Chapter 53: The Withdrawal Begins

Georgia

He doesn’t say a single word to me, and it’s louder than every conversation we’ve ever had.

I see him first at breakfast, across the dining hall, and for half a second I let myself think today will be normal. Then his eyes find mine, hold for exactly one beat, and slide away like I’m a stranger he’s trying not to be rude to. He picks up his tray and sits at the far end of the table with Liam, back to me, shoulders set in a way that isn’t cruel, just closed. Like a door quietly locked from the inside.

*It’s nothing,* I tell myself. People have off mornings. I have off mornings.

By second period, it isn’t nothing anymore.

He’s in the hallway outside our lit class when I round the corner. I watch him see me coming, watch the exact moment recognition crosses his face, and then watch him turn and walk the other way like he suddenly remembered somewhere else he needs to be. No hello. No nod. Nothing. Just the back of his jacket disappearing around the corner. Something pulls tight in my throat, quick and strange, gone before I can name it. I stand there with my books against my chest, feeling like an idiot for the crime of existing in a hallway.

I don’t chase him. I have some pride left, even after the gala. Even after the alcove, his eyes gone gold in the dark, his mouth opening and closing on nothing while I stood there demanding an answer. Even after I said the word out loud, "beneath," and watched it land on him like a slap he didn’t try to dodge.

*This is what I wanted,* I remind myself. Distance. Space from a boy who called me beneath him in a hallway he thought I couldn’t hear. I should feel relieved. I built an entire argument in my head last night about how this is for the best, how I don’t need someone who can’t give me an honest answer when I ask him to.

It doesn’t feel like relief. It feels like something got scooped out of my chest with a spoon.

Our project meeting is at four. I get to the library early, because I’m stubborn, and because some traitor part of me is hoping he’ll be early too, that whatever happened this morning will dissolve the second we’re sitting across from each other with a shared book and a deadline neither of us can avoid.

He doesn’t show.

By ten past four, I’ve reread the same paragraph of our assigned text four times without absorbing a single word. When Liam drops into the seat instead, out of breath like he ran the whole way, his smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

"He’s, uh. Tied up," Liam says, his voice too bright, too rehearsed. "Hockey thing. Coach called an extra session. He asked me to bring you his notes."

He slides a folder across the table. I look at it instead of at him, because I don’t trust my face right now. ℯℯ𝘭.

"An extra session," I repeat, flat, testing the words.

"Coach is intense." His smile flickers, just barely, like a light bulb about to die. "You know how it is."

I don’t know how it is, actually. There’s a flutter behind my ribs when I look down at his handwriting, small and unwelcome, like my body noticed something before I did. I don’t push. I open the folder, flip through pages of Puck’s handwriting, slanted and hurried like he wrote it in five minutes flat just so he’d have something to send in his place, and I nod like this all makes perfect sense.

"Tell him thanks," I say, quiet, careful.

"Will do," Liam says. He hesitates like he wants to say something else, opens his mouth, then apparently thinks better of it. "I should get back."

He leaves faster than he arrived. I sit alone at the table for a long time after that, the folder open in front of me, not reading it, just staring at the door like it might swing open and prove me wrong about all of it.

It doesn’t.

The rest of the day goes the same way. I see him twice more, once across the quad, once in the dining hall at dinner, and both times it’s the same choreography. He clocks me. He looks away. He finds somewhere else to be that doesn’t involve being anywhere near me. It’s not rude, exactly. It’s not cold in the way I expected cold to feel, no glares, no pointed silence aimed like a weapon. It’s just absence. Like I’ve become something he’s carefully editing out of his day, one interaction at a time.

Walking back to my dorm as the sky goes gray and then dark, I tell myself this is exactly what I wanted. I stood in that ballroom and threw his own words back at him. I told him I couldn’t believe him. If he’s decided to take me at my word and disappear, that’s fair. That’s what I asked for, even if I didn’t mean it the way it’s turning out.

I keep telling myself that all through dinner, all through brushing my teeth and changing into pajamas and climbing into bed while Mandi chatters about something happening in the common room that I only half hear. Right up until the lights are off and the room is quiet and there’s nothing left to distract me from the fact that I miss him. Actively. Physically. Like a habit I didn’t know I’d built until it was suddenly gone.

I’m staring at the ceiling, at that same water stain shaped like a comma, when it happens.

It starts as pressure, low and dull, right behind my sternum, and for a second I think I’m imagining it, some kind of anxious body response to a day that wore me down more than I let myself admit. But it doesn’t fade. It sharpens. It blooms outward from that one point in my chest until it feels like something is pressing against my ribs from the inside, insistent, aching, with absolutely no reason I can point to.

I sit up fast, one hand flying to my chest, fingers spreading flat against my sternum like I can hold whatever this is in place.

It hurts to breathe.

Not sharp, not like a heart attack, not like anything I’ve ever felt before. Just a deep, hollow ache that makes every inhale feel like it’s dragging against something raw. I press harder, like pressure will help, like I can push the feeling back down to wherever it came from.

"You okay?" Mandi asks, her voice sleepy, drifting from the other bed.

"Fine," I say, my voice coming out thinner than I mean it to. "I’m fine."

I’m not fine. I have no idea what this is. I only know it started sometime after dark, sometime after a full day of watching a boy who won’t look at me anymore, and some small, illogical part of me that I don’t want to listen to is already wondering if the two things are connected.

*That’s insane. That’s not how pain works. That’s not how anything works.*

I lie back down, hand still pressed to my chest, and stare at the ceiling until the ache dulls into something I can almost ignore.

Almost.