Chapter 30 The Fight (Brynn POV)
Thursday night I wrote six hundred words of the comparative essay, ate the sandwich Jaxon had brought, and fell asleep at my desk sometime around eleven with my cheek on my notebook for the second time in two days, which was becoming a pattern I did not love.
Friday I handed in the comparative essay four minutes before the portal closed, having finished the last paragraph at breakfast on my phone with one hand while eating toast with the other. Harper watched this without comment, which was its own form of support.
The weekend passed in the particular blur of someone trying to claw back ground Saturday at the library, Sunday with Vera's reading list and the Hargrove essay staring at me from a blank document, a cursor blinking with the energy of something deeply unbothered by my problems.
By Monday I had four hundred words of the supplementary essay, a headache that had been living behind my left eye since Thursday, and the distinct sensation of someone who has been treading water long enough that the treading has started to feel like the normal state of things.
The Alpha meeting was Tuesday. The essay was Tuesday. Tuesday was tomorrow.
I was fine. Everything was fine.
It started in the corridor outside the library Monday afternoon.
Not dramatically there was no inciting incident, no single thing that broke it open. It was just that I'd been carrying too much for too long and Jaxon happened to be there when the weight finally shifted, which was not fair to him and which I understood was not fair to him even while it was happening.
He'd found me coming out of a study session, and he fell into step beside me the way he always did easy, unhurried, like there was nowhere else he was supposed to be. We'd been walking for about thirty seconds when he said, "How's the essay going?"
"Fine," I said.
"You've got four hundred words."
I stopped walking. "How do you know how many words I have?"
"Harper mentioned it."
"Harper mentioned it," I repeated.
"She's worried about you." He said it evenly. "We both are."
"I don't need you comparing notes about me."
"We weren't comparing notes, we were"
"What, checking in? About me? Without me?" I started walking again, faster. "I'm handling it, Jaxon."
"I know you are." He kept pace without effort, which was somehow more irritating than if he'd had to work at it. "I just thought if you wanted to talk through the argument structure, I did Hargrove's class last year, I know what he"
"I know what Hargrove wants," I said. "I don't need a tutor."
"I'm not offering to tutor you, I'm offering to help."
"They're the same thing."
"They're really not."
I turned to face him then, right there in the corridor, and I knew somewhere in the functioning part of my brain that this was not actually about the essay, and I knew he knew that too, and neither of us stopped.
"You want to know what's not helping?" I said. "Being monitored. You and Harper running reports on my word count. Webb sitting across from me telling me I have no rights. Your father waiting for Tuesday like it's a collection date. Everyone in my life treating me like a problem that needs managing." My voice had gone tight in a way I couldn't fully control. "I am so tired of being everyone's concern."
Jaxon looked at me steadily. "That's not what this is."
"Isn't it?"
"No." His voice had changed still controlled, but the effort was showing now. "You want to talk about pressure? My father calls me every day. Every single day, Brynn, asking where things stand, asking whether you've agreed to anything, asking when I'm going to stop " He stopped. Jaw tight. Started again. "You think I don't understand pressure? He wants me to bring you in. That's the phrase he uses. Bring you in. Like you're something that needs to be retrieved." A beat. "In chains is not far off."
The corridor had gone quiet around us in the way corridors go quiet when something real is happening in them.
I became aware, distantly, that we had an audience.
Not a crowd exactly but people who had been walking somewhere and had slowed, or stopped, or found a reason to be near the water fountain. Six, maybe eight people. And not strangers Tyler from Jaxon's pack, a girl from my biology class, two seniors I recognized from the dining hall. People who would remember this.
I lowered my voice. "Then why haven't you?"
"Because I'm not doing that," he said, at normal volume, and then registered the same thing I had the watching, the stillness and dropped his own voice. "Because that's not who I am, regardless of what he wants."
"But one day the gap between what you are and what he wants might close," I said. "And I won't have any warning. And I'll have no rights, because Marcus Webb said so in a room with good upholstery."
"That is not going to happen."
"You don't know that."
"I do know that."
"You know it right now," I said. "You knew it this morning. You knew it last week. People know things right up until circumstances change and then they make different decisions and they find good reasons for it." I was shaking slightly, which I hated. "I don't get to trust you just because you've been trustworthy so far. That's not I can't afford that."
The words landed. I watched them land. And I watched Jaxon absorb them with the stillness of someone taking a hit they hadn't fully expected, and I knew even in the middle of the exhaustion and the fear and the essay and the everything that I had just said something that would need addressing later, in a quieter place, with more honesty than I was currently capable of.
The watching people were not pretending anymore. Tyler had taken two steps closer. The biology girl had her phone out not visibly recording, but out. One of the seniors said something to the other in a low voice.
Jaxon looked at me. "Are you done?"
"I don't know," I said honestly.
"Neither am I." He ran a hand through his hair. "But I think we shouldn't do this here."
"Bit late for that."
"Yeah." He looked at the assembled witnesses with the particular expression of someone recalculating several things at once. "Yeah, it is."
We didn't get the chance to find somewhere quieter.
We were still standing in the corridor the audience had partially dispersed but not fully, the way people disperse when they want to look like they're leaving but actually want to see what happens next when I saw Dean Whitmore coming from the direction of the administrative offices.
She was a compact, brisk woman in her sixties who ran the student affairs division with the energy of someone who had seen everything and been impressed by very little of it. She had the specific walk of a person who had been told something and was now going to address it directly.
She stopped in front of us.
"Miss Calloway. Mr. Hale." She looked between us with the calm of someone who did not need to raise her voice to establish authority. "My office, please."
It was not phrased as a question.
I glanced at Jaxon. He glanced at me. Whatever was still unresolved between us got set aside by the shared, immediate problem of being called to the Dean's office on the afternoon before the most important day of our lives.
"Of course," Jaxon said, with the smooth courtesy of someone who had been raised to be composed in front of authority figures.
I said nothing and fell into step.
Behind us, I heard the distinct sound of people resuming conversation, and I knew without turning around that within the hour the entire school would know that Brynn Calloway and Jaxon Hale had argued in the library corridor and been called in by Dean Whitmore. Whatever privacy we'd had about what we were to each other tentative, unspoken, unregistered with anyone except the people closest to us was gone.
Dean Whitmore held her office door open. We went in.
She sat behind her desk. We sat across from it. She folded her hands and looked at both of us with the expression she probably used for everything from lost student IDs to actual emergencies, which was a form of professional equity I could only admire.
"I've had three reports in the last ten minutes about a disruptive altercation in the library corridor," she said. "I understand tomorrow is a significant day for both of you. I also understand that this campus is still an academic institution and that its corridors are shared spaces." She looked at us evenly. "Do either of you want to tell me what happened?"
Jaxon and I looked at each other.
"We had a disagreement," Jaxon said. "It got louder than it should have. That's on both of us."
Dean Whitmore looked at me.
"He's accurate," I said.
"I see." She was quiet for a moment. "I'm not going to make this into a formal disciplinary matter given the circumstances. But I want to be clear tomorrow's proceedings are Council business and they will be handled in the appropriate venue. My corridors are not that venue." She unfolded her hands. "I would also suggest that whatever you need to say to each other, you find a private place to say it. The campus has been aware of your" she paused, choosing "situation for some time. Today didn't tell people anything they hadn't already speculated about. It simply confirmed it."
That sat in the room for a moment.
"Understood," Jaxon said.
"Understood," I said.
"Good." She stood, which meant we were dismissed. "Get some sleep, both of you. Tomorrow is a long day."
We walked out into the corridor. The door clicked shut behind us.
We stood side by side and didn't say anything for a moment.
"She's not wrong," Jaxon said finally. "About the sleep."
"I have an essay due tomorrow," I said.
"I know." He looked down the corridor. "I'm sorry about what I said. The chains thing I didn't mean it to land the way it did."
"You meant it to land exactly as much as I meant what I said about not trusting you." I looked at my hands. "Which means we both said true things badly."
"Yeah," he said. "We did."
We stood there a moment longer, the corridor quiet around us now, the audience long gone.
"Tomorrow," I said.
"Tomorrow," he said.
We went our separate ways.