Chapter 32: Confronting Regina
Karen came out of the library stacks alone, smoothing her hair with the practiced efficiency of someone who had learned to reassemble herself quickly, and found Gretchen standing at the side entrance with her arms crossed and the specific expression of someone who had been waiting long enough to have formed an opinion about it.
"Hey," Karen said.
"Regina sent me," Gretchen said. Simple. No editorial.
Karen looked at her. "How long have you been standing there?"
"Long enough," Gretchen said, which was not a specific answer and was designed not to be.
Karen absorbed this. She'd miscalculated the timeline — had thought she had more margin than she apparently did — and the feeling that came with understanding that was a complicated one. Part of it was the guilt of someone who'd done something they couldn't fully justify. Part of it was the irritation of someone who was tired of needing to justify things.
"Gretchen—"
"I'm not going to tell her," Gretchen said, quietly. "What you do on your own time is your business."
Karen looked at her for a moment with the expression of someone who had expected to have to negotiate and had just been given something for free.
"Thank you," she said.
Gretchen started walking. Karen fell into step beside her, the two of them moving toward the senior hallway in the comfortable practiced proximity of people who had been navigating the same spaces together for years.
They were almost to the main corridor when Gretchen stopped.
Karen tensed. "What?"
Gretchen looked at her. Something in her expression was different from its usual careful neutrality — a small current of something that was almost amusement, almost warmth, occupying the space that was usually held empty.
She touched her own lips lightly with one finger.
"Your lip gloss," she said. "Touch it up before we get back."
She walked on.
Karen stood for a second in the hallway, fingers going to her mouth, and felt something shift in her understanding of Gretchen Wieners — the quiet, composed, permanently elegant girl she'd been standing next to for two years without fully seeing.
She's been watching this whole time, Karen thought. And she doesn't miss anything.
She pulled out her compact and fixed her gloss.
In the second floor girls' bathroom, Cady was running cold water over her wrists — her standard method for resetting after something that had required a lot of performance energy — when Janis and Damian found her.
Damian had arrived in the girls' bathroom with his characteristic total lack of self-consciousness about this, nodding to the two sophomores at the mirror who looked at him, decided it wasn't worth it, and left.
"Talk," Janis said, leaning against the wall. "All of it."
Cady told them. The invitation, the way it had been framed, Karen's explanation of the rules, the specific timing of Regina's walk across the cafeteria, the milk carton. All of it, in order, the way she'd learned to report observations growing up in field research conditions — facts first, interpretation second.
Janis listened without interrupting, which was not her default mode and indicated she was taking this seriously.
Damian sat on the counter.
When Cady finished, Janis was quiet for a moment.
Then: "She moved fast."
"I know."
"The rule thing — that was to box you out before you'd even officially joined." Janis's voice had the specific flatness it got when she was angry and had decided to be analytical about it instead. "Classic Regina. Make you a member and hand you the rulebook in the same breath so you can't claim you didn't know."
"Karen told me," Cady said. "As a warning."
Janis looked at her. "Karen told you."
"She pulled me aside."
Janis was quiet again. Her expression did something complicated that she didn't explain.
"Karen does that sometimes," Damian said, to Cady, carefully. "She's—" He glanced at Janis. "She has her own thing going on. It's complicated."
Janis's jaw had a particular set to it.
"Janis," Cady said.
"I'm fine," Janis said, in the tone of someone who had been fine about this for a long time through substantial personal effort.
Cady looked at her. She'd known Janis for less than two weeks and she'd already learned to read the specific quality of Janis's I'm fine — the one that meant there's a history here I've processed and put away and I'm not going to perform it for you.
She didn't push.
"Okay," Cady said. "So. The question is what I do now."
"You could leave the group," Damian offered. "You literally just joined today."
"Or," Cady said, and something in her expression had sharpened into a quality that Janis recognized and Damian had been hoping to see, "I stay."
Janis looked at her.
"I've been watching how that group works since I got here," Cady said. "Regina's position isn't as solid as it looks. It runs on the other two going along with everything, and Karen's already—" She stopped. "Karen's not entirely on board with all of it. And Gretchen—"
"Gretchen would rather eat glass than disagree with Regina openly," Janis said.
"In public," Cady said. "In public she would. But she's been doing what Regina needs for two years and she's got a face that doesn't quite match her words when she's agreeing to things she doesn't want to agree to." She'd noticed this at the table. The precise elegance that Gretchen maintained as a kind of armor, and what it was armor against. "There are cracks."
Janis stared at her.
"You've been here two weeks," she said.
"I grew up studying behavioral patterns," Cady said. "My parents are field researchers. I spent my whole childhood learning to read groups."
Damian looked at Janis.
Janis looked at Cady with the expression of someone reassessing a situation in real time.
"What's your plan?" Janis said.
Cady thought about it. About the rules Regina had written for her own benefit, the careful architecture of obligation and visibility, the way it all ran on making sure no one else got enough gravity to compete.
"I'm going to learn how it works from the inside," Cady said. "And then I'm going to help it work differently."
"That's not a specific plan," Janis said.
"It's a starting position," Cady said. "The plan comes from information."
Damian was nodding with the energy of someone who had decided he was fully committed to whatever this was. "I love this. I'm in. What do we need?"
"Right now?" Cady said. "I need something pink for Wednesday."
Janis looked at her all-black ensemble — the band tee, the dark jeans, the jacket — and spread her hands.
"Hard pass," she said.
Damian's expression brightened considerably. "I have options," he said. "Several. In multiple shades."
Both girls looked at him.
"They're nice options," he said. "Fashion-forward. Very current."
Cady considered the specific risk calculus of accepting Damian's fashion-forward pink options.
"How current are we talking?" she said.
"I'll bring a selection tomorrow," Damian said, with the confidence of someone who had been waiting his whole life for this assignment. "You can choose."
"And if none of them work?"
"They'll work," he said.
Janis picked up her bag. "This is either going to be brilliant or a complete disaster."
"Those are usually the same thing," Cady said.
Janis looked at her.
Then, slowly, she smiled — the real one, the one that showed up rarely enough that it meant something when it did.
"Okay," she said. "Let's go to class."
They filed out of the bathroom — Janis first, Cady second, Damian last with the unhurried ease of someone who had concluded his business and was satisfied with the meeting's outcomes.
Meanwhile, in the reference section of the library, Mike had gotten Sheldon to eat half a banana and a package of crackers, which was the soft-food compromise they'd arrived at, and Sheldon had spent the time eating it explaining to Tam why the sausage incident was, from a purely mechanical standpoint, an engineering failure on the part of whoever had designed the human trachea.
Tam listened to this with the patient attention he gave most of Sheldon's theories.
"The esophagus and trachea sharing a junction point is genuinely inefficient design," Sheldon said. "Any first-year engineering student would have separated the systems."
"Evolution isn't engineering," Tam said.
"That's exactly my point," Sheldon said.
Mike ate his crackers and said nothing, which was the appropriate contribution.
A small point of light drifted off Sheldon — the ambient output of a mind working through something it found genuinely interesting.
[Biology +1]
Mike absorbed it.
Every day, he thought. He just generates them.
The bell rang.
Sheldon packed his things with the precise efficiency of someone who was not going to be late twice in one day and gathered his dignity.
"The crackers were acceptable," he said.
"High praise," Mike said.
They went to class.
(End of Chapter 32)
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