FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHORS OF THE CHEATER.FAKER.TROUBLEMAKER SERIES (WATTY'S 2016, FICTION AWARDS 2016, HACHETTE AUDIO 2017), JENNY ROSEN & KRISTEN MAGLONZO.
After bullies, braces, and brutal heartbreak shatters his faith in love, soon-to-be fre...
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CHAPTER 33
Lacey
Elias hasn't been at school all week.
I've been trying not to notice.
Forcing myself to believe that I can go back to who I was before he made me feel a little more alive and a little less lonely.
But that's the thing about loneliness, eventually it sinks into your skin. You learn how to deal.
How to tolerate it.
How to get to that point where you almost forget that it's there.
But absence refuses to go unnoticed.
And Elias's is impossible to ignore. His name's been on the lips of every single person at Mission Bay to the point where even the teachers have gotten involved.
On Monday, everything at school shifted. Principal McGill called all of our teachers into his office for a mandatory meeting before the first bell. The always punctual Mr. Kissinger showed up ten minutes late for class and skipped over Elias's name on the roster like the class wouldn't notice.
We did.
I spent the rest of science class that morning staring at Elias's empty seat trying to come up with reasons for why he wasn't in it.
I'd barely gotten halfway through imagining which one of the girls on the cheerleading team had managed to snag his attention when the school secretary, Mrs. Halbert, walked in and shattered my theories to pieces.
She called Mr. Kissinger out of the classroom only for him to come back a few minutes later, pale and uncharacteristically quiet. He gathered Elias's things from his desk and handed them to Mrs. Halbert, and then brought class to a swift end without mentioning what had happened.
That was the beginning of the rumors.
By the time morning break ended, clusters of hushed conversations spread like wildfire from the freshman class all the way up to the seniors. Gossip leaked out of our little science room, into the hallway, and has been poisoning the entire school ever since.
Four days later, I still can't stand the whispers. The way people have taken their reckless assumptions about the King brothers' absence and turned them into ammunition.
