THE OVERHEAD LIGHT flickered as he waited for her to enter the dormitory hallway.
His door was wide open and he stood just inside the lip of it, angled toward the hall. It was Day 40, which meant he’d lived across the hall from her for forty days, and this was the first day he’d left his door all the way open. He’d covered his walls with basketball posters and lit a candle that smelled like pine trees. His hair was long enough now that it was starting to turn upward at the bottom, like the boy she said she liked from 3rd Rock from the Sun—Joseph Garden Whoever He Was. He’d even found one of his signature button-ups in the Lost and Found.
It was delicate, being in the right spot at the right time. It usually involved several minutes of standing in the right spot, waiting for the right time, and sometimes being placed in the right dorm and waiting forty days. Today, he held a Goosebumps book to his face, pretending to read and staring over the top at the hinge across the hall where at any moment, her door would open, and Emma would come gliding out.
He checked his watch: twenty minutes to mass. A few students passed but none of them noticed him standing at attention behind the book. It was easy to blend in at Redemption; the fact that everyone came from different parts of the world meant students were always doing unexpected things. One of the lessons you learned in week one was to always look the other way, and before too long, you didn’t have to try. It was better that way. Forty days on this floor, and only two or three other students knew his name.
Across the hallway, the hinge creaked open, and Emma rushed out the door with her head down. She turned left.
Evan leapt forward, brushing past her in the opposite direction. His right hand dropped, and the book slipped from between his fingers, but he kept moving down the hall away from her.
He counted off ten seconds before chancing a look back. The Goosebumps book hung in her doorframe, blocking the latch.
Emma walked alone to church every Thursday night. Twenty minutes early, down the Human Sciences dorm hallway to the stairwell in the lounge. A stop at the water fountain on the way. The third pew in chapel. Hands crossed the whole time. A solo prayer at the outdoor cross afterward. A walk back with Neesha. A painted smile every time some plebe tried to say hi to her. A half hug for every pretend friend. Emma lived in a loop.
It wasn’t just Emma. The whole world was like that. In a loop. You could find a pattern in anything, if you stood far enough away from it. Day becomes night, success becomes failure becomes success becomes failure, green becomes yellow becomes red. All of it could be predicted.
And beaten.
That’s how you win at chess. You can’t solve the game; the game is objective. There’s an absolute mechanical parity to the pieces on both sides of the board. You solve the other person. You study their pattern. Every time they sacrifice a pawn to protect their bishop, they tell you about their carelessness. Every time they bring a castle back to protect their queen, they reveal an insecurity. Most people broadcast their mistakes before they even know they’re going to make them. So you load up not where they’re weak but where they’re going to be weak, and when they inevitably play the part they’ve been telling you they’re going to play, you take them.
Evan rushed down into the Human Sciences Lounge and out into the fog. It was thin today, the kind you could see through. The chapel was a quarter of a mile across the lawn, and the yellow light atop the wooden cross was the only one on the school’s back complex to guide the students. They were told to walk carefully through the fog, with their eyes on the ground, following the network of dirt paths, avoiding the rock formations and wild grass in between. He ran, his eyes up, around a slow-curving path that banked along the forest, until the gold in her hair broke through the fog, twenty feet ahead.
Emma stopped at the mouth of the path and stared into the mass of students. People came from all directions toward the stairs of the chapel, but where she stood, slightly elevated, it gave