Chapter Eight
Eight
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: conditionals
Redo
IT’S THE FIRST THING I see when I wake up and grab my phone—a succinct response to the work I sent to Jamie late last night. I never heard him come home, but the email is time-stamped three a.m., so I guess my pillow-over-the-head routine is starting to get me through the long, noisy nights.
I groan and roll over, kicking my feet in frustration. Redo? Redo the work that took me hours to finish? That kept me up well after midnight? I have my first studio class at Stone & Spiral tonight. I don’t have time to just redo it.
After vigorously brushing my teeth and eating a protein bar in stony silence in the kitchen, I grab my laptop and march to Jamie’s door. My three sharp knocks are met with silence, so I try again, picking up both force and speed until finally I hear from the other side, “What, what, what?”
The door swings open, and Jamie falls against the jamb, wearing nothing but his boxers and proving exactly what I expected—that whatever he’s been doing the last year has carved away every soft part of him.
Jamie has always been fit—he used to run track, though never fast enough to win anything—but that leanness has given way to unyielding muscle.
Jamie pushes his free hand through his short hair. “Why am I not surprised it’s you?”
I look pointedly away. “Can you please dress yourself? You’re offending my delicate sensibilities.”
“You’re the one who came to my room.” He shuffles away from the door, returning in a pair of shorts and pulling a sleeveless shirt over his head. I’m pretty sure they came from the floor, which… ew. But living with Sawyer has desensitized me to the disgusting nature of boys.
“You want me to redo this.” I pull up LabLab, the shared platform where I’ve been working on his code, and flip my laptop around to show him my work from last night. “All of it? Are you serious?”
He yawns. “This couldn’t wait until, I don’t know, a reasonable hour of the day?”
“It’s ten in the morning.”
He stares at me, his gaze heavy-lidded. Is he falling back asleep?
I snap my fingers an inch from his nose, and his eyes pop open wide before settling into a glare.
“I can’t wait until a reasonable hour. I have my first studio tonight, and if I need to redo all this…
” My stomach clenches at the thought. I need to work on my practice modules for the APM and start my first assignment, and I have five minutes penciled in for lying on my bed in despair.
I am bereft of wiggle room. “My schedule is a bit tight today. Can you show me exactly what needs to be fixed?”
Jamie sighs. “I thought you’d done this before.”
“I have. But your app is complicated, and—well, I built that app with a team. We had a faculty adviser. This is very hands-off.”
Jamie tilts his head. “So you lied.”
“No—”
“You misrepresented your skill level—”
“Was it really bad enough that I need to redo the entire thing?” I shove my laptop at him. “Show me where I messed up.”
He catches my laptop one-handed and pushes it back at me. “Fine.” He retreats into his room but holds up a finger when I try to follow, then points it at the threshold. I only have time to let out a squawk of annoyance before he shuts the door in my face.
“You are an insufferable toad,” I mutter at the door.
It pops open again, and Jamie leans out to reply, “And you’re an annoyance.” He shuts the door again, and I hear the click of the lock.
“This would be a lot faster for both of us if you’d just let me in.
” I wait a beat, hearing nothing from the other side of the door.
If he’s fallen back asleep, I’m going to kill him.
“Jamie. Hello?” I knock lightly, pressing my ear to the door, and am unprepared when it swings open again.
I yelp as I pitch forward, the side of my face landing hard against Jamie’s chest.
“Oh god, not the floor shirt!” I scramble upright, rubbing at my cheek.
Jamie presses his fingertip to the center of my forehead and pushes me away from him. I go willingly, still scrubbing at my face. I don’t want to know when that shirt was last washed. Do I need to worry about breaking out?
“Table,” Jamie says, jerking his chin toward the kitchen. He has his own laptop cradled in one arm, the other reaching back to shut his door firmly behind him.
“Why are you so secretive about your room?” I ask as I follow him. “I’ve been inside. It’s not that interesting.”
“It’s called boundaries. Sit.”
I do, in a manner one might call obedient, and eye his laptop as he boots it up. “I thought you used a desktop.”
“I have both. You should get a desktop too. When you’re in the major, you’ll want something faster.” He opens LabLab, then gets up and shuffles to the kitchen. “Do you drink coffee?”
“Honestly, Jamie, I’m kind of getting whiplash right now.”
He leans a shoulder against the wall, fixing me with his exhausted, heavy-lidded gaze.
“I’ve gotta give my laptop about five minutes to work out its issues before it’ll let me use LabLab without crashing.
I also need to work out my issues, with caffeine.
I’m offering to fill the coffee pot if you also need caffeine.
Which it sounds like you do, judging by the brain lag. ”
I scowl and bite my tongue against something snippier as I respond “yes” so tightly, my vocal cords may as well be a rubber-band ball.
I try not to watch him as he moves through the kitchen, but it’s hard not to drink in every detail of him in this new space.
At my house, Jamie acted like a thief perpetually on the brink of being caught.
He was comfortable in Sawyer’s room, but in the kitchen during meals or in the hallway running into one of my parents, he was quick to withdraw.
At school, he was unassuming, never doing too much or too little. My eye was always drawn to him as a familiarity, but he didn’t seem to blip dramatically on anyone else’s radar, with three notable exceptions:
One, his final breakup with his on-again, off-again sort-of girlfriend Lyric his sophomore year.
It happened one morning in the middle of the courtyard, and I could tell from the way Jamie kept shifting on his feet that he wanted to move somewhere less public, but Lyric never shied away from attention.
It ended with her throwing a book at his head, which left the tiniest scar above his brow.
Two, the time his senior-year capstone project—an app focused on tracking a rehabbed panther’s vitals in the wild, which he partnered with a local rescue on—won some prestigious award, which was announced at our year-end assembly.
Jamie shuffled onstage looking like he wished he were anywhere else, but when our principal butchered the project’s mission, Jamie very casually leaned into the mic to murmur, “If you say so,” with a wry smile that made everyone laugh.
Three, his reputation in middle school—that he’d landed in anger management after he punched a kid at a track meet for making a comment about his mom leaving. It was widely known that going into therapy was the only way he could keep from getting expelled.
I wonder if he’s different here, at college.
If he’s not burdened by a reputation that made some people wary of him—something I never understood.
Even when Lyric had thrown that book at his head, he didn’t lose his temper.
With blood dripping over his brow, he’d simply picked the book up from the ground and handed it back to her.
I realize I’ve been staring and give myself a mental slap. I cannot waste this much brainpower on Jamie. I have bigger things to worry about.
“So is Douse the worst professor in the entire major?” I ask. “Tell me honestly.”
Jamie hesitates, tapping his fingers lightly on the counter. Then he tips his head, a little rueful. “No.”
I groan, dropping my head to the table.
“The APM is supposed to be hard. It’s his job to break you. Last year we had two guys quit early, and I found out later that’s almost unprecedented.” I lift my head when he doesn’t go on, and I realize he’s doing a dramatic pause. “Usually it’s five or more.”
My stomach clenches. Right now, I think most of my classmates would bet I’ll be in that group.
“They don’t want people to pass, Blair. They want to collect your APM tuition and then collect it again when you don’t leapfrog into upper-level classes.
Half the people in the APM don’t make it in.
It’s designed that way. The ones who do are the brightest stars, and the department will be more concerned with pushing them to produce high-level work and win awards that reflect well on the school.
That’s the point of the APM. The half that passes will get them donors and prestige, and the ones who don’t will give them more money. ”
“You make it sound like a scam.”
He arches one brow at me as he pours coffee into two mugs. “You tell me if you think I’m wrong, once you finish.” He returns to the table, slipping a mug of coffee in front of me. It’s slightly lightened with cream, and when I take a sip, it’s perfectly, pleasantly sweet, exactly how I like it.
I slide the mug away from me, peering at it with suspicion.
“What?” Jamie says.
I turn, staring at him. His expression goes stony and then makes the slow transition to nervous.
“Stop looking at me,” he says, facing his laptop and taking a careless gulp from his mug, despite the fact that it’s steaming.
“Thank you,” I say after a long moment. “For the coffee.”
He gives a wordless nod, but as he clicks around on his computer, color rises to his cheeks. He opens LabLab, accidentally selecting the wrong tab, then another, and this is when I get my first glimpse of his app’s design mock-up.
“Wait, hold on. Go back.”
He shoots me a wary glance. “What?”
I reach over, shoving his hands away so I can click back to the mock-up. “Oh my god, Jamie.”
“What?” he demands, irritated.