The notice board outside the Advanced Economics and Policy seminar room is the kind of old wood that’s been polished so many times over so many decades it’s stopped looking like a notice board and started looking like an heirloom, and I am standing in front of it at eight fifty-five in the morning trying to process the fact that my entire semester just got considerably more complicated.
Semester Capstone Project — Partner Assignments (Randomized) Bennett, A.
— Kingsley, D.
I read it three times, certain there’s been some clerical error similar to the one that landed me in Wycliffe Wing, before Priya appears at my shoulder, reads the same line, and makes a sound like she’s just watched someone walk into traffic.
“Okay,” she says slowly.
“I need you to understand that ‘randomized’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and I have never once, in three years at this school, seen Damian Kingsley’s name end up next to a scholarship student’s in a randomized partner assignment.” “You think it’s rigged?” “I think,” Priya says, “that Professor Lindqvist has been trying to get a research grant renewed through the Kingsley Foundation for two years, and I think the universe has a sense of humor, and I genuinely do not know which explanation I find more disturbing.” I don’t have time to decide which explanation I find more disturbing either, because the door to the seminar room opens and Damian walks out exactly as the bell signaling the end of the previous class rings, like even time itself adjusts its schedule slightly to accommodate him.
He sees the notice board.
He sees me standing in front of it.
Something in his expression — not surprise, I’m realizing surprise might not be an emotion this particular face has much practice with — shifts into a kind of resigned, assessing patience.
“Bennett.” “Kingsley.” “I assume you’ve seen the list.” “I assume you have too, since you’re looking at it like it personally inconvenienced you.” The corner of his mouth does the thing again, that almost-smile that isn’t warm so much as it’s interested, the expression of someone watching a chess piece move somewhere he didn’t predict.
“It did personally inconvenience me.
I had a partner I requested specifically because she does exactly what I tell her and doesn’t waste my time arguing about it.” “That sounds less like a partner and more like an employee.” “Most people on this campus would consider that an upgrade from being my partner.” “I’m not most people.” “No,” he says, and something in the way he says it — slower, quieter, with an edge of something that isn’t quite mockery anymore — makes the back of my neck go warm in a way I immediately resent.
“I’m starting to understand that.” Priya, beside me, has gone very still in the specific way of someone trying very hard not to be noticed while witnessing something she intends to report on in detail later.
I can’t blame her.
I’m having a similarly difficult time processing what’s happening in front of the notice board right now, mostly because some small, traitorous part of my brain has decided that the low, focused way Damian Kingsley is looking at me is interesting instead of alarming, and I need that part of my brain to be quiet immediately.
“The capstone is worth forty percent of the semester grade,” he says, businesslike now, the moment of whatever-that-was folding itself back into something colder and more efficient.
“I don’t intend to let a randomization error cost me a grade I need for my transcript.
I assume, given your scholarship status, you feel similarly motivated.” “You assume correctly.” “Then we work together.
Efficiently.
We meet, we divide tasks, we don’t waste time on whatever this morning’s commentary has been, and we produce something that gets us both an A.” He says it like a contract being read aloud, terms and conditions, nothing personal.
“My schedule is full most evenings.
I can give you Thursdays, seven to nine, library archive room four.” “You’re assuming I don’t have a say in the schedule.” “I’m assuming you want this to go well, which means accommodating the fact that one of us has considerably less flexibility than the other.” It’s not said cruelly.
It’s said the way he seems to say most things — as observed fact, delivered without much interest in whether I like hearing it.
“Thursdays, seven to nine.
I’ll see you there.” He’s gone before I can decide whether I’m angrier about the assumption or the fact that, underneath the anger, some quieter part of me is already turning over the knowledge that I am about to spend two hours a week in close, sustained proximity to exactly the person I came to this campus to investigate.
This is, I remind myself as Priya finally exhales next to me like she’s been holding her breath for the entire exchange, useful.
This is an opportunity, not a complication.
Two hours a week of unsupervised access to Damian Kingsley’s habits, his patterns, the small unguarded details a person reveals when they think no one’s paying close enough attention to notice.
This is exactly the kind of proximity I spent four years preparing myself to exploit.
I am annoyed, mostly, that it doesn’t feel like strategy.
It feels like something closer to nerves, and I do not have room in my plan for nerves.
Thursday arrives with the particular dread of an appointment I’ve been both anticipating and avoiding thinking about all week.
Archive room four is tucked into the oldest wing of the library, lined with portraits of Kingsley University’s founding patrons in heavy gilt frames, the air thick with the smell of old paper and older money.
Damian is already there when I arrive, seven minutes early by my count, sitting at the head of the room’s single long table with three textbooks open and a legal pad covered in handwriting so precise it looks closer to typeset than human.
“You’re punctual,” he says, not looking up.
“I wasn’t sure you would be.” “You were expecting me to be difficult.” “I was expecting you to make a point of being difficult, which isn’t quite the same thing.” Now he looks up, and there’s something almost like amusement settling into the line of his mouth.
“I’m pleasantly surprised you decided strategy mattered more than pride.” “Don’t get used to it.” We work, for the first hour, with the careful, efficient distance of two people who have agreed to treat each other as instruments rather than rivals.
He’s sharper than I expected — not in the way money makes people sharp, the easy confidence of never being told no, but in a way that suggests actual rigor, actual hours spent earning the competence everyone assumes was simply handed to him along with his last name.
I find myself, despite every intention not to, adjusting my opinion of him in small increments I don’t entirely trust.
It’s during the second hour, cross-referencing a set of policy case studies neither of us particularly wants to be reading, that he asks the question I should have anticipated and didn’t.
“Where are you from, Bennett?” I keep my eyes on the page in front of me, my voice carefully, deliberately bored.
“Does it matter?” “It’s a conversation.
Conversations are how people learn things about each other.
I’m told it’s customary among partners.” “Small town.
Nothing interesting.
You wouldn’t have heard of it.” “Try me.” “Why does it matter to you?” Something in his expression sharpens, just slightly, the look of a man recalibrating an assumption.
“Because you walked into this university four days ago and managed, within an hour, to become the single most discussed first-year student on this campus, and in my experience, people who generate that kind of attention either want it desperately or are running from something that makes them desperate to avoid it.
I’m trying to determine which one you are.” The accuracy of it lands somewhere uncomfortably close to the truth, close enough that I have to work to keep my expression as flat and unreadable as I’ve trained it to be.
“Maybe I’m neither,” I say.
“Maybe I just don’t like being told where I’m allowed to live by someone who’s never once had to ask permission for anything in his life.” “That’s a deflection, not an answer.” “It’s the only answer you’re getting tonight.” For a long moment, he doesn’t push.
He just looks at me — that same patient, assessing attention from across the quad, except closer now, closer than is entirely comfortable in a room this quiet, with portraits of dead Kingsleys watching from every wall.
“Fine,” he says finally, returning his attention to the case study in front of him.
“Keep your secrets, Bennett.
I find I don’t mind discovering things slowly.” It should sound like a threat.
It doesn’t, entirely, and that’s the part that unsettles me most as I gather my things at nine o’clock sharp and walk back toward Wycliffe Wing through a campus gone dark and quiet, my pulse refusing to settle into the calm, controlled rhythm I’ve spent four years perfecting.
I came here to destroy this boy’s family.
I did not plan for the growing, treacherous awareness that destroying him is going to be considerably harder than I anticipated, not because he’s well-protected — though he is — but because some unguarded, undisciplined part of me has started finding reasons to want to know him instead of simply ruin him.
That part of me is a liability.
I fold it away, the way I fold everything else, and I keep walking.