Tessa was still in the faculty wing when he came out, standing at the bulletin board by the stairwell, very busy reading a flyer about a career fair that had already happened in April.
Wes clocked it from thirty feet away without breaking stride.
She’d waited.
Fifteen minutes of pretending to read a dead flyer, waiting for a boy who wasn’t sure of anything, and the Hollow Graduate took one look at that and knew exactly what to do with it, because people who waited like that didn’t want the truth, they wanted to be trusted with something.
“You’re still here,” said Wes, letting the surprise land soft.
“Bus schedule changed,” said Tessa, too fast.
“So? What did she want? Was it just about the midterm?”
He sighed, and it was the tired kind, the kind that had weight behind it.
“She offered me a way to make up the credit through a research project. But it’s going to eat up a lot of my time.”
“That sounds like her, because she values labor over excuses,” said Tessa, falling into step beside him toward the quad while looking at him sideways.
“I was worried she was going to tear you apart, Wes. You’ve seemed different lately. Distracted.”
“Life has a way of getting complicated when you least expect it.”
They crossed the quad together through the late afternoon crowd, and Tessa glanced at him again.
“You were in there a long time. I was starting to think she’d actually called security on you.”
“It felt like an interrogation at first, but we found a middle ground. She’s complicated,” said Wes, with a short tired laugh.
“Complicated is one word for it. Most people just say terrifying.” Tessa leaned in slightly.
“What kind of research project did she give you? Because usually she only trusts her TAs with her private data.”
Wes paused for a beat and let the silence stretch, because silence was a prop and he’d learned this week that a held silence made people lean in and fill it themselves.
“It’s sensitive,” said Wes.
“So let’s just say she needs someone who can pay attention to details without asking too many questions. And I think she realized I’m not the typical student who just wants a passing grade.” Follow the newest chapters on novelping(.)com.
Tessa frowned.
“You’re definitely not typical, Wes. Especially not lately. Everyone’s talking about how much you’ve changed. You used to be so quiet, almost invisible.”
“Invisible is safe, Tessa, but safety doesn’t pay the rent,” said Wes, and he put on the weary face of a man carrying the whole world in a book bag.
“Sometimes you have to stop being invisible and start being what the situation requires.”
Tessa stared at him with her eyes searching his face like she was looking for the seam of the mask.
“That sounds incredibly lonely.”
“It can be,” said Wes.
He softened his expression for one split second, one, just long enough for her to believe she was seeing the real him underneath, before the tiredness came back down like a curtain.
“But then again, some people make the noise worth it.”
Tessa’s cheeks went pink and she looked away quickly, very interested in a tree.
“Well. If you need help with the research, or if the Warden gets too heavy to handle, you know where to find me.”
“I do. Thanks, Tessa. I mean it.”
She walked off toward the dorms with her bag strap held in both hands.
Wes watched her go, and that’s when the strange feeling hit him full in the chest, the one that had been building all week and finally had a name.
He hadn’t been acting just now.
That was the thing.
He’d been steering.
Every pause had moved her a step closer, every soft word had landed exactly where he’d placed it, and he’d watched her face the whole time like a chess player watching a board, adjusting, feeding, retreating.
He felt like a puppeteer with his hand inside a live interaction, and the puppet was a conversation, and the scariest part was how natural the strings felt in his fingers.
There was no research project, there was a photograph of a woman named Meredith Fane burning in his pocket and an office he’d just made a wreck of.
And wrapped around that lie was the Hollow Graduate, the tired brilliant boy who was mostly a costume he’d invented forty minutes ago in a classroom, and she’d bought both, at full price, without blinking.
Two lies, running simultaneously, no sweat, no stumbles.
Acting wasn’t something he did anymore.
It was the operating system everything else ran on.
BZZT!
The Ledger buzzed in his pocket.
[Notice: Tonight’s appointment at 20:00 has been rescheduled by the client to Saturday at 20:00. No penalty applied. Tomorrow’s 08:00 appointment remains confirmed.]
Wes stared at the screen and let out a breath.
The Company had just handed him his night back, and somewhere a woman he’d never meet had moved him around her calendar like a dentist appointment.
He pocketed the phone and turned toward the east side of campus, where the old chapel building sat at the edge of the grounds with the theater hall attached to its hip, because rehearsal had somehow survived the morning and the club still technically existed.
He was halfway across the green when the bleeding started.
A girl from his stats section waved at him near the fountain, a normal friendly wave, and he answered her with the Hollow Graduate’s low, exhausted register, quiet and heavy, and she blinked at him like he’d spoken a different language.
Two steps later a guy from the debate team gave him the nod, the little Chapel Prince salute guys gave him now, and Wes almost gave him the tired Half Graduate sigh instead of the warm easy smile, and caught it at the last second and swapped faces mid-stride like changing a shirt while walking.
By the time he reached the chapel path he’d worn three faces in four minutes, 714’s silk still sitting somewhere under his tongue, the Graduate’s weight on his shoulders, the Prince’s warmth in his mouth, and the edges of all of them had gone soft and run into each other like wet paint, and for one second, standing alone on the path in the long gold light.
Wes genuinely could not remember which face had been on him when he woke up this morning.
Then the chapel bells marked the hour and the feeling passed, and he pushed through the heavy double doors of the theater hall.