Some memories don't fade. They just sit there, pressed flat against the back of your mind like a dried flower between the pages of a book , fragile, preserved, and impossible to throw away.

Mine is from five years ago. Sixth grade. A party I never wanted to attend.

The living room smelled like cheap chips and someone's older brother's body spray. Somebody's parents were out of town , I can't even remember whose house it was now , and about thirty kids were crammed into a space that could've comfortably fit half that. The carpet was sticky. The music was too loud. I was sitting in a circle on the floor, telling myself I was fine, that this was fun, that this was what normal kids did on Friday nights.

Then Marcus spun the bottle.

It slowed. Wobbled. Stopped , pointing directly at me.

The room erupted. Not in cheers. In laughter.

"Ew," Marcus said, and he didn't even try to lower his voice. He turned to Dylan beside him and made a face, theatrical and cruel in the way only eleven-year-old boys can be. "No. I would never kiss her."

The laughter got louder. My face went hot. Not just warm , burning, the kind of heat that starts behind your eyes and spreads down your throat and makes you feel like your skin is trying to turn itself inside out. I stared at the bottle. I couldn't look up. If I looked up, someone would see that I was about to cry, and I would rather have died.

"I'll kiss her."

The words cut straight through the noise.

I looked up.

Liam Carter was already moving, crossing the circle in two easy steps like it was nothing , like it was the most natural thing in the world , and then he was crouching in front of me, and his eyes were steady and warm and completely unbothered, and he gave me this small, private smile, just for me, and then he leaned in and pressed his lips to mine.

It lasted maybe two seconds. Maybe less.

The room went quiet in that dumb, stunned way crowds go quiet when something happens that nobody expected. Then someone whistled. Then the moment broke apart and the noise rushed back in, and Marcus was saying something defensive, and Dylan was laughing again, but it was different now , the joke had shifted, and I wasn't the punchline anymore.

Liam sat back down beside me like he hadn't just rearranged the entire architecture of my life. He grabbed a handful of chips from the bowl in the center of the circle and glanced sideways at me. "You good?"

I nodded. My voice had gone somewhere else entirely.

The party kept moving. The bottle kept spinning. And I sat there in that sticky-carpeted room with the ghost of Liam Carter's mouth on mine, feeling something inside my chest rearrange itself into a shape it would never quite go back from.

Five years.

That's how long I've been carrying that two-second kiss around like it means something. Five years of watching Liam Carter move through his life , our life , completely unaware that he left a mark on me that night as permanent as a scar.

Here's the thing about Liam: he didn't mean anything by it. I know that now. I probably knew it then, somewhere in the rational part of my brain that the rest of me immediately voted to ignore. He did it because he was kind. Because Marcus was being a dick and I looked like I was about to shatter, and Liam Carter has never once in his life been able to walk past someone falling without reaching out a hand. That's just who he is.

That's the problem. That's always been the problem.

After the party, he never mentioned it. Not once. He texted me the next morning asking if I wanted to come over and play video games, completely casual, completely Liam, and I spent forty-five minutes staring at that text trying to decode it before I gave up and just said sure. We played Mario Kart for three hours. He beat me every single race. He laughed every time. Nothing had changed for him.

Everything had changed for me.

I told myself I'd get over it. Middle school crushes don't survive high school , that's basically a law of physics. Except then Liam shot up four inches the summer before freshman year, and his shoulders got broad, and he made varsity football as a sophomore, and suddenly every girl in school knew his name, and I was still me, sitting next to him in the car on the way to school, watching him become someone the whole world wanted to look at, and I just , couldn't stop.

Then Mom got sick.

Junior year of middle school, diagnosis. Two years of watching her fight. Two years of Liam showing up at our front door with his mom's casseroles, or just sitting with me in my room when I couldn't talk about it, when I couldn't do anything but exist in the same space as another person who knew her. He came to the funeral. He held my hand during the service. He didn't say anything stupid about being in a better place or everything happening for a reason. He just stayed.

After that, how was I supposed to stop loving him?

He's had four girlfriends since freshman year. I've counted. I've hated myself for counting. He talks to me about some of them , not all, but some , and I always say the right things, the friend things, because what else am I supposed to do? Tell him the truth? Hey, by the way, I've been in love with you since you kissed me at a sixth-grade party, and every time you date someone new it feels like swallowing glass?

Right. That would go great.

So I don't say anything. I smile. I listen. I tell myself that being his best friend is enough, and then I go home and know, in the quiet and the dark, that it is absolutely not enough, and that I am a coward who is going to keep choosing the comfortable lie over the terrifying truth indefinitely.

That's who I am. Seraphina Hayes. Senior year. Completely pathetic.

My alarm goes off at six-fifteen, and I hit snooze twice before I remember it's Friday and Chloe will actually kill me if I'm late again.

I peel myself out of bed and into the bathroom. The face in the mirror looks exactly like someone who stayed up until midnight overthinking things that don't require any more of her thinking: dark circles, hair that has opinions of its own, the general expression of a person who is coping.

I brush my teeth. I drag my hair into something that qualifies as intentional. I pull on the school uniform , black skirt, white button-down, white Converse that have seen better days , and I head downstairs.

Dad's already gone. His coffee mug is rinsed in the dish rack, and there's a granola bar on the counter with a Post-it that says don't skip breakfast, Sera in his handwriting. He's on call most Friday mornings. Cardiothoracic surgery doesn't really do flex scheduling. I eat the granola bar standing at the counter, reading the Post-it twice, and then I grab my bag and lock the front door behind me.

The drive to school is twelve minutes on a light traffic day, nineteen on any other. I know every turn on autopilot. I've been driving this route since I got my license sophomore year, because Dad leaves before I wake up and the alternative is the bus, and I am not doing the bus.

I park in the junior lot , technically the senior lot now, since we turned over in September, but old habits , and I'm halfway across the quad when my phone buzzes.

Chloe Davis: please tell me you're not still in your car

Me: I'm literally walking

Chloe Davis: WALKING IS NOT HERE

Me: Davies is going to notice you on your phone

Chloe Davis: Davies notices nothing he's been talking about the same Fitzgerald essay for fifteen minutes

Chloe Davis: ok but TONIGHT. white lies party. you're coming right

Me: I said I'd think about it

Chloe Davis: that means no and I refuse to accept no

Chloe Davis: Sera. SERA. I already have our shirts

I slide into my seat in AP English two minutes before the late bell, and Chloe is already there, turned halfway around in her chair with the expression of someone who has been waiting to have this conversation since approximately last Tuesday.

"You're coming tonight," she says, not a question.

"Good morning to you too."

"It's a white lies party. You write a lie on your shirt. It's fun. You remember fun."

Mr. Davies is writing something on the board about The Great Gatsby that I'll actually need to pay attention to, because unlike Chloe, who pulled an eighty-one on our last test and called it "practically a B-plus," I am trying to keep my GPA somewhere in the zip code of a ninety-seven. I flip open my notebook.

Chloe leans across the aisle. "I got you a plain white shirt. All you have to do is write something on it."

"What are you writing on yours?"

She grins. "I won't drink tonight."

I press my lips together to keep from smiling. "That's not a lie, that's a public safety announcement."

"Same thing." She glances toward the front of the room, then back. "Come on. It'll be good. You need to get out of your own head for like five minutes."

She's not wrong. She's almost never wrong about this specific thing, which is annoying.

"Fine," I say.

Chloe does a small, silent victory fist-pump and turns back around just as Davies calls on her to discuss the symbolic function of the green light. She fumbles through an answer that is , generously , adjacent to correct. I write it down in my notes anyway.

Tonight, I think. Sure. Fine. Whatever.

The cafeteria at Westbrook High operates on a social geography that has been essentially unchanged since freshman year. The football table runs along the east windows, prime real estate, maximum visibility. The student council and honor society kids anchor the center. Everyone else arranges themselves in the remaining space according to some combination of friend group, lunch period, and the invisible social topography that governs where a person can sit without it meaning something.

I have a table. It's a good table , corner, near the windows, enough seats for Chloe and me and Maya and Owen and Ethan, who are currently in a heated debate about designated driver logistics for tonight that I am only half-listening to.

"I'm just saying," Ethan is saying, "if I'm DDing, someone owes me a breakfast burrito Saturday morning. That's the deal."

"That's extortion," Owen says.

"That's the cost of responsible decision-making."

Chloe is telling Maya about the shirt she's making Maya write on , I'm an excellent driver , and Maya, who once reversed her mom's Prius into a mailbox, looks appropriately offended. I'm nodding at something and pushing a fry around my tray and trying very, very hard not to look at the football table.

I look at the football table.

Liam is there. Of course he's there , he's always there, center of it, laughing at something Nolan Pierce said, still in his practice jacket with his hair doing that thing where it curls slightly at the ends when he hasn't gotten it cut recently. He looks easy and bright and completely at home in his own life in the way that I have always, privately, found devastating.

And Scarlett Vance is sitting in his lap.

Not next to him. In his lap. Turned sideways, one arm hooked around his shoulders, her dark hair falling over both of them as she tips her head back to laugh at something. She's beautiful in the way that makes you feel like beauty is a weapon , all sharp edges and flawless presentation , and right now she is wearing it like armor, like ownership, like a flag planted in territory she has already claimed.

Liam's hands are on her waist.

I look away. I look back down at my tray. The fry I was pushing around has gone cold.

'Don't,' I tell myself. 'Do not do this right now.'

I do it anyway. That's the other thing about being in love with someone who doesn't know: the hurt never stays where you put it. It always finds a way out.

",Nolan's actually single again, by the way," Chloe is saying, and I realize she's been talking for a while and I've been missing most of it. "His girlfriend broke up with him last week. So if anyone's feeling motivated tonight,"

"I'm not," I say.

"I wasn't necessarily talking about you."

"You were definitely talking about me."

Chloe opens her mouth, closes it, gives me a look that I know means we're going to talk about this later. I manage something that resembles a smile and glance back across the cafeteria against my better judgment.

There's a guy at the football table who I've clocked before but never really focused on. Jasper Thorne , quarterback, apparently also some kind of school legend, impossible to spend thirty seconds near the cheerleaders without hearing his name attached to a story. He's got the kind of easy, practiced attractiveness that looks engineered specifically to be noticed, and right now he's leaning back in his chair with the particular looseness of someone who has never once in his life worried about whether he's welcome somewhere. He laughs at something, and every girl at that table responds to it like a flower tilting toward sunlight.

Charming, I think, with the special sourness of someone who finds this completely unimpressive. What a lot of effort.

I force my gaze back to my own table.

"Okay," Ethan is saying, "so it's settled. I'll drive, someone buys me breakfast Saturday, and nobody dies. Perfect. Functional system."

"You're a hero," Owen tells him, completely deadpan.

"Someone's got to be."

I pick up my fork. I eat a fry. Across the cafeteria, Scarlett laughs again, the sound carrying even through all the noise, and Liam tilts his head down toward her like she's something worth leaning into.

I look at my tray.

I should probably eat less. On an empty stomach, it'll take less to feel it.

At least, I think, I'll get drunk faster.

My Quarterback — Chapter 5: Cracks in the Armor

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