All Chapters of Fake it with me : Chapter 1 - Chapter 4

The first thing people learned about Ava Bennett was that she did not repeat herself.The second thing they learned was that they wished she had, because the first time she said something, it usually left a mark."Reset," she said, and the word landed in the gym like a stone dropped in still water.Five girls who had been mid-collapse from exhaustion immediately pulled themselves back into formation. Nobody argued. Nobody even sighed loud enough to be heard. This was Ava Bennett's practice, and in Ava Bennett's practice, you either kept up or you got out of the way.She walked the length of the formation slowly, her eyes moving across each girl with the kind of focus that made people feel simultaneously seen and evaluated. Her white sneakers were spotless. Her ponytail hadn't moved in two hours. She looked exactly as composed as she had when practice started, which was honestly a little unfair to everyone else in the room."Your timing is off," she said, stopping in front of the young

Ava has decided right from time that there was nothing special about Mason, he was just overhyped. He was charming, she wasn't delusional. But there was a difference between being genuinely magnetic and being the beneficiary of a reputation that had been building since freshman year, and Mason Reed had spent two years coasting on the second one while everyone around him confused it for the first. The school had decided he was golden, and so everything he did got filtered through that, his jokes were funnier, his mistakes were more forgivable, his presence in a room more significant than it had any right to be.It was, in Ava's considered opinion, one of the more embarrassing things she had witnessed in her three years at Crestwood High.She was thinking about this on Wednesday morning while watching him hold court in the middle of the main corridor, which he did with the regularity of a scheduled event. He was leaning against the lockers with his arms crossed, saying something to the