Chapter Three

Gabriel drummed his fingers on the desk and stared at the classroom door.

She was here. Somewhere in this building, she was here — he’d caught her scent the moment he’d walked in for his Friday interview, faint and familiar, threading through the institutional smell of the hallways like something that didn’t belong to this world. Lilacs and violets. He’d had to work very hard to finish the interview.

Getting the position hadn’t been difficult. Teachers were scarce, his Master’s in English was genuine, and the resume — while largely fabricated — was backed by references he’d spent two days arranging. His actual employment history was the kind that didn’t appear in any database a school board would think to check. Background check came back clean. It always did.

He’d walked into first period behind Mr. Leonard and the scent had hit him like a wall. Sweet and floral and overwhelming, saturating the room, and every careful, patient instinct his mother had drilled into him over the phone was suddenly working very hard to hold him in place. Go slow. Build trust.

He’d scanned the class methodically. Several girls were already watching him with the particular intensity of teenagers who’d decided he was interesting — open, obvious, a little hungry. He’d looked at each of them in turn and felt absolutely nothing. No recognition, no pull, no sense of her. Just a classroom full of kids who meant nothing to the compass in his chest.

Which made no sense. The pull had led him here, to this town, to this school. He was at the epicenter of it. So why couldn’t he find her?

The bell rang and they filed out, and the scent thinned and faded, and he was left standing at the front of an empty classroom feeling like a man who’d been handed a map with no legend.

He taught two more classes — CP English, then standard — and by the end of the day his patience was fraying at the edges. The work didn’t help. Mrs. Dipalma had apparently been teaching essay writing as a kind of paint-by-numbers exercise, and the results were exactly what that suggested. Competent. Formulaic. Dull. He moved through the stack quickly, marking as he went, and was halfway through the AP essays before something made him slow down.

The paper was handwritten. Small, neat cursive on college-ruled notebook paper, no cover sheet, just a name at the top of the first page. He read the opening paragraph and sat back.

He read the whole thing twice.

It was sharp and original and genuinely provocative in the way that good essays are — not provocative for effect, but because the writer had actually thought about something and arrived somewhere unexpected. It was the kind of work that made admissions committees sit up. He flipped back to the name at the top.

Honor Talbot.

He uncapped his pen, wrote A at the top, and added a note underneath: Please type and resubmit. Then he set it aside from the others and tried to remember which student had been Honor Talbot. He’d met too many faces today. The name wasn’t coming.

He loosened his tie, which he’d been wanting to do since approximately seven this morning, and reminded himself to be patient.

She wasn’t going anywhere. Neither was he.

There was something wrong with the air in first period.

Honor noticed it the moment she sat down — a warmth, a kind of low hum of anticipation that didn’t match the usual Monday morning lethargy of AP English. The girls in the front row were already whispering, heads together, eyes on the door. Tara Wells had apparently dressed for a different occasion entirely, her neckline somewhere south of professional. Honor pulled her hood up and arranged her hair and decided that whatever was happening, it wasn’t her problem.

Then Mr. Shepherd walked in and she understood.

She studied him from behind the curtain of her hair with the careful, uninvested attention of someone who had learned to observe without being observed. He was — objectively, unavoidably — extremely good looking. The kind of good looking that felt almost aggressive, like it hadn’t consulted anyone before arriving. The tie and the dress shirt were doing their best but they were clearly losing. He tugged at his collar almost immediately and she thought, distantly, he hates that tie.

But it wasn’t just that. There was something else in the room, something she couldn’t account for. A tension, almost electric, like the pressure drop before a storm. She glanced around. Nobody else seemed to feel it. The kids in the front row were reacting to him the way teenagers react to attractive adults — loudly, transparently, without subtlety. But the thing Honor was feeling was different from that. It was internal. It was hers.

And then there was the smell.

Warm and rich, like caramel just off the heat, like brown sugar and something darker underneath. It was coming from somewhere in the room and it was making her slightly insane. Mr. Shepherd had a coffee on his desk and she decided that must be it, some expensive roast, something she’d never smelled before. That was all.

She was hungry. That was all.

He lectured about sixties counterculture and its influence on American literature and she half-listened and doodled in the margin of her notebook and tried to ignore the smell and the strange dizziness that kept moving through her in slow waves. Hypoglycemic, she told herself. You need to eat. You’re fine.

He moved while he talked, wandering the aisles with the ease of someone comfortable in his own body, and she tracked him peripherally and made herself very small as he came down her row. She’d gotten good at disappearing in plain sight. It usually worked.

He stopped at her desk.

She went completely still.

He tapped the desktop lightly. “Excuse me — doodle bug.” There was something almost warm in it, like he wasn’t actually making fun of her. “What’s your name?”

The class thought this was hilarious. She heard the snickering from three directions.

“That’s Honor,” someone supplied helpfully. “She doesn’t talk.”

“Honor Talbot.” A pause. His voice shifted slightly, something in it changing register. “Your last essay was extraordinary. Congratulations.”

She looked up before she could stop herself.

His eyes were grey and very direct and for one disorienting moment the classroom simply ceased to exist. The noise dropped away. The fluorescent lights, the smell of industrial cleaner, the scrape of chairs — all of it went quiet and distant, and there was just this: his face close to hers, his eyes on hers, and a feeling like standing at the edge of something very high with no particular fear of falling.

She yanked her gaze down to her hands. Her heart was hammering.

What is wrong with you?

She thought she’d seen something in his expression in that moment — something unguarded, something raw and almost desperate — but she must have imagined it. She was lightheaded. She needed food. She was making things up.

He cleared his throat and moved on, picking up the thread of his lecture, and she stared at her notebook and waited for the world to settle back into its normal shape.

When the bell rang she was first out the door.

She made it to the girls’ restroom, locked a stall, and stood there with her back against the door breathing carefully. Her head felt strange and heavy. Her stomach was doing something complicated. She felt, absurdly, like she might cry, which made no sense because nothing had happened. A teacher had complimented her essay. That was all.

She unlocked the stall and ran cold water over her wrists and pressed her wet hands against her face. The mirror was streaky and unflattering. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes too bright, and the bruise Tanner had left on her cheekbone had faded to that particularly ugly stage of yellow-green that somehow looked worse than fresh purple. She’d gotten good at not looking at herself. She wasn’t sure why she was looking now.

She dug through her backpack and found enough loose change for a granola bar from the vending machine down the hall. She ate it in four bites and told herself it was just low blood sugar. That the dizziness would pass. That the strange, unsettled, almost hopeful feeling in her chest was nothing, was hunger, was nothing.

She was fine.

Everything was fine.

She crushed the wrapper in her fist and went to class.