CHAPTER 6

ARIA'S POV

I didn't go home.

The thought of walking into that big quiet mansion, with its polished floors and cold air and four boys who didn't care — I couldn't do it. Not tonight. Not with my words still ringing in my ears in Reed's mocking voice.

I went to Maya's.

Her apartment was small and messy and smelled like incense and burnt popcorn and it was the most comforting place I knew. She took one look at my face when she opened the door and immediately started pulling on her shoes.

"I'm going to find him," she said. "I'm going to find Reed and shove that letter so far up his—"

"No." The word came out flat. Final. I walked past her and dropped onto her lumpy couch. "You can't."

"The hell I can't! He humiliated you, Aria. In front of the whole school. Again."

"And if you go after him, tomorrow's story is 'Maya and Aria attack Steel Boy over secret love letter.'" I looked at her. The cold logic of it sat heavy in my chest. "It becomes more material for them. More proof we're emotional. Unstable. Easy to mess with."

She paced, hands in fists. "So we just take it? We do nothing?"

"We don't react," I said. "That's the one thing they won't know what to do with. They're waiting for tears. They want the rage. They want to watch me fall apart." I pulled my knees up to my chest. "I won't give it to them."

Maya stopped pacing and looked at me for a long moment. "You're kind of scaring me right now."

"Good," I said quietly. "Maybe I should."

I slept on her couch.

Badly, in short pieces, the city noise coming through her thin windows. By morning it was already everywhere.

Maya showed me her phone over cereal I couldn't eat. A screenshot of my letter — my actual words, the ones I'd rewritten seven times, the ones I'd been genuinely proud of — with laughing emojis and crude comments underneath. Bianca had shared it with a caption: Loser tries poetry. Someone get this girl a dictionary and a clue. Tiffany and Jade had added their own.

The walk to school was a tunnel. I kept my face smooth and my pace steady. I felt the stares. Heard the snickers. Saw the phones come up. I didn't flinch. Didn't speed up. I just walked through all of it like it was weather.

Don't react. Don't give them anything.

Between second and third period, someone's hand brushed my arm in the crowded hallway.

"Aria."

Reed's voice. Lazy but with something sharper underneath it.

I didn't stop.

I didn't turn around.

I didn't even glance at him. I just kept walking, eyes straight ahead, pace completely unchanged, like he was a piece of furniture I'd walked past a hundred times.

From the corner of my eye I caught it — his smirk disappearing. His face going still. Then tight. A flash of something moving across it: surprise, then real irritation, before the crowd swallowed me and he was gone.

It was the smallest thing. But the clean, sharp thrill it sent through me was better than anything I'd felt in weeks.

The most powerful thing I've ever done to him and I didn't say a single word.

The mansion was its usual quiet that evening.

I went straight to my room, closed the door, and finally let out a long, shaky breath against the wood. Keeping that face on all day was exhausting in a way I hadn't expected. Like holding a heavy thing with both arms for hours.

About an hour later — a soft scrape outside my door.

No knock. No voice. Just that small sound, then silence.

I waited. Then I turned the handle and pulled the door open a few inches.

On the floor, sitting neatly just inside the threshold, was a protein bar. The kind athletes keep in their bags. No note. No message. Nothing written on it.

Just the bar, placed carefully on the polished wood floor.

Jasper.

I stood there staring at it for a long moment. My heart did this complicated, stupid little squeeze that I immediately told it to stop doing.

It wasn't kindness. It couldn't be. These boys didn't do kindness, not toward me. It was something else — observation, maybe. A test. A wolf leaving a small piece of food for the injured thing in its den, just to see what it would do.

I didn't pick it up. I didn't throw it away either. I left it exactly where it was, like a tiny strange monument, and closed the door.

But I couldn't stop thinking about it.

That small, silent thing bothered me more than the memes. More than Bianca's caption. More than Reed's voice in the hallway. Because it meant Jasper had noticed me. Had thought about me. Had done something about it.

And I had absolutely no idea what any of that meant.

Marcus liked family dinners.

He enforced them with this loud, cheerful energy that made my back teeth ache. Every evening, the same long table. Marcus at the head, my mother beside him, smiling her new hopeful smile. The four brothers spread across the other side. Me at the far end, like a footnote.

Nobody was openly mean. That would've been easier.

Marcus would ask about classes. Cole would give one word back. Reed would make some dry comment about the food. Kai would eat in silence, his eyes doing slow, occasional sweeps of the table that always seemed to land on me for just a half second too long before moving on. Jasper kept his eyes on his plate, this contained, tightly wound energy coming off him like heat from a stove.

They'd stopped ignoring me. That was the thing. The blank nothing had shifted into something else — looks, pauses, silences that had weight to them. It was worse than being invisible. The indifference had been a wall. This felt like a cage with the door left open, everyone watching to see if I'd be stupid enough to walk out.

Bianca didn't let it go.

The nerd trying to seduce the popular guy thing became her favorite joke of the week. She'd say it under her breath when I walked past. Tiffany and Jade would echo it, their little laughs following me down the hall like something stuck to my shoe.

Then came history class.

Mr. Henderson's room. I had my semester project binder on the edge of my desk — months of work, late nights in the library, printed sources, handwritten note cards, all of it organized in careful sections.

Tiffany walked past to sharpen her pencil.

Her hip bumped the desk.

The binder flew.

It hit the floor and burst open like a dropped piñata — pages, note cards, printed sources exploding outward in every direction, sliding under desks, fluttering into the aisle, scattering across dirty tile.

The whole class went quiet.

My heart just — stopped.

"Oops," Tiffany said, not even glancing back as she sat down.

Mr. Henderson sighed. "Miss Collins. Collect your things, please. Quickly."

I got down on my knees.