I wish I could say it was the first time I'd put off writing an article until the day it was due, but my dad didn't raise a liar.

The third floor of Buchanan, the main library on campus, was bleak.

Florescent lights twitched overhead and the scent of burnt popcorn circulated through the air conditioning ducts. Luckily, it was only the first week of the semester, so no one was around to watch me wrestle my USB drive into a slot on the side of an ancient copy machine.

I still hadn't finished unpacking into the new off-campus apartment Hanna and I had leased, but somehow I'd managed to spend fifty-eight dollars on Mexican food and leave an important assignment until the last second.

The food thing was Andre's fault. He was the one who kept suggesting we grab lunch at Pepito's, our favorite taco stand (a place where self control meant nothing to me).

The second thing was all my own doing, unfortunately.

But this morning I'd had hope. I'd thought I'd pulled off another successful feat of procrastination—another last minute lunge across the finish line that separated failure from permissible mediocrity.

I hadn't accounted for the rain.

Garland, California (population thirty thousand during the school year, and half of that in the summer) was an hour north of downtown Los Angeles. We were used to droughts. But by the time I'd made it to Buchanan, I was soaked from the crown of my head to the chipped nail polish on my toes.

I'd worn a sundress. I looked like an idiot.

A very damp idiot.

And as I stood there, slapping the side of the copy machine and dripping a puddle onto the hideous grey-green carpet beneath me, my phone started to vibrate somewhere in the depths of my backpack.

I groaned and dropped it to the floor to begin a search and rescue mission.

There were only three people who could realistically be calling me—Andre Shepherd, Hanna Pham, and my dad.

It was Hanna.

"Why are there granola bars all over the bathroom floor?" she demanded, in lieu of a greeting.

"I'm sorry," I said. "The bottom of the box gave out. I was in a rush."

"Are you in class yet?"

"Nope. Buchanan. Third floor."

"Oh, shit. Is it Thursday already?"

It was, in fact, Thursday—otherwise known as deadline day at the Daily, Garland University's school paper. Our editor-in-chief wanted a hard copy turned in to a box on her desk by noon.

Joke's on her, I thought.

My article was going to suck no matter what format it was in.

The abomination in question had started chugging out of the printer at a speed of approximately two lines an hour.

I groaned and pinched the bridge of my nose.

"I'm in hell," I muttered under my breath.

"Well, at least you finished it, right?" Hanna offered. "Ellison can't get mad at you if it's done. You did your best. That's what counts."

I barked out a bitter laugh.

"Han, this is the worst thing I've ever written."

And I'd authored a lot of Jonas Brothers fan fiction back in middle school, so the standards of judgment were pretty low.

"Yeah, but you spent, like, the entire summer in Mexico City. I think you get a free pass on this one. Visiting your mom's family is more important than a fluff piece about the football team."

Except it'd turned out more like a celebrity gossip column than fluff piece.

I hadn't started so much as brainstorming my article until last weekend, when Hanna and I moved into our new place and I was forced to accept that school is an inevitable evil with which I must grapple for two more years.

Speaking of—I had class in four in a half minutes.

My article was going to be late.

"Look, just push all the granola bars against the bathtub and I'll take care of them after I get back from Dick Jokes."

It was a nickname Andre (and several of the other guys on the football team) had come up with for the class we were taking.

Human Sexuality (often just called BIO 108 by kids relaying the details of their semester schedules to their parents) fulfilled the core requirement for a science-based course, despite involving very little science other than reproduction anatomy. The roster was full of seniors and athletes, who got to pick their classes before the rest of the student body, but I'd been lucky enough to get a spot. Now I just needed to make roll call to keep it.

"I'll be at Figure Drawing until three," Hanna said. "So enjoy the penises."

"You too."

"And remind Andre he owes me an iced coffee!" Hanna blurted before I hung up.

I shoved my phone into the pocket of my sundress—the one redeeming value of an otherwise useless garment—just as a pair of heavy footsteps came thundering up the stairs.

A husky blond kid stumbled around the corner, wet from the rain and panting, his pale cheeks flushed pomegranate red.

I recognized him. He was another writer at the Daily—a junior, like me.

He was having about as great a morning as I was, if the way he was spitting out curses under his breath was any indication.

"Hey Joey," I greeted as he jammed a button on the copy machine next to mine.

He blinked at me like I'd asked him for a tampon, which is all it took for me to realize that he had absolutely no clue who I was.

"Uh, hey," he said. "Hey, you."

There was no recognition whatsoever. It was fine. We'd only had that IR class together. And intermediate nonfiction. And a freshman seminar on journalism in the Middle East.

"Guess this is what we get for waiting until the last minute to print, huh?" I asked. "Ellison Michaels is gonna drop-kick me across the student union."

Joey nodded and laughed in that way people do when a distant relative makes a racist joke and they're not in the mood to start World War III at the dinner table.

It was uncomfortable for both of us.

I smacked the side of my printer, willing it to have mercy on me. The seventh sheet of my typo-riddled eight-page article slid into the tray right as my phone buzzed with a text.

It was from Andre.

Did u die?

I snorted and replied, I fucking wish!!!

As if it'd heard my prayers and taken pity on me, the printer spat out the last page of my article.

I snatched it up, crinkling one corner by accident—usually I would've taken the time to reprint but it wasn't like I had a piece of groundbreaking journalism in my hands—and started off in a dorky half-jog towards the stairs, sandals squelching as I went.

"Good luck, Joey!" I called over my shoulder, already knowing that our entire interaction was going to haunt me when I tried to fall asleep that night.

"Oh, thanks," he replied, a bit bemused.

I was already around the corner when he tossed in a, "You too!"

I hustled down the stairs—half expecting to slip and eat shit, because that seemed like it would fit in with the morning's general aesthetic—and comforted myself in the knowledge that Joey wouldn't remember me by tomorrow morning.

I was very forgettable.

This was something I considered more of a party trick than a character flaw.

I was neither stunning nor hideous, neither brilliant nor fanatically incompetent, neither a saint nor a total asshole. My articles always wound up buried five pages deep in the Daily, where no one would read them, because they were too well-written to be tossed but they weren't particularly radical or exciting enough to warrant a spot on the front page, which was all most people bothered to read anyway.

I was like an extra in a movie. Perfectly inconspicuous, unlikely to offend, and able to blend in anywhere.

I'd been born into this world a generic stock character.

Today, I was girl running late for something important.

(It felt like comedic relief, at the time.)

Outside of Buchanan, the rain had eased to a lazy drizzle. I tucked the pages of my article close to my chest and made a run for it.

The tree-lined parkway that ran down the middle of campus was slick with puddles, where green and white confetti from orientation week was floating amongst clumps of dead leaves. Most of Garland's campus was composed of manicured rose bushes, paved pedestrian walkways, and redbrick buildings, but the trio of newer constructions on the far edge of campus were modern steel and concrete monstrosities.

I stumbled into the lobby of the nearest one.

The stairs on that end of the building were caution-taped off and reeked of fresh paint, so I headed for the elevator, slipping and sliding in my sandals and breathing harder than I probably should've been after mild exertion.

I smacked the call button before checking my phone again.

Professor's here, Andre had texted four minutes ago.

Then, a minute later, He's calling attendance MOVE UR ASS.

I paced, leaving a trail of wet footprints in my wake as I cursed my last name for beginning with the third letter of the alphabet.

The elevator was tucked away in a dim little alcove that someone had attempted to make less like something out of a horror movie by sticking a potted shrub in the corner and hanging a cork board on the wall. There were only two things pinned to the cork board—a torn scrap of paper advertising the sale of a used futon, and a glossy green poster listing the dates of this season's home football games.

There were four faces on the poster. One in each corner.

In the bottom left and right were Scott Quinton, our best offensive tackle, and Kyle Fogarty, the star tight end all the girls (and a fair number of the boys) at Garland were in love with.

Quinton, who was about three hundred pounds and had a neck wider than my right thigh, was smiling like a little kid in his picture. Fogarty and his blond undercut were shooting the camera an easy, confident smirk.

In the upper right corner of the poster was our quarterback.

I'd seen Bodie St. James launch a football fifty yards down the field with pinpoint accuracy and shrug off guys who were built like boulders, but somehow the scariest thing about him was the unrelenting steel gaze.

He looked like a leader. He looked like a god.

I'd heard his friends thought he was more like a puppy.

Bodie St. James and I had never spoken, but from what I'd heard, he was supposed to be a very nice person. Polite to a fault, respectful of his elders, recycled his plastic bottles—that kind of nice. But a part of me didn't buy the idea that someone so widely adored by a town could manage to not have a severely overinflated ego.

If you had thousands of people telling you that you were the best thing since Netflix, you'd have to start believing it at some point.

Across from him, in the upper left, was a portrait of head coach Truman Vaughn, the father figure of Garland's multi-million-dollar behemoth of a football program.

I scoffed.

It was a well-known fact that Truman Vaughn had been to rehab sometime in the nineties for a cocaine addiction. His comeback had been a huge deal. He'd convinced the president and board of trustees that his days of partying were over, and he was ready to give his all to the program.

As it turned out, that was a load of shit.

The article in my hands contained several first-hand accounts of a two-week-long partying binge that Vaughn had gone on over the summer break.

It was the most scandalous story I'd ever attempted for the Daily, but I'd written the damn thing with about as much skill and finesse as a twelve-year-old authoring her first Jonas Brothers fanfic.

Ellison Michaels was going to hate it.

Best case scenario, she'd be so busy proofreading that week's batch of articles that she wouldn't even glance at my name on the top—she'd just toss the thing in the trash, where it belonged, and be done with it.

And no one else will ever know, I thought regretfully, that Vaughn's a lying douche.

The elevator finally arrived, announcing itself with a cheery ding that sounded borderline mocking. I threw myself inside and sighed with relief, now that I was, as Andre had so eloquently suggested, moving my ass.

"Hold the door!" someone called.

Any other morning, I would've.

But not today.

"Sorry, buddy," I mumbled under my breath.

I was hidden in the corner of the elevator, so whoever was jogging down the hall couldn't see the guilt on my face as I pressed the close doors button.

Just as the doors were about to touch, a hand appeared between them.

A very large hand.

I had just enough time to yank my arm back from the button panel and stand bolt upright before the doors bounced open again, revealing a face I'd seen not ten seconds earlier.

Wet hair. Pink cheeks. Eyes dark as thunderclouds.

Puta madre, I thought.

"Going down?" Bodie St. James asked.

❖   ❖   ❖

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is my first big project in a long time, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous as all hell for the reaction to it.

It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that my writing is best when I embrace cliches and silly tropes and bad jokes. I tried to write serious, solemn prose. Didn't work. Turns out my "voice" is the literary equivalent of finger guns.

So here it is. Me, attacking the tropes of new adult fiction with diversity, my liberal education, and the #metoo movement in mind. Finger guns blazing.

Your friendly author,
Kate