The fluorescent lights in Trader Joe's had a specific kind of cruelty.

James Alcott had catalogued it. Twelve-hour shifts during finals week had given him nothing but time to think about the way the white light flattened everything — made the Hawaiian shirt they made him wear look less ironic, made the frozen section smell more like defeat, made every customer look either exhausted or insane.

He was running a price check on a jar of Unexpected Cheddar when she walked in.

He knew it was her before he fully looked up. Something animal in the back of his brain fired first — the specific frequency of her laugh reaching him from the entrance, light and unbothered, the way sounds are when they come from someone who has never once worried about their electricity bill.

Don't.

He looked up anyway.

Same girl. Absolutely the same girl. The one from the Sigma Phi thing three Saturdays ago where Priya had dragged him saying you need to exist outside of a Bloomberg terminal, James, actual human contact, please. The one who'd been dancing with the kind of loose confidence that made everyone nearby feel like they were standing wrong. The one who had — and he would carry this specific humiliation into the grave — actually laughed at something he said. Genuinely. Touched his arm.

Later, in a hallway that smelled like cheap tequila and somebody’s spilled seltzer, kissed him like she meant it.

Then her friend had pulled her away sometime around two in the morning, after they'd already made several extremely questionable decisions.

He still hadn't gotten her name.

She was standing at the sample station now. Talking to Marcus, the other cashier, doing that thing where beautiful people talk to strangers like it's effortless because for them it literally is.

She hadn't looked his way yet.

James made a calculation. This was what he did — risk assessment, probability modeling, behavioral prediction. It was why he was good at what he was actually studying. The variables here were:

One. She recognized him. Probability: moderate. Lighting at that party had been dim, he'd been in a regular shirt and no glasses, and they'd talked for maybe twenty minutes before things… escalated.

Two. She recognized him and was going to pretend she didn't. Probability: higher than he wanted to admit.

Three. She genuinely did not recognize him. Probability: honestly? Looking at him right now in this Hawaiian shirt under these lights, holding a jar of cheese? Distressingly high.

He pushed his glasses up his nose. Reflex.

At the party he'd been wearing contacts. He hated contacts. He only wore them when Priya threatened him. Without them he was — he knew this, he'd been told this by his mother and exactly one honest roommate — a different person visually. The glasses changed the whole read. Added something. Subtracted something else.

He watched her drift from the sample station toward the produce section.

Don't do anything. Ring people up. Exist professionally.

The thing was — and this was the part his brain would not let go of — she had been cool. Not in the exhausting performative way that a lot of people at Stanford were cool, where you could feel them calculating their own impressiveness in real time. She'd been genuinely funny. Had opinions. Had made fun of the party they were both at while being at the party, which was a specific skill James respected.

He'd thought about her four times since then.

Five, if he counted the morning he woke up remembering her laugh against his neck.

He'd told Priya zero times, because Priya would combust.

She was moving toward his register now, basket over her arm. Just a few things — oat milk, some fancy crackers, the dark chocolate with the sea salt that everyone in a five-mile radius of this campus bought like it was scripture.

James looked down at his register.

She might not recognize you. That's fine. That's normal. You're a cashier right now. Just be a cashier.

"Hi, did you find everything okay?"