“I knew that too.”
“So et tu meansand you.”
“Pers.”
“It’s not as flexible as you’re using it.”
Stanley turns back to me with both arms wide, like this betrayal is just one more weight he must carry. “Reeve.The rule. Please.”
I mutter quickly, “No falling in love before the draft.”
He ruffles my hair. “Good boy. Now go fail Stats.”
“I’m not going to fail.”
He smirks, walking back to the couch. “I was talking to your dick.”
Blue, who is in the middle of swallowing water from the giant Hydroflask he carries everywhere like a small child, snorts and chokes. The water goes the wrong way. He coughs into his elbow. The on-screen striker scores anyway.
“Stanley,” Rowan says into the carpet, “his player just scored on you.”
I open the front door. The afternoon comes in — warm, smelling like cut grass from somebody’s lawnmower.
Before I can shut the door, Stanley calls out, “Reeve, report back on if she’s hot or not.”
I shake my head. “No.”
He shouts, “Hot or not.”
I pull the front door shut on him saying something else. Behind me, faintly, through the door, I hear Rowan say, “Stanley, your goalie isn’t even on the field.”
The walk is twelve minutes if you take Hawthorne to State and cut behind the math building. It’s fifteen if you take the long way, which I’m not taking, because I am not going to be late.
Late August Michigan keeps doing its thing. The leaves on the maple in front of the dean’s house are committing — three of them have gone yellow — and a kid on a bike with a backpack the size of his torso almost takes me out at the corner of State and Birchwood. Across the quad, somebody is playing a speaker that is too loud. Sorority girls are out in clusters on the grass, some of them smiling my way.
I think of what my sister said before we got off the phone yesterday.Don’t captain her.And I am suddenly, twenty feet from the library doors, deeply curious about what that means exactly. I have a feeling it means don’t enter the tutoring room and re-arrange it.
The library doors are heavy. I push through, and the air conditioning hits me. I cut left to the stairs because the elevator takes forever, and I climb to the third floor two at a time. The teaspoon of caffeine from this morning’s coffee is still doing something for me, and my body wants to move.
I reach the third floor and round the corner. The row of glass-walled study rooms is at the end of the hall. They are lit from inside like a row of small aquariums. 3A, empty. 3B—
She’s already in there.
She is sitting on the far side of the round table, facing the door, with a full cup of something deep red. She has a notebook open in front of her, a textbook, and a row of pencils I can count from here. Her hair is dark and pulled back. She’s biting on a pencil. I push the door open before I can do a double-take.
She places the pencil down next to the others and stands up immediately. Her chair pushes back two inches with the backs of her knees. She extends her hand across the table.
“Hi. Lucy Moss.”
I take her hand. “Benson Reeve.”
Her soft fingers are cold. The handshake is firm and brief, two pumps and clean. It tells me she means business. She sits, and I sit across from her. There are exactly two seconds where neither of us says anything. The clock above the whiteboard ticks once, audibly. Her phone is face down by her left hand.
“So,” she says. “Stats 215. I have your syllabus pulled up. Your professor is Markham, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t look up at me, but I notice her bottom lip is naturally plump. And her eyes are a deep shade of brown. She’s not wearing any makeup. She opens her notebook, distracting me from observing when it slaps the table. “Markham’s fine. He moves fast. His midterms are notoriously rough. Can I see what you’ve gotten back so far?”
