“He mentioned that he wanted to schedule more time to rehearse my solo. That’s it,” Ana says when I approach. Her face has gone blank. I’ve absolutely pissed her off. “Why’d you ask me about that?”

“I was just wondering.”

“Really?” she says, icy cold. “That’s the first real thing you’ve said to me for, like, two weeks, you know.”

My shoulders sag. She’s not wrong. “Sorry,” I say quietly. She keeps looking at me expectantly, but I don’t have anything better to say. “Um, you don’t have enough wormwood for the recipe. Do you want me to get you some more?”

She tents her hands over her nose, sighs, and stalks off to the supply closet. I follow her because I don’t know what else to do. When we get there, I instantly regret following the witch I have a crush on into a small enclosed room. She closes the door to access the shelf with the wormwood, which makes everything worse. I shift awkwardly in place, lamenting the choices that brought me here.

Ana faces the wooden shelf with the wormwood but doesn’t move. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” I say, staring at the back of her head as if it’s going to give me answers as to how I should deal with this conversation.

“Then what?” she says, rounding on me. “I can’t deal with this, Shay. If you don’t want to be friends with me anymore, you have to tell me. Stop doing this shit where you act all angsty and don’t tell me what’s going on.”

Oof. She’s absolutely correct, and I am the worst. “I want to be friends with you,” I say haltingly. “I just feel like . . . with all the scholarship stuff the way it is, we can’t really be close.”

She blinks at me. “That’s the problem?” she says incredulously. “That doesn’t make sense. You knew we were competing for the scholarship when we started being friends. What changed?”

I don’t know what to tell her. We stare at each other.

“Forget it,” she says eventually. “I’m over this.”

She turns away from me, and I know this is it. If I let her go now, we’ll never have any kind of relationship again.

“Mr. B was going to replace me with you,” I say, the words pouring out of me. “He got annoyed with me, and I wasn’t the favorite anymore, and I had to really suck up to him to fix things. It felt gross, Ana.” I let out a frustrated sigh. “It made me realize that . . . I don’t know. This isn’t like a fun competition, you know? This is my whole life. I’m really trying to win. And if I win, you lose.”