CHAPTER FIVE: CAPTAIN MATERIAL

Ava did not sleep well.

This was not something she would ever admit to anyone, including Sofia, including Mia, including the journal she had stopped keeping in ninth grade precisely because she didn't want a written record of the things that kept her up at night. But the fact was that she lay in bed until past midnight with her phone face down on her nightstand and Mason Reed's four words sitting in the back of her mind like a splinter she couldn't locate well enough to remove.

She had not responded to his text.

She told herself this was because she had nothing to say. She told herself this at eleven pm, and again at eleven thirty, and again just before midnight when she picked up her phone, looked at the message, put the phone back down, and stared at the ceiling until sleep eventually arrived out of what felt like pity.

She was up by six.

By seven she was in the school library with her laptop open and a document on the screen titled CAPTAIN CAMPAIGN — STRATEGY, which currently contained four bullet points and a lot of white space. She had been staring at the white space for twenty minutes.

The problem, and she had identified it clearly enough by now that she could look at it directly, was that Chloe had been right. Not completely right, not right in a way that Ava was going to announce publicly, but right enough that ignoring it would be the kind of mistake she didn't allow herself to make. The girls on the squad didn't just want excellent. They wanted to feel like excellence included them, like the standard existed to lift them rather than to measure how far below it they were standing.

Ava knew how to be excellent. She had been doing it since she was twelve years old.

She was less certain she knew how to make other people feel excellent, which was a different skill entirely and one that nobody in her life had ever specifically taught her, because the people in her life had always been more interested in the result than the process.

She added a fifth bullet point to the document: *Connect.*

Then she stared at it.

Then she deleted it.

Then she typed it again.

"You're here early," said a voice, and Ava looked up to find Lily Carter standing two tables away with a library book under her arm and the expression of someone who was genuinely surprised rather than performing surprise, which Ava had learned to tell the difference between.

"I'm always here early," Ava said.

"I know," Lily said. "I've just never been early enough to see it."

There was a brief pause that wasn't quite awkward, the kind of pause that existed between two people who knew each other well enough to be aware of the complicated thing between them but hadn't yet decided how directly to address it.

Lily sat down two tables over, not at Ava's table, not pointedly far away, just two tables over, which felt like a considered choice. She opened her book. Ava looked back at her screen.

They worked in silence for ten minutes, which was not as uncomfortable as Ava would have predicted.

"Can I ask you something?" Lily said, without looking up from her book.

Ava waited.

"Why do you want captain?"

It was a simple question and Ava had a simple answer ready, the one she had been refining since she decided to run, the one about legacy and standards and taking the program to the next level. She opened her mouth to give it.

"Because I've been working toward it for three years," she said instead, which was not the prepared answer but was more accurate, "and because I think I'm the best person for it."

Lily looked up. "That's honest."

"I try to be."

"No you don't," Lily said, and there was no cruelty in it, just a simple observation delivered the way someone might note the weather. "You try to be right. That's different."

Ava looked at her across the two tables.

"Why do you want it?" Ava asked.

Lily considered this with the particular quality of attention of someone who took questions seriously. "Because I think the squad could be something more than a performance. I think it could be a place where people actually want to be, not just a place they work hard to stay in."

The sentence landed quietly.

Ava said nothing.

Lily went back to her book.

By the time first period started the library conversation had settled somewhere in the back of Ava's mind alongside Mason's text and Chloe's corridor comment and the poll with its fourteen-point gap, a collection of things she was not ready to fully examine but could not quite put down.

She got through first and second period without incident. Third period was PE, which she shared with half the football team due to a scheduling arrangement that whoever designed the timetable would one day have to answer for, and which meant that Mason Reed was present and approximately impossible to ignore for fifty minutes twice a week.

Today he was on the opposite end of the gymnasium running drills with Noah and two other players, and Ava was with the cheer girls doing a conditioning circuit, and there was enough physical distance between them that the situation was entirely manageable.

This was fine for the first twenty minutes.

Then the PE teacher reorganized the class into mixed groups for a relay activity, because apparently the universe had a consistent position on the matter, and Ava found herself in a group of six that included, through what she could only describe as a targeted cosmic inconvenience, Mason Reed.

He arrived at the group with his water bottle and looked at the assembled lineup with the easy scan of someone taking inventory. When he got to Ava his expression didn't change, but something in it settled slightly, the way someone's expression settles when they find the thing they were looking for.

"Bennett," he said.

"Reed," she said.

"Sleep well?"

She looked at him with the level steadiness she used for people who were testing her patience. "Fine."

"You didn't text back."

"I was busy."

"At eleven pm."

"I keep a full schedule."

Noah, standing just behind Mason, made a sound that might have been a cough or might have been something else. Mason didn't look back at him.

The relay started and Ava ran it the way she ran everything, with complete focus and zero wasted movement, and her team won by a margin that was not particularly close, and she registered this with quiet satisfaction and immediately moved on. Mason had run the anchor leg for his team and was fast, genuinely fast, faster than she had expected, and she noticed this the way she noticed useful information, catalogued it and filed it without ceremony.

After the relay, waiting for the next activity, Mason came to stand beside her without being invited.

"I meant what I said," he said. "About the poll."

"You don't know anything about cheer captain elections."

"I know fourteen points isn't a death sentence."

"I didn't say it was."

"You didn't have to." He looked at her sideways. "You've been carrying it since yesterday. I can tell."

Ava turned to look at him fully. "You cannot tell anything about me."

"I can tell more than you think," he said, and his voice was completely even, no smile behind it, no performance, just the flat statement of someone saying something they believed. "That's what bothers you about me."

She held his gaze for exactly as long as it took her to decide she was not going to give him the satisfaction of a response, then she looked back at the gym floor.

They stood in silence for a moment.

"What did you mean?" she said, and hated that she said it, hated that the question had been sitting in her chest since last night waiting to get out, hated that he was the one who had put it there.

"What?"

"Your text. The last message."

Mason was quiet for a second, and she could feel him looking at the side of her face the way someone looks at something they are deciding how much to say about.

"I meant what I said," he said finally.

"That's not an explanation."

"No," he agreed, "it's not."

The PE teacher blew the whistle for the next activity and Mason moved away to rejoin his group, easy and unhurried, like he hadn't just refused to answer the one question she'd carried through an entire sleepless night.

Ava stared straight ahead at the gym floor.

She had four words from a text message, no explanation, and the deeply aggravating awareness that Mason Reed had managed to occupy more of her mental space in the last eighteen hours than the cheer captain election she had been preparing for since June.

She pulled out her phone after class, opened the message thread, and read his four words one more time.

*You're going to win.*

She still didn't know what to do with that, and what made it worse, what made it genuinely insufferable, was that somewhere underneath all the irritation and the pride and the fourteen-point gap, a small and traitorous part of her had needed to hear it.

And he had somehow known that.

Which meant Mason Reed had been paying attention to her in a way she had never once thought to account for, and now that she knew it, she couldn't unknow it, and she had absolutely no idea what to do with that information except carry it forward into tomorrow and hope it got lighter.

It didn't feel like it was going to get lighter.