Not shocking.
It was the same thing with Aria. Because of the way I’d already behaved, it made this not that far of a stretch.
Failing with Aria, I called Hannah, getting an answer immediately after the first ring. “Tristan.”
“Hannah, I swear to god—”
“Who do you think I am?” she snapped. “I know you didn’t do this. Not with the way you feel about Aria. You know who Idothink did it though?”
My hands strangled the steering wheel. “Lucky.”
“That must have been what he was up to last night,” Hannah said. “He told me that he had to use the bathroom not long after you went outside. He must have followed you, heard you guys talking and decided to take matters into his own hands. Can you come over? I’ve been looking into him all morning.”
“I’m already halfway there,” I replied.
When I got to Hannah’s house, she came out instead of inviting me in. She hopped into the passenger’s side of my car and looked at me sadly, then her eyes popped out. “My god! What happened to your face?”
“Taylor thought I did this,” I replied.
Hannah’s sad expression came back. “My parents have seen the post and are pretty livid too. Until we have definitive proof that it wasn’t you, I should probably keep you out of there.”
“Great,” I said, irritated. “At least Taylor knows it wasn’t me now. He’s working on finding out directly from the page who sent the picture and then is going to get, at least the picture taken down, but he’s hoping for the whole page.”
With nowhere to go in particular, and not feeling confident that any place we went would be safe, I just started driving around the city while Hannah gave me the rundown of what she’d found.
“Apparently, Lucky and Aria are best friends. They went to high school together before she transferred, and even work together. But then a couple of weeks ago, he started sharing really creepy, ‘nice guy’ posts and stuff about being friendzoned. I think he confessed to her and she turned him down. He even talks about guys being able to be horrible and still get the girl while guys like him can’t get a leg up. She must have mentioned you at some point.”
“When did you two start talking?” I asked.
She let out a little growl. “Yeah, that’s the worst part. Lucky added me as a friend a long time ago, back when it was exciting to just have as many friends as possible, but only reached out to meafteryou and Aria reconnected. I’m not quiet about our friendship. If she mentioned to him that you two had run into each other and he realized you were my friend, it’s highly likely that that’s theonlyreason he reached out to me. To keep an eye on you, or try and ruin your reputation or what, I don’t know. When I brought up Sadie Hawkins, he jumped all over it. I’m certain his plan was to do this to you to get Aria to leave you alone and go with him.”
“If he cared about her at all, how could he ever let a picture of her be on a page like that?” Rage boiled up in my body and I wanted to get my hands around that guy’s neck more than I could say. My car phone rang, and I slammed the button to answer so hard, my finger stung. “Hello?”
“The page is gone,” Taylor said. “Once I mentioned a class action lawsuit of all the people whose pictures they uploaded, they were quick to oblige.”
“Did you get any info about whoactuallysent the picture?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he replied. “The handle was LuckyLuck121090.”
Hannah held up the social media page she was looking at, and the handle was the same. “There’s our proof.”
“Thanks Taylor,” I said.
“Yeah. I’m sorry again,” he responded, then just hung up without waiting for a response.
“He’s not having a good day,” Hannah said.
“No, but I’ll deal with that later. For now, I need to show this to Aria. Will you come with me?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “Do you have her address?”
I sighed. “No, and I’m blocked so I can’t call her.”
“That’s okay. I have it,” Hannah said.
I looked over at her. “How do you have it?”
She gave me a nervous glance, but then took a deep breath. “Back when Arden and I were still talking, we joined a location group so we could see each other. I still have hers, and I can see she’s not a home. With all this shit, I’m guessing she’s at Aria’s.”