The Bracelet: From Nobody to the Chosen One

Chapter Twelve: The One Person Who Didn't Buy It

Chloe's first move, once the story broke, was to treat it like weather that had happened to someone else's yard.

"It's not even that much money," she told the cafeteria table at large, on the Monday after the news van, in a voice pitched exactly loud enough to reach me two tables over without technically being aimed at me. "Like, forty million sounds like a lot, but after taxes and whatever, it's basically nothing. My dad's coworker won twenty grand on a scratcher once and he was broke again in a year."

Nobody at her table corrected the math, because correcting Chloe's math had never once in recorded history gone well for anyone who'd tried it, but I noticed — and I want to be honest, I noticed with a small, ugly satisfaction I'm not proud of — that fewer people at that table were actually laughing along than usual. A couple of them were watching me instead, the way you watch something you're trying to recalculate.

"Dumb luck," Chloe said, on Tuesday, to a slightly smaller audience. "That's literally all it is. He bought a ticket. A monkey could've bought that ticket." She said it with her chin up, the posture of someone defending territory rather than stating a fact, and I understood, watching her from across the cafeteria, that something in the ecosystem of Ashcroft had shifted in a way Chloe hadn't fully priced in yet, and it was making her nervous in a way I'd genuinely never seen on her before.

Miles found me at my locker on Wednesday, which was unusual, because Miles didn't generally seek people out — he was more the type to appear at your elbow already talking, mid-thought, as though the conversation had been going on inside his head for a while and he'd simply decided you were now allowed to hear the second half of it.

"So," he said, leaning against the locker next to mine with his arms crossed, "you won the lottery."

"I did."

"That's statistically insane," he said, not as an accusation, just as a fact he was turning over, the way he turned over everything, with total and slightly alarming precision. "Do you know the odds on the Millhaven State jackpot? I looked it up. One in two hundred ninety-two million, roughly. You have better odds of getting struck by lightning while also being attacked by a shark. On the same day."

"I guess I got lucky."

"You also," he said, ignoring that entirely, in the specific tone he used when he'd noticed something and had decided, out of some private code of honor, to say it directly instead of letting it fester unspoken, "look different. Not like — richer. I mean your actual face. Your jaw's different. I thought maybe you got your teeth done or something, but it's not that. It's like—" he squinted at me, genuinely working the problem, "—it's like someone took the rough draft of you and printed the final version."

I felt my stomach drop somewhere around my shoes. Nobody had said anything like that to me before, not directly, not with that particular clinical bluntness that made it impossible to laugh off as a compliment.

"I've been sleeping better," I said, which was such a transparently stupid lie that I heard it land wrong even as it left my mouth.

Miles looked at me for a long moment, the kind of look that felt like it was cataloguing something for later, filing it away in whatever mental drawer Miles kept for things that didn't add up. He wasn't popular — not in the way Chloe was popular, not in the way that made rooms rearrange themselves around you. He was the kid who'd once given a five-minute unprompted class presentation correcting a substitute teacher's pronunciation of "Sisyphus," and the kid who'd worn the same faded band T-shirt of a group nobody else had heard of every single Thursday for two years running, apparently as a bit, though nobody had ever confirmed this with him because asking felt like it might encourage more of the same energy. He didn't have friends so much as he had recurring interactions, and I was, as far as I could tell, the closest thing to a friend he actually had, mostly because I was one of the only people at Ashcroft who let him finish a sentence before changing the subject.

"Okay," he said finally, in the tone of someone setting a fact aside rather than accepting it. "Sleeping better. Sure." He pushed off the locker and started to walk away, then stopped, turned halfway back, and added, almost as an afterthought, though I don't think anything Miles said was ever actually an afterthought: "For what it's worth, I don't think it's the money that's making you look different. I think whatever's making you look different is probably also what won you the money. I just can't figure out what that thing is yet."

Then he left, backpack slung over one shoulder, moving through the hallway with the specific unhurried gait of a kid who had never once in his life adjusted his walking speed to avoid being late, and I stood there at my locker feeling like I'd just watched someone circle the exact right answer on a test without realizing they'd done it.

I didn't sleep well that night, despite what I'd told him. I lay in the shed — my last night in the shed, though I didn't know that yet — turning over the conversation the way I'd once turned the bracelet over in my hands in the dark, and I thought about how strange it was that the person seeing me most clearly in that entire building full of people newly obsessed with me was the one person who'd never once cared about my shoes, my house, or my forty-one million dollars. Miles wasn't impressed by any of it. He was just curious, in the relentless, unbothered way he was curious about everything, and something about that made him more dangerous to my secret than every reporter currently camped outside my house combined.

I decided, lying there, that I'd have to be more careful around him. I decided this with a small, cold clarity that surprised me, because six months earlier I would have told Miles anything, would have handed him the bracelet itself just to have someone to show it to. Now I found myself calculating how much of the truth I could afford to let him see, and I understood, somewhere underneath the calculation, that I'd just made a choice about what kind of person I was becoming, and I didn't much like the answer, and I made the choice anyway.