Chapter 8

"It's what I'm wearing."

"It's February."

"I have a coat."

"You have a jacket," Brenda said. "I've seen it. It's a jacket. There's a difference and the difference is frostbite."

"I'll be indoors most of the day."

"There is outdoors between the indoors," she said, and pulled her own scarf off the end of the bed and threw it at me. It was the thick gray one she had been sleeping on all week, and it landed across my bag in a heap.

"Take it. Take it or I'll spend all morning worrying, and if I worry I'll text you, and if I text you, you'll answer four hours later and I'll worry more."

"Chloe," I said, mostly to get out from under it, "did you actually send your mother my name, or were you being nice to me at dinner?"

Chloe dropped back against her headboard with her hands over her face and groaned. "I sent it at eleven. She wrote back in four minutes, which for her is basically a sprint. She's going to have somebody in the office email you the details and the files this morning."

"What files?"

"Breakdowns. Schedules. Something she calls the deck. You'll figure it out — you're the one who's good at this."

"Tell her not to oversell me. Oversold is how you get found out."

"You say that like it's a philosophy," Rachel said from her pillow.

"It's a policy," I said, and pulled my hair back, and went to shower.

I had no class until one, so I put the morning into the library, where I intended to walk in already knowing things about casting breakdowns and call sheets and what a CSA membership was, so that when Diane looked at me she would see someone she could use rather than someone who needed a favor.

On the way I stopped at the dining hall and spent a good five minutes at the counter — three eggs, a bagel with too much cream cheese, two hash browns, a stack of pancakes, a side of bacon, a banana, and the largest coffee they would sell me. The tray was heavy in a way that felt like an accomplishment.

I set it down, squared the edges of everything, and photographed it before I touched a single item, and then sent it to him.

There was a pause of about ten seconds.

you eat more than a pig.

I took a bite of the bagel and chewed it slowly and reminded myself that this man was a job, a hostile rate of return, a line item on a spreadsheet in a document called S PLAN. Then I typed, with my face perfectly flat: i know you can afford to feed me, right?

depends.

depends on what?

call me master and I'll feed you.

I bit down on my back teeth and typed four different things and deleted all four, because every one of them would have cost me ten thousand dollars a month. no thanks, I sent. but you can agree to be my boyfriend first, and we can talk about meals after that.

For a man who took a full minute to answer anything, he answered that in four seconds.

keep dreaming.

keep playing your basketball. don't get hurt.

I finished the tray and the bacon had gone cold, which was a fair summary of the morning. Pig. Then master. Not one line in it worth keeping. A sharp tongue, nothing given away, and a joke aimed in exactly one direction — the man was going to be work. I stacked the plate, fitted the lid back on the coffee, and reached down for my bag.

The phone buzzed in my hand before I got the strap over my shoulder — the flat notification tone I had set for work orders. New order. Three hundred dollars already loaded onto the account, which meant somebody who had bought the top tier without reading what came in it. Men who pay before they talk are men who want to be agreed with.

hi, I typed. when would you like to play?

now, came back. your ratings are good. don't make me change that.

give me five minutes, I told him.

I looked at the library steps a hundred feet away and the quiet table on the third floor I had already claimed in my head, and I set the plan down. The library would still be there this afternoon. I found the corner of the student center where the vending machines made enough noise to cover a human voice, put my headset on, and dropped the room code into the community channel.

The roster filled slowly — a handful of handles I recognized, a few I didn't, the kind of crowd that had nowhere better to be at this hour. Still two seats short of a full table.

I opened with the register I had spent a month refining — low, unhurried, faintly amused, the voice of a woman who has never once been surprised by anything. "Good morning. Your Storyteller is here. We're waiting on two more — shouldn't be long."

He laughed before I finished the sentence, a real laugh, loose and bright and a little theatrical, the laugh of a man who had expected something else entirely. "That's a good voice. I'm Felix. Call me Felix."

"I'll call you whatever you'd like, Felix." I put the smile into it, because they can always hear the smile, and by the small pause on his end I could tell it had landed exactly where I aimed it.

We talked while the room filled — nothing consequential, the easy back-and-forth I had learned to keep going with one hand while the other watched the door.

He was quick, funnier than most, and he laughed at his own jokes half a beat before the punchline, which should have been annoying and somehow wasn't. Two minutes in, he said, "Hang on. I want to bring someone in. He'll like you."

"There's one seat left," I said. "It's his if he wants it."

A pause. Then: "He's going to pretend he doesn't want it."

I had no answer for that, so I didn't give one.

The roster refreshed. The last slot filled, and beside Felix's name a new one appeared near the bottom of the list — no avatar, no display name beyond a single initial, uppercase, sitting in the roster like a period at the end of a sentence that hadn't been written yet.

Felix said, "There he is."