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My voice sounded unconvincing even to myself.

I rolled over, tried to force my brain to shut down. Tomorrow I'd apologize. Tomorrow I'd be professional and polite and make this right. Tomorrow I'd figure out why some Instagram-obsessed woman had gotten under my skin like nobody had in years.

Tomorrow I'd stop thinking about the way she'd looked at me. Like she could see right through every defense I'd built. Like she knew exactly how to cut deep with just a few well-aimed words.

Like she was something I didn't understand and couldn't control.

And that bothered me more than it should have.

More than anything had bothered me in a long time.

I squeezed my eyes shut, tried to think about plays, about film study, about the next game. Tried to think about anything except Harper DuBose and her sharp tongue and her performative Instagram and the way her eyes had blazed when she'd told me off.

It didn't work.

By the time I finally fell asleep, it was nearly three AM, and my last conscious thought was that I was way in over my head.

I just didn't understand why yet.

3

I'm Not Going

Harper

"I'm not going."

I was lying on Mia's couch, staring at her ceiling, wondering if it was too early in the day to open the bottle of wine I'd brought over. It was four PM on a Saturday. That felt reasonable. Ish.

"You're going," Mia said from the kitchen, where she was stress-baking cookies for the dinner I absolutely was not attending. Her long strawberry-blonde hair was pulled up into a high ponytail, a few intentional wisps loose to frame her exquisitely pretty face. She wore an apron over the romantic pink coquette dress she wore, waist cinched, puff sleeves big and imposing in a good way.

"I'm really not." I sat up, grabbed my phone, and started scrolling through Instagram even though I'd already checked it three times in the last ten minutes. Ninety-seven likes on this morning's coffee story. The oat milk foam had been particularly photogenic. "Tell Isla I have the plague. Consumption. Scarlet fever. Whatever disease sounds most Victorian and tragic."

"Harper."

"Smallpox? Is smallpox still a thing? I have smallpox."

Mia appeared in the doorway, flour on her hands, giving me that look. The one that said she loved me but also wanted to shake me. "You're going to dinner. Cam's going to apologize. You're going to accept her apology like an adult. And then we're all going to have a nice evening and move past this."

"Or," I countered, "I could stay here, drink this wine, watch you bake, and we could pretend Captain Miserable doesn't exist. That sounds better. Let's do that."

"Cam feels terrible, Harper."

"Good. She should feel terrible. She was terrible." I went back to my phone, opened Cam's Instagram even though I'd already looked at it six times today. Still the same as every other time I'd looked: professional highlight reels, charity events, training photos. Nothing personal. Nothing real. The most recent post was from three days ago, some game highlight with a caption about teamwork that sounded like it had been written by a PR team. Sixty thousand likes.

I scrolled back further. Weeks of posts, all following the same sanitized pattern. This wasn't a person's Instagram. This was a brand. A carefully managed public figure account with zero personality, zero authenticity, zero anything that made her an actual human being.

And she'd called me shallow for using Instagram.

"You know what pisses me off?" I said, holding up my phone to Mia. "She mocked me for being on Instagram. Called me Instagram like it was an insult. But look at her feed. It's completely fake. It's all professionally shot photos and canned captions about teamwork and perseverance. There's nothing real here. No life, no personality, nothing. At least when I post, it's actually me. And the fucking hypocrite! She has two million followers."

Mia came over, looked at my phone. "I mean, she's a public figure. That's pretty normal."

"That's my point! I'm out here posting my actual life—my coffee, my outfits, my thoughts, my coming out journey, all of it and to only three thousand followers—and she calls me shallow for it. But her entire online presence is a performance for two million people. A fake, sanitized, corporate-approved performance. How is that less shallow than me taking pictures of my latte?"

"Maybe you should tell her that," Mia said carefully.

"Oh, I plan to." I tossed my phone onto the couch. "Fine. I'll go. But I'm wearing the dress."