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er," I said, and she grabbed my arm. "Aria." "I'm not going to shrink every time he's in the room; that's not who I am. If I let him steamroll this project from day one, he'll do it the whole six weeks." She looked at me for a long second, "You know Celeste is going to lose her mind when she finds out you're partnered with him." I hadn't thought about that. "That's her problem," I said. Hanna did not look convinced. The next day I got to the library at four fifty-five, sat down, spread my notes out, and started organizing. Five o'clock came and went. Five oh five. Five ten. I was pulling out my phone to send him something sharp when he walked in at five twelve looking like he had nowhere else to be and hadn't checked a clock once in his life. "You said you're never late," I said. "I said I'm never late to things that matter," he dropped into the seat across from me, shrugging his jacket off, "project-starting meetings are a formality." "So your word only counts when you personally decide something is worth it, noted." "Are you going to be like this the whole six weeks?" "Are you going to show up twelve minutes late the whole six weeks?" He looked at my notes spread across the table, then back at me, something shifting in his expression. "You actually prepared," he said. His eyes lingered on me for a second. Not impressed. Assessing. Like he was recalculating something. "I always prepare." He didn't respond to that, just reached into his bag and pulled out his own folder. I glanced at it. It wasn't empty either; he'd done work, actual work, outlines, and some research already printed out. I hadn't expected that. I didn't say so. We worked for two hours. Thirty words between us that weren't strictly about the project; twenty of those were disagreements. "That angle is too broad," he said, pointing at my outline. "It's not broad; it gives us room to develop the argument." "It gives us room to ramble; narrow it down." "Narrowing it down this early boxes us in." "Narrowing it down this early keeps us focused." "Those are not the same thing." "They are in this case." I looked at his reasoning on the page. I didn't like that it made some sense. "Fine," I said, "but we keep my secondary point as a fallback." "Fine." We went back to working in silence. At the end, when we were packing up, he closed his folder and just sat there for a second, not reaching for his bag yet. "What?" I said, not looking up. "Nothing." "You're just sitting th