Fake it with me
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 mid-flinch, was not a version of herself she was willing to let stand as the final word on the matter.
She called Sofia at nine.
"I need help," she said, which were three words Ava Bennett did not say often, and Sofia's silence on the other end of the line communicated that she understood the rarity of the moment.
"With?"
"Mason said something true on Friday, in front of the whole school, and the entire narrative right now is that he won that exchange." Ava sat up against her headboard, the morning light coming flat and gray through her window. "I'm