MasukLiam's POVI first noticed her on Tuesday.Not the way you noticed a stranger. The way you noticed someone you already knew when they turned up somewhere unexpected. She was at one of the long tables near the window when I came in, laptop open, head down. I went to a different section, got out my work, and started.I did not think about it for the rest of the session.On Wednesday she was in the corridor outside one of my lectures. She was leaving a seminar from the room next door when I came out. We passed within about six feet of each other. She had her phone in her hand, looked up briefly when she heard people coming out, our eyes met for about two seconds, and then she looked back at her phone and kept walking.I kept walking too.On Thursday she was in the library again.This time she was in my section. Not next to me. Two tables over and three seats down. Far enough that it was not a deliberate approach. Close enough that if I looked up I could see her.I told myself the campus
Jade's POV I went next door on Saturday. Not Thursday when I first saw it. Not Friday when I spent the day wondering whether I actually knew who was living next door to me. I spent Friday ignoring her calls because I needed to face her myself and not talk about anything on the phone. So I went on Saturday. Two days after I saw the footage that changed everything I thought I knew about the person next door. I knocked on her door at eleven. She opened it immediately. Like she had been somewhere near the door, ready to open it, for two days. She looked at me. I looked at her. "Can I come in?" I asked. "Yes," she said. She stepped back and I walked past her into the hallway and she closed the door behind us. We went to the kitchen. Thirteen years of difficult conversations meant we always ended up at a kitchen table. I took a chair. She settled across from me. Neither of us said anything. Then I asked, "Is it you?"It was not really a question. The footage had already ans
LAST WEEK THURSDAYJADE'S REACTION TO THE VIDEO RELEASED OF AVERY FROM LAST WEEKJade's POVMy phone buzzed at seven forty on Thursday morning and I picked it up from the nightstand without opening my eyes properly.It was a message from a girl on my course. Three words and a link.'Have you seen?'I opened the link while still half asleep.I watched it twice before I fully understood what I was watching.Then I pushed upright in bed and watched it again.The stage. The dancer. The mask falling forward in slow motion, frame by frame, the way someone had edited it to make the fall seem deliberate rather than accidental. The face. Fully lit. Three to five seconds before the hand came up.I knew that face."What the fuck?!"I said it out loud and it did not feel like enough so I said it again. I threw back the covers and stood up and then dropped back down because my legs were not sure what the correct response was. I opened the video a fourth time. Then I put the phone face down on the
Avery's POVI walked into the first lecture of the week and took a seat at the front.Not because the front was where I usually went. I was a middle-row person, left side, the seat with the right angle to the board without feeling like I was in the spotlight. The front was where people who needed to feel visible went, or people who needed to not be visible from behind.I was the second kind this week.The view from the front was different. The board was closer than I was used to and the lecturer was closer and the space that usually existed between me and the rest of the room was gone. But nobody behind me could take a photo of my face without me seeing them do it. Nobody could lean over to a friend and point and think I would not notice. From the front I could see the door and I could see the board and I could not see the room.That was the point.The lecture was Urban Planning. I had my laptop open before anyone else was settled and my notes from last week on the screen and my eyes
Avery's POVVega's office was small and always had too much in it.Binders on the shelves that went floor to ceiling on one wall. A whiteboard covered in formation diagrams that she never fully erased, just wrote over until the old marks became ghost layers underneath the new ones.A desk with two chairs in front of it and a single plant on the windowsill that had survived every semester I had been at Crestwood college because Vega was the kind of woman who did not let things die on her watch.I took the chair on the left at ten on the dot on Monday morning.She came in two minutes later with a coffee she had made somewhere down the corridor and settled across from me. She looked at me directly and said nothing."Thank you for coming," Vega said."You asked me to," I told her."I did," she said. "And I want to be clear before we start that this is not a formal hearing. Nothing said in this room is going to a committee or a board or anyone who is not in this room. This is a conversatio
Brianna's POVI called Colton on Saturday.Not because anything had changed overnight. The footage was still spreading and Avery was still silent and the campus was still processing. None of that required a call. I called because I had been sitting with the same thought since Thursday morning, turning it over from different angles, looking for the flaw in it, and the flaw had not appeared in two days of looking so I was ready to say it out loud to someone who would tell me honestly if I was wrong.I needed to hear myself say it.And I needed someone who understood the mechanics to tell me whether there was something wrong.He answered on the second ring."I want to file a formal complaint," I said.A pause. "Against who?""The athletics board has a code of conduct for athletes," I said. "It covers public behaviour, representation of the programme, actions that bring the athletics complex into disrepute." I had read it three times before I called him. "What Avery has been doing for m
Avery's POVI went to Liam's at four.The game was at seven thirty and I needed to leave by six. I had two hours, and I did not want to spend them alone in my house turning the five names over in my head for the fourteenth time, so I knocked on his door. He opened it and looked at me for a second,
Avery's POVVega called me in on Wednesday morning.Not her office this time. The athletics director's office. Dr. Osei's assistant met me at the door and showed me to a different room from Monday, a larger one with a table and four chairs. Dr. Osei was already there along with Vega and a woman I d
Avery's POVI had seen Liam briefly on Monday evening, before the week took over. We had stood in the corridor outside the gym long enough for me to tell him what had happened with Brianna and for him to tell me what had happened with Colton, and somewhere in the middle of it we had both arrived at
Avery's POVLiam was coming out of the athletics building as I was crossing the car park just before ten in the morning.He saw me and I saw him. We both slowed and stopped on the empty Monday morning tarmac. No words were needed. The expressions told both of us everything."Vega," I said."Reyes,"







