Chapter 5: Skylar

Skylar Thompson had a rule she’d made for herself freshman year and kept without exception: she did not insert herself into other people’s situations unless she was prepared to see it through to the end. Half measures made things worse. If you were going to step into someone’s life you stepped in fully or you stayed out.

She’d stayed out three weeks ago when she should have stepped in.

She wasn’t going to make that mistake twice.

She’d noticed Zoey Daniels the week she came back from the hospital. Not because Zoey was causing scenes or drawing attention in any dramatic way — it was subtler than that, and subtle things were what Skylar was best at reading. It was the eyes. The way they moved. Zoey had always been pretty in a quiet, unmanufactured way — the kind of girl who didn’t need to work at it — but there had always been a containment to her, a sense of someone who kept herself to herself and meant it. That containment was gone. Something in the accident had switched it off and now Zoey was putting out a signal she clearly didn’t know she was transmitting.

Skylar had watched the boys pick it up one by one. She’d seen the way Steven Brooks started positioning himself. She’d clocked the looks passing between him and Cole Pratt in the cafeteria on more than one occasion. She’d known exactly what it was adding up to and she’d told herself it wasn’t her place and Zoey had friends and people who cared about her and it wasn’t Skylar’s job to manage every situation she could see coming.

Then Cole Pratt’s house happened.

Then it became her business retroactively, and she had to sit with that for a week before she trusted herself to do something useful about it rather than something driven purely by guilt.

She found Zoey at her locker on a Thursday morning, eight days after Zoey had come back following the assault. The hallway was busy and loud and two girls talking at a locker looked like nothing in particular, which was exactly what Skylar wanted.

“Walk with me,” she said.

Zoey looked at her the way you looked at someone from a different orbit who had materialized in your space without explanation. Cautious. Trying to read what this was and what it was going to cost her.