Private (Private 1)

cussing me. Talking about me and picking me apart about last

my mouth shut. Soon Leanne was all packed into her car, on her way night.

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“You guys don’t understand,” I said.

Noelle narrowed her eyes into a look of sheer distaste. I was

begging for my life here and she knew it. And she didn’t like it.

“I’m bored,” Kiran said with a sigh.

“So bored,” Taylor echoed.

ALONE

“Ladies?” Noelle said.

“Noelle,” I said, overcome with desperation. My entire world

was shifting before me. “Ariana, you can’t—”

But they ignored me, looking through me like I wasn’t even

there. Noelle turned, and Ariana, Kiran, and Taylor all fell into That afternoon, each of my teachers started off with a lecture on ranks around her, moving off toward their upper-level classes. Just not allowing the recent scandal to distract us, but the classrooms like that. Without me.

were still full of whispers. The instructors spent so much time reprimanding people for gossiping, they didn’t seem to notice me staring out the window, wondering where it had all gone wrong.

Should I have thrown Thomas out of my room that morning?

Probably. But then Ariana still might have seen him leaving and assumed I had spoken to him. Maybe if I could just get one of

them—any one of them—alone, I could explain. If they just heard me out and realized that Thomas had cornered me, maybe I could

still win them back.

But then, of course, there was the little issue of Thomas himself.

I had told him I would help him. I had told him I would be there for him. I couldn’t have both him and the Billings Girls—that much had been made perfectly clear. So what was I going to do?

Just to make my solitude more complete, Thomas was MIA for

the rest of the day. Normally I would see him in the halls between

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classes or lounging in the quad before the bell, but he was nowhere I was grasping at straws.

to be found. I checked my cell for messages every five minutes, but I hit speed dial four. Noelle had preprogrammed them for me.