Page 192 of Swallow Your Sorries

I need distance from him so I can overdose on reality again. And my stark reality is that I don’t need more cuddles with Gant in the forest. I need money.

I need a damn job.

I stare at my phone screen where the edited video of Gant sits staring back at me as an attachment to Beaussip’s email.

It’s been like that since Aria’s drunken spiel last night. I hit send and quickly shove my phone into my pocket. It’s done now. Everything. The interlude. Gant and I. All of it.

“Ready?” I ask Stassi, who’s still using her air curler. She’s offered to do my hair too, and I was more than grateful. I actually…looked beautiful. Not cute, not pretty, but beautiful, just like Gant always said.

Gant…

“Yeah,” Stassi says, unplugging the curler, but I don’t miss her quick glance at Aria’s bed. There’s no way she’ll be joining us in town today.

She’s in the nurse’s wing with mild alcohol poisoning, she’s passed off as bad fish from one of Zedd’s latest recipes. It was the first time I’d ever seen Stassi show so much softness and concern for her brother. She’d called him, explaining that Aria only said that because if she blamed the dining hall, it’d be too suspicious that no one else was sick. She’d wanted to reassure him that his cooking was the best. That he was the best.

I never saw Zedd show an ounce of emotion besides indifference or anger unless he was with Stassi. It’s hard not to smile from her bubbliness.

As we make our way to the trolley, we bypass the tiny infirmary behind the library.

On Stassi’s call with Zedd, he’d said that Étienne was going insane, losing his grip because the head nurse wouldn’t let him visit Aria until she’d finished her IV and rested again. So he’d scaled the building and he’s beneath the covers with Aria now, sliding underneath the bed whenever a nurse comes to check on her.

“I don’t get what the hell is going on with Éti, Ari and Rin,” Stassi says looking up at the window for the girls’ ward where Aria must be.

“I don’t think Aria does either,” I say. I’m not sure how much Aria has shared with her about what we’saw in the forest, and just like Stassi wanted me to guard her secret, I guarded Aria’s. Still, I just hope the girls can finally get over everything soon.

Just like I hope to get over whatever spell Gant’s casting over me once I leave Beaulieu’s gates in three, two, one…

***

If we thought outside was a dud, then inside is a bust with floorboards so damaged, my heels are a liability. There’s an unidentifiable odour clinging to the stale air and a general griminess that permeates the yellowing wallpaper and sticky-looking bar.

“AGH!” Stassi squeals, jumping up on a nearby couch as a mouse scurries across the floorboards.

“I wouldn’t touch that,” I say, eyeing the moth-eaten furniture. “You’ll probably contract scabies or pink eye.”

I was wrong about not having to worry about Jarret as a customer. This is definitely the sort of place he would frequent. He’d be right at home with all the vermin.

“I think the burger joint is a better idea than this,” Stassi says, hopping off the couch and eyeing the bartender, who doesn’t seem to notice us. Is she hard of hearing? She has to be seventy-five at least, with coke-bottle glasses and grey hair that’s tinted violet.

A lone patron stumbles to the bar from another door in the back. The bathroom maybe? He flops onto a barstool and puts his head down while the bartender wipes out a glass with a filthy rag.

“Let’s go,” I sigh, already upset with myself that I’d wasted forty dollars on the outfit hidden beneath my oversized coat.

“Be honest, Rie Rie. Do you think it’s that bad?” the male voice slurs.

“Even with my cataracts, there’s no getting around the fact that this place is a dump,” Rie Rie says with a heavy emphasis on the last word. “You said your family owns Perriots. I applied to work there at least a dozen times.”

“You never got a callback?”

“Can you believe it?” Rie Rie says, shaking her head. “That club’s absolutely beautiful though. Why don’t you just ask your mother for help?”

“She doesn’t support what I’m doing. I’m trying to be different. She thinks it means I’m trying to bebetter. She thinks I’m trying to be like all the other posh kids at Beaulieu.”

“Are you?”

The man sighs. “I just want to fit in with them.”

“I thought you were super popular. An Untouchable?”

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