Chapter 2 JACE HOLLOWAY

IVY's POV

I see him before he sees me every morning. That's not an accident.

The goal is simple, get to the east corridor before eight, take the long route past the science wing, arrive at English from the opposite direction. It adds four minutes to my commute. I do it without complaint because four minutes is nothing compared to what happens when I miscalculate.

Thursday I miscalculate by thirty seconds.

I come around the corner near the main stairwell just as he's coming down it with Marcus and Tyler, mid-laugh about something, jacket half zipped, looking like someone who's never once had to plan a route around another human being. I pivot without breaking stride, take the longer hallway, arrive at Room 204 slightly out of breath.

That's my mornings now. That's what I've built my senior year around.

Jace Holloway doesn't know any of it. He's not avoiding me, he's not thinking about me at all. I've rearranged my entire daily life around a person who has never once rearranged a single thing around me. On the hard mornings when the effort feels disproportionate, I think about the note and the way Marcus laughed. I remember the effort is exactly right.

Here's what Ashridge knows about Jace Holloway. Started every varsity game since sophomore year, GPA 4.1 which feels unfair given everything else he has, five Division I programs recruiting him. His father, Richard, hired a sports management firm before Jace was even seventeen. Dated Vanessa Pierce for eight months, she still acts like that's ongoing, he never corrects her. That detail says more about him than the GPA ever will.

Here's what I know from personal experience, he's careless. Not cruel in the way that requires planning, careless in the way that causes damage without noticing it happened. Makes a joke and moves on. The joke stays behind in the chest of the person it landed in for weeks, getting harder the longer it sits there. You can't defend against careless. It's not aimed at you, it just falls where it falls and you happen to be standing there.

By week two I have his full schedule mapped, arrival time, route between classes, which exit after practice. Not with interest, with necessity. By week three the map is working, eleven days without being within speaking distance of him, fourteen reroutes, small losses, worth every one.

Then Thursday afternoon I break the one rule I made outside the map.

I have forty pages left of Wuthering Heights and something in me needs to finish it today. I walk to the library with the book open in my hands, come around the east stairwell corner reading and nearly walk directly into him. We both step back, three feet between us. His expression moves through surprise and lands somewhere I can't place.

"You're in my English class," he says.

I wait. There's always an angle with people like him, a setup approaching from somewhere.

"Ivy, right?" He says my name like he's checking it against something he memorized. "Monroe."

He knows my name. Three years invisible at this school and he knows my name. That single fact sits wrong in my chest in a way I don't have a category for.

"Yeah."

His eyes drop to the book. "Wuthering Heights."

"It's for class, not our class, different class." I hear how defensive it sounds and can't pull it back.

He holds my gaze one beat longer than the moment requires. Something moves behind his expression that isn't unkind and isn't kind either, something occupying unfamiliar territory between both. Then his phone buzzes in his pocket and he looks down. Whatever he was going to say, he doesn't. He walks past me, close enough that I catch the smell of his jacket, something clean and outdoors, then he's gone and the hallway is empty and I'm standing there with my book open to page 312 and my heart doing something I'm not going to name.

I tell myself it's adrenaline from the near collision.

I believe that for exactly two days.

Day three, he looks at me across the English classroom during the Daisy Buchanan discussion. Doesn't look away fast enough, less than two seconds, but I feel it the way you feel pressure change before a storm, present and real and gone before it can be named. I look away first. From this point on that's the rule. Whatever happens, I look away first, don't give him the last second, don't let him see that I noticed.

The note is still in my pocket. I haven't thrown it away. Evidence, I tell myself, a reminder of what he is and what I am and the distance I need between those two things if I'm going to survive this year.

I look away first every single time.

It costs me more than I want to admit.

But I don't know that one day I won't be able to look away at all.