Belle's POV
The screenshot is still on my screen and I am walking and doing both of those things at the same time, which means I am not doing either of them well. The hallway is loud and moving and I need to stop and look at the image properly but stopping means standing still in the middle of Crestview's main corridor at passing period and that is not something I do. So I walk and I look and I try to understand what I'm seeing.
The message thread is between Jasmine and someone named Carter. I don't know a Carter. The four words are clear. Your dad called mine. Below it, Carter again: about the scholarship kid. Then Jasmine: which one. Then Carter: you know which one.
I put the phone in my pocket.
I know which one.
The library on Meridian is three blocks from school. I've been going there for two years. Every Tuesday and Friday the science section gets reorganized by someone who doesn't check spine numbers and I have been correcting it every Thursday in complete silence and telling myself I wasn't tracking the pattern. I know the coffee order. Black, no extras, always from the cart outside because it's a dollar less than the place on the corner. I know the reading schedule. Whenever there's a free period the novel comes out, not a textbook, always fiction, always dog-eared somewhere in the first third like he reads the same section multiple times before moving forward. I know which table. Window-side, facing the door.
I know all of this and I never asked for any of it. It just accumulated. That's not the same as paying attention.
I'm still telling myself that when I walk into the library fourth period for my free study slot and I see Ethan Cole at the window-side table and my feet do something that is not quite stopping and not quite continuing and I end up standing slightly too long at the entrance in a way that has no good explanation.
He doesn't look up.
I take a table four rows back. I open my Chemistry notes. I read the same equation six times.
This is already a problem. The library was mine. The Thursday shifts and the Tuesday afternoons and the quiet corner I've made for myself here were the one part of my week that didn't belong to anyone else. They didn't belong to my father's dinner schedules or Jasmine's careful measurements or the version of me that Crestview sees in the hallways. The library was just mine. And now I've agreed to come here twice a week, on a schedule, with a purpose, and sit across from someone my father's already made a phone call about.
I didn't have to agree. That's the thing I keep coming back to. He offered Tuesday and Friday and I said that works before I had time to think about whether it did. I didn't negotiate. I didn't suggest the school lab or the study room on the second floor or any other option. I said that works and I meant it and I didn't know why until right now, sitting four rows back, staring at an equation that has stopped making sense.
My phone buzzes once. I turn it over.
Jasmine: you saw it right
I don't reply. I put the phone face-down.
At the front of the library Ethan closes his notebook and starts packing up. He has maybe twelve minutes before his next period, same as me. He stands, and because I have apparently lost all interest in self-preservation I watch him from four rows back. He picks up his bag in one motion, easy and practiced, and he starts toward the exit and then he stops.
He looks up.
Directly at me.
Not a sweep of the room. Not a general glance. At me, specifically, like he already knew where I was sitting, which is not possible because he didn't look up when I came in, I checked, and yet here we are.
I hold it. I don't look away and I don't pretend I wasn't watching because pretending would be worse than the watching. I just look back and wait.
He walks over.
My stomach does something I am categorizing as a stress response and nothing else.
He stops at the edge of my table. He doesn't sit. He just looks down at my notes for a second and then at me. "Journals," he says. "The Meridian branch has the chemistry journals we need for the research component. First floor, east section." He says it like he's confirming a fact I might not have. "Thought you should know before Tuesday."
"I know where the chemistry journals are," I say.
Something crosses his face. Not quite a smile. Something smaller. "Okay," he says. And then he leaves and I sit at my table in the library that used to be mine and I feel the ghost of that almost-smile for longer than makes any sense.
My hands are shaking.
Not visibly. But I press them flat against the table to feel how much they're moving and they are moving, just slightly, and I have no framework for what to do with that information so I put it next to everything else I'm not examining right now.
I get through the rest of my free period and I get through two more classes and I am heading toward the exit at the end of the day, thinking about the screenshot and what my father said to Jasmine's and what Jasmine is planning to do with what she knows, when I hear her footsteps.
She has a specific way of falling into step with someone. She matches your pace exactly, which forces you to either slow down or accept that you're walking together. I don't slow down. She keeps up easily.
"Ethan Cole." She says it low, like a secret she's enjoying. Her smile is already in place, the particular one that lives at the corner of her mouth, the one she uses when she's several moves ahead. "Interesting choice, Belle."
"It's a lab assignment," I say, not looking at her.
"Mm." She adjusts her bag strap. The smile doesn't move. "Does he know that?"
I don't answer.
She makes a small sound that isn't quite a laugh. We walk four more steps together before I realize she's not going to say anything else, because she doesn't need to, because the silence is doing exactly what she wants it to do.
Ahead of us, through the main doors and down the steps, Ethan Cole is walking away from school without looking back.
Jasmine watches him go. Then she looks at me. And what's on her face is not casual anymore.