Chapter 351: At a party
The party was already loud by the time Justina pushed through the front door of the Delacroix house, a sprawling place two streets over from campus that some junior with more trust fund than sense had decided to fill with strobe lights and a fog machine for the third weekend in a row.
Bass rattled through the floorboards. Someone had spilled a drink near the entrance, and nobody had bothered to clean it, so the tile by the door was faintly sticky, and Justina stepped around it in heels she’d changed into in the back seat of her car three blocks from the house, after telling her mother, with a completely straight face, that she wasn’t going anywhere near this place tonight.
She told herself she only wanted to pass through. Show her face. Be seen for ten minutes, maybe fifteen, long enough that word would get around she’d been there, and then slip out before anyone noticed she’d left, back to Lucy’s dorm and the biology notes that were, in fact, real and waiting for her on the desk.
That was the plan. She’d said it to herself in the mirror before she left, the way she said most of her plans lately with more conviction than she actually had.
The truth, the real truth underneath the plan, had a name. Nolan.
He was a sophomore, tall in that easy, unbothered way some boys managed without trying, dark hair that always looked like he’d just run a hand through it, and a laugh that carried across rooms in a way that made people turn just to see what was funny.
He played intramural soccer badly, and everyone loved watching him do it anyway. He was the kind of boy a room rearranged itself around without quite realizing it was doing so, and Justina had spent the better part of the semester finding excuses to be in whatever room that happened to be.
She’d grown, over the last two years, into the kind of young woman people noticed when she walked into places, tall, striking, the kind of figure magazines liked to put in dresses and call effortless, though nothing about achieving it had felt effortless at all.
And yet, strangely, infuriatingly, none of that seemed to matter when it came to Nolan, or really to any boy at all. They looked. They didn’t come closer.
Justina had turned this fact over in her mind more times than she wanted to admit, and had landed, eventually, on an answer she suspected but didn’t like saying out loud, not even to Lucy: they know whose daughter I am, and it makes them nervous.
Boys who might otherwise have worked up the nerve found themselves doing quiet math about billionaires and trillionaires and decided, apparently, that the equation wasn’t worth the risk.
Tonight, though, she’d told herself, would be different. Tonight she wasn’t going to be careful. She was going to walk in, find Nolan, laugh at something he said, and for one night not be the girl whose face was on a school wall next to a headline about her parents’ latest acquisition. Just a girl at a party.
She found him near the kitchen within ten minutes, a red cup in his hand, laughing with two of his teammates, and for a moment, just a moment, it worked exactly the way she’d hoped.
He caught her eye across the room, smiled, said something to the guy next to him, and started making his way over.
It was right about then, cutting through the kitchen on her way to somewhere she could compose herself before he reached her, that Justina saw the door to the back pantry cracked open, and three people inside it who were very clearly not looking for snacks.
She recognized one of them a girl from her econ lecture, kneeling on the floor beside a low table, a small mirror balanced on someone’s textbook, white lines cut neat and precise across the glass.
Somebody else had a lighter out, and the smell coming from that end of the pantry wasn’t tobacco.
Justina stood frozen in the doorway for exactly as long as it took her stomach to drop, and then backed out fast, heart hammering, all thoughts of Nolan and red cups and being someone else for one night gone completely out of her head.
She didn’t think. She went straight out the back door into the yard, phone already in hand, thumb shaking slightly as she dialed.
Julian and Amara were already in the car by then, the hotel room and the candlelight and the whole elaborate detour of Akash and Sasha left behind them like something from another night entirely.
—-
"Do you need me to call Josh, get the address of the party?" Julian asked, one hand on the wheel, jaw tight in a way Amara rarely saw on him.
"No," Amara said, already glancing down at the small glowing dot moving across the map on her dashboard display. "I already know."
Julian glanced over. "You put a tracker on her car."
"I did." She didn’t look up. "And right now, I’m very glad I did."
"Amara,"
"Don’t," she said, not sharply, just tired, the particular tired that came from being right about a fear you’d desperately wanted to be wrong about.
"Don’t tell me it’s an invasion of her privacy. Tell me that after we know she’s safe."
Julian exhaled, reached over without taking his eyes off the road, and found her hand in the dark of the car, squeezing it once. "Alright. Baby, please, calm down. Our baby is a well-behaved child."
Amara said nothing to that, because she believed it too, had believed it the whole drive over, had believed it through every red light he’d nearly run but belief and fact had a way of parting company where teenagers and parties were concerned, and she’d learned that lesson secondhand from enough of her friends’ children to know better than to relax until she’d seen Justina’s face with her own eyes.