Chapter 8: Delete

By Saturday morning the whole school believed Rhett Kolstad had been sent a picture.

I found out from Dottie, who called me at eight with a voice.

"Have you seen the account?"

"I don't look at Kenzie's account."

"Look at Kenzie's account."

I opened it on my phone, still half asleep in a T-shirt and one sock.

There was a photo of the hockey team at practice, and a caption in pink letters.

"Who sent our captain a mystery pic?? Asking for a friend."

Under it were four hundred comments.

Some were jokes.

Some were guesses, and some were names, and the name Anja Lindahl showed up a dozen times, every one of them quickly buried.

Nobody believed it was me.

Nobody could picture me doing it.

For the first time in my life I was grateful to be the kind of girl who wore a cardigan.

"He's a hero," Dottie said. "He took the bullet."

"He didn't take a bullet, he told a lie."

"A beautiful lie. A lie for the ages."

"Dottie."

"I'm just saying he had no reason to do it."

I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at my plain blue wall.

"He doesn't even know it's me," I said.

"That's what makes it romantic."

"It's not romantic. It's a catastrophe. He's going to have the whole school asking about a girl who doesn't exist."

"Then the girl who doesn't exist should say thank you."

She hung up on me, as she did when she'd made her point.

I stared at the phone.

It was a bad idea.

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