All Chapters of Fake it with me : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The first thing people learned about Ava Bennett was that she did not repeat herself.The second thing they learned was that they wished she had, because the first time she said something, it usually left a mark."Reset," she said, and the word landed in the gym like a stone dropped in still water.Five girls who had been mid-collapse from exhaustion immediately pulled themselves back into formation. Nobody argued. Nobody even sighed loud enough to be heard. This was Ava Bennett's practice, and in Ava Bennett's practice, you either kept up or you got out of the way.She walked the length of the formation slowly, her eyes moving across each girl with the kind of focus that made people feel simultaneously seen and evaluated. Her white sneakers were spotless. Her ponytail hadn't moved in two hours. She looked exactly as composed as she had when practice started, which was honestly a little unfair to everyone else in the room."Your timing is off," she said, stopping in front of the young

Ava has decided right from time that there was nothing special about Mason, he was just overhyped. He was charming, she wasn't delusional. But there was a difference between being genuinely magnetic and being the beneficiary of a reputation that had been building since freshman year, and Mason Reed had spent two years coasting on the second one while everyone around him confused it for the first. The school had decided he was golden, and so everything he did got filtered through that, his jokes were funnier, his mistakes were more forgivable, his presence in a room more significant than it had any right to be.It was, in Ava's considered opinion, one of the more embarrassing things she had witnessed in her three years at Crestwood High.She was thinking about this on Wednesday morning while watching him hold court in the middle of the main corridor, which he did with the regularity of a scheduled event. He was leaning against the lockers with his arms crossed, saying something to the

Ava did not sleep well.This was not something she would ever admit to anyone, including Sofia, including Mia, including the journal she had stopped keeping in ninth grade precisely because she didn't want a written record of the things that kept her up at night. But the fact was that she lay in bed until past midnight with her phone face down on her nightstand and Mason Reed's four words sitting in the back of her mind like a splinter she couldn't locate well enough to remove.She had not responded to his text.She told herself this was because she had nothing to say. She told herself this at eleven pm, and again at eleven thirty, and again just before midnight when she picked up her phone, looked at the message, put the phone back down, and stared at the ceiling until sleep eventually arrived out of what felt like pity.She was up by six.By seven she was in the school library with her laptop open and a document on the screen titled CAPTAIN CAMPAIGN — STRATEGY, which currently conta

The school's Fall Kickoff event had been on the calendar since August, and for most of Crestwood High it was simply the first real social event of the year, a Friday afternoon occasion involving food, music, a student showcase, and the general atmosphere of people who were happy summer was over and happier still to have somewhere to be.For Ava Bennett, it was a logistics problem that someone had failed to solve correctly.She found out about the scheduling conflict on Friday morning, forty minutes before first period, when she arrived at the events board outside the main office to confirm the cheer squad's performance slot and found a printed memo pinned directly over the confirmation she had received two weeks ago.The memo informed her that the football team's season opening presentation, which included a highlight reel, a team introduction, and remarks from the captain, had been allocated the same thirty-minute window as the cheer squad's showcase, in the same space, on the same s

The message sat unanswered for three days.Ava was aware of this in the background of everything she did, the way you were aware of a door you had decided not to open, present and specific and requiring a small continuous effort to leave alone. She went to practice. She attended her classes. She worked on the campaign strategy document that now had eleven bullet points and was beginning to look like something functional. She did all of this with the quiet discipline that governed most of her life, and she did not open Mason's message again, and she did not respond to it, and she told herself this was because she had nothing to say and not because the question had unsettled her in a way she hadn't finished processing.She was good at telling herself things.It was Tuesday when she met Ethan Cole.Not met in the way you met someone for the first time, because Ethan had been at Crestwood since sophomore year and occupied the particular social category of people Ava knew existed without h