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CHAPTER NINE: ETHAN COLE
publish date:
2026-07-01 03:24:34
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Fake it with me CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: JEALOUSY WITHOUT REASON
They left the stairwell with two agreements and no resolution.No responding to the unknown number. No pulling threads until after the election. Quiet, careful, and patient, which were three things Ava was good at and which she intended to apply with full force to the next three days while ignoring everything that wasn't the presentation.She was largely successful at this.Largely.Thursday morning arrived with the particular charged quality of a day that had been circled on a calendar for six weeks, and Ava woke at five thirty without an alarm and lay in the gray early light going through her presentation one final time, not the words but the intention underneath them, the thing she needed to be communicating beneath the content.She got up, got ready, and went to school.Mason was at his locker when she came through the main entrance.He was not alone.Two girls from the junior class were standing with him in the particular configuration of people who had engineered proximity and w
Fake it with me CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: MASON FINDS OUT
He picked up on the first ring."Where are you?" Mason said, and his voice had none of its usual ease, none of the performance, just flat and direct in the way it got when something had stripped everything else away."Science corridor," Ava said. "What's wrong?""Not on the phone. Can you meet me? East stairwell, ten minutes."She almost said she had class. She almost said she needed more information before she agreed to anything. She said neither of these things, which was itself information she filed away without examining too closely."Ten minutes," she said.She got there in eight.Mason was already there, standing at the bottom of the stairwell with his hands in his pockets and the particular stillness of someone who had been moving fast and had forced themselves to stop. He looked up when she came through the door and something in his expression shifted, relief maybe, or the specific version of relief that arrived when you had been carrying something alone and someone else had f
Fake it with me CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: THE EASY THING
Wednesday morning arrived gray and specific, the kind of October morning that felt like a deadline, and Ava walked into school with three days until the election and the unknown number's message sitting in her bag like something with actual physical weight.She had made a decision overnight.She was not going to ask Mason about the Elite Prospects recommendation. Not yet. Not three days before an election when she needed every available unit of focus on the campaign and could not afford to open something that might require more of her than she currently had to give. The message would keep. The question would keep. She was good at keeping things until the right moment, and this was not the right moment.She found Ethan in AP History before class started.He was in his usual seat, third row, slightly right of center, writing something in the margin of his textbook in the small precise handwriting she had memorized without intending to, and he looked up when she sat down two rows ahead a
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
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