I cover my face with my hands. I’m about to tell her I can’t, that it’s all too fresh. I even consider an outright lie, saying I slept at a bus station for the last two nights … but then one look up at my sweet, loyal, friend … and it all comes pouring out of me.

The first part is easy … right up until I’m sitting on the curb outside my old foster home after being kicked out after midnight on my birthday.

“I had nowhere to go. Then …” I close my eyes and swallow hard. This is the hard part. “I found out you weren’t the only one trying to get in touch with me all summer.”

She plays the perfect audience. She’s surprised, curious, eager … and outraged as I tell her the final, ultimate moment of betrayal at the hands of the man I thought was to be my savior.

Dana’s jaw drops. “What a scumbag, really. I might have expected something like that from Astor, but not Blair. I really thought he was different.”

I close my eyes as tears come fast. “I did too.”

She shakes her head, and it’s not the only thing that’s shaking. Her hands are unable to stay still on the edges of the bowl she’s holding, and she has to set it back onto my desk before she scatters popcorn kernels all over the floor.

“This is why I gave up men a long, long time ago.”

I shoot her a look

through my tears. “That’s not the same, and you know it.”

She sighs. “I know, I just … I really … Teddy, what was he thinking?” She eyes me again, harder this time. “I really hope you don’t plan on becoming his booty call or something.”

“Of course not,” I snap back, though just the thought of being close to him again, our bodies intertwined … it’s intoxicating enough to make my body ache in spite of it all.

We can’t stay holed up in our room forever, so eventually, after much coaxing and promises of chocolate, I agree to come down with her to dinner. I’m dreading the inevitable, but dreading it isn’t going to stop it happening.

It just would have been nice if it waited until I was approximately three slices deep into a chocolate mousse cake. As it is, however, we’re just walking into the dining hall when we walk straight into the last group of people that I want to see in the entire school.

Astor and Victoria, Wills, and Blair. All four of them give me a cold, hard glare, and I freeze to the spot where I’m standing. I can’t move. I can’t think. All I can do is stare back at them and hope that they can’t see the pain on my face. Blair doesn’t give a single thing away; he just turns and walks off with them.

Victoria looks over her shoulder at me and calls back, “I see they let the trash back in. Too bad. This school used to have such high standards.”

Dana groans softly and takes me by the arm, steering me into the dining hall. “Let’s see this as an improvement,” she says. “They actually looked at you this time. That’s better than last semester.”

“Is it though?” I ask, miserably. I want to throw my face into my folded-up arms on the table—but Dana just keeps tugging us towards the dessert bar. I’ve never selected ice cream flavors with such a heavy heart.

Dana and I take a seat in a remote corner of the room because the boys, or as Dana always refers to them, the holy trinity, aren’t the only ones giving me death glares. The other students all over the room who know me are also shooting me dark and hateful looks.

When we’re out of the way and diving into our chocolate escape, Dana frowns and points her spoon at me as she begins to chew.

“You know what,” she says between bites, “I feel like we’ve been going about this the wrong way. We need to come up with a proactive plan of action.”

I blink at her in confusion. “A what?”

She peers thoughtfully at me. “Well think about this. Your natural reaction has been to avoid them, and anyone else who tries to give you hell, so far.”

I glance up from my ice cream. “And the other option is? You know what they’re like.” I shove my spoon back into the bowl with a vengeance.

“That’s right,” Dana says. “We do know what they’re like … and it isn’t what they’re pretending to be.”

I stop eating. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” she says, pushing away her own plate, “that you got to know them better than anyone else here last year. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that … well … they expected you to fight back? The Teddy I knew last year stood up to them like no one else ever had.”

“That was Sadie,” I say.

But Dana isn’t having it. “I don’t agree,” she says. “Now … you can go on getting ignored and shunned, or you can try and do something about it. It’s up to you. And after all, what’s there to lose?”

I’m about to answer her when I have to stop.

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