Because maybe that’s not even entirely false.
I sit on the low stone wall under the tree and press the ice to my shoulder finally, properly, the cold biting through my shirt.
Across the quad, bells chime from somewhere I can’t see.
Another hour gone.
I tip my head back and close my eyes.
When I open them again, the sky is painfully blue.
Beautiful.
Indifferent.
And I know two things at once.
Isa is not fake.
And she is absolutely coming for him. I sit there quietly with my ice sleeve and my pride and the taste of regret rising like blood in the back of my throat.
Then I stand up.
Because practice doesn’t care.
Class doesn’t care.
Life doesn’t care that I just heard exactly how another girl learned to go after what she wanted.
Maybe that’s the real lesson.
Not that Isa is worse than me.
That she’s not.
That she is strategic and coached and willing — and somehow still sincere.
And I am none of those things when it comes to Tristan Vale.
No strategy.
No script.
No mother in my ear telling me to be softer, prettier, hungrier.
Just me.
Just all this feeling and nowhere clean to put it.
By the time I go back to the athletic campus a few hours later my face is smooth.
My spine is straight.
My mouth is set.
No one would know that hours ago I was standing behind a curtain listening to another girl explain exactly how she planned to catch the boy I never stopped wanting.
Good.
