The Harry Ainsworth Library was quiet, the kind of quiet that made Kirk Leonard’s skin itch. It wasn’t the normal kind of silence, like the locker room after a loss, it was intentional silence. Heavy, scholarly, almost sacred. The towering windows let in slanted bands of late-afternoon sun that made the dust in the air shimmer like static. Somewhere far off, a page turned. A cough. The click of a pen. Otherwise, nothing.

Kirk hunched at one of the long oak tables on the second floor, surrounded by books he didn’t understand and students who all looked like they’d been born doing calculus. He shifted in his chair. His thighs barely fit under the table and his hoodie kept catching on the carved armrests. The biochemistry textbook in front of him might as well have been written in Elvish.

Across from him, they looked perfectly at home in this world: calm, collected, pen tucked behind one ear, a stack of notes arranged in neat, color-coded piles. It was unfair, really, how someone could look that serene next to phrases like allosteric regulation and competitive inhibition. Kirk scratched the back of his head and frowned at a diagram.