Chapter 1 #2
Susie was already back in their room when Ellery got up there, sitting at her computer typing furiously.
She didn’t say anything when Ellery came in, so Ellery didn’t say anything, either.
Instead she climbed onto her bed and opened her sketch pad, but not only was the shading on the sparrow’s wing still eluding her, the whole drawing seemed suddenly stale and pointless.
She was just closing the sketch pad when someone knocked on the door.
Susie got up to answer it, which was their custom—no one, since the day of first-year move-in, had come to their room looking for Ellery—but when she opened the door, the narrow hallway was empty.
“What the hell,” Susie said, bending down to pick something up off the dingy carpet.
When she turned around, Ellery saw it was a white paper to-go cup from the dining hall.
Susie frowned, sniffing the lid as if it might be poison. “I think this is apple cider,” she said suspiciously. Ellery, shocked and delighted, laughed out loud.
The following morning, she was eating a slice of peanut-butter-and-banana toast in the dining hall when Camp sat down at the table across from her.
“Hi again,” he said. Today he was dressed in a cable-knit Ralph Lauren quarter-zip with the sleeves pushed to the elbows, the little polo player cantering across the pocket.
There was a pair of Wayfarers tucked into the neck of the sweater, like possibly he was going to get in the car and go on a sightseeing trip right after he finished his bowl of raisin bran.
“Hi.” Ellery let herself really look at him for the first time in the weak-tea sunlight streaming in through the dining hall windows. He wasn’t handsome, exactly; still, he had a compelling energy about him. Even the hair on his arms seemed to glow.
“So listen,” he said, “I was thinking about you last night after the meeting. And I came up with three reasons why you shouldn’t transfer.”
“Oh yeah?” Ellery said, munching a crust. It felt easier to talk to him than it had last night—her brain blinking back online, her synapses starting to fire. “Lay ’em on me.”
“One,” Camp said, ticking them off on his long fingers, “it’s about to get very beautiful here, autumn-wise, and it would be a shame for you to miss it. Two: skiing! And three”—here he paused dramatically—“if you really put your mind to it, I think you can probably win the Harpswell Prize.”
Ellery burst out laughing. “Why would you possibly think that?” she asked.
Camp shrugged. “I have a feeling,” he said lightly. “I’m going to write your peer recommendation.”
Ellery flinched, like he’d pressed on some bruise deep inside her. It felt cruel, though she supposed he didn’t mean it that way, for him to joke about something like that. “Sure,” she mumbled. “You go ahead and do that.”
Danny appeared before Camp could reply, his tray laden with four different genres of breakfast. “Are you pestering her?” he asked Camp.
“Probably,” Camp admitted.
“You’re not,” Ellery said, though for a moment he kind of had been. She supposed she wasn’t in any position to look gift acquaintances in the mouth.
Danny sat down and began to eat with gusto, eggs and cereal and yogurt and a waffle, and instead of talking any more about the Harpswell Prize, they talked about Danny’s western civ professor, who’d taught class with his fly unzipped twice so far this semester.
“Once is an accident,” Danny said, snapping a banana in two before peeling each half individually. “Twice, and a person begins to wonder.”
Camp had an 8:00 a.m. lecture, for which he insisted on leaving at 7:45 so he would have his pick of the stadium seating. “How long have you guys been together?” Ellery asked, once he was gone.
“What?” Danny looked at her blankly, still chewing. “Who?”
“Nobody,” Ellery said, crumpling up her paper napkin. “Walk me to class?”
Before she quite knew how it had happened, she was spending basically all her waking nonclass hours with Camp and Danny.
She ate dinner with them in the dining hall.
She watched movies with them in the den.
She studied beside them in the library, Danny clicking his pen over and over while he read until Ellery kicked him under the table to get him to stop.
“What?” Danny asked, looking across the table at her, his expression sweetly dazed.
“You know what,” Camp said, reaching over and ruffling his hair.
Back in their freezing-cold room on the fourth floor of Honors House, they taught her to play a complicated variation on gin rummy, monogrammed playing cards fanned out across a coffee table that had come from Camp’s parents’ house in Boston.
Danny’s half of the room looked like a normal dorm, but Camp’s side looked like a library from the 1800s that was also a speakeasy, with two different antique rugs and a leather club chair.
“How did you get this up the stairs, anyway?” Ellery asked one day, swinging her legs over the arm. “Did your manservant hoof it up here?”
“His butler,” Danny put in, and Ellery laughed.
Danny, for his part, had not wanted to live in Honors House.
Danny maintained that the only thing worse than living in a dorm with a bunch of spoiled rich kids was living in a dorm with a bunch of spoiled rich kids who had all spent the last four years being told they were the smartest people in their high schools, but the fact remained that participation in the Honors Program—and, by extension, residency in Honors House—came with free room and board, and so here he was.
Danny was from a part of Vermont so far north it was basically Canada, where all the radio stations broadcasted in French and everything was mostly mountains and rocks and farmland.
He’d come to Preston on a combination of academic and athletic scholarships that meant he was always either running or studying or eating, his body an engine that was always warm.
“Go ahead,” Camp said now. He was lying on the floor, propped up on one elbow, the cards fanned out in his free hand. “Have a giggle.”
“I will, thank you.” Ellery pulled a cashmere throw off his bed and wrapped it around herself, nodding at Danny to deal her in one more time.
Fall came just like Camp had promised, the entire campus exploding into reds and oranges and yellows, the sky a million brilliant shades beyond blue.
The Friday before Halloween, Camp casually liberated an entire pizza from the dining hall and the three of them ate it on the wide back porch of Honors House while the sun sank behind the mountains to the west. “Told you this was worth sticking around for,” he said, sounding pleased with himself.
“When are you headed back home, anyway?”
Ellery stretched her legs out in front of her, looking out at the tree line.
The grass had gone dry, a frost on the lawn in the mornings; the air smelled like woodsmoke and like leaves and like cold.
“You know something crazy?” she asked, reaching over and plucking a string of melted cheese off Danny’s chin. “I’ve been thinking I might stay.”
It would have been a lie to say she was surprised the first time Camp kissed her, but it would also have been a lie to say she wasn’t sort of expecting Danny to be the one to do it first. They were sitting side by side on Camp’s bed, studying for a midterm; they had an art class together, a survey full of slides Camp had already seen in person on visits to Italy and France.
Ellery, who had enrolled at Preston as an art history major only to realize she had neither talent for memorization nor faith in her own analysis, lived in abject fear of being called on.
“Are we doing this?” Camp asked her now. He was already leaning halfway in.
Ellery considered that, considered him: the flecks of gold in his irises, the whiteness of his teeth. “I suppose I don’t see why not.”
This wasn’t true, exactly—of course she saw why not; he was six feet, two inches tall and currently running the relay over at the Hunt Memorial Athletic Center.
Still, admitting that—looking at it directly—would have upended something delicate and vital, and so when Camp reached for her, she let him, winding her arms around his neck and breathing in his faint, expensive smell.
He was less confident than she would have expected, coming in slightly hot with his tongue and his teeth; Ellery put her hands gently on his face to correct him, felt his whole body go still as a deer’s. “Ellery,” he said, and for a second it felt like he might be about to tell her a secret.
Ellery pulled back, looking at him carefully. “What?” she said. “Camp. What?”
Camp shook his head then—smiling, becoming himself again. “Nothing,” he promised, and kissed her one more time.
The next time he showed up at her room—two mornings later, while Susie was at her sociology lecture—Ellery stopped him before he could lean in to kiss her hello.
“We need to talk to Danny,” she said.
“I already told him,” Camp promised.
“Oh!” Ellery wasn’t sure why the thought of it made her want to die. She wished he had talked to her first, though she knew instinctively that was silly. Danny, after all, had belonged to Camp first. “You did?”
“I did,” Camp said. “He’s fine with it.”
Ellery tried to imagine how that conversation might have gone and found she couldn’t, exactly.
Still, she knew they had in fact had it, because when she and Danny met that afternoon to work on their research project for essay writing, she brought it up as soon as he walked into the study room, wanting to get it out of the way: “Camp told you, right?” she asked. “About, like . . . ?”
“Oh,” Danny said, after blinking about a thousand times. “Yeah.”
“And you’re cool with it?”
“I’m cool,” he said. “I’m cool I’m cool I’m cool.”