Quarterback Hated Me First

IVY's POV There is a specific kind of loneliness that has nothing to do with being alone. I know this because I am surrounded by four hundred students every single day and I have never once felt anything other than completely, structurally alone. Not the sad kind. The kind you build yourself on purpose, brick by careful brick, because you figured out early that invisibility is safer than being seen by the wrong people. At Ashridge Preparatory Academy, being seen by the wrong people costs you everything. My name is Ivy Monroe. Senior year. Scholarship student. The kind of girl who eats lunch in the art supply closet not because she has nowhere else to go but because the closet doesn't have opinions about her. The cafeteria has opinions. The cafeteria has Vanessa Pierce and her constellation of perfect people who treat every meal like an audition for a life the rest of us aren't allowed to apply for. The closet has paint smell and silence. I'll take it every time. What I'm missing, if anyone were paying close enough attention to ask, is simple. I want to matter to someone in the ordinary, quiet way that most people take completely for granted. Not desperately. Not in the way that makes girls do foolish things for boys who don't deserve it. Just the way where your presence in a room changes something about the room. Where if you left, someone would notice the exact shape you left behind. I have one person like that. Maya Kim. She notices. Everyone else at Ashridge looks through me like I'm a window. I'm late this morning. My mother Elena worked an overnight shift at Mercy General and her car battery died at six a.m. in the hospital parking lot. Two buses and a fifteen minute walk in shoes with a worn left heel. I arrive with four minutes to spare and I use the side entrance because the side entrance has fewer people and fewer people means fewer chances for the day to go wrong before it's even started. English. Room 204. Mr. Davenport seats alphabetically which puts Monroe safely in the middle-back row. Not invisible enough to look like I'm hiding. Not exposed enough to become a target. I've calculated every seat in this school over three years. Middle-back is always the correct answer. I uncap my pen. Write the date at the top of my notebook page. Take the deliberate breath I always take on difficult mornings, slow, even, the breath that says you have done this before and you will do it again. The door opens six minutes after the bell. And the room changes. That is the only honest way to describe what happens when Jace Holloway walks in. The air in Room 204 reorganizes itself. Girls who were slumped over their desks sit up. Boys do the wordless chin-lift. Even Mr. Davenport who once made a varsity soccer captain cry over a misplaced comma, simply waves toward an open seat like he is honored by the opportunity to direct him somewhere. I know who Jace Holloway is the way everyone at Ashridge knows. You absorb it without trying, like the school colors and the fight song. Starting quarterback since sophomore year. Team captain. Son of Richard Holloway whose name is on three buildings and a parking structure. Tall in the way that takes up doorframes without effort. Dark hair that exists in a state of permanent effortlessness that I'm fairly certain requires significant effort. The kind of face that makes you look and then feel quietly annoyed at yourself for looking. I have a policy about people like him. Eyes down. Don't engage. Don't exist inside their orbit. The only open seat in the room is directly in front of mine. Of course it is. He drops into it like gravity is something he invented personally. He smells like something expensive and clean. He pulls out a leather notebook, actual leather, not the two-dollar spiral kind I have, and uncaps a pen and I think: fine. Proximity means nothing. I have survived three years at this school by refusing to assign meaning to things that don't require it. Eleven minutes into Davenport's lecture on the green light I am doing well. Writing notes. Invisible in exactly the way I practiced. Then Jace Holloway turns around. Not to speak to someone behind him. To look at me. His gaze moves slowly across my notebook, my worn cardigan, my lunch bag visible in the front pocket of my backpack. Three seconds. Then he turns to his friend Marcus and leans in close. He doesn't whisper quietly enough. "Who brings a brown bag lunch to Ashridge?" Almost amused. Almost curious, like I'm an interesting species he's never encountered before. "What's she saving up for? a second scholarship?" Marcus laughs. Someone nearby stifles a smile behind their hand. The class keeps moving around them like nothing happened. I write the date again at the top of my page. It's already there. My pen presses a little harder into the paper than it needs to. I do not react. I do not look up. My face stays completely still because my face is the one thing I can always control completely and I will control it. But the thing in my chest ,the tight, quiet clenching that arrives whenever someone makes a throwaway joke out of the one thing I carry with the most care, that I cannot control. My grandmother spent three years of her life applying for the scholarship that pays my tuition at this school. She sat at our kitchen table every Sunday morning with reading glasses held together by a rubber band and she wrote essays about potential and excellence and what education can do for a girl who has nothing to offer but her own mind. She died four months before the acceptance letter arrived. I keep that letter folded in my wallet. Not for motivation. Just because sometimes I need to touch something she touched. Jace Holloway just made a punchline out of it. Casually. Without looking back. The bell rings. He grabs his bag and walks out without a single glance in my direction. I sit still while the room empties around me. I breathe. I think about my grandmother's handwriting and the rubber band on her glasses and the letter in my wallet. One more year. One more year and I build something real from what she left me. I pick up my bag. I walk out into the hallway and adjust my straps and make myself small and keep moving. I don't know yet. Standing in that corridor on the first morning of my last year — that I am going to end up living in his house. That I will hear him crying through walls he believes are thick enough. That I will learn things about Jace Holloway that he has never said out loud to a single living person. It will all start with a video I never meant to record.