Chapter One ONE
“Grunts!”

At the sound of our collective title, my deskmate and I look up. The Torch managing editor, Christopher, is twisted around in his chair, staring at us.

“Did you get those cutlines to Angelica?”

I point at my deskmate at the same time he points at me.

“Oh, no-no-no,” I say, jabbing my finger closer. “You said you’d do it.”

He pushes his glasses up onto his forehead, his expression overly patient—something I’ve learned means he’s truly exasperated. “You know, I love these imaginary little scenarios you like to invent—”

“It’s not imaginary!” I swivel to face him in the small space beneath our desk. The arm of my chair bangs into his, narrowly missing his fingers, earning me a glare in response. “You literally said yesterday that you’d take care of the cutlines! Is your memory really that bad?”

His expression cools. “I said I’d take care of formatting the headlines. Is your hearing really that bad?”

“Hey!” Christopher barks, waving an arm to get our attention. “I don’t care if one of you said you’d be doing the cancan lines on a Mississippi steamboat—we need the cutlines now. Get it done.”

Sometimes I wonder if Christopher thinks we’re running the Washington Post or something.

My deskmate puts on his best politician voice. “You know what? It’s okay. I’ll handle the cutlines too.” He shoots me a nauseating smile. “No problem.”

Three Wellborn, everyone: suck-up of the highest order.

If I’d known accepting a grunt internship with the Torch would land me at a desk with the most obnoxious and devious person I’ve ever met, I might have given the decision a second thought. But my first and most important goal at college was to land a spot—any spot—on the school newspaper.

The university’s journalism program is highly competitive and accessible only to existing students through an application process. Most of the other freshmen who’ll apply in the spring will have their sights on broadcasting, spending fall semester on one of the dozens of school-centric podcasts or clawing their way into spots on campus video channels, like the Torch’s biggest rival, Two Minute News. They’re a short-form video daily news update run by a revolving door of “reporters” who do little more than shuttle gossip around campus. Unfortunately, their viewership leaves the Torch in the dust.

But they’re also oversaturated with content creators, which is why securing my place at the Torch is essential. Having writing credits as a freshman will boost my application beyond the competition. I’m sort of counting on it, because when you’ve got your long-term sights set on a job in the struggling print-media industry, failing to get into the journalism program at a state school is not an option.

Three must feel the same, because he hasn’t quit yet, despite the hours we’ve spent bumping elbows and trading long, silent looks of disdain in the quiet newsroom. Our superiors have made it clear that as long as we get our work done, we’re free to attempt to murder each other with our eyes as much as we wish. When we don’t get our work done, we get publicly dragged for it in front of the rest of the staff, like today.

I try to remind myself that future Pulitzer Prize winners don’t let flies like Three get under their skin. But if he thinks I’m going to let him take over the cutlines like he’s picking up my slack, he’s not as smart as he wants everyone to believe.

“Oh no, don’t worry about it,” I say sweetly. “I’m happy to take one for the team.”

“But you’ll have to stay late.” Three reaches over and pats my hand lightly. “Really, I don’t mind.”

I can’t fight my grimace as I pick up his hand with two fingers and drop it back on his side of the desk. “Ew.”

Three grins, knowing he’s won. Because that’s the goal: whoever gets a rise out of the other first wins. It’s a twisted little game we’re playing every second we spend together.

He flicks his gaze toward Christopher. “I’ve got the cutlines. I’ll have them to you before I leave tonight.”

“I don’t know how to convey to you how little I care,” says Christopher. “I thought I did a good job of it earlier with that line about the cancan, but it seems your skulls are getting thicker by the second. Don’t talk to me again until they’re done. I don’t care who does them. I’m not your babysitter.”

Three turns to me, tapping his pen against his lower lip. There is a victorious fire in his eyes that makes me want to grab the nearest sharp object and gouge them out of their sockets. “I guess it’s all me. I’m pretty sure you have a job to get to.”

It kills me that he knows my schedule so well. Because I do, in fact, have a shift at the library in fifteen minutes. I’ll already need to rush to get there on time.

“Fine.” The word comes out bitten off as I stand, grabbing my bag.

I shove my chair in, bashing it a little harder than necessary against Three’s seat. Even from behind, he looks smug. It fills me with rage, which makes it very difficult to put on a normal, well-adjusted voice as I call goodbye to the rest of the staff in the newsroom.

I shoulder my bag with enough force that it smacks Three in the back of the head.

“Whoops,” I say lightly, glancing back. His glasses have gone askew, and his glare is deadly. I manage to choke out, “Sorry!” and rush for the exit, making it into the hall just as my laughter explodes out of me.

It’s a small victory in our ongoing war.

The worst part about Three isn’t that he’s, arguably, the most unpleasant human being I’ve ever met. It isn’t his sneer, or his perfectly timed jabs, or the way he pushes his reading glasses up onto his forehead like he’s some kind of movie reporter.

It’s the fact that everyone else thinks he’s incredible. The rest of the Torch staff finds him charming. I’ve caught more than one person in our shared statistics class shooting him major heart eyes. He’s well-spoken and, unfortunately, intelligent, so professors love him. No one would ever believe that under his nice hair and his kind smile and his good manners, there lies a plotting, poisonous snake.

The second-worst part about Three is that he’s cute. He’s got the kind of face you would inherently trust—or at least not be surprised to find in a Vineyard Vines ad. He’s got the look of East Coast old money, though really he’s just Midwest old money. It doesn’t matter—it’s all money either way. He even went to boarding school, where I imagine he earned such a boarding school nickname like Three. As though a normal nickname, when he is Nathaniel Wellborn III, would be too pleb.

It stings to acknowledge, but when I first saw him, my brain did a deep dive into every campus romance webcomic I’ve ever read. We were very firmly not friends—Three was impossible to be friends with back then, no matter how hard I tried. But for five minutes at a time, when I arrived with a cup of coffee just for him, he was charming. I’d get a morsel of him for myself to stow away for giggling, feet-kicking fantasies as soon as I was alone. And at the grunt desk, we handled the work like partners, dutifully tackling the to-do list together.

It all fell apart a few weeks ago when Angelica, the Campus Life editor, found out she got an internship at the Columbus Dispatch starting next semester. Now that she’s leaving the Torch and others in her section are moving up, there’s going to be a spot for a new Campus Life reporter.

A spot that’s going to be mine.

Landing a staff position on the Torch blows a little writing credit straight out of the water. It’ll prove I have real value to the paper beyond a few articles they happened to like. (Not that I’ve gotten to write any articles yet.)

Three might think he needs to win for the same reason, but I’ve looked at the numbers—there is a disproportionate amount of female applicants over male applicants, but a fairly even number of male and female journalism students. He has nothing to worry about—or at least less to worry about than I do.

And yet, the day Angelica announced she would be leaving, Three waited until the noise in the room picked up again before turning to me and saying, casual as ever, “You know I’ll destroy you before I let you win that spot, right?”

And just like that, every happy, flirty thought I’d ever had about him got flushed. We were at war.

There’s a guy coming out of my dorm room when I arrive late that night. It’s after midnight, the hall quiet and the lounge mostly empty except for one person studying.

“Um, hi?” I say when the guy nearly knocks into me.

“?’Sup,” he says, but it’s not a question, because he’s already walking away.

I catch the door before it swings shut and poke my head into the room, the rest of my body following, relieved, when I see my roommate, Ellie, sitting at her desk. She’s wearing sweats that are baggy on her thin frame, her brown hair pulled up in a messy bun—her go-to when she hasn’t washed it in a while. She has the overhead fluorescents turned off, the room lit by her color-changing lamp, which is currently blue. It makes her look extra pale.

Not that I have room to talk. The sight of my reflection in our vanity is staggering—shoulder-length brown hair in tangles from the windy walk home, dark eyes bloodshot from staring at my computer in the newsroom all afternoon, and skin sheet-white now that we’ve left summer far behind.

Even though we’ve been here for weeks, Ellie’s side of the room is still pretty bare-bones. Other than the single poster for some obscure film I’ve never heard of, there is very little to be learned about Ellie from her decor.

Which I think is partly to blame for why she still feels a bit like a stranger, even though I know she brushes her teeth three times a day and listens to Rumours by Fleetwood Mac on repeat whenever she’s in a bad mood. But anything more than what you learn simply from sleeping four feet away from someone for a few weeks? Maybe just one: Ellie is a vault.

“Hey.” I shut the door behind me, jerking my thumb over my shoulder. “Who was that?”

She glances up from her computer for only a second. “We have a class together.”

I want to ask more, but I can tell from her tone that I’ve been dismissed. Not meanly, but that she simply won’t be saying anything else.

When I first got to school, I was excited for a roommate. I thought we’d hang out in the lounge, share meals in the dining hall, walk to class together sometimes. When I arrived and saw the little astronauts our RA had posted on our door—Elizabeth and Éowyn written on them—I seriously got butterflies.

Ellie and I had texted a few times, and of course I looked her up as soon as I got my room assignment. But she isn’t very active on social media, and her texts were pretty basic as we decided what we’d each bring for the room.

Even as my parents helped me unpack, Ellie was nice but distant. The second they left, she took one look at the handmade Middle-earth blanket Mom had insisted I bring with me and said, “I was wondering about the name, but now…”

“My parents are big fans,” I replied, pulling the blanket from my bed. I started folding it up, making it as small as possible so I could shove it into the top of my closet. “I go by Wyn.”

My parents’ love for The Lord of the Rings is boundless beyond sensibility. They didn’t notice when I started moving the memorabilia from my room to other parts of the house, or that I stopped dressing up as characters for Halloween sometime around the age of thirteen. If you asked my parents if I was teased much for my name or their obsession, they’d probably say no.

They have no idea.

“Got it,” Ellie said. “We’ll have to let the RA know for when she makes her new little name tags.” The eye roll was implied.

I liked the name tags on our door. I still do, actually: now we have Ellie and Wyn on hot-air balloons.

It became clear over the next couple of weeks that Ellie and I get along but have little in common. We don’t hang out unless we both happen to be in our room at the same time. We don’t share meals or walk to class together, though not for my lack of trying at first. But I got shot down too many times for my pride to handle. Ellie was always too busy for me, because as it turns out, she already has friends here. And if I didn’t spot them in the dining hall or out on campus, I’d know anyway, because there is a constant revolving door of people in and out of our room.

Like tonight.

“Hey, is that Wyn?” A voice echoes through the shared bathroom that links our room and the one next door.

I shouldn’t be surprised they heard me come home. The walls in this place are paper-thin. The other day I sneezed, and someone in the next room said, “Bless you.”

A moment later, Dara pokes her head in. She’s dressed for bed in a pumpkin-print pajama set and silk bonnet, dark skin shining with cocoa butter.

Of my three suitemates, Dara is the easiest to talk to. But like Ellie, she already has friends at school—Kayla and Yasmin, who drop by Dara’s room all the time. Kayla is Dara’s friend from back home, and Yasmin is a girl who lives on Kayla’s floor. The three of them quickly became a unit, to the point where you’d never guess Yasmin hasn’t known Dara and Kayla forever. It’s what I wished for myself, coming to school. To find my people. And not the same people I’ve always known—the ones I’ve spotted on campus that crossed the stage with me back in Troy, who are familiar-faced strangers at best. I want friends. Kindred spirits. Something I’ve never had before.

Sure, I had friends in high school—people to hang out with on the weekends, or sit with at lunch, or talk to between classes. But I always felt like a hanger-on, and I learned later, that’s basically what I was. Friendships forged in elementary school over crayons and lunch boxes and which cartoon fairy was our favorite soured as we got to middle school and rotted entirely when we reached high school. In the end, there was nothing left between us but thin, worn strings of obligation. Apparently playing investigator with me had been fun when we were kids—figuring out which teachers were secretly dating, or helping get the word out about a lost dog—but when I wrote in our school paper about football players stealing concessions money after games or a tradition of test-sharing among certain honors students, it was “embarrassing” and “over-the-top.” I found myself being invited out less and less as the years wore on, until graduation rolled around and no one was calling at all.

“Can Madison borrow your cape?” Dara asks now, hanging on the doorframe.

From their room, Madison calls, “I don’t need it, Wyn! It’s really okay!”

“Yeah, no problem. What for?” I go to my closet, pushing aside my clothes to pull out the cape my parents slipped into my luggage. It’s part of a replica of Éowyn’s funeral gown, a graduation gift from my parents.

Madison appears in the doorway on the other side of the bathroom. From my closet, I have a view straight across to their room—or more specifically, Madison’s closet, which is all pastels. I once overheard Ellie telling one of her friends that Madison is a priss, which is rude but also kind of accurate.

Madison tugs at her long ponytail, which is shampoo-commercial shiny. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t think—”

“At least try it.” Dara takes the cape from me and crosses the bathroom to Madison. She glances back at me and shrugs. “It’s for this new routine she’s doing for glee club.”

I follow them into their room, which is miles cozier than mine and Ellie’s. It helps that they have a very similar style. Everything is feminine and floral, with flower-print sheets and a cohesive color palette. They planned it before they came to school—something I wish Ellie and I had done, even though Ellie clearly has no interest in decorating, and I could never afford to make my side of the room look like a Pottery Barn catalog. My decor options were whatever was cheapest at Target, and even that in limited quantity.

Which is fine. I don’t need a flower-shaped desk lamp like Madison, or Dara’s watercolor tapestry. Or their fluffy, flower-print area rug. Or the little butterfly lights hanging over their window. Or…

I should stop. Jealousy is like a pulled thread—it’ll unravel me quickly.

Next to her bed, Madison holds my cape like it might bite her. When she sees I’ve followed, she flushes and quickly pulls it on.

I see the problem right away, and judging from her face, Madison knew it first. We might be close in height, but where I’m firmly plus-size, Madison is the only person I’ve ever met in real life who wears an extra-extra-small.

My cape dwarfs her.

“Sorry,” she says, taking it off again.

“For what?” I ask.

Madison sucks in a breath, stops, then looks to Dara for help.

Dara shrugs, holding out a hand for the cape. “Sorry for… wasting your time?” She glances at Madison, who frowns.

“Sorry for… being thin?” I ask, forcing out a small laugh to show I’m joking.

Madison’s light skin colors red. She splutters, but nothing coherent comes out.

“I’m kidding.” I take the cape from Dara. Madison won’t even come near me.

Sometimes I wonder if she thinks fat is catching. It’s something I’ve dealt with many times. I had plenty of friends in high school who were uncomfortable at the mention of my weight. They were happy to lament their own—I look so bloated and I had to wear my fat pants today and I’m not eating fast food until after prom—but never wanted to admit, to me or to themselves, that the truth of those statements was that a body like mine was their nightmare. That I never lamented with them must have felt like a blessing, so they didn’t have to acknowledge the way I looked at all. But for me, it wasn’t about making them comfortable. It was because I’ve always taken my relationship with my body seriously, and wishing it were different—or worse, insulting it outright—felt like a betrayal.

I can be uncomfortable sometimes, and I can dislike how I look occasionally, but I can’t go through life hating my body. It’s the only one I get. I’d rather work to love the way it looks than work to change the way it looks, which is often fruitless effort anyway.

And I know that bothers people sometimes, that I refuse to treat my body like a worst-case scenario. That I deign to care for it, and love it, even if I’m not always the most confident in it. Even if I have to sometimes be realistic about how others see me because of it.

“Well, good luck. I’m going to bed.” I head back to my room, shutting the bathroom door behind me. Ellie is at our vanity sink now, brushing her teeth.

She glances over at me as I shove the cape back in my closet. Spitting into the sink, she says, “Did she drown in it?”

“Yep,” I answer, heading for my dresser. I pull out my pajamas and start to change.

Ellie snorts. “Of course.”

I’ll give Ellie one thing—at least she doesn’t shy away from the truth of a situation.