“Thank you,” Ren said. She walked to the back. She sat behind the pillar. She opened her notebook to the page with the date written on it, and she continued writing. She did not write down what she was feeling. That was not the kind of thing she wrote down.
At the front of the room, the door opened again, and Professor Eleanor Marsh walked in. Marsh was sixty-seven years old. She had silver hair cut short and practical, reading glasses on a chain around her neck, the posture of someone who had been standing at the front of rooms for a very long time, and had stopped thinking about how she looked doing it. She set her briefcase on the desk with a decisive thud, looked out at the room, and said simply, “Good, you’re all here.”
Her eyes moved briefly to the back corner to Ren behind the pillar. Then she began the lecture. Ren took notes, good notes, the kind you take when you are genuinely paying attention and also beneath that processing something else entirely. The kind of notes where the handwriting stays neat even when your thoughts are not.
She did not look at the young man in the second row. She did not need to. She had already noted exactly where he was sitting, the angle of his shoulders, the way he leaned back in the chair with the specific ease of someone who had never been asked to make himself smaller. She had met this kind before. She had known this type since she was fifteen years old, standing on a mat in a gym in Pittsburgh, learning for the first time that the loudest person in any room is very rarely the most dangerous one.
By noon, the cafeteria was loud in the warm institutional way of dining halls everywhere. Harwick’s main dining space was officially named Founders Hall, which was a significant name for a room that smelled primarily of steam trays and dish soap, round tables, plastic chairs, a wall of windows along the south side that looked out onto the quad where students cut across the grass in groups of two and three.
Ren got a bowl of tomato soup and a piece of cornbread and found a table near the windows. Not the most central table, not a hidden one either, just a table with a decent view, good light, and enough distance from the nearest cluster of people that she could think. She had been there about ten minutes when she heard him.
You could always hear Derek Stole before you saw him. He moved through space like someone who had never been required to take up less of it. His voice carried across the dining hall before he had made it through the door. Loud and comfortable. The voice of someone who had grown up in rooms where his presence was assumed to be welcome.
He came in with two others. One was shorter and stockier with a crew cut and a Harwick athletics shirt stretched tight across his shoulders. The other was leaner with the easy practiced laugh of someone who had learned early that laughing along with the right person opened more doors than thinking carefully about what was said. She would learn their names later. For now, they were simply the people who walked with him.
They got their food and scanned the room. Derek looked at Ren’s table. She noticed. She kept eating. He said something to the shorter one. The shorter one grinned. They walked over. Derek pulled out the chair across from Ren and sat down in it without asking. The other two took the remaining chairs, arranging themselves with the casual ease of people who did this often and had never been turned away.