Chapter 4 Four

Hazel pov

The gymnasium still smelled like rubber and stale sweat when Coach Hendricks finally blew her whistle and released us from what I could only describe as a forty-five-minute experiment in human suffering.

I peeled myself off the hardwood floor - we'd ended the session with a set of suicides that left my calves screaming in protest - and hobbled toward the bleachers where I'd left my water bottle. My ponytail had come half-undone somewhere around the third sprint, and there was a very attractive streak of floor grime across my left knee. Excellent. Truly excellent start to a Thursday.

I changed out of my gym clothes in record time, stuffed everything into my bag with the kind of careless efficiency that only comes from being too exhausted to care, and checked my inhaler. Still there, right in the front pocket where I always kept it. I'd had mild asthma since I was nine - nothing dramatic, usually, as long as I managed my triggers. Dust. Cold air. Too much exertion without warming down properly.

I gave myself a mental note to actually warm down next time, then headed to the cafeteria.

Maya Chen was already at our usual table near the window when I arrived, tray loaded and phone face-down - which meant she'd been waiting and had things to say. Serious things. I knew that face.

I set my tray down and barely had my chair pulled out before she leaned forward with the intensity of a woman who had been sitting on information for approximately four hours too long.

"Okay," she said. "Start talking."

I picked up my fork. "About what?"

"About what." She said it back to me like I'd just told her the sky was green. "Hazel. I saw you this morning. Walking across the parking lot." She paused for dramatic effect. "With him."

"With who?"

"Don't 'with who' me. The tall one. Dark hair. Jawline that should be illegal in at least twelve states." She folded her hands on the table like she was conducting a board meeting. "Who is he and why were you arriving to school with him at eight in the morning?"

I speared a piece of broccoli. "That's Silas. He's Leo's best friend."

"Your brother Leo."

"I only have one brother, Maya."

"And you just - what, carpooled?"

"My car's in the shop." I shrugged. "Leo asked him to drop me off. That's it. Literally the full story."

Maya stared at me for a long moment, searching my face for the thread she was convinced I was hiding. I ate my broccoli. She narrowed her eyes.

"He looked at you," she said finally.

"People look at each other. It's called having eyes."

"Not like that they don't." She stabbed her pasta. "He watched you walk away, Hazel. I saw it. I was standing by the gym doors and I saw the whole thing."

Heat touched the back of my neck before I could stop it, and I immediately hated myself for it. "We're not close," I said firmly. "We've known each other for years and we've had maybe a dozen real conversations. He's just - he's Leo's person, not mine. Nothing is going on, nothing is going to go on, and I need you to let this die a natural death."

Maya pointed her fork at me. "I'm putting this on pause, not closing it."

"Fine. Pause it."

She smiled and reached for her drink, and for about thirty seconds the table felt normal - the comfortable, low-hum normal of two people who'd eaten lunch together every day for three years.

Then the air changed.

I heard the heels first. A sharp, rhythmic click against the cafeteria tile that was somehow louder than the noise of two hundred students. I didn't need to look up. I already knew.

Tiffany Holloway moved through spaces like she'd been hired to do it - head high, skirt criminally short, blonde hair catching the cafeteria light in a way that felt choreographed. She had two girls flanking her on either side, both laughing at something on her phone, and she was smiling the smile she always wore: the one that looked warm from a distance and felt like a door slamming in your face up close.

She passed our table.

And without looking at me - without even breaking her stride - she said it.

"Slut."

Quiet enough that only Maya and I could hear. Delivered like an afterthought. Like I wasn't worth the full breath it would have taken to say it louder.

Maya was out of her chair before I could register what had happened.

"Excuse me-" she started, voice already sharpened into something I recognized as the opening note of a very serious Maya Chen confrontation.

I grabbed her arm. "Maya."

"She just-"

"I know." I tugged her back down into her seat. My jaw was tight. My appetite had evaporated. "Sit down. Please."

Maya sat, but she was vibrating with it - that particular frequency of righteous fury she got when someone came at me. It was one of the things I loved most about her and also one of the things that occasionally gave me stress hives.

"She has no right-"

"I know she doesn't."

"Just because you didn't join her stupid team-"

"I know, Maya."

I watched Tiffany's retreating figure disappear around the corner toward the far exit, and I turned the question over in my head the same way I always did, the same way I had been doing for months: What is your actual problem with me? I hadn't done anything. I'd declined the cheerleading tryout politely, told the recruiter I wasn't interested, and moved on. That was it. I hadn't insulted her. I hadn't campaigned against her. I had simply opted out of her world, and apparently that was an offense she was unwilling to forgive.

I picked up my fork again, though the food tasted like nothing now. "She's not worth it," I said, and I meant it, and I also hated that I had to keep meaning it.

The hallway after lunch was loud and close, the kind of shoulder-to-shoulder traffic that always made me feel slightly claustrophobic. I told Maya I'd catch her in Lit after sixth period and peeled off toward my locker on the east corridor to grab my textbooks for the afternoon block.

It was a perfectly ordinary thing. I did it every day.

I spun the combination - twenty-two, seven, fifteen - and pulled the handle.

The cloud hit me before I even registered what it was.

A dense, billowing burst of fine white powder exploded outward from the top shelf, catching me full in the face, flooding my nose and mouth and the back of my throat in the single breath I'd happened to take at exactly the wrong moment. Chalk dust, or flour, or something close - it didn't matter what it was. What mattered was that it was everywhere, and I had just inhaled it.

The reaction was immediate and merciless.

My airways tightened like someone had taken a fist to my chest. I knew this feeling. I had grown up with the early versions of it, the manageable versions, the kind that a quick pull from my inhaler could unwind in thirty seconds. I spun away from the locker, one hand pressed to my sternum as if pressure could solve it, and shoved my other hand into the front pocket of my bag.

Nothing.

I felt around again, fingers searching the pocket's corners with increasing desperation.

Nothing.

I unzipped the main compartment, dug through notebooks and pens and my makeup pouch, my movements growing faster and less controlled as my chest kept cinching tighter, tighter, a vise with a slow and patient crank. The noise of the hallway around me started to distort - voices stretching, footsteps going muddy, the fluorescent lights overhead bleeding at their edges.

It was there this morning. I checked. I checked.

My back found the locker and I slid against it, legs losing the argument with gravity. I could feel people stepping around me, the vague awareness of a few pausing, the distant sound of someone saying hey, are you okay? in a voice that felt like it was coming from the far end of a tunnel.

I couldn't answer. I couldn't find the air to answer.

The floor came up.

I heard Maya before I saw her - or felt her, more precisely. Her hands were on my shoulders, and she was saying my name over and over in a voice that had lost all of its ordinary composure, and then she was screaming it outward, screaming someone help, she can't breathe, somebody please-

Hands. More hands. The soft click of someone's lanyard. A voice with authority in it, staff or faculty, cutting through the crowd with instructions. A spare inhaler pressed into my hand - blue, familiar, someone's emergency supply - and a steadying grip behind my back, and I brought it to my mouth and fired it on the next fractured attempt at an inhale.

One breath. Then another.

The vise loosened one slow, grinding degree at a time.

"Infirmary," someone said. "Now. Can you walk? We can carry her-"

I was being helped to my feet. Maya's hand was locked around mine hard enough to hurt, and I was grateful for the pain, for something sharp and real to hold onto.

I looked up.

Through the thinning crowd, at the far end of the east corridor, a figure stood very still against the drift of students moving around her. Blonde hair. Short skirt. She wasn't walking anywhere.

She was watching.

And Tiffany Holloway was smiling.