His name lit my phone like trouble.
Silver lay sprawled across her narrow dorm bed, staring at the hairline cracks that spider-webbed across the ceiling of their Gothic tower room. The ancient plaster had probably been there since her grandparents' generation, a reminder that Yale's history stretched far beyond her own small dramas. Her figure skates sat abandoned in the corner like discarded armor, blades still damp from afternoon practice at Ingalls, the worn leather bag slumped against the stone wall as if even it had given up on her skating ambitions.
She should have been working on her Victorian Literature seminar reading—twenty pages of dense theoretical analysis about industrial reform movements that felt as dry as week-old toast. The book lay open beside her, its pages filled with her half-hearted annotations in blue ink, but the words might as well have been written in ancient Greek for all the sense they were making to her distracted brain.
