fourty percent
1101 Words
Linda Bennett picked up on the second ring, which meant she'd been near her phone, which meant she'd been waiting.
"How is it?" Her mother's voice had that particular lift — the one she used when she was determined to sound like everything was fine, which probably meant she'd been sitting with the phone in her hand for a while. The brightness was real. It was also work.
"Good," Cindy said. "Program's strong. Professor seems serious."
"Have you been eating?"
"Mom."
"That's not a yes."
"I ate today."
A pause. Outside Cindy's window the campus was lit up — someone playing music two floors down, voices bouncing off stone. It sounded like money and ease, the specific freedom of people who weren't carrying anything too heavy.
"Cindy." Her mother's voice dropped into the register she used when she was about to say something real. "You're allowed to be there. You know that?"
Cindy looked at the ceiling. Maya had gone to the library. The string lights above her bed buzzed softly.
"I know."
"You earned it."
"I know, Mom."
She did know. She just had to keep earning it — every day, every class.
She thought about what he'd written in his notebook.
She turned the light off and told herself she'd find out what was in that book tomorrow.
The project announcement came on a Tuesday.
Whitman set down his briefcase with his usual lack of ceremony. "Semester project. Pairs. Full legal case analysis, mock trial presentation. Forty percent of your final grade." He looked up. "Pairs are assigned. Not chosen."
The room tensed in the particular way of people who do not want to leave things to chance.
He picked up a sheet, read without looking up. "Adams and Park. Bhatt and O'Sullivan. Bennett and Cole."
Cindy's pen stopped moving.
"Chen and Vasquez "
She heard the rest of the list from somewhere far away.
Two seats over, William had gone very still.
She went to Whitman's office at four.
He was already at his desk, reading something, and waved her in without looking up.
"Professor Whitman." She sat down. "I'd like to request a different pairing for the semester project."
He turned a page. "No."
"I have academic concerns about the pairing."
"Miss Bennett." He looked up — the eyes of a man who'd heard every version of this conversation already. "I pair by diagnostic performance. You and Cole are the top two students in this cohort. The pairing is intentional." Back down to his page. "You'll produce excellent work."
"With respect, I work better independently."
"Most good lawyers say that. Most good lawyers are wrong." Another page turned. "Anything else?"
There wasn't. She thanked him, which she also didn't mean, and walked back out into the hallway.
William Cole was leaning against the wall outside.
They looked at each other.
"You asked him to reassign you," she said.
"He said no."
"He said no to me too."
A beat. He straightened up. "So we're doing this."
"Apparently."
He pulled out his phone, opened a calendar. "Library. Thursday, seven. Ground rules first, then we divide the research."
She hadn't expected that — the efficiency of it.
"Fine."
He nodded and walked away. She watched him go, the easy stride, the way the hallway moved around him, and felt the thing in her chest she'd been calling irritation and intended to keep calling irritation.
Thursday. Ground rules. Fine.
What happened *before* Thursday was Zara Voss.
Cindy was in the campus café, laptop open, when Zara appeared at her table uninvited, sat down, and smiled the way people smile when they're doing something else entirely.
She was beautiful in a deliberate way — everything chosen, everything considered. Dark hair, perfect nails, the confidence of someone who'd never had to wonder if she belonged somewhere.
"Cindy, right? I'm Zara. We're in Whitman's seminar together." She said it like they were already old friends. "I heard you got paired with William."
"News travels fast."
"Small program." A soft laugh. "I just wanted to say — welcome. Transferring in is hard. Good that you've got a strong partner."
Cindy looked at her and said nothing.
"William and I have history," Zara went on, voice perfectly even. "We're in a complicated place right now, which I'm sure he hasn't mentioned, because he doesn't talk about things like that. I'm not saying don't work with him. I'm just saying he can be hard to read. Don't take the way he acts personally."
"Thanks for the tip."
"Of course. We girls have to look out for each other."
She left. Cindy watched her cross the café and sit with a group of girls who all looked like variations on the same theme.
That had been, she thought, a warning dressed up as kindness. She'd met enough of those to know.
The question was what Zara had actually been warning her away from: William as a difficult person, or William as something that already belonged to someone else.
Cindy typed a note in her research doc: “jurisdiction variance in contract tort — follow up.”
It didn't matter. It was a project. Forty percent of one grade in one semester. She'd do her half, they'd do it well, she'd move on.
She typed another note and didn't look up when the café door opened, but she heard it. Heard the particular weight of his walk, like he'd never once in his life worried about taking up too much space.
William Cole didn't sit down. He stood at the end of her table with two coffees, like that was a normal thing to do, like they hadn't spent four days exchanging exactly nine words.
"You looked like you needed this." He set one down in front of her.
"I didn't ask for that."
"I know. That's why I bought it instead of asking."
She almost smiled. Caught it before it got anywhere.
"Zara talk to you yet?" he said, and there it was — the question underneath the question.
"She introduced herself."
"That's one word for it."
"What's yours?"
He pulled out the chair across from her without being invited and sat, elbows on the table, like he'd decided something on the walk over and wasn't going to unmake it now.
"Whatever she told you, it's not about you. It's not really about me either, at this point." He turned his cup a quarter turn, didn't drink from it. "We dated. It ended badly. She didn't agree it ended."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer you're getting today."
Fair, she thought. She'd have done the same.
- Writer
