He Deserved It

Lia’s phone buzzed itself off the nightstand at 6:52 a.m.

It hit the carpet face-down and kept going, rattling against the floor like something trapped. She lay still and listened to it, the way you listen to a smoke alarm and hope it’s the neighbor’s.

The house was already loud. East Arroyo didn’t do quiet mornings, and neither did a family of seven with one working bathroom. Somebody was pounding on that bathroom door. Somebody else was yelling that she’d been in line first. Her dad’s spatula clanged against a pan, and her mom’s teleserye played from the kitchen, a woman sobbing in Tagalog about a betrayal at a wedding.

Normal. All of it normal.

For ten seconds, Lia let herself pretend it was just another Monday. No tests. No drama. No Jordan.

The phone buzzed again.

She leaned over the edge of the bed and fished it off the floor.

47 notifications. Group chat Sol Girls: 19 new. Snap: 6 mentions. Texts from Nora, Shanti, Mia, and a number she didn’t know.

The previews stacked on top of each other like they were shoving to get to her first.

yo girl what is this??

check AM Snap you’re in it

how did this get to AM???

Lia… they’re tagging somebody in the comments

Her chest went tight before her thumb even moved.

She opened Snapchat.

It was a screen recording of someone’s story from Friday’s pep rally at Rio Del Sol, the East Arroyo public high school known for its football team, its ag kids, and a gym that smelled like popcorn and floor wax. Cheerleaders mid-stunt, the drumline going, the camera swinging across the bleachers like whoever held it was dancing too. Then a zoom. Slow. Deliberate. Someone had found something better than the stunt.

Two people near the back of the bleachers. A girl in a faded green hoodie. A boy’s hand on her waist. A kiss that was easy and unhurried, like they’d done it a hundred times. Because they had.

Her. And Jordan.

She hadn’t known anyone was filming. She’d known nobody was looking. Those weren’t the same thing, it turned out.

At Rio Del Sol, nobody would have blinked. Everyone there knew she and Jordan were together; a kiss in the bleachers was old news in those hallways. But someone had reposted the clip to AM Snap, Arroyo Mesa High’s page, and now it was on that school’s threads: the Snap group, the gossip page, every story that shared it.

And somewhere at Arroyo Mesa was a girl who didn’t know about Lia.

Jordan had never given her a name. But he’d let one piece of the outline slip: one of the others went to Arroyo Mesa. Lia had always pictured her as a blur in a hallway she’d never walked down. By third period, the blur would have the video. Maybe she already did.

Lia had kept his secret because he asked her to. Now it was out, and nothing that got onto Arroyo Mesa’s threads ever went back in. Somebody was going to pay for this. She just didn’t know yet who.

She scrolled.

third one this semester? damn

why does he always pick the funny ones lmao

is she the side or the main I need a diagram

Under that, someone had made the diagram.

Lia stared at it. She knew the template — a flowchart with arrows and clip-art hearts, the kind she’d built a hundred times on her meme account for strangers’ breakups. Ten thousand followers laughed at those. She was good at it.

Somebody had put her face in the center box.

The room tilted, slow, like a boat taking a wave.

She dropped the phone on the bed and made it to the bathroom only because her sister had just walked out of it.

She threw up until there was nothing left, then kept going for a while out of spite.

Afterward she lay on the bath mat with her cheek on the cold tile and her hoodie sleeves bunched at her elbows. The grout smelled like her mom’s lemon cleaner. A Dora toothbrush watched her from the counter.

A knock. “Ate? Are you dying? Because if you’re dying, can you do it after I do my eyeliner?”

“I’m giving birth,” Lia said into the tile. “It’s twins. They’re both 6 foot nine and bite.”

A pause. Then, quieter, a different voice entirely: “Ate… you’re on my For You page.”

Lia closed her eyes.

“Don’t show Mom.”

“I’m not gonna show Mom.” Another pause. “Is that the boy from—”

“Don’t show Mom,” Lia said again, and her sister’s footsteps went away down the hall, which was somehow worse than if she’d stayed.

⋆―――⋆

When she could stand, she went back to her room, sat on the edge of the bed, and watched the clip again.

Not because she wanted to. Because she saw the world in pictures — it was the one thing she’d always been good at — and something in this picture sat wrong.

She paused it. Zoomed. Studied it like a composition, the way her art instructor had taught her: Where does the eye go? What is the light doing? What is the artist hiding?

Jordan’s hand on her waist looked easy. Natural. The rest of him didn’t. He’d picked the back corner, under the light that had been burned out since September. His shoulders were angled toward the wall, his face tucked into her hair, turned away from the bleachers and the phones and the whole bright gym.

Like he’d known exactly where the cameras weren’t. He’d just missed one.

He had never once kissed her anywhere with good lighting. She’d always known why. She’d just never had to watch it.

She turned the phone face-down.

The green hoodie hung over her desk chair, where it had been since Friday. He’d left it in her car. She’d washed it once and still hadn’t given it back.

She picked it up and turned it inside out, the way she did with anything she was about to sketch, to see how it was put together.

In the side seam, stitched in small neat thread, were three letters: S.W.P.

She’d noticed them once before and decided they were a brand. She’d known about the other girls from the start, but only as an outline, with no names and no faces.

They weren’t a brand. They were somebody.

Knowing had been easy while they were shapes. Three neat letters made one of them real.

She folded the hoodie very carefully and laid it back on the chair, as if it might wake up.

⋆―――⋆

She’d met Jordan the summer before junior year, at a kickback off East 24th, when she’d made him laugh at a boy moonwalking badly on a patio. After that he kept turning up at AMVC — Arroyo Mesa Valley College, the commuter college downtown where Rio Del Sol kids could take early college classes. She was there for art. He claimed to be taking psych. She was never sure he actually went.

He’d never lied to her about the other girls. That was the thing. Early on, walking somewhere, he’d told her he wasn’t good at clean lines. There’s other people. Not like this. But they exist.

So I’m one of many, she’d said.

You’re the only one who sees it all. That counts for something, right?

She’d let it count. He gave her the outline and kept everything inside it — no names, no faces, no number — and she’d told herself that being the girl who knew made her different from the girls who didn’t. She’d let him keep the second phone he always left face-down on her dashboard — the one he said was for his uncle’s business — and she’d never asked what kind of business an uncle runs at midnight.

Now there was a diagram.

“Anak.”

Her mom stood in the doorway in her robe, coffee in one hand, already frowning. She had always been able to read Lia’s face from across a room, which was inconvenient for a girl who’d built a whole personality on not being read.

“You’re not dressed.”

“Cramps,” Lia said. “The bad ones. Like a demon is redecorating.”

Her mom crossed the room and pressed the back of her hand to Lia’s forehead, which did nothing for cramps and everything for Lia’s throat. She held it there a second too long.

“You look pale.”

“Ma. I’m always this color on Mondays.”

Her mom didn’t laugh, but the corner of her mouth moved. “Stay home. I’ll call the school.” She took her hand back. “There’s garlic rice. Eat something before you take medicine.”

At the door she stopped and looked back. Lia held her face very still.

“You tell me,” her mom said. “When you want to. Okay?”

“Okay.”

The door closed. Lia breathed out for what felt like the first time since 6:52.

His sketch of her was in the desk drawer. It had fallen off the wall last week, and she hadn’t put it back up. Her, in his style: eyes half-lidded, jaw sharper than hers really was, the curve of her neck exaggerated the way he always did it.

She held it for a minute.

Then she crumpled it, tight, and shoved it into the drawer with the broken pencils and the dead erasers.

She didn’t throw it away. She wasn’t ready to let it go all the way, and she hated that.

Her phone buzzed against the sheets.

She almost didn’t look. She looked.

Jordan: I never wanted to hurt you.

That was all. No apology. No explanation. No who posted this, no are you okay, not even a lie she could be properly mad at.

She typed then why did you and deleted it.

She typed whose initials are and deleted it.

She typed lol and deleted that one fastest.

She didn’t reply.

She deleted Snapchat. Logged out of Instagram. Turned the phone off — all the way off, the long press, the slide — and pushed it under the bed like something that might bite.

Down the hall, her sisters were fighting over a hair straightener. Her dad sang along to the radio, badly. The house kept going, loud and warm, exactly like every other Monday, as if nothing had happened.

Lia pulled the blanket over her head and curled into the dark.

The ache in her chest didn’t go away. But it settled. Quiet. Honest.

Her last thought before sleep found her was simple.

He gave me honesty. And I used it to lie to myself.