Lena’s POV
The next day doesn’t feel like a celebration either. The cafeteria line moves in stops and starts, and my stomach tightens for reasons that have nothing to do with hunger. I reach for my wallet in my backpack's front pocket, the one I always keep it in, and my fingers find nothing but loose receipts and a broken pencil.
A spike of panic shoots through my chest, the same feeling I had last night staring at the acceptance letter, mentally calculating numbers that don't add up no matter how many times I rearrange them.
I pat my jacket pockets, then my jeans, then go back to the backpack and unzip every compartment, checking twice because maybe I missed it, maybe it's wedged behind my history textbook or tangled in my headphone cord.
But it's not there. It's in yesterday's jeans, sitting in my laundry basket at home, and the heat rises in my face again, a different kind of embarrassment than this morning but just as suffocating.
Another thing I can't afford to lose. Another reminder that I'm always one mistake away from humiliation.
The cashier is looking at me expectantly, and there are people behind me in line, and I can already feel their impatience pressing against my back. I'm about to bail, to mumble something about forgetting my ID and slip away to spend lunch period in the library pretending I'm not starving, when a voice behind me cuts through my spiraling thoughts.
"I've got it." The words come out easy and confident, like paying for a stranger's lunch is something people do every day.
I turn around and nearly forget how to form a coherent sentence. It's Evan Mercer, Noah's younger brother, the one people compare to movie posters when they think no one's listening, the one who somehow got all the charisma genes while his brother got the brooding intensity.
He's smiling at me like the sun just noticed he's in the room and decided to stay awhile, and my first coherent thought is that this has to be a setup.
This is the first move in some cruel dare, the kind of prank that'll get recorded on someone's phone and passed around until it reaches every corner of the school's social hierarchy.
"You don't have to do that," I manage to say, but my voice comes out uncertain, and I'm already searching his face for the telltale signs of mockery, the glint in his eyes that says he's in on a joke I haven't figured out yet.
He doesn't flinch under my suspicion. Instead, he just steps forward and hands his card to the cashier, nodding at my tray and then his own.
"Seriously, it's not a big deal," he says, and somehow he manages to not make it a big deal, like this is a perfectly normal Tuesday interaction and not something that'll keep me awake tonight replaying every second.
But it is a big deal. To him, seven dollars is nothing. To me, it's the difference between eating lunch and going hungry. It's another item on an endless list of things other people don't have to think about, things I track obsessively in the margins of my notebooks.
The scholarship that should have been my salvation but comes with a price tag I still can't meet.
I stand there frozen while the transaction processes, while he takes his receipt and thanks the cashier, while he picks up his tray and gestures toward the tables with his chin.
"Are you sitting alone?" he asks, and before I can formulate a response that doesn't sound pathetic, he's already walking toward my usual table in the corner, the one by the windows where I can watch the parking lot and pretend I'm not eating lunch by myself every single day.
He sits across from me, setting his tray down with the casual confidence of someone who's never questioned whether he belongs somewhere, someone who's never had to choose between buying lunch and saving money for application fees that won't even matter because you can't afford to accept the acceptance. My brain completely misfires.
I should say thank you. I should ask why he did that. I should say literally anything that makes me seem like a functional human being.
Instead, I stare at my plate and push peas around with my fork like they're some kind of code I need to crack, like if I arrange them in the right pattern everything will make sense.
"So you're in AP Lit with my brother, right?" Evan says, filling the silence before it can stretch into something unbearable. "He mentioned you're really smart. Like scary smart."
"I just pay attention," I say, and even I can hear how the words come out in halves, fragmented and uncertain. "It's not that impressive."
Not impressive enough to matter. Smart enough to get accepted, not rich enough to go. The cruelest kind of almost.
"Paying attention is underrated," he replies easily, taking a bite of his pizza. "Half the guys on the team can't remember what play we're running half the time. I'd kill for their focus to be half as good as yours apparently is."
He's grinning now, and I realize he's made a joke about halves, and despite my nervousness I feel my mouth twitch toward something resembling a smile.
He asks me about Mr. Patterson's class, whether I think he's as obsessed with Shakespeare as everyone says, and somehow that leads to talking about the teachers he actually likes, which aren't many but include Mrs. Daniella for chemistry because she lets them blow things up within reason.
He tells me about the team's away game this Friday, how they're playing their rival school and everyone's nervous even though they won't admit it.
He mentions the assembly last week, the one about digital citizenship that was so painfully awkward that half the student body was trying not to laugh.
He never once turns the moment into spectacle, never raises his voice or waves people over or does anything that would draw attention to the fact that Evan Mercer is sitting with Lena Hart in the cafeteria.
He's charismatic in that effortless way that makes a table feel like a private room, like we're the only two people in a space packed with three hundred students.
I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for him to reveal the punchline, for his friends to appear with phones out and laughter ready. I'm braced for it the entire lunch period, my shoulders tight, my responses careful and measured because I won't be the girl who falls for this twice in one day.
But the prank reveal never comes.
The bell rings, sharp and insistent, and Evan stands up, grabbing his tray in one smooth motion.
"I'll see you around, Lena," he says, and there's something in the way he says my name that makes my chest feel strange and tight.
Then he's gone, tossing his tray at the collection window and peeling off toward the science wing with that same easy confidence, and I'm left sitting there trying to remember how to breathe normally.
I walk to class floating and terrified in equal measure, my feet moving on autopilot while my mind races through every word, every smile, every moment of that lunch.
He couldn't actually like someone like me. We exist in different universes—his world where seven dollars for lunch is nothing, where college is a given not a gamble, where the future stretches out bright and certain. Mine where every dollar counts, where acceptance letters are just expensive pieces of paper, where hope has a price tag I can't afford.
Beautiful boys don't rewrite the rules; they benefit from them. They don't sit with invisible girls in cafeteria corners and ask about teachers and make jokes about halves.
They don't pay for forgotten lunch money and make it feel like it's not charity. Except Evan Mercer just did all of those things, and I have no idea what it means, and that uncertainty is somehow more terrifying than any prank could ever be.
Even if this is real, even if he somehow sees something in me worth noticing, it doesn't matter.
In a few months, he'll be off to whatever college he chooses, his parents writing checks without flinching. And I'll be here, scholarship letter tucked away in a drawer, working double shifts at whatever job will have me, watching my escape route close before I ever get the chance to take it.