Chapter 4

Serena:

Chloe's answer to Richard's question was still hanging in the dining room air when I heard the Maserati's engine turn over.

By the time I got to the front door, the pearl-white car was already at the end of the driveway. The window came down exactly one inch.

"I don't share rides with strays."

The window went back up. No brake lights. Just a clean white shape disappearing around the curve of the drive, and then nothing.

Diana stood at the entrance with a brown paper bag in both hands, watching the spot where the car had been. She exhaled once, very quietly, the kind of breath that's really something else held back. Then she turned and found me still crouched over my shoe buckle, and she looked at the empty driveway one more time.

"Serena," she said. "Chloe has — why don't I ask Hunter to —"

"It's fine. I don't need —"

"It's not a problem."

Hunter came around the landing with his keys already in hand, eyes tracking back from the direction Chloe had gone. They stopped on me for two seconds, moved away.

"I'll take you."

No inflection. No offer of anything extra. Just those three words, landing flat and final.

Diana pressed the paper bag into my hands before I could say anything else. Her fingers rested on the back of my hand for a moment — one moment, then gone, like she'd caught herself.

"Eat on the way," she said. "First day. If anything feels wrong, you tell me."

Mom.

She'd said it again without saying it. The word lived in the sentence somewhere, in the you tell me, in the way she was still holding the shape of the bag even after I'd taken it. Every time it surfaced I felt something in my chest do a small, involuntary thing that I hadn't figured out how to account for yet.

"Okay," I said.

Hunter's Range Rover was deep blue, interior clean, a Ice Hawks crest hanging from the rearview mirror. I ran the relevant information in about four seconds — back seat empty, full tank, straightforward exit geometry — and then I just sat there with the paper bag on my knees and watched Verdia Bay wake up outside the window.

The morning light was very white. Palm tree shadows cut across the road at angles, regular as a metronome, flashing past one after another.

I pulled the muffin out of the bag. Blueberry. Diana had folded the parchment paper around it so carefully it had left a crease pattern on the sides.

"Do you know where the school is?"

"No."

"Then stop staring out the window like you're mapping the whole city."

I looked at him. His jaw was set, eyes straight ahead, no follow-through in the comment — it wasn't a jab. It was what came out when he didn't have anything else ready.

"I'm memorizing the route," I said.

A pause. Longer than it needed to be.

"...Smart."

He didn't say anything after that. I turned back to the window and took another bite of the muffin, and the silence settled into something that wasn't exactly comfortable but wasn't hostile either. Just two people in a car who didn't know each other yet, which was, I supposed, exactly what we were.

The school gates appeared at a red light — black iron, school crest in relief, California oaks on both sides trimmed into perfect symmetry. The parking lot entrance was already backed up with a line of vehicles: Porsche, Bentley, two Range Rovers identical to Hunter's.

Then the attention started.

Hunter pushed his door open, came around the hood, and stopped just slightly ahead of me and to my left. He didn't say anything. He didn't do anything deliberate. He just stood there, and the angle of his body put him between me and the densest cluster of people near the entrance, and I was fairly certain he had no idea he'd done it.

"Who is that —"

"Hunter's sister? The Sterling —"

"No way, seriously?"

I followed him toward the gate and let the voices blur into background. Someone had their phone up. I didn't look.

The registrar took twelve minutes. I walked out with a schedule and a campus map, committed the relevant structures to memory, folded the paper into my jacket pocket.

First period: Introduction to Economics, West Building, second floor. Professor West talked fast and put too much on each slide.

I sat in the back, confirmed I already knew everything he was covering, and spent the remaining forty minutes watching the room instead — the guy in the third row with his pen cap bitten down to nothing, the girl to my right with her phone screen dimmed as low as it would go, the one in the far back corner asleep with his head sliding incrementally toward his own shoulder.

Normal. All of it exactly, unremarkably normal.

The bell went and I was already reaching for my bag.

"Hey — wait —"

The voice came from behind me, moving fast. I turned.

A girl with a high ponytail and freckles across both cheeks was half-jogging out of the building's side exit, a stack of books under one arm and an enormous iced caramel latte in the other hand, the cup listing dangerously with every step.

"You're Serena Sterling, right?"

"Yes."

"Oh thank god." She shifted the books higher on her hip and caught her breath. "I'm Keira Bennett, student council orientation — I was supposed to meet you this morning but my econ class ran over and I am so sorry, you've been on your own this whole time —"

"I found everything."

"Right, okay, good." She didn't slow down. "Where are you headed now?"

"MMA center. South end."

"Perfect, same direction," she said, and fell into step beside me with the ease of someone who had already decided we were going the same way. "There's a fork near the east connector that's genuinely confusing, first-timers always end up at the pool. I'll walk you."

I didn't argue. She was useful and she talked constantly, which meant I could listen and she wouldn't notice I wasn't saying much. Faculty office hours, elevator in A-block that broke every other week, the dining hall's morning muffins versus the afternoon ones.

The east connector was a covered walkway, glass walls on both sides, afternoon light coming in at a low angle and laying parallel strips across the floor. Keira was explaining the athletic center's open hours when I registered the group coming from the other direction.

Four of them. Kappa Rho jackets — same as Chloe's, same emblem on the chest. Talking among themselves, taking up most of the width.

Keira stepped right. Just a small automatic adjustment, the kind people make when they've learned to get out of the way early.

The girl at the front didn't slow down.

She walked straight into Keira — not a brush, a real collision, shoulder into shoulder — and the caramel latte's lid popped loose on impact, coffee arcing out and landing across the sleeve of the Kappa Rho jacket.

The walkway went quiet.

The girl stopped. Looked at her sleeve. Then looked up at Keira with an expression so relaxed it had clearly been practiced.

"Huh."

Keira's voice came out unsteady. "Ashley, I'm sorry, I — that wasn't — you walked into —"

"I walked into you?" Ashley said it lightly, almost like she found the idea interesting. "I'm walking, you've got a cup you can't control, and somehow that's on me?"

"You hit my shoulder —"

"Did I?" She glanced back at the three behind her. They shook their heads, right on cue. One of them added something about the cup. Ashley had her phone out by then, lens aimed at the coffee stain, and then she turned it toward Keira. "So what are we going to do about this?"

Keira's fingers were tight around what was left of the cup. Her mouth opened and closed without anything coming out.