“What?” I asked.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Become what people want so quickly.”
The question should have felt like praise. Instead, it felt like she had placed a hand against something bruised.
I looked back toward the party through the glass doors. Lila was telling someone I was hilarious. Miles was watching Katherine from a distance with confused interest. Two girls I barely knew were whispering over their phones, and when one noticed me looking, she smiled.
I smiled back automatically.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Katherine’s voice softened. “Yes, you do.”
Maybe I did.
Maybe I had learned too young that survival depended on reading a room faster than anyone else in it. My father’s moods. My mother’s silences. The Montgomerys’ invisible rules. Bellamont’s hunger for beauty that looked effortless. Every room had a temperature, a rhythm, a set of desires people pretended not to have.
All I did was adjust.
“You do it with school,” I said.
Katherine frowned. “That’s different.”
“No, it isn’t. You see systems.”
“Cells and social groups are not the same thing.”
“They are to you.”
She considered that, unwillingly interested despite herself.
Then she looked back through the glass doors at the party.
“They like you more than me.”
The statement was quiet enough that the music almost swallowed it.
I did not answer immediately because denying it would insult both of us.
Instead, I leaned my shoulder against hers. “They don’t know you yet.”
“They know me enough.”
“No, they know the version of you that corrects people at lunch.”
“They should stop saying incorrect things.”
I smiled faintly. “That’s not how friendship works.”
“Maybe friendship should work better.”
Something about the sentence made my chest ache.
I turned toward her fully. “You don’t need them.”
