Page 18 of Feed Your Fiends

Especially not their ‘sorries’. Not Gant’s. Not Jaime’s. Not Stassi and Aria’s, although they have nothing to be sorry for, unless their guilt is simply over having such a callous, manipulative beast for a friend.

No matter how badly it hurts to put a wall between me and the only female friends I finally have, I have to. They’re Gant’s friends first, and I can’t hold that against them, just like I won’t push them away entirely. I can’t be an island in this game. I need cards, pieces, and pawns to move around. Stassi’s the first piece I’m going to move. That’s why I’d texted her.

I shake my head and smile sadly. “You warned me about Gant on my very first day at Beaulieu. You told me to leave. I didn’t listen.”

“There’s no excuse. He doesn’t know when to stop.”

I don’t miss that she’s intentionally not using his name for my sake. She looks like she’s about to cry, but Aria…Aria looks the way her eyes sometimes make me feel.Frozen.They’re a mesmerising blue-green, but in the right lighting, they’re mostly blue, and today, they resemble glaciers. And yet she says something I don’t expect, given her frosty demeanour.

“I’m sorry too.”

“For what?” I ask, realising her expression isn’t for me at all. Something’s weighing on her because she isn’t lookingatme; she’s staring through me.

“I got rid of the shoebox,” she says quietly, eyeing my feet. “I don’t know who got their hands on it and brought it to the theatre.”

My heart thunders to a stop.

I know that Aria’s closer to Gant than Stassi is, but unlike his horsemen, I never thought she was so close that he’d tell her his plan. Why does it shock me? Why does anything shock me anymore?

I can almost hear the invisible walls flying up even higher between us. Far higher than I’d been preparing to build.

“You knew about the box all along?” I ask, my throat so damn dry it could spark a flame.

Stassi looks at her best friend, horrified. “Ari… no.” She shakes her head. “You didn’t…”

“I didn’t know all along,” Aria says defensively. “I knew right before the play started when it was too late to tell you even if I wanted to, Elle. You were about to go on stage and the last thing I wanted was to fuck with your head. With your performance. I know how much those scouts meant to you.”

“Would you have told me after if I’d never put them on? Or did you think it was okay since you’d intervened in his plan? No harm, no foul, right?”

Aria says nothing.

We both know the answer. Her alliance is with Gant. I knew that. I know that. So why does it still hurt?

“Why did you ask to come to the hospital with me?” Stassi asks quietly.

“What?” Aria pulls her frosty gaze away from me and blinks up at Stassi.

“It’s clear whose side you’re on,” Stassi says, her voice hollow. “Shouldn’t you be comforting his bitch ass instead?”

I can see the cracks deepening in Aria’s expression, cracks that started forming in the summer when Stassi went M.I.A without a word.

“Side?” Aria asks incredulously.

“Gant’s side. You said you weren’t taking any, but you have. His petty pranks are cruel but expected. But this…. Potentially ruining a dancer’s career? Even as an ice skater, you should understand how vile that is—”

“I did understand. Why do you think I took them?” Aria snaps. “Besides, I knew they were tampered with, but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t see the glass in them.”

“Put two and two together,” Stassi hisses. “You saw he had a pair of pointe shoes the same colour as Cinderella’s for the finale. You were supposed to be Cinderella! You knew the costume. You knew!”

The ice trickling down my spine hardens into icicles. I knew that Gant was responsible for Aria dropping out of the play, but the fact that she’d probably planned to do so from the very beginning…

Why am I so stupid? Why did I think we could ever be friends?

“What did it matter if I’d already taken them?” Aria insists. “I got rid of them. Rid of whatever his plan was at that time. I thought I was doing the right thing.” Her eyes, full of sudden desperation, fly from Stassi to me as if pleading with us to understand her point of view.

“So you took them, and you were going to keep quiet about it while encouraging me to be with him?” I croak. “You’ve always encouraged me to be with him because it’s what he wanted.”

“No.” She shakes her head, her curls bouncing. “It’s because I saw how good you were for him, even when he couldn’t see it.”

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