Chapter 9: The Fountain

I read the messages until the words stopped looking like words.

Then I put the phone face down on my desk and screamed into a pillow.

Then I picked the phone back up and texted the group chat.

"Night Owl. Thursday. Bring your laptop, Kimble. Somebody's wearing my face."

Crew answered in under a minute.

"On it."

Corey answered a minute later.

"Saylor?"

"Who else hates me enough to make up a nickname for her own pearls?"

He sent nothing back for a long time.

Then: "What do you need."

I stared at that.

Nine years, and he'd never once asked me that.

But there was something I needed first.

Before the meeting.

Before I walked into a room full of people deciding whether I was a liar.

I needed one thing on that campus to go my way.

"Crew," I typed. "Thursday, noon. Wear something you don't mind getting wet."

On orientation day in August, they'd been waiting by the quad fountain.

I'd been carrying a box of my things across to Ashgrove.

Crew took the box and handed it to Corey.

Then he picked me up and dropped me into the water in my white T-shirt.

Half the freshman class filmed it.

The clip was still on the account's page.

The account had captioned it, "Wet T-shirt contest, winner by default."

Thursday at noon the quad was packed with people going to lunch.

The fountain sprayed white in the sun.

I sat on the low stone rim with an iced coffee.

Corey stood a few feet back with his hood up.

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