Alvarez hadn't asked her to clarify. He'd simply thanked her for the call and, that same afternoon, pulled aside a fifteen-year-old named Priya Shah, who'd been running his sound board with quiet, unshowy competence since freshman year and who had, as it happened, overheard Whitfield make a nearly identical comment about a different student the previous spring.
"If anyone comes up on that stage during the ceremony and starts talking to a student in a way that doesn't sound right," Alvarez had told her, "you keep that mic hot. No matter what. Can you do that?"
Priya, sitting behind a mixing board covered in glow-in-the-dark stickers of cartoon frogs, had looked at him for a long moment.
"Yeah," she'd said. "I can do that."
She hadn't known it would be tonight. She hadn't known it would be Julian, specifically, a boy she'd sat across from in AP Bio and who'd once helped her fix a broken pipette clamp without making it weird. But when she saw Whitfield's shadow cut across the stage lights fifteen seconds before the ceremony was supposed to start, and heard the principal's voice drop into that particular register — sugar-coated, quiet, unmistakably cruel — Priya's hand had gone to the fader before her brain had even finished the thought.
She hadn't hesitated for one second. And now, sitting in the front row with her heart hammering against her ribs, she watched Julian look down at the folded paper in his hand, and she thought: please. Please let this be worth it.