Freshman Just Wanted Dinner — Until Three Bullies Made a Mistake That Cost Them Everything
Chapter 9
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She thought about the girl who had walked in tonight: brown hair, backpack listing to the right, gray hoodie, reading a court case on her phone while she ate soup. She thought about the way that girl had stopped in front of this letter, the way she had looked at it, like it meant something she could not quite name.Dot had worked in this diner since 1989. She had seen thousands of people walk through that door. She knew how people looked at things they recognized; she knew what recognition looked like when people did not know they were recognizing something.And she thought about the last thing Claire had said before she walked out:Don't let anyone take that letter down.Dot breathed out slowly. She turned off the register light. The room went dark. In the darkness, she was quiet for a long moment."She's here, Eleanor," she said.She said it to the dark room, to the framed letter, to thirty-seven years of Fridays and Saturdays and Sunday mornings and holidays and slow Tuesdays. She said it the way you say something to someone you miss: quietly, without expecting an answer, but meaning every word.She picked up her coat and her keys. She walked to the back. She did not turn around.What Dot did not know that night was what had already been set in motion. While Claire walked the twelve blocks back to campus with her ruined notebook in her bag and her coffee cup half empty in her mind, already turning over the events of the evening, Marcus Reed was sitting in the passenger seat of Tyler's car with his phone in his hand.He had posted the photo to the Hartwell student forum at 9:16. By 10:00, it had forty-three reactions; most of them were laughing emojis. The caption read:"Scholarship grind culture really hits different when you're studying in the middle of a diner lol." He had tagged it with the Hartwell student page and added a second line:"Some people just don't know where they belong." And he had tagged the sticker on Claire's laptop—the Eleanor Matthews Scholar sticker.In the comments, someone had written,"Isn't that the Matthews scholarship? Like she's literally being bankrolled to be there." Someone else had replied,"These legacy charity cases always act like they earned it."Tyler had not commented, but Tyler had seen the comments. And Tyler had done what Tyler always did when he saw an opportunity: he had thought about it carefully, methodically, the way someone thinks who has done something like this before. Because Tyler Weston had done something like this before—three times in the last eighteen months, to be precise. But no one at Hartwell had connected those three times yet; no one had thought to look.