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CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE PERFECT BOY
publish date:
2026-07-01 13:10:50
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Fake it with me CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: LILY'S ADVANTAGE
The voice note was forty-three seconds long and Mason's voice in it was quieter than she was used to hearing it, none of the performance, none of the audience-facing ease, just his actual voice in what sounded like an empty room.He said: *I heard the debate. Sofia told Noah and Noah told me. I know you changed the speech. I don't know why I'm sending this instead of texting it but I think it's because I wanted you to hear that I meant what I said in the equipment room, about you being good at what you do, and the speech today was that, the real version of it, and I thought you should know someone noticed. That's it. That's the whole message. Ignore this if it's weird.*Forty-three seconds.Ava stood on the path outside school with students moving around her and Sofia watching her face with the focused attention of someone reading weather, and she listened to it twice, the second time with her eyes closed, and then she locked her phone and put it in her bag and kept walking."Well?" S
Fake it with me CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THREE CANDIDATES
The voice belonged to Chloe Whitmore.Ava stood at the bottom of the stairwell and let that land for a full three seconds before she trusted herself to respond. Of everything she had imagined in three days of anticipation, of every face she had placed at the top of that stairwell in every version of this moment she had rehearsed, Chloe had not been in any of them."You," Ava said."Me," Chloe confirmed, and came down the stairs with the particular unhurried quality of someone who had been waiting for this conversation for longer than the last ten minutes. She stopped on the third step from the bottom, which put her at eye level with Ava, and looked at her with the composed, assessing expression Ava had seen across debate stages and practice floors and school corridors for the past month. "I know. Not who you were expecting.""Explain," Ava said."The screenshot first, or the number?""Both. Now."Chloe sat down on the third step, which Ava had not expected, and folded her hands in her
Fake it with me CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE WEIGHT OF WINNING
Ava read the screenshot four more times before she trusted herself to drive home.By the fourth read she had stopped looking for new information and started looking for an explanation that made it less than what it appeared to be, some context that would turn a conversation with her name in it into something harmless, a misunderstanding, a coincidence. She did not find one. The conversation was dated three weeks ago. It mentioned her by name, multiple times, in a tone that suggested planning rather than passing comment, and the two participants were people whose names she recognized well enough that the recognition itself felt like a small betrayal.She did not know what to do with it.She drove home with the radio off and her hands tight on the wheel, and by the time she pulled into her driveway she had made a decision, the only decision that made sense given how little she actually understood about what she was looking at. She was not going to confront anyone. Not yet. She was going
Fake it with me CHAPTER FOURTEEN: NOBODY WINS
Principal Hartley's office had a particular smell, the specific mix of old carpet and stale coffee that every student who had ever been sent there could identify with their eyes closed, and Ava was sitting in one of the two chairs facing his desk on Tuesday morning with the distinct and unfamiliar sensation of being somewhere she had never expected to find herself.Mason sat in the other chair.Neither of them had spoken since they had been called out of first period within four minutes of each other and directed, separately, to the same office, where they had arrived to find the other already seated and had said nothing, not a single word, the silence between them heavier than anything either of them had said in the cafeteria yesterday.Principal Hartley closed the door and sat down behind his desk with the slow, deliberate movements of a man who had given this particular speech to enough students that he no longer needed to think about the words, only the timing."I've had four sepa
Fake it with me CHAPTER FIFTEEN: FORCED COOPERATION
Ava did not open the screenshot again that night.She told herself this was discipline. She had read it once, in the equipment room, with her hands going cold and the floor tilting slightly beneath her, and she had closed the message and put her phone in her bag and walked home with her mind running through every possible interpretation of what she had seen, and somewhere around the third interpretation she had made herself stop, because none of the interpretations changed the immediate problem, which was that she still had four more hours of community service to complete with Mason Reed, who currently was not speaking to her, and a screenshot in her phone that she did not yet understand well enough to act on.She arrived at the equipment room on Wednesday at three fifteen exactly.Mason was already there.He did not look up when she came in, just continued sorting through a crate of cones with the same mechanical focus he had brought to it yesterday, except yesterday there had been s
Fake it with me CHAPTER THIRTEEN: REVENGE IS SWEET
Ava did not sleep well that night, and for once it had nothing to do with Mason Reed.The message sat in her phone, unanswered, the way the first one had, except this time it had weight to it that the first one hadn't carried, specific weight, a name attached to information she didn't yet know what to do with. She read it four more times before midnight. She did not respond. She told herself this was strategy, that she needed more information before she acted on something that could be entirely false, planted by someone who enjoyed chaos for its own sake, and this was a reasonable position to hold.It did not make her sleep any better.By Saturday morning she had decided two things. The first was that whatever the unknown number knew, she was not going to chase it. If it was true, it would surface on its own, the way these things always did. The second was that the video from Friday's pep rally had nine hundred comments now, and the version of herself frozen in that thumbnail, caught
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