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It comes again, three more, fast. I cross the room with my heart going and open the door.

It’s Paige. Her hair is coming out of its clip, and she’s breathing like she ran here. “You need to come with me.”

“What?” I ask, confused.

“You need to come with me right now.”

“Paige, it’s fucking bedtime. What happened?”

“Koda called me.”

My whole body comes back down, because this is about Koda. Something happened, and she needs to talk. “Okay. What happened with Koda?”

“No.” Paige shakes her head. “Not like that. He called me about Nash.”

Behind me, Tessa’s bedsprings creak.

“What about Nash?”

“He didn’t say.” Paige has a hand on the doorframe, and she isn’t laughing, and Paige is always laughing. “He called from outside somewhere. He said, Is Kylie with you? and I said no, and he said, Go get her.”

“Get me for what?”

“He said Nash won’t calm the fuck down.”

I grab my jacket off the chair and shove my feet into the first shoes I find. When I turn around, Tessa hasn’t moved. She’s still against the wall with her knees up and her phone in both hands.

“Tess,” I say. “Put the chain on after me. It’s okay. I have to go.”

She nods, and I feel bad for leaving her like this because she’s clearly scared.

I hear the chain slide into place, and then I follow Paige down the stairs.

16

Two Hours of Excellent Self-Control

Nash

Study hall is the easiest two hours of my week now, which is its own kind of joke. Seven to nine, third floor, six athletes and a grad student with headphones. I sign in on time. Greeley sits across from me and doesn’t say a word, and neither do I, and for two hours the only sound at our table is two guys typing.

At nine, the grad student says, “That’s time,” and I sign out under my names from last Tuesday and Thursday, a little column of me being exactly where I said I’d be. Greeley gets up when I do. We take the same stairwell down, six feet apart, which for us is practically holding hands.

“Kenny,” he says.

I glare at him.

“You’re having a good week,” he says.

“It’s Tuesday,” I reply. “That’s barely a week.”

He laughs, and it sounds real. It always sounds real. “Dannebrog noticed. He said something to me about it. He thinks you’ve matured.”

“Great.”

We come out onto the library steps at nine-fifteen. The quad is mostly empty, a couple of people heading toward the dining hall, lamps on, and my breath is right there in front of my face.

“What are you doing later?” he asks.