By October, I stop pretending I'm busy.
I still attend meetings, still speak when spoken to, still nod at the right moments—but my real work has narrowed to observation. Not gossip. Not surveillance in the dramatic sense.
Pattern recognition.
Oscar's developed a rhythm now. Mondays with faculty advisors—Dr. Harlan most often, sometimes Ms. Alvarez from Activities. Tuesdays and Thursdays with the environmental coalition he's folded into his platform. Wednesdays are open, which mean lunches that always seem to end with someone new laughing too loudly at his jokes.
Confidence does that. It creates a space of safety. People step into it without realizing they're doing it.
I keep notes the way I always do: in pencil, light pressure, easy to erase. Times. Names. Rooms. Nothing incriminating. Nothing that wouldn't look obsessive if someone else found it—but no one ever did.
People underestimate how invisible diligence could be when it doesn't ask for attention.
Oscar has stopped checking who else was listening.
That, more than anything, tells me he thinks he's winning.
The student council room has three filing cabinets and one shared cabinet no one liked to talk about. The shared one is where things went when they don't quite belong anywhere else: leftover posters, budget binders from last year, extra sign-in sheets, blank ballots sealed in envelopes that say DO NOT OPEN and rely entirely on trust to mean it.
Trust is the school's favorite policy.
I learned this the afternoon I volunteered to help inventory materials for the midterm events push. It's not an assignment. No one asked me. I frame it as efficiency—something she'd learned administrators rarely question.
"Just log what you access," the council treasurer said, already halfway out the door. "You know the system."
I do.
The digital log lives in a shared drive. Name. Time. Purpose. Optional comments, which most people ignored. There's no requirement to log what you do once you're in. Only that you'd been there.
Oscar had accessed it three times that week.
So had I.
The difference is that I write comments. Short ones. Boring ones.
Reviewed previous allocations.
Confirmed materials list.
Checked approval timestamp.
Oscar leaves his blank.
It's not carelessness, exactly. It's confidence again—he's assuming that presence equals permission, that no one ever needs the why.
I notice the same thing with the Event Engagement Allocation, the discretionary fund everyone loves and no one monitors. It sits under a bland heading in the budget spreadsheet, approved automatically unless someone flagged it.
Historically, no one ever had.
I pull up last year's entries. Incomplete notes. Rounded numbers.
The system wasn't corrupt. It was casual.
Oscar had talked—publicly, enthusiastically—about using incentives to drive turnout. Food trucks. Raffles. Pop-up events. He says it in meetings. In speeches. In the hallway outside the library, once, to a group of juniors who nodded like he's invented democracy.
All of it is allowed.
All of it requires paperwork.
I submit mine early. I attach rationale. I cite precedent. I use the language faculty likes: engagement, equity, visibility. When the approval comes through, it does so silently, timestamped and archived.
I print the confirmation and slide it into my folder.
Not because I need it.
Because someday, someone else might.
The honor-based system works the way honor systems always do: it assumes good faith until it can't afford to anymore. It tracks entrances, not outcomes. Access, not intent. Proximity, not responsibility.
I understand this fully once I realize:
I could tell, down to the minute, who had last touched almost everything—and almost nothing about what they'd done with it.
The danger isn't in the rules being broken.
It's in how cleanly the rules recorded compliance.
I don't change anything. I don't move anything. I don't touch what wasn't already open to me.
I just watch.
Oscar accessed the election materials cabinet the Friday before fall break. He logged in at 3:12 p.m. No comment. Probably checking quantities.
Probably nothing.
But probably wasn't a defense the system recognized.
I sigh and think of the notebook at the dance. How something private could become public without being altered at all. How the truth could be rearranged simply by being seen by the wrong people, at the wrong time.
I cup my head in my hands and close the spreadsheet.
I'm not planning anything. Not yet. Planning implies desire, and desire implies urgency. What I feel instead is clarity.
The pieces are already on the board. No one has put them there deliberately. They'd accumulated the way systems always did—through convenience, through trust, through the assumption that everyone wants the same outcome.
Stability. Fairness. Order.
I understand, sitting alone in the council room as the lights flickered, that responsibility at Meadows Ridge isn't assigned. It's inferred.
And inference, I know, can be guided.
I pack my bag, log out properly, and leave the room exactly as I'd found it.
Okay. The gun is on the table.
I don't need to pick it up to know how easily someone else can be made to appear holding it.
Not today.
But soon.