I’m in my room researching the private equity fund that owns xomegan.com. I finally went to debate practice, though a lot of good it did. Everyone else had been emailed the motion in advance except me. Mr. Connelly said he must have accidentally left me off the email chain. Oops.
I can hear Claire yelling on the phone in her room. Who’s she talking to? I bookmark the page I’m on. It’s the website of Phoenix Capital. I’ve managed to narrow it down to this private equity real estate fund, which strangely enough, is not headquartered here in the US but in Hong Kong.
“I just want to know where you were this week! Why won’t you tell me?” Claire shouts.
I take off my headphones and listen to her conversation.
“If we’re going to be together, we have to be honest with each other,” Claire says. “I need to be able to trust you!” Her voice cracks on the last words.
After they hang up, I walk out of my room and knock gently on hers.
“Hey . . . you okay?” I ask.
Claire walks over and opens the door for me. Her nose is red, and she’s holding a tissue in her hand.
“Just typical boy stuff,” she says, blowing into the tissue.
I sit down on her bed as Claire applies lotion to her tear-stained puffy eyes and tells me what happened with Jay.
“It bugs me so much that he won’t tell me where he went,” she says. Her eyes slide over to a picture of her parents on her bureau. “Maybe because I have trust issues . . .”
“No, it’s not you.” I shake my head. I think back to Jay’s bedroom, the smug look on his face when we walked in on him having sex. “You’re smart to not trust him,” I tell Claire.
She shifts her eyes from her parents’ picture to me and scrutinizes my face. “What do you mean?” she asks. Claire’s instincts hone in on me. “What do you know?”
“Nothing,” I mutter. Quickly, I get up from her bed.
Claire follows me to my room. “Tell me!”
“Nothing!” I insist. But Claire won’t stop pressing me. She corners me in my room, and I buckle under the pressure of her intense eyes. The lotion in her hand falls onto the floor when I tell her what happened in his bedroom that day.
“He asked you guys to join in?” Claire asks. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? When you realized it was him?”
Claire gets up and walks back to her room, slamming the door.
“I’m sorry, Claire,” I say through the door. “I’ve just been going through a lot. I was going to tell you!”
“No, you weren’t! You were going to keep this a secret from me. I thought you were my friend!” she yells from the other side of the door.