As long as nothing else goes wrong in the next twenty-four hours, I thought, gritting my teeth.
“Well, all right, then.” Her tone brightened considerably. “I’ll let the others know.”
“Would you?” I said gratefully, collapsing into the back of the bench and slumping down slightly. “That would be so helpful.”
“Absolutely. I look forward to meeting you in person, Miss Brennan,” Lissa said. “Good-bye.”
“Me as well,” I replied, then almost gagged. Was that even close to good grammar? “Good-bye.”
I hung up the phone and groaned, dipping my head toward my knees. Someone sat down next to me, and I recognized by the polished, pointed toes of her shoes and signature musky scent that it was Noelle.
“Bad day?”
“Not entirely,” I said, lifting my face and flipping my thick hair back. I sat up straight, feeling the need to keep up appearances with her as much as I did with all the alums. Lately, when I was around Noelle, all I wanted to do was prove to her that I was doing the right thing. “In fact, the board voted to let us go ahead as planned.”
Noelle rested her arm on the back of the bench, gazing out across campus, taking in the beautiful pink and purple sky. The torchlights lining the walks suddenly flickered to life, painting a quaint and peaceful picture, the kind of warm, scenic shot Tiffany would have loved to have captured on her camera. The kind of image the Easton Academy catalog would have gladly slapped on its cover.
“I heard,” she said, with a sour twist of her lips. “So why with the groaning and moaning?”
“I guess the rumors got ahead of me,” I said, holding up the phone as the screen lit up once again. “All the alums and their assistants are calling to make sure everything’s okay.” I sighed and hit ignore. “I never realized that explaining and ass-kissing could be so exhausting.”
Noelle looked me over. “You do look tired, Reed. And stress lines do not become you,” she added, waving a finger around my brow area. I batted her hand away. “I’m just saying! Why don’t you just let this whole Billings thing go? You’re only here for one more year anyway. Why don’t you try focusing on other things? Things that you can actually control?”
I blinked. What, exactly, made her think I couldn’t control the Billings reconstruction? Hadn’t I just proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could take on anything and anyone?
“Just live in Pemberly, spend your weekends at Cornell with loverboy like you know you’re going to anyway, graduate with honors, and put it all behind you,” she added, leaning back.
“Is that what you’re going to do? Just put it all behind you?”
Put me behind you? I added silently, feeling like a needy loser.
She pressed her lips together, giving me a condescending look that made my toes curl. “It’s hard to explain, but there’s something that changes when you get this close to the end,” she said, gazing out at the quad again. Couples strolled hand in hand, enjoying the warm evening. A gaggle of freshman girls giggled their way across campus toward the solarium. Off in the distance, a church bell clanged. “You suddenly start to feel . . . no, you start to know, that none of this . . . it just doesn’t matter, Reed.”
Now my fingers curled into fists. Didn’t she realize what she was saying? That this place that I loved despite everything, this place that had changed my life, didn’t matter? That I didn’t
matter? That none of the crap we’d been through together over the past two years mattered?
I swallowed hard, not wanting to voice these thoughts. Not wanting to give her the opportunity to look down on me that way again. Like I was some pathetic middle schooler begging for her attention.
“I hate to say this, Noelle, but Billings . . . it’s part of our heritage,” I reminded her, shifting in my seat to face her. My phone rang again and I hit ignore as quickly as possible. “The Billings School for Girls was founded by our ancestors. I’m just trying to keep a part of that alive. Don’t you care about that at all?”
Noelle lifted her shoulders, then let them fall. “That’s all in the past. And after everything that’s happened, I think we should keep it there. It has nothing to do with us.”
I stared at her, wondering if she really believed that. Even when Josh walked up behind Noelle, hovering at the end of the bench, I didn’t break eye contact.
“Hey, guys,” he said tentatively. “What’s up?”
Noelle sighed audibly and stood, lifting her bag onto her shoulder. “Maybe you can talk some sense into her, Hollis. I’m out of ideas. And quite honestly, I’m starting to be bored by this whole thing.”
I let out a disbelieving bark of a laugh as she walked purposefully away. Josh slowly, tentatively sat down next to me and touched my shoulder, drawing a circle on my sweater with his thumb.
“What was that all about?” he asked.
“Just Noelle trying once again to squash all my hopes and dreams.” The phone rang and I jammed my finger into the screen over the word “ignore.” Then I turned it off and tossed it into my bag, already dreading the ten million calls I’d have to return later. I turned toward Josh. “She still wants me to give up on Billings, even though we just scored the board’s approval. She thinks I should be focusing on ‘other things,’” I told him, throwing in some highly sarcastic air quotes.
Josh tilted his head and chewed his lip, something he seemed to do often when he had something to say, but knew I wouldn’t like it. I felt my heart drop. “Well, there is a lot of other stuff going on.”
“Josh!” I wailed.