Chapter 105: The Rope

POV: Georgia

She looked at me like I already had a rope around her neck.

I don’t see it coming. After the library, I spend the rest of the day in a kind of daze. My hand keeps tingling where I touched Puck, and the ache behind my sternum stays gone, which is so strange that I keep pressing my palm against my chest to check. Puck and I didn’t say much after that. He just looked at me for a long moment, then said, "Thank you for not leaving," and walked me to the library doors like I might break. Then he went one way and I went the other, and my cane clicked down the hallway the whole way back to my room.

I sleep better than I have in weeks. I wake up to a gray, drizzly morning, and I almost feel normal.

It lasts until after lit class.

I’m crossing the courtyard toward the dining hall, taking the slow route because the cobblestones are wet and my knee hates them. The air smells like woodsmoke and rotting leaves, and every few steps a drop of cold water slides off the oak branches and lands on my collar. I keep my eyes on the ground, watching for slick patches.

"Georgia."

The voice is so quiet I almost miss it. I stop and turn.

Bella Bellamy is standing beside the stone fountain, which has been drained for the season and is full of brown leaves. For a second I don’t recognize her. The Bella I know is immaculate. She wears pressed skirts and perfect ponytails, and she walks like someone who has never once tripped on anything.

This girl has her cardigan buttoned wrong. Her hair is pulled back in a messy knot with strands hanging out of it. Dark purple smudges sit under her eyes, deep ones, like thumbprints, and her skin has a gray, papery look. She’s hugging her own arms so tightly her knuckles are white.

"Bella," I say. "Are you okay?"

She doesn’t answer. Her eyes slide past me, over my shoulder, toward the dining hall doors. Then they jump to the windows of the science building. Then to the dark line of trees at the edge of campus. She checks every direction like someone crossing a street with no crosswalk.

"Can we talk?" she asks. "Not here. Somewhere. Anywhere."

"There’s a bench behind the greenhouse," I say. "Nobody goes there when it rains."

She nods, too fast, and follows me.

The greenhouse is old and fogged with condensation, and the bench behind it is tucked under a small overhang that keeps the worst of the drizzle off. It smells like wet soil and tomato leaves back here. A faint warmth drifts through the glass. I lower myself onto the bench in one smooth motion, no wince, no bracing against the armrest, and the ease of it still catches me off guard. A week ago the drop alone would have sent a hot wire of pain up my spine. Now there’s nothing. Bella perches on the very edge of the bench, like she might need to run.

I dig into my bag and pull out my thermos. I fill the lid with hot chocolate, which Mandi made me promise to carry because she says I’m "perpetually underfed," and I hold it out.

"Here."

Bella stares at it. "I don’t..."

"It’s just chocolate. It’s warm. You look cold."

After a second she takes it. Her fingers are trembling so badly the surface of the drink ripples in tiny circles. She wraps both hands around the lid and holds it close to her chest without drinking.

I don’t say anything. I let the quiet stretch.

Rain taps softly on the overhang. A crow lands on the greenhouse roof, shakes out its wings, and flies off again. Bella breathes in, in short, shallow pulls.

"I..." She stops. Her mouth stays open for a moment, and I watch her swallow whatever she was going to say. She shakes her head and presses her lips together.

I could push. Every part of me that has spent weeks chasing answers wants to lean in and say what is it, just tell me, I’m right here. I think about the way Mandi flinched when I pressed her, and Liam, and the way I’ve been treating every one of these people like a locked drawer.

Bella isn’t a drawer. She’s a scared girl on a bench.

So I keep my hands in my lap, and I wait.

A minute passes. Maybe two. A drip falls off the roof and lands in a puddle with a small, bright plink. Bella lifts the cup halfway to her mouth, then lowers it again.

"I’ve been..." she tries again. Her voice cracks on the second word. "I haven’t been sleeping. Since the Classic. I close my eyes and I see her standing over me, with blood on her - "

She cuts herself off. This time her whole body goes stiff, and her head snaps up and toward the corner of the greenhouse, where a path runs back toward the main building. Her nostrils flare. Her pupils shrink to pinpoints. For a moment she doesn’t look like a girl at all. She looks like something listening for a footstep.

I look too. There’s nothing there. Just wet gravel and a wheelbarrow someone left leaning against the wall.

"It’s okay," I say softly. "There’s no one."

"You can’t know that." It comes out in a whisper. "She always knows where I am."

I don’t ask who she is. I don’t need to. I think of Bianca’s long, unblinking stare. I think of the way Bella looked at the floor every time her sister walked into a room.

"I’m not going to tell anyone we talked," I say. "Take your time."

Bella finally looks at me. Up close, her eyes are red-rimmed, and there’s something in them I’ve never seen on a Bellamy before. It isn’t coldness or contempt. She looks at me the way a person looks at a judge in a courtroom, waiting for the sentence.

"I know I don’t deserve you being nice to me," she says.

"Maybe not," I say. "But I’m being nice anyway."

A tiny, broken sound escapes her, half laugh, half sob. She presses the back of her wrist against her mouth. The hot chocolate sloshes over the lip of the cup and drips onto her skirt, and she doesn’t even notice.

Her hands are shaking so hard now that I reach out without thinking and steady the cup, closing my fingers around hers. Her skin is ice cold. Not burning like Puck’s, not even warm. Just cold and clammy, like someone who’s been standing in the rain all night. My own chest stays quiet and easy as I hold her hands, no ache, no warning tightness, as if whatever used to live behind my sternum has simply packed up and left. I think, absurdly, that I have never felt so free while sitting this close to someone so broken.

She goes completely still.

"I need to tell you something," Bella finally whispers.

My heart kicks. I lean in. "Okay. I’m listening."

She opens her mouth.

A phone buzzes.

It’s a sharp, ugly sound against the quiet, and it comes from the pocket of her cardigan. Bella flinches so hard the hot chocolate flies out of her hands and hits the gravel. She fumbles the phone out with shaking fingers and looks at the screen.

I can see it from where I’m sitting. A single name glows across the glass in bright white letters.

BIANCA.

All the color drains from Bella’s face. She makes a small, terrible noise in the back of her throat, like she’s been struck. The phone hits the wet ground, still buzzing, Bianca’s name glowing up from the gravel.

"Bella..." I start.

But she’s already on her feet. She doesn’t pick up the phone. She doesn’t look at me. She turns and runs, her shoes skidding on the gravel, her messy knot of hair coming loose as she vanishes around the corner of the greenhouse.

I sit there with an empty cup at my feet, a buzzing phone on the ground, and her last words still hanging in the damp air. My sternum doesn’t ache at all. It hasn’t in hours. I press my palm flat against it anyway, the way I keep doing, and I wonder what it means that I’ve been handed this strange, impossible relief while Bella sits in the dark somewhere, drowning in whatever she can’t say.