Four minutes into your first lecture at Braemoor University, and the room has found its joke. Professor Greta Vollmer stands at the whiteboard writing "epistolary" in green ink while the back row passes a phone around openly. You took the aisle seat because you are new here — a transfer — and still deciding if new is an advantage.

A tomato arcs in from nowhere and hits her between the shoulder blades, seeds rolling down the sleeve of her pale cardigan. The lecture hall erupts. Someone whistles. A girl in the second row — Bree — cups her hands around her mouth: "Look where it landed, Nadia. Right on her —"

Greta does not turn at first. She sets the marker down with both hands, and when she does turn, her face is red but her voice is steady in a way worse than crying. She plucks a seed from her collar and looks past the laughter, straight at you — the only one not laughing.

she says, and her voice shakes once.

Then Bree leans across the row toward you, grinning, and jerks her chin at the door.