Belle's POV
My father asked where I was and I told him the library and the line went quiet for three seconds before he said which one and I said Meridian and he said the one on the east side and I said yes and he said he'd have the car pick me up in twenty minutes. That was Tuesday. He didn't explain the car or the twenty-minute window or why he was tracking my location close enough to know I wasn't home yet. I didn't ask. I got in the car when it arrived and we ate dinner in the usual silence and I spent the whole meal calculating what he knows and how long he's known it and whether Tuesday night was a test or a warning or both.
I still don't have an answer. It's Thursday now.
Jasmine finds me at my locker before first period with the loose, easy energy she uses when she's most dangerous. She's already been somewhere this morning, I can tell by the slight readjustment happening behind her eyes, the way she's deciding in real time how much to give me.
"Lunch," she says. Not a question.
"I have a makeup session with Calloway at lunch."
"After, then." She leans against the adjacent locker. "Sofia heard something from Marcus about the team's group chat. Apparently someone added a name that wasn't there last week." She looks at her nails. "Yours."
My hand stops on my locker combination. "That's not possible. I'm not on the team."
"No," she says. "But someone who is apparently shared a contact." She looks up. Her eyes are reading something in my face that I'm working very hard not to put there. "Probably an accident."
"Probably," I say.
She pushes off the locker and walks away, and I watch her go, and I think about the car on Tuesday night and my father's voice asking which library and the screenshot she sent me last week and the way she said the word accident just now with a precision that made it mean the opposite.
By lunch I've thought about it enough that the thinking has stopped being useful. I take my usual seat and Jasmine is already there with Sofia and two others, and the conversation is already going, and I put my food down and listen without appearing to.
Sofia is talking about the project pairings. She calls it the weird one, which is how I know she means mine. She says she heard Belle Hartwell got put with the scholarship kid and doesn't that seem like a Calloway thing to do, very democratic, very forced proximity. The table laughs lightly. Jasmine doesn't laugh. She picks up her fork and eats and says absolutely nothing, which is a specific kind of loud.
I watch her not react.
Jasmine has opinions about everything. She comments on weather, on font choices, on the emotional subtext of someone's Instagram caption from six months ago. Jasmine's silence is not neutral. Jasmine's silence is what happens when she has already decided that her opinion is more valuable than a lunch table conversation and she's saving it for a better audience.
Sofia keeps going. She says she heard he works two jobs and asks isn't that crazy and I grip my fork and keep my face completely empty. Across the table Jasmine picks up her glass and I watch her, specifically, I watch the angle of her chin and the set of her shoulders and the way she is very carefully not looking at me.
She's been watching him since freshman year. I don't know how I know that but I do, the same way I know things about patterns I wasn't supposed to be tracking. The library section. The coffee order. The reading schedule. She knows her version of that list. She has her own version. I can see it in the deliberate way she stays outside the conversation, the way a person stays back from something they already own.
The table shifts to something else. Jasmine finally speaks, something about the weekend, and the moment passes and everyone moves with it except me.
I eat. I don't say anything. I think about the contact in the team group chat and I think about who could have added it and I think about why it matters that I'm now reachable to a group of people I've never spoken to, and underneath all of that I'm thinking about something I don't want to think about which is that she was watching him before I started watching him and she has never once told me that and she has been my closest friend for four years.
After lunch she falls into step with me in the hallway, which is normal. We do this every day. The rhythm of it is so established that I stop noticing it, and I think that might be exactly the point.
"You're quiet today," she says.
"I'm always quiet."
"You're a different kind of quiet today." She says it without looking at me. Conversational. Easy. "Is the project going okay?"
"It's a project. It's fine."
"Good." She adjusts her bag strap. "You know you can tell me things, right. I'm not going to make it into something."
I look at her profile for a moment. The clean line of it, the practiced neutrality. She means it to sound reassuring and it almost does. Almost. Except I know what her face looks like when she's not performing reassurance, and this is not that.
"I know," I say.
We walk the rest of the hall without talking and at the junction she turns right and I turn left and that's normal too.
In AP Chemistry I sit down and open my notebook and three seats to the left Ethan Cole is already writing and I do not look over once, and I make that into a rule I hold for the full fifty minutes, and when the bell rings I pack up fast and leave without being last for the first time all week.
My phone buzzes halfway down the hallway.
Jasmine, I assume. Or my father's assistant. I pull it out without slowing down.
Unknown number. A message so short it takes less than a second to read, and I read it twice anyway because the second time doesn't make it better.
Tell her to back off. She doesn't know what she's getting into.
I stop walking. Around me the hallway moves. I look at the screen. No name. No context. The timestamp is four minutes ago, meaning whoever sent it knows roughly where I am and roughly what I'm doing.
My hands are very still.
Someone is watching this closely enough to have my number, and they want Jasmine to stop, and they told me instead of telling her, and I have no idea yet whether that makes me the warning or the weapon.