At lunch, Amaya was carrying her tray toward the squad's usual table when Jordan slid into the seat across from her in the empty corner she'd chosen instead. Jordan speared a tater tot and said, without preamble, "I heard them planning it."
Amaya set her tray down slowly. "What?"
"Tuesday. Behind the field house, before practice. Brett, Derek, Sam." Jordan's voice was low, and the wry humor was gone from it. "Brett said — he said he was going to 'fix' you. Said you'd been showing everyone up at practice and somebody needed to take you down a peg. Derek laughed. Sam said he'd film it." Jordan met her eyes. "I didn't know what 'fix' meant. I swear I didn't know it was going to be — that. If I'd known—"
"You'd have what?" Amaya said gently. "Three against one?"
"I'd have told somebody." Jordan's jaw tightened. "I tell myself that, anyway." A beat. "I wrote down what I heard. Dates, times, exact words as close as I can remember. My brother's pre-law and he said to write it like a witness statement, so I did." Jordan pushed a folded paper across the table. "It's yours. Use it however you need."
Amaya unfolded it. The handwriting was cramped and careful — a statement, dated, signed. Evidence.
"Jordan—"
"Don't." Jordan stood, tray in hand, the humor creeping back like armor. "If Brett asks, I was never here." But at the edge of the table, Jordan paused. "For what it's worth? What you're doing — not hiding, not quitting — it's kind of legendary. Half the school's talking about it."
"Half the school?"
"Oh, it's camps now, Walker." Jordan grinned, quick and crooked. "Team Haircut versus Team Everybody-Else-Is-Disgusted. Guess which side's bigger."
After lunch, Amaya found a note folded into her locker vent. No name. Just a phone number and three words: *Ask Tariq. Trust him.*
She found Tariq in the library during study hall, hunched over a laptop with the intense stillness he brought to everything. He looked up, pushed his glasses up his nose, and said, "You got my note."
"You're very mysterious."
"Occupational hazard." He turned the laptop toward her. On the screen was a file directory, and in it, a video file. The thumbnail showed the locker room — the bench, the tile wall. Amaya's stomach dropped.
"Sam posted it Thursday night," Tariq said quietly. "Private story, twelve viewers. Down by morning — somebody told him to delete it. But I screen-recorded it at eleven forty-two, before it vanished. Timestamp, device info, the original poster's handle. It's all here."
Amaya stared at him. "Tariq. That's — how did you even—"
"I have notifications on for half the school. People forget I'm watching." The smallest smile. "I'm quiet, not absent." He ejected a USB drive and held it out. "Copy's on here. Original stays with me, backed up twice. If Harrison's investigation is real, this is the part that makes it undeniable."
She took the drive like it was something precious. It was.
"Why are you helping me?" she asked.
Tariq considered this with his usual gravity. "Last year, Brett's crew put a dead fish in my backpack and filmed me opening it in the cafeteria. Two hundred views." He shrugged. "Nobody documented it. Nobody stood up. I told myself I'd be ready next time." He closed the laptop. "This is next time."
Walking home that afternoon, Amaya counted. A witness who saw. A witness who heard the planning. A video with metadata, secured before it could vanish. Her own log. Her father's photographs.
And it wasn't just evidence. Between classes, a sophomore girl she'd never spoken to touched her arm and whispered, "I'm glad you're still here." At practice, two girls from the squad saved her a spot in the stretch circle without being asked. Small things. Cracks of light.
The school was dividing — Jordan was right. She could feel it in the looks in the hallway: some hostile, some curious, more and more of them quietly, watchfully on her side.
That evening she laid it all out on the kitchen table — the notebook, Jordan's statement, the USB drive — and her father looked at it for a long time.
"Evidence," he said softly.
"Allies," Amaya said.
He nodded toward the gym bag by the door. "And tomorrow — excellence."
She smiled. The plan was working. The truth was getting harder and harder to ignore.
Somewhere across town, she imagined, Brett Carson was finding out that the video hadn't vanished after all — and that the girl he'd tried to cut down was building something he couldn't cut.
She almost felt sorry for him.
Almost.
Chapter 10
Short Hair, High Head
Amaya stood in front of the bathroom mirror on Friday morning and finished what she'd started.
She'd spent an hour the night before with the good scissors, evening and shaping, and now she made the final passes — cleaning the neckline, sharpening the angle — until the cut looked intentional instead of wounded. Short. Sleek. Deliberate. When she turned her head, the light moved across it like water.
She looked at herself for a long moment. The girl in the mirror didn't look like a victim. She looked like someone who had decided.
Downstairs, her father took one look and nodded — approval, and something deeper. Recognition.
"Short hair," he said. "High head."
"High head," she echoed, and grabbed her gym bag.
The gym smelled like it always did — rubber and sweat and floor wax — but the air inside it had changed. Amaya felt it the moment she walked through the double doors: the conversations that dipped, the heads that turned. She kept walking, chin level, and did not hurry.