Page 97 of Swallow Your Sorries

I hesitate, contemplating if I should give her privacy, or ask if she wants to vent. I want to vent so badly, that I’m ready to do it to my own reflection.

But no, Stassi and I aren’t friends. Why would she care to talk to me? Someone she sees in the dorm every day but never utters more than ten words to at a time.

I reach for the door handle but stop when she hiccups and snorts uncontrollably.

“Stassi?” I call quietly.

Silence.

Okay, she wants to be alone.

Sighing, I reach for the handle again, but the sound of the glossy grey stall door creaking open stops me and Stassi peers at me with bloodshot eyes.

“Hey,” she mumbles miserably. She’s sitting on the closed toilet, tissues balled in her fists.

It must be nice to be so beautiful even when you’re bawling. She looks like a goddess with her perfectly tousled dirty blonde hair, her bright amber eyes and her full lips that look even fuller from crying. When I cry, I look like a lizard, or so I’ve been told. In her lap, her lit phone screen draws my attention.

I recognize Beaussip’s newsletter immediately from its black and silver interface. There’s a picture of Stassi on the front. Two, in fact, one from a few months ago, and one from yesterday at dance practice. I know, based on the cute mint green outfit she’s sporting. The girl hardly ever wore the same thing twice. In the first photo, though, she must be about ten kilos heavier.

“You found my secret bathroom,” she sniffs. “I don’t think I’ve ever run into another student in here before.”

“Yeah, well, if you came thirty minutes earlier, you would’ve seen a snake.”

Stassi’s eyes search my face quizzically, then they fly to my leotard covered in the dirty mop water I’d accidentally spilt on myself.

“What happened to you?” She wrinkles her nose.

I sigh for what must be the fifteenth time. “You first.”

She blinks at me a few times as if contemplating the barter before handing me her phone and getting up to wash her tear-stained face at the sink.

Stassi’s back in Èze, but she’s left ten kilos in St. Barts. Or was that in Yves?

A close source says she was interning with her estranged aunt and fashion mogul, Allison Headly. Either way, it seems Stassi can’t keep her story straight. Was she merely relaxing on white powdery beaches in the Caribbean, or relaxing with a white powder of another kind?

Kilos to kilos, maybe…

I meet Stassi’s gaze in the mirror.

“That’s horrible,” I whisper. “Really horrible.”

She gives me a watery smile that I can tell is just a mechanism to stop her from bawling again as she attempts to fix her smudged eyeliner. “I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but for once Zedd’s right. The rumours keep changing every day, but this seems to be everyone’s favourite. They keep snorting and sniffling behind my back. Have you ever seen someone overdose?”

“Almost,” I say, thinking of Jarett convulsing on the couch. But he’d made it through.

I’d hoped he didn’t.

“I have. And I wouldn’t touch that white powder with a fifty-kilometre pole. Maybe if I hadn’t witnessed the effects firsthand, I wouldn’t care so much what Beassip said about me.”

I nod in understanding.

“But what’s worse, is I guess I can’t blame them. How else would I lose weight so fast in three months?”

How did she do it? But I know not to ask. It isn’t any of my business.

“Don’t you want to ask me how?” she asks, cocking her head.

YES!

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