Chapter One: The Assignment
Felix Marsh laced his fingers through hers in the middle of the cafeteria, in front of God and Jessica Nandan and everyone, and Harper Sutter's whole body forgot, for one humiliating second, that this was supposed to be fake.
"You're squeezing kind of hard," he murmured, not looking at her, smiling at a passing junior like this was the most natural thing in the world. "Rule four, Sutter. Natural contact only."
"I am being natural," Harper hissed back. "This is what natural panic looks like."
That was Thursday. First, there was Tuesday, and the worksheet that started all of it.
Mr. Okafor had a habit of writing the day's objective on the whiteboard in handwriting so neat it looked typed, and on Tuesday morning it said, in block letters: UNIT 7: ATTACHMENT, LOSS, AND THE SIMULATED RELATIONSHIP PROJECT.
Harper had actually laughed out loud. She stopped when nobody else did.
"Some of you have heard the older cohort talk about this," Mr. Okafor said, passing out a stapled packet with the ease of a man who had broken bad news to teenagers for eleven years running. "Some of you have not, because you were, understandably, too busy panicking about the SATs to listen to juniors gossip. Here is the short version. For the next two weeks, you will be assigned a partner. You will simulate a full relationship arc. Introduction. Escalation. At least three logged instances of public affection appropriate to a school environment. A shared journal, one entry per day, each of you, no exceptions, no plagiarizing your partner's feelings. And on the final day, you will perform a scripted termination of the relationship in front of the class, using language provided in your packet, so that we can observe and discuss the physiological markers of simulated grief."
"A fake breakup," said someone near the back, delighted.
"A simulated breakup," Mr. Okafor corrected, in the tone of a man who had corrected this exact phrase every year since the unit was invented. "The distinction matters for your grade, if nothing else. You are not performing heartbreak for entertainment. You are documenting, in real time, how a human nervous system behaves when it believes something is ending, even when the rational mind knows it was never entirely real to begin with. That tension, ladies and gentlemen, is the entire point of the unit. Partners are assigned by me. Randomly, before anyone asks, and no, you cannot trade."
A groan moved through the room, half performance and half genuine. Someone asked if they could request a partner they already liked, and Mr. Okafor said, without looking up from his roster, that this was exactly the sort of bias the randomization existed to prevent, which only made the groaning worse.
It's fine, Harper told herself, opening the packet, feeling the particular dread of a person who has just realized she cannot control the next two weeks of her life. Worst case, I get stuck faking chemistry with someone I don't even like. That's easy. That's nothing.
She had not yet seen the assigned-pairs sheet.
She saw it four minutes later, when Mr. Okafor taped it to the side of his desk and the whole class surged toward it like it was concert tickets, and she found her own name third from the top, next to a name that made her stomach drop somewhere south of her shoes.
Sutter, Harper. Marsh, Felix.
Of course, she thought, and the thought arrived flat and a little sick. Of course it's him.
She found Felix already looking at her from across the crowd of classmates, one eyebrow up, the corner of his mouth doing the thing it always did right before he said something that would either be very funny or very annoying, and with Felix it was rarely possible to tell which until it was already too late.
They had known each other since they were seven, since a summer of scraped knees and shared popsicles and one memorable incident involving a treehouse, a garden hose, and Harper's mother's good towels. They had been, for exactly eleven days last spring, something more than that, a fact neither of them had ever said out loud since, a fact that lived in the space between them like a splinter neither had bothered to pull out. It had ended the way things ended between two people who were too scared to want something out loud: quietly, awkwardly, with a shrug and a we're better as friends that neither of them had actually believed.
He is going to make this a joke, Harper thought, watching him cross the room toward her with the loose, easy walk of someone who had never once in his life worried about being liked. He is going to make this a joke because that is what he does with things that could actually matter.
"Partner," Felix said, arriving at her desk, dropping into the seat beside her like he'd been assigned there and not just wandered over uninvited. "This is either the best thing that's happened to me all semester or a war crime. I genuinely can't decide."
Around them, the rest of the room was still sorting itself into its new pairs, a low hum of nervous laughter and negotiated seating, someone already asking their partner if they wanted to be "the clingy one or the emotionally unavailable one," and Harper was grateful, briefly, for the noise. It gave her somewhere to look that wasn't Felix's face.
"It's a class assignment, Marsh. Not a referendum on your whole personality."
"Everything's a referendum on my whole personality. Keeps things interesting." He flipped open the packet, scanning it with a speed that suggested he was reading considerably less carefully than she had. "Oh, we have to hold hands in public. Three times. Documented."
"I saw."
"And a journal. Where I have to write my feelings. Every day."
"I saw that too."
"Harper." He looked up at her then, and for one unguarded second the joke dropped out of his face entirely, and what was underneath it was something she recognized, something careful, something that remembered exactly what those eleven days last spring had felt like even if neither of them had ever said so. "We don't have to make this weird."
"I'm not the one who's going to make it weird," she said, too fast.
"No," he agreed, easy again, the joke sliding back over his face like a curtain drawn shut. "That's definitely my department."
It already is weird, she thought, watching him tuck the packet into his bag with the careless confidence of someone who had decided, apparently, to simply be fine about all of this. It's been weird since April. We just agreed not to say so.
The bell rang before either of them could say anything else, and Harper spent the rest of the day rehearsing, in her head, every version of a conversation she was fairly sure she'd never have the nerve to actually start.
By the time she got to her locker after sixth period, she had almost talked herself into believing this would be simple. Two weeks. A journal. A few hand-holds and a scripted goodbye at the end of it, and then everything would go back to exactly the careful, comfortable distance she and Felix had spent the last five months building between them, brick by brick, ever since April. She had gotten good at that distance. She had told herself, more than once, that she preferred it.
She read through the packet again while she waited for her ride, flipping past the daily journal prompts, "describe a moment today when you felt closer to your partner" and "describe a moment today when you felt distance forming," until she reached the final page, the one stapled shut with a small printed warning: DO NOT READ THE TERMINATION SCRIPT UNTIL DAY THIRTEEN. She almost peeled the staple back anyway. She made herself stop.
Two weeks, she told herself again, tucking the packet into her bag. You have survived worse than two weeks of pretending.
She was still telling herself that on Thursday, right up until Felix sat down across from her at lunch.
She found out how badly she'd underestimated the assignment on Thursday, in the cafeteria, when Felix slid into the seat across from her at lunch without asking, set his tray down like this was a normal thing they did now, and reached across the table to take her hand in front of the entire junior and senior class.
"What are you doing," she said, through a smile that felt bolted onto her face.
"Logging entry one," Felix said cheerfully, not letting go. "Public affection, appropriate to a school environment, witnessed by, let's see." His eyes swept the cafeteria with theatrical precision. "Half the junior class, most of the senior class, and Jessica Nandan, who has been staring at us since I sat down, which is honestly doing more work for our credibility than the hand-holding is."
Harper followed his gaze without meaning to, and found Jessica two tables over, dark eyes narrowed with an interest that had nothing academic in it, her spoon paused halfway to a bowl of yogurt she had clearly stopped tasting the moment Felix sat down across from Harper.
She still likes him, Harper thought, and hated the small, sharp thing that turned over in her chest at the realization, hated it precisely because she had no right to feel it. She's liked him since sophomore year, and everyone knows it except apparently Felix.
"You're squeezing kind of hard," Felix murmured, still smiling at a passing junior like this was the most natural thing in the world.
"I am being natural," Harper hissed. "This is what natural panic looks like."
"Relax your hand, Sutter, you're going to break my fingers before we even get to the journal part." He turned his hand over under hers, slow, deliberate, until it wasn't really her holding his hand anymore so much as the two of them simply holding on, palm to palm, in a way that felt entirely too easy for something that was supposed to be fake. "There. Was that so hard."
Yes, she thought, feeling the warmth of his palm against hers, feeling the particular, treacherous ease of a hand that already knew the shape of hers from a hundred small, ordinary moments over ten years of friendship. That was exactly that hard, and you have no idea why.
"You know this is a school project," she said aloud, carefully light. "Not an actual relationship."
"I'm aware," Felix said, and something flickered behind his eyes too quick to name before the easy grin swallowed it whole again. "Believe me. I am extremely, painfully aware."
Across the cafeteria, Jessica set down her spoon.
She stood, smoothed her skirt, and started walking toward their table with the unhurried confidence of a girl who had clearly decided this was the exact moment to remind everyone in the room, Harper especially, that she had known Felix Marsh for three years and had never once needed a class assignment to find a reason to sit down across from him.
"Incoming," Harper said under her breath, and felt Felix's hand tighten around hers, not letting go, right as Jessica reached their table and said, bright and brittle as glass, "Well. This is new."
"Hey, Jess." Felix's voice slid easily into its usual warm register, the one Harper had heard him use on teachers, on younger kids, on anyone he wanted to keep comfortable, and she hated, a little, how well it still worked. "You heard about Okafor's unit yet?"
"I heard." Jessica's gaze dropped, brief and pointed, to their joined hands on the table, then rose again, perfectly composed. "Didn't realize you two were partners. Small world."
"Randomized," Harper said, before she could stop herself. "Not exactly a choice either of us made."
"Sure." Jessica's smile didn't waver, but something behind it did, just for a second, something that looked almost like the same sharp, private ache Harper had been trying to keep off her own face all lunch period. "Well. Good luck with the journal part. I hear it gets more honest than people expect."
She left before either of them could answer, weaving back toward her own table with her chin held a fraction too high, and Harper watched her go with a knot forming somewhere under her ribs that had nothing to do with the assignment and everything to do with the particular, familiar sting of watching someone else want the thing you were too scared to admit you wanted too.
"That was weird," Felix said, finally letting go of her hand to reach for his fork, his voice carefully light again, carefully back to normal. "Right? Tell me that was weird."
"That was weird," Harper agreed, though what she was thinking, underneath it, was something else entirely. She looked at us like we were real. And for one second, so did you.
Felix opened his mouth to say something else, something that might have actually mattered, and then his phone buzzed against the table, and whatever he'd been about to say folded itself back behind the easy grin before it ever made it out.
"Journal entry one," he said instead, tapping the screen without looking at it. "Should I write that lunch was normal, or should I write down what actually happened?"
Harper looked at their empty, unclasped hands lying an inch apart on the table, close enough to touch, neither one of them reaching first, and found she did not have an honest answer to give him.