He found Reed after practice one evening. The locker room mostly cleared out. Just the two of them in the hum of a ceiling fan overhead. “I need you to do something with that video,” Dalton said. “The one from the diner.” “What about it?” “Cut the part where she picks the napkin up. Just keep the beginning where she’s giving me attitude before I touch anything.”
Reed frowned slightly, phone still in his hand, thumb hovering. “Why?” “Because I’m filing a complaint,” Dalton said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “She’s been telling people I’m harassing her. Some girl in my econ class heard her talking about it. I need to get ahead of this before it turns into something.”
This wasn’t quite true either. Nobody had heard Josie say any such thing because Josie hadn’t said anything at all to anyone about the boys’ behavior. But Dalton had somewhere over the past three weeks convinced himself of a version of events where he was the one being wronged, quietly rewriting the story in his own head each time he told it until the edited version felt truer to him than what had actually happened.
Reed, who considered himself Dalton’s friend more than he considered himself an honest person, agreed to help. It took him about twenty minutes at his desk that night scrubbing back and forth through the footage, cutting before the napkin ever hit the floor. Cutting before Josie’s calm, steady response. What remained was ten seconds. Josie’s voice sharp out of context. No beginning, no explanation for why it wasn’t the truth. But it looked enough like the truth to convince someone who hadn’t been there.
He sent it to Dalton with a single word. Done. Nolan found out about the edited video two days later when Dalton showed it to him proudly in the dining hall, holding his phone across the table like he was sharing good news. “Watch this,” Dalton said. “This is going straight to student affairs if she keeps running her mouth about me.”
Nolan watched the clip. Something twisted in his stomach, slow and cold. “That’s not what happened,” he said quietly. “What are you talking about? That’s exactly what happened. She was on camera being rude to me.” “You’re not showing the part where you dropped her dad’s napkin on the floor,” Nolan said. “You cut that out.”
Dalton’s smile faltered for half a second before returning harder now. Colder. “It doesn’t matter what happened before,” he said. “What matters is what people see, and what people are going to see is her losing it at me for no reason.” “That feels wrong, man.” “You’re feeling sorry for her now?” Dalton asked, an edge creeping into his voice. “She’s just some scholarship kid who thinks she’s better than everybody because her daddy was a cop or whatever. Get over it.”
Nolan didn’t say anything else. He picked at his food, appetite gone, and thought again about his grandmother’s letters, sitting unopened in his closet back home, tied with a faded ribbon he still hadn’t found the courage to untie. He thought about how easy it would be to say something right now at this table in this moment, and how much easier it was to say nothing at all, to let the silence do the deciding for him.