The fluorescent lights hummed the same dead note they’d been humming since September, and Ginny was pretty sure they were slowly drilling a hole through her skull.

She stabbed her plastic fork into the Jell-O on her tray—lime today, the color of something that had gone wrong in a laboratory—and watched it jiggle without enthusiasm. Across the table, Abby was doing the thing where she stacked her Goldfish crackers into a tiny pyramid and then knocked it over with one finger. Build. Destroy. Build. Destroy. Like some kind of sad, orange meditation.

“God,” Abby said, not looking up from her pyramid. “I would literally rather be in geometry right now.”

“Don’t say that.” Ginny let the fork clatter against the tray. “Don’t give the universe ideas.”

“It’s already given us ideas. The idea is this.” Abby gestured vaguely at the cafeteria—the sticky tables, the kids scrolling through their phones, the smell of industrial-grade marinara sauce that never fully left the air, not even on weekends. “This is the idea the universe had for us today. And it sucks.”

Ginny leaned back in her chair and let her gaze drift. Marcus was two tables over with some kid from his AP class, talking with his hands the way he did when he was explaining something he actually cared about. She looked away before he could catch her looking. That was a whole other problem, and she didn’t have the energy for it at 12:47 on a Tuesday.

“You know what would make this less boring,” Abby said. She had that voice. That specific Abby voice that meant trouble was about to arrive dressed up as a suggestion.

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

“I know your face. Your face is doing the thing.”

Abby grinned—all teeth, all mischief. She leaned forward across the table, her pyramid forgotten. “I dare you to walk topless down the main hallway.”

Ginny stared at her. The Jell-O continued to jiggle.

“Are you insane?”

“Probably.”

“Fuck you.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“I’m serious.” Ginny lowered her voice, though nobody at the surrounding tables was paying attention. “That’s not a dare, that’s a criminal offense. That’s a one-way ticket to getting expelled and probably arrested and definitely having my mom murder me and then bring me back to life so she could murder me again.”

Abby tilted her head, considering this like it was a reasonable counterargument she hadn’t fully anticipated. Then she shrugged. One shoulder. Casual. Like she was adjusting a strap.

“Fine. Then we both do it.”

Ginny blinked. “Both?”

“Yeah. Both. Everything. Full monty. We walk down that hallway like we own the place and we’re not wearing a single thing.” Abby’s eyes were bright now, practically glowing, and Ginny recognized the look—that manic, reckless energy that lived somewhere behind Abby’s ribcage and only came out when she was either very happy or very, very bored. Today it was the bored one.

“You’re actually crazy,” Ginny said.

“Obviously.”

The cafeteria noise swelled around them—someone laughing too loud, a tray hitting the dish return with a clang, the distant sound of a teacher’s voice cutting through the chaos from the hallway. Ginny looked at Abby. Abby looked back. Neither of them moved.

Then something shifted in Abby’s expression—the mischief softening into something warmer, something that looked almost like trust, which was terrifying in its own way. Ginny felt her own mouth doing the thing. The thing it did when Georgia’s wildness crept up through her bloodstream and reminded her that she was, after all, her mother’s daughter.

A smile. Slow. Dangerous.

Abby saw it and matched it, and just like that, the afternoon wasn’t boring anymore.