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CHAPTER TWENTY: THE GOLDEN BOY PROBLEM
Tanggal publikasi:
2026-07-04 03:50:17
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Fake it with me CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: CLOSE ENOUGH TO MATTER
Monday arrived the way Mondays arrived after significant Sundays, with the particular requirement of assembling yourself back into the version that functioned in public, and Ava did this with the focused efficiency she brought to most things, standing at her bathroom mirror at six forty five with the specific intentionality of someone who understood that the day was going to require something from her and was making sure she had it available.She had not responded to Mason's text.Not the floor message and not the rival versus enemy message and not the two words from Friday night, and the not-responding had accumulated over the weekend into a weight she was carrying into Monday with the quiet awareness of something unresolved that was not going to resolve itself by being ignored.She went to school.First period passed. Second period passed. She moved through the morning with the competent, forward-facing energy she used on days that required it, attending to the things that required
Fake it with me CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: THE GIRL BEHIND IT
Mason had not meant to see it.He had come through the corridor adjacent to the practice room because the east corridor was blocked for maintenance and the alternative route added seven minutes to the walk from the football field to the locker room, and seven minutes mattered when you had film review at four and a father who checked timestamps on the training logs.The practice room door was slightly ajar.He pushed it open.He saw her before she heard him.She was sitting on the floor in the center of the room with her knees drawn up and her hands in her lap, and she was looking at her reflection in the mirror with an expression he had never seen on her face in two years of sharing the same building, the same corridors, the same overcrowded schedule of events and conflicts and public exchanges that the school had decided was entertainment.He had seen Ava Bennett composed.He had seen her controlled, intimidating, precise, commanding, occasionally furious in the specific way she was
Fake it with me CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: WHEN NO ONE IS WATCHING
The mistake happened on Sunday.Not at the meeting, which ran cleanly and efficiently and produced the clarity all four of them had been working toward for three weeks, Sofia and Noah presenting what they had assembled from the library sessions while Ava added the four words from her notebook and the picture completed itself in the specific, uncomfortable way pictures completed themselves when all the pieces were finally in the same room.They agreed on a plan.They agreed to move carefully and without announcing that they were moving.They agreed not to tell anyone what they knew until they were ready, which meant not Mason, though he was in the room, and not Lily, and not Chloe, and not anyone adjacent to the person the picture pointed to.After the meeting Ava went to the gym.This was where the mistake happened.She was running the competition routine alone, the one the squad was preparing for the regional showcase in three weeks, and she had run it eleven times before the mistake
Fake it with me CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: LOOKING AWAY
She went to the grocery store on Saturday morning because the grocery store required nothing from her.No campaign strategy, no cheer formation, no unknown numbers or photographs or six-word text messages sitting unanswered in her phone. Just a list, an aisle, a task with a clear beginning and end, and Ava Bennett had always found comfort in tasks with clear beginnings and ends.She was in the cereal aisle at nine fifteen when she saw him.Not immediately. She was reading the back of a box with the focused attention she brought to things that did not require it, because sometimes giving unnecessary attention to small things was its own kind of rest, and she looked up to reach for something on the shelf above and found Mason Reed standing at the far end of the aisle.He had not seen her yet.He was with a boy she didn't recognize, maybe twelve or thirteen, with Mason's same jaw and a considerably more chaotic version of his energy, moving through the aisle with the specific restlessnes
Fake it with me CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: AFTER THE WHISTLE
Crestwood lost by six points.Not a collapse, not a disaster, just six points, the particular kind of loss that was almost worse than a blowout because it arrived with the specific cruelty of something that could have gone differently, that had been going differently until the fourth quarter when a fumble on the thirty yard line handed Eastbridge the momentum and the momentum did not come back.Ava knew the score before the final whistle because she was on the sideline, which was where the cheer squad stood during home games, and she had been aware of the scoreboard in the peripheral, background way she was aware of most things during performances, present but not primary.The primary thing was the routine, which ran clean, the back formation transition landing exactly where it was supposed to land, half a beat corrected, not that she was thinking about that.When the final whistle blew the stadium noise changed character in the specific way it changed when a home team lost, the parti
Fake it with me CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: EASTBRIDGE
The rivalry between Crestwood and Eastbridge High was not the kind that needed explaining.It had existed for eleven years, built from a combination of geographic proximity, evenly matched programs, and the specific institutional memory of schools that had been losing and winning against each other long enough that the losing hurt more than it would against anyone else. It lived in the hallways as a background hum most of the year and became a foreground roar in October, when the first of their two scheduled matchups landed on the calendar and the school oriented itself around it the way schools oriented themselves around things that temporarily made everyone feel like they were on the same side.The announcement went up Tuesday morning.Friday. Home game. Eastbridge.By second period the corridors had the particular charged quality of a building that had decided what it cared about for the week, and by third period Ava had been asked four separate times whether the cheer squad had a
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