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“My house will work fine,” he said, on the move again.

I stared after him, swallowing my outrage. Twenty-five dollars an hour. Twenty-five dollars an hour. If I’d had the chance to meet him before we struck our deal I would’ve applied an asshole tax and never agreed to less than fifty.

FOUR

Dear Locker 89,

I don’t know whether it’s time to break up with him. I keep trying to communicate, but it’s like he doesn’t hear me. I’ve told him about 20 times I need him to text me more, I need him to pay me more attention, and to come sit with me in the cafeteria at least SOMETIMES. But the more I communicate my needs, the more he avoids meeting them. One of his friends actually called me demanding the other day! Am I being demanding? Is it unreasonable to know what you need and to communicate that? Serious question. Be honest with me. I can take it.

[email protected]

Locker 895:06 p.m. (0 min ago)

to Strangerthings894

Hey strangerthings!

Let’s do some redefining. It’s totally reasonable to communicate your needs. But you seem confused about what your needs are. You don’t *need* anything from your boyfriend. You want it. Saying we *need* something from someone else makes us feel like we can’t live without them, or they completely control how we feel, which is not true. When you say you *need* him to do xyz, what I’m hearing is that your real need is to feel loved, and special, and wanted. And you can get that need met from people other than your bf! I recommend rewording the way you explain your needs to him. Tell him your real needs, and then let him know what kind of things he *could* do to help you feel loved, special, and wanted. People respond better to encouragement than criticism. Then it’s on him. Once he understands that it’s not about him and what he’s doing wrong, but about you and how he can make you feel awesome, he might step up to the plate! And if he doesn’t, that’s when you ask yourself if you’re satisfied getting those needs met through platonic relationships, or if maybe this isn’t the right guy for you.

Good luck!

Locker 89

I swallowed hard in the driver’s seat of Ainsley’s car—she’d lent it to me for the day so I could fulfill my extortionrequirements—as Brougham pulled off the road ahead of me into what I assumed was his house. To put it lightly, though, this was no house. It was a mansion. A fuck-off enormous mansion.

There were about a million different sections, room after room after room, dormer windows and bay windows and balconies and columns and cornerstones, fancy French windowpanes and a mixture of curved and boxy rooftops. The brick was a cool, calming shade of purple-gray, which, paired with the bluish roof and cream detailing, gave it an overall fairy tale feel. The front yard was immaculate, with trimmed hedges bordering a sprawling, two-lane driveway.

Comeon.

There was no way I was taking my car up that driveway. It felt like eating a work-of-art cupcake. This driveway was meant to be observed, not used, right?

So I pulled over to the curb outside the gate instead. Brougham, who had driven straight up the driveway to park near the entrance, leaned against his car and watched me trek up the winding path with raised eyebrows.WhenI finally reached him, he gave me a pointed look, then led me to the front door.

“Do you have a butler?” I asked as we entered, suddenly excited. “Or, like, a chef or something?”

Look, it’s not that I could necessarily be bribed with food, but let’s just say if Brougham had a chef who could bring us tastefully presented after-school snacks like crustless sandwiches or dragon fruit salad, I’d be a lot more amenable to afternoon mansion visits.

But to my boundless dismay, Brougham gave me a look of disdain. “No, Phillips, we do not have a butler.”

He was really not in a rush to forgive me for calling himAlexander, was he?“Sorry,”I said. “Just, it seems like a lot of work to clean a mansion by yourself, that’s all.”

Brougham had the nerve to sigh at me. “Well, of course we havecleaners,” he said, the same way someone might say “of course we have a roof,” or “of course we have a kitchen sink.”

I hung behind to make a face at the back of his head. “Well ofcourse,” I muttered. “Naturally. Who doesn’t have cleaners?Pfft.”

“And it’s not a mansion.”

“Bullshitit isn’t a mansion,” I said with a flash of irritation. How was it Brougham managed to come across equally grating when he was bragging about his wealthandwhen he was underestimating it?

“It’s not. Maybe it’d be considered one in, like, San Fran. But it wouldn’t cut it in a town like this.”

The look on his face was half pitying, half judgy. Well, excuse me for not being well versed on mansion politics before speaking, ever-so-sorry about that.

We’d entered a sweeping open space in the way of a grand foyer, complete with a wrought-iron balcony over our heads—I guessed so people could gaze patronizingly upon visitors from the great heights of the second floor—cream marbled flooring and a chandelier dripping crystals from the impossibly high ceiling. I bent my neck at an angle that was too close to ninety degrees to be safe, but right now my neck muscles had to take a backseat to taking all of this in. When we crossed into the hallway, my shoes slipped on the marbled floors, and I adjusted my pace to keep control. The last thing I needed was to go careening off track and collide with a mahogany desk or priceless Ming dynasty vase.

Brougham walked slightly ahead of me, making no real effort to match my slower speed. It was almost like he wastrying to hurry me through the house. Probably to protect the vases, in all fairness.

The first indication we weren’t alone was the clacking of heels against marble, an extra percussion element to Brougham’s and my already out-of-sync footsteps. A woman sauntered into the hall ahead of us, through an archway to our left, in a cloud of French perfume. She was confident, she was sleek, and, unless I was reading her face entirely wrong, she was irritated to see us.