Chapter 4 The Rules

Avery's POV

Jaxon was waiting outside AP English when I arrived, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and his backpack slung over one shoulder. He looked like he'd been standing there for a while, and when he saw me coming he pushed off the wall and walked toward me like he'd been waiting specifically for this moment. I considered walking past him, taking the long way to class and pretending he didn't exist, but he moved into my path before I could make a decision. "Morning," he said, and I noticed his voice was carefully neutral in a way that felt deliberate.

"Did you need something?"

He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and held it out to me, and I took it without looking at it. It was warm from his hand, and I hated that I noticed that. I unfolded it and read the list in neat black ink. Four items. Don't use the main kitchen during the hours of six to eight in the morning when his father had breakfast. Don't go into the east wing after nine when his mother worked late. Don't talk to the staff about anything that happened at the house. Don't expect him to be friendly.

"You came all the way to my locker to give me a list of rules?" I asked, looking up from the paper. "You live on the property," he said. "You should know how it works." I folded the paper and tucked it into my pocket, and I could feel the weight of it against my thigh. "These aren't house rules," I told him. "These are you rules." He shrugged and said they were the same thing, and I stood there trying to figure out why he'd bothered to write them down and hand them to me.

"One more thing, "The support page. I reported it. Anonymously. It should come down in a few days." I froze for a second and I could feel the words landing somewhere unexpected. "You reported it?" I asked, and I heard the surprise in my own voice. "Someone should have done it weeks ago," he said. "No one did. So I did." I didn't know what to say to that. I'd reported it myself twice and nothing had happened. The school said it was outside their jurisdiction and the platform said it didn't violate their terms, and it had stayed up because no one had any reason to take it down. "I didn't ask you to do that," I said. He was already walking toward the classroom door. "I know," he said without looking back. "That's why I did it."

He sat next to me in AP English, and I noticed he'd never done that before. He always sat in the back row with the other athletes, close to the door and ready to leave the moment the bell rang. But today he dropped his backpack on the seat beside mine and slid into the chair like he'd been sitting there all year. I saw Madison watching from one row back, and her face shifted when she noticed him. Her eyes moved from him to me and back again, and she filed away whatever she'd seen with an expression I couldn't read. She smiled at him when he looked up, and he nodded and turned back to his notebook.

The lecture was about narrative structure in modern fiction, and I wrote down the words without really hearing them. I was too aware of the boy sitting next to me and the way his arm kept brushing the edge of my desk. I was too aware of the stares from the rest of the room and the whispered questions and the way people looked at us like we'd suddenly become something they needed to understand. After class Madison caught me in the corridor, moving fast enough that I knew she'd been waiting for the right moment. "Hey," she said. "Can I talk to you for a second?" I stopped walking and waited, and she smiled at me with her head tilted in that careful way she had.

"Jaxon and... Are living on his property now?. I heard about the cottage." I asked her where she'd heard about that, and she just said people talk, which was the same answer everyone always gave me. "Getting close to Jaxon Ryder is a contact sport," she said. "Girls have left this school over it." I asked her what she meant by that, and she told me it was just a warning, that he wasn't someone I wanted to be associated with right now especially with everything else going on. She didn't wait for a response and she walked away with her head high and her shoulders back and the practiced grace of someone who'd never been embarrassed in her entire life.

I went to the tech lab alone after school, and the room was empty and quiet and smelled like dust and old electronics. I sat at my usual terminal and pulled up the code for the game, and I scrolled through the files until I found the branch I'd been avoiding. I'd built a moment where the player stopped running and turned around, the moment when everything changed. The player had been running from something since the beginning, and now they had to decide whether to keep running or turn and face whatever was chasing them. I'd been stuck on that branch for days because I couldn't figure out what the player found when they turned around.

I stared at the screen and tried to imagine it. A confrontation or a revelation or the thing they'd been afraid of turning out to be something else entirely. I couldn't find the words, and I sat in the empty tech lab with my fingers on the keyboard and waited for something to come to me. Nothing did. I saved the file and closed the laptop and walked back to the cottage through the darkening garden. The main house was lit up in the distance with warm light spilling from the windows and the sound of someone playing piano drifting through the evening air. I walked past the fountain and the rose bushes and the stone path that led to the east wing, and I didn't look back.

The cottage was dark when I got there, my mother had left a note on the counter telling me she'd gone to the store and would be back later. I read it twice and folded it into my pocket next to the list of rules, and I didn't know why I was keeping both of them. I opened my phone and scrolled to the support page, and the printout from my locker had been removed but the page was still there. New comments and new photos and a poll about whether the move was a coincidence or a setup. I closed the phone and went to bed, and I lay in the dark trying to figure out why Jaxon had bothered to report the page and why Madison had bothered to warn me and why neither of those things made me feel any safer.