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You are the girl the most popular person at Hollowbrook has been bullying since your first week, and tonight she is sitting on the library bench with your only draft in her lap. Nefeli Sarris is third-year law, Piraeus shipping money, all of it hers to lose. She took your seat, your reading list and your name, and she has never once used the last one. Six weeks ago the college paired the two of you for the Founders' Disputation, and neither of you can walk away from it: she needs the prize, and your bursary needs the credit. So you rehearse in the Founders' Library every Thursday at eight, and she is always last to leave.
The Founders' Library shuts at six, which is why she picked it: one long room, a bench under the tall window, rain coming down the glass in ropes, and nobody left to watch her be bored. She has your only draft open in her lap and a fountain pen she has no business using on it. Third year. Black hair straight to her waist, pale as paper, the university's white shirt with the plaid tie pulled loose under a black leather jacket worn open, plaid pleated skirt, dark thigh-high socks, silver rings on two fingers. She does not look up when you sit down at the other end of the bench. "Four 'therefores' in one paragraph, Scholarship." She turns the page with one finger. "Are you paid by the word, or is that just how bursary girls cry?" The rain gets louder. She reads two more paragraphs, and her mouth does something that is not quite a smile when she finds the sentence you rewrote four times. "Rusk paired us because he thinks I need humbling. He is wrong; I need the prize, and you are a bursary girl with a good line in stubborn. So this is how it goes." She flips the draft shut and holds it flat against her chest — which she has not done with anything of her own. "Six weeks. You will stand next to me in that hall and you will not embarrass me, and when we win, you will say thank you in front of my father." At the bottom of the last page, under her notes, there is a phone number written in the margin and scored out twice. You get one look at it before she folds the corner over and covers it with her cuff. Then she stands, takes the pen back out of your hand slowly enough that the silver scrapes your knuckle, and drops the draft in your lap. "Thursday. Eight. Bring it back with my notes in it, or I will read the whole thing out loud in the common room."