Before the College Application Deadline My Boyfriend Unplugged My Mouse Chapter 08

Before the College Application Deadline My Boyfriend Unplugged My Mouse Chapter 08

“Natalie, was this you? Why would you do this to me? I already apologized!”

I sent her one final message.

Me: [It wasn’t me.]

And it truly was not.

I later learned that another student who had been in the computer lab could not stand what had happened and posted the story on an anonymous forum.

The post was deleted soon afterward.

But it had stayed up long enough for everyone to learn the truth.

Before her first semester had even started, Hailey was already infamous in the incoming-students group

chat.

Someone asked her, [Did you really sabotage your best friend’s application over a guy?]

She frantically replied, [I didn’t do it on purpose.]

But the screenshots were right there.

The more she cried, the more irritated everyone became.

Nolan did not escape the ridicule either.

Someone wrote in the group chat, [Is this Mr. Boyfriend of the Year, who heard his girlfriend say she hadn’t submitted her application and still helped someone else first?]

Another person added, [Who would ever do a group project with him? He’d unplug your mouse at the worst possible moment.]

Nolan never responded to any of it.

He only sent me one message.

Nolan: [I wasn’t the one who posted it.]

I stared at those words, struck by how absurd they were.

Even now, he thought I cared who had posted the footage.

I turned off my phone and pulled my suitcase toward the security checkpoint.

By the time Hailey reached the airport, it was already too late.

She shouted my name from behind the barrier.

“Natalie!”

I stopped.

Her makeup was streaked from crying.

“I was wrong. I know I was wrong. When you come back, can we ever be the way we used to be?”

I looked at her.

The way we used to be?

After her parents divorced, she used to call me crying in the middle of the night, and I would stay on the

phone with her until three in the morning.

When she could not afford academic competition prep materials, I gave her copies of mine.

When she was afraid to take the bus alone, I went halfway across the city to take her home.

But I had never imagined that one day, she would treat all my kindness as leverage she was entitled to use.

I said softly, “Hailey, people don’t drift apart all at once.”

“It happens after one person has been pushed away again and again.”