Page 11

It happened once. It is not happening again.

I underline it twice, the way I underlined TRUTH.

The trouble with underlining a thing twice is that some quiet, honest part of me has already marked it down as exactly the kind of lie Dr. Adler builds a whole semester out of catching. The kind you tell to protect yourself. The kind that’s a story about who you’d like to be, told right over the top of the one that’s true.

I put a box around it for good measure.

It doesn’t help.

Chapter 4

Theo

My week has no give in it. That’s on purpose.

Practice. Lift. Class. Game tape. The eight hours of sleep I tell my mom I’m getting. I built the week with no slack in it because slack is where things get in, and I’ve spent my whole life keeping things out.

And this class is exactly the kind of thing that gets in. A grade I can’t afford to drop — the draft looks at all of it now, and a scholarship kid with a soft transcript is a scholarship kid they can replace with a cheaper one. A partner I didn’t pick. Six weeks of scheduled proximity to the one problem I’ve spent three months keeping on the far side of the wall.

Except here’s the thing I’m not saying to anyone, least of all me: I’ve looked at that scheduling grid four times since she sent it. Not because I’m dreading it. I’d have eaten a failing grade over this pairing if a failing grade wouldn’t cost me the thing I’m bleeding for — that’s the line I keep telling myself. It’s true. It’s also not the whole truth. The whole truth is that some part of me is looking forward to eleven o’clock like an idiot who didn’t learn one single thing from the last eight days.

Then Margo sends me a scheduling grid.

Color-coded. Of course it’s color-coded. A whole spreadsheet of her life laid over mine, every hour we’ve both already spoken for, and the only white space in the entire thing — the only slot where two people this booked can sit in a room and build a story about ethics — is the library. Late. After my shift, after her practice. Eleven at night, third floor, a study room she reserved under her own name, because Margo reserves things.

This is the only slot, the text says. Already booked it. Don’t be weird.

wasn’t planning on it, I send back, which is a lie, because I’ve been weird about this girl since October and we both know it.

The library at eleven is mostly dead. A few grad students haunting the long tables under the green lamps, a janitor’s cart somewhere, the heating pipes doing their thing. I came straight off the desk shift — four hours renting skates to strangers and pretending the overtime isn’t the difference between a tight month and a bad phone call home — so I’ve got rink cold still in my jacket and the heavy kind of tired that sleep doesn’t touch. The third-floor study rooms are glass boxes along the back wall. Ours is the last one, and she’s already in it, because of course she is, because she’s early the way I’m early. It’s the one thing we’ve never had to argue about.

She’s got her stuff laid out like a surgeon’s tray. Legal pad squared to the table. Two pens, a third in reserve, because she told me once that a pen will betray you and I have thought about that sentence more than I’ll ever admit to her. And she’s out of the seminar armor — no camel coat, no gold, just leggings and an oversized Whitmore Cheer crewneck with the sleeves pushed up, hair scraped back. Which is worse, honestly. The put-together version I can hold at arm’s length. This one — the after-practice one, the one nobody dressed for, the one that looks like she’d let you close — this one I’ve had, and my whole body remembers it the second I walk in.

“You’re late,” she says, not looking up.

“I’m four minutes early.”

“I’m six minutes early. You’re late by my count, and mine’s the one that’s booked.” She caps and uncaps a pen. “Sit down. The sooner we pick a dilemma, the sooner we never have to do this again.”

“You always this warm with your project partners, or am I special.”

“You’re special.” She finally looks up, and there’s the blade in the smile. “You’re the only one I actively resent. Sit.”

I sit. Across, not beside — I put the laptop down on the table between us like a wall I can hide behind, which is closer to true than I want it to be. “Fine. You’re the defender. You pitch, I’ll tell you why it won’t build.”

Here’s what nobody warns you about a girl like Margo: she’s fast.

I came in braced for the bright thing, the party version, the smile she hands out like napkins. That’s not who’s across the table at eleven at night. This one’s quick and precise and a little mean, and she throws ideas at the dilemma like she’s trying to break it, shooting down her own before I can — which is annoying, because shooting them down was going to be the fun part, and now I’ve got to work for it.

“Trolley problem,” she says. “Reader pulls a lever, somebody dies either way.”

“Everyone’s built the trolley problem. It’s the participation trophy of dilemmas.”

“Fine. Whistleblower. Loyalty against the truth —”

“Too clean. Reader sides with the truth-teller and feels great about himself. No cost.”

“A doctor who lies to a dying —”