Episode 3

"Who was the girl in the black dress?"

I did not hear Austin Coleman ask that question.

If I had, maybe I would have been smarter about the next week.

Saturday morning arrived with Maggie's curtains leaking gray light over the room and my laptop still closed on the scholarship portal. I woke with a crease from the borrowed dress pressed into my ribs and the memory of Austin's mouth leaving Annika's like a bruise I refused to touch.

Maggie was awake before me, sitting cross-legged on her bed with her phone in both hands.

"Do not look at campus stories," she said.

I sat up. "That is exactly how you make a person look at campus stories."

"A normal person, yes. You are stubborn enough to resist out of spite."

"Show me."

"Ava."

"If everyone else gets to know what happened to me, I should at least get the public version."

Her mouth tightened, but she turned the phone.

The clip was already everywhere in the private ALU feeds. The balcony door closing. The cheer. Annika leaning in. Austin kissing her back for a handful of seconds before his head lifted too soon. The caption changed depending on who reposted it.

QB1 and Annika, round two?

Old habits at Riverbend.

Coleman calendar starts again.

I pointed at the last one. "What is that?"

Maggie made a face. "Nothing."

"That face means something."

"It means people are bored and cruel."

I did not get the full explanation until Monday, because Maggie believed in emotional triage and Toby Mercer believed in information arriving with sources.

He found me outside the computer science building after our systems lecture, backpack hanging from one shoulder and laptop already open.

"I have context," he said.

"That is a threatening greeting."

"It is relevant context." He turned the screen toward me. "Austin Coleman has a reputation."

"I noticed."

"Not just the football thing." Toby tapped through a campus blog thread with the grave concentration of a person debugging code. "Dating thing. One month, maximum. Sometimes less. People call it the Coleman calendar."

The phrase sat there, ugly and neat.

One month.

Long enough to become a story. Short enough to leave before anyone expected him to stay.

"Efficient," I said.

Toby winced. "I am not endorsing it."

"You are aggregating."

"Exactly."

He hesitated, then clicked another image. Austin stood near the quad in daylight with a blonde girl laughing beside him, her arm looped through his. The photo was old enough to have been reposted too many times and new enough to hurt for no reason.

"People use this one in every thread," Toby said. "No one agrees who she is."

"I do not need a roster."

"Right. Sorry."

I shut the laptop gently before I could stare any longer. "I have work."

Work saved me.

At least, work gave my hands something to do.

By Thursday, my life had shrunk into clean columns: scholarship portal, work-study email, rent spreadsheet, diner shifts. The portal still said processing. The work-study office sent a cheerful message about delayed placement matching. My rent spreadsheet responded by turning two cells red.

So I took extra hours at the campus diner.

The diner sat two blocks from the CS building, close enough for students to bring laptops and far enough from the stadium that nobody expected glamour. It smelled like coffee, fryer oil, and the lemon spray Lily Walsh used whenever the counter got sticky.

"Table seven wants separate checks," Lily said, sliding past me with an armful of plates. "And Peter forgot the side of ranch again."

Peter Bell looked up from the pickup window. "I am being attacked."

"You are being managed," I said, tying my apron tighter.

It felt good to be useful in a place where effort had visible results. Water glass empty, fill it. Order wrong, fix it. Table dirty, wipe it clean. No room full of people deciding what a kiss meant.

During my break, I opened my spreadsheet beside a half-eaten grilled cheese and tried to make the numbers behave.

My phone rang.

Dad.

I stared at Martin Harper's name until the third ring, then answered. "Hey."

"Ava, quick question." His voice had the distracted brightness of someone doing three other things. "You were not planning on staying here over winter break, were you?"

My fork stopped halfway to my mouth. "I had not decided yet."

"Right. Well, I wanted to give you a heads-up. We are starting the renovation earlier than expected, and with the due date coming, your old room is going to be part nursery, part storage for a bit."

For a bit.

That was what people said when they wanted a permanent thing to sound temporary.

"Okay," I said.

"You understand. You are an adult now, and campus housing is probably easier anyway."

The rent spreadsheet glowed red beside my elbow.

"Sure."

"Do not make it sound like that. I am not kicking you out."

No. He was just making sure there was nowhere to return to.

"I am at work," I said. "I have to go."

"Ava..."

I ended the call before he could make me comfort him.

The rest of my shift passed in a bright, mechanical blur. Smile. Refill. Print receipt. Clear plates. Pretend the word storage had not lodged under my ribs.

At closing, Maggie texted that she could meet me.

I typed, I'm fine.

Then I deleted it, because even I was tired of that lie, and wrote, I can get myself back.

The bus stop outside the diner was empty except for Austin Coleman.

He stood under the shelter light in a dark coat, hands in his pockets, looking so out of place against the scratched plastic wall that for one second I thought I had imagined him.

"No," I said.

His mouth curved slightly. "Hi to you too."

"No is a complete sentence."

"I know." He stayed where he was. "I wanted three minutes. If you say no again, I leave."

That should not have mattered.

It did.

Maybe because he did not step closer. Maybe because he looked at my apron before he looked at my face, like he understood I had a real life attached to me, not just a black dress and a balcony.

"Three," I said.

"The girl in the quad photo is my cousin."

I blinked. "That was minute one?"

"I thought I should start with the easiest misunderstanding."

"The balcony was not easy?"

"Annika is my ex," he said. "The kiss was a dare. I should have refused."

No excuse. No smile.

That was inconvenient.

"You have a calendar," I said.

His expression changed. "I have what?"

"One month. Sometimes less. Apparently the whole campus has office supplies for your love life."

"That is what they call it?"

"You did not know?"

"I knew people talked." He looked toward the empty street, jaw tight. "I did not know they made it sound cute."

The bus was nine minutes away. My hands were cold around my phone.

"Why are you here, Austin?"

It was the first time I had said his name to his face. His attention sharpened on it, and I almost wished I could take it back.

"Because I saw you before the balcony," he said.

"Everyone saw me leave the balcony."

"No. Before that. Outside Hawthorne Hall last week. You dropped a stack of notes, then argued with the wind like it had a personal agenda."

Heat climbed my neck. "That was private."

"It was memorable."

"It was paper."

"It was you."

The street went too quiet.

He took a breath, still not moving closer. "I wanted you from first sight, Ava. I just did not know your name yet."

Every practical, tired, red-cell part of me knew better than to believe a rich boy at a bus stop after a bad shift. Promises were easy for people who had never watched a room become storage.

"That is a good line," I said.

"It is not a line."

"I am not a one-month experiment."

His face went very still.

The bus turned the corner, headlights spilling over the curb, the diner windows, the apron I had forgotten to untie.

Austin held my gaze.

"Then give me longer than a month."

My fingers shook around my phone.

I walked onto the bus before he could see.

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