Ashes & Roses

Chapter 16

Geneviève Oakley✨👠

I woke up in a bed that was not mine and spent a full second deciding whether I was going to be sick about it. Zaelen's room smelled like cologne that cost more than it deserved and laundry that had not been done on time. A football jersey hung off a chair. Textbooks he clearly did not open were stacked like decoration. Morning came in mean through half-closed blinds and striped the carpet where he was still asleep on the floor, one arm flung over his eyes, mouth open, the picture of a boy who thought offering a girl his mattress made him decent. Nothing had happened. I had made sure of that before I closed my eyes. He had talked, and I had let him, and when his hand found the edge of the mattress I had told him if he got in this bed I would walk home in the dress and the dark and he could explain the empty room to whoever was keeping score. He had laughed like I was charming. Then he had taken a pillow and the floor like a man collecting credit. I sat up slowly. My mouth tasted like last night's drink, cheap pizza and the sentence I could not stop hearing.

I've known you for five seconds. We're not friends.

Wynter had said it in a doorway with neon on her face and her voice too loud, and I had said okay because anything else would have been a scene. I had not gone after her. I had let Zaelen put a glass in my hand and talk until the house thinned out, and I had told myself I was giving her space. The truth was uglier. I had been stung, and I did not know where to put it. Our synched calenders said she had classes until early afternoon. Ballet first. Good. I could get in, get dressed, and get out before I had to look at the bed she had slept in after telling me I was nobody. I left Zaelen on the floor without waking him. The frat house in daylight was a different animal. Disgusting. Sticky floors, a girl asleep on a couch in yesterday's makeup, the sour of beer baked into the carpet.I kept my shoes in my hand until I hit the porch. No one needed a story about Geneviève Oakley doing a walk of anything.

The dorm was quiet when I let myself in. Wynter's side looked slept in and abandoned in a hurry. Stained dance bag gone. Pink suitcase still under the bed, but corner showing. Her I'm sorry still sat in my messages, unanswered. Sorry was easy. Sorry did not unsay it. I showered until the house smell left my hair. Blew it out. Chose the white button down shirt and white pleated mini skirt with a black v-neck cashmere knit sweater because looking unfinished would have felt like letting last night win. Mascara. Tint on the mouth. Earrings. A pair of black heels. The face I used when a room expected Oakley and I was not in the mood to disappoint it. In the mirror I looked like myself. That was the point.

Principles of Business lived in the building that always smelled like printer toner and ambition. I took a seat toward the front, and center where Harrington could see I was present and the rest of the room could see I was not hiding. I opened my notebook. I did not think about Wynter. I thought about the assignment coming back today, because a perfect score was a cleaner feeling than a roommate who had decided I was temporary. Harrington worked the stack down the aisle with the air of a woman who had been disappointed by undergraduates since the nineties. When my paper landed, the red at the top was a 100. No notes. No mercy s***h of a question mark. I let myself have the small, private pleasure of it. She cleared her throat.

"Before we move on, I want to recognize the highest mark on this assignment."

I set my pen down. Straightened an inch, brushed down my skirt readying to accept a round of praise. The assumption arrived fully dressed.

"Sage Lee. One hundred and two. That includes the extra-credit item most of you treated as optional."

The room did the polite applause it reserved for other people's wins. My smile twitched as I turned slowly in my seat. He was in the back, a little off-center, black hair caught at his nape like he had not decided if it was a bun today. Charcoal sweater. The same calm face from the coffee shop, the one that had handed me a drink that tasted like a personal insult and then smiled at the person behind me. He took the paper when it reached him with a small nod. No bow. No look around to collect the room. He sat there with a 102 like this grade was a casual reoccurrence. Heat crawled up the back of my neck as I turned back in my seat. Harrington tapped the two empty podiums at the front.

"Reminder. If you wish to defend a mark or contest another student's reasoning, you may do so here. You will exchange papers first. You argue what is on the page, not what you wish you had written. Two minutes each. On the work. Not on personalities. Anyone feeling brave this morning?"

I was on my feet before I had a full sentence. The chair scraped louder than I meant it to. A few heads turned. I walked the aisle with my hundred in my hand, heels sounding with every step and stopped at the left podium as if it had been holding my place.

"I'd like to contest Sage Lee's extra-credit reasoning." My smile widened but the twitch remained. I kept going back to that sad excuse of a drink and that smug look he had on his Sage. Harrington's brows lifted. Interested, not offended.

"Mr. Lee, you're under no obligation," Professor Harrington said, looking toward the back of the room.

A pause in the back. Then a chair, everyone watched him as he pushed himself away from his desk and fist bumped one of his friends. He came down the aisle without hurry, which I decided I hated on principle. Up close he was taller than the counter had made him look. The accent sat under his English the way it had at the register, light, unbothered. Harrington held out a hand between us, palm up.

"Papers. Now. You do not debate a grade you have not read."

I did not want to give him my work. That was the first honest feeling I had had all morning that was not about Wynter. Reluctantly, I handed it over and he passed me his without ceremony, I snatched it with a small huff. The pages were still warm.

"Two minutes to read," Harrington said. "Then Ms. Oakley."

His handwriting was smaller than mine, tighter, almost stingy with the margins. No decorative phrasing. The required sections were shorter than they should have been and somehow still complete. Then the extra-credit page a counterbid model, a footnote cited by packet page, a sentence about price if a second buyer appeared. The 102 was written in Harrington's sharp red at the top, underlined once.

My own paper, in his hands, looked suddenly like something that had been dressed for an occasion. I found a thin place in his third paragraph while I still had time. He had assumed a cash component the prompt had not specified. I put my nail under the line so I would not lose it.

"Time," Harrington said. "Ms. Oakley." I set his pages on the podium.

"The prompt asked for a risk assessment of a mid-size acquisition," I said. "Capital structure, regulatory exposure, cultural integration. That is the assignment. Mr. Lee answers those three in less space than the rubric implies, then spends his remaining page on a hostile counterbid the lecture did not cover. The extra credit is optional. Using it to outrank a complete treatment of the required work rewards whoever treated the packet like a scavenger hunt." I turned his page so the room would not think I was inventing it.

"Here. He builds the counterbid on a cash-heavy close. The case study never says the buyer is paying cash. If that assumption fails, his extra two points fail with it. A clean hundred on what was asked should not lose to a hypothetical that only works if you invent the financing."

Harrington did not nod. She did not stop me either.

"And if extra credit is going to decide the top of the curve," I said, "that should have been in the prompt. Not announced after the fact."

"That's the clock," Harrington said. "Mr. Lee. You have her paper. Use it."

Sage looked at my pages the way he had looked at the espresso machine: like there was a correct way and he had already found it. When he spoke it was even, almost conversational, which made the room lean in whether it wanted to or not.

"Ms. Oakley's paper is better written than mine," he said. No irony, all seriousness. "The integration section is the strongest in the room. I wrote less there. That is fair." He turned to my second page and I felt my spine go tight.

"But she treats cultural risk as a paragraph of caution and then leaves it. No metric. No owner. No what-happens-if. The rubric asked for an assessment, not a warning. That is not wrong. It is unfinished. I used the leftover space on the extra question because the packet put a counterbid in a footnote on page forty-one. So it was in the unit, even if we did not spend lecture on it." He glanced around the room and towards the professor with that same smug smile

"The cash assumption is labeled as an assumption. First sentence of the model. If the buyer uses stock, the number changes. I said that. The two points are not for guessing. They are for what you do when the clean model breaks." A laugh moved through the left side of the room, fond. I felt my jaw set and my fingers tightly gripping his paper, I heard it crinkle underneath my grip.

"So the standard," I said, before Harrington could lift her hand, "is whoever has leftover time and a talent for footnotes."

Sage's eyes came back to mine. Still calm. A little brighter.

"The standard is whoever reads the whole packet," he said. "Including the parts that look optional. And who finishes the section they started. You started cultural risk. You did not end it."

"Oh..That's cute." I said mockingly, I tilted my head to the side and bit my bottom lip to contain the curse words.

"It is not meant to be cute. It is on your page." Sage shrugged softly.

Harrington lifted two fingers. "That is two minutes and a bonus round I did not authorize. Marks stand. If you want the written rubric, office hours are on the syllabus. Return each other's papers. Sit."

We circled the podiums. Sage handed me my paper, and I snatched it from his fingers before he could say anything else. Then I shoved his now wrinkled paper into his hand.

"Nice debate" he remarked softly, he held out his hand as a sign of a truce. My face twisted in disgust looking down at the gesture. I looked back up at him. The same unbothered mouth. A small scoff left my lips and I walked past him shoving his shoulder out of the way with mine. I went back to my seat before I said something that would follow me out of the building. He returned to the back row. I did not watch him go. I watched the board until the letters stopped meaning anything. Under the polish, under the 100 that was no longer the highest number in the room, last night was still asleep on Zaelen's floor, and Wynter's voice was still too loud in a doorway, and the boy from the coffee shop had just stood at a podium and put his finger on the one paragraph I knew was thin.

By the time I walked into Finance, the irritation had had time to settle and find new corners. Harrington's room still sat under my skin. Sage Lee's voice. My own paper in his hands. The thin place in the cultural-risk paragraph that I had known was thin and had not wanted named out loud. Professor Price's classroom was colder, all white board and humming vents. I was ready to take it out on the first person who looked at me like I owed them a pleasant morning. Dakota was already in the back. She had claimed two chairs without asking, one under her and one under a beat-up backpack that had never seen the inside of a lecture meant for people in collared shirts. Boots on the edge of the desk. Headphones slung around her neck, one side still leaking a thin thread of bass. She was drawing in the margin of a notebook that had given up on being a notebook weeks ago black ink, sharp little shapes, a face I did not recognize. Dark clothes, silver at her fingers, eyeliner smudged like she had slept in it on purpose. She looked like she had wandered into the wrong building and then decided the building could adjust. She glanced up when I reached the row. One look at my face and her mouth curled, slow, delighted. She dropped her boots and hooked the bag off the empty chair with two fingers.

"Aww." She tugged one earbud free. "Did someone scuff the Louboutins, or is this a personality thing?" I sat. Crossed my legs because the skirt required it and because I needed something to do with the anger.

"If I wanted commentary on my shoes, I would have stayed in the hall."

"That's not a no." Dakota tipped her head, studying me the way she studied people she intended to keep. "You look like you lost a fight you thought you were owed."

"I woke up, and the entire campus decided to piss me off."

"God." She sank lower in the chair, grinning. "You really do think the you're that important."

"I think I am allowed to be in a mood without a diagnosis."

"You're in eight-thirty Finance in four-inch heels." Her eyes dropped, unapologetic. "That's not a mood. That's a statement." I followed her gaze. The leather was already biting the back of my ankle.

"They're five inches and I’m fine okay? Just woke up late."

Dakota looked at me for a long second, then laughed once, under her breath.

"That's the cleanest lie you've told all week. Write it down. Price might extra-credit you."

I faced the front. If I gave her more, she would live in it. The door opened on a knot of boys who had never learned how to enter a room at an indoor volume. Price glanced up from her laptop, unimpressed, and went back to whatever she was pretending to grade. I almost let them pass as noise. Then I heard him. Not the words. The pitch. The easy, unhurried laugh I had just stood across a podium from. My stomach dropped, stupid and immediate. Sage came in with three other students, backpack slung off one shoulder, black hair pulled loosely off his face like the morning had not required armor. He looked comfortable. That was the insult. He looked like a man who had not spent an hour with my assignment under his hands and my name in his mouth. He moved down the aisle without searching the room and took a seat toward the rear with his friends, a few rows off ours, close enough that I would hear him every time he found something funny. I watched him sit.

"He's unbearable," I said.

Dakota followed the line of my stare. When she landed on him, she made a sound that was almost a laugh and not quite kind.

"Unbearable," she agreed. "Also hot. Tragically."

I turned my head. Slowly. She looked back at me, open, unbothered, as if she had commented on the weather.

"What." I snapped

"Nothing."

"That was not a nothing face." She tapped her pen against the doodled margin. "That's the face you make when you're deciding whether to start a war or a rumor."

"I have a face for neither."

"Sure." She shrugged and bent back over the page. "Or you're wound so tight you're picking a fight with the first decent-looking boy who beat you at something. Happens."

"I beg your pardon." I coughed.

"You heard me." She did not look up. The pen kept moving. "Sexually frustrated. Academically bruised. Same temperature."

"You do not get to diagnose me in a finance lecture." I hissed in a sharp whisper

"I just did."

I leaned in, voice down, because Price had started writing on the board and I was not about to be the Oakley who got ejected before roll.

"The amount of weed in your system has wrecked your concept of reality"

Dakota's shoulders shook with laughter. She still did not lift her eyes. She only raised one hand, middle finger lazy and precise, and held it in the space between our desks long enough for me to look at it.

"You're vile," I said. I turned toward the board before I said something that would follow both of us out of the room. Price underlined a word I did not absorb. Behind us, Sage laughed at something one of his friends muttered, low and unbothered, and the sound landed in the same place the extra two points had. For a single moment I had forgotten what had transpired the night before until I felt my purse vibrate, I pulled it out and read the screen.

Wynter: i understand that you're angry with me. just let me know that you're safe please. im sorry again.

My eyes scanned over the text numerous times. Before tears could flow down my cheeks I turned off my phone and shoved it back into my purse. My mind drifted from the lecture and by the time the lecture ended, I hadn't taken any notes, I couldn't even tell you what the professor said.

"I'm meeting up with Veronica for drinks at her job, come on" Dakota nudged my shoulder playfully and picked up her skateboard that was tucked underneath the desk. I nodded faintly at her as I packed up my belongings. The thought of not facing Wynter for another few hours relaxed me a bit and God knows I need a drink.