He heard it before he even reached the Finance building, hissed between cupped hands, dropped behind backpacks, said once right to his face by a girl walking the other way who looked him over and mouthed it like a prayer.
Chapel Prince.
Because that was the thing about Marbury, it kept score.
Two years ago a girl asked him out by the fountain and he said no, and then another one did, and then another, twenty of them over four semesters, actual open invitations.
And over a hundred more tried the soft approaches, study groups, borrowed notes, parties he never went to, and he turned every single one flat and polite, like a wall.
Nobody ever got a reason beyond a shake of the head.
Somewhere in his second year the campus stopped calling it weird and started calling it a brand, because he rehearsed in the old converted chapel with the drama club and turned down women like a man under holy orders, and the name just stuck.
The Chapel Prince.
Oblivious, celibate, or playing for the other team, those were the three running theories, and the campus argued about them the way other schools argued about football.
Wes walked through those crowds now with eighteen hours of truth burning a hole in his jacket pocket.
A suite.
A ledger.
An aunt.
A senior with no name.
A booking tonight.
The least celibate man on the eastern seaboard, and the whole school still calling him a monk at a volume just under shouting.
The clock over the corridor said 8:04 when he hit the Finance hall, and the door was already shut.
He slipped inside anyway, gasping, and the room went dead silent, forty faces turning at once, and at the front of the hall, mid-sentence with a marker in her hand, stood Professor Beatrice Hollis.
He knew the face from brochures and mandatory intro slides.
Forty-something, silver threaded through dark hair pulled back so tight it looked structural, eyes like deposit slips, and a reputation that walked three steps ahead of her everywhere she went.
She’d spent a decade eating her way up the real markets before Marbury hired her away, and the university printed her name on everything because her name alone pulled donations and endowments and prestige just by showing up.
Her Corporate Finance class had a ninety percent fail rate, which she quoted out loud on day one like a trophy.
Her door locked at 8:00:00 exactly, to the second, every time, on principle.
They called her the Warden.
“Mr. Corrigan,” said the Warden.
“Professor, I know it’s past, but the bus, there was traffic, I can explain,” said Wes.
“You’re either early or you don’t exist,” she said, marker still in hand.
“The retake is pending. The date posts outside my office. Don’t waste any more of my time.”
She just turned back to the board like he was a rounding error, and he stood there one breath with the whole class staring at him through the little window with the faces of people watching a man walk to a firing squad, and then he peeled himself off the spot and walked, because standing there looking wounded would’ve been the old Wes, and the old Wes was two days dead.
“Dammit,” Wes muttered under his breath as he backed out into the corridor.
He headed for the library with his lungs still burning, because the retake would be built off the Hollis practice set, he’d bet his life on it, and that thing was reference only, it didn’t leave the building, so the building was where he had to be.
He spotted Reggie before he found a corner, because Reggie was waving both arms from a table near the periodicals like he was landing a plane.
“Hey! Wes! Over—”
“SHHH…!!!”
The sound cut through the reading room like a whip, and Wes turned with his whole body, because he’d heard shushes before and this wasn’t one of those.
This was artillery.
It came from the front desk, where a girl rose up out of her chair behind a wall of returned books.
Thick lenses, air scraped back.
A baggy sweater drowning a baggier hoodie, layers of faded grey hanging off a small frame, and a stare that stopped Wes’s kidneys cold.
The lanyard on her chest said WINNIE OSEI.
Nothing else did.
He’d heard of her.
Head librarian, full scholarship, working part-time because she was dirt poor, and the kind of strict that made tenured professors lower their voices near her desk.
They called her the Dragon of the Stacks, and now Wes understood why.
“I’m sorry, we’re so sorry,” said Wes, bowing his head on pure instinct while Reggie did the same beside him.
Winnie Osei gave them one long, sharp, lingering look through the lenses, the kind of look that filed them away for a future offense report, then dropped back into her chair and went back to stamping returns like they were beneath the sentence.
Wes slid into the seat across from Reggie and put his head down on the table.
“I’m officially dead.”
“Ouch. The Iron Lady, right? You know how she is,” said Reggie.
“One minute late?” said Reggie.
“Four,” said Wes.
Reggie whistled and shook his head.
“I know. I’m officially dead,” said Wes.
“Well, it’s not the end of the world. How was your night? Did you get some rest?”
“Not much. I’m exhausted.”
“How come? You went straight home after dinner, right? Like the little princess you are, haha,” said Reggie.
Wes glared at him.
“Go to hell. I went out for a burger and a girl started flirting with me.”
“I get it, I get it! The Chapel Prince finally—”
“SHHH…!!!”
“—drew his sword, huh?” Reggie whisper-shouted straight through the shush, wiggling his eyebrows.
“SHHHH…!!!” said Winnie, louder, and this time she was already out of her chair, already marching, and she planted herself at the end of their table with her arms crossed over the baggy sweater.
“One more sound and I’m banning both of you for the rest of the month,” said Winnie.
They froze.
They nodded.
They sat like statues until she turned and walked back to her desk, and the second her back was turned Reggie leaned in close, and his whisper had the exact volume of a normal person’s speech.
“So the practice set, that’s what you need, right? The reserve section,” said Wes, keeping his voice under the radar this time.
“Yeah, the Hollis set, reference only,” said Reggie.
“Man, my night was insane, I’ve got stories, so this girl I’ve been seeing texts me at like midnight and says her roommate’s out of town, so I—”
“SHHH!!!”
The stamp came down on a returned book hard enough to make the desk jump.
They both flinched, and Reggie, being Reggie, decided the correct move was to keep talking.
“I’m just saying, her roommate was GONE, so I—”
“THAT’S IT.”
Winnie was back over the table with her hand out flat, and the whole reading room had gone dead quiet, two hundred faces watching over their books like a jury.
“I’m done. Both of you. Out. You’re banned for today, and if this happens again it’s a month, so get out.”
“But the practice set,” said Wes.
“The Hollis set is reference only, I can’t check it out, I need it for the retake—”
“Then you should have thought of that before you came here to talk,” said Winnie, already turned, already walking, already stamping.
They packed up in silence under the eyes of the entire room, and the last thing Wes heard as the doors swung shut behind them was the flat clack of Winnie Osei’s stamp, one book at a time, like nothing had happened at all.