Chapter 10
ten
SLOANE
The teaching assistant doesn’t show up for the evening seminar.
He isn’t late, disengaged, or reading off his phone. He’s just absent, the chair at the front of the table empty, with a group of students sitting around it in awkward silence and Professor Moreno seated off to the side.
Moreno waits four minutes, grading with her red pen and not making a production of it. Then she catches my eye and lifts her chin toward the whiteboard, and I’m so intimidated and impressed by her that I’m up before I find a reason not to.
As seventeen heads track my movement to the front, I keep my eyes on the whiteboard and try to act more composed than I feel. When I’m in position, I flip to chapter three, thankful I did the reading twice to avoid thinking about Rowan.
“Mendez’s framing argument,” I say. “Who wants to start?”
Nobody wants to start.
A girl at the front gives me a sympathetic wince, and I love her for it and also kind of want her to die. The rest of them stare at me, waiting, and at this point, I realize maybe half of them have done the reading and most of them don’t want to speak up.
“Fine, I will.” I tap the page. “The claim that public narratives about transgression aren’t neutral — that someone is always authoring them — frames the whole piece. Does anybody not buy it?”
Prescott’s hand goes up.
“I think she’s overstating,” he says, with the kind of patience men use when they’ve already decided you’re wrong. “The case she cites had a documented record, so the account isn’t authored, it’s reported.”
I let that sit, then I uncap the pen and write RECORD on the whiteboard.
“Okay, but the account puts the woman’s testimony after the committee’s response, so that isn’t the record, right?” I turn back. “In the record of investigation, the testimony came first, and Mendez flips it, so the testimony reads like reaction instead of accusation.”
“So?” Prescott asks, defensively, knowing he’s being set up.
“So the narrative framing — the order of presentation — changes who has agency.”
“That sounds like spin.”
“It is spin.” I smile. “On the part of the committee, who covered it up.”
Somebody in the middle of the table laughs, low, and I feel the room tilt toward me. But more than that, for the first time since arriving at Halden, I feel the spark of myself without the immediate urge to stuff it back down.
Am I actually enjoying this?
“But if the outcome was correct—” Prescott starts.
“Was it, though?” I say, my voice faster now. “The institution wanted a different outcome than the accuser did. To get it, they didn’t need to lie. They just needed to tell the story in the right order.”
I tap the whiteboard. “The account is a story someone told in a particular order, and calling it the record just reflects who won the argument and who lost it. In this case, the institution won, and the girl who made the accusation is branded as hysterical.”
Prescott opens his mouth and closes it, and the room tilts another half inch, and I stop checking. I stop monitoring whether my voice is too loud, whether my hands are moving too much, and whether I’m taking up too much of the room.
Prescott keeps pushing back, which is great, actually, because every time he pushes I find a sharper way to say what I mean. When I’m halfway through a quote from chapter five from memory, a girl asks what page, and I tell her without looking, and her eyebrows go up.
The hour is gone in an instant, the room buzzing, and after people pack up, a couple of them say good discussion on the way out, in the slightly stunned tone that means they hadn’t expected one. I’m capping the pen and gathering my things when Moreno catches me.
“Sloane,” she says. “Got a minute?”
She has a tote bag that looks like it’s been to grad school and back, and she sets it on a chair, pulling out a stapled article, which is dog-eared and has lines highlighted in three different colors and notes in the margin.
“You ran that well,” she says. “It’s the first time I’ve seen you like that.”
“Thanks,” I say, in the small, polite, rehearsed voice.
“I’m looking for a research assistant. I’d like you to think about taking the role.
” She holds out the article. “This is something I’m working on.
It’s about narrative framing in public shaming cases.
Read it, and if you can bring me an opinion that’s worth something, we’ll talk about whether you’re the right fit for the job. ”
I take the article. “I’ll read it,” I say.
She smiles, just at the corner of her mouth. “You did really good work tonight.”
And then she’s gone, so I stand with the article against my chest, feeling a spark of pride I haven’t felt in a long time. The first thing I think is, don’t tell Mom yet — and I decide not to look at why.
I slide the article into my bag, and as I put on my coat, I feel the mask settle back, piece by piece, over the thing that just happened. I head out of the building and find the quad mostly empty, and I’m halfway back to Sterling House when my phone buzzes.
It’s Ivy:
Ivy: Ravens lost. 2–1.
Then, a beat later:
Ivy: Rowan played his heart out.
I stop in the middle of the path, the cold working through my jacket. I read the second message twice for no good reason, then lock the screen and keep walking, already tasting the hot chocolate I’m going to make as soon as I walk in the door.
But my mind drifts back to Rowan.
We haven’t really talked about what happened at the toga party. He showed up at the dorm when Ivy was spiraling about her aunt, and I watched him hold the whole thing together, but that was for Ivy, not for me.
I’ve forgiven him, but we haven’t been alone long enough for me to tell him, and I haven’t figured out what I’d say if we were. I ended things with Mason three days ago and I haven’t told Rowan, because telling him would mean admitting there’s a reason to tell him.
And I’m not there yet.
I keep walking, and that’s when I see him.
He’s on the low stone wall in the quad, the one nobody sits on because, at night, even in September, it’s basically a slab of cold against your ass. He’s got his hood up, his bag at his feet, his elbows on his knees, and his chin in his hands. He’s not waiting for anyone.
He’s just sitting.
He doesn’t see me. That’s the thing that gets me first. Rowan always sees me. At Maple & Main, outside the Lantern, and the whole night of the party at Ironwood House, I could feel him knowing where I was. But right now he’s looking at the bricks between his shoes.
And there’s nothing on his face. No captain, no big brother, no problem solver. He looks like a guy who got hit by a truck about an hour ago and hasn’t found a way to stand up yet. But it can’t just be the game, because he’s lost games before.
He looks small, and Rowan never looks small.
I cross to the wall and he looks up when I’m three steps out, and his face responds in stages. Surprise, then recovery, then the start of reassembling into the guy who’s always fine and always ready to help — but the recovery fails halfway up his face.
“Hi,” I say, before he can finish assembling.
“Hi.” He tries to force a smile, but it doesn’t make it.
“Mind if I sit?”
He shifts his bag with his foot. “Sure.”
I sit. The wall is exactly as cold as I thought it would be, and I’m wearing a coat that wasn’t designed by someone with “sitting on cold stone” in mind. There’s barely any space between his leg and mine, and I notice while I’m tucking my hands into my pockets.
“Ivy texted me,” I say, trying to focus on anything but that fact. “About the game.”
“Yeah.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Not our best.”
“She said you played your heart out.”
He snorts. “She’d fight anyone who said I didn’t, even if I’d bailed like Gavin.”
“Who?”
He looks at me sideways, not turning his head, just his eyes. He’s deciding whether to move on without sharing. His mouth even starts to shape it’s fine, then doesn’t, because something in him is too tired to lift it.
“Gavin,” he says. “The captain.”
The last word comes out with something close to disdain.
“What about him?” I ask.
“He’s done.” He says it like he’s been holding it on his tongue all night. “He’s checked out, and I’ve been covering for him all season, but tonight I couldn’t cover and play at the same time. We lost, and I—” He stops. “Sorry. You don’t need this dumped on top of you.”
“I asked.”
“Right.”
His knee is pressing gently against mine now. I don’t know when that happened, and neither of us moves. It feels like something he needs, whether he realizes it or not, and it feels like something I need, too.
Because, right now, he seems so alone.
“The freshmen don’t know how to handle it,” he says, quieter. “Theo took a bad hit tonight and came off shaking. I had to talk him through it because nobody else was, and then I was back over the boards trying to hold the whole thing together, and we still lost, and I—”
The sentence doesn’t finish.
He takes a breath.
“Hey.” I bump his knee with mine, gently. “Don’t censor yourself.”
“I feel like I have to, sometimes,” he says. “I think we all do.”
I don’t respond immediately, and he looks at me, and there’s a flicker of something — recognition, maybe. Because his words confirm what I’ve thought since that day in the courtyard: he’s the only one who sees through who I’ve been trying to be.
I’ve been carrying a version of him in my head, too. One that isn’t right or fair. It’s the version that got blamed at the toga party rather than thanked. It’s the version I got angry at, not the version I forgave.
We’re both bad at hiding from each other, it turns out.
“I told Mason it’s over,” I say. “I told him it’s not going to work.”
He goes still. He doesn’t ask what I told him or why or how he took it. He exhales, long and slow through his nose, his shoulders coming down, like one thing he’s been carrying has been set down.
“Okay,” he says, finally.