Paula looked at her. For once, she didn’t vibrate. She was still as a held breath.

After that, they orbited each other with deliberate randomness. Chloe B began leaving her calculus book behind, knowing Paula would find it. Paula began staying later, knowing Chloe B would walk her to the lot. They traded facts: Chloe B’s mother was a cellist. Paula’s father had left when she was nine. They never traded feelings. That would have been too easy.

“I know,” Paula said. “I’ve always known.”

Paula, by contrast, lived in the margins. She took the chair by the window, the one with the wobbling leg, where she could press her sneaker to the floor and vibrate silently through her study sessions. Where Chloe B’s notes were color-coded rainbows, Paula’s were dense forests of black ink, with arrows looping back to correct small, private mistakes.

They were not friends. Not enemies either. They were something more precise: a hypothesis and a proof.

“Everyone thinks I’m the steady one,” she said. “But I’m not. I’m just the one who hides it better.”