Chapter 9: Reed's Roll Call

Reed's POV

I sent the committee home at half past midnight, and I stayed behind to lock the print room.

I locked it twice.

My shirt was still untucked on the left side, and my hands had not stopped shaking since the copier.

I told myself it was the caffeine.

Then I went out to the quad to make sure Lucy Fenn had gotten on her shuttle.

She had not.

She was sitting alone on the bench under the lamp outside the cafeteria, with her knees pulled up and her chin on them.

The quad was empty, and the sprinklers were ticking.

She was talking.

I stopped behind a tree thick enough to hide a car.

"So the goat," Lucy said softly, to nobody, "went through the revolving door three times, and each time he came out in a different hat."

She waited a second.

"No, that's the whole story. It's about the hats."

Nobody laughed, because nobody was there.

"Okay," she said, brighter. "Good talk, everyone. Great turnout. We'll do it again soon."

She tucked her hair behind her ear.

Her phone screen lit her face from below, and it read 07:41:12.

She turned it over so she could not see it.

"What's the next topic?" she said to the empty bench beside her. "Anyone? You, in the back?"

A sprinkler head came on, and she jumped.

She laughed at herself, quick and thin, and started talking again before the sound had finished.

I had spent five days reading her wrong.

I had thought she talked because she liked an audience.

I had put it on a printed form, in a bold font: SOCIAL DEPENDENCY.

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