Chapter 13 — Continued: "Cafeteria Chronicles and Double Lives" (Extended)
Lucas pushed through the dorm doorway feeling the day weigh pleasantly on him: a public meal, a perfunctory lecture, the small, private victories of a man who had not yet failed a scene. Outside the building, the quad's sycamores shivered in a wind that smelled faintly of rain and old paperbacks. He moved with the sort of unplanned slowness that made his walk feel like a scene he hadn't rehearsed but somehow had the timing for.
Sebastian closed the door with a soft click and matched his step.
"You'll want to prepare for Professor Mendoza's analysis tomorrow," Sebastian said as they walked down the corridor. "She may call on you to illustrate presence."
Lucas laughed, dialing his phone. "Presence? I was barely present at breakfast. I'm more of a 'show up, improvise, flop into sleep' type."
To him it was a joke. To Sebastian it sounded like a strategy.
They passed the library's side entrance, and Lucas glanced in. The reading room was quieter than usual; a carved wooden sign warned people not to speak loudly. Someone had left a small display of weathered pamphlets about the city's trait history on a round table: the university's little shrine to inherited oddities.
At that table sat a woman with hair the color of storm clouds and a stack of annotated journals. She looked up as they passed.
Professor Ivo—officially an adjunct in social anthropology, but informally the campus authority on trait applications—had the habit of wearing three watches at once. His trait, Temporal Lobe Offset, didn't actually speed up his time; it tuned him to micro-patterns in people's behavior. When Lucas paused to smile at a child carrying a model glider, Ivo's eyes traced the gesture and adjusted a mental graph.
"He's attracting pattern clusters," Ivo murmured into a small recorder he kept in his pocket. He meant "attracting" academically: the way certain individuals become focal points in social ecosystems. To everyone else, his notes would sound like pedantic hedging. To the underworld, Ivo's recordings would read like prophecy.
Across the room, Juno—campus podcaster, awake at odd hours and legally under-caffeinated—tilted her head and aimed her handheld recorder. She had a podcast called Static & Signal where she specialized in interviews that sounded like confessions. She loved contradictions. Lucas, who wore contradictions like an accidental costume, fascinated her.
She leaned over to the student beside her, voice low. "Do you see how different people treat him? He's either a patron saint or a prophecy." The student whispered back, "He's trending again—someone made a poster that says 'The Drops Belong To Me' and then took it down."
Lucas, humming a tune he'd been testing for an audition, slid a book under his arm and decided to go upstairs for a quiet hour of reading. That passing decision created three new narratives at once: the librarian saw him as a respectful presence who never tore pages; the girls in the study group saw him as a romantic lead in miniature; and a security researcher watched him as potential data point for a paper she had been writing on trait-socialization.
When he reached the stacks, he chose a corner with low light and a window that looked over the quad. He liked windows because they made it possible to look outward without having to decide to be seen.
Sebastian lingered at the entrance, not because Lucas needed escorting but because Sebastian measured safety in degrees of proximity. He observed the students from the threshold like a man guarding a fragile vase, and the vase happened to be a person who had accidentally agreed to be a ghost.
Lucas opened his book—film theory—and the printed pages smelled of glue and ideas. He read a paragraph, closed his eyes to think, and, on impulse, jotted a note in the margin: "presence = honesty + timing."
That line, so small and so useless, ricocheted across the room.
Professor Ivo recorded the syllables and wrote "presence = diplomacy?" in his notebook. Juno scribbled the phrase into her phone and flagged it as a potential title for next week's episode. A student overheard, turned it into a tweet, and the cafeteria's gossip thread lit up like a match being held under dry leaves.
Later, when Lucas rose, he didn't notice the ripple he left: people's body language shifted. A junior who had been rehearsing a debate took a deep breath as if he had been given permission. A barista, at her station, amended a drink order and smiled at a stranger instead of scrolling through her phone. None of these actions had anything to do with Lucas. All of them were how his trait worked: a mirror without a mirror, a ladder without footsteps.
He found Maya at the counter, smoothing the foam on a cappuccino with a tiny scraper like a jeweler setting a gem.
"Hey, Lucas," Maya said, sliding him a refill. "Did you see the plant sale on the quad? They have air-purifying ones."
Lucas smiled. "I did, actually. Thinking of getting a fern for the windowsill."
Maya's eyes softened. In her mind he was already someone who supported small-town business incubators and environmental initiatives. She handed him the cup as if presenting a small flag of community. "You'd like this blend—stability in a mug."
Sebastian watched the exchange, reading into every subtle cue as if it were a page in a manual left open to the instructions for a coup. She offers support; she trusts him. Trust is contagion. Contagion must be managed.
At noon, the student council convened unexpectedly in the glass atrium. Lucas had been the pretext—not because he'd asked, but because committees needed focus and his name had become focus. A young woman from the council, earnest and serious, looked up and asked if he would say a few words about sustainable campus initiatives. It was a ritual now: ask, claim, overinterpret.
Lucas, who had been idly sketching a storyboard in the margins of his notebook, felt the familiar flutter of stage-fright and stage-joy. "Sure," he said, and tried to compress what he cared about—clean water, decent rehearsal spaces, fair access to props—into something the assembly could understand.
He spoke plainly, in the low voice he used for scenes where nothing dramatic was supposed to happen.
"We should make sure everyone has what they need to rehearse," he said. "Not just space. Things that make practice possible: time, light, and quiet."
For those with ordinary expectations this was a civic-minded statement. For the assembly, already primed by months of rumor, it read as edict. The student who wanted to be dramatic interpreted it as a declaration; the facilities manager wrote it down as an actionable task; a rumor-monger saw a coded order.
Afterward, Lucas unrolled his battered script and retreated to the plant conservatory—a small glasshouse the campus kept as a climate experiment. He liked the quiet green there. He did not realize Professor Ivo had followed him, ostensibly to check on seedlings but in truth to compare the human loom of reactions in a closed environment.
"Why do people see different things?" Ivo asked quietly as they stood among ferns and orchids.
Lucas blinked. "See, people? I don't know. Maybe my face is just interesting."
Ivo smiled with the tired indulgence of someone who read grant applications that never ended. "Your trait makes you a canvas. But canvas isn't blank; it borrows colors from the observer."
Sebastian, arriving with two paper cups of tea, overheard and interpreted the whole conversation as confirmation.
He chooses his colors deliberately, Sebastian thought. He is aware of how to appear. He is being cautious for reasons we do not question.
Lucas sipped the tea, which tasted faintly of bergamot and unfamiliar responsibility. He let the green quiet of the conservatory wash over him, and careful for once not to lift a limb that might be misread.
When he left, the trail he left behind was softer than thunder but no less effective. People would rewrite the day's events as lessons in leadership, evidence in the making of a man who could bend small things into big outcomes. None of it would land in his inbox as accusation. None of it would feel dangerous to him.
At dusk, back in the penthouse, Lucas thumbed through reviews of the campus carnival and frowned.
"Everyone's being so intense," he mused aloud. "It's like they're trying to dramatize my grocery list."
Sebastian replaced a folded blanket at his feet, face unreadable with all the certainty of a faithful soldier.
"It is because your role in the narrative matters," Sebastian said. "It always has."
Lucas looked at him and then laughed, a short, unbothered sound. "Okay, then. Tomorrow I'll be less dramatic—maybe I'll be a supporting character."
Sebastian drew himself up. A supporting character in his shadow, he thought. A perfect place to stand.
Lucas went to bed with his script beside him, the city faintly humming below. Outside, patterns rearranged themselves overnight—tweets, a hastily composed petition, a security camera realigning its angle. The world, as always, tried to fit him into one of the shapes it preferred.
He slept as only someone who didn't know the song could sleep: easy and untroubled, while reverberations he would never hear rearranged the next day's headlines.
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End of Chapter 13.