The Bet

Lena -

Sophie's voice drops half an octave and goes gravelly and clipped.

Suddenly, she's not Sophie anymore. She's Professor Donnelly, explaining thermodynamics like he's personally offended by the existence of entropy.

"The second law," she intones, adjusting an imaginary pair of glasses, "states that some of you did not do the reading."

Priya shrieks and throws a throw pillow at her head.

Ava is cross-legged on her bed, chemistry notes spread around her like a crime scene. She doesn't even look up, but I catch the corner of her mouth twitching, the smallest crack in her studious armor.

"Do the one where he loses his laser pointer," Priya begs. "Do it. Do it. Do it."

Sophie stands on the bed, wobbling slightly, wine sloshing dangerously close to the rim of her plastic cup. Then she launches into an impression so specific and so painfully accurate that I can't breathe.

My stomach hurts from laughing.

Ava's laughing too now, silent, her shoulders shaking. That's how I know something is actually funny. Ava doesn't waste a full laugh on ordinary dorm-room jokes, and when she does, it feels like winning a small, private prize.

This is the part of my life I don't talk about with Julian.

This part is still mine.

The room smells like cheap moscato and the vanilla candle Priya isn't supposed to have because it violates fire code. Someone has strung fairy lights crookedly around the window, and Sophie's hair is falling out of its bun in a way that makes her look like she just rolled out of somewhere good.

She is, hands down, the best friend I've ever had.

She remembers that I take my coffee with oat milk and exactly one pump of vanilla. No more. She remembers the small things, the things that don't matter to anyone except the person who's paying attention.

Last month, she texted me at two in the morning just to ask if I was okay because my last Snap looked "off."

She was right.

I was off.

I just couldn't tell her why.

I love these girls. I love this room. I love this messy, ordinary version of college life, the kind that feels indestructible right up until it isn't.

And some small, annoying part of my brain keeps whispering that I should hold onto it. Memorize it.

Because nothing this soft ever lasts.

"Okay, okay," Priya says, flopping back onto Sophie's bed. "Moving on from Donnelly. We need to discuss the injustice that is a cappella auditions."

"Here we go," Ava mutters.

"Brooke Sinclair, who cannot hold a note in a bucket, made callbacks." Priya puts a hand dramatically against her chest. "Callbacks. Meanwhile, I did the run in 'Chandelier' flawlessly and got a we'll be in touch."

"You will not be in touch," Ava says, still staring at her notes.

"I will not be in touch," Priya agrees mournfully, reaching for the wine bottle like it owes her an apology.

Sophie drops onto her mattress, cross-legged now, already reaching for her phone.

"Okay, but can we please talk about something more important than Priya's tragic vocal legacy?"

"Rude."

"The faculty page," Sophie says.

My entire body goes still before my brain catches up.

She's pulled up Pembroke's directory, the university's stiff blue background filling her screen. Rows of faculty headshots sit inside little gray boxes, each one a tiny, humorless passport photo.

She's scrolling quickly.

Too quickly.

I sit very still on the edge of Ava's bed and watch the phone like I already know I'm not going to like what comes next.

For half a second, I think about Sophie's sister.

I always do when Sophie gets like this.

Her sister left school three years ago, during sophomore year. No warning. No goodbye tour. Just gone.

I remember Sophie coming back from winter break with red eyes and a hard set to her jaw. She'd helped her mom load the last of her sister's boxes into a car outside our old dorm and refused to say much beyond, "She's not coming back."

The reason came up once.

Something about it not being the right fit.

She'd said it in a tone that made it very clear there would be no follow-up questions, a tone I hadn't heard from her before or since.

I wonder, not for the first time, if that's why Sophie watches professors the way other people watch the weather.

Waiting for something.

Bracing for a storm the rest of us can't see coming.

"Okay, but objectively..."

Sophie stops scrolling.

Julian's photo fills the screen.

He looks different in the headshot. His tie is a little too neat, his jaw set in that professional half-smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes.

But it's still him.

Still the mouth that was on mine on a balcony over black water three weeks ago.

Still the hands I know now grip a coffee mug the same way they gripped my hip.

"I mean," Priya says, leaning over Sophie's shoulder, "if we're being objective, and we are legally required to be objective, that man is unfairly attractive for someone who assigns three hundred pages of reading a week."

"He's fine," Ava says, glancing up for half a second before returning to her notes.

For Ava, that's basically a love letter.

My face is doing something.

I can feel it.

Heat crawls up my neck, and I grab my wine and take a drink like it's medicine.

"Lena."

Sophie's eyes snap toward me.

Sharp.

Delighted.

"You're in his seminar, right? Early British Lit?"

"Yeah."

My voice sounds normal.

Miraculously normal.

"He's..." I shrug. "I don't know. Fine. Whatever."

"Whatever," Sophie repeats, dragging the word out until it loses all meaning.

She looks at Priya.

Priya looks back, delighted, the two of them communicating in the silent shorthand of girls who have shared a room for two years.

"She says whatever about the hottest man on this campus."

"He's not the hottest man on campus."

The words come out way too fast.

Priya gasps.

"Oh my God. She has a ranking."

"I don't have a ranking."

"Okay, but what if someone actually tried?" Sophie asks.

The room shifts.

Only slightly.

She's not looking at her phone anymore.

She's looking at me.

Her smile is still easy, still Sophie, but there's something more focused underneath it, something that makes me feel like a specimen under glass.

"Like, hypothetically," she continues. "What if someone made a move on Professor Ashford?"

"That's insane."

"Is it?" Priya is already leaning forward, eyes bright with the joy of creating drama that costs her nothing. "It's not like it's illegal. He's not her thesis advisor."

"It's a terrible idea."

My voice comes out sharper than the joke deserves.

Sophie's eyes flicker.

She caught it.

Of course she did.

"Wow. Okay." She raises both hands, laughing. "Didn't realize we had strong feelings about Professor Ashford's honor."

"I don't."

I take another drink.

"I just think it's a stupid game."

"Sure," Sophie says, the word landing softer than I expect, which somehow makes it worse.

The conversation moves on.

Priya returns to her audition drama. Ava tells a story about her lab partner nearly putting a Bunsen burner on the wrong beaker. I laugh when I'm supposed to. I drink my wine.

Eventually, my pulse settles.

Later, Priya disappears into the bathroom and Ava puts in her headphones, retreating into her own small world of enzymes and equations.

Sophie scoots closer to me on the bed, pulling her knees up.

Her voice drops.

Casual.

Too casual.

"You've been weird since the cruise."

I laugh.

It sounds normal.

"Something happen down there?"

"Nothing happened."

I give her a shrug.

"I got sunburned, read like four books, and came back more tired than when I left."

She watches me.

For a second too long.

Long enough that I start wondering if I'm giving something away without realizing it, some tell I don't even know I have.

Then her expression changes.

Not much.

Just enough.

"Weird," she says lightly. "You just seem different."

"I'm the same."

"Sure."

She smiles.

It's the same warm Sophie smile I've seen a hundred times, the one that used to make everything feel simpler.

Except for that tiny moment when it doesn't quite reach her eyes.

Somewhere in the middle of Priya's audition postmortem, Priya looks up from her phone.

"Oh, gross."

"What?"

She turns the screen toward us.

There's an article about a professor at some state school out west. Tenured professor. Graduate student. Quiet settlement. Six figures. Nondisclosure agreement.

The story is barely interesting.

The kind of headline that flashes across your screen and disappears from your brain ten seconds later.

Except Sophie's whole body goes rigid.

Her hand tightens around her cup until her knuckles turn white.

Her face goes blank.

Completely blank.

For one long second, there's nothing there, like someone reached in and switched her off.

Then Priya says something, Sophie laughs, and it's gone, that easily, that quickly, as if I'd blinked and missed the entire thing.

I almost convince myself I imagined it.

Almost.

But something settles in my chest anyway.

A quiet confirmation of something I'd already started wondering about when she was scrolling through the faculty page, a suspicion I don't have words for yet.

I don't ask.

Not now.

The wine is warm in my stomach. Priya is doing her Brooke Sinclair impression. The fairy lights blink in their crooked rhythm against the window.

It's a perfect, ordinary night with the people I love most.

Sophie -

An hour later, the quad is empty.

Streetlights do their halfhearted best against the dark. One of them flickers near the science building, just like it has for the past two years because apparently nobody on this campus fixes anything unless there's a donor's name attached to it.

Nate's already there when I reach him, a shadow leaning against the lamppost like he's been carved out of the cold itself.

His hands are buried in his jacket pockets, his breath fogging faintly in the cold.

"You're late."

"I was being a good friend."

I fold my arms.

"It's exhausting."

He almost smiles.

Almost.

Nate Ferro doesn't do much beyond almost, and I've learned not to expect more from him.

"She's in?"

"She doesn't know she's in anything."

I glance toward the dorms.

One window three floors up is still glowing gold behind the blinds.

"But yeah. She's in his class. And she's got a whole reaction to his name that she thinks she's hiding."

"That's not proof."

"It's a start."

My voice sounds flatter than I intend, worn thin by an evening of performing normalcy.

"You get me proof he's done this before, actual proof, the kind that doesn't disappear into some dean's desk drawer, and I'll get you whatever you need out of her."

"And if it costs her something?"

I look at him.

For a moment, I think about what it felt like to believe the university would protect the person who needed protecting instead of the name printed on the building.

"Then it costs her something."

He nods once.

We've settled it.

We shake on it, quick and businesslike. His hand is cold and dry against mine.

There's nothing romantic about it.

Nothing dramatic.

Just two people agreeing on terms, the way you'd finalize a contract neither of you particularly wanted to sign.

He heads toward the faculty lot.

I walk back alone, my hands shoved into my pockets, breath clouding in front of me.

When I pass beneath Lena's window, I stop.

I look up at the gold light glowing behind her blinds.

I think about her laugh tonight.

Real and easy.

Her whole face lit up while she did the bit about Donnelly's laser pointer with me.

I think about the two a.m. texts.

The oat milk.

The way she cried on my shoulder freshman year over a boy who didn't deserve her tears, and how I'd promised her, more than once, that she deserved better than that.

I'd meant every word of comfort I'd ever given her.

That was the part that would make this so easy.