Page 13 of Tangled Up In You

CHAPTER SIX

FITZ

To Fitz’s complete lack of surprise, the article about Ren had the whole campus falling over themselves in fawning adoration. Suddenly every person in his loose social circle had a Ren story to share. She was brilliant, she was selfless, she was just so fascinating. To them, unconventional meant inspiring; naive meant idealistic. But in fact, there was only one line in the entire article that Fitz agreed with: I think my peers would say I’m book-smart, not street-smart. He couldn’t agree more. Despite whatever Allison Fukimora thought, this world was going to eat Ren alive.

Did no one else notice how she held the door to the building open for so many people that she was late to her own class? Did it not irritate anyone else how profusely she overthanked a student when he picked up her pen after it rolled off the table? Did it not make anyone else want to claw their face off how from the moment Dr. Michel Audran began the very first class with a round of trivia, Ren’s hand never went down?

Sitting maddeningly close to him, she’d correctly answered everything the rest of the students couldn’t: that Dr. Audran did his doctoral work with Wolfgang Banzhaf at Michigan State before running his own lab at Institut de Génomique Fonctionnelle in Lyon. That his “research on nonsynonymous substitutions in SNPs had contributed significantly to the various genotyping technologies that companies were using to provide private users with their DNA-based hereditary information.” That he was, in fact, one of the board members for the world’s most commercially successful DNA testing kit, HereditarME.

So, of course, it was Ren who correctly guessed today that the next lab project the class would be doing was comparing the findings of the commercial kit with a simpler form of the genotyping assay they’d conduct in class. Necessity meant that Fitz was prelaw, but his joy had always been science. He’d been looking forward to this class as soon as it had been announced last fall. That top spot was his; he wouldn’t really even have to try that hard for it. Until Ren Gylden arrived, that is, and quickly outranked even the highest class scores, therefore making his life a living hell.

A hell that was only getting more unbearable, because while a case of the assay kits made its way around the classroom, Audran took a few minutes to hand back the unit one tests the class had taken the previous week. Fitz looked down and, for the first time in his entire college career, stared at a thick, red D.

Before anyone else could see it, he shoved it into his backpack, heart pounding.

Is this when it all started to fall apart? Had he really let her get under his skin this much? What the hell had happened? He’d been distracted by Ren the morning of the test—irritated by the way the entire class had circled around her before Audran appeared, enthralled by her story of helping a cow give birth or something—but he still thought he’d done okay. He thought he’d answered the essay questions completely. But Audran’s lengthy scrawled notes in the margins said otherwise. There were only four exams in the entire lecture portion of the course, making up 80 percent of his grade. Even if he scored perfectly on the next three exams, the best he could manage would be a low A.

That wouldn’t cut it.

Fitz was vaguely aware of Audran directing them to go grab a kit at the back of the room near what he called the Polaroid Wall, where he had goofy photos of each student to help himself and the TAs remember their names. Fitz was vaguely aware of Ren returning to her seat, of her setting an assay kit in front of him. He was vaguely aware that she’d asked him something. But he ignored her because he was intensely aware that this grade was a disaster. Judge Iman—now Governor Amira Iman—had been very clear in the deal in writing she’d made with him the night of his release from juvenile detention seven years ago: If he could finish at the top of every class in college, she would have his record completely expunged and write him a letter of recommendation to any law school he wanted. She knew it would be a challenge, but if he could do it, she promised to be his personal champion.

This assurance had been the foundation of his future, and unfortunately the new, brilliant woman in the class and this stupid, mediocre grade had just unraveled everything.

CHAPTER SEVEN

REN

For an innately self-possessed man—who was regularly greeted by the class like a beloved king walking into his court—Fitz had grown suddenly and weirdly silent. Was he having the same internal debate she was? Because as she held the boxed DNA kit in her hands, Ren knew without having to think about it very hard that Gloria and Steve would never—not in a billion years—allow her to send her DNA off to some giant laboratory in New Jersey.

Around her, students happily opened their kits, read the directions, and laughed as they watched each other spit into the vials.

“Should I?” she said quietly. She knew what her parents would say: an unequivocal no. No meals out, no leaving campus, no boys, no alcohol, no makeup, no internet. But Ren had been away from home long enough to have softened some of those fearful boundaries. She’d walked with a professor to get a cup of tea at the café across the street from Davis Hall, and it had felt just as safe as sitting in the dining hall. She’d let Miriam put a small amount of blush on her cheeks for an outdoor concert on campus, and Ren hadn’t felt the need to start wearing makeup all the time. She’d had a study session with a group of students at a TA’s apartment a block off campus, and none of the males in attendance had tried anything untoward. It was fine. The profile in the student portal was perhaps the best example: Her name wasn’t searchable anywhere in there. Sure, everyone on campus knew it was about her, but no Google search could bring up her name. There were times when you simply had to trust people to do what they said they would do, and if Dr. Audran said he would protect their anonymity, then he would.

Right?

Ren groaned, scrubbing her hands over her face. Was this a test of her conviction? If so, she worried she would fail; her curiosity raged. “Ugh. I don’t know what to do.”

Dazed, Fitz turned. “About what?”

“Whether I should do this DNA thing.”

“It’s optional,” he said. “It’s all anonymous anyway.” He gave her one of those brief sarcastic smirks that she liked despite her better instincts, and said, “You know, just like that anonymous fluff piece in the portal.”

“Fluff piece?”

“The article about you.” He rubbed a finger over his flirty eyebrow.

“You read it?”

He nodded. “It was glowing.”

“I’m sure you’ve had one, too.”

“I have.”

“And yours wasn’t glowing?” she asked, ducking to smile at him. “That seems improbable.”

“Mine was basically about how I’m smart and my dad is rich,” he said with a humorless laugh, and then looked back at his own DNA kit. He gazed at it as if making a wish, before unceremoniously opening it and carrying out the directions. Ren watched while he peeled one label from the instructions and carefully lined it up over his vial. The other he stuck to the inside of his folder and pointed to the sample ID there. “You only link it to your name online if you want to. Otherwise, you’re just a number.”

---