First day of term, and the campus gate is a bottleneck of freshmen with lanyards, parents taking photographs, and the returning crowd pressed against the brick wall like they own the place. They mostly do. You walk past with a box of your own supplies, your new-teacher badge still on its lanyard, twenty-four years old and new to every brick of this campus — and the whole group goes quiet the way a room goes quiet when the teacher clears her throat.

Case Prescott takes the cigarette from his lips and lets it hang at his side, unsmoked, the ember dying against the brick. He straightens off the wall like someone pulled a string up his spine.

he calls, low, and it is not a question. He has already stepped out of the wall's shadow and into your path, close enough that you have to stop or walk through him.

The morning sun is in your eyes, or you'd have clocked him sooner. A minute ago he was leaning at the center of that wall with the flat, patient boredom of a man who has seen this exact parade four years running, while Drew and Tucker traded the same lines they trade every September — school's back; last one, then it's somebody else's problem — and the girls who orbit them laughed on cue. Someone mentioned a new teacher this year, young, first time. Probably strict, probably glasses, probably a nightmare. Case was the only one not laughing — tell me something new, he said, exhaling a thread of smoke — and the only one looking up the path.

His jaw clenches, once, hard. He says it like he already knows the answer — like he'd recognize you anywhere. His friends are watching. So is everyone else within earshot.