OFF LIMIT FOR THE HOCKEY CAPTAIN

By Wednesday morning, half of Cedarfield thought Dylan Kingston and I had been secretly dating since summer, which was impressive considering we hadn't been anything at all until yesterday afternoon in a hallway with a flyer taped to the wall.

I found this out the way I found out most things at this school, which was badly and in public, when a sophomore I'd never spoken to in my life stopped me by the water fountain to ask if it was true we'd met at some lake house party neither of us had ever attended.

"Where did you even hear that?" I said.

"Everyone's saying it." She shrugged, entirely unbothered by the fact that she'd just invented a summer romance out of thin air. "Also that he got you a promise ring."

"There is no ring."

"That's not what Vanessa said."

I walked away before I could hear whatever Vanessa had allegedly said about a ring that did not exist, because apparently once you let one lie loose in a school like this, it grew a life of its own and started reproducing, spinning off details nobody had actually witnessed.

Dylan found me at my locker before first period, looking entirely too pleased with himself for someone who was, in theory, supposed to be as unsettled by all this as I was.

"You've heard," he said.

"I've heard several versions. Which one are we going with?"

"I like the lake house one. Very cinematic."

"I have never been to a lake house in my life."

"Details." He leaned against the locker next to mine, easy as anything, like we'd been doing this for months instead of one day. "For what it's worth, this is good. The louder it gets, the less room Steph has to argue with it."

"The louder it gets, the more people are going to ask me questions I don't have believable answers for."

"So we get our story straight." He said it simply, like it was obvious, and maybe it was, and I just hadn't caught up yet to how fast this whole thing was moving. "When did we start talking? What do you like about me? All of it. If we don't match, Steph will find the crack in about four seconds, and she'll use it against both of us."

He wasn't wrong. I hated that he wasn't wrong.

"Fine," I said. "Lunch. You, me, get our story straight."

"It's a date."

"It's a business meeting."

"Sure it is."

At lunch, he sat across from me instead of at his usual table, which caused a ripple through the cafeteria I could physically feel, dozens of heads turning at once like we'd triggered some kind of alarm system.

"Okay," he said, sliding his tray next to mine. "How'd we start talking?"

"You annoyed me in a hallway. That part's true, at least." I stole a fry back off his tray in retaliation for the earlier theft.

"Right, but we need a version where I'm charming instead of an obstacle."

"There isn't one."

He laughed, and it was different from the hallway laugh, quieter, meant for exactly one person instead of an audience, and I felt it land somewhere in my chest I didn't want it landing.

"Fine," he said. "You noticed me at a game. I noticed you noticing me. I made a move. You resisted for approximately five seconds before falling for my devastating charm."

"That's not what happened."

"It's close enough for Steph's purposes." He stole a fry off my tray without asking, which should have annoyed me and somehow didn't. "What do you like about me?"

"Nothing, currently."

"Come on. Give me something. If Steph corners you, you need at least one real-sounding answer."

I thought about it longer than I meant to, longer than the question probably deserved for something that was supposed to be fake.

"You're not what people think you are," I said finally, surprising myself with how true it came out. "Everyone thinks you're one thing. Hallways, girls, the whole performance. But there's something underneath that you don't show anyone, and I've caught it maybe twice now, and both times it didn't look like a performance at all."

Dylan went quiet in a way that didn't suit him, his usual easy expression slipping into something more careful, more real, and for a second I thought I'd said too much, handed him something I shouldn't have given away this cheaply, this early, over a lunch tray in a crowded cafeteria.

"That's a good answer," he said finally, voice lower than before. "Almost too good for fake."

"Don't get used to it."

"Too late."

Across the cafeteria, I caught Stephanie watching us, arms crossed, expression unreadable in a way that made the back of my neck prickle. She wasn't buying it, or she was buying it completely and hated every second of it, and either way felt equally dangerous, like watching a match get lit somewhere just out of reach.

That night Ryan found me on the porch, phone in hand, scrolling through something with a look on his face I recognized immediately, the same look he got before every hard conversation we'd ever had, the one that meant he'd already made up his mind about something before he opened his mouth.

"People are saying you're dating Dylan Kingston," he said, not looking up from his phone right away, like he was giving me one last chance to just say it wasn't true before things got complicated.

My stomach dropped straight through the floorboards.

"That's insane," I said, too fast, exactly the way Maddy had warned me never to answer if I actually wanted to be believed.

"That's what I told them." He looked up at me, and for one terrible second I thought he already knew everything, the deal, the kiss, all of it. "Because there's no way my sister would be that stupid. Right, Gin?"

I opened my mouth to answer him, and nothing came out at all.