“Right,” Levi jumps in, and my appreciation for him rescuing me almost supersedes my embarrassment. “It’s because we get to watch his slow descent into crossing a sacred moral boundary. Also, I think there’s simply the benefit as a reader of being in his head and having access to his innermost thoughts. He may be a deeply flawed person, but we see, at the end of the day, he’s still a person. Just like us.”

A few months ago, Us Weekly ran a photo of my mom at the Whole Foods salad bar in their “Celebrities: They’re Just Like Us!” section. In the picture, she looks impossibly glamorous despite wearing head-to-toe spandex and wielding tongs to dish out baby spinach.

My guess is that Paloma staged the picture. That it was orchestrated perfection. A gaslighting of sorts, because I doubt that a single woman who saw that photo came to the same conclusion as the headline: that Joy Fields was “just like her.”

“How does it feel to be forced to see a murderer as a person?” Mrs. Pollack asks Levi, and I realize with relief that I’m off the hook. I keep writing anyway so it looks like I’m listening.

I scribble down: Criminals: They’re Just Like Us!

—

“Taking it again?” Levi asks after class, nodding at my SAT prep book, which I carry around with me everywhere, tucked under my arm, exactly the same way they made us hold the robot baby for an entire month for health class last year.

“You know,” I say noncommittally. I haven’t mentioned to Levi that I’m living in a never-ending loop of SAT hysteria. He obviously has Isla’s and Shola’s test-taking superpowers. He too was one and done.

“I can help if you want. I weirdly love standardized tests.”

“You would,” I say, and nudge him in the shoulder, in that flirty-not-flirty way we’ve perfected that suggests either an easy friendship or a loaded one. “I have a tutor already, but thanks.”

The SAT would be a perfect excuse to hang out with Levi alone; too bad studying with him is my worst nightmare. My class ranking isn’t a secret—people generally know how everyone else does here—but you can chalk bad grades up to laziness or lack of interest in the material. My kind of SAT and ACT scores would make him think I was never smart enough to be at Wood Valley in the first place.

“You going to Xander’s party this weekend?” Shola asks Levi, since she knows that I’m desperate to know if he’ll be there.

“Yup,” Levi says, and I can’t tell if I’m imagining the eagerness in his voice when he adds: “You’re coming too, right, Chloe?”