Chapter Three: The Problem With Mondays

The rumor spread the way all Millbrook High rumors spread: fast, wrong, and completely unstoppable.

By Monday morning, Nora had received four texts, two voice memos from Maya, and a hand-delivered note in second period that read *is it true you and Whitaker are a THING??* in purple gel pen with a small stunned face drawn next to it.

She stared at the note.

She had not thought about Monday.

This was a significant oversight in her planning.

---

Maya was waiting at her locker with the energy of someone who had been physically restrained from calling her all weekend.

Maya Chen was Nora's best friend and, apparently, Cole's emergency contact, which was a sentence Nora was still processing. She was small and relentless and had exactly zero ability to hide what she was feeling, which made her a terrible keeper of secrets and a wonderful human being.

"Okay," Maya said, the moment Nora was within earshot. "Talk."

"There's nothing to—"

"Cole Whitaker texted me Sunday morning to ask if your favorite coffee order was still an oat milk latte or if you'd switched back to black." She said it the way a lawyer presents evidence. "Sunday. Morning. He knows you went through a black coffee phase."

Nora opened her locker. "We're figuring out the details."

"The details," Maya repeated. "Nora. He remembered the coffee phase."

"Maya."

"You went to his family dinner!"

"Lower your voice."

"His grandma texted my mom that she liked you!" Maya grabbed Nora's arm. "Mrs. Whitaker senior does not text anyone. She sends handwritten letters. She sent a text."

Something warm and unwelcome moved through Nora's chest. She shut it down immediately. "It's fake," she said, calm and clear. "You know it's fake. I'm doing him a favor."

Maya looked at her for a long moment with the searching expression that meant she was deciding how much to push.

"Okay," she said finally. "Fake. Sure." She paused. "Does Cole know it's fake?"

"We literally negotiated the terms—"

"I'm just saying, he looked for your coffee order."

"Go to class, Maya."

"I have thoughts—"

"Go."

---

Cole found her at lunch.

This was new. Cole Whitaker did not come to her corner of the cafeteria. Cole Whitaker had his own corner — the loud one near the windows, always surrounded by the hockey crowd, Millbrook royalty in their natural habitat. He and Nora existed in different atmospheric layers of the same school.

Except he set his tray down across from her like it was the most normal thing in the world, and said, "People are talking."

Nora set down her fork. "I noticed."

"So we should probably — I don't know. Be seen together? Occasionally?" He said it carefully, like he'd rehearsed it. "Nothing weird. Just. Make it believable."

"You thought about this."

"I think about a lot of things." He picked up his water bottle. "I'm not just a pretty face, Jensen."

She looked at him flatly. "You literally said that with a straight face."

"I've been working on it." But there was a hint of something self-aware in it, something that made it land different than it would have from the version of Cole she'd always kept at arm's length. "Is it okay? The being seen thing. I'm not trying to make your life weird."

And there it was again — that off-guard sincerity, showing up in places she didn't expect it.

"It's fine," she said. "We made a deal."

"Right." He nodded, and started eating his lunch. Didn't make a production of leaving. Just... stayed.

Nora went back to her food.

Across the cafeteria, she could see Maya watching them with an expression of barely suppressed I told you so.

She looked away.

This was fine. This was a transaction. She was smart and organized and completely in control of this situation, and nothing about Cole Whitaker was going to disrupt the careful order of her life.

She glanced up.

He was reading something on his phone, slightly frowning, biting the edge of his thumbnail without noticing he was doing it, and she thought with sudden, absolute certainty:

I am in so much trouble.

She looked back at her lunch.

Fine,she thought. It's fine.

She ate her sandwich in a silence that felt, against all odds, strangely comfortable.

This is completely fine.