Chapter 30: CROSSED WIRES

Georgia

Puck saw me talking to Darcy and looked at me like I’d already left.

Nothing about the afternoon feels planned. Darcy catches me crossing the quad, easy as always lately, and falls into step beside me like we’ve done this a hundred times. The late sun cuts low across the frost-stiffened grass, and the air smells faintly of woodsmoke drifting from somewhere near the dormitories. He makes some dry comment about a professor we both apparently despise, and I laugh before I even register how funny it actually was. The sound surprises me. Light. Unforced. My shoulders drop an inch without my permission.

*This is what normal feels like,* I think. *I forgot.*

That’s when I see Puck.

He’s near the edge of the quad, books stacked against his chest, mid-stride toward somewhere else before he simply stops. His eyes land on me first, then slide to Darcy, then back. He watches the laugh still fading from my mouth like he’s cataloging it, filing it away for later use.

His face shuts down.

Not slowly. All at once, like a light switched off behind his eyes. He doesn’t walk toward us. He doesn’t say a single word. He just turns and heads the opposite direction, each step measured and unhurried in a way that somehow says more than shouting ever could. My stomach drops hard, the same lurching free-fall from that first day on the cobblestones, except the warmth isn’t pointed at me this time. It’s pointed away. I don’t know which direction hurts worse - the version where he watches everything, or this new one where he refuses to look at all.

I try to shake it off. Darcy keeps talking beside me, easy, unaware or pretending to be, and I let his voice pull me back into the moment. But he notices anyway. His gaze flicks toward the space where Puck disappeared, then returns to me, sharp with something too satisfied to be casual.

"You checked out for a second there," he says, teasing tone barely covering something colder underneath. "Careful. I told you he’s not as harmless as he looks."

I fold my arms and steer the conversation somewhere else, and he lets me, though his words stay lodged under my skin the rest of the day, a splinter I keep prodding without meaning to. *Does he actually know something, or is he just planting poison and watching to see if it grows?* Neither option sits right in my chest, and both keep circling back no matter how hard I try to shove them aside.

That evening I find Puck waiting outside our lit classroom for the study session we planned days ago. The hallway smells of old paper and radiator dust, the fluorescent light overhead humming faintly against the quiet. One look at him tells me everything has changed.

"Hey," I say, hopeful tone, testing the water.

"Hey." His voice comes back clipped, flat, empty of the warmth that’s built quietly between us since the storm walk, since the library, since every small moment neither of us bothered to name.

We take our usual seats. The silence between us turns brittle almost immediately - short answers, no real eye contact, none of the sharp back-and-forth that’s defined every study session before this one. He answers my questions about the outline in the fewest words possible, and every attempt I make to steer us somewhere warmer gets redirected back to the assignment with surgical precision. I watch his hands instead of his face, the white-knuckled grip on his pen like it’s the only thing keeping him anchored to the table, the faint scent of pencil shavings and cold air still clinging to his jacket from outside. When I ask a genuine question about the reading, something we would have argued over happily a week ago, he answers in four flat syllables and drops his eyes back to his notes before I can respond.

"Is something wrong?" I ask finally, unable to sit inside the silence any longer.

"No." Clipped tone, eyes still down.

"You’re being weird."

"I’m working on the assignment." His voice stays level, controlled, and somehow that control cuts deeper than anger would have. Anger I could fight. This gives me nothing to push against, no edge to grip, nothing but smooth refusal.

"Puck." I set my pen down deliberately, the small click loud in the quiet room, forcing him to either meet my eyes or pointedly refuse to. "Talk to me."

"There’s nothing to talk about." Flat tone, final.

"You’ve said maybe ten words to me all night."

"I’ve said what’s necessary for the assignment."

"That’s not what I mean and you know it." The frustration boils over before I can stop it. "This is about the quad. About Darcy."

His jaw tightens. For a long moment he says nothing, and I think he might retreat completely into that flat silence he’s been wearing like armor all evening. Then something in him snaps loose.

"You wouldn’t believe me if I told you," he says, quiet tone, final enough to end the conversation before it starts.

He gathers his books and walks out, the classroom door swinging shut behind him with a hollow clap that seems to hang in the air, leaving the words unexplained.

*What wouldn’t I believe? Try me,* I think, too late to say it out loud.

I sit there long after the door swings shut, staring at the space where he’d been, his half of the outline still open like he might come back for it. The overhead light keeps humming, and somewhere down the hall a door closes, footsteps fading into silence. He won’t come back. I already know that. I gather my things slowly, turning his sentence over in my mind, searching for some shape I can actually hold onto and finding nothing but the same hollow, unanswered feeling that has followed me through every hallway of this school since the day I arrived. Whatever he thinks I wouldn’t believe, I’m starting to suspect I already do - and that terrifies me more than any answer he could have given.