My Best Friend, The Billionaire

The note landed on Ivy's desk exactly four minutes before the bell, folded into a triangle the way Grayson always folded things when he didn't want anyone else reading them over her shoulder.

Meet me by the lockers after class. Important.

She didn't even look up. "You could just text me, you know. Like a normal person."

"Where's the fun in that?" Grayson Cole dropped into the seat behind hers, the one that was technically Marcus Webb's but that nobody dared mention because Grayson had been sitting there since September and Marcus had simply... stopped showing up to that class. Ivy never asked. She didn't want to know if it was intimidation or just Grayson's particular gravity, the way people rearranged themselves around him without being told to.

They'd known each other since they were eight years old, since the day Grayson tried to trade her his lunch, an actual, from-a-real-bakery croissant, for her peanut butter sandwich, because he'd never had one and wanted to know what "normal food" tasted like. She'd said yes. Best trade of her life. They'd been stuck to each other ever since, in the specific, permanent way you get stuck to someone when you've seen them cry over a dead goldfish and they've seen you throw up at a birthday party.

"Fine," she said. "What's important?"

"Not here." He nodded toward the front of the room, where Mrs. Alden was already giving them The Look. "Lockers. After class."

Ivy should have known then. She didn't.

By the time the bell rang, half the hallway had already heard, because that's how it worked at Kensington Prep, gossip outran actual news by a solid ten minutes, that Grayson Cole's eighteenth birthday was going to be held at the Cole family's private island, the one that showed up in magazines with headlines like "A Look Inside the Billion-Dollar Getaway You'll Never Afford."

Ivy found him exactly where he said he'd be, leaning against her locker like he owned it, which, considering his family basically owned the wing the science building was in, wasn't entirely a joke.

"So," he said, way too casual, rocking back on his heels. "Birthday thing. Saturday. You're coming."

"That wasn't a question."

"It wasn't," he agreed. "But I'm asking anyway. As a formality." He looked at his shoes, which he never did (Grayson looked people dead in the eye when he talked to them, it was practically a personality trait) and said, too fast, "As my best friend. Obviously. Just as my... you know. Friend. Coming as a friend."

Ivy raised an eyebrow. "You said friend three times."

"Did I?" He finally looked up, and something crossed his face that she couldn't name yet, something that made her stomach do a small, confusing flip she filed away under ignore this immediately. "Guess I really wanted to make sure you understood the assignment."

"Understood," she said, even though (and this was the part she definitely wasn't going to think about on the walk home) she didn't, not really. Not the part where his voice had gone strange on the word friend, like it was a coat that didn't fit right anymore but he was going to keep wearing it out of habit.

"Bring a dress," he added, already walking backward down the hall, flashing the grin that made half the girls in their grade forget how to form sentences. "A nice one. My mom's doing the whole thing properly this year."

"Grayson." She called after him. "I work Saturdays. At the diner. Remember, some of us have actual jobs..."

"Already talked to your manager," he called back, not even turning around. "You're off."

"You can't just..." she started, but he was already gone, and arguing with an empty hallway wasn't exactly a productive use of her time. Typical Grayson. He'd probably slipped Denny a hundred-dollar tip on his way out of the diner last week and called it "networking."

Ivy stood there in the emptying hallway, half-annoyed, half something else she wasn't ready to name, watching him disappear around the corner like a boy who'd never once in his life been told no.

The scholarship kid and the billionaire's son. Best friends since they were eight.

She had no idea, standing there, that Saturday was going to be the night everything started to change.

Ivy's best friend Priya caught up with her at her locker two minutes later, out of breath and grinning like she already knew something Ivy didn't.

"Okay, so," Priya said, "is it true? The island thing?"

"How does the entire school already know?"

"Sophie Lin's cousin does the catering. Or the flowers. Something with an S." Priya leaned against the locker next to Ivy's, arms crossed, studying her face in that way she had, like she was reading a book she'd already memorized the ending to. "You're going, right?"

"Apparently my schedule's already been rearranged for me," Ivy said, and Priya laughed, because she knew exactly what that meant. Grayson Cole didn't ask people things so much as he informed them of decisions that had already been made on their behalf, usually with their best interests stapled on as an afterthought.

"You know," Priya said, dragging the word out slow, "for someone who's just his friend, he sure spends a lot of time making sure you never say no to him."

"Don't."

"I'm just saying. A boy doesn't bribe your boss so you can come to his birthday party unless..."

"Priya."

"Fine, fine." She held up both hands in surrender, but the grin didn't budge. "I'll drop it. For now."

Ivy walked home the long way that afternoon, past the bakery she and Grayson used to stop at after school when they were twelve, back when a shared cinnamon roll was the most complicated thing between them. The streets were doing that early-autumn thing where the light turned gold too early and made everything look like a memory before it had even finished happening.

She kept thinking about his voice on the word friend. The way he'd said it like it cost him something.

It didn't mean anything, she told herself. It was Grayson being Grayson, performing normalcy the way he performed everything else, easily, effortlessly, like the world existed specifically to agree with him. He probably hadn't even noticed he'd said it three times. She was the one making it strange. She was the one who needed to stop.

By the time she got home, her mother had dinner half-made and a hundred questions about her day, and Ivy gave her the easy version: fine, normal, nothing happening. She didn't mention the note folded into a triangle, or the island, or the dress she apparently needed to find by Saturday on a diner-shift budget. She definitely didn't mention the stomach flip.

Some things you keep to yourself until you're ready to know what they mean.

Ivy lay in bed that night staring at the ceiling, replaying the hallway like a scene from a movie she couldn't stop rewinding. Grayson's easy grin. The three friends. The half-second where his eyes had actually looked uncertain, which was not a thing Grayson Cole's face was built to do.

It always came back to the same memory, the one she never let herself sit with for long. They were fourteen, sitting too close on this same bed doing algebra homework neither of them wanted to finish, and somehow, between one joke and the next, his mouth had brushed hers. An accident. Two seconds, maybe less. Neither of them had moved for what felt like an hour afterward, and then he'd laughed it off, awkward and too fast, and she'd laughed too, and they'd gone back to the homework like nothing had happened at all.

Nothing had happened, officially. They'd never spoken of it again, not once in three years, and Ivy had told herself so many times that it hadn't meant anything that she'd almost started to believe it. Almost. Except she could still remember exactly how it felt, and except somewhere in the three years since, that one accidental, unspoken kiss had quietly turned into a crush she'd never managed to talk herself out of.

Eighteen years old, and for the first time in a decade of friendship, she fell asleep wondering what Saturday was actually going to mean.

By Wednesday, Ivy had a problem, and the problem had a price tag.

She stood in front of her closet with her arms crossed, staring at the same six outfits she'd been staring at for two years, none of which belonged anywhere near a word like gala. There was her graduation dress from eighth grade, which no longer fit anywhere it needed to. There was the black dress she wore to her grandmother's funeral, which felt wrong for entirely different reasons. And there was everything else, which was mostly things you wore to a diner shift, not a private island owned by a family whose net worth had its own Wikipedia page.

"You could just tell him no," Priya said from Ivy's bed, scrolling through her phone with the particular focus of someone who was absolutely not going to be helpful. "Revolutionary concept. People do it all the time."

"He already un-scheduled my shift. There's no version of this where I don't go."

"There's a version where you go in something that isn't