“When students request to work together I see no reason not to accommodate them.”
“I’m not sure what you mean. I didn’t request for us to work together.”
She shook her head, a little half laugh threading through the words.
But she knew it wasn’t very convincing. Harrison glanced up from the books he was shuffling around on his desk as they talked, attention suddenly completely caught. As though he’d heard a warning beneath that fake sound of amusement, and wanted to see if her expression backed it up.
If she was frowning now—and she was.
Just a tiny one, but it was there.
“Oh? I assumed it was your choice, too. In fact, I believe Mr. Sullivan stated it was.”
“Tate stated that I chose to work with him? That I wanted to work with him?”
“Indeed, yes,” he said. “Though I can see by your expression that Mr. Sullivan was not entirely honest with me. Is that the case, Ms. Carmichael? Because if it is, I may have to take it up with that young man. I would very much disapprove of any trick you might be suggesting he has perpetrated here.”
“No, I don’t think…I don’t think that he…it wasn’t a trick.”
The frown had deepened now. And it had gathered a few extras—a clenched jaw, some folded arms, a suddenly hammering heart.
“I see. Then your working relationship was perfectly amicable?”
“Yes. Yeah, absolutely, it was great. It was really great.”
“And you had no problems with him at all.”
“No, god no, none. He was a perfect gentleman in every single way. You would never, ever have thought that he had…that he had created this situation, and certainly not for any awful reason.”
Her voice was strange by that point. Faraway, somehow, and robotic. And when she got to the end of the sentence, a part of it broke. The last word came out in several pieces, for reasons she tried not to think about. It probably wasn’t what it looked like anyway. It was just like Chad taking that picture—an accident, a mistake, a thing that he had nothing to do with. Hadn’t he punched him?
He had. He wouldn’t have punched him if this was all some elaborate game.
“I just remembered I have a thing to do, Professor. Thank you for your time.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She just blundered through the lecture hall doors, dizzy with the dozens of crazy thoughts that were clamoring inside her head. For a second she actually had to lean against the wall in a stairwell somewhere and take deep breaths. Though it barely helped. Nothing helped—not even her phone buzzing to tell her that she had a message from Tate. I’ll be done in an hour, he said. Wait for me in my dorm, he said. Everything so innocent it should have been fine.
But instead she climbed the stairs to his room wondering what would be waiting for her there. Her mind kept going to the movie Carrie, and the weeks of planning they had done just to dump pigs’ blood on her head. How she might open the door and find herself covered in something. And even after she’d gone inside, she couldn’t quite shake that feeling. She trod carefully over the discarded sweatshirt on the floor between his bed and his desk, as if there could really possibly be something underneath.
A bear trap, just waiting to spring.
Or would it be something subtler, something more insidious? Something like the flyer he had posted around school telling everyone to watch out for the whale that had gotten loose from SeaWorld, maybe—though when she riffled through the papers on his desk she found nothing. Just stuff that belonged to the new him, the him that she had come to love. There was a bunch of her notes to him, carefully saved. A book she’d mentioned—The Amber Spyglass—that he’d underlined passages in.
She read them sitting in his desk chair, teeth digging deep into her lip. Half convinced by the end that it was all just her imagination jumping at shadows again. How could it be otherwise, when he’d actually written this next to the words the birthday of my life has come, my love has come to me? There wasn’t a reason to do that. It didn’t help with any master plan. He had no reason to think she would find this book and pick it up and be impressed by what he’d written there.
He had no reason to have done a lot of the things he had for her.
But the emails were in his sent box all the same.
Truthfully, she didn’t intend to look. She knew she was already hovering on the wrong side of insane. Him lying to Professor Harrison meant almost nothing, and the picture Chad had taken meant even less—so really what was the point? She didn’t know. She just clicked on his mail app anyway, like a sleepwalker who negotiated the living room furniture out of habit more than awareness.
And then she was scrolling through his emails.