3: since when do you care

Marion pov

I don’t remember deciding to move.

One second I’m three lockers down, half-listening to Reece run his mouth about Friday’s game plan, and the next my hand’s fisted in some sophomore’s collar and he’s on the floor looking up at me like I fell out of the ceiling.

“Some people say she’s the curviest”

I don’t even hear the rest of it. Something in my chest just goes white and loud, and then I’m moving, and then it’s already done, and I genuinely could not tell you the seconds in between.

“This is a warning,” I hear myself say, except it doesn’t sound like me. Flatter. Meaner. I don’t know where that voice comes from. I don’t love that I have it.

The hallway’s dead silent. Reece is staring at me like I just failed a drug test in front of him.

I don’t know why I did that. That’s the truth, and it’s an ugly one, so I’m not going to sit here and dress it up with some speech about how I’ve secretly cared about her all along like some movie. I don’t know. I heard something and my body decided before I did.

Sasha’s at her locker, forehead nearly against the metal, and when she looks up there’s no thank-you in her face. Just something guarded. Confused. Like she caught me doing something I wasn’t supposed to be capable of.

Good. She shouldn’t trust it. I don’t trust it either.

She slams her locker and walks off without a word, and I stand there in the wreckage of a hallway I apparently just decided to destroy, and the first thing I think the actual first thing, before anything noble is: what is wrong with me.

Coach finds me before first period’s even over. “Heard you decked a kid.”

“It wasn’t” I don’t have a word for what it was. “He had it coming.”

“This about Sasha about Alexandra’s sister?”

I don’t answer. I don’t have an answer that isn’t a problem.

“You’re benched for the half Friday.” He starts to walk off, stops, looks back at me like I’m a play he can’t read. “You’ve been weird about that girl a long time, Carter. Might wanna figure out what your deal is before it costs you something.”

I want to tell him I don’t have a deal. I want to tell him it’s nothing, that I’d have done the same for anybody, that this is just about reputation, optics, not letting anyone make my friend group look bad.

I don’t say any of that. Because even in my own head, it sounds like a lie I’m rehearsing for later.

Alexandra corners me at my locker before lunch. “You jumped Deacon over what talk?”

“They were saying stuff about your sister.”

“Since when do you care what people say about Sasha?”

Since the day I met her, something in me wants to say, and I hate that thought so much I nearly flinch. “I don’t,” I say instead. “Bad optics for the team, that’s all. Can’t have people thinking my QB’s sister is a joke.”

It comes out smooth. Too smooth. Jackson buys it instantly, relaxes, claps my shoulder, already onto Friday’s lineup.

I used to think he just didn’t notice how bad it got for her. Watching him now, already bored of the topic, I’m starting to think he notices fine. He just decided a long time ago it wasn’t his problem to fix.

That should bother me more than it does. It bothers me. I just don’t know what to do with it that doesn’t require admitting something I’ve spent ten years making sure nobody including me ever looks at directly.

By lunch the story’s mutated three times. I put a kid in the hospital. It was over a bet. She asked me to.

None of it’s true. She hasn’t looked at me since the hallway, and something about that specific kind of not-looking makes my skin feel too tight.

I find her anyway. Not on purpose.

Okay. On purpose.

She’s alone near the vending machines, food untouched, arranged in that specific kind of alone where nobody has to make room for her. Something about it sits wrong in my chest, low and uncomfortable, and I don’t have a name for that either. I’m running out of things I have names for today.

“You could say thank you,” I tell her because apparently even now, with my knuckles still raw, my mouth only knows one setting with her.

She looks up. Her eyes are flat in a way I’ve genuinely never seen on her before. “For what? Now everyone’s talking about it instead of just talking about me. Congratulations.”

That lands somewhere I don’t like. I open my mouth to argue and nothing comes out, because she’s right, and I hate that she’s right, and I don’t know how to say any of that without it turning into something I’m not ready for it to turn into.

“I didn’t do it for a thank you,” I say instead. True. Unhelpful.

“Then why’d you do it?”

I don’t have an answer. I have several answers, actually, all of them true, all of them things I would rather eat glass than say out loud in a cafeteria.

So I do the thing I always do when the truth gets too close to the surface.

I smirk. “Guess I just don’t like sharing my favorite target with amateurs.”

Something in her face closes, quiet and total, like a door I didn’t know was still open until I heard it shut.

“There he is,” she says, and picks up her tray, and walks away.

I watch her go and don’t move for a long time.

Coward, something in me says, and for once I don’t have a joke ready to talk over it.