Making food for people is kinda Danielle’s thing, and she’s surprisingly great at it. She’ll probably have her own TV show someday. One time sophomore year we were all watching Kitchen Nightmares at Hannah’s house and Gordon Ramsay made some poor guy burst into tears, and Danielle said, I think I’d be good at that.

Cooking? Hannah asked.

Well, yeah, Danielle said. And making people cry.

I’m sure some part of her is using the scones as an excuse to ignore Chase, but maybe some other part of her feels bad.

Now, when she taps my desk, it makes me jump.

“Did you see who sent this?” She has a little scrap of white paper clenched in her hands. I take the paper from her and unfold it. It has five words scrawled across it, written in blue ink:

DANIELLE OLIVER IS A SLUT

I crumple the paper and let go like it’s burned me. “I wasn’t looking. Sorry.”

I glance around the room for a guilty face, for someone who might be paying us a little too much attention. Chase is slumped in his desk on the opposite side of the room. I note the pencil he’s chewing on and then look back at the blue ink on the paper. There’s a chance he used a different writing implement and then slipped it back in his bag, but I really doubt Chase could be that sneaky.

“Where did you get it?” I whisper.

Ava leans past Danielle to whisper back. “We just found it. It’s like it came out of nowhere.”

We all turn toward Chase, and he must feel the heat of our stares, because he looks up and locks eyes with Danielle. He stops chewing on his pencil and cocks his head, the expression on his face unreadable.

“I don’t see how anyone thinks they can get away with this,” Danielle says at lunch, popping a grape tomato from her salad into her mouth. “It’s like treason.”

We’re in the senior section, by the windows where the tables get the most sunlight. Prescott is small enough that everyone has lunch at the same time, but it means we’re always fighting over the best tables, like we’re vying for spots in a lifeboat. People used to care a lot about who they sat with, but now that we’re seniors, we’ve all gotten over ourselves, and stuff that used to matter doesn’t anymore.

Right now though, it’s just Danielle, Ava, Hannah, and me because Danielle is keeping the note a secret. Before this weekend, I don’t think she would have even let me see it. I know it’s probably because I was there with her at the party. I’m fully in this now.

She lays the note down on the table, smoothing out the edges with a black-polished fingernail.