Leo went back to the library the next day, because it had been, crashed physicist notwithstanding, the most peaceful half hour he'd had all week, and he was not about to surrender his one refuge over a single baffling encounter.
He needn't have worried about finding it empty. He should, in retrospect, have worried about the opposite.
She was there. The girl in the cardigan - Chloe, he'd since learned her name was, though not from her; Aria had supplied it with great interest when he'd described the library incident, along with the electrifying detail that she was President Vance's younger sister, a fact Leo was still turning over. She was installed at a table near the back, ostensibly deep in the terrifying blue textbook, and she was doing a truly terrible job of pretending she hadn't been watching the door.
Leo knew she'd been watching the door because the instant he came through it she snapped her eyes down to the book with the violent overcorrection of someone who has absolutely been watching the door, held the book a little too high, and turned out to be holding it upside down.
He decided, kindly, not to mention the upside-down book.
"Hey," he said, approaching at an unthreatening angle, keeping his voice low to match the hush of the room. "Mind if I sit? I won't bug you, I just wanted somewhere quiet. You found the gauge thing okay? The extended formalism?"
Chloe's eyes came up over the top of the upside-down book. She seemed surprised, and faintly suspicious, that he'd remembered the words. "...The extended formalism," she confirmed warily. "Yes. It was - adequate." A pause, during which some internal debate visibly resolved itself. She lowered the book - registered, with a flicker of horror, that it was upside down - turned it over with as much dignity as the situation allowed, and gestured stiffly at the chair across from her. "You may sit. The table has - there's capacity. For two."
Leo sat.
What followed was, by any reasonable standard, a strange way to make a friend, but Leo was beginning to suspect that nothing about this world was going to be reasonable, and he'd take his friendships however they came. Chloe, it transpired, had prepared. She had, between yesterday and today, evidently decided that the correct response to an anomalous variable was sustained controlled observation, and she had come equipped with a small device - a neat little homemade thing of circuit board and wire and a tiny glowing display - which she set on the table between them with the wary pride of someone showing off a pet that might bite.
"What's that?" Leo asked, leaning in to look.
"It's a - " She caught herself, recalibrated to layman's terms with visible effort. "It measures things. Environmental things. Ambient signals." This was not, strictly, what it measured, but Leo had no way of knowing that, and she wasn't about to tell him that she'd built it overnight specifically to monitor her own galloping pulse in his presence in the hope of identifying a cause she could then eliminate. "It's a personal project. For - calibration."
"That's so cool," Leo said, with total sincerity, peering at the little glowing display. "You just - built that? With your hands? That's incredible. I can't even change a plug without reading the instructions twice."
Chloe went slightly pink and pretended to adjust a dial.
And then, somehow, they were talking. Leo asked questions - real ones, the kind that revealed he'd actually listened - and Chloe answered, and the stiff little packets of her speech loosened again into the bright fluent rush he'd glimpsed yesterday, and she showed him what the device did (a redacted version), and explained the principle (a simplified version), and he was patient with the stutter that came when she got excited and never once filled in her words for her or let his eyes do the thing, and slowly, over the better part of an hour, the small wary creature came all the way out from behind the stool.
It was nice, Leo thought. She was nice - prickly and odd and brilliant and clearly unused to anyone sitting still long enough to find that out, but nice, under it all, with a dry startling humor that surfaced when she forgot to be guarded. He liked her. He liked that she didn't gawk. He liked that she'd built a machine with her hands. He liked that talking to her required him to actually think.
The trouble came, as it always did, from the smallest possible thing.
Chloe was in the middle of explaining something - reaching across the table for a pen to sketch a diagram, talking fast, fully animated now - and in her enthusiasm she knocked her own carefully-arranged stack of papers off the edge of the table, and lunged to catch them, and missed, and they fountained across the floor, and she made a small mortified noise and dropped to her knees to gather them, sleeves flapping, glasses sliding down her nose, muttering a rapid stream of self-directed exasperation - "no no no, the ordering, I had them in - that took twenty minutes to sort, the indices, why - "
Leo dropped down to help her, gathering pages, and looked up to find her flushed and flustered and grumbling at her own scattered papers with her hair falling out of its knot and her glasses askew, the formidable physicist entirely overthrown by gravity and her own eagerness, and the picture of it was so unexpectedly, thoroughly endearing that he laughed - a warm, fond, helpless little laugh - and said, without thinking, without the slightest awareness of the ordnance he was deploying:
"You're really cute, you know that?"
The library went silent.
Chloe went still on the floor, a half-gathered sheaf of papers in her hands, and looked at him.
Leo, replaying the sentence a half-second too late, registered that it had perhaps come out more - something - than he'd intended, and opened his mouth to clarify that he'd meant it in a completely friendly, observational, no-pressure sort of way -
but it was already too late, because something was happening to Chloe Vance, and the something was total.
In sixteen years, Chloe had been called a great many things. Smart. Brilliant. Gifted. A prodigy. The clever Vance. A genius, which people said the way you'd describe a useful appliance. She had been praised, exhaustively and exclusively, for the contents of her skull - for her mind, her marks, her terrifying facility with the formalism - until she had quietly concluded that the mind was the only part of her anyone valued, that she was, essentially, a very good processor attached to an inconvenient and socially incompetent body, and that the processor was the price of admission and the body was just where she happened to keep it.
No one - not once, not ever, not in her entire life - had called her cute.
Cute was for the part of her that wasn't useful. Cute was for the flustered girl on the floor with her hair coming loose and her papers everywhere, the part she'd long ago filed as a liability, the awkward human wrapper around the valuable processing core. Cute meant he'd looked at that part - the part that dropped things and stuttered and couldn't manage a knot - and found it not embarrassing, not a flaw to be tolerated for the sake of the mind, but cute. Endearing. Worth a fond laugh and a warm word. He'd looked at the part of her she was most ashamed of, the human part, the not-clever part, and liked it.
The processing core, faced with input for which it had no handler, did the only thing it could.
It crashed.
"You -" Chloe said, and stopped. The little device on the table, forgotten, began to emit a soft urgent beeping, its tiny display spiking into the red. Neither of them noticed. "That's not - cute is not a - I'm not - the data doesn't - " The pink had gone to crimson, flooding her face, her ears, the back of her neck. Her hands had clenched on the papers, crumpling the carefully-indexed pages she'd just spent twenty minutes mourning. Her eyes were enormous. "You can't - that's not a valid - cute isn't - nobody says - that's not an accurate characterization of - "
"Sorry," Leo said, alarmed all over again - he really had to stop doing whatever this was - "I didn't mean - I just meant you're funny and you got all flustered with the papers and it was - I just meant it nicely, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to -"
"It's MALFUNCTIONING," Chloe announced, with sudden volume, snatching up the beeping device, which was now shrilling steadily in the quiet library. She stared at its red-spiked display - her own heart rate, screaming off the top of the scale - with the wild eyes of a scientist whose instrument has just confirmed something she very much did not want confirmed. "The device is - there's a fault in the - this is anomalous, this is a clear instrument fault, I have to - I need to run diagnostics, immediately, urgently, the readings are completely - "
They were not completely anything except completely accurate, but Chloe was already on her feet, papers crushed to her chest in a hopeless crumpled wad, the shrieking device clutched in her other hand, her glasses fully askew now and her face a shade of red Leo would not have believed achievable.
"I have to recalibrate," she said, for the second time in two days, in a strangled voice, backing toward the stacks. "The instrument. Not me. The instrument requires recalibration. This conversation produced - there was a confounding variable - goodbye - "
And for the second time in two days, she fled - faster this time, the abandoned chair rocking in her wake, the soft beeping of her traitorous device receding down the aisles until a distant door swallowed it.
Leo knelt alone on the library floor among a few stray pages she'd missed, holding them, and let his head drop forward gently against the edge of the table.
"Cute," he said to himself, with quiet despair. "I said cute. Why did I say cute. What is wrong with me." He gathered the last of the pages into a neat stack to return to her - she'd want them ordered, he'd noticed, she cared about the ordering - and sighed. "Two for two. I can't talk to anyone in this entire world without setting them off. I'm a menace. I'm a polite menace."
He had no idea. He genuinely, completely had no idea - that he had just handed the loneliest, most over-praised and under-seen girl in the school the one word she'd been starving for her whole life without knowing it, and that somewhere in a quiet corner of the building she was sliding down a wall to sit on the floor with a crushed wad of papers and a beeping machine, pressing both hands over her furiously red face, and discovering that the human part of her - the cute part, the part she'd written off - had apparently been waiting sixteen years for exactly one person to find it worth a fond laugh, and that now that it had happened she had absolutely no idea how to make her heart go back to a survivable rate.
Leo stacked her papers, set them squarely on the table where she'd find them, and went, at last, to find his own quiet corner - and got it, finally, a whole hour of undisturbed peace among the high shelves, which he spent not reading at all, but staring at the same page and turning over, with mild persistent bewilderment, the question of how he kept managing to make the people of this strange world combust simply by being nice to them.
Three girls now - the President, the runner, the genius - had each, in the space of a fortnight, been struck by lightning and walked away changed, and the only person in Oakhaven who hadn't noticed a single bolt of it was the boy holding the rod.
The first act of Leo Evans's accidental conquest of Silverleaf Academy was, though he would have been horrified to hear it described that way, complete.
He just wanted somewhere quiet to sit.
He really, truly, only ever wanted that.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Leo went back to the library the next day, because it had been, crashed physicist notwithstanding, the most peaceful half hour he'd had all week, and he was not about to surrender his one refuge over a single baffling encounter.
He needn't have worried about finding it empty. He should, in retrospect, have worried about the opposite.
She was there. The girl in the cardigan - Chloe, he'd since learned her name was, though not from her; Aria had supplied it with great interest when he'd described the library incident, along with the electrifying detail that she was President Vance's younger sister, a fact Leo was still turning over. She was installed at a table near the back, ostensibly deep in the terrifying blue textbook, and she was doing a truly terrible job of pretending she hadn't been watching the door.
Leo knew she'd been watching the door because the instant he came through it she snapped her eyes down to the book with the violent overcorrection of someone who has absolutely been watching the door, held the book a little too high, and turned out to be holding it upside down.
He decided, kindly, not to mention the upside-down book.
"Hey," he said, approaching at an unthreatening angle, keeping his voice low to match the hush of the room. "Mind if I sit? I won't bug you, I just wanted somewhere quiet. You found the gauge thing okay? The extended formalism?"
Chloe's eyes came up over the top of the upside-down book. She seemed surprised, and faintly suspicious, that he'd remembered the words. "...The extended formalism," she confirmed warily. "Yes. It was - adequate." A pause, during which some internal debate visibly resolved itself. She lowered the book - registered, with a flicker of horror, that it was upside down - turned it over with as much dignity as the situation allowed, and gestured stiffly at the chair across from her. "You may sit. The table has - there's capacity. For two."
Leo sat.
What followed was, by any reasonable standard, a strange way to make a friend, but Leo was beginning to suspect that nothing about this world was going to be reasonable, and he'd take his friendships however they came. Chloe, it transpired, had prepared. She had, between yesterday and today, evidently decided that the correct response to an anomalous variable was sustained controlled observation, and she had come equipped with a small device - a neat little homemade thing of circuit board and wire and a tiny glowing display - which she set on the table between them with the wary pride of someone showing off a pet that might bite.
"What's that?" Leo asked, leaning in to look.
"It's a - " She caught herself, recalibrated to layman's terms with visible effort. "It measures things. Environmental things. Ambient signals." This was not, strictly, what it measured, but Leo had no way of knowing that, and she wasn't about to tell him that she'd built it overnight specifically to monitor her own galloping pulse in his presence in the hope of identifying a cause she could then eliminate. "It's a personal project. For - calibration."
"That's so cool," Leo said, with total sincerity, peering at the little glowing display. "You just - built that? With your hands? That's incredible. I can't even change a plug without reading the instructions twice."
Chloe went slightly pink and pretended to adjust a dial.
And then, somehow, they were talking. Leo asked questions - real ones, the kind that revealed he'd actually listened - and Chloe answered, and the stiff little packets of her speech loosened again into the bright fluent rush he'd glimpsed yesterday, and she showed him what the device did (a redacted version), and explained the principle (a simplified version), and he was patient with the stutter that came when she got excited and never once filled in her words for her or let his eyes do the thing, and slowly, over the better part of an hour, the small wary creature came all the way out from behind the stool.
It was nice, Leo thought. She was nice - prickly and odd and brilliant and clearly unused to anyone sitting still long enough to find that out, but nice, under it all, with a dry startling humor that surfaced when she forgot to be guarded. He liked her. He liked that she didn't gawk. He liked that she'd built a machine with her hands. He liked that talking to her required him to actually think.
The trouble came, as it always did, from the smallest possible thing.
Chloe was in the middle of explaining something - reaching across the table for a pen to sketch a diagram, talking fast, fully animated now - and in her enthusiasm she knocked her own carefully-arranged stack of papers off the edge of the table, and lunged to catch them, and missed, and they fountained across the floor, and she made a small mortified noise and dropped to her knees to gather them, sleeves flapping, glasses sliding down her nose, muttering a rapid stream of self-directed exasperation - "no no no, the ordering, I had them in - that took twenty minutes to sort, the indices, why - "
Leo dropped down to help her, gathering pages, and looked up to find her flushed and flustered and grumbling at her own scattered papers with her hair falling out of its knot and her glasses askew, the formidable physicist entirely overthrown by gravity and her own eagerness, and the picture of it was so unexpectedly, thoroughly endearing that he laughed - a warm, fond, helpless little laugh - and said, without thinking, without the slightest awareness of the ordnance he was deploying:
"You're really cute, you know that?"
The library went silent.
Chloe went still on the floor, a half-gathered sheaf of papers in her hands, and looked at him.
Leo, replaying the sentence a half-second too late, registered that it had perhaps come out more - something - than he'd intended, and opened his mouth to clarify that he'd meant it in a completely friendly, observational, no-pressure sort of way -
but it was already too late, because something was happening to Chloe Vance, and the something was total.
In sixteen years, Chloe had been called a great many things. Smart. Brilliant. Gifted. A prodigy. The clever Vance. A genius, which people said the way you'd describe a useful appliance. She had been praised, exhaustively and exclusively, for the contents of her skull - for her mind, her marks, her terrifying facility with the formalism - until she had quietly concluded that the mind was the only part of her anyone valued, that she was, essentially, a very good processor attached to an inconvenient and socially incompetent body, and that the processor was the price of admission and the body was just where she happened to keep it.
No one - not once, not ever, not in her entire life - had called her cute.
Cute was for the part of her that wasn't useful. Cute was for the flustered girl on the floor with her hair coming loose and her papers everywhere, the part she'd long ago filed as a liability, the awkward human wrapper around the valuable processing core. Cute meant he'd looked at that part - the part that dropped things and stuttered and couldn't manage a knot - and found it not embarrassing, not a flaw to be tolerated for the sake of the mind, but cute. Endearing. Worth a fond laugh and a warm word. He'd looked at the part of her she was most ashamed of, the human part, the not-clever part, and liked it.
The processing core, faced with input for which it had no handler, did the only thing it could.
It crashed.
"You -" Chloe said, and stopped. The little device on the table, forgotten, began to emit a soft urgent beeping, its tiny display spiking into the red. Neither of them noticed. "That's not - cute is not a - I'm not - the data doesn't - " The pink had gone to crimson, flooding her face, her ears, the back of her neck. Her hands had clenched on the papers, crumpling the carefully-indexed pages she'd just spent twenty minutes mourning. Her eyes were enormous. "You can't - that's not a valid - cute isn't - nobody says - that's not an accurate characterization of - "
"Sorry," Leo said, alarmed all over again - he really had to stop doing whatever this was - "I didn't mean - I just meant you're funny and you got all flustered with the papers and it was - I just meant it nicely, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to -"
"It's MALFUNCTIONING," Chloe announced, with sudden volume, snatching up the beeping device, which was now shrilling steadily in the quiet library. She stared at its red-spiked display - her own heart rate, screaming off the top of the scale - with the wild eyes of a scientist whose instrument has just confirmed something she very much did not want confirmed. "The device is - there's a fault in the - this is anomalous, this is a clear instrument fault, I have to - I need to run diagnostics, immediately, urgently, the readings are completely - "
They were not completely anything except completely accurate, but Chloe was already on her feet, papers crushed to her chest in a hopeless crumpled wad, the shrieking device clutched in her other hand, her glasses fully askew now and her face a shade of red Leo would not have believed achievable.
"I have to recalibrate," she said, for the second time in two days, in a strangled voice, backing toward the stacks. "The instrument. Not me. The instrument requires recalibration. This conversation produced - there was a confounding variable - goodbye - "
And for the second time in two days, she fled - faster this time, the abandoned chair rocking in her wake, the soft beeping of her traitorous device receding down the aisles until a distant door swallowed it.
Leo knelt alone on the library floor among a few stray pages she'd missed, holding them, and let his head drop forward gently against the edge of the table.
"Cute," he said to himself, with quiet despair. "I said cute. Why did I say cute. What is wrong with me." He gathered the last of the pages into a neat stack to return to her - she'd want them ordered, he'd noticed, she cared about the ordering - and sighed. "Two for two. I can't talk to anyone in this entire world without setting them off. I'm a menace. I'm a polite menace."
He had no idea. He genuinely, completely had no idea - that he had just handed the loneliest, most over-praised and under-seen girl in the school the one word she'd been starving for her whole life without knowing it, and that somewhere in a quiet corner of the building she was sliding down a wall to sit on the floor with a crushed wad of papers and a beeping machine, pressing both hands over her furiously red face, and discovering that the human part of her - the cute part, the part she'd written off - had apparently been waiting sixteen years for exactly one person to find it worth a fond laugh, and that now that it had happened she had absolutely no idea how to make her heart go back to a survivable rate.
Leo stacked her papers, set them squarely on the table where she'd find them, and went, at last, to find his own quiet corner - and got it, finally, a whole hour of undisturbed peace among the high shelves, which he spent not reading at all, but staring at the same page and turning over, with mild persistent bewilderment, the question of how he kept managing to make the people of this strange world combust simply by being nice to them.
Three girls now - the President, the runner, the genius - had each, in the space of a fortnight, been struck by lightning and walked away changed, and the only person in Oakhaven who hadn't noticed a single bolt of it was the boy holding the rod.
The first act of Leo Evans's accidental conquest of Silverleaf Academy was, though he would have been horrified to hear it described that way, complete.
He just wanted somewhere quiet to sit.
He really, truly, only ever wanted that.
You've reached the end of this chapter