Chapter 2
Here is what I know about surviving: You learn the layout first.
Exits. Blind spots. The distance between where you are and where you’d need to be if something goes wrong. You do this before you learn anyone’s name. Before you unpack. Before you let yourself believe that this place might be different from the last one.
Edgewood Preparatory Academy has four exterior exits on the ground floor, two stairwells, and a service corridor behind the dining hall that leads to the loading dock.
The windows in the humanities wing open outward. The ones in the science building don’t. The quad is roughly a hundred and fifty yards from the main gate. There are no cameras covering the west parking lot.
I mapped all of this during the first week of August. Before classes started, before the campus filled with students and noise and expectations.
My father thought I was admiring the architecture while he signed paperwork in the administration building.
I was counting steps.
Thirty-two from the humanities entrance to the nearest stairwell. Fifteen seconds to reach the service corridor if you run.
Old habits. The kind you don’t unlearn just because a therapist says the word progress enough times that it starts sounding like it might be real.
Jonathan catches up to me between first and second period. I hear him before I see him. His footsteps are quick and uneven, the rhythm of someone constantly trying to move a little faster than his natural pace—as if arriving somewhere first means he’s already won. He falls into step beside me.
“Hey,” he says, slightly out of breath.
Before I can respond, he reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. The gesture is gentle, practiced. My skin tightens under his fingertips. I shift my weight slightly, angling my body a few inches away.
A small adjustment, barely noticeable, distance without confrontation.
Jon is handsome in the way private schools manufacture handsome. Straight teeth, blue eyes, blond hair parted with mathematical precision. He looks exactly like someone’s idea of what a boyfriend should be.
Which is exactly why I chose him.
Not because he excites me, not because my pulse does anything interesting when he touches me. Because he is safe.
But safe is a complicated word in my vocabulary. It doesn’t mean comfort, it doesn’t mean affection. Safe means predictable, readable. Someone whose behavior I can map the way I map buildings—patterns, exits, escalation points.
Jon is transparent in his wants. He wants a girlfriend who looks right beside him. Someone who agrees with him in public. Someone who makes him feel like the smartest person in the room even when he isn’t.
Those are manageable wants. I can work with manageable.
What I cannot work with is the boy who leaned against the stone column this morning and watched me cross the quad like he was solving something.
Kaiden Monaghan.
I’m not going to describe him the way the other girls here probably would. Not the tattoos, not the piercings, not the jawline. All of that is decoration. Surface. None of it is the point.
The point is that when I walked past him under that archway, every nerve in my body reacted at once. Not attraction, recognition. The recognition of someone who operates the same way I do.
Watching, calculating, observing the room before stepping into it. People like that are easy to identify once you know the signs. The stillness, the attention, the sense that the version of themselves they show the world is only a fraction of what’s actually there.
Kaiden Monaghan plays the king of Edgewood Prep the same way I play the perfect daughter. Total commitment. Total control. And the quiet understanding that if either of us slipped for even a second, the whole performance would shatter.
I noticed because noticing is what I do. It’s the only survival skill I have left that doesn’t leave marks.
“What was that about in Saunders’ class?” I ask Jon, shifting the books in my arms. “With Kaiden.”
Jon’s jaw tightens almost immediately.
“I told you,” he says. “He’s dangerous. Last year I caught him on campus with drugs and a girl on her knees—”
“Jon.”
He frowns at me. “What?”
“Weed isn’t heroin,” I say calmly. I adjust the books against my hip before continuing. “And I’m going to guess the girl was there voluntarily.”
For a moment he just stares at me. Then he lets out a short, humorless laugh. “You think that’s funny?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You’re defending him,” Jon says, his voice tightening.
“I’m correcting you.”
The words come out even, measured.
Jon’s expression hardens. “He’s not someone you correct people about, Catherine. He’s someone you stay the hell away from.”
“I can manage my own interactions.”
Jon stops walking abruptly. I take two more steps before realizing and turning back toward him. The hallway continues buzzing around us—lockers slamming, voices rising and falling—but the space between us goes very still.
“You don’t know what he’s like,” Jon says.
“I know what you told me.”
“And that should be enough.”
His tone isn’t loud. It’s worse. It’s certain.
I study him quietly. Jon likes certainty. He builds his entire personality around it. Being right. Being the one with the answers. So when I say, “People exaggerate,” it lands harder than it should.
Jon’s shoulders square slightly. “You think I’m exaggerating.”
“I think you’re angry,” I reply.
The silence that follows is thin and sharp. Jon doesn’t like being read. Not by me. Not by anyone.
“The Elite Five aren’t a rumor, Catherine,” he says quietly. “They’re a problem. Everyone here knows that.”
“I noticed.”
“Then act like it.”
His hand closes around my arm. The pressure is slightly too firm. Not painful, not enough to bruise. Just enough to make a point.
My body stills instantly. Every nerve going quiet. Every muscle locking into a posture I know too well: motionless, silent, waiting.
He’s not like that. You’re projecting. You’re always projecting.
“I’m serious,” Jon says, lowering his voice. “Don’t even look at them.”
His fingers tighten slightly, then release. Without another word, he turns and walks away. I watch him go. Perfect posture, perfect stride, the image of the boyfriend every parent would approve of.
I press my thumbnail into the pad of my index finger until the sting pulls me back into the hallway. The noise. The lights. The present.
He’s not like that… and I almost believe it.
BC Calculus. Mister Burke. Room 108, ground floor, two windows on the east wall—neither opens—one door, twenty-six desks.
I know Kaiden is in the room before I cross the threshold. I don’t know how to explain that except to say that the air changes. Some people walk into a space and the space absorbs them. Kaiden walks into a space and the space rearranges itself around him.
He’s in the back row, blazer sleeves pushed to his elbows, forearms resting on the desk.
The tattoos are visible now—black ink crawling from wrist to elbow, designs I can’t make out from this distance and refuse to get close enough to examine.
Xander is beside him, chair tilted back on two legs, looking like a boy who has never once been afraid of falling.
Every other seat in the room is taken. The only empty desk is directly in front of Kaiden.
Of course.
I sit. Place my notebook on the desk. Align my pens—black, blue, green—in a row along the right edge.
Open to a fresh page. These rituals are mine.
Small, controllable things in a world that has proven, repeatedly, that very little is controllable.
My therapist calls them coping mechanisms. I call them the reason I’m still functioning.
A tug at the back of my head. Light, deliberate. The unmistakable sensation of fingers closing around a strand of my hair.
I turn. Kaiden’s face is six inches from mine.
Those eyes—not blue, not grey, something in between that shifts depending on the light—are locked on me with an expression I can’t categorize.
Amusement, maybe. Or curiosity. Or something darker that I don’t want to name because naming it would mean acknowledging the heat that just flared at the base of my spine.
He smiles. Crooked, unhurried, like he has all the time in the world and plans to spend it making me uncomfortable.
I dig my thumbnail into my finger. The sting helps. A little.
“Where’s the boyfriend, Kitty Cat?”
“It’s Catherine. And he’s not in this class.”
“Right. Because this is BC Calc.” The implication hangs there, and Xander snickers beside him. Kaiden leans back, spreading his arms wide across the desk behind him. “Come to the game this weekend. We’re throwing a party after.”
“No.”
“Just like that? No curiosity? No what game, what party, who’ll be there?”
“What game?”
He grins like I’ve just proven his point. “Lacrosse. Biggest sport in this school. Practically a religion around here.”
“I’m not religious.”
Xander barks a laugh. Kaiden just studies me—that same calculating look from the archway, like he’s running an algorithm and I’m the variable that won’t resolve.
The classroom door opens, and Mister Burke walks in.
He’s older—late sixties, maybe—with the posture of a man who peaked when Kennedy was president and has been in decline ever since.
He scans the room, and his eyes land on me the way eyes always land on the new person: with assessment and a preemptive verdict already forming.
“New student. Introduce yourself.”
I stand. Back straight, hands at my sides. The familiar performance of being perceived.
“Catherine O’Farrell. I transferred from North Jared.”
“And what are your academic plans after Edgewood?”
“Nuclear science and engineering.”
The room goes quiet. Burke’s eyebrow lifts—one long, grey caterpillar arching toward his receding hairline.
“Bold choice for a young woman.”