Chapter 5 THE FOOTBALL GOD

IVY's POV

Everyone at Ashridge knew Jace Holloway. The question was whether anyone actually knew him.

I had been watching him for three weeks with the specific attention of someone mapping a threat. What I had collected was a picture that the school's version of him did not quite account for. The school's version was simple. Captain. Quarterback. Golden boy. Son of Richard Holloway, whose name was on buildings and whose money was the kind that did not need to introduce itself. That version walked through hallways and made rooms tilt and accepted the attention like it was simply a condition of existing and always had been.

What I had noticed was everything underneath that.

The way he rolled his shoulders before every class like he was resetting something that had tightened up between the last room and this one. The way his jaw went tight on certain days in a pattern I had started to recognize as connected to his phone, specifically to calls he took outside near the athletics building and came back from looking like someone who had just been told something they already knew and still had not found a way to accept. The way he was genuinely intelligent in class, forming real thoughts rather than performing the appearance of them, and then looking almost surprised when a point landed well. Like someone had told him often enough that his value was physical that the other version of himself still caught him off guard. The way he laughed with Marcus and Tyler in the hallway and how sometimes it reached his eyes and sometimes it was just a sound his face made because the room expected it from him.

I was not supposed to be noticing any of this.

Tuesday afternoon I was in the library doing my Gatsby reading when the door opened and Jace came in alone. Practice bag still on his shoulder, clearly coming straight from the field. He went to the far table and dropped into a chair and pulled out his own copy of Gatsby and started reading. The library was nearly empty. Three other students at separate tables and the librarian at the desk and me with a clear sightline to where he was sitting if I looked up.

I looked up.

He was reading with the same focused quality I had seen in class, genuinely present with the page, not performing studious for anyone. Just actually there with the book. One hand flat on the table and the other holding it open. His jaw still had the tight line it had been carrying all afternoon. He had been near the coach's office between third and fourth period when I passed it and I had heard the tail end of a phone call, just the last few seconds of it, just him saying yes sir into the phone before the silence. The yes sir had a specific quality that was not respect and was not deference. It was what you sounded like after years of learning that the other available options cost more than compliance did.

I filed that away with everything else I was filing about him.

His father was Richard Holloway. I knew the name from the buildings and from the sports management firm that had apparently been handling his recruitment since before he was legally old enough to sign anything himself. That sounded impressive until you thought about what it actually meant. Who had been making decisions about this boy's future and when that had started and whether anyone had asked him what he wanted it to look like. Five programs wanted him. The school newsletter had run it as a success story the same way it ran scholarship students as success stories, which was to say as evidence of something flattering about the institution rather than about the person at the center of it.

I looked back at my book.

Across the library Jace exhaled slowly and leaned back in his chair and pressed the heel of his hand against his eye like someone managing a headache that had been running longer than one afternoon. Then he sat forward again and went back to the page.

He did not know I was there. That was the thing about three years of practiced invisibility. You could be in a room and not quite be in it. Jace Holloway had never had a reason to extend his attention toward me except to make a comment at my expense. So I sat in the library and watched him press his hand against his eye and thought about yes sir and buildings with his father's name on them and a management firm making plans for a future that belonged to someone who had not been old enough to vote when it started.

I closed my book and put it in my bag and stood up to leave.

That was when he looked up and saw me.

A moment of genuine surprise, completely unguarded, the kind that happened before the performance had time to load. In that moment I saw what lived underneath the ease. Something tired in a way that was not physical. Tired in the specific way of someone who had been performing something demanding for a very long time and had never quite been allowed to put it down.

Then the moment closed. His expression settled back into the version the school recognized.

"Library," he said, like he was noting my presence somewhere he had not expected to find me.

"It has books," I said. "That is what they are for."

I picked up my bag and walked out. I did not look back. I kept not looking back all the way to the bus stop. On the bus home I stared at the city through the window and thought about that one unguarded second and what had been visible in it before he could close it off.

I thought about it past the point where it was useful. I thought about it past the point where it made any sense given what I already knew about him and what I needed to maintain to get through this year in one piece. I thought about it anyway. That was the problem. That was the specific and growing problem. Because three weeks ago Jace Holloway had been a system I navigated around without assigning meaning to. And somewhere between the library and the bus stop, that had stopped being entirely true.