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Lileah throws a napkin at me. It misses me which makes me laugh. “I’m going with my roommate. Want me to make notes for you?” she asks Mason.

“I’ll take Miles’ hacked notes,” he replies.

“Don’t forget we’re walking you,” I tell her before she walks away.

“I know,” she snaps as she leaves.

I watch Lileah walk away, and that’s when I notice her, Sadie, walking across the courtyard with two of the girls I saw her with before. She’s carrying a takeaway cup in one hand and a camera strap looped over her other shoulder. She’s laughing at something, and the way she looks has something inside me going crazy.

Mason says something making Declan laugh, and it pulls me away from Sadie.

“You would think…“ I stand up as Mason’s mid-sentence. “Where are you…” Mason starts.

I don’t answer him and slowly walk toward her.

I’m not following her. I want to be precise about that, at least with myself, so I tell myself a few times: following implies she’s leading, and at this point she doesn’t know she’s doing anything. I’m just adjusting my position, and updating my information. I keep telling myself, they are not the same thing.

I move past the faculty tables, past the cluster of first-years in identical jackets, and the girls who stand in front of me when they see me walking toward them.

She’s on the low wall at the far end. She has her camera up, aimed across the courtyard at something I can’t quite see from where I am. Her teammates have wandered further off onto the grass area, and they start doing a few gymnastic moves.

I come to a stop at a stone pillar seven or eight meters to her left, far enough away that she can’t see me. I take out my phone, pull up some random thing to give my eyes somewhere else to look so she doesn’t spot me staring at her.

She shoots, checks the screen, and then makes a small, dissatisfied sound and adjusts.

I push off the pillar and move closer. Not toward her, but parallel, the way you’d drift across any open space on your way somewhere else. I’m close enough now to see the small crease between her brows when she checks a shot she doesn’t like. Close enough to hear the shutter. Close enough that if she looked left right now…

She looks left. Everything in me goes completely still. I don’t flinch. I don’t step back. I just stand still, so that I don’t draw her eye because there’s nothing to catch. I’m looking at my phone. I’m a student on a path, mildly bored, going somewhere unremarkable.

Her gaze passes over me.

She moves on, and my heart stops racing as much.

She lifts the camera again.

I wait three full seconds. Count them in my head, then I walk on, at the same pace I’ve been walking all day. I look over at her once again and smile. She has no idea, but she’s going to be mine, and no one is going to stop me, not even her.

Back at the table, Mason looks at me and then over my shoulder, back toward where I’d come from, then back to me with a smile.

“Are you looking for fun?” He looks over my shoulder again; the smile still spread over his stupid face. “Which type of fun are you looking for?”

“How many types of fun are there?” I ask, sitting back down on the bench.

“Oh, there are so many, but I have a feeling your fun is a little more creepy than mine.” Mason jokes and starts laughing as he takes a big mouthful of his food.

***

The thing about information is that it's never really complete.

I learned that early on. Sitting in front of a screen at thirteen, I would watch data streams resolve into something useful, something actionable, and something that told you exactly where a person was and what they were doing without them knowing you'd looked. Cain drilled that shit into me quickly, and if I fucked up, there was a punishment. Cain always said that you learn quicker knowing you will get a punishment if you mess it up. Fuck, was he right.

My father called it a gift. Mason calls it terrifying. I call it accurate.

I close the laptop at eight forty-three.

The campus empties differently at night. People are going somewhere specific: a bar, a club, a girl's house. Everyone has a place to go. I walk with my hands in my jacket pockets, my pace even, there’s nothing about me that says I'm going anywhere I shouldn’t be going.

I know where she is at all times. Tuesdays and Thursdays she's in the gym by seven forty-five. I know the team usually migrates to Grounds after Friday evening sessions. Three of her teammates follow the café's Instagram and it has a happy hour special that runs until nine. I know this because the café's Instagram is public, and two of those accounts are easy to trace back to campus IDs I already have open tabs on.