Chapter 17: Pet

I sat on the end of the mattress with the phone in my hand and the collar still on.

Beckett woke up and saw my face.

He took the phone from me and looked.

I watched him go white, then something worse than white.

"I'll find who posted it," he said.

"I know who took it."

"So do I." He set the phone face down. "I heard the heels on the call that night. I heard the click. I should have said it louder in that office."

"I told myself it was a lock."

He reached for his jeans.

"Where are you going?"

"To the Academy. To the dean's house, if I have to."

"Rule five," I said.

He stopped with one leg in his jeans.

"You never decide what I can handle," I said. "Sit down. It's my picture. I'll handle it."

He sat down.

It took him a while, but he sat.

All weekend the photo went around.

Three hundred people. Then the junior chat. Then somebody's cousin at Northwestern.

Daisy spent Sunday reporting it to every platform on earth and swearing in two languages, one of which was just Indiana.

On Monday morning, I walked into the fourth-floor studio for crit.

Forty people stopped talking.

Somebody laughed and turned it into a cough.

Somebody else barked, quiet.

Blaire sat in the front row in a camel coat, her phone face up on her knee.

She didn't look at me.

She didn't have to.

The substitute was setting up at the desk.

The dean stood beside him with his bow tie and his hands behind his back.

My phone buzzed.

Beckett.

I'm resigning today. In public. Unless you tell me not to. Rule two: I'm not deciding this without you.

I typed back.

After me.

I put my drawing on the crit wall like everyone else.

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