Reckless Obsession

Chapter One

MARA

The milk carton hit the back of my head before I even made it through the cafeteria doors.

I heard the laughter before I felt it — that wave of sound that crests and breaks specifically for you, the kind that makes your ears ring in a way that has nothing to do with volume. I didn't turn around. I'd learned, slowly and painfully over the last two years at Westbrook High, that turning around only ever made it worse. So I kept walking. Tray in hand, chin down, eyes tracking the safe path between tables like I was navigating a minefield I'd memorized.

I found my corner. The one by the far window where the heater rattled loud enough to drown out most conversations and the light was bad enough that nobody wanted to sit there. It was my corner. I'd earned it through a long and unglamorous process of elimination.

I set my tray down and pulled out my notebook — the battered one with the periodic table cover — and tried to feel normal. Tried to feel like a girl who was just eating lunch and reading and not thinking about the way her blouse was now damp and smelled faintly of two-percent.

That's when the doors on the other side of the cafeteria swung open.

Cole Renner didn't walk into rooms the way regular people did. He arrived in them. There was some quality to his presence that I had never been able to name and had spent more time thinking about than I would ever admit — some gravity that made people shift, turn, recalibrate without knowing they were doing it. He was laughing at something Dex had said, his head thrown back, and even from across the cafeteria I could see the easy perfection of him. The green and white of his jersey. The way the other students parted without being asked.

I looked back down at my notebook.

It didn't matter. None of it mattered. Cole Renner existed in a different layer of this school than I did, one that sat cleanly above mine and never intersected with it except when he or one of his friends needed a target.

I just hadn't expected that intersection to happen quite so literally, quite so soon.

"Hey."

I looked up.

He was standing at the edge of my table. Just him — Dex had peeled off somewhere, probably to bother a sophomore — and for a long second Cole looked at me the way people look at things they don't quite recognize. Like I was a sign in a language he didn't speak.

"You're Mara Delgado."

It wasn't a question. Which was strange, because I was fairly certain Cole Renner had never said my name before in his life. I had the irrational thought that maybe someone had put him up to it. Maybe this was the next phase of something I hadn't been warned about.

"Last time I checked," I said.

His jaw shifted. Not quite a smile. "You tutor, right? Mrs. Kamali's AP Bio section."

"I help out in the lab sometimes, yeah."

"I need a tutor."

I stared at him. He stared back. Neither of us, I think, was entirely comfortable with the situation.

"There's a tutoring board outside the counselor's office," I said carefully. "Lots of people listed."

"Kamali said you're the best one." He said it the way people say things they're not happy about — flat, practical, clipped at the edges. Like admitting I might be good at something caused him actual discomfort. "I'm failing her class. If I fail, I lose my starting spot. Coach made that clear." A beat. "I need to not lose my starting spot."

I thought about saying no. I genuinely did. I sat there and turned it over in my mind and found every reasonable argument: he had never been kind to me, his friends were the reason I ate lunch next to a rattling heater, and the last thing I needed in my senior year was to be orbit-adjacent to Cole Renner and everything that came with that.

Then I thought about my mother. About the medical bills she tried to hide in the kitchen drawer. About the scholarship applications sitting on my desk, half-finished, hinging on every line of my GPA and every recommendation letter and every thing that could go wrong or right before May.

The tutoring stipend wasn't nothing.

"Fifty an hour," I said. "Paid weekly. You cancel less than twenty-four hours out, you still pay for the session."

Something moved across his face. I couldn't read it. "Fine."

"And you come to me. I'm not driving across town."

There it was — just barely, barely — the flicker of something. Annoyance or amusement, I couldn't tell. "Fine," he said again.

He pulled out his phone, tapped something, and mine buzzed in my pocket. "That's my number. Text me your address." He picked up his tray from wherever he'd set it. "We start this week."

And then he was gone, sliding back into his layer of the school like he'd never left it, and I was sitting alone by the bad heater with milk drying in my hair and fifty dollars an hour and a feeling in my chest that I didn't have a name for yet.

I looked down at my notebook.

The periodic table stared back. Neat, ordered, everything in its right place.

I had a feeling nothing in my life wa

s about to be any of those things.