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The fact that she’d told me to take a picture that one day, because it would last longer, stood out. Terse, but not unfriendly. Direct, but not inviting me to get closer. It took a while for it to hit me.
I’d made her uncomfortable.
But she didn’t talk a lot. To me or anyone else. I had enough classes with her to see her interactions. Her disappearance on our joint assignment had irked me, but I turned her in. The baffling part was that when I tried to make things square, she didn’t turn me in.
She did the work, with no complaints, then put my name on it. I didn’t deserve the grade. She had the opportunity to get even and just didn’t. Her words haunted me…
“Because it was a joint project, and you picked me for your partner.” She shrugged like it wasn’t important at all. “I turned it in. It’s done. If you have a problem with the research or the video, you had plenty of time to object—or even, you know—show up. But you were too busy doing whatever it was you were doing.”
That didn’t make any sense. I screwed her grade. She should have taken the opportunity to pay me back in kind. I would have deserved it. “That’s not a reason.”
“No.” And sheglaredat me. “That is a reason. It was my reason. You don’t have to like it. Hell, you don’t even have to believe me. I don’t care. Trust me when I say you’ve beaten the give-a-shit right out of me this semester. It’s done, it’s turned in. If we fail, we fail together. If we get an A, we get that together, too. You want to be a dick—knock yourself out. I have better things to do.”
The spark of irritation in her eyes had almost been worth the confusion. Still, the more I learned about her, the more she didn’t fit into any of the ideas we had about her. She wasn’t arrogant or stuck-up. She didn’t seem to crave attention; if anything, she shrank from it.
The sex tape breaking had left her the butt of every Tom, Dick, and prankster on campus.Thatwasn’t her fault. She wasn’t in the tape. She didn’t release the tape. She didn’t deserve the mockery.
Still…until I gave her the music, we hadnothingto talk about. Or maybe we did but…
“Please, finish taking your seats, ladies and gentlemen. We have a lot to cover.” The school’s dean—or one of them, since each “school” under the prep umbrella had their own dean—took the podium. “Now, people.”
His somewhat nasally voice cut through the crowd’s murmurs, gradually silencing them as the chairs filled in. No one sat next to me.
Good.
KC had rolled her head back to stare up at the ceiling and whatever her friend said to her made her smile briefly. Too briefly. Then she turned her face completely away as she focused on the stage.
“Thank you all for coming on short notice,” the dean said, giving all of us a look over the rim of his glasses. “I also see dress code being adhered to…” He seemingly pinned a look on the row of jocks who were either still in pajamas or their workout gear. “By most of you. Gentlemen, you four,” he continued with a motion to that row of jocks. “Come see me when this is done.”
The crowd rumbled with laughter at them being called out. Not that it seemed to bother the jocks. Why would it? Prep didn’t make sports any less important. The jocks at the school pretty much got to do what they wanted.
“Now, there have been a lot of questions regarding housing following the incident at Apollo/Volusia One.”
Incident? Burned to the ground seemed to rate more than an “incident.” No one asked me. Movement to my right had me flicking a look over to where Ramsey had come to stand just inside. Dressed in his suit, he looked more like the faculty than an RA. You’d never know he was only four years older than me.
Asshole.
He didn’t seem to notice me. His attention was on the same row mine had been. Irritation scraped under my skin.
“We appreciate your patience as we worked out the best plan to accommodate so many shifts…”
The man droned on in his explanation of how they arrived at their decision. No one cared. They just wanted the information and then to get back to it.
Wait…
What did he say?
“…just because we will be reorganizing current housing assignments to co-ed, this will not change our rules on fraternization or on behavior. If anything, we expect the Blue Ivy Way to be the guiding principle for your interactions. Juniors and seniors, you will also be reorganizing. All juniors currently housed in…”
The groans and the laughter came in equal measure. Co-ed dorms. It wasn’t like we had communal showers. That wasn’t the problem. Juniors were all being rehoused out of my dorm to a different one. Yeah, I didn’t care.
I wasn’t moving. But did that mean KC was moving intomydorm?
I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the concept. Curiously, I didn’t mind it at all, though. If she were in my dorm, it would be easier to—
A shout went up, dragging my attention back to the room. “Are you kidding?” one girl yelled. “You can’t force us to share even the bedrooms in the suites…”
It took a moment for what I’d missed to filter back into my brain. Instead of two to a suite, there may be as many as four. Not in all cases, but it was to accommodate the moving of just under two hundred students into a more confined set of spaces.
