Page 76 of Final Drive

She turns and walks. I go with her, and behind us Olivia and Madison are steering Kinsley the other way with their voices going sharp.

We get around the corner of the humanities building before Reese takes my arm and steers us behind the bike rack, out of sight of the quad.

“Okay,” she says. “Now I’m going to throw up.”

She doesn’t. She bends at the waist with her hands on her knees and pulls air through her teeth for a solid minute, and I stand between her and the sidewalk so nobody going past can see her do it.

“That,” I tell her, “was the most devastating thing I have ever watched a person do with a straight face.”

“I can’t feel my hands.”

“Adrenaline. It passes.”

She straightens. Her eyes are bright and wet, but she keeps blinking it back. “She won’t stop. This isn’t going to be enough.”

“No. But she just went after a complainant on camera in front of thirty phones. She confirmed somebody told her about the complaint before she should’ve known. She practically announced that she has your student records. And she did the whole thing in public before ten in the morning.” I put my shoulder against the brick beside her. “Kinsley Adams set fire to every bridge she had left.”

Reese nods, working it through. “What about Quinton?”

Her hands are still shaking and she’s already two moves ahead.

“Quinton’s been quiet, which is the part that worries me. He’s watching this happen.”

“So he’ll cut her loose.”

“If he’s as calculated as Tyler’s messages make him look, he’s already deciding whether she’s worth the risk.”

“And after this?”

“Probably not.”

Reese presses her lips together. “Scared people make mistakes.”

“So do angry ones. And you just made her very angry.”

“Good. Angry and scared is sloppy. She’ll overreach again, and next time Okafor already has the retaliation on file.” Reese comes off the wall and squares up. “Come on. I really do have a ten o’clock.”

We walk the rest of the way without talking, and it’s the comfortable kind.

I hold the door to the lecture hall. She goes through with her chin up and her back straight, and if anybody in that room has seen the post, not one of them could tell from looking at her that anything in her life is less than entirely in hand.

I take my usual seat two rows behind her. She opens her laptop and starts on her notes like it’s an ordinary morning.

My phone buzzes.

Gray: How is she?

I look at the back of her head. The tight line of the ponytail. The set of her shoulders. Her fingers moving over the keys, quick and certain, like she’s already filed this morning under things that happened and are over.

But I’m two rows back, and I can see what the room can’t. The fine tremor in her right hand when she reaches for her water bottle. The fact that she doesn’t drink any of it. She just holds it, because she needs something solid in her hand.

Me: Terrifying. In the best way.

And then, because he needs this too.

Me: Quinton hasn’t posted. Hasn’t texted anybody on the team. Hasn’t reacted at all. That bothers me more than anything Kinsley did.

Gray answers straight away.