Chapter 2 JACE HOLLOWAY

IVY's POV

I saw him before he saw me every morning. That was the goal. Get to the east corridor before eight, take the long route past the science wing, arrive at English from the opposite direction to wherever Jace Holloway was coming from. It added four minutes to my commute every single day and I did it without complaint because four minutes was nothing compared to what happened when I miscalculated.

On Thursday I miscalculated by thirty seconds.

I came around the corner near the main stairwell just as he was coming down it with Marcus and Tyler, mid laugh about something, jacket half zipped, looking like someone who had never once had to plan a route around another human being in his entire life. I pivoted without breaking stride and took the longer hallway and arrived at Room 204 slightly out of breath.

That was what my mornings looked like now. That was what I had built my senior year around.

Jace Holloway did not know any of it. That was both the point and the part that sat heaviest. He was not avoiding me. He was not thinking about me at all. I had arranged my entire daily life around a person who had never once arranged a single thing around me. I thought about that on the mornings when the effort felt like too much. Then I thought about the note in my pocket and the way Marcus had laughed and I remembered that the effort was exactly right.

Here is what Ashridge knew about Jace Holloway. He had started every varsity game since sophomore year. His GPA was 4.1, which felt genuinely unfair given everything else he had going for him. Five Division I programs were recruiting him and his father Richard had hired a sports management firm to handle the negotiations before Jace was even seventeen. He dated Vanessa Pierce for eight months last year. She still acted like that was ongoing. He never corrected her. That last part said more about him than the GPA ever would.

Here is what I knew from direct personal experience. He was careless. Not cruel in the way that required planning or intention. Careless in the way that left damage behind without noticing it had happened. He made a joke and moved on and the joke stayed behind in the chest of the person it landed in for weeks, getting harder and heavier the longer it sat there. You could not defend yourself against careless. Careless was not aimed at you. It just fell where it fell and you happened to be standing there.

By the end of week two I had his full schedule mapped. Arrival time, route between classes, which hallway he took to the cafeteria, which exit he used after practice. I knew his movements the way you learned any system you needed to navigate safely. Not with interest. With necessity.

By week three the map was working. Eleven days without being within speaking distance of him. Fourteen reroutes. I had given up the library window table, the bench near the east exit, and the shorter route to the science wing. Small losses. Worth it.

Then on a Thursday afternoon I broke the one rule I had made outside of the map. Never read while walking.

I had forty pages left of Wuthering Heights and something in me needed to finish it that day, needed to reach the ending and close the cover and just sit with it for a minute. So I walked to the library with the book open in my hands and I came around the east stairwell corner reading and nearly walked directly into him.

We both stepped back. Three feet of space opened between us.

His expression moved through surprise and landed somewhere I could not immediately name.

"You are in my English class," he said.

I waited. There was always an angle with people like him. A setup dressed up as something ordinary.

"Ivy, right?" He said my name carefully, like he was checking it against something he had memorized. "Monroe."

He knew my name. I had not expected that. Three years of being furniture at this school and furniture did not have names, it had positions. The fact that he knew mine meant he had spent at least one conscious moment thinking of me as a specific person rather than a general category. I did not know what to do with that.

"Yeah," I said.

His eyes dropped to the book in my hands. "Wuthering Heights."

"It is for class."

"Not our class."

"Different class."

He held my gaze one beat longer than the moment needed. Something moved behind his expression, not unkind, not kind, something that lived in unfamiliar territory between both. Then his phone buzzed in his pocket and he looked down at it. Whatever he had been going to say, he did not say it.

He walked past me. Close enough that I caught the smell of his jacket, something clean and outdoors. Then he was gone and the hallway was empty and I was standing there with my book open to page three hundred and twelve and my heart doing something I was not going to name.

I attributed it firmly to the near collision and nothing else. I believed that for exactly two days.

On day three he looked at me across the English classroom during the Daisy Buchanan discussion and he did not look away as fast as he should have. Less than two seconds. But I felt it the way you feel pressure change before a storm. Present and significant and gone before it could be named properly.

I looked away first.

I made that a standing rule from that point forward. Whatever happened, whatever he did, I looked away first. I did not give him the last second of eye contact. I did not let him see that I had noticed. I looked away first every single time.

It cost me more than I wanted to admit to anyone, including myself. And I could not explain why, except that something in me recognized something in him that I had not expected to recognize. I did not trust that recognition at all.

The note was still in my pocket. I had not thrown it away. Evidence, I told myself. A reminder of what he was and what I was and the distance between those two things that I needed to keep if I was going to survive this year intact.

I looked away first. Every single time.