CHAPTER SIX: BROTHERS

Noah Ellis had a theory about Mason Reed.

The theory was this: Mason was the most self-aware person Noah had ever met who worked the hardest to pretend he wasn't. Everything Mason did, the jokes, the charm, the easy confidence that filled whatever room he walked into, was deliberate. Not fake, Noah had never thought it was fake, but deliberate, the way an architect is deliberate, building something functional and beautiful that also happened to hide its own foundations.

Most people never looked for the foundations.

Noah had been looking for them for four years, which was how long he had known Mason Reed, and he had found enough of them by now to understand that the public version and the private version were not opposites but they were not identical either, and the distance between them was where all the interesting and occasionally alarming things lived.

He was thinking about this on Thursday evening while Mason ran the same passing drill for the fourth consecutive time in the empty practice field behind the school, throwing to a target cone twenty yards out with the focused repetition of someone who was not practicing a skill but punishing himself with one.

Noah sat on the bench at the sideline and waited.

He had learned early that with Mason, waiting was more useful than asking. Mason would get to it eventually. He always did, in his own time, in his own way, usually sideways rather than directly, but he got there.

The ball hit the cone again.

Mason jogged to retrieve it, came back to the line, threw again.

"You've been out here forty minutes," Noah said.

"Good counting," Mason said.

"Practice ended an hour ago."

"I know when practice ended."

"Coach already left."

"I know that too."

Noah stretched his legs out in front of him and looked at the sky, which was doing the particular thing it did in October when the light started going earlier than you were ready for, turning everything a shade of amber that looked almost intentional. "Bad practice or bad day?"

Mason threw again. The ball hit the cone. He watched it bounce and roll before answering. "Neither."

"So good practice and good day."

"I didn't say that either."

"Then what?"

Mason picked up the ball, held it for a moment, and then instead of throwing it he just stood there with it in both hands, looking at the far end of the field with the expression Noah associated with Mason actually thinking rather than Mason performing thinking, which were two very different things.

"You know what Ava Bennett's problem is?" Mason said.

Noah blinked. Of everything he had been expecting, this was not it. "I wasn't aware we were talking about Ava Bennett."

"We are now."

"Okay." Noah kept his voice neutral, because the situation called for neutrality. "What's her problem?"

"She's so focused on being the best that she forgot to let anyone actually see her being human." Mason tossed the ball lightly in one hand. "She's running for captain against someone who makes people feel like they matter, and she's responding by being more impressive, and it's not going to work."

Noah looked at him carefully. "When did you become an expert on the cheer captain election?"

"I'm not. I'm an expert on people." He finally walked back to the bench and sat down, dropping the ball at his feet. "She's going to lose if she doesn't change her approach."

"And you care about this because?"

Mason picked up his water bottle. "I don't care about it."

"You just spent two minutes explaining the strategic weaknesses in her campaign."

"I was making an observation."

"About Ava Bennett."

"About people in general."

"Specifically Ava Bennett."

Mason gave him the look he used when he wanted someone to stop making a point that was landing too accurately. Noah was immune to this look by now, having been on the receiving end of it since eighth grade.

"I texted her," Mason said, after a pause.

Noah sat up slightly. "You texted Ava Bennett."

"I sent her something useful."

"When did you get her number?"

"I have my ways."

"Mason."

"I got it from the student council contact list. She's on the events committee." He said this with the defensive precision of someone who had anticipated the question and prepared an answer that was technically complete. "It's not a big deal."

Noah looked at him for a long moment. Mason looked back with the particular steadiness he used when he was waiting to see if a thing was going to become a conversation or stay an observation.

"What did you send her?" Noah asked.

"A video. About leadership."

"A leadership video."

"Yes."

"You sent Ava Bennett, the girl you have openly described as the most irritating person in this school, a helpful leadership video."

"I described her as the most arrogant person in this school. Irritating was your word."

"She's not irritating?"

"She's extremely irritating. That's different from being the most irritating."

Noah did not smile. He worked very hard not to smile. "And she responded?"

Something moved across Mason's face, quick and unguarded in a way that Mason's face very rarely was. It was there and then it wasn't, replaced by the usual easy composure, but Noah had been watching Mason Reed's face for four years and he caught it.

"She said thank you," Mason said.

"Ava Bennett said thank you."

"Two words. Don't make it a thing."

"I'm not making it a thing."

"You have the face."

"I don't have a face."

"The one where you're about to say something I don't want to hear."

Noah leaned back on the bench and looked at the sky again. The amber was deepening now, going toward something closer to orange, the last twenty minutes of light before everything turned blue. He thought about what he knew about Mason, about the foundations, about the distance between the public version and the private one. He thought about the forty minutes of extra practice that weren't really about practice. He thought about a helpful leadership video sent to the one girl in school who had never once looked at Mason Reed the way everyone else did.

"She's different," Noah said.

"Don't," Mason said.

"I'm just saying—"

"She's annoying and arrogant and she looks at me like I'm something she's deciding whether to step over."

"And you sent her a leadership video."

"Because she's going to lose the election if someone doesn't say something useful and everyone around her is too busy agreeing with her to be honest." Mason picked up the football again, turned it over in his hands. "It has nothing to do with anything else."

"Okay," Noah said.

"I mean it."

"I know."

"She drives me insane."

"Completely."

"Stop agreeing with everything I say."

"You told me to stop making points. Now I'm agreeing and that's also wrong. What do you want from me, Mason?"

Mason threw the ball at him without warning. Noah caught it on instinct, which was the only reason it didn't hit him in the chest.

"I want you to stop looking at me like that," Mason said.

"Like what?"

"Like you know something."

Noah turned the ball over in his hands. He thought about what he knew, which was considerable, and what he was going to say about it tonight, which was very little, because Mason was not ready for what Noah knew and pushing Mason before he was ready was like pushing a door that opened the other way, you just ended up bruised with the door still closed.

"You know what I think?" Noah said.

"Probably something I don't want to hear."

"I think you haven't met a lot of people who don't immediately give you what you want. And I think when you do meet one it either makes you walk away or it makes you very interested, and you haven't walked away yet."

Mason looked at him.

Noah held the look.

"She's annoying," Mason said.

"You said that already."

"It bears repeating."

He stood up, picked up his bag, and started toward the school building with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders set in the particular way they were set when he was done with a conversation he was still thinking about. Noah watched him go.

At the door, Mason stopped.

He didn't turn around.

"If she asks where I got her number," he said, "don't say anything."

"She already knows. You told her it was the events committee list."

A pause. "Right."

"Mason."

He waited.

"The fact that you remember she's on the events committee is also something," Noah said.

The door opened and closed.

Noah sat alone on the bench with the football in his hands and the October light going dark around him, and he thought about what was coming with the particular quiet dread of someone watching two weather systems move toward each other from a distance, able to see the collision long before the people inside it could.

His phone buzzed.

A text from Sofia Reyes, which was unusual because Sofia Reyes had never texted him before. They had each other's numbers from a group project in sophomore year that neither of them had deleted.

*Did Mason text Ava tonight?*

Noah stared at the message.

He typed back: *Why?*

Three dots. Then: *Because she watched a video he sent her and now she's been staring at her phone for twenty minutes and I've never seen her look like that before and I need to know if I should be concerned.*

Noah read the message twice.

He looked at the door Mason had walked through.

He looked back at his phone.

He typed: *You should probably be concerned.*

He hit send, then immediately typed: *Don't tell either of them I said that.*

Sofia's response came back in four seconds.

*Too late for which part?*

Noah stood up from the bench, picked up his bag, and walked toward the school building with the distinct feeling of someone who had just watched the first domino tip and could already see, with uncomfortable clarity, exactly how far the line went.

His phone buzzed one more time.

He looked at the screen.

It was Mason: *Did Sofia Reyes just text you?*

Noah stopped walking.

He looked at the message for a long moment.

Then he typed back: *Go home, Mason.*

He put his phone in his pocket before the response came, which was the only sensible thing to do, because whatever Mason had sent back was either going to be a denial or a deflection and Noah had had enough of both for one evening.

He pushed through the door into the building.

Somewhere on the other side of the school, two people who couldn't stand each other were sitting with their phones in their hands, and Noah Ellis was the only person who currently understood what that meant.

The problem was that understanding it and being able to do anything about it were two very different things, and the gap between them was exactly where everything was about to go wrong.