“What are we doing?” Camp asked.
“I . . . don’t know.”
Camp nodded. “Can I ask you something?”
“Will it stop you if I say no?”
“Yes,” Camp said seriously.
“Okay.”
“Why did you come to the meeting if you’re not going to do the Harpswell?”
Ellery considered that. Truthfully she had come because she promised her parents she’d attend at least one Preston event outside of her room, and she hadn’t had to leave the building to go to this one, but she wasn’t so far gone as to want to admit this out loud. “It’s good to have as much information as possible,” she hedged finally. “Also, the flyer said there would be hot apple cider.”
“I didn’t see any hot apple cider,” Camp said.
Ellery nodded grimly. “There wasn’t any.”
“You should talk to your dad about that,” Danny told Camp.
“I’ll call him,” Camp promised.
They were back upstairs in the foyer of the building by now, everyone else wandering up to their rooms or out the front door in search of dinner. Honors House was a creaky old Victorian on the westernmost edge of campus, all turrets and gables and enough small, weirdly shaped bedrooms to house all twenty-eight first-year students in the program. It was, in theory, a privilege to have been selected to live here, though in reality the pipes clanked endlessly, the showers were furred with mildew, and the mice didn’t so much scurry as saunter across the floor with the entitlement of creatures who had been here long before Ellery arrived and would remain, she thought, long after she’d gone.
“Well,” she managed now, looking back and forth between Camp and Danny. “It was nice talking to you.” She felt panicky all of a sudden, her throat fuzzy and tight. Until this moment, she’d nearly convinced herself that she wasn’t lonely. It was the latest small humiliation in a long series of small humiliations to realize that was not, in fact, the case. “See you around.”
“I suspect so,” Camp said, bowing a little bit grandly. Danny rolled his eyes.
Susie was already back in their room when Ellery got up there, sitting at her computer typing furiously. She didn’t say anything when Ellery came in, so Ellery didn’t say anything, either. Instead she climbed onto her bed and opened her sketch pad, but not only was the shading on the sparrow’s wing still eluding her, the whole drawing seemed suddenly stale and pointless. She was just closing the sketch pad when someone knocked on the door.
Susie got up to answer it, which was their custom—no one, since the day of first-year move-in, had come to theirroom looking for Ellery—but when she opened the door, the narrow hallway was empty. “What the hell,” Susie said, bending down to pick something up off the dingy carpet. When she turned around, Ellery saw it was a white paper to-go cup from the dining hall.
Susie frowned, sniffing the lid as if it might be poison. “I think this is apple cider,” she said suspiciously. Ellery, shocked and delighted, laughed out loud.
The following morning, she was eating a slice of peanut-butter-and-banana toast in the dining hall when Camp sat down at the table across from her. “Hi again,” he said. Today he was dressed in a cable-knit Ralph Lauren quarter-zip with the sleeves pushed to the elbows, the little polo player cantering across the pocket. There was a pair of Wayfarers tucked into the neck of the sweater, like possibly he was going to get in the car and go on a sightseeing trip right after he finished his bowl of raisin bran.
“Hi.” Ellery let herself really look at him for the first time in the weak-tea sunlight streaming in through the dining hall windows. He wasn’t handsome, exactly; still, he had a compelling energy about him. Even the hair on his arms seemed to glow.
“So listen,” he said, “I was thinking about you last night after the meeting. And I came up with three reasons why you shouldn’t transfer.”
“Oh yeah?” Ellery said, munching a crust. It felt easier to talk to him than it had last night—her brain blinking back online, her synapses starting to fire. “Lay ’em on me.”
“One,” Camp said, ticking them off on his long fingers, “it’s about to get very beautiful here, autumn-wise, and it would be a shame for you to miss it. Two: skiing! And three”—here he paused dramatically—“if you really put your mind to it, I think you can probably win the Harpswell Prize.”
Ellery burst out laughing. “Why would youpossiblythink that?” she asked.
Camp shrugged. “I have a feeling,” he said lightly. “I’m going to write your peer recommendation.”
Ellery flinched, like he’d pressed on some bruise deep inside her. It felt cruel, though she supposed he didn’t mean it that way, for him to joke about something like that. “Sure,” she mumbled. “You go ahead and do that.”
Danny appeared before Camp could reply, his tray laden with four different genres of breakfast. “Are you pestering her?” he asked Camp.
“Probably,” Camp admitted.
“You’re not,” Ellery said, though for a moment he kind of had been. She supposed she wasn’t in any position to look gift acquaintances in the mouth.
Danny sat down and began to eat with gusto, eggs and cereal and yogurt and a waffle, and instead of talking any more about the Harpswell Prize, they talked about Danny’s western civ professor, who’d taught class with his fly unzipped twice so far this semester. “Once is an accident,” Danny said, snapping a banana in two before peeling each half individually. “Twice, and a person begins to wonder.”
