The One's Who Burn

Chapter Three: What People Say

Dani had a gift for finding things out. Not in a malicious way — she wasn't the kind of person who dug for information to use against you. She just moved through the world with her eyes fully open while most people walked around half-asleep, and things landed on her way leave land on still water. Naturally. Without effort. By Wednesday morning, she knew exactly who Eli Voss was, and she sat across from me at breakfast with the particular expression of some Chapter Three

What People Say

One holding a secret they have been physically restraining themselves from sharing since the night before.

"Say it," I said, without looking up from my coffee.

"I didn't say anything."

"You're doing the face."

"I don't have a face."

I looked up. She had a face. Both elbows on the table, chin resting on her linked fingers, eyes bright in a way that meant she had been waiting for this moment since she woke up. I put my cup down and gave her the silence she needed to fill.

"Eli Voss," she said as she was announcing the verdict. "As in Voss Capital. As in his father is Richard Voss. As in Richard Voss, who owns approximately one third of the commercial real estate on the eastern seaboard and has a net worth that has too many zeros for me to say out loud at this hour." She paused. "That Eli Voss has been sitting next to you in Alden’s class."

I considered this. Outside the dining hall windows, the campus was grey and still, the kind of Tuesday morning that couldn't decide whether it wanted to rain. "He stole my seat," I said.

Dani stared at me. "Zara."

"I'm serious. I've sat in that seat for six weeks."

"That is genuinely not the part of this conversation I need you to focus on right now." She leaned forward. "Do you understand what I'm telling you? His family has a building named after them at Whitmore. An actual building. With their name on it in letters you can read from the street."

I picked my coffee back up. "Good for the building."

She made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and despair. "He talked to you. After class. You told me he talked to you."

"He made an observation about Fitzgerald."

"An observation about —" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. Regrouped. "Okay. And how did that make you feel?"

"Like he'd read the book."

"Zara. I am your best friend, and I am telling you, with love, that you are being insane." But she was almost smiling when she said it, the way she always did when I frustrated her — like my stubbornness was both the worst and most predictable thing about me, and she had made her peace with it a long time ago. "All I'm saying is that he is a nobody. Whatever is happening in that classroom, go in with your eyes open."

"Nothing is happening in that classroom."

She gave me a long, level look that said she had filed that statement away to present to me again in approximately four to six weeks. Then she picked up her fork and went back to her eggs, and we didn't talk about Eli Voss again for the rest of breakfast.

* * *

I looked him up that afternoon. I'm not proud of it. I sat on my bed with my laptop open and told myself I was just being informed, the way you'd read about anyone you were going to be sitting next to twice a week, and I typed his name into the search bar and hit enter and immediately wished I hadn't.

It wasn't that there was anything bad. It was that there was so much. News articles about his father's company go back fifteen years. A profile piece in a business magazine from two years ago with a photograph — a family portrait, stiff and formal, Richard Voss in the center with the particular expression of a man who had never once doubted his own importance. And beside him, younger, not quite looking at the camera, Eli.

He looked the same. That was the unsettling part. Same set jaw. Same careful eyes. But there was something in the photograph that wasn't in the hallway or the classroom — a tension in his shoulders, a stillness that didn't look like his own. It looked like something imposed. Like someone had told him to stand there, and he had decided the only way to survive it was to go somewhere else entirely inside his head.

I recognized that too. I closed the laptop.

The thing about growing up without money — real money, the kind that has its own gravity — is that you learn early that it changes the rules. Not, obviously. Not in ways people admit out loud. But the rules are different, and everyone who has it knows it, and everyone who doesn't knows it, and nobody talks about it because talking about it makes everyone uncomfortable in different directions. I had grown up in a house where the heat got turned down in January because the bill was too high. Eli Voss had grown up in a house with his name on a building at a university.

There was no version of this where we were the same kind of person.

I knew that. I held onto it deliberately, the way you press a bruise to remind yourself it's still there.

* * *

Thursday came faster than I wanted it to.

I walked into Alden’s class seven minutes early — earlier than usual, a fact I refused to examine — and the seat was empty. My seat. The corner row, third from the back. I sat down, opened my laptop, and told myself the loosening in my chest was relief and not something else entirely.

He came in two minutes before class started. Didn't look around the room the way most people did. Walked directly to the seat beside mine — not mine, the one beside it — dropped his bag, and sat down. Pulled out the same cracked paperback. Opened it to wherever he'd left off.

He didn't say anything. Neither did I.

But he had chosen the seat next to mine in a room with thirty other options, and we both knew it, and the silence between us had the particular weight of two people not saying the same thing at the same time.

Professor Aldeen started talking. I opened a new document and stared at it and typed nothing, and beside me Eli turned a page, and outside the window the sky finally made up its mind, and it started to rain.