Chapter 3 Every Room Has An Exit

• Junie POV
• I didn't sleep.
• I lay there running through every person on this campus who might own that number, who might have been close enough to watch Rhett and me through the kitchenette's narrow window without either of us clocking them, and the list kept collapsing back down to the same two names no matter how many times I tried to expand it.
• Vienna. Or someone doing this for Vienna.
• At 6 a.m. I finally gave up on sleep entirely and lay there staring at Steve the water stain, phone clutched against my chest like it might bite me again if I let it out of reach, and by the time Priya's alarm went off at seven I'd already rehearsed and discarded four different plans, none of which involved anything as sane as ignore it and move on.
• "You look like you got hit by a bus," Priya said, squinting at me over her pillow.
• I handed her my phone without a word.
• She read the text twice. Her face did the flat-jaw thing again, the dangerous one. "Okay. We're doing something about this."
• "Doing what? I don't even know who sent it."
• "Doesn't matter who sent it. What matters is what you do next." She sat up fully, business mode fully engaged, the same voice she used when she was president of her mock trial team and had decided a witness was lying. "Do you actually like him? Rhett. Be honest, not scared-honest — actually honest."
• I thought about the lobster apron. The way he'd said both, obviously like it was the easiest sentence in the world. The way he hadn't looked away when I told him the true thing about Vienna instead of the easy one.
• "Yeah," I admitted. "I think I really do."
• "Then you don't let one anonymous coward's text decide whether you keep seeing him. That's exactly what they want. They want you scared enough to disappear back into the wallpaper." Priya pulled her knees up, wrapped her arms around them, looked at me with the kind of fierce, unwavering care that had gotten me through freshman year, sophomore year, every hard year in between. "You've spent your whole life shrinking so you take up less space in rooms that don't deserve you anyway. I'm not watching you do it again over a text from a burner number."
• I wanted to believe her. Some stubborn, frightened part of me still didn't.
• I found out who sent it by lunchtime, and I found out in the worst possible way — Vienna herself, cornering me by the salad bar in the dining hall, close enough that I could smell her perfume, expensive and floral and completely at odds with what came out of her mouth next.
• "Cute little baking date," she said, low enough that only I could hear it, casual as commenting on the weather. "Does he know you cried in the bathroom after our meeting? Someone heard you. It's already all over the group chat, by the way. The crying thing."
• My stomach turned to ice. I hadn't cried in the bathroom that night — I'd wanted to, badly, and I hadn't, and the fact that this detail was both cruel and wrong somehow made it worse, because now I had to decide whether correcting a lie was worth giving her the satisfaction of knowing it had landed.
• "Was that you?" I asked instead, quiet, steady, refusing to let my voice shake even though everything under my skin was shaking. "The text last night."
• Something flickered across her face — not guilt, Vienna doesn't do guilt, but a kind of sharp, satisfied recognition, like a chess player watching you notice the trap a move too late. "I don't know what you're talking about."
• "Vienna."
• "I'm just saying." She examined her nails, bored, deadly. "Rhett's had every girl on this campus throw themselves at him since freshman year. Actual pretty girls. Girls who don't need a whole speech about body positivity to feel okay about themselves. You really think this is anything but him being nice? He's like that with everyone. It's kind of his whole thing."
• Each word landed exactly where she meant it to land, straight into the oldest, rawest part of me, the part that had spent twenty years believing exactly what she was saying before I even needed her to say it. That was the real skill Vienna had — she didn't invent the cruelty. She just found the cruelty I already carried and pointed it at myself with better aim than I ever managed alone.
• "You dated Grayson before I did," I said, surprising myself. "That's what this is actually about, isn't it? Not me. Not Rhett. Just— you, still mad that he chose someone else after you, and needing somewhere to put that."
• For one full second, something true crossed her face. Then it was gone, replaced by the smooth practiced boredom she wore like armor.
• "Cute theory," she said. "Enjoy your galette, or whatever it was. I'm sure it's very filling." And she walked away before I could say anything else, leaving me standing at the salad bar with my tray shaking in my hands and half the dining hall pretending very hard not to have watched the whole thing happen.
• Rhett found me twenty minutes later, in the library, in the corner I go to when I need four walls and nobody's eyes on me.
• "Priya told me," he said, sliding into the seat across from me without asking. "About Vienna. The text. The dining hall thing."
• "Priya has a big mouth."
• "Priya loves you, which is different from having a big mouth, and I'm glad she told me, because I would've wanted to know." He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and there was an intensity in his face I hadn't seen from him before, something that had burned off all the easy charm from the kitchenette. "I need you to know that text wasn't from me, wasn't anything I'd ever say, and if I find out who sent it, I'm not going to be nice about it."
• "You don't have to fight my battles for me."
• "I'm not trying to fight your battles. I'm trying to tell you the truth, which is that what Vienna said about me — that I'm 'like that with everyone' — is a lie, and I think you already know it's a lie, and I think the reason it hurt anyway is that some part of you has been waiting for a reason to believe it." His voice dropped, quieter now, careful. "Am I wrong?"
• I didn't answer, because he wasn't wrong, and we both knew it.
• "Junie." He reached across the table, not quite touching my hand, close enough that I could feel the warmth of it anyway. "I don't care what Vienna thinks this is. I know what it is. I've known since Thursday, standing in that doorway, watching you hold that whole room together with your bare hands while everyone else fell apart around you. That's not nothing to me. You're not nothing to me."
• My throat went tight. I opened my mouth to say something — I don't even know what, some deflection, some easy joke to defuse the moment because that's what I do, that's my whole practiced repertoire — and that's when my phone buzzed again, face-up on the table between us where we could both see it.
• private number: ask him about freshman year. ask him what he did to get vienna to stop talking to him. you're not the first girl he's played nice with right before he drops her.
• I watched Rhett's face change as he read it upside down. Watched something go pale and tight behind his eyes.
• "Rhett." My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "What happened freshman year?"