Chapter 2

My period came early.

I climbed out of bed with a hand pressed to my stomach and started digging through everything I owned, but I couldn't find a single pad.

Back when I used to buy pads, I bought them by the thousand-dollar haul.

And I just left them out in the shared area of the dorm for everyone to use.

Remembering that, I steeled myself, walked over to Jacob, and asked, "Do you have a pad? Can I borrow one?"

I thought that, both of us being girls, and after the way I'd treated them before, at the very least she could spare me one pad.

But I didn't expect Jacob to just glance up at me, then drop her eyes back to her show and toss out two flat words. "I don't."

My heart sank straight to the bottom. None of it felt real.

Just last semester, when she'd found out my period had come, she'd secretly boiled hot tea with honey for me on that little pot in the dorm.

But the dragging ache low in my belly told me all of this was really happening.

The bankruptcy was fake. Her true face was real.

I didn't dare imagine how I'd be falling apart right now if I really had gone broke.

I didn't say anything else. I shuffled, step by step, over to Selina's spot.

"Do you have a pad I can borrow?"

She chewed her lower lip and hesitated for a long time before finally opening her cabinet.

Her hand hovered inside it for a moment before she pulled out a shady, no-brand pad and handed it to me.

But I saw it clearly. Inside her cabinet were the liquid-tech pads I'd bought last year and left out in the dorm's shared area.

I took that dust-covered no-name pad, closed my fist around it, and said nothing more.

I went to the bathroom, folded some tissue as a stopgap, washed the blood out of my sheets, and then headed to the convenience store to buy new pads.

The weather in Seattle switches between sun and rain by the hour.

I'd just finished paying and was about to leave the convenience store when the rain came down hard.

If this had been before, I wouldn't have needed to say a word.

Whenever Daniela noticed I hadn't come back to the dorm, she'd get anxious and message to ask where I was, even though the library was a half-hour walk from the dorm.

She'd come running to bring me an umbrella without a single complaint, tilting it toward me with that look of concern on her face.

I used to think that was friendship, so I learned from them and treated them just as sincerely. Bringing umbrellas, grabbing meals for them, buying them food and whatever else they needed.

Now I understood it was only because I'd had money back then.

Since I was "broke" now, I wasn't going to embarrass myself by asking whether one of them could bring me an umbrella.

I sighed, pulled out my phone, and sent a message to the dorm group chat. "It's pouring. Could you please bring in my sheets and clothes for me? Thanks."

Five minutes after I sent it, no one had replied.

I've never had what you'd call a normal social life, but a request like that should be about the most ordinary thing in a girls' dorm.

Yet fifteen minutes later, the group chat still sat exactly where it had, on the message I'd sent.

I lowered my eyes, waited for the rain to ease a little, then ran back through the drizzle.

Seeing me come in soaked and bedraggled, Jacob only glanced up before going back to her phone.

And Selina kept drilling English vocabulary, not paying me the slightest attention.

I walked out to the dorm balcony. Their clothes had all been taken in.

My clothes and sheets were still hanging out there, thrashing in the wind and rain.

I stood there staring at the fabric, soaked through and still dripping, and couldn't get out a single word.

Worse still, they'd crammed all of my things together into one tight bunch, clearly just so their own clothes could hang with more room to dry.

Before I could brace for it, my tears fell.

Hurt and bitterness tangled together in my chest.

In their eyes, the broke version of me wasn't even worthy of being treated like an ordinary classmate.

I took out my phone, photographed it, and added it to the slide deck.

By the time I'd cleaned everything up, Jacob had already gone out to hang with friends.

And Selina came up close to me, and one sentence left me frozen where I stood.