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He doesn’t look up from unzipping his bag. “They let cheerleaders take ethics now?”

“They let anyone take ethics. That’s sort of the whole scandal of it.”

“Huh.” He pulls out a laptop that has seen things, its lid a graveyard of stickers I don’t have time to read. “Didn’t take you for the moral-philosophy type. Figured your ethics came pre-printed on a sorority tank.”

“And I didn’t take you for the reading type. Figured yours came pre-printed on a penalty box.” I smile at him, all teeth, the good one, the one with a blade in it. “Small world, big disappointment.”

Somebody down the table laughs. A guy in a beanie leans over to his neighbor and says something, and I catch the shape of it — those two, every year, like an old married couple — and it should be a relief, because it’s the cover, it’s the exact cover I need. Theo and Margo, mortal enemies since October, at it again. Nothing to see. The most boring thing in the world.

Except I know what his hands do now.

That’s the whole problem. He’s two feet away doing that thing with his jaw where the muscle jumps — the exact thing he did over me at midnight on New Year’s. Eight days ago I was working full-time to not remember what his hands do. Now my traitor body is sitting up and paying attention like a dog that heard a can opener, and I have to look down at my very squared legal pad and breathe through it like the top of a basket toss. There is nothing, nothing, dignified about the way my pulse is behaving in a humanities seminar at nine in the morning, and I know it, and knowing it doesn’t slow my pulse down by a single beat.

Fine. Okay. It’s one class. Twice a week. I can be awful at a man twice a week for a semester — I’ve been doing it for months, I’m practically credentialed.

Then Dr. Adler walks in and shuts the door, and everything gets so much worse.

She’s small and sharp and dressed like she has better places to be, and she doesn’t do a syllabus-day soft open. She writes one word on the board — TRUTH — turns around, and looks at all of us like we’re already disappointing her.

“Every story,” she says, “is a set of choices about what to leave out. Who gets to speak. Whose version we believe. Who gets protected by the telling, and who gets sacrificed to it.” She caps the marker. “For the next six weeks we’re going to interrogate those choices, and I’m going to make you deeply uncomfortable, and some of you are going to discover you’ve been the villain of stories you thought you were the hero of. That’s the class. If you wanted comfortable, philosophy’s down the hall.”

I write TRUTH on my legal pad and underline it twice, because it’s a good class — a genuinely good class — and for about ninety seconds I forget the wall with tattoos sitting diagonal to me and just enjoy my own brain doing the thing it likes best.

Then she gets to the project.

“This whole seminar is one project.” She clicks to a slide. “Six weeks. In pairs. You’re going to write a story where the reader chooses what happens — pick this, go here; pick that, go there — built around one hard moral choice with no clean answer. Then you’re going to defend it. You’ll argue, on paper, that you played fair. That whichever way the reader went, you didn’t rig it to make one choice the hero and the other one the fool. That you gave them an honest decision and let them live with it.”

A story where the reader picks. My stomach drops, because I can build an argument in my sleep — persuasion is the one thing I’d bet the house on — but I have never built a story in my life. I wouldn’t know where to start, and I’m already running the frantic internal inventory of which philosophy major I’m going to have to befriend in the next four minutes —

“I’ve paired you,” Dr. Adler says.

Oh no.

“Every pair has a builder and a defender. One of you makes the story work. The other argues it’s fair. I picked the pairs on purpose, so don’t come to me about it.” She picks up a printed sheet. “This is the class that eats its own tail — you’ll be arguing about honesty while trying to be honest with a partner you didn’t pick. Enjoy that.”

She starts reading names. I stop breathing somewhere around the C’s, counting it out fast — fourteen people, seven pairs, the odds are fine, the odds are genuinely mostly fine —

“Ashby,” Dr. Adler reads, “and Mercer.”

The room keeps existing. I’m fairly sure. Somebody’s pen keeps scratching, the radiator ticks, and Dr. Adler moves on to the next pair like she hasn’t just reached into my color-coded fortress of a semester and set the main support beam on fire.

I turn my head, slowly, because I have to, because not turning would be its own tell.

He’s already looking at me.

His face is doing the shuttered, unreadable thing — the nothing-face, the wall — but I’ve had my hands on this man, I’ve felt that face crack, and I catch it, one flicker, gone almost before it lands: he’s as wrecked about this as I am. Diagonal to me for the next six weeks. Yoked at the grade for every last one of them — his, which he needs for whatever a scholarship boy on a draft year needs it for, and mine, which I need for a mother and a law school and a whole future I’ve been building since birth. A builder and a defender. He makes the thing. I argue it’s fair.

We have to agree on a dilemma. We have to sit in rooms together, alone, on purpose, for six weeks, and build a story about honesty.

Us.

And here’s the part that turns the knife: I need him. That’s the thing I can’t get around, doing the fast, horrified inventory under the table. I can argue anything — hand me a position and I’ll defend it till the other side apologizes — but I cannot build a story where a reader chooses. He can. He’s the builder. He can make the thing I can’t, and I’m the only one who can make the case for the thing he makes, and Dr. Adler saw all of that in about four seconds and stapled our futures together on purpose. Needing people is the thing I’ve spent my whole life engineering my way out of. And the universe has just assigned me, in writing, to need Theo Mercer.

“Well,” I say, under my breath, just for him, because the room’s gone back to Dr. Adler and for one second there’s only the two feet of air between our chairs. “This is going to be a disaster.”

“Yeah,” he says. Dry. Certain. The most agreeable he’s ever been with me about anything.

And then, so quiet I almost miss it — so quiet I’ll spend the rest of the day deciding whether I imagined it — the corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. The rumor of one. The exact thing he did at midnight after, wet-mouthed and unbearably pleased with himself, and my whole body remembers it in high definition. I face forward and square my legal pad to the table edge and write, in the margin, in letters so small no one will ever read them: