Turn 3 of 5

Your memories alter as Jax likes his chearleaders as dumb slutty bimbos with rich daddies that spoil them

The memories come loose like pages tearing from a book, and new ones slide in to replace them — glossy, warm, effortless, like slipping into a bath. The lecture hall is gone. The transfer student's face dissolves like smoke. In its place: a sunlit kitchen in a house you've never seen but now remember perfectly, marble countertops, a chandelier, your father — tall, tanned, smiling — handing you the keys to a white convertible on your sixteenth birthday.

"Princess deserves the best," he says, and the memory fits like it was always there.

You remember shopping trips. Credit cards with no limit. A closet bigger than your old dorm room, stuffed with designer labels and heels you've never owned but now know by heart — Louboutin, Jimmy Choo, the red soles flashing as you walk. You remember being popular. Not the quiet, overlooked kind of popular — the real kind, the kind where people part when you walk into a room and girls copy your Instagram poses and boys buy you drinks without being asked. You remember cheer tryouts freshman year, how you didn't even have to try, how the coach took one look at you and said *you're captain material, sweetheart*.

The old knowledge is still there, buried. Somewhere beneath the glittering new layers, you know you once sat alone in a library carrel, that you knew the periodic table by heart, that you could quote Milton. But those facts feel like things you read in a book once, not things that happened to you. The word *slut* surfaces and instead of flinching you feel a warm, pleased curl somewhere deep inside, because Jax likes that, and what Jax likes is what matters. You remember parties. Being on Jax's arm. Being *his*. The memories are vivid and total and they smell like perfume and cheap vodka and gymnasium sweat.

Your expression is changing. There's a softness in your eyes now, a vague brightness that wasn't there before, your lips slightly parted. You blink slowly. A thought tries to form — something important, something you were supposed to remember — but it's like trying to hold water in your hands. It slips through, and you don't miss it. You don't miss it because missing things requires knowing they were there, and that knowledge is already fading, replaced by the simple, glowing awareness that Jax is crouching in front of you and he is *so hot* and you look so pretty and everything is, like, totally fine.

"You okay, babe?" Jax asks, reaching out to brush a strand of gold hair from your face.

You lean into his hand automatically. "Mmhm," you say, and the sound comes out breathy and musical. "I feel *really* good."