“I wanted to talk to you sooner, to tell you how awful I feel about what happened to you, but I didn’t know how,” Iris says. “The fact that it happened when you were going home after my party . . . I think about it all the time.”

A tug of sympathy pulls at my chest. “It’s not your fault,” I say sincerely. She doesn’t seem sure of whether or not she should accept my words. I jerk my chin in the direction of her sketchbook. “What are you drawing?”

The page is filled with a collection of different pairs of eyes, but they don’t seem like random, disconnected doodles. All of them are trained straight forward, intense.

“Oh.” Pink floods her cheeks. “It’s kind of dark.”

“Now I’m even more interested,” I say.

“Sometimes I draw things based on emotions. This one is based on guilt.” Iris brushes away some stray eraser shavings with her fingers. “I guess it’s more about what you might see when you’re guilty. Or what you think you see.”

I stare at the drawing for a few beats longer, until it really does begin to feel like judgmental eyes are watching my every move. “Damn. You’re very talented.”

“Thanks.”

“There was another drawing of yours I saw on Instagram,” I say. “It had these two girls, their eyes looked a bit like this.”

An unreadable emotion darts across her features. “Allie, that was a picture of you.”

My limbs go still. “What?”

Iris turns the pen around in her hands, looking nervous. “Well, it was you and Zoe. I drew it after the party.”

“Why?”

She opens her mouth to say something then closes it quickly as someone passes by us, heading into the school. I recall the caption of the picture: The End of an Era. The breeze flutters the pages of her sketchbook and raises the hairs on the back of my neck.

When we’re alone again, she ducks her head, leaning closer. “Because your friendship definitely ended that night. You spent most of the party screaming at each other.”

“Was I drunk?” I ask.

“No,” she says immediately. “Zoe was the drunk one. I don’t know what you were fighting about, but it seemed pretty serious. That’s why I drew the picture. Both of your emotions were so heightened, I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

It’s similar to what Mason already told me, but it isn’t the whole story. The incident with Jacob happened many months prior to all of this, yet the email draft was recent, shortly before the party. What was the tipping point that finally pushed us over the edge?

“Were we always like that before?”

She shakes her head solemnly. “I’d never seen anything that bad. It was on another level.”