《Fake it with me 》全部章節：第 31 章 - 第 40 章

The argument started because of a water bottle.Specifically, Sofia's water bottle, which she had left on the bench outside the gym on Monday afternoon and which she returned to find occupied by someone's football gear, a pair of cleats and a training vest dumped on top of it with the casual disregard of someone who had not checked whether the bench was already in use.She moved the cleats.She picked up the vest."Hey," said a voice behind her. "That's mine."She turned around.Noah Ellis was standing three feet away with his practice bag over one shoulder and the mild, unhurried expression of someone who had not yet assessed whether this was going to be a problem."I know," Sofia said. "It was on top of my water bottle."He looked at the bench. "I didn't see it.""It was underneath your cleats.""I said I didn't see it." He reached past her and picked up the cleats without any particular urgency. "Sorry about the bottle.""You put your cleats on someone else's things.""Accidentally

The rivalry between Crestwood and Eastbridge High was not the kind that needed explaining.It had existed for eleven years, built from a combination of geographic proximity, evenly matched programs, and the specific institutional memory of schools that had been losing and winning against each other long enough that the losing hurt more than it would against anyone else. It lived in the hallways as a background hum most of the year and became a foreground roar in October, when the first of their two scheduled matchups landed on the calendar and the school oriented itself around it the way schools oriented themselves around things that temporarily made everyone feel like they were on the same side.The announcement went up Tuesday morning.Friday. Home game. Eastbridge.By second period the corridors had the particular charged quality of a building that had decided what it cared about for the week, and by third period Ava had been asked four separate times whether the cheer squad had a

She went to the grocery store on Saturday morning because the grocery store required nothing from her.No campaign strategy, no cheer formation, no unknown numbers or photographs or six-word text messages sitting unanswered in her phone. Just a list, an aisle, a task with a clear beginning and end, and Ava Bennett had always found comfort in tasks with clear beginnings and ends.She was in the cereal aisle at nine fifteen when she saw him.Not immediately. She was reading the back of a box with the focused attention she brought to things that did not require it, because sometimes giving unnecessary attention to small things was its own kind of rest, and she looked up to reach for something on the shelf above and found Mason Reed standing at the far end of the aisle.He had not seen her yet.He was with a boy she didn't recognize, maybe twelve or thirteen, with Mason's same jaw and a considerably more chaotic version of his energy, moving through the aisle with the specific restlessnes

Mason had not meant to see it.He had come through the corridor adjacent to the practice room because the east corridor was blocked for maintenance and the alternative route added seven minutes to the walk from the football field to the locker room, and seven minutes mattered when you had film review at four and a father who checked timestamps on the training logs.The practice room door was slightly ajar.He pushed it open.He saw her before she heard him.She was sitting on the floor in the center of the room with her knees drawn up and her hands in her lap, and she was looking at her reflection in the mirror with an expression he had never seen on her face in two years of sharing the same building, the same corridors, the same overcrowded schedule of events and conflicts and public exchanges that the school had decided was entertainment.He had seen Ava Bennett composed.He had seen her controlled, intimidating, precise, commanding, occasionally furious in the specific way she was

The regional showcase was in two weeks.Ava had known this since August, had it marked in three separate places, her phone calendar, the whiteboard above her desk, and the back page of the notebook she carried everywhere, and for most of the year the date had existed as a fixed point she was orienting everything toward, the first major competition of her tenure as captain, the first public evidence of what her leadership actually produced.She called a full squad meeting Tuesday morning before school.Not a practice. A meeting. There was a difference, and the difference mattered, and she had spent Sunday evening after the gym, after the voice note, after everything, writing the agenda with the methodical focus she brought to things she needed to get right.The squad assembled at seven in the gym, twelve girls and the particular early-morning energy of people who had shown up before they were required to because they had been asked to and had decided to honor that.Ava stood at the fro