Fake yours.

Chapter 2

By eight the next morning, Zara’s phone had thirty-seven unread messages and no intention of apologizing for it.

She lay on her back staring at the ceiling, arm extended, screen tilted toward her face. The notifications had started sometime around midnight a trickle at first, then a flood, the kind that meant something had gone wrong in a public and irreversible way. She opened the first message from Amara, which read only: don’t go on social media. Then the second, which read: okay so I know I said don’t but you need to see this. Then a link.

Zara clicked it.

The video was seventeen seconds long. Blurry, shot from across the rooftop, cut off precisely at the worst possible moment after the drink left her hand, before the shove that caused it. Seventeen seconds of decontextualized disaster, already sitting at forty thousand views and climbing.

She put the phone face down on her nightstand.

From across the room, her roommate Lily made a sound that was trying very hard not to be laughter and failing completely.

“Don’t,” Zara said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

Lily pressed her lips together. Then: “It’s a little iconic.”

“It is not iconic. It is a documentation of an accident that is being misread by forty thousand strangers.”

“Forty-three thousand now.”

Zara pulled a pillow over her face.

The comments, which she absolutely should not have read and read anyway, were a particular kind of torture. Strangers had collectively decided the incident was charged with romantic tension, that she had done it on purpose, that she and Noah Kane were going to be something, that she had wanted his attention. The confidence with which people stated things they had invented was genuinely staggering.

By noon, the campus had caught up with the internet.

She felt it the moment she stepped outside the particular quality of attention that meant people recognized her, a low-grade electricity following her across the courtyard. Someone outside the student center stopped her to ask whether Noah was as attractive in person as he appeared on a screen, a question so bizarre that Zara genuinely paused mid-step trying to formulate a response, then decided against it and kept walking.

She arrived at the café an hour early, on the theory that work would be straightforward and the campus would not.

Her manager took one look at her and grinned.

“Absolutely not,” Zara said.

“I didn’t say a word.”

“You had a word on your face.”

He laughed and handed her an apron. For three hours she made coffee and wiped down tables and successfully avoided thinking about Noah Kane, which felt like a genuine personal achievement. Then the bell above the door rang, and she looked up out of habit, and the achievement evaporated.

He looked, infuriatingly, like someone who had not spent the morning as the subject of viral humiliation. Relaxed, unhurried, scanning the café with the mild interest of someone who owned the room without having purchased it. His gaze found her immediately, the way it had on the rooftop, with that same unsettling directness.

Around him, the café quietly rearranged its attention.

“What do you want?” Zara asked, before he reached the counter.

“Hello to you too.”

“I’m working.”

“I noticed.” He leaned against the counter. “You’re having quite a morning.”

“Your existence is the reason for that.”

Something flickered in his expression — not offense, which would have been satisfying, but amusement, which was not. “That’s a heavy thing to put on one person.”

“You seem capable of carrying it.”

He laughed. An unguarded sound, shorter than the performative version she’d heard on the rooftop, and she hated that she registered the difference. She turned to make his iced coffee before he’d ordered it, because she already knew, because apparently she had started paying attention to him without authorization.

When she slid the cup across the counter, he looked at it for a moment without taking it.

“What?” she asked.

“Checking for revenge.”

Against her better judgment, she laughed. One syllable, involuntary, gone almost before it arrived. When she looked up, his expression had shifted into something quieter than amusement something that watched her the way you watch a thing you’re trying to understand before it disappears.

She looked away first.

He left without further incident, and the café immediately became a chorus of opinions she hadn’t requested. She tuned them out, methodically restocking the pastry case, replaying the interaction with the detached analytical instinct she applied to everything looking for the angle, the performance, the thing people wanted when they did what they did.

The trouble was, she couldn’t find one.

That evening, she sat at her desk with her psychology textbook open to a page she’d read four times without retaining a word. Outside, the campus had gone quiet. Lily was out. The room felt larger than usual, the kind of silence that made thoughts louder.

Her phone buzzed.

Unknown number. She frowned, reached for it.

A text message, no greeting, no preamble.

The guy from the café. Who is he to you.

Not a question. A statement punctuated like one.

Zara sat very still.

She hadn’t given Noah Kane her number.

She hadn’t given Noah Kane her number, and he had it anyway, and he was using it to ask about Adrian at eleven o’clock at night, and none of that should have made her pulse do what it was currently doing.

She typed back: how did you get this.

Three dots appeared immediately. Then his response.

That’s not what I asked.