2: in your dreams

Sasha pov

Alisa finds me at my locker before the hallway has a chance to start in on me she’s got a gift for that, showing up right when I need her to. Three years since the theater, and she still reads me like she’s got a manual nobody else bothered to pick up.

“You look like you’re already planning a murder,” she says, tucking a strand of blonde hair behind her ear.

“Mar-EE-on,” I mutter. “Before eight a.m. New record.”

“Ugh. You’d think after all these years he’d get bored.” She loops her arm through mine, steering us down the hall like she’s herding a stray. “And hey if you do commit the murder, I’ll testify the victim had it coming.”

I laugh  short, surprised out of me, the first real one all day. It’s a small thing, but it’s mine, and nobody handed it to me the way everyone else here hands me their opinions about my body like they’re doing me a favor.

Alisa’s the only good thing that came out of any of this. The girl who saw me breaking three years ago and decided, for reasons I’ve never fully understood, that I was worth staying for.

We make it almost to first period before I feel it  that specific prickle at the back of my neck that means Marion’s somewhere nearby, watching. I don’t even have to look. I’ve had ten years of practice knowing exactly where his attention lands.

He’s leaning against a locker down the hall, laughing at something Alexandra said, head tipped back, throat exposed, and for one unguarded second his eyes catch mine over my brother’s shoulder.

There’s no smirk in them. No sharp edge. Just him, looking at me like he sees something he wasn’t expecting to see.

My stomach does something traitorous and stupid.

Then he blinks, and it’s gone, replaced by the grin I know too well.

“Like what you see, Sunshine?” he calls across the hall, loud enough that three people turn to look.

Heat floods my face. “In your dreams.”

But I heard the hitch before he covered it. I always hear the hitch. That’s the problem.

By lunch I’ve mostly talked myself down, which is its own kind of exhausting a full-time job I never applied for. Alisa drags me past the newspaper club’s sign-up table on the way to the cafeteria, the way she does most weeks, like eventually the habit alone will wear me down.

“One article,” she says, tapping the clipboard like it owes her money. “You already write better than half the stuff they print. You just complain about it instead of doing it.”

“I complain about a lot of things. Doesn’t mean I want to do them.”

“You wrote four paragraphs in our group chat last week about how badly they covered the homecoming game. Four paragraphs, Sasha. Unprompted.”

“That’s different.”

“How.”

I don’t actually have an answer for that, so I sign my name before I can talk myself out of it, mostly to make her stop looking at me like she’s already won. She grins like she has.

“See? Wasn’t that easy?”

“Don’t push it.”

At our table, I’m halfway through my sandwich when I feel eyes on me from the football table  not Marion’s, for once. A guy I don’t recognize, sitting a little apart from the rest of them like he hasn’t fully learned the seating chart yet. Dark hair, easy smile, nothing sharp in his face at all. He catches me looking and doesn’t smirk, doesn’t call out a nickname across the cafeteria. Just gives a small, ordinary wave, like a person who hasn’t yet learned there’s a version of me people aren’t supposed to be nice to.

I look away first, unsettled by how normal it feels.

“Who’s that,” Alisa says, following my line of sight.

“No idea.”

“He’s cute.”

“He’s sitting with the football team. Pass.”

She hums, unconvinced, and I let it drop, because I already have enough happening in my chest without adding a stranger to the pile.

Today’s no different where Marion’s concerned. I’m halfway through my second thought about the boy with the easy wave when I hear him across the room.

“Hey, Alexandra! Better hide your food or Sasha will eat it all before you blink.”

The table erupts. Alexandra doesn’t defend me. He never does.

“She could be the team mascot,” someone adds. “Put her in pads, she’ll bulldoze the defense!”

Alisa mutters, “Statistically, most of them couldn’t spell ‘defense’ without help, so,” and I manage a huff of a laugh even with my face still hot.

I spend the rest of the morning trying to talk myself out of what that felt like the flicker in the hallway, not the lunch table and I’m still failing at it by the time I get to my locker after last period, when I hear three boys behind me, voices pitched just loud enough to make sure I catch every word.

“Some people say she’s the curviest in the whole school.”

“Oh really? Is that why she’s in big clothes all the time?”

“Ohhh… I’m having the image of what she might look like in my head.” They laugh so hard it echoes down the hall, bouncing off metal doors like it’s been invited to stay.

I stick my head inside my locker, praying for time to move faster, tears coming anyway, hot and humiliating. “This is all Marion’s fault,” I whisper  the boy who taught this whole school it was open season on me, years before anyone else got the memo.

Then the laughter stops. Not fading. Just gone, cut off mid-breath.

Silence. A sound close to my legs. I look down and find one of the boys on the ground. I trace him back to his friends with my eyes, and just as fast, the other two are down too, Marion standing over them, breathing hard, knuckles already reddening, a crowd gathering fast at the end of the hall.

“This is a warning,” he says, and his voice doesn’t sound like the one that’s spent ten years making fun of me. It sounds like something underneath that voice, finally let out. “To everyone who ever speaks ill of Sasha Benson again.”

It sends real fear through half the hallway. Maybe I should be grateful  the one person who’s made my life hell for a decade just put himself between me and three guys twice my size, knowing exactly what it’ll cost him.

But it doesn’t heal anything. If anything, it splits something open that I don’t have a bandage for.

I catch his eyes on me and slam my locker shut before he can see my face do something I don’t have a name for.

This is the first time anyone’s ever stood up for me. And it wasn’t my twin brother.

That terrifies me more than every insult combined. Because what if  just what if  the boy who’s made my life hell for years is the one I can’t stop noticing?

What if the one I hate most is the one I’m secretly drawn to?

And what if he already knows it?