My phone immediately starts to buzz, and the three of us look at each other, wide-eyed. Margot picks it up and looks at it. “It’s Peter!” She hot-potatoes the phone to me. “Let’s give them some privacy,” she says, nudging Chris. Chris shrugs her off.
I ignore both of them and answer the phone. “Hello.” My voice comes out thin as a reed.
Peter starts talking fast. “Okay, I’ve seen the video, and the first thing I’m going to say to you is don’t freak out.” He’s breathing hard; it sounds like he’s running.
“Don’t freak out? How can I not? This is terrible. Do you know what they’re all saying about me in the comments? That I’m a slut. They think we’re having sex in that video, Peter.”
“Never read the comments, Covey! That’s the first rule of—”
“If you say ‘Fight Club’ to me right now, I will hang up on you.”
“Sorry. Okay, I know it sucks but—”
“It doesn’t ‘suck.’ It’s a literal nightmare. My most private moment, for everybody to see. I’m completely humiliated. The things people are saying—” My voice breaks. Kitty and Margot and Chris are all looking at me with sad eyes, which makes me feel even sadder.
“Don’t cry, Lara Jean. Please don’t cry. I promise you I’m going to fix this. I’m going to get whoever runs Anonybitch to take it down.”
“How? We don’t even know who they are! And besides, I bet our whole school’s seen it by now. Teachers, too. I know for a fact that teachers look at Anonybitch. I was in the faculty lounge once and I overheard Mr. Filipe and Ms. Ryan saying how bad it makes our school look. And what about college admissions boards and our future employers?”
Peter guffaws. “Future employers? Covey, I’ve seen much worse. Hell, I’ve seen worse pictures of me on there. Remember that picture of me with my head in a toilet bowl, and I’m naked?”
I shudder. “I never saw that picture. Besides, that’s you; that’s not me. I don’t do that kind of stuff.”
“Just trust me, okay? I promise I’ll take care of it.”
I nod, even though I know he can’t see me. Peter is powerful. If anyone could fix such a thing, it would be him.
“Listen, I’ve gotta go. Coach is gonna kick my ass if he sees me on the phone. I’ll call you tonight, okay? Don’t go to sleep.”
I don’t want to hang up. I wish we could talk longer. “Okay,” I whisper.
When I hang up, Margot, Chris, and Kitty are all three staring at me.
“Well?” Chris says.
“He says he’ll take care of it.”
Smugly Kitty says, “I told you so.”
“What does that even mean, ‘he’ll take care of it’?” Margot asks. “He hasn’t exactly proven himself to be responsible.”
“It’s not his fault,” Kitty and I say at the same time.
“Oh, I know exactly who’s responsible for this,” Chris proclaims. “My she-devil cousin.”
This knocks the wind out of me. “What? Why?”
She gives me an incredulous look. “Because you took her man!”
“Genevieve’s the one who cheated on Peter. That’s why they broke up. It wasn’t because of me!”
“Like that matters!” Chris shakes her head. “Come on, Lara Jean. Remember what she did to Jamila Singh? Telling everyone that her family had an Indonesian slave just because she had the balls to date Peter after they broke up? I’m just saying, I wouldn’t put a bitch move like this past her.”
On the ski trip, Genevieve said she knew about the kiss, which has to mean that Peter told her about it at some point in their relationship—though I doubt he told her that he was the one who kissed me and not the other way around! Even so, I find it hard to believe that she could do something so cruel to me. Jamila Singh and Genevieve never liked each other. But Gen and I were best friends once. Sure, we haven’t talked much the last few years, but Gen was always loyal to her friends.
It had to have been one of the guys hanging out in the rec room, or maybe . . . I don’t know. Maybe anyone!
“I’ve never trusted her,” Margot says. Then she says to Chris, “No offense. I know she’s your cousin.”
Chris snorts. “Why would I be offended? I can’t stand her.”
“I’m pretty sure she’s the one who scraped up the side of Grandma’s car with her bike,” Margot says. “Remember, Lara Jean?”
It was actually Chris, but I don’t say so. Chris starts biting her nails and giving me panicky eyes and I say, “I don’t think Genevieve was the one who posted the video. It could’ve been anybody who happened to see us that night.”
Margot puts her arm around me. “Don’t worry, Lara Jean. We’ll get them to take the video down. You’re underage.”
“Pull it up again,” I say. Kitty cues it up and pushes play. I feel the same sinking feeling in my stomach every time I watch it. I close my eyes so I don’t have to. Thank God the only things you can hear are the sounds of the woods and the hot tub water bubbling. “Is it . . . is it as bad as I’m remembering? I mean, does it really look like we’re having sex? Be honest.” I open my eyes.
Margot’s peering at it, head tilted. “No, it really doesn’t. It just looks like . . .”
“Like a hot makeout,” Chris supplies.
“Right,” Margot agrees. “Just a hot makeout.”
“You guys swear?”
In unison they say, “We swear.”
“Kitty?” I ask.
She bites her lip. “It looks like sex to me, but I’m the only one here besides you who’s never had sex, so what do I know?” Margot lets out a gasp. “Sorry, I read your diary.” Margot swats at her, and Kitty crawls away fast like a crab.
I take a deep breath. “Okay. I can live with that. I mean, who cares about a hot makeout, right? That’s just part of life, right? And you can barely even see my face? You’d have to really know me to know it was me. My full name isn’t on here anywhere, just Lara Jean. There must be a ton of Lara Jeans, right? Right?”
Margot gives me an impressed nod. “I’ve never seen anybody move through the five stages of grief that fast. You really do have an incredible bounce-back.”
“Thank you,” I say, feeling a little proud.
But then in the dark, when my sisters and Chris have left and Peter and I have said our good nights and he has assured me for the millionth time that everything will be fine, I look at Instagram again, at all the comments. And I am mortified.
I asked Peter who he thought could have done it; he said he didn’t know. Probably just some horny pathetic guy, he said. I don’t ask the thing I’m still thinking about, the thing that’s still stuck in my craw. Was it Genevieve? Could she really hate me so much that she’d want to hurt me that badly?
I remember the day we exchanged friendship bracelets. “This proves that we’re best friends,” she said to me. “We’re closer with each other than with anyone else.”
“What about Allie?” I asked. We’d always been a trio, though Genevieve had taken to spending more time at my house, mainly because Allie’s mom was strict about boys coming over and being on the Internet.
“Allie’s okay but I like you better,” she’d said, and I had felt guilty but honored. Genevieve liked me best. We were close, closer than with anyone else. The bracelets were proof. How cheaply I was bought then, with just a bracelet made out of string.