Quarterback Hated Me First

Chapter 2: JACE HALLOWEY

IVY's POV

I spend the first week of senior year building a precise map of Jace Holloway's daily movements.

Not because I'm interested in him. Because I need to know where he is at all times so I can be somewhere else. There is a difference and it matters to me.

Here is what I learn. He arrives between seven fifty and seven fifty eight, always through the main entrance, always with at least one person beside him. English first period, which I already know and already hate. Physics third period on the opposite end of the building, which gives me a safe corridor between ten and ten fifty. Lunch in the center of the cafeteria, which is why I eat in the art room. Practice every day after school until six. He leaves through the athletics exit.

I map him the way you map a weather system. Not because you find weather interesting. Because walking into a storm without knowing it's there is how you end up destroyed.

His name is not just a name at Ashridge. It is a social organizing principle. The way people position themselves in the hallway changes depending on whether he is in it. Conversations shift. Volume adjusts. Even teachers soften around the edges of their authority when he is present. I have watched this happen for three years and I still find it faintly incredible, the way one person's presence can restructure the physics of a space without him doing anything specific to cause it.

He doesn't try. That is the most infuriating part. He just exists and the room reorganizes itself around the fact of him.

The brown bag comment from English on day one doesn't dissolve the way I told myself it would. I gave it three days. By day four I had to admit it had embedded itself somewhere in my chest with the specific uncomfortable permanence of something said carelessly by someone who has no idea what they are saying.

My grandmother fought for three years for that scholarship. She wrote eight full applications and was rejected four times before one committee finally read her words correctly and understood what they were looking at. Not a charity case. Not a sad story. A woman who believed so completely in her granddaughter's potential that she was willing to spend whatever years she had left fighting for it.

Jace Holloway made it a punchline in eleven words.

And here is the part I can't quite explain: I don't think he is a bad person. I think he is a careless one. There is a difference and that difference somehow makes it worse, because a bad person intends harm and you can protect yourself from intention. Careless people cause damage without noticing it happened. You cannot defend yourself from something that isn't even aimed at you.

By the second week I've added Tyler and Marcus to my avoidance map. They orbit Jace and amplify whatever frequency he's broadcasting. On days Jace is in a good mood the hallways are merely uncomfortable. On days something has clearly gone wrong, practice didn't go well, his father called, a recruiting email fell through, Tyler gets specific and Marcus gets loud and I have learned to read those mornings from thirty feet away and reroute accordingly.

I haven't spoken to Jace again since the first day. I've been close to him in English class, across a discussion group table, once in the library when I had to pass within four feet of where he was sitting. Each time he looks through me like I'm part of the furniture.

This is what I want. I tell myself this clearly and regularly.

Then on a Thursday afternoon three weeks into the semester I'm walking to the library with a book open, a dangerous habit I cannot break, and I round the east stairwell corner and nearly walk directly into him.

We both step back. Three feet between us. His expression moves through surprise and then settles into something I can't immediately name.

"You're in my English class," he says.

I wait. There is always an angle with people like him. A setup approaching from somewhere.

"Ivy, right?" He says my name carefully. "Monroe."

He knows my name. That single fact unsettles me more than the brown bag comment ever did. Cruelty from a stranger is manageable. Attention from someone who treats you like furniture is a different and stranger thing entirely.

"Yeah," I say.

His eyes drop to my book. "Wuthering Heights."

"It's for class."

"Not our class."

"Different class."

He holds my gaze one beat longer than the moment requires. Something moves behind his expression, complicated, occupying unfamiliar space, and then his phone buzzes and he looks down.

Whatever he was going to say, he doesn't.

He walks past me. Gone.

I stand alone in the hallway. I notice that my pulse is doing something irregular. I attribute it firmly to the near collision and nothing else whatsoever.

I believe that for exactly two days. On day three he looks at me across the English classroom and doesn't look away as fast as he should.

I look away for both of us. I make that a rule from this point forward.

It costs me more than I want to admit.