Chapter 5: The Stairwell

By Monday morning, the whole campus knew my price.

It was written on the whiteboard in the dining hall under the day's soups.

HAVERLY BOUGHT A WIFE: 5M.

Someone had drawn a small crown over the M.

I wiped it off with my apron sleeve and went back to scooping oatmeal.

"You didn't have to come in," Cleo said at my elbow. "You're rich. You have a husband. Quit this stupid job."

"I have a shift." I said.

"You have five million dollars." Cleo said.

"I have an account with five million dollars in it, and a line on a schedule that says six a.m. I like the schedule."

Cleo looked at me for a while with her red curls tucked under the hairnet.

"You're the strangest rich person I've ever met," she said, and handed me a tray of muffins.

By ten, I had heard the word wife whispered in four buildings.

I heard it in the library elevator. I heard it in the line at the coffee cart.

In Statistics I sat in my usual seat and did not turn around.

Dane sat in his, two rows back.

I knew exactly where he sat.

We had not said much since the stairwell.

He'd made eggs, and I'd eaten them standing up.

He had told me, politely, that he had crew practice at five and would be back by eight.

It was the most married conversation I had ever heard.

At eleven, the lecture ended.

I went down the back stairwell of Haverly Hall, which nobody uses because it comes out by the loading dock.

I needed a minute without a hundred people looking at me.

I got less.

"Hey."

Dane came down the steps behind me two at a time, in the navy hoodie, with a backpack on one shoulder.

There was a smear of blue ink along his jaw, from his pen.

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