Chapter 2 Orange Juice and One Hundred Eyes

Zara's POV

She heard the dining hall before she reached it.

Voices, laughter, the scrape of chairs on stone floors. The smell of warm food drifting through the double doors. Zara had not eaten since the gas station sandwich her mom packed at 6am. She pushed the door open and walked in.

Every single head turned.

Not a few people. Not the ones near the door. Everyone. Like someone had pressed pause on a hundred separate conversations all at once. Zara kept walking. She did not slow down. She picked up a tray, joined the food line, and stared straight ahead at the eggs and toast while the noise slowly started back up behind her.

She told herself it was just because she was new.

She did not fully believe it.

The line moved. She took eggs, toast, and orange juice. She scanned the room for a place to sit. The back left corner had a half-empty table. She started walking toward it.

And then she felt it. That specific kind of silence that happens when something is about to go wrong.

She looked up.

He was already looking at her.

The boy from the hallway yesterday. Silver eyes. The one who had walked away from her dropped map without blinking. He was sitting at the center table — the biggest one, with the best view of the whole room — surrounded by people who all looked like they belonged in a magazine.

He was not smiling. He was just watching her, the way someone watches a bug walk across a table before deciding what to do about it.

Zara looked away first. Kept walking.

She was three steps from the back corner table when it happened.

Cold. Wet. Heavy.

Orange juice poured over her left shoulder, down her sleeve, across her back. Then eggs. Then something warm she could not even identify. The tray clattered to the floor beside her. The sound bounced off every wall.

The room went absolutely silent.

Zara stood completely still. She did not scream. She did not spin around. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, one slow breath, while orange juice dripped off her elbow onto the stone floor.

Then she turned.

He was standing right behind her. His tray in his hands, now empty. His expression was bored. Almost surprised, like this was an accident. Like he had not just done this on purpose in front of every single person in the room.

"Watch where you're going," he said. Calm. Almost kind. "Charity case."

Two words.

Somebody laughed first. Then it spread, table by table, until the whole room was noise and Zara was standing in the middle of it, soaking wet, holding an empty tray.

She looked at him for exactly three seconds. She counted. She needed to know his face completely. She needed to remember every detail of this moment, because she was going to need it later.

Then she picked up her tray off the floor. Set it on the nearest table. Walked out of the dining hall without running. Without looking back. Without making a sound.

— ✦ —

She made it to the bathroom in the scholarship wing before her hands started shaking.

She ran cold water over her wrists the way her mom taught her when things got too big. She breathed. She did not cry. She specifically did not cry. She looked at herself in the mirror — hair damp, blazer ruined, face completely dry — and she made herself say it out loud.

"You are still here."

Her voice came out steady. That was something.

She changed into her spare shirt. Ate two granola bars from her bag. Went to every single one of her afternoon classes and answered every question correctly when teachers called on her. She was not going to disappear. That was not an option.

That night, she sat at her tiny dorm desk and opened her phone.

Forty-three notifications.

She clicked the first one. Instagram. A video reposted to a meme account with sixty thousand followers. The caption read: "Cresthaven's scholarship girl gets her welcome gift lol."

It was her. Taken from across the dining hall. Clear enough that you could see her face, her scholarship pin, the orange juice spreading down her back. You could see the exact moment she picked up the tray off the floor.

Eighty thousand views. In one day.

She scrolled the comments until she found the person who posted it originally. A student account. Private. But the username was visible.

BV.cresthaven.

BV.

Bianca Voss. She had heard that name in the scholarship meeting. Luca Harlow's girlfriend. Head of the student social committee. The girl who, according to Ms. Adler's careful non-explanation, "sets the tone" at Cresthaven.

Zara put her phone face-down on the desk.

She was not nobody. She was GoldPen. She had helped forty-three students pass exams they would have failed without her. She had kept her family's lights on since she was thirteen years old. She had read the Crown Contest rules three times on the train ride here and she already knew which rounds she was strongest in.

She picked her phone back up. Opened GoldPen. There was a new message from LHarlow97, sent twenty minutes ago.

"Did you see the video going around? Some scholarship girl got destroyed at breakfast lol. Anyway — can we start on the leadership essay tonight?"

Zara read it twice.