Just like with her, she thought.
Ava hadn’t always taken school seriously. Her freshman year, she’d thought studying was for losers. Nerds. Geeks. Uglies. Ava was gorgeous, and she knew it. Half Iranian and half Irish, she had striking almond-shaped eyes, smooth caramel-colored skin, and a long-limbed figure with impressive curves. She’d even worked a few modeling gigs, posing for an upscale makeup company based in Seattle and shimmying into skintight designer jeans for a department store’s ad campaign. Who cared about getting into Yale or Stanford—maybe she didn’t even need to go to college.
Then her mom had died, hit by a drunk driver one night on her way home from campus. Her mom had always insisted that Ava was smarter than her report cards. Every time Ava brought home another mediocre test score, Ava’s mom defended her to her dad: “She’s figuring out who she is, Firouz. She obviously has a great role model for how to be brilliant”—she pointed to herself ironically—“but no one around here can show her how to be brilliant and beautiful at the same time. That’s a burden only she can bear.” Ava’s dad would laugh, and the storm would pass.
In the void after her mom’s death, Ava had found herself wanting to study for the first time. And it turned out her mom was right—she was smart. Her dad noticed the change in her behavior and her GPA, and constantly told her how proud he was. Teachers began to take her seriously.
That is, until Nolan Hotchkiss sent all her hard-won efforts crumbling to sand.
“The crime genre is one that’s changed shape dozens of times over the years, always morphing to provide a commentary on the moral stance Americans take at any given point in time.” Mr. Granger’s voice pulled Ava back to the present. “A lot of crime movies investigate the idea of a gray area of morality, where heroes would be challenged to behave as criminals—and vice versa. Some people love this about crime film, and some people hate it.”
Ava glanced down at her notes. She’d written the words heroes, criminals, and hate. She realized with a sinking feeling that the hate she’d written looked far too similar to the hate she wrote on Nolan’s face last weekend, the one that was featured in newspapers and newscasts and nationwide blogs. She quickly flipped to a new page before anyone could notice.
“Now, before we keep going, I’ll hand back your papers on And Then There Were None.”
Everyone in class sat up, on alert, as most kids did when a teacher was handing back a paper or a test. Ava knew that in the next few moments, there would be huge smiles . . . and some tears, too. Yes, even a class like film studies mattered. Every grade mattered at Beacon.
“Some of you did very well,” Mr. Granger murmured, peeling a paper off the stack. Ava was sure Mr. Granger looked right at her as he said that, and she sat up a little straighter in her chair. “Some of you, however, need to be challenged. The moral questions this movie asks are complicated and maybe even a little subversive. I’d like to see you really push your arguments on this next unit.” Mr. Granger picked up a stack of papers from his desk and started to move around the room.
When he got to her row, Mr. Granger set her paper facedown on the desk. Ava turned it over, eager to see his notes—and gasped at the bright red C scrawled across the top.
A C? She couldn’t believe it. She put lots of effort into this class, watching long-winded interviews with directors and reading film theory articles online. Her papers on the first movies they’d watched, Psycho and Vertigo, had earned her A-pluses. Then again, she’d written the And Then There Were None paper after that eerie group discussion in class—and after she’d lured Nolan upstairs at his party. She remembered the heaviness of his body as he leaned on her, the smell of beer on his breath as he tried to kiss her sloppily. The moment his muscles had gone lax . . .
She shook her head. The last thing she had wanted to do was think about Nolan, the movie, or what she’d done.
“How’d you do?”
She glanced up to see Alex, his arm resting on the back of his seat. His expression changed quickly when he saw that she was upset.
“Um, not so great,” she mumbled.
“It’s okay. Maybe he’ll let you rewrite it. We can watch the movie again together—”
“No,” Ava said quickly, then winced at the flash of hurt in his warm brown eyes. She just didn’t want to see that movie again, no matter what. “Sorry, I just—”