CHAPTER THREE: THE GOLDEN BOY PROBLEM

Ava has decided right from time that there was nothing special about Mason, he was just overhyped. 

He was charming, she wasn't delusional. But there was a difference between being genuinely magnetic and being the beneficiary of a reputation that had been building since freshman year, and Mason Reed had spent two years coasting on the second one while everyone around him confused it for the first. The school had decided he was golden, and so everything he did got filtered through that, his jokes were funnier, his mistakes were more forgivable, his presence in a room more significant than it had any right to be.

It was, in Ava's considered opinion, one of the more embarrassing things she had witnessed in her three years at Crestwood High.

She was thinking about this on Wednesday morning while watching him hold court in the middle of the main corridor, which he did with the regularity of a scheduled event. He was leaning against the lockers with his arms crossed, saying something to the group assembled around him, and the group was doing what groups around Mason Reed always did, laughing on cue, nodding, angling themselves slightly toward him like plants toward a window.

Two girls near the front of the group were doing the specific thing that Ava found most tedious, the thing where they laughed a half second after everyone else because they were busy watching his face to make sure they were reacting correctly. Mason said something else and touched one of them lightly on the arm, the briefest possible contact, and she visibly lost the thread of whatever she had been about to say.

Ava turned away and kept walking.

"You're doing the face," Sofia said, falling into step beside her.

"I don't have a face."

"The one where you look at something like it personally offended you."

"He's blocking the corridor again. Other people need to get to class."

Sofia glanced back at the group. "There's plenty of room on the left side."

"That's not the point."

"What is the point?"

Ava shifted her bag on her shoulder. "The point is that he does whatever he wants and nobody says anything because he's Mason Reed and Mason Reed gets to exist by different rules than everyone else."

Sofia was quiet for a moment. "This really bothers you."

"Everything inefficient bothers me."

"Sure," Sofia said, in the tone she used when she was agreeing with something she didn't believe at all.

They made it to first period without further incident, which Ava counted as a reasonable start to the day. She sat in her usual seat, second row, slightly left of center, close enough to the front to hear clearly and far enough from the board that she wasn't straining her neck. She had sat in this seat since September of sophomore year and saw no reason to change something that worked.

Mason walked in four minutes later and sat in the back row.

Of course he did.

Their English teacher, Mr. Hargrove, was still setting up at the front when Mason's phone buzzed loudly on his desk. He picked it up without any particular attempt at subtlety, read whatever was on the screen, and grinned. The girl sitting next to him leaned over to see. He angled the phone toward her and she laughed, and they had a brief whispered conversation that had nothing to do with the Fitzgerald novel currently sitting untouched on Mason's desk.

Mr. Hargrove started talking. Mason put the phone face down on the desk, which was the minimum possible concession to the fact that class had begun, and leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed and the expression of someone who had made peace with being somewhere he hadn't chosen.

Ava opened her notebook.

Twenty minutes into the lesson, Mr. Hargrove asked the class what they thought Gatsby's parties represented. Three people offered tentative answers. Mr. Hargrove pushed further, asking whether Gatsby was performing for the crowd or for one specific person.

"Reed," Mr. Hargrove said, apparently deciding that Mason's contribution was overdue. "What do you think?"

Mason didn't sit up. "I think Gatsby throws parties for the same reason anyone performs publicly. He wants one specific person to notice, and he doesn't know how to just say that, so he makes himself impossible to ignore instead."

The room was briefly quiet.

Mr. Hargrove looked like he hadn't expected that. "That's a reasonable reading. Can you expand on it?"

"Not really," Mason said. "That's kind of the whole thing."

A few people laughed. Mr. Hargrove moved on. Mason went back to looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone who had said what he had to say and considered the matter closed.

Ava had written down exactly none of that because she had been listening with the specific quality of attention she reserved for things she didn't want to find interesting but did anyway, which was an experience she associated almost exclusively with Mason Reed and found deeply inconvenient.

She drew a line through a sentence in her notes and rewrote it.

After class, in the corridor, Mason appeared beside her with the timing of someone who had been waiting, which she refused to believe was the case.

"You wrote that down," he said.

She didn't look at him. "I write everything down. It's called taking notes."

"You wrote down what I said."

"I wrote down the relevant literary observation that happened to come out of your mouth. The source is irrelevant."

He fell into step beside her, which she hadn't invited and apparently didn't need to. "You could just say it was a good point."

"I could also do a lot of things I have no intention of doing."

"Harsh."

"Accurate."

They were walking in the same direction, which was an ongoing logistical problem she hadn't found a solution to, since they apparently shared more of the same schedule than any two people who disliked each other should reasonably be expected to tolerate. Mason walked with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders relaxed, taking up exactly as much space as he wanted to, and Ava walked beside him with the rigid awareness of someone who was refusing to adjust her pace or her path for anyone.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"You're going to regardless."

"What would it actually take for you to think I was worth something?"

She stopped walking.

He stopped too, half a step ahead, and turned back to look at her. The corridor was busy around them, students moving in both directions, conversations overlapping, lockers opening and closing with their particular metallic percussion. In the middle of all of it, Mason Reed was looking at her with an expression that wasn't charming and wasn't performative and wasn't any of the things she had catalogued and filed away under predictable.

It looked, uncomfortably, like a real question.

"I don't think about whether you're worth something," she said. "I don't think about you at all."

Something shifted in his expression. "Yeah," he said, after a moment. "You do."

He walked away before she could respond, moving back into the current of the corridor with the ease of someone who had never needed to check whether a room would make space for him.

Ava stood exactly where she was for three seconds longer than she intended to.

Then she turned and walked in the opposite direction, her jaw set, her notebook pressed flat against her chest, and the distinct and irritating awareness that he had just won an exchange she hadn't realized they were having.

Worse than that was the question he had left behind, sitting in the corridor like something she had dropped and couldn't decide whether to pick back up.

What would it take?

She didn't have an answer, and the fact that the question was still following her three hallways later, quiet and uninvited, was the most aggravating thing Mason Reed had managed to do to her yet, and he had managed quite a few.