Chapter Nine #2
No wonder he’s confused when I don’t fawn all over him.
From Ivan’s perspective, I am a broken chatbot—spitting out negative responses to prompts he uses to great effect in every other encounter with similar software.
I look back at the fries. Yeah, I’m not eating those.
I’d feel dirty taking part in Ivan’s fry lie. French Lies?
“So wait.” Kavi slides the fries back toward us. “Hold up. Ivan. You came in here guns blazing like Zora was out of line for pretending you were dating, but that’s what you were doing in that video?”
“Not to this degree!” Ivan argues.
“Still counts,” Trieu adds apologetically. “Gotta be honest, I was Team Ivan coming in here, but no, you’re both nuts. Talk about matching each other’s freak.” He pauses to breathe around a bite of fries—should have warned him they were hot. “I kinda love it.”
“Me too.” Now that Trieu has broken the fry seal, Kavi moves to shake the table’s bottle of ketchup over the whole plate.
Ugh, I hate when people put sauce on things willy-nilly.
Now all the flavors are touching, and I have to pretend like it’s fine.
I’m fine! Comparatively, this is fine. “Trieu, are you thinking what I’m thinking? ”
“Yup.” Trieu eats another fry. “I think we could do it. You and me? No problem.”
“I mean, it would be a challenge, but we’re not starting from nothing here. This is Ivan Hunt we’re talking about.”
“Literally what is happening right now?” I ask. I’m lost again at my own war council.
“What’s happening is there’s really only one way to fight a rumor,” Trieu begins.
“With the truth?” I offer hopefully.
“What? No. What are you, five? You fight a rumor with another, more interesting rumor. Or, in this case—”
“You own it.” Kavi picks up the idea and runs with it. “Double down. It’s your rumor world, and you have to start living in it. Harness the power of the rumor. Control it. Mold it to your ambitions.”
“We’re still talking about the dating thing, right? Not, like, the Sith?”
“Same difference,” mutters Ivan. “Anyway, they’re right. Whatever both of us did to get here is irrelevant. If we show up tomorrow saying we’re not actually dating, I look like a girl-eating jerk again. I’ve come too far to slide back down there, reputation-wise.” Has he?
“We need to be dating tomorrow; it’s simple as that,” Ivan says, like anything about that is simple.
Like he didn’t even give a second thought to the idea of using me to launder his reputation.
But that’s not how this is going to work.
I am not a two-legged aura cleanse whose proximity grants a “totally not misogynist” buff to problematic white boys.
“Agreed,” says Kavi. “Zora, what do you say?”
Gee, I don’t know. What does one say in this situation?
There is no fake-dating primer out there for me to download and peruse before making an informed decision.
Obviously part of me thinks it’s a terrible idea, but there’s another part that remembers the way Brian Juno sized me up onstage, like he wanted to flip through the contents of my mind to determine if I was a good witch or a bad witch.
What’s odd is that even after my disqualification, I don’t think he’s decided which kind of witch I am. Yet.
All I know is Brian and Ivan have history.
Positive history, considering how Brian openly favored him before today’s match.
If anything will change Brian’s mind about me, it’s allying with Ivan.
So again, what does one say in this situation?
Maybe it’s easier to think of it like writing a cutscene.
What comes next in the story? Got it. It’s this:
“I’m not against the idea in theory,” I admit. “I just want to be clear on what I’m getting out of this.”
“Of course you do,” Ivan scoffs. Really?
“What you get is a cheat code. A shortcut,” Trieu explains. I think back to what Cassius told me earlier today, about my uncle Clive. I get why he’d maybe have a thing against shortcuts.
“Right now you’re at the bottom of the academy food chain. Ivan and, let’s face it, people like me and Kavi are much closer to the top.”
And that is something else that’s bothering me about this. I invited Trieu and Kavi to the war council, but mostly for advice on how to kill the rumor I started. I don’t understand what they get out of helping me keep it alive. I make that my next question.
“Believe it or not, but this was kind of our strategy coming in,” Kavi says.
“What?” I ask. “Your strategy was to wait for a complete social media Luddite to freak out in front of Brian so she gets disqu—”
“I need to stop you there,” Trieu says sharply, but not unkindly. “But you talk in legit paragraphs, and if we let you start describing things, I repeat, we will be here. All. Night.”
“Fair.”
“Obviously Trieu and I have collabed before, but we’ve been trying to scout two or three other people to form a pod within the academy.
” Kavi eats another fry. Her nonchalance is admirable, but unlike Ivan it doesn’t feel like a performance.
She’s just good at this, at conveying her thoughts in order.
Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s media training.
“We’d keep an eye on each other, work together, cross-post to each other’s accounts, co-stream, all that jazz. At least until the final week.”
Ivan breaks the silence he’s kept up for a few moments to heave a loud sigh. “Teamwork makes the dream work,” he quotes solemnly. Very original.
“I mean, think about it.” Kavi ignores Ivan. “The thing about battle royales is that you can’t actually win them alone.”
That doesn’t ring true at all, but Kavi presses on.
“Katniss in Hunger Games,” she says. “How did she win?”
I think about it for a moment. “She made alliances.”
“The students in Battle Royale. How did they survive?”
“They formed an alliance.”
“Squid Game?”
“They—Wait, no. That one doesn’t work at all.”
“Then it’s a good thing we’re not in Squid Game,” Kavi concludes, arms crossed across her chest.
This was not how any of this was supposed to go.
I was supposed to stay in my lane, start strong on the concrete work of winning, and keep my eyes on that number one win with Cassius at the end of the summer.
I was supposed to be enjoying my first night away from home, a seventeen-year-old in New York City with minimal supervision and all the sushi she could eat.
One GLR match, one party, a backpack full of bottles, and one massive internet coincidence later, I’m here.
Everything happens too much, I think. I wish today were over.
Two blocks away or twenty, the long toll of a church bell rings loud enough for the sound to pass through the diner’s glass windows.
I guess that’s the noise my wishes make when they come true.
It’s midnight. Today is over, and I’m starting my tomorrow in a diner with three strangers, two of whom I’m pretty sure are about to turn my problems into their personal summer renovation project, and one of whom is Ivan.
I look up at him again and see in his face that he’s not kidding about going through with this. A fake relationship so neither of us spends the rest of the summer doing damage control on account of his green eyes and my big mouth.
“Please, Zora,” he says quietly. “Give me another chance.”
He is not begging; he’d never beg. But for the tiniest second, between the “please” and my name, I see something new.
VANE’s mask just slipped—there!—and behind it, the real Ivan Hunt waved hello.
He is cleaner and he smells good, but he is just as young and exhausted and, let’s face it, desperate as me.
That desperate boy doesn’t perform for no reason.
He does it because it makes people like him, because he needs that, and it obviously works.
Kavi and Trieu are literally enjoying the fries of his emotional labor.
I rub my eyes. God, I’m so tired. When I look back, Ivan’s mask is back up, but my memory of what’s behind it lingers like the phantom toll of the last twelve o’clock bell.
There must be a Third Zora in here somewhere.
A secret Zora, one that left her tools out for someone like Ivan to find and use them to widen the tiniest of cracks in my defenses.
I can only imagine how smug he’d be if he knew she existed and that he was making progress.
I make a mental note here, right now, to never let him know.
If we’re going to fool the world, we have to perform like pros.
Top of the leaderboard, the best to ever do it. So let’s do it.
“Fine.” I pick up the longest fry I can find and bite it clean in half. “But I’m not doing it for you. And we need to have some rules.”