Chapter 19: Chapter 19

Riley Voss smiled at me on a Monday morning and I almost walked into a locker.

Not because the smile was warm — it wasn't, exactly, it was the kind of smile that had been assembled from the correct components but in the slightly wrong order, like a sentence that was grammatically fine but semantically suspicious. It was because Riley Voss had spent the better part of my first three weeks at Evergreen High treating me like a weather event she was waiting to pass, and now she was standing by the water fountain in the east corridor at eight fourteen in the morning with her cheer squad flanking her like a very well-dressed security detail, and she was smiling at me like we were old friends who had simply been too busy to connect.

"Avery," she said. Warm. Easy. "Cute sweater."

I looked down at my sweater. It was the green one. Fine sweater. Nothing notable.

"Thanks," I said, because I had apparently left my survival instincts in AP Lit.

"We're doing a spirit week planning committee meeting at lunch," she said, adjusting the strap of her bag with the practiced casualness of someone who had rehearsed casual. "You should come. We could use a fresh perspective. Someone who's not, you know, already entrenched in the whole thing."

I blinked. "The spirit week planning committee."

"It's more fun than it sounds."

I sincerely doubted that.

"I'll think about it," I said, which was the diplomatic version of absolutely not, and kept walking.

I made it approximately eleven steps before Sophia materialized at my elbow from what appeared to be nowhere, which was becoming a pattern with her.

"Don't," Sophia said.

"Don't what?"

"Whatever you're thinking about doing with Riley's lunch invitation. Don't." She fell into step beside me, the two of us moving through the hallway with the slightly mismatched rhythm of people who were somewhere between acquaintances and something more complicated. "She's being nice to you."

"I noticed."

"That's bad."

"I also noticed that."

Sophia glanced at me sideways. She was carrying a binder that said TEAM MANAGER in neat block letters on the cover and her hair was up in the specific kind of effortless ponytail that took twenty minutes to achieve. The bonfire sharpness was gone from her face today — she'd been different since the library conversation, not soft exactly, just less weaponized. "Riley only plays nice when she wants something. The cruelty is actually more honest."

"That is a deeply unsettling sentence."

"Welcome to three years of cheer squad adjacency." She stopped at the intersection by the science wing, shifting her binder under her arm. "Last time she played nice was sophomore year when she wanted the lead in the winter showcase away from a girl named Petra. By the time Petra realized what was happening, Riley had the solo and Petra had a friendship bracelet and a lot of questions about how she'd ended up volunteering to run the lighting board."

I stared at her. "What does she want from me?"

Sophia's expression was the specific one of someone who had a theory they were 60 percent sure about and 100 percent not ready to say out loud. "I don't know yet. But it's something to do with Knox. It always comes back to Knox."

She turned and walked away before I could ask anything else, because apparently that was just how conversations with Sophia ended — complete, but open at one edge, like a sentence with a comma where the period should be.

I stood at the intersection and thought about this for four seconds.

Then Knox texted: Morning. You look like you're solving a math problem. Stop standing in the middle of the hallway, people are going around you.

I looked up. He was at the other end of the corridor, leaning against his locker with his phone in his hand and that completely unreasonable morning-person energy he operated on before eight thirty, which I had still not forgiven him for. He raised his free hand in a small wave.

I walked toward him. "Were you just watching me stand there?"

"For a little while, yeah." He pushed off the locker, falling into step beside me with the easy confidence of someone who had been navigating these hallways since freshman year and owned every inch of them without trying. "Sophia stopped you."

"Does everyone in this school watch everything?"

"Yes," he said simply. "What did she say?"

"She said Riley being nice to me is bad."

Knox went momentarily still — just a fraction, just enough to notice if you were paying attention, which I was. "Riley talked to you?"

"Spirit week planning committee. She called it a fresh perspective opportunity." I looked at him. "Your jaw just did a thing."

"My jaw didn't do anything."

"Knox. It absolutely did a thing."

He was quiet for exactly one step too long, which in Knox terms was the equivalent of a full confession. "Riley's been—" He stopped. Started differently. "She and I have history. Not the Sophia kind. More the she-once-told-the-entire-junior-class-I-cried-at-a-Disney-movie kind."

"You did cry at the Disney movie."

"That is so not the point." He held the AP Lit door open for me, and I ducked under his arm, which was becoming a habit we had apparently agreed to without discussing it. "The point is Riley collects useful things. Information, access, proximity to people who matter. She's been trying to find a way into the team's orbit for two years because it's good for her social positioning, and before you arrived the answer was always no because the team is loyal and she doesn't actually like any of them." He paused. "And then you arrived."

I sat down in my seat and looked up at him. "And I'm useful because I'm the coach's daughter who's dating the captain."

"Dating is a strong—" he started.

"Knox."

He looked at me. "Yeah. That's probably what it is."

I processed this. "So the smile was a real estate move."

"The smile is always a real estate move."

Finn dropped into the seat on my left at that exact moment, unwrapping a granola bar, and caught the tail end of the conversation with the expression of someone arriving mid-movie but piecing the plot together quickly. "Are we talking about Riley's Monday morning smile?"

I turned to him. "You saw it too?"

"Avery, Riley Voss doing anything publicly is a performance with an audience in mind. I saw it from the parking lot." He broke the granola bar in two and held half across the desk to me, which I took on pure reflex because it was apparently a thing we did now. "What did Sophia say?"

"That it comes back to Knox."

Finn looked at Knox over my head. Something passed between them — the wordless shorthand of people who had been best friends since third grade — and then Finn nodded once and ate his half of the granola bar.

"Just don't go to the meeting," Finn said to me.

"What if I want to go to the meeting?"

"Do you want to go to the meeting?"

"Absolutely not."

"Then we're aligned." He balled up the granola bar wrapper with one hand. "Avoid, observe, report back. It's a solid three-step strategy."

"You're making it sound like a covert operation."

"Riley Voss runs spirit week like a covert operation. We're just matching the energy."

Knox sat down behind me, leaning forward so his elbows were on my desk, which was invasive and comfortable in equal measure. "For what it's worth," he said, quietly, close to my ear, "the fact that she's paying attention to you means she sees you as relevant. Which, for Riley, is actually a form of respect."

"That's the most twisted compliment I've ever heard," I said.

"It's a twisted school."

Ms. Okafor walked in and the room settled. Knox's elbows left my desk — reluctantly, or at least that was how I was choosing to read the geometry of it. I opened my notebook to a fresh page, wrote the date, and underneath it wrote: Riley Voss smiled at me. Threat level: unclear. Approach: granola bar solidarity and Sophia intelligence briefings.

A folded piece of paper landed on my desk from the direction of Knox.

I unfolded it under the cover of my notebook.

It said: You're handling Evergreen extremely well for someone who three weeks ago described it as cruel and unusual.

I wrote back: I had excellent local guidance.

Slid it back. Thirty seconds passed.

It came back: The guidance finds you extremely easy to guide.

I pressed my lips together to keep from smiling at a piece of paper like a person who had lost all critical faculties, which was exactly what was happening. I wrote: That sentence doesn't even make grammatical sense and folded it back.

It didn't come back after that, but when I glanced sideways at the window I caught his reflection in the glass — that grin, the genuine one, the boyish one I was collecting without permission — and I faced forward very quickly and wrote three completely unnecessary lines of notes about the chapter of Gatsby we hadn't even started discussing yet.

Priya, to my right, passed me a note of her own.

It said simply: You two are a disaster.

I wrote back: I know. She wrote back: It's very entertaining. I wrote back: Glad someone's enjoying it. She wrote back: Everyone is. You're basically the school's favorite show right now.

I put the pen down and stared at Ms. Okafor's whiteboard and thought about Riley's real estate smile and Sophia's comma-sentence warning and Knox's elbows on my desk and the granola bar solidarity and the piece of paper that said the guidance finds you extremely easy to guide and the fact that three weeks ago I had been standing in a hockey rink feeling like my life was imploding.

It was still complicated. It was still fast. There was still a Riley-shaped question mark on the horizon and a whole town full of history I was still mapping.

But somewhere between the vending machine crackers and the forehead press and the note-passing in AP Lit, Evergreen had stopped feeling like something happening to me.

It was starting to feel like something I was in.

Which was either very brave or very dangerous.

Knowing this place, probably both.