Chapter 3 Everything I Can't Control

Wren's POV

He did not text back.

I checked my phone six times before I fell asleep and three times before my alarm went off, and he never replied. Not even a read receipt. Just my two messages sitting there looking stupid in the dark, and me lying in bed listening to the silence through the wall, wondering if I had imagined the keyboard sound altogether.

I did not imagine it.

I also should not have texted him.

I decided on the drive to school that it did not happen. I will walk in, set up my camera, film my back-to-school segment, post it by second period, and the photo will die the way all gossip dies, fast and forgotten, replaced by something louder. I have forty-one thousand followers. I have a plan. I have everything under control.

I have everything under control for exactly four minutes.

I am already through the front entrance, camera out, Celeste beside me mid-sentence about the new media room setup, when I feel it. That specific shift in the air when a group of people all look in the same direction at the same time.

I turn around.

Declan is walking through the front entrance.

Same gray shirt. Different tear. Eyes forward, earbuds in, keyboard bag over one shoulder, moving through the crowded hallway like he has been here a hundred times and is already tired of it. He does not see me. Or if he does, he does not show it.

But everyone else sees us.

Celeste goes completely silent mid-word. I watch her eyes travel from me to him and back to me, and I can see the exact moment the photo connects in her brain because her mouth does a thing it only does when she is trying very hard not to react.

She reacts anyway.

"Wren," she says. Quiet. Careful. "Why is the guy from the photo walking into our school?"

"He lives near me," I say. "We just happen to."

"He goes here?"

"Celeste"

"Since when does he go here?"

People are looking. Not everyone, not yet, but enough. Two girls from the junior class are already leaning toward each other. Someone has their phone out. I smile the smile I use when I am filming, easy and unbothered, and I grab Celeste's arm and walk.

I spend the next three periods explaining to four different people that the photo is nothing. We left the same party at the same time. It was raining. It meant nothing. I say it so many times that the words stop feeling like words.

What I do not say is that he is living in my house.

What I do not say is that he texted, actually no, that I texted him at midnight like a person who has completely lost her mind.

What I do not say is that I checked my phone again this morning, and his silence somehow felt worse than a bad reply would have.

I find out about the composition class when I walk through the door during the third period, and he is already sitting in the back row.

He looks up.

I look at him.

We both look away.

I take the front row. I set my bag down very calmly. I open my notebook to a clean page and write the date at the top like a person who is completely fine.

Our teacher, Mr. Osei, is new this year, young and fast-talking and already the kind of teacher people actually listen to. He spends the first ten minutes going through the semester project, a full original composition, and then he says something that makes my stomach drop straight through my chair.

"Paired listening exercise. I am going to call names. You will share headphones and respond to what you hear. This is about instinct, not analysis. Do not think. Just react."

He calls names from a list.

He calls mine and then, four seconds later, like the universe is personally against me, he calls Declan's.

The room does a thing. A small thing. A few heads turn. Someone near the window makes a sound that is almost a laugh and cuts it off fast. I stand up before I can feel anything about it, and I walk to the back row, and I sit down next to Declan Voss, and I hold out my hand for one earbud without looking at his face.

He puts it in my palm without a word.

The track plays.

It is two minutes and forty seconds of something instrumental and building, the kind of music that starts quiet and gets enormous without warning. I write three lines of response in my notebook. I do not look at him. He does not look at me. But at exactly the moment the music peaks, the loudest, most overwhelming part, his pen stops moving, and mine does too, and for about four seconds neither of us writes anything at all.

The track ends.

The room comes back.

I pull the earbud out and set it on the desk between us. He picks it up. I look straight ahead. His notebook is angled away from me, but I catch one line before he closes it, five words in small, pressed-hard handwriting that I read without meaning to.

It sounds like starting over.

The bell rings.

He takes the earbud, closes his notebook, picks up his bag, and walks out without once looking at me.

My pulse is doing something I absolutely refuse to name.

I am still thinking about those five words when I get to the media room at lunch.

I set up my camera. I check my angle. I pull my hair back, and I look into the lens, and I am about to hit record when my phone lights up on the desk beside me.

It is the Hartwell gossip account.

New post.

I pick up the phone.

It is a video this time, not a photo. Fifteen seconds of shaky hallway footage from this morning. Me turning around. Declan is walking in. The way we looked at each other for that half second before I grabbed Celeste and walked.

The caption reads: So he goes HERE? Wren Calloway, explain yourself immediately.

Thirty-two thousand impressions in forty minutes.

I put the phone down.

I stare at the camera.

And then my phone rings, and the name on the screen is not Celeste, not my mother, not anyone I expected.

It is Mr. Osei.

Our composition teacher.

Calling me personally.

At lunch.

On the first day of school.