Soaked
The cafeteria at Westbrook Prep smelled like overpriced marinara and the particular anxiety of four hundred teenagers pretending they had their lives together. Ava Bennett had claimed the corner table by the window three years running, not because she liked the view of the parking lot full of BMWs and Land Rovers, but because it was the one spot the popular crowd usually ignored. Usually.
She hunched over her sketchbook, pencil moving in quick, confident strokes, shading the collar of a jacket she'd designed the night before—something structured and sharp, the kind of thing she'd never be able to afford but could draw for free. Her tray sat untouched beside her, a limp slice of pizza going cold, because eating in front of an audience had never been her strong suit, not since freshman year, not since Ryan Whitfield decided her existence was a personal amusement park.
She felt them before she saw them. The air around her table shifted, that particular hush-then-murmur that rippled through a room whenever Ryan and his entourage moved through it, like sharks parting a school of smaller fish. She kept her eyes on the page, willing herself invisible, but invisibility had never once…
