CHAPTER TWO: THE GIRL WHO DOESN'T LAUGH

The school opening event was held in the main hall, and by five fifty-five the next evening, Ava had already mentally reorganized the entire setup three times.

The banners were slightly crooked. The sound system was positioned in a way that would create an echo problem the moment anyone spoke above a conversational volume. The chairs were arranged in rows instead of a slight arc, which meant the students in the outer seats would spend the entire event looking at the backs of other people's heads instead of the stage.

She had fixed the banners herself. She had mentioned the sound issue to the AV student twice. The chairs she was currently staring at with the quiet intensity of someone deciding whether a problem was worth the political cost of solving it.

"You're doing the thing again," Mia said from beside her, holding two cups of fruit punch and offering one to Ava with the energy of someone who had already decided tonight was going to be entertaining regardless of how it went.

Ava took the cup without looking away from the chairs. "What thing?"

"The thing where you find everything that's wrong with a room before you find anything that's right with it."

"The chairs are in the wrong formation."

Mia looked at the chairs. Then back at Ava. "They look like chairs to me."

"That's because you're not thinking about sight lines."

"I'm really not," Mia agreed cheerfully.

Sofia appeared on Ava's other side, having apparently materialized from nowhere the way she occasionally did when she sensed Ava was approximately forty seconds away from rearranging school furniture without permission. "The chairs are fine. The program starts in five minutes. Where is your head?"

"Here," Ava said. "Completely here."

"Then why have you checked the door four times in the last two minutes?"

Ava had not realized she had done that.

She made herself stop looking at the door.

The hall was filling quickly, students spilling in from the corridor in groups, finding seats, pulling out phones, generating the particular noise of a crowd that was present in body but not yet in attention. Teachers stood along the walls. The principal was near the stage, speaking to someone from the student council. Everything was exactly as it should be, organized and functional and running on the schedule Ava had reviewed twice that morning.

Everything except the fact that Mason Reed was seven minutes late.

She was not concerned about this. She was simply aware of it, the way she was aware of the crooked banner and the sound system and the chairs, as a logistical variable that needed accounting for.

The door opened.

Mason walked in at six-oh-two with Noah Ellis at his shoulder and the particular unhurried energy of someone who had never once in his life felt the specific anxiety of being the last person to arrive somewhere. He was wearing a clean shirt, which was more effort than Ava had expected, and his hair was slightly damp at the edges, which meant he had come straight from the locker room and hadn't bothered to account for travel time.

He spotted Ava across the room and raised a hand in a wave that managed to be simultaneously casual and deliberately provocative.

She looked back at the stage.

"Six-oh-two," she said to no one in particular.

Mia, who had apparently been watching the door with considerably more enthusiasm than Ava, said, "He looks good though."

"Mia."

"I'm just saying. Objectively."

"Please stop talking."

Mason reached her in a few long strides, Noah peeling off to find a seat as Mason came to stand beside her with the ease of someone who hadn't just kept sixty people waiting. He smelled like soap and something else, something clean and faintly warm, and Ava filed this observation away in the part of her brain labeled irrelevant and moved on.

"I'm here," he said.

"You're late."

"By two minutes."

"The program started at six."

"And I'm here at six-oh-two, so technically I made it." He looked around the hall with a casual sweep, the way someone looks at a room they feel comfortable in rather than one they're responsible for. "Looks good."

"The chairs are in the wrong formation."

He glanced at the chairs. "They look fine to me."

Ava turned to look at him directly for the first time since he'd walked in. "You and Mia should form a club."

Before he could respond, the principal tapped the microphone at the front of the stage and the room settled into the particular anticipatory quiet of an audience waiting to be addressed. Ava straightened. This was the part she had prepared for, the part she was good at. She had written her remarks three days ago, revised them once, and memorized them without meaning to.

They moved to the side of the stage to wait for their introduction. The space was narrow, bodies close together, and Ava was acutely aware of the six or seven inches between her shoulder and Mason's arm.

"You nervous?" he asked, quietly enough that only she could hear.

"No."

"You're doing that thing with your jaw."

She stopped doing the thing with her jaw. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You clench it when you're stressed. You did it during the history presentation in March too."

She turned to look at him, and the fact that he had noticed that, that he had apparently catalogued it somewhere in his mind and was now producing it like evidence, was briefly more disorienting than anything else about the evening.

"Why do you remember that?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Good memory."

The principal said their names.

They walked out together, and the room reacted the way it always did when Ava and Mason appeared in the same space, with a particular quality of attention that was slightly different from regular attention, something alert and waiting, like a crowd that already knew these two were interesting and was settling in to be proven right.

Ava reached the microphone first. She delivered her remarks cleanly, confidently, without notes, and when she finished the applause was genuine and immediate. She stepped back.

Mason stepped forward.

He didn't use the remarks he was supposed to use. She could tell immediately because he didn't glance down at the card in his hand, just set it on the podium and started talking, and the room laughed within thirty seconds, genuinely laughed, and then laughed again, and the attention in the room shifted toward him with the ease of sunflowers finding light.

Ava stood two feet behind him and watched it happen.

She had worked on her remarks for three days. He had apparently decided his weren't necessary, and the room loved him for it. She felt something move through her chest that she identified as irritation and nothing else, nothing more complicated than that.

When he finished, the applause was louder.

He stepped back beside her, and she could feel him looking at her profile, waiting for her reaction with the particular patience of someone who already knew what it was.

She gave him nothing.

They walked off the stage together, and the moment they cleared the curtain and were out of the audience's sightline, Ava turned to face him.

"You didn't use your prepared remarks," she said.

"They were boring."

"They were appropriate."

"Same thing, sometimes." He was smiling now, easy and unbothered, and it made her want to say something that would make him stop. "The crowd liked it."

"The crowd laughed. That's not the same as taking the event seriously."

"Events like this don't need to be serious, Bennett. They need to be memorable." He tilted his head slightly. "When's the last time you let something be fun without turning it into a performance review?"

The question sat in the air between them and Ava did not answer it, partly because she didn't want to give him the satisfaction and partly because, somewhere in the back of her mind, in the same place she had filed away the observation about his soap, a quieter and more honest part of her was turning the question over and realizing she wasn't entirely sure.

"We're done here," she said instead, and turned away.

"Ava."

She stopped. He almost never used her first name.

She turned back slowly.

Mason was looking at her with an expression she hadn't seen on him before, something that wasn't a joke and wasn't a challenge, something that was just straightforward and direct in a way that felt almost unfair coming from him.

"You were good up there," he said. "I'm not saying that to be nice. You were genuinely good."

She stared at him.

He held her gaze for exactly one second longer than was comfortable, and then the easy smile came back, and he walked away toward Noah like the moment hadn't happened at all.

Ava stood in the narrow corridor behind the stage, alone, and the thought that arrived was quiet and unwelcome and refused to leave as easily as he had.

He had noticed her jaw in March.

He had remembered it in October.

What else had Mason Reed been paying attention to, and why had she never once thought to wonder?