Book Three Teaser
Rebecca Carney.
I know the name. Everyone at Edgewood knows the name.
Black heart Becca. The ice queen. The girl who walks through this school like she’s passing through an airport terminal—no investment, no attachment, no indication that anything here matters enough to hold her attention.
I’ve seen her in the hallways. Dark hair, always pulled back.
Blue eyes that operate at a temperature below freezing.
The kind of face that would be beautiful if it ever moved.
She’s already seated when I drop into the desk across from her.
Her posture is straight. Her expression is blank.
Not bored—blank. There’s a difference. Bored means you’ve evaluated and dismissed.
Blank means you’ve decided not to evaluate at all.
I recognize it because I’ve been wearing a version of the same face for weeks.
The teacher tells us to share five things about ourselves. An icebreaker. The academic equivalent of a trust fall.
“I’m Danny.” I lean back in my chair. “I play lacrosse. I have a—” The word catches.
Twin. I have a twin sister. Had. The tense change is a knife I wasn’t ready for, not here, not in a classroom full of people who would notice the flinch.
“I had a sister,” I say, and keep moving before the silence can fill with pity.
“I have no interest in this class. I don’t date, so don’t get attached. And I love the beach.”
She pops a bubble of bright pink gum. The sound is deliberate—a punctuation mark.
“I’m Becca.” Her voice is flat. Not hostile.
Not warm. Temperature-controlled, like a room set to exactly sixty-eight degrees.
“I couldn’t care less about you, so don’t worry about getting attached.
My only goal is to pass this class, so please don’t mess it up for me.
I’m fluent in Russian. I skateboard to piss off my mother. And I hate the beach.”
Five facts delivered like a police report. No elaboration. No eye contact. No invitation.
And yet.
I notice things. It’s what I do. It’s all I do. And what I notice about Becca Carney in the thirty seconds it takes her to dismiss me is this:
She said “my mother.” Not “my mom.” The formality of that word choice is a wall built from a single brick, and I can see the entire architecture behind it.
Her left hand is resting on the desk. Her right is in her lap, curled into a fist she doesn’t seem to know she’s making. The knuckles are white.
There’s concealer on her jaw. The wrong shade—too warm for her skin tone. Applied in a car, probably. The kind of rushed, imperfect job you do when you’re trying to cover something before first period.
And underneath the ice, underneath the flat voice and the popped gum and the practiced indifference—there’s a current. A heat. The kind of energy that radiates off people who are holding something down with both hands and losing the grip.
I know that energy. I’m running on it.
She’s not boring. She’s not cold. She’s a liar. The same way I’m a liar. The same way everyone who sits in the back row and says “I don’t care” is a liar—because not caring is the most exhausting performance there is, and only people who care too much ever bother to learn the lines.
Something in my chest shifts. Not attraction. Not yet. Something worse. Recognition.
I lean forward.
“Alright. Let’s get this show on the road.”
I hold up the assignment packet. “It clearly says the project needs approval. She’ll know if we phone it in.” I slide a blank notebook toward him. “Write down ideas. Anything that comes to mind. We’ll sort through them after.”
He stares at the notebook like I’ve handed him a live grenade. Then, slowly—with the reluctance of a boy being asked to participate in his own education—he picks up the pen and starts writing.
I write Ideas at the top of my own page and draw a small dot underneath.
Then I stare at the dot and wait for brilliance to arrive.
It doesn’t. What arrives instead is the uncomfortable awareness that Danny Rorke smells good.
Pine needles and something warmer underneath—brown sugar, maybe, or the clean starch of his uniform shirt.
And mint from his gum. The combination is annoyingly specific, the kind of scent profile that lodges in the back of your brain and refuses to vacate.
I refocus. The dot. The page. The assignment that will determine thirty percent of my grade in a class I cannot afford to fail because my transcript is the only thing standing between me and a future that doesn’t involve Hartley Carney.
“Do you have an idea?” I ask, because the silence is starting to feel like something other than silence.
Danny looks up. His eyes are green—dark green, the color of the woods behind Edgewood in December.
The red rims make them brighter. The grief makes them older than eighteen.
And right now they’re focused on me with an intensity that suggests he’s been studying my face the way I study my notebooks: systematically, with attention to detail.
I blink. Look away. This is not attraction.
This is proximity and hormones and the fact that Danny Rorke, for all his faults, has a jawline that could cut glass and I am a seventeen-year-old girl with a functioning nervous system.
That’s biology, not interest. Biology can be overridden. I override everything else.
“Earth to Becca.”
I clear my throat. “Sorry. What’s your idea?”
He leans forward. The chair drops to four legs. And when he speaks, the voice is different—not the lazy drawl from thirty seconds ago. This voice has edges. Precision. The voice of someone who has been thinking about this longer than the five minutes since the assignment was handed out.
“What if we did something with the local farms? Not just a garden—an actual system. We partner with farms in the area, set up a teaching program for kids to learn sustainable agriculture. On top of that, we build a distribution channel—organic, local produce going directly to families in need. Cut out the grocery chains. We bring in nutritionists to teach healthy eating in a way that doesn’t feel like a lecture.
And we get restaurants involved—farm-to-table dinners, locally sourced, with the profits cycling back into the program. ”
I stare at him.
He taps his pencil against the desk. Waits.
“Danny… that’s…” I search for the appropriately restrained response and come up empty. “Holy shit. That’s an amazing idea.”
He grins. Full. Unguarded. The kind of grin that transforms a face from attractive to devastating, and I hate that I noticed the transformation because noticing means I was looking and looking means I cared enough to observe and I do not care about Daniel Rorke.
“See?” He taps the pencil again. “Not a bad partner after all, Becs.”
Becs. The nickname is casual—tossed out like it’s nothing. But nobody calls me Becs except my father and Katya, and hearing it from this boy’s mouth does something to my chest that I file under “ignore immediately.”
I jot down everything he said. Fast, messy—my handwriting deteriorating in direct proportion to my excitement, which is a diagnostic I’d rather not examine. “I’ll type this up tonight. These notes are a disaster. We can present the concept to the teacher tomorrow for approval.”
The bell rings. Danny slides his phone across the desk. “Give me your number so we can work on it outside of class.”
I type my number in. Hand it back. Our fingers don’t touch because I make sure they don’t, and the fact that I had to make sure is information I am choosing to discard.
“Text me if you have other ideas,” I say.
Danny winks. Stands. “Will do. See you around, Becs.”
He walks out. I sit there for an extra minute, packing my things slowly, precisely—pens in order, notebooks stacked, the desk tapped twice. The ritual. The scaffolding. The architecture that holds me up.
Maybe this class won’t be entirely unbearable.
I discard that thought too.