Pregnant For my School Rival

The Hartwell list went up at 7:40, and by 7:45 Emma Wilson had read it nine times. Two names on cream paper, pinned to the corkboard outside the headmaster's office with a brass tack. Wilson, E. Blake, A. Alphabetical, she told herself. It still looked like somebody had done it on purpose. "You're blocking the board." A sophomore with a lacrosse bag. Emma stepped aside and he read the list in two seconds and whistled, low, and left. Rain ticked against the tall windows of Hollis Hall. Her blazer sleeves were rolled twice at the wrists, because the thrift shop in Haverford had only had it in a size too big, and blue ink had worked into the creases of her right hand again. She rubbed her palm on her skirt. It never came out. Hartwell meant four years, full tuition, room and board, anywhere she got in. Without it she was looking at the state school and a loan with a comma in it. Her mother had taped the announcement to the fridge in September, next to the electric bill, and neither of them had said anything about the two things sharing a magnet. "Em. Hey." Victoria Hale had two paper cups and a smile that looked like it had been ironed. She held one out. "Oat milk, no sugar." "I didn't ask you to-" "You said it once. Junior year. Chem lab." Victoria shrugged, and the cup stayed out until Emma took it. It was hot. It was exactly right. "I saw the list. I'm rooting for you, you know. Alex can be a lot." "He can be a lot of things." "Mm." Victoria laughed, softly, and tucked her arm through Emma's like they did this every morning. They did not. "Come on. Pruitt wants everyone in chapel hall. Something about the panel." Chapel hall smelled like floor wax and wet wool. Two hundred students in navy blazers, and Emma found a seat on the aisle in the ninth row, where she could see the stage and the doors both. Victoria slid in beside her. Dr. Pruitt tapped the microphone twice, and the speakers coughed. The doors banged open. Alexander Blake walked down the center aisle like the assembly had been scheduled around him. Tie loose. Blazer open. Hair dripping onto his collar, because of course he hadn't brought an umbrella, because the Blakes had a driver for that. He nodded to a few people. He grinned at a girl in the fourth row, who went pink. He took the empty seat two rows ahead of Emma and stretched his legs into the aisle. Emma looked at the back of his head and felt her jaw lock. Two years ago, the Lowell Cup. Sophomore finals. She'd stood at a podium in this same room with a clicker in her sweating hand and walked the judges through her cost projections for a fake bakery chain, and she'd been good. She knew she'd been good. Then Alexander got up for rebuttal, smiled at the panel, and said, "I appreciate the effort, but these figures look like charity math." The room had laughed. Not everyone. Enough. He'd found one decimal. One. He'd held it up like a dead mouse. She lost the Lowell Cup by two points, and the two points were the Carrow Institute summer program, and Carrow came with a stipend, and the stipend was supposed to cover her mother's rent for July and August. She'd worked doubles at Lindy's that summer instead. She still had the receipt book. "Good morning," Dr. Pruitt said. "I'll keep this brief." He never did. Eight minutes on tradition. Four on the Hartwell family's generosity. Emma drank Victoria's coffee and counted ceiling tiles. "The final round takes place on the twenty-fourth," Pruitt said. "Each finalist will present a business case before a panel of three. I'm pleased to announce them. Professor Alice Navarro, from the university's economics department. Ms. Denise Okafor, of Okafor Ventures." Polite applause. "And Mr. Richard Blake, chairman of the Blake Group, who has been a friend of this academy for twenty years. And who, as most of you know, is also Alexander's father." A rustle ran through the hall like wind through dry corn. Emma didn't breathe. She watched Alexander. He'd gone still. Not the lazy, legs-out stillness from before. His shoulders had come up an inch and locked there, and his hand, the one on the armrest, had closed. She saw it. Knuckles, pale. He turned his head slowly toward the stage, and then, for no reason she could name, toward her. Their eyes met across two rows of blazers. He hadn't known. She was sure of it, for about one second. Then his face shut like a door, and the grin came back, crooked and cold, and he mouthed something she couldn't read and turned around. "Oh, wow," Victoria whispered. "That's, um. That's really not great for you, is it?" "It's fine." "Em, it's his dad." "I said it's fine." She crushed the paper cup. Coffee ran down her wrist and into her sleeve. After assembly the hallway was a river. Emma pushed against it toward the east stairwell, where nobody went, and had her hand on the rail when someone said her name. "Wilson." She didn't turn. "No." "I didn't even-" "Whatever it is, no." His footsteps came down two stairs and stopped. She could smell the rain on him, and the expensive soap, and underneath that something like pencil shavings. She hated that she knew what pencil shavings smelled like on him. She turned around. Alexander stood one step above her, which put his eyes level with hers. Up close he looked tired. Shadows under the eyes, a shaving cut on his jaw. Not that she was looking. "You think it's rigged," he said. "I think your father's on the panel." "I didn't ask him to be." "Sure." "I didn't." His voice cracked on it, barely, and he stopped, and swallowed, and the smirk slid back on like a coat. "Doesn't matter. You'd lose anyway." "Yeah? Say that again when you've got a decimal to find." Something flickered across his face. She couldn't tell what. Then he reached into his blazer pocket, took out a folded sheet of paper, and held it out between two fingers. "What's that?" "Your slide deck. Draft three. It was in the printer tray in the library, like, an hour ago. Somebody left it." Her stomach dropped. She snatched it. Her own handwriting, her own margins, her own coffee ring in the corner. She'd printed it last night. She'd put it in her bag. She was certain she had. "You went through my stuff." "I didn't. I just found it." He glanced at the page, and then at her. "Slide four. Check the second line." "Go to hell, Blake." "Check it, Wilson." He went back up the stairs, two at a time, and the stairwell door clanged shut behind him. Emma stood there with her heart going hard in her ears. The paper shook in her hand. She made herself look. Slide four, second line, the revenue projection for the third quarter, the number her entire argument stood on. 41,000. She had written 14,000. She knew she had. She read it again. The ink was hers, the same blue, the same slant on the four. She pressed her thumb against the figure until the paper creased.