Chapter 3 First Morning

Avery's POV

The alarm goes off at four thirty and I'm already awake.

I've been awake since two, lying in a room that isn't mine, listening to a house I don't know settle around me in the dark. The mattress is better than anything I've slept on in years. That almost makes it worse.

I dress without turning the light on, grab my laptop, and go looking for the kitchen.

The east wing connects to the main house through a corridor lined with photographs, Jaxon at fourteen, sixteen, last year, each version bigger and more certain than the one before, trophies on a side table, a jersey mounted in a shadow box, the whole hallway arranged like a monument to one person's future. I walk through it without stopping.

The kitchen is large and grey with early light coming through the window above the sink. I find the coffee, find a mug, and have the machine running before I sit down. I open my laptop and pull up the app I've been building since junior year, a puzzle platformer with a branching narrative engine underneath it, three years of late nights and stolen lunch periods and every spare hour I could find.

The video has four hundred thousand views now. I checked at two in the morning before I made myself stop checking.

I focus on the code.

Twenty minutes pass. Then footsteps come down the back staircase, heavy and unhurried, and Jaxon walks in wearing training shorts and a cutoff shirt, hair pushed back, not expecting anyone. He stops when he sees me.

"It's four fifty," he says.

"I said four thirty."

He looks at the coffee machine. Then at the mug in my hands, the large one with the cracked handle that was sitting on the drying rack. I grabbed it without thinking.

I keep both hands around it and don't move.

He gets a different mug, pours his coffee, and leans against the counter across the island. Outside a bird starts up somewhere in the garden. Neither of us says anything for a while.

"You're always up this early?" he asks.

"When I have work."

He glances at my screen. I tilt it slightly. He doesn't push it.

"The video's still going," he says.

"I know."

"Madison does this at the start of every year. Picks someone. It usually blows over."

"Great."

"I wasn't trying to comfort you."

"I know that too."

He grabs a protein bar from the pantry and goes back down the corridor without another word. I listen to his footsteps fade past all those photographs of himself.

I look back at my screen.

The third branch has a bug, the one where the player chooses silence over confrontation. The game is supposed to register that as a valid path forward. Instead it keeps looping the player back to the start like silence isn't an option at all. I find the error, fix it, run the sequence again.

This time it holds.

My mother comes down at six thirty, already dressed, already composed the way she always is before anyone else is awake. She makes toast, kisses the top of my head, and goes to find Mrs. Ryder. I pack my laptop, get my bag, and walk to the front door to wait for the car.

Jaxon comes down at six fifty with his backpack and his keys and looks at me standing there and says nothing. I say nothing back. We stand in the same hallway and wait.

The car arrives at seven. We get in on opposite sides. The drive to Ridgemont takes twelve minutes and neither of us uses a single one of them.

The school gates come into view and my stomach drops before I can stop it.

People are already gathered near the entrance and I can see phones out before the car even stops. Someone points. Someone else holds up a screen and even from inside the car I can see it's the video, my face on their phone, being shown to the person next to them like a joke they are sharing for the second or third time.

Jaxon sees it too. His jaw tightens.

He gets out first. The crowd shifts toward him immediately, names called out and hands raised and the full machinery of his social world closing around him before he's taken three steps. He moves into it without looking back.

I get out on my side and walk through the gate alone.

The whispers start before I reach the main building. Not loud, not direct, just that particular quality of quiet that means people are watching and waiting to see what I do next. I keep my eyes forward and my pace steady and make it to my locker without stopping.

Someone has taped a printout to the door. A still from the video, my face mid-crumble, with the word SHED printed underneath it in block letters.

I peel it off, fold it once, and drop it in the bin beside the water fountain.

Madison is leaning against the lockers at the end of the row with two of her girls, watching. She smiles when I look up.

I look away first. Not because she has won. Because I'm not giving her the reaction she came here to collect.

First period is AP Computer Science. I sit in the back row, open my IDE, and keep working on the branch logic while Mr. Calloway goes through material I already know. Nobody sits next to me. The seat on my left stays empty the way it always has, the way it has for three years, and I made my peace with that a long time ago.

The code is running clean. The silent path holds all the way through.

That's what I take into the rest of the day.

At lunch I take my tray to the far table by the windows and open my laptop and get eleven minutes of uninterrupted work before someone sits down across from me.

Not Madison. Not one of her girls.

Luca Ferretti, the transfer student from spring semester, dark eyes and an easy unbothered energy that comes from someone who genuinely does not care about Ridgemont's social architecture because he didn't grow up inside it.

"You're Avery," he says.

"Yes."

"I saw the video." He opens his lunch. "For what it's worth, I thought you handled it well."

I look at him. "I went viral."

"You didn't cry." He shrugs. "I've seen people cry. It's worse."

I look back at my screen. He eats his lunch and doesn't try to fill the silence, which is either respectful or suspicious. I haven't decided which yet.

Across the cafeteria Jaxon is at the center table with his team, laughing at something. He glances over once, sees Luca sitting across from me, and looks away.

I go back to my code.

Small victories. I'm collecting them.