Chapter 6: Freya's Radar

Freya didn't say anything to Carlton until they were already in the parking lot, out of earshot of the classroom, but she'd been rehearsing the question the entire walk there.

"So who's the girl?"

Carlton didn't even look over at her right away, just kept walking toward his car with his bag slung over one shoulder. "What girl?"

"The one you were sitting next to. Practically had your heads together over that desk." She kept her voice light, deliberately light, the way she always did when she wanted something to sound like idle curiosity instead of what it actually was. "You've been coming home from that class in a weirdly good mood lately. I noticed."

"It's just a partner thing for English. Alvarez paired us up for the essay unit." He unlocked the car and tossed his bag into the back seat, still not quite looking at her. "Her name's Jenna. She's new."

"Jenna." Freya repeated the name slowly, testing the shape of it like she was trying to decide if it deserved to matter. "The scholarship girl?"

"I guess. I don't really think about it like that."

"Interesting that you know that much about her without thinking about it like that." She slid into the passenger seat, arms crossed, watching him with an expression he'd learned a long time ago not to underestimate. Freya rarely raised her voice when something actually bothered her. If anything, the quieter she got, the more careful he needed to be.

"It's a class assignment, Freya. I'm not going to pretend I don't know her name."

"I didn't say you should." She turned to look out the window instead, watching the school grounds slide past as he pulled out of the lot, and for a while neither of them said anything else, the silence in the car stretching out in a way that felt heavier than it should have for something as small as a partner assignment.

But it wasn't actually small, and some part of Freya had known that the second she'd seen them through the classroom door, heads bent close together over the same page, the two of them laughing at something before either of them had noticed her standing there. She'd seen Carlton laugh like that before, easy and unguarded, but it had been a long time since it had been directed at anything she'd said.

That night, she didn't bring it up again, not out loud. Instead she did what she always did when something started to feel like it was slipping out of her control. She looked the girl up.

It didn't take long. Jenna Williams didn't have much of a social media presence, which was strange in itself, a handful of old photos from what looked like a much smaller school back home, nothing recent, nothing that gave Freya much to work with beyond a face and a name. Scholarship student. New this semester. Not the kind of girl who typically registered on anyone's radar at a school like theirs.

Which was exactly what made it worse, if Freya was honest with herself. If it had been someone flashy, someone competing on the same terms Freya usually competed on, she'd have known exactly how to handle it. But this was different, some quiet unassuming girl who apparently didn't even seem to be trying, and Carlton had come home smiling about her anyway.

She thought about the way he'd said her name in the car. Easy. Familiar. Like it belonged in his mouth already.

On Wednesday, she brought it up to her friend Bianca over lunch, keeping her voice casual even as she picked apart every detail of what she'd learned.

"There's some new girl in Carlton's English class," she said, stirring her fork through a salad she had no real intention of eating. "Scholarship kid. Apparently they're partners for some essay thing."

"So?" Bianca didn't look up from her phone. "Partners for an assignment isn't exactly a scandal."

"I didn't say it was a scandal. I said I noticed." Freya set her fork down, more firmly than she meant to. "He came home from that class Thursday practically glowing. You know how he gets when something's actually bothering him, quiet, distracted. This wasn't that. This was different."

Bianca finally looked up, studying her for a second in a way that made Freya wish she hadn't brought it up at all. "You're not usually the jealous type."

"I'm not jealous. I'm observant. There's a difference." She picked her fork back up, stabbing at a piece of lettuce with more force than the moment strictly required. "I just like knowing what's happening in my own life. Is that so unreasonable?"

Bianca shrugged and went back to her phone, clearly unconvinced but unwilling to push it further, and Freya spent the rest of lunch replaying the conversation in her head, irritated at how defensive she'd sounded even to her own ears. She wasn't the jealous type. She'd never had to be, not once in two years with Carlton, not when half the school seemed to organize itself around the fact that they were together. Jealousy was for people who felt like they had something to lose.

The thought sat uncomfortably with her the rest of the afternoon.

By Friday, Freya had positioned herself outside Mrs. Alvarez's classroom five minutes before the bell, telling herself it was nothing, just checking in on her boyfriend between classes the way any girlfriend might. Through the door window, she watched them together for exactly as long as it took to confirm everything she'd already suspected. The way Jenna leaned slightly toward him when she talked. The way Carlton's whole posture had loosened compared to how he usually held himself around most people, guarded, performing, always slightly braced for something.

He didn't look guarded around her at all.

When the bell rang and he finally spotted Freya through the glass, his smile faltered slightly, catching on whatever expression she was wearing. She didn't say a word, didn't need to. Her face did enough of the talking on its own, jaw tight, arms crossed, the kind of look that made freshmen scatter out of her path in the hallway without her having to ask.

"You good?" he asked, once they were out of earshot of the classroom.

"Perfect," she said, not looking at him, already walking toward the parking lot. "Must be nice, having such an engaging partner for English. I'm sure the essay's coming along beautifully."

"Freya."

"What? I'm being supportive." She kept her voice light, almost bored, the kind of tone that gave nothing away except to someone who knew her well enough to hear the edge underneath it. He knew her well enough. He didn't say anything else the rest of the walk, and neither did she, but the silence between them felt different than their usual comfortable quiet, more like something being carefully stepped around than something restful.

He dropped her off without much conversation, and instead of going inside right away, Freya sat in her driveway a few extra minutes turning the afternoon over in her mind, cataloguing it the same careful way she catalogued everything that threatened the architecture of her life.

Freya had built a lot, over the years, more than most people at that school probably realized. Being seen as effortless took an enormous amount of effort. Being the girl everyone assumed had everything figured out required constant maintenance, constant vigilance, constant awareness of exactly how every piece fit into the larger picture people had of her. Carlton was one of those pieces. Not the only one, but an important one, the visible proof that the story she'd built about herself, successful family, beautiful life, boyfriend everyone envied, actually held together under scrutiny.

She wasn't about to let some scholarship girl with a quiet voice and an unassuming social media profile unravel any of that.

That weekend, she found herself scrolling back through old photos of herself and Carlton, the two of them at games, at dinners, at that spring formal last year where she'd worn the dress everyone had complimented for weeks afterward. Proof of an entire story she had built carefully, piece by piece, over the better part of two years. She wasn't going to let it fall apart over some class assignment and a few shared laughs over a persuasive essay draft.

She thought about confronting Jenna directly, briefly considered it and then dismissed the idea just as quickly. That wasn't how Freya operated, not really. Direct confrontation gave people something to push back against, something to rally sympathy around. No, if something needed to be handled, it needed to be handled quietly, in a way that left no fingerprints, the kind of thing that could be denied entirely if anyone ever asked.

She didn't have a plan yet, not exactly. But by Sunday night, lying awake staring at her ceiling, she had the beginnings of one, small and vague and not yet fully formed, but there all the same. A seed of something that hadn't existed a week earlier, before a clipboard and a pair of names had rearranged the quiet order of things she'd spent so long building.

She thought back to the girls who had come before, though there hadn't been many, not really, not anyone who had ever gotten close enough to actually register as a threat. Freshman year there had been a girl on the dance team who'd flirted with Carlton a little too openly at a party, and Freya had handled that within a week, a few pointed comments in the right ears, a little strategic distance at the right moments, and the girl had transferred her attention elsewhere before it ever became a real problem. It hadn't taken much. It never did, usually. People generally understood where the lines were without needing to be told twice.

But something about this felt different, and she couldn't quite put her finger on why. Maybe it was the fact that Jenna wasn't performing for anyone, wasn't angling for attention the way that dance team girl had been. Maybe it was worse precisely because it looked so unintentional, so genuinely unaware of the current it had stirred up. It was harder to fight something that didn't seem to know it was fighting at all.

She thought about texting Carlton something reassuring, something to smooth over the quiet tension still lingering from the car ride home. She typed out a few different versions and deleted all of them, unsatisfied with how each one sounded, too needy, too controlling, too much like she was asking permission for feelings she didn't want to admit she was having in the first place. Eventually she just set her phone face down on the nightstand and let the silence sit there instead.

Monday morning, she watched from across the courtyard as Jenna walked toward the building with some boy Freya didn't recognize, easy and laughing about something, completely unaware that she'd already become a problem worth solving.

Freya adjusted the strap of her bag, straightened her shoulders, and started walking toward her own first class, already turning the shape of her plan over and over in her mind, sharpening its edges a little more with every step.

She didn't know yet exactly what form it would take. But she knew, with the same quiet certainty she brought to everything else in her carefully constructed life, that by the time she was finished, Jenna Williams would understand exactly whose school this actually was.