Page 27 of Campus Heat

I couldn’t breathe. It was as if that one simple word had turned my entire life upside down. Like she had more control over me than I would ever be comfortable with. And in that moment, I wanted it more than I ever wanted anything else.

She stood up and moved past me. She was close enough that her shoulder brushed my arm, sending another jolt of electricity through me. It definitely wasn’t accidental. Everything she had done that entire morning was deliberate. And that graze wasn’t any different. She walked off, but I stood there for a moment longer, trying to steady my racing heart.

My future was still uncertain, and the losses we suffered still stung, but for the first time since I arrived at the college, something deep in the pit of my soul didn’t feel cold anymore.

“Are you coming or are you just going to hang around there, looking like you’ve been hit by a roach bus?” she asked as she reached the door, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

12

Elizabeth

I stepped into the library and took a deep breath. It was one of my favorite places on the planet. I loved the smell of the books and the quiet that the place offered. It was something I had found nowhere else.

My eyes scanned over the seats that were filled with students as I looked for a place of my own, but something else caught my eye. Ethan was sitting in a dark corner, and he looked like he was losing a game that no one knew he was playing. There were books and papers scattered across the table, and he was furiously typing on his dimly lit laptop.

His hair was messy. His coffee was probably ice-cold, and his mismatched clothes told me he hadn’t slept in days. There was something serious on his mind, and I had to find out what it was before it consumed him even more than it already had.

I approached slowly and got an even better idea of what was coming to me. His notebook had thick, aggressive cross-outs, and he was slamming his finger against the calculator as if it offended him. He was so preoccupied that he didn’t even notice I was coming until I pulled the chair opposite him out.

“Before you even think of saying anything,” he said without looking up. “Just know that I absolutely hate this class.”

I leaned over to read the header on his screen. Business statistics: Regression and probability analysis.

“That’s dramatic,” I said with a concerned look. “But I don’t think you hate it. I just think you might not understand it.”

“Are you calling me stupid?”

“No,” I rolled my eyes. “But the art of learning is all in the way things are explained to a student. Some teachers master that craft. Others don’t. Obviously, yours is the latter.”

He finally looked up, and the face staring at me didn’t belong to the guy I knew. There wasn’t any gameplay in his eyes. There was no swagger, only frustration. “That’s even worse.”

I studied him for a minute longer than I meant to and realized that there was something else hidden in his gaze. It was much darker and so much heavier.

“I can’t fail this,” he muttered. “This stupid project is worth 50% of my grade. And I’ve already wasted three weeks on it. Which has gotten me absolutely nowhere, just by the way.”

“I thought jocks were supposed to be all about the short,” I joked, hoping it would lighten the mood.

“If only it were that simple,” he said, resting his face in his hands. “I’m not officially on a scholarship here, because Stamford couldn’t transfer it. So my stay is conditional. If my GPA drops, so does my funding.”

That’s what it was. He wasn’t being arrogant or proud. He was under a mountain of pressure that none of us could see. We all thought his ego was ruling him because no one would ever expect a man like him to be drowning under the pressure.

There was so much that I could say to lighten the mood, but I chose not to. He didn’t need to feel like I wasn’t taking his situation seriously. He needed help, and I wanted to give it to him.

“Okay,” I said as I grabbed his notebook. “Show me where it stopped making sense.”

“It never made sense to begin with,” he scoffed, but he turned his laptop toward me and tapped the screen. “Correlation, Regression and Intercepting the slope. They all blend and eventually I’m looking at a bunch of figures that make absolutely no sense at all.”

I scanned over his assignment and realized that it wasn’t as bad as he was making it out to be. In fact, it could be super easy if he just looked at it the right way.

“So… a sports equipment company is analyzing whether increased advertising led to higher sales across its branches,” I said to no one in particular. There are multiple variables and a lot of revenue data. They also have a threshold that they want to hit consistently.”

“Yeah. If any of that makes sense to you,” he said.

“It makes complete sense,” I said, trying my absolute best not to sound condescending. “Your problem is that you’re looking at the entire thing the wrong way. You’re trying to memorize the steps. That’s why it becomes a number salad for you.”

He looked at me as if I had grown a second head. “How else do you expect me to do it?”

I looked at him and smiled. He was such a tough, unbreakable guy, but in so many aspects, he was just a little boy. His way of thinking about this problem proved it. On the field he could find so many different strategies on the fly, but for something he felt he couldn’t understand, he drew a total blank. It was quite adorable.