Chapter 10 Chapter 10

Chapter 10 Chapter 10


Six days before Valentine's Day, Chloe floated into my bedroom.

That is the only word for how she moved — floated, untethered from gravity the way people get when something wonderful is happening to them and the wonderful thing has started to feel permanent. She was glowing again. The same glow from the window-knock, but brighter now, more settled, like a fire that had moved past the uncertain flicker stage and become something that knew how to sustain itself.

I was sitting at my desk pretending to read when she came in. She dropped onto my bed stomach-first, kicked her feet behind her, and held her phone to her chest like she was keeping it warm.

I knew the posture.

I prepared myself.

"He said yes," she said.

"To what?"

She rolled over and faced the ceiling, arms spread wide, the phone still pressed to her chest. "I asked him to the Valentine's Dance."

The sentence hit me the way cold water hit — fast, total, no warning.

"You asked him?" I said.

"I know, I know — I was terrified, my hands were literally shaking, but Mika said just do it and I did it and he said—" she paused for the full theatrical effect, "—he said I was wondering when you'd ask."

A sound came out of me. I aimed it at being a laugh. I think I hit somewhere close.

"He was waiting for me to ask, Si." She sat up, legs crossed, eyes bright. "He knew I was going to and he waited. What does that even mean, what kind of person does that—"

"A confident one," I said.

"An infuriating one," she said, but she was smiling so wide it cancelled the word entirely.

I folded my hands in my lap.

They were very neat. Very still. I was focusing on keeping them that way.

"That's really exciting, Chlo."

"It gets better." She leaned forward. Voice dropping to the specific frequency of shared secrets. "I've decided that Valentine's night is the night."

"The night for what?"

"The first kiss." She said it like the capital letters were built in. "I haven't kissed him yet, Si. We've held hands, we've had the diner, he texted me good morning four days in a row — but nothing physical. And I think — I know — that if I plan it right, Valentine's night, the dance, the whole atmosphere—" she stopped and looked at me with the open, trusting expression she had been giving me since we were twelve years old. "Midnight. I want it to happen at midnight."

My chest had stopped doing the pressure thing.

It had moved past pressure into something quieter and colder that I didn't have a name for yet.

"That's a good plan," I said.

"You think?"

"Midnight at a Valentine's Dance. It's — yes. It's a good plan."

"Okay." She exhaled. "Okay good. Because I need your help."

I looked at her.

"The outfit," she said. "I need the perfect outfit. Something that says—" she thought about it, "—I've been patient but I'm not patient anymore. You know?"

"I know exactly what that means," I said.

Something about saying it out loud — those exact words — pressed against something in my chest from the inside and I kept my expression where it was through sheer practiced force.

"Saturday?" she said. "You, me, the mall. Whole afternoon. I'll buy you that overpriced tea you like."

"Saturday," I said. "Yes."

She launched herself off the bed and hugged me — warm, real, her arms tight the way they had been since we were twelve — and I hugged her back with both arms and held on for a second that was about more than she knew.

"You're the best, Si. Genuinely."

"I know," I said.

She laughed and was gone — floating back out of my room, door clicking softly behind her — and then there was just me and the desk and the unread book and the silence she left behind that was shaped exactly like everything I hadn't said.

I stood up.

I moved to the mirror on the back of my wardrobe door — the one I used every morning to assemble the Sienna that Silver Ridge expected, lip gloss and posture and the particular arrangement of features that communicated I have everything under control.

I looked at her.

She looked back.

And something happened.

It was not dramatic. It did not arrive with noise. It was a quiet thing — a shift, like a tide changing direction, like a temperature dropping one final degree past the point where water became something harder and colder and entirely new.

For three weeks I had watched. I had stayed quiet. I had sat in bleachers and smiled at reports and folded my hands neatly in my lap and told myself that stillness was strategy. That waiting was wisdom. That keeping the mask perfect and the status intact and the performance running was the smart play.

Madison's voice in the library. Placeholder.

Jax in the dark field. Your best friend is smarter than you.

Liam and Madison's three-second look across a fire I was standing ten feet from.

Chloe floating into my bedroom glowing like a girl who was about to get everything she wanted.

Midnight.

I looked at the girl in the mirror for a long time.

She did not look weak. She had never looked weak — that was the thing about a mask, the thing people misunderstood. A mask didn't make you weak. A mask was something you built because you were strong enough to carry it. The problem wasn't the strength.

The problem was the direction she'd been pointing it.

The girl in the mirror had spent weeks absorbing, enduring, staying still, letting things happen to her while she smiled and nodded and handed over the things she wanted to people who had simply been brave enough to ask for them out loud.

Her eyes in the mirror were different now.

Not angry. Something colder than anger. Something that didn't shake.

Midnight, Chloe had said.

I've been patient but I'm not patient anymore.

I had borrowed her words by accident and they had meant something entirely different in my chest.

I was done being a placeholder.

I was done being invisible.

I was done pretending that the thing growing in my chest for weeks was nothing, that the boy who had called me Princess in the dark and looked through me in the light and told me my best friend was smarter than me was nothing, that any of this was nothing.

It wasn't nothing.

It had never been nothing.

And Chloe had six days.

I looked at
the girl in the mirror one more time.

Her eyes were not soft anymore.

They were decided.

Clock's ticking, Princess, I thought.