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I pull out my phone.

Scroll to her contact.

I don’t call her. I just look at her name for a second— Mormor because I put her in my phone when I was fourteen and never changed it — and think about the bookshop and the bell over the door and the girl who kept the whole place running while Mormor was in Vermont, who redid the new arrivals wall overnight on a Tuesday like it was nothing.

Margaret’s Sloane, I said.

The way she looked at me when I said it.

I put the phone away.

“I’m going to bed,” Cash says, standing, stretching.

“Yeah.”

“Tomorrow, Wren.”

“Tomorrow, Wren,” I confirm.

He goes inside. I sit for a few more minutes — the semester six days old, preseason one week in, my shoulder its usual low-grade complaint — and then I go in after him, lock the door, take the stairs.

I don’t sleep great.

But I have a plan.

Chapter 6

Sloane

Advanced Scene Study lets out at 3:40, which is exactly forty minutes later than the syllabus claims it does, because Professor Reyes has never once in recorded history ended a class on time. Today it's because she got into a twenty-minute defense of why Chekhov is funnier than people give him credit for, which I happen to agree with, and which I would have enjoyed enormously if Vivienne hadn't been sitting two rows in front of me wearing the shade of forest green she wears when she wants the room to find her, contributing comments that were forty percent insight and sixty percent audition for Reyes's good opinion.

She didn't look at me once.

I want to be clear that this is worse than if she had.

If she'd turned around and smirked, or done the good luck at callbacks voice, or acknowledged in any way that less than twenty-four hours ago I'd walked in on her in bed with my now-ex-boyfriend, I'd at least have had something to push against. Instead, she sat there being brilliant about Chekhov, raising her hand at the right moments, treating me like furniture, which is its own kind of statement and one I recognize, because I've used it myself.

So that's the headspace I'm in when I walk out of the Hartwell Arts Building at 3:42 on the first day of classes.

Hartwell is, objectively, the best building on campus, and I will defend this position to anyone who challenges it, which no one does, because no one who isn't in the arts ever goes inside. It's the oldest building Whitmore has red brick gone soft and rosy with age, tall arched windows that pour afternoon light into the studios, a central staircase with a banister worn smooth by a hundred years of hands. The whole place smells like old wood and rosin and the dust of a building where people have been making things for a very long time. The theater wing has a black box on the second floor and a proper proscenium house on the first, and I have spent more hours inside it than I've spent anywhere else at this school, and walking out of it always feels like stepping out of the version of myself that works and back into the version that has to manage everything else.

The afternoon is gold and cool, the maples along the quad just starting to turn. I have fifteen minutes before my shift at the bookshop. I'm doing the math on whether I have time to go back to the Sailmaker first or whether I should just head straight to Main Street, and I'm reaching into my bag for my phone to check the time, when I see him.

Beau Sorensen is leaning against the brick wall of Hartwell, just left of the main doors, holding two takeaway cups.

I notice several things at once, in the involuntary way you notice things. Dark jeans. The black-and-silver hockey jacket, the one with RAVENS across the back that approximately a third of the female student body would recognize from a hundred yards. Black Timberlands. He's got a bag over one shoulder and he's standing there with the easy weight of a person who is comfortable being looked at, which people are doing — two girls by the bike rack have noticed him and are conducting a conversation that is entirely about him while pretending to be about something else.

He's waiting for someone.

Obviously, he's waiting for someone. People like Beau Sorensen do not lean against the arts building holding coffee for people like me. There is a girl somewhere — a dance major, probably, or one of the sorority girls, or honestly anyone — who is about to walk out of this building and have a very nice afternoon.

I adjust my bag and angle to walk past him.

“Sloane.”

I stop. I look around, because surely…

I do an actual scan of my immediate vicinity to confirm there isn't a different Sloane, a more plausible Sloane, standing somewhere behind me that he could reasonably be addressing.