6. Chapter 6
Chapter six
Alex
I know what the stares mean now.
Not curiosity anymore. Something has shifted — the calculation behind it, the way people adjust their path before I'm close enough to require it, conversations dropping a register when I pass and picking back up when I'm far enough away.
Something has been moving through this campus since I got here. Passed from person to person like a question no one's saying.
I don't know what they've decided.
Only that they have.
The dining hall is busy — morning crowd, bodies close, the noise of a hundred conversations running at once.
I get coffee and eggs and find the window table and a boy I've never spoken to pulls his bag off the chair beside mine before I've asked.
Doesn't look at me. Just moves it and goes back to his phone.
I sit down.
Dalton is somewhere behind me. I don't look for him.
Across the room a table of students has been watching me since I walked in. Not first-day staring. More considered — the four of them talking low with their eyes tracking me at intervals. One says something and another shakes her head and they look away.
I eat my eggs. Drink my coffee. Watch the treeline.
When I stand to leave a path opens in the crowd without anyone announcing it.
I walk through it and out into the cold.
***
Tomlinson moves the class into how transformation myths function as social regulation — what a community does when someone crosses a line it needs to believe is real. He asks the room what tools a community has when containment fails.
The student who argued last time goes first. Exile, he says. Removal. You protect the group by separating the threat.
Another student pushes back. That assumes the threat is external, she says. What if it was always internal. What if the line was never as fixed as the community believed.
The first student looks at her. That's worse, he says. That's scarier.
Tomlinson doesn't weigh in. He asks the room what they think and the room splits and I write down what seems worth keeping.
The rest stays with me.
After class the boy from the door yesterday is in the corridor again. He sees me coming and holds the door without the surprised expression this time. Just holds it.
***
Writing 101.
The room is half full when I arrive, Dr. Clary not there yet. Desks in a circle, students scattered through it — phones out, notebooks open to nothing, two girls near the window talking low. I find my gap and sit and pull out my notebook.
Becky is across from me.
She's been watching me since I sat down.
More students filter in. The room fills without settling. Someone's phone goes off and gets silenced. A chair scrapes.
Then Becky says, to the girl on her left, not to me, but not quiet either —
"Okay, but what have you actually heard about her."
The girl glances at me, then back at her. "She has her own cottage and a guard. But is the guard for her or for us."
"Right," Becky says. "But why."
No answer.
She leans back in her chair, looking at me without pretending she isn't now.
"Someone said dangerous," the girl offers.
Becky huffs a quiet laugh. "That's not a reason. That's a headline."
Her eyes move over me. Quick. Assessing.
"She doesn't look rich," she says. "I mean — look at her clothes."
The girl beside her glances at my boots. "Those are good boots."
"Sure," Becky says easily. "One good thing doesn't mean anything."
A beat.
Then louder, aimed at me —
"I've been trying to figure you out."
A couple of heads lift.
I don't look up.
"Since you got here," she says. "Nobody knows what your deal is. You show up in a van, you get your own cottage, you've got someone following you everywhere you go." A pause, just long enough. "What did you do?"
I turn a page I'm not reading.
"Seriously," she says. "We're all thinking it. What do you have to do to get a personal security detail at school? Like what did you actually—"
"Becky." The girl to her left, low. A warning.
Becky doesn't take it.
"I'm just asking. Is it a danger-to-others thing or a danger-to-yourself thing, because what exactly are we dealing with—"
My back teeth lock.
Two people go quiet who weren't quiet before.
Becky keeps going.
"—because the babysitter thing is a lot, right? Like what did you actually—"
I lift my head.
She stops.
Mid-word.
My eyes find hers across the circle and I don't say anything and I don't move and that's the thing — the complete absence of movement, the going-still that isn't calm, the kind of still that registers as wrong before anyone knows why.
Becky's mouth is still open.
The girl to her left has pushed her chair back two inches without noticing.
I let it sit. One second. Two.
Then I say, "Careful."
That's all.
My voice doesn't rise. A growl sits under it — low, rough, not entirely human. Not loud. Just enough that it carries across the circle and stays there.
The room goes still.
A pen hits the floor somewhere to my left.
Nobody moves to pick it up.
Becky's face has gone the color of someone who just understood something she can't explain. Her shoulders pull back.
"I—" she starts.
Her voice comes out wrong. She hears it. Stops.
She doesn't finish.
I hold it one more second.
Then I let it go.
Sound comes back — a chair shifting, someone exhaling.
I look back to the page.
Same line. Same place.
No one says her name again.
Dr. Clary comes through the door with her stack of photocopied poems and her coffee. She looks around the circle and something crosses her face — the too-careful stillness of it — and then she sets her things down and opens the class.
Nobody looks at me directly for the rest of the session.
Becky doesn't look at me at all.
When class ends she leaves first.
I pack up my notebook and go.
***
The corridor outside is busy — midday traffic, students moving between buildings. I walk through it and nobody says anything and nobody gets in my way.
I find the window table in the dining hall and get lunch and sit with it.
My hands are steady.
That's the first thing I check.
Steady. Heartbeat even. Nothing spilling over that shouldn't be.
Gavin calls that unstable.
I don't.