The Boy Beneath the Ivy

Part One

The September We Became Strangers

Chapter one

The Morning Everything Went Wrong

Autumn came to Fairhaven under the sky the color of worn denim. On the first Tuesday after Labor Day, buses coughed through town, parents crowded the school entrances, and the maples along Main Street had begun to turn red at the edges.

Across from the blinking light at Maple and College stood Fairhaven University: limestone, red brick, narrow arches, and ivy old enough to have its own legends. It was the kind of campus printed on postcards—the kind where people met reaching for the same library book.

It was also where Ellie Hayes had no business being at 8:17 on the first morning of senior year.

She was late, overloaded with textbooks and college brochures, and carrying an iced coffee that sweated against her fingers. Marissa had texted at 7:12: IF YOU WEAR THAT SKIRT, I WILL DISOWN YOU.

Ellie had worn it anyway.

At seventeen, she was trying to become someone who made her own choices. She was also trying not to think about Daniel Whitmore. That effort had gone badly all summer. Cereal aisles, burned CDs, fireworks, and the blue glow of her computer all led back to him. His name still sat on her AOL buddy list.

Offline. Always offline.

Then Ellie rounded the arch at Whitcomb Hall and walked straight into a tall boy with a paper cup.

Her coffee flew. His sloshed. A brown stain spread across his white T-shirt.

She looked up into dark hair, gray-blue eyes, and a mouth already deciding whether to smile.

“Good morning, Ellie.”

Daniel glanced at his shirt, then at her. The smile won.

“Oh my God. Daniel, I’m sorry.”

“Promising start to the semester.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“The collision suggested that.”

“I was checking the time.”

“Very responsible.”

“Shut up.”

There it was: their old rhythm, alive after three months of silence.

While she searched for a napkin, he assured her the shirt had survived worse. Then he noticed her haircut.

“An inch,” she said.

“Two.”

“One and a half.”

“Looks nice.”

The compliment lodged beneath her ribs.

Students streamed past. A phone rang with a tinny ringtone. Somewhere, a bicycle rattled over brick. The world continued, rude enough not to stop for Daniel Whitmore.

He nodded at her brochures. “Where are you applying?”

“Everywhere. Boston. Chicago. Michigan. A few places in Ohio.”

“Ohio?”

“I hear they have electricity now.”

He laughed, then glanced toward Whitcomb Hall. “Guess we’re both trying to get somewhere.”

Daniel had graduated early through a university bridge program. Now he belonged to lectures and professors and a campus ID. Ellie still had a locker that jammed when it rained and a mother who considered eleven dangerously late.

Their lives had moved apart. Their hearts had apparently missed the announcement.

“I should go,” Ellie said.

“Yeah. See you around.”

She watched him disappear beneath the ivy. It was 8:23. Her coffee was gone, her shirt was stained, and the boy she had spent all summer forgetting had looked at her as if he had been waiting.

She ran toward Fairhaven High repeating one promise: she would not fall in love with Daniel Whitmore again.

Not this year. Not ever.

The promise lasted until lunch.

At school, the ordinary machinery of senior year tried to reclaim her: bells, attendance sheets, a chemistry quiz she had barely studied for. But Daniel remained at the edge of every thought. His longer hair. The coffee on his shirt. The way he had said her name as if the summer between them had been an interruption rather than an ending.

Ellie knew better than to trust that feeling. Daniel had always made closeness seem effortless, right up until it became frightening. In May, one kiss had changed the shape of their friendship; his silence afterward had changed Ellie. She had spent June telling herself she was angry, July insisting she was over him, and August avoiding songs that proved otherwise.

At lunch, Ellie sat with Marissa beneath a window filmed with years of fingerprints. The cafeteria swelled around them—plastic trays striking tables, sneakers squeaking on tile, somebody arguing about homecoming nominations. Ellie unwrapped a sandwich and discovered she had no appetite.

Marissa watched her for half a minute. “You’re doing the thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing where your body is here and the rest of you is writing an alternate ending.”

Ellie looked toward the courtyard. Freshmen clustered around the concrete planters, still carrying maps of the school. She remembered Daniel at fourteen, leaning across the aisle to whisper a joke during a filmstrip. She remembered how quickly he had become the person she looked for whenever she entered a room.

“He said he was trying to get somewhere,” Ellie murmured.

“Everybody is trying to get somewhere. That doesn’t mean they get to run over you on the way.”

The words were blunt, but Marissa’s hand settled beside Ellie’s on the table. Ellie knew the warning came from love. Marissa had witnessed the aftermath in May: the unanswered calls, the invented excuses, the evenings Ellie spent watching the buddy-list door icon open and close for everyone except Daniel.

Across the cafeteria, Tyler Grant lifted a hand in greeting. He was broad-shouldered, easygoing, and captain of a soccer team Ellie had never watched. He had asked her to homecoming the previous year and accepted her refusal without drama. Marissa waved back with pointed enthusiasm.

“That,” she said, “is a boy who knows how telephones work.”

Ellie laughed despite herself. “I’m not dating Tyler.”

“I didn’t say date him. I said observe the rare and beautiful functioning male.”

For the first time that morning, Ellie’s shoulders loosened. Yet when the final bell rang, she took the long route home past the university. She told herself it was because the maples were prettier there.

Whitcomb Hall stood quiet beneath its ivy. Daniel was nowhere in sight.

Relief came first. Disappointment followed so closely she could not separate them.