Volume Nine: The Choice No One Sees
Chapter 9
The storm hit on a Saturday, the kind of storm the local news spends all week hyping and then, for once, actually undersells. By six p.m. the wind had peeled a section of gutter clean off the old dining hall, and by eight the university had sent out its first emergency alert — evacuate low-lying dorms, seek higher ground, avoid the east quad entirely, where a century-old drainage system was apparently losing its decades-long argument with the weather.
I was three buildings away when the second alert came through, getting ready — hair curled, dress steamed, the whole ridiculous machinery of it — for the interview that would decide the citywide Winter Rose title, the honor that had quietly replaced the Ambassador scholarship in my ambitions the moment the committee had crossed my name off the first list. I told myself it mattered less than it used to. I still checked the mirror four times in twenty minutes, so I suppose some part of me hadn't fully caught up to the rest of me yet.
That's when Blair's name lit up my phone — Blair, who I still wasn't quite speaking to, who apparently thought a flood was worth breaking the silence for.
"Lily went back," she said, no hello, her voice thin and scared in a way I'd never heard from her. "For her portfolio. The old dorm's flooding and she went back in for it and nobody can reach her."
I stood there in my half-curled hair and my steamed dress, doing a terrible kind of math in real time. The interview started in fifty minutes. The old dorm was a fifteen-minute walk each way, longer in the storm, longer still if something went wrong once I got there. I could make it back in time if nothing went wrong. I could also, very easily, not.
"Where's campus security?"
"Spread thin. There's flooding in like four places at once. Sienna, I don't know who else to call."
I hung up and called Noah before I'd finished deciding anything, which I think tells you what I'd actually already decided.
* * *
He wanted to come. Of course he wanted to come — some things about Noah Bennett had become entirely predictable to me over the last two months, and throwing himself directly into danger on my behalf was apparently one of them. He was halfway out the door of his dorm, jacket half-zipped, when a tree limb came down across the walkway outside his building and a first-year I didn't know went down hard trying to dodge it, ankle twisted underneath her at an angle that made my stomach turn even through the phone.
"Go," I told him, already moving, my curled hair flattening under the rain within the first thirty seconds. "Help her. I've got Lily."
"Sienna — "
"I mean it. She needs you right there, right now. I'll call you the second I'm out."
He didn't argue again, which meant he trusted me, which was its own strange, warm thing to feel in the middle of a genuine emergency.
* * *
The old dorm looked like something out of a disaster film by the time I reached it — water already ankle-deep in the ground-floor hallway, emergency lighting flickering red along the baseboards, the whole building groaning faintly under a weight it hadn't been built for. I found Lily on the second floor, soaked through, kneeling over a plastic bin of sketchbooks and portfolio pages that water had already started creeping toward.
"You have got to be kidding me," I said, and she looked up at me with an expression somewhere between relief and pure disbelief.
"I'm not leaving these," she said. "Four years of work is in this bin."
"Then we carry the bin. Come on."
The stairwell we'd both used to get up was already unusable by the time we tried to leave — water pouring down it in a way that made the whole structure sound like it was actively deciding whether to hold. I remembered, from some long-ago building tour I'd sat through half-listening, that there was a service exit on the far side of the second floor, narrow and unglamorous and exactly the kind of thing I'd never once had a reason to notice before this semester made me pay attention to things I used to walk right past.
We found it. We got through it. I will spare you the parts that were mostly just cold, wet, terrified scrambling, except to say that my dress — the one I'd steamed forty-five minutes earlier for an interview I was now definitely going to miss — tore clean up one side on a piece of exposed rebar, and my phone, which I'd been using as a flashlight, slipped out of my soaked hands into six inches of moving water somewhere around the halfway point and was never seen again.
By the time we made it out into the open, both of us were caked in mud, drenched, shaking from cold and adrenaline in roughly equal measure, and completely, gloriously unfilmed. No one was there. No cameras. No committee. No applause. Just Lily, gripping her ruined-but-saved portfolio bin like a life raft, and me, standing in the wreckage of what had been, ninety minutes earlier, a genuinely excellent blowout.
"Thank you," Lily said, when she could finally speak without her teeth chattering through it. "I mean it. You didn't have to do that."
"I did, actually," I said, and meant it in a way that had nothing to do with curses or reputations or anything except the simple, uncomplicated fact that I hadn't wanted her drowning in a stairwell over a bin of drawings. "I'm just glad we're both still upright."
We got her to the shelter set up in the student center, wrapped in the scratchy emergency blankets they hand out for exactly this kind of night, and somewhere in the chaos of checking her in, I finally had a moment to look down at myself — torn dress, no phone, makeup gone, hair a ruined tangle — and feel, instead of the horror I expected, something startlingly close to peace.
I touched my cheek without meaning to. It was an old habit by now, checking. The last mark, the small stubborn one from the video, the one that had refused every ounce of applause I'd thrown at it, was gone. Not faded. Gone, like it had simply finished whatever it needed from me and let go.
* * *
I found Noah an hour later, sitting on a cot in the makeshift infirmary the university had set up, one hand wrapped in gauze, a cut above his eyebrow already starting to bruise where the tree limb had apparently caught him worse than the first-year girl he'd been shielding.
"You look terrible," I said, which was not remotely what I meant to say, but exhaustion has a way of overriding your better instincts.
"You look like you fought a river and mostly won," he said, and somehow, despite the bandage and the swelling and the general chaos of the night, he still managed to look genuinely, unreasonably pleased to see me. "Lily?"
"Safe. Portfolio and all. I lost my phone and possibly an entire outfit in the process, but she's fine." I sat down on the edge of his cot, careful of his bandaged hand, and let myself finally feel how tired I was. "I missed the interview. Winter Rose. It started forty minutes ago."
"I know. I saw the announcement go out that they'd rescheduled it for candidates 'directly impacted by tonight's emergency response efforts.'" He said it very evenly, like he was reading a weather report, but I caught the small, private smile underneath it.
"Wait. What?"
"Apparently word got around that you pulled someone out of a flooding building instead of showing up to get judged on a stage. It didn't exactly hurt your case, is what I'm saying." He shrugged with the shoulder that wasn't bandaged. "Not that it looks like you care."
"I don't," I said, and was startled to realize it was true. "I really, genuinely don't. Is that insane?"
"I think it's the opposite of insane." Noah reached out with his good hand and gently brushed a streak of dried mud from my cheekbone, right where the last mark had been sitting for weeks, and went very still when his fingers registered what his eyes apparently already had. "It's gone."
"I noticed."
"You didn't do that for an audience. There wasn't one."
"No," I agreed. "There really wasn't."
He looked at me for a long moment, something building behind his eyes that he seemed to be deciding whether he had the right to say out loud yet. Outside, the storm was finally starting to thin, rain softening from a roar to something almost gentle against the infirmary windows.
"I loved you before you became a good person, you know," he said finally, quiet, like he was setting something down carefully instead of throwing it. "I want you to know that. Not because I'm trying to take credit for who you turned into. Because I need you to know it wasn't conditional. Even the version of you that made fun of my sweaters in that ethics class — some stupid, stubborn part of me was already paying attention to you back then, and I hated it, and I never stopped."
I didn't say anything for a moment, because my throat had done something complicated and I didn't entirely trust my voice yet.
"I think I loved you a little before I deserved to be loved back," I finally managed. "Which is a strange thing to say out loud, but there it is."
"You don't have to deserve it," he said. "That's sort of the whole point of it."
I kissed him then, careful of the cut above his eyebrow, careful of his bandaged hand, not careful at all of anything else, and for a long moment the storm outside and the ruined dress and the missed interview and the entire exhausting semester simply stopped existing.
* * *
Lightning cracked somewhere far off as we finally stepped outside the infirmary into the cool, washed-clean air the storm leaves behind when it's finally spent itself. In the wet reflection of a puddle at my feet, gold light rippled once, briefly, and I could have sworn — just for a second, just long enough to make my breath catch — that I saw Delia's face looking back up at me instead of my own, smiling in a way I'd never once seen her smile before.
I didn't say anything to Noah about it. Some things, I was starting to understand, you only need to see once to know exactly what they mean.