By lunch, I'd almost convinced myself I'd imagined the whole thing.

Almost. Except every time I closed my eyes I saw it again, that smaller, sharper smile, the one that didn't belong to the Dylan Kingston everyone else got. I hated that I'd catalogued the difference. I hated more that some small, traitorous part of me wanted to see it again.

"You're doing the thing," Maddy said, sliding her tray across from mine, dropping into her seat like she'd been chasing me down half the cafeteria.

"What thing?"

"The staring-into-space, replaying-something thing. You did it in second period too. Mr. Alvarez called your name twice."

"I was thinking about the history test."

"You were thinking about Dylan Kingston."

I stabbed my fork into my salad like it had personally wronged me. "I was not."

"Gin. Your ears go red when you lie. They're doing it right now."

I covered them out of pure reflex, which was, admittedly, not helping my case. Maddy grinned like she'd won something, and across the cafeteria, as if summoned by his own name, Dylan walked in with two of his teammates, laughing at something, completely at ease in the way people are when the whole room has already decided to like them before they've done anything to earn it.

He didn't look at me. Not once. Which shouldn't have bothered me, but did.

"Okay, weird theory," Maddy said, watching him too now. "What if he actually likes you?"

"He does not like me," I said it too fast, and I knew it the second it left my mouth.

"He stares at you in the hallway. He gave you that face this morning, the one you described to me in way too much detail for someone who claims not to care."

"He stares at everyone. It's a personality disorder."

"Uh huh." Maddy popped a grape into her mouth. "And if I told you Amber said Dylan told the guys he was going to, and I quote, finally crack the ice queen, would that change your theory?"

Everything in me went still.

"Where did you hear that?"

"Amber. Who heard it from Vanessa. Who heard it from someone on the team, so, you know, filtered through Stephanie's personal news network, take it with a grain of salt. But apparently there's a bet. Something about him getting you to go out with him before winter formal."

I put my fork down slowly, because my hands had started doing something I didn't like, this small, humiliating tremor I couldn't seem to shut off.

"A bet," I said.

"That's what she said."

I looked across the cafeteria at him again, and this time, like he could feel it, he looked back. Held it a beat too long, same as this morning, and something in my chest that had been embarrassingly warm all day turned instantly, mercifully cold.

Of course. Of course it was a bet. Dylan Kingston didn't look at girls like they were people, he looked at them like scoreboards, exactly like I'd told Ryan a hundred times, exactly like every single girl before me had learned the hard way. I'd almost been stupid enough to forget that for one hallway, one look, one stolen half smile that meant nothing at all except that I was apparently his next target.

I stood up so fast my chair scraped against the floor.

"Where are you going?" Maddy said.

"To fix my ears."

I didn't fix my ears. I walked straight across the cafeteria, ignoring the way conversations quieted as I passed, because everyone at Cedarfield had an instinct for drama the way sharks had one for blood, and stopped directly in front of Dylan's table.

"Hayes," he said, and had the audacity to smile like this was a pleasant surprise.

"I heard about the bet."

Something flickered across his face, fast, there and gone, but I saw it. Guilt. Actual guilt, which almost made it worse, because it meant it was true.

"It's not what it sounds like," he said.

"It sounds like you told your friends you're going to, what was it, crack the ice queen. Did I get that right?"

His jaw tightened. Behind him, his teammates had become very interested in their food. "Ginny…"

"Don't." My voice came out steadier than I felt, which I counted as a small victory. "You don't get to call me that. You don't get to call me anything. I'm not a bet, and I'm definitely not a game, and you can go tell whoever you made that bet with that it's officially off, because I wouldn't go out with you if you were the last…"

"It's not a bet with them," he said, standing up now, low enough that only I could hear it. "It's a bet with myself."

I stopped.

"What?"

"There's no bet, Ginny. I made that up to shut them up because they wouldn't stop asking why I keep ending up wherever you are." He ran a hand through his hair, and for the first time since I'd known him, Dylan Kingston looked like he didn't know what to do with his own mouth. "I told them it was a bet because it sounded better than the truth."

"And what's the truth?"

He looked at me the way he had that morning by the trophy case, except there was nowhere to hide from it now, no crowded hallway, no easy exit, just his eyes on mine and the whole cafeteria pretending not to watch, forks paused halfway to mouths, conversations gone strangely thin.

"The truth," he said quietly, "is that I don't know what I'm doing yet. But it's not a bet."

Behind him, weaving through the tables with Amber and Vanessa flanking her like bodyguards, Stephanie Colton was already walking straight toward us, chin up, smile sharpening with every step, and the look on her face told me whatever this was between Dylan and me, she'd just decided it was about to become her problem too.

Stephanie Colton smiled at people the way most girls smiled at spiders. Like she was deciding whether to scream or squash it.

She stopped a foot away from us, close enough that I caught her perfume, something expensive and sharp, and let her eyes travel from Dylan to me and back again, cataloguing the distance between us like she was doing math.

"Am I interrupting something?" she asked, in a voice so sweet it had to be a weapon.

"Nope," Dylan said, stepping back from me like I was suddenly contagious.

I hated how much that stung, and I hated more that I noticed it happening in real time, my whole chest doing something complicated and stupid over a boy stepping half a foot away from me in a cafeteria.

"Good." Stephanie's smile widened, landing on me now, and up close I understood exactly why people got out of her way in the hallways without being told to. There was something in her eyes that dared you to be interesting enough to bother with. "Virginia, right? Ryan's sister?"

"Ginny," I said.

"Cute." She said it like it wasn't. "I don't think we've actually talked before."

"We haven't."

"Well." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and Amber and Vanessa arranged themselves on either side of her like furniture. "I heard you're trying out for cheer Thursday."

I hadn't told anyone that except Maddy. Which meant either Maddy had told someone, unlikely, or Stephanie Colton had a surveillance network more sophisticated than the actual school administration, entirely likely.

"Word travels," I said.

"It does when it's interesting." She tilted her head, studying me the way you'd study something you'd stepped in. "You know it's a competitive squad. We don't just take anyone who shows up wanting to be popular."

"I'm not trying out to be popular."

"No?" Her eyebrows went up, delighted, like I'd said something genuinely funny. "Then why?"

Because I've wanted it since I was eleven years old and stood in these same bleachers watching girls fly through the air like nothing scared them, and because it was the one thing I'd ever wanted that had nothing to do with being someone's sister or someone's rival's little problem. But I wasn't about to hand her that much of myself, not standing here in a cafeteria with an audience, so instead I said, "Because I'm good at it."

"We'll see." She turned back to Dylan before I could say anything else, her whole posture shifting, softer now, angled toward him in a way that made my stomach twist even though I had absolutely no claim to feel anything about it. "Dylan. You're still coming to Chelsea's thing Friday, right?"

"Probably."

"Good." She let her hand rest on his arm for just a second too long, and I watched him not pull away, and told myself very firmly that I did not care. "We should catch up. It's been a while."

"Steph…"

"I'll text you." She was already walking away, Amber and Vanessa trailing behind like she'd tugged them on strings, but she paused after a few steps and looked back at me, and whatever performance she'd been doing for Dylan's benefit dropped clean off her face. What was underneath was colder. Sharper. Real.

"Good luck Thursday," she said. "You're going to need it."

Then she was gone, swallowed into the crowd, and the cafeteria exhaled like it had been holding its breath the whole time.

"That was pleasant," I said, watching her disappear around the corner with her entourage still perfectly in formation.

Dylan winced. "She's not usually like that."

"She seemed exactly like that. Practiced, even. Like she's done this before."

"We used to date. Freshman year." He said it carefully, like he was handling something breakable. "It ended a long time ago. She just hasn't fully caught up, and she doesn't love being reminded of that in public."

"Clearly."

"Ginny." He said my name differently than he had all day, quieter, without the performance. "About earlier…"

"I have to go." I didn't, not really, but I'd used up every ounce of composure I had for one lunch period, and I could feel my ears doing the thing Maddy had called me out on, the thing that apparently gave away every lie I'd ever told, and I was not about to let him watch that happen too.

I found Maddy by our lockers after the bell, and she took one look at my face and didn't say a word, just fell into step beside me toward class, letting the silence stretch until she couldn't hold it anymore.

"So," she finally said, halfway down the hall, unable to hold out any longer. "No bet."

"No bet."

"But something."

"I don't know what it is." Which was true, and also the most unsettling sentence I'd said all day, because I'd built my entire life around knowing exactly what Dylan Kingston was. A flirt. A collector. A boy who made a hobby out of hallways and half smiles and never meaning any of it. And now, apparently, I didn't know anything at all.

I turned the corner toward chemistry, still turning it all over, Stephanie's cold little threat looping in my head on repeat, and walked straight into a wall of navy blue fabric that smelled like laundry detergent and cold rink air.

"We need to talk," Dylan said, and for the first time all day, there was nothing lazy or easy about his voice at all.

Behind him, taped to the wall outside the chemistry lab where the entire junior class would see it in exactly four minutes when the bell rang, was a printed flyer with my school photo on it, my actual school ID photo, the one from freshman year I'd spent two years trying to forget existed, blown up and centered like some kind of wanted poster.

Across the bottom, in bold red letters, someone had written: ASK HER ABOUT THE BET.

I ripped the flyer off the wall before the bell could ring, which did absolutely nothing, because forty people had already seen it, and at Cedarfield, forty people seeing something was the same as the entire school knowing by the end of the day.

"Who did this?" I said, crumpling it in my fist.

"I don't know," Dylan said, and for once I believed him, because he looked as blindsided as I felt, jaw tight, eyes scanning the hallway like the answer might be standing there watching us. "But I have a guess."

"Stephanie."

"Or Amber. Or Vanessa. Doesn't matter which one held the tape. It's the same source."

"This is insane." My hands were shaking, and I hated that they were shaking, because it meant this had gotten under my skin faster than I wanted to admit.

"She heard a rumour that wasn't even true and turned it into a poster with my face on it in under two hours."

"Welcome to Stephanie Colton," Dylan muttered. "She doesn't do slow."

The bell rang. Neither of us moved.

"This isn't going to stop," he said. "You know that, right? Whatever she thinks is happening between us, she's going to make your life miserable over it. Cheer tryouts included."

My stomach dropped, because he'd said out loud the exact thing I'd been trying not to think about since lunch. Stephanie ran that squad like her own personal kingdom, and I'd just become, through no fault of my own, a problem she wanted gone before I ever set foot on the floor Thursday.

"So what," I said. "I just don't try out? Let her win before I even show up?"

"No." Something shifted in his face, calculating now, like he was working out a play on the ice. "You go in with backup she can't argue with."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning if she thinks you're with me, actually with me, she backs off. Steph doesn't fight fair, but she doesn't fight people who matter to me either. Not directly. She's smarter than that."

I stared at him. "You want to fake date me."

"I want to help you make it onto that squad without spending the next two years dodging landmines. And yeah. Fake dating gets Steph off both our backs at the same time. She's been circling me since lunch like nothing ended, and this ends it clean."

"Why would you even want that?"

"Because she doesn't quit, and I'm tired of it." He shoved his hands into his pockets, and the easy, practiced Dylan disappeared for a second, replaced by someone more tired than I'd seen him. "You get the squad. I get Steph gone. Everybody wins."

It should have been an easy no. It would have been an easy no, twenty-four hours ago, before the hallway, before whatever this thing was that kept happening between us that I didn't have a name for yet.

"Why would I help you?" I said, mostly to buy myself time to think, because some smaller, quieter part of me had already started doing the math on what this would cost me and what it might get me back.

"Because I know how bad you want to get on that cheer squad," he said, and it landed like he'd reached into my chest and pulled the truth out without asking permission. "I saw your face when Steph brought it up at lunch. That's not a hobby. You want this the way I want the captain's C, and you and I both know Steph's about to make sure you never get it unless something changes."

I hated that he was right. I hated more that I was actually considering it.

"If we do this," I said slowly, "it's fake. Completely fake. You don't get to treat it like it's real just because it's convenient."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

"And it ends the second I make the squad. No dragging it out."

"Deal." He held out his hand like we were closing a business contract, which, in a way, I supposed we were.

I shook it. His hand was warm, and I let go faster than necessary.

"We should probably look convincing," he said, and there was something new in his voice now, something testing the water. "Steph's still in the building. If she sees us together right now, arguing over a flyer, that's not exactly selling it."

"What did you have in mind?"

He didn't answer with words. He stepped closer, slow enough that I could have stopped him, close enough that I had every chance to step back, and I didn't, and then his hand was at my jaw and his mouth was on mine, softer than I expected for someone who did everything else in his life like a performance.

It lasted three seconds. Maybe four. Long enough that when I opened my eyes, Stephanie was standing twenty feet away at the end of the hall, frozen mid-step, her face doing something complicated between fury and disbelief.

Dylan pulled back just enough to murmur, "Convincing enough?"

I couldn't answer. My whole body had gone warm and stupid and entirely too invested in something that was supposed to mean nothing.

I told Maddy everything that night, sitting cross-legged on my bed with my phone buzzing uselessly beside me, because I needed someone to tell me I hadn't lost my mind.

"You kissed him," Maddy said, delighted and horrified in equal measure. "For fake dating purposes."

"For cheer squad purposes."

"Uh huh." She grinned. "Does Ryan know?"

"Absolutely not, and he can't. Not yet. Not until I figure out what I'm actually doing." I grabbed my pillow and pulled it against my chest like it might protect me from what I already knew was coming. "Promise me, Mads. Not a word."

"I promise." She held up three fingers, solemn as a scout. "But Gin. For a fake thing, you're blushing a lot."

I

threw the pillow at her, and she laughed, and neither of us said what we were both thinking, which was that fake had a way of turning real when nobody was paying close enough attention.