Chapter 4 The President

The card came during second period. A boy I had never seen opened the door without knocking and handed it to the teacher, who read it. Something moved in his face and then got put away.

"Miss Linds."

Thirty heads turned at once.

Nell got hold of my sleeve under the desk. "What did you do?"

"I stood on a path," I said, and got up.

I had gone down to the courtyard that night. Of course I had. The grass was empty, the sprinklers had run, and the lawn was soaked and soft and perfect. There were no prints in it at all.

I had stood there in my socks a while, then gone back up and slept three hours with the notebook under my pillow like a nine-year-old.

Walking to the Student Council office now, I was not thinking about punishment. I was thinking about how a person stands on wet grass without leaving a mark.

The office was on the second floor of the east wing, behind a door with no number.

It was not a school office. There was a fireplace, a rug that had outlived four generations of somebody, and a long table with nothing on it, not a paper, not a pen, which somehow felt worse than a desk full of files.

Ashen Ford was standing at the window with his back to me.

"Close it," he said.

I closed the door and stayed near it.

He turned around. In daylight he looked younger and worse, with shadows under his eyes that no amount of money fixes.

"Sit."

"I'll stand."

Something almost happened at the corner of his mouth. It did not get all the way there.

"Fine," he said.

He came to the table and put both hands flat on it, and I braced for the speech. I had it mapped out. We have standards here. You embarrassed a Laurent. The Fund is a privilege. I had answers for all of it and meant to enjoy about half.

"Your father was Daniel Linds," Ashen said.

The room got very small.

I kept my face where it was. It took work.

"Is that a question?"

"No."

"Then why say it?"

"To see what you do when I say it." He watched me another second. "You did well. You only blinked once."

I put my hands in my blazer pockets so he could not see them. "How do you know his name?"

"Everyone can read."

"Nobody reads. He wrote about water contracts and he died eight years ago and nobody remembers him." My voice came out flatter and harder than I meant. "So try again."

Ashen did not answer.

He walked the length of the table instead, slowly, and stopped at the far end, and I understood he had put six feet of wood between us on purpose.

"Who gave you the rose?" he said.

That was not on my map.

"How do you know about the rose?"

"Chris."

"I don't know who gave me the rose." I said it before I could think about whether to. "It was on my desk. The door was locked. My roommate won't touch it and won't tell me why, and she sleeps in her shoes now, which she didn't do on Tuesday."

I did not mention the page.

I had half decided that on the walk over. The page was mine. It had my name on it in my father's hand, and until I knew what side of the table Ashen sat on, he was getting the rose and nothing under it.

For the first time since the driveway, something in Ashen Ford's face came loose.

It was small. A half second. His eyes went to the window and back, and when they came back they were doing arithmetic.

"Was there anything with it?" he said.

I kept still. "With what?"

"The rose."

"No," I said.

He looked at me a moment longer than the lie deserved. He did not believe me. And he was not going to push, which frightened me more than pushing would have.

"It wasn't you," I said slowly.

"No."

"You thought it was."

"I hoped it was," he said. "That would have meant I still knew what was happening."

I felt the floor tilt about one degree.

I had walked in here expecting a boy who owned the school. What I had was a boy standing at the far end of a table, running the numbers, and not liking the answer.

"What does a white rose mean?"

"It means someone with weight is interested in you." He said it like reading a temperature. "Historically it goes one of two ways."

"And the other way?"

"You already know," Ashen said, "or you wouldn't have gone out on the grass at two in the morning in your socks."

I stopped breathing for a beat.

"How could you possibly know that?"

"Stop," he said.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I'm giving you, and it isn't the point." He came back up the table. Not fast. "The point is that you need to stop. Stop reading. Stop asking. Go to class, take the free education, be extremely boring for four years. Do that and you walk out of here with a degree and a life."

It was almost word for word the deal I had made myself on the floor at two in the morning.

I had turned it down then, too.

"No," I said.

"You don't understand what you're saying no to."

"Then explain it."

"I can't."

"Won't."

"Can't," Ashen said, and for one second he sounded so tired that I almost felt sorry for him, and I hated that.

I took my hands out of my pockets.

"My mother told me not to bring his things here," I said. "She put her hand flat on the box and she looked at me like I was going to a war. And nobody in eight years has ever explained why, and now the president of this school knows my dead father's first and last name and won't tell me how."

I was closer to the table than I had been. I did not remember deciding to move.

"So I'm going to keep asking," I said. "That's what's happening. You can help or you can get out of the way."

Ashen looked at me for a long moment.

Then he said, quietly, without a trace of cruelty in it, which was somehow the worst part:

"Your father made the same mistake."

I did not move.

Neither did he.

The fire had gone out at some point without either of us noticing, and the room was cold, and eleven floors of old stone stood over us saying nothing.

"Get out," Ashen said. "Please."

I made it to the door. My hand was on it.

"Linds."

I stopped.

He had gone back to the window. He was not looking at me. He was looking down at the courtyard, at the lawn, at the exact patch of grass I had stood on in my socks, and his voice when it came was pitched for me and nobody else.

"Whatever you decide," he said, "decide it fast."

"Why?"

"Because they're already watching you."