Belle's POV
I spent the weekend deciding how to walk into the library on Tuesday. Not literally, not the physical mechanics of it, but the version of myself I was going to bring through that door. The collected version. The one who treats this exactly like what it is, a research project with a shared grade and a fixed deadline, and nothing else. I practiced the posture of it in my head while I was doing other things, eating dinner across from my father's silence on Saturday, reorganizing my desk for no reason on Sunday, lying on my bedroom floor at eleven pm staring at the ceiling and not thinking about a particular almost-smile and how long it stayed with me after it had technically already ended.
I got here two minutes early. That was a mistake. Being first would have given me something to do with my hands, putting down my bag, choosing the chair, being already settled when he arrived, but he was already here when I walked in and now I'm the one arriving and he's the one already settled and I don't know why the difference matters but it does.
He's at the window table. His table. Coffee to the left, notebook open, pen in hand, not looking at the door. He was here before me, which means he left school and walked three blocks faster than I did or he was already close, and I don't know which one and I'm not going to calculate it.
I sit down across from him. I put my bag on the chair beside me. I take out my notebook and the research brief Calloway handed out on Friday and I open to the first page and look at the project outline like I haven't already read it three times.
"I split the research sections," he says, without looking up. He pushes a handwritten page across the table. Clean columns, each section labeled, a name next to each one. Some have his name. Some have mine. The split is even.
I look at it. "You could have texted this."
"You didn't give me your number."
I did not give him my number. That's true. I have his, from the class contact sheet Calloway sent out in September, and he has the contact sheet too, but my number isn't on it. I took it off the first week of school because I didn't want calls from people I hadn't decided to know yet, and I told myself it was a privacy decision and it was, mostly, and it also meant that when Calloway read Cole and Hartwell last week the only way he could communicate with me about the project was to come to my table in the school library and tell me about the chemistry journals.
Which he did.
I take the handwritten page. I read it properly. The section split is logical, which is mildly irritating because I would have divided it the same way and now I can't argue the structure. "Deadlines?" I ask.
He turns his notebook around and shows me a two-column calendar. Dates on the left, deliverables on the right. All the way to January. He's already mapped the entire semester.
I look at the calendar for a moment. Then I look at him. He's watching me read it with the same expression he had in AP Chemistry, like he's waiting to see if I'll find a problem. I don't find one. "That works," I say, which is the second time I've said those two words to him without thinking about it first.
He takes the notebook back. We divide the journals between us. We set the first checkpoint for two Fridays from now. We speak about the project and only the project and the whole exchange is so clean and functional that it almost doesn't feel real.
Thirty minutes in, I find the gap.
I'm reading through the section he assigned me and I hit a subsection that references a secondary source neither of us has. It's not in the Meridian branch collection. I check the catalog on my phone and it's listed at the main downtown library but not here. I put my pen down.
"The Hargrove paper isn't here," I say. "We need it for the methodology section."
He looks up. He knows which paper I mean immediately, which means he's already read ahead further than his own section, which means the clean column split on his handwritten page was not the whole picture of what he'd already done. He interlibrary loans it from his phone in under two minutes and shows me the confirmation. Available Thursday.
"I have a shift Thursday," he says.
"I volunteer here Thursday," I say.
We look at each other across the table. He processes this information with a stillness that I'm starting to understand is just how his face works when he's thinking. There is no readable reaction. "I can leave it at the desk," he says. "For you to start on."
He was going to do part of my section. He didn't ask. He just built the contingency into the schedule. I don't know what to do with that so I write Thursday, Hargrove paper in my notebook and move on.
We work for another hour. We don't talk about anything except the project. He doesn't fill silences. I'm used to people filling silences around me, either with conversation or with careful performance, but he just lets them sit there, and after the first few times I stop waiting for him to fill them and I stop feeling like I should either.
At seven-fifteen I close my notebook. "Same time Friday," I say.
He nods. He's already writing something.
I pack up and leave. I go down the library steps and turn left onto Meridian and I'm maybe twenty feet down the sidewalk when something makes me stop. Not a sound. Not a reason. Just the particular pull of wanting to check something you already know the answer to.
I turn around and look back through the library window.
He's watching me leave. He's turned around in his chair, weight on one arm, looking directly at the window. At me. He holds it for one full second after I turn around, long enough that there is no version of it that was accidental, and then he looks away. Back to his notebook. Easy and immediate, like he just needed to confirm something and now he has.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
I pull it out. My father's name on the screen, not his assistant, him, which means this isn't scheduling.
I answer.
"Where are you," he says. Not a question.