Not Your Side Character

There's a comment section on my life. Every last person in it agrees I'm the villain.

And her? The girl who bites her lip, lets her eyes go glassy, lets her shoulders cave one slow inch until every head in the room swings her way? She's the heroine. The precious little thing they all ache for.

I'm the jealous psycho hogging a boy who was never mine, wrecking her sad little love story.

Two people on this earth know the truth. Me. And Dorian, the boy she's decided to love.

She's the snake.

It was an open secret at school: Ivy had a thing for my childhood friend, Dorian. So every time he and I stood a little too close, and she watched us with that martyred, coming-apart look, some classmate would appear at my desk to set me straight.

"Celeste... I really think you should keep some distance from Dorian."

"When you two are this careless with each other, it's not fair to whoever he ends up with. And honestly? Your future husband is the one I pity. Cheated on before he's even met you."

"Besides, you know Ivy likes him, and you're glued to his side every day anyway. How do you think that makes her feel? You're both girls. There's no need to be this cruel."

Chapter 1

That actually made me laugh.

"I don't care how it makes her feel."

"She has a crush on him. He didn't get sold to her. Every time I get within three feet of him she puts on a face like somebody died, like the two of us owe her something. I'm the one who should be annoyed."

A few of them kept at it. "But it's just a crush. What's wrong with liking someone?"

"If you ask me, the real problem is Dorian. Why string her along? If he doesn't like her, he should just say so."

Another one jumped in. "Right? It's gross. He just likes having a girl worship him."

"Poor Ivy, crushing on a fake like that. Won't confess, won't reject her. That's textbook fuckboy behavior."

"Everyone thinks he's so sweet and gentlemanly. If he actually were, he'd keep his distance from you and every other girl instead of hurting Ivy. He doesn't respect her at all."

I was out of patience. "Is there anything in your heads but air? Has Ivy ever actually confessed to him?"

They said it like it was obvious. "Of course not! That's why it's called a crush!"

"Right. She's never said a word." I let that sit. "So tell me. How exactly is he supposed to turn her down? He rejects a girl who never confessed, she saves face by telling everyone he flattered himself, and suddenly he's the delusional creep. You want to walk him into that?"

They scrambled for a comeback.

I cut them off. "If me standing next to Dorian is a crime, go ahead. Call the cops on us."

One of them, losing and sore about it, started yapping. "I feel so bad for your future husband. Wife's already tangled up with some other guy in college, cheating on him before he even shows up, leaving him to settle for used goods."

"Save your pity for yourself. You've built an entire personality around a wedding that's never going to happen."

Then I muttered something about wasting my evening and turned to go.

The guy blinked at his friends. "...What did she even mean by that?"

Someone filled him in. "She said you need a hobby."

He glared at my back with nowhere to put it.

Behind me, the feed flickered up.

Comments: [ God, she's vicious. ]

I didn't break stride.

Dorian's birthday was a few days out. The sneakers I'd tracked down for him from overseas had just come in.

Even doing homework at his place, I was in a good mood. For once, everything was easy.

Chapter 2

It was eleven thirty at night. I was packing up to head back to my own place across the hall when Dorian's phone rang.

He answered on speaker without thinking.

Ivy's voice spilled out, panicked, over a wall of background noise. "Dorian, can you come to The Lantern and get me? I'm working a shift, and there's this guy who won't keep his hands to himself. He's drunk now, and he's got me cornered in the changing room. I'm really scared..."

A fist hammered on a door somewhere behind her.

Every inch of Dorian's very nice face said he was done. "You've got time to call me but not the cops? Calling them would actually help. You really don't rate my life very high, do you."

"I'm not coming. I like being alive. But I'll happily report it for you. No need to thank me."

Then the feed lit up in front of me.

Comments: [ Why is he going off-script?! This is the part where he floors it through fifteen red lights in his parents' car to come save our girl! ]

Comments: [ Our girl doesn't want the cops. She wants HIM to come get her! ]

Comments: [ Why is she pulling night shifts at a bar anyway? Because a twenty-dollar birthday gift is embarrassing and she wants to buy him fifteen-hundred-dollar sneakers. ]

Comments: [ Our girl and her grandma have never owned a pair of shoes over twenty bucks. Honestly, he deserves to suffer. ]

Comments: [ If anything happens to her, it's on him. She called him for help and all he did was offer to dial 911. ]

Reading that, I could have died of secondhand shame for that grandmother.

Ivy's family didn't have money. Her parents died when she was small, and her grandmother raised her. A woman in her sixties or seventies, bringing a granddaughter all the way up through college. You can imagine what that took.

And here she was, pulling late shifts at a bar after evening study so she could buy a boy she liked a pair of sneakers that cost a few thousand dollars.

Had Dorian ever saved her entire family's life or something?

The rest got around the whole school. The guy who'd cornered her ended up paying her a few thousand to make it go away.

On Dorian's birthday, Ivy proudly handed him her gift: designer sneakers worth well over a thousand dollars.

He turned them down.

Ivy's face fell. "Do you really dislike me that much? You won't even take a gift from me?"

Dorian frowned like her logic baffled him. "What are you talking about? Why would I take shoes worth over a thousand dollars from a regular classmate?"

"When the scholarship students got up to talk about their families, you said yours died when you were young and your grandmother raised you. She's in her seventies and still up at five in the morning picking fruit in someone else's orchard to cover your tuition, scrimping on everything, saving to keep you in school, giving you the best of what little she has, running herself sick without ever spending a cent on a doctor."

"So what are you doing with a thousand-plus dollars? Buy your grandmother some warm clothes. Get her something good to eat. Take her in for a checkup. Anything but spending it on a regular classmate."

Ivy went red to the tips of her ears. Her hands drew the shoebox back against her chest, and she took half a step back.

Chapter 3

Saturday. My parents were gone the whole day, so dinner was at Dorian's.

After, we holed up in his study, heads bent over the same page, trading problems back and forth. The quiet only ever worked that way with him, the one other person who saw the whole room for exactly what it was.

Rain came down in fat drops against the glass. Thunder cracked somewhere over the neighborhood.

Then the doorbell rang. Long, insistent. A fist hammering right behind it.

Mrs. Hale's voice came from the hall, uncertain. "Dorian, come out here a second. There's... someone here for you."

I checked my phone. Past ten.

Who shows up at somebody's house at this hour.

Dorian looked like he was wondering the same thing. I trailed after him, curious.

Right on cue, the comments scrolled up where only I could see them.

Comments: [ Is Celeste a dog? Trailing him around night and day, no shame at all. A girl, this late, camped out at a guy's house. Did her parents never teach her the word "decency"? ]

I looked past the noise, at the girl dripping on the doorstep.

Ivy. Soaked through, clothes twisted and clinging, hair pasted to her cheeks.

The second she saw Dorian, her eyes went glassy and red, and her voice broke on his name like it cost her something.

"Dorian."

She dabbed at her eyes. Chin trembling. The whole room tilted toward her, and she knew it. Every tremble was aimed.

"Can you take me in? Just for tonight?" Her breath hitched. "I stay with my aunt's family, and tonight, everything blew up. Everyone screaming. My uncle threw me out in the middle of it. I don't have anywhere to go, and it's so late, and I'm scared to be by myself. I didn't know where else to go. Please. Just one night."

Another girl, showing up like this. The anger stirred anyway, on reflex.

"Did you try calling anyone?" I said. "If it's that bad at your aunt's, sort it out through the right channels. Call your family. Call a friend. Call someone who can actually fix it. Crashing at a stranger's house isn't a plan."

The comments detonated.

Comments: [ God, Celeste is such a piece of work. ]

Comments: [ Same age, same everything, and her heart is this black? A girl shows up soaked and Celeste's first move is to send her back out? ]

Comments: [ She has nowhere to go and Miss Perfect wants to talk "right channels." Fate is literally handing these two to each other, and she's standing in the doorway blocking it. ]

Comments: [ Cold. Jealous. We see you, Celeste. ]

I laughed under my breath, dry.

Not one of them had asked her the obvious question. The one that might've actually helped.

They didn't want her helped. They wanted her kept.

Help is a gift. It isn't a bill you hand to whoever cries the loudest.

But my opinion was never on the ballot. One soaked girl on a doorstep, and the feed already had its heroine, its villain, and its verdict.

The villain was me.

Chapter 4

Turned out Ivy's mind ran on the same track as the comments.

She dropped her eyes and let her voice go small and wet.

"I don't want to make it a whole thing. I don't want anyone to know. Can I just stay? One night. I'll take the couch. Or the floor. I'll sleep on the floor of your room if I have to. Anywhere."

That last part. I almost laughed.

The comments were thrilled.

Comments: [ Aww, our girl is so smart. ]

Comments: [ No way he lets her sleep on the floor. He's going to cave, obviously. This is fate locking them in. She holds her ground tonight and it's basically written. ]

Comments: [ And Celeste wants to throw her out into the rain. Cold-blooded doesn't cover it. ]

Dorian didn't even take a beat.

"Sorry. My place isn't an option."

Then, because he's the kind of person who does the decent thing even when he's annoyed, he added, "If you've got nowhere to stay, I'll book you a hotel."

Ivy's eyes filled instantly, her shoulders curling in.

"I don't want a hotel. I can't be alone right now..." Her voice frayed. "What if someone jimmies the lock? What if there's a camera in the room? I can't."

She turned to Mrs. Hale, tears running now.

"Ma'am, please. Just one night. I'll sleep in the entryway, I don't care. My parents passed when I was little, and my grandma's out in the country. I don't want to worry her. Please."

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

Then Ivy broke the quiet herself.

"I'm putting you on the spot. Forget I said anything." A brave, wobbling smile. "Don't worry about me, ma'am. A night outside, even a dangerous one, is safer than going back there. And if something did happen to me out there, I'd never blame you."

Mrs. Hale had actually felt sorry for her, right up until that last part. Something crossed her face then, hard to name.

But a girl, alone, this late. She wasn't wrong that it wasn't safe. Mrs. Hale gave a reluctant nod.

"Fine. You can stay the one night."

Ivy lit right up. A shy little smile.

"Thank you, ma'am. And really, Dorian doesn't need to give up his bed. I'll just lay down on his floor."

Mrs. Hale stared at her. Blinked. Took a couple seconds to find words.

"...You don't need the floor. We have guest rooms. Several."

The smile dropped clean off Ivy's face.

Once Ivy was parked in a guest room, Mrs. Hale pulled Dorian aside and dropped her voice.

"Letting that girl stay out there felt dangerous. Letting her stay here?" She gave him a look. "Somehow I feel like you're the one in danger."

Then, dead serious. "Lock your door tonight. In case she 'wanders' into the wrong room and ends up in your bed."

Dorian's face didn't do anything I could read. He turned, walked to his door, and threw the bolt.

The lock clicked home.

He told me the rest the next day, and even secondhand it crawled under my skin.

Sometime after midnight, he heard it. Soft footsteps stopping outside his door. The handle turned. Slow. Careful.

It caught on the bolt.

Whoever it was stood there a moment longer, then gave up. The footsteps padded away.

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn't.

Later, up for water, he passed the hall and saw light bleeding under the laundry-room door.

He figured someone had left it on. Then he heard it: water running, the wet drag of something being scrubbed, over and over, behind the door.

He stopped outside it. The sound on the other side didn't belong to this hour of the night.

He reached for the handle.

Chapter 5

I was about to put my phone down and sleep when the feed lit up.

Comments: [ Awww, our girl is SO devoted. He takes her in for one night and here she is at midnight doing his laundry to pay him back. Wife material. ]

Comments: [ She's basically moved in already. Folding his clothes, making his space hers. This is a woman building a home. ]

Comments: [ Screenshot this. Future wedding-slideshow material right here. ]

I lay there and did the math on what that meant. Across the hall, in the Hales' laundry room, a girl who'd been in the house for two hours was washing a near-stranger's clothes and photographing herself doing it.

Dorian found her there. He told me the rest later, but the comments had already sketched the shape of it.

Light under the laundry-room door. The wet drag of scrubbing. He pushed it open.

Ivy, mid-motion, his shirt in her hands. Her phone propped on the shelf, camera pointed at her face.

His hand closed on the doorframe. Knuckles white.

"What are you doing."

She startled like a rabbit, head ducking, her face flushing hot. "Dorian... I only wanted to thank you for tonight. I thought I'd do something for you. To pay you back."

"The only thing that counts as thanks is what I actually asked for." His voice never lifted. "Doing whatever you want and handing it to me? That's not gratitude. It's the opposite."

He held her stare until the color bled out of her face. Then he crossed the room, took the shirt out of her grip, and dropped it in the trash. In front of her. Like it was spoiled now that a stranger's hands had been on it.

Ivy's eyes went red.

Dorian's face didn't move. "Be gone by morning. This house doesn't have room for whatever you're pretending to be."

Ivy's fingertips shook. She backed up until the wall stopped her