~~~~~ Emery’s Pov ~~~~~
Thursday morning lecture hall smelled like burnt coffee and the particular exhaustion of two hundred students who hadn’t slept enough, and I’d barely dropped into my usual seat near the back before Priya slid in beside me.
Her coat still half-zipped, her hair thrown up in the kind of bun that meant she’d woken up eleven minutes before class started.
“Okay,” she said, without any preamble at all, “how did it go.”
“How did what go?”
“Don’t do that.
Don’t play dumb with me before 9 a.m., I don’t have the energy for it.” She pulled out her notebook, not opening it, entirely focused on me instead.
“The tutoring with Marchetti yesterday.
You texted me ‘it went fine’ at 10:30 last night, which is the least informative sentence a human being has ever sent another human being, and I need details.”
“It went fine.
That’s the whole update.”
“Emery.”
“What?”
“You were tutoring the hottest girl on campus for forty-five minutes in a library and all I get is ‘fine’?
I refuse to accept that.
Give me something.
Did she yell at you.
Did you yell at her.
Did anyone cry.”
“Nobody cried.” I pulled out my own notebook, mostly to have something to do with my hands, aware of the heat creeping up my neck that had nothing to do with the overheated lecture hall.
“She’s actually smarter than people give her credit for.
She just rushes everything.
Once she slowed down she got the material fine.”
“Uh-huh.
And?”
“And nothing.
That’s it.
That’s the whole session.”
Priya stared at me with the specific focus of someone who’d known me since freshman orientation and could smell a deflection from three seats away.
“You’re blushing.”
“I’m not blushing, it’s hot in here.”
“It’s sixty-eight degrees in here, I checked the thermostat on the way in, you’re blushing.” She leaned closer, lowering her voice even though the professor hadn’t arrived yet and half the room was still half-asleep anyway.
“Something happened.
Tell me something happened.”
“Nothing happened.
We did chemistry problems.
She talked a little about her family.
That’s it.”
“She talked about her family?” Priya’s eyebrows shot up, genuine surprise cutting through the teasing for a second. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“The ice queen opened up about her family to you on session one?”
“It wasn’t a big deal.
It just — came up.”
“Things like that don’t ‘just come up’ with someone who apparently doesn’t let anyone closer than arm’s length.
Emery.” She said my name again, slower this time, like she was trying to make a point land.
“One session in and she’s already telling you things she probably hasn’t told her own teammates.
That is not nothing.
That is, in fact, extremely something.”
I didn’t have a good response to that, mostly because some traitorous part of me agreed with her completely, and I busied myself flipping to a blank page in my notebook instead of meeting her eyes.
“I rest my case,” Priya said, entirely too pleased with herself, and settled back into her seat just as the professor walked in and the lecture hall noise dropped into something resembling attention.
I spent most of the lecture only half listening, scribbling notes on autopilot while the other half of my brain replayed pieces of the previous night.
Priya glanced over at me twice during the hour, smirking both times like she could read exactly what I was thinking about, which, annoyingly, she probably could.
I didn’t get a reprieve from the teasing until lunch, and even then it only changed shape rather than disappearing entirely, because Jordan was waiting for us at our usual table in the dining hall.
Her tray was already emptied of half its contents.
Her phone was in hand like she’d been sitting there stewing in anticipation.
Jordan had been out sick most of the previous week.
Some brutal flu that had taken down half the dorm.
And this was the first time I had seen her since before the whole tutoring situation had started, which meant she was catching up on roughly two weeks of developments all at once.
A fact she made abundantly clear the second we sat down.
“Okay, so,” Jordan said, not even bothering with a greeting, “somebody needs to explain to me why my sick-bed doom-scrolling turned up a picture of Emery Hale.
My Emery Hale, quiet, top-of-the-class, allergic to drama Emery Hale was sitting in a diner booth with Calloway Marchetti like it’s the most normal thing in the world.”
I nearly choked on my water.
“You saw that already?”
“Everyone’s seen that.
I was running a hundred and one degree fever and even I saw that.” Jordan set her phone down, fully committed now to the conversation, ignoring her food entirely.
“Priya, why didn’t you tell me my best friend was secretly dating a hockey captain.”
“She’s not dating her.
She’s tutoring her.” Priya’s tone made it very clear she didn’t believe a word of what she was saying, delivering it with the exact deadpan energy of someone setting up a punchline.
“Allegedly.”
“It’s actual tutoring,” I said, for what felt like the hundredth time in twenty-four hours.
“For money.
For rent.
There is nothing more to it than that.”
“Uh-huh.” Jordan and Priya said it at almost exactly the same time, in almost exactly the same tone, which was somehow more damning than if either of them had said anything at all.
“You two are impossible.”
“We’re realistic,” Priya corrected.
“There’s a difference.
“Oh my god, the group chat.” Jordan’s face lit up with the specific delight of someone who’d been waiting all lunch to deliver this particular piece of gossip.
“So apparently half the hockey team has a group chat specifically for tracking whatever’s going on between you two.
My roommate’s on field hockey, she’s friends with one of the girls on the actual team, and apparently there’s a betting pool.
Actual money.
On when you two are going to ‘admit it.'”
“There is not a betting pool.”
“There’s absolutely a betting pool.
I heard it’s up to like sixty dollars.” Jordan grinned, entirely too delighted by my visible horror.
“I’d put money on it myself if I actually knew either of you well enough to have insider information, but since I clearly don’t—” she gestured pointedly at me.
“—since apparently my best friend has been keeping secrets from her sickbed-confined roommate, I’m just going to have to trust the group chat’s math on this one.”
“There’s nothing to have insider information about.
We had dinner because she was hungry and I was hungry and we happened to be in the same place at the same time.”
“That’s the most tutoring-adjacent sentence I’ve ever heard,” Priya said.
“It’s honestly impressive how hard you’re working to make something sound boring.”
“It is boring.
That’s the whole point.”
Jordan and Priya exchanged a look across the table, the kind of look best friends share when they’ve silently agreed not to argue further because the other person is clearly, obviously, hilariously wrong, and I felt my face go hot again despite my best efforts.
“Fine,” Jordan said, finally picking her fork back up, mercy arriving at last.
“Keep pretending.
But when the betting pool pays out, I expect a cut, since I’m apparently the only one in this friend group who’s honest about what’s actually happening.”
“I could’ve told you sooner if you hadn’t been dying of the flu.”
“Don’t turn this around on me.
I was incapacitated.
That’s not a character flaw, that’s a medical event.” Jordan pointed her fork at me for emphasis.
“Also, for the record, I fully expect updates now that I’m back among the living.
Real ones.
Not ‘it went fine.'”
“There’s nothing happening.”
“Sure, Emery,” they said again, together, and this time I didn’t even bother arguing, just let my head drop forward onto the table with a groan while my two best friends laughed at my expense over a lunch I was fairly sure neither of them planned on letting me forget anytime soon.
By the time I finally escaped to my afternoon lab, phone buzzing in my pocket with a text from Calloway confirming Wednesday’s session.
I had fully accepted that Priya and Jordan weren’t going to let this go.
Not this week, probably not this semester, maybe not ever, if the betting pool was really up to sixty dollars.
I read the text three times before typing back a simple confirmation, and told myself, unconvincingly, that the small flip in my stomach was just leftover nerves from lunch and not something that had anything to do with the two words at the end of her message:
*can’t wait.*
I put my phone away before I could read too much into two words a person might type to anyone.
I mostly succeeded.