Begin Again(86)

Connor lets out a laugh that borders on mean. “You’re the what now?”

“Forget it,” I mumble. Given the state of this conversation, it’d be a waste of breath to explain. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does. I know you. And yesterday you weren’t going to break up with me. You were going to give me another chance.” He gestures at Milo’s picture on the wall, unintentionally also gesturing right at my mom. He doesn’t even notice her there. Somehow that stings worse than everything else he’s said so far. “Tell me if that Milo Flynn guy didn’t exist, we wouldn’t still be together.”

I open my mouth to tell him how wrong he is, but the door crashes open. A very wide-eyed sound engineer stares at the two of us with undisguised panic before diving toward the console behind Connor and flicking off a switch. A light turns from green to red. I stare at it like it’s something unholy, the realization dawning on me before the engineer even opens her mouth.

“Um,” she says, “so—you were broadcasting live.”

Connor must have knocked it on when he was leaning on the console. And we’re both too close to the mic for it not to pick us up.

“The dance party in the quad,” I say, my voice flat with horror.

The engineer winces. “I got here as fast as I could. But the whole thing played over the music.”

“Oh, no. Oh, no.”

Those are apparently the only two words left in my vocabulary, because when I reach into my brain, that’s all I can seem to think, too.

“Great,” says Connor, blowing out a breath and clearly not recognizing the magnitude of what we just did.

I’m not sure if I can even recognize it myself. I’m rooted to the spot, my brain replaying our conversation like some kind of horror-movie film reel as the engineer backs out of the studio like she just walked in on a crime and doesn’t want to be implicated in it.

“We just revealed the Knight to the whole school.”

I don’t say it to Connor so much as to the room. It feels like he’s not even here anymore. It’s just me and my complete and utter self-hatred, me and the knowledge that I’ve let both Milo and my mother’s legacy down.

“Why do you even care so much?” Connor asks.

I turn to look at him. This boy I’ve known and loved. This boy I folded up paper fortune-tellers with and kissed in school parking lots and shared a blanket with at homecoming games and picked out wedding songs for. This boy who knew me with my mom and without her; this boy who has shared his parents with me for years, even when I could never fully feel like I belonged; this boy who shaped so much of me that he’ll always be there, even when he’s not.

And still, I never told him the truth about my mom being the Knight. I used to wonder why it was so important to me that the secret be just mine. But now in this moment, I think I understand—it’s not that I don’t belong at Blue Ridge. It’s that I never really belonged with Connor. I might have been able to convince myself in every other way that I did, but the memory of my mom was the one thing too precious to put on the line.

“I have to go,” I tell him.

Connor has the nerve to look bewildered. “So that’s just . . . it, then?”

All the anger is blown out of him now. There’s just Connor, eight and eighteen at the same time, looking so lost that it feels like I’m going against every instinct not to guide him.

Maybe someday we can be friends again. Once we’re both untangled from the pressure and the hurt that brought us here, and can find some new kind of baseline to meet each other. But for now all I can say is, “That’s it.”

He hangs his head. There are a few beats of quiet. Of acceptance. “I really fucked up,” he finally says.

I don’t deny that. I walk over to the chair where he’s still seated and put a hand on his shoulder. “Tell your parents what happened last semester, Connor. They love you. They want to help.”

He’s shaking under my palm. He nods without looking back up at me. I walk out, closing the door on him and so much else in my wake.





Chapter Twenty-Eight


On the way to my statistics exam, I call Milo. It goes straight to voicemail. I call a second time, and a third time, and a fourth.

“Unicorn cream cheese,” I mutter, shoving the phone back into my pocket.

I consider trying to make a break for it, running over to Cardinal to apologize to him face-to-face and risk being late for the exam and blowing it. But I know Milo. He’d be more upset with me for missing the exam than if I didn’t immediately try to make this right.

Still, I check the time just to do some mental math and see if I can swing it. If I sprint, I can—

“What the hell, Andie?”

I look up from my phone into the eyes of one extremely indignant Shay, who is waiting for me outside the psychology building in her sweaty, post-dance-party glory with both of her hands on her hips.

The moment I make eye contact with her, the anger softens. My face must look a heck of a lot worse than I thought it did.

“I can’t reach Milo,” I blurt.

Shay lets her arms go loose at her side, kicking at a stray twig on the sidewalk. “Yeah, no shit.”

I step closer to her. “Is he okay?”

Her eyes search my face, like she’s still trying to decide how to process what just happened. What she and Valeria must have heard out on the quad with half the student body.