I'd always been warned that Garland was a dry place, and that just one ember was enough to spark a wildfire capable of mass destruction.

By Tuesday night, I realized that our article was less of an ember and more of a gasoline-doused bonfire. My dad had been right; the local radio station in my hometown had gotten hold of the story. As had just about every other major news outlet in Southern California, including the Los Angeles Times.

Hanna tracked down a physical copy of their Wednesday paper, cut out the article on Vaughn, and tacked it to our fridge like a proud parent.

When she and I dropped by Pepito's for dinner that night, we found Oscar plastering JUSTICIA PARA JOSEFINA posters on every available surface of the stand's exterior. He paused this endeavor to call Pedro and Joaquin to the order window, so they could all thank me—in Spanish so heavy with emotion that even I had a hard time following along—for putting Josefina Rodriguez's name in my article.

I plastered on a smile and told them all, "No, no hay qué agradecer."

Oscar insisted our food was on the house, but when he wasn't looking, I slipped a crumpled twenty dollar bill in the tip jar.

❖ ❖ ❖

On Thursday morning, I convinced myself that I needed to skip Human Sexuality. The carpet in the bedroom was a hair-magnet. The fridge smelled a little funky. The bathroom mirror was splattered with water droplet stains. It was therefore justifiable—nay, imperative—that I stay home and, in the pursuit of cleanliness, address these very urgent matters.

It totally had nothing to do with the fact that I'd heard the entire football team was fuming about our article, and that somehow, my name had gotten tossed around in the locker room enough that even Andre heard it.

"I can just take notes for you," he'd told me the night before. "You don't gotta come to class if you're scared, but I really don't think they're gonna do anything, you know? It's all talk."

I wasn't scared.

I just needed to clean the apartment.

That was the plan, at least, until Andre texted me fifteen minutes before class: Okay so Fogarty says Nick warned St. James there's a pop quiz on the reading today.

I spat out an expletive and tore off my rubber gloves. There was no time to change into something more flattering than the stretched-out leggings and my dad's old XL shirt that I'd thrown on that morning. I grabbed my backpack and booked it to campus, wishing the whole way that I was one of those kids who didn't care about making good grades or keeping scholarships or disappointing their parents.

The stairs in the biological sciences building still reeked of paint, even though there were no more signs or ribbons of caution tape warning me not to brush up against the walls.

I figured I could hold my breath for thirty second if it meant avoiding the elevator.

In fact, if I could just keep my head down, take the pop quiz, and then make a quick escape before the lecture started, I'd be alright.

The auditorium was crowded when I slipped through the double doors behind a pair of blonde girls who were bitching loudly about a biochem midterm with a bad curve. I scuttled straight to my usual seat—the third row from the back, second in from the aisle—and slapped my notebook and a mechanical pencil onto my desk, then scanned the auditorium for signs of trouble.

Nick stood up at the front, shuffling stacks of papers at his podium. Fogarty and a couple of the other starters were sitting in the middle of the room, their voices lowered and significantly less rowdy than I'd grown accustomed too. There was no sign of Bodie.

I pulled out my phone, as I was prone to do in times of stress, and shot off a quick text to Andre.

Okay made it

His reply was immediate and over-punctuated.

Typography ran late!!! Be there in 5!! And save my seat!!!

I flipped up the too-small swivel desk on the aisle seat so people wouldn't throw their stuff down without stopping to ask if it was taken. Then I cradled my phone in my lap and scrolled through Instagram while I waited for Andre to come be my human shield.

I was six months deep in a meme account when I heard the snap of a swivel desk being shoved back between seats.

A backpack hit the floor at my feet. I looked up, fully prepared to warn Andre not to make a single comment about how horrible I looked unless he wanted me telling Mehri Rajavi about the enormous crush he'd had on her before we found out she was exclusively interested in girls.

But it wasn't him.

It was Bodie St. James.

In a suit.

He stood in the aisle for a moment, eyebrows pinched as he stared down at me like I was a cockroach in a bathroom stall on the first floor of Buchanan. Like he wanted to crush me under his shoe, but was sort of hoping I'd just skitter off and he could pretend he'd never seen me.

Our stare-down lasted either a half a second or twenty-five years.

It felt like the latter, given that my entire body was tensed with fear like a newborn deer in the headlights of a semi truck.

Finally Bodie took a bolstering breath, a muscle in his jaw working as he clenched his teeth together, and dropped into the seat next to mine without a word.

And then it got worse.

A few rows down from us, Kyle Fogarty twisted around in his seat. When his eyes landed on Bodie, he smirked and rose his eyebrows in question. Bodie nodded once, curtly. Fogarty saluted him with two fingers to his forehead, then tipped his chin up in a way that said, you got this bro.

I did not care for this nonverbal conversation at all. I seriously considered grabbing my backpack and sprinting out of there (screw the pop quiz—I'd email Nick to tell him I had food poisoning and beg for mercy), but Bodie and his ridiculously long legs were blocking the aisle.

I wasn't about to ask him to move his knees.

And I most definitely wasn't going to try to squeeze around him or crawl over his lap, even though it looked very welcoming in navy blue dress pants.

He wasn't wearing a tie—just a slightly wrinkled white shirt with the top button undone—and his dark hair was slicked back into a perfect wave that suggested he'd skipped the tie by choice, not because he was in any way incapable of dressing well. He looked like a Sports Illustrated cover story. Tall and handsome and perfectly composed, the young warrior prince of a multi-million dollar athletics empire.

Except his hands were shaking.

I only noticed it when he leaned forward to fidget with his backpack, and then again when he sat up and reached between our seats to pull his swivel desk back up in one violent tug. The tiny slab of faux-wood locked into place with a hollow thunk so loud I flinched.

"Sorry," he snapped.

Then he exhaled sharply, splotches of pink blooming on his cheeks, and turned to face me.

"Laurel, right?" he asked.

Oh god, it's happening.

I opened my mouth to blurt that no, I wasn't, but quickly realized that I'd look like an imbecile if I lied in response to what was clearly a rhetorical question.

"Um," I said after an uncomfortably long pause. "Yes."

He nodded sharply. I braced myself for a follow-up of some kind, but Bodie just pressed his lips into a solemn line and turned back towards the front of the lecture hall, seeming suddenly very interested in the bright blue loading screens on the projectors that warned, in blinking letters, that no HDMI input was detected.

The tips of his ears were pink.

Is that it? I thought.

Bodie didn't seem angry so much as he seemed flustered and anxious.

In my peripheral, I saw someone very tall pause at the end of the aisle, then keep walking.

It was Andre.

He darted into a row across the aisle and a few down, muttering apologies as he squeezed past a few people to get to an empty chair. When he was seated, he turned over his shoulder to shoot me a wide-eyed look and mouth the words, What the fuck?

Great question.

I didn't have time to answer it, because up at the front of the auditorium, Nick cleared his throat and started his introductory spiel.

"We've got three graduate students sitting in on the class today," he announced, sweeping one hand towards a trio of twenty-somethings in the front row who turned in their seats and waved awkwardly. "They're going to help me with a few things today. Let's actually kick things off with—" he held a stack of papers aloft, "—a quiz on the reading!"

This was met with a chorus of groans and expletive-laden whispers.

"It's only five points," Nick added, sounding a little peeved. "This is really straightforward stuff, guys. We went over most of it in lecture on Tuesday."

The three grad students popped out of their chairs and started up the aisles, handing out stacks of quizzes to each row. When one of them reached ours, Bodie offered him a tight smile, then took a sheet off the top and held out the rest without looking at me.

"Thanks," I said, my voice reaching an octave higher than was audible to the human ear as I took care not to let any part of my arm brush any part of his.

I grabbed my mechanical pencil, tucked my hair behind my ears, and tried to focus on the sheet of paper in front of me—which got a little challenging when Bodie started bouncing his knee so hard it made my chair shake.

The first question was easy.

Name an STD that condoms can help prevent (when used properly).

I cleared my throat and hunched over my desk, hoping that my hair would shield me. Something about having to write the words genital herpes while Bodie St. James sat close enough I could smell spearmint on his breath was unspeakably embarrassing.

What contraceptives methods can be used during oral sex to help protect participants from STDs?

I scribbled down my answers in an increasingly small, condensed version of my usual chicken scratch handwriting. The other three questions were simple enough. I finished the whole thing in less than a minute, then flipped the quiz over and sat back in my chair to twiddle my thumbs.

Beside me, Bodie exhaled in a huff.

I shot a discreet glance at his paper. He still hadn't written anything other than his name.

I knew it was just a five point pop quiz, and that it was probably his own fault that he hadn't studied for it even after Nick tipped him off, but Bodie seemed like a nervous wreck. His knee was still bouncing wildly, and he'd given up on trying to answer the questions and resorted to staring at his teammates on the other side of the room.

Considering every Southern California news outlet was busy dissecting every move his head coach had ever made, Bodie was probably having a rough week. The whole team was, obviously, but Bodie was the one who'd had some of his words used to connect Vaughn to a missing woman. It was bad luck that, buried in all the well-meaning praise, Bodie had accidentally offered something we could use against Vaughn.

I hoped Bodie didn't fault himself for what he'd said.

And I hoped Vaughn hadn't been mad at him when he read our article.

The thought made me sick.

So it was an unholy combination of empathy and guilt and that drove me to attempt—for the first time in my life—to cheat.

I sat up as straight as I could and lifted my paper, just a little, like I needed to double check my answers but had suddenly become farsighted.

Bodie glanced over at my quiz, then averted his eyes.

Come on, you noble moron, I thought. It's five points. Just take my answers. I used your quotes. We'll be even.

I set down my quiz, face-up, then faked a stretch and let my hand accidentally knock the corner of it, so it was better angled for him to read.

He didn't look over again.

But why would he take anything I offered him? Bodie St. James probably thought that I was the kind of girl who closed elevator doors in people's faces. The kind who interviewed people and then used their own words to cut down the people they cared about. The kind who felt comfortable cheating on pop quizzes.

I felt a sudden and unrelenting urge to say something. To turn to him and explain myself.

I'm not a bad person, I thought. I'm not.

When one of the grad students came up the aisle to collect our quizzes, I caught a glimpse of Bodie's—blank, save for his name in neat block letters in the upper left corner. I sunk lower in my chair and busied myself with picking little torn scraps of paper from the spiral ring of my notebook.

Up at the front of the lecture hall, Nick waited until he had our quizzes to click on the projector.

The words Unit Three: STIs and STDs appeared on the screens.

"Alright, guys," Nick said, tapping the stack of papers against his podium to even them out. "I'd like to start off the lecture today by having you turn to the people around you and talk about what you think some of the common myths are surrounding sexually transmitted diseases."

I'd rather get syphilis and die, thanks, was my first thought.

My second was that I should probably identify someone who was not named Bodie St. James to discuss STDs.

The pair next to me—a small, skinny boy with perfectly coifed black hair and a girl with dirty blonde waves and bushy eyebrows—had already started talking, but the sliver of conversation I caught seemed to be a private one that had absolutely nothing to do with class.

"Well he can suck your dick," the boy was saying. "You don't need his condescending—"

I wasn't brazen enough to interrupt them, even in such desperate circumstances.

I risked a glance at Bodie.

He was still looking at his teammates, so I took half a second to stare shamelessly at his face, tracing the sharp lines of his profile and the tan on his cheeks and forehead. His eyes were a dark, muddied grey—warm and cool in equal measures—and there was a big freckle on his right cheek that was, true to his general aesthetic, very charming.

Then I followed his line of sight just in time to catch Kyle Fogarty nod once, firmly, before shooting me a mocking sneer and twisting back around in seat.

I glared at the back of his stupid green faux-hawk, hating that my eyes prickled.

Nobody had ever sneered at me before.

Bodie shifted beside me. I felt the heat of his stare on me—on the hole in my leggings on my right knee, on my oversized t-shirt, on my unbrushed hair—and felt small. But I tipped my chin up and faced him, anyway. He seemed steadier. More determined. I watched the hand on his desk clench into a tight fist, then go slack again as he stretched out his fingers.

He leveled me with a look I recognized as the stare-down he usually reserved for his opponents on the football field.

And then he asked, very sharply, "Why'd you write that article, Laurel?"

It was a question as loaded as Andre liked his nachos, but the answer was easy.

"Because I wanted to do the right thing," I said.

Bodie reared back like I'd slapped him. I caught the flicker of anguished confusion—my only hint that he'd been expecting me to say something different, hoping I'd say something different—before his face crumpled into a hard glare.

"You—" he began, then exhaled a harsh breath that was almost a scoff. "Dragging a man's name through the mud so yours can be on the front page is the right thing?"

It shouldn't have cut me like it did.

But I was angry, suddenly. Furious that the football team could overlook reason and hard evidence. Outraged that they'd make the assumption that Ellison and I had made everything up just to get a little more traffic on the Daily website.

And then there was the part of me that worried Bodie was on to something.

I'd always been curious about the spotlight, hadn't I? And I'd sat back and basked in the glory of it all when Ellison and the rest of the senior staff at the Daily threw me a surprise pizza party. I had a copy of the Los Angeles Times pinned to my fridge—that was, like, the epitome of pretentious and egotistical.

The surge of self-doubt was like a punch to the stomach.

And so my response was, perhaps, a bit rash.

"Eat a dick, St. James."

❖ ❖ ❖

whoomp there it is.

Friendly reminder that we now have character aesthetics for this story! You can find them between the "about" and "01 | perfect storm." And a bonus Bodie in the header of this chapter because why not.

This chapter got much longer than I intended (I guess I have to abandoned the perfectionist side of me that had word count goals for each batch of chapters lmao that was cute). It was also a struggle and a half to write! My outline is very extensive and very lovely, but when you get this deep in a story, you start considering the thought processes and motivations for literally every move your characters make.

Basically, this story is the slowest of slow burns and we've still got so much story left to tackle (FOOTBALL PUN), so thank you guys for being my cheerleaders (EVEN WORSE FOOTBALL PUN).

Your friendly author,

Kate