Chapter 1

The air in my room felt thick, heavy with the pressure of tomorrow.

The National Innovators Scholarship exam, our ticket to Caltech's Advanced Engineering Program.

Ethan Hayes, my best friend since kindergarten, and I had talked about this day for years.

We were supposed to be a team, two brilliant minds conquering the world, starting with this scholarship.

But Ethan wasn't here, cramming formulas with me.

He was with Jessi Vance.

New, rebellious, and everything I wasn't.

She'd convinced him to skip our final, crucial review session.

For his eighteenth birthday party, she said. An epic one.

I paced my room, the practice papers blurring before my eyes.

A knot of unease tightened in my stomach. This wasn't like Ethan.

He was ambitious, driven.

Jessi was a distraction, a dangerous one.

I remembered the day he introduced her, a smirk on his face, a new swagger in his step.

"Sarah, meet Jessi. She's... different."

Different was an understatement. She looked at me like I was something stuck to her shoe.

My phone buzzed. A text from Ethan.

"Party's at The Overlook. Jessi says come if u want. B epic."

The Overlook was a notorious party spot, miles from town.

No, I wouldn't go. I had to study. He should be studying.

Later, unable to focus, I went for a walk, needing to clear my head.

My route took me past the local diner, a place Jessi and her friends often haunted.

Through the window, I saw her, holding court, laughing loudly.

Curiosity, or maybe a premonition, pulled me closer to the slightly ajar side door.

"He's so whipped," Jessi was saying, her voice dripping with amusement.

"Thinks this party is all for him. Little does he know, it's to make sure he bombs that nerdy exam tomorrow."

A girl next to her giggled. "You're evil, Jess."

"He'll be so wasted, he won't even remember his own name, let alone calculus," Jessi boasted. "No Caltech nerd for me. He stays here, with me."

My blood ran cold.

She wasn't just distracting him, she was actively sabotaging him.

His future, our shared dream, meant nothing to her.

I had to do something.

My first life unspooled in my mind then, a torrent of remembered pain.

I had rushed to Ethan's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hayes.

Told them everything.

They were furious, but at Jessi, not Ethan.

They dragged him home, forced him to study, made him take the exam.

He got in. Caltech accepted him.

Jessi, enraged at being thwarted, went on a bender.

A real one.

She wrapped her car around a tree.

Drunk driving. Instant death.

Ethan was devastated.

His grief, twisted by his parents' subtle manipulations, found a target.

Me.

He decided I was to blame for Jessi's death.

If I hadn't interfered, he would have been with her, she wouldn't have been alone, wouldn't have crashed.

His logic was a broken, jagged thing.

Then came the frame-up.

Meticulous. Cruel.

He planted "evidence" in his room. A torn piece of my clothing, a few strands of my hair.

He called the police, his voice choked with fake tears, telling a story of a fabricated sexual assault.

Me, assaulting him.

His family, respected in town, used their influence. People believed him.

I was arrested.

The scholarship, Caltech, my future – all gone.

My parents, bless them, fought for me.

But the local shaming, the relentless cyberbullying amplified by the Hayes family, it was too much.

One rainy night, their car went off the Blackwood Bridge.

The police called it an accident.

I knew, deep in my shattered heart, it was despair. Suicide.

Ethan had driven them to it.

He visited me in jail, a ghost of the boy I once knew.

His eyes were cold, empty.

He held up a newspaper, the headline screaming about my parents' "tragic accident."

"This is what you get for ruining my life, Sarah," he whispered, his voice a venomous hiss.

"You and your family paid for Jessi."

The words were a final, crushing blow.

The grief, the betrayal, the sheer injustice of it all – it overwhelmed me.

My heart, always a little fragile, a condition I'd managed carefully my whole life, couldn't take it.

A sharp pain, a tightening in my chest, and then... darkness.

I died in that cold, sterile cell, a victim of a love I'd tried to save and a friendship that had turned monstrous.