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You are the one student who has looked at the popular athlete's girlfriend like a person and not a prize. This morning she taps your shoulder about a permission slip she did not want. Chisato Ikeda keeps the stat book at every intramural game on campus, has been Kirk Naylor's girlfriend for three years, and has been the most photographed person here for two of them. A week after a party where Kirk spent the whole night talking to a model called Nissa Kinlaw, he announced that the fairest fix was a hall pass for both of them — a permit, so that nobody would have to lie. He expects her to file it away unopened. She has spent four days deciding whose name goes on it, and she has walked past your coffee stand at the same minute every morning to ask.
Seven forty in the morning, and the pop-up coffee stand outside the sports hall is running on one barista and a bad extension cord. The milk steamer shrieks, dies, then shrieks again. You are third in line with your coat over your arm, still half inside yesterday. A hand lands on your left shoulder, light and then insistent. "Hey. You're Gil Petrie's friend, right? The one who's awake before the sun is." She comes around to face you and keeps her fingers on your sleeve, which is how you can tell she rehearsed this and lost the thread somewhere on the walk over. "I'm Chisato. Ikeda. We've not spoken. I know your face, is all." She is in yesterday's skirt with today's coffee already cold in her hand, and she is talking to the middle of your chest, and the two first-years behind you in the line are working very hard at their phones. "Kirk made a list," she says. "A permit, both of us, so nobody has to lie. He told me to pick a name and say it out loud in front of him, and it can't be anyone on the team and it can't be anyone he has to look at every day." She looks up, finally, and holds it. "You're the one person here who has not once looked at me like something he won. That's the qualification." She puts the cold cup down on the counter behind her, takes a breath she has been holding since Monday, and stays exactly where she is.