Page 36 of Going the Distance
“What rumors?” My brain felt fuzzy. Maybe they weren’t even rumors aboutme.Maybe someone else had pulled some crazy shit over the weekend. Maybe someone else had gone home with Levi, when he’d gone back to the party. I blinked a few times, but it didn’t help clear my head.
“Everyone’stalking about it,” Lisa pitched in, and even though she gave me a pitiful, sympathetic look, her tone was laced with the excitement that accompanied any kind of gossip. “How you left the party early. With Levi.” She glanced at his empty seat.
“But we know you didn’t actually, you know,go homewith Levi,” Rachel added, cutting Lisa a glance that clearly said “Shut up.”
Then I caught on, gaping at them, and Lee said what I was thinking before I could recover from my speechlessness.
“Wait, people thinkEllehooked up withLevi?”
The girls exchanged a look. Lisa said, “Yeah. Everyone’s talking about it.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Lee and I chorused. We exchanged a look, Lee pulling his best “WTF?” face.
I carried on. “Why would they think that? Just because I left early and he took me home? Like that never happens to anyone else?”
The girls looked at each other again, more apprehensively now. My stomach was already tied up in knots, and now those knots pulled tight and I squirmed in my seat. My nails dug into my palms.
“What? What aren’t you telling me?”
“People are also saying,” Rachel said slowly, looking down at her fingertip tracing a pen mark on her desk, “that…that you and Noah broke up.”
That threw me even more than the rumors that I’d slept with Levi. “Wait,what? Where did that come from?”
“Well…didyou?” Lisa asked, obviously unable to help herself.
My eyes narrowed. “No, we’re…we’re still together.” If a little rocky…“Why?What are people saying?”
Rachel suddenly hauled her huge Mary Poppins–esque purse up onto her desk, pawing through books and files and sheets of paper for her cell phone. “It’s less what people are saying”—she tapped on her phone a few times, before holding it out—“and more what they’re seeing.”
Lee got up and moved to Levi’s empty chair, then leaned over so his head was next to mine. He sucked in a sharp breath. I was pretty sure I’d forgotten how to breathe.
Blown up on Rachel’s cell phone screen in crisp, high definition, was a photo uploaded to Facebook from someone called Amanda Johnson.
Noah was tagged in it.
The caption read:Such a fab night! xxxx—with Noah Flynn.
The picture had sixty-two likes. It had seventeen comments. Eighteen—someone else commented while I was looking.
The photo showed Noah, wearing a white shirt lined with blue under the collar and with blue thread; I remembered him buying it just before he left for college. There was an extra button undone. There was a huge grin on his face, and he looked like he was laughing at something.
He had his arm around a girl, holding her in close.
The girl was blond and beautiful, and her dress (at least, I guessed it was a dress) was strapless and very low cut to accentuate what little curves she had.
And what little curves she had were pressed up against my boyfriend, and she looked like she was giggling, her eyes half closed and crinkled around the edges.
And she was kissing his cheek.
And he was grinning.
I felt sick.
Lee took Rachel’s phone out of my hands—which was lucky, because I probably would’ve dropped it a second or two later. My shoulders slumped before it hit me; I tensed up completely, even my toes curling in anger.
“This is some kind of sick joke, right?”
Rachel leaned away from me slightly and slowly took her cell back from Lee, dropping it into her cavernous purse. “Um…”
