Episode 2: The Emergency Dating Handbook
I finished the rulebook at 11:47 p.m., which is a full thirteen minutes before my self-imposed midnight cutoff for anything requiring higher brain function, and I want that on the record too, because it is possibly the last piece of academic-grade organizational work I would produce for the rest of this ordeal.
Twelve rules. I'd numbered them, cross-referenced them against school policy, and even color-coded the ones that involved potential legal exposure. Rule four: No use of the word "handle" in reference to another student, especially in front of faculty. Rule seven: No lockpicking tools, of any kind, brought to any date-adjacent activity, social event, or extracurricular gathering. Rule nine, which I'm slightly ashamed of in hindsight: No declarations of "protection" made in a volume audible to more than three people.
I printed it, punched holes in the margin, and slid it into a plastic sleeve, because if you're going to enter a fraudulent thirty-day relationship with the single most unpredictable person at Northbridge High, you might as well laminate your dignity while you still have some.
I handed it to Iris the next morning outside the science wing. She read it in total silence, lips moving slightly on rule seven, which I chose to interpret as begrudging respect. Then she took the pen from behind her ear — she always had one there, like other people have a phone in their pocket — and wrote something at the bottom.
Rule 13: If Evan says he's fine more than three times, someone has to take him out to eat.
"That's not a real rule," I said. "That's — that doesn't even relate to safety."
"It's the most important one," she said, and walked off before I could argue, which I would learn was her preferred conflict resolution strategy: state something absurd with total confidence, then leave before anyone can construct a rebuttal.
I thought it was a joke. I want to stress how completely I believed it was a joke, right up until 6:52 that evening, when my doorbell rang and I opened it to find Iris Vale standing on my porch holding a cake shaped, unmistakably, like a fire hydrant.
"You said 'I'm fine' three times today," she said, by way of greeting. "Once at lunch, once after Denny yelled at you about the truss report, and once just now, over text, when I asked if you were mad I signed your rulebook in red ink like a legal summons."
"I wasn't counting."
"I was." She held up the cake like it was Exhibit A. "This is a fire hydrant. Mara helped me pipe the frosting. It's red velvet, because subtlety isn't really the assignment here."
I stood in my doorway for a solid three seconds, trying to determine the correct emotional response to a girl who terrified an entire cafeteria showing up at my house with a hand-piped novelty cake because she'd been keeping a private tally of my emotional deflections. I landed, eventually, on the only honest answer available to me.
"Do you want to come in and eat this with me before my mother gets home and asks a thousand questions I don't have prepared answers for?"
"Rule fourteen," Iris said, stepping past me into the hallway like she'd been invited a hundred times before. "Always have prepared answers."
The following Thursday, Iris announced — with the same tone she'd used to inform the entire cafeteria of my "protection" status — that we needed to go on an actual date, in public, to establish what she called "a credible pattern of normalcy" for anyone who might be building a file on either of us.
I suggested somewhere quiet. She suggested a restaurant two blocks off Founders Street that I'd walked past roughly four hundred times without ever going in, a narrow little place with red booths and a bell over the door that Iris disabled the moment we walked in, out of what I can only assume was reflex.
"You just took the clapper off the bell," I said.
"It was loose," she said. "I fixed it. You're welcome."
"It wasn't loose ten seconds ago."
"It's loose now. Things change."
We sat down, and Iris immediately did something I would come to recognize as entirely characteristic of her: she chose the seat with its back to the wall, facing the door, and then spent a full thirty seconds visually mapping every possible exit route in the restaurant, including — I watched her do this — the kitchen's swinging door.
"What are you doing?"
"Situational awareness." She said this the way other people might say ordering water. "You should know where the exits are. It's basic."
"We're on a date. At a family restaurant. That serves soup."
"Soup can be a resource," she said, entirely seriously, and then flagged down the waiter — a tired-looking college kid named Perry, according to his name tag — to ask, with complete sincerity, whether the tomato soup on the menu had a consistency that could function as an adhesive in an emergency.
Perry looked at her for a long moment, looked at me — I offered him nothing but a helpless shrug — and said, "I mean. It's pretty thick?"
"Good to know," Iris said, and ordered it, along with a grilled cheese, like she hadn't just asked a teenager to evaluate his workplace's soup for structural applications.
I put my face in my hands. I was laughing. I hadn't meant to be laughing, but there I was, shoulders shaking, trying to explain to Iris Vale that most people, on a first date, discuss hobbies or music, not the tensile properties of tomato bisque, and Iris just watched me laugh with an expression of profound, unbothered satisfaction, like this had been her goal all along and she'd achieved it through sheer accident.
"You have a nice laugh," she said, apropos of absolutely nothing, and then immediately looked deeply annoyed at herself for having said it, turning her full attention to buttering a piece of bread like it had personally wronged her.
I didn't say anything. I filed it away instead, in the same mental folder where I was starting to keep an alarming number of things about Iris Vale that had nothing to do with the thirty-day arrangement and everything to do with the fact that I liked, very much, making her say things she hadn't planned to say.
We were still riding that particular high — cake the night before, soup diplomacy that evening — when Mia found us at my locker the next morning, phone already in hand, expression grim in a way that made my stomach drop before she even said anything.
"Someone posted this on Northbridge After Bell," she said, turning her screen toward us.
It was a photo of Iris and me from the restaurant, taken through the window from the street, the two of us mid-laugh, the fire-hydrant cake box visible on the seat beside me from the night before as if someone had been watching my house too. Underneath, in the anonymous board's signature all-caps commentary style: CHAOS QUEEN FORCING NEW BOYFRIEND TO SMILE ON CAMERA? SOURCES SAY HE LOOKS SCARED.
I did not look scared in the photo. I looked, if I'm being fully honest with myself, extremely happy, which was somehow worse, because it meant someone had taken a genuinely nice moment and rewritten it into something sinister without changing a single pixel.
My hand moved toward Mia's phone. "I'll get it taken down. I can email the mods, I have Ms. Alvarez's contact for—"
"Don't," Iris said.
I stopped. "It's spreading a lie about you."
"It's spreading a lie people already believed before the photo existed." Iris's voice had gone very flat, very careful, the tone she used, I was starting to notice, whenever something actually hurt. "If you get it taken down, it just proves I need protecting. I'd rather people see the photo and decide for themselves than have you scrub the internet every time someone's scared of me."
"I'm not trying to protect you. I'm trying to fix a lie."
"Same thing, from where I'm standing." She looked at me, and for just a second the flatness cracked, just enough that I saw something underneath it — something tired, something that had clearly had this exact conversation with people before, and lost. "I don't need you to make it disappear, Evan. I need you to not flinch when it doesn't."
I put my phone away. It was, I think, the first time I understood that Iris Vale wasn't asking me to fix her reputation. She was asking me to stop being embarrassed by it in private while defending it in public, which was a much harder thing to promise, and an even harder thing to actually do.
That afternoon, we went back to the prop storage room — ostensibly to help Mr. Denny finish the festival damage report, but really because I hadn't stopped thinking about the sheared bolt, and neither, apparently, had Iris.
Someone had been in there. A toolbox sat squarely in the middle of the room, positioned with the kind of deliberate centering that meant it hadn't just been left there — it had been placed. Iris crouched beside it and flipped the latch before I could suggest we maybe not touch potential evidence with our bare hands.
Inside, nestled in foam cutouts clearly meant for other tools, was a plastic toy hammer. Bright red, dented at the head, the exact one — I recognized it from the whispered version of the story that had followed Iris around Northbridge for two years — that she'd been suspended over the first time, the one people swore she'd used to "threaten" a kid who'd since transferred schools rather than admit he'd made the whole confrontation up.
"That's not mine," Iris said immediately, and I believed her instantly, which surprised me slightly less than it should have. "Mine's at home. In a drawer. I haven't touched this specific hammer in two years."
I turned it over carefully by the very edge of the handle. There, unmistakably, was a partial fingerprint pressed into a smear of grease near the grip — and beside it, fainter but present, a second print, smaller, that could very plausibly have belonged to Iris from whatever contact she'd had with the object originally.
"Two sets of prints," I said. "One's probably yours, from before. But the other—"
"Nolan," Iris said, before I finished the sentence, with the flat certainty of someone who'd already run the same math I had. "He'd know exactly which prop to plant. He'd know it would be the one story everyone already half-believes."
It wasn't proof. Not real proof, not the kind that would hold up if we brought it to the office — a partial print, half-smudged, on a toy nobody could definitively place in anyone's hands that day. But it was enough to feel, for the first time, like the ground under this whole mess had a shape to it. Someone was building a case against Iris out of pieces designed to look exactly like the story people already wanted to tell.
We were still crouched there, close enough that I could smell engine grease and something like peppermint on her jacket, when a sharp knock sounded against the frosted glass of the storage room window — followed immediately by a small, undignified thump as something dropped onto the windowsill outside.
Iris was up and across the room before I'd fully processed the noise. She unlatched the window, and Pickle hopped through with the enormous self-satisfaction of a creature who has never once questioned his right to enter any building he pleases, a small object clutched in his beak.
He dropped it directly onto my open palm, apparently deciding I'd earned the delivery, and flapped up onto a shelf to observe with what I can only describe as smug interest.
It was a keychain. Silver, tarnished slightly at the edges, engraved on the back in small, careful lettering that had clearly been done by hand rather than machine.
Don't let her remember that night.
I looked up at Iris. Whatever warmth had been on her face a moment before — the closeness, the peppermint, the shared triumph over a half-solved clue — drained out of it entirely, replaced by something I hadn't seen from her yet in the two days I'd technically been her boyfriend.
She looked, for the first time since the stage collapsed on top of us, genuinely afraid.
"Iris. Whose keychain is this?"
She didn't answer right away. She just stared at the small silver object in my palm like it might do something on its own if she looked away first, and when she finally spoke, her voice had none of its usual flat confidence left in it at all.
"I don't know," she said. "And that's the part that scares me."
End of Episode 2.