Chapter 2 2
Lila
By morning, I had one hundred and forty-three notifications and zero desire to look at any of them.
I looked at all of them anyway.
"Okay, stop," Ivy said, snatching my phone off the kitchen counter mid-scroll. She was still in last night's makeup, half of it smeared under one eye, clutching a mug of coffee like it owed her money. "You're not allowed to read the comments. That's rule one of being internet famous for the wrong reasons."
"I'm not internet famous."
"You have a hashtag, Lila."
"I have a—" I grabbed the phone back. "What hashtag?"
"Do not look at the hashtag."
I looked at the hashtag.
'#LilaVsTyler' had four thousand posts under it by nine a.m., mostly the video, some of it screenshots of Selena's since-deleted Instagram story that just said 'some people can't handle a joke lol', and one blurry photo — taken from someone's car, apparently, at a red light — of me getting into Kael Ryder's SUV outside the party.
The caption on that one said: "okay but who's the guy???"
It had eleven thousand likes.
"This is insane," I said.
"This is Tuesday," Ivy said, not looking up from her own phone. "Wait till Wednesday when someone photoshops something. Oh — oh no."
"What."
She turned her screen around. It was Tyler's Instagram. He'd posted a shirtless gym mirror selfie with the caption 'focused on myself rn 💯' and the comments were an actual warzone, half the school defending him, the other half calling him every name available in the English language, and Selena's account tagged in three separate replies.
"He's playing victim," I said.
"He's playing victim BADLY. This is almost impressive."
My phone buzzed again. Unknown number.
"hey it's tyler, can we talk? this whole thing is getting out of hand and I don't think either of us wants it to keep going like this."
I stared at it for a long moment.
"Who is it," Ivy said, already leaning over my shoulder.
"Tyler."
"Do not answer that."
"I wasn't going to."
"You were thinking about it, I can see your face doing the thing."
"I don't have a THING."
"You have several things, and one of them is currently happening right now." She plucked the phone from my hand again, calmly deleted the text without asking, and handed it back. "There. Problem solved. Drink your coffee, we have the Kessler seminar in forty minutes and you already missed it twice."
I made it exactly four hours into the day before Kael Ryder cornered me outside my Media Ethics lecture.
I mean that literally. I walked out the door with my bag half-zipped and my brain three hours deep into caffeine crash, and there he was, leaning against the wall across the hallway like he'd been standing there since the semester started, arms crossed, watching the door instead of his phone the way everyone else in this hallway was.
"Hart."
"I don't have time for whatever this is."
"You have time." He fell into step beside me anyway, which was infuriating, because his legs were roughly twice as long as mine and I had to actually work to keep pace while pretending I wasn't. "Two minutes."
"I've had a really long twelve hours, Kael."
"I know. I'm in most of the photos."
I stopped walking. He stopped too, close enough that I had to tip my head back to actually look at him, which put me at an immediate disadvantage in any argument, a fact I was fairly sure he knew and used constantly.
"What do you want," I said.
"Same thing I offered last night in the car."
"I said no last night in the car."
"You said no while you were also crying. I don't count that as a real answer." He said it flatly, no cruelty in it, just fact, and somehow that was worse than if he'd been mean about it. "I'm saying it again while you're sober and not crying. Fake date me."
"That's insane."
"It's efficient."
"Those aren't the same thing."
"They can be." He glanced past me, down the hallway, at the two girls very obviously pretending not to watch us from by the vending machine. "My family's been trying to set me up with alliance matches for two years. I need it to stop. You need money and you need Tyler to feel like garbage every time he opens Instagram. I can arrange both."
"I don't need—"
"Your tuition installment's due in three weeks." He said it like he was reading off a piece of paper, and my stomach dropped, because how did he know that, why would he know that. "I'm not saying that to scare you. I'm saying it because I already know you're going to say no right now out of pride, and then you're going to go home and do math in your head for an hour and call me back."
I hated that he wasn't wrong. I hated it so much I could have thrown another drink.
"You don't know anything about me."
"I know you work the closing shift at the campus bookstore Tuesdays and Thursdays. I know you haven't posted anything since your mom's account went quiet two years ago. I know you threw a drink in a guy's face last night instead of crying in front of everyone, which took actual nerve." He shrugged, like none of that was a big deal, like he hadn't just recited details about my life I didn't remember telling anyone. "I pay attention. It's a character flaw."
"That's not a character flaw, that's stalking."
"It's public information and campus is small." A ghost of something almost like a smile. "Take the deal, Hart. Three months, we make it look real, my family backs off, your tuition's covered, Tyler watches you get exactly what he thinks he took from you. No strings. We end it whenever we both want out."
"And if I say no?"
"Then I keep getting photographed with you anyway, because apparently that's already happening whether we agree to it or not." He nodded down the hallway at the girls by the vending machine, one of whom immediately looked at her phone like it had just become the most interesting object in the building. "Might as well get paid for it."
I didn't say anything for a second. My brain was doing the math he'd already predicted it would do, tuition against pride, pride against the very real number sitting in my bank account that I hadn't let myself look at in a week.
"I need to think about it."
"Take the weekend." He straightened off the wall, already turning to go, infuriatingly unbothered, like he hadn't just upended my entire semester in a hallway between classes. "You know where to find me."
"I don't, actually. I don't know where you live."
"You will." He said it over his shou
lder, already walking away. "Everyone finds their way to my house eventually, Hart. It's kind of the whole problem."
