I stop, my jaw open. He grins, clearly amused and more than a little pleased with himself. “So, you’re a creep?”
He holds a hand to his chest like I’ve wounded him. “Not a creep, just clever! And operating under Dean McKinnon’s explicit orders to make first contact with you today.” Ocean eyes set in a tanned face take me in, and a knowing smile sends a wave of warmth to my ears. “Timed it perfectly too. You walked out five minutes after I arrived.”
“Being clever and being creepy are not mutually exclusive.”
“Oh, I agree.” He scratches at his chin. “There’s probably a Venn Diagram or a graph of direct proportionality in there somewhere—”
I groan. “This is, by definition, using your intelligence for evil.”
Nick tilts his head. “Correct. On two levels, in fact.” He raises a finger. “Using one’s cleverness to creep and”—a second finger—“using one’s cleverness to diagram the cleverness-to-creepiness relationship.”
I open my mouth, close it, turn, and walk away. He follows.
We walk in silence for a few moments, letting the night flow around and between us. I glance back once. Nick’s easy stroll reminds me of a dancer: long strides, straight posture. When my eyes reach his face, there’s a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. I whip around.
After a minute, he speaks up again, his voice curious behind me. “So, did you jump the cliff? The one at the Quarry?”
“No.”
“Well,” he muses, “aside from landing in the dean’s office on your first day of school—a record, I’m guessing, so well done—it’s not the worst thing to do. Cliff’s not that high, and it’s kinda fun.”
I turn back to face him, surprised in spite of myself. “You’ve done it?”
He chuckles. “I have.”
“But aren’t you the dean’s golden boy?”
He lifts a shoulder. “I’m great on paper.” A few minutes later, we arrive at an intersection where walking paths branch out all around us in a circle like spokes on a wheel. He steps beside me and we walk together down the path on our right toward Old East. Crickets and cicada song drone in the distance.
I wonder if Alice is back in our room. We’ve fought before, plenty of times, but nothing like this. Nothing that left me feeling this cold. I imagine Alice’s eyes in my mind, angry and scornful. The last person who’d yelled at me like that had been my mom. How am I so good at hurting the people I love? Hurting them so badly that they scream and cry in my face?
“So, Dean McKinnon said you enrolled with a friend?”
This boy is intuitive. Unnervingly so. “Alice. She’s always wanted to come here.”
He eyes me. “And you didn’t?” I blink, unsure how to respond, and he takes my silence as an answer. “Then why did you come?”
“I’m a smarty-pants.”
His scan of my face is quick, appraising. “Obviously,” he murmurs, “but that’s how you got here, not why. Nobody comes to EC just for the classes.”
I snort. “Tell that to Alice. She’ll be crushed.”
“Not answering the question. I see.” His attentive eyes pass over me like he’s found my insides and wants to idly peruse them. No rush. Don’t mind me. Just digging out your guts.
“Dean McKinnon asked me to talk to you about your student activity requirement since some campus groups begin recruiting members the first week of school. See any you like?” I’d completely forgotten about that part of the program. Nick spots the look on my face and hides a smirk behind his palm. “Do you even know what a student group is?”
“I can guess,” I growl. “Clubs. Professional degree orgs for pre-med kids or pre-law kids. I dunno… fraternities and sororities?”
“Mostly right,” he says, “except EC kids can’t join frats or sororities. Minors in environments notorious for partying and drinking? That’s a no-go. What parent would send their precious underage baby to UNC if they thought we were studying organic chem during the day and doing keg stands at night?”
“Well, which one did you join? So I know which one to avoid.”
“A second sidestepped question. Cricket Club.”
“Cricket. Club. In basketball and football country?”
He shrugs. “I knew it would piss my dad off.”
Something twists in my heart, tight and sharp. “Oh?”
“My dad’s an alum. A psychology professor here.”
“And he wants you to do something other than cricket?”
“Yep.” Nick tips his head backward and watches the tree limbs as we pass under them. “Follow in his footsteps.”
“But you’re not going to do that something else?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
He drops his gaze to mine. “Because I don’t do things just because my father wants me to.”
Suddenly, irrationally, the twist in my chest transforms into something more aggressive. “He just wants a connection.”
Nick scoffs. “I’m sure he does, but I don’t care.”
I stop on the pathway and turn to him. “You should care.”
Nick stops walking. Uses my earlier response against me. “Oh?”
“Yes,” I challenge.
We lock eyes, brown to blue, and something unexpected passes between us. A tug of friendship, a dropper full of humor.
“You’re pushy,” he observes, and smiles.
I don’t know what to say to that, so I start walking again.
Old East appears ahead of us, beige-yellow brick and unremarkable identical windows running in rows down its sides. You’d never guess it had been standing for almost two hundred and thirty years—the oldest state university building in the country.
I don’t know why it bugs me that Nick doesn’t want to connect with his father. We’ve only just met, we barely know each other, and he doesn’t owe me any details about his life. It shouldn’t irritate me.
But it does.
Contempt and jealousy intertwine and slice through my stomach like jagged claws. I want to aim them at this Nick so that he can feel what I think of his wasted luxury: a parent who’s still alive for reconciliation. I turn to him, the words on my tongue, when I catch a flash of unearthly light in the distance, just over his shoulder.
Selwyn’s magic had been smoke and swirling silver. These flames, pulsing in the sky above the trees, burn a rotting neon green.
“Oh my God…,” I whisper, my heart suddenly racing.
“What?” Nick asks.
I’m running past him before any other thoughts fully form. I hear him yelling behind me, asking me what’s wrong, but I don’t care. I can’t care.
This time of day on a college campus makes a straight path impossible. Strolling students, sitting couples, and a Frisbee game send me zigzagging. Last night I ran away from magic. Tonight, I have to run toward it. For my mom, for my dad, for me. I have to know the truth. I have to know if not getting a chance to talk to her again was my fault, or if—
I round a hedge, and the world drops out from underneath me.
Crouched between two science buildings is something I’d never imagined could exist.