Chapter 1 THE SCHOLARSHIP GIRL

Ivy's POV

I found the note in my locker before first period. Folded through the vent, small and tight, like someone had taken their time. I didn't read it in the hallway because people were watching, so I read it in the bathroom stall with the door locked and someone else's blow-dryer humming on the other side.

Does the scholarship cover your lunch or do you have to beg for that too?

No name. There never was.

I folded it back and put it in my pocket, then washed my hands like I'd touched something dirty before walking to English class with my face doing what it had learned to do over three years ~ nothing ~ just blank ~ just keep moving.

My name is Ivy Monroe, senior year, scholarship student. My grandmother spent her last years writing essays for this chance. Every Sunday morning she sat at our kitchen table with reading glasses held together by a rubber band, typing on an old laptop until her fingers cramped. She wrote about potential and excellence and what education could do for a girl with nothing but her own mind ~ she wrote about hard work and believing in yourself even when no one else did.

She wrote eight applications, got rejected four times, kept writing.

She died four months before the acceptance letter arrived.

I kept that letter in my wallet, not for motivation but because sometimes I needed to touch something she had touched ~ the last thing she fought for that I could still hold. And someone had made a joke out of it this morning.

The hallway outside Room 204 was crowded when I got there, students leaning against lockers, talking in groups, laughing at things I couldn't hear. I walked past them without looking up, invisible ~ and that was fine. That was safe.

I sat in the middle back row, uncapped my pen, wrote the date, and the note stayed in my pocket like a weight while I stared at the blank page and thought about my grandmother's hands ~ the way they looked when she typed, the way she would stop and rub her fingers because they hurt but she never complained. She just kept going. She believed in me on the days I couldn't believe in myself.

Then the door opened.

Jace Holloway walked in six minutes late and girls sat up straighter, boys did that chin lift thing, even Mr. Davenport ~ who once made a varsity captain cry over a comma ~ waved toward an open seat like it was an honor. Everybody knew Jace Holloway, starting quarterback since sophomore year, team captain, son of Richard Holloway whose name was on three buildings at this school. He walked like he'd never once wondered if he belonged anywhere.

I had a rule for people like him ~ eyes down, don't engage, stay out of their orbit. I learned that rule the hard way freshman year when I made eye contact with the wrong person, smiled at someone too far above me in the school's invisible hierarchy, and ended up with a week of whispers and a note in my locker I took three days to forget. So I never made that mistake again.

The only open seat was directly in front of mine. Of course it was.

He sat down and pulled out a leather notebook and a silver pen, smelling expensive, taking up space like someone who'd never been told to make himself smaller, and the note in my pocket felt heavier as I pressed my fingers against it until the paper crinkled.

Eleven minutes into the lecture he turned around, not to talk to someone but to look at me, his eyes moving over my worn cardigan, my lunch bag, my cheap notebook before he leaned toward Marcus and didn't even bother to whisper low enough.

"Who brings a brown bag lunch to Ashridge? What is she saving up for, a second scholarship?"

Marcus laughed. Someone nearby covered her mouth. Mr. Davenport kept talking about symbolism in The Great Gatsby, and nobody else seemed to notice. My face stayed still because that was the one thing I could control, and the note suddenly made sense ~ the handwriting I didn't recognize, that word scholarship, someone who knew exactly where to aim.

He turned back to the front and never looked at me again.

My grandmother wrote eight applications, got rejected four times, kept writing, and died without knowing if it worked. But she kept going anyway because she believed in me on the days I couldn't believe in myself, and I thought about her at the kitchen table, glasses held together by a rubber band, fingers moving across the keyboard.

She never complained. She never stopped. She just kept going.

The bell rang and Jace grabbed his bag and walked out while everyone filed past. I stayed seated, my hand still in my pocket touching the note, just breathing, just thinking ~ because everything was still the same and nothing had changed.

This year was going to be bad, I already knew that. What I didn't know was that I would end up living in his house, hearing him cry through walls he thought were thick enough, learning things about him he'd never told anyone.

It all started with a video I never meant to record.