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.

By Wednesday morning, half of Cedarfield thought Dylan Kingston and I had been secretly dating since summer, which was impressive considering we hadn't been anything at all until yesterday afternoon in a hallway with a flyer taped to the wall.

I found this out the way I found out most things at this school, which was badly and in public, when a sophomore I'd never spoken to in my life stopped me by the water fountain to ask if it was true we'd met at some lake house party neither of us had ever attended.

"Where did you even hear that?" I said.

"Everyone's saying it." She shrugged, entirely unbothered by the fact that she'd just invented a summer romance out of thin air. "Also that he got you a promise ring."

"There is no ring."

"That's not what Vanessa said."

I walked away before I could hear whatever Vanessa had allegedly said about a ring that did not exist, because apparently once you let one lie loose in a school like this, it grew a life of its own and started reproducing, spinning off details nobody had actually witnessed.

Dylan found me at my locker before first period, looking entirely too pleased with himself for someone who was, in theory, supposed to be as unsettled by all this as I was.

"You've heard," he said.

"I've heard several versions. Which one are we going with?"

"I like the lake house one. Very cinematic."

"I have never been to a lake house in my life."

"Details." He leaned against the locker next to mine, easy as anything, like we'd been doing this for months instead of one day. "For what it's worth, this is good. The louder it gets, the less room Steph has to argue with it."

"The louder it gets, the more people are going to ask me questions I don't have believable answers for."

"So we get our story straight." He said it simply, like it was obvious, and maybe it was, and I just hadn't caught up yet to how fast this whole thing was moving. "When did we start talking? What do you like about me? All of it. If we don't match, Steph will find the crack in about four seconds, and she'll use it against both of us."

He wasn't wrong. I hated that he wasn't wrong.

"Fine," I said. "Lunch. You, me, get our story straight."

"It's a date."

"It's a business meeting."

"Sure it is."

At lunch, he sat across from me instead of at his usual table, which caused a ripple through the cafeteria I could physically feel, dozens of heads turning at once like we'd triggered some kind of alarm system.

"Okay," he said, sliding his tray next to mine. "How'd we start talking?"

"You annoyed me in a hallway. That part's true, at least." I stole a fry back off his tray in retaliation for the earlier theft.

"Right, but we need a version where I'm charming instead of an obstacle."

"There isn't one."

He laughed, and it was different from the hallway laugh, quieter, meant for exactly one person instead of an audience, and I felt it land somewhere in my chest I didn't want it landing.

"Fine," he said. "You noticed me at a game. I noticed you noticing me. I made a move. You resisted for approximately five seconds before falling for my devastating charm."

"That's not what happened."

"It's close enough for Steph's purposes." He stole a fry off my tray without asking, which should have annoyed me and somehow didn't. "What do you like about me?"

"Nothing, currently."

"Come on. Give me something. If Steph corners you, you need at least one real-sounding answer."

I thought about it longer than I meant to, longer than the question probably deserved for something that was supposed to be fake.

"You're not what people think you are," I said finally, surprising myself with how true it came out. "Everyone thinks you're one thing. Hallways, girls, the whole performance. But there's something underneath that you don't show anyone, and I've caught it maybe twice now, and both times it didn't look like a performance at all."

Dylan went quiet in a way that didn't suit him, his usual easy expression slipping into something more careful, more real, and for a second I thought I'd said too much, handed him something I shouldn't have given away this cheaply, this early, over a lunch tray in a crowded cafeteria.

"That's a good answer," he said finally, voice lower than before. "Almost too good for fake."

"Don't get used to it."

"Too late."

Across the cafeteria, I caught Stephanie watching us, arms crossed, expression unreadable in a way that made the back of my neck prickle. She wasn't buying it, or she was buying it completely and hated every second of it, and either way felt equally dangerous, like watching a match get lit somewhere just out of reach.

That night Ryan found me on the porch, phone in hand, scrolling through something with a look on his face I recognized immediately, the same look he got before every hard conversation we'd ever had, the one that meant he'd already made up his mind about something before he opened his mouth.

"People are saying you're dating Dylan Kingston," he said, not looking up from his phone right away, like he was giving me one last chance to just say it wasn't true before things got complicated.

My stomach dropped straight through the floorboards.

"That's insane," I said, too fast, exactly the way Maddy had warned me never to answer if I actually wanted to be believed.

"That's what I told them." He looked up at me, and for one terrible second I thought he already knew everything, the deal, the kiss, all of it. "Because there's no way my sister would be that stupid. Right, Gin?"

I opened my mouth to answer him, and nothing came out at all.