Chapter 4 The Leak

• I woke up to my phone vibrating nonstop.
• It was 6:14 in the morning. My alarm hadn’t even gone off yet. My mom was still asleep down the hall. The room was dark except for the light from my phone screen.
• I had seventeen new messages. Three missed calls from Maya Chen. Two from Weston. One from a number I didn’t have saved.
• And a link.
• Maya had sent the link four times with the same text.
• Maya: “Emma please tell me this isn’t real”
• Maya: “Emma are you awake???”
• Maya: “Emma call me”
• I clicked the link.
• It was a post on the school’s anonymous confession account. The account has twenty thousand followers. Everyone follows it. Teachers pretend they don’t, but they do too.
• The post was a photo. A clear photo of our contract.
• Not a blurry copy. The actual paper. My signature at the bottom. Weston’s messy signature under mine. Every rule we wrote in the library.
• Rule 1. No feelings.
• Rule 2. No jealousy.
• Rule 3. No private dates.
• Rule 4. No kissing unless necessary.
• Rule 5. No telling anyone.
• Rule 6. No breaking the agreement before the scholarship decision.
• The caption under it said: “So much for #couplegoals. Carter x Blackwood was FAKE this whole time. Contract dating for scholarship clout?? Thoughts?”
• It had 612 likes. It had been posted at 2:03 AM.
• My hands started shaking so hard I dropped the phone.
• I picked it up and opened Weston’s messages.
• Weston: “Emma, did you see it?”
• Weston: “Call me when you wake up.”
• Weston: “I’m so sorry.”
• Sorry for what? Sorry that he posted it? Or sorry that someone else did?
• I called Maya.
• She picked up on the first ring.
• “Emma! Oh my god, are you okay?” she said. She sounded like she had been awake for hours.
• “No,” I said. My voice was small. “Maya, where did that come from?”
• “I don’t know. Someone sent it to the confession account. Everyone has seen it. Everyone. The comments are insane.”
• “What comments?”
• “Don’t read the comments,” she said quickly. “Just… are you and Weston actually fake?”
• I didn’t know what to say. We had signed rule five. No telling anyone. That included Maya.
• “Maya, I can’t talk about it right now,” I said.
• “Emma, people are saying you faked it for the scholarship. Duke is in the comments.”
• “Duke is in the comments?”
• “Yeah. He wrote ‘I told you so.’”
• I closed my eyes.
• “I’m going to be late to school,” I said. “I have to go.”
• “Are you coming to school?” Maya asked. “Maybe you should stay home.”
• “I have to come,” I said. “If I don’t come, it looks like it’s true.”
• “It is true, though, right?” Maya said softly.
• I hung up.
• I got dressed with my phone still buzzing. My mom knocked on my door.
• “Emma, are you okay? Your phone has been ringing since six,” she said.
• “I’m fine, Mom. It’s just school stuff.”
• “Are you sure? You look pale.”
• “I’m fine.”
• I wasn’t fine.
• I got to school at 7:30. Normally the gates are quiet at that time. Today they weren’t. A group of juniors were standing by the entrance looking at their phones and then looking at me when I walked past.
• I kept my head down and went to my locker.
• Weston was there waiting. He looked like he hadn’t slept. His hair was messy, his jacket was half-zipped.
• “Emma,” he said.
• “Did you do it?” I asked. It came out harsher than I meant.
• His face changed. “What?”
• “Did you leak it?”
• “No! Why would I leak our contract? That ruins both of us.”
• “Then who did? You’re the only other person who had a copy.”
• “I didn’t have a copy,” he said. “You had the original. I only had a photo on my phone. And I didn’t post it. I swear.”
• “I had the original in my backpack,” I said. “It never left my backpack.”
• “Then someone took a picture of it when we weren’t looking. At lunch? At the library?”
• We stared at each other. The hallway was getting more crowded. People were walking by slowly, pretending not to listen while very obviously listening.
• “Everyone thinks I faked it for clout,” I whispered. “Everyone thinks I’m a liar.”
• “Everyone thinks we both faked it,” Weston said. “I got called a fraud in the group chat. Jonah said I was using you for sympathy points after the assembly thing.”
• “So you think I leaked it?”
• “I didn’t say that.”
• “You were thinking it,” I said. “You texted me ‘I’m so sorry’ like you were guilty.”
• “I said I’m sorry because this happened to you, not because I did it!” His voice got louder. A sophomore walking past jumped.
• We both went quiet.
• Weston ran a hand through his hair. “Okay. Okay, let’s not do this here. Let’s not fight where everyone can see us.”
• “We are already fighting where everyone can see us,” I said.
• He looked around. At least ten people were watching.
• “Come with me,” he said. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the empty classroom next to the lockers. Room 2A, which is always empty before first period.
• He closed the door.
• “Listen,” he said. “I did not post that. I would never post that. I know how much the scholarship means to you. I know how much this whole thing means.”
• “Then who did?” I asked. My eyes were starting to sting.
• “I don’t know,” he said. “But think about it. Who benefits if we look fake?”
• “Duke,” I said immediately.
• “Exactly. Duke. He was mad after assembly. He warned me at lunch on day one that you were using me. He told you I promised him something. He wants us to break up.”
• “But why would he post the contract? If he wants us to break up, posting it helps us break up. It gives us a reason to end it.”
• Weston frowned. “Unless… unless he doesn’t want us to break up. Unless he wants us to look stupid but stay together.”
• That didn’t make sense.
• “Or maybe it’s not Duke,” Weston said. “Maybe it’s someone from the confession account who saw us writing it in the library. The librarian walked past. Remember? She saw the paper.”
• “The librarian wouldn’t post our private contract at two in the morning,” I said.
• We both sat down on desks, facing each other.
• “My mom is going to kill me,” Weston said quietly. “She texted me this morning. She said ‘Is this true?’ I haven’t answered.”
• “My mom doesn’t know yet,” I said. “But she will. Everyone’s mom will.”
• The door opened. We both jumped.
• It was Duke.
• He stood in the doorway, smiling. That perfect, friendly smile.
• “Well, well,” he said. “The happy couple. Or should I say, the business partners.”
• “Get out,” Weston said.
• “Relax,” Duke said. He walked in like he owned the room. “I just came to say I’m sorry. I saw the post. That’s rough. All those rules. No kissing unless necessary. Wow. You guys really thought this through.”
• “We didn’t—” I started.
• “Oh, I know you did,” Duke said, looking at me. “No feelings. That’s my favorite one. Very professional, Emma. Did you learn that in your tutoring proposal? How to not feel anything?”
• “Shut up,” Weston said, standing up.
• Duke put his hands up. “Hey, I’m just reading what you wrote. Don’t shoot the messenger. The whole school is reading it. You should see the comments. People are very creative.”
• He looked at me. “They are saying you paid Weston. Is that true? Did you pay him?”
• “I didn’t pay him,” I said.
• “Then what did you promise him?” Duke asked. He looked at Weston. “What did you offer him that was better than what I offered?”
• Weston didn’t answer.
• Duke laughed. “This is great. You two fake date for influence, you get caught, and now you have more influence than ever. The post has eight hundred likes now. You should thank whoever leaked it. They did you a favor.”
• He walked to the door, then stopped.
• “Oh, and Emma,” he said. “Good luck at the mixer tonight. If they still want you after this.”
• He left.
• The door swung shut.
• I put my head in my hands.
• “We should break up,” I said. “We should post that we broke up. Say it was a misunderstanding. Say it was a joke.”
• “If we break up now, Duke wins,” Weston said. “He just told us that. He wants us to look stupid and then disappear. If we break up today, everyone will say he was right. That we were frauds.”
• “But we are frauds,” I said. “We did fake it.”
• “Yeah, but we were doing it for a reason. And it was working. You got invited to the mixer. You made top five.”
• “I won’t make top five anymore. Not after this. Mrs. Albright will uninvite me.”
• “She won’t,” Weston said. “You know why? Because everyone is talking about us. And the foundation loves when people talk. They love attention. Even bad attention is attention.”
• I looked up at him. “So what are you saying?”
• “I’m saying we don’t break up,” he said. “We do the opposite. We act like the contract doesn’t matter. We act like, yeah, we wrote some stupid rules because we were nervous, but we are actually together. We lean into it.”
• “That is insane,” I said.
• “Is it? People love a redemption story. Fake to real. Everyone is watching us now. If we show up tonight to the mixer together, holding hands, happy, they will eat it up.”
• “Weston, you just accused me of leaking it an hour ago.”
• “And you accused me,” he said. “And we are still here. Because we both know neither of us did it.”
• He was right. I knew he didn’t do it. I could tell by the way he looked when I asked. He was hurt that I thought he would.
• “So we continue?” I asked.
• “We continue,” he said. “We go to the mixer. We show them that we don’t care what some anonymous account says. We are Emma and Weston. We are together.”
• I took a deep breath. My phone was still buzzing in my pocket.
• “Okay,” I said. “We continue.”
• “Good,” he said. He stood up and held out his hand. “Come on. First period is starting. Let’s give them something to look at.”
• We walked out of the classroom holding hands. It was the first time we had ever held hands. His hand was warm and a little sweaty.
• The hallway was full. Everyone turned to look.
• Whispers started instantly.
• “They’re still together?”
• “After the leak?”
• “No way.”
• We walked past Duke’s group. Duke saw our hands and his smile faded just a little.
• We made it to class. We sat down. My phone buzzed one more time.
• It was another message from the unknown number.
• I opened it under my desk so the teacher couldn’t see.
• Two words.
• “Good choice.”
• I looked up at Weston across the room. He was looking at me, confused, like he wanted to ask what was wrong.
• I didn’t show him the message. Not yet.
• Someone had leaked our contract at 2:03 AM.
• Someone had just texted me at 8:42 AM praising us for staying together.
• Someone was watching us, hour by hour, decision by decision.
• And they were happy we didn’t break up.