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Maya chokes on her drink.

Bree closes her eyes briefly. "She's not wrong."

"I'm not staring." I try to fight my case, which is hard when I actually am staring.

"You haven't blinked in forty-five seconds," Cara says.

I blink deliberately, looking back at the table and pick up my coffee, taking a very long sip while the girls descend into laughter which gets looks from the tables around us. They don’t stop laughing.

Miles and Mason both look over at our table. How can they not? My friends are laughing so hard at the moment, and everyone is looking at us.

Miles collects his order, says something to the girl behind the counter, and walks out.

"You should have talked to him when you had the chance," Juno says, still laughing.

"I hate all of you."

"No, you don't."

She’s right, I don't.

***

My communications professor is called Dr. Alton, and she has the energy of someone who genuinely loves what she teaches and has made peace with the fact that not everyone in the room feels the same way. I like her.

She starts the class, and the first thing she tells everyone is. “If your essay isn’t handed in by the end of the week, you will fail. To the ones who have, well done, and I will hand them back to you.” She starts walking through the rows, and I make a note and underline that I need to hand mine in. I still have a lot of changes I need to make.

She stops in front of me and places a paper with a grade on it. "Really strong work," she says. "Confident argument, well-sourced. This is the standard I'd like to see from you going forward."

I look down at the paper in my hand.

Then I look at it properly.

The title is correct. My name is right. The formatting is mine. I recognize the font, the margins, and the way I set up the header. But the words underneath are not mine. I know this because I know my own style, my own voice and I know how I put sentences together. This isn't how I write.

This is much better than how I write.

The argument is structured in a way that mine wasn't. It wasn't even close to this. The citations are sources I'd never found, pulling from journals I didn't know I had access to. The conclusion lands cleanly on a point I'd been circling for three drafts without ever quite reaching an ending.

It's good. It's genuinely, uncomfortably good.

I read it twice while Dr. Alton moves on to the next row. Then a third time, slower, looking for something that might explain it, a section I wrote while was half asleep and forgot about, or a draft I'd saved without realizing.

But there’s nothing that looks like mine. The work is immaculate and entirely unfamiliar, my name is on the top of it, and I have no explanation.

I fold it carefully and put it in my bag and spend the rest of the lecture staring at the front of the room without hearing a single word. I’ll have to check my laptop to make sure this was sent from mine and not mistaken for someone else's once I get back home. My mind is all over the place this morning, I even forgot to grab my laptop.

The rest of the class is a blur, I’m not listening to anything, and when the professor dismisses the class, I rush to practice, hoping it will clear my head.

Practice is the thing that fixes my head when nothing else can.

I work through a piece on the mat, just moving to the music playing, getting lost in my movements, and then the music stops.

Coach Pearce calls us in at the end of the session, and looking at her face, this is going to be a serious conversation.

"Regionals," she says. "Four weeks."

The gym goes silent; it's the sound of five people recalibrating simultaneously.