Page 30 of What's Left of Us

I’m quiet, not wanting to point out how uncomfortable her mother looked when she left for work this morning. Mrs. DeMatteo frowned at the borrowed clothes I took from her daughter’s closet before closing the door behind her, which Millie didn’t seem to think twice about before telling me she was going to drive us into town to go shopping since I refused to leave the house the first two days after I showed up.

“Anyway,” Millie goes on, not realizing that I’m barely tuning into her rants. “You’re sort of lucky. My parents are always on my case about something. Yours let you go do whatever you want. That’s most twenty-one-year-old’s dream.”

Being iced out by their family? I highly doubt that. “It doesn’t feel very freeing,” I mumble, walking over to the window when Millie picks up her cell and starts texting someone. I stare out onto the street, my brows pinching, when I see a black car parked on the far side of the road with something sticking out of the rolled-down passenger window.

“Millie?” I ask, a heavy feeling settling into my stomach.

She doesn’t reply. When I look over, I see her smiling over whatever is on her screen. I bet she’s talking to the boy she met in one of her college classes. She’s told me his name, but I can’t remember it. It’ll be somebody different in a month if it’s anything like the boys she had flings with in high school.

Sighing, I turn back to the window and watch the vehicle sit there for ten more minutes before eventually pulling away. The feeling nipping at my stomach never goes away as I turn away from the window and watch my friend’s fingers fly across her keyboard with a big grin on her face.

“You would love college,” she says absentmindedly, her eyes never lifting from her phone. “You always liked the academic stuff, and the girls I’ve met there are actually pretty cool.”

I can’t help but feel like I’m being replaced now that she’s making other friends. She’s mentioned some of the girls who’ve talked her into pledging at one of the sororities at NYU, but I didn’t think she’d gotten close to any of them.

“Sam is telling me about a party happening tonight,” she says. “Maybe I can take you now that you’re off your dad’s leash.”

Millie has never filtered her words before, so I’m not surprised she’s being so blunt now. But a leash? “I’m not a dog.”

All she says is, “Duh.”

It’s sometime later when she tosses her phone onto the bed, done talking to her new best friends about college stuff that I’ll never understand. “Come on, you can help me wash this stuff out. My scalp is starting to itch.”

I follow her into the bathroom and wait until she adjusts the water to the temperature she wants before she dunks her head under the faucet.

As I wash out the neon pink, she says, “Seriously, though. You should do something rebellious now that you’re free. Blue would be a wild color on you.”

I blanch. “I think I’m good on rebellion for a while,” I say over the water, nose wrinkling from the ammonia radiating from her head.

“Bitch, please,” she says over the running water. “Sleeping with someone is hardly the end of the world. Which I’m totally proud of you for doing, by the way. You pulled a WWMD—what would Millie do. I’m honored. But they’ll get over it eventually. It’s not like you have to walk around with a scarlet A on your chest.”

Millie never understood how the Del Rossi family worked. Half of the time, I didn’t either. While she was sneaking out to parties and making out with boys, I was stuck at charity events, forced to mingle with high society. I wasn’t allowed to have regular birthday parties with friends but dinner parties with guests who loosely knew Nikolas and Leani, celebrating with people I barely even knew. Some had kids, but most were younger than me or as uninterested in being there as I was. And I never got to have cake or choose which dessert I wanted because Leani always catered from the nicest restaurants she could find, choosing options that no teenager wanted to eat.

I never told Millie about my arranged engagement to Luca Carbone because I didn’t want to talk about it. And, frankly, I don’t think she would have cared. As far as she knew, I snuck out and slept with a random cop at a bar just because that’s what she would do.

If she only knew how much deeper it was.

“I don’t want to dye my hair blue,” I finally tell her, passing her a towel once we’re finished and not going into details.

Looking at myself in the mirror, I frown and wonder what will happen to my hair now that I’m no longer there. Should I cut it? Let it grow? My father loved my long hair because my mother always put it into pretty braids or curls. He never let me get it trimmed past my shoulders.

Millie is right.

I can do what I want now.

Change things.

Cut my hair. Dye it. Experiment with clothes and new makeup. Who’s going to stop me?

My friend bumps me out of the way of the mirror to style her hair. “Give me twenty minutes to get ready, and we can go out to lunch. There’s no food here right now.”

I walk back into the bedroom, glancing out the window to see the same black vehicle has returned. An eerie feeling makes the hair on my arms stand on end.

When Millie walks out of the bathroom thirty minutes later, there’s a frown on her face as she lowers her phone.

“What?” I ask, sitting on the edge of her bed.

“Er…” She looks away, scratching the side of her neck. “My mother said I need to help you pack your things.”

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