He Asked Me Out to Get Back at Her, I Gave Him a Rulebook Instead novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Dark Screen
Frannie works out that the comments only see what happens near Ainslee, meets a different Linc behind the garden wall, and learns the bet has grown to twenty thousand dollars.
"It's not your building," I said. "It's a drawing."
"Drawings get built, sweetie. That's what they're for."
Her friends giggled into their rosé.
[the roommate thinks she can fight the ogdens lmaooo]
[sit DOWN garden girl]
I went into my room and shut the door.
The words stopped mid-sentence.
Over my bed, nothing.
I opened the door an inch.
[poor thing is hiding in her room]
I shut it.
Nothing.
I opened it again.
[why does she keep doing that]
I shut it and sat down on the floor and started a fresh page in my green notebook.
At the top I wrote: WHEN.
By Wednesday I had three pages.
They came when Ainslee walked into the dining hall, and they left when she walked out.
They came in the suite, every time, with her.
They came when she called me to ask if I'd taken her oat milk, and they went dark the second she hung up.
They didn't come to the greenhouse.
They didn't come to my seminar, my shift, my shower, or my bed.
On Wednesday night I asked them, out loud, in the suite, while Ainslee was in the bath.
"Who are you?"
Ainslee called through the door. "Are you talking to yourself again?"
[lol the roommate talks to herself]
[chapter 3 is so slow, get to the gala]
Chapter three.
They weren't watching me.
They were reading her.
Ainslee Ogden was the girl in a love story, and these people were her readers, and I was the roommate.
They could only see the pages she was on.
Everywhere else, the book went dark.
I underlined it twice and wrote one more line under it.
They don't know what she doesn't know.
On Thursday afternoon Linc was waiting outside my studio, leaning on a pillar.
Rule six.
In public he looked at me.
He was annoyingly good at it.
Two girls from my studio walked into a doorframe watching him do it.
"You said I'd find out what the Founders' Garden is," he said. "I'm finding out."
"It's not a date."
"Every single thing we do is a date. That's the deal."
So I walked him behind the chapel.
Then the wall started, fieldstone, eight feet high, green with moss on its north face.
The iron gate was chained.
I had the only key that wasn't in a drawer in Facilities.
Linc watched me unlock it.
"You have a key to a secret garden."
"I have a key to a capstone. Duck."
He ducked under the ivy and stepped inside.
Then he stopped.
The garden was an acre of gold weeds and old shapes under them.
Brick paths ran in a cross.
The glasshouse at the far end had collapsed in on itself, iron ribs bent.
Along the north wall, my beds were dark and dug, with kale and chard and garlic coming up in rows.
Everything else was the year nobody had come back.
"Huh," Linc said quietly.
Out here, he talked differently.
Nobody was going to clip it and post it.
"It's eighteen-nineties," I said. "A kitchen garden. It fed the whole college once. They let it go in the sixties when the dining hall started buying frozen peas."
"And you're fixing it."
"I'm proving it can be fixed. That's my capstone. Restoration plan, plus the north beds as a working sample."
"So they can bulldoze a working sample instead of a dead one."
"Thank you, Linc. Very helpful."
He walked along the path with his hands in his coat pockets.
"Can I tell you something that isn't for the audience?" he said.
"There's no audience in here."
"I hated the roses."
I looked at him.
"Ninety-nine of them. Austin's idea. The quartet was her mother's idea. The banner was my father's assistant." He kicked a clod of dirt. "I was standing in the middle of somebody else's party, holding somebody else's flowers, and I knew she was going to laugh before she did."
"Then why'd you do it?"
"Because I've never not gotten something." He smiled, not nicely, at himself. "Turns out it's a weird feeling."
"Welcome," I said. "Most of us live here."
He laughed, quietly, and looked away first.
"What's that?" he asked.
He meant the south wall.
A tree grew flat against the stone, its branches trained sideways in perfect tiers like the arms of a candelabra.
The bark was gray and split.
No leaves.
"A pear," I said. "Somebody espaliered it a hundred and thirty years ago. They tied every branch to the wall by hand, every year, for decades."
"It's dead."
"Everybody says that."
"Is it?"
"I don't know yet." I touched the oldest branch. "I scratched it with my thumbnail in August. There was a little green under the bark. Just a little."
He looked at the tree for a long time.
"Is that how it works? You just keep scratching?"
"And pruning. And waiting. And not telling the trustees."
He reached past me and touched the same branch, very carefully, like it could hear him.
"I won't tell the trustees," he said.
I locked the gate behind us.
He walked me as far as Wexford Hall and said good night like a normal person.
I went up the stairs feeling almost light.
Ainslee was curled on the velvet sofa with her phone.
But the words came in with her, fast, a whole flood of them.
[ok the boys just raised it to 20k]
[20K. by homecoming.]
[the roommate is so done]
[linc is SO good at the fake nice thing, she's falling for it]
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