Chapter 3

I left Mia in the hallway and went to the library.

The noise out there had nothing to do with me. I opened my laptop and pulled up my Harvard application — Restrictive Early Action, almost done, the alumni interview a week out. A real acceptance, a full scholarship, and a whole country between me and that trailer park.

That night, I worked at the wobbly desk in my storage room until the trailer went quiet.

I knew Mia. The rumor in the hallway had only been a warm-up. Last time, when whispers stopped being enough, she'd graduated to forging proof — and nothing kills a college acceptance faster than a school believing you cheated. Sooner or later she'd come for something she could send to Harvard.

So I gave her something to find.

For two days I'd let it "slip" around the house, loud enough for Ryan to hear, that there was a folder I couldn't afford to lose — that it would finish me if it ever got out. Then I made the folder: a fake answer key, a stack of scribbled "cheat sheets," all of it dressed up to look like the dirty secret of a girl who'd faked her way to the top.

I set it on the desk, turned off the lamp, and put my head down like I'd fallen asleep over my books.

A while later the door eased open. By the light from the hall I watched my own brother tiptoe in, snatch the folder off the desk, and slip back out.

I almost smiled.

The next morning, I was in a bathroom stall when Mia and two of her hangers-on came in.

"Is it true you're livestreaming when SAT scores drop? You've already got sponsors?"

"Obviously." Mia sounded delighted with herself. "I'm a genius and I'm gorgeous. Not like Chloe — she's done this time."

"Why's she done?"

"Her idiot brother sold me her little secret for a couple hundred bucks." She laughed. "Cheat sheets. Years of them. The day she gets that Harvard letter, I mail the whole thing to admissions and they take it right back."

I slid my phone out and pressed record.

There it was, in her own voice. Mia thought she had my throat in her hand. She didn't know the folder was full of paper I'd made for her, or that she was handing me every word as she gloated.

And she hadn't opened a textbook in weeks. She was too busy filming, posting, answering sponsors — she just assumed the scores would land in her lap, the way they always had for me.

They wouldn't. Not this time.

I waited until they finished, then flushed and came out to the sink.

Mia spun around, caught for half a second. Then the sneer slid back on. "So you heard. So what?" She crossed her arms. "You've got nothing, Chloe."

"I've got an interview Friday." I dried my hands slow, watching her in the mirror. "Harvard. Once that's done, none of this reaches me."

Something shifted behind her eyes. Not panic — something colder, like a piece dropping into place.

She smiled.

"Friday," she said, soft, almost sweet. She came up beside me at the sink, close, where the others couldn't hear. "You really think you'll make it there?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

She didn't answer. She gathered her bag and her little crowd and went for the door, and at the last second she looked back at me.

"Wear something you don't mind getting dirty."

Then she was gone, heels clicking off down the hall.