Turn 13 of 26

The phone stops ringing as it disappears. You are nerds, you don’t use phones. You get back to focusing on your notes just like everyone else while giggling and snorting. The class ends 2 hours later with everyone sounding the same they did 2Everyone packs up the same as they leave the classroom and walk back to the honors dorm. You look at Ruth and see som

The buzzing stops. Not silenced — gone. Your hand drifts to your pocket and finds it empty, flat fabric, no rectangle, no weight at all. You pat it twice, confused for half a second, and then the confusion dissolves like sugar in warm water, because of course your pocket is empty. You don't have a phone. You're a nerd. Nerds don't use phones — phones are for the popular girls, the ones in the letters, and you were never one of them. The thought settles over the missing weight in your pocket like snow, and you can't remember what you were reaching for. You go back to your notes.

The two hours slide past in the best warmth you've ever known. The bow-tied professor poses problems; the room erupts; you argue, you giggle, you snort, you defend Megan's thirty-seven until the professor himself walks your row, looks over your work, and says, "Excellent instinct, Miss Kessler — carry the singular term and it's thirty." Miss Kessler. Your chest floods with a pride that feels older than you are.

Then it ends. Thirty pencils cap in one motion, thirty notebooks square themselves, thirty girls rise, and you rise with them, and you cannot remember the door again — the gap is there, smooth and white, and on the other side of it you're walking down the stairwell in a tide of cardigans toward the evening.

The honors dorm is brick and ivy, quieter than the frat houses across campus, warm light in the windows. The girls file in the way they file into everything, together, and Ruth climbs the stairs beside you chattering about Thursday's problem set. Your room is on the second floor — a new room, a dorm room, and your body turns toward it without hesitation while your mind scrambles for where your keycard went, where your string lights went, where anything went.

You look at Ruth to say goodnight, and see something in her face — a satisfaction so deep and so calm it looks almost like love, the look of someone watching a project come out exactly right.

"Thame theath tomorrow," she lisps, patting your soft arm. "Don't forget your dentitht appointment. They're wiring your braceth permannently." She smiles, braces to braces.

"Thleep well, Emma." The door of your new room is in front of you, and the corridor is emptying, and for the first time all day, no one is telling you where to sit.