Chapter 102 Into

Chapter 102 Into
Madison Thorne stepped into my path before I made it three steps through the door, and I knew right then that tonight was going to be a problem.
The welcome party was already loud, the kind of loud where you had to lean in to hear someone, but the second Madison opened her mouth, the people nearest to us got quieter. Not all at once. Just enough.
"Well, well." Her eyes moved over me from head to toe, slow and deliberate, like she was reading a receipt and finding errors. "The scholarship infestation has finally arrived."
I stopped walking. Her four girls fanned out behind her without being told, which told me they'd done this before.
"Love what you've done with your face," I replied, keeping my voice completely even. "Did the filler finally settle, or is that still a work in progress?"
The girl on Madison's left pressed her lips together. Someone behind me laughed once and cut it short.
Madison tilted her head, unbothered. "Still in the thrift store dress." She let the words sit there for a second, like she was giving the room time to look. "I literally saw that exact one hanging outside a pharmacy donation bin last week."
"Then someone had excellent taste."
She stepped closer. Close enough that I caught her perfume, something expensive and sharp. Her voice dropped just slightly, just enough to feel like a secret between us even though it wasn't.
"I heard your mother started cleaning for the Ryders," she murmured, watching my face while she talked. "Mopping their floors. Scrubbing their toilets. Getting on her hands and knees so your family can keep the lights on." She tilted her head the other way. "How does that feel? Knowing your survival depends on your mother wiping up after people who actually matter?"
My hands went flat against the sides of my dress. My jaw tightened. My throat did the closing thing and I breathed through my nose until it passed because I was not going to fall apart in this room, not in front of her, not in front of any of these people.
My mother had taken that job three weeks ago. She came home every night smelling like cleaning products and telling me it was temporary, just until something better opened up. I had not told anyone at school. Not one person. I had believed that if no one at Ridgemont knew, I could keep the two halves of my life from touching each other.
Madison had just slammed them together in front of two hundred people.
"At least my mother works," I replied. My voice stayed level, which cost me more than anyone watching would ever know. "What exactly do you do besides spend your father's money and peak at eighteen?"
Something moved across her face. Something real, quick, and then gone.
A phone appeared somewhere in the crowd behind her. Then another. I heard the soft click of a camera.
"Go ahead, say it again." Madison raised her voice now, turning just slightly toward the gathering crowd. "Little Miss Coding Genius over here. The scholarship girl who builds video games in her bedroom because she can't actually afford to go anywhere worth going."
The laughter came in waves. It moved through the room the way fire moved through dry grass, catching people who hadn't even heard the original comment and pulling them in just because everyone else was already burning.
I stood there with my fingers pressed into my dress and my teeth locked together and I breathed.
I was not going to cry in this room.
Then something changed in the crowd before I heard why. The people around me shifted. The energy tilted. Everyone adjusted their posture by about ten degrees and I didn't understand it until I turned and saw Jaxon Ryder walking through the circle they had automatically made for him.
Dark jacket. Hair that looked like he'd come straight from practice and put in minimal effort after. Pale gray eyes that moved over the situation with the particular expression of someone who found it mildly inconvenient.
He stopped between me and Madison. He didn't look at either of us for more than a second.
"Thorne." His voice carried without being raised. "Party's that way."
Madison's expression shifted into something careful. "Jaxon, I was just having a conversation—"
"Leaving," he repeated.
She held for a moment. The crowd held with her. Then she flipped her hair back, laughed like none of it had been a big deal at all, and walked. Her girls followed. The circle broke apart. The music swelled back up like it had never stopped.
I looked at the floor and let out a breath.
"You okay?"
His voice, right behind me.
I turned around. He was still there, arms crossed loosely, watching me with a slight frown like he was trying to calculate something.
"I didn't need you to do that," I said.
"Didn't say you did."
"Then why?"
"She was making a scene." He uncrossed his arms. "It wasn't about you."
I looked at him for a second. He looked back without looking away, which most people didn't do after they'd said something like that to me.
"Right." I picked up the clutch I'd dropped without noticing. "Thanks for the rescue, quarterback. I'll try to be less inconvenient going forward."
I turned and walked out before he could respond, through the crowd, past the string lights and the catered food I wasn't going to eat, through the front doors and into the cold air that hit me like a wall.
I sat down on the front steps.
My phone was already buzzing.
The video had sixty-three thousand views. I watched it with the screen an inch from my face, my stomach dropping on every frame. Madison's voice, perfect audio. My face, every flicker. Comments loading faster than I could scroll. Not just about the dress or the scholarship. About my mother. About the job. About our building and our block and the things I had worked so hard to keep quiet.
I put the phone face down on the cold stone beside me and sat there.
My mother's Honda pulled into the driveway before I had even texted her. She had been at the Ryder house, on shift, watching her phone between rooms, and she had seen it the moment it went live. She got out of the car and walked straight to me and put both arms around me without saying a word first, and she smelled like the cleaning products she used on their floors and I pressed my face into her shoulder and stayed there.
"You stood up for yourself," she murmured into my hair, her hand on the back of my head. "I didn't raise a girl who stands there and takes it."
I nodded. My throat was still closed.
She drove me home. I went to bed with the view count somewhere past two hundred thousand. I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and waited to feel something other than the heavy, specific exhaustion of a person who had been on guard for too long.
Better didn't come.
What came instead was the quiet and the dark and the knowledge that tomorrow was going to be worse.
What I didn't know yet was that by morning, my mother would be sitting at our kitchen table with her hands around a cold cup of coffee, and she would tell me we were moving into the Ryder house.
And Jaxon Ryder, who had looked at me that night like I was a problem he'd solved and moved past, was about to become someone I couldn't avoid.