Ranked: Where We Fall

Chapter 1: Two Names, One Line Maya's POV The hallway outside the administration building smelled like floor wax and somebody's anxiety. Mine, probably. I'd been standing in the same spot for four minutes. I knew because I'd checked my phone twice and both times told myself I wasn't nervous. I was just waiting. There was a difference. A significant one. The ranking board wasn't even anything dramatic. It was a corkboard with a printed sheet of paper pinned to the center. White paper, black ink, blue Blackwell Academy header at the top. The kind of thing that looked completely ordinary until you understood what it meant to every single person crowded around it. First semester rankings determined your academic standing for the year. Your standing determined your access to the senior mentorship program, the scholarship extensions, the letters that came with names attached to them — names that opened doors that didn't open for most people. For me, it determined whether my parents' sacrifice had been worth something or just expensive. I pushed through the edge of the crowd. Nobody moved for me, but I was small enough and determined enough that I found gaps where other people didn't see them. A girl with a plaid headband said "excuse you" when my elbow caught her arm. I said "sorry" without stopping. The sheet came into view. I found my name in three seconds. Maya Lin. I was looking for it in the top five, which was where I'd placed every practice assessment since September. My eyes went left to the number. One. I blinked. Then I looked at the number next to the name directly below mine. One. I looked at that name. Ethan Vance. The hallway went quiet. Not completely, not all at once, but in that specific way where the noise doesn't actually stop but your brain stops registering it. I read both lines again. Maya Lin. Ethan Vance. Same score in every column. The footnote at the bottom of the sheet said: First shared rank placement in Blackwell Academy history. Someone near the back let out a short breath. "That can't be right." A hand reached toward the paper, stopped an inch from it, then dropped. "Don't touch it," another student said. "It's official." I read the two names again. My name. His name. The same number beside both. A phone camera clicked. Then another. "Who got the higher raw score?" someone asked. "They're tied across every column." The words moved through the crowd in fragments. I heard them without turning toward the voices. My thumbnail pressed into the side of my phone hard enough to leave a pale crescent in the skin. I released it. The paper remained exactly where it was. So did my name. "Oh," I said. Out loud. To nobody. "That's never happened before." The girl beside me had her phone up, already taking a picture. "Like, ever." "I know," I said. "You're her." She lowered her phone and looked at me. "You're Maya Lin." "Yeah." "And he's—" She turned, and I followed her gaze without meaning to. Ethan Vance was standing at the far end of the hallway near the window. He was taller than I'd registered from across a lecture hall. Dark jacket, no tie, which was technically a uniform violation that somehow looked intentional on him. He was talking to two people I didn't recognize, and while he talked, someone approached from the side with a planner open and a pen extended. Without breaking his sentence, without even glancing down, he took the pen and signed it. Handed it back. Kept talking. He hadn't looked at the board yet. That was the thing that stuck. Everyone else in this hallway was either staring at the results or staring at their phones or staring at each other with the kind of expressions that meant they were already doing math. Ethan Vance was standing twenty feet from the most significant announcement of the academic year and he was signing someone's planner like it was a Tuesday. Like he already knew. Or like it didn't matter. I couldn't decide which one bothered me more. I looked back at the board. One. One. Both of us. I had come to Blackwell on grades alone. No legacy. No donation wing. No grandfather's name on a library. My father worked sixty-hour weeks and my mother ran a school and they didn't complain, not once, not where I could hear it, and I had spent four years making sure that meant something. And now my name was sitting next to his like we'd arrived at the same place the same way. We hadn't. I took a picture of the board. Not for anyone else. For myself. So I could look at it later when the feeling in my chest had settled into something I could actually name. Priya appeared at my shoulder from nowhere, which was her general mode of existing. "Okay," she said. "Before you say anything, I need you to know I am completely calm." "You don't look calm." "I'm calm on the inside." She grabbed my arm. "Maya. Your name is first." "His name is also first." "But yours is physically above his on the paper." "That's alphabetical." She made a face. "Can you let me have this for thirty seconds?" I looked at the board one more time. Then I looked at Ethan Vance again. He'd finished signing the planner. He was listening to something the taller of the two people was saying, and there was the faint outline of something on his face, not quite a smile, not quite nothing. He still hadn't looked at the board. I filed that away. I didn't know why yet. But I filed it. "Thirty seconds," I told Priya. "Then we go to breakfast." She pumped her fist. "I'm getting you something with caramel in it." "You don't have to" "Maya. You just tied the most untouchable rank in Blackwell history on your first semester. I'm getting you something with caramel in it." I didn't argue. I turned away from the board and walked with her toward the east corridor, and I did not look back at Ethan Vance again. I thought about looking back. That was the part I didn't tell Priya.