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CHAPTER FOURTEEN: NOBODY WINS
publish date:
2026-07-01 13:34:05
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Fake it with me CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: THE FIRST CRACK
The message from the unknown number said: *Ask Mason who recommended him for the Elite Prospects Program.*Ava read it three times in the empty gym, and then she put her phone in her bag with the careful deliberateness of someone handling something fragile, and she ran her practice routine alone for forty minutes with the focused, mechanical precision of someone who needed her body to be busy so her mind could work undisturbed.She did not reach a conclusion by the end of practice.She reached the beginning of a question, which was different, and she carried it home and through dinner and into the quiet of her room, where she sat on the floor with her back against the bed and her phone in her lap and the question turning over with the slow, patient rotation of something that had not yet found its answer but was not in a hurry because it understood that the answer mattered too much to rush.She did not text Mason.She did not text anyone.She put her phone face down and went to sleep,
Fake it with me CHAPTER TWENTY: THE GOLDEN BOY PROBLEM
Ava did not respond to the text.She stood in the main corridor with the preliminary results on the bulletin board behind her and Mason's three words on her screen in front of her, and she made a deliberate decision, the kind that required more effort than it should have, to put her phone in her bag and walk to her next class and think about the election, which was the thing that actually mattered right now, and not about whatever Mason Reed had decided to send her on a Monday afternoon when she was already carrying more than she had budgeted for.She thought about the election for approximately four minutes.Then she thought about the three words for the rest of the day, which was not the outcome she had intended but was, she was learning, the kind of outcome that arrived regardless of intention when Mason Reed was involved.She did not respond.Not Monday evening, not Tuesday morning, and by Tuesday afternoon the not-responding had accumulated enough weight that it had become its ow
Fake it with me CHAPTER NINETEEN: CHLOE'S CHALLENGE
The name Ava had confirmed on Saturday was Mara Jenkins.Mara was a junior, mid-tier socially, unremarkable in most of the ways the school measured these things, except that she had been on the cheer squad for two years and had not made the cut for the performance roster at the start of this season, and Ava had been the one to deliver that decision. She had delivered it the way she delivered most difficult things, directly and without excessive softening, because she believed that clarity was kinder than cushioning, and she had moved on without fully considering what she had left behind.What she had left behind, apparently, was someone with a specific grievance and enough patience to wait for the right moment to use it.The information Mara was planning to release on Monday was a recording. Ava had confirmed this through the six-word message she had sent on Saturday and the four-word response that had come back in forty seconds, confirmed through a source she trusted enough to believ
Fake it with me CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: LILY'S ADVANTAGE
The voice note was forty-three seconds long and Mason's voice in it was quieter than she was used to hearing it, none of the performance, none of the audience-facing ease, just his actual voice in what sounded like an empty room.He said: *I heard the debate. Sofia told Noah and Noah told me. I know you changed the speech. I don't know why I'm sending this instead of texting it but I think it's because I wanted you to hear that I meant what I said in the equipment room, about you being good at what you do, and the speech today was that, the real version of it, and I thought you should know someone noticed. That's it. That's the whole message. Ignore this if it's weird.*Forty-three seconds.Ava stood on the path outside school with students moving around her and Sofia watching her face with the focused attention of someone reading weather, and she listened to it twice, the second time with her eyes closed, and then she locked her phone and put it in her bag and kept walking."Well?" S
Fake it with me CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THREE CANDIDATES
The voice belonged to Chloe Whitmore.Ava stood at the bottom of the stairwell and let that land for a full three seconds before she trusted herself to respond. Of everything she had imagined in three days of anticipation, of every face she had placed at the top of that stairwell in every version of this moment she had rehearsed, Chloe had not been in any of them."You," Ava said."Me," Chloe confirmed, and came down the stairs with the particular unhurried quality of someone who had been waiting for this conversation for longer than the last ten minutes. She stopped on the third step from the bottom, which put her at eye level with Ava, and looked at her with the composed, assessing expression Ava had seen across debate stages and practice floors and school corridors for the past month. "I know. Not who you were expecting.""Explain," Ava said."The screenshot first, or the number?""Both. Now."Chloe sat down on the third step, which Ava had not expected, and folded her hands in her
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
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