Fake it with me
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.