BOUGHT BY SILENCE, BOUND BY BLOOD

**Chapter 2: Know Your Place**

By Monday, the story had made its way around the CS department the way stories always did at Ashcroft — quietly, efficiently, with names attached.

Annabelle heard the first version of it in the library, two sophomores at the next table not bothering to lower their voices. Apparently the scholarship girl humiliated Whitfield in Ilori's class. Apparently she's like, actually terrifying. She kept her eyes on her laptop and let them talk. It wasn't the worst thing she'd overheard about herself. It might not even have been unkind, exactly, except for the way scholarship girl did all the same work as people like you.

By Wednesday, the version making the rounds had changed. Now she'd shown off. Now she'd embarrassed him on purpose, in front of the whole department, because she had something to prove. Now — this one made her stomach drop when she heard it outside the lecture hall — now there were whispers that she'd only gotten into Ashcroft because of some quota, some exception made for a girl who couldn't otherwise afford the application fee.

She knew exactly where that version had started. She just couldn't prove it.

"Ignore them," Josie said that night, cross-legged on her bed with a bag of pretzels balanced on her knee, watching Annabelle stare at the same paragraph of her reading for the fourth time. "Seriously. Whitfield's crowd gossips because they're bored and rich. It's basically a hobby."

"It's fine." Annabelle turned a page she hadn't actually read.

"It is very much not fine, and you're doing the thing where you say 'it's fine' in the voice that means the opposite." Josie tossed a pretzel, missed, let it roll under the desk. "What happened?"

Annabelle finally set the book down. "I answered a question correctly. He didn't like it."

"That's it?"

"That's it." She almost smiled. "Apparently that's a crime, if you're supposed to be invisible."

Josie's expression did something complicated — sympathy fighting with the particular fury of someone who had never once had to think about which bus stop made her look poor. "He's an ass. Everyone knows he's an ass. His dad's basically famous for firing people on their birthdays, there's an article about it, I'll send it to you—"

"Don't." Annabelle almost laughed. "I don't need the article."

"Fine. But if Priya says one more thing to you in the dining hall, I will end her."

"You will not. You'll glare intensely and then complain to me about it for twenty minutes."

"...Fair." Josie grinned, and for a second the tightness in Annabelle's chest eased, just slightly, the way it always did around her. Josie didn't understand everything — couldn't, not really, not with her easy tuition and her parents who called every Sunday just to talk — but she understood enough. She understood that Annabelle needed someone in her corner who wasn't keeping score of what it cost her to be there.

Annabelle's phone buzzed on the desk. She glanced at it out of habit and then went still.

Mom: Feeling a little tired today, nothing to worry about. Did you eat lunch?

Nothing to worry about. Annabelle had learned, over two years of her mother's diagnosis, that this phrase meant precisely the opposite — that Miriam Reyes had spent the day counting spoons of energy the way Annabelle counted dollars, and had come up short, and didn't want her daughter to know.

"Everything okay?" Josie asked, watching her face.

"Yeah." Annabelle typed back a reassurance she half-believed herself, then set the phone face-down. "Just my mom."

Josie didn't push. That was another thing Annabelle loved about her — she knew which doors not to open uninvited.

Across campus, in a dorm suite that cost more per month than Annabelle's tuition, Max sat with his laptop open and unread, watching Wes pace in front of the window.

"You didn't have to do the whole hallway thing," Wes said. "The know your place bit. That was — that was a lot, man."

"She started it."

"She answered a question, Max. Correctly. In a class. That's not a declaration of war, that's Tuesday."

Max didn't look up from the screen. "It's the third time this semester she's made me look stupid in front of people."

"It's the third time she's been right in front of people. That's different from making you look stupid. You did that part yourself."

Priya, curled in the armchair by the window with her own laptop balanced on her knees, didn't glance up either. "She's been weird about you since the semester started. Staring in seminar. I've seen it."

This wasn't true, or at least Max had never noticed it being true, but it slotted so neatly into the story he already wanted to believe — she's not actually better than me, she's just been performing for my attention — that he let it sit there, unexamined, gathering weight.

"Whatever," he said. "It's not a big deal."

"You spent ten minutes on it in the hallway," Wes said. "It's a big deal to somebody."

Max closed the laptop, harder than he meant to. He didn't have an answer for that — not one he was willing to say out loud, not even to Wes, who'd known him since they were twelve and had a talent for asking the questions Max least wanted to sit with.

The truth was smaller and stupider than any of them would have guessed, and it embarrassed him more than losing to her twice in one afternoon: he'd noticed her before today. Weeks ago. The way she took notes without looking down at her hand. The way she never once asked him for anything — not a study partner, not a connection, not access to whatever door his last name could open — in a school full of people who wanted exactly that from him.

It had unsettled him, being irrelevant to someone. He didn't have a category for it.

So he'd done what he always did with things he didn't understand and didn't like: he'd found a way to make it about her instead.

"There's a thing at Delta Row this Friday," Priya said, changing the subject with the ease of someone used to smoothing her way past Max's moods. "Whole department's invited. Should be good."

"Fine," Max said, already thinking about something else, though he couldn't have said what.

Three floors away, unaware that her name had come up twice in a conversation she'd never know happened, Annabelle finished her reading, set an alarm for five-fifteen, and went to sleep already tired for tomorrow.