Chapter 34 : Midterms

Chapter 34: Chapter 34 : Midterms

Midterm week at SCU smelled like burnt coffee and highlighters. Ethan cut across a quad full of people quizzing each other off index cards and went straight to Carrington Hall. He had a four o’clock with the President, and this time he’d brought paperwork.

The President’s assistant was the same woman who’d stamped his appeal back in September. She took one look at the thick folder under his arm and raised an eyebrow. "Page sixty-one again?"

"Page twelve," Ethan said. "Facilities use."

She lost the fight with a smile and waved him in.

Whitman was standing at the window, watching a Frisbee game on the lawn. He turned when the door opened. "Mr. Cole. I hear you’ve been to New York."

News traveled. "The Sony Building. Thirty-first floor."

"And you came back with a hundred thousand dollars." Whitman sat down. "Dana told me. Dana tells me everything that might end up in a brochure."

Ethan set the folder on the desk. A facilities use application with every box filled in. A certificate of event liability coverage from Sony’s insurer. A campus map with every location circled in red. And a safety plan with Hendricks listed as the campus police liaison. Ethan had walked the plan over to the campus police office first thing that morning. Hendricks had read the whole thing and asked exactly one question. "There’s a permit this time?"

Whitman paged through it to the end, then tapped the last page twice with one finger.

"Permits first. Releases first," he said. "You were listening."

"You were pretty clear about it."

Whitman pulled out the application, and his eyes stopped on the date. "Saturday, October fourteenth." He looked up. "That’s five days from now."

"Sony’s console launches November seventeenth, and preorder season starts next week. The video has to be out before people make up their minds. And midterms are over by Friday. Everybody’s free."

Whitman read on. "The football practice field. The central lawn. The ground floor of the library. The ground floors of Halsey and Mercer. The indoor gym. The track." He looked at Ethan over the top of his glasses. "Mr. Cole, that’s not a facilities request. That’s the campus."

"Just the middle of it. You can keep the parking structures."

Whitman didn’t laugh. "A hundred students. Cash. Cameras. If one of those kids breaks an ankle on my lawn, I’m the one explaining it to the board."

"The insurance covers the ankle. Hendricks’s people cover the crowd. Everything goes back the way it was by Sunday night, and if the grass doesn’t survive, we pay to resod it."

Whitman sat back. "And what exactly are you planning to do with my campus?"

"Red Light, Green Light."

Whitman blinked. "The playground game?"

"Every kid in America has played it," Ethan said. "Nobody’s ever played it for a hundred thousand dollars."

He’d sat through more brainstorms than he could count, rooms full of people straining for something new. The ideas that actually took off were almost never new. They were something everybody had played at eight years old and then forgotten. Nobody needed the rules explained. They just needed a reason to care again.

Whitman didn’t answer right away. He swiveled his chair toward the window and the lawn.

"Do you know what our applicants write on the line that asks where else they’re applying?"

"UCLA."

"Every single one," Whitman said. "U.S. News has them at twenty-five and us at thirty-one. We’re the school people apply to just in case. I’ve been president for eleven years, and I’ve spent all eleven trying to fix that with a brochure."

He turned back around. "After your Katrina video, we got a hundred and forty out-of-state inquiry forms in one weekend. After the one with the young man and his mother, a station in Chicago ran a segment on us. Chicago."

"Then picture this," Ethan said. "A hundred kids in green tracksuits running across your lawn on a live feed. Every high school senior in the country who’s watching is going to decide SCU is the coolest college in America."

"The coolest college in America." Whitman said it quietly, trying it on. He seemed to like the fit.

He picked up a pen and signed the bottom of the application.

"Three conditions. Hendricks has the final word on safety. Not one cent of that money touches a university account. And when the cameras are rolling, make sure they can see the bell tower."

Ethan gathered up the folder and stood. He’d made it to the door when Whitman spoke again.

"One more thing. Carol Benning stopped by this morning. Your advisor." He took off his glasses. "Four absences. Two missed quizzes. Your scholarship renews at a 3.5, and at this rate she has you somewhere around a 3.2."

Ethan stopped in the doorway.

"She also told me you’re the most interesting student she’s had in years." Whitman folded the glasses. "In my experience, the most interesting student and the one who graduates aren’t always the same person."

"I’ll be in class Thursday," Ethan said. "Front row. I’ll even take notes by hand."

"See that you do." Whitman put his glasses back on. "It would be embarrassing to put the coolest college in America on television and then lose its most famous freshman to a GPA."

Out in the hall, Ethan ran the numbers. Four classes, two of them easy, every final worth forty percent. He’d pulled a 3.8 out of this same major once, back when he was working twenty hours a week in the editing lab on top of it. Plenty of room.

It was a comfortable number. He put it away and didn’t think about it again for three weeks.

From the steps of Carrington Hall he sent one text to Noah and Maya. Eleven seconds later, Noah called. The first thing out of the phone was a scream.

Maya didn’t answer.

Maya got the text on the third floor of the library. She didn’t get a chance to answer it, because the chair next to hers had just scraped back and Chloe Daniels had dropped into it.

During midterm week the library was standing room only. The girl by the window was mouthing econ formulas to herself, and the guy at the next table had fallen asleep on his organic chemistry textbook with a highlighter still in his hand. Chloe set down a marketing textbook and three highlighters.

"Last open seat on the floor," she said. "Don’t worry, I’m quiet."

She wasn’t. Inside ten minutes she’d uncapped and recapped the same highlighter forty times.

"Did you hear?" Chloe leaned over. "Your boy got the whole campus. A girl in my econ section saw the paperwork sitting on the President’s desk."

"He’s not my boy."

"Your partner. Whatever." Chloe kept going. "So what’s he going to do with it?"

"No idea." Maya didn’t look up from the linked lists. "He doesn’t tell me anything until he needs something built."

"Huh." Chloe went back to her textbook. Maya went back to her code.

That lasted about fifteen minutes.

"I walked past Carrington this afternoon and he was out on the steps on the phone," Chloe said, to nobody in particular. "Grinning like he’d won the lottery. Three different people stopped to say congrats, and he knew every one of their names."

"And that night at the restaurant on the pier, you should’ve seen him order. Like he owned the place. The waiter practically bowed." Chloe ran her highlighter under a line, realized it was the wrong line, and kept going. "Then the whole drive back he didn’t say a word. Just watched out the window. I thought he was carsick."

Maya crossed out a line of code and wrote it again. "Mm."

"Does he ever sleep? My roommate saw him outside B14 on the phone at three in the morning. Three! Who is he even calling?"

Maya’s pen stopped. "Is he really that great?"

It came out sharper than she’d meant it to. Chloe hadn’t seen that coming. Her highlighter stopped halfway to the page.

"He’s..." She paused. "He’s not that great, actually. I’ve been about as obvious as a person can get, and he still—"

She didn’t finish. She laughed instead, embarrassed, and tucked her hair behind her ear.

"But he’s kind of great, too," she said, quieter.

"Everybody I know is just floating. Majors their parents picked. He acts like he already knows exactly where he’s going. And you’ve seen him in front of a crowd. Five hundred people yelling over each other, he says one sentence and they shut up."

She turned the highlighter over in her fingers. "And Owen, the guy on the grill at the dining hall? Half my floor doesn’t even know his name. Ethan asks about his mom’s car every single time he goes through the line."

Maya didn’t say anything. She could have said most of it herself, and she didn’t love that. She pulled the linked-list printout closer, as if the problem were in the code.

"What’s he like with you guys?" Chloe asked.

A few things came to Maya at once. The coffee on the library steps. Four in the morning at One Wilshire, him reading her upload scripts line by line and then asking about the one function she was proudest of. None of it was anything she was about to say out loud.

"Same as always," she muttered at the page. "Bosses people around all day."

Chloe laughed. "God. That sounds exactly like him."

Maya picked up her phone and finally opened Ethan’s text. She typed Congrats, then deleted it.

Saturday is five days away.

The reply came almost instantly.

I know. B14, 7 a.m. Bring coffee.

Bring your own.

She set the phone down and closed the stack of linked-list code. Data structures was Thursday. The game was Saturday. She opened a blank file and started on the one that couldn’t wait.