LAUREL – Chapter 16

Jessica Perot, Laurel, Montana, October 31st, 2018

The world had narrowed to three things, Dani's arm around her waist, the copper taste of blood in her mouth, and the cold. Not the atmospheric cold of Halloween, the decorative chill that made your breath visible and your cheeks pink and made you press closer to whoever you were walking with. This was the other kind. The Montana kind. The kind that got under your clothes and into your bones and lingered. It was a warning, you don't belong outside right now. Nothing living does.

Jess's legs were working, technically. The signals were traveling from her brain to her feet and her feet were hitting the sidewalk in something resembling a rhythm. But every third step her right knee buckled, just slightly, and every time it did, Dani tightened her grip—fingers digging into the soft space between Jess's ribs and her hip—and hauled her upright without breaking stride.Full novel: LAUREL — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠

"I can walk," Jess said, or tried to say. Her cheek had swollen enough that the left side of her face felt like it belonged to someone else. The words came out thick and mushy, the consonants dissolving before they could fully form. I gan waulk.

"Shut up," Dani said, not unkindly. Her breath was coming fast—Jess could feel the expansion and contraction of Dani's ribs against her side—but her voice was controlled. Steady. The voice of a girl who had dealt with worse and refused to let the current disaster know it had rattled her.

Jess reached up and touched the teal fabric pressed against her cheek. It was warm and wet. She pulled her fingers away and looked at them under the streetlight, and they were dark, glistening, not the color blood was supposed to be. It looked nearly black.

"Sorry," Jess mumbled. "About the scarf."

"I said shut up about the scarf." Dani's arm tightened. "Two more blocks."

Jess tried to focus. Two more blocks. She could see the street sign at the corner of her street, with its row of sensible two-story houses and its bare trees reaching their skeleton fingers toward a sky that was too dark and too low, like the clouds were pressing down.

But her brain was being a traitor. It had always been a traitor—organized and efficient when she needed to make a practice schedule or plan a set, but catastrophically, compulsively thorough when she needed to stop thinking. And right now it was replaying the last thirty minutes on a loop, isolating every sensory detail.

The flashlight. The beam sweeping across them like a prison spotlight, like they were inmates who'd scaled the fence. It had paused on Laurel's face for too long—way too long—and Jess had seen Laurel shrink, had watched the girl she'd spent weeks coaxing out of her shell try to fold herself back into nothing, and the rage that had risen in Jess's chest had been so immediate and total that she'd forgotten she was the one bleeding.

Not all of you are women, are you?

The words made Jess's stomach turn. Not because the cruelty surprised her—nothing surprised her about this town anymore—but because she'd been powerless. Standing there with her face split open, a soaked scarf pressed to her cheek, watching a grown man terrorize her best friend and knowing that if she opened her mouth she'd make it worse.

And then Ana. Ana with her lying eyes and her politician mother's name and her frightening, surgical composure. Ana stepping forward like she was approaching a podium instead of a cop, wielding her family's power like a blade, slicing through Silverson's authority with a single well-placed threat.

Jess hated that it had worked. She hated that the thing that saved them was privilege, not justice. She hated that Ana had been the one to do it.

She hated, most of all, that a small treacherous part of her had been impressed.

"Step," Dani said, guiding her over a curb.

Jess's boot caught the edge anyway. She stumbled, her weight lurching forward, and Dani caught her—both arms now, wrapping around Jess's torso from the side, pulling her against her body to keep her upright. The blue wig was askew, half sliding off Dani's head, and her cheeks were flushed red from the cold and the effort.

"Okay," Dani breathed, adjusting her grip. "Okay, new plan. I'm basically carrying you."

"You're five-six."

"Five-seven and full of rage. Come on." Dani got her arm back under Jess's and started moving again, practically dragging her the last block and a half. The scarf had slipped, and Jess could feel the night air hitting the open wound—a sharp, whistling sting that made her eyes water.

She focused on the porch light. Getting closer. Getting warmer.

"Hey," Dani said, her voice softer now, just for Jess. "Stay with me."

"I'm here."

"Your eyes keep drifting."

"I'm thinking."

"Stop that. Thinking is how you get yourself in trouble." Dani's fingers flexed against Jess's ribs, a small pressure, grounding. "Just look at the light."

Jess looked at the light. Her mother's porch light, the one Gina left on every night regardless of whether Jess was out.

They made it up the walkway. Three stone steps.

Dani propped Jess against the railing and reached for the doorbell.

The door opened before her finger touched it.

Gina Perot was standing in the doorway in a bathrobe and slippers, her reading glasses pushed up on her head, a mug of something steaming in her hand. She'd been waiting—probably pacing between the kitchen and the living room window, the way she did whenever Jess was out past midnight. The mug was her tell. Gina only drank tea when she was anxious; the rest of the time she lived on coffee and Diet Coke.

"Oh thank God, I was about to—" Gina started, her voice bright with relief.

Then she saw Jess's face.

The mug hit the floor. Not dropped—released, like Gina's hand simply forgot it existed. Chamomile tea splashed across the hardwood, the ceramic splitting into three clean pieces, and Gina didn't look down, didn't flinch at the sound. Her eyes were locked on the gash beneath Jess's eye, on the blood soaking the teal scarf, on the swelling that had turned half her daughter's face into something misshapen and wrong.

"Jessica."

The word came out strangled. Not angry yet—the anger would come later, would arrive with the full force of a woman who had raised a daughter in a town that gave her nothing and who would fight God Himself if He touched her child. Right now it was just terror, raw and naked, cracking Gina's voice like thin ice.

"Mom," Jess said, and hated how small it sounded. "It's not as bad as it looks."

Gina crossed the threshold in two steps. Her hands were on Jess's face instantly—gentle, so gentle, the way she used to touch Jess's forehead when she had a fever—turning her chin toward the porch light to see the wound.

"Who did this to you?" Gina's voice was shaking. "Jessica Marie Perot, who did this."

"It was—there was an incident at the party—"

"An incident." Gina's jaw set. "An incident doesn't tear someone's face open. Was it a boy? I swear to God, if some boy—"

"It was a girl, actually," Dani said.

Gina's head snapped toward Dani.

For a beat—maybe two seconds, but it felt longer—Jess watched her mother take in the full picture of Daniela Rivera. The cheap blue wig hanging half off her head. The beanie. The lip ring glinting in the porch light. The tattoo peeking from under the hem of a jacket that smelled like cigarettes and vanilla.

Gina blinked.

"Hi, Gina." Dani said. She was still supporting Jess's weight, one arm locked around her waist. Her chin was up, her dark eyes steady, her posture radiating the particular defiance of a person who was used to being judged on sight and had stopped caring about it a long time ago. "I'm Dani. We need ice. And butterfly bandages if you have them. The cut's deep but I don't think it needs real stitches—it's clean-edged under the swelling. We should irrigate it, get the blood off, and close it up before it gets infected."

Gina stared at her.

"I worked at a first aid booth at a community center," Dani added. "For, like, two summers. I've uh seen worse."

Something shifted in Gina's face. Not quite trust—Gina didn't trust strangers, not with her daughter—but recognition. The recognition of someone who spoke competently about keeping another human being intact.

"Inside," Gina said. "Both of you. Now."

The Perot kitchen smelled like pumpkin spice air freshener and lavender cleaning spray. Gina had Jess sitting on a stool at the island within thirty seconds, an ice pack wrapped in a dish towel pressed against her cheek while Gina rifled through the medicine cabinet in the downstairs bathroom.

Dani stood at the kitchen sink, running hot water over her hands. She'd stripped off the blue wig, and most of her costume leaving her in a black crop top and her real hair, black, messy from being compressed under the wig all night. Without the costume, she looked smaller. More real. More like the girl who'd held Jess during the blizzard.

"Hold still," Dani said, approaching with a wet cloth. She tilted Jess's chin up with two fingers and began carefully wiping the dried blood from her neck and jaw. Her touch was clinical, efficient, but her eyes were something else entirely. Dark and focused and soft at the edges, the way they got when she was pretending she wasn't scared.

"Found them." Gina returned with an armful of supplies: hydrogen peroxide, butterfly bandages, antibiotic ointment, cotton balls, and—because she was Gina—a bottle of children's Tylenol that had expired in 2014. She dumped everything on the counter and stationed herself on Jess's other side, creating a two-front medical operation.

"Okay." Gina put on her reading glasses, the ones that made her look like a concerned librarian. "Tell me what happened. Everything."

Jess closed her eyes. The ice pack burned against her cheek. "There was a party. At Sarah Snyder's house."

"Sarah Snyder." Gina said the name like it was a synonym for something unpleasant. "The cheerleader?"

"Yeah. Ana showed up—"

"Ana Yankowski."

"She showed up after Sarah had been harassing her. Sarah lost it. She tried to hit Ana, and I—" Jess swallowed. "I stepped between them."

Gina went very still.

"You stepped between them," she repeated.

"Yeah."

"Between Ana Yankowski—the girl who ruined your freshman year—and someone trying to punch her."

"Yeah, Mom."

"Because protecting the girl who destroyed your reputation was more important than protecting your own face."

Jess opened her good eye. Her mother was looking at her with an expression that was ninety percent fury and ten percent something else—something Jess recognized but couldn't name right now. Something like pride.

"She was going to get hurt," Jess said quietly.

Gina exhaled through her nose—a long, controlled breath, the kind she used when she was choosing not to scream. She uncapped the hydrogen peroxide. "That girl didn't deserve you then, she's lucky you were there tonight. This is going to sting."

It did sting. It stung like hell. Jess hissed through her teeth as the peroxide hit the open wound, foaming white against raw skin. Dani's hand appeared on her knee—a warm, steady pressure—and Jess focused on that instead of the fire in her face.

"Easy," Dani murmured. "Almost done."

Gina dabbed the wound dry with a cotton ball, her movements precise and maternal. Then she turned to Dani.

"You," Gina said, pointing with the cotton ball. "The butterfly bandages. You said you know how to do this."

Dani straightened. "Yes, ma'am."

"Don't 'ma'am' me, I'm not eighty. Show me."

Dani moved to the counter, tearing open the bandage packaging with practiced fingers. She positioned herself in front of Jess, close enough that her hip pressed against Jess's knee, and leaned in to examine the wound under the kitchen light.

"Okay," Dani said, half to Gina and half to Jess. "The cut runs diagonal—starts about a centimeter below the eye socket and angles down toward the jaw. It's maybe two inches. Not deep enough for muscle damage but deep enough that it needs to be held closed." She held up a bandage strip. "I'm going to do three points. One at the top, one in the middle, one at the bottom. Tight enough to hold the skin together but not so tight it puckers."

"You really did work at a first aid booth," Gina said, sounding reluctantly impressed.

"Oh uh… yeah." Dani leaned closer to Jess, close enough that Jess could smell her—cigarettes and vanilla and cold night air—and began placing the first bandage. Her fingers were steady. Her brow was furrowed in concentration, her bottom lip caught between her teeth, the lip ring pressing into the skin.

Jess held perfectly still. She watched Dani's face inches away. Dani's thumb brushed the uninjured skin below the wound, featherlight, and Jess felt her breath catch in a way that had nothing to do with pain.

"Second one," Dani said softly. She placed it with the same careful precision, her fingertips lingering a fraction of a second longer than necessary on Jess's jaw. Her eyes flicked up to meet Jess's, just for a moment—checking on her, reading her—and in that glance there was everything they'd done on the futon and everything they hadn't talked much about since.

Jess's chest tightened.

"Third," Dani whispered, and placed the final bandage. She smoothed the edges down with her thumb, then stepped back to assess her work. "There. That should hold if she doesn't talk too much."

"So it'll hold for about thirty seconds," Gina said dryly. She handed Dani a paper towel. "Your hands are bloody."

"Oh." Dani looked down at her fingers like she'd forgotten. She wiped them, and Jess watched the red smear across the white paper, her own blood on Dani's skin.

Gina was watching too.

Not the blood. Not the bandages. Gina was watching Dani's face, the way Dani's eyes kept drifting back to Jess even while she cleaned her hands. The way Dani's body angled toward the stool where Jess sat like she was magnetized to it. The way Dani's expression, stripped of the wig and the costume and the punk rock armor, was unguarded and tender in a way that wasn't about first aid.

Jess saw the moment her mother clocked it. Gina's hands paused over the tube of antibiotic ointment. Her gaze moved from Dani to Jess, then back to Dani. Her lips parted, then closed. She adjusted her glasses.

Then she unscrewed the ointment and said, "Dani, was it? You eat yet tonight?"

Dani blinked. "What?"

"Food. Have you eaten."

"I had some... earlier"

"Sit down." Gina was already moving toward the fridge. "I've got leftover chicken noodle from yesterday, and there's sandwich stuff, and I think there's half a pie—"

"Mrs. Perot—"

"Gina. And you're not leaving this kitchen until you've eaten something. You look like you haven't had a proper meal in a while.”

Dani opened her mouth, closed it, then sat down on the stool next to Jess with the bewildered expression of someone who had been picked up by a current and was no longer in control of where they were going.

Jess bit back a smile that immediately turned into a wince.

The kitchen filled with the domestic sounds of Gina Perot in crisis mode: the microwave humming, a pot clanking onto the stove, the fridge opening and closing three times in rapid succession. She produced soup, sandwiches, the half pie, a bag of Doritos, and two glasses of water with the speed and efficiency of a woman who believed food was the correct response to every emergency.

"Eat," Gina commanded, setting bowls in front of them.

They ate. The soup was exactly what Jess needed—warm and salty, the broth cutting through the metallic taste of blood that had been sitting in her mouth for an hour. Dani ate like she'd been starving, which, knowing Dani's financial situation, she might have been. She hunched over the bowl with the protective posture of someone who'd learned not to take food for granted.

Gina sat across from them, her mug of tea replenished, her eyes sharp behind her glasses. She was doing the thing she did—the quiet cataloguing, the maternal data collection. Filing away every detail. The wig on the counter. The bloodstained scarf. Dani's lip ring and the scars on her arms. The way Jess kept glancing at Dani when she thought Gina wasn't looking.

"So," Gina said eventually, wrapping both hands around her mug. "Dani. You're from California?"

Dani looked up, a spoonful of soup halfway to her mouth. "Yeah."

"And you're friends with—" Gina paused, choosing her words carefully.

"With Laurel," Dani corrected, without hesitation. "Yeah."

Something softened in Gina's face. She took a sip of tea. "Jessica told me about the situation. Some of it. Probably not all of it." She shot Jess a look. "But enough that I know there's a kid in this town who needs people in her corner."

Dani's chin lifted slightly. "She has people."

"Good. She needs more." Gina set her mug down. "I told Jess that child is welcome in this house anytime. Day or night. That goes for her people too." She looked directly at Dani. "That means you."

Dani's jaw worked. For a terrible second, Jess thought Dani might cry, her eyes went glassy, and she blinked hard, looking down at her soup like it contained the answer to a question she'd been carrying for years.

"Thanks," Dani said. Her voice was rough.

"Don't thank me for being a decent human being," Gina said. "The bar is underground in this town and I refuse to trip over it."

They finished eating. Gina cleared the dishes, refused all offers of help, and sent them to the living room with instructions to "sit down and don't move." Jess settled onto the couch with the ice pack, her cheek throbbing in time with her heartbeat. Dani sat next to her, close. Their thighs were touching and they stared at the muted TV, which was playing a rerun of some ghost-hunting show with the closed captions on.

"Your mom is terrifying," Dani said quietly.

"She's five-four and she runs on caffeine and spite."

"Exactly. Terrifying." Dani's hand found Jess's under the blanket Gina had draped over them. Their fingers interlaced. "How's the face?"

"Hurts."

"Scale of one to ten."

"Six. Maybe seven when I talk."

"Then stop talking."

"You stop talking."

Dani's mouth curved. She lifted their joined hands and pressed her lips to Jess's knuckles—a brief, soft kiss, barely a brush of contact, but it sent warmth flooding down Jess's arm and into her chest.

From the kitchen doorway, Gina cleared her throat.

They separated like they'd been electrocuted. Jess yanked her hand away. Dani suddenly became intensely interested in the ghost-hunting show. The air between them crackled with the specific panic of two teenagers who'd just been caught.

Gina walked into the living room, drying her hands on a dish towel, and sat in the armchair across from them. She looked at Jess. She looked at Dani. She looked at the six inches of deliberate space that had materialized between them on the couch.

She didn't say anything. She picked up the remote, unmuted the TV, and watched a man in night-vision goggles scream at an empty hallway.

After a while, Gina spoke without looking away from the screen. "Dani. It's late and it's freezing. You're not walking home. There's a spare pillow and blankets in the hall closet. The couch pulls out."

Dani glanced at Jess, uncertain.

"She snores," Jess said.

"I do not—"

"Like a chainsaw."

"I will remove those bandages myself, Captain."

Gina stood, clicked off the TV, and headed for the stairs. She paused at the bottom step.

"Jessica."

"Yeah, Mom?"

Gina looked at her for a long moment. Her expression was layered—exhaustion, worry, residual fury about the punch, and that other thing again, the thing Jess couldn't quite name. Understanding, maybe. Recognition.

"I'm glad you're safe," Gina said. "I'm glad you had someone to bring you home."

She looked at Dani when she said it. Just for a second. Then she went upstairs.

The house settled into nighttime sounds, the furnace clicking on, the wind pressing against the windows, the creak of Gina's footsteps above them. Jess helped Dani pull out the sofa bed, a mechanical nightmare that required three attempts and a whispered string of profanity.

"She knows," Dani said, once the bed was made and they were standing on either side of it.

Jess's stomach turned. "She doesn't know anything."

"Jess. She watched me kiss your hand. She looked at us like she was reading a book with very large font." Dani sat on the edge of the pullout. "She knows."

Jess pressed the ice pack harder against her swollen cheek. "Even if she does, she didn't say anything."

"She said 'I'm glad you had someone to bring you home' while looking directly at me. That's mom code for 'I see you and we'll discuss this when there's less blood involved.'"

Jess didn't have a counterargument. She stood there, in her ruined Buffy costume, her face held together with butterfly bandages, and felt the weight of everything—the party, the punch, Silverson, Laurel's panic in the park, Ana's calculated composure, her mother's quiet all-seeing gaze—settle onto her shoulders like a physical thing.

"Go to sleep," Dani said gently. "You need it."

Jess hesitated. Then she crossed to the pullout, leaned down, and kissed Dani on the forehead. Soft. Careful. Achingly brief.

"Thank you," she whispered. "For getting me home."

Dani's hand came up and touched Jess's uninjured cheek. Her thumb traced the line of her jaw. "Always."

Jess pulled away before she could do something reckless, again.

She went upstairs. She washed the remaining blood from her neck and changed into sweats. She crawled into bed and lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, her cheek pulsing with pain, her chest pulsing with something else.

Her phone buzzed.

LaurelLore: i'm home. i'm safe. ana walked me. i'm okay. are you okay? please tell me you're okay.

Jess typed back with one hand:

CaptainJessSparrow: I'm okay. Dani patched me up. Don't worry about me. Get some sleep.

LaurelLore: jess i'm so sorry

CaptainJessSparrow: Don't. None of this was your fault.

LaurelLore: i love you. you know that right?

Jess stared at those words until the screen blurred. She pressed the phone against her sternum, feeling it vibrate with a follow-up text she couldn't read through the tears.

"I know," she whispered to the dark.

Jess stood in front of the bathroom mirror and examined the damage with the detached precision of someone assessing an opponent's form. The gash itself was hidden under bandages, but the surrounding skin had bloomed overnight into a grotesque watercolor—plum at the center fading to indigo, then a sickly green at the edges. Her left eye was half-swollen shut. She looked like she'd lost a boxing match. Which, technically, she had.

She spent twenty minutes with concealer, foundation, and a prayer. The result was better than nothing and worse than good. She looked less like a crime victim and more like a girl who'd walked into a door at moderate speed. The bandages were the giveaway—no amount of makeup could hide them—but at least the bruising was muted to a dull shadow instead of a screaming accusation.

Downstairs, Gina had made waffles.

The kitchen smelled like batter and maple syrup. Dani was already at the island, dressed in yesterday's clothes minus the wig, eating a waffle with her bare hands while Gina fussed over the iron.

"Morning, honey." Gina looked at Jess's face and pressed her lips together but didn't comment. She slid a plate across the counter. "Eat."

Jess ate.

Dani gave her a look across the table, a quick once-over, checking the swelling, then a barely perceptible nod that meant you'll live. Their knees bumped under the counter. Jess didn't move hers away.

"I called the school," Gina announced, pouring more batter. "Left a message with the front office about what happened."

"Mom—"

"I didn't name names. I said there was an altercation at a party and you were injured. They need it on record, Jessica. If that girl tries to spin it—"

"She won't."

Gina's spatula paused mid-flip. "You don't know that."

"I do, actually." Jess took a sip of orange juice, wincing as the acid stung a cut inside her lip she hadn't noticed. "Sarah's already in trouble. Someone recorded the whole thing."

Gina's eyebrows rose. "Someone recorded it."

"Welcome to Gen Z," Dani said through a mouthful of waffle. Jess elbowed her.

Jess arrived at school forty minutes later, Dani having headed back to her apartment after a lingering goodbye on the Perot porch that Jess was one hundred percent certain Gina had watched through the kitchen curtains. The air was cold and bright, the sky that particular shade of Montana blue that looked like it was trying too hard to be cheerful.

She made it approximately eleven steps into the building before she realized something was wrong.

Not wrong in the way things had been wrong yesterday—no immediate danger, no blood, no cops. Wrong in the social sense. Wrong in the way that a high school hallway changed frequency when gossip achieved critical mass.

People were staring. Not at her face—though some did double-takes at the bandages—but at her with a strange, loaded curiosity, the way people looked at someone who was adjacent to a story they were dying to discuss.

Jess caught fragments as she walked.

"—at the party, and then she—"

"—Ana was there, and Montana—"

"—his dad saw them—"

"—making out on the porch—"

Jess's feet stopped moving.

She stood in the middle of the main hallway, backpack on one shoulder, hair hiding half her bruised face, and felt the words reassemble themselves in her brain like a puzzle she hadn't been given all the pieces to.

She grabbed the nearest source—a sophomore named Tori who was whispering to her friend by the water fountain.

"What did you just say?" Jess asked, and something in her tone must have been alarming because Tori flinched.

"I—about what?"

"About Montana. And Ana."

Tori's eyes went wide, flicking to the bandages on Jess's cheek, then back. "I mean... everyone's saying they're together? Like, dating? Apparently someone saw them kissing outside Montana's house last night. Like, it was a whole thing."

Jess's eyes widened.

She walked. She didn't know where she was going for the first sixty seconds—her legs just moved, carrying her past the lockers and the trophy case and the banner for the upcoming basketball season while her brain worked furiously, violently, rearranging everything she thought she understood about last night.

Ana walked Laurel home.

Ana, who had orchestrated the entire confrontation with Sarah. Ana, who had a video ready. Ana, who had weaponized her mother's name against Silverson. Ana, who moved through the world like a chess player three moves ahead of everyone else.

Ana had kissed Laurel for Derrick.

The pieces clicked together with an audible snap in Jess's skull, and the picture they formed made her want to put her fist through the nearest wall.

The provocation. Sarah's predictable rage. The video. The call to Olivia Yankowski. And then, as the cherry on top of this meticulously engineered catastrophe—a kiss. A public, parent-witnessed kiss that repositioned Ana from "disgraced maybe-lesbian cheerleader" to "Montana Payton's girlfriend."

Ana hadn't just staged a fight. She'd staged an entire narrative. She'd written herself a new story and cast Laurel as the love interest without so much as asking.

Jess found Ana in the girls' bathroom on the second floor. Not by accident—she'd checked three locations before this one, working through the school with the systematic fury of someone who'd spent two years learning exactly how her enemy operated.

Ana was standing at the sink, alone, washing her hands. She'd stood there in a cashmere sweater, dark jeans, her hair down past her shoulders. Without the Jennifer's Body costume, without the blood and the black wig and the dead-eyed defiance, she looked like the Ana Jess remembered from before everything went wrong: composed, beautiful, and utterly calculated.

Jess let the bathroom door slam shut behind her.

Ana looked up. Their eyes met in the mirror.

"Jess," Ana said. Measured. Unsurprised. Like she'd been expecting this.

"You planned the whole thing," Jess said.

Ana turned off the tap. She pulled a paper towel from the dispenser and dried her hands with the unhurried composure of a woman at a spa.

"You're going to have to be more specific," Ana said.

Jess stepped closer. The fluorescent lights hummed above them, casting everything in that blue-white institutional glow that made everyone look slightly dead.

"The costume. Showing up to the party dressed like a bomb. Saying exactly the right things to set Sarah off. Making sure someone was recording when she snapped." Jess's voice was low and steady, the voice she used during guard critiques, the one that cut through excuses. "You wanted her to swing. You wanted it on video. And now you've sent it to your mother, and Sarah's going to get suspended or expelled, and you get your spot back, and you get to be the victim. Am I wrong?"

Ana folded the paper towel into a precise square. Set it on the counter.

"No," she said.

The admission was so casual, so devoid of guilt, that it hit Jess harder than the word itself. She'd expected denial. She'd prepared counterarguments, evidence, a prosecutorial breakdown of every step in Ana's scheme. She hadn't prepared for Ana to simply... agree.

"No?" Jess repeated.

"You're not wrong. That's essentially what happened." Ana turned to face her, leaning against the sink. Her arms crossed over her chest, her posture elegant and defensive in equal measure. "Sarah has been running a campaign to destroy me for a week. She's been spreading rumors, rallying the squad, trying to take my position. She's a bigot and a bully and she was going to win because she had the numbers. I evened the odds."

"You didn't even anything, Ana. You manipulated everyone at that party like pieces on a board."

"I created conditions for Sarah to show her true self. I didn't force her to punch anyone. That was all her."

"You baited her—"

"I showed up, for the first time in forever. She committed assault. There's a difference."

Jess's hands were shaking. She clenched them at her sides, feeling the tension, feeling the rage building in her chest like steam in a closed pipe.

"You used Laurel, you kissed her." Jess said. "You're using her right now."

Something shifted behind Ana's eyes—a flicker, barely there, like a candle in a draft. "Oh," Ana said softly. "I take it you heard about the kisses."

The world tilted.

Jess stared at her. The bathroom hummed. The faucet dripped. A girl's laughter echoed from somewhere down the hall, muffled and distant.

"What do you mean kisses?" Jess said.

Ana's composure cracked—just barely, just a hairline fracture in the facade, enough for Jess to see the flash of miscalculation underneath. Ana had assumed Jess already knew. She'd assumed that Laurel had told her.

"Jessi—"

"What. Other. Kiss."

Ana's jaw tightened. She recalculated, visibly, the way a poker player adjusts after showing their hand too early.

"On the bleachers," Ana said. "I was having a really bad day, Sarah's bullshit was getting to me, then Laurel came and that's when I confronted her about her identity. I um… I insulted her… And then I..." She paused, choosing her words. "I kissed her. Last week.”

The fluorescent light buzzed. The faucet dripped. Somewhere in the distance, a bell rang for first period, and neither of them moved.

The silence that followed was deafening.

It filled the bathroom like water—rising past her ankles, her knees, her chest—and she stood in it, drowning in it, while the fluorescent lights buzzed their idiot song overhead and Ana Yankowski leaned against the sink like she was waiting for a bus.

Last week.

The bleachers, the blizzard. The day Laurel had come home and texted Dani that she wasn't coming over. The day Jess had made reckless choices on a futon.

Laurel hadn't told her.

The hurt of that was a separate thing from the rage—a quieter wound, deeper, located somewhere behind her ribs where she kept the things she didn't examine too closely. She'd deal with it later, in the dark, in her room, with her face in a pillow. Right now she had Ana.

"You kissed her," Jess said. "On the bleachers. After insulting her. After finding out she's trans."

"I was having a really bad—"

"And then you kissed her again. Last night. In front of her father."

"That was different."

"How was that different?"

"Because last night was strategic." Ana said it like the word justified itself. Like strategy was a moral framework.

"Derrick saw his son walk a pretty girl home after a party. He saw us kiss. He saw normal. Do you understand what that bought her? Breathing room. Safety. He's not going to look at Montana and see—" She caught herself, redirecting. "He's going to see a boy with a girlfriend. That's armor, Jess. That's protection."

"That's a lie you constructed without asking her."

"It's a lie that's gonna keep her alive."

Jess stepped forward. The distance between them shrank to three feet, then two. Ana didn't flinch, but her fingers tightened on her crossed arms—a tell, tiny, the kind of thing you only noticed if you'd spent years studying someone's body language because they'd once been your best friend.

"And the bleachers?" Jess pressed. "Was that strategic too? Kissing the trans girl who was trying to comfort you, after making her feel like shit—was that part of the master plan?"

The fracture in Ana's composure widened. Not much. Just enough.

"No," Ana said. Quieter now. "That was..." She exhaled through her nose, a sharp sound, frustrated. "That was a mistake."

"A mistake."

"A moment of weakness, if you want to be dramatic about it. Which you always do."

"You kissed someone without their consent because you were having a bad day. That's not weakness, Ana, that's—"

"I know what it is." Ana's voice snapped like a branch. For a half-second, the mask slipped entirely, and beneath it was something raw and furious and young—a girl cornered, not a chess player. Then she rebuilt, brick by brick, and the composure resettled. "I know what it was. And I'm—"

She stopped.

Jess waited.

Ana's jaw worked. She looked at the ceiling, then at the tile floor, then at a point approximately six inches to the left of Jess's ear. Her throat moved.

"I'm sorry," Ana said, "that you got hit."

The words landed in the space between them like a coin dropped into a well—small, insufficient, swallowed immediately by the depth of what lay beneath.

"I didn't plan for that," Ana continued. "The Sarah thing—yes. The video—yes. But I didn't plan for you to jump in front of it. I didn't think you would. I didn't think you'd protect me." Something complicated moved across her face. "I should have known better. You always were stupidly brave."

Jess let the silence stretch. Let it breathe. Let Ana sit in it. "That's it?"

Ana blinked. "What?"

"That's what you're sorry for. The punch."

"I—yes. That's what I'm apologizing for. You got hurt because of something I set in motion, and I didn't intend that. I'm sorry."

"And the rest of it?" Jess's voice was very quiet now. "Outing me freshman year. Destroying my reputation. Getting me kicked off the squad. Turning my best friend into my enemy because you couldn't handle your own shit. Are you sorry for any of that?"

Ana looked at her. Directly. No evasion, no calculation, no flickering between options.

"No," she said.

The word was flat and clear and absolute, like a door closing.

Jess laughed. It came out broken and ugly. "Of course not."

"You want me to lie? I can lie. I'm excellent at it. I can tell you I lay awake at night regretting what I did to you, that I feel terrible, that I'd take it all back if I could." Ana's arms unfolded. She planted her hands on the edge of the sink behind her, gripping the porcelain. "But I wouldn't. I'd do it again if I had to."

"Why," Jess said. Not a question. A demand.

Ana's chin lifted. "Because you had people."

Jess went still.

"You had your mom," Ana said. "Your terrifying, five-foot-four, waffle-making, porch-light-leaving mom who would burn this town to the ground for you and you know it. You had a house where someone left the light on. You had friends who showed up. You got knocked down, and people picked you up, and you survived, Jess. You survived and you became captain of the guard and you found Laurel and you built this whole—" She gestured vaguely, encompassing everything Jess had and everything Ana didn't. "This whole life where people love you and it's fine. You're fine."

"I wasn't fine," Jess whispered. "You hurt me."

"I inconvenienced you," Ana corrected, and the cruelty of it was precise and surgical and so classically Ana that it hurt like a phantom limb. "You healed. You had the infrastructure to heal. I didn't have that. I still don't have that."

Her voice had dropped, not to a whisper but to something worse—a register of honesty that Ana Yankowski almost never used, stripped of performance, raw as nerve. "You think I wanted to throw you under the bus? You were my best friend. You were the only person in that school I actually—"

She stopped. Swallowed.

"But it was you or me," she continued. "And if it was me, there was no net. There was no Gina Perot making soup and leaving lights on. There was my mother polling donors about which minorities to target next and my father being—" The word caught. She breathed through it. "Being my father. And Lis was already gone. Already with Jake. Already unreachable. So it was going to be me, alone, in that house, outed, with no one."

The faucet dripped three times.

"So yes," Ana said. "I chose you. Because you could take the hit and I couldn't. Because the fall from your height was survivable and the fall from mine was off a cliff. And I'm not sorry, Jess. I'm not sorry for doing what I needed to so that I could actually survive."

Jess's vision blurred. She blinked hard, refusing to give Ana the satisfaction of seeing her cry twice in twenty-four hours. Her cheek throbbed under the concealer and the bandages, and her chest felt like it was being compressed, like someone had reached in and was squeezing.

She didn't want to understand. She wanted to hate Ana cleanly, completely, without the complication of empathy. She wanted the version where Ana was a villain and Jess was a victim and the line between them was clear. But Ana had just drawn the line in a different place, and Jess could see it, and she hated that she could see it.

"And the kiss on the bleachers," Jess said, her voice scraped thin. "That was survival too?"

Ana's composure flickered. Just her eyes,.a quick, involuntary softening that she couldn't control, the way a person flinches at a bright light.

"No," she said again. Softer. "That was... I liked it. She was kind to me. No one is kind to me. She sat there in the snow and talked to me like I was a person instead of a problem, and she looked at me with those stupid brown eyes, and I—" Ana's hands tightened on the sink. Her knuckles went white. "I liked it. I enjoyed it. And I can't afford to enjoy it, Jess, because there's no net. If I fall, that's it. It's over. Everything I've built, everything I've controlled—gone. My mother, my scholarship, my future. All of it. So that's not what I'm doing."

She said it like she was reading a verdict. Clinical. Final.

Jess stared at her. At this girl she'd loved, then hated, then tried to forget. At the perfect hair and the cashmere sweater and the manicured composure that concealed what? A house with locked doors and a senator who smiled for cameras and a father whose name Ana couldn't say without her voice catching.

"So you built a fake relationship instead," Jess said. "Without telling her."

"I built a cover story. For both of us." Ana straightened, releasing the sink, crossing her arms again. Rebuilding. "Derrick thinks his son has a girlfriend. That's good for Laurel. The school thinks Ana Yankowski is dating Montana Payton. That kills the lesbian rumors. That's good for me." She raised an eyebrow. "It's a net positive."

"You didn't ask her."

"I didn't have time to ask her. We were standing on her porch with her psychopath father ten feet away and I just finished wiping makeup off her face. I made a call."

"You made a call with someone else's life—"

"I made a call that kept her safe last night. You're welcome, by the way."

Jess opened her mouth. Closed it. The audacity of Ana Yankowski demanding gratitude for a scheme she'd designed primarily to save herself was so breathtaking that for a moment, Jess had no language for it.

Ana filled the silence. Because Ana always filled silences—nature abhorred a vacuum and so did Anastasia Yankowski.

"And speaking of things we're not telling Laurel," Ana said, and her tone shifted. Sharpened. The vulnerability of thirty seconds ago was gone, sealed behind glass, and the girl looking at Jess now had the assessing, predatory calm of someone about to flip a table. "You and Dani were giving each other fuck-me eyes all night."

The bathroom air changed temperature.

"Don't," Jess said.

"At the party. In the park. Walking down the goddamn street with her arm around your waist like you were her girl and not Laurel's best friend." Ana tilted her head, studying Jess's face with a forensic interest that made Jess's skin crawl. "Does Laurel know?"

Jess's jaw locked.

"Does Laurel know," Ana repeated, slower, savoring each word, "that her best friend is sleeping with her ex-girlfriend?"

The accusation hit like a second punch. Not to the face this time, luckily.

Because it was true. Because Jess had been carrying the guilt of it like a stone in her pocket for days, turning it over and over, feeling its edges, and hearing it spoken aloud in Ana Yankowski's precise, weaponized diction made it real in a way she hadn't been prepared for.

"That's none of your business," Jess managed.

"It's interesting, though, isn't it?" Ana's voice was silk over steel. "You're in here screaming at me for kissing Laurel without permission, for making decisions about her life without asking. And the whole time, you've been—what? Hooking up with the love of her life behind her back?" She let that sit. "At least my deception protects someone. What does yours do?"

Jess's hands were trembling. She pressed them flat against her thighs to stop them.

"It's not the same thing," Jess said.

"You're right. It's worse. I lied to a stranger's father to keep his kid safe. You're lying to your best friend about sleeping with the person she loves." Ana smiled, thin, joyless, the smile of a girl who knew she'd drawn blood. "Glass houses, Captain."

Jess looked at Ana. Really looked at her. Past the sweater and the posture and the calculated cruelty, past the performance and the politics, down to the thing underneath—the girl who'd said no one is kind to me and meant it. The girl who'd kissed Laurel in the snow because someone looked at her like she was a person instead of a problem, and then panicked so badly she'd run across a parking lot.

"You don't get to use Laurel as a prop," Jess said. Her voice was steady. Quiet. Final. "I don't care how logical it sounds. I don't care if it helps both of you. She's not a chess piece, Ana. She's a person, and everyone has made decisions about her life without asking. If you want this—whatever this fake relationship is—you need to ask her. You sit down and you look her in the eye and you give her the choice. That's the bare minimum."

Ana's expression didn't change. But something behind her eyes shifted.

"And if she says no?" Ana asked.

"Then you figure out your own cover. That's not her job."

The door opened. A freshman walked in, saw the two of them squared off in the middle of the bathroom and walked right back out.

Ana picked up her bag from the counter. She slung it over one shoulder, checked her reflection in the mirror, a quick, automatic adjustment, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and turned to leave.

She paused at the door.

"You should tell her about Dani," Ana said, without turning around. "Before someone else does."

Then she pushed through the door and was gone, her footsteps clicking down the hall with the measured, unhurried rhythm of a girl who had nowhere safe to go and had learned to make every hallway look like a runway.

Jess stood alone in the bathroom for a long time. The faucet dripped. The fluorescent light hummed its single, tuneless note. She looked at herself in the mirror—the bandages, the bruise, the smudged concealer failing to hide either.

She looked like someone who'd been in a fight. Which she had. Multiple fights, on multiple fronts, and she was losing all of them.

Her phone buzzed.

DaniCalifornia: How's the face? How's school? Do I need to come commit a felony?

Jess stared at the message. She thought about Dani's hands on her cheek last night. She thought about the futon. She thought about the way Dani's eyes had gone soft in the kitchen, and her mother's quiet, knowing look from the armchair.

She thought about Laurel, alone in a cold house with a monster, trusting Jess with everything she had.

She thought about Ana, walking out of the bathroom with her armor back in place, right about the one thing Jess desperately wanted her to be wrong about.

Does Laurel know?

Jess locked her phone without responding and pressed her forehead against the cold glass of the mirror.

The faucet dripped. The light buzzed. Outside, the hallway filled with the sounds of a school that kept turning, indifferent to the quiet implosion happening in the second-floor girls' bathroom.

Jess stayed there until the bell rang.

Laurel Melody Parker, Laurel, Montana, November 1st 2018

​The whispers started before Laurel even reached the front doors of the high school.

​Usually, the murmurs that followed Montana Payton were predictable. They were the low, ugly sounds of a small town digesting something it didn't understand. Freak. Fag. Why does he dress like that? Look at his hair. Laurel had spent the better part of a month learning how to tune them out, turning the volume down until the cruelty was just a baseline hum of static.

​But this morning, the static was different. The frequency had changed.

​As she walked past the trophy case, her boots squeaking against the linoleum, she caught the fragments of conversation drifting from the lockers.

​"—saw them on his porch—"

"—literally making out, my brother drove past—"

"—Montana Payton? Are you serious? With Ana?"

​Laurel froze, her hand hovering over the cold metal handle of her locker.

​She turned her head, looking down the corridor. At the far end, standing near the cafeteria double doors, was a group of junior boys who usually made a sport out of bumping into her in the halls. Today, they were just staring. And the look in their eyes wasn't disgust. It was a bizarre, calculating mixture of confusion and... respect.

​Oh, god, Laurel thought, the memory of the freezing porch rushing back. The smell of Derrick’s cigarette smoke. Ana’s hand flat against her chest. The soft, terrifying press of Ana’s lips against hers, and Derrick’s voice approving of his "son."

​It hadn't just been a performance for Derrick. Ana had staged it outside, in the open, on a street where anyone driving home from the Halloween parties could see.

​Laurel slammed her locker shut without taking off her coat. The metallic bang echoed sharply, making a passing freshman jump.

​She needed to find Ana.

Now.

​She found her in the library.

​Ana was sitting alone at a corner table near the reference section, a textbook open in front of her. She was back in her armor: a pristine cream-colored sweater, her blonde hair sleek and perfect, the Jennifer’s Body nightmare completely scrubbed away. But up close, Laurel could see the exhaustion. The dark circles under Ana’s eyes had been heavily concealed, and she was gripping a highlighter so tightly her knuckles were white.

​Laurel marched over, pulled out the chair across from her, and dropped her backpack onto the table with a heavy thud.

​Ana didn't flinch. She slowly capped her highlighter and looked up. "Good morning, Montana."

​"Don't do that," Laurel hissed, keeping her voice low so the librarian wouldn't hear. "Don't play innocent. I heard them in the hallway. Everyone thinks we're dating."

​"Everyone thinks Montana Payton is dating Ana Yankowski," Ana corrected calmly. "Which is exactly what I intended."

​Laurel felt her heart hammering against her ribs. The sheer audacity of it left her breathless. "You manipulated me. You used me as a prop in front of my father, and you made us a thing so the whole town would talk."

​"I did," Ana agreed. She folded her hands neatly on top of her textbook. She wasn't defending herself; she was simply stating facts. "And you're welcome."

​"I'm welcome?" Laurel's voice pitched up, entirely abandoning the low, masculine register she usually forced herself into at school. "You made us out to be a couple without my permission! You kissed me without asking, twice!"

​"If I had asked, you would have panicked," Ana said, her dark eyes locking onto Laurel's. "You would have said no because you're terrified of drawing attention to yourself. But look at the reality of the board, Laurel. Look at the pieces. What was happening to you yesterday?"

​Laurel glared at her, refusing to answer.

​"I'll tell you," Ana continued, leaning forward, her voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper. "Hunter Stevens cornered you with a baseball bat. Officer Silverson was ready to drag you to the station for wearing makeup. Your father was waiting on the porch to tear you apart. You were bleeding out socially and physically, and you had no cover."

​Ana reached across the table, her manicured finger tapping the wood for emphasis. "Now? You are Montana Payton, the quiet, brooding guy who somehow managed to pull the head cheerleader. Do you know what boys like Hunter Stevens think of that? They don't understand it, but they respect it.

Traditional masculinity in this town is currency, Laurel. And I just handed you a blank check."

​Laurel stared at her. The sick, twisted part of it all was that Ana’s logic was flawless. Derrick’s reaction on the porch proved it. Derrick had literally patted her on the shoulder. He had looked at her with pride instead of disgust.

​"It's a shield," Ana said, her voice softening just a fraction. "For both of us. The rumors about me hooking up with Dani were going to destroy my life. My mother was going to pull my college fund and send me to some conservative nightmare camp. But if I'm dating you? If I'm with a guy? The rumors turn into 'Ana was just experimenting at a party, but she's actually with Montana.' It fixes my problem. And it gives you an iron-clad alibi for your father. It's mutually beneficial."

​"You still should have asked," Laurel whispered, her anger warring with the suffocating relief that Derrick was off her back. "I'm not a chess piece, Ana."

​"I know you're not." Ana looked down at her hands. For a second, the armor cracked, revealing the desperate, terrified girl underneath. "I know. And I'm sorry I kissed you without asking. But I am not sorry for the outcome."

​Laurel slumped back in her chair, running a hand through her messy, unkempt hair. She felt exhausted. Her emotions volatile, and right now, she felt like she was trapped in a spinning room.

​"So what?" Laurel asked, defeated. "We just... pretend?"

​"We pretend," Ana nodded. "We sit together at lunch sometimes. We walk to class. And to make it believable, we need to fix your wardrobe."

​Laurel blinked. "Excuse me?"

​"Your clothes, Laurel. If you're going to be my boyfriend, you can't walk around looking like an extra from a grunge music video who just rolled off the floor." Ana gave her an appraising, slightly critical look. "We're going shopping this weekend."

​"I don't have money for clothes."

​"I do," Ana said dismissively. "My mother gave me her credit card to 'treat myself' after the trauma of Sarah's 'unprovoked attack.' I'm going to buy Montana some decent, respectable clothes. Jeans that fit. Flannels that aren't frayed. A jacket that doesn't scream 'school shooter.'"

​Ana paused, and her eyes softened genuinely. "And... while we're there. If Laurel wants anything. A sweater. Makeup. Anything at all. I'll buy it for her. As a peace offering."

​Laurel looked at Ana, stunned. The offer was incredibly generous, layered with a bizarre, calculated kindness. Ana Yankowski, the girl who had terrorized Jess, was offering to buy Laurel clothes as a bribe under the guise of outfitting her fake boyfriend.

​"Fine," Laurel said quietly. "We're fake dating."

​"Excellent," Ana smiled. It was a terrifying smile. "Now, walk me to second period, boyfriend."

​Walking the halls with Ana Yankowski was a surreal experience.

​For the past month, Laurel had perfected the art of invisibility. Head down, hoodie up, moving through the margins of the hallways. Now, she was front and center. Ana walked close to her, their shoulders occasionally brushing.

​The scrutiny was palpable. Laurel could feel the eyes boring into the back of her neck. She saw the cheerleaders, the girls who had followed Sarah Snyder like ducklings, staring open-mouthed as Ana walked past them without a sideways glance. She saw the basketball players elbowing each other.

​Why him? was written across every face they passed. Why the weird, skinny guard kid? They were halfway to the science wing when the sea of students parted.

​Hunter Stevens stepped out from the intersecting hallway, blocking their path. He wasn't wearing his baseball uniform today, just a letterman jacket and a cruel, knowing smirk. Two of his friends flanked him, looking like eager attack dogs.

​Laurel’s stomach instantly dropped. Her heart hammered against her ribs, the phantom weight of a baseball bat swinging toward her head making her breath hitch.

​"Well, well," Hunter drawled, stepping directly into Laurel’s personal space. "If it isn't the happy couple."

​Ana stopped. She didn't shrink back. She simply looked at Hunter like he was a stain on the linoleum. "Move, Hunter."

​"Just wanted to offer my congratulations," Hunter laughed, looking Laurel up and down with blatant disgust. "Though I gotta admit, I'm a little confused. Everyone knows what you are, Yankowski. We all heard about the goth chick at the party."

​Hunter leaned in closer to Laurel, his voice dropping into a vicious sneer. "And I know what you are, Payton. My brother made sure I knew exactly how you act. So what is this? Two fags trying to cover for each other? It's pathetic."

​The hallway went dead silent. People stopped walking. Everyone was watching.

​Laurel froze. The terror paralyzed her vocal cords. He knew. Hunter knew, and he was going to say it out loud, right here in the middle of the school.

​Ana didn't miss a beat.

​She turned to Laurel, grabbed the lapels of Laurel’s oversized flannel, and pulled her down.

​Ana’s mouth connected with Laurel’s. It wasn't the soft, performative peck from Derrick's porch. It was aggressive. It was fiery. Ana’s hands tangled in Laurel’s messy hair, pulling her close, entirely erasing the space between them. Laurel gasped against Ana's mouth, tasting cherry lip gloss and fierce, unyielding defiance.

​It lasted for three long, agonizingly public seconds.

​When Ana finally pulled back, Laurel was flushed, wide-eyed, and completely short of breath.

​Ana slowly turned her head to look back at Hunter. She wiped a smudge of her own lip gloss from the corner of Laurel’s mouth with her thumb, never breaking eye contact with the junior boy.

​"Are you done projecting your insecurities, Hunter?" Ana asked, her voice echoing in the silent hallway. "Or do you want to stand here and watch my boyfriend and me make out all day? Because frankly, he's a much better kisser than you could ever hope to be."

​Hunter’s smirk collapsed. The boys behind him shifted uncomfortably, looking at each other. The narrative Hunter was trying to spin had just been violently dismantled in front of an audience.

​Hunter spat a curse under his breath, shoved his hands into his pockets, and pushed past them, shoulder-checking Laurel hard on his way out.

​"Come on, Montana," Ana said loudly, slipping her hand effortlessly into Laurel’s. "We're going to be late."

​As they walked away, Laurel squeezed Ana’s hand. Her legs were shaking, but for the first time in five years, she had looked a Stevens in the eye and hadn't been the one to run.

The adrenaline lasted approximately ninety seconds after Ana peeled off toward her AP History class with a casual "See you at lunch, babe" that made Laurel's skin crawl and her cheeks burn in equal measure. Then the hallway swallowed Ana's blonde ponytail, and Laurel was alone with the aftermath.

Her lips were tingling. Cherry lip gloss. She could still taste it.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and ducked into the nearest bathroom, the single-stall one by the art room and locked the door and pressed her forehead against the cold tile wall and tried to remember how to breathe like a person who had not just been publicly kissed by Ana Yankowski in front of half the junior class.

Her phone was already buzzing. She pulled it out.

DaniCalifornia: so uh

DaniCalifornia: sam just texted me that someone told him that you're dating ana

DaniCalifornia: and i'm choosing to believe this is misinformation because otherwise i'm going to need a LOT more context than a text message can provide

Laurel groaned and typed back.

LaurelLore: it's complicated. i'll explain later. please don't panic.

DaniCalifornia: "don't panic" she says, while i am already panicking

DaniCalifornia: laurel melody parker i swear to god

LaurelLore: LATER. i promise. are you working today?

DaniCalifornia: yeah marlene's got me on. come by after school?

LaurelLore: can't. i need to find jess first.

There was a pause. Three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.

DaniCalifornia: yeah. you should. she had a rough night.

The way Dani said it, she had a rough night, carried weight that Laurel couldn't fully parse. There was tenderness in it.

LaurelLore: i know. i'm going to find her now.

DaniCalifornia: ok. tell her i said hi. and that the scarf is replaceable. she keeps apologizing about the scarf.

LaurelLore: ❤️

She pocketed the phone, splashed water on her face, and went to find Jess.

She found Jess in the band room.

Not practicing, not organizing sheet music, not doing any of the captain things that usually kept Jess in constant productive motion. She was sitting on the floor behind the percussion shelves, knees drawn to her chest, her denim jacket pulled tight around her like a cocoon. The butterfly bandages on her cheek were stark white against the bruise, which had darkened since yesterday into deep, mottled purple that bled into sickly yellow at the edges.

Jess didn't look up when Laurel came in. She was staring at the floor, her jaw tight, her blue eyes red-rimmed in a way that suggested she'd either been crying recently or was about to.

Laurel approached slowly, the way you approached an animal that had been hurt. She set her backpack down quietly and slid onto the floor beside Jess, their shoulders touching. She didn't say anything. She'd learned, over the past month, that Jess sometimes needed silence more than words.

They sat there for a long time. Two minutes. Maybe three. The band room hummed with the residual vibrations of third period, the faint smell of brass polish and old carpet.

Finally, Jess spoke. Her voice was small, which was wrong. Jess's voice was never small.

"Sarah's been suspended."

Laurel turned her head. "What?"

"Pending expulsion." Jess's jaw worked, the muscles tensing and releasing. "The video went to the school board this morning. Ana's mom called the superintendent directly. The ring counted as a weapon. There's a zero-tolerance policy. Sarah Snyder is suspended pending a disciplinary hearing, and she's off the cheer squad effective immediately."

Laurel let out a breath. "That's... I mean, that's good. Right? She assaulted you."

"It's what Ana wanted." Jess's voice was flat. Toneless. Like she was reading the results of someone else's experiment. "Every single piece of it went exactly how Ana planned. The provocation, the video, the call to mommy's office. Sarah's gone. Ana's back on top. The chessboard reset."

Laurel felt the weight of Jess's words settle over her. She understood now that this wasn't relief. This was the specific exhaustion of being used as a pawn and then told you should be grateful.

"Jess."

"And now you're dating her." Jess's voice cracked on the word. She pressed her palm against her uninjured cheek, hard, like she was trying to hold herself together through pressure alone. "The whole school thinks you're dating Ana Yankowski. She kissed you in the hallway. In front of Hunter Stevens. In front of everyone."

Laurel swallowed. "It's fake. You know it's fake, right?"

"I know it's fake." Jess exhaled, a shaky breath that rattled on the way out. "I know the logic. I know it gives you cover with Derrick. I know it fixes Ana's reputation. I know it's strategic and smart and probably the best option on a board full of terrible options." Her voice went thin as wire. "But I'm so tired, Laurel. I'm so tired of everything being a strategy. I'm tired of lies on top of lies on top of lies. I'm tired of pretending that none of this hurts."

Laurel's chest ached. She reached over and took Jess's hand, threading their fingers together. Jess's grip was limp at first, then tightened—clutching, desperate, the grip of someone who was using another person as an anchor against a current that wanted to pull her under.

"What hurts?" Laurel asked softly.

Jess made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Pick something. My face hurts. My pride hurts. Watching you get kissed by someone who isn't—" She stopped. Breathed. "Everything hurts. And I'm supposed to be the strong one. I'm the captain. I'm the one who holds it together. But last night, that cop looked at you like you were nothing, and I couldn't do anything. I just stood there with my face split open and watched him—" Her voice broke. "I couldn't protect you."

"Hey." Laurel shifted, turning to face Jess fully, pulling their joined hands into her lap. "Look at me."

Jess didn't. Her gaze stayed fixed on the carpet, her lower lip trembling.

"Jess. Look at me."

Jess looked. Her blue eyes were swimming, the unshed tears catching the fluorescent light and making them almost silver.

"You stepped in front of a punch last night," Laurel said. "You stepped between Sarah and Ana—a girl who hurt you—because you couldn't stand to watch someone get hit. You walked six blocks bleeding so I wouldn't have to worry. You let Dani patch you up and you sat in your mom's kitchen eating soup and making sure everyone else was okay before you'd even let yourself feel it." Laurel's voice was steady, firm, the kind of steady she'd borrowed from Jess a hundred times before. "You don't have to be strong right now. Not with me. You're allowed to just be hurt."

The first tear fell. Then the second. Then Jess's face crumpled, the composed captain exterior collapsing like a house of cards, and she leaned into Laurel and pressed her face against her shoulder and cried.

Laurel held her. She wrapped both arms around Jess and pulled her close and held her the way Jess had held her so many times, in the auditorium, in the car, on the phone at midnight, without agenda, without expectation, just the simple act of being present while someone fell apart.

Jess cried quietly, the way people cry when they've had a lot of practice hiding it. Small, controlled sobs that she tried to swallow, her fingers curling into the fabric of Laurel's hoodie. Laurel rubbed circles on her back, slow and rhythmic, and rested her chin on top of Jess's head, and said nothing.

After a while, the sobs eased. Jess pulled back, wiping her face carefully—avoiding the bandages, wincing when her knuckle grazed the swollen skin.

"Sorry," Jess mumbled. "That was—"

"If you apologize for crying I'm going to be genuinely offended."

Jess let out a wet, broken laugh. "Okay. Fair."

"And for the record," Laurel said, "I didn't want Ana to kiss me. Either time. She didn't ask, and I'm... I'm going to deal with that. With her. But I need you to know that it wasn't something I chose."

Jess nodded slowly. "I know. I confronted her this morning, actually. In the bathroom."

"You did?"

"It was a whole thing." Jess rubbed her eyes. "She's... she's a nightmare, Laurel. She's calculated and manipulative and she doesn't apologize for any of it. But she's also..." Jess trailed off, her expression shifting into something complicated. "She's scared. Under all of it, she's scared. Her family is a cage, and she's doing what caged things do—she's biting everything that gets close."

Laurel thought about Ana in the dark, wiping makeup from her face with cold hands. The tremble in her fingers. The way she'd said I'm not a good person like it was a diagnosis she'd accepted a long time ago.

"Do you want me to end it?" Laurel asked. "The fake relationship. I can tell people we broke up. I'll deal with Derrick. I'll find another way."

Jess was quiet for a long time. Laurel could see the internal war playing out behind her eyes. The desire to say yes, to rip the bandage off, fighting against the pragmatic understanding that Ana's plan, hateful as it was, actually worked.

"No," Jess finally said, the word heavy with resignation. "It's keeping you safe. That matters more than how I feel about it." She sniffed, hard, and straightened her spine, and Laurel watched the captain reassemble herself in real time. "But I swear to God, if she kisses you again without asking, I'm going to finish what Sarah started."

"Noted." Laurel squeezed her hand. "Can I walk you to class?"

"I'm skipping," Jess said. "Miss Vick let me in the band room. Said I could stay here until next period when she has a class."

"Then I'm staying too."

"You have English—"

"And you have a busted face and you've been crying. English will survive without me."

Jess opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. The fight went out of her, and she leaned back against the wall, her head tipping to rest against Laurel's shoulder.

"Thank you," Jess whispered.

Laurel rested her cheek against Jess's hair. It smelled like the lavender shampoo from the Perot house, and underneath it, faintly, something else—vanilla and cigarettes.

"Always," Laurel said.

The rest of the school day passed in a blur of whispered gossip and loaded glances. By lunch, the rumor of Sarah Snyder's suspension had fully detonated across the student body. The cheerleaders were in visible disarray. Ana presided over the wreckage with the serene composure of a queen who had successfully executed a coup, eating a salad at her usual table like nothing had happened.

Laurel sat with Jess and the guard kids in the cafeteria, ignoring the stares, eating a sandwich.

When the final bell rang, Laurel found Jess at her locker.

"Come on," Laurel said. "I'm walking you home."

Jess didn't argue.

They walked through the November cold, their breath fogging between them, shoulders close enough to brush with every step. The sky was the color of old pewter, low clouds pressing down on the town like a lid. Jess was quiet—not the tense, loaded silence of the band room, but something softer. The silence of someone who had emptied themselves out and was resting in the hollow.

They turned onto Jess's street. The Perot house came into view—porch light on, as always—and Laurel saw something that made her steps slow.

A familiar Saturn was parked in the driveway.

Jess noticed it at the same time. "Is that—"

"That's Dani's car."

They exchanged a glance.

Laurel pushed open the front door, and the warmth of the Perot house engulfed them—vanilla air freshener, the hum of the furnace, the specific domestic comfort that Laurel associated with safety. From the living room, she heard voices.

Gina's voice, bright and animated: "—and I told him, I said, Dennis, if you think I'm going to pay forty dollars for a tire rotation when YouTube exists, you've lost your damned mind—"

And then a laugh. Low, warm, genuine. Dani's laugh.

They stepped into the living room. Gina was in her worn floral armchair, a mug of coffee balanced on the arm, looking like she'd been holding court for at least an hour. Dani was in the chair across from her, the straight-backed one that Gina usually reserved for guests, and she stood up when they came in, or rather, she tried to stand up and the chair caught on the rug and she sort of lurched upward in a graceless tangle of long limbs, grabbing the arm of the chair to steady herself.

"Hey," Dani said, recovering with the specific brand of nonchalance that meant she was embarrassed. "You're back."

But Laurel wasn't looking at Dani's face. She was looking at the kitchen table, visible through the open doorway, where a glass jar was filled with flowers—yellow sunflowers and white daisies, bright and defiant against the grey November light filtering through the window.

"You brought flowers," Laurel said.

Dani shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans—black, ripped at the knees, paired with a grey thermal that she'd pushed up to her elbows, revealing the dark line work of her forearm tattoos. Her lip ring caught the light as she bit down on it.

"They're for Jess," Dani said. "Because of her face. And, you know. The whole getting punched thing. I figured..." She trailed off, one hand emerging from her pocket to gesture vaguely, like the flowers were self-explanatory and words were a waste of everyone's time. "Seemed appropriate. As appropriate as ‘I'm sorry you got your face split open by a super bigot can be."

Jess stood in the doorway, her denim jacket hanging off one shoulder, her bruised face catching the warm light of the living room. She looked at the flowers. She looked at Dani.

"You bought me flowers," Jess said. Her voice had gone very soft.

"Don't make it weird," Dani said. "I bought you flowers because you got decked at a Halloween party. It's not a grand gesture, it's basic human decency."

"You arranged them in a jar."

"Gina helped."

"I did not," Gina called from the armchair, not looking up from the magazine she'd started leafing through. "She asked me for a vase and I told her we don't own a vase and she spent ten minutes washing out a pickle jar. It was very sweet."

Jess crossed the room and hugged Dani. It was quick and fierce, Jess burying her face in Dani's shoulder for just a moment, Dani's hands coming up to rest on her back, one palm flat between her shoulder blades. From where Laurel stood, she could see Dani's expression over Jess's head, the punk rock armor dissolving for half a second into something raw and tender before she rebuilt it.

"Thank you," Jess mumbled against Dani's collarbone.

"Shut up," Dani whispered back.

Gina turned a page of her magazine with theatrical disinterest. Laurel caught the smallest smile on her face.

The three of them ended up in Jess's room, which was the natural gravitational endpoint of any gathering in the Perot house. The walls were still the garish lilac and mint green that Jess had painted in seventh grade and never gotten around to redoing, plastered with color guard photos and concert posters and a world map with pins in all the places Jess wanted to visit someday. The desk was buried under textbooks. The bed was unmade. Three color guard flags leaned in the corner like sentinels.

Jess sat on the bed with her back against the headboard, the ice pack returned to their post against her cheek. Laurel sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed, her boots kicked off, her hoodie sleeves pulled over her hands. Dani commandeered the desk chair, spinning it around to straddle it backwards, her chin resting on her folded arms along the backrest.

"So," Dani said, looking directly at Laurel with an expression that was equal parts amused and dangerous. "You're dating Ana Yankowski."

Laurel groaned. "Fake dating."

"Mhm. Fake dating. The girl who kissed you. What twice now? In front of God, your dad, and Hunter and the entire—"

"Can we not?"

"We can absolutely not. We can also absolutely discuss it, because I have questions and they are multiplying."

Jess made a sound that might have been a laugh if it didn't clearly hurt her face. "Get in line."

Dani pointed at Jess without looking away from Laurel. "See? She has questions too. This is important."

Laurel pulled a pillow into her lap and squeezed it. "It's a cover story. For Derrick. And for Ana. She's terrified her mom's going to find out she's—that she likes girls, and I need a reason for Derrick to stop looking at me sideways. Montana having a cheerleader girlfriend solves both problems."

"Temporarily," Jess said.

"Everything in my life is temporary right now."

The room went quiet. Dani's fingers drummed against the back of the chair—a nervous habit Laurel recognized from years of proximity—and then she sighed, a long, theatrical exhale.

"Okay. Fine. I hate it, but fine. As long as we're clear that if she puts her hands on you again without permission, I'm going to have a conversation with her that involves significantly less talking and significantly more of me being a problem."

“Like last time you two were alone together?” Jess sniped.

“Easy, captain.”

"Noted," Laurel said, and the tension in the room broke by a degree.

They talked. About the suspension, about the video, about the cheerleaders' visible panic in the cafeteria. Dani had gossip from Marlene's—apparently two of Sarah's friends had come in for milkshakes after school, looking shell-shocked, and Marlene had overheard them saying Sarah's parents were considering legal action against the school for the expulsion hearing.

"Good luck with that," Jess said darkly. "There's a video. With audio. And a dozen witnesses."

"And a state senator who's already made the call," Dani added. "Ana doesn't lose."

"Ana doesn't play fair," Jess corrected.

"Same thing, in this town."

Dani shifted the subject with the casual grace of someone who'd spent a lifetime navigating emotional minefields. She started talking about how Marlene had started calling her "kid" in a way that was gruff and proprietary and oddly touching.

"She doesn't know," Dani clarified, catching Laurel's look. "About you. About any of it. She just thinks I'm some runaway from California who needed a job. But she talks about you sometimes—about her ‘nephew’, about how worried she is. She says you look thin."

"I am thin," Laurel said.

"You're too thin," Jess and Dani said simultaneously, then looked at each other with identical expressions of startled recognition.

"Jinx," Dani said, grinning. "You owe me a soda."

Laurel watched them and felt something loosen in her chest. A knot she hadn't known she was carrying, one she'd been tying tighter every day since Dani arrived in Laurel. She'd been so afraid of this—of Dani and Jess occupying the same space, of the awkwardness and the jealousy and the territorial dynamics that felt inevitable when the two most important people in your life had independent claim to different versions of you.

She'd imagined fights. She'd imagined cold silence and loaded glances and the slow, agonizing process of having to choose. She'd lain awake at night in her barricaded room running scenarios in which Dani and Jess circled each other like wary cats, and she was the scrap of food between them.

Instead, they were here, together.

Dani had her chin propped on her arms, her dark eyes bright with the specific joy of someone who lived to provoke, and Jess was gesturing with the ice pack, her bruised face animated for the first time all day, and they were—they were laughing together. and for five minutes, ten minutes, some uncounted stretch of time, they were just three girls in a bedroom, being young, being stupid, being alive.

Dani started a playlist on her phone. She propped it against Jess's desk lamp and the tinny speakers filled the room with The Runaways, then Bikini Kill.

The afternoon slid by. Dani migrated from the chair to the floor, then from the floor to the bed, her long legs stretched across the mattress in a way that forced Jess to shift to accommodate her. At some point, Dani started braiding Laurel's hair—an old habit, something she used to do on the rooftop in California—and Jess found herself watching with visible curiosity.

"You're good at that," Jess said.

"I've had practice." Dani's fingers worked through Laurel's auburn hair, separating sections with practiced ease. "When we were in Marisol Heights, I used to braid her hair before guard practice. She has this cowlick right here—" she tugged gently at a strand near Laurel's temple "—that fights you every time."

"I know about the cowlick," Jess said.

"You know about it?"

"I've been doing her hair for guard since August."

They looked at each other over the top of Laurel's head—Dani's hands still tangled in her hair, Jess leaning forward—and something passed between them that Laurel felt more than saw. An acknowledgment.

"Huh," Dani said.

"Huh," Jess echoed.

Laurel sat between them and felt warm and safe and confused and grateful and something else—something she didn't have a name for yet—all at once.

She left at five, when the sky was already darkening to charcoal and the temperature had dropped enough to make her breath visible before it left her mouth. Dani walked her down to the porch. Jess stayed inside, waving from the window.

"Saturday," Dani said, leaning against the porch railing. "You're going to Missoula with Ana?"

"For the clothes thing. Yeah." Laurel pulled her hoodie tighter. "She's buying me stuff for the—the cover. The boyfriend wardrobe."

Dani's jaw tightened, barely perceptible. "And you're okay with that?"

"I don't love it. But she offered to buy me other stuff too. Makeup. Things for—for Laurel."

Something in Dani's expression softened. "Okay. That's... okay. Just be careful with her."

"I will."

Dani looked at her for a long moment, the porch light casting half her face in warm gold and leaving the other half in shadow. Her lip ring glinted. Her dark eyes held something Laurel couldn't quite reach.

"I'll be here when you get back," Dani said.

Laurel nodded and turned away before she could do something stupid like cry.

Derrick wasn't home. Night shift. The house was empty and dark, which was simultaneously a relief and its own kind of punishment. Relief because she didn't have to perform. Punishment because the silence in the Payton house was never really silence—it was the held breath of a building that had seen too much and said nothing.

She went upstairs. Moved the dresser against the door. Changed into sweats and an old tee shirt.

She sat on her bed and pulled her knees to her chest.

The warmth of Jess's house was already fading from her skin. The sound of Dani's laughter was already dimming in her memory, replaced by the creak of old floorboards and the distant hum of the refrigerator downstairs.

Her heart hurt.

It wasn't a metaphor. There was a physical sensation in her chest—a dull, persistent ache that sat behind her sternum and radiated outward, not sharp enough to be panic, not diffuse enough to be sadness. It was specific. Pointed. The ache of wanting something she could see but couldn't touch.

She wasn't jealous. She kept telling herself that, testing the word against the feeling, and it didn't fit. Jealousy implied possession, implied that something was being taken from her, and nothing was being taken. Dani and Jess were right there. They'd spent the entire afternoon with her. They'd braided her hair and argued about music and made her laugh until her stomach hurt.

But she'd watched them. She'd watched the way Dani's hand had lingered on Jess's shoulder when she stood up. She'd watched Jess's eyes track Dani across the room with a focus that went beyond casual attention. She'd watched them exist in each other's space with an ease that was new—an ease that hadn't been there three weeks ago, when they'd met as rivals and circled each other with bared teeth.

Something had changed between them.

Something that existed in the spaces Laurel wasn't present for—in the nights at Dani's apartment, in the conversations she wasn't part of, in whatever was building between two girls who had found each other through the common thread of loving her.

And they weren't hiding it. That was the part that made her chest ache. The flirting was right there, in the open, performed casually in front of her like it was the most natural thing in the world. Dani calling Jess "babe." Jess blushing when Dani touched her.

They weren't waiting for her anymore.

The thought arrived with the cold clarity of a thing she'd been avoiding for days. Dani and Jess had found something in each other that didn't require Laurel as an intermediary. They didn't need the connecting thread. They'd become their own line.

And Laurel was happy for them. She was. The part of her brain that loved them both—fiercely, completely, in ways that felt too big for her damaged body to contain—was genuinely, authentically glad that they weren't alone. That Dani had someone warm to hold her on the nights when California felt impossibly far away. That Jess had someone who saw past the captain facade and touched the girl underneath.

So why did it hurt so much?

She reached for her headphones—the bulky over-ear ones that blocked out the world—and plugged them into her phone. She opened Spotify and hit shuffle on her playlist.

The tears came without warning.

Not the controlled, quiet tears of someone who'd had practice. These were the other kind—sudden, violent, the kind that wrenched themselves from somewhere deep in her body and clawed their way out through her throat. She curled onto her side, pulling her knees to her chest.

She didn't even know why she was crying. That was the worst part. She couldn't point to a single cause.

It was about being in a room with two people who loved her and feeling, somehow, more alone than she'd felt walking home in a blizzard.

It was about wanting to be wanted. Not as a project. Not as a mission. Not as the fragile, traumatized center of a rescue operation that required coordination and strategy and careful handling. She wanted someone to look at her the way Dani looked at Jess. She wanted someone to touch her the way Jess touched Dani. She wanted to be desired, simply, hungrily, without the asterisk of her history, without the weight of everything she carried.

The songs played on. The tears kept coming. She pressed her face into the pillow and let the sound fill her headphones until it drowned out everything else—the house, the town, the silence, the ache—until she was just a body in the dark, crying for reasons she couldn't name.

She fell asleep like that. Headphones on.

Daniela Rivera, Laurel, Montana, November 3rd, 2018

Saturday morning hit Dani like a truck made of sunlight and bad decisions.

She was standing in the tiny kitchenette of apartment 2B in boxer shorts and a worn Ramones tank top, squinting at the coffee maker like it had personally wronged her, when the knock came. Three sharp raps on the faded door with its slightly crooked number.

Dani glanced at the clock on the microwave. 8:47 AM. Sam was at the gas station—Saturday shift. Laurel was already gone, picked up by Ana at eight for the Missoula trip, a fact that sat in Dani's stomach like a stone she'd swallowed and couldn't quite digest. The idea of Laurel spending the day with Ana Yankowski—in a car, in stores, trying on clothes, being shaped and styled by someone whose motives Dani still didn't trust—made her jaw tight every time she thought about it.

Which was approximately every forty seconds.

Three more raps. Louder.

"Hold on," Dani called, pulling the door open with one hand while the other held the coffee carafe mid-pour.

The woman on the other side of the threshold was five-foot-seven with a blunt black bob that stopped at her jaw, small gold hoops, and a rust-colored corduroy jacket over a black turtleneck. She carried a leather weekender bag on one shoulder and a paper cup of coffee in her free hand. Her dark eyes—identical to Dani's in color and shape, though steadier, more practiced at holding still—swept over Dani with the rapid, comprehensive assessment of someone who'd been doing this exact inventory for years.

"You look like shit," Sofia Rivera said.

Dani stared at her. The coffee carafe tilted dangerously in her hand. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

"Checking on you."

"You flew here to check on me."

"To the Bozeman airport, technically. Six AM flight to Billings, rental car to Laurel. I've been driving for an hour and a half and I haven't eaten. Are you going to let me in, or do I need to stand in this hallway and critique your pajamas from out here?"

Dani stepped back. Sofia entered the apartment, her gaze cataloguing the space the way she catalogued everything—quickly, efficiently, without visible judgment but with the unmistakable thoroughness of an older sister who had been worrying professionally since she was sixteen.

The twinkle lights. The Runaways poster. The colorful rug. The futon, currently unmade, with its tangle of blankets and—

Sofia stopped.

There were two pillows on the futon. And a second coffee mug on the floor beside it, half-full, with a smudge of lip gloss on the rim.

"You have company," Sofia said.

The bathroom door opened. Jess stepped out in an oversized band tee—one of Dani's, a Black Flag shirt that hung to mid-thigh—her blonde hair sleep-tousled, the butterfly bandages on her cheek vivid against her skin. She froze when she saw Sofia.

"Um," Jess said.

"Um," Sofia echoed, looking between them.

Dani set the coffee carafe down with a thunk. "Jess, this is my sister. Sofia. Sofia, this is Jess. She's—we're—she stayed over because—"

"I had a bad night," Jess supplied quickly, then seemed to realize this didn't explain why she was wearing Dani's shirt and… nothing else. "A bad... week. There was an incident at a party and I got hit and Dani's been helping me and—"

"Your face," Sofia said, her expression shifting. She crossed the room in two strides and tilted Jess's chin toward the light with a gentleness that contrasted sharply with her no-nonsense entrance. "What happened?"

"Class ring," Jess said. "It's healing."

"The butterfly closures are good." Sofia released her chin. "Someone knew what they were doing."

"That was Dani."

Sofia glanced at Dani. Something complicated moved behind her eyes—pride, maybe, or the bittersweet recognition that her little sister had learned first aid not from a textbook but from a life that required it.

"I'm going to get dressed," Jess announced, grabbing her jeans from the chair and retreating to the bathroom with the urgent efficiency of someone who had just met their girlfriend's sister with no underwear on.

The bathroom door clicked shut. Dani and Sofia looked at each other.

"So," Sofia said.

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You're about to."

Sofia sat on the edge of the futon, setting her coffee on the floor. She was doing the thing—the patient, composed, Sofia-sits-and-waits thing that Dani had always found simultaneously infuriating and effective. The therapy posture. The "I have all day" posture.

Dani crossed her arms over her chest, realized her tank top had ridden up, and tugged it down. The motion exposed the left side of her ribcage, and Sofia's gaze snagged there—on the tattoo that climbed Dani's ribs in dark, delicate ink. Bay laurel leaves, a cascade of them down her ribs, and it was new. Sofia hadn't seen it before.

"Laurel leaves," Sofia said quietly. "Bay laurel."

Dani pulled the tank top down harder. "It's just a tattoo."

"Laurel leaves. On your ribs." Sofia's voice was careful, the way it got when she was navigating something fragile. "Huh."

"Sofia."

"I'm not saying anything."

"You're saying 'huh' in that voice that means you're saying a lot."

Sofia held up her hands in surrender. Then, in the same fluid motion, she reached out and caught Dani's wrist.

The touch was gentle but deliberate. Sofia turned Dani's arm over. She ran her thumb along the skin there, her eyes were searching. Reading. Looking for something specific beneath the ink.

Dani jerked her arm away.

"Don't," Dani said, and her voice had gone flat, a door slamming shut. "Don't do that."

"Dani—"

"I said don't.”

Sofia's expression didn't change, but something behind her eyes flinched. The careful composure held, but Dani could see the cracks in it—the old fault lines that ran through their entire relationship, through the years of absence and the resentment and the guilt.

"I'm not checking you like you're Marianne," Sofia said. "I'm checking you because the last time I accidentally saw your arms—"

"The last time you saw my arms, I was stupid and hurting, and you walked into my room without knocking and I told you to get out and you treated me like I was made of glass for three months." Dani's voice was rising. She could feel it, the heat climbing her throat, the old anger surfacing like a reflex. "I'm not doing this. I'm not your project, Sofia. I'm not your broken little sister who needs monitoring."

"You are my sister," Sofia said, and for the first time, her composure cracked. "That's all you are. My sister. And when I got the call from that school in 2017, when I drove down and found you sleeping on Sam's floor fifteen pounds underweight with your knuckles bloody from punching a wall, I made a promise to myself that I would never stop checking. I'm not apologizing for that."

Dani's jaw worked. She turned away, facing the window, her arms wrapped around herself. Through the glass, the sky was grey and low, the November cold pressing against the pane.

"My wrists are fine," Dani said after a moment. Quieter. "I haven't... I don't do that anymore. Not since Oakland."

"Okay," Sofia said.

"I'm serious."

"I believe you."

The silence hung between them, thick and tangled with history. The bathroom faucet ran—Jess, giving them space, probably pressing her ear against the door and trying to decide if she needed to intervene.

Sofia broke the quiet first. "The girl in the bathroom."

"Jess."

"Is she your girlfriend?"

Dani turned back. "It's complicated."

"Complicated how?"

"Complicated in that I'm also still in love with Laurel, and Jess is also in love with Laurel, and Jess and I are..." Dani gestured vaguely. "A thing. That's happening. Concurrently."

Sofia blinked. "So you're polyamorous now?"

"I don't know what I am, Sofia. I'm eighteen years old and I'm living in a studio apartment in Montana and my ex-girlfriend is being held hostage by her father and I'm sleeping with her best friend and I work at a diner run by her aunt. Labels feel a little aspirational right now."

Sofia's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile, but the ghost of one. "Fair."

Dani dropped onto the futon beside her, the cushion sagging under their combined weight. She pulled a blanket over her lap and hugged a pillow to her chest—a defensive posture, childlike, the kind of thing she only did around Sofia, who had known her since before she had defenses.

"What about you?" Dani asked, with the pointed deflection of someone who desperately wanted the spotlight off herself. "How's Francesca?"

Something shifted in Sofia's expression. A flicker. A tell.

"Francesca's fine."

"Mhm. And are you two still doing the whole 'roommates who look at each other like that' thing, or—"

"We're not dating," Sofia said.

"Mm."

"We're not dating." Sofia looked down at her hands. Then she added, barely above a murmur: "We're engaged."

Dani's brain short-circuited. She sat up straight, the pillow falling to the floor. "You're WHAT?"

"Engaged. We're engaged. She proposed in September. There's a ring. I didn't bring it because I didn't want to—I wasn't going to just show up wearing—"

"Sofia!" Dani grabbed her sister's shoulders, shaking her. "You're getting married? To Frankie? And you didn't tell me?"

"I'm telling you now!"

"It's November! September was two months ago!"

"I was working up to it—"

"Working up to—it's a phone call! 'Hey Dani, I'm getting married.' Five words! You could have texted!"

Sofia's composure finally fully broke, and she laughed—a real laugh, helpless and bright, the kind Dani almost never heard from her, the kind that reminded her of the girl Sofia had been before she'd had to become the woman she was.

"I wanted to tell you in person," Sofia said. "That's part of why I'm here."

Dani stared at her. The anger—the reflex anger, the anger that lived in the space between them like a permanent weather system—softened. Not gone. Never gone. But quieter.

"Congratulations," Dani said. The word felt strange in her mouth, too formal for the moment, but she meant it. "Frankie's... she's good. She's really good for you."

"She is." Sofia's face was doing something vulnerable and unguarded that Dani almost couldn't bear to look at. "She wanted to come. She sent you this—" Sofia dug into her jacket pocket and produced a small package wrapped in brown paper. "She made it."

Dani unwrapped it. Inside was a hand-knit beanie, deep teal, with a tiny embroidered bay leaf on the brim.

Her throat closed.

"Tell her I said thanks," Dani managed.

"Tell her yourself. She answers her phone, unlike some people."

The bathroom door opened. Jess emerged, fully dressed now in her own jeans and Dani's flannel thrown over her shirt, looking cautiously between them.

"Is it safe?" Jess asked.

"It's safe," Sofia said, standing and extending her hand. "I'm sorry about the ambush. I'm Sofia. Dani's older sister."

Jess shook her hand. "Jess Perot. I'm Dani's..." She glanced at Dani.

"Thing," Dani supplied. "She's my thing."

"Romantic," Jess deadpanned.

Sofia looked between them and smiled—small, real. "How's the face, Jess?"

"Healing. Thanks for asking. So, you flew up from Oakland?"

"This morning." Sofia sat back down, retrieving her coffee. "I try to check in when I can. Dani has a talent for finding high-stress situations and moving into them."

"I'm right here," Dani said.

"I know. Does it annoy you?" Sofia took a sip of her coffee, her composure fully restored, and then her expression shifted into something more serious. "Okay, time to get serious. I need to talk to you about Marianne."

The temperature in the room dropped. Not literally, the apartment was still cranked to its usual California-nostalgic eighty degrees but Dani felt it in her bones. The name Marianne did that. It always did that.

"No," Dani said.

"Dani—"

"I said no. I don't want to hear about her. I don't want to talk about her. I don't—"

"She's using a cane."

Dani stopped.

The words hung in the overheated air of the apartment, and Dani felt something inside her rattle—something she'd locked in a box and shoved to the back of a shelf and refused to look at for years. She'd built her entire emotional architecture around not thinking about Marianne Rivera. Not about the house on Oleander Street. Not about the doormat that said BLESS THIS MESS. Not about the woman who'd looked at a photo of her daughter kissing a girl and said get out.

But a cane. Marianne was using a cane.

"What do you mean?" Dani heard herself ask. Her voice sounded distant, like it belonged to someone else.

"She's in an assisted living facility in San Jose." Sofia's voice was measured, clinical, the way she delivered information when she knew it would hurt. "Her condition has progressed faster than they expected. She's having trouble with mobility. She uses a cane for most things now, and on bad days, a wheelchair."

Dani's hands were shaking. She clenched them into fists and pressed them against her thighs.

"She asks about you," Sofia said quietly. "Every time I visit. She asks if you're okay."

"She doesn't get to ask about me." The words came out jagged, broken glass in her mouth. "She kicked me out. She chose her pride over her daughter. She doesn't get to—"

"I know."

"—sit in some facility feeling sorry for herself and pretend she cares—"

"I know, Dani."

"Then why do you keep bringing it up?"

Sofia held her gaze. Patient. Steady. The wall Dani couldn't crack. "Because she's not doing well. And I think, when this is all over—not now, not soon, but eventually—you might regret not having the option to see her."

"I won't."

"Maybe not. But I want you to have the choice." Sofia paused. "That's all I've ever wanted to give you. Choices."

The word choices landed somewhere deep, in the place where the resentment lived—the resentment that had fermented for years, since Sofia had walked out of Oleander Street at seventeen with her guitar and her girlfriend's number and left Dani and Bree behind. Francesca's parents had taken Sofia in. They'd had space for one runaway Rivera girl, not three. Sofia got a bed in a warm house. Dani got a condemned roof and a mother who saw her as a sin.

When Sofia showed up in 2017 to help, Dani had been grateful and furious in equal measure. Grateful because she was drowning. Furious because Sofia had left the water first.

"There's something else," Sofia said.

"Of course there is."

"I reached out to Tia Rosa in Seattle."

Dani went very still.

"Rosa's doing well. She's teaching at a community college." Sofia reached into her jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. "And Bree is with her, also doing well. I have her number, she finally agreed to give it to us."

Sofia unfolded the paper and held it out. "I have it here. If you want it."

Dani stared at the paper. Her little sister, reduced to digits on a folded scrap.

She took it. Her fingers were trembling so badly she could barely hold it.

"She's sixteen now," Sofia said. "Rosa says she's doing okay. She's in school. She cut her hair short, apparently. Rosa said she looks like you."

Dani pressed the paper against her chest, over her heart, and bent forward, and Sofia's hand was on her shoulder immediately, and for a moment the three of them existed in the small, overheated apartment in a configuration that felt almost like a family—Jess's hand on her back, Sofia's hand on her shoulder, the paper with Bree's number held against her sternum.

"Thank you," Dani whispered.

Sofia squeezed her shoulder. Then, with the practiced shift of someone who knew how much emotion her sister could handle before she shut down, she straightened and changed her tone.

"So. Laurel."

Dani sat up, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand. "What about her?"

"I want to see her while I'm here. I'm staying until Monday—I booked a room at that sad little motel on the highway. If she's available—"

"She's in Missoula today." Jess spoke up from beside Dani, her voice steady. "With Ana. Shopping."

"Ana being—"

"The fake relationship, she sent a state senator after Sarah Snyder, the one who punched me, and is currently buying Laurel a boyfriend wardrobe on her mother's credit card," Dani summarized. "Yes. That Ana."

Sofia blinked. "I've been here for twenty minutes and I already need a chart."

"Welcome to Laurel, Montana," Jess said.

Sofia pulled her phone from her pocket and checked something, frowning. "Dani told me about what happened to Laurel. The conversion therapy. The custody transfer. The grandfather—Richard."

"Richard Parker," Dani confirmed, her voice going hard.

"I've been thinking about him." Sofia leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "Laurel turns eighteen in—what, January?"

“January 4th." Dani and Jess said simultaneously.

"Right. So she's almost clear. Derrick's custody ends, she's a legal adult, she can walk away." Sofia paused. "But Richard is still out there. He has money. He has lawyers. And he's already demonstrated a willingness to use the legal system as a weapon against his own granddaughter."

Jess's expression tightened. "You think he'd try something after she turns eighteen?"

"I think a man who sent his sixteen-year-old grandchild to conversion therapy and then sued for the right to continue controlling her medical care is not someone who stops at eighteen." Sofia's voice was even, analytical—the voice of someone who'd spent time thinking through worst-case scenarios. "Laurel's going to need documentation. Medical records, evidence of the abuse at Wholeness Ministries, testimony from the people who know what happened. If Richard tries to claim she's mentally unfit, or contests her medical autonomy, or tries to freeze her trust—if there is a trust, or tries to force a conservatorahip—she needs to be prepared."

Dani felt the familiar surge of protective rage—hot, acidic, the kind that made her want to drive to San Francisco and burn Richard Parker's condo to the ground. "He wouldn't."

"He would." Sofia met her eyes. "You know he would."

Dani looked away. Out the window. At the grey November sky pressing down on a town that had never wanted any of them.

"Tomorrow," Dani said. "Laurel will be back tomorrow. I'll talk to her about seeing you."

"Okay." Sofia stood, brushing off her jeans. "I'm going to go check into the motel and eat something that isn't from a vending machine. Text me." She looked at Jess. "It was nice to meet you, Jess. Take care of my sister."

"I don't need taking care of," Dani said, standing too, pulling herself up to her full five-ten—three inches taller than Sofia, which she'd been leveraging as a power move since her growth spurt at fifteen, though it had never once worked because Sofia's authority had nothing to do with height.

"Of course not," Sofia said, patting her on the cheek. "You're a tower of independence and self-sufficiency." She picked up her weekender bag, shouldered it. At the door, she turned back. "The beanie looks good on you, by the way."

Dani looked down. She'd put on Francesca's teal beanie without realizing it.

"Get out of my apartment," Dani said.

Sofia grinned—an expression so rare on her composed face that it transformed her entirely, made her look twenty-one and hopeful and human—and pulled the door shut behind her.

The apartment was quiet. Dani stood in the middle of it, holding the paper with Bree's number, wearing a beanie knit by her future sister-in-law, and tried to hold all of it at once—the love and the resentment and the grief and the gratitude—without flying apart.

Jess stepped closer. Her hand found Dani's.

"Your sister is terrifying," Jess said.

"You have no idea."

"I like her."

"Everyone likes her. It's incredibly annoying."