Ranked: Where We Fall

chapter 2- He Does Not Even Look Up

Chapter 2: He Does Not Even Look Up

Maya's POV

I had a system for Tuesdays. Six forty-five, library. One hour of reading before the building filled up and the quiet became approximate instead of actual. Seven forty-five, dining hall. Priya would already be there with her pre-med notes spread across half the table and a plate of food she'd tell me she wasn't going to finish and then finish. Eight thirty, first lecture. The system worked. The system had worked for three months. I was not a person who needed things to work differently.

Except Priya had overslept, which meant I went to the dining hall alone, which meant I sat at the small table near the east window because I didn't feel like explaining to anyone at the regular table why my name was on the board next to Ethan Vance's name and what exactly I planned to do about it. The answer was: study harder. Obviously. That was the only answer that made sense.

I pulled out my notes and my highlighters. Yellow for definitions, pink for arguments I agreed with, blue for arguments I needed to challenge later. I'd had the system since ninth grade. It made Priya laugh the first time she saw it. She'd said, "You highlight in a color-coded system?" and I'd said "doesn't everyone?" and her expression had answered the question.

I was halfway through a chapter on constitutional frameworks when I became aware that the table two rows over had gotten louder. Not obnoxious loud. Just the specific frequency of a social gathering that had grown without anyone planning it. I glanced up.

Ethan Vance was at the center of it. He was seated, which somehow made it more pronounced, because everyone else was standing or leaning or angling toward him. He had a coffee in front of him and a book open on the table, and he was in conversation with a guy I recognized from the athletics program while two other people waited at a slight distance like there was an actual queue.

Someone approached with a notebook. He glanced down, signed it without fully breaking the conversation, and the person left looking like they'd received something valuable. I watched that for a moment longer than I intended to.

It wasn't that it was impressive. It was that it was practiced. Everything about him had the quality of something that had been done so many times it no longer required attention. The way he held the pen. The way he leaned back. The faint smile that arrived and disappeared on schedule. He knew exactly what he looked like. That was the thing. He wasn't unaware of the effect. He was managing it.

I went back to my notes. Pink highlighter. The argument in paragraph four was interesting but the evidence was doing too much work for the conclusion it was supposed to support. I made a note in the margin.

"You're staring." I looked up. Priya had appeared with a tray and approximately nine items on it for a meal she'd already told me she wasn't hungry for.

"I was observing," I said. "From this angle those look the same." She sat down and arranged her tray with the focused energy of someone who had opinions about where things went. "How long have you been here?" "Since six fifty." "Maya." "I like the morning." "It's not morning anymore, it's seven twenty-three." She glanced in the direction I hadn't been staring. "He hasn't looked at the board yet. I checked this morning. Corinne from my stats class said he walked right past it." "I don't care about the board." "You care about everything related to the board. That's your whole thing."

I picked up my coffee. It was the dining hall blend, which was not good, but it was hot and I'd already added enough vanilla syrup from the station to make it tolerable. "He signed three things in ten minutes," I said. "Without stopping what he was doing." Priya looked over. "He does that a lot apparently. Corinne says people bring him things to sign like he's already famous." "He's not famous." "He's a Vance. At Blackwell that's basically the same thing."

I knew that. I knew the name. Everyone at Blackwell knew the name. The west wing library had it on a bronze plaque beside the entrance door. I'd walked past it on my first day and thought: someone's grandfather built a room and now his grandson walks in every day with his name already on the wall. I didn't say that to Priya. It wasn't her fault and it wasn't even really his. It was just a fact. And facts were more useful when you dealt with them directly instead of being annoyed by them.

"He's genuinely good," Priya said, with the slight reluctance of someone admitting something they'd rather not. "Like, the tie score wasn't a fluke. Corinne says his assessment work is different. Not better necessarily. Just different from everyone else's." "Different how?" "Like he actually has opinions." She stabbed a piece of melon. "Not just answers. Opinions."

I thought about that. I looked at my notes. The margin comment I'd written was an opinion disguised as an observation, which I now recognized because Priya had just made me recognize it.

Across the dining hall, someone said something that made Ethan laugh. It was short and surprised, like it caught him off guard, and then it was gone. His face went back to its default, which was composed and slightly distant, and the people around him continued talking like they hadn't noticed. I noticed.

I did not know why I kept noticing things about a person I had never spoken to, but the honest answer was that he was the only person in this building who was also ranked first, and I needed to understand what I was dealing with. That was all. That was a practical reason. It made complete sense.

I closed my notes. "What do you have first?" "Biochem," Priya said mournfully. "I'll walk with you." I gathered my things and did not look back at the table two rows over. I thought about looking back. I didn't.