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CHAPTER FIFTEEN: FORCED COOPERATION
publish date:
2026-07-01 13:33:58
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Fake it with me CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE WEIGHT OF WINNING
Ava read the screenshot four more times before she trusted herself to drive home.By the fourth read she had stopped looking for new information and started looking for an explanation that made it less than what it appeared to be, some context that would turn a conversation with her name in it into something harmless, a misunderstanding, a coincidence. She did not find one. The conversation was dated three weeks ago. It mentioned her by name, multiple times, in a tone that suggested planning rather than passing comment, and the two participants were people whose names she recognized well enough that the recognition itself felt like a small betrayal.She did not know what to do with it.She drove home with the radio off and her hands tight on the wheel, and by the time she pulled into her driveway she had made a decision, the only decision that made sense given how little she actually understood about what she was looking at. She was not going to confront anyone. Not yet. She was going
Fake it with me CHAPTER FOURTEEN: NOBODY WINS
Principal Hartley's office had a particular smell, the specific mix of old carpet and stale coffee that every student who had ever been sent there could identify with their eyes closed, and Ava was sitting in one of the two chairs facing his desk on Tuesday morning with the distinct and unfamiliar sensation of being somewhere she had never expected to find herself.Mason sat in the other chair.Neither of them had spoken since they had been called out of first period within four minutes of each other and directed, separately, to the same office, where they had arrived to find the other already seated and had said nothing, not a single word, the silence between them heavier than anything either of them had said in the cafeteria yesterday.Principal Hartley closed the door and sat down behind his desk with the slow, deliberate movements of a man who had given this particular speech to enough students that he no longer needed to think about the words, only the timing."I've had four sepa
Fake it with me CHAPTER FIFTEEN: FORCED COOPERATION
Ava did not open the screenshot again that night.She told herself this was discipline. She had read it once, in the equipment room, with her hands going cold and the floor tilting slightly beneath her, and she had closed the message and put her phone in her bag and walked home with her mind running through every possible interpretation of what she had seen, and somewhere around the third interpretation she had made herself stop, because none of the interpretations changed the immediate problem, which was that she still had four more hours of community service to complete with Mason Reed, who currently was not speaking to her, and a screenshot in her phone that she did not yet understand well enough to act on.She arrived at the equipment room on Wednesday at three fifteen exactly.Mason was already there.He did not look up when she came in, just continued sorting through a crate of cones with the same mechanical focus he had brought to it yesterday, except yesterday there had been s
Fake it with me CHAPTER THIRTEEN: REVENGE IS SWEET
Ava did not sleep well that night, and for once it had nothing to do with Mason Reed.The message sat in her phone, unanswered, the way the first one had, except this time it had weight to it that the first one hadn't carried, specific weight, a name attached to information she didn't yet know what to do with. She read it four more times before midnight. She did not respond. She told herself this was strategy, that she needed more information before she acted on something that could be entirely false, planted by someone who enjoyed chaos for its own sake, and this was a reasonable position to hold.It did not make her sleep any better.By Saturday morning she had decided two things. The first was that whatever the unknown number knew, she was not going to chase it. If it was true, it would surface on its own, the way these things always did. The second was that the video from Friday's pep rally had nine hundred comments now, and the version of herself frozen in that thumbnail, caught
Fake it with me CHAPTER TWELVE: THE CHALLENGE
By Friday morning, Ava had decided three things.One, she was not going to ask Mason about the text message. Two, she did not care who the girl was. Three, both of these decisions were completely sincere and not at all undermined by the fact that she had checked her phone forty separate times since Wednesday afternoon for a message that never arrived.She walked into school with her chin level and her bag over one shoulder and the particular controlled composure she wore on days that required it, and Friday required it, because Friday was the day the cheer squad performed at the pep rally, the first major public appearance before the captain election results, the kind of moment that mattered enough that she had run through her opening sequence four times before breakfast just to be sure her hands had stopped shaking from something that was not, she told herself, nerves.Sofia met her at the main entrance."You look terrifying," Sofia said, which from Sofia was a compliment."Good.""H
Fake it with me CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE PERFECT BOY
Ava did not think about Mason Reed on Thursday morning.She thought about the campaign strategy document, which now had fourteen bullet points and a section titled *Connection — Practical Applications* that she had written at eleven pm and reread at six am and found, to her moderate surprise, was actually good. She thought about the cheer schedule for the following week and the fact that Jade's timing had improved enough to consider moving her into the secondary formation. She thought about the AP History essay due Friday and the two paragraphs she still needed to write and the specific argument she wanted to make in the conclusion that kept arriving in her mind almost fully formed but not quite.She did not think about Mason Reed.She was doing well with this until approximately eight twenty, when she walked into the main corridor and found him there.He was not doing anything remarkable. He was standing at his locker with Noah beside him, pulling out a textbook with one hand and eat
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