Catch Me If You Can

The day senior exams ended, my mortal enemy posted this to his close friends:

Him: [I'm in love with you. Visible to you only.]

I typed back, delighted:

Me: [you absolute idiot, you forgot to hide it from me LMAOOO]

One second later a voice memo dropped into my phone. Through gritted teeth:

Him: Mr. Halloran was right about you. You really are a disgrace to the English language. You're a brick. A literal brick.

Hold on. I roasted him, like, twice. And he goes for the throat?

Chapter 1

Report cards came out, which meant I made my usual pilgrimage to the teachers' office to get chewed out.

I'd barely cleared the doorway when my shoe came down on a stray exam paper.

I glanced at the floor and grinned. "Whose handwriting is this? Looks exactly like what my chickens scratch in the dirt."

The whole office laughed. I didn't get why, but the back of my neck went cold anyway.

"Excuse me. You're standing on something."

The voice behind me was low and arctic. I turned around and found myself eye level with a very nice throat.

He bent down. A face that wasn't entirely a stranger's dropped into view. Sharp brows, a clean straight nose, the loose hair at his forehead swaying with the motion.

Becoming his mortal enemy, I'd realize later, was an accident. It started here, with my shoe on his paper.

His next words snapped me out of it, each one filed to a point.

"Do your feet just love my paper that much?"

He was bent at the waist, head tilted up at me, one set of knuckles pinching the corner of the page under my sole.

I yanked my foot up and apologized in a rush. "Sorry, sorry, I "

He didn't wait for the rest. He turned away, cold, and left me staring at the most insufferably smug shoulders I'd ever seen on a teenager.

I rubbed my nose. Awkward.

"What, you flunked so hard you're too scared to come in?"

Mr. Halloran picked that exact moment to walk in with a stack of papers. He spotted me, slid the top one off the pile, pressed it into my hand, and smiled in a way that made my scalp crawl. "Go ahead. Read me your reading-comprehension score."

The English teacher took a sip of tea and fanned the flames. "Oh, Wren's fine. Top of her homeroom in English."

The math teacher chimed in. "Lost one point on math. Careless error."

Mr. Halloran looked like he might cry.

"In all my years of teaching, I have treated every student exactly the same."

The finger he aimed at me was shaking. "Wren. Tell me. What did I ever do to you."

I looked at the 110 circled on the page and mumbled, "This isn't even bad."

"Why don't you go look at what you scored in everything else!"

He snatched the paper back and flapped it open, his hand trembling like a Parkinson's case. "This. The reading comp."

His face twisted. He asked it softly, almost gently. "The theme was brotherhood. You wrote two pages on romantic longing. Care to explain?"

I gasped. "What? No I wrote about pining. Lovesickness. That's totally different."

The office went dead silent.

Mr. Halloran stared at me, the corner of his mouth twitching, and for a long moment produced no sound at all.

I was genuinely wondering whether I should do something about it, slap his back or check his pulse, when a laugh broke out beside me.

I followed it. The chicken-scratch boy had his head down, shoulders shaking like a paint mixer.

"Aiden. You think you get to laugh?"

Mr. Halloran swung the gun his way. "Hers was unhinged, sure, but at least a human being could tell what she meant."

"Look at your handwriting. Tell me that isn't earthworms having a seizure."

"I can't even grade your tests. My eyes hurt."

"And your essay. What was that supposed to be?"

"A fever dream you transcribed at three a.m.?"

A grin doesn't vanish. It just relocates.

I studied the ceiling, the floor, anything, fighting to keep my face from cracking where he could see it.

Mr. Halloran looked at the two of us planted in front of his desk and let out a cold little laugh.

"I must have been a serial killer in a past life," he said, "to end up teaching the both of you in this one."

Chapter 2

The bell for long break was almost up when Mr. Halloran waved a hand and told us both to get lost.

The chicken-scratch boy walked ahead of me, his paper still dangling from his fingers.

I caught a glimpse of the essay side.

A laugh got out before I could stop it.

A frigid look landed on the top of my head. I glanced at his not-great expression, smiled, and waved it off. "My teeth were hot. Just airing them out."

"Mm." He looked at me, unhurried, and let out one thin, scornful little laugh. "Right. Expressing your romantic longing."

I glared and fired back. "Still beats whatever fever dream you turned in."

He cut a look at my score. Breezy. "And yet I got a 120."

I covered my 110 and kept glaring. "Your handwriting looks like a chicken did it."

"And yet. 120."

"Your presentation score is a zero!"

"And yet. 120."

"..."

"You faked your own height at the last physical. You changed a 179 to a 180!"

"But I I'm actually 180!" He froze, caught up to himself a beat late, the tips of his ears going red. "The machine glitched!"

"An electronic scale does not glitch!"

I had him by the throat now, and I was loving it. "I went to grab the forms. I watched you do it."

I wasn't bluffing.

That week's physicals had left me logging everyone's height for both of Mr. Halloran's homerooms. I'd gone for the forms during long break, the building hollow and quiet, and seen a tall, lean boy come out of the office, chin tipped up like that rooster of ours that pecks anything it can reach. He went straight down the stairs. Never saw me.

But I knew him. The new transfer.

I flipped to his row out of pure reflex. The height box had been scrubbed at. You could just make out a 179 underneath, and the 180 written over it in big sloppy strokes, all flourish, no legibility.

Now his ears were red and his eyes were shooting daggers.

I smiled and offered comfort. "It's okay. You've still got time. Maybe in a few years you'll really hit 180."

"I don't need your concern."

He looked down his nose at me, the corner of his mouth curling, and dragged the words out long and slow. "Per. En. Nial. Runner-up."

Right in the sternum.

I detonated. "You're the perennial runner-up! Your whole family is!"

He raised an eyebrow. "We both know which one of us that is. I came first this month, either way."

The noise outside swelled back up. Laps were over.

He checked the big clock in the center of the building, stretched, and ambled off, taking his sweet time. "Back to the grind. Some of us would rather not turn into the kind of person who reads brotherhood and writes lovesickness."

I stood there grinding my molars to powder.

Aiden and I had the same weak spot. English Lit.

Not awful, exactly. But next to the rest of our scores it looked downright embarrassing.

Before he transferred in, I sat undisputed at the top of the entire grade. Worshipped from below, and laughed at daily, my classmates pointing at my English Lit score like I'd personally betrayed the language.

After he transferred in, I became the perennial runner-up.

Chapter 3

Six months in, he'd beaten me on every test, big and small, by a wide enough margin to feel deliberate.

And now there were two of us getting laughed at instead of one.

First and second place. I got mocked for essays that read like grocery lists. He got mocked for handwriting that looked like worms in distress.

I'd actually felt a flicker of solidarity with him at first, two misfits, same wound. But the boy was so relentlessly venomous.

And he called me the perennial runner-up.

The more I chewed on it the angrier I got, until I smacked my hand flat on the desk.

My deskmate, hunched over a free-body diagram, nearly left her skin. "What. What happened."

My eyes were blazing. "I am taking first place back from Aiden."

She reached over, trembling, and laid the backs of her fingers against my forehead. "Are you running a fever, or did you take something."

Once I explained, she sighed and shook her head. "Do you even know where he came from?"

"Don't care," I scoffed. "Today's the day I put him in the ground."

"He's from out of state. One of the cutthroat ones."

I snorted. "So? Everybody's from somewhere cutthroat. Why would that scare me?"

"He was at a magnet school. Then transferred to one of the top prep schools in the country."

"Last year's national physics olympiad. He placed first in his region."

"Word is his family wouldn't sign off, so he never even joined the national team."

A physics monster. Great.

This month's physics exam had been biblically hard. One perfect score in the entire grade, and it was his. Apparently the teacher for the other homeroom had started looking at people down the bridge of his nose.

I glanced at my own 90 and asked her, "His total this time. Is it 703?"

She nodded and gave me a look brimming with pity. "First exam he beat you by five points. This time it's twenty-five."

I choked.

I groped for some dignity. "That's only because he just got here. I was being a gracious host."

She slid me a sideways look. "You've been a gracious host for six months. Think that's plenty?"

I huffed twice, snapped open a fresh problem set, and spread it out. "Just sit back and watch me drag him off his throne."

Evening study hall hadn't even let out and I'd already finished a full set.

A little wrung out, I lifted my head and scanned the room. Everyone was bent low over their books.

I stretched and got up to go splash water on my face.

Our two homerooms were both on the fourth floor, side by side.

Passing his homeroom door, my head turned toward it before I'd decided to look.

The room was packed, and somehow I found him in the first half-second.

He was just that hard to miss.

The oversized blue-and-white uniform made him look leaner, his spine straight, like a stalk of bamboo holding its line through wind and rain.

Outside the window, the sky was burning orange. Inside it, a boy bent over his work.

My steps slowed without my deciding to slow them, my eyes stuck to him like they'd forgotten where I'd been headed.

A gust came through right then and stirred the loose hair at his forehead, and with no warning at all he looked up, his gaze cutting straight to where I stood.

The instant our eyes met, he arched one brow at me. Surprise, maybe. Or a dare.

I am terrible at English Lit. And yet a line surfaced in me anyway, unbidden, something about a boy in spring who could undo a whole street just by walking down it.

My heart slammed once against my ribs. I wrenched my face away and hurried past.

Chapter 4

The bathroom mirror showed me flushed to the ears, and I cursed myself for having no spine, for going soft over a pretty face every single time.

It took a few handfuls of cold water before the heat backed off at all.

I fixed my hair and stepped out.

Walked straight into Aiden.

A drop of water still clung to his bangs, his skin cool and pale, his eyes laughing as they landed on me.

"Small world, runner-up."

A face like that, and they gave it a mouth. Tragic.

I didn't take the bait. I smiled too. "Small world, 179."

His expression went through a whole color wheel. Beautiful, honestly.

"I'm 180!" His cheeks pulled tight, the words forced out one at a time through his teeth. "The machine glitched!"

I flicked the water off my hands and started back toward class, sighing like a woman with no good options left. "Fine, fine. You're 180. You were always 180. How about I just call you One-Eighty from now on?"

The whole brand is driving people to an early grave and not paying for the funeral.

I'd almost reached his homeroom's back door when a voice came at me, low and grim. "Wren. I'll get you for this. Sooner or later."

My scalp prickled and I bolted back to my room.

He wasn't going to round up people to corner me, was he?

I have a championship mouth. That does not mean I can fight.

We could table whether he was 179 or 180, but my 160 was not up for debate. If he actually came for me, I wouldn't even get a head start.

I ran through a hundred versions of how he might get me back, and missed the one that mattered.

Aiden's wiring is not like other people's.

The school had spun up an honors track for the top university candidates, and as the grade's former number one, of course I was moving into it.

And right now the grade's current number one had just turned down the prime seat the teacher picked for him, dead center, third row, and was pointing at the empty spot next to me. "Sir, let me sit with Wren. We've both got the same weak subject. Sitting together, we can compare notes."

Me: ???

Nobody wants to compare notes with you.

If I were comparing notes it'd be with someone good at English Lit. Two people with the same gap, sitting together, accomplishes what, exactly. A contest over whose answers are more deranged?

And yet the homeroom teacher bought it.

My brand-new deskmate swung one long leg over and dropped into the seat, chin tipping toward me, eyes lit with it. "The guy who outranks you, parked right next to you. Stew in it."

Me: ......

This was his big revenge?

I cut a glance at the side of his face. Heavy lashes, a clean ridge of nose, a jaw with a hard edge to it.

It was... yeah. It was a good face.

Everyone at school knew Aiden's name. Partly the unhinged scores and the catastrophic handwriting. Partly that face.

You could fill two classrooms with the people crushing on him. The girls slipping love notes onto his desk were not in short supply.

But some of them had no sense of where the line was, and those ones got on my last nerve.

Like right now. Aiden had gone to refill his water, and I was trying to steal a little rest on break.

When somebody started poking at me.

Poking. In the literal sense.

"Move over a sec. I'm putting something down."

I cracked my eyes open, irritated, and found a girl in the middle of opening Aiden's bag.

"Hey. That's not really okay, is it?"

She paused, rolled her eyes at me, and snapped, "None of your business."

The zipper of his bag tore open with a rasp, baring a few books and a phone inside.

Chapter 5

I caught the girl's wrist, frowning, and pulled her out of the space between my seat and Aiden's. "Going through someone's things without asking. That's a little rude, don't you think?"

"Are you sick in the head? You think sitting next to Aiden makes you somebody?"

She wrenched her arm free, hard enough to send me staggering back several steps.

I was a half-second from losing my balance and hitting the floor when a hand appeared, caught me at the waist, and reeled me in steady against him.

The heat coming off the body behind me was alarming, furnace-grade, and my brain just stopped.

"She is somebody."

Aiden's voice had none of its usual lazy drawl. It was cold, like there were ice chips in it. "And who exactly are you. Going through my things, and putting your hands on the person sitting next to me?"

The girl burst into tears on the spot. She didn't say a word, just stumbled out of the room sniffling.

Clipped my shoulder on the way out.

I sucked air through my teeth.

Aiden let go of me and mocked me without an ounce of mercy. "Aren't you usually such a big shot? What happened. You went soft as a dumpling."

I rubbed my shoulder and glared. "Who was that even for?"

"Right. You charged into battle on my behalf. I'm overcome with gratitude." He raised a brow, smiling. "To repay the debt, you can have me do anything you want today."

"Anything?"

He set his water cup on the desk and propped his chin on his hand, watching me. "Short of offering myself in marriage."

I was digging through my bag, and at that I rolled my eyes. "Like I want your fan club to tear me limb from limb."

I finally fished it out, spread the worksheet open, and slid it into the no-man's-land between us. "This one. I've never gotten it. See if you can."

The second it was about studying, his face went serious. "Let me look."

Thirty seconds, and his head came up. "Not hard."

"See, the prompt says the velocity is "

The noise around us dropped away, and there was nothing left but his voice, low and clear, and the late sun sliding in off the window to pool on the long knuckles of the hand that held his pen.

After a moment he glanced up. "Got it?"

He'd untangled the whole thing. I dropped my eyes and nodded, copying out the formula.

"Aiden, I've got one I can't crack, could you take a look?"

I was buried in my own numbers when I heard him say, "Give me a minute."

I stole a glance at him and ran straight into his eyes.

Focused. Serious. Less of the arrogance, a thread of something gentler in its place.

My pen tip stuttered. I dropped my gaze fast and kept calculating.

I'd just written down the last answer, hadn't even looked up, when the worksheet got pulled out from under my hand.

He skimmed it before passing it back. "Not bad. You used a method I hadn't thought of."

I tipped my chin up, smug. "Obviously."

He smiled at me, then turned to the one who'd asked. "Sorry to keep you waiting. Which problem? Let me see."

"It's fine. Number four."

The boy's expression was composed, his lowered lashes hiding his eyes, and it made him look steadier, older.

I blinked, a little off balance, my heart going faster than it had any reason to.

What a strange feeling.

Chapter 6

End of the month, a weekend, and Mr. Halloran sent me to his place to pick up some materials. Problem sets from a famous professor, he said. The kind ordinary people can't get their hands on.

I knocked on his door, bright-eyed.

It opened on Mr. Halloran's face, smiling wide as a flower, and behind him, Aiden, wearing the expression of a man who'd been had.

When he saw me, Aiden's mouth curled into pure schadenfreude.

I knew instantly this was bad, spun on my heel to run, and got hauled back by the strap of my bag. "And where do you think you're going?"

Two minutes later Aiden and I were sitting in a tidy row.

A reading-skills workbook open in front of me. A handwriting practice book open in front of him.

"How'd he get you here?"

Aiden traced over the practice strokes, face drooping. "Told me he had a set of physics olympiad mock exams. The newest edition."

There's no fox like an old fox.

"What. What is this." Mr. Halloran rocked his chair and sipped his tea, tapping the armrest. "Eyes down. Both of you."

I made a face and bent obediently over the page.

Around dinnertime, Mr. Halloran grabbed his keys and headed out, pausing to warn us. "Don't try anything cute. Sit here and behave."

The door banged shut. Aiden and I looked at each other and started stuffing our bags at the exact same moment.

He finished first and went to scope out the balcony. "He took the scooter. Didn't con us."

I zipped my bag, giddy as a bank robber who'd actually pulled it off, grabbed Aiden, and ran for the door. "Then what are we waiting for. Go, go."

The poplars outside the building were bare, and the dead leaves underfoot gave a crisp snap with every step.

We didn't stop until we'd cleared the complex gates.

Something brushed lightly against the inside of my palm. Aiden, a smile in his voice. "Deskmate. Your hand is pretty sweaty."

That was when I realized we were still holding hands.

I let go. Not fast enough. For a half-second my palm hung in the cold where his had been, still carrying the heat of it, and the air went strange.

I curled my fingers into a fist and pushed it up my sleeve, and even with my eyes forward I could feel the weight of his gaze sitting on the top of my head.

Right as I was scrambling for something to break the silence, my stomach beat my mouth to it.

A long, mortifying growl.

A soft laugh came from above me, and before the embarrassment could even surface, my wrist was caught.

Aiden walked me forward, shoulders broad, frame long, voice as clear as ever. "Come on. Whole night's on me."

At a street stall I gnawed on a lamb skewer while Aiden, a chicken wing between his teeth, cracked open a cold soda for me.

The night market roared with people. I asked the boy beside me, "Why'd you even transfer to a school like this? Your old prep school was leagues better."

He thought about it, then said, serious, "A dream."

I looked at him like he was an idiot. "Nobody chases a dream by moving to a worse school."

He laughed. "Wasn't up to me. Family laid down the law. Go home and inherit the business. So this was the only move I had left. Find my own school, on my own."

He said it like it was nothing.

I sat there with my jaw on the ground.

Chapter 7

"What do you mean, inherit the business? Why would inheriting anything stop you from going to school?"

Aiden leaned back in his chair and took a pull of soda. "My dad wanted me to go abroad and study finance. I said no. Went on a hunger strike for three days. That's the only reason he let me transfer to the prep school at all."

"Then I wanted the national physics team. He shut it down. Scared I'd lock myself into physics for good."

"I made his life hell for a while. Eventually he just told me to get out. Not one cent of family money. Do whatever I want, he said, as long as I make something of myself inside ten years. Then he'll stop running my life."

I gaped. "Then how are you paying for, like, food. Rent."

He gave me a puzzled look, like the answer was obvious. "I've got shares. Plus a little I made investing. Enough to buy a place."

Me: ......

Right. The young master. Loaded.

I ordered twenty more skewers, eyes watering.

Filthy capitalist. I'll eat you into bankruptcy if it's the last thing I do.

I was chewing through lamb with real venom when he asked, "Wren. Which one are you going for? The top two?"

I looked at him, amused. "You've got a lot of faith in me."

He held my eyes, dead serious. "There's no version where you end up anywhere else."

"I've spent enough time around you to know exactly how much you want it."

"I've watched how hard you work. The way I see it, nothing less than the best is good enough for you."

Something hit me square in the chest.

The pleasure of being seen by your rival, maybe. Or some other thing I couldn't name.

"I don't work this hard for the name on the diploma," I said. "I do it to make myself worth more."

I learned young that if you have no value, even surviving gets hard.

I tipped my head back and drew an arc through the air with my skewer, and said it low. "I want to stand somewhere high. High enough that everyone has to see me."

"That's my deskmate. Having a dream. Iconic." His whole face lit, and he knocked his cup against mine. "To the dream."

His mood was contagious. I laughed too. "To both of us getting everything we're after."

Aiden and I were the type who had to brawl before we got along, and once the edges came off, we never ran out of things to say.

English to chemistry, chemistry to physics.

We were deep in it when Aiden's face changed, like he'd remembered something. "Didn't the physics teacher say he's going over the exam in Sunday study hall?"

I nodded around a skewer.

He looked at me and let the words out slow. "Is today. Sunday?"

Me: !

We shot to our feet in unison and tore off toward school.

Made it halfway. Both spun around.

Over the stall owner's shouting, Aiden yanked a few bills out of his pocket and slapped them down, dragging me along, yelling as we ran:

"Boss! If it's not enough, go to the high school and find an English teacher named Halloran!"

We staggered into the classroom and called out, together, that we'd like to come in.

The physics teacher stood at the front, looking sour, and the second he saw the two of us his knotted brows smoothed right out.

"That careless mistake on the last problem? Aiden and Wren would never."

He didn't grill us on why we were late. If anything he went tender. "Aiden. Wren. Bring me your papers. Let's show the class what the model answers look like."

We're done for.

I'd been planning to do the physics set this afternoon.

Chapter 8

"Use Aiden's. He's better at physics."

"Use Wren's. Her handwriting beats mine."

The two of us said it at the exact same time. I shot him a covert glare and found him blinking at me like his life depended on it.

Eye cramp?

Two minutes later the physics teacher looked at the two blindingly blank papers in front of him, face flat, and pointed at the door. "Out."

And the man was still complaining. "This doesn't add up. How do you not have the homework done?"

I rolled my eyes. "It's physics homework. You didn't do it either."

"Those sets weren't a challenge. Obviously I saved them for last." He muttered it. "I was going to do them this afternoon. Then Halloran happened."

"Funny. I could've sworn I heard someone taking my name in vain."

Aiden had barely finished when Mr. Halloran came strolling up, hands behind his back. "Well, well. If it isn't first and second in the entire senior class."

He looked us up and down, dripping with it. "Tch. Really doing this school proud."

I'm starting to think Aiden and I are cosmically incompatible.

Nothing good ever happens when I'm anywhere near him.

Aiden and I played deaf, chins up, standing ramrod straight