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I should leave. I watch her instead.

The way her fingers move across the keyboard—quick and precise. With the same dexterity as a piano player. There’s a Post-it stuck to the corner of her laptop, covered in tiny, perfect handwriting I can’t read from here.

She doesn’t look up.

“You owe me.”

Outside the Hartley building, the air’s cold and there’s not a phone in sight, and I’m standing there grinning about a debt. I’m totally insane.

I owe a favor to a girl whose name I don’t know, who would clearly prefer I never come back to pay it.

Fine by me.

I’ve got bigger problems than a lab coat with an attitude.

Chapter Four

January /// Bea

“I’m going to miss you, Christmas Mickey.”

Sydney hugs the giant stuffed mouse, Santa hat askew, and lowers him gently into the box.

I’m sitting cross-legged on the rug with a roll of packing tape looped around my wrist, surrounded by the remains of Christmas. Gran sent me back from break with a tin of shortbread to share with the girls.

We may have finished the whole thing already.

Sydney holds up the final ornament from the tree: a fat glitter bee missing one wing. We found her at the thrift shop in November and unanimously voted her our tree topper.

“Goodnight, our queen,” she says solemnly.

She lays the bee beside Christmas Mickey like we’re conducting a burial.

“I think she’d want us to be strong,” I say.

Gianna bows her head. “She’s with the angels now.”

“The other sacred winged creatures,” I agree, giggling.

Sydney presses a hand to her heart.

The bee is a symbol of this house. We are, per the group chat, The Hive. Or Hive House. Partly because Sydney decided when we first moved in that we’re all little busy bees, but mostly because in week one, we discovered a beehive the size of a basketball under the back porch. Gianna screamed at seven in the morning at a volume that suggested she’d found a body.

We called the landlord immediately, because although we are all independent women studying STEM subjects, none of us wanted to handle the beehive. That’s one of the few times we will gladly let a man save us. Three of us had class, so Sydney was the only one home when he came.

She has never recovered.

“He showed up in all black,” Sydney told us that night, gathered around the kitchen table like it was a folktale around the firepit. “He said maybe ten words the entire time. Just looked at the hive, made one phone call, and then stood in our backyard with his arms crossed until the bee man came.” She’d paused for dramatic effect. “So mysterious. So fucking sexy.”

“He’s married, Sydney. And may I remind you it’s his wife who gave us all a place in this house,” Gianna said. Gianna’s the baby of the house, a freshman two years younger than the rest of us, though you’d never guess it.

“And I respect that marriage enormously. Tara is a goddess, and I would lay down my life for her.” We’d all nodded. Tara interviewed each of us for this house as part of her women-in-STEM outreach work. Each of us except Gianna, who got in the old-fashioned way: her cousin Delilah has been best friends with Tara and Alfie since college, and one phone call later Gianna had a room a block off campus instead of a bunk in the freshman dorms.

Not that any of this has stopped Sydney from turning Mr. Spencer into a mythical figure.

“I am simply reporting the data.” She pointed at me. “Bea appreciates data.”

“One man, observed once, by one hungover witness is called an anecdote. Not data.”