Love & Disobey

Chapter Two: The Name Everyone Knows

Aria's theory about invisibility had been tested across three high schools, two summer programs, and one deeply ill-advised semester abroad at seventeen, and it had never once failed her.

The theory was simple: in the first weeks of any new place, the people who stood out were the people who got consumed. They became the subject of opinions before they had a chance to form their own. They were assigned a role — the pretty one, the weird one, the one who tried too hard — and then spent the rest of their time there fighting it. The invisible ones, the ones who wore grey and sat in the middle and laughed at the right moments without saying anything memorable, got to watch. Got to choose. Got to decide who they wanted to be before anyone decided for them.

Aria had been choosing invisible since she was fourteen. She was very good at it.

She dressed accordingly. Dark jeans, a plain cream-coloured top, a jacket that was warm without being interesting. She pulled her hair back in a way that was tidy rather than styled. She wore no jewellery except the small gold ring on her right hand that had been her grandmother's and which she never took off, but which was small enough that it didn't count. She looked, she assessed in the bathroom mirror, like someone who was passing through.

Good. That was exactly right.

She ate breakfast alone in the kitchen — Marcus had already left, her mother was still sleeping, and the rest of the house was quiet in the particular way of large houses in the early morning, all that space holding its breath. She drank her coffee standing at the counter, looking out at the back garden in the early grey light, and told herself the day was going to be fine.

Then she picked up her bag, straightened her perfectly invisible jacket, and went to survive her first day.

---

Orientation was held in a lecture hall that smelled of new carpet and institutional coffee, and it was there, approximately seven minutes in, that Aria's invisibility theory encountered its first significant obstacle.

The obstacle sat down beside her, set a very large iced coffee on the fold-down desk despite the clearly posted signs about no food or drink, and said, without any preamble whatsoever: "You have excellent posture. Most people slump. I respect it."

Aria looked at her.

The girl was bright-eyed and sharp-faced, with the kind of energy that suggested she had already had two coffees before the iced one and was considering a third. Her hair was natural and gorgeous, pulled up loosely, and she was wearing an orange top that should not have worked as well as it did. She looked like someone who had never in her life considered being invisible and found the concept baffling.

"Thank you," Aria said carefully.

"I'm Jade. I know everyone here and I know everything about everyone here, which sounds like a brag but is actually a burden." She extended a hand. Her nails were painted yellow. "You're new. Transfer?"

"Second year. I moved here over the summer."

"From?"

Aria told her. Jade nodded as though filing this information in a specific and labelled drawer.

"Okay," Jade said. "I like you. I've decided. You have a good face — not, like, in a weird way, just in a 'you're actually listening to me' way, which is rarer than it should be." She turned back to the orientation presenter with the air of someone who had completed a task. Then, thirty seconds later, without turning: "What's your name?"

"Aria."

"Pretty. Unusual without being try-hard." A pause. "I'm going to introduce you to people. Don't argue. It'll be faster."

Aria thought about arguing. She decided, on reflection, that Jade was probably right.

---

By eleven o'clock, she had learned more about Crestwood College's social landscape than she'd learned about any school in the first month of attending it. Jade was, as advertised, a comprehensive and efficient source. She dispensed information the way other people breathed — continuously, without apparent effort, with the particular authority of someone who had never once been wrong about who mattered and why.

She covered the essential factions, the notable professors, the parties worth attending and the ones that were traps, the best and worst places to study, eat, park, and cry. She was funny and precise and Aria found herself laughing twice in the first hour, which was not something she had anticipated doing today.

Then, in the queue for lunch, Jade said: "Oh, and obviously the main thing you need to know about is Damien Stone."

Aria's hand stilled on her tray.

"Captain of the lacrosse team," Jade continued, in the reverent tone of someone reciting scripture. "Which, okay, lacrosse, but trust me it matters here. His family basically built two of the buildings on this campus. He's been here since first year and I have personally watched seventeen girls plan their entire semester around getting his attention, and I say that with no judgment because I understand the impulse completely." She paused to consider a sandwich. "He's also just — objectively, scientifically, measurably — the best-looking person within a thirty-mile radius. It's almost offensive. Like, some people are attractive, and some people are Damien Stone, and those are two different categories."

"Mm," Aria said.

"The girls who've dated him all say he's not actually a player, which is interesting — like, he dates, it ends, nobody seems to hate him after. Which is either a sign that he's genuinely decent or that he's so charming that they can't even be properly angry, and honestly either option is compelling." Jade picked up the sandwich. "Why do you look like you've seen a ghost?"

"I don't."

"You've gone a very specific shade of not-reacting. I notice things. It's my gift and my curse." Jade's eyes narrowed. "Do you know him?"

Aria set down her tray. She looked at Jade very directly and said: "If I tell you something, can you keep it to yourself? Completely to yourself. Not tell anyone, not hint at it, not even think about it loudly in a crowded room."

Jade's expression sharpened with the intensity of someone who has just been offered exactly the kind of information they most want. "Absolutely," she said, with complete and utter insincerity.

"I need you to actually mean that."

A beat. "Okay. Yes. I mean it. What?"

"He's my stepbrother," Aria said. "His father married my mother in June. I moved in last night."

The sandwich slipped. Jade caught it. She stared at Aria with the expression of someone whose entire understanding of the day had just been revised.

"You," she said slowly. "Live. In his house."

"I do."

"As of last night."

"As of last night."

Jade put the sandwich down. She appeared to need both hands free for what she was feeling. "Aria," she said, very carefully, "I need you to understand that you are now the most interesting person I have ever met in my entire life. And I once interviewed a man who claimed to have been abducted by aliens for a journalism class."

"Please don't tell anyone."

"I won't." She picked up the sandwich again. She was quiet for approximately four seconds, which seemed to be her absolute limit. "Okay but what is he like at home?"

---

She had four classes. She survived three of them without incident. It was the fourth — an afternoon literature seminar she had specifically chosen because it had had twelve students registered when she'd enrolled — that presented a problem.

It now had twenty-two students. The room was fuller than she'd planned for. She took a seat in the back row, opened her notebook, and was in the process of reminding herself that this was fine when the door opened and Damien Stone walked in with two people she didn't recognise.

The first was tall and loose-limbed, with an easy grin and the particular energy of someone who found most things funny and wasn't trying to hide it. He dropped into a seat with his long legs already taking up more room than strictly necessary, said something to Damien that made Damien's mouth twitch, and immediately looked around the room with the comfortable curiosity of someone who had never once felt out of place in his life.

The second was a girl with dark hair and the expression of someone who had arrived at a party and found it insufficiently exclusive. She sat down, crossed her arms, and proceeded to look at every female in the room with a quality of assessment that was not friendly.

Her eyes landed on Aria. Moved on. Aria released a breath.

Damien hadn't looked up from his phone.

He sat two rows ahead and one seat left, which placed him almost exactly in Aria's sightline if she looked at the front of the room, which she needed to do, because that was where the professor was. She spent the first fifteen minutes of the lecture developing an elaborate system for looking at the professor without looking at the back of Damien's head, which was directly in the way, and which was — she noted, clinically and without interest — exactly as well-structured from behind as it was from the front.

He did not once turn around.

This was ideal. This was exactly what she wanted. She wrote three pages of notes and retained approximately forty percent of them.

---

The corridor after class was full in the way that corridors after popular lectures always were — people slowing down, reforming into social groups, the whole room exhaling and rearranging itself. Damien's particular gravitational field was immediately visible: a cluster of people finding reasons to move toward him, conversations redirecting, the girl from class appearing at his elbow with something to say.

Aria kept her head down and moved along the wall. She had a clear path. She was going to take it. She was ten feet away, then eight, then six, and she was going to make it, she was actually going to make it —

His arm came out.

Not grabbing. Not aggressive. Just — there. Across the corridor in front of her, braced against the wall, blocking her path with the simple, unhurried certainty of someone who had decided this was where the arm was going to be.

She stopped. She looked up.

He was looking at her. The people around them were looking at the people around them. Nobody had noticed. His voice, when he spoke, was low enough that it stayed between the two of them, which she understood immediately was a deliberate choice.

"You didn't tell me you were starting here."

"I didn't think it was your business."

Something moved in his expression — not quite amusement, not quite irritation, not anything she could pin a name to. He studied her for a moment with that same quality of attention she'd felt across the dinner table the night before, the one that made her feel like he was seeing something she hadn't given him permission to see.

Then the arm dropped.

"Fair enough," he said.

She walked past him. She did not look back. She kept her pace even and her shoulders level and she did not, under any circumstances, let the arm drop too obviously from her thoughts until she was around the corner and out of the corridor entirely.

Then she leaned against the wall and breathed for a moment.

Fine, she told herself. Completely fine.

---

The kitchen that evening was a careful negotiation.

She arrived at half past seven, intending to make tea and retreat. He was already there, standing at the counter with his back to her, doing something with leftovers from the fridge. She considered retreating immediately. She decided that retreating immediately would be more noticeable than staying, which was the kind of logic that only held up if you didn't examine it too closely.

She filled the kettle. He moved to the other counter. She got a mug. He opened a cabinet — the one directly above her — reached past her without comment, took what he needed, stepped back. Neither of them spoke. The kettle began to boil. He put something in the microwave. She made her tea.

It was, she thought, the most elaborate silence she had ever participated in.

She took her tea. She left. She went upstairs without saying goodnight because goodnight would have required one of them to acknowledge that the other was a person in the room, and they had both, by unspoken agreement, decided not to do that tonight.

She was halfway through her reading when her phone buzzed.

Jade: okay I've been thinking about it all afternoon

Jade: you are SO not going to survive this semester

Jade: I say this with love

Jade: also please describe the kitchen in detail

Aria stared at her phone for a long moment.

She was horribly, deeply, entirely afraid that Jade was right.