Chapter 7 Chapter 7

Here is a list of things I did not expect to happen on my second day at Evergreen High:

One: spill an entire iced coffee down the front of my white sweater in the middle of a packed hallway.

Two: do it directly in front of the cheer squad's locker bay.

Three: make eye contact with Riley Voss while it happened.

Four through infinity: everything that followed.

It started innocuously enough. I'd actually felt good leaving the house — dark jeans again, white chunky knit sweater, hair down for once instead of shoved under a beanie. Dad had looked up from his playbook and said, "You look nice, kid," which from a man who once wore the same tracksuit for four consecutive days meant genuinely something. I'd walked into Evergreen High with the energy of someone who had, marginally, figured out the geography.

I had not figured out the geography.

I was cutting through the east corridor — the fast route to AP Lit that Finn had shown me — when I hit the intersection by the vending machines at the exact wrong moment. A junior I'd never seen before came around the corner at full sprint, backpack swinging, and clipped my arm. My iced coffee — the one luxury I'd allowed myself from the gas station on the way in, the one that had cost me $4.79 and my last crumpled bill — went airborne.

Time slowed the way it only does during disasters.

The cup tumbled. The lid surrendered. A generous arc of cold brew and oat milk described a graceful, terrible parabola through the air and landed directly in the center of my chest, soaking through the white knit in approximately half a second.

The hallway went quiet.

Then it didn't.

Laughter. Not mean exactly — the reflexive, startled kind that people can't help — but it echoed off the lockers and the linoleum and every available hard surface in a way that felt specifically designed to hollow me out. I stood there, arms out, coffee dripping off my sweater onto my shoes.

"Oh wow." Riley Voss materialized from the cheer bay like she'd been waiting in the wings for exactly this cue. She looked at my chest, then up at my face, head tilted. "Bold choice, wearing white in a school with vending machines."

Her friends made that sound — not quite a laugh, not quite an agreement. The sound of people performing cruelty at low volume.

I opened my mouth. I had a comeback in there somewhere, I was absolutely sure of it. Something dry and devastating. Something Avery Kane, daughter of a hockey coach, survivor of a cross-country move, author of twelve chapters about a dragon-riding librarian, would say.

What came out was: "Yep."

I turned and walked to the bathroom with as much dignity as a coffee-soaked person can carry, which is a limited quantity. I locked myself in a stall, pressed my back against the door, and breathed through my nose for thirty seconds.

Yep"

My comeback was yep"

I did what I could with paper towels, which was not much, and spent the rest of the day with my jacket zipped to my chin, sweating through AP Calculus and Spanish III while the coffee dried into a vague brown continent across my sternum. By the time the final bell rang I had made a decision, quiet and absolute, in the way you only make decisions after a humiliation.

Tomorrow, I was going to look good.

Not for Riley. Not for Knox or Finn or anyone with a last name that got chanted in grocery stores. For me. For the girl who'd left her whole life in San Diego and deserved to walk into a hallway and feel like herself instead of like a cautionary tale about beverage management.

I was already mentally reorganizing my closet when Knox found me at my locker.

"Heard about the coffee."

I closed my eyes briefly. "Small town."

"Small town," he agreed, leaning against the adjacent locker with the loose ease that was simply his natural resting state. He was still in his practice jersey, hair damp at the edges, cheeks carrying that permanent cold-weather flush. He smelled like the rink and mint gum and, faintly, like the kind of trouble that had excellent bone structure. "For what it's worth, Riley Voss once told the entire junior class that I cried at a Disney movie."

I looked at him. "Did you?"

"That is so not the point." But his mouth twitched. "The point is, she does this to everyone new. It's a hazing thing. You survived it."

"I said yep" I told him flatly. "One word. Monosyllabic. She eviscerated me in front of the cheer squad and I responded with yep"

"Honestly?" He pushed off the locker and turned to face me fully, arms crossed, doing a terrible job of hiding a smile. "That's kind of iconic. Very unbothered. Very—"

"Do not say cool"

"I was going to say mysterious "

"You were absolutely going to say cool."

He laughed, and despite everything — the coffee, the sweater, the yep — it loosened something in my chest. He reached out and tugged the zipper of my jacket once, quick and light, the way you'd flag down a friend. "Hey. You okay? Actually."

The actually landed differently than the rest. Softer. Less captain, more just — him.

"I'll live," I said. "But I'm staging a wardrobe comeback tomorrow that Riley Voss will think about for weeks."

Knox's eyes did something warm and unhelpful. "Yeah?"

"I have a yellow dress," I said, with great solemnity. "It's devastating."

He held my gaze for a beat longer than necessary. "I believe it."

The hallway moved around us — lockers slamming, someone's backpack hitting someone else's shin, the low roar of two hundred teenagers trying to escape into the afternoon — and for a second it all went pleasantly blurry at the edges.

Then his phone buzzed. Practice reminder. The moment dissolved.

"Tomorrow," he said, already backing away, that grin still in place. "Yellow dress. I'll be watching for it."

"You'll be at practice."

"I contain multitudes, Kane."

He turned and disappeared into the crowd, and I stood at my locker for a moment, jacket still zipped, coffee stain still underneath, smiling at a row of textbooks like an idiot.

Tomorrow.

Yellow dress.

Game on.