Do Not Panic

SLOANE

Eastlake High had dressed up its bones, but it couldn’t quite hide them.

The gym was still the gym. No amount of silver streamers could disguise the faded championship banners, the scuffed hardwood, or the lingering scent of floor wax beneath clouds of expensive perfume and cheap cologne. Still, someone had strung white fairy lights across the rafters, and fake snow dusted the photo backdrop near the bleachers. In the dim, forgiving glow, the student body looked less like hostages in a public institution and more like people trying on versions of themselves they had only imagined.

Winter Formal.

Two words that had looked harmless on hallway posters.

Two words that now felt like an ambush.

I stood just outside the gym doors with Riley, Priya, Leah, and Jake, fighting the urge to tug at the hem of my dark green dress for the tenth time. The fabric fit too perfectly to ignore. Riley had called it flawless. Leah had called it lethal. Priya had smiled and said it made me look like I knew exactly what I was doing—which was generous enough to count as fiction.

I did not know what I was doing.

Not tonight.

Not lately.

Maybe not ever.

Riley stepped closer and adjusted the thin strap on my shoulder with gentle fingers. Her black dress was sharp and simple, her curls pinned back with tiny silver clips that caught the light whenever she moved. For once, her signature grin was missing. She studied my face with quiet intensity that made my skin itch.

“You’re doing that thing,” she murmured.

“What thing?”

“Pretending you’re fine so aggressively that it’s starting to look like a medical condition.”

Priya offered a sympathetic wince. “You’ve been practically nonverbal since we got out of the car.”

“I’m always quiet before school events,” I deflected. “It’s how I honor the tragedy.”

Jake, looking surprisingly sharp in a slightly crooked black suit, watched me with uncharacteristic restraint. “That almost sounded normal. Except your hands are shaking.”

I curled my fingers into my palms. “My hands are cold.”

Leah glanced toward the pulsing bass vibrating through the gym doors. “It’s eighty degrees in there.”

“That is not encouraging.”

When Riley didn’t laugh, the last bit of air left my lungs.

She waited until a pack of glitter-drenched juniors shrieked their way past us before dropping her voice. “Are we going to talk about Thanksgiving?”

My stomach seized. Priya’s posture stiffened. Leah’s eyes darted between us. Jake wisely became fascinated by his dress shoes.

“Not here,” I said.

“You said that on Monday.”

“And it’s still true.”

Riley exhaled a long, measured breath. The teasing was entirely gone from her voice. “I’m not asking for a play-by-play. I don’t *want* the details. I just want to know if you’re okay.”

It should have been a one-syllable lie. Clean. Efficient. Instead, the question hung between us, heavy and rotting.

Because Riley had seen enough at that dinner table to know the rules between Chase and me had changed. She hadn’t seen the full, ugly shape of it, but she’d seen Chase watching me like a man holding a match near an open gas line. She knew I had spent the entire meal wound so tight I was practically vibrating. She knew whatever game we were playing had stopped being a game.

I looked past her, fixing my eyes on the gym doors. “I don’t know,” I whispered.

Riley’s expression fractured into something soft. That was worse than judgment; softer things always found the cracks in my armor. She reached out, wrapping her hand loosely around my wrist.

“Whatever happened, Sloane… whatever is *still* happening… you can’t keep carrying it like it’s only dangerous if you say it out loud.”

Before I could suffocate on the truth of that, the heavy double doors opened behind us.

The hallway didn’t dramatically shift. The music didn’t cut out. But my attention snapped violently toward the noise, as if the gravity in the room had just reversed.

Ethan had arrived.

He wasn’t styled into someone unrecognizable. He was just Ethan—dark suit, crisp white shirt, hair brushed back but still falling soft at the temples. He held a clear plastic box in one hand. He scanned the crowd, found me, and his face broke into a smile so remarkably sincere that my chest physically ached.

There was zero performance in it. That was what made Ethan so difficult to navigate. He was decent without demanding a gold star for it. Kind in a way that felt terrifying because it came with no strings attached.

He crossed the hallway toward us.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I breathed.

His eyes swept over me—not hungrily, not like he was assessing a prize, but with a stunned reverence that sent a flush creeping up my neck. “You look beautiful.”

Just the truth, handed over gently.

“Thank you,” I said. “You clean up okay yourself.”

He lifted the plastic box, suddenly looking a little boyish. “I know it might be old-fashioned, but I thought… it’s a formal, right?”

Inside was a wrist corsage. White flowers, thin silver ribbon. A tragically normal thing. A boy bringing flowers to a girl because he actually wanted to be there.

“You don’t have to wear it,” he added quickly, catching my hesitation.

“I want to.” The honesty in my own voice startled me.

His smile softened. “Okay.”

He took the flowers out and waited. I offered my wrist. His fingers were warm as he tied the ribbon, his touch so deliberate that I hyper-focused on every square inch of skin he *wasn’t* touching. When he finished, his thumb brushed once, lightly, across my pulse point.

Barely anything. But it landed.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her.

Ava stood near the gym entrance like an omen wrapped in black silk. Her hair was pinned back, her expression perfectly, terrifyingly blank. Nora was chattering beside her, but Ava’s eyes were locked on Ethan’s hand around my wrist.

Then, her gaze flicked to my face.

It wasn’t anger. It was the devastating look of someone watching a door lock from the outside, pretending they never wanted the key.

Ethan noticed. Because Ethan noticed everything. His hand dropped from my skin. He looked at Ava, and a microscopic fracture of regret crossed his face before he smoothed it over.

But Riley saw it. Priya saw it. The silence that followed us into the gym was deafening.

Inside, the bass thumped against my ribs. Riley dragged Leah toward the dance floor, and Jake surrendered to his fate. Priya lingered just long enough to squeeze my hand. “I will be close,” she promised, before vanishing into the crowd.

Suddenly, the space around Ethan and me felt dangerously exposed.

He looked at the sea of swaying teenagers, then down at me. “Do you want to dance?”

“As friends?” I blurted out.

I hated the question the second it left my mouth. But I hated the flash of pain in his eyes even more.

He swallowed, nodding slowly. “As friends.”

He offered his hand. On the dance floor, he kept a painfully respectful distance. One hand resting lightly on my waist, the other holding mine. Around us, couples clung to each other with the desperate, awkward courage of high schoolers. Ethan just swayed with me, a calm anchor in the middle of my escalating panic.

“You’re overthinking,” he said over the music.

“It’s a hobby.”

“I know. It gets loud in there.” He offered a faint, lopsided smile. “It’s one of the first things I noticed about you. You don’t just walk into a room, Sloane. You read it for exits.”

The observation sliced a little too close to the bone. I looked away, my eyes catching on the refreshment table. Ava was there, supposedly pouring punch, but her attention kept snagging on Ethan’s hand resting on my waist.

“Do you like her?” I asked.

Ethan’s silence was a masterclass in confession. The song dragged on. He stared over my shoulder at a spot on the bleachers.

“I care about her,” he finally murmured.

“That’s not the same thing.”

“No,” he agreed, his jaw tightening. “It isn’t.”

“Then why did you ask me tonight?”

He looked down at our joined hands. “Because I wanted to. Because you’ve seemed so sad lately, even when you're faking it flawlessly. Because you treat kindness like it's a trap, and I wanted to prove it isn't. I just thought… maybe tonight could be something easy.”

*Easy.* The word tasted like ash.

“Nothing is easy,” I whispered.

“Yeah. I’m starting to get that.”

Against my palm, my phone vibrated violently.

I pulled back just enough to glance at the illuminated screen.

**RILEY:** Do not panic.

My blood turned to ice water. There is no combination of words in the English language designed to induce faster panic.

A second bubble popped up.

**RILEY:** Chase is here.

I didn’t even have to look at the doors. I felt the exact moment the atmospheric pressure in the room shattered. The pulsing pop music seemed to fade into a dull, underwater hum as the heavy double doors swung shut.

I turned my head.

He was standing at the edge of the bleachers. He wasn’t wearing a tie. His dark suit jacket hung open over a black shirt, looking like he had stepped out of a completely different, much darker kind of party. He didn’t bother scanning the room. He didn’t look at the streamers, or the teachers, or the lights.

His eyes cut straight through the crowd, bypassed Ethan entirely, and pinned me exactly where I stood.