I sank into my chair and shrugged. It was supposed to be a good year. The noises from downstairs announced a party. Taylor’s silence was the reminder that there was nothing to be done here. We’d failed Stats like always. If something didn’t change, we were both totally screwed.
Yet I didn’t know how to change anything anymore. I thought I’d done a good job, dammit. I thought I’d studied hard enough and understood the assignment, but I’d done such a poor job that Professor Colby didn’t even bother pointing out all that was wrong with it in the notes.
I knew I wasn’t very smart, but I hadn’t realized just how stupid I was until this sobering moment.
CHAPTER TWO
bennet
The round tablewas placed in the living room before I got up. Rowan didn’t leave things to chance or dice, so he made sure everything was ready for tonight. Fridays at the Thinkers’ House were reserved for Dungeons & Dragons, a well-known fact of a long-running tradition. An honorary game was played as part of the induction process since the 1990s.
We kept the table folded behind a bookcase in the corner of the living room, setting it up once a week and putting it back afterward. It was ritualistic enough that future anthropologists would debate how the round table with wobbly legs fit into our religion. Just wait for them to discover that I was a level seven Paladin.
Friday mornings at the Thinkers’ House usually felt like a warm-up round. The kitchen hummed with a soft chorus of typing from two of the guys who were already arguing about probability in some obscure coding language. Someone had left a mug with acartoon wizard by the sink. Someone else had forgotten their calculator on the counter again. The place never felt messy. It felt lived-in and quietly proud of it.
I grabbed my backpack from my room and felt the familiar sense of order settle into place. My things stayed exactly where I left them. My schedule never surprised me. My goals lined up in neat columns in my mind, and each column eventually pointed toward the dream of a future office at Elmwood, where I would lecture about things most people avoided at parties. The image calmed me more than it probably should.
The campus waited outside in full late-October sunlight. The Thinkers’ House sat at the top of a gentle slope, so every morning came with a view of the green stretching toward the main quad. As I followed the path down, the breeze carried the smell of cut grass and something sweet from the dining hall. Students drifted across the lawn with lazy confidence, while the trees overhead traded their green for warm shades of copper.
Near the edge of the field, the same sight greeted me. The shirtless football guy stood in the middle of the grass like a statue someone forgot to put away after a mythology exhibit. His golden retriever sprinted back and forth while he tossed a bright blue rubber bone. Two girls hovered near him, laughing at something he said. He flexed without doing anything on purpose, which felt unfair.
My eyes lingered in spite of my better judgment.His shoulders were wide and carved in clean lines, and the morning light made it hard to ignore the motion of his back as he reached for the dog. My pulse ticked upward in a way I wished it wouldn’t. I felt my palms warm inside my sleeves, and for a second, I hated that my body betrayed me with this kind of honest reaction.
I pulled my attention away and tried to blame him instead. He was always outside with no shirt, even when the rest of us layered up against the cold. He wore sweatpants that hung low on his hips like he was starring in his own commercial for being extremely pleased with himself. He didn’t need to put on a show. The dog already adored him. The girls obviously liked him. The universe had clearly organized itself in his favor. At birth, his stat sheet got all the extra points for constitution, strength, charm, and probably luck. I doubted the fullness of his intelligence bar, if I were being honest.
I glanced down at my own narrow frame, hidden under a sweater that never fit quite right, and let the comparison end before it turned into something bleak. Some people won the genetic lottery. Some people got wobbly round tables and an academic to-do list that could topple a horse.
I kept walking and nudged the thought aside. I had a lecture to get to, something advanced enough that even the overachievers avoided it. The morning light stretched over the campus in long, warm strokes, and the air tasted sharp and clean. This was the part of the day I liked best. The path opened toward the brickbuildings of the science wing, and each step felt like progress toward the future I wanted, even if the present insisted on throwing shirtless distractions in my way.
I wish I could say he didn’t stay on my mind for the rest of the morning. Some guys just had it, whatever it was. Nameless, lacking all details in my mind, he still haunted me while I furiously typed notes in the front row of the lecture hall, trying to focus on Professor Colby’s passionate recitation.
I pushed the hot jock aside for the better part of the next ninety minutes, although a sliver of annoyance, or envy as people might call it, sat wrong in the pit of my stomach.
I shut my laptop after Professor Colby finished the lecture five minutes early. “Oh, Bennet, would you mind staying behind for a moment?” he asked. “I need a word.”
“Absolutely,” I said, sitting back while the lecture hall emptied.
Professor Colby said he’d be back right away after his assistant took him away. He was a popular faculty member at Elmwood with fingers in many pies. Truly, having been noticed by him last year had helped define the course of my studies.
He had taken me as an unofficial mentee in my first semester after the midterms. Staying behind for casual progress reports was common for me. Professor Colby had a personal journal on promising students, keeping up with their schedules, their grades, theirvolunteering hours, and their shifting interests. Few professors were so dedicated to the entirety of teaching and college life. Fewer still did that while also maintaining an advisory role on numerous NASA projects.
And that was the key.
Looking at Professor Colby, the part I wanted to take looked sharper than ever. He was everything I wanted to become, and he believed that I could. So I had to put up with not-so-academic assignments that Professor Colby believed were crucial for personal and professional growth.
It would be trite to say he was the father I had never had, but the phrase did come up in my mind from time to time. Well, minus the first sip of beer or teaching me how to operate a power tool. I was not interested, thank you very much.
When Professor Colby returned to the lecture hall, he waved me over to his office. I followed with my backpack hanging from one shoulder, then settled across from him at his cluttered desk. A model of the Apollo XIII spacecraft proudly sat on the edge of the desk in the only neat and clean spot I could notice. The rest was filled with countless papers, color-coded binders, sticky notes, a tablet with a tremendously busy and colorful calendar open on the screen, and pens and pencils in such a number that I feared the university’s storehouse was depleted for the year.
Professor Colby transferred three books from his desk chair, and I could just imagine him this morning, standing by the window, reading the pages before thefirst lecture, using the chair as extra storage. He sank into it now and seemed too large. I knew he had an athletic background. He would have been an astronaut had it not been for a sports injury that derailed his career. A curse for him but a blessing for me, because I never would have had a devoted mentor had he gone off to space.
“Weekend plans, Bennet?” he asked, searching through the papers on his desk. There were assignments there, all corrected in red ink. Scribbled comments filled the margins.
“The usual,” I said.
Professor Colby chuckled. “Dungeons & Dragons, then,” he said fondly. A former Thinker, he had been part of the Friday tradition for years before passing on the torch. “Some things never change.”
“Why mess with perfection?” I asked.