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"We'll walk slowly," Juno amends, without looking away from me. "Go."

"I'm not going to walk up to a stranger outside the science block and just…"

"Hi, I'm Sadie, you were at the party last night," Maya offers helpfully. "That's literally all you have to say." She tries to push me that way, but I hold myself in place.

"It's not that simple."

"It’s exactly that simple."

I look across at the science block. Miles is still there, talking to Mason, there’s something calm about the way he stands, like the morning has a different pace for him than it does for the rest of the campus. He laughs at something, and something in my chest does the thing again that I'm declining to name. Am I starting to like a guy just by the look of him?

"He doesn't look like a one woman man," Bree says.

Everyone goes slightly quiet because Bree has a gift for stating the thing in the room at full volume.

"She's not wrong," Maya says, more carefully.

"I'm never wrong," Bree says, not unkindly. "The ones who stand like that at parties, watching everything, dancing with whoever, they're not looking for something real. They're just looking."

I know she's right. Some part of me that is sensible and self-preserving and has made it nineteen years without a single genuinely bad decision knows this is true.

The other part of me watches him tip his head toward something Mason's saying and he looks like a sex god. His lips curl into a smile, and the only thing I’m thinking is, I bet those lips could make you forget everything around you.

"I'm not going to talk to him," I say.

"You're absolutely going to talk to him eventually," Juno says.

"That may be true, but not today,” I tell her.

She looks as if she has more to say. She always has more to say. But she turns and falls back into step beside me and lets it go, which is one of the better things about Juno. She knows when she's made her point.

The athletics building hits me before the door is fully open, the chalk and floor cleaner and that warm rubber-and-effort smell that I have associated with gymnastics since I was six.

My shoulders drop.

The others fan out toward the changing rooms. Juno is already unwinding her scarf, back on the conditioning block monologue. Maya has her phone out. Bree tucks her sunglasses into her kit bag with the careful reverence of someone storing something irreplaceable.

I stop at the changing room door and look back through the narrow window at the morning outside, the path, the sky, and the corner where the science block would be if I could see that far.

I can't.

Maybe I will talk to him, maybe I should push myself to do something I wouldn’t do, but can I? No. I’m not that type of girl, I like to have fun, but I’ve never asked a guy out, and I don’t think I’ll start now.

Seven

Miles

She's been sitting at the same window table for forty minutes. I know this because I followed her. She’s sitting on the second floor, east stack, the row of reference shelves that nobody uses anymore because everything is digital and the physical books are just architecture now. It’s a good sightline, quiet, and a corner that doesn't get foot traffic because there's nothing here anybody needs. Why the hell does anyone even go to the library anymore, you can find everything you want from the internet?

She’s by the window. That’s one thing I’ve noticed about her; she likes to be by the window all the time. She likes to look around at the world. Her camera comes up every few minutes. She's not someone who shoots everything on impulse and edits later. She waits, watches the light shift by degrees, the way it moves across the table, the way it catches the edge of her coffee cup, and the dust that floats through it if you look at the right angle. She waits until whatever she's seeing resolves into something she wants to keep, and then she shoots.

Once, sometimes twice, then she sets the camera down and goes back to her work.

I've been watching her do this for forty minutes, and I haven't opened my laptop once. I brought it with me so I could watch her and work on my own hacking software. It’s something only I can use, not even my brothers will use it. This is mine, and I’m going to make sure it's the best system out there.

She lifts the camera again, turning it slightly, chasing something in the way the light is breaking across the window frame, and the concentration on her face is set.

The shutter clicks. She checks the screen. Whatever she sees makes something shift at the corner of her mouth; it’s not quite a smile, just a loosening, and she looks like she got exactly what she came for.