Chapter 6: Chapter 6

Chloe had dressed for a basketball practice like it was a first date.

Not obviously. She was too smart for obvious. But I noticed the way she had changed out of her uniform after last period and into a fitted grey-and-navy outfit that happened to be Silver Ridge's colors. The way her hair was down instead of in the messy knot she usually wore after school. The way she was carrying a small cooler bag that clinked softly when she walked.

"What's in the bag?" I asked.

"Hydration support," she said brightly.

"It's a practice, Chloe. Not a marathon."

"Electrolytes are important."

"You've never cared about electrolytes in your life."

"I care about them now." She looped her arm through mine and steered me toward the gymnasium entrance with the cheerful certainty of someone who had already decided how the afternoon was going to go. "Come on. It'll be fun."

"You said that about the farmer's market and I stood in the rain for two hours."

"You bought nice cheese though."

"That is not the point."

She laughed and pushed open the gym door and pulled me inside and I followed because I always followed Chloe when she was like this, lit up and decided and moving forward because it was either follow or get left behind, and I had never been good at being left behind.

The gym smelled like every gym, floor polish and old sneakers and the particular warm staleness of a space that held bodies in motion for hours every day. The bleachers were pulled halfway out, a few other students scattered across them, girlfriends, interested parties, people with nowhere better to be. The team was already running drills, the squeak of sneakers sharp against the court noise.

I found Liam immediately. Habit. He was at the far end, working a ball-handling drill, that easy athletic grace he had that made everything look effortless. He hadn't seen me yet.

Then I found Jax.

He was mid-court. A coach I didn't recognize was talking to him, pointing at the board, drawing something and Jax was watching with the focused, still attention he brought to everything, like the rest of the gym had simply ceased to exist.

He was wearing a plain white practice shirt and he had a small cut on his left hand from something I didn't know about and his hair was doing the thing it always did, which was exactly what it wanted, and I was cataloguing all of this in the span of four seconds the way I catalogued things about him without deciding to.

I looked away.

I found a spot on the bleachers and sat down and took out my phone and was extremely engaged with my phone.

Chloe did not sit.

Chloe walked straight to the edge of the court with her cooler bag and waited patient, bright, present until Jax looked up from the board.

Something moved in his face when he saw her. I was watching. I couldn't help watching, the same way you couldn't help watching a car accident, the same way your eyes went to the thing you most wanted to look away from. It wasn't a big reaction, Jax didn't do big reactions but it was something. A softening. A small, real shift in that controlled face.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey yourself." Chloe held up the cooler bag. "I brought supplies."

The corner of his mouth moved. "You didn't have to do that."

"I know I didn't have to. But I just want to."

He looked at her for a moment, just a moment and that same almost-smile appeared, the one I had seen once before and tried to forget. Then he looked past her, just briefly, scanning the bleachers with the automatic awareness of someone who always knew where every person in a room was.

His eyes moved across me.

Past me.

Back to Chloe.

Not a pause. Not a flicker. Not the smallest recognition that I was sitting twelve feet away, that I had been sitting here watching him, that we had exchanged words in an AP Lit class two days ago that I had replayed approximately forty times in the privacy of my own bedroom.

Nothing.

Like I was furniture. Like I was part of the bleachers. Like I was anyone at all.

I looked down at my phone.

The screen was showing my messages with Liam. Three texts from him this afternoon that I had read and not answered because I didn't know how to answer them yet, which was a problem I was storing in the back of my head behind all the other problems I was storing back there.

I pressed the screen off.

“Good,” I told myself. “This is good. This is exactly what you wanted. He's not paying attention to you. You're invisible. That's the ideal outcome for a girl who has a boyfriend and no feelings whatsoever about the new basketball player.”

Somewhere on the court, a drill started. Whistle, movement, the thud of the ball.

I listened to it without watching.

Five minutes passed.

Ten.

Chloe had claimed the seat on the team bench nearest the court, somehow, inevitably and was perched on the edge of it with the attentiveness of a girl who was genuinely interested in every part of the person she was watching. Not performing it. Actually there. She cheered when Jax made a clean drive, small and genuine, and he glanced at her once with an expression that was not warm, exactly, but oriented. Aware. Like her presence registered in a way that other presences did not.

I watched this from my spot on the bleachers.

Twelve feet away.

At the other end of the court, Liam drove the baseline and scored and looked up at the bleachers immediately , the automatic, habitual scan for me and found my face, and I raised my hand and smiled, and he nodded and went back to the drill, and the whole exchange took four seconds and felt like a formality we were both performing for reasons neither of us was examining.

Mika materialized beside me from nowhere, dropping onto the bleacher with a bag of chips she offered wordlessly.

I took one.

"She's good," Mika said. Quietly. Not looking at me.

Down on the bench, Chloe said something to Jax as he came off the court for a water break and he stopped, looked at her, and answered with more words than I had heard him say consecutively. Four sentences, maybe five. Chloe laughed, the real one, not her social laugh and Jax looked at the floor for a second like he was deciding something.

Then he reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

Light. Casual. Like it was nothing.

Like it cost him nothing.

The bleacher was hard under me. The gym was loud. Mika's chips bag crinkled.

I felt it in the center of my chest not a sharp pain, not the dramatic cinema kind. Something slower and worse. A pressure. Like a hand pressing steadily against something that wasn't designed to hold that much weight.

“He looked right through you,” something said in the back of my head, in a voice I recognized as honest and therefore hated. “Two days ago he called you Princess in front of a room full of people and today you don't exist.”

I ate another chip.

"She brought him electrolytes," I said. My voice came out normal. I was proud of it.

"I know," Mika said.

"It's a good strategy."

"Sure."

"She's going to win the dare."

Mika was quiet for a moment.

"Probably," she said.

On the court, practice resumed. Jax went back to his drill, focused, fluid, devastating in the specific way he was devastating, which was quietly and completely. Chloe watched him with her chin in her hand and her eyes bright.

He didn't look at me again.

Not once. Not for the entire remaining hour.

I sat in the bleachers a

nd watched the boy who had called me Princess look straight through me like I was made of glass, and I told myself it didn't matter.