Everett knew he was being irrational by the time he got to third period.
This did not improve his mood.
Irrationality, as a concept, offended him on moral grounds. It was messy. Imprecise. Usually driven by feelings that had escaped containment and now wanted to ruin the structural integrity of everything else.
Which was, unfortunately, what his own brain had apparently decided to become.
It had started the night before, in fragments.
Jake in the truck, saying I hate when they say Ross is helping me in that rough, unguarded voice that made Everett feel things he could not sort into safe categories.
Jake looking at him like he actually meant it when he said I don’t really know where I fit in it either.
Jake getting swallowed by the field and the lights and the coaches and the future all over again the second he stepped back out of the cab.
Then the note under the windshield wiper.
Then the deeply inconvenient fact that Everett had gone to sleep imagining, with humiliating detail, what it would have felt like to put his hand back over Jake’s in the truck and not let go this time.
That alone should have been enough to ruin a Thursday.
Instead, the universe had layered in witnesses.
By ten-thirty that morning, Everett had already seen:
one girl from student council touch Jake’s arm and laugh too brightly at something Everett couldn’t hear,
two teammates shoulder-check him in the hall and drag him bodily toward the locker room as if his skeleton belonged partly to them,
and Mrs. Henderson stop Jake after class with a hand on his paper and that sympathetic-teacher expression Everett usually liked on principle and currently wanted to file a complaint against.
Not because any of it meant anything.
Because none of it had to.
That was the problem.
Jake fit everywhere.
Maybe not comfortably.
Maybe not honestly.
But visibly.
People understood what to do with a boy like Jake Richardson on sight.
They made room for him.
Claimed him.
Expected things of him.
Wanted things from him.
Touched him without hesitation.
Everett, on the other hand, had spent most of high school perfecting the art of making himself easy to route around unless somebody needed chemistry homework explained or a weird historical fact at exactly the wrong moment.
It should not have mattered that much.
It mattered enough that by lunch he had begun to hate his own bones again.
He was aware that this was not Jake’s fault.
That did not stop the spiral from taking shape anyway.
The cafeteria was too loud, the fluorescent lights too high and unforgiving, the tables too packed with bodies that all seemed to belong to themselves in ways Everett had never mastered.
He sat where he usually sat, at the far end of the table with Isla from history club, Noah from band, and Priya from academic decathlon, all of whom were perfectly decent and currently guilty of existing in his line of sight while his brain was malfunctioning.
Noah was saying something about the spring concert set list.
Isla was making fun of the principal’s email voice.
Priya was trying to eat pasta while also annotating a philosophy article and therefore living in a state Everett strongly respected.
Everett heard maybe every fourth word.
Because Jake was three tables over with the football guys, laughing at something Mason Harper had said while simultaneously shoving him away with one hand and taking a carton of milk from Theo with the other.
He looked tired.
That should have been the main thing.
It was one of the things.
The other thing — the worse thing — was that a girl in a cheer hoodie kept leaning in toward him from the next table over, close enough that her hair brushed his shoulder once when she laughed.
Jake didn’t lean back.
Didn’t lean in either.
Just stayed there in that loose, automatic social posture he had that made room for everybody unless he actively decided not to.
Everett hated how quickly he noticed it.
Hated even more that he kept noticing it.
Noah followed his gaze and said, “Oh, wow.”
Everett looked back at him immediately. “What?”
Noah chewed once, then pointed his fork vaguely in Jake’s direction. “Richardson looks like he got hit by a truck.”
That was not what Everett had been looking at.
But now that Noah said it, he couldn’t unsee that either.
Jake’s smile was there, but thinner. Delayed by half a second. His shoulders sat too tight even when he was laughing. Every now and then he’d go still for one beat too long, like he’d drifted out of the room and had to yank himself back.
Something uneasy moved under Everett’s irritation.
Isla glanced over too. “He does look rough.”
Priya, still annotating, said, “Maybe he is capable of human fatigue after all.”
Noah snorted.
Everett looked back down at his lunch tray and stabbed a fork into one of the sad cafeteria fries with more force than the potato deserved.
This was ridiculous.
He was doing exactly what he had promised himself, in a thousand private ways over the years, he would never do:
sitting in public and hurting his own feelings with information nobody had even offered as a weapon.
Across the room, Jake laughed again at something the cheer girl said.
Everett looked up before he could stop himself.
The girl touched Jake’s forearm this time.
Just briefly.
Friendly.
Easy.
Jake smiled back automatically.
That was all.
That was it.
It hit Everett low and mean anyway.
Because it was easy.
Because she did not have to fight her own body to be near him.
Because if she wanted to flirt, nobody at school would call it weird or overcomplicated or structurally unsound.
Because if Jake ever wanted somebody easier, the world would hand him options by the dozen and call it natural.
“Everett?”
He looked up.
Priya was watching him over the edge of her water bottle, sharp-eyed in the quiet way she had when she’d noticed something and was deciding whether to be kind or merciless.
“You just stabbed that fry like it insulted your bloodline.”
Everett set the fork down. “It was texturally deceptive.”
Noah laughed. Isla looked unconvinced.
Priya’s eyes flicked once toward Jake’s table and then back to Everett’s face.
Oh, no.
Everett felt the exact second he understood that she understood enough to become dangerous.
He reached for his water before she could say anything out loud and discovered, to his growing personal humiliation, that his hand was not as steady as he would have liked.
Priya, mercifully, chose kindness.
“Eat something that’s not school fries,” she said.
“That is, weirdly, good advice,” Isla added.
Everett nodded once and did not say the problem is not the fries, the problem is that I have somehow started measuring my own worth against the shape of Jake’s life like a complete idiot.
Because that would have been a difficult lunch conversation even by Flat Rock standards.
Across the cafeteria, Jake looked up.
Their eyes met.
And there it was again — the tiny hitch in the air, that impossible, immediate recognition.
Jake’s expression changed slightly.
Not dramatically.
Just enough for Everett to see the weariness under the social version of him.
Then Jake glanced toward the people at Everett’s table.
Saw Noah saying something.
Saw Isla smile at whatever Everett had not heard.
Saw Priya still watching everything with the expression of somebody who collected information as a sport.
Jake looked back at Everett.
And something in his face sharpened.
It was gone a second later.
Probably imagined.
Probably not.
The bell rang before Everett could analyze it to death.
Students stood. Trays scraped. The room dissolved into motion.
Jake got pulled sideways by Mason before he could move more than a step.
Everett turned away first because apparently he was a coward now in addition to everything else.
That was a fun development.
By the time last bell rang, Everett had a headache sitting directly behind his left eye and enough contempt for his own internal life to qualify for sainthood.
He should have gone home.
That was the sensible thing.
Instead he went to the library, because if his brain insisted on being unusable, he might as well at least place it near books and pretend there was dignity in that.
He made it through exactly fourteen minutes of outlining a paper on postwar American identity before Jake appeared at the end of the table like the embodied consequence of bad decision-making.
Everett looked up.
Jake looked tired.
Worse than tired, actually.
Drawn around the edges in a way that made something in Everett immediately unclench and then clench harder.
“You hiding?” Jake asked.
Everett closed the book in front of him. “I was trying to.”
Jake nodded once like this was a valid and perhaps admirable life choice.
Then, without waiting for permission, he slid into the chair across from Everett.
That should not have sent a ridiculous current of awareness through Everett’s entire body.
It did anyway.
The library hummed softly around them — pages turning, a printer starting up somewhere near the front desk, someone coughing into a sleeve with profound commitment.
Jake set both forearms on the table and looked at him.
Not playful.
Not casual.
Concerned.
Everett hated how quickly that concern reached him.
Hated more that he wanted it.
“What?” he asked.
Jake frowned slightly. “You’re weird today.”
There were probably many possible responses to that.
Everett went with, “Devastatingly precise.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.”
Jake studied him for one second longer. “Did something happen?”
Yes, Everett thought. My self-respect apparently died in the cafeteria.
Instead he said, “Nothing that qualifies as a reportable event.”
Jake leaned back in the chair. “Ross.”
There it was.
That tone.
The one that said Jake had decided not to be distracted and Everett was going to have to live with the consequences.
Everett looked down at his notes because looking directly at Jake while this particular internal disaster was underway seemed like a poor tactical choice.
“You look like you’re trying to solve a murder no one else knows happened,” Jake said.
Everett let out one short breath that nearly counted as a laugh.
“That’s obnoxiously specific.”
Jake shrugged one shoulder. “I know your face now.”
The sentence landed like a dropped weight.
Everett’s eyes lifted before he could stop them.
Jake looked like he hadn’t fully planned to say it that way. The words hung there between them, awkwardly sincere and impossible to drag back.
Neither of them moved.
Then Jake looked down at the notebook in front of Everett and said, too casually, “What are you working on?”
Coward, Everett thought.
Then: relief.
He answered because answering was easier than saying you knowing my face is part of the problem, actually.
“Postwar American identity.”
Jake blinked. “That sounds fake.”
“It’s a paper.”
“That sounds worse.”
Everett almost smiled despite himself.
Jake caught that and relaxed by half a degree.
Which should not have mattered.
It did.
He nodded toward Everett’s notes. “You eat lunch?”
The question was so apparently unrelated Everett nearly missed the thread.
Then he didn’t.
“You cannot diagnose hunger on sight.”
Jake raised an eyebrow. “Can when it’s you.”
Everett stared at him.
Jake did not seem to realize how insane that sounded until a beat later, at which point his face changed very slightly.
“Not like—” He stopped. “I mean, you get quieter when you haven’t eaten.”
Everett looked down again, because the alternative was letting Jake see too much of what that sentence had just done to him.
“I ate.”
Jake looked unconvinced. “Fries don’t count.”
Everett frowned. “Were you watching me?”
That had not come out the way he meant it to.
Too sharp.
Too close to the real question under the real question.
Jake went still.
Then, very carefully, “Yeah.”
The honesty of it hit harder than deflection would have.
Everett’s fingers tightened around his pen.
This was ridiculous.
This whole afternoon was ridiculous.
Jake leaned forward a little. “What’s wrong?”
No teasing now.
No exit ramp.
Just Jake, exhausted and still somehow here, asking real questions in the library like he had any right to make Everett answer them.
Everett looked at him and thought, not for the first time, that being wanted by Jake Richardson was becoming dangerous mostly because it kept making him forget that he had no usable way to trust it.
“You don’t have to keep doing that,” he said.
Jake blinked. “Doing what?”
Everett laughed once, low and without humor. “Acting like I’m hard to read when I’m not.”
Jake stared.
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“No?”
“No.”
The answer was immediate enough to sound offended.
Good, Everett thought.
Let him be offended.
That was cleaner than this constant, awful unsteadiness of not knowing what he meant and not being able to stop hoping he meant too much.
Jake sat back slightly. “Ross, what happened?”
And there it was.
The pressure point.
The thing under all the others.
Everett looked at the edge of the table and spoke to that instead of Jake’s face.
“Nothing happened.”
Jake exhaled through his nose. “That’s getting old.”
“Then stop asking questions you won’t like the answer to.”
The silence that followed was immediate and ugly.
Jake’s head tilted just slightly. “You think I won’t like it?”
Everett laughed again, because apparently his body had chosen bitterness as today’s coping mechanism.
“I think,” he said carefully, “that there are easier things in your life than this.”
Jake didn’t move.
Everett kept his eyes on the table because if he looked up now he might stop talking, and some vicious part of him had decided stopping would be even worse than saying any of this aloud.
“Easier people,” he added.
The room went very still.
There. Fine.
Done.
Humiliating.
Excellent.
Jake looked at him for one long second.
Then said, quietly, “That’s what this is about?”
Everett’s face went hot immediately.
He should deny it.
He absolutely should.
Instead he said, “Partly.”
Jake stared at him in a way that made Everett feel suddenly overexposed, like he’d stripped his skin off in the middle of the library and was now expected to sit there professionally.
“Ross,” Jake said.
Everett looked up before he could stop himself.
Jake’s face had gone softer.
Not pitying.
Worse.
Understanding.
Everett hated that too.
Because understanding from Jake always landed like kindness, and kindness from Jake had become one of the most destabilizing forces in Everett’s life.
“You don’t get it,” Everett said.
Jake’s jaw tightened slightly. “Then explain it.”
There was that phrase again.
That impossible phrase.
The one Jake kept using like explanation was a bridge Everett could just decide to walk over if he wanted to.
Everett looked at him and decided, against all sense, to try.
“Fine.”
Jake didn’t interrupt.
Everett stared at the spine of his history book because it was easier than the alternative.
“You want to know what’s stupid?” he said. “I know you’re not doing anything wrong.”
Jake stayed very still.
“I know you being tired in a cafeteria with people around you is not some moral failure on your part. I know a girl leaning on your shoulder while she talks does not actually mean anything. I know teammates dragging you around like a shared public resource is not your fault.” He swallowed once. “I know all of that.”
Jake was looking at him like the sentence a girl leaning on your shoulder had reached up and slapped him.
Good.
Maybe.
No, not good.
Just fair.
Everett went on before he lost momentum.
“But I also know,” he said, voice flatter now because feeling too much was making precision harder, “that people like you don’t have to fight every room they walk into.”
Jake’s expression changed.
Everett saw it and kept going because now there was no graceful way out.
“You don’t have to calculate whether you look wrong standing next to somebody. You don’t have to wonder if people are seeing you and immediately filing you under awkward or too skinny or obviously temporary.” His mouth twisted. “You don’t have to wonder whether the person who keeps showing up for you is going to wake up one day and realize there are easier options.”
Silence.
The whole library seemed to narrow around the table.
Jake looked at him for one long second and then, very quietly, “You think I’m gonna do that?”
Everett laughed once, exhausted by himself now. “I think it would make more sense.”
Jake stared at him.
That was the worst part, maybe.
Not anger.
Not disbelief.
Hurt.
Actual hurt.
As if the thought that Everett could believe that of him landed somewhere he had not armored.
Everett looked away immediately, because apparently he had reached his daily quota of intolerable honesty and still found time to exceed it.
“You asked,” he said.
Jake did not answer right away.
When he finally spoke, his voice was lower than before. Rougher.
“Yeah,” he said. “I did.”
A chair scraped somewhere behind them. Someone laughed too loudly near the printers. The world went on in all its usual irritating ways while Everett sat there wishing, too late, that he had kept his mouth shut and also strangely relieved that he hadn’t.
Jake leaned forward again, forearms on the table.
“Look at me.”
Everett stared at him in disbelief. “That sounds aggressive.”
Jake’s mouth twitched once, but there was no real humor in it. “Ross.”
Everett hated how quickly his eyes obeyed.
Jake held his gaze.
He looked wrecked.
Tired from practice and meetings and carrying too much.
Open in that dangerous, specific way he only seemed to get around Everett now.
“I don’t know how many times I have to tell you,” Jake said quietly, “that you’re not a worse option.”
The sentence hit Everett so hard he almost looked away again.
Didn’t.
Barely.
Jake kept going.
“And I don’t know how to say this in some polished, smart way you’ll respect more.” His fingers flexed once against the tabletop. “But when you talk like I’m gonna get tired of you because some girl in a hoodie touched my arm at lunch, it makes me want to shake you.”
Everett’s breath caught.
Not because of the near violence in the wording.
Because of the force under it.
Because Jake sounded personally offended by the idea of wanting anyone else more easily.
“That is a terrible reassurance strategy,” Everett said weakly.
Jake barked out one startled laugh. “Yeah, probably.”
Some of the tightness in Everett’s chest shifted.
Not gone.
Never that simple.
But moved.
Jake looked down at the papers between them, then back up.
“I’m not saying this right,” he admitted. “I know that.”
Everett swallowed. “No.”
“But I’m saying it.”
That one was harder to survive.
Because he was.
Because Jake kept doing it — reaching for the truth badly, imperfectly, without the language for it, and somehow making it matter more because of the effort.
Everett looked down at his own hands.
They were shaking just slightly.
He hated that Jake might see that.
Hated more that Jake almost certainly already had.
Jake saw.
“I know I’m not easy,” Everett said finally.
Jake moved, a slow, deliberate shifting of his weight that made the library chair groan under him. He reached out, sliding his hand across the table toward Everett’s hand—the one still white-knuckled around a pen.
He didn’t close the gap. He stopped three inches away, palm turned slightly up, a silent, open-ended question. It was the hand of someone who spent his afternoons hitting people at full speed, but right now, it looked hesitant. Vulnerable.
Everett stared at it. He felt the heat radiating from Jake’s skin, a physical reminder of how much space Jake occupied, how solid he was compared to Everett’s own jagged edges. He didn’t move his hand away, but he didn’t bridge the distance either. He just let the warmth sit there, a bridge half-built.
Everett looked up despite himself.
Jake was watching him with tired affection and something sharper under it now, something that had started in frustration and ended somewhere much more dangerous.
“You’re not easy,” Jake said. “You’re also not the problem.”
Everett stared.
That sentence went somewhere too deep too fast.
Because that was the line, wasn’t it?
The whole wound in one place:
easy versus chosen.
easy versus wanted.
easy versus worth it.
Jake saw something in his face then.
Something small and cracked open and too close to belief.
His own expression changed in response.
Softened.
Not into pity.
Into care.
God, Everett thought dimly.
This is how people make terrible decisions.
Jake lowered his voice. “I’m still here.”
Everett’s mouth went dry.
The library had become impossible.
The table too narrow.
The air too thin.
He could not do this here.
Could not sit under fluorescent lights between reference books and printer noise and let Jake Richardson say things like that in a voice like that and expect his body to remain a manageable thing.
So of course, at that exact moment, Noah appeared at the end of the table.
“Oh,” Noah said, stopping dead. “Did I just walk into emotional damage?”
Everett closed his eyes.
Jake sat back at once.
The entire room snapped back into shape around them so fast it almost hurt.
Noah looked between them once, instantly understood he had stepped into something above his pay grade, and raised both hands.
“I can leave.”
“Yes,” Everett said.
Jake said, at the same time, “Please.”
Noah nodded. “Great. Love this for both of you.”
Then he vanished into the stacks like a witness fleeing a scene.
Everett dropped his forehead briefly against the heel of his hand.
Jake laughed once under his breath.
Rough.
Helpless.
“Your life is ridiculous,” Jake said.
Everett looked up. “Mine?”
“You think mine’s better?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“How recently you’ve had a man from the marching band walk in on your crisis.”
Jake nearly smiled.
Then the smile faded again when their eyes caught.
The moment was broken now.
Not gone.
Just dispersed into smaller, harder pieces.
Jake glanced at the clock on the wall and sighed. “I’ve got practice.”
There it was again.
The pull.
The world outside the library already waiting to claim him back.
Everett felt the old ugly pang of that at once and hated that his body still had time for jealousy after everything Jake had just said.
Jake seemed to see some version of the feeling cross his face because he added, too quickly, “I’m not running away.”
Everett blinked.
Jake looked vaguely irritated at himself for how fast the sentence had come out. “I just actually have practice.”
Despite everything, a short laugh slipped out of Everett.
“I know.”
Jake watched him for one beat.
Then nodded once, almost relieved by the sound of it.
He stood, gathered his notebook, and hesitated.
This part was becoming its own ritual:
the almost-departure, the unfinished looking, the sense that if either of them moved wrong the room would tip into a different universe entirely.
Then Jake tore a page from the back of his notebook, wrote something quickly while standing, folded it, and slid it across the table.
Everett looked at it.
Then at him.
Jake rubbed the back of his neck. “Read it after I’m gone.”
That should not have sounded as intimate as it did.
Everett took the note.
Jake nodded once and turned before the moment could become more catastrophic.
He got three steps away before Everett said, “Jake.”
Jake stopped. Turned back.
Everett held his gaze for one second and said, very quietly, “I know you’re still here.”
Jake’s whole face changed.
Not dramatically.
Just enough.
Enough for Everett to feel it.
Then Jake left, and Everett sat there in the library with the note in his hand and a pulse that had no business behaving like this over folded paper and impossible boys.
He waited until Jake disappeared through the double doors before opening it.
Jake’s handwriting was rushed and slanted and still somehow unmistakably his.
I don’t want easier.
I want you to stop saying that like it would be a relief.
Everett stared at the page, his hand hovering over the note as if it might burn him.
His throat tightened.
Noah materialized next to him holding a stack of music folders and one expression.
“Well?” he asked.
Everett looked up. “Do you enjoy risking your life?”
“Only recreationally.” Noah said. “You look less homicidal.”
“That’s a low bar.”
He folded the note carefully, once along the crease Jake had already made, and slid it into the inside pocket of his binder where the older notes lived now like evidence of a life he had not meant to build and could no longer pretend he didn’t treasure.
“It’s still movement.”
Everett closed the binder. “I hate you.”
Noah smiled. “Noted. Want to tell me what happened?”
“No.”
“Cool.”
Noah dropped his music folders onto the table with a heavy thud and slid into the chair next to Everett, ignoring the shoosh from the librarian three aisles over. He didn't say anything at first; he just waited for Everett to stop trying to vibrate out of his own skin.
Everett looked away at first.
He had spent seventeen years cataloging his own defects with the precision of a court reporter. Jake was trying to burn the ledger, and Everett wasn't sure who he was supposed to be without it.
"He's not making sense," Everett said, his voice barely a thread. He didn't look up from the note. He couldn't.
"Usually he’s the one failing English, Ross. Not you," Noah said, but the snark lacked its usual bite.
“He wrote that he doesn’t want easier. That he wants me to stop saying that like it’s a relief.”
Noah whistled low. “Point for Richardson.”
“No, it’s not a point, Noah. It’s a flaw in the data.” Everett finally looked up, and the frustration there was raw.
Everett finally looked at him, and the sheer, exhausted confusion in his eyes made Noah go still. "No, I mean—look at him, Noah. He’s solid. He’s... everything has a place. And then look at me. I’m just a collection of sharp angles and bad posture. I’m a placeholder."
He smoothed the note with a thumb, his nail catching on the paper.
"I want to believe he means it. I really do.” Everett whispered. “I want to believe him so badly my chest hurts. But it’s like he’s describing a person I’ve never met. I look in the mirror and I see a problem to be solved, or ignored. He looks at me and acts like I’m the destination. How am I supposed to trust that he won't eventually realize he's just... lost?"
He did not feel better after that.
Not exactly.
The spiral wasn’t gone.
His body still felt like a wrong answer half the time.
The cafeteria still happened.
Girls in hoodies still existed.
Jake still belonged to a world that could pull him in six directions at once and make it look natural.
But the center of the panic had shifted.
Because now when Everett imagined Jake walking away for someone easier, he also had to hold the memory of Jake’s face when Everett said it.
That startled hurt.
That frustrated certainty.
I don’t want easier.
The sentence did not solve anything.
It did not magically rewrite years of Everett’s self-image or make him trust the world to hand him what he wanted without charging interest.
But it lodged.
When Jake showed up at the Ross house after practice looking exhausted and wind-burned, carrying a bag of fries he claimed were “for household diplomacy,”
Everett looked at the bag, looked at Jake once, and said, “Those don’t count as dinner.”
Jake grinned slowly. “That your professional opinion?”
“Yes.”
Everett’s little brother, Wesly, yelled from the living room, “That was already established in previous data.”
Jake laughed.
Everett reached for the bag, expecting the usual quick hand-off—the kind of efficient, blink-and-you-miss-it contact they’d had for years.
Instead, Jake didn't let go.
His fingers stayed curled around the top of the paper bag, his knuckles brushing against Everett’s hand. The heat of him was immediate and undeniable, a solid anchor against the evening chill. Everett froze, his pulse doing that frantic, irrational thing again, but he didn't pull away.
He looked up, and Jake was already watching him.
There was no social mask now. No "jock" posture. Jake just looked... certain. It was a heavy, quiet gaze that seemed to take in all of Everett’s sharp edges and jagged nerves and decide they were exactly what he’d come for. It was a look that said I’m not lost, Ross. I know exactly where I am.
Everett’s throat tightened. He wanted to look away, to retreat back into the safety of his own binders and books, but the contact—the simple, steady pressure of Jake’s fingers against his—held him there.
I want to believe you, Everett thought, the words a silent plea in the space between them. Please don't make me the only one who sees the mistake.
Jake’s thumb shifted, just a fraction of an inch, a slow caress against the back of Everett’s hand before he finally let the bag go.
Everett stood there with the bag in one hand, Jake’s note in his binder on the side table, and the terrible, dawning realization that jealousy was still embarrassing, still irrational, still deeply offensive to his personal standards — and also, apparently, survivable.
Which was irritating.
Because it meant what came next would probably be worse.
“See you tomorrow, Ross,” Jake said, his voice low and rough.
“Tomorrow,” Everett repeated.
He stood in the doorway and watched Jake walk back to his truck.
The spiral wasn’t gone, and the mirror in the hallway was still waiting to tell him all the ways he didn't fit—but for the first time, Everett wondered if the mirror was the one with the flawed data.