I wedged the last paperback in at the edges of the box. Its cover crumpled, and I straightened the aging card stock, grappled the box up into my arms with a grunt, and let it thud onto my empty desk.
The room smelled like Burgess always did in the winter: like the uniformly stale air from the heating vents. It was enough to give you a headache, the close, dry grip of it. I closed my eyes, trying to will away the throb of my swollen face.
I wedged a nail into my key ring and maneuvered my room key into my palm. I gripped it, the teeth bit into my fingers, and with a hard lump in my throat, I walked down the hall to Anabel’s room, wig and makeup on.
“Hey,” she said when I knocked, pulling the door open. “Jordan.” She wore loose gray sweats, her hair in a sloppy ponytail. Cursive on her T-shirt read, Connecticut girls do it better. I wondered what “it” was.
Anabel played with the end of her ponytail. “Look, I went to the a cappella thing, and I heard what happened after.”
My cheeks burned. After a second’s silence, I pulled off my wig. “Well, that traveled fast.”
“Connor’s telling everyone.”
“Great. Awesome.”
She folded her arms, leaning against the doorframe. “I just wanted to say, everyone I’ve talked to thinks you’re kind of a badass.”
I blinked rapidly. “They what?”
“Yeah. Going undercover? Who does that? I mean, every Kensington kid wants to be that kid who breaks the mold, but this is, like, next level.”
I smiled weakly and looked down at my flats, too exhausted to be relieved that the student body didn’t think I was the weirdest person ever to live and breathe. After a second, I held up my key. “Should I give this to you, or . . . ?”
“Reese, probably.” Her smile faltered. “She only told me this afternoon that you’re leaving.”
We stood in the sort of uncomfortable silence you share with people in waiting rooms, not sure whether to discuss what’s next.
“Well, I’m going to—” I gestured toward Reese’s room.
“Right.”
“Okay.” I headed down the hall.
“Jordan?” Anabel called.
I looked back over my shoulder.
“Um, good luck in California,” she said. “You’ll be great wherever you are.”
I found a smile. “You too.”
Her door closed. I let out a slow breath, turned back toward the end of the hall, and found Isaac standing there, looking into my open room, staring at the blank walls and stripped bed. When he faced me, his expression told me all I needed to know. I’d seen the same look on Michael’s face at the end of last year. Goodbye looked like a crease between the eyebrows and a thinning mouth.
“You told me last night,” he said. “You said—but I didn’t get it. I’m an idiot. I thought you meant you were leaving the group.”
“You’re not an idiot.”
“Why are you leaving?” He approached me.
I gripped my room key so tight, it threatened to cut. “Money.”
“That’s bullshit,” he said.
My palms grew warm. “I mean, but it’s not.”
“But it’s bullshit. You shouldn’t have to leave.”
“But I do have to, okay?” My voice rose. I couldn’t keep it down. “So it’s not like some unrealistic, unreasonable—it’s just real life, okay? This is how it works, Isaac.” I swallowed, shaking my head.
I could imagine the novel’s worth of responses piling up in his head, but all he let through was, “Why didn’t you tell us?”
The softness of his voice sliced through me. I heard the real question. Why didn’t you tell me?
“I tried to,” I said. “But if you don’t say it out loud, sometimes it feels like it won’t really happen, you know?” It was hopeless, trying to explain why denial helped, why it felt better to delay the inevitable than to move forward. “Like there’s something at the last second that’s going to dive in out of nowhere, and save you, and fix everything.”
Isaac’s hand found mine. Squeezed. “I want to.”
I chuckled. It sounded horrible, a grinding little sound. “You can’t.”
“I know. But I want to.” His voice was quiet, fierce, earnest. As if the sentiment itself could stitch everything back together. Heat coursed through me, and a second later, gratitude. Sometimes good intentions couldn’t do a thing except make you feel less alone, and sometimes that was enough.
“Why’re you here, anyway?” I murmured.
He tugged on my hand, leading me down the hall. “Come on.”
I headed to Reese’s room, slid my key under her door, and followed him.
The Nest’s red door creaked open, and silence took the tower’s interior, a swell of a hush in the aftermath of voices. We stepped in, the door closed behind us, the flag rippled, and I leaned back against it, taking the black fabric between my thumb and forefinger.
“Hey,” I said. Six pairs of eyes were riveted on my face. On my makeup, probably.
No—seven. Victoria was sitting beside her brother.
She was the first to speak. “Um, so,” she said.
For a second, I didn’t understand. Then I looked over at Isaac, and it clicked into place. He hadn’t figured it out when he’d seen my empty room. Victoria had told them what I couldn’t: that Kensington’s ivory tower had grown too tall and too narrow, crowding me out.
My cheeks went hot, but I refused to feel shame.
“You’re transferring back to San Francisco,” Trav said, looking severe. “From a musical standpoint, it would have been helpful to know this ahead of time.”
I couldn’t help a bit of a smile. I could have predicted that reaction down to the word. It was sort of comforting, Trav being as unchanging as Prince Library itself.
“Look,” Jon Cox said, “if we can do anything to . . . I don’t know, help out—”
“You can’t,” I said, on gut instinct. But for some reason, I thought of Reese’s eyes as she’d spoken to me in the office that day. We can take this little by little. And I thought, Well, couldn’t I borrow money for a plane ticket back to campus after break? The idea of asking for a loan made a defensive instinct flare in the back of my head, but it was a start, right? Wasn’t there something people could do to help?
But no. Not unless they changed my parents’ minds. They’d wanted to file my transfer application since the day I’d set foot on campus.
The ensuing quiet felt like the moment of silence we took at the start of every meal, that full, reflective hush. “Thanks for having my back earlier,” I said.
“Of course,” Trav said.
“So . . . what’s going on?”
Nihal cleared his throat and held up a sheet of paper. A fine-tipped pen hung behind his ear, casting a shadow across his eye. “I printed the recategorization petition and filled it out. I talked to Dr. Graves, and frankly, I think it would kill him if the Minuets got to tour instead of us, so he signed it. Isaac’s going to visit Student Life and file it tomorrow before they close up for the semester.”
I frowned, uncomprehending. “But the dean needs to sign it. Caskey needs to sign it.”
“No. A cappella groups aren’t discipline-exclusive, so a dean needs to sign it.” Nihal passed me the paper. Beside Graves’s slapdash pair of initials, a tight spiral of a signature was coiled up at the bottom. “So I made a visit to your housemother, who, by the way, is exactly as scary as you’ve claimed, and who also seems pretty interested in this whole thing. She called it avant-garde found theater, which sounds vaguely complimentary.”
“I’m going to get this filed tomorrow,” Isaac said. “I’m going to stay in the Student Life office until I see them get it done myself. We have the signatures. Caskey can’t stop it from happening.”
I clutched the paper for a minute, waiting for some sort of inevitable contradiction, maybe, for one of the guys to speak up. No, we don’t want you. No, no, no. The retraction, the rejection.
All my plans had come undone. Everything was exposed. It didn’t seem possible that this was where it got me.
Why was I so afraid, all of a sudden? Nervous like I hadn’t been in months?
“But I—I have a flight home tomorrow,” I said. “I can’t cancel it.”
“We talked to the Aural Fixation guys,” Isaac said. “They can take care of all that. The only thing is whether you want to come with us.”
My hold tightened on the corner of the flag in my hand, and I snuck the word out into the air: “Yeah.” It hung there for a moment, hesitant, before settling. Then smiles started creasing faces, heads started bobbing, and the inimitable relief of crossing some sort of finish line rushed into me, cold and overwhelming.