You’re the Reason, стр. 44
Someone banged on my door, pulling me from my thoughts.
I removed the ice bag and stood from my spot on my bed, approaching the door. “Who is it?”
“Valerie.”
I pulled it open, and Valerie stood there with tears staining her cheeks. “Oh my God. What’s wrong?”
She walked into my room and dropped down on Chantel’s bare bed, holding her phone out to me. “I’m getting kicked out of school.”
“What?” I closed the door and moved to her, taking her phone and pressing the video on the screen.
“Stand still, pledges!” Valerie yelled at a row of pledges whose faces had been blurred.
The camera zoomed in on the pledges’ nearly naked bodies which had been circled in black marker in various places.
“Let’s go sisters!” Valerie yelled as she paced back and forth in front of the pledges, tapping the areas on their bodies with a yardstick that had yet to be circled. “You missed lots of fat here!”
I switched off the video, unable to stomach this cold version of Valerie on the screen. “That didn’t even sound like you.”
“Do you hate me?” she asked.
“Why’d you do it?”
“That was last semester’s pledge class. Chantel made me do it.”
“No one makes you do something like that. Especially, if you don’t want to do it.”
We both fell silent. I wondered why she was showing the video to me. Had other people seen it? Is that why she was being kicked out of school?
“During hell week,” Valerie sniffled. “Pledges are barely allowed to sleep.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“And they have to do all sorts of crazy things while they’re sleep deprived.”
“Like allow sisters to circle their body fat?”
“That’s not even the worst of it.” She paused as if she didn’t wholeheartedly want to tell me what she was about to tell me. “They have to tell their deepest, darkest secret.”
“Did you have to do that as a pledge?”
She paused for a moment, then nodded.
“And Chantel records the secrets, amongst other incriminating things, as you’ve seen.”
“Why?”
“So, if any of us step out of line or do anything she thinks looks bad for the Alpha Phis, she’ll expose us.”
I suddenly understood why everyone always treaded so lightly around Chantel. One wrong move and their unsavory behavior or deepest secret would go viral. The juicier the secret, the greater fear instilled in her “sisters.”
I waved her phone out. “Who’s seen this?”
“I’m sure everyone by now, including the dean.”
“So, why’d she leak it?” I asked.
Valerie cocked her head, as if I should already understand.
My eyes widened. “Because of me?”
“What was it she said?” Valerie asked. “Payback’s a bitch?”
“That was directed at me.”
“By releasing the video, she hurt both of us. She knows we’re close. If I get kicked out, you lose a friend.”
“And if you don’t get kicked out?”
“Well, then, she’s making sure I won’t tell you things.”
“What kind of things?”
She shook her head, scared of whatever it was she wasn’t saying.
I knew better than to push her. When I’d pushed her, she’d disappeared.
I pressed my palms to my eyes as guilt flooded my body. “So, this was a warning?”
She nodded. “To both of us.”
“I’m so sorry.”
She shook her head, not looking for an apology or my sympathy. “It could’ve been my secret,” she said. “The hazing’s nothing compared to my secret.” Her eyes moved away from mine. “And she knows it.”
“What’s that mean?”
She looked back to me, her eyes lifeless and dark. “Another wrong move and it’s out there.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“I saw Valerie cleaning up leaves on the quad earlier,” Chase said.
I peeked up at him seated across from me in the coffee shop. “At least she’s still here.”
Valerie had been called to the dean’s office to discuss the video that surfaced. I don’t know what she said to the dean, but he decided not to kick her out of school. However, she was placed on probation and sentenced to one-hundred hours of on-campus community service. So, her free time no longer belonged to her. I’d offered to help her, seeing as though I was partly to blame for Chantel’s payback, but she wouldn’t allow it.
But I still couldn’t shake the guilt I felt.
“When do you wanna watch the movie?” I asked Chase.
“You tell me. Because you alone in a dark room is all the motivation I need.”
“We actually have to get our paper written.”
He rolled his eyes. “So demanding.”
I bunched up a napkin and tossed it at his face.
He laughed, the raspy sound burrowing into every crevice around my heart as he grabbed it from the table where it bounced.
Oh, man. I was more far gone than I ever imagined.
“So, she makes the soccer team and all of a sudden she thinks she can start ordering me around?” He tossed it back at me, but I caught it in the air.
“Ordering you around?” I laughed. “Oh, the irony,”
“Well, isn’t this nice.”
Our eyes jumped to Chantel, standing beside our table with her hands dug into her hips.
Her eyes moved to mine. “Just saw Valerie cleaning up leaves. I wonder what made her go all crunchy earthy these days?”
I shoved back my chair, prepared to get in her face, but Chase grabbed my arm, stopping me from standing.
Chantel’s eyes dropped to his hand on me. “Watch him. One minute he doesn’t have time for a relationship, the next he does. Seems like he doesn’t know what he wants.”
I tried reining in the anger I felt toward her. How could she hurt Valerie the way she had? Especially since it was me she was really angry at. “How could you do