WALKING DISASTERS

006 | what good girls do

Students chattered outside the bathroom while Charlie wrung the rainwater from her hair and clothes. She stared into the mirror, her lips still trembling, eyeliner smeared over her hooded lids after she'd rubbed them raw.

In her next class, while the professor lectured, she dug her fingers into her thighs and waited for the bang bang bang on the door that never came. Wet hair fell over her face in frizzy clumps. She'd forgotten her bag and had nothing to take notes with, so she remained motionless in her seat, trying to convince herself that the cocky, deathly handsome boy from earlier had been nothing but an impossible dream.

"Why hello there," Quincy said as Charlie approached their usual table in the dining hall. "Shit, I thought you up and left forever. Here, I have your stuff. And what was that all about anyway?" He nibbled on the end of a fry, his stare unfaltering.

"I just went to use the bathroom," she managed to say. "Thank you for keeping my bag."

"Were you crying? Your makeup is a mess, dude." He leaned back and grimaced at his own reflection on the cracked screen of his phone. "And I'm looking like Frankenstein's monster too over here. Got any concealer?"

She shook her head and ducked low in her seat. He didn't know. He didn't know yet, but it wouldn't be hard to connect the dots. People liked to pin Quincy as the oblivious type, but he'd been the first to discover her crush-bordering-on-obsession with Peter. He'd even encouraged her to ask him out instead of being a, quote, "Crazy cat girl watching church boy in the locker room—that's how you'll get a restraining order instead of a date; trust me on this."

Charlie looked up to see Raquel now approaching... but the girl walked past them to sit beside Quincy's brother Evan instead.

"Can you believe they're a thing?" Quincy asked.

It'd been the biggest slap in the face.

"No," Charlie admitted.

"Scratch that. What I really can't believe is that Evan only wanted her in the band to improve his chances of hooking up with her."

Evan King. Wide receiver on the football team, drummer for his and Quincy's punk band, and also known for groping girls in class or giving people perverted grins when they stared too long at the self-harm scars on his arms—the last person Charlie thought Raquel, founder of Sabre College's new feminist club, would date.

"I wonder what she sees in him," Charlie mumbled. His cold, blue-eyed gaze had always put her on edge.

Quincy stuffed a fry in his mouth. "I don't know, mommy issues? 'Cause we have plenty of that to go around."

"We?"

"Orphans, duh."

It'd been one of the first things Quincy told her about himself, but the word stung harder now. She resisted the urge to squeeze his hand or tell him she was there to listen. After Raquel pushed her away, Charlie had been extra careful with boundaries, not initiating hugs or deeper-than-normal conversations. Like Raquel, Quincy was one of the few people she knew from high school—though she'd barely talked to him then, intimidated by his popularity, the string of admirers wrapped around his finger, devious smiles and lollipop hearts. But they both started at Sabre College over the summer semester, and the slower pace on campus paired with the newness of college made them stick together. Or at least... she'd stuck to him.

He handed her a fry. "This is soggy—do you want it? I think it's vegan."

Charlie took it. "Thank you."

"So, what about your parents? Do you think you're an orphan, too?"

"My parents aren't dead yet," she said. "They're not that old."