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“Are you throwing a party and didn’t fucking invite me?”

He nods at Paige on his way past, grinning at her like they have a secret, which they do, except everybody in this hallway knows about it.

“What’s going on?” he asks, looking at Blondie.

“He punched Greeley over the blonde,” Rafe says.

Koda’s whole face lights up. He points at Kylie. “No fucking way. Mystery solved.”

“That’s not why,” I say.

Paige scoffs. “You literally just said—”

“It was part of it. He told me he was going to take everything I have, one piece at a time, and he started with her because he thought something was there.”

Koda looks right at Kylie. “He thought you and her? Oh, that’s great. He doesn’t know about Jules, does he?”

The hallway goes quiet.

“Who’s Jules?” says Kenzie.

“Jules?” Paige says.

Koda opens his mouth to explain, happily. Kylie is looking at me with her arms crossed, her chin up, and her face has gone from pink to something else. She isn’t asking who Jules is. She’s standing in the middle of six people after telling a guy she barely knows that she thinks she’s being played, and now there’s a name on the floor in front of her that has nothing to do with her, and she looks like she’d like to be anywhere else on the planet.

I meet her eyes. “Can you guys give us a minute?”

Nobody moves.

“A minute,” I say again.

Paige grabs Kenzie’s arm, and the other girl’s already walking. Rafe leans in the doorway with his arms crossed and doesn’t go anywhere until I look at him, and then he goes back inside. Koda follows and shuts the door loud enough to make a point, and through it, I can hear him already starting on Rafe.

“Kylie,” I say. “Come on. Let’s walk.”

“Where?” she asks quietly.

“Anywhere.”

“The stairs,” she says, and I follow her.

The third-floor stairwell is cold and gray and smells like concrete, with a strip of lights down the middle of the ceiling and one of them out. She goes through the door ahead of me. It swings shut behind us, the sound of the building cuts off, and she just stands on the landing with her back to me.

I stop three feet away, near the railing, and don’t say anything, because I don’t have anything. I’ve never been good at this. Koda could fill this silence in half a second with something stupid, and it would work. Rafe would know what to say without thinking. I’m not like that.

Her shoulders come up, and I think she’s fucking crying.

“Sorry,” she says, turning away from me. Her voice is wrong. “I can’t believe I’m crying. It’s so—”

“It’s fine,” I say because I don’t need her freaking out.

“It’s not. I don’t even like him.” She wipes her face with the heel of her hand, still turned away. “I don’t even know why I care.”

I wait.

“I just feel stupid.” She turns around. Her eyes are red, there are two wet lines down her face, and she’s furious about them. “God. It’s too soon. That’s what it is. Everybody’s telling me it’s normal to go out with somebody, and it’s been a week, and the first guy who was nice to me was—” She laughs, and it cracks. “He was nice to me. That’s all it took. He handed me a drink in a kitchen and asked what my major was, and I thought, oh, there’s a good one.”

I put my hands in my pockets. At least she sees it.