Chapter 57: [2.30] A Thesis Statement Delivered from a Sunbeam
The next morning arrived too soon, as it always did.
I navigated through Hartwell’s halls on autopilot, brain still processing the previous night’s lesson planning. Cassidy’s face when I’d accepted her bet kept replaying in my head. That mixture of shock and something else I couldn’t quite identify.
But that was a problem for later.
Right now, I had a free period. Eleven o’clock. Fifty glorious minutes where no one needed me, no one expected me, and no Valentine sister could demand I feed them ramen or help with stuck zippers.
Every minute I used productively now was a minute I got back later.
The library called to me like a siren song.
Most students avoided the second floor during free periods. Too quiet. Too far from the vending machines. Too much like actual studying might occur.
I climbed the worn wooden stairs and navigated past the reference section, past the study carrels where overachievers camped out during exam week, past the rows of books that probably hadn’t been touched since the Reagan administration.
My destination sat tucked into a bay window overlooking the courtyard. A massive leather beanbag chair, faded and cracked with age, large enough to fit two people comfortably. The afternoon sun poured through the glass, creating a warm pocket of light that made the spot feel separate from the rest of the library’s academic atmosphere.
I’d found this spot early in my first year at Hartwell. Back when everything felt overwhelming and the commute seemed impossible and the gap between scholarship student and legacy wealth felt like the Grand Canyon. This window seat became my refuge.
Three full years at this school. Hundreds of free periods. I’d never once found someone else sitting here.
The leather groaned as I sank into it. I pulled out my laptop, opened my half-finished Gatsby essay, and got to work.
The green light as a symbol of unattainable desire...
My fingers found their rhythm on the keyboard. The courtyard below was empty except for a maintenance worker trimming hedges. Sunlight warmed my back through the glass. For twenty blessed minutes, nothing existed except Fitzgerald’s prose and my own analysis.
This was the dream. This was what peace felt like.
Then the beanbag dipped.
I didn’t hear footsteps. Didn’t catch movement in my peripheral vision. One second I was alone, the next I wasn’t.
Sabrina Valentine materialized beside me like some kind of purple-eyed apparition. She sank into the leather without asking permission, without greeting, without any indication that she recognized another human being existed in the space she’d just invaded.
"This is my nook."
Not a question. Not a demand. Just a statement of fact delivered in that soft murmur of hers.
I didn’t look away from my screen. "It’s a very nice nook."
"It is."
She settled. And I mean settled, like a cat finding the perfect sunbeam. The nature of the beanbag meant that two bodies couldn’t occupy it without touching. Physics demanded proximity. And Sabrina apparently saw no reason to fight physics.
Our thighs pressed together from hip to knee. Her warmth seeped through the fabric of our uniforms, through her black stockings, through my navy slacks. She curled up, pulling her feet onto the beanbag and tucking them beneath her, which caused her to lean into my side.
She was using me as a brace.
A heat source.
A piece of furniture.
Zero concept of personal space. Or perfect understanding of it and complete disregard. I forced my attention back to the essay. Fine. As long as she’s quiet.
She was quiet.
For thirty minutes, neither of us spoke. Sabrina read something from a book I couldn’t see the title of. I typed. The sun moved incrementally across the floor. A pleasant sort of silence settled between us, the kind that didn’t demand to be filled.
I’d almost forgotten she was there when her voice drifted up, soft as smoke.
"You’re quoting." A pause. "’So we beat on, boats against the current...’ Predictable."
I stopped typing. "You can see my screen from there?"
"I don’t need to see it." Her eyes stayed on her own book. "I can hear it. Your typing pattern changes when you’re quoting. Your analysis is more sporadic."
She’d been listening to my typing patterns closely enough to distinguish between quotation and original thought.
"The green light as a symbol of unattainable desire," I said. "It’s the standard interpretation."
"Standard is another word for boring."
"What would you write about?"
Sabrina closed her book and turned those half-lidded purple eyes toward me, and for the first time since I’d met her, they seemed genuinely focused.
"The corruption of genuine emotion by the pressure to perform wealth."
I waited.
"Gatsby’s tragedy isn’t that he can’t have Daisy." Her voice remained soft, but the words carried weight. "It’s that the person he had to become to even try... was no longer the person Daisy could have loved. He wasn’t chasing a woman. He was chasing a version of himself that could only exist with her as a trophy."
Damn.
I thought about the car sitting in the student lot. The credit card in my wallet. The new clothes Vivienne had demanded I buy.
The way I’d started thinking about image and presentation in ways that would’ve made the version of me from a month ago uncomfortable.
"That’s..." I searched for the right word. "Actually brilliant."
A ghost of a smile touched Sabrina’s lips.
"I know."
She opened her book again. Conversation over.
I stared at my laptop screen. The blinking cursor waited patiently for me to resume typing my "predictable" essay about the green light.
I deleted the last three paragraphs and started over.
The tragedy of Jay Gatsby lies not in his inability to obtain Daisy Buchanan, but in the fundamental contradiction at the heart of his pursuit. The self-made man he became in order to win her was, by definition, no longer the person she fell in love with...
Sabrina had given me a thesis in thirty seconds that was better than anything I’d produced in two hours of struggling.
Troublesome woman.