myself over and over as if I can somehow change reality through the sheer force of my denial. “No. ”
“Were you saving them up this entire time? Waiting for the right moment to strike?”
“I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t what?” And unlike Rosie, he actually waits for me to answer.
“ I— I didn’t mean to send those emails,” I tell him. I’m afraid I’m going to faint, or throw up, or both. “I just— a lot is going on right now. But I don’t know how they got to you. I really . . .
I swear, you have to believe me. You were never supposed to get them.”
His dark eyes roam over my face, and the air in my lungs stills. The way he’s looking at me— it’s like he can see everything, every terrible, ugly thought that’s ever flickered through my mind, every impulse and fantasy, every lie and insecurity. “I believe you,” he says at last, evenly.
I’m so surprised I almost can’t speak. “You . . . do?”
“I believe that you’d never want anyone else to read those emails,” he says, folding his arms across his chest, the angles of his face sharp and hostile. “That would go against your good student reputation, right? You would never be that brave,” he adds with a scoff. “You’re too fake.”
It feels like someone’s held a torch to my cheeks. Everything in me burns. “You think I’m fake?”
“You don’t think you are?” He cocks his head. “You go around smiling and charming the teachers and agreeing to anything anyone asks of you like you’re some kind of angel, and then you go back and write your secret little emails about how much you hate my guts and wish to strangle me—”
“It’s called being nice,” I cut in.
“Yes, strangulation is very nice. Practically a peace offering.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
He laughs, a cold, hard sound. “You never say what you mean anyway.”
There’s a dangerous pressure building behind my eyes. I blink furiously, squeeze my hands into fists, ignore the odd knot of pain in my throat. “You can’t accuse me of being fake for having basic manners.” If this were any other day, I would stop here. Just short of getting into a real confrontation, of speaking my mind.
But then I realize, with a burst of hysteria, that Julius already knows what I think. There’s no point pretending anymore when he’s seen the worst of me. It’s almost liberating. “I know you don’t care about anyone except yourself, and I know you can get away with it because you’re you, but not all of us are built like that.”
Something flashes over his face, and I falter.
Maybe I went too far. Maybe I was too harsh. As much as I hate him, the emails are still my fault. “I am sorry,” I make myself say, my tone softening just a little. “I was really, really annoyed when I drafted those emails, so if they hurt your feelings—”
And as if I’ve hit a switch, his expression hardens. His mouth tugs up in a mocking smile, his black eyes glittering. When he exhales, I can see the ghost of his breath in the air between us.
“Hurt my feelings?” He says it like a joke. “You have far too high an opinion of yourself, Sadie. You aren’t capable of hurting me.
On the contrary . . . don’t you remember what you wrote?”
An alarm goes off in my brain.
Danger.
Retreat.
But I’m frozen to the ground, only my heart galloping faster and faster.
“From what I recall, you wrote two whole paragraphs protesting the color of my eyes,” he drawls, and I feel myself pale with horror. “They’re too dark, like those of a monster from the fairy tales. Like a lake you could drown in on the coldest day of winter. My lashes are too long, more fitting for a girl’s. I don’t deserve to be so pretty. My gaze is too sharp, too intense; you can’t hold it for long without being overwhelmed.” He stares right at me as he speaks, like he wants to see if it’s true, to witness his effect on me in real time. “You said it makes it difficult for you to concentrate in class.”
I’ve always resented Julius’s perfect memory, but I’ve never resented it as much as I do in this instant.
“That’s enough,” I try to say.
But of course he won’t listen to me. If anything, he only seems more determined to continue. “You then wrote three hundred words ranting about my hands.” He flexes his long fingers, examining them carefully. “I had no idea you paid such close attention to the way I held my pen, or gripped the violin bow, or how I looked when I was answering something on the board.”
I unclench my jaw to defend myself, but I can’t think of a single solid defense. It really is every bit as mortifying as it sounds.
“You know what I think?” he murmurs, drawing so close his mouth skims my ear, his cruel face blurring in my vision. My breath catches. Goose bumps rise over my bare skin. “I think you’re obsessed with me, Sadie Wen.”
Heat lashes through me. I move to shove him away, but my hands only hit hard, lean muscle, the flat planes of his chest. He laughs at me, and I want to kill him. I mean it with every cell in my body. I’ve never wanted to kill him so badly. I hate him so much that I could cry.
“Go away,” I hiss.
“You don’t have to be embarrassed—”
I hardly ever raise my voice, but I do now. “God, just leave me alone. I’m so sick of you.” It comes out even louder than I intended, cracking the serenity of the gardens, sounding over the treetops. My throat feels scraped open with the words.
He finally steps away then, his face impassive. “Oh, don’t worry, I was already planning on leaving.” Because it has to be his choice, not my command. Because he won’t even give me this one small satisfaction.
I don’t watch him go. Instead I fumble for my phone in my skirt pocket and load up my emails. Maybe they’re not all as terrible as I think, I attempt to reassure myself, though it sounds delusional, the voice of a girl insisting the fire isn’t that big when her house is burning down before her. Maybe you’re overreacting.
Maybe the situation is still salvageable.
But then I open my first email to Julius from nine years ago, and a few sentences in, my insides turn to stone.
your a lier, Julius Gong.
when the Chinese teacher asked us for the idium for “water and fire don’t mix,” I answered at the same time you did!!!!!!
How DARE you tell the teacher you were the one who got it right and not me??!!! How DARE YOU take MY gold stickre???? Who gave you the right, huh? you don’t deserv any stickers. your a very, very bad person, I don’t care how good other poeple think you are. I’m gonna make you regret this so much you’ll cry, just you wait.
My awful spelling at eight years old is almost as embarrassing as the content itself.
Desperate, I pull up another one. A Reply All response to an email Julius had sent to the year level below, offering to sell his study material for an almost offensive sum only a day after I’d offered up my notes for sale. My spelling here is better. The content is, objectively, worse.
Sometimes I dream about throttling you. I would do it slowly. I would do it when you weren’t ready, when you were relaxed. I 45
imagine wrapping my hands around your long, pale throat and watching the fear bloom in your eyes. I imagine your skin turning red, your breathing quickening as you struggle. I want to watch you in pain, up close. I want you to beg me. I want you to admit you were wrong, that I’ve won. Maybe you would even sink to your knees for me. Plead for mercy. That would be fun, but even then, that wouldn’t be enough—
It takes all my self- restraint not to hurl my phone into the pond.
I squeeze my eyes shut so tight I see stars. I like to consider myself a smart person. I take great pride in knowing things, like whether a graph is wonky, or when an answer is accurate, or which essay topic is going to work best.
But it doesn’t require much intelligence to know that I’m completely, utterly screwed.
