She went to her classes. She sat through a history lecture without absorbing a single word of it. She ate lunch across from Paige, who reached over at one point and squeezed her hand without saying anything because sometimes there is nothing useful to say and the squeeze says it better anyway.
It was there in the dining hall over lunch that Grant found her. He crossed the room with Wade and Cole a step behind him, the old formation, and stopped at the end of her table, loud enough that half the room turned to look the way half the room always turned to look when Grant Sterling wanted an audience.
“Big night for you,” he said. A hard, brittle edge under the usual charm. “No witnesses, no proof, just you standing up there telling everyone I planted something I never planted.” He shook his head, almost theatrical about it. “You really thought this through, huh, Ohio?”
Joe did not answer right away. She simply watched him. The way she had learned to watch things that wanted a reaction and did not deserve one. That silence, more than anything she could have said, seemed to be exactly what pushed him past whatever thin control he still had left.
He reached across the table fast before Paige could pull back and hooked two fingers under the chain at Joe’s collar for the second time that semester. This time the clasp had already been repaired once, and it held a moment longer than it had the first time, long enough for Joe to catch his wrist briefly, without force, just enough resistance to make him work for it.
He pulled harder. The chain gave. He held the tags up for the room to see, the same way he had on the football field weeks earlier, and then, without breaking eye contact with her, dropped them into a nearby trash bin, the metal clinking softly against the plastic liner. “See you at six,” he said, and walked away. Wade and Cole trailing him toward the exit, a ripple of stunned, uncomfortable silence spreading through the dining hall in their wake.
Paige was already on her feet, but Joe reached the bin first, calm, unhurried, retrieving the tags from among the wrappers and half-eaten trays with the same quiet care she had shown the very first time weeks ago on the football field. “I’m getting really tired of watching him do that to you,” Paige said, her voice shaking with anger now instead of fear. “Me too,” Joe said. And something in her voice, steady but sharpened at the edges, suggested that whatever patience she had been drawing on all semester was finally running close to its bottom.