“No, you weren’t,” I quietly said. “You were just young.”

“So young,” she whispered. “I was fifteen and everything had gone so fast. When he eventually tried to go past just making out, I refused. I was scared to go there.”

My fingers dug harder into the armrest of my chair. I had an idea what would come next and I wasn’t sure I could stomach hearing it from her mouth, but she continued.

“One night we were at a party together. He got me drunk.” She stopped, forcing herself to take a deep breath. “I can’t remember everything that happened that night. I know that I asked him to take me home and that he brought me to his apartment instead.”

Even though it wasn’t like me, the strain in her voice made me wish I had gotten my knuckles bloody earlier.

“When I woke up the next day, I felt dirty and ashamed and suddenly uncomfortable being around him. But I had no one to talk to about it since I hadn’t spoken to my friends in over three months and I was set on not telling my mom anything about him. In the end, I decided to meet his best friend, the one who had hosted the party where we had first met. He knew Kyle better than anyone else, so I was convinced he could tell me that he wasn’t like that, that it was okay, that it was a normal thing and I didn’t have to worry.

“What I hadn’t thought of was that Kyle was still going through my phone. He found my text asking his best friend to meet me and confronted me about it, telling me I wasn’t allowed to see him. That was how our first actual fight started. I told him I was sick of him being so controlling; he hit me. Then he locked me in his apartment.”

She was silent for a moment. I wanted to say something, but none of the words I knew seemed big enough to encompass the sheer dread that had overcome me. I suddenly felt so cold I was sure my breath ought to be forming clouds by now; the way Noelle was describing it—matter of factly and numb, like she was talking about a TV show and not her own past—made my insides freeze.

“I climbed out of his window and took a cab home,” she continued. “In the meantime, he had gone to his former best friend’s house and beat him up to the point that he had to go to the hospital.” By now, her fingers were clenched so tightly her knuckles were showing. “I told my mom about everything that happened the second I got home. I cried and she listened and then she hugged me and we went to the police. We got a restraining order against Kyle that prohibited him from coming anywhere near me, but I still didn’t feel safe. A week later, my mom sent me to Seven Hills under a new name.” She gulped. “I thought that was it. But then, earlier today . . . or I guess, yesterday now, I got a call from him. I had blocked his number, but he used a burner phone. He had found out my location because of the information from The Chitter Chatter that was spread in the news. He told me that he had a hit on my mom. I believed him because she didn’t pick up when I tried to call her and because of the talk I had with her a while ago.”