Chapter 356: A mother’s fear
"Can we be friends?" Nolan asked, and there was something in the way he said it, easy and a little crooked, eighteen years old and fully aware of exactly how much charm he had at his disposal, that made Justina feel, for one dizzy second, like the gymnasium floor had tilted slightly under her feet.
"Yeah," she said, trying to sound far more casual than she felt. "I’d like that."
They talked for the better part of an hour after that, tucked into a corner near the punch table while Kelvin’s set wound down behind them, and then they danced nothing dramatic, nothing that would have made the whispers start up again, just close enough that Justina could feel the warmth of him and count, without meaning to, every time his hand found the small of her back.
Somebody took a picture of the two of them laughing near the stage lights, and then another, and by the time the night ended, Justina had a small collection of them saved to her phone, tucked carefully into a folder she’d created and named something forgettable enough that nobody would think to open it.
Kelvin dropped Justina home a little after midnight, walked her to the door himself the way Julian had clearly expected him to, and gave her shoulder a friendly squeeze goodbye that felt, by that point in the night, almost anticlimactic compared to everything that had happened after his set ended.
Upstairs, Justina locked her door, kicked off her heels, and sat cross-legged on her bed still in the purple dress, scrolling back through the pictures from the night, Nolan spinning her under the lights.
JJ’s flat, unimpressed hello still made her laugh when she thought about it, and, tucked at the very end of the folder, three photos of her and Nolan, laughing, close, easy in a way that felt entirely different from the anxious performance she’d walked in wearing.
She hid those three carefully, moved them somewhere no one else would think to look, before she finally lay back against her pillows, phone resting on her chest, still smiling at the ceiling long after the house had gone quiet around her.
For the first time in weeks, she fell asleep thinking about someone other than what everyone at school thought of her just Nolan, and the way he’d said I’d like that, and the small, private hope, still new enough to feel fragile, that maybe this was only the beginning of something.
Justina found Lucy before the first period and pressed her phone into her hands without much explanation. "Can you keep these for me? Just hide them somewhere. Don’t ask."
Lucy scrolled through the three photos once, raised an eyebrow, and said nothing more incriminating than "Oh, okay," before pocketing the phone to transfer them onto her own.
She didn’t need it explained. She’d met Amara enough times to understand exactly why Justina didn’t want anything sitting in her camera roll that her mother might stumble across during one of her occasional phone checks.
Amara wasn’t a snoop, not exactly, but she wasn’t above glancing at a screen left face-up on the kitchen counter either, and Justina had learned the difference between privacy and carelessness the hard way.
Nolan found her right after, catching her wrist gently before she reached her lecture hall.
"There’s a party this afternoon, off campus. Small thing, my friends’ place. Come with me."
"I have class," Justina said, glancing at the door she was three steps from walking through.
"You’re the smartest person I know," Nolan said, grinning, already pulling her the other direction. "One class won’t hurt you. A few hours, that’s it. I want you there."
She should have said no. She knew she should have said no, could feel the shape of the word sitting right there behind her teeth, but there was something about the way he said I want you there casual, easy, as it cost him nothing to admit that made the class, the syllabus, the whole careful plan of her day feel suddenly much less important than it had five minutes earlier.
She wanted, badly, to be the kind of girl who could say yes to things like this. So she did.
She left her own car in the lot and climbed onto the back of his motorcycle instead, arms wrapped around his waist, the wind loud enough that neither of them tried to talk the whole ride over, and something about the recklessness of it no helmet check from her mother.
This one, at least, started better. It was smaller, quieter, nothing like the sprawling chaos of the Delacroix house just Nolan’s close friends, a few beers, music low enough to actually talk over.
Justina sat pressed against his side on a worn couch, and while the drinking happened openly around her, nobody produced anything harder than that in front of her, not this time.
Someone handed her a cup of juice at one point, and she took it, and some small, careful part of her brain flagged the moment as not entirely right even as she told herself she’d only stay a few more minutes.
Just long enough. Just long enough for him to really like her.
They weren’t given the chance to find out. The police broke the party up less than an hour later someone’s neighbor, someone’s noise complaint, it hardly mattered in the moment, and this time there was no clean exit for Justina, no calm walk to her car while an officer praised her good judgment.
This time she was swept up with everyone else, herded into the back of a cruiser alongside Nolan and half a dozen others, and driven to the station while her phone buzzed uselessly in her bag with a missed call from her mother she hadn’t been given the chance to answer.
When Amara got the call, something in her chest went cold in a way it hadn’t the first time. That first night, at least, there had been the shape of a good story waiting on the other end of the drive. Justina, the hero, Justina who’d done everything right.
This time there was nothing but a flat voice on the phone telling her to come to the station, and Amara had driven the whole way there, gripping the wheel so tightly her knuckles ached, unable to make sense of how the same girl who’d stood so composed in front of that officer two weeks earlier had ended up back here already.