Page 42 of As the Rain Falls (Sainte Madeleine #1)

YOU WON'T SEE IT COMING

Cassandra

Class ends, but I don’t leave. In fact, I wait until the room empties out and run to the bathroom, disappearing in one of the empty stalls.

I can’t find it in me to move, not after what happened with Caleb in the library.

The shame I feel each time I think about his lips pressing against mine is curling in my stomach.

I feel nauseous and out of breath, and my heart is beating too loudly in my chest.

Wrong .

It all feels wrong.

My intuition is telling me to run to safety, but I can’t even picture what my version of a safe place would be.

I guess I’ve always expected it to be a person.

It’s all the stories I’ve read combined in my head making a hopeless romantic out of me.

For a second, I start to forget that there is nothing romantic in this situation.

I am absolutely alone. I have no one to trust. No one to turn to.

My loneliness is causing me to be desperate enough to let a boy kiss me just because.

I am an attention seeker.

I am a whore.

“Cassie? Are you here?”

Kayla knocks against the door. I open it and come out of the stall, only to walk past her and let my body fall seated against the wall.

Her ballet tights are peeking out from underneath her skirt, and her hair’s pulled back into some kind of loose, messy bun that probably took ten minutes to get right.

“I’m hanging out here until dinnertime comes.” I shrug. “You look different.”

“I know, it looks weird.” She sighs loudly and pulls the hairstyle down. Her curls fall around her face, softening the edges of her heart-shaped chin. “I don’t know what I was doing this morning. Trying something, I guess.”

“No, I like it.” I shake my head. “It looks good, Kay.”

“Really?” Her eyes widen, a grin stretching across her lips. “Well, thanks. Olivia’s running a bit late, and I saw your bike in the parking lot. You haven’t been texting me back.”

“I know.” I give her a weak smile. “I’m sorry.”

Kayla doesn’t smile back. “What’s going on? You’ve been avoiding me all week.”

I shake my head, words jamming up in my throat as I listen to her question. “I’m not avoiding you. I’m just…”

“Caleb asked me about you today,” she cuts me off, taking a step closer and sitting next to me. “I was trying to be a good friend when I told him you were probably in the library. Was I wrong?”

“You weren’t,” my voice is quiet. I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, suddenly self-conscious. I turn my head slowly just to take a good look at her. “He kissed me today.”

Kayla’s eyes widen, her mind racing to track what’s wrong about my statement. “He… did?”

I start to nod, swallowing hard. “And Angelina Cardoso caught us.”

Kayla tries to hide her gasp, but it still comes out anyway. I snort, even though there’s nothing funny about this.

“Is it a problem?” I hear the worry in her voice. “She’s not Maria’s friend, is she?”

“I don’t think so,” I deny it, side-eyeing Kayla again. “I’m sorry if I didn’t call or text. And I haven’t been avoiding you on purpose; I just feel…”

“Sad?” Kayla offers, smiling knowingly. “I know.”

She tilts her head back, considering her next words. A pinch of worry is now hiding in her eyes, and I feel like I was the one to put it there. I hate how I always seem to drag her down to the bottom. I don’t ever mean to.

“But you often feel that way these days,” she says. Her eyebrows are furrowed in concentration. “What’s really going on, Cassie? You know you can tell me anything.”

“I’m just going through a hard time, that’s all.”

“Did something happen with your grandma? I’ve been thinking, like,” she stops and gestures to herself as if trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. “It’s like you’re just, I don’t know. I’ve been so busy, so maybe there’s something that I’m missing.”

“No. I mean, she’s not getting better, but this has nothing to do with her.

” I almost tell her the truth, then.The words balance on the tip of my tongue, teetering on the edge of something too big.

I’m almost there.It’s hard, but I’m trying to be honest. “I just think that what happened with Caleb today brought up some bad feelings, and…”

I was—

“Did you not like the kiss?” Kayla’s voice comes out sweet and innocent. “Because if you didn’t, it’s okay. You don’t have to keep going out with him, you know?”

The discrepancy between what I was trying to say and what she thinks must have happened makes me feel sick.

My friend is such a normal girl. How she thinks, the things she worries about.

Kayla never had to grow up fast, not like I did.

Compared to her, I’m too fast. I’m too eager.

I’m the girl Caleb wants to fuck hard and leave.

I realize very quickly how fucking inadequate it’d be to tell her about what happened to me. She will never understand how I feel. Kayla will push me towards going to the cops about it, and I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to have my business be exposed in a town as small as ours.

What if they find out about how I didn’t fight Nathaniel off?

Incest is taboo for a reason, isn’t it? It’s just a disgusting thing to do.

“No, I liked it.” The lie tastes bitter on my tongue. “I was going to say that… I think I need to pee.”

It sounds more like a question, even to me.

Kayla blinks, startled. Then she snorts, and her laugh breaks through the tension.

She never assumes the worst because, unlike me, Kayla has had a good life so far.

Her family loves her, and they keep her safe.

I wasn’t protected like her. It means that I have nowhere to run to.

“You need to pee?” she echoes, raising a brow at me. “Well, lucky for you, we’re in a bathroom, right? Go. I’ll wait for you to come out.”

I get up and head for another empty stall.

The door swings shut right behind me. As I pull my skirt down, my eyes drift towards what’s written behind the door with red and black markers.

Some of it is just random doodles left by bored kids, half-faded because of the passing of time.

My fingers trace over the familiar mess, recognizing some of the graffiti as my own.

What’s your number?

LOL

#MeToo

I 3 One Direction

Rock n’ Roll!

Yun is a cunt.

I listen to Kayla’s quiet humming. She’s shy about singing, but her voice is always perfectly tuned, no matter what song is driving her crazy at the moment.

Insults, drawings of smiley faces, and shattered hearts.

My hand stills next to the poster. It’s large, the paper cold and wrinkled under my touch.

The title tells me that it’s some old anti-bullying campaign from last year.

I peel at the corner, and it comes off the door too easily, like someone’s done this before, again and again.

The paper only rips a little where my fingers are pressing too hard, but that’s because I’m too eager.

As I let the poster fall to the ground, I pause and read what was hidden underneath.

My eyes widen and my stomach drops, this terrible feeling washing over me, something truly cold and chilling.

Lucia Evans is a slut.

I press my fingers against the last word, following the lines and the curves of each letter. It’s too big, too loud, too wrong.

Le Port’s biggest whore.

Whore.

Slut.

Whore.

Maybe I should stop reading.

Lucia Evans has a stretched-out pu—

“Hey, Cassie?” Kayla calls my name, her voice only a whisper through the door, like she doesn’t want to spook me. “Are you done?”

Then I see it.

Smaller. Barely visible, crammed between every insult like it’s just an afterthought. Buried like it doesn’t matter. But the lines were traced over and over again with the pen, like someone needed it to be seen.

Nathaniel Rivera is a rapist.

My whole world falls apart in a second.

Someone knows?

Kayla knocks gently on the door. “Cassie? Are you okay? Please, open the door.”

I unlock it without thinking and walk out. She spots the poster on the floor.

“Did you just rip that down? Because, you know, we’re really not allowed to…”

Her voice dies when she sees the writing. Too shocked to say anything, I freeze and stare as her face twists into a grimace, looking pained, like the words physically hurt to look at.

“That’s so disgusting…” she trails off, looking horrified. “Who would even do that?”

I shake my head side to side. “I don’t know.”

“They need to start taking my warnings more seriously.” Kayla traces the surface of the door with her fingers. “I keep telling the administration that harassment is becoming a huge problem, but no one ever listens to me.”

“Do you have any markers on you?” my own voice comes out hollow.

She blinks, caught off guard. “What?”

“A permanent marker. I need one.”

“Oh,” she hesitates before opening her purse, then starts digging through her stuff. “I even have glittery ones, if you—”

“Anything black?”

She hands me one. I take it, march back into the stall, and start scribbling over the words. I press hard. Too hard. The marker squeaks.

“What are you doing?” Kayla asks, alarm creeping into her voice. “Cassie!”

“What does it look like?”

“Wait, we should be telling your dad! Maybe he can help!”

“Help with what?” my voice cracks, and I shrink into myself, feeling my chest hurt so bad. “What’s he going to do, Kayla? Paint all over it so we can act like it never happened?”

I can’t go to my father. He is going to see what was written in it and assume that I must’ve said it to someone else. I can’t risk having this secret come to light. It’s mine. It belongs to me. If I can’t face it, no one else should be trying to expose me either.

This is not fair .

Kayla grabs my wrist, stopping me.

“Cassie, please,” her voice is more gentle than before, and I can tell she is picking each word carefully. “Lucia probably never even saw it.”

Lucia.

She didn’t see it. She’s not seeing it.

She’s seeing the words written about Lucia. She’s not seeing… How is she not seeing it? It’s written right there. How is she not—

“But what if she did?” My vision instantly blurs. “Beckett thinks something happened to her before she passed. What if this was it?”

What if… What if she is the one who wrote this?

What if she knew?

But no, she couldn’t have figured it out. I kept to myself. I hid it well. My best friend thinks I’m just sad and depressed because of a boy, for fuck’s sake. There’s no way in hell Lucia Evans could’ve ever known about my brother raping me back when she was alive. It doesn’t make any sense to me.

Kayla’s face softens. Her full lips, now pressed together, are turning into a thin line.

“Beckett is grieving, Cassie. He must be feeling really sad about losing his sister; you shouldn’t take everything he says seriously. Remember when I lost my uncle? Remember how I kept trying to find reasons to explain why he’d get behind the wheel? That was just grief talking.”

“Okay, but it doesn’t make it any less wrong!” I snap, not liking the turn this conversation is taking. Kayla should be on my side. “You really think it’s okay for Lucia to be remembered this way? What if this was me? What if this was you?”

“Of course, it doesn’t,” she breathes out, her features hardening with confusion. “God, I didn’t mean it like that. I take it back, I promise I didn’t mean anything other than this probably just being just another case of bullying.”

I can’t fully believe her words, because as far as I know, no one could ever bully a girl like Lucia. It’d even be easier to believe that she wrote those words herself, which still would’ve been a crazy thing to do.

“But how… how can they say this about her?”

“I don’t know.” Kayla shakes her head, looking troubled. “I’m really sorry.”

Her hands press against my cheeks, cupping the sides of my face. It’s a kind gesture, something we’ve done to each other since we were little kids for comfort.But I don’t feel comforted now.I feel cold.I feel cold and I’m crying.

“Cassie.” She catches one of my tears with her thumb. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I’m not hurt.” I blink hard, but the tears keep coming. She takes me by the hand, pulling me outside of the bathroom stall. My fingers intertwine with hers.“I’m okay.”

But she’s still not seeing it.

Kayla is not even looking .

“No, you’re not. Come here,” she whispers and hugs me tightly, desperate to comfort me. I let her hold me because I don’t know what else to do. “I’m so sorry. I just didn’t know you felt this strongly about her.”

“I…”

“Shh. It’s okay, Cassie.”

But it’s not. It’s not—

“It’s not fair!” I choke out. “Kayla, it’s not fair!”

I’ve spent years fighting these words, pretending like they didn’t matter or didn’t hurt. Someone else wrote them down like it was nothing. Like it was easy . They picked up the pieces that I so carefully keep hidden from the world and tossed it all up in the air.

Nathaniel Rivera is a rapist.

Then, I hear it. I hear that voice that pulls towards somewhere dark and cold in my mind. Somewhere I can’t come back from alone at all. It’s him. He won’t ever let me go.

If you tell anyone, I’ll fucking kill you . I’ll kill you, and I’ll kill them, too. I swear to God, Cassandra.It’ll happen so fast you won’t even see it coming.