Chapter 16: The Tip

Eli did not see it from the outside.

Eli was inside the boy at the keyboard, and the boy's thoughts came through the boy's fingers.

"He'll win. They said it in the corridor. Donnelly. Donnelly, with his chipped tooth and his ridiculous warm face."

The announcement was at ten in the morning.

The notice about the academic-conduct hearing sat open in another window, pinned up by mistake on the department's board that afternoon.

Eli Donnelly, Hearing, Thursday.

"A minor thing. A borrowed set of drafts. He lent them to a friend. It's nothing. It will be nothing."

The boy's hands were cold.

"But the jury chair doesn't know."

The cursor blinked in the address line.

"If he goes to Copenhagen, he comes home with the whole world."

"And I'm the one who stays behind, the one who was never anyone's first choice."

The boy typed.

He typed a short, polite sentence, with the facts of the hearing and nothing else.

His thumb hung over the key for a long minute.

Then the boy pressed it.

"It's sent."

Something inside the boy went flat and quiet.

The next morning, in the department hall, the chair read out one name.

It was not Eli's.

Eli felt the boy's knees go, and he felt him smile, because it was the only face he knew how to wear.

He saw a dark rented room in Copenhagen with a good window.

He saw five weeks of lonely work.

He saw a letter to a man called Godfrey Lippincott, with the word sorry written eleven times.

He saw an office with green blotting paper and a fountain pen.

"I'll keep this between us, Declan."

And then the stairwell came back.

The window light, the cold rail, a man's chest rising and falling under Eli's hand.

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