She'd pushed the door open a crack.
The person at the front of the room was talking about carbon credit markets and the room was responding with the particular focused stillness of three hundred people who'd forgotten to check their phones. She'd stood in the doorway for about thirty seconds before the person at the front glanced up from his notes, registered her presence in the door frame with no apparent surprise, and said, without breaking the sentence he was in the middle of, "-which creates exactly the kind of misaligned incentive that allows the problem to persist without triggering correction, if you'd like to come in and find a seat or if the doorway is more comfortable, either works."
She had walked in and sat down.
She'd gone back the following Tuesday. And the Tuesday after that. Until the add/drop window closed and she was officially enrolled and her thesis was still three weeks behind and she had, apparently, added a three-credit Environmental Policy elective to a degree that didn't need it.
Lucas had texted her that afternoon.
I see ENVP 2240 on your enrollment.
I see you checking my enrollment.
I'm on the class listserv. They notify peer advisors. A pause. Was this about the professor or the material.
She'd put her phone away without answering.
That was September. This was mid-October, and she was still in the window seat, and the answer to Lucas's question had not gotten simpler.
The Ashbury thing was its own separate problem.
Her grandfather, William Ashbury, had served twenty-two years in the United States Senate representing Virginia. She'd met him six times. He sent her a birthday card every year, always handwritten, always exactly four sentences, always signed Sincerely, William-not Grandpa, not Grandfather. William. She'd thought, when she was younger, that this was formal. She understood now that it was just accurate. He was a man who had chosen his public life so completely over his private one that the distinction had ceased to matter.
Her father had not chosen his public life to the same degree, but he'd chosen a version of it. He'd remarried when she was twenty-a woman named Camila who was warm and practical and had two children from her first marriage and who Genevieve did not dislike, which was its own complicated emotion to carry. They lived in Miami now. Her father called on Sundays, for approximately fifteen minutes, and the calls were kind and slightly distant in the way that phone calls are when both people know there's a gap but have collectively decided not to name it.
Her mother had been dead since Genevieve was eighteen.
She didn't think about her mother every day anymore. Some days she thought about her and some days she didn't, and on the days she did, it was usually in the form of a specific small thing-the way her mother had said I see when she meant I understand but I disagree, or the smell of the particular hand lotion she'd kept on her nightstand, or a sentence her mother had said once when Genevieve was about twelve and had come home from school in tears over something she couldn't even remember now: You feel things quietly, Genevieve. That's not a flaw. But you'll need to decide at some point whether quiet means private or quiet means hidden.
She'd been thirty-five when she said that. She'd died at forty-one.
Genevieve had spent seven years trying to work out the difference between private and hidden and had not arrived at a satisfying answer.
On campus, there was a version of her that she found largely unrecognizable: the Ashbury girl, beautiful in the particular way that made people suspect something was being leveraged, photographed once at a benefit gala in a red dress that someone had described online as not appropriate for the occasion and that had circulated enough to function as shorthand for a reputation she'd never actively cultivated. She'd sat through conversations about herself at parties, spoken about in third person by people who assumed she either wasn't present or didn't mind. She'd learned to find this mildly interesting rather than upsetting, which she understood was a coping mechanism but had decided was also fine.
Adrian had known all of this. He'd known her for eight months, known the private version and the campus version and the version that smoked sometimes behind the journalism building when the semester got heavy, and he'd ended things in April with the explanation that she was hard to reach. Not cold, not unkind-just unreachable. Like she was always one step back from the thing he was trying to touch.
She'd thought about that for a long time.
She'd concluded he was probably right, and she hadn't known what to do with being right.
Lucas had sat down next to her behind the journalism building one evening in early September and not said anything for about a minute, and then said: "Is this a regular thing now?"
"Sometimes," she said.
"Okay," he said.
He hadn't told anyone. He was good at knowing what to say and better at knowing what not to. She found him easier than most people, which was a high bar.
He was twenty-two, two years younger, and the only person at Columbia she'd have described as a genuine friend rather than an amiable acquaintance. He had been, in the way that people sometimes are, simply there at the right moments-walking up at the right time, sitting down without needing an invitation, texting at eleven-fourteen on Tuesday mornings to ask how class was.
She'd asked him once why he did it. He'd thought about it seriously.
"I think you're interesting," he said. "And I think you don't let many people see that."
She'd said "that's kind of you" and changed the subject.
He'd mentioned Whitmore's Tuesday section the week after the journalism building, offhand, the way he offered her things-not a push, just information she might use. Supposed to be really good. Like, people actually keep coming back.
She'd filed it away.
And then she'd been walking past Hamilton 303 with thirty minutes and nowhere to go and a cigarette she'd decided not to smoke, and she'd heard the voice through the door.