《Fake it with me 》全部章節：第 11 章 - 第 20 章

Ava did not think about Mason Reed on Thursday morning.She thought about the campaign strategy document, which now had fourteen bullet points and a section titled *Connection — Practical Applications* that she had written at eleven pm and reread at six am and found, to her moderate surprise, was actually good. She thought about the cheer schedule for the following week and the fact that Jade's timing had improved enough to consider moving her into the secondary formation. She thought about the AP History essay due Friday and the two paragraphs she still needed to write and the specific argument she wanted to make in the conclusion that kept arriving in her mind almost fully formed but not quite.She did not think about Mason Reed.She was doing well with this until approximately eight twenty, when she walked into the main corridor and found him there.He was not doing anything remarkable. He was standing at his locker with Noah beside him, pulling out a textbook with one hand and eat

Ava did not sleep well that night, and for once it had nothing to do with Mason Reed.The message sat in her phone, unanswered, the way the first one had, except this time it had weight to it that the first one hadn't carried, specific weight, a name attached to information she didn't yet know what to do with. She read it four more times before midnight. She did not respond. She told herself this was strategy, that she needed more information before she acted on something that could be entirely false, planted by someone who enjoyed chaos for its own sake, and this was a reasonable position to hold.It did not make her sleep any better.By Saturday morning she had decided two things. The first was that whatever the unknown number knew, she was not going to chase it. If it was true, it would surface on its own, the way these things always did. The second was that the video from Friday's pep rally had nine hundred comments now, and the version of herself frozen in that thumbnail, caught

Principal Hartley's office had a particular smell, the specific mix of old carpet and stale coffee that every student who had ever been sent there could identify with their eyes closed, and Ava was sitting in one of the two chairs facing his desk on Tuesday morning with the distinct and unfamiliar sensation of being somewhere she had never expected to find herself.Mason sat in the other chair.Neither of them had spoken since they had been called out of first period within four minutes of each other and directed, separately, to the same office, where they had arrived to find the other already seated and had said nothing, not a single word, the silence between them heavier than anything either of them had said in the cafeteria yesterday.Principal Hartley closed the door and sat down behind his desk with the slow, deliberate movements of a man who had given this particular speech to enough students that he no longer needed to think about the words, only the timing."I've had four sepa

The voice belonged to Chloe Whitmore.Ava stood at the bottom of the stairwell and let that land for a full three seconds before she trusted herself to respond. Of everything she had imagined in three days of anticipation, of every face she had placed at the top of that stairwell in every version of this moment she had rehearsed, Chloe had not been in any of them."You," Ava said."Me," Chloe confirmed, and came down the stairs with the particular unhurried quality of someone who had been waiting for this conversation for longer than the last ten minutes. She stopped on the third step from the bottom, which put her at eye level with Ava, and looked at her with the composed, assessing expression Ava had seen across debate stages and practice floors and school corridors for the past month. "I know. Not who you were expecting.""Explain," Ava said."The screenshot first, or the number?""Both. Now."Chloe sat down on the third step, which Ava had not expected, and folded her hands in her

The name Ava had confirmed on Saturday was Mara Jenkins.Mara was a junior, mid-tier socially, unremarkable in most of the ways the school measured these things, except that she had been on the cheer squad for two years and had not made the cut for the performance roster at the start of this season, and Ava had been the one to deliver that decision. She had delivered it the way she delivered most difficult things, directly and without excessive softening, because she believed that clarity was kinder than cushioning, and she had moved on without fully considering what she had left behind.What she had left behind, apparently, was someone with a specific grievance and enough patience to wait for the right moment to use it.The information Mara was planning to release on Monday was a recording. Ava had confirmed this through the six-word message she had sent on Saturday and the four-word response that had come back in forty seconds, confirmed through a source she trusted enough to believ