Chapter 1: The Partner I Never Asked For

"There has to be a mistake," Christian Ashworth says. "I don't do partner projects with strangers."

Professor Lindqvist doesn't look up from the seating chart. "You filled out the preference form yourself, Mr. Ashworth. Three weeks ago. You wrote one name."

The room goes quiet in the way a room does when something expensive is about to break. I keep my eyes on my notebook, where I have written the date twice and nothing else. Row four, the seat by the radiator, is where I have sat every Tuesday and Thursday since September, and Christian walked past it at 9:02 this morning without seeing it. Or me. That is the arrangement I have with the universe. He doesn't look, and I don't get hurt by it.

"Which name?" someone behind me asks, delighted.

"Rebecca Hale," Lindqvist says.

Every head in the room turns. I feel it on the back of my neck like a change in weather. Twenty-six people are trying to place a name they have never once heard aloud, and then they find my face and fail to place it anyway. I have never been more grateful to be forgettable.

Christian turns around slowly. He is even more unfair up close than he is across a lecture hall, and I hate that after all these years I still notice it first: the dark hair pushed back by a careless hand, the gray sweater that probably costs more than my textbooks for the semester, the ease in his shoulders that says nothing has ever landed on him hard. His eyes travel the room and stop on me. He looks at me for exactly as long as it takes to make it worse.

"Right," he says, and gives the class a smile so easy I almost believe it. "Top score on the midterm. I figured if I was going to be dragged through this seminar, I should be dragged by the best. Strategic decision. Nothing mysterious."

A few people laugh. Someone whispers, "Of course he did," and the room relaxes, because the explanation is rich and confident and fits the boy who says it. Only Lindqvist's eyebrow moves, a fraction of an inch, and I file that away.

I did get the top score. I didn't think anyone but me had noticed.

"Then you'll want to sit with her," Lindqvist says dryly. "Row four, Mr. Ashworth. Bring your things."

For a second I think he'll refuse. His jaw shifts, a muscle jumping under the skin, and something crosses his face that I can't name. It isn't annoyance. It looks more like a man stepping toward an edge he chose. Then he picks up his bag and comes up the stairs, and every step is a small, ridiculous earthquake in my chest.

He sits. The chair squeaks. He smells like cedar and rain and something warm underneath, and I am twenty years old and furious at my own lungs.

"Hi," he says, low, just for me.

"Hi."

"I'm Christian."

"I know," I say, before I can stop myself, and then hear it. "Everyone knows. You're the reason the dining hall has that ridiculous frozen yogurt machine."

He laughs, a real one, surprised out of him, and it lands somewhere under my ribs. I have imagined that sound for years. I imagined it wrong. It is younger than I thought, and shakier.

Lindqvist talks for an hour about unreliable narrators and the stories people tell to survive themselves. I take notes with a steady hand and no idea what I am writing. Christian doesn't take notes. He turns his pen over and over between his fingers, and twice I catch him looking at my page instead of the board. The second time I look back, and he doesn't glance away. That is new. In all the years I have been watching Christian Ashworth, he has always been the one who gets to look away first.

When class ends, the room empties in a rush of zippers and voices. Dom Reyes is waiting by the door with two other boys, all of them loud in the same well fed way, and I watch Christian's whole body change as he sees them. His shoulders drop into a slouch, his face goes blank and bored, and he becomes someone I have only ever seen from a distance.

"Ashworth," Dom calls. "Who's your girlfriend?"

I stop breathing. It's a joke, obviously. It's exactly the kind of joke nobody expects an answer to.

Christian doesn't turn around. "Lindqvist's idea of punishment," he says. "Give me ten minutes."

Dom laughs. The other boys laugh. I shove my notebook into my bag and tell myself that this is the sound of the world being exactly what I expected. I have been the girl in the back row for so long that a sentence like that should just slide off me. It doesn't. It sticks, and I carry it toward the stairs.

"Rebecca."

He has followed me into the stairwell. The door swings shut behind him and cuts off Dom's voice, and suddenly we are alone in a concrete shaft that echoes every breath. Christian stands two steps above me, one hand on the rail, as if he is not sure whether he is allowed to come closer.

"That was a rotten thing to say," he tells me. "In there. I'm sorry."

"You said it to be funny."

"I said it because it was easier." He rubs his jaw. "That's worse, isn't it?"

"A little."

He nods slowly, taking the hit. I don't know what to do with a Christian who takes hits. "Can I ask you something strange?"

"You already made me your partner without asking me. I think we're past strange."

That gets half a smile out of him, and it disappears just as fast. His gaze moves over my face, searching for something, the way you look through a drawer for a key you know you own.

"Do we know each other?"

The stairwell hums. Somewhere below us, a door bangs. I could tell him. I could say a rainy night six years ago, a catered gala, a coat around my shoulders that smelled exactly like this. I could say I have kept the memory in a place I don't visit because it costs too much to look at. But he asked it so carefully, so hopefully, and I have spent my whole life learning what happens to girls who hand boys like him their most precious thing before they have earned it.

"No," I say. "We've never met."

Something flickers behind his eyes, too fast to name. Then he nods, once, as if I have confirmed a suspicion instead of refuting one.

"Funny," he says quietly. "I'd remember you."

He goes back up the stairs and through the door, and the noise of the hallway swallows him. I stand there gripping my strap, pulse ticking in my throat, and tell myself to breathe like a person who has just gotten away with something.

My phone buzzes against my hip.

Unknown number.

The top score excuse was a lie. So was "we've never met." I'll tell you why, but not here. Library, third floor, tonight. Come alone, and tell no one.

I read it three times, and by the third my hands are shaking. Because I never gave Christian Ashworth my number.