• • •

I can't go back in the living room yet. My phone is frozen in my hand, my fingers clutching it so tightly that there's an imprint of the power button in my palm. What am I supposed to think after that? My head's a scramble, and it only scrambles more when curiosity gets the better of Gray and he slinks out of the living room with a slice of pizza in his hand.

"Everything ok?" he asks. He offers me the slice. I shake my head. His face falls. "Oh, no. What's wrong?"

"I ... I don't know," I say. "Navya's coming over."

Confusion floods his features. "What? Why? Is she ok?"

"I don't know. She sounded upset. She said she needs to talk to me and we can't talk over the phone and I need to hear something from her," I say, my voice starting to shake as much as Navya's. "Did something happen, Gray? Are you two ok?"

"What? Yes! We're great! I just saw her this morning," he says. "She was upset?"

"She was crying."

His face falls. Gray takes on other people's emotions as though they're his own and grief flickers in his eyes. "Why?"

"I don't know! She sounded upset and it's obviously a big deal if she's driving here. She's two hours away. Her parents are gonna kill her." I lower my voice when a thought enters my head, and I hold Gray's gaze when I ask, "Is she pregnant?"

"No! Oh my God, no!" he cries, his eyebrows shooting up. "No, no. Definitely not. We're careful. Very careful," he says, suddenly looking terrified. Color drains from his cheeks. "And if she was, surely she'd call me?"

I slump against the wall, my mind skittering out of control. "Yeah. I'm gonna go crazy until she gets here."

"Maybe Rich was being an asshole," Gray offers, "or she needs a girl talk or something."

I nod, but I know it's not that. If Navya wanted a girl talk, she'd call. If Rich was being an asshole, she'd text. If something huge happened, she'd drive here crying.

I can't go back into the living room. I can't sit back on the sofa and watch a movie with Mom and Tad and act like everything's normal, and I don't want to drag them into whatever's going on, so I struggle into my coat even though I really don't want to leave the house.

Gray bites the pizza slice I rejected. "Where're you going?"

"We're going out," I say, pulling my hair out from under my collar.

"Where? Nav's on her way over."

"Just to the diner," I say. "She can meet us there. I just ... whatever's going on, I don't want to do it here."

He swallows and asks, "Why? Surely it'll be worse in the diner."

"Is this how you want your dad to meet your girlfriend?" I ask, trying not to sound mean. I don't want to be mean; I don't want to hurt Gray, but I'm struggling to know what to think right now. He slowly nods.

"Good point," he says. He grabs his coat. "I'll tell them we're going out."

• • •

I hate December. I hate the cold, the way the wind bites at my cheeks like a thousand papercuts. I hate that it gets so dark so early, that my fingers are numb in my pockets within five minutes of leaving the house. We could've driven. It would take two minutes to make it to the diner in the car, but I couldn't bring myself to get behind the wheel again so we're walking.

"Don't catastrophize," Gray says, his elbow jostling mine. The sidewalk is too narrow for us to walk without bumping. "I can see it in your eyes. You're thinking the worst."

"Aren't you?"

He pauses for a moment. "No. I think maybe she's upset and needs a friend and she knows that if she drives here, she has access to both of us," he says. He waits for a beat before he asks, "What're you thinking?"

I'm thinking a lot. Every god-awful scenario has raced through my mind, every terrible thing that could have happened, but there's only one that sticks out amongst the rest.

"I think she saw Liam with another girl," I say. Saying it out loud doesn't make me feel any better. In fact, it just makes me feel worse. Saying the words makes them sound too real, too feasible, too normal. As soon as I say it, it's all I can imagine. Liam and I have hardly seen each other all week. Maybe it hasn't been frat stuff. Maybe it's another girl. Maybe Navya saw him with someone else. Maybe she saw him kiss her.

"No," Gray says. His voice is surprisingly firm, enough to make me stop walking. He holds my elbow, even though it's barely forty degrees out and he's not wearing gloves. "Don't do that to yourself. He loves you, Storie. He's totally besotted. I've seen how he looks at you."

"That doesn't mean he can't look at anyone else the same way," I say, simultaneously aware that I'm worsening my paranoia while unable to stop myself. "He could have any girl he wanted and he's with me. Why wouldn't he be with someone else?"

"Stop it!" Gray cries. "You're talking crap and you're making yourself feel worse. He's with you because he loves you. Just because he's a hot frat guy doesn't mean he's going to cheat on you. You guys have been together for, like three months and has he ever even looked at another girl?"

"No," I say quietly as we keep walking. It's too cold to stop, and we're not far from the diner. I hope it won't be too busy. Five Oaks isn't exactly known for its buzzing social life.

"Do you trust him?"

"Yes."

But there's a niggle of doubt. I do trust him. But he's hurt me before. What if he's done it again? I feel sick, my stomach churning and my face freezing. I don't want to deal with this. I don't want there to have to be something to deal with.

"And it's probably nothing to do with Liam," Gray says. "Maybe Nav wants to break up with me and she wants to talk to you first."

"Don't be stupid," I mutter. "She adores you. And whatever it is, she said that I need to hear it from her."

Gray sighs. "Well, we're getting nowhere. So let's just talk about something else and grab a milkshake."

I nod, even though I know that'll be impossible when my mind is a runaway train on a looping track, and he loops his arm through mine. It's an awkward way to walk but I don't shake him off. I've never been that big on physical contact, but Gray is strangely soothing despite being a manic puppy of a person.

It takes us thirty minutes to walk to the diner. It wouldn't ordinarily take longer than twenty, if that, but it's so cold and the sidewalk is threatening to ice over. The last thing I want to do now is slip and break my ass.

The diner's quiet. There are only a couple of people here, so it isn't hard for us to scoot into a booth as far from anyone else as possible. My hands are numb, my fingers more like icicles, and I drop the menu after fumbling with it for a moment.

"Storie." Gray puts his hands over mine. They're warmer, and the heat slowly seeps through my skin. "Calm down."

"Easier said than done," I say, and he nods.

"I know. But you're psyching yourself out. Just untense yourself. I'm gonna get us a couple hot chocolates, and I'm gonna call Nav, ok?"

I nod, and my heart sinks a bit when he shifts out of the booth, even though he's only heading to the counter. I slip my phone out of my pocket but there are no new messages. Navya hasn't tried to call me again and the last text from Liam is the one I never replied to. I reread it, the message I read right before Navya rang.

cant wait to see you. sorry I wasn't around much this week. you're my #1. I don't have the words for how much I love you. (maybe I can borrow some from my favorite English student??)

My heart aches. I want him. I wish I was with him right now, tucked up in his room with a cheesy movie on Netflix and his body to warm my hands. I sit on my fingers until they're warm enough to cooperate, to reply to his text.

i'm running low on words rn but I wish you were here

I stare at it for a long time before I eventually send it, hoping it's not as cold as I am. Gray's right. I have no idea what it is Navya's so desperate to talk to me about, and the last thing I want to do is push Liam away and for it to turn out to be about her classes or something.

Gray returns after a long five minutes and pushes an overloaded hot chocolate across to me. Whipped cream spills over the lip of the mug, a few mini marshmallows sinking to the cocoa and pushing the cream higher.

"Did you get through to Navya?"

He gives me a small smile as he sits. "Yeah. She said she'll be here in an hour and that her parents are not to know that she's coming here. They think she's working a closer and staying with Georgie."

"Did she say anything else?"

He shakes his head. "Just that she needs to talk to you, and she's really sorry that she freaked you out. She'll be here soon." After slurping his drink, he wipes cream from the end of his nose and leans across the table to me, his eyes boring into mine. He wears a slightly sad smile for a moment before he pulls back and takes out his phone and scrolls to his calendar.

"When d'you reckon we need to start the Shakespeare paper?" he asks, pursing his lips. I appreciate that he's trying to help, but it can be pretty hard to talk my mind down from the clutches of panic until I've answered all the questions in my head.

"Um, I don't know," I say, scrunching up my nose. "It's due in two weeks."

"Plenty of time, then," he says, as though he didn't know that already. "And then it'll be Christmas before you know it."

I can't believe how fast it's come around. When Mom and I first got here in May, I thought time would drag its feet but somehow it has been seven months since we took the plunge, seven months since I found my best friend.

"Do you and your dad have any Christmas traditions?" I ask, forcing myself to sound as normal as I can manage. The words sound forced, like an awkward ice-breaker question.

"Sometimes Dad's mom comes over and sometimes we go see one of my aunts. Once, we all went to my grandma's but it was a lot of people and Dad gets a bit overwhelmed by his sisters," he says. "Usually, we just hang out here and go to church and just chill. Presents, food, and a movie." He shrugs and smiles. "Nothing major. Nothing we can't all do. How about you?"

"Pretty much the same," I say, stirring my hot chocolate. When the door opens, an icy gust sends a chill through me and my heart jumps in case it's Navya, but I know she's still forty miles away so I tear my eyes from the window and back to Gray. "Kris comes over for a few days and we do church and he cooks."

"He and Dad can fight for kitchen control." Gray grins and taps his nails on the table, then his smile fades a bit and I catch a flicker of wistfulness in his eyes. "I miss how it was when I was a kid."

"The magic?" I ask, because I totally get that. Christmas used to feel like the most magical day, when I could hardly sleep the night before and I woke up to realize Santa Claus had been. Kris kept up the illusion well into his twenties, until I finally realized that my parents were the ones busting their asses to wrap the day in magic.

"Yeah," he says with a sigh. "I don't know. It was different when I was a kid, back before my mom left. It was this big special thing." He gets this adorable look on his face as he describes the season, choosing the tree with his mom and decorating the house. It gives me a warm feeling that throws me back to childhood, when I used to get tangled up in the festivities with my parents. I miss those days. They feel like they belong to someone else, as though they're memories implanted into my mind.

"Anyway. I'm excited for this Christmas," he says. "I thought it was gonna be when Dad proposed to your mom but I guess he already got that out of the way."

Sometimes it hits me that Mom's engaged, that she and Tad are going to get married and the four of us are going to be an actual family, that this is our present and our future. This is one of those moments, when I'm struck by how much has changed. A pang of guilt hits me when I think that I wouldn't dream of giving up Gray and Tad, but they're only in my life because my dad died.

Those emotions are hard to deal with, the ones that I'd rather just push to the side. I've had enough long, deep conversations with Gray to last me a lifetime; we've seen plenty of each other's baggage and that's only going to become more true tonight, I'm sure.

• • •

Exactly an hour after Gray called Navya, she's pushed through the door by a howling wind, her hair whipping around her face. My stomach seizes, my body frozen when Gray jumps to his feet and greets her with a kiss. When I manage to drag myself out of the booth, already dreading whatever got her to come out here on a Friday night, she pulls me into a tight hug before I can register her expression.

"Hey, Storie," she murmurs, her arms a vice around me. It does nothing to alleviate my fears.

"Hi, Navya."

She gives me a weak smile. I feel a hundred times worse. Her eyes flit around the diner. "Any chance we can go back to yours?"

Mom and Tad are at mine. I don't want to have to explain whatever's about to happen, and I don't want to force Gray to introduce his girlfriend to his dad, but he jumps in before I can answer.

"We'll go to mine," he says. He spends so much time at mine that I forget that he has his own house right next door to mine, and I numbly follow when he leads Navya back to her car, directing her to his house. I have a million questions stuck on my tongue, but it's only once we're inside Gray's bedroom that they spill out.

"What the hell is going on?" My words trip over each other and my cheeks are flushed from the heat. My skin's prickling and I struggle out of my coat, my gaze fixed on Navya. She looks like she's about to cry.

"I'm so sorry, Storie, I really didn't want to freak you out," she says. "I hoped you were still on campus and then you weren't and I just ... I needed to talk, but now I've had two hours to figure out what I'm going to say and I don't know how to do it."

That doesn't help. I drop onto the edge of Gray's bed. Navya does the same. Gray pulls over his desk chair rather than choose which of us to sit next to.

"You're really scaring me," I say, my voice wobbling. "What happened? Did you see Liam with another girl?" The question leaps from me before I can wait for her to answer. Her eyebrows shoot up.

"No! No, no," she says, shaking her head, and the relief that floods me is palpable. I instantly feel bad for my frosty text. "He loves you Storie, he really does. I can see how much he adores you."

"So what is it?" Irritation bubbles up. If she's fine and she and Gray are fine and she didn't see Liam cheating on me, then I don't know what else could have brought her out here and I'm annoyed that I might have just wasted two hours theorizing every worst-case scenario.

Navya takes a deep breath. "Ok. I'm just going to say it because you need to know, and also because I can't bear the thought of you finding out some other way and knowing that I knew. I called you as soon as I found out, I promise." Her dark eyes are huge and shining, and fixed on me.

"What?" The word is a creak.

"The frat's been suspended," she says. "Theta Chi Theta. Liam's frat. I heard a couple of hours ago. There's an investigation and they're on probation and I know you've barely seen Liam this week, so I guess this is why, and I kind of freaked when I found out and I thought maybe you already knew but I did some digging and-"

"What? What the hell? Why? What?" All the blood drops from my cheeks. I swear my heart stops for a moment. "Suspended? Why? What investigation?" A horrible itch flushes hot and cold up and down my body. Liam hasn't said a thing. Why the hell wouldn't he tell me?

Navya clutches her hands together. My thoughts are thrown to the warnings she gave me when I first told her about Liam. Everything about the frat. Frats in general. The stuff that goes on. The stuff I can't imagine. I think of the boys who died, the ones who took their own lives. I think I'm going to be sick.

"What happened?" Gray asks when he sees that I can't force out another word and Navya doesn't seem to know how to continue. I want to shake her, to see if that'll loosen her verbal block.

"Apparently," she begins, her voice shaking, "there was a competition going on inside the frat." She holds my eye contact. I can feel myself shrivelling. "From what I heard, the brothers had a competition."

"To do what?"

"To sleep with the heaviest girl."

And just like that, everything shatters.

I feel sick. Shame crawls on my skin like a disease, sinking into my pores. Confusion floods me. Mortification seeps in. I ... I don't get it. But I do. Navya just said it. She's still talking but I don't hear a word she says after she confirms my fears. The stupid niggle I've been pushing to the back of my mind, the one I ignored because Liam loves me.

I was right. I'm a joke. I guess he won. When it comes to big girls at SoLa, there's no contest. I win.

• • •