THE BOY I SHOULD HATE

The bus dropped Isabella two blocks from the front gate because the driver said he wasn't paid to navigate the circular drive with all those parked sports cars, and she didn't argue. She walked the rest of the way with her duffel bag cutting a line into her shoulder, past a wrought iron gate with RAVENSHADE UNIVERSITY worked into the metal in letters tall enough to read from the road, and told herself this was just a school like any other.

It was not like any other school. The buildings rose in gray stone and ivy on one side of the quad, and in glass and steel on the other, as if two different centuries had been zoned to coexist without touching. Students moved across the lawn in expensive coats, laughing in the easy way of people who had never once worried about rent, and Isabella felt their attention land on her and slide away, the particular dismissal reserved for someone who clearly did not belong.

She knew what they saw. The duffel bag. The jacket she'd saved four months of night shifts to buy. The name that, if anyone here read the news three years ago, they would recognize.

Registration was held in a hall with a domed ceiling and a mural of men in powdered wigs looking down on the proceedings with painted disapproval. Isabella stood in line behind a girl discussing a yacht as though it were a mild inconvenience, and ahead of a boy who corrected the registrar's pronunciation of his own last name twice. She kept her eyes on the folder in her hands: scholarship letter, housing assignment, a student ID photo that made her look like she'd been arrested.

That was when she felt it, the way you feel a change in air pressure before a storm breaks. She looked up and across the hall, past the crowd of navy blazers and cashmere, and found him.

Adrian Blackwood had not simply gotten older. He had been rebuilt into someone harder, sharper, a boy's face resharpened into something designed to be looked at and never fully understood. He stood a head above most of the people around him, dressed in black that probably cost more than her tuition, and three students orbited him with the careful attention of people who knew exactly whose family signed the checks. He was not looking at her. And then he was.

Isabella's hands started shaking before her mind caught up to what her body already knew. Three years, and her pulse still remembered him like a language she'd never fully unlearned. His expression did not move, not a flicker, not a twitch at the mouth, but something passed behind those pale gray eyes, there and gone so fast she might have imagined it. Then he turned back to the boy speaking to him and gave no sign that the last three years had happened at all.

"Oh my God, you're Isabella, right? Isabella Hayes?" A girl appeared at her elbow with an armful of orientation folders threatening to spill, dark curly hair, a smile that seemed to require no effort. "I'm Nora. Nora Powell. I'm supposed to be helping with new student stuff, but mostly I just stalk the housing list until I find someone who looks like they need a friend." She said it all in one breath, then laughed at herself. "That came out so much creepier than I meant it."

"It's fine," Isabella said, and meant it, grateful for anything that pulled her attention away from the hall and the eyes she could still feel on the back of her neck. "I do need a friend. Or at least someone who knows where my dorm is."

"Hawthorne Hall, building three. I'll walk you." Nora fell into step beside her, already talking about the dining hall schedule and a professor to avoid for ethics, and Isabella let the words wash past her without absorbing most of them.

They had almost reached the door when a hand did not touch her arm but came close enough that she stopped walking anyway, some old instinct answering a presence rather than a touch.

Adrian stood close enough that she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes, and up close the three years showed more than they had across the hall. The faint scar along his jaw. The shadows beneath his eyes that no amount of money could buy away.

"You shouldn't have come here," he said. No greeting. No acknowledgment of the years between them, as if the conversation had simply picked up from wherever it left off, except it hadn't, because the last time he'd spoken to her it had been in a courtroom hallway and he hadn't spoken to her at all, only handed a folder to a man in a suit and walked away.

"Hello to you too, Adrian."

"Transfer out. Before the semester starts. There's still time to do it quietly." His voice stayed flat, controlled, the voice of someone reciting instructions rather than making a request.

Isabella felt the old anger rise, familiar and almost comforting in how fast it came. "Is that a threat?"

"It's the only warning you're going to get."

He walked away before she could answer, back toward the boys in navy blazers, and Nora stared after him with her mouth slightly open. "Okay, what was that? Do you two know each other?"

"We used to," Isabella said, and didn't explain further, and Nora, to her credit, didn't push.

Her dorm room was small and smelled of fresh paint, a narrow bed against one wall and a window looking out over a courtyard she didn't yet trust. She unpacked slowly that night, setting her few sweaters into drawers that had never held anyone else's clothes, and near the bottom of the duffel bag her fingers found something she did not remember packing: a photograph, its edges soft with handling, folded in half.

She opened it under the desk lamp. Two kids on a pier, fourteen years old, his arm slung around her shoulders, both of them laughing at something lost to time. She did not remember taking this photograph. She did not remember keeping it. She stared at it until her eyes burned, then folded it back along its crease and slid it between the pages of her journal, where it would be safe, where she would not have to look at it again until she was ready.

She was not ready tonight. She turned off the lamp and lay in the dark, listening to a campus full of strangers, and did not sleep for a long time.