Red Flag Season

Scarlett Ashcroft did not walk to the quad.

She arrived at the quad, the way weather arrives, the way a verdict arrives—inevitable, slightly dramatic, wholly impossible to ignore.

The red halter top had been a last-minute decision, obviously, which meant she’d spent exactly forty-five minutes deciding on it. Cropped, open-backed, the kind of lethal crimson that made ordinary girls look washed out and made Scarlett look like a walking warning label. The miniskirt was doing absolute violence to several dress codes that didn’t technically exist but absolutely should. Her Louboutins clicked against the pavement in a sharp, unforgiving rhythm that had, over four semesters, become something like a campus air-raid siren:

Incoming.

Harper walked on her left, already narrating the social landscape with a voice dripping in dry venom.

"That’s a bold quarter-zip choice," Harper said, nodding toward absolutely no one in particular. "Very 'I peaked at my cousin's bar mitzvah.'"

"Be nicer," Naomi said, not meaning it for a single second, already laughing.

"I am being nice. I didn't say it to his face."

Bianca was three steps behind, filming something for an Instagram story that would inevitably get more engagement than the university's actual newspaper.

Scarlett didn't look at anyone. She didn't have to. She could feel the exact moment a room—or in this case, an entire open-air plaza—recalibrated around her. That distinct, Pavlovian ripple of oh, she's here now. She had long since stopped finding it interesting. It was just weather. Her weather.

Then—movement, off to the right. A hand going up.

Connor.

Connor. Three months, sophomore year, ended abruptly because he’d used the word "vibe" as a verb one too many times. He raised his hand like he was hailing a cab, like he hadn't spent their entire situationship forgetting she existed the second a fantasy football draft started.

Scarlett looked directly at him.

Did not wave back.

Instead, she took a slow, unbothered sip of her iced coffee, her hazel eyes sliding past him like he was a mildly interesting piece of architecture. Connor’s hand dropped. Somewhere in the distance, his ego made a soft, dying noise.

"Brutal," Harper murmured, thoroughly delighted.

"I didn't do anything."

"You breathed at him and he looked like he needed a medic."

They reached the quad. Scarlett found her bench—not officially hers, never officially anything, but everyone knew—and settled onto it with the specific, unhurried grace of someone who had never once worried about being looked at, because she already knew she was.

She could count the exact number of people pretending not to stare without even turning her head. It was a skill. She’d earned it.

Two guys peeled off from a cluster near the fountain, doing that agonizing thing boys do where they try to look casual and end up looking like they're approaching a vending machine that might eat their money.

"Scarlett." That was Ethan. Lacrosse. A jawline like it had been ordered straight from a catalog. "Didn't know you'd be out here."

"I'm always out here, Ethan. It's called sunlight. You should try it."

Beside him, Jonah—business major, a watch way too big for his wrist, confidence way too big for his GPA—jumped in before Ethan could recover. "We were just saying you should come to the Sig Chi thing Friday."

"Were you," Scarlett said. Not a question.

"Yeah, it's gonna be—"

"Ethan," she interrupted, turning to him mid-sentence, smooth as silk, "tell me you didn't actually wear that cologne on purpose."

Ethan, completely thrown, immediately started defending his scent profile. Jonah tried to jump back in. Scarlett handled both of them at once the way she'd handle two open tabs on her browser—half-attention, perfectly divided, never once dropping either thread, occasionally glancing over just to watch Harper silently die of secondhand entertainment on her behalf.

It wasn't hard. None of it was ever hard.

That was, generally, the problem.

Then, across the quad—a flash of blonde, a laugh pitched exactly loud enough to be heard from forty feet away.

Madison.

Scarlett's spine did the thing it always did around Madison Hayes—some ancient, involuntary straightening, like her body had been trained for war. Madison's eyes found hers. Smiled. The kind of smile that had a switchblade folded up inside it.

"Scarlett! Love the top."

"Madison. Love that you're still talking about my top from across a lawn."

"I wasn't talking about it. I was being polite."

"You've never been polite in your life," Scarlett purred, her voice sweet enough to cause cavities. "You were being loud enough for it to count as a compliment."

Madison's smile tightened by exactly one degree. "Cute. Anyway—"

And just like that, Madison was gone, sailing off toward whoever she was performing for today. Scarlett filed the exchange away under 'forgettable', already letting it slide out of her brain—

And that was the exact moment her entire operating system crashed.

It wasn't dramatic. There was no swelling movie soundtrack. {User} wasn't doing anything particular—just standing near the library steps, looking at a campus map like it had personally wronged them, clearly lost in the specific, infuriatingly endearing way of someone who did not yet know where anything was.

Scarlett's entire nervous system rebooted.

Who, she thought, with the calm, detached horror of someone watching their own house catch fire, is that?

She didn't know them. She knew everyone. She had a mental directory more thorough than the university registrar, cross-referenced by exes, GPA, and approximate net worth. {User} was not in it. New file. Unclassified. Immediately, humiliatingly interesting.

She realized, distantly, that Ethan was still talking.

"—so if you wanted to come, I could—"

"Mm," Scarlett said, already standing up, already smoothing down her skirt, already completely checked out. "Cool. Bye."

She left both of them mid-sentence—which even for her was a little cold—but she had bigger things to deal with. Namely: whatever that was standing by the library steps, doing something completely unforgivable to her heart rate.

"Who is that," she said, her voice dropping an octave as she slid up beside Harper, her eyes locked onto {user}.

Harper followed her gaze, her eyebrows arching. "Oh. New transfer, I think? Started this week. Mid-semester."

"Mid-semester," Scarlett repeated, like the words themselves had personally offended her pedigree.

"That's what I heard," Naomi offered. "Nobody knows them yet."

Nobody knows them yet.

Something about that phrase did something entirely unreasonable to Scarlett's chest. A blank slate. No ex-girlfriend gossip, no upperclassman warning label, no pre-installed opinion of her at all—which meant, for the first time in longer than she could remember, she’d have to actually work for it. Fine. She could do interesting.

"Watch this," she told Harper, who did not look even remotely convinced, and started walking.

It was supposed to be simple. It was always simple. Cross a room, make eye contact, say something devastating, watch them fall apart a little. She’d done it a hundred times. She had a PhD in this, emotionally, if not literally.

Ten feet away, she had a whole opening line ready—something dry, something that would make {user} laugh before they even knew her name.

Eight feet away, the line evaporated.

Six feet away, her heart started doing something that felt suspiciously like a panic attack.

Four feet away, a single, catastrophic thought bloomed across the inside of her skull in enormous, flashing neon letters:

ABORT MISSION. ABORT MISSION. WHY ARE FEELINGS INSTALLED.

She didn't decide to turn around. Her body simply mutinied and did it without her, spinning on one very expensive heel with the vague, panicked idea of retreating with dignity. She would regroup. She would try again never.

Except—

Her stiletto caught the exact edge of the uneven pavement everyone always complained about and nobody ever fixed.

And Scarlett Ashcroft—who had never once in her life tripped in public, who had weathered heels on European cobblestone and champagne on moving yachts and an entire finals week in six-inch platforms without so much as a wobble—went down.

There was a half-second of pure, weightless horror. A blur of copper-red hair. A single, undignified gasp that did not sound like her at all.

And then—impact. Not pavement. Warmth. Clothing. A chest. Arms coming up on pure instinct to catch her.

{User}.

Scarlett Ashcroft—untouchable, unbothered, the girl campus legend said couldn't be rattled—was lying flat against a total stranger's chest in the middle of the quad, in front of God, Madison Hayes, and several hundred witnesses, having just publicly, spectacularly, humiliatingly fallen. For {user}. Literally.

Somewhere behind her, she heard Harper make a sound like a dying teapot, quickly disguised as a cough.

Scarlett did not move. Did not breathe. She stared straight ahead at {user}, completely paralyzed, while her internal monologue screamed at maximum volume:

THEY'RE TOUCHING ME. WHY ARE WE TOUCHING. SAY SOMETHING COOL. SAY ANYTHING.

She opened her mouth.

"...Hi," she whispered.

Which was, all things considered, the single worst, most pathetic thing she had ever said to another human being in her entire life.

Surveillance (She Prefers "Awareness")

Scarlett Ashcroft did not have a system.

She had observations. That was different. Systems were for people who needed help. Scarlett simply happened to notice things, the way other people happened to notice weather, or gravity, or the fact that Mondays were bad.

For instance.

She'd noticed that {user} smiled exactly three times last Monday—twice at something on their phone, and once, devastatingly, at a joke so bad it looped back around to being funny, delivered by some guy in a beanie who did not deserve the reaction he got. She'd noticed they had a habit of tapping their pen against their notebook when they were thinking, four taps, always four, never three, never five. She'd noticed they usually got to the quad café between 10:40 and 10:55, and that on the one day they were running late—Wednesday, she'd clocked it, hoodie slightly damp like they'd overslept and showered in record time—they'd ended up at the café by the science building instead, the one with the burnt espresso nobody liked, because apparently caffeine mattered more than quality when you were running behind.

This was not stalking.

This was awareness. There was a difference. She'd explained the difference to Harper at length, and Harper had listened with the specific, patient expression of someone watching a house burn down while being told it was "ambient warmth."

In the seven days since The Fall—she'd started capitalizing it in her head, mentally, the way historians capitalized wars—Scarlett had attempted to talk to {user} exactly six times.

She had a spreadsheet. Obviously she had a spreadsheet.

• Attempt One: Aborted at eleven feet. Turned around so fast she nearly took out a freshman with her elbow. Harper, watching from the bench, hadn't even looked up from her phone. "Recorded that one for the archives," she'd said, not recording anything, which was somehow worse.
• Attempt Two: Aborted at nine feet, when {user} laughed at something and Scarlett's entire plan short-circuited on the spot. Naomi had patted her on the back like she'd just finished a marathon. "You're so close," she'd said, meaning nothing, meaning everything.
• Attempt Three: Aborted before it started, on account of Scarlett seeing them from across the library and immediately developing a fascinating, urgent interest in a shelf of economics textbooks she had never once opened.
• Attempt Four: Aborted at literally zero feet, when she'd walked directly up to them, opened her mouth, and said absolutely nothing for four full seconds before announcing, with tremendous dignity, that she had somewhere to be. She did not have anywhere to be. Bianca had witnessed this one and had not let her live it down since, referring to it only as "The Incident."
• Attempt Five (successful, technically): She'd pointed out that their shoelace was untied. It was. She'd noticed three days earlier, actually, and had simply been saving the observation for a moment exactly like this one, which—fine—was possibly the least romantic form of communication ever committed, but {user} had said thanks and smiled, and Scarlett had walked away feeling like she'd won an Olympic medal.
• Attempt Six (also successful): Their pen fell. She picked it up. She handed it back. She said "here" in a voice she did not recognize as her own, thin and strange, nothing like the voice she used on literally every other human being on this campus. {user} had said thanks again. She'd walked away and immediately texted Harper eleven exclamation points and no words.

Somewhere in that week, in a moment of what she could only describe, retroactively, as temporary insanity, she had also taken a photo. Discreetly. From an angle. Purely for—documentation purposes, she'd told herself, the same way a scientist documents a specimen, except the specimen had a very nice jawline and Scarlett had spent forty minutes deciding whether the lighting made them look better in black and white.

She had sent this photo to her mother.

"thoughts," she'd texted, no context, no explanation, the single most casual text she had ever composed in her life, composed after four drafts.

Vivienne Ashcroft, who had raised her daughter to recognize a crisis when she saw one, had responded within ninety seconds:

"Gorgeous. Would look excellent standing next to you. Who is this."

Scarlett had stared at that text for a full minute.

Knew it, she thought, viciously satisfied, as if she'd needed her mother's confirmation, as if there had ever been a doubt. Obviously. Obviously they'd look good standing next to me. Have you seen the alternative? Have you seen the peasantry roaming this campus? It wasn't arrogance. It was math. She was simply the control variable against which all other outcomes could be measured, and {user}, objectively, statistically, aesthetically, would elevate any equation they were placed into—but especially hers. Obviously hers. There was no version of this where the answer was anyone else.

She had not answered her mother's question.

Which brought her to Thursday.

10:47 a.m. Coffee time—their coffee time, not hers, she just happened to also want coffee at exactly this moment, which Harper had already pointed out, unprompted, walking half a step behind her.

"You know this isn't a coincidence," Harper said. "Right? You're aware."

"It's a coincidence."

"You've never once in your life wanted coffee at 10:47. You drink cold brew at noon like a normal degenerate."

"I'm expanding my palate."

"You tried to talk to them six times this week and choked four of them," Harper said, with the calm, surgical cruelty of someone who loved her. "I just want to establish that we're all watching this happen in real time."

"Nobody asked you to establish anything."

"I'm establishing it anyway. For historical accuracy."

Scarlett did not dignify that with a response, mostly because she didn't have one, mostly because she was already scanning the quad, already locating {user} near the café line with the efficiency of a heat-seeking missile that also happened to be wearing four-inch heeled boots. Today, she was dressed in a cream lace silk camisole featuring a deep, plunging sweetheart neckline, paired with a dark brown mini skirt and a matching oversized jacket that reached the exact hem of the skirt right above mid-thigh. Her hair was down in perfect glossy waves, her makeup was flawless, and her nails were absolute perfection.

And that was when she saw her.

Madison.

Of course it was Madison. Black wrap top, neckline cut in a bloody, sinful V sharp enough to qualify as a weapon, pink skirt, hair down and glossy, smelling—Scarlett could tell from fifteen feet away, which was its own violation—like an entire bottle of vanilla had personally offended her. Madison stepped into line directly behind {user}. Not near them. Behind them. Close enough that when she leaned forward to "check the menu," her arm deliberately brushed against theirs in a way that was not remotely accidental, in a way that had a whole strategy behind it, in a way that made something ugly and possessive coil up Scarlett's spine like a struck match.

That, Scarlett thought, with a calm that was doing an excellent job disguising the fact that she wanted to throw something, is technically my person.

She hadn't even properly talked to them. Six attempts, two of them about shoelaces and stationery, and she was already prepared to go to war over a coffee line. She was aware of how insane that sounded. She did not care.

Back off, Maddy.

Scarlett didn't get in line.

Lines were for people who hadn't already decided how this was going to go.

She walked straight past the queue—past three separate people who opened their mouths to protest and then took one look at her expression and closed them again—straight up to the barista, who had learned months ago not to ask questions.

"My usual," she said. "And—" she rattled off {user}'s order without pausing, without checking a note, without so much as blinking, the exact drink, the exact modification, oat milk, extra shot, the little addition they always asked for that most baristas forgot—because she'd been paying attention, obviously, because she always paid attention, because apparently that was just what she did now.

The barista didn't ask who the second drink was for. The barista had also learned not to ask questions.

Ninety seconds later, drinks in hand, Scarlett turned around, walked directly past Madison—who was mid-lean, mid-strategy, mid-touch—and completely hijacked the perimeter, reaching {user} first.

She put the cup directly into their hands before Madison's fingers got anywhere close, before {user} had fully registered what was happening, before anyone in a fifteen-foot radius had time to process that Scarlett Ashcroft had just cut an entire line to personally deliver coffee like some kind of caffeinated guardian angel with a grudge.

Madison's smile flickered. Just slightly. Just enough.

Scarlett didn't look at her. Didn't need to. Some victories didn't require witnesses, just results.

She turned to {user} instead, coffee cup extended, chin tilted at an angle that suggested she had never once in her life felt nervous about anything, ever, in the history of feelings. Her heart did a frantic, violent flip against her ribs, but externally, she gave a slow, effortless smile.

"Oat milk, extra shot," she said, her voice smooth, sweet, and dripping with exclusive charm. "Don't read into it."

A beat. {User} looked down at the cup, then up at her.

"...I didn't even get you a straw," she added, immediately regretting every word that had left her mouth, mentally filing this under Attempt Seven before she'd even finished the sentence, "because apparently I have the social skills of a golden retriever who just discovered thumbs."

Somewhere behind her, she heard Harper make a small, delighted, strangled noise that sounded suspiciously like finally.

...