CHAPTER 7

                                                                  MASKS & RIVALRIES                                                              

                                                                                 ✦

     The campus festival arrived in early October with the suddenness of a season change — one day the college was a place of lectures and corridors, the next it was draped in lights. String bulbs ran between the stone towers of the old quadrangle. Food stalls appeared overnight in the courtyard like they had been growing under the flagstones all year. The music was too loud and the laughter was performative in the way of groups that are still establishing themselves, and the whole event had the slightly desperate energy of people who are trying to feel something specific and are not yet sure if it's working.

Maya had found the center of it before most people had found the entrance.

     She was dressed in something that caught and redirected light — a silver wrap that moved when she moved, never quite settling. She stood at the center of the main courtyard with her back half-turned to the crowd and her chin slightly elevated, which was not arrogance exactly but the posture of someone who has calculated precisely how much attention their positioning will attract. She had done this calculation. It was accurate.

     "Bets," she said, to no one and therefore to everyone. Her voice carried with the easy authority of someone who has never needed to raise it to be heard. "Dares. The interesting kind."

     The crowd organized itself around her in the way crowds always organize themselves around people who speak with absolute confidence about what the next five minutes should look like. Students from three or four different friend groups found themselves forming a loose ring without having decided to. Maya looked around the ring with the expression of someone taking inventory.

     Kai stood at the outer edge. He had come to the festival because staying in his room had started to feel like a choice he was making consciously rather than falling into, and he didn't want to be making it consciously yet. He had his hands in his jacket pockets and his collar up and he was watching the courtyard with the detachment of an anthropologist at a field site.

     Jia was three people to his left, which he was aware of in the way he was always aware of her position in a room — peripherally, against his will, with the irritating precision of a compass needle that's decided north is somewhere it didn't used to be. She was watching Maya with a different expression than the rest of the crowd: not drawn in, not performing interest, but alert in the way of someone who knows a game is being played and is running the possible moves ahead of time.

     Maya's eyes found Kai across the ring. He didn't know what she saw in him. She smiled as though she did.

                                                                                  * * *

     "Let's raise the stakes," she said. The ring tightened slightly, instinctively. "Simple rule. You say the one thing you never say out loud. One word, one name, whatever it is you keep farthest from the surface. You win. You won't. But the invitation stands."

Silence moved through the ring. People looked at their shoes, or at each other, the way people do when something has suddenly required more of them than they signed up for.

     "Say her name," Maya said. She was looking directly at Kai. She had been looking directly at Kai since framing the rule. "Summer. Say it here, in front of everyone, and I'll concede anything you want for the rest of the year."

The world tilted.

     It was not the name itself — he said the name alone, in his room, in the dark, with the practiced intimacy of prayer. It was the use of it. The way Maya had taken something private and structural — the central load-bearing beam of his architecture — and made it a performance piece. A party game. A dare on a lit-up autumn night with strangers in a ring watching to see if he'd flinch.

     His chest tightened. The edges of the courtyard went soft. The string lights blurred into the particular smear of vision that preceded bad episodes, and he was aware of his heartbeat in the wrong way — aware of it the way you become aware of an organ when it starts doing something unscheduled.

He turned away. He turned and moved through the outer ring of the crowd, not running, not urgently, just moving with the steady controlled pace of someone putting managed distance between themselves and a thing they cannot afford to encounter right now.

     Behind him, laughter. Some of it directed at him; some not. He didn't distinguish.

                                                                                 * * *

     He found a space between the east wing and the stone boundary wall — a gap of about three feet, unlit, where someone had stacked plastic chairs and forgotten them. He put his back to the wall and controlled his breathing and counted, the way he had taught himself to count, until the edges of his vision returned to their proper sharpness.

He became aware, after several minutes, that he was not alone in the gap.

     Jia was sitting on the top chair of the abandoned stack, knees pulled up slightly, watching him with an expression from which the smirk had been completely removed. Not replaced by anything overt. Just — absent. She was looking at him the way someone looks at something they recognize from a context they don't want to acknowledge.

     She didn't speak. She didn't ask if he was alright. She sat with him in the gap between the wall and the building and the festival noise continued behind them and she simply was there, which was a different thing from all the other things she usually was.

Later — he did not know how much later — he stood in his room and said Summer's name quietly into the air. Not for Maya, not for any crowd. Just for himself. Just because saying it in the dark was the one thing he could do that felt real.

The silence answered with its usual faithfulness.

                                                                                       ✦