Chapter 5

Evelyn's POV:

The threat was still on my screen when I read it the second time, and it did not improve.

Block you.

Two words. No punctuation, no room for interpretation. I stood in the hallway outside my media theory classroom with my back against the wall and my books pressed to my chest and did the math I had already done before, the version that ended badly.

No contact meant no progress. No progress meant no bonus. No bonus meant another year of my mother saying it's fine, it's nothing, don't come home early, and meaning none of it.

I had opened with something I thought was clever. Light. The kind of line you throw out when you want someone to reach back for you — I won't bother you anymore, clearly you have better things to do. A test.

What I wanted was a don't. What I got was a block threat delivered at three in the morning his time, which meant he had been awake long enough to compose it and decide it was the right response.

So I did what I do.

I typed fast, before I could second-guess the angle. I told him his grades were his own and nobody had bought them for him. I told him a man who had built something real at twenty-four in a city where his last name carried no weight had earned the right to be as difficult as he wanted. I meant all of it, more or less. Then I ran out of material and I told him he was handsome.

That part was pure invention, and I knew it while I was typing it. I had never seen his face. Camilla hadn't either. Eleven weeks of his page and what I had was a co-authored paper on regional logistics, a photograph of a whiteboard covered in supply chain diagrams, a short comment under a professor's post, and nothing else.

No face, no casual shot, nothing personal. His account was a professional surface and he maintained it like one.

But compliments don't expire, and flattery doesn't require evidence, and I needed him to stay on the line.

He called me ugly.

One word, three in the morning, no follow-up. And then nothing, which was its own kind of answer.

I had opened Camilla's page and looked at the photos in the folder she had labeled BRAND — the professional shots, the kind that cost more per hour than I made in a week, hair that had never once been rained on, a jaw that could cut glass.

He's blind, I told myself, or he's petty, and either one I can work with. The important thing was that he hadn't blocked me. The important thing was that the chat was still open.

I was still deciding between a rude cat sticker and an unimpressed frog when someone stepped into the doorway ahead of me and I had to stop walking.

He was leaning against the frame with one elbow propped up, taking up space with the ease of someone who had never had to think about whether he was in the way. Dark hair, a practiced smile, a jacket that cost more than my share of the utilities. He straightened when I looked at him.

"Hey. Evelyn, right?"

"Eve." I locked the phone. "Can I help you?"

"Marcus." He said it the way people say names they expect to land. "You're in the Tuesday media theory section. I've seen you around."

"Okay."

"This is going to sound forward." He laughed a little — the kind of laugh that was supposed to be disarming. "Can I get your number? Just to talk. No pressure."

I looked at him for a moment. Not at him, exactly. At the situation. At the version of the next three months he had already sketched out in his head: coffee first, then dinner, then my schedule slowly rearranging itself around his. I had seen it before. I had nothing against him personally.

"No," I said. "But thank you."

"Can I ask why?"

"Because I'm not interested." I moved around him and kept walking.

Behind me, two girls at the water fountain were not being quiet about it. That's Marcus. His family owns the new block on Lafayette. She just said no. Some people seriously don't know what they're passing up.

Two boys came the other way, neither of them the kind anyone turned a head for.

"She said no to Marcus." "She didn't." "She did. I watched her." "Marcus. With the face. And the car." "And she walked around him like he was furniture."

A pause, the kind that happens when a man is quietly recalculating his own odds in front of you. "So what's our move, then?" "Our move is we go to class."

I kept walking. I had spent a year learning exactly what I was short of, and it was not male attention. I had a rule about money that I had made for myself and kept: I could take it for work I had done well. I was not going to take it for sitting across a table laughing at things that were not funny.

My seminar ran until three-thirty. I came down the stairs and found a spot at the bottom with my back against the tile and my books on my knees, waiting for the others. Rachel appeared first with her tote bag on her shoulder, then Brenda, then Chloe, still holding her phone out in front of her like she was navigating by it.

I opened Facebook while I waited.