Hanna's excitement was contagious. It was also the feeling I'd been holding my breath for since the morning the article broke, so when I shouldered through the door to our apartment and she shoved a shot glass of Fireball in my face, I didn't even pull a face at the fragrant stench of cinnamon and regret. I just dropped to a knee and tossed it back.

"That's my girl!" Hanna cheered. "Okay, now go throw on some leggings or something. We're going to the Art House."

"What's wrong with my uniform?"

Hanna made a retching sound.

I rolled my eyes, climbed back to my feet with an unflattering grunt, and went to riffle through my closet for something that didn't make me look like a middle-aged father of two on a vacation somewhere tropical. When I finished changing into something more befitting of my youth, we tucked the rest of the Fireball into an inconspicuous reusable bag from Trader Joe's and made our way over to the Rodeo.

It was unusually dead for a Gameday. I guess people weren't really in the mood to celebrate after such a bad loss.

That was fine.

Hanna and I would turn up on behalf of the entire study body.

A boy with watery eyes and greasy shoulder-length hair answered the door of the Art House, his face sinking in disappointment at the sight of us.

"It's not the pizza!" he called over his shoulder.

There was a chorus of groans from the living room. Hanna and I shouted out our apologies as we clambered up the stairs and down the hall, where we pounded on Mehri Rajavi's door and yodeled out her name until she finally yanked it open, sighing in a way that told me she was more amused than annoyed.

"I smell Fireball," she accused.

"We're celebrating!" Hanna announced, tugging the handle out of her reusable bag with a flourish.

Mehri frowned skeptically.

"I thought we lost the game."

"Oh, we got ," Hanna confirmed. "Just, like, annihilated."

"So what's the occasion?"

I smiled and said, "Dismantling the patriarchy."

Mehri nodded, just as I'd known she would, and replied, "I'll drink to that."

❖ ❖ ❖

Exactly one week after our article dropped, I slept through my Monday morning alarm.

I knew I'd be late for Writing 301 the moment I pried my eyes open. The room was too bright, too uncomfortably warm from the sunlight streaming in through the window—although these complaints might've just been the residual effects of the hangover I'd given myself from drinking a third of a bottle of Fireball on Saturday night.

Which reminded me.

Truman Vaughn was suspended.

Ellison and I, along with everyone else at the , had pushed over the first domino in what would surely be a long and winding chain. But there was momentum, and there would be an end. Vaughn would face the consequences for what he'd done.

I believed that.

And so I rolled out of bed with a smile on my face.

I showered and threw on denim shorts and a pale pink short-sleeved shirt, then slid on a pair of sunglasses I'd stolen from Andre and headed onto campus.

By the time I made it to the humanities building, I'd missed passing period completely.

I didn't even care.

I tugged out my headphones, still mouthing the lyrics of the Ariana Grande song I'd been blasting, and pushed Andre's sunglasses up on top of my head, where they immediately became tangled in my hair.

The first floor hallway was barren, save for a pair of girls hovering across the hall from the bathrooms, under a glass case of posters for various performance art groups. The two girls were almost comically opposite—one tall and dark-skinned and built like a runner, the other short and pale and round—but I wasn't paying that much attention to them until the taller of the two spotted me over her friend's shoulder and, with an exchanged nod, they both circled around to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the middle of the hall.

I stuttered to a stop in front of the human barricade they'd formed.

"Hi there!" the shorter girl greeted. Her brown hair had been flat-ironed to death and her foundation looked almost orange where she'd tried to blend it into the white of her neck. These felt like awful things to notice, so I tried to focus on how pretty her red nail polish looked against the green of the paper coffee cup clutched in her hands.

"Hi," I parroted, a bit breathless from the brisk walk across campus

"Are you Laurel Cates?" asked the taller girl, who looked like she could definitely beat me in a footrace.

It took me a second to register that I was, in fact, Laurel Cates. In my defense, I was still preoccupied with trying to free Andre's sunglasses from my wet hair. But I also wasn't used to people knowing who I was—especially not when I knew absolutely nothing about them—so I was a little thrown of my game.

"Um," I said after far too long a pause, "yeah. Yeah, I am."

The girls exchanged a look.

"We have a message for you," the shorter one said. "From St. James."

"A what?"

Maybe if I'd been paying more attention, I would've noticed that they both looked a bit nervous. Jittery, but determined. And if I'd caught on to this earlier, then maybe I would've been suspicious when the shorter of the two popped the white plastic top off her paper coffee cup.

But I didn't realize what she was doing until it was too late.

Some instinctual part of my brain told my body to brace for the sting of scalding hot liquid against my skin. It was almost a relief when I realized the coffee was lukewarm—like it'd been sitting in the cup for an hour.

And then it sunk in.

Literally.

Because they'd dumped coffee on me.

Two girls I'd never spoken to in my life had paid four bucks at the campus Starbucks and waited for who knows how long outside that specific classroom just to toss a drink down the front of my shirt, like this would somehow inconvenience more than it had them.

It was the pettiest thing I'd ever witness anyone do. Which is probably why, in the tense moment of silence after it happened, I had the strangest urge to laugh.

The shorter girl set the lid back onto her coffee cup and smiled at me like we'd just promised to exchange notes for class, or something. Like she just assault me fifteen feet from the door of my Writing 340 classroom.

"Go Lions," she said.

And then she and her tall friend turned and took off down the empty hallway, murmuring excitedly in an kind of way. I stared after them in open-mouthed shock, watching as they high-fived and then disappeared around the corner.

I might've believed that I'd imagined the whole thing, if it weren't for the fact that when I looked down, there was a very real puddle of black coffee on the linoleum tile floor at my feet.

I turned and darted into the bathroom.

The stall doors were all propped open, the off-white toilets dingy and menacing under the harsh fluorescent lights. It was a small consolation that my attackers hadn't cornered me during passing period, when the lines for the bathroom wrapped into the hall and hundreds of students were streaming back and forth to their next classes—there had been no witnesses to my caffeinated assault.

I stood at the sinks and blinked at myself in the mirror for a moment.

There was coffee from my neck to my toes. It dripped from the ends of my hair and onto my pale pink shirt and the straps of my backpack. A few rivulets traced the length of my arms, tickling the insides of my elbows and spilling off my fingertips.

Why hadn't she aimed for my face?

It seemed like a missed opportunity.

I tore a paper towel out of the dispenser, ran it under the sink, and started mopping up the stain down the front of my shirt. When I glanced at my reflection again, a laugh tore out of my throat.

"What the fuck?" I asked aloud, the words echoing against the tiled walls.

Talking to myself in an empty bathroom seemed a little melodramatic, but really. What the fuck had that been? How had they even known where to find me? I had so many logistical questions.

And then there was the matter of the shorter girl's prefacing statement.

So Bodie had sent them. I hadn't thought he was capable of something so malicious. Wasn't his whole thing supposed to be that he was unwaveringly nice? So much for load of bullshit. He'd wanted me doused in hot coffee, and he'd sent a pair of minions to do it—probably so he wouldn't have to get his hands dirty.

The coward.

I wet another paper towel and kept rubbing at my shirt, watching the coffee stain bloom like one of Mehri Rajavi's watercolor flowers. It was only getting bigger, more spread out—a little paler, perhaps, but still undeniably there.

My nose started to run.

I sniffled sharply, and pressed harder on my shirt, then had to stop for a second and use the dry corner of the paper towel to blot at my teary eyes.

When I tried to laugh again, it was a tiny, hoarse thing.

"What the fuck?" I croaked.

I went through three handfuls of paper towels before I finally gave up. There was no saving my shirt—or my morning, since I couldn't walk into Writing 301 without having to explain both my tardiness and my dampness.

It was time to go home.

I tucked my hair behind my ears, took a deep breath, and slipped out of the bathroom.

The hallway was empty—my second stroke of luck that morning, behind getting to campus so late that my assailants couldn't make a spectacle of me like they'd intended to. I scurried back towards the main doors, my head down and shoulders hunched in case anyone caught a split-second glimpse of me through the windowed panels on every classroom door.

I knew my luck had to run out, eventually.

I'd just hoped it would last me to the end of the hallway.

But fate really was a stone cold bitch, because just as I thought I might escape my miserable morning without any more witnesses, a walking storm cloud dressed in a black t-shirt, joggers and Nikes burst through the main doors, a black Garland football jacket hooked over his elbow.

It was Bodie.

I stopped twenty feet short of the lobby of the humanities building, every muscle in my body bracing for confrontation.

But Bodie didn't look up.

He kept his head down, eyes on the ground, and hooked a sharp turn and started up the staircase to the second floor.

I blinked in surprise.

My feet started moving. Before I could think rationally, I was at the bottom of the stairs—my fight or flight instinct having decided it was a smackdown kind of day. Bodie was already halfway up the steps. There was something wild about his movements—a kind of restlessness that might've given me pause, if I weren't dripping wet and suddenly filled with unbridled rage.

"St. James!" I roared.

It was unspeakably satisfying to watch Bodie flinch so hard he nearly ate shit on the stairs.

His arm shot out and grabbed the handrail. To my slight disappointment, he managed to right himself from the step the toe of his Nike had missed. I saw the muscle of his back pinch beneath his t-shirt and remembered, suddenly, that on Saturday I'd watch him get the absolute shit knocked out of him by the University of Washington's defensive line.

He was hurting.

I balled my hands into fists at my sides. There would be no mercy.

Bodie turned around to see who had bellowed his name like it was some kind of Viking war cry. He was clearly startled to find standing at the foot of the stairs, glaring up at him with fire in my eyes.

"Laurel," Bodie huffed, his shoulders slumping. Like, . Then his eyes dropped to my shirt and the little wrinkle between his brows deepened. "Why are you always wet?"

I was so distracted by the way the sunlight streaming through the window behind him caught his brown hair, casting a halo of gold around his head, that I almost missed the blatant double entendre. . But Bodie seemed to realize how his question sounded the second the words left his mouth. His ears went bright red.

"Not like—I meant like in the elevator—"

Later, I'd let myself think about the fact that he remembered me from that morning. But not now.

"I know what you meant," I snarled. "Call off your attack dogs."

His eyebrow furrowed.

"What?"

God, I wished I had something to throw at him.

"Your attack dogs. The ones you sent to dump coffee on me. You could've at least done it yourself, you know. You didn't have to be a little bitch about it."

Bodie looked bewildered for a moment before his face sunk with sudden realization.

He knew exactly who I was talking about.

"I did tell them to do that," he said, pointing one adamant finger at my wet shirt.

"Okay. So you it."

"No! I—. I was just talking to them about the article, and they said they'd be willing to talk some sense—" he cut off, abruptly, and pinched his eyes shut like he hadn't realized until now what those words usually connoted.

"Talk some sense into me?" I finished for him, my eyebrows raised as if to say, ?

"Yeah, alright," Bodie grumbled. "Alright, that's my bad. But I didn't—" he began, then groaned in exasperation and scrubbed one hand down his face. "I swear on my life, I didn't want them to do that."

I folded my arms over my chest, immediately regretting it when I felt my cold, damp shirt become plastered to my stomach.

Bodie's eyes flickered down, then snapped back to my face.

I wasn't sure which of us blushed harder.

The moment broke when Bodie cleared his throat, his face hardening.

"Look," he said, impatiently. "I really don't have time for this right now. I'm late to class—"

I flinched despite myself.

The coffee hadn't scalded me, but his dismissal did.

"Go, then," I snapped, waving him off. "I'm—it's fine. We're done here."

Bodie's eyebrows pinched and, once more, I wanted to chuck something at him. How dare he look at me like he knew I'd just spent ten minutes in the bathroom trying to convince myself that crying would only ruin my makeup.

"Do you want—" he began, then snapped his mouth shut like he'd thought better of whatever he'd been planning to say.

He looked torn as he dropped his arm back to his side. I realized, belatedly, he'd been about to offer me his jacket.

But Bodie's hatred of me was clearly enough to override his impulse to be kind.

I tipped my chin up and jammed Andre's sunglasses back on. We were indoors, so the dark tint made it tough to see and I was sure I looked like a complete tool, but I was determined to make an exit.

"No thanks," I snapped. "See you in class."

And then I turned on my heels and stormed out of the humanities building with what was left of my coffee-stained dignity.

_________________

Trying out a new end-of-chapter line break so I can stop tricking people into thinking there's more chapter left when it's just me refusing to shut up. Also spilled a little bit of iced coffee on myself this morning while editing. Life imitates art.

This is one of about seven or eight chapters in my outline that I've had in my head since college, and it was both terrifying and wonderful to finally write it out.

I always thought I'd be dealing with a bad-boy, and that he'd be cruel and cutthroat and fully responsible for the main character's bullying.

But instead I wrote Bodie. And I'm so glad I did.

Your friendly author,

Kate