CHAPTER 5

ARIA’S POV

"Not a love note," she said firmly. "Something real. Something that sounds like a whole, actual person. Something that makes him wonder who wrote it and want to find out." She pointed at me. "You put it in his locker. He reads it. He sees the mind behind the girl who tripped. He comes looking."

It was terrifying. It was also the only idea either of us had.

I spent two nights on it. I sat in the middle of my enormous, silent bedroom with the occasional thump of bass drifting from down the hall — Kai's room, I'd figured out — and I wrote drafts until they stopped sounding desperate and started sounding like me. Not trying too hard. Not begging. Just honest in a way that had its own kind of confidence.

The letter went through seven versions before I kept one.

Zane,

There's something about you I can't stop thinking about. Maybe it's the way you move — so easy and sure, like you own every room you walk into. Or maybe it's your eyes. Deep and focused and the kind that could take a person apart if they looked too long. I've tried not to notice. I'm not very good at it.

But it's not just how you look. It's how you carry yourself. The way you laugh. The way you're so completely, unapologetically yourself without even trying. That's rarer than you think.

I know I'm barely a blip on your radar — if I'm even that. But maybe you'll read this and wonder. And maybe when you come looking, I'll be ready.

Yours, secretly — A

No last name. Just the initial. A small, terrifying gamble.

The next morning my hands were shaking when I slipped the folded white paper through the vent of his locker. Then I spent the entire day barely breathing — every bell a jolt, every hour stretching the knot in my stomach tighter. Terror and hope twisted together in my chest like two things that had no business being in the same place.

I hid in the library. I pretended to read. Maya sent me thumbs-ups from across classrooms like a coach on the sideline.

Let the words do the work, I kept telling myself. You wrote something real. Just let it land.

After practice, I couldn't stay away.

I stood at the far end of the main hallway — inconspicuous enough, close enough to see — and waited. My heartbeat was embarrassingly loud in my own ears.

The team poured out in a wave of noise and sweat and easy post-practice energy. And there was Zane — laughing, shoving someone's shoulder, jaw catching the light because of course it was. Warm and golden and completely out of reach.

And right beside him, walking with that loose, unhurried ease I was starting to recognize, was Reed.

Of course. Different sport, same tier of untouchable. It made a horrible, perfect kind of sense that I hadn't seen coming.

Zane spun his combination. The locker swung open.

Reed leaned against the one beside it, scrolling his phone — not even paying attention, just existing in that careless, effortless way he did everything. His hand moved on autopilot, reaching toward the top shelf.

His fingers caught the edge of the white square.

It fluttered. Started to fall.

He caught it before it hit the floor.

My entire body went stiff.

Reed looked down at it. Turned it over. The small frown on his face lasted about one second before something else moved behind his eyes — curiosity, first. Then amusement starting to build.

"Ooh." His voice lifted, warm and carrying, designed to draw a crowd. "Fan mail, Park? Let's see if it's worth something."

"Relax, give it here," Zane said — but he was already smiling, which meant he wasn't going to push.

Reed unfolded it. His eyes moved across the first line. And then he started reading out loud, in that voice — pitched perfectly to entertain, mock-sweet and theatrical, one hand pressed to his chest like the words were personally moving him.

"There's something about you I can't stop thinking about—"

Someone laughed. More people slowed down, drifting closer.

"The way you move, so easy and sure, like you own every room—"

The crowd kept growing, pulled in by Reed's performance the way they always were — because boys like Reed were gravity, and everyone else just orbited. He milked every line, rolling his eyes, shaking his head like he couldn't believe what he was reading.

Every single word was mine.

Every rewritten, agonized-over, carefully chosen word — out loud, in that voice, in front of all of them.

My lungs stopped working properly.

Reed flipped the paper over, dragging out the pause, letting the crowd lean in.

"And when you come looking, I'll be ready. Yours, secretly — A." He let the last word sit there. Then: "Ooh. An initial. Very mysterious." He scanned the page one more time — and then his smirk faltered.

Just for a second. One quick, real second.

Something crossed his face that wasn't performance. Recognition, landing fast. Then the cold, sharp comprehension that followed it — pieces clicking into place behind his eyes.

He knew. He knew exactly who A was.

He looked up.

Across the whole loud, crowded hallway — through all the noise and the laughter and the twenty bodies between us — his eyes found mine like they had the coordinates memorized.

He held them. Didn't smirk. Didn't perform. Just looked at me with that cold, still, certain stare that said one thing very clearly:

You. You did this.

Then from somewhere in the crowd: "A? That's the new girl — the one who got painted! Aria!"

The name hit the group like a spark hitting dry paper. The laughter turned sharp and pointed, rippling outward fast — she wrote this? to Zane? after the whole bra thing? — voices overlapping, people turning, the hallway coming completely apart.

Zane's easy smile died. He looked at Reed's face, then at the letter, then turned his head and followed Reed's line of sight until he found me at the far end. Something shifted in his expression — the warmth gone, replaced by something more complicated. A frown. A flicker of something that wasn't quite pity but lived in the same neighborhood.

He took a half-step toward me. His mouth opened.

I turned around.

One foot. Then the other. Smooth and steady and controlled because I would not run, I would not cry, I would not let any of them — not the crowd, not Zane, not Reed holding my letter with my words still warm from his mouth — see me break.

The hallway stretched long and empty ahead of me.

Behind me, my name floated through the noise one more time, smaller now, already becoming a joke that people would forget by tomorrow.

I didn't look back.

What I didn't see — what I wouldn't find out until much later — was Zane watching me walk away with something in his face that had nothing to do with the crowd laughing around him. Something quiet. Something that had shifted, just slightly, in the few seconds he'd watched me hold myself together and keep walking.

But I was already gone.

And Reed was still holding my letter.