The Campus Bully Hounded Me Out of My Seat, Then I Told Him I Was Pregnant novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cage
On her fifth day at Halden, Aksel Kvale orders Thea out of his library seat and says he will find her tonight; she sees the scar on his hand, locks the used-textbook cage in front of him, and goes to the boathouse dock to wait.
The biology text was halfway onto the shelf when a man's hand took it out of mine.
I had been shelving used textbooks in the bookstore cage for five days, and nobody had ever taken one from me.
The hand was long and pale, with a thin white scar across the back of it in the shape of a fishhook.
I knew that scar.
I did not look up yet.
"You're the transfer," Aksel Kvale said.
His voice was low and level, and it carried to the back of the store.
The two girls at the register stopped talking.
A boy by the sweatshirt rack picked up his bag and left.
I had been at the college five days, and I already knew who this was.
He was a senior who stroked the men's varsity eight, and his family's name was cut into the lintel of the boathouse.
Everyone stepped around him in the halls as if he were a wet floor.
The girl across the hall from me had told me, my first night, that two students had been thrown out in three years because he said they cheated.
"You've been at my table in the north reading room four nights running," he said.
"Stop."
I looked at him then.
He was six-two and lean, with short dark-blond hair and gray eyes that did not move off my face.
He wasn't angry.
That was the worst of it.
"It's a library table," I said.
"It belongs to my family."
"The library belongs to the college."
"The college belongs to my family," he said.
He set the biology text on the cage counter and laid his left hand flat beside it, an inch from mine.
I could feel the cold coming off his sleeve.
In the pocket of my mother's navy wool coat, on the peg behind me, was a plastic stick with two pink lines on it.
I had taken the test that morning in the one-stall bathroom on the second floor of the dorm.
I had sat on the edge of the tub for a long time afterward.
"I'm going to find out why you came here," Aksel said.
He said it softly, as though he were reading it off a card.
"I'll find you tonight.
"Be somewhere I can."
I looked at his hand.
I looked at the scar.
Three weeks and two days ago, on the river bluff above the boathouse in the dark, a man in a gray hood had held my hand against his face.
He had told me he couldn't sleep.
I had told him I couldn't either.
I had run my thumb across the back of his hand and found a ridge of old scar there, curved like a hook.
He never told me his name, and I never told him mine.
He never took the hood down.
In the morning I had walked back up to the dorm with my braid full of grass and no way to find him.
Now his hand lay an inch from mine on the cage counter, and the scar was the same one.
I did not say so.
My heart was going hard enough that I thought he could hear it through the wire.
He had no idea.
I could see that.
He was looking at a stranger he meant to frighten, and there was nothing else in his face.
A hot, stupid want went through me, right there in the bookstore, with two girls watching.
It made me furious.
I took the biology text back out from under his hand.
I slid it onto its shelf, spine out, between the chemistry and the botany.
Then I took my keys off the hook, stepped around the end of the counter, and pulled the cage door closed in front of him.
The lock clicked.
"We close at six," I said.
"It's six," he said.
He stood there with his hand still on the counter.
For the first time since he'd walked in, something moved in his face.
I took my mother's coat off the peg and put it on.
The bookstore manager came out of the back with a clipboard and saw who was standing at the cage.
She stopped walking.
I walked out past all of them, through the front doors and down the steps, into the September dusk.
The bluff road was cold, and I could smell the river.
I didn't go back to the dorm.
I went down the long switchback stairs below the library to the water, where the boathouse sat on its pilings with the family name across the lintel in black letters.
The doors were chained.
The dock ran out beside it into the dark, and I walked to the end and sat down on the planks with my feet over the Vermillion.
I put my hand in my coat pocket and held the test.
If he wanted to find me, I would not make him look.
I waited a long time.
A boat horn sounded somewhere downriver, and then it was quiet.
Then footsteps came down the boathouse stairs, slow and unhurried.
A flashlight beam swung across the dock and found my face.
I did not raise a hand against it.
"You said you'd find me," I said.
"Here I am."
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