Six inches between the front of her sweater and my chest. Her heels had put her closer to my height and she was still craning, and the little bit of tremor that ran through her shoulders was the last honest thing in the conversation.
"I’m perfectly comfortable," Petra said, and lifted her chin, and put every generation of her family’s money into holding the eye contact.
Which, credit where it’s owed, was the single most impressive thing I’d seen her do.
Here’s where I want to be clear about who I am, because I spend a lot of time being funny about it and the joke has gotten thin. I could have kept going. She was ten seconds from cracking and I could feel the exact shape of the ten seconds, the sentence that would do it, the pressure that would take her from standing her ground to needing somebody to tell her what to do next. That was available to me. It was sitting right there on the table with a bow on it, and there was a version of this night where I took it, and she’d have thanked me for it by Friday and hated herself by Sunday.
The system would have paid me for that. The system would have paid me extremely well for that.
So I stepped back.
Two feet, unhurried, hands loose. The air between us came back and she took a breath that she was not prepared for anyone to hear.
"Here’s what happens now," I said. "Odette Reyes reached out to me twenty minutes ago. Candidate assessment, Lang Agency. Fifteen minutes, informal, my convenience."
"Odette." Petra blinked, and for a second the poise was just gone, and what was underneath was a girl who did not know her mother’s staff had gotten involved. "Odette doesn’t do first-years. Odette does contract renewals for people in the top hundred."
"Then somebody upstairs decided I was interesting." I let her sit in that, and watched her arrive at the same place I had, which took her about four seconds and cost her most of the color she’d gotten back. "You didn’t hand me to your parents, Petra. You handed me to your mother’s professional apparatus, and it’s already moving, and neither of us gets to call it back."
"I’ll speak to her."
"You’ll make it worse."
"I will speak to my mother," she said, and her voice found its spine again, and honestly the recovery speed was almost admirable. "Whatever you imagine about my family, I am not a decorative object in it. If I tell Margot Lang that an inquiry was filed in error, she will accept that, because she trusts my judgment considerably more than she trusts a nineteen-year-old analyst’s curiosity."
"And what do you tell her the error was."
"That I overreacted to a personal matter."
"Which personal matter."
The flush came back so fast it looked painful.
"That is none of your"
"You’re going to have to say it out loud to her." I put my hands in my pockets, because it made me less of a wall, and because I needed her thinking instead of reacting. "You’re going to have to explain to Margot Lang that you asked your brother to complain to your father about a boy in your cohort because you walked around a corner and saw that boy kissing someone else, and you’d rather she didn’t examine why that bothered you. That’s the sentence. You want to make that call, make it. I’ll even hold your phone."
Petra stared at me.
The sprinklers cut out somewhere near the tree line and the quiet that replaced them was enormous.
"I loathe you," she said, with a precision that suggested she’d been assembling it since move-in day.
"Sure."
"You are arrogant, and manipulative, and you weaponize sincerity, which is somehow more offensive than lying, and you have constructed an entire personality out of being underestimated so that you never have to be measured properly."
"That’s the most accurate thing anyone’s said about me in two months."
"It was not a compliment."
"I know," I said. "It’s still the most accurate."
She made a sound. Small, frustrated, entirely involuntary, and she turned her face away from the door light like the shadow would take it back.
"So what is it you actually want," Petra said. "You didn’t summon me out here at eight in the evening to itemize my failures. You want something. You always want something, and you dress it up in a speech first, and everyone in that homeroom claps."
"I want you inside this with me."
Her head came around. "Excuse me."
"Reyes wants fifteen minutes. She’s going to get thirty, and she’s going to get them Friday, on campus, in a room I pick, with Diane Fitzgerald sitting on my side of the table, because Diane already has a lunch scheduled with the Halloran liaison desk and she doesn’t waste a trip." I watched her track it. She tracked fast, whatever else was true about her. "And you’re going to be in that room. Not as my representative. As Lang. Because the second Margot Lang’s own daughter is on record in the room, the inquiry stops being an investigation and becomes a courtesy meeting, and courtesy meetings don’t generate secondary verification requests, and secondary verification requests don’t leak to forums."
"You want to use my surname as a shield."
"I want to use your surname as a lid."
"And in exchange." Her arms folded again, higher this time, and she’d stopped pretending she wasn’t negotiating. "You’ve clearly costed this. What do I receive for lending my family’s name to a boy whose file I have publicly questioned."
"Everything I actually am." I said it flat, once, because hedging it would have been worse. "Not the registration. Not the version I gave Reyes’s boss on paper. When it becomes safe to say it, you’ll be one of the people I say it to. That’s the offer, and it’s worth more than anything else I’ve got, and you know it or you wouldn’t have asked."
Petra didn’t answer.
She looked at me for a long moment with the west door throwing a yellow bar across half her face, and her hand rose and pushed her hair back again, which by my count was the fourth time she’d done it in ten minutes, and she’d never once done it in a classroom.
"Friday," she said finally. "Fourteen hundred. Fourth-floor conference room, as scheduled, and you will arrive early, and you will wear something with a collar."
"You people and collars."
"You look like an unmade bed, Belmont, and my mother’s staff notice that." She turned, boots finding the path, and got three steps before she stopped and spoke without turning around. "If your registration is a lie."
"Then you’ll have signed your name next to it."
"Yes," Petra said. "I’m aware of what I’m doing."