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ᴀᴄᴇ'ꜱ ꜱᴇᴄʀᴇᴛ ᴀʟᴏɴɢ with 15 others' had been exposed to each other earlier, although only one person knew which secret belonged to whom. He knew Min's secret was among them, but he couldn't figure out which one was hers. None of them sounded like something the Min he knew would do, but he knew his secret wasn't something the Ace that Min knew would do.
There were a lot of things they shared between them. If he did something that would get him in trouble, she was the first person to know. If she needed to talk to someone about how she was fearing that she wasted her time studying because she wouldn't be selected for the Ultimate Contest for Eminent Students, he was who she immediately went to. From the outside, it could seem like they shared everything with each other. That wasn't the case, though.
The sixth grade brought a lot of new situations for them. They were fortunate enough to go to the same middle school, but they weren't fortunate enough to have any of the same classes, making them only meet at lunch and sometimes for a brief moment after school. School was too easy for her, which other students had started to notice. Unlike in elementary school, students had come up to her and tried to get her to tutor them for even 10 minutes for only one day. One student had offered to steal his mother's jewellery box if she could help him understand algebra, and another promised to give her the keys to her father's car if she told her how and when to use models for science. She always turned them down and only offered her services to Ace after noticing he was starting to struggle. He wanted to turn her down, but, even with having more people he could consider friends, he wanted to spend more time with her, and tutoring seemed to be one of the few ways to do it. The bonus of getting his grades up was gone from his head until he received the highest marks on his first after she started tutoring him, much to the envy of some of his classmates.
Moments outside of school brought the most difficulties, however. Specifically, jockeys had to be lightweight, as the horses were larger and heavier. They had to be able to control their weight and maintain a healthy diet, but he was struggling to do that. The easy option would be to drop out of horseback riding, but more people were starting to notice him for his talents. More pressure was being placed on him after some people mentioned him being able to get scholarships from it, and the prizes kept making more people get him to win them. His weight was starting to become an issue.
He wasn't allowed to leave horseback riding soon, so he took the easier option: eating less and less.
He knew Min wouldn't be happy to hear that, so he never let her know. There were lots of moments he could think of where she almost found out. When she asked why he had suddenly gained a strong liking to mint, he said he simply liked the flavour better now. When she asked why his lunch looked to be getting smaller and smaller, he said he felt less hungry nowadays since he was being treated to lots of lunches if he won a competition. Lies, lies, and more lies were told to her, and he knew her long enough to know how to say it to make her believe them.
Min would never know that Ace's body was falling apart. She couldn't. Maybe he could have told her, and maybe that would have changed the outcome even by a little. She, out of everyone he ever knew, would be able to tell him what to do and support him through it all. It was too late to change that now, though.
