Chapter 11
eleven
ROWAN
I tackle the same paragraph four times, but I still can’t explain what a pegged currency is.
That’s because Sloane is sitting opposite me at a table on Bellamy Library’s second floor. She’s bent over some article Professor Moreno gave her, and she has no idea how damn good she looks.
As she concentrates, I keep stealing glances: the pencil moving in and out of her mouth, her eyebrows pulling together, her lips silently repeating a sentence back to herself before she frowns at the page and underlines something with force.
I decide this is her best angle, because it’s her.
No mask.
All Sloane.
I drag my attention back to chapter seven, because even after playing a game tonight, there’s no escape from international finance. But I can’t focus, because every time I reach the bottom of a paragraph, my eyes drift to her.
I’m lucky Bellamy’s second floor at ten thirty on a Friday is abandoned, because otherwise someone might catch me looking. As it is, there’s nobody else here in the silence of a building about to close. I just hope I can knock out chapter seven before then.
But when I look up, she’s watching me.
Busted.
“What?” I say.
“You moved my highlighter,” she says. “It’s now parallel to my notebook…”
“It’s perfect now,” I say.
“You also squared off my books.” She nods at the stack of books near my elbow, spines flush. “I was hoping you might organize my notes.”
I smile, and she smiles back, then leans forward and goes back to her article. After holding my gaze on her, I try chapter seven again. I get half a page before I feel her watching, and when I look up, she holds it a beat too long, then drops her eyes to the page.
The pencil goes back into her mouth, and I track her lower lip instead of reading a word. When she leans over the article, my eyes drop to the neckline of her sweater before I drag them up, and catch her catching me. She doesn’t look away this time.
“You’ve read that page four times,” she says, smiling. “Either it’s very difficult, or I am.”
“Definitely you,” I say. “Tell me about the article.”
She turns the article so I can see it. “Narrative framing. She argues that institutions don’t have to lie about what happened when scandals strike. They just have to tell the story in the right order, even if it means victims are silenced and perpetrators are excused.”
“Go on.”
She pauses, an eyebrow climbing slightly, skeptical. “Really?”
“I’m sitting here pretending to learn about exchange rates.”
“Well, in that case…”
She gives me that smirk again, then lights up, hands moving and voice picking up speed on a section that makes her angry, then going quieter on a part that makes her think. And I decide I was wrong, because her study face isn’t her most beautiful angle.
This is.
She talks with her hands like she can’t stop herself — quick, sharp gestures, like she’s cutting the argument into pieces and rearranging them in the air. She tells me about the article, running the seminar, and Moreno asking her to be a research assistant.
I watch her try to swallow the pride and fail.
“That looks good on you,” I say.
Her eyes narrow. “What does?”
“Pride,” I say. “Confidence.”
“Thanks.” She gives me a little smile that she can’t put away, then goes back to her page.
We work in quiet after that. The good kind. The comfortable kind. She tucks her feet up under herself on the chair, and the smallness of the gesture — the way she doesn’t stop herself, or force herself to be proper — tells me she’s not performing right now.
Then her hand slides across the table and settles on mine, and she closes her book with the other. “Tell me about exchange rates.”
“I’d rather not,” I say. “And… uh… I never did finish the chapter. You’re too distracting to study with.”
“You’re not so easy yourself, all that staring and all that arranging,” she says, using her free hand to nudge my pen a few degrees out of square, then watching my fingers twitch toward it before I catch myself. “You do that with everything, don’t you? You see something crooked and put it right.”
“Reflex,” I say.
“I know.” The tease goes out of her face, and her thumb moves once, slow, across the back of my hand. “Can I ask you something, and if you don’t want to answer, that’s okay?”
“Yeah,” I say, without hesitation.
She’s quiet for a moment, like she’s deciding whether to say it. Then she does. “Why do you carry so much for everyone?”
The answer is ready before she finishes. Somebody has to. That’s just how I’m built. I don’t mind.
But she deserves more than that.
“I guess I just always have,” I say, taking a breath and looking at our hands on the table. “The first time I remember doing it, I was fourteen. Ivy was twelve — braces, the works — and she got caught stealing a lipstick from the CVS on Boston Post Road during a field trip.”
“Oh no.”
“She didn’t even want it. She just wanted attention.” My thumb moves along the side of Sloane’s hand. “But when the school called my dad, his assistant said he was in a meeting and couldn’t be disturbed, so they called me. I had the flu, fever was a hundred and two.”
Her fingers tighten on mine. “But you fixed it anyway?”
“I had to.” I shrug. “Dad was busy, and Mom was upstairs with one of her headaches.” I hear the word come out, pausing to make sure she’s alright with it before I go on. “That’s the family term for it.”
She doesn’t push. She waits.
“So I forged a note, biked to the school, and then threw up in the parking lot before I went in.” I laugh. “Then I walked into the vice principal’s office and told him my parents couldn’t make it, and he bought it, because I had my shit together.”
The reading room is so quiet that I can hear the clock above the reference desk.
“I got Ivy on my bike. She was crying. I was riding with one hand on my handlebars and one steadying her.” My voice is doing the level thing it always does. “When we got home, Mom looked at both of us and said, ‘Oh good. You sorted it,’ and then went back to bed.”
I stop and look away. Outside the window, the wind has picked up, and fallen leaves scatter sideways through the lamplight. I keep the lid on it, barely, and realize again why nobody else on campus has ever heard that story.
But Sloane is still holding my hand, and her thumb traces a line across my knuckles, slow. “Are you lonely?” she asks.
I laugh, surprised. “I’ve got so many people in my life I can barely keep them straight some weeks. Ivy, the guys, Coach—”
“That doesn’t answer the question,” she says, gently.
My thumb stops on her hand. “Yeah,” I say after a while. “I am.”
It sits between us.
“Me too,” she says, but she doesn’t pull her hand away. “Rowan, I—”
She catches herself.
“You don’t need to tell me, Sloane,” is all I say, giving her an off-ramp.
“I want to tell you the rest.” Her voice catches, and she laughs at herself, frustrated, wiping under one eye with the heel of her hand. “Out there on the wall, I gave you the start of it and then I lost my nerve. This next part I’ve only ever said to family, so—”
“Take your time.”
She takes a breath, letting it go too fast.
I make myself hold still, my jaw already tight.
“I sent him photos.” Her cheeks flush, but her eyes hold mine. “The kind you only send someone you—” She stops, makes herself start again. “Someone you trust completely. And he shared them.” She swallows. “Not all at once. People never get that part.”
“Okay,” I say, leaving her the space to continue.
“It was slow. A sideways look or a comment. But then I’d ask Harrison and he’d get this wounded expression, like I was insulting him by even asking the question, and every time I walked away feeling like I was the problem. Like I was paranoid, or jealous.”
My hand finds hers across the table and squeezes, because I don’t trust what would come out of my mouth.
“Then my parents found out.” She swallows. “And that’s when it became real, because suddenly there were lawyers in our kitchen and everyone was talking about containment. Not justice. Containment.”
Her hands are moving now, quick and choppy, no choreography.
“It took me a week to confront him. I cried, I yelled. But by then his family had already made calls — his father was a state senator — and the school’s position was that the situation needed to be resolved quietly. That meant I had to go.”
Her shoulders rise and fall, and I want nothing more than to round the table and wrap her in a hug, the kind I sometimes have to give Ivy. But I sense that’s not what she needs right now, so I offer what she seems to want: my hand and my ears.
“My parents weren’t angry at Harrison. They were mortified by me. The mess, the scene, having to explain it at the club the following week. My mother said—” She cuts herself off, shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter what she said. What matters is that I heard it.”
“Halden was the reset,” I say quietly.
“Yeah.” She looks away. “I came here promising I’d never be that girl again. I’d be the Halden Girl, just like my mother. Composed and pleasant. Don’t take up any room, don’t make noise, and above all don’t become the scandal again.”
“I see you, Sloane,” I say. “The one who talks with her hands.”
I can’t say what’s on my face, but my jaw aches from clenching. My free hand is flat on the table, knuckles going white, because I want to find Harrison and put my fist through his teeth.
She sees it.
“There it is,” she says, gently.
“There what is?”
Her thumb traces my whitened knuckles. “I can see you wanting to fix this.”
“I do want to fix it.”
“I know,” she says. Then, quieter, she goes on, “I saw you with Ivy, in the dorm room.”
I open my mouth and nothing comes. My father’s voice is right there — Hales don’t let problems fester, son, and they don’t bring their problems to the table — and for the first time I can remember, I’m fighting the urge to act.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I say.
“Do what?”
“Just sit here with what you told me, without trying to fix it,” I say. “I—”
I stop. Swallow hard. Regroup.
“What do you need from me right now?” I say.