THE BOY I SWORE TO HATE

Rules of Engagement

I didn't prepare anything.

That was a choice. I made it consciously, on the bus to school, watching the city blur past the window. Preparing meant sitting down the night before with a notepad and writing Marcus Reid's name at the top of a page and building something around it. Preparing meant treating this like a real partnership. Like something I'd chosen.

I hadn't chosen it. So I arrived at Study Room C with my regular notebook, my regular pen, and absolutely nothing else.

He was already there.

This was the second time in three days I'd walked into a room and found Marcus Reid already in it, already settled, already looking like the space had been arranged around him. He had a folder open on the table. Printed pages, color-coded tabs, a highlighter lined up parallel to the spine. His blazer was draped over the back of the chair instead of worn, sleeves pushed to his elbows in a way that managed to look deliberate.

He looked up when I came in. Didn't say anything. Watched me sit down across from him and set my single notebook on the table and that was it, that was all I'd brought, and something moved across his face. Not contempt. Closer to assessment.

"You didn't prepare," he said.

"I prepared." I opened the notebook to a blank page. "In my head."

He looked at the blank page. He looked at me. He didn't say what he was thinking, which was somehow more irritating than if he had.

"I have a strategy document," he said.

"I can see that."

"Do you want to look at it?"

I did want to look at it. I wanted to look at it the way you want to look at something when you already know it's going to be better than what you have, which in this case was a blank page and a bad attitude. But wanting and showing were different things.

"Sure," I said. Like it didn't matter. Like I was doing him a favor.

He slid it across the table.

It was good.

I hate that it was good. I hate that I read through the first page and had to keep my face completely neutral because my first instinct was to say so out loud. He'd broken the competition into phases, regional qualifier, semifinal, nationals, with a different preparation approach for each, accounting for the fact that the format changed at every level. He'd pulled results from the last six years to identify patterns in question categories. He'd noted where Hawthorne's previous teams had lost points and built a training schedule around closing those gaps.

It was thorough and it was structured and it was exactly the kind of document I would have made if I'd been willing to sit down and make it.

I set it down.

"Before we go any further," I said, "we need to establish some rules."

He leaned back in his chair. Not relaxed, watchful. "What kind of rules?"

"The kind that make this survivable." I kept my voice even. "We work together for the competition. That's it. No personal questions, no social overlap, we don't sit together at lunch, we don't acknowledge each other in the hallway unless it's about the championship. Work sessions only. Results matter. Nothing else does."

He was quiet for a moment. His pen turned once between his fingers, a slow, deliberate rotation, and then stopped.

"Fine," he said.

"Fine?"

"I said fine, Elena." The way he said my name was neutral. Not warm, not sharp. Just, precise. Like he was placing it exactly where he meant it to go. "You want ground rules. I have no problem with ground rules."

I waited for the but. There was no but.

"Then we agree," I said.

"We agree." He pulled the strategy document back toward him and turned to the second page. "Category breakdown. Sciences are our strongest combined area. Literature is the gap, I'm better at contemporary, you're better at classical based on your AP scores. We need to close it."

I blinked. "How do you know my AP scores?"

"The same way you know mine. Academic rankings are public within the school." He didn't look up. "You've read them."

I had read them. I wasn't going to confirm that.

"Contemporary literature," I said instead, and pulled the document back across the table to read the second page myself.

We worked for ninety minutes.

That's the part I wasn't expecting, not just that he was good, but that the ninety minutes went somewhere. We covered the category breakdown, argued about time allocation in a way that was almost productive, and established a draft schedule that neither of us was fully happy with, which probably meant it was fair. He knew things I didn't. I knew things he didn't. The spaces between us fit together in a way I didn't want to think about too carefully.

He was precise. Every point he made had a reason behind it. When I pushed back, and I pushed back on almost everything, partly because some of it deserved it and partly because I needed to establish early that I wasn't just going to agree with him, he didn't get defensive. He either conceded or he explained himself further, and both responses were given with the same level of attention. Like my disagreement was data he was factoring in rather than an obstacle to get around.

It made him very difficult to stay angry at.

Which made me angrier.

I was writing something down, a note about the history category, a gap we'd identified, when I felt it. The particular quality of someone's attention landing on you. I looked up.

He was watching me.

Not the way boys watch girls when they think you're not noticing. Not like that at all. More like, trying to work something out. Like there was a question he was running the numbers on and I was part of the equation. His expression was open in a way I hadn't seen on him before. Unguarded. Like he'd forgotten for a moment to make his face say nothing.

I held his gaze. "What?"

He didn't look away. He didn't look embarrassed about being caught looking. He just said, "Nothing," and dropped his eyes back to the document.

Nothing.

I stared at the word I'd just written, something about the French Revolution, completely unrelated, and waited for my pulse to stop doing whatever it was doing. It took longer than it should have.

This is a competition, I reminded myself. He is the person who took your scholarship. He is sitting across from you because Hawthorne put your names on the same sheet of paper, not because either of you chose it. Keep the rules. That's what the rules are for.

I went back to my notes.

We wrapped up at five-fifteen. I started stacking my papers, three pages of notes I'd filled without meaning to, and he closed the folder and clipped his highlighter back to the cover and for a few minutes we were just two people packing up at the end of a session, quiet and separate and fine.

I stood. Picked up my bag. Got as far as the door.

"Elena."

His voice was the same as it had been all afternoon. Measured. Unhurried. I turned around with my hand on the door frame.

He was still at the table, folder closed, watching me with that same look from before, the one that wasn't hostility and wasn't warmth and was something I genuinely could not categorize.

"You believe everything you were told about me, don't you." Not a question. He said it like a statement of fact he'd just confirmed, something he'd been turning over for two days and had finally landed on. "Everything. All of it."

The room was very quiet.

I could have said something sharp. I had several options loaded. But standing there with his eyes on me and ninety minutes of working beside him still in the air between us, I found I didn't want to perform certainty right now. I was tired.

"Shouldn't I?" I said instead.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"That depends," he said, "on who told you."

He picked up his bag and walked out past me, close enough that I had to take a half-step back, and then he was gone down the corridor and I was standing in the doorway of an empty room holding three pages of notes I hadn't planned to take, wondering why that sentence felt less like an answer and more like a door I hadn't known was there.