She went there to study in the afternoons because it was genuinely quiet, and because the chairs were the good kind. The old wooden ones with the curved backs that Caldwell had never gotten around to replacing with modern mesh office chairs.
She was there. Shane and Pierce were two aisles over.
They were talking at a volume that said they believed they were alone. Not loudly, but clearly.
Reagan did not move. She did not make a sound. She turned a page of her book at a natural interval, so as not to draw attention. And she listened.
She caught fragments. Not everything, but enough.
"...conduct clause, which means one formal action..."
"...regional competition. She loses eligibility if she's suspended before..."
"...so, the window is..."
"...Trent can do it. If it's public enough, in front of witnesses, she reacts, and it's over..."
"...if she doesn't react, we file the report anyway and say she'd been threatening. Either way..."
Reagan turned another page.
She breathed very slowly. In through the nose, measured, the way Ray had taught her before competition. The breath that keeps the heart rate from climbing. That keeps the hands from tightening. That keeps the face from showing what the mind is doing.
She understood what she'd just heard.
Trent Calloway, the one Shane used as a blunt instrument, was going to engineer a public confrontation. Physical, if possible.
Designed to either provoke Reagan into responding, which would generate a conduct violation. Or, if she didn't respond, to be reported as a threat anyway, with a constructed witness account.
Either path led to a formal disciplinary action. Which triggered the conduct clause. Which cost her the scholarship.
The regional competition was in 27 days. The trap had to close before then.
Which meant it was coming soon. Maybe this week. Maybe next.
She kept her face completely neutral and her eyes on the page.
The voices moved away. Shane and Pierce gathered their things and left.
Reagan sat for another five minutes. Did not move.
Then she took out her notebook and wrote down exactly what she'd heard. The words she could confirm. The words she was paraphrasing from partial context.
She labeled it clearly: Overheard. Library, second floor periodicals. Not confirmed. Do not rely on this alone.
She was careful about that. What you overheard was not what you witnessed. Conflating the two was sloppy, and sloppy thinking cost you.
She put the notebook away.
She thought about Trent Calloway.
She'd seen him around campus. He was 21, a junior, built wide through the shoulders. He'd played football in his first year before dropping off the team. She'd heard that from Delia.
He still moved like someone who'd spent years using his body as a battering ram and hadn't quite updated the software.
She thought about what he was going to do.
And she thought about what she was going to do about it.
Not fight back. Not in the way he was expecting.
Something else.