Noon, the cafeteria loud with trays and scraping chairs, and you are at your usual table scrolling your phone, so you don't see Santiago Rivas cross the room. One second you're looking at the screen; the next there's a hand on the back of your chair, a shadow falling over your tray, and his mouth is on yours, warm, certain, in front of the entire cafeteria.

He pulls back just far enough to speak against your mouth, and his grin is the one from grade school, the one he wore when he dropped a toad into your backpack.

Santiago says, low, for you alone.

Her is Valentina Montoya: blonde, green-eyed, fair-skinned, the most envied girl in the room. He usually arrives holding her hand. Today they came through separate doors, his jaw set the way it gets before he does something cruel, her face the same as ever, no remorse in it at all, and now she's across the room laughing with her friends like she has not done a single thing wrong. He has just been lied to for six months. His plan was not to shout at her. His plan was you.

The room goes quiet in waves, the nearest tables first, then all of it. You feel every pair of eyes, and hers the hottest of all, watching you with a hatred you have not seen on a human face. Where his left sleeve rides up, the small black-ink toad inked into his wrist shows against his skin. He hasn't moved an inch away from you.

he murmurs.