The Term Sheet Heartbreak

Chapter 3- The Wrong Table

Elena's pov. Chapter 3: The wrong table.

The scholarship table was by the east window, second from the wall. Nobody assigned it to us. Nobody had to. It was just the table where the people who carried dining cards and wore the same three rotation of clothes and checked their phones for shift confirmations during lunch sat down without discussion and didn't spread out.

I set my tray down. Rice, lentils, the cheaper protein. Marcus was already there with his headphones around his neck and a plate of scrambled eggs that he'd somehow convinced the kitchen to make at noon. "You're eating eggs for lunch again." "Eggs are a complete food source," he said. "They work at any hour. This is science."

I sat. I pulled out my logic set because I had twenty minutes before my next shift and I didn't believe in dead time. Marcus glanced at the page. "You're doing logic during lunch?" "I'm doing logic before work." "That sounds worse." "You're eating eggs." "Eggs don't require concentration." "They require chewing." "Exactly." I kept my eyes on the first question. Marcus leaned across the table and tapped the corner of my notebook. "You've got twenty minutes." "Twenty-one." "That's even worse." I moved the pen down the page. "What's the first one?" He looked at the problem. "I don't know." "You're the one who said it was easy." "I said eggs were easy." "You said everything was science." "It is." I looked at him. He grinned. For a few seconds, the conversation stayed there, small and ordinary, while the dining hall filled around us and I worked through the first sequence.

Three tables over, the legacy crowd filled the long table near the center. White tablecloths on the weekends, bare wood today, but they arranged themselves around it the same way regardless. Sienna Blake was at the head, because Sienna Blake was always at the head. She had the kind of posture that made everything around her look slightly less organized.

I was not watching their table. I was watching my problem set. "She said what?" Marcus's voice dropped just enough. I looked up. He had one earbud half in, the other dangling. His eyes were on the center table but his face was doing the thing it did when he heard something and was deciding how much to tell me. "Marcus." "I'm not saying anything." "You already started saying something." He picked up his fork. "Sienna Blake just told the girl next to her that you got in on a sympathy vote."

The words landed. I felt them, somewhere behind my sternum, a tight cold thing that pressed and did not move. Marcus watched my face. "Say something." "I don't have anything to say." "That wasn't exactly a compliment." "I know." He waited. I lowered my eyes to the page. The numbers were still there. Three, seven, eleven. The sequence should have been simple.

"Does she say things like that often?" Marcus's mouth tightened. "About you?" "About people." He shrugged. "Depends who she's talking about." I moved my pen beneath the next line. "Then leave it." "Elena." "What?" "You don't have to pretend you didn't hear it." "I heard it." "Then react." I looked at him. "That would make her words more important than they are." He didn't answer. I turned the page and flattened the corner where it had curled upward.

I looked down at my problem set. "Okay," I said. "That's it? Okay?" "What do you want me to say?" "I want you to have a normal human reaction to someone publicly discussing how you don't deserve to be here." "She wasn't public." I kept my voice even. "She was talking to the person next to her. You heard it from three tables away because you were listening for it." "I wasn't listening for it. It was loud."

I wrote a number in the margin of my problem set. It was the wrong number. I crossed it out. "She's not wrong that the application was borderline," I said. Marcus put his fork down. "Elena." "I'm not agreeing with her. I'm saying the application was borderline and I know that and I still won the essay competition and I'm still here and what she thinks about that has nothing to do with my shift at four or my logic set or my tutoring client at two."

He looked at me for a moment. "You're doing the thing," he said. "What thing." "The robot thing. Where you process something that would make a normal person upset and then you list your schedule at it." "My schedule is relevant." Marcus stared at me. "You really have an answer for everything." "Not everything." "Most things." I looked at the clock on the wall. "Twelve minutes." "You're counting now?" "I have work." "You always have work." "Yes."

He leaned back. For a moment neither of us touched our food. Then he picked up his fork. "You know what?" "What?" "Forget it." I returned to the problem set. He took a bite of his eggs. I wrote the next number. "That's wrong," he said. I stopped. "You didn't even look." "You always make that face when you're about to write the wrong answer." I looked down. He was right. I erased the number before finishing it. Marcus smiled. "See?" "Eat your eggs." "Yes, professor."

"Your feelings are also relevant." I looked at my problem set. The wrong number was still there under the crossout. I erased it fully and wrote the correct one. "It's handled," I said. Marcus picked his fork back up. He didn't say anything else. That was why he was the only person at this table I'd chosen to sit next to. He didn't reach across the table to take the page from me. He didn't ask whether I was upset again. He simply ate and let the conversation end where I had ended it. I finished the equation. Then the next.

The noise around us rose and fell with the movement of lunch. Trays touched tables. Chairs scraped against the floor. Someone laughed near the drink station. I kept writing. The tightness remained. I pressed the pen harder against the paper. The point snapped. Marcus looked up. "You okay?" I stared at the broken pen tip in my hand. "Fine." He reached into his bag and slid another pen across the table. I took it. "Thanks." "Anytime."

I did not look at Sienna Blake's table again. I didn't need to. I could still hear her voice, not the words, just the shape of them, easy and certain, the voice of someone who had never once questioned her right to take up space. I looked at my problem set and worked the next equation and told myself the tightness behind my sternum was hunger. It wasn't hunger.

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if any paragraph still feels too big tell me which one and i'll break just that one.