Paige Mercer

# Chapter 1: The Veneer of Victory

## Part 1: The Last Quiet Minute

The light does this thing every September that it doesn't do the rest of the year — goes thick and gold around eight in the morning, like somebody dipped the whole town in it before anyone woke up to complain. Franklin's always been photogenic. Brick storefronts, wrought-iron balconies, a courthouse square that looks staged even when nobody's filming anything for once. But in September the light gets almost unfair about it, and some mornings I catch myself thinking the sun is just one more thing around here that knows exactly how to perform.

I drive with my window cracked an inch, because the vents in my Jeep still carry a ghost of vanilla body spray that never fully airs out, and depending on the day, that smell alone can turn my stomach if I'm not careful. Today I keep my eyes forward. The road that curves in past downtown is already dressed for tonight — porch flags, a bedsheet spray-painted BEAT SUMMIT strung between two columns on a wraparound porch two doors down from the Whitfields', navy-and-silver ribbon wound around every mailbox on the block like the whole street got engaged to Franklin Ridge football. Varsity plays Summit under the lights at Knight Stadium tonight. Pep rally's last period. Between now and then, I have exactly one job, which is to be the version of me that makes six hundred people scream on command.

I can do that part standing on my head. Has been muscle memory since I was fourteen. It's the part after that I still haven't figured out.

The radio's on low, some new country single about a tailgate and a girl in her daddy's old flannel, and the DJ keeps cutting in every few songs to hype tonight's game like Franklin's ever going to be anywhere else on a Friday in September. I don't turn it up. Don't turn it off either. It's just noise, something to keep the car from getting too quiet, because quiet is where the other stuff lives, and I have gotten very, very good at not letting it live anywhere close to me.

Senior lot's already in full Friday mode by the time I pull in — somebody's got a speaker going out of a truck bed two rows over, a cluster of girls in cable-knit sweaters and fresh eyeblack camped on a tailgate like today's the actual game, half the football team wandering around in jerseys they're technically not allowed to wear until third period. It smells like Axe and Monster Energy and somebody's strawberry vape, and over all of it, that thick gold light, turning every dented tailgate and beat-up Civic into something that looks staged for a commercial. Nobody here needs a filter. Franklin does it for free.

I pull into my spot — third row, under the one crepe myrtle that hasn't given up its leaves yet — put the Jeep in park, and don't get out.

Six minutes, usually. Sometimes eight. Long enough that if anybody asked, I'd say I was checking my phone. Nobody's ever asked.

I run through the day the way Coach taught us to run a routine before we compete — see it before you do it. Pep rally's a thirty-minute abbreviated schedule, gym doors at 1:50. Farris needs the run-of-show by ten or he'll corner me at lunch, all clipboard and cologne, acting like the fate of the entire assembly rests on me personally, which — fine, it kind of does. Student council's got the banner. Did Reagan finish the banner. I texted her twice last night and got back one ominous thumbs-up. Cheer's debuting the new stunt tonight, the one where I'm on top and Harper's my back spot, which means if I go down, I go down on Harper's watch, and Harper has never once let anyone go down on her watch, and I am not about to be the first.

Four years. Four years of stunts and standing on people's hands eight feet off the ground, and I have never once—

My phone buzzes in the cupholder. Life360, chipper as ever: *Mom has arrived at work.* Second buzz, Instagram: *Magnolia & Vine tagged you in a story.* I don't open it. I already know what it is — Saturday's shoot, me in cream-colored knit under lights that made my skin look like it was cut from the same fabric, because apparently that's a thing my skin does now, professionally, for three boutiques and counting. A third buzz — the football team's hype account, a countdown graphic: **12 HOURS TO KICKOFF**, some sophomore's face pressed way too close to the camera.

This is what people get of me from the outside. Face of a boutique nobody my age can actually afford. A council president who answers every text inside the hour. A cheer captain who's never once fallen. Somebody's daughter, printed out and laminated and nailed to a hallway wall like a museum exhibit.

*It's giving girl who has her whole life together,* I think, and almost laugh, because if that isn't the whole joke.

And then, because my brain's been doing this more and more the last couple weeks, a date surfaces behind my eyes without asking permission first — not even a full thought, just a shape. A porch light left on too long. The particular way bass sounds through a closed door, muffled and underwater. Cold tile under—

My pulse does something ugly and fast, high up in my throat, and for one whole second the parking lot goes distant and tinny, like I'm hearing it from underwater instead of ten feet away.

*No. Not here. Not in the parking lot.*

I put my palm flat against the steering wheel and press until the leather creaks, and I count, because Coach taught us that too, for the girls who psych themselves out before Regionals. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. It works about as well on this as it does on competition nerves — which is to say, not completely, but enough to get me out of the car eventually, which is really all I'm asking of it today.

I haven't let myself actually count the days. Not on purpose. But some traitor part of my brain has been keeping the tally anyway, ahead of me, without my permission, the way it's been doing most things lately. A handful of days. Maybe fewer. Close enough that I can feel it coming the way you feel weather change in your knees, if your knees were somewhere behind your sternum instead.

I flip the visor down and check the mirror, out of habit more than need, because I already know what's there. Hair, fine. Skin, fine. And the smile — the specific one, the one Coach says can light up a gym from half-court — already sitting there, waiting, like it stopped being a thing I do a while ago and started just being a thing I am.

*Okay,* I tell the mirror. *Six minutes is up.*

Someone raps two knuckles against my window hard enough that I nearly hit the horn.

**Harper: "Girl! Were you seriously about to sit through first bell in the parking lot? Farris is already losing his whole mind over the banner situation, and I need you to be a full, functioning human in the next ten minutes — no offense."**

I laugh, easy and automatic, the real thing wrapped so tight around the practiced thing that most days even I can't find the seam. I grab my bag off the passenger seat.

**Paige: "Define 'banner situation.'"**

**Harper: "Honestly? It's giving disaster. Reagan's one wrong staple gun away from crashing out, Tucker's 'helping,' which means he's actively making it worse, and apparently Coach wants us on the field before homeroom for a run-through nobody told me about until eight minutes ago."**

**Paige: "Nobody told me either."**

**Harper: "No cap, of course not — you're never allowed to know things, you're too busy being perfect at everything else."**

She says it fond, not sharp — Harper's never once said anything to me that wasn't fond, not in nine years — and I shove the door open anyway, and the whole gold, loud, Axe-scented morning rushes in at once. Bass from the truck bed. Somebody's dog barking two rows over. A hundred conversations happening at exactly the same volume as mine.

*Just get through today,* I tell myself, one more time, like repetition's ever made anything more true. *You've gotten through three hundred and sixty of these. You can get through today.*

**Paige: "Okay. Show me the disaster."**

I sling my bag over my shoulder, hit the lock button without looking back at the Jeep, and follow Harper into the gold.

# Chapter 1: The Veneer of Victory

## Part 2: Steps Before the Bell

The walk from the senior lot to the front doors takes about ninety seconds if you don't stop to talk to anyone, which never actually happens, because stopping to talk to people is basically my whole personality now, whether I planned on it being that or not.

We're not even halfway up the front steps before I spot Tess parked on the low brick wall by the flagpole, arms crossed over her Ridge hoodie, staring at her phone like it personally wronged her. Colt's a few feet off, one hand jammed in his letterman's pocket, scrolling his own phone with the specific, deliberate stillness of somebody working very hard to look like he's not thinking about anything at all.

*That's new,* I think, and then immediately correct myself, because it isn't new, not really — it's just the quiet version instead of the loud one. Tess and Colt fighting is a known weather pattern by now. Tess and Colt not-fighting, sitting six feet apart in total silence like two people who used up every word they had at 1 a.m. — that's the version that actually worries me a little.

**Harper: "Okay, what's the vibe here."**

Tess looks up, and her whole face does that thing where it tries to smooth itself out on purpose, which is somehow more obvious than if she hadn't tried at all.

**Tess: "There's no vibe. I'm so normal about it, actually."**

**Harper: "Cool, love that for you."**

**Tess: "We're just — it's a whole thing. I'll tell you at lunch."**

She says it flat, final, the specific tone that means *drop it now, unpack it later*, and I let it drop, because pushing Tess before she's ready just makes her dig in harder, and also because some genuinely petty, exhausted part of me doesn't have it in me this morning to hold anyone else's whole thing before eight-fifteen. I hate that thought as soon as I have it. I file it away anyway, next to all the others I'm not looking at right now.

**Paige: "Lunch. Got it. You good otherwise?"**

**Tess: "I'm great,"** she says again, which isn't an answer so much as a wall with paint on it, and I let her have it.

Colt glances up long enough to give me and Harper a single nod — not unfriendly, just economical, a guy conserving words he clearly doesn't have many of this morning — and goes back to his phone.

I'm still working out whether to actually sit down next to Tess or just let her have the space when I hear it: that specific laugh, big and easy and pitched just loud enough to travel, the one that means Luke Whitfield has entered a hallway. He's coming up the walk with Brody Kessler beside him, both of them still in yesterday's practice shirts, backpack slung over one shoulder like it weighs nothing, grinning the exact grin he's been wearing since approximately the third grade — the one that makes teachers forgive late homework and makes freshman girls forget how to form sentences.

*There he is.* Some low, automatic, completely unremarkable part of my brain just — settles, a little, the way it's settled every single morning I've seen that grin for as long as I can remember. Luke's not a person I have to perform for. He's just there, the way the courthouse square is there, the way Sunday dinners used to be there before Grant and Jackson moved out — something that was already part of the landscape before I ever had an opinion about it. Our dads coached rec league together when we were both still losing teeth. I have actual memories of him cannonballing off his family's dock at Center Hill that are older than most of my memories of anything. He's the reason I know how to talk to boys without getting weird about it, honestly, because you can't get weird about someone you've watched eat a whole stick of butter on a dare.

**Luke: "There she is. Madam President."**

**Paige: "Captain."**

**Luke: "You look like you haven't eaten today."**

**Paige: "It's 8:04."**

**Luke: "That's not a no."**

I roll my eyes, but I'm smiling doing it, because this is just how Luke says good morning — clocking something small, saying it out loud like it's a joke, except it's usually right. I didn't eat. I never do before an early practice morning, and I don't remember telling him that, and I also don't spend any real time wondering how he knows, because he's just — like that. Pays attention. Always has. It's honestly one of the more restful things about him.

**Brody: "Y'all ready to lose your minds at this pep rally or what."**

**Harper: "Depends if Reagan finishes the banner without having a full nervous breakdown first."**

**Luke: "Speaking of."** He looks at me properly now, easy grin dialing down into something almost businesslike, which is its own kind of familiar — Luke in council-meeting mode, Luke who actually reads the agenda before I send it. **"What time do you need us in the gym? Coach wants to know if we're doing the walkout with the band or just filing in."**

**Paige: "Walkout. Farris finally signed off on the tunnel entrance, so you'll come in through the side doors by the locker room, band picks up the second they open. I need you lined up by 1:45, which means practice has to wrap by 1:30, which means—"**

**Luke: "Which means you're about to text Coach Dell yourself instead of trusting me to do it."**

**Paige: "I mean. Yeah."**

**Luke: "Smart. I wouldn't trust me either."**

He says it easy, laughing at himself, and Brody laughs too, and for a second it's just — nice. Uncomplicated. The kind of thirty-second exchange that keeps this whole enormous machine of a school running on time, two people who happen to be good at the same specific thing doing it together without either of us having to explain ourselves first.

*This part I don't have to think about,* I realize, filing the whole interaction away as one more thing today that's actually, blessedly, easy. *This part just works.*

Behind us, Tess still hasn't moved off the wall, and Colt still hasn't said a single word, and the first bell is four minutes out, and somewhere inside the building Reagan is presumably having some kind of banner-related breakdown that's about to become my problem whether I'm ready for it or not.

**Harper: "Okay, as much as I love everyone — we gotta go deal with Reagan before Farris does it for us."**

# Chapter 1: The Veneer of Victory

## Part 3: Not Like That

Harper's already turning toward the doors, phone out, thumbs flying — probably drafting some kind of banner-crisis triage plan in the group chat before we've even made it up the last three steps — but Luke doesn't move yet. He's got that look, the one where his eyes narrow a little and his mouth does the thing right before he says something he thinks is funnier than it's actually going to be.

**Luke: "Hold up. You're gonna walk in there looking like that and not even give me a heads-up?"**

**Paige: "Like what, tired?"**

**Luke: "No. Like — I don't know. Put-together. Annoyingly put-together, for somebody who apparently hasn't eaten since Tuesday."**

Something in my shoulders goes a little tight, and I'm not totally sure why, except that Brody's already grinning at both of us like he's watching a rerun he likes, and Harper's glanced up from her phone with the exact face that means she's filing this away for later, and neither of those reactions is anything I asked for.

**Paige: "Okay, thank you, I think — "**

**Brody: "Bro, just say she looks nice, you're making it weird."**

**Luke: "I'm not — "** He laughs, but it's half a beat off from his usual rhythm, and then he actually looks at me — not performing for the group anymore, which somehow makes it worse — and says it plain, no joke wrapped around it this time. **"You do look good today, Mercer. I'm just saying it."**

There's a tiny pause where Brody makes a sound like a game-show buzzer and Harper's eyebrows do something I choose to ignore completely.

*Okay. Weird.*

That's genuinely the whole thought. Not butterflies, not whatever Tess would narrate for forty-five minutes if the situation were reversed — just a flat, faintly itchy *weird*, the same weird as if Jackson had said it, which, honestly, is close enough to what Luke actually is to me that the comparison isn't even a stretch. Our dads coached rec league together back when we were both still losing teeth. I've watched this boy cannonball off his family's dock more summers than I can count, watched him eat an entire stick of butter on a dare in the eighth grade and then throw up behind the boathouse. Whatever this is, it isn't that.

**Paige: "You're being so weird right now."**

**Luke: "I'm being nice."**

**Paige: "You're being weird-nice. There's a difference."**

I say it light, laughing it off the way I'd laugh off Jackson trying to give me actual life advice — fond, a little exasperated, already halfway to the next subject — and for a second Luke just looks at me, quiet, like he's deciding whether to push it or let it go.

*Since when does Luke go quiet?*

It's such a small thing I almost don't clock it at all. Then, just as fast, he's back — shrugging, grinning, the regular version of him sliding back over whatever that was like it never happened.

**Luke: "Fair. Anyway — Coach Dell, 1:45, side doors. You'll text me the second Farris signs off on anything else?"**

**Paige: "You'll be the first to know."**

**Luke: "Bet."**

And that's it — folded back up and put away, business as usual. Brody's already jogging up the steps, still snickering to himself, and Harper falls into step beside me with the specific silence of someone who is absolutely bringing this up later and is only being merciful about the timing.

The front doors are propped open with a trash can, which means somebody already knows the morning's about to be chaos, and from somewhere down the main hallway I can hear Reagan's voice pitched two octaves higher than usual, saying something about staples, and Farris right behind her, saying something about "optics."

**Harper: "That's our cue."**

We go in.

# Chapter 1: The Veneer of Victory

## Part 4: Damage Control

By the time we round the corner into the commons, Reagan's mid-meltdown in a way that's less "crying" and more "controlled fury," which honestly checks out — Reagan gets loud in exact proportion to how much she cares, and she's spent three weeks on this banner.

The vinyl came back from the print shop this morning with FRANKLIN RIDGE stretched wrong across the template, so half the second word is crammed up against the Knight logo like it's trying to escape the frame. Tucker's already "fixed" it by taping cut-out poster-board letters over the gap, except he eyeballed the spacing, so now it reads FRANKLIN RID E in Sharpie-black block letters that don't match anything else on it.

**Reagan: "Don't. Say. Anything. I'm one comment away from actually losing it."**

**Paige: "I wasn't going to say anything."**

**Reagan: "You were going to say something calm and reasonable and it was going to make me feel worse."**

Fair, honestly. I set my bag down instead of arguing the point and get eyes on the actual damage, then start doing the thing I'm apparently built to do — take one three-week-in-the-making disaster and turn it into four small, extremely solvable problems. We don't need the whole word visible from the floor. We need it visible from the bleachers, which is a completely different math problem. Fold the bad section under six inches, re-tape from the back so nothing shows, and the gap disappears into the seam where the banner's already going to bow slightly under its own weight anyway. Tucker's poster-board letters come down.

**Tucker: "I feel like I'm being punished."**

**Harper: "You are. Sit there and hold the tape."**

Farris finds us four minutes later, clipboard against his chest like a shield, saying "optics" twice in one sentence about a banner that, ten minutes ago, said RID E. I walk him through the fix, tell him the run-of-show's already sitting in his inbox, and watch him visibly recalculate whether today's a disaster, based almost entirely on my tone of voice. It's a strange kind of power, when I actually think about it — not the doing of things, but managing how alarmed everyone else is allowed to be about them. I've gotten frighteningly good at that part. Some days it feels like the only thing I'm actually good at anymore.

*Where do you even learn a skill like that,* I think, snapping the tape gun shut, *and would you pick it, if anyone ever asked you first.*

First period passes the way first period always does — Mr. Boyd spends twenty minutes of AP Gov on the electoral college and then, unprompted, decides "our very own council president" should walk the room through how student elections actually work, so I spend the back half of class fielding questions I could answer asleep while half-drafting next week's stuco agenda in my head. Between second and third, I text Coach to move the field run-through to athletics block, since apparently nobody actually sent that memo out in time. Between third and fourth, I catch Tess in the stairwell — school face fully back on, quick thumbs-up, a "later, promise" — gone before I can decide whether I believe her.

And somewhere in all of it — folding vinyl, talking Farris off a ledge, half-listening to the electoral college — Luke's face keeps surfacing behind whatever I'm actually doing. That one flat second before he changed the subject.

*Weird,* I think again, the same word from this morning, worn a little smoother every time I turn it over. *Probably just stressed. Recruiting calls, maybe. Or Beau's back in town and it's a whole thing.* I run through three or four boring, reasonable explanations, none of which actually satisfy me, and then I do what I always do with anything that doesn't have an obvious slot to file itself into — I set it down. I don't have the bandwidth today to go solve a mystery that probably isn't one. Luke gets weird for four seconds maybe twice a year. It's not exactly breaking news.

Athletics block, and the gym smells like rubber matting and this morning's floor wax. Coach runs us through the new stunt twice full-out before she's satisfied — me on top, Harper under my left foot, Sydney and a sophomore named Brynn anchoring the base, the whole thing building toward full extension and a cradle catch that has to look effortless even though everyone underneath me is doing actual physics to keep it that way. Second rep, right at the top of the extension, my focus slips half a beat — not my body, just my head, some stray flicker of Luke going quiet on the front steps — and Harper's voice cuts through it instantly, sharp and automatic:

**Harper: "Eyes up, Mercer!"**

I lock back in so fast it's almost embarrassing, land the cradle clean, and Coach claps twice, already moving on to spacing notes for tonight. But my pulse is going a little too fast for a stunt I've hit two hundred times, and it wasn't the height that did it.

*Get it together,* I tell myself, chalk dust still on my palms. *You do not get to lose focus eight feet off the ground because a boy you've known since Pull-Ups made one weird face.*

By the time the bell rings for last period, the gym's already half-full of underclassmen filing in loud and restless, the band's warming up somewhere behind the curtain, and Harper falls into step beside me at the tunnel entrance with her game face fully on.

**Harper: "You ready?"**

**Paige: "Always."**

I shove the Luke thing down one more time, all the way down, next to everything else that lives there, and follow the sound of six hundred people already screaming before we've even walked out.

# Chapter 1: The Veneer of Victory

## Part 5: A Beat Too Long

The corridor behind the gym is its own kind of chaos by 1:40 — band kids threading through with instrument cases held over their heads, JV cheerleaders doing last-second hair checks against the trophy case glass, some freshman getting physically redirected by a teacher before he wanders straight onto the actual floor. Harper peels off toward the rest of varsity to check spacing, already half-shouting something at Sydney about the back line being too tight, and for about four steps I'm alone in the crush of it, weaving toward the tunnel doors where Coach wants us staged.

I'm not even looking up when I hit him — full shoulder-to-shoulder, hard enough that I stumble half a step and he drops whatever he was holding, a water bottle bouncing once and rolling off under somebody's feet.

**Paige: "Oh my gosh — sorry, sorry, that was fully on me—"**

I'm already laughing a little saying it, the automatic kind, because this is just what happens at every single pep rally, everybody moving too fast through too small a space. Normally whoever I've just plowed into laughs it off too, or doesn't even break stride.

Mason doesn't laugh.

He looks at me — actually looks, longer than the half-second a hallway collision usually earns, long enough that it stops feeling like accident-recovery and turns into something else, something I don't have a name for and don't especially want one for. His jaw does something tight. And then, just as fast, whatever that was slams shut behind his eyes and gets replaced with something flatter and colder.

**Mason: "Watch where you're going."**

It comes out clipped, almost bitten off — way out of proportion to a shoulder bump in a crowded hallway thirty seconds before a pep rally, the kind of tone you'd use on somebody who did it on purpose. He doesn't wait for anything back. Just steps around me fast, shoulders up near his ears, and disappears into the cluster of jerseys by the tunnel doors without looking back once.

I stand there a second longer than I mean to, in the exact spot he left me.

Something goes cold and still, low in my stomach — there, and then gone, before I can actually look at it straight on.

**Paige: "...sorry,"** I say again, quieter, mostly just to close the loop for myself, since he clearly wasn't sticking around to hear it the first time. It's not really about him by the time it leaves my mouth. More like shaking out a hand that's fallen asleep — a reflex, something to do with the leftover jolt of it.

*He's just stressed. Big game, big rally, everybody's wound tight today.*

It's not even the first time this year he's gone stiff and short around me for no reason I can point to — I've clocked it before, filed it under things-I-don't-have-time-to-solve, right there with Luke's weird four seconds this morning and about nine hundred other loose threads I've decided not to pull on. Some people just get weird under pressure. That's all this has to be, because I genuinely do not have the bandwidth today to make it anything else.

I bend down, retrieve his water bottle from where it rolled, and set it up on the equipment bin nobody's using — leaving it on the floor for somebody to trip over would bother me more than whatever that was already does.

Farris's voice cuts across the corridor from somewhere near the tunnel doors, clipboard-loud.

**Farris: "Miss Mercer! We are officially out of buffer time!"**

That's the sound that actually moves my feet. I shove the whole thing down into the same place I've been shoving everything else today, smooth my ponytail with one hand, and jog the last stretch toward the tunnel, where Coach is already waving me into position and somebody's pressing a cordless mic into my hand like it's the most ordinary object in the world.

**Coach: "Council opener first, thirty seconds, straight into the entrance after — you good?"**

**Paige: "I'm good."**

I am, mostly, by the time I say it — smile already sliding into place, spine straightening, six hundred voices on the other side of that door turning from background noise into something I can actually feel through the floor. Coach nods, steps back, and somebody cracks the tunnel door just enough that light and noise come pouring through at once.

*Okay. Showtime.*

I walk out into it before I let myself think about it any harder than that.

# Chapter 1: The Veneer of Victory

## Part 6: What the Crowd Sees

The noise hits before anything else does — a wall of it, six hundred voices already worked up from whatever hype reel Ridge Report's been running on the big screen, something with slow-mo tackles and a bass drop timed to the Knights logo smashing into frame. I catch the tail end of it stepping out of the tunnel, Luke half a step behind me, and the sound alone is enough to shove everything from this morning — the car, the date I'm not counting, Mason's face in that hallway — clean out of my head. There isn't room for any of that in here. There's barely room for me.

Principal Holt's already at center court with the cordless mic, waiting for the noise to come down enough that he can be heard over it, which around here takes a solid thirty seconds and a raised hand.

**Principal Holt: "Man, I do love a Friday like this."**

That gets a laugh, cheap and easy, exactly the kind he was going for. He runs through the basics fast — kickoff time, the bus schedule for anybody riding over with band, a reminder that yes, the concession stand will in fact have the good nachos tonight — and then does the thing every principal does, which is hand the actual momentum of the room off to somebody who can carry it better than he can.

**Principal Holt: "Now — I could stand up here all day, but I think you'd all rather hear from your student body president. Paige, come on up here."**

The mic's warm in my hand before I've even fully processed taking it, and the crowd's already up — not screaming yet, just that low roar that means they're primed, waiting to be told what to be loud about. I find Harper's face in the cheer line, then Coach's, then a blur of everybody else, and something in my chest does the thing it always does right before this part — settles, actually, weirdly, like the enormity of six hundred people looking at me is somehow easier to carry than the quiet was in my own car this morning.

*This part I know how to do.*

**Paige: "Okay, okay — first of all, whoever cut that hype video needs an actual raise, because I got chills, and I'm literally on the team."**

Laughter, a couple whistles. I let it land before I keep going.

**Paige: "But for real — y'all know what tonight is. We are going to Knight Stadium, we are turning those lights on, and we are going to do what Franklin Ridge does best, which is put on a show. Now, Summit's got a decent team this year, I'll give them that much—"**

A chorus of boos, delighted, right on cue.

**Paige: "—but I don't care how good you are, nobody plays their best football in front of a crowd that sounds like a jet engine. So here's what I need. I need every single person in this gym in those bleachers tonight. I need you loud enough that their kicker forgets his own name. Can you do that for me?"**

The roar that comes back actually moves air. I grin into it, let it hit me for exactly as long as I need it to, and turn to my left.

**Paige: "Now — the guy who's actually gonna go win it for us. Y'all know him. Give it up for your captain, Luke Whitfield."**

I hand the mic over, and for half a second, right at the handoff, I catch him — not looking at me at all, just scanning the crowd toward where the team's clustered near the bleacher steps, easy grin already sliding into place like this morning never happened. Which, fine. It didn't, not really. Whatever that quiet second on the steps was, it's clearly nowhere on him now, and some small, practical part of me is almost grateful for that — one less thing to think about today.

**Luke: "Alright — real quick, before I get into any of that. Can we get one more round for Paige?"**

He says it before the crowd's even fully quieted, so it comes out over the tail end of the noise, and something about that — him not waiting for silence to say it — makes it land harder than if he'd planned the pause.

**Luke: "Because I don't think half of y'all actually clock what this girl does. She runs student council, she runs the whole cheer program, she was out here at seven this morning fixing a banner that caught on fire overnight, apparently, and she still answers literally every text I've ever sent her about anything. This whole place runs because of her. That's not a joke, that's just facts."**

The applause that gets is different from the boo-hiss stuff — warmer, longer, a few actual whoops from the cheer line. I feel my face do something automatic and real at the same time, that specific overlap I mostly can't tell apart from each other anymore, and give a little wave like it's nothing, because in the room it has to be nothing, has to look exactly as easy as everything else I do up here.

**Paige: "Okay, stop, you're gonna make me cry in front of the freshmen."**

Then Luke turns it, fast, the way he always does — flips from sincere straight into performance mode without so much as a breath between them.

**Luke: "Y'all ready for tonight or what?!"**

The gym answers like it's one animal instead of six hundred separate ones. He asks again, louder, gets louder back, and then he's off — starting some call-and-response about Knights on three, the whole student section stomping the bleachers hard enough that I actually feel it through the gym floor, a rhythm that keeps building instead of settling, until Farris, somewhere off to the side with his clipboard, starts making a very specific throat-cutting gesture at nobody in particular, glancing up at the old bleacher supports like he's doing structural math in his head.

**Luke: "One more time—!"**

**Farris (mouthing, mostly to himself): "Wrap it up. Wrap it—"**

Luke either doesn't see him or pretends not to, grinning out at his guys clustered by the steps — Brody's already up on his feet, a couple of the O-line doing something that might generously be called dancing — and for a second he's not performing for the whole gym anymore, just for them, some private current running between him and the team that the rest of us are only borrowing the edge of.

And then, still riding it, still grinning, he drops the arm holding the mic and puts the other one around my shoulders.

It's fast enough that I don't clock it happening until it's already happened — his arm just there, solid, casual, pulling me half a step into his side in front of the entire student body, and for exactly one beat something in me goes stiff and alert before I've even decided to have an opinion about it.

Then it's just Luke. Same guy who taught me how to skip rocks off his family's dock, same guy who ate a whole stick of butter on a dare in the eighth grade. Football captain, cheer captain, standing together in front of the crowd like a photo somebody's mom would frame — which, knowing this school, somebody's already taking.

*It's fine,* I think, settling into it, letting my shoulder do the small adjustment that makes it look natural instead of surprised. *This is just what captains do.*

The noise crests around us, and somewhere past the bleachers I can already hear Coach yelling for cheer to get into position for the routine, and I catch Harper's eye across the floor — she's got an eyebrow up, filing something away again, the exact look she had after the steps this morning.

I ignore it, smile wider instead, and let the moment do whatever it's going to do.

# Chapter 1: The Veneer of Victory

## Part 7: The Faces in the Crowd

Coach's whistle cuts through the noise, one short blast, and the whole gym seems to inhale at once — six hundred kids somehow going quiet enough, fast enough, that I can hear Harper's sneakers squeak into position behind me, and that specific hush right before a routine starts, which is really just a held breath with better posture.

We open tumbling — Sydney's standing pass first, clean, no hesitation, then a run of back handsprings down the diagonal that gets the crowd moving again before we've even hit the good part. I fall into my mark at center, feel Harper's hands settle at my hip and ankle exactly where they're supposed to be, feel Brynn and the rest of the base locking in on the other side, the whole formation clicking together the way it only does after two hundred repetitions — muscle memory doing the thinking so my actual brain doesn't have to.

*This is the only place my body and my head agree on anything.*

Extension on the count, straight up, no wobble — I find my spot on the far wall the way Coach drilled into us freshman year, focus on one fixed point and let everything else blur, and for three full seconds I am nothing but balance and height and the strange, specific quiet that exists eight feet above a screaming gym floor. We're saving the real one for the stadium tonight — this is just enough to make the gym lose its mind early. Then the cradle — down fast, caught clean, Harper's arms locking like a seatbelt — and the whole formation resets into the finish, a half-pyramid with me stepping down off Brynn's thigh onto the mat like it's the easiest thing in the world, because by now, it basically is.

The gym loses its mind.

Not the polite, obligatory noise from earlier — an actual roar, the kind that comes up through the floor and into your teeth, six hundred people on their feet at once. Coach is clapping so hard I can hear it individually over everything else. Somewhere behind me Tucker's shouting something that's stopped being words entirely, and Harper grabs my hand and throws it up with hers like we just won something instead of just performed it, and for one clean, uncomplicated second, I let myself actually have it — the win, the noise, the fact that my body did exactly what I asked of it in front of every single person who matters to my entire social existence.

I'm grinning, chest still heaving, eyes sweeping the bleachers the way you always do after a routine — not really looking for anything, just riding it, letting my gaze travel the way it does when a crowd's this loud.

And somewhere in the middle of that automatic sweep, my brain does the thing it's been doing more and more lately, the thing I never asked it to start doing and can't figure out how to make stop.

It starts counting faces instead of just seeing them.

A sophomore in a Knights hoodie, hands cupped around his mouth. Two juniors from my English class, screaming at each other instead of at the floor. A cluster of guys near the top row I couldn't actually name, could not pick out of a lineup, have probably passed in a hallway a hundred times without either of us clocking the other — and something about that thought lands wrong, drops straight through the good feeling like a stone through water.

*I wouldn't know him if I saw him.*

It's not even a full thought so much as a fact my body already knew, arriving late to the rest of me. That's the whole horror of it, the part I've never said out loud to a single living person — I don't have a face to be afraid of. I have a blank space shaped like one. So every face becomes a candidate, briefly, uselessly, all at once — the sophomore in the hoodie, the guys I don't know, half the football team still clustered by the bleacher steps in their game jerseys, cheering for me right now, completely interchangeable with each other in the one specific way that actually matters.

My eyes catch, without my permission, on Mason.

He's not even looking at me — just clapping along with everybody else, doing exactly what six hundred other people in this gym are doing right now. But I'm still holding the shape of the hallway from twenty minutes ago, the way his jaw went tight, the way he couldn't get around me fast enough, and my body files it before my brain's even finished forming the thought: *that. That's what guilty looks like. I know what that looks like now.*

I hold my smile. I don't think it's stopped moving through the motions of this whole routine since the mic left my hand fifteen minutes ago — but for exactly as long as it takes to blink and look away again, something under my sternum goes cold and small and very, very far from all this noise.

*Not now. You are literally standing in the middle of a pep rally.*

Harper's still got my hand up in the air, still riding the high, completely unaware that half of me just went somewhere else for a second and a half. I squeeze her hand back, laugh at something Tucker's shouting that I didn't actually hear, and let the noise fold back over the top of it the way it always does — loud enough, if I let it be, to cover almost anything.

Coach's whistle again, two short blasts — reset, clear the floor, JV's up next — and the spell breaks the practical way it always does, with somewhere else I have to be.

**Coach: "Great job, ladies — varsity, off the mat, let's go, let's go!"**

I drop Harper's hand, fall back into formation, and jog off the floor still smiling, still glowing, still every inch the girl six hundred people just watched be perfect.

# Chapter 1: The Veneer of Victory

## Part 8: Just Wondering

The gym doesn't really empty so much as it drains, slow and loud, everybody peeling off toward fifth period in clumps, and for a solid five minutes I don't manage two steps without somebody stopping me — a sophomore I've never actually spoken to telling me the stunt was "actually insane," Mrs. Pierce from the English hallway grabbing my arm to say the whole routine gave her chills, three separate freshmen asking if student council's still taking volunteers for homecoming committee, like the pep rally personally recruited them on the spot.

Behind me, the Squad's basically vibrating. Harper's still catching her breath from tumbling. Reagan looks like she personally deserves a medal for the banner surviving contact with the public.

**Reagan: "It held. The banner actually held. I could cry."**

**Harper: "You did cry. An hour ago. In front of Farris."**

**Reagan: "That was a different kind of crying."**

I laugh, mean it, throw an arm around Reagan's shoulders for a second because she's earned it three times over today, and make sure I actually say it to everybody who did the real work — Sydney for holding the base rock-steady, Brynn for nailing a stunt she's had exactly two weeks to learn, even Tucker, for eventually, begrudgingly, being useful with the banner. Every one of them gets the same thing from me: an actual thank-you, an actual smile, eye contact I don't rush even though I've got ninety more people to get through before the bell. It's not hard to mean it. They earned every bit of today.

Somewhere in the general scatter of bodies filing toward the doors, I clock that a handful of the football guys already peeled off before the room even finished clapping — Mason among them, gone before I thought to look for him.

*Probably got pulled for something. Coach Dell hates when they linger before a game — he'd rather have them stretching or watching film than standing around a gym for twenty extra minutes.* It's not even really a thought so much as a reflex, one more small thing sorted and set down. Not everything has to be a whole thing.

By the time the floor's mostly clear, it's just Squad and a handful of stragglers folding mats back against the wall, and I'm dragging one myself when I hear him before I see him.

**Luke: "You know they're gonna be talking about that extension for a week, right?"**

I glance up. Luke's already out of his jersey, back in his regular shirt, backpack over one shoulder like he's got somewhere better to be, even though he clearly doesn't.

**Paige: "That was all Harper and the base. I just stood there and didn't fall."**

**Luke: "'Just stood there.' Eight feet up, no hands, didn't even blink."**

**Paige: "Fine. I'm a little bit incredible. Happy now?"**

He laughs, easy, and I fold the last corner of the mat and drop it against the stack with the others, and for a second that's it — the whole interaction, done, and I'm already halfway turned toward the next thing on my list for the afternoon.

Except he doesn't leave.

I catch him doing it again — the same flat half-second from the front steps this morning, like he's running something through his head before deciding whether it's worth saying out loud.

**Paige: "Okay, what."**

**Luke: "What?"**

**Paige: "You're doing the thing. The weird thing. You've been doing it all day — just say whatever it is."**

Something flickers across his face, quick and a little sour, gone almost before it lands, and the laugh that follows doesn't quite sit right on him.

**Luke: "Damn. Didn't realize I was that easy to read."**

**Paige: "You're not, usually. That's what makes it weird."**

He huffs out something that's technically a laugh, and for half a second I actually think that's all I'm getting — Luke deciding it's not worth it, letting it drop the way he usually does with anything that isn't football or student council. Then:

**Luke: "So — is something going on with you and Jason?"**

That is not remotely what I was bracing for.

**Paige: "...Why are you asking me that?"**

I say it smiling, mostly reflex, but there's an actual edge of *what* underneath it, because out of everything today could've turned into, this was nowhere on the list.

**Paige: "It was one date. It stayed one date."**

Some guy from Blakely's church group, actually — coffee, ninety minutes, perfectly nice, and I haven't texted him back since Tuesday for reasons I haven't fully looked at and don't especially want to.

**Luke: "Yeah, well — that's not really what's going around."**

**Paige: "Going around where?"**

**Luke: "I don't know. People talk. Apparently you're out here seeing half of Williamson County and nobody bothered telling me."**

I roll my eyes, but it lands a little harder than it should — some low hum of *of course that's what one coffee turns into by Friday* running underneath it.

**Paige: "That's insane. It was coffee. Why are you even asking?"**

**Luke: "I don't know. Just wondering."**

*That's not an answer,* I think, holding the last stray pom off the floor, watching him actually think about something instead of just talking, which isn't a thing I see from him very often. He's got this look on him now — almost embarrassed, which is so far outside his usual register it takes me a second to even place it.

**Paige: "What does that mean?"**

He exhales, short, like he's been holding it a while.

**Luke: "I worry about you sometimes. That's it. That's the whole thing."**

I look at him for a second — the same face I've known since before either of us lost our first tooth, easy and familiar, doing something slightly unfamiliar with it right now — and something in me softens automatically, the way it always does with him.

**Paige: "That's sweet. I promise I'm fine, though."**

**Luke: "I know you are."**

He says it fast, easy again, like whatever door cracked open a second ago just quietly shut itself, and the normal version of him slides back into place so smoothly I'd almost think I imagined the other one.

**Paige: "I'll see you after the game."**

**Luke: "Yeah. After the game."**

He nods once, holds my eyes a beat longer than the sentence actually needs, and then he's gone — backpack over one shoulder, cutting toward the side doors without looking back.

I stand there a second with the pom still in my hand. Then I bend down and grab the next mat, because the floor's not going to clear itself, fifth period starts in six minutes, and Luke being a little weird before a big game is really not the strangest thing that's happened before lunch today.

# Chapter 1: The Veneer of Victory

## Part 9: Open Door Policy

Fifth period, it turns out, is lunch today — pep rally Fridays scramble the whole schedule into something that makes sense to nobody except whoever built it back in June, and I'm not about to question a system that's accidentally handing me food twenty minutes after I did an extension eight feet off the ground. I grab a tray mostly out of obligation to whatever Coach would say if she caught me skipping a meal on a game day, and follow Harper and the rest of the Squad to our usual table by the windows — the one that's had our unofficial claim on it since freshman year for reasons nobody actually remembers anymore.

The cafeteria on a pep rally Friday is its own kind of loud. Half the school's still in spirit gear, a table of freshmen is doing something with battery-powered pom-poms that's going to end with somebody in the office, and somebody's fight-song playlist blares from a phone propped against a milk carton until a teacher makes them kill it. I've barely got my tray down before Emerson Lacey — junior, homecoming committee, sweet but perpetually two steps behind — slides into the seat across from me, laptop already open.

**Emerson: "Sorry, sorry, I know it's lunch, but the food truck guy needs a headcount by three and nobody's answering the group chat—"**

I glance at her numbers, do the math against last year's turnout, tell her to round up fifteen percent and get the order in before three-fifteen so Farris doesn't have to sign off on a change twice. She thanks me like I just performed surgery and vanishes back into the noise.

This is basically the actual shape of my day, if I'm honest. Not the pep rallies, not the stunts. This — forty seconds here, ninety there, some question that feels enormous to whoever's asking and takes me exactly as long to answer as it takes them to ask it.

Blakely slides in next to Harper a minute later, phone already turned toward me before she's all the way in her seat.

**Blakely: "Okay, don't judge me, but — is this too much? For tonight? Jace wants to come and I don't know if that's a whole group thing or if I'm supposed to warn everybody first—"**

I glance at the screen — some outfit flat-lay, nothing dramatic — then at her face, which has that specific hopeful nervousness she gets every time Jace comes up. Blakely doesn't ask for much. After what happened with that guy sophomore year — three months of being made to feel like an inconvenience before he finally admitted there'd been someone else the whole time — she's careful now in a way the rest of us mostly aren't, half-braced every time she lets herself want something.

**Paige: "It's not too much. Bring him. Everybody already wants to meet him — you've been very mysterious about this whole thing."**

**Blakely: "I have not."**

**Harper: "You showed us four pictures and told us nothing else. That's mysterious."**

Blakely laughs, actually relaxes, goes back to her phone with the specific lightness of someone who just needed one person to tell her it was fine. Cost me maybe eight seconds. Carries her through the rest of the day.

*This is the part nobody sees from the outside,* I think, unwrapping a straw I'm not sure I'll use. *Not the trophies. This.*

Harper doesn't ask me anything outright — she's not built that way about things that actually matter to her — but I catch it anyway, the half-second she goes quiet stabbing at her tray when somebody two tables over says the words *early decision*.

**Harper: "My mom asked me my GPA again last night. Like she doesn't already have it memorized to the decimal."**

**Paige: "You're going to be fine. Vanderbilt would be lucky to have you and you know it."**

**Harper: "You have to say that, you're my best friend."**

**Paige: "I'd say it even if I hated you."**

That gets a real laugh, her shoulders coming down half an inch, and she goes back to her food like the moment never happened — acknowledged, then closed, exactly how she likes it.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it — Emerson, Blakely, Harper, whatever's next — I catch myself doing the math I try not to do very often. How many of these I field in an average day. How long it's actually been since anybody's asked me the real version of *you okay?* and stuck around long enough to hear something other than *fine, just tired.*

*Nobody's rude about it.* And they aren't — it's just that I'm good at this, the way Sydney's good at math and Reagan's good at not losing her temper, and once you're good at something, that's what people come to you for. Nobody asks the fixer what's broken in her own house.

Somewhere under all of it, Luke surfaces again for about four seconds — the flat look on the steps, the catch in his voice outside the gym. I let myself turn it over exactly once and put it back down. Friday. Game day. I don't have anywhere to put one more thing today, not even a small one, not even his.

By the time trays start clearing and the table thins — Sydney off to call in her café shift, Blakely trailing after Emerson to "help" with a food truck order she has no actual authority over — it's mostly just me and Tess left, and I notice she hasn't touched much of anything.

She waits until Harper's a few steps toward the tray return.

**Tess: "Can we actually talk? Like, for real. Not the hallway version."**

I recognize the undertone — the one that means she's been carrying something all morning and it's finally too heavy to hold alone.

**Paige: "Yeah. Course."**

We end up by the vending machines, half out of the noise. Tess crosses her arms over her middle, bracing for something she's already embarrassed about.

**Tess: "Okay. So. Last night wasn't even about anything, that's the stupid part. He didn't text back for like three hours and I just — spiraled. Convinced myself he was out with people and didn't care, and by the time he actually called I'd already sent, like, eleven unhinged texts."**

**Paige: "Okay."**

**Tess: "Normally that's just — that's us, you know? I go off, he apologizes, we're fine by morning. Except this time he didn't apologize. He said—"** She stops, presses her lips together. **"He said he can't be everything I need all the time. That I make him feel like he's failing some test he didn't know he was taking."**

She says the last part fast, like getting it out quicker will hurt less, her voice cracking right at the edge of it — not crying, not yet, just close.

**Paige: "Tess—"**

**Tess: "And the worst part is he's not even wrong. I know I'm a lot. I've always known. I've just never had anybody say it to my face like that."**

I don't jump straight to fixing it, because there isn't a version of fixing it that would land right now. She doesn't need a strategy. She needs somebody to sit in it with her first.

**Paige: "You're not 'a lot.' You just love people out loud instead of quietly. Those aren't the same thing, even when it feels like it."**

**Tess: "Feels the same from where I'm standing."**

**Paige: "I know. It still isn't."**

She almost smiles, small and unconvinced but grateful, and wipes fast under one eye with her wrist even though nothing's actually fallen yet.

**Tess: "He grabbed my hand when I tried to walk off mid-fight. Not hard, just — trying to get me to stay and listen. And I keep thinking about that more than the thing he actually said, which is so stupid—"**

Something goes very still and very quiet in me, one full second — not about Colt, not really even about the sentence itself, just some old, wordless flinch my body keeps on a hair trigger now, gone again before I have to look at it straight on.

*Not now. This isn't that. Colt's not—* I don't finish it. I don't need to. It passes the way it always does, fast enough that nothing on my face has to know about it.

**Paige: "It's not stupid. Being grabbed, even gently, when you're already upset — your body's allowed to remember that part too, separate from whatever he actually meant by it."**

Tess looks at me a beat too long, like that landed somewhere she wasn't expecting, and some distant part of me files away that I should probably think harder about where sentences like that keep coming from, before one of these days somebody actually asks.

**Tess: "...Yeah. Maybe."**

The bell cuts through before either of us has to sit in that any longer. Tess exhales hard, drags both hands down her face once, and comes back up with something recognizable — not fixed, just functional, the version she wears out into hallways.

**Tess: "Okay. I have to go be a person now."**

**Paige: "You are a person. A slightly unhinged one, but a person."**

**Tess: "Wow. Love you too."**

She bumps my shoulder with hers, almost smiling for real this time, and we fall into the crowd funneling toward the doors together — her thing tucked back into whatever pocket she keeps it in, mine tucked back into the one I never actually open for anybody.

# Chapter 1: The Veneer of Victory

## Part 10: Unfiled

Last bell rings and the whole building exhales at once — lockers banging, a wall of noise rolling down the main hall as everybody funnels toward the doors, half of them already talking about tonight like class hasn't even technically ended. I'm doing math in my head as I walk — nap if I actually manage one, food that won't sit wrong before warm-ups, the navy ribbon I still need for my ponytail — mostly on autopilot, threading through the crowd toward the doors that'll spit me out closest to the senior lot.

That's about when I actually clock him.

He's over by the trophy case, shouldering a backpack that's seen better years, and something about him snags my attention before I've even consciously decided to look — not loud about it, not trying, just tall and easy in a way that doesn't match the rest of the hallway's performance. Dark hair that's clearly never met a school picture day. A gray hoodie, sleeves shoved up, the kind of build that isn't gym-mirror built so much as just — built, from actually doing something with it. He glances up right as I'm working out where I know his face from, and something clicks half a second later.

*Right. New guy. Sydney was talking about him last week — something about an ancient truck that backfires by the gym.*

I don't know a single other thing about him, which after four years of knowing basically everyone at this school by at least one fact is its own small, strange kind of interesting.

*He's also better-looking than that description made him sound.*

I catch his eye and do what I always do, which is just — say something, because that's easier for me than not saying something, and Southern manners don't come with an opt-out clause even for people you've never technically met.

**Paige: "Hey — you're Shawn, right?"**

He looks at me a beat too long before answering, not rude about it, just unhurried, like he's actually deciding whether to bother instead of running the reflex everyone else runs.

**Shawn: "Depends who's asking."**

**Paige: "Paige."**

**Shawn: "I know who you are."**

Flat, no particular weight on it either way, and I can't quite tell if that's a compliment or just an observation — which is rare enough for me that I almost laugh.

**Paige: "You coming to the game tonight?"**

Easy, smiling, the same question I've probably asked forty people today without thinking twice about any of them. He tips his head slightly, something dry moving behind his eyes.

**Shawn: "Is that like — a thing here? Just walking up to people and asking that?"**

I open my mouth to answer — something about it kind of being the whole point of today, actually — but I don't get the chance.

**Luke: "Yo — hold up, I know you!"**

Luke's already crossing toward us, Brody a step behind, real delight on his face, the genuine kind, which somehow makes what comes out of his mouth next land even more sideways.

**Luke: "You're the DoorDash guy! You dropped like four bags of Cook Out at my place a couple weeks back — saved my whole night, man, I was starving. Small world, huh?"**

He goes in for a shoulder clap, easy and loud, exactly the kind of thing Luke does to guys on the team he's known since Pop Warner — except Shawn's never been on any team with him, and for one flat second something moves across his face that isn't dry humor anymore. Gone almost as fast as it shows up, tucked back under before Luke even seems to register it happened. But I catch it — the jaw, the half-beat too long before he answers.

**Shawn: "Yeah. Small world."**

Even, almost pleasant on the surface. Something underneath it isn't, and Luke — still grinning, already halfway into whatever he's about to say next — doesn't seem to clock the difference at all.

Shawn shifts as he says it, just slightly, angling half a step closer to me and away from Luke and Brody both, backpack strap adjusted like that's the actual reason for the movement. I don't think he notices doing it. I definitely notice.

**Brody: "You still doing deliveries around here or what?"**

**Shawn: "Sometimes."**

He doesn't offer anything past that, and there's a short pause where Luke, undeterred, opens his mouth like he's about to invite him somewhere — the game, probably, or wherever the team's headed after — and Shawn gets ahead of it before it fully lands.

**Shawn: "Can't tonight, actually. Got some stuff I gotta handle."**

Plain, no real weight to it, the kind of sentence that closes a door without slamming it. Something about how easily he does that — no explanation offered, none expected — makes me wonder, just briefly, what "stuff" actually means for a guy who's been here two weeks and already looks like he's carrying more than a backpack.

*Not my business,* I remind myself, filing the thought away before it goes anywhere. *You just met him ninety seconds ago.*

**Shawn: "I'll catch y'all around."**

His eyes flick to me for half a second on his way past — not long, nothing dramatic, just a beat longer than a stranger's glance usually runs — and then he's gone, cutting through the crowd toward the side exit like he already knows a faster way out than the one everybody else is using.

I watch him go a second longer than I probably should, then turn back to Luke and Brody, and the thought's already there before I can stop it.

*He's been so weird today. All day.*

Not Shawn — Luke. The steps this morning. The arm around me at the rally. Whatever that was by the gym at lunch. And now this — loud and easy on the surface, just slightly off underneath it, in a way I can feel more than actually name.

**Luke: "Anyway."** He's already back to grinning, like the last thirty seconds didn't happen the way I just watched them happen. **"Can't wait for tonight. With you running that sideline, I don't know how Summit thinks they've got a shot."**

Full grin, easy and warm — the kind of line that would've landed as pure charm on any other Friday. I let it sit there instead of saying any of the four things stacked up behind my teeth: that he's been strange since eight this morning, that Shawn's face did something real for half a second that Luke walked straight past, that "small world" clearly means two very different things depending which side of the delivery bag you're standing on.

I smile instead. The real one, mostly, folded neatly around all of it.

**Paige: "We'll see. Good luck tonight."**

**Luke: "Don't need luck. I've got you on the sideline."**

**Paige: "Smooth. I'll see you later."**

He knocks his knuckles once against the trophy case on his way past, already moving, Brody trailing after him still half-laughing about something, and then it's just me and the thinning hallway and the doors up ahead letting in one long slice of that same gold afternoon light.

I head for the senior lot, keys already out, the whole strange little collision of the last two minutes sitting somewhere in the back of my head where I don't have time to unpack it — not yet, not with a game tonight and a nap I'm already not going to get.

# Chapter 1: The Veneer of Victory

## Part 11: All at Once

The house is empty when I pull into the driveway — Dad's got surgeries scheduled through five, Mom's probably still walking somebody through a closet bigger than most people's bedrooms off 96 — and for the first time since 6:45 this morning, there's genuinely nobody watching. Not a friend, not a teacher, not six hundred kids in bleachers. Just me, the quiet, and about two hours before I have to be somebody again.

I drop my bag inside the door, kick my shoes off without lining them up the way Mom likes, and head straight upstairs. Shower first — I always shower before a game, even knowing I'm about to sweat straight through a fresh uniform in a few hours anyway, because something about being genuinely, completely clean makes the rest of getting ready feel less like armor and more like just getting dressed.

The water's good and hot, and for a few minutes it's actually fine — better than fine, almost peaceful, the kind of ordinary quiet I don't let myself have very often. I run through today without really meaning to, the way you replay a song that's been stuck in your head since morning: the light on the drive in, the banner disaster, Tess by the flagpole, the stunt, six hundred people on their feet. Luke's arm around my shoulders. Weird Luke on the steps. Weirder Luke by the gym. Mason's jaw, tight and furious over a shoulder bump that shouldn't have meant anything to either of us. Shawn's face doing something complicated for half a second before he folded it away, same as I do, except worse at hiding it. A whole day's worth of small, sortable things, filed as I go, same as always.

I get out, wrap my hair in a towel, and start getting ready properly — foundation first, the version of my face that has to survive stadium lights and a hundred phone cameras. I'm halfway through blow-drying my hair, dryer humming, nothing on my mind but the mechanical business of a round brush and a mirror, when it happens.

Not gradually. Not the way it usually creeps in around the edges of a quiet moment, small enough that I can shove it back down before it lands. All at once — like somebody reached into my chest and yanked every single drawer open at the same time, dumped everything out onto the floor together instead of one thing at a time the way I've been so carefully managing it all day.

*Luke's arm, heavy across my shoulders in front of the whole school. Is something going on with you and Jason. Mason's jaw, gone before I could even finish apologizing. Six hundred faces I couldn't pick out of a lineup if my life depended on it, and it might have, once, and I still don't know which one. A porch light left on too long. The particular gold of this morning's light through the windshield, and how I thought, stupidly, that the sun here knows how to perform too. Four days. Maybe fewer. I never let myself count, except apparently some part of me's been counting the whole time, keeping score behind my own back.*

My hands are still moving through my hair — brush, dryer, brush — muscle memory holding the shape of normal even while everything underneath it stops making sense at once.

The room tilts, just slightly, like the floor forgot to check in with the rest of the house first. I set the dryer down — I don't remember deciding to, it's just off, suddenly, sitting on the counter — and grip the edge of the vanity with both hands. The mirror doesn't look like anything I recognize for a second. Just a girl. Damp hair, half a face of makeup, eyes too wide.

My stomach turns over, fast and ugly, and some distant, absurdly practical corner of my brain is already calculating how loud the bathroom fan is and whether anyone would hear anything even if they were home — which nobody is, which is somehow both the worst part of this whole minute and the only bearable one.

I don't quite get sick. It rolls through me like a wave that crests just short of breaking, leaving my mouth dry and my whole body cold and shaking in its wake instead.

I sit down — not gracefully, just down, onto the closed lid of the toilet, because my legs have stopped being something I trust to hold me up. The tile's cold enough through my leggings that some small animal part of my brain notices and flinches at that too, on top of everything else, like it's just looking for reasons now.

*Not now. You have a game in two hours. You do not get to do this right now.*

It doesn't listen. My eyes are stinging before I've even registered deciding to cry, and then it's just happening — quiet, at least, no sound to it, just tears running fast and hot and entirely outside my control, the kind that don't wait for permission and don't care that six hundred people are going to expect a very specific version of me on that sideline tonight.

I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, hard, like pressure alone could hold it back in, and for a second that almost makes it worse — the dark behind my eyelids sitting a little too close to other dark I don't let myself visit.

*Okay. Okay. One minute. You just need one minute.*

I breathe the way Coach taught us, the one thing in my whole body I still fully trust right now. In for four — I count it slow, deliberate, feeling my ribs push against the pressure sitting on my chest. Hold for four. Out for four, shaky and uneven the first couple times, before it finally starts to smooth into something steadier.

I do it again. And again. Four, hold, four, out — the same box, over and over, until the room stops tilting quite so hard, until my stomach settles from a full boil down to something closer to a simmer, until my hands, when I finally look at them, have mostly stopped shaking.

It doesn't fix anything. I know that even while I'm doing it — this isn't a cure, it's a lid, the same lid I've been screwing back onto this same jar for almost a year now. It's just that today the jar fought back harder than it usually does, and some small, cold, honest part of me clocks that and doesn't love what it might mean.

I stay there another minute or two, elbows on my knees, breathing, letting the last of it drain out in slow, shuddering pulls of air. The tears stop before the shaking fully does. When I finally make myself stand and look in the mirror again, my reflection is blotchy and red-eyed and about as far from game-ready as I've looked in longer than I can remember.

*Two hours,* I tell the mirror, pressing a cool washcloth against my eyes and holding it there, counting another slow four. *Two hours is enough. It has to be enough.*

Downstairs, faint through the floor, I hear the garage door start to grind open.

# Chapter 1: The Veneer of Victory

## Part 12: Camera Ready

I splash cold water on my face first — not gentle about it, just enough to shock some color back into my skin and get the worst of the blotchiness down before I even attempt foundation again. My eyes are still a little pink at the rims when I check the mirror, but concealer's built for exactly this kind of afternoon, and by the third careful pass, there's nothing left in my reflection that would tell anyone this face was crying on the bathroom floor twenty minutes ago.

I start over properly this time — foundation, the good kind that survives four quarters under stadium lights and a hundred phone flashes, waterproof mascara because apparently I'm not taking any chances with myself tonight, blush high on my cheekbones the way Coach likes for game days because it "reads" better from the bleachers. My hands are steady now. Whatever that was, it's already folded itself back down into wherever it usually lives, small and quiet and out of the way, exactly like it's supposed to.

Uniform next — the real one, not practice gear, crisp and navy-and-silver and slightly too stiff the way it always is fresh out of the closet. I braid the sides back the way I've done a thousand times, pin the ribbon Coach requires for game days, step into all of it like the last coat of paint going on something that's already, underneath, mostly finished drying.

By the time I'm done, I look exactly like what I'm supposed to look like. Which is, I guess, the whole point.

I stand in front of the full mirror a second longer than I need to, and some quieter, more honest part of me — the one that's been buried under the rest of today — finally lets itself actually look at what happened upstairs.

*I know what that was.*

I do. I've known for months, even if I've never once said the actual words out loud, not even inside my own head if I can help it. I know why it happens too, if I let myself follow the thread back even two inches — which I'm not doing, not standing here in full hair and makeup with forty minutes on the clock.

*I don't want to think about it.*

That's the part that actually works, most days. Not not-knowing. Just refusing the invitation. It's been like this since that night, on and off, never on a schedule I could predict — weeks of nothing, and then out of nowhere my own body staging a coup in a bathroom on some random afternoon for no reason I could point to out loud. I used to be able to go a month, sometimes longer, in between.

It hasn't been a month in weeks now. Barely days.

*Because it's almost been a year.* I let myself think exactly that much and not an inch further. The date I won't count out loud is close enough now that my nervous system's apparently better at math than I am, running its own private countdown whether I check a calendar or not.

I hate this. Hate it so much it almost embarrasses me on top of everything else — that I can stand eight feet off the ground with people trusting me with their actual physical safety and not blink, and then twenty minutes later be shaking on a bathroom floor over nothing anyone in this house could even see. I should be better at this by now. It's been almost a year. Other people go through things and they're fine within a few months — aren't they? I don't actually know that. I've never asked anyone, because asking would mean admitting there's something to ask about, and I am not going to be the one who opens that particular door. Not tonight. Not with a game in two hours.

*Get it together. You are so much better than this.*

I don't fully believe it even while I'm thinking it, and some small, tired part of me clocks that too — that even my own pep talks have started sounding a little hollow lately, a routine I've run so many times I've stopped feeling anything when I land it.

And under all of that, quieter, is the part I hate admitting most: I'm not really doing the math on how I feel right now. I'm doing math on how it would look. Harper finding out. The Squad finding out. Six hundred kids who screamed for me four hours ago finding out the girl they were screaming for spent twenty minutes today crying on a bathroom floor over nothing they could see. I think about Reagan, who cried over a banner this morning and got to just — have that, out loud, no consequences beyond a joke at lunch. I think about what happens if anyone ever sees the version of me that isn't fine. Whether they'd still want the same things from me after. Whether "reliable" survives anybody finding out what it's actually costing.

*They wouldn't look at you the same way. Nobody does, once they know something's actually wrong with you.*

I don't even know if that's true. I've never once tested it. That's sort of the whole problem.

I know, somewhere underneath the part of me already smoothing my hair back into place, that this isn't getting better. I've told myself for months it would — that it's a phase, that it'll fade the way things eventually fade. It hasn't. If anything it's doing the opposite, louder instead of quieter, closer together instead of further apart, and some flat, unsentimental corner of my brain has already started filing that fact away too, right next to everything else I'm not currently looking at.

A knock at my door, two soft raps, my mother's voice right behind it.

**Caroline: "Paige? You about ready, honey? I want to grab a picture before we head over — your father's trying to get out of his last surgery in time and I told him I'd send something to make him hurry."**

**Paige: "Yeah — one second!"**

I don't actually need the second. It's already there by the time I say it — the smile, the posture, the whole practiced shape of me sliding back into place like it never once left, like the last half hour happened to somebody else entirely.

I open the door, and there she is — already dressed for tonight in her own navy and silver, hair done, phone in hand, practically vibrating with that bright energy she gets before anything where people might be watching her family.

**Caroline: "Oh, look at you! Turn around, let me see the whole thing—"**

I turn, obedient, easy, and she makes the sound she's been making at me since I was seven in a dance recital costume — like every single outfit is somehow still a brand-new surprise.

**Caroline: "Deb from the office already sent me a video from the pep rally — you should see the comments, Paige, half the county's talking about that stunt. I am so proud of you I could burst."**

**Paige: "It was a whole team thing, honestly."**

**Caroline: "Well, the team didn't do the interview part, did they."**

She's already got her phone up, angling for the shot, and I arrange my face into the exact configuration three years of these photos has taught me works best — chin down slightly, smile easy, the one that reads as effortless every single time she reposts it. She doesn't look twice. Doesn't catch anything in my eyes that wasn't in the last forty pictures just like this one. Why would she. I built this face specifically so that nobody would.

**Caroline: "Perfect. Okay — your dad just texted, he's leaving now, so we should head out in fifteen so we're not stuck parking a mile away. You want anything before we go? You barely touched dinner last game night, I worry you don't eat enough on these days—"**

**Paige: "I'm good, Mom. Promise."**

**Caroline: "Okay. You look beautiful, by the way. You always do, but especially tonight."**

She says it easy, already turning toward the stairs, already two steps ahead to whatever's next on the list — completely unaware that fifteen minutes ago her daughter was on the floor of this exact bathroom, shaking, and that the girl standing in front of her now is made almost entirely out of the same practiced material as every photo she's ever taken of her.

**Paige: "Thanks, Mom."**

She heads down the hall, already texting somebody about parking. I stand in my doorway another second, watching her go, before I grab my duffel and follow her down.