Leo woke before his alarm, which was a thing that happened to him on mornings when some part of his brain had decided, without consulting the rest of him, that today mattered.

He lay still for a moment, looking at the unfamiliar ceiling, and ran through his rules.

Keep your head down. Don't stand out. Blend in. Be normal. Be boring. Get through the year.

"Easy," he told the ceiling. The ceiling, wisely, said nothing.

He got up, showered, and put on the uniform. It fit him well - the version of himself who had lived here before had apparently been the same size, which was one small mercy in a life that had recently run very short on them. He stood in front of the hall mirror and assessed the result: an ordinary boy in a school blazer, the silver leaf gleaming on the breast pocket. Forgettable. Perfect.

"Hi, I'm Leo," he practiced, in his most unremarkable voice. "Just a normal new student. Don't mind me."

He ate a quick breakfast, washed the plate, and decided to walk to school. The map on the wall said it was twenty minutes on foot, and walking felt safer than the alternatives - no taxi driver to refuse his money, no crowded bus, just him and the pavement and a sensible, anonymous stroll. He'd slip in with the morning crowd of students, find his classroom, sit at the back, and disappear into the wallpaper. He'd done it a thousand times in his old life. He was a professional.

The walk was pleasant. Oakhaven in the morning looked so much like the England he knew that he could almost pretend nothing had changed - the same damp grey light, the same hedges and brick, the same smell of rain that hadn't decided whether to fall. He passed shops opening their shutters, a cafe steaming with breakfast, a park where someone walked a small enthusiastic dog. For a few blocks, Leo let himself relax.

Then he reached Silverleaf Academy, and the relaxing stopped.

The school was a grand old building of pale stone, with the kind of arched windows and ivy-softened walls that suggested a great deal of history and an even greater deal of fees. A wide gate opened onto a courtyard, and the courtyard was full of students streaming toward the doors.

They were almost all girls.

Leo had known this, intellectually, since reading the book the night before. Knowing it and walking into it were two different things. The courtyard was a river of girls - chatting, laughing, hurrying, dawdling - and scattered through that river, here and there, sparse as stars in a city sky, a handful of boys. And every one of those boys was surrounded. Escorted. One had a girl carrying his bag while two others walked beside him, attentive, hanging on whatever he was saying. Another stood under the shelter of the entrance while a small group fussed around him, one adjusting his collar, another offering what looked like a flask of something warm.

Leo took all this in, swallowed, and reminded himself of the rules. Head down. Blend in. He hitched his own bag higher on his shoulder - carrying it himself, because of course he carried it himself, what else would he do with it - and walked through the gate.

The effect rippled outward from him like a stone dropped in still water.

The nearest girls noticed him first. A conversation stopped mid-sentence. A head turned, then another. He saw it happen in his peripheral vision and kept his eyes fixed forward, picking up his pace, doing his level best to project the energy of a person not worth a second glance.

It didn't work. It worked, in fact, in precise reverse.

Because here was a boy - a boy, one of the rare and precious ones - walking into school entirely alone. Carrying his own bag. No escort, no entourage, no one fussing at his side. Moving through the courtyard under his own steam like it was the most natural thing in the world. To Leo it was simply how a person got to school. To everyone watching, it was extraordinary, almost reckless, the way it might look to see someone stroll calmly across a tightrope with no net and no apparent awareness they were doing anything unusual at all.

The whispers started.

"Is that - who is that?"

"I've never seen him before."

"He's by himself -"

"Is he new? He must be new."

Leo caught fragments of it and misread every one. New. They'd clocked him as the new student. That was all. New students got looked at; that was universal, that was true in any world, the fresh face always drew a glance. It would pass. He just had to get inside and find his class and let the novelty wear off.

He reached the entrance. There was a heavy door, and a girl ahead of him was struggling with an armful of folders, trying to get it open with her elbow. Leo did what Leo always did, what he would have done in any world without thinking about it for even a fraction of a second: he stepped forward and held the door open for her.

"Here you go," he said, with an easy smile.

The girl looked at the open door. Then she looked at Leo. Then she looked at the open door again, as though it might explain itself.

"You - held the door," she said faintly.

"Yeah. You had your hands full." Leo gestured at her folders, still holding the door. "After you."

She went through it the way a person walks through a door they're not entirely sure is real, never taking her eyes off him, and on the other side she stopped and put a hand against the wall as though she needed it for support.

Leo let the door close behind them and tried to move on. He did not get far.

Word, it turned out, traveled fast. By the time he was halfway down the entrance hall, he had acquired an audience, and the audience was getting bolder.

"Can I carry your bag?" A girl had appeared at his side, slightly breathless, hands already half-extended. "It looks heavy. Let me carry it."

"Oh - no, thank you, it's fine," Leo said. "It's not heavy at all, really."

This answer landed among them like he'd recited something profound. Two more girls had materialized on his other side.

"Do you know where you're going? I can show you. I'll walk you wherever you need."

"Are you thirsty? I have water. I have two waters."

"Did you walk here? You walked? In this cold?"

"That's - I'm okay, honestly," Leo said, increasingly aware that he was now the center of a small, growing knot of people in the middle of a hallway, which was the precise opposite of the wallpaper-blending he'd planned. He kept his voice gentle and his refusals polite, because they were being kind, in their strange overwhelming way, and he didn't want to be rude. "Thank you, though. Really. That's very nice of you. I think I can manage from here."

I think I can manage from here.

He might as well have set off a firework. The girls around him pressed their hands to their hearts. One of them made a small wounded noise of pure delight. The polite, gentle, completely sincere insistence that he didn't need looking after was, he was beginning to dimly suspect, having an effect roughly opposite to the one he intended - though he couldn't for the life of him work out why being self-sufficient should make people more interested rather than less.

He pressed on, scanning the corridor for room numbers, the cluster trailing after him.

And then, of course, the corridor did to him what corridors do. Someone coming the other way, hurrying, arms full, clipped a shoulder against the wall and lost their grip, and a stack of textbooks went tumbling toward the floor.

Leo moved on instinct.

He didn't decide to. There was no calculation, no thought of the rules, no awareness of the dozens of eyes on him. There was just a stack of falling books and a body that had been catching falling things its whole life, and before the topmost book hit the ground he had stepped in, caught it, swept up two more in his other hand, and was crouching to gather the rest.

"Whoa - I've got it, don't worry," he said, stacking them neatly and rising to hold them out to their stunned owner. "There you go. All yours."

The corridor went silent.

Not quiet. Silent. The kind of silence that has weight to it, that you can feel land on your shoulders. Leo looked up, books extended, and found what felt like the entire hallway frozen mid-step, staring at him.

The girl whose books they were took them back in numb hands.

"He caught them," someone whispered, several feet away, in a tone of hushed disbelief.

"He just - he picked them up. For her."

"A boy picked up books. Off the floor. On purpose."

Leo stood in the ringing center of all that attention and felt his stomach drop. This. This was the opposite of everything on his list. This was standing out. This was making a fuss. This was, by every measure of his careful five-rule plan, a catastrophe, and he had managed it before first period.

"Sorry," he said reflexively, to no one and everyone. "Didn't mean to - I'll just -"

He ducked his head and walked, fast, away from the frozen tableau, and the worst part, the part that made his ears burn, was that he'd diagnosed it all completely wrong. He thought the problem was him being clumsy and conspicuous. He thought he'd drawn the eye by making a scene, by being awkward, by failing to be smooth and invisible. He resolved, walking stiffly down the corridor, to be even more careful. Even quieter. Even smaller. He would give nobody any reason to look at him.

He could not have been more wrong about the cause if he'd tried, and because he was wrong about the cause, every single solution he reached for would make it worse. He just didn't know that yet.

He found his classroom by the simple method of checking the number against his letter, slipped through the door, and felt a wave of relief so strong it was almost dizzying. A room. A normal classroom, with desks and a whiteboard and a window and a sense of ordinary scholastic dullness. He could work with this. He could sit down and be a student and let the morning's disasters fade.

The relief lasted approximately three seconds, which was how long it took the room to notice him.

Thirty-odd faces turned toward the door. The chatter died. And there it was again, the by-now-familiar phenomenon - the stillness, the staring, the dawning of expressions he was beginning to recognize and dread, that mixture of wonder and appetite that followed him like a scent.

The teacher, a poised woman with reading glasses pushed up into her hair, looked up from her desk, and her professional composure did the same small wobble he'd seen on the doctor's face.

"Ah," she said, recovering, rising to her feet with rather more ceremony than the moment seemed to call for. "You must be our new student. Everyone - everyone, settle down - we're very fortunate this morning. Very fortunate indeed." She said fortunate in a way that made Leo want to disappear into his own blazer. "Please, come in. Introduce yourself."

Leo walked to the front of the room on legs that felt borrowed, turned to face the class, and delivered the introduction he'd practiced in the mirror, which he'd hoped would be reassuringly bland and which now felt absurdly inadequate to the weight of attention pressing on him.

"Um. Hi. I'm Leo Evans." He attempted a small, normal smile. "I'm new. It's nice to meet you all."

Nice to meet you all.

The room reacted as though he'd said something extraordinary. There was a collective shift, a leaning-in, a soft chorus of indrawn breath. Somewhere in the back, a girl murmured something to her neighbor and both of them went pink.

Leo stood there in the warm glare of all of it and felt, underneath the panic, that older and quieter ache he'd carried since the hospital window. Because they were looking at him - really looking, more eyes on him at once than had probably looked at him in his whole previous life combined - and yet not one of them was seeing him. Leo Evans, the actual person, the boy who liked quiet ceilings and missed a water stain shaped like a duck, who cooked because someone had always had to and it had ended up being him, who wanted nothing more than to be left gently alone. None of that. They saw the category. The rare thing. The treasure. He'd traded being invisible for being the most looked-at person in the room, and somehow it managed to be exactly as lonely as before.

"Lovely," the teacher said, a touch breathlessly. "Lovely. Let's find you a seat." Her eyes swept the room and settled on a spot near the windows. "There - there's an open desk. Next to Miss Vance. Miss Vance, you'll look after our new student, won't you?"

Leo followed her gaze.

Nearly every face in the room had worn some version of the same expression - that soft, dazzled, hungry wonder. But the girl by the window did not.

She sat very straight, dark hair pulled back with severe neatness, a pen poised over an open notebook as though she'd been interrupted in the middle of something important and resented it. She was, he registered distantly, striking - sharp-featured, composed, the kind of face that looked like it was used to being obeyed. And she was looking at him not with wonder but with something closer to suspicion. A narrow, assessing, faintly displeased scrutiny, the look of someone running calculations and not liking the numbers. As though Leo were not a treasure or a marvel but a problem that had just walked into her morning - an unscheduled variable to be measured, contained, and managed.

Leo crossed the room under that cool stare and slid into the empty desk beside her, and felt, perversely, the first genuine flicker of relief he'd had all day.

Finally, he thought. Someone who isn't making a fuss.

She didn't look starstruck. She didn't offer to carry anything or fetch him water. She just frowned at him for one more measured second, then turned crisply back to her notebook, evidently having filed him under some private heading of her own.

Thank goodness, Leo thought, settling in, his shoulders coming down from around his ears for the first time since the gate. At least one normal person.

It was, of course, yet another thing he had gotten completely and beautifully wrong - but he could be forgiven this one. He had no way of knowing that the girl beside him, Scarlett Vance, was the President of the Student Council, that managing problems was the great organizing principle of her entire life, and that she had just looked at him and concluded, with the absolute certainty she brought to everything, that this strange self-sufficient new boy was going to be the most disruptive variable Silverleaf Academy had seen in years.

She was, for what it was worth, the only person in the building who was completely right about him.

The teacher began the lesson. Leo opened his notebook, kept his head down, and silently recommitted to his five rules, certain that the worst of the day was behind him.

Beside him, without looking up, Scarlett Vance wrote a single line at the top of a fresh page, underlined it twice, and turned it slightly away from him so he couldn't see.

The morning light came through the tall windows. The lesson droned on. And two desks' worth of distance apart, the new boy who wanted to disappear and the girl who intended to keep an eye on him sat side by side, neither of them having the faintest idea that the door, in every sense that mattered, had just been opened.