Chapter 12 - Catherine #3
“You—” He stops. Starts again. “You just told the entire hallway you killed someone.”
“I know.”
“Cat.”
“I know.” My voice is steady but my hands are starting to shake. The adrenaline is metabolizing. The reality of what I just said—out loud, in public, the thing my parents spent two years and God knows how much money burying—is landing on me in waves. “I know what I just did.”
His hand finds the small of my back. Warm. Steady. The pressure that keeps me in my body when my instincts are screaming to leave it.
“We’ll deal with it,” he says. Low. Just for me. “Whatever comes from this, we deal with it. But Cat?”
“What.”
“You didn’t need me for that.”
I lean into his hand. Just slightly. Just enough.
“No. But I’m really glad you’re here.”
Iz appears on my other side. His expression is carefully neutral, but his eyes are wide.
“So,” he says conversationally. “That happened.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m just saying—the ice princess has layers. Like an onion. A terrifying, homicidal onion.”
“Iz.”
“Sorry. Processing. Give me a minute.” He falls into step beside me. Bumps my shoulder. Quieter now: “You okay?”
“No,” I say honestly. “But I’m standing.”
“That’s enough,” he says. “That’s always enough.”
BC Calculus. Mister Burke’s classroom—second floor, east wing, floor-to-ceiling windows that seal properly because Edgewood maintains its buildings the way it maintains its reputation: obsessively.
Climate-controlled air. Polished oak desks.
The faint smell of leather from the bound volumes lining the back wall.
A classroom that costs more per square foot than most apartments.
Kaiden is on my right. Xander on my left. I set my pens in their row—black, blue, green. Notebook open. The ritual. The only thing in my day that is entirely mine to control.
Penny slides into the empty desk behind me. She’s supposed to be in AP History. She is not in AP History. She’s here, because Penny MacHale treats class schedules the way she treats dress code regulations: as suggestions she’s reviewed and declined.
“Relocating?” I whisper.
“Strategically. I heard there was a development in the Kaiden situation, and I refuse to receive this information secondhand.”
“There’s no ‘situation.’”
“You got out of his car this morning with your lip gloss gone and your ponytail crooked. There’s a situation.”
Xander turns his head. His expression is military-grade neutral, but his ears are red. Penny catches it.
“Don’t eavesdrop, Xander.”
“You’re not whispering. You’re broadcasting.”
“Then tune out, X. Go back to whatever you do during calc. Drawing? Brooding? Thinking about—”
“Finish that sentence, Penelope.”
The full name. Again. The way his mouth wraps around every syllable like he’s tasting it. Something electric passes between them—visible, almost tactile—before Penny breaks eye contact and turns back to me with a composure that’s slightly less composed than it was three seconds ago.
“Anyway,” she says, too brightly. “Details. Now.”
“Later.”
“You’re the worst.”
Kaiden leans into my space. His mouth close to my ear. His breath warm on my neck. The proximity is deliberate—not accidental, not subtle, the kind of closeness that’s designed to make my brain stop working.
“What would happen,” he murmurs, “if I knocked all those pens off your desk right now?”
My stomach drops. The heat starts at the base of my spine and crawls upward.
“Then every fantasy you’ve had about bending me over in this skirt goes out the window,” I whisper back.
His jaw tightens. His hand lands on my thigh under the desk—palm flat, fingers spread, the possessive weight of it making my muscles lock with the effort of not reacting visibly. His thumb traces one slow circle on the inside of my knee.
“Keep talking like that, Kitty Cat,” he says against my ear, “and we’re not making it to the parking lot.”
Goosebumps down both arms. I fight the shiver. Lose. Penny makes a sound behind me that’s either a cough or a stifled scream.
The door opens. Burke walks in.
He’s late—coffee in one hand, a stack of graded papers in the other, the particular shuffle of a man who stopped caring about punctuality around the same time he stopped caring about his students.
He scans the room, takes inventory, and his gaze snags on three things in sequence: Kaiden’s chair pulled too close to mine, my flushed face, and Penny sitting in a desk that is not assigned to her.
“Miss MacHale.” He sets his coffee down. “This isn’t your class.”
“I’m auditing,” Penny says.
“You’re not. Leave.”
Penny doesn’t move. Just looks at him with the placid defiance of a girl who has been thrown out of better rooms than this one.
Burke decides she’s not worth the battle. He turns to the board. Writes L’H?pital’s rule in handwriting that hasn’t changed since Carter was president.
Five minutes in, he’s droning about indeterminate forms, and I’m taking notes because I already know this material but the act of writing keeps my hands busy and my mind off the warm imprint of Kaiden’s palm still ghosting on my thigh.
Burke works through a problem on the board. Gets to the third step. Pauses. Frowns. Erases. Rewrites. Pauses again.
He’s wrong. The substitution is incorrect. He’s applying the rule to a form that isn’t actually indeterminate—the limit exists without L’H?pital’s, and he’s overcomplicating it because he memorized the procedure thirty years ago and hasn’t thought critically about the concept since.
I raise my hand. Burke ignores me. I keep my hand raised. The room starts to notice. The silence shifts from bored to attentive.
Burke turns. “Yes, Miss O’Farrell.”
“The limit is three.”
His eyebrow arches. “Excuse me?”
“The function isn’t indeterminate at x equals two. If you factor the numerator, the discontinuity cancels and the limit evaluates directly. You don’t need L’H?pital’s. It’s algebraic.”
Silence. Burke looks at the board. Looks at me. Looks at the board again. The vein at his temple twitches.
“I’m sure you think you’re very clever, Miss O’Farrell.”
“I’m sure the answer is three, Mr. Burke.”
A student in the second row pulls out a calculator. Taps. Looks up. “She’s right. It’s three.”
The murmur starts. Burke’s face begins its familiar migration toward crimson. He erases the board with short, aggressive strokes and starts the problem over—arriving, through the longer method, at the same answer I gave him fifteen seconds ago.
He doesn’t acknowledge it. Just moves to the next problem. But something’s shifted in the room—the particular energy of a class that’s just watched the teacher get corrected by a student and is deciding how to feel about it.
Burke makes it through two more problems before he turns and looks at me—at my face, at Kaiden beside me, at the narrow distance between our desks that’s been shrinking all period.
“You know, Miss O’Farrell,” he says, leaning against his desk with the manufactured casualness of a man about to say something he’s been holding in.
“In my thirty years of teaching, I’ve seen a lot of bright girls walk through this school.
Top of their class. Full of potential. And you know what most of them did with all that potential? ”
He gestures vaguely toward Kaiden. “They found a boy. A wealthy one, ideally. And all that brilliance got redirected toward the real goal—the MRS degree. The Mrs. Somebody. You’re what, seventeen?
Already latched onto the most prominent boy in the building.
” He shrugs with theatrical resignation.
“I suppose it’s only natural. Why waste a perfectly good MIT acceptance when you can just marry into money? ”
The room goes corpse-quiet.
I don’t react. Not my face, not my body, not the faintest twitch of any muscle.
I sit in my chair with my three pens lined up and my notebook open and I look at Mister Burke with the expression I wore when I looked at a man in a burning hallway.
The expression that has nothing behind it because everything behind it is too dangerous to show.
“The answer to problem four is negative seven-thirds,” I say. “You haven’t written it on the board yet. Would you like me to show the work, or would you prefer to continue your commentary on my romantic life?”
Someone in the back makes a sound that’s trying very hard not to be a laugh and failing. Burke’s mouth opens. Closes.
“Because I can do both,” I continue, picking up my pen. “Correct your math and ignore your opinions. I’ve been doing it all semester.”
The dam breaks. The room laughs—not loud, not cruel, but the involuntary, slightly disbelieving laughter of thirty students watching a girl dismantle a teacher with a calculator and a complete absence of emotion.
Burke’s face is the color of a fire engine. He turns to the board. Writes problem four. Arrives at negative seven-thirds. Does not look at me.
Kaiden doesn’t stand up. Doesn’t deliver a speech. He does something worse.
He starts a slow clap.
One clap. Then another. Deliberate. Loud in the quiet room. His face is perfectly composed—no smirk, no grin, just that steady, unblinking eye contact with Burke that says “I see you and I’m not impressed.”
Xander joins. Same rhythm. Same dead-eyed stare. Two of the most prominent students in the school, clapping in unison like they’re applauding a particularly mediocre performance at a talent show.
The class starts to snicker. Then laugh. Then a few more join the clap. The sound builds—rhythmic, mocking, the universal language of a room turning against the person at the front of it.
Burke slams his hand on his desk. “That’s enough!”
Kaiden stops clapping. Leans back in his chair. Folds his arms. The silence he creates is somehow louder than the clapping was.
“You’re right,” Kaiden says. Casual. Almost bored. “It is enough.”