Page 49 of The Obsession

“Okay, okay, not ‘aww’. Okay. Seriously, that is some weird shit.” Aisha went still for a second and then suddenly gasped. “Oh my god! That explains the weird-ass conversation I had with him!”

“What conversation?” I asked, my skin prickling.

“The other day I ran into Logan and he was like, ‘Yo, Aisha, how’s it going?’ and we started chatting, and then he asked which colleges you and I are planning to apply to, and I thought it was really sweet that he was so interested and—” Aisha took a sharp inhale and bit her lip. “I told him all of your college choices.” Her face was twisted now. “Shit, I’m so sorry, Dee, I—”

“It’s okay, you couldn’t have known,” I said. All the food I’d just eaten sat heavily in my stomach. I wanted to throw up. The past few days, I’d been surviving, consoling myself with the thought that I could simply go to some other college. I didn’t have to go to NUS. I liked Berkeley, I loved the greenery, the way it was tucked in between the hills in an off-beat city full of vegan restaurants and graffitied walls. Push came to shove, I could give NUS up. But now, as it turned out, not only did Logan know about NUS, he knew all of the schools I’d listed as my backups. “I think he has this condition calleddelusional disorder.” I gave Aisha a quick rundown on the symptoms.

“Okay…” Aisha said. “That means you can report him, right?”

“No! He has something on me, remember?”

“What if I made the report? Like, say I noticed something off about his behavior and went to the school counselor ’cause I’m a good citizen… Would that work?”

Would it? I toyed with the idea for about a second before I immediately shut it down. Too risky. Who knew how Logan would react? What if he somehow linked it back to me? I shuddered at the thought.

“If it makes you feel any better, it’s not you. It’s him,” Aisha said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not the first time Logan’s become obsessed over a girl. When we were freshmen, he was totally in love with this junior. He followed her around like a little dog. She thought it was funny. We all thought it was harmless.”

Ice prickled down the length of my body. “Was it Sophie?”

“Yeah,” Aisha said, straightening up. “You know about her?”

“Sort of. I’m fuzzy on the details.”

“Nobody really knows what happened. All I know is she was expelled and then she died.”

For a second, my mind crystallized into something solid and jagged. “She—died?” I choked out. “Did someone—”

Aisha shook her head. “No! Sorry, I should’ve been clearer. She killed herself. I guess she couldn’t handle getting expelled. She got all messed up on drugs and then overdosed.”

Overdosed? My stomach turned. Lisa had told me about an old assistant of hers who’d started sampling the product and gotten addicted. She’d fired the girl immediately. “Never, ever sample the product,” Lisa had said, her eyes drilling into mine, and I’d nodded. Now I wondered if Sophie was that girl.

“How did Logan react?”

“How do you think he reacted? He was super in love with her. He had to go on antidepressants or something, but people didn’t really pay much attention to him ’cause that year was like, bonkers.”

I nodded. “I heard about the mess with the teacher and the cops. Brandon mentioned it before—um, before, you know. He said there was a lot going on at school, like really shady stuff.”

“Right, so when Sophie died, no one really noticed Logan or anything, and he went off the deep end. He was so broken.”

Despite myself, a tiny part of me ached at the thought of Logan, mourning the death of the girl he loved all alone, while all around him, his peers chattered excitedly about the latest scandal. If Sophie hadn’t died, would he have won her heart in the end? Or maybe she would’ve gone to college, leaving him to get over her gently. And then maybe he wouldn’t be in my life at all, and my biggest worry at this moment would be normal school stuff instead of how to get rid of my blackmailer.

“And he hasn’t gone out with any other girl since Sophie?” I said.

“Not that I know of. That’s why I was so excited when he asked you out.”

“But why me? I don’t get it!” I wailed.

“Okay, Whiney McWhinerson,” Aisha said. She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes at me. “I never thought of this before, I mean, I was never close to her or anything, but you sort of look like her. I think you do, anyway. I don’t know, I’ve forgotten how she looked, exactly. She was two years my senior.”

“He likes me because I remind him of a dead girl,” I said flatly.

“How creeptastic,” Aisha said, grinning.

“So what do I do? Be as different from her as I can be? I don’t even know what she was like.”

---