Chapter 391: Alibi
We had three classes together. I discovered this over the next week as I watched my schedule slowly fill with her presence. English Composition. Introduction to Psychology. World History.
Every time I walked into a classroom, there she was. Laughing with someone new. Sprawled across a desk like she owned the space. Drawing doodles in the margins of her notebook while the professor droned on about syllabus requirements.
She waved at me every time she saw me.
I never waved back.
I started taking different routes to class, lingering in bathrooms until I was sure she’d already arrived, sitting in corners where she couldn’t easily approach. It wasn’t that I disliked her—I didn’t feel strongly enough about her to dislike her. I just didn’t know what to do with her persistent friendliness. It felt like a trap I couldn’t identify.
It worked for two weeks.
Then she cornered me after World History, stepping in front of me as I tried to slip out the side door.
"Did I do something to you?" she asked bluntly.
"No."
"Then why are you avoiding me?"
I opened my mouth to deny it, but we both knew it would be a lie. She had this way of looking at you, direct, unblinking, that made lying feel pointless.
Before I could formulate a response, a group of guys from our class walked past. One of them called out, loud enough for half the hallway to hear: "Yo, Aria! Leave the weirdo alone and come hang with us!"
I felt my jaw tighten. Not from hurt, I’d been called worse, but from the familiar exhaustion of being seen exactly as I’d always been seen.
Aria’s head whipped around.
"Mind your own damn business!" she snapped. "I didn’t ask for your opinions!"
They laughed, but they kept walking. She turned back to me, and I braced myself for the apology, the awkward retreat. Instead, she just looked at me expectantly.
"Well?"
"You must feel obligated," I said quietly.
"Because you saved me. But you don’t have to talk to me. Even if you hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered. I could’ve just replaced what he stole."
She stared at me for a long moment. Then, inexplicably, she laughed.
"A nepo baby, huh?"
Before I could react, she grabbed my arm, her hand warm through my sleeve, and started pulling me down the hallway.
"Come on. Let’s skip next period and hit up that karaoke place near campus."
I yanked my arm free. "Leave me alone."
I turned and walked away before she could respond, my heart doing something strange and irregular in my chest. When I glanced back from the end of the hallway, she was still standing there, watching me with this bemused expression that I couldn’t decode.
I told myself I’d finally succeeded in driving her away.
But two days later, my phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number.
you can’t avoid me forever, nepo baby. see you in psych tomorrow.
I didn’t respond.
But I also didn’t block her number.
I stared at it for a long time, thumb hovering over the screen.
Curiosity was a small, persistent thing... like a grain of sand caught beneath the skin. You could ignore it for a while, pretend it wasn’t there, but it never stopped aching.
And when I showed up to Psychology the next day, she was already there, saving the seat next to her with her backpack.
She grinned when she saw me hesitating in the doorway. Patted the empty chair.
I sat down.
Her text came again that night.
wanna join the study group tomorrow? we’re reviewing notes for the upcoming test. free snacks.
Then day after
lunch? my treat.
Then
you’re really hard to get, you know that?
Each message arrived like a pulse, small but impossible to ignore. I began to anticipate the vibration of my phone, the little flare of light that came with her name. I told myself I didn’t care. I told myself it didn’t matter. But I never deleted a single one.
When our class decided to host an end-of-term hangout, a karaoke night at a cheap bar off campus, Aria volunteered me before I could refuse. I’d barely looked up from my notes when she chirped across the room, "Sarah’s coming too!" and everyone nodded as if my attendance were already fact.
That night, I stood outside the neon-lit doorway, my coat clutched tight, the cold cutting through my sleeves. Laughter spilled from inside, muffled through glass, her laughter, bright and wild and alive. I told myself I’d go in for ten minutes, smile once, leave unnoticed. I turned to leave instead.
"Sarah!"
Her voice.
I froze.
When I looked back, she was running toward me, hair flying loose, cheeks pink from the winter air. She grabbed my wrist before I could step away.
"I knew you’d come," she said, breathless, triumphant, as if my presence had been a promise she’d been certain I’d keep.
Before I could answer, she dragged me inside.
The heat hit first, humid, loud, bodies pressed close together. Colored lights strobed across cheap wallpaper, voices shouting over music.
Aria moved through it all like a current, people parting instinctively around her. She pulled me into a booth and sat so close our knees brushed.
Everyone’s attention was on her, as always, boys offering drinks, girls laughing at her jokes but she only looked at me. Asked me if I’d ever sung karaoke before. I said no. She grinned and told me that was about to change.
I didn’t sing. But she made me laugh, just once, when she accidentally spilled her drink and cursed under her breath, cheeks flushed from embarrassment. It startled me, the way the sound felt in my throat, unfamiliar and warm.
When the night ended, she insisted on walking me home.
"You don’t have to," I said.
"I know."
She smiled, that same small, unguarded smile I’d first seen in the auditorium, and started walking beside me anyway.
The streetlights painted her hair in gold. She talked the whole way, about nothing, professors, dorm food, the weird smell in the library. I barely said a word, but she didn’t seem to mind.
When we reached my building, she stopped and turned to me.
"See you tomorrow?"
It wasn’t a question. It was a certainty.
And I...
I nodded.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Her laugh kept replaying in my head, echoing through the dark like the afterglow of something bright. She sparkled, messy, radiant, untouchable and I realized, with a kind of slow-spreading horror, that I wanted it.
I wanted her.
Not the way people usually want. Not soft or innocent or simple.
I wanted to keep her.
From that day on, she dragged me everywhere.
To morning coffee runs, to bookstore aisles, to late-night walks through campus when the air smelled like rain and the world felt too big to ever be real.
And I let her.
Because for the first time in my life, someone wanted me around.
It felt good.
And I wasn’t ready to let that go.
...
For a year and a half, I was normal.
Or at least, I felt normal.
Because of her.
Before I even noticed the shift, my life had begun to orbit her. Days turned into weeks, weeks into a rhythm, and that rhythm was her.
We became inseparable.
She waited for me after lectures, even when I told her not to. She’d lean against the brick wall by the campus fountain, hair tied in a messy bun, eyes catching sunlight in the kind of way that made the world look unfairly soft. "You’re late," she’d tease, even though I never was.
Lunch together, always at the same café, the one that sold pastries she swore were better than therapy. Study sessions that started serious but ended with her singing under her breath, making up ridiculous mnemonics for exam material until I was laughing so hard I forgot to keep track of my own smile. Sleepovers in her dorm, where she’d braid my hair and talk until 3 a.m., the sound of her voice a steady heartbeat against the static in my head.
She filled every gap in my day without asking permission, and I let her.
Because for the first time, the emptiness didn’t echo back.
Aria introduced me to her family the following spring.
Her mother was warmth incarnate... soft-spoken, smelling faintly of lavender and cocoa butter. She hugged me the moment I stepped through the door, no hesitation, no performance. "Any friend of Aria’s is family," she said, her smile so easy, so disarming, that I almost forgot how to breathe.
The house was chaos. Music from the kitchen, laughter from somewhere down the hall. Her younger sister, Olivia, eyed me with mischief.
"So," she said, arms crossed, "are you two, like, dating or what?"
Aria burst into laughter. "God, Liv, no!" She turned to me, cheeks pink, still laughing. "Ignore her. She’s convinced everyone’s in love with me."
I didn’t laugh.
I didn’t know what this feeling was... this sharp, sudden ache that bloomed in my chest and stayed long after the laughter faded. Belonging, maybe. Or love. But it didn’t feel like the kind I’d seen in movies. It wasn’t tender or clean. It was feverish. Consuming.
I wanted to stay in that house forever. Wanted to keep her mother’s warmth, her sister’s teasing, the hum of something ordinary that felt unreachable until Aria handed it to me.
For a while, I was happy.
And it terrified me.
The shift came months later, unplanned, unexpected.
It was a Saturday morning with just us both when my parents showed up at my dorm unannounced. I hadn’t told them much about my life at school, there was no need to invite their scrutiny but there they were regardless, standing outside my door with that brittle mix of politeness and control that had always made me feel smaller.
When I opened the door, they noticed her almost immediately.
Lounging on my bed, scrolling through her phone, laughing at something she’d found online. Her laughter filled the sterile air of my dorm room, making it feel like a place that actually belonged to someone.
Then she looked up and smiled. "Oh! Hi!"
My stomach dropped.
My parents froze in the doorway.
Aria, oblivious, hopped off the bed and extended a hand like she was introducing herself at a party. "You must be Sarah’s parents! I’ve heard so much about you."
She hadn’t. I’d never mentioned them once.
My mother blinked, disoriented, then smiled, genuine and startled, like someone seeing sunlight after years underground. "It’s so nice to meet you, Aria. Sarah doesn’t usually bring friends around."
My father nodded, the stiffness in his posture melting just slightly. "We were starting to think she’d gone entirely off the grid," he said with a half-laugh. "It’s good to see she’s found someone."
Aria’s hand was still in my mother’s when she looked back at me, eyes shining, utterly unaware of the seismic shift she’d caused.
They looked at me differently after that.
Not like a case file or a problem to manage.
Aria made them see me as human.
Not broken. Not dangerous.
Just... a girl with a friend.
And in that moment, I realized something that both thrilled and terrified me,
Aria wasn’t just my friend.
She was my proof.
My alibi.
My shield.
The piece of me that made all the other pieces make sense.
And I decided, quietly, irrevocably,
I would never let her go..