The humid September heat clung to the asphalt of Orangeside Community College, a place that felt less like an institution of higher learning and more like a purgatory for the distracted.
Chase Wright adjusted his sunglasses, watching the scene on the quad with the practiced detachment of a man who didn’t belong there. On a makeshift stage, Dean Joshua Starmer was currently losing a fight with a portable stereo. High-energy rap music blasted over the speakers, drowning out his attempts at a dignified welcome.
“How do we turn this off?” the Dean squeaked, his voice thin and panicked. “Can you help me turn this off? Uh-oh. Uh-oh.”
Chase sighed. He was twenty-seven, wore a sports coat that cost more than the tuition for the semester, and was currently enrolled in a place he considered a “school-shaped toilet.”
“I’m only half Mexican, actually,” a voice piped up beside him.
Chase turned to see a rail-thin student with wide, unblinking eyes. This was Elvis. They were in Computer Science 101 together, a fact Chase was already beginning to regret.
“My dad is Mexican,”Elvis continued, his words tumbling out in a rhythmic, matter-of-fact stream. “He’s a U.S. citizen, he’s not an illegal or anything. My name’s Elvis, by the way.”
“Elvis,” Chase said, holding up a hand to stem the tide. “Nice to know you and then meet you, in that order. Now, about that question I had?”
Elvis blinked. “Oh. Five after eleven when you asked.”
“Elvis.” Chase’s voice took on the low, persuasive tone that had once charmed juries into overlooking felony embezzlement. “What’s the deal with the girl from Computer Science class? I can’t find a road in there.”
He nodded toward a blonde woman sitting at a nearby table. She had a leather jacket, a cynical set to her jaw, and eyes that looked like they had seen through every line Chase had ever used.
“Her name is Christina, “Elvis recited instantly. “She’s twenty-five, birthday in October. She has two older brothers. She thinks she’s going to flunk tomorrow’s test, so she really needs to focus. And she’s sorry if that makes her seem cold.”
Chase stared at him, genuinely stunned. “Holy crap. Elvis, I see your value now.”
Elvis’s expression didn’t change, but there was a flicker of something—gratitude, maybe—in his gaze. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
Finding Christina in the cafeteria was easy; her aura of guarded exhaustion acted like a lighthouse. Chase stepped into the lunch line, cutting past three people with a smile that suggested he owned the building.
“Oh, hey, Computer Science,” he said, leaning against the rail beside her.
Christina didn’t even look up from her tray. “Yeah, don’t hit on me, okay?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Chase lied smoothly. “I just wanted to let you know about my Computer Science study group. I’m taking the class undercover. My online alias is Satoshi Nakamura.”
Christina paused, finally looking at him. Her eyes were suspicious, but there was a crack in the armor—the desperation of someone who really didn’t want to fail. “Can you tell me what a BIOS is?”
Chase didn’t know computers, just played games on them. He knew phrases he’d heard watching Mr. Robot and old movies. He leaned in and whispered a string of confident, rhythmic gibberish that sounded vaguely technical.
Christina exhaled, the tension leaving her shoulders. “I really need help with Computer Science.”
“I’m Chase,” he said, flashing the high-beam grin. “The group meets at the library at four.”
“Christina,” she replied. “Thanks.”
The library was quiet, smelling of old paper and industrial cleaner. Chase had arrived early, “renting” a large table by scattering a few notebooks he didn’t intend to open. When Christina walked in, he felt a surge of professional triumph. The trap was set.
“Welcome,” he said, gesturing to the chair beside him. “The rest of the group is running late, but you and I can get acquainted. So… What’s your deal?”
Christina sat down, her expression wary. “My deal is, above all else, honesty. You tell me the truth, I will like you. You lie to me, I will never talk to you again.” Christina looked at Chase confidently and asked, ”So, what’s your deal?”
Chase felt a momentary pang of something resembling a conscience. It was a very small pang. “I would have to say… honesty. Because I would say anything to get what I want, and I want you to like me.”
Christina actually smiled. It was a small, genuine thing that made Chase feel like he’d just won a closing argument. “Well, that’s a very honest answer. For now, I like you just fine.”
“Really?” Chase leaned in. “Wow. You’re easy.”
“Hell, yeah!” a she boomed, welcoming his question.
Chase jumped once he noticed Elvis meandering into the room, looking as if entering on que to interrupt a special moment.
“Elvis. In the house. Whoo!” Christina cheered, high-fiving him.
Chase’s smile felt brittle. “Whoo. Why?”
“Christina invited me, “Elvis said, pulling out a chair. “Is that pretty good?”
“I can’t think of a single logical reason why it would be pretty bad,” Chase said through gritted teeth.
“Good, “Elvis said, sitting down. “That’s pretty good. This is kind of like The Breakfast Club, huh? I’m sure we’ve each got an issue balled up inside that would make us cry if we talked about it.”
“Do you have something balled up inside you?” Christina asked, leaning forward with genuine interest.
“Oh, I got a little doozy in the chamber if things get emotional, “Elvis promised.
Before Chase could find a way to pivot the conversation back to Christina, he picked up his phone and feverishly started typing. Then Elvis’s phone buzzed.
“Hey, text message,”Elvis said, staring at his screen with wonder. “I’ve never gotten one of these.” He then stared at his phone intently and repeated the words on the screen ‘ ‘Say you have to pee. I need to talk to you.’”
Christina frowned. “That is weird.”
Chase looked at his own phone, itself just chirped. It was Miyamoto.: An SIR @ Da Futbol Feel Duh.
“I just need five minutes, you guys,” Chase said, standing up and grabbing his jacket. “Go ahead and study all the… BIOS options.”
Chase found Miyamoto standing near the football field, looking twitchy and scanning the horizon for what Chase assumed were chemtrails. The Professor’s academic robes fluttered in the breeze, making him look less like a scholar and more like a large, nervous crow waiting for the “mud flood” to return.
“Suppose I was to say to you it was possible to get those test answers,” Miyamoto began, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper as he adjusted his glasses. “Suppose I told you that maybe the reason you’re here is to help you see the process in the system, not just answers to bypass it.”
“I would say go for that,” Chase replied, crossing his arms. “And you could have said so in a text, and try not to make this a big ethics lesson. You’re a psych teacher not an anthropology teacher.”
Miyamoto stepped closer, his expression shifting into something uncharacteristically earnest. “I’m asking if you know the difference between right and wrong, Chase?”
Chase didn’t hesitate. He had spent his entire adult life navigating the grey areas of the law; to him, morality was just another closing argument. “I discovered at a very early age that if I talked long enough, I could make anything right or wrong. So either I’m God or truth is relative, and in either case—booyah.”
Miyamoto stared at him, looking both impressed and deeply disturbed. “Interesting. It’s just, the average person has a little spark of something in them called a conscious that doesn’t see reality so malleable.”
“Miyamoto, you don’t have to play shrink to protect your pride,” Chase scoffed. “I accept your cowardice.”
The jab landed. Miyamoto’s face flushed. “You trying to use reverse psychology on a psychologist?”
“No, I’m just using regular psychology on a man who thinks mountains are just giant petrified trees.”
“I’m a professor!” Miyamoto shouted, pointing a finger at Chase’s chest. “You can’t talk to me that way! I have a doctorate in Behavioral Science and a moderator on the Agartha forums!”
“A six-year-old girl could talk to you that way,” Chase countered, stepping into Miyamoto’s personal space.
“Yes, because that would be adorable!”
“No, because you’re a five-year-old girl, and there’s a pecking order.”
Miyamoto sputtered for a moment, the wind completely taken out of his sails. Finally, he threw his hands up. “Fine! I’ll do it! Happy? Goodbye! Enjoy your ‘illusion’ while it lasts!” He turned and marched away, still muttering about “suppressed architecture” and shouting at a passing crow as he went.
When Chase returned to the library, the quiet sanctuary of the study room had been breached. The table was no longer occupied by just Christina and Elvis. Four strangers sat there, looking expectant.
“You guys aren’t going to believe this,” Chase said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “but the rest of the ‘group’ is here.”
A man who looked to be in his fifties, wearing a suit that suggested he had money but no taste, peered at Chase through thick glasses. “Are you the board-certified tutor?”
“That means you do my homework, right, Crypto-king?” added a younger guy in a high school letterman jacket, leaning back with an air of unearned confidence.
“I need to call my babysitter if we’re gonna be later than seven,” a middle-aged woman said, clutching her purse.
A younger girl with a tight ponytail and an even tighter grip on her highlighter looked Chase up and down. “What does inventing crypto have to do with being a tutor?”
Chase ignored them all, his eyes searching the room. “Where’s Christina?”
“Not sure, “Elvis said helpfully. “I invited people from Computer Science class. Is that pretty good?”
Chase felt a vein throb in his temple. “It’s pretty damn good. I’m gonna go to the bathroom… Just gotta get my phone…and bring my jacket, wallet, and keys with me in case there’s a fire.”
He ducked out of the room, feeling the walls of Orangeside closing in on him. He found Christina outside by a side entrance, surrounded by vapor and holding a small green box with a pulsating light in her hand.
“And busted,” she said, though she didn’t look particularly bothered.
“Now you know. I vape,” she confessed, taking a drag from her vape-pen and exhaling a plume of vapor.
“No burning,” Chase noted, leaning against the brick wall. “So they’re safe. Look, Christina… I think Elvis took out a page on Craigslist. That group in there? I never saw a problem I couldn’t fix, but they may be untutorable.”
Christina raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really?”
“Why don’t you and I go study over dinner? Or drinks?”
Christina pocketed her vape device. She looked back toward the library, then at Chase. “I think we should prioritize. We study first. If they really prove to be untutorable, we slip out early for dinner.”
Chase’s heart did a little victory lap. “Oh, they will be untutorable. Trust me.”
Back at the table, the atmosphere was thick with tension and the smell of old carpet. Chase took his seat at the head of the table like a reluctant king.
“All right. Look at this crew,” he said, trying to regain control. “My name is Chase.”
A man in his mid-fifties stood up, extending a hand. “Chase, it’s a pleasure. My name is Wilson Firestone. And no, not that Firestone with the tires, but the guy who won the state $700 Million jackpot.”
“I was just gonna ask,” Chase lied.
“I’m rich, hence the Toastmaster,” Wilson announced, his chest swelling. “I should do the introductions. You know Katrina—”
“Christina,” she corrected.
“Elvis. The Spic and Span man with a plan. Is that inappropriate?”
“Sure,”Elvis said without looking up.
“Byron, Byron the the boy who loves sirens—”
“Tyrone,” the athlete corrected.
“Little princess Elizabeth—”
“Amelia,” the girl with the ponytail snapped.
“And finally,” Wilson said, gesturing to the woman with the purse, “this beautiful creature is named Sharon.”
“Is that even close?” Chase asked her.
Sharon nodded with a weary smile. “Unfortunately, yes.”
“I’d like to know why I had to find out about this group by accident,” Amelia said, her voice rising in pitch. She looked like she was one “B-” away from a nervous breakdown.
“This is getting way more like The Breakfast Club now, “Elvis whispered.
“There’s breakfast?” Wilson asked.
Chase saw his opening. If he could just nudge them into a full-blown argument, he and Christina could be at a Thai restaurant within twenty minutes. “Shouldn’t we address Amelia’s concern? Did we not invite her?”
“Sweetie, it’s not behind your back—” Sharon started.
“Can we stop with the ‘pumpkins’ and the ‘sweeties’?” Amelia interrupted. “Being younger does not make me inferior. If anything, your age indicates that you’ve made bad life decisions.”
Chase leaned back, metaphorically lighting a fuse. “Sharon has a response to that.”
“No, I don’t,” Sharon said, though her eyes were narrowing.
“It looks like you do,” Chase prodded. “Go ahead.”
“Okay,” Sharon said, her voice dropping into a dangerous, low register. “I’m sure I’ve made some bad decisions. And maybe Amelia’s will be better. But she needs to decide if she wants to be a child or an adult. Children get pity. Adults get respect—and they also get their heads grabbed and pushed through jewelry displays.”
The table went silent for a heartbeat before erupting into chaos. Within minutes, Wilson was being accused of sexual harassment for his “Spic and Span” comment, Tyrone was aggressively defending his high school rushing yards, and Amelia was screeching about how Tyrone had looked right through her in the cafeteria for four years.
SLAM.
The sound of Elvis’s palm hitting the table was like a gunshot. Everyone froze, Tyrone mid-gesture, as Elvis stood up. His eyes remained unblinking, but his face had turned a shade of intense, performative red.
“You wanna know what I got for Christmas this year?” Elvis demanded, his voice dropping into a raspy, theatrical gravel. “It was a banner year at the Santiago household. I got a carton of cigarettes. The old man grabbed me and said, ‘Hey, smoke up Johnny!’”
He threw his arms out, staring at the ceiling as if waiting for a spotlight.
“And then he punched me,” Elvis continued with a chilling, rhythmic flatness. “He said, ‘You’re a failure, you’re nothing, you’re just like your mother!’ And I said, ‘No, Dad, I’m a computer science student!’ And he just laughed while the tree burned down.”
The silence that followed was heavy and uncomfortable. Sharon gripped her purse so tight her knuckles turned white. Amelia looked like she was about to cry for an entirely different reason.
Chase stared at Elvis, his mouth slightly agape. His lawyer-brain was frantically cross-referencing pop culture data. Wait. Is he…? He is. He’s doing Judd Nelson. He is literally reciting ‘The Breakfast Club’ word-for-word.
“Elvis,” Chase whispered, a mix of genuine confusion and a dark, twisted kind of respect washing over him. “That is… that is remarkably accurate. Are you actually quoting—”
BZZT.
Chase’s phone chirped on the table. He glanced down.
Miyamoto: The Truth is hiding in plain sight. Meet me by the tiny car. I have the ‘Ancient Manuscripts’ (The test answers). Beware the drones.
“I’ll be right back,” Chase announced, standing up quickly and using the Elvis-induced trauma as his window of escape. “But while I’m gone, you guys need to hash this stuff out. Clearly, Elvis has opened the door to our shared pain. No stone unturned. Go!”
He practically ran for the exit, leaving the group to stare in shell-shocked silence at Elvis, who had already sat back down and was calmly organizing his highlighters.
The parking lot was cast in the sickly orange glow of sodium-vapor lamps. Chase found Miyamoto huddled inside a car so small it looked like it belonged in a high-end toy store rather than a faculty parking space.
“Every answer to every test in your curriculum this semester,” Miyamoto said, his voice a frantic stage whisper. He brandished a thick, manila envelope through the window of his car—a vehicle so small and rounded it looked like a motorized helmet. “Directly intercepted from the Orangeside mainframe. It’s good to have friends in the IT department.”
Chase reached for it, his fingers itching for the shortcut to his old life. “I knew you could do it. Now give me the ‘Forbidden Knowledge’ so I can get out of here.”
“Whoa, there, grabby-grabby,” Miyamoto pulled the packet back, his eyes glinting with a sudden, sharp greed. “What do I get in exchange for risking my friendship with TothFan420?”
“The satisfaction of being even,” Chase said, his lawyer-brain already pivoting to the next closing.
“Even, fairness, right, wrong. There is no God. Booyah, booyah,” Miyamoto mocked, throwing Chase’s own words back at him with a biting sneer. “I want your Acura. You have the Super Handling All Wheel drive right? I need it for ice if I take it to Antarctica”
Chase froze. “My car? For a semester’s worth of answers?”
“Will it be just a semester, though, Chase?” Miyamoto’s smile was oily. “Won’t you be taking the easy way out for the next four years? I want payment in advance. I want the leather seats and ball warmers for my trip to the Ice Wall.”
Chase looked at his sleek, black luxury sedan, then back at Miyamoto’s glorified golf cart. “You know, plans this stupid are usually reserved for people who attack windmills in Spain.”
“Have a nice disbarment hearing,” Miyamoto replied, reaching for the ignition. “I’m sure Michael & Cole will love your ‘creative’ interpretation of a law degree.”
“Wait!” Chase snapped. He felt the weight of his pride battling the weight of his laziness. Laziness won. He tossed his keys through the window. “What am I supposed to drive? A unicycle?”
“Take this. It’s a 1998 Geo Metro, I customized it into an electric car. 12 hours to charge for 30 minutes or 30 miles of range, whichever comes first,” Miyamoto chirped, handing over the envelope and scrambling out of his tiny vehicle to claim the Acura. “It’s practically invisible to the deep-state satellites.”
“So is a cardboard box,” Chase grumbled, staring at the plastic, sun-faded dashboard of the tiny car. “But it’s not how a man gets around.”
Back at the library, the glass doors didn’t even muffle the sound of the shouting. Chase found Christina pacing the hallway, looking genuinely distressed.
“It is a disaster in there,” she said, gesturing toward the study room where Tyrone and Amelia were currently having a volume contest.
“Yeah. Untutorable,” Chase said, tucking the envelope into his jacket. “Do you like Thai food? I love Thai food.”
Christina stopped. She looked at the door, then back at Chase, her eyes darkening with a sudden realization. “Wait… so this is a game to you? You put human beings into a state of emotional shambles for a shot at getting in my pants?”
Chase blinked. He’d been called a lot of things in court, but the way she said “human beings” made him feel a strange, flickering heat in his chest. “Why can’t you see that for the compliment that it is?”
“You’re unbelievable.” She turned to walk away.
“What do you want me to do?” Chase called out.
“Oh, maybe one decent thing could be to go in there and clean up your mess,” she snapped over her shoulder.
Chase hesitated. He had the answers in his pocket. He had a (tiny) car. He could leave. But he looked at Christina—really looked at her—and saw the disappointment. “Okay. If I do that, then dinner, right?”
“Yeah, fine, whatever,” she sighed, defeated. “As if there’s a dinner on earth that could make me forget you are a shallow douchebag.”
“Oh, you’re gonna eat those words when you see my new car,” Chase muttered, straightening his sports coat and marching back into the fray.
The room was a battlefield of egos. Wilson was red-faced, Sharon was clutching her Bible like a weapon, and Tyrone and Amelia were still re-litigating high school.
“All right, everybody!” Chase roared. “I wanna say something. Everybody sit down.”
The sheer volume of his voice—the “lawyer voice”—forced a sudden, ringing silence. They sat.
“You know what makes humans different from other animals?” Chase started, pacing the front of the room.
“Feet,” Tyrone suggested.
“No, no,” Wilson interjected. “Bears have feet.”
“We’re the only species on earth that observes ‘Shark Week,’” Chase said, ignoring them. “Sharks don’t even observe ‘Shark Week,’ but we do. For the same reason I can pick up this pencil, tell you its name is Jason, and go like this—” He snapped the pencil in half.
Elvis let out a small, wounded gasp.
“And part of you dies just a little bit on the inside,” Chase continued, his voice softening into a persuasive, melodic lilt. “Because people can connect with anything. We can sympathize with a pencil, we can forgive a shark, and Mr. Beast is one of the most viewed people on the internet.”
“Big mistake,” Wilson muttered.
“People can find the good in just about anything but themselves,” Chase said, leaning against the table. He looked at each of them, finding the hooks Elvis had given him earlier. “Look at Amelia. She’s driven. We need driven people or the lights go out and the game servers go down. And Wilson—this guy has luck that might rub off on you. Sharon has earned our respect not as just a mom, but as a woman who’s more capable than you know; that jewelry display thing was too specific. Tyrone, maybe he is all that. And Elvis…Elvis’s a shaman. You ask him for salt, he gives you soup, because soup is better. You are all better than you think you are.”
The room was dead quiet. Sharon was dabbing her eyes. Even Tyrone looked thoughtful.
“I want you to look to the person sitting next to you,” Chase commanded. “I want you to extend to them the same compassion you extend to sharks, pencils and Mr. Beast. I want you to say, ‘I forgive you.’”
A chorus of “I forgive yous” rippled around the table. It was thick with a strange, communal cathargy.
“You’ve just stopped being a study group,” Chase announced, feeling the high of a successful closing argument. “You have become something unstoppable. I hereby pronounce you a community.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Sharon whispered. “I like that.”
“That’s pretty good, special moment there Chase,” Elvis chirped.
“I agree with Elvis that tonight has been very special,” Chase said, checking his watch. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a dinner engagement. Christina?”
Christina stood up, with a forced artificial smile. “I lied.”
Chase paused. “What?”
“I lied to get you to fix the mess you made. But since you’re not a Computer Science Tutor, just a lying creep who purposely upset everyone, I’d appreciate it if you left.”
The silence that followed was different. It wasn’t respectful; it was cold.
“Fine,” Chase said, the sting of rejection turning into a sharp, defensive bite. “And I’m happy to report that one of the benefits of being a lying creep is having all the answers to tomorrow’s test.” He pulled the envelope from his pocket. “I don’t need a study group. Me creating bitcoin, I made it up. That ‘look left’ speech? Made it up. That’s what I do. I was a lawyer.”
“Oh, man,” Sharon said, her voice dripping with disappointment. “What is wrong with you?”
“I thought you were like John Krasinski in all of his films, “Elvis said quietly. “But you’re more like Pedro Pascal in any of his films.”
“Yeah? Well,” Chase snapped, flailing for a comeback, “you have Asperger’s!”
The room gasped.
“What does that mean? “Elvis asked, looking genuinely confused.
“Ha!” Tyrone let out a sharp laugh. “Ass-burger.”
Amelia snapped back, “It’s a serious condition.”
“If it’s so serious, why does it sound like someone’s opinion of Mcdonalds food?” Wilson said, then giggled at his own joke joined by Tyrone.
Chase didn’t wait to hear the rest. He turned and walked out, the heavy library doors swinging shut behind him.
The Paper Trail
Standing under the flickering buzzing of a streetlamp, Chase felt the cool weight of the manila envelope in his hand. It was the physical manifestation of his victory. He didn’t need this school; he just needed a shortcut.
He slid his thumb under the flap, tearing it open with the satisfied precision of a man opening a settlement check. He reached in and pulled out the first page.
It was blank.
Chase frowned, tilting the page toward the light. Maybe it was some kind of academic shorthand? Invisible ink? He pulled out the next sheet. Blank. He began to shuffle through them faster, the rhythmic snap-snap-snap of the paper echoing in the quiet parking lot.
“Miyamoto?” he whispered, his voice catching.
He turned the envelope upside down and shook it. A dozen more sheets of crisp, white, terrifyingly empty printer paper fluttered to the asphalt like oversized confetti. There were no answers. There wasn’t even a stray pencil mark. Only writing was on the last page, which said ‘Boo-Yah’. Chase dropped the papers.
He stared down at the pile at his feet. He had traded an Acura with built-in ball warmers for twenty cents’ worth of office supplies.
Chase marched back to Miyamoto’s office, his heels clicking sharply against the linoleum. He didn’t feel like a “genius at law” anymore; he felt like a man who had traded his dignity for a manila envelope and a toy car.
Chase slammed his way in.
“Chase Wright,” Miyamoto said, looking up from his desk with a look of feigned pity. “Before you say anything, you might want to think about the gift you’ve been given.”
“An excuse to punch a hippy?” Chase snarled, slamming the envelope onto the desk.
“No,” Miyamoto said, unfazed. “An important lesson, my friend. You see, the tools you acquired to survive out there will not help you here at Orangeside College. What you have, my friend, is a second chance at an honest life.”
Chase didn’t want a sermon. He wanted his leather seats back. “Give me my keys.”
“No,” Miyamoto said, leaning back. “I have to keep your car for the lesson.”
Chase’s eyes darkened. He took a predatory step forward.
“Don’t hit me!” Miyamoto shrieked, suddenly shrinking into his chair and shielding his face with his hands. “Please don’t hit me! Chase? Chase Wright? Are we cool? Are we cool?”
Chase stared at the trembling professor for a long moment, then realized he didn’t even have the energy to be angry. He snatched his keys, to his beloved Acura, and turned his back on the man.
Miyamoto said, “We cool.” As Chase left his office.
He walked out into the cool night air, pausing at the library steps.
Miyamoto hadn’t just tried scamming him for his car; he’d played him.
“I like you, Chase Wright,” a voice cracked from the shadows of the library entrance.
Chase looked up. Wilson was standing on the steps, looking older and lonelier than he had under the fluorescent lights. “You remind me of myself at your age.”
Chase slumped down onto the concrete step beside him. “I deserve that.”
“You know I’ve been divorced seven times?” Wilson asked, staring out at the empty quad. “Sometimes I think I’m doing something wrong.”
Chase looked at him, seeing a terrifying glimpse of his own future—rich, successful, and utterly alone. “You keep getting married.”
Wilson paused, his eyes widening behind his glasses. “I never looked at it that way.”
The library doors pushed open, and the rest of the group spilled out. They stopped when they saw Chase. The bravado he’d carried all day had evaporated, leaving him looking smaller in his expensive coat.
“Shouldn’t you guys be studying?” Chase asked, nodding toward the door.
“Yeah,” Tyrone said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Things got kind of boring after you left.”
Christina stood at the back of the group, her expression unreadable. “Shouldn’t you be rolling around on a bed covered in test answers?”
Chase let out a short, hollow laugh. He held up the blank pages. “I don’t have any of the answers. I’m going to flunk the test.”
“If you just, like, study for an hour, it’s not that hard,” Tyrone offered. “You seem pretty smart. You got a sports coat.”
Chase looked down at his sleeves. “Well, the funny thing about being smart is you can get through most of life without having to do work. So I’m not really sure how to do that.”
He saw them exchanging looks—Sharon’s sympathetic wince, Amelia’s pained “A-student” expression, Elvis’s neutral observation.
“What’s going on?” Elvis asked suddenly, looking from face to face. “Can you guys hear me? Am I deaf? Can you hear me talking right now?”
“Yes,” they all chorused.
“That’s good,” Elvis said, relieved.
Christina stepped forward, the cynicism in her eyes finally giving way to something softer—not quite forgiveness, but an invitation. “You know what, Chase? Actually, we didn’t get that far without you. So if you want to come back upstairs…”
Chase looked up at her, surprised. “Really?”
“Well,” she said, leaning against the doorframe, “it is your study group, so…”
“Come on,” Sharon urged, heading back inside. “Let’s study.”
Chase stood up, brushing the grit off his slacks. He followed them toward the warm glow of the library, the sound of their bickering fading into a comfortable hum. Elvis fell into step beside him as they crossed the threshold.
“I’m sorry I called you Pedro Pascal,” Elvis said seriously. “And I see your value now.”
Chase smiled, and for the first time since he’d arrived at Orangeside, it wasn’t for show. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
As the doors closed behind them, the “loser college” didn’t feel quite so empty.