Chapter 5 Partners Who Hate Each Other

Zara's POV

She heard him before she saw him.

Not his voice. His footsteps. Heavy. Unhurried. The kind of walk that says I have never been in a room where I did not belong. Zara did not look up from her book. She turned the page even though she had not finished reading it, just so he would not think she had been waiting.

She had not been waiting.

She had been in the library for forty minutes working on chemistry notes and trying very hard not to think about the fact that LHarlow97 had asked his secret tutor whether he should be scared of his debate partner and she had told him yes. She had been replaying that for forty minutes and it still made something warm flicker in her chest.

The footsteps stopped beside her table.

She looked up.

He was not sitting. He was leaning against the shelf next to her table with his arms crossed, looking down at her the way someone looks down at a problem they have not decided how to solve yet.

"You're Zara Cole," he said. Not a question.

"You already know that," she said. "You texted me last night."

Something moved across his face. Not quite surprise. More like he had expected her to be nervous and she was not, and he needed a second to adjust.

"The debate is in six days," he said. "We need to prep."

"I know when the debate is."

"I'm just saying we should take this seriously."

Zara put her pen down. She looked at him properly. Not quickly, the way she had in the dining hall when she was counting seconds and memorizing his face. Properly. The way you look at someone you are going to have to work with whether you like it or not.

"You came here to tell me not to embarrass you," she said. "That's what this is."

His jaw tightened. Just barely. "I came here to discuss prep strategy."

"Same thing." She picked her pen back up. "You don't need to worry about me embarrassing you. I have never embarrassed myself in my life. That seems to be more your area."

— ✦ —

The silence that followed was the longest three seconds she had experienced since arriving at Cresthaven.

He was not used to this. She could see it clearly. People at this school stepped back when he stepped forward. They laughed when he wanted them to laugh and went quiet when he wanted quiet. He moved through Cresthaven like someone who had never once been told no by anyone his own age.

She had been telling difficult people no since she was thirteen years old. It did not feel like anything special to her. It was just the truth said out loud.

"Library," he said finally. "Tomorrow. Four o'clock."

"I have a chemistry review at four."

"Four-thirty then."

"Fine." She looked back at her notes. "Don't be late."

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. Then the footsteps moved away and she did not look up until she could not hear them anymore.

She let out a slow breath.

Her hand, she noticed, was gripping her pen a little too tight. She made herself loosen it.

He was more than she had expected up close. Not in a good way. In a complicated way. The kind of complicated that made things harder, not easier.

She wrote DEBATE PREP — TOMORROW 4:30 at the top of a clean page and underlined it twice. Then she went back to chemistry and did not let herself think about silver eyes for the rest of the afternoon.

— ✦ —

That night she logged into GoldPen at 9pm.

LHarlow97 was already there. He had sent the message twenty minutes earlier.

She clicked it open.

"Okay so I found out who my debate partner is. She's one of the scholarship students. We talked today. I tried to set up a prep schedule and she basically told me I was the embarrassing one. To my face. In the library."

Zara read it carefully. She kept her face very still even though there was no one in the room to see it.

"She thinks she knows everything," the message continued. "I looked her up. There's nothing about her online except that viral video from day one. She has no record. No competitions. No awards. Nothing. I don't know why the system paired us but it's going to be a disaster."

No record. No competitions. No awards.

He had looked her up. And he had found nothing because GoldPen had no public profile, because Zara Cole did not put her wins on the internet, because she had been working quietly and carefully since she was thirteen and had never once needed anyone to know her name to keep going.

"She said you're the embarrassing one?" GoldPen typed back. Just that. No judgment either way.

"She said it like she believed it," he wrote. "Nobody talks to me like that."

"Maybe that's the problem," GoldPen said.

Three minutes of silence.

"Whose side are you on?" he finally wrote.

"I'm on the side of helping you win," she typed back. "And right now I'm telling you that underestimating your partner is the fastest way to lose. If she made you feel off-balance in a thirty-second conversation, what do you think she'll do in a six-minute debate?"