Courtney gasped, like a light bulb had gone off. “I know!”
How?
“Courtney,” I gritted out, “I swear to god, shut your mouth.” But my warning only made it worse. She gave me a look of pure pleasure. Oh, she hated me all right. She hated that I’d had Mint first, that when everyone remembered college, they thought of Mint and Jessica.
“Remember how Frankie always joked about wanting to steal Heather away from Jack?”
“That was harmless, right, Frank?” Mint stepped in front of his friend, as if he could physically shield him.
“Heather went home with Frankie,” Courtney said. “The night of the Sweetheart Ball, he took her home. I never told the police because they were so sure Jack did it. But if Frankie was the last person to see her, and then he was trying to off himself…”
It was so far from what I’d expected to hear that the breath left my lungs all at once.
“Is that true?” Coop took a step forward. Apparently, domestic life—lawyerly life—hadn’t bled the tough out of him yet.
Instead of rising to Coop’s challenge like the old Frankie would have, he screwed up his face. A tear ran down his cheek. Right there in front of us, in the middle of the Phi Delt basement, Francis Kekoa cried.
“I did it,” he sobbed. “I hurt her.”
Chapter 12
May, junior year
It was late, even for us. We were drunk and tired, but still high off the sheer absurdity of everyone’s costumes for the Nineties party. Frankie was carrying Heather down from the second floor of Phi Delt—the only one of us strong enough, as usual, after we’d all had too many tequila shots, and Jack walked beside him, monitoring. Caro and I led the pack down the stairs in coordinating Cher and Dionne miniskirts. We couldn’t stop looking back at Coop and laughing.
“I will never be able to look at you the same way again,” Caro wheezed, clutching the banister. “Seriously, this is the picture of you in my mind, forever.”
Coop grinned and fingered the glittery butterfly clips holding his hair back. He wore a pink baby-doll dress that I couldn’t believe he’d found in his size, with knee-high white stockings and black Mary Janes.
“You know, if I’m being honest,” he said, “there’s probably always been a twelve-year-old girl inside me, waiting to get out.”
“Please don’t talk about coaxing out twelve-year-old girls when you’re in the Phi Delt house, Coop, or I’ll have to reinstate your ban.” Jack, in Kurt Cobain flannel, watched Heather over Frankie’s shoulder. She blinked sleepily.
It was strange to want Coop when he looked like a mirror image of myself in middle school, but here I was. I caught his eye, and he grinned.
“Uh, guys?” Caro’s voice shifted as we came to the bottom of the stairs. “What’s going on here?”
In the foyer, a group of brothers a year older than us huddled over the large composite pictures lining the walls. I stepped closer and realized what they were doing: drawing thick, vicious X’s over Danny Grier’s face.
Danny Grier, the Phi Delt brother who’d just come out. The one frat guy I knew in all the years I’d been at Duquette to come out—which only meant he was the brave one. Anger welled inside me, but before I could speak, Jack was stepping forward.
“What are you doing?”
I felt a moment of fear for him—Jack was a junior and well liked, but these were seniors, popular Phi Delt brothers. They had power, and there were more of them than us. But Jack stood his ground, head held high.
“What does it look like?” one of them asked. He was tall, and I remembered having a crush on him when I was a freshman—a crush I now clawed back in my head. “Cleaning up the composites.”
“It’s 2008,” I said. “How are you this backwards?”
“Yeah, that’s some retrograde bullshit,” Coop said. “No wonder I never wanted to join your stupid cult.”
“Frankie, come on.” One of the other brothers, who hadn’t stopped drawing on Danny’s face when we walked in, raised an eyebrow. “Set your friends straight.” He turned to Jack. “Frankie gets it.”
We turned to Frankie. The conversation had woken Heather, and now she stood on her own two feet, shaking her head groggily. Frankie looked like he was staring down the barrel of a gun. I tensed, waiting for him to tell his brothers to go to hell.
“They’re right,” Frankie said instead, voice thick. “Danny doesn’t belong here. You can’t be that way and be a Phi Delt. It doesn’t work like that.”