Chapter 8: Sobering Realizations
The Uber’s tires crunched over discarded red solo cups as it halted two houses down. The bass was a physical presence, a subterranean throb you felt in your molars. Scarlett paid the driver, her movements swift and economical, but her hand found mine again the second she was out of the car. The grip was vise-tight.
“Remember our deal,” I said, my voice barely audible over the music bleeding from the cracked-open windows of a sprawling, dilapidated Victorian. Shadows moved chaotically behind the curtains.
“I remember.” She said it like a mantra, and walked us toward the noise.
We didn’t have to go inside. She was on the porch steps, a crumpled sculpture of sequins and despair. Katy. She was hunched over, her head in her hands, that famous waterfall of wavy hair a tangled curtain obscuring her face. The flickering string lights above painted her in strobes of sickly yellow and blue.
A guy in a frayed Harvard sweater was hovering. “Hey, you gonna be okay? You want some water?” His voice was weary, the goodwill of the night exhausted.
Katy didn’t look up. She just shook her head, a slow, pendulum motion.
Scarlett dropped my hand. For one heart-stopping second, I thought it was a betrayal, but she was just moving faster, taking the warped wooden steps two at a time. She crouched in front of Katy, her voice cutting through the bass. “Katy. Look at me.”
Katy’s head lifted. The sight was a physical blow. Her mascara wasn’t smudged; it was liquefied, carving black tributaries down cheeks flushed an unnatural, feverish red. Her eyes were glassy, the pupils dilated voids. They swam, trying to anchor on Scarlett’s face.
“Scar,” she slurred, the name a wet, broken thing. A smile, grotesque in its confusion, twitched on her lips. “You came. I knew… I knew you’d come.” She tried to push herself up, her limbs uncoordinated, spaghetti-loose.
Scarlett stood, bracing herself, and hooked an arm under Katy’s shoulder. “Up. We’re going home.” She pulled, and Katy stumbled into her, a dead weight reeking of vodka and salt.
It was then that Katy’s swimming gaze, over Scarlett’s shoulder, landed on me. On my hand, which Scarlett, true to her word, immediately reached back and seized, pulling me a step closer into the circle of light.
Katy’s face underwent a slow, tectonic collapse. The drunken, relieved smile melted into a rictus of incomprehension. Her eyes darted from our joined hands, up to Scarlett’s resolute face, back to me. The processing was visible, agonizingly slow, a supercomputer drowning in syrup.
“Wh…” she started. Then her face paled beneath the rouge. Her free hand flew to her mouth.
“Katy—” Scarlett began, her tone shifting to one of pure practicality.
It was too late. Katy crumpled forward, wrenching herself from Scarlett’s grip, and vomited violently into the thorny hydrangea bush lining the porch. It was a gut-deep, agonizing sound. The sharp, sour-sweet stench of vodka-lime and stomach acid bloomed in the cold air, a palpable fog of misery.
Scarlett held her hair back with one hand, her face a mask of tight compassion. Her other hand never let go of mine. The contrast was surreal: anchored to me, anchoring Katy through her retches.
The guy in the Harvard sweater muttered, “Oh, man,” and retreated inside.
When the heaving subsided into ragged sobs, Scarlett produced a pack of tissues from her coat pocket and wiped Katy’s mouth with a clinical tenderness. “Done?”
Katy nodded, shivering violently. She allowed herself to be pulled upright again, but her eyes, now slightly clearer with the violent purge, were locked on the point where Scarlett’s skin met mine.
“You…” Katy breathed, the word a ghost of its usual confidence. “You’re holding her hand.”
“I am,” Scarlett said, her voice devoid of all affect. It was a statement of fact, solid as stone.
“Why?” The question wasn’t jealous yet. It was profoundly, childishly confused. Like asking why the sky had turned green.
“Because I want to.” Scarlett adjusted her grip on Katy, starting to guide her down the steps. “Vy’s with me. We’re taking you home.”
“No.” Katy planted her feet, a sudden, petulant strength in her resistance. “No. Explain. You’re holding her hand. While I’m… while I’m like this.” She gestured weakly at herself, at the vomit-splattered bush.
The music swelled behind us, a raucous chorus that felt like mockery.
“There’s nothing to explain tonight, Katy,” I said. My voice sounded calmer than I felt. The scent was choking me. “You’re hurt. You’re drunk. Let’s get you safe.”
“You don’t get to decide what’s for tonight!” Katy shrieked, the sound tearing through her throat. She focused on me, and the confusion in her eyes crystallized into a sharp, poisonous clarity. “This is because of the rooftop. Isn’t it? This is your… your pathetic little revenge. Wait for your moment and swoop in.” She turned her scorching gaze back to Scarlett. “And you. You’re just… rebounding. Using this child to punish me for Rain. I see it.”
Scarlett went very still. The streetlight caught the hard line of her jaw. “You don’t see anything, Katy. You’re intoxicated and you’re hemorrhaging drama. You called me because you needed help. I’m helping. Vy is helping. That is the entire transaction right now.”
“Transaction.” Katy laughed, a hollow, ugly sound. “God, you’re such a fucking robot. Even now. I’m bleeding here, Scar!” Tears started anew, mixing with the ruined mascara. “And you brought a specimen to observe the damage. Is she taking notes? For her stats minor?”
The cruelty was so precise it stole my breath. It was Katy at her most potent—aiming straight for the insecurities she’d once soothed.
Scarlett’s grip on my hand became almost painful. “Stop it.”
“Why? Is it true?” Katy swayed, leaning into Scarlett’s space. “Did you run your little scans on her too? Does her prefrontal cortex get all pretty and active for you?” She was echoing Mary’s lab revelation, but warping it, making it sound cheap and grotesque.
“Katy, I swear to god—”
“What? You’ll what?” Katy’s voice dropped to a venomous whisper. “You’ll choose her? Right now? Go ahead. Walk away. Take your shiny new variable and run your experiments. Leave me here. See how that data feels in the morning.”
It was a test. A brutal, high-stakes test flung onto the sticky porch between us. The unspoken history hung thick in the sour air: all the times Scarlett had chosen her, cleaned up the messes, been the reliable one. Katy was betting everything on that pattern holding.
Scarlett was vibrating with tension. I could feel it thrumming through her hand into mine. I saw the conflict in the tight furl of her brow, the rapid pulse in her throat. The architect of clean systems, confronted with the original chaos.
I let go of her hand.
The effect was instantaneous. Scarlett’s eyes snapped to me, a flicker of panic in them. Katy’s swollen lips curled in a grimace of triumph.
I didn’t step back. I stepped forward, into Katy’s space. Close enough to smell the vomit and the expensive perfume beneath it. “He’s not coming back, Katy,” I said, my voice low and steady. “Rain made his choice. And this…” I gestured between Scarlett and myself. “This isn’t about him. It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now. You don’t get to vomit on my life because yours tastes like ash tonight.”
Katy stared at me, stunned into silence. The script had been ripped from her hands.
I turned to Scarlett. Her face was unreadable. “You made a promise to get her home safe. So do that.” I swallowed, my next words tasting like ground glass. “I’ll get my own Uber. The experiment for tonight is over.”
“Vy,” Scarlett said, just my name, but it was filled with a thousand ruined charts.
“No. You have a prior commitment. I understand the data.” I gave her the ghost of a smile, one that hurt my face. “Prove her wrong. Be the hero. It’s what you do.”
I turned and walked down the steps, my back straight, each step measured on the cracked sidewalk. The cold air was a slap. I didn’t look back until I reached the corner, my phone already glowing in my trembling hand.
They were still on the porch. Scarlett had both arms around a now-weeping Katy, who was slumped against her, all fight gone, just a heap of shattered glamour. Scarlett was looking over Katy’s shoulder, straight at me. The distance was too far to see her expression, but the outline of her, holding up the broken pieces of her old world, was answer enough.
My Uber was seven minutes away. I stood in the dark, the phantom scent of hydrangeas and vomit clinging to me, listening to the distant party laugh and scream. I had walked into the fault line, and the ground had swallowed me whole. The momentum from the lab, from the kiss under the lamplight, was gone. All that was left was the cold calculus of what came next, a spreadsheet with a question mark bleeding into empty cells.
All that was left was the cold calculus of what came next, a spreadsheet with a question mark bleeding into empty cells. I stared at my phone’s ride-share map, the little car icon frozen three minutes away, while the wind scoured the taste of that porch from my lips. My thumb hovered over the cancel button. A single tap would strand me here, a fitting punishment for my own failed experiment.
From the porch, a raw, jagged sob tore through the bass-line. It wasn’t performative. It was the sound of something breaking internally.
I turned.
Scarlett was speaking low and rapidly into Katy’s hair, one hand steadying her, the other patting her coat pockets for a phone or keys. Her movements were all efficiency, but her shoulders were rigid with a stress her spreadsheets never modeled. Katy was limp against her, the elegant tallness of her collapsed into a shuddering question mark of her own.
Katy’s eyes opened. They found me across the twenty feet of cracked pavement and frozen grass.
They held. Even through the vodka haze and the ruined mascara, the connection was a live wire. Everything had been said on the rooftop, in the lab, in the venom she’d just spat, but this was different. This was atomized. The high tension wasn’t about rivalry anymore; it was suspended in the stark reality of her unraveling, my witness of it, and the awful, silent acknowledgement passing between us that this was real.
I had never seen Katy Guo as anything less than a solar event—confident, warm, throwing light on everyone in her orbit. To see her as a collapsing star, held upright only by Scarlett’s fierce, tired grip, sent a crack through my resentment. A part of me, the part that had craved her approval since orientation, twisted with a pity so intense it felt like nausea.
Scarlett finally extracted Katy’s keys. She tried to guide her toward the street, but Katy resisted, her gaze still glued to me.
“Vy,” Katy called out. Her voice was shredded, too loud and too soft all at once.
Scarlett’s head whipped toward me, a warning in her eyes. Don’t engage. Stick to the plan.
But the plan was ash. I took one step, then another, closing the distance I’d just carved. The Uber notification chimed in my hand. I ignored it.
“What, Katy?” My tone wasn’t kind, but the edge was gone. It was just tired.
Her mouth worked, searching for a sentence that wouldn’t form. The clever retorts, the economic analyses, the literary quotes—all inaccessible in the neurological swamp she was drowning in. “I’m…” she started, then faltered. A fresh tear cut a clean line through the mess on her cheek. “The bush is… ruined. Those hydrangeas.”
It was so absurd, so profoundly Katy to mourn the landscaping in her devastation, that a stunned, faint sound escaped me. It wasn’t a laugh. It was a release of pressure.
“They’ll grow back,” I said.
She nodded, too many times, as if I’d delivered a profound truth. “Right. They grow back.” Her eyes, bloodshot and too bright, searched my face. “Does he? Grow back?”
The question hung there, pathetic and enormous. She wasn’t talking about Rain, not really. She was talking about her own nucleus, scattered.
Scarlett interjected, her patience a thin veneer. “Katy, we need to go. Now.”
“I’m talking to Vy,” Katy said, pushing weakly at Scarlett’s chest. The movement unbalanced her. She stumbled sideways, and I reacted without thinking, stepping forward to catch her other arm. My fingers closed around the cold sequins of her sleeve.
We stood like that, a unstable triad on the dying lawn: Scarlett holding her up on one side, me on the other. Katy looked at my hand on her arm, then up at me. The sour smell of her sick was on her, but underneath was the ghost of her signature jasmine perfume, a ghost of the person I’d admired.
“You’re worried about me,” she murmured, a statement of pure, drunken wonder.
I was. Against every algorithm of self-preservation, I was. It infuriated me. “You’re a mess. Anyone would be.”
“Not anyone.” Her head lolled toward Scarlett. “Just her. And now you.” A weighted, miserable sigh emptied from her lungs. “Great. I’ve made it a team-building exercise.”
“Stop talking,” Scarlett commanded, and began walking forward, forcing us to move or drop her. We moved. My cancelled Uber driver sped past, his taillights flashing red in the dark.
We bundled Katy into the backseat of her own car, a surprisingly sensible hybrid. Scarlett buckled her in like a child. Katy’s eyes were closing, the brief coherence spent. “Don’t be mean to her, Scar,” she mumbled, her forehead against the cold window glass. “She’s… prettier when you’re not mean.”
Scarlett shut the door with a solid thunk. The silence outside the car was absolute for a beat. She leaned back against the metal, her breath clouding, and looked at me. The streetlight hollowed out her eyes.
“I have to take her home. To her dorm. I have to make sure she doesn’t choke in her sleep.” She recited it like a clinical protocol. “This is the residual obligation. The cleanup of old variables.”
“I know,” I said.
“I don’t want to go.” The admission was quiet, fierce. It wasn’t about Katy. It was about the momentum we’d lost, the kiss that now felt like a fossil in amber. “What I want is to rewind to the lamppost. I want to run a different scenario where her phone explodes two minutes later. I want that data.”
“You don’t get controlled experiments with people.” I wrapped my arms around myself. “You just get messy, real-time results.”
She pushed off the car and stood in front of me. She didn’t touch me. The space between us vibrated with everything unsaid, with the brain scan’s fireworks and the harsh porch light and the vomiting hydrangeas. “What is the result, Vy? Of tonight’s mess?”
I looked past her, at the shapeless form of Katy in the backseat. I thought of the Psychology of Attachment textbook, dog-eared and waiting in the lab. I thought of the cost of hesitation.
“The result,” I said, meeting her exhausted, beautiful eyes, “is that you’re driving. I’m riding shotgun. We’re both seeing her safely inside. And then you and I are going to talk. Not in a lab. Not on a crisis porch. Somewhere neutral. Where the only variables are us.”
A profound relief, stark and simple, washed over her features. She nodded once. “Neutral territory. Okay.”
I opened the passenger door. “Then let’s finish cleaning up the old experiment.”
We got in the car. The interior smelled of Katy’s perfume and, faintly, of bile. As Scarlett started the engine, Katy stirred in the back. Her voice was a slurry, sleepy whisper from the shadows. “Are you two… holding hands?”
Scarlett’s hand was on the gear shift. Mine was on my knee. She didn’t look over. She pulled the car smoothly into the empty street. “No, Katy,” she said, her voice finally softening into something almost like grief. “We’re not holding hands right now.”
But as she drove, her hand left the shifter and rested, palm up, on the center console. An invitation. A new parameter.
I placed my hand in hers. The connection was electric, a silent circuit completed in the dark, moving car, with the wreckage of the past breathing softly behind us. The road ahead was unlit, leading away from the party’s neon glow and into the deeper night, and we were moving forward into it together, for now.
The road ahead was unlit, leading away from the party’s neon glow and into the deeper night, and we were moving forward into it together, for then. My hand in Scarlett’s was the only steady point in a universe tilting on its axis. We didn’t speak. The car was a capsule holding our silence, the wet sound of Katy’s breathing in the back, and the ghost of her question.
Scarlett’s thumb traced a slow, absent pattern on my knuckle. It felt like she was mapping me, translating my skin into data she could understand. I watched her profile, lit by intermittent streetlights, her focus entirely on the road. She was compartmentalizing, assigning the crying woman behind us to a box labeled ‘Liquid Emergency’ so she could function.
We pulled into the familiar dorm circle. Getting Katy out was an operation. She was a dead weight of limbs and murmured nonsense. “He said the poems were derivative… is that why?” she slurred into Scarlett’s shoulder as we hauled her toward the door. We navigated the hushed, carpeted hallway like thieves, my heart hammering against my ribs. Every closed door felt like a judging eye.
Scarlett handled the key with one hand, her other still anchored around Katy’s waist. I supported the other side, the sequins of Katy’s dress digging into my palm. The room inside was a snapshot of her chaos: expensive perfumes jumbled with textbooks, a silk robe pooled on the floor, a single high-heeled shoe lying on its side by the bed. It smelled like her, a fact that felt like trespassing.
We laid her down. Scarlett removed Katy’s shoes with a tenderness that made my throat ache, then draped a blanket over her. Katy’s eyes fluttered open, landing on me where I stood awkwardly by the door, an intruder in this intimate ritual.
“You stayed,” she whispered.
“We both did,” Scarlett said, her voice flat. She placed a glass of water on the nightstand with a definitive click. “Drink that. Go to sleep.”
Katy’s gaze never left me. It was clearing, the drunken haze receding to reveal raw, unmediated hurt. “I’m sorry,” she breathed, the words meant for me. “About the porch. The things I said.” A tear escaped, trailing a new path through the ruined makeup. “I just… it really hurt, Vy. Seeing your hand in hers.”
The air vanished from the room. Scarlett went still by the bed, her back to us. She was a statue, listening.
I couldn’t speak. My tongue was lead. All I could do was nod, a short, stiff acknowledgment that felt entirely insufficient. The admission was a landmine in the soft, perfumed dark of her room, detonating a truth I’d been desperately trying to outrun. It had hurt her. I had known it would. I had done it anyway.
“Come on,” Scarlett said, tone broker-like, final. She gently pushed Katy’s shoulder back onto the pillow. “Enough. Sleep.”
This time, Katy obeyed. Her eyes closed. Scarlett stood over her for a long moment, watching the rise and fall of the blanket, then turned and walked to me. She didn’t take my hand. She just walked past me into the hall, and I followed.
The dormitory door shut with a soft, decisive click. The sound separated one world from another. We were in a bright, silent hallway that smelled of lemon cleaner and old carpet. The emotional decompression was immediate and violent. My knees felt weak.
Scarlett leaned back against the wall opposite Katy’s door, her head thumping softly against the cinderblock. She stared at the ceiling tiles. “Well,” she said. The word was exhausted, stripped bare.
“Yeah.” I slid down the wall to sit on the cold floor, legs giving out. The adrenaline was gone, leaving a chemical burn in my veins.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Once. Then, a minute later, again. I ignored it.
“You should check that,” she said, not looking at me. Her voice was detached, analytical. “It could be your ride. Or Mary, with more fascinating neural observations.”
“It’s not Mary.”
She finally looked down at me, her expression unreadable. “You should check it.”
I pulled the phone out. The first notification was a rideshare cancellation fee. The second was a text message. From Katy.
My breath hitched. I looked up at Scarlett. She just stared, waiting.
I opened it.
Katy (2:17 AM): im so sorry. that was the most humiliating night of my life. and i took it out on you. again. you didn’t deserve the porch. you didn’t deserve the rooftop. you just showed up and were kind and i was a disaster and i ruined it. i ruin good things. i know i do. i’m so sorry vy. for everything.
The words blurred. A hard, painful lump lodged in my throat. The apology was too honest, too self-lacerating. It was the unvarnished truth, sent from the dark of the room we’d just left, and it dismantled me. Because she was right. She had been a disaster. A beautiful, radiant, captivating disaster.
And back then, I had fallen into that disaster headfirst, willingly, desperately.
I had met her at a freshman mixer, feeling like a ghost in my own clothes. She had been a beacon. Katy, the junior who knew everyone, whose laugh was a command to join in. She’d teased me about my meticulous notes, then borrowed them. She’d found me studying alone in the library and dragged me for bubble tea, explaining game theory with straw wrappers. Our time together had been a string of perfect, stolen moments: laughing over terrible library coffee, her fingers brushing mine as she handed back my highlighter, the way she’d lean in to explain a concept, her jasmine scent enveloping me.
I had been falling, hard and fast, into the gravitational pull of her. It had been perfect. The sunlight through the library window, the shared silence that felt like understanding, the electric hope that maybe, just maybe, someone like her could see someone like me.
But I’d met her two weeks after Rain had ghosted her. She was a galaxy still collapsing from a previous supernova. I was just warm radiation, a temporary comfort in the cooling dark. She’d kiss me, then stare out a window. She’d call me brilliant, then flinch when her phone buzzed. Our perfect moments were shards of something she couldn’t actually give me. The timing wasn’t wrong. It was catastrophic.
“Vy?” Scarlett’s voice was a wire, taut.
I handed her the phone. I couldn’t speak. To try would be to scream or sob.
She read it. Her face didn’t change, but something behind her eyes calcified. She handed the phone back. “It’s a good apology,” she stated, as if grading an assignment. “Specific. Takes accountability. No excuses.” She pushed off the wall. “It also changes nothing about tonight.”
“It changes everything,” I choked out, the words finally breaking free. “Don’t you see? It makes it real.” I gestured to the phone, to the door behind her. “That’s not a villain. That’s a person. A person I used to…”
“Love?” Scarlett finished, the word hanging in the sterile air like an indictment.
“No,” I said, but it was weak. It wasn’t love. It was the prototype of love, the thrilling, painful blueprint. “I was falling. And she was… unavailable. And now she’s in there, bleeding all over her silk sheets, and I’m out here with you, and it feels…” I searched for the statistic, the correct model, and found only human mess. “It feels like I kicked a puppy. A tall, glamorous, emotionally chaotic puppy.”
A faint, unwilling snort of air escaped Scarlett. She sank down the wall to sit beside me, our shoulders not touching. The cold from the floor seeped through my jeans.
“You didn’t kick her. She’s an agent of her own choices. Rain was a choice. Drinking to the point of danger was a choice. Her pain is legitimate, but its origin isn’t you.” She spoke like she was reading from a textbook, but her hand found mine again on the tile floor. Her fingers were icy. “My origin, however, is currently you. That’s the data I have to work with.”
I looked at our hands, pale against the industrial carpet. “What does the data say?”
“It says the variable ‘Katy’s Apology’ induces a strong stress response in variable ‘Vy.’ It predicts hesitation. It suggests a re-evaluation of prior cost-benefit analyses.” She paused, her thumb pressing into my palm. “But the correlation between you and my focus remains the strongest signal. It’s an outlier. It’s significant.”
I leaned my head back against the wall. The ceiling lights were too bright. “So what’s the next step in the method? How do we control for this?”
“We don’t.” She said it simply. “We acknowledge it as a confounding variable. We factor her pain into the equation as a known quantity, not a disruptor. And we proceed.” She turned her head to look at me. “Do you want to proceed?”
The question was the only one that mattered. It wasn’t about forgiving Katy. It was about choosing Scarlett, knowing Katy’s pain was now a permanent strand in the knot. I saw the brain scan in my mind, that spectacular, focused firestorm. I felt the precision of her kiss under the lamppost, a contrast to Katy’s chaotic, yearning ones. I thought of the textbook, dog-eared by her careful hand.
“Yes,” I said. The word was clean, a single data point in the noise.
She nodded. “Then we leave this hallway. We go somewhere neutral. My car is not neutral. Your dorm is not neutral.”
“The 24-hour diner on Highland,” I suggested. “Bright lights. Bad coffee. Maximum neutrality.”
A real smile, small and weary, touched her lips for the first time since the lab. “A perfectly controlled environment.” She stood, pulling me up with her. Our hands didn’t separate. We walked down the hall, away from Katy’s door, away from the lemon-scented silence.
We didn’t look back. The momentum was different now—slower, weighed down with hard truths and a glowing phone in my pocket, but it was forward. Into the deeper night, toward the greasy glow of a diner, where the only thing left to map was the uncertain territory between us.