Volume Four: The Nerd and the Friendship Test
Chapter 4
Dr. Alvarez paired us with a spreadsheet, which felt like exactly the kind of petty, godless efficiency a professor would use to ruin two lives at once. She read the list out loud, group by group, and when she got to "Hart, Bennett," I actually turned around to see if anyone else had heard it wrong.
Nobody had. Noah didn't turn around at all. He just opened a fresh document on his laptop, like a man bracing for surgery.
"We have three weeks," Dr. Alvarez said, "to present a case study on ethics in emerging technology. I want depth, not decoration."
I leaned over before she'd even finished the sentence. "We should just pick something easy. Facial recognition bias, maybe. Everyone's already written that paper, we can basically reverse-engineer an A."
Noah didn't look up from his screen. "I want to do algorithmic hiring discrimination. There's a case out of a logistics company from two years ago that nobody's covered properly, and the data's actually public if you know where to request it."
"That sounds like four extra hours of research we don't need."
"That sounds like the entire point of the assignment."
I want to be clear that I did not enjoy losing that argument, and I lost it slowly, over four days, the way you lose an argument to someone who is annoyingly, consistently correct. By the end of the first work session in the library, in a study room that smelled like old carpet and somebody's abandoned energy drink, I'd learned three things about Noah Bennett that surprised me.
One: he took notes by hand, in a small, cramped script, and somehow could still find any fact in them instantly, like his own brain had an index.
Two: when he disagreed with me, he never raised his voice. He just got quieter and more specific, which was somehow worse, because it meant I couldn't win by being louder.
Three: he was, infuriatingly, always right about the actual substance of things, even when I hated how he said it.
"You're impossible," I told him, on day two, after he'd rejected my third attempt to simplify our thesis into something that would fit cleanly on one slide.
"You're allergic to depth," he said, not even looking up. "You're good at presenting. You're not good at sitting with something long enough to actually think about it."
"That is deeply unfair."
"Is it wrong, though?"
It was not wrong, which was the most annoying part.
* * *
The trouble came on day three, when Blair and two of our usual group — Ainsley and a guy named Preston who mostly exists to laugh at whatever Blair says a half-second before anyone else does — wandered into the library "to say hi," which really meant they wanted an audience for whatever they were about to do.
Noah had his laptop open, headphones half on, reading something with the kind of focus that makes a person forget the rest of the room exists. Blair leaned over his shoulder, uninvited, and made a face at whatever was on his screen.
"Oh my god, is this the actual bibliography? Noah, nobody's professor reads footnotes. You know that, right?"
"I read them," Noah said, not looking up.
"Right, obviously, because you're — " Blair did a small, cruel impression of him hunched over a laptop, glasses pushed up his nose, and Preston laughed exactly on schedule.
I want to tell you I stepped in immediately, out of pure moral clarity. That would be a lie. For one long, ugly second, my body did the thing it has always done in this exact situation — it went still, waiting to see which way the group's laughter was going to land, ready to laugh along the second it became clear that was the safer option.
Then I looked at Noah's face. He wasn't laughing. He also wasn't reacting at all, which I now understood, after three years of not noticing, was its own kind of exhausted performance — the specific stillness of someone who has decided that flinching only makes it last longer.
"Blair," I said. "Stop."
The study room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with library policy.
"Stop what?" Blair said, still smiling, waiting for the joke to resume.
"That. The impression. It's not funny, and I don't want to do it anymore." I heard my own voice come out flatter and more certain than I expected, like I'd rehearsed it somewhere I couldn't remember. "We have a project due. Can you guys hang out somewhere that isn't directly behind us?"
Ainsley's eyebrows went up somewhere near her hairline. Preston actually stopped laughing mid-breath, which might be the single funniest thing that happened all week. Blair looked at me like I'd started speaking in a language she used to know but had let go rusty.
"Since when do you care what happens to Noah Bennett?"
"Since always, actually," I said, which wasn't true, and we both knew it wasn't true, and I said it anyway because the alternative was explaining a curse to my best friend in a library on a Tuesday. "Can you go?"
They went, eventually, with the specific slow, insulted shuffle of people who want you to know they're leaving on their own terms. Blair caught my eye on her way out, and there was something in her face I'd never seen directed at me before — not hurt exactly, more like recalculation, the look of someone doing quiet math about whether I was still going to be useful to stand next to.
I didn't chase her down to explain. I sat back down across from Noah instead.
He hadn't said a single word through any of it. He was looking at me now, though, with an expression I couldn't immediately place — somewhere between suspicious and something softer that he clearly didn't trust yet either.
"You didn't have to do that," he said.
"I know."
"Blair's going to make that weird for you. She always finds a way to make things weird for whoever isn't in the room."
"Probably," I agreed. "I'm getting kind of used to weird."
He almost smiled at that — the corner of his mouth twitching in a way I was starting to recognize as his actual, unguarded reaction, as opposed to the flat default face he wore for everyone else. Then he caught himself doing it and looked back down at his laptop, and we didn't talk about it again, which somehow felt like the correct amount of not talking about it.
* * *
We finished the outline that night, both of us more tired than either would admit, slouched at opposite ends of the same study table with our shoes off and a truly upsetting number of empty coffee cups between us.
"Read this part back to me," Noah said, sliding his laptop across. "Out loud. I want to hear how it sounds before we build slides around it."
I read it. I'm good at reading things out loud — it's one of the only academic skills I've never had to fake — and I let my voice do the thing it does, the pacing, the small pause before the point that matters, and when I looked up at the end, Noah was staring at me like he'd discovered a second, previously unknown feature on a phone he'd owned for years.
"What," I said.
"Nothing. You're just — actually good at that. Genuinely good, not curse-good."
"There's a difference?"
"There's a huge difference," he said, and for the first time all week, he laughed — a real laugh, short and surprised out of him, like it had escaped before he could file the paperwork to approve it. "I always assumed you were all delivery and no content."
"Rude."
"Accurate, historically. I'm allowed to revise an opinion." He leaned back in his chair, and for a second, without the tension of an actual audience in the room, he seemed almost relaxed — funnier than I'd given him credit for, quicker, the kind of dry that sneaks up on you if you're not paying attention. I realized, somewhere in that stretch of empty coffee cups, that I had spent three years deciding Noah Bennett was boring without ever once actually listening to him finish a sentence that wasn't a homework answer.
It was an uncomfortable thing to realize about yourself. I filed it away to be uncomfortable about later.
"You're not as boring as I thought," I admitted, which is about as close to an apology as I was capable of that week.
"High praise," he said. "I'll add it to my college applications."
* * *
It was nearly eleven when we finally packed up and split off toward our dorms, and I was still smiling about the college-applications line — actually smiling, not performing one — when I turned the corner near the east quad and saw the car.
It was the kind of car that didn't belong in student parking. Black, low, unnecessarily clean for a campus lot, with a driver standing beside the rear door like he'd been waiting there for exactly this long and not a minute more. I slowed down without meaning to, the way you do when something doesn't fit the picture around it.
Noah was already there.
He said something to the driver I couldn't hear, short and clipped, and ducked into the back seat fast — too fast, the kind of fast that isn't really about being in a hurry so much as about not being seen doing it. I caught maybe two seconds of his face through the tinted glass before the door shut, and it wasn't the face he'd had ten minutes earlier laughing about his college applications. It was careful. Closed. The exact stillness he'd worn in the study room with Blair, except this time there was no joke anyone was making that he had to survive.
The car pulled away before I'd even decided whether to wave.
I stood there in the cold for a second, going back over the last four days in my head — the handwritten notes, the too-precise data requests, the way he seemed to know exactly how a public records request worked like he'd filed one before, the careful, permanent flatness he wore like armor around anyone who wasn't me. None of it had struck me as strange in the moment. All of it struck me as strange now, lined up together in the dark, watching taillights disappear around the corner of a building that had definitely never seen a car like that pick up a student before.
I didn't know what I'd just seen. I only knew, with the specific, uneasy certainty of someone who has just noticed a puzzle piece that doesn't match the box it came in, that Noah Bennett was hiding something a great deal bigger than a pair of glasses and an ugly sweater.
I went to bed without checking the mirror once. For the first time since this whole nightmare started, my own reflection wasn't the thing keeping me up.