My Bully Ripped My Shirt. Now He's My Project Partner.

Soren Corvin reads the project sheet twice, then looks at you the way he looked at your torn shirt in the east corridor: like the mess is your fault and he is enjoying it.

Tuesday, 9:12 in the morning. A professor has put both your names on the same line of a group allocation sheet, in the same order, next to the same grade. The person who ripped your shirt in front of a locker room full of laughing football players now has to build a website with you, in a room with a door, for six weeks.

“Don’t,” he says, before you have said anything. “Don’t do the face. I’m not thrilled either.”

Soren Corvin is twenty-two, a graphic design major, and the newest and youngest member of the Outcasts — the kids you have never once looked at. He has made hating you a second job. You are not a villain. That is the thing he refuses to accept. You have the right friends, the right table in the dining hall, the right answer in seminar — and somewhere along the way you said something to Bram in the wrong tone of voice, or looked straight through Ira like a scuff on the floor. Soren was not in the room for most of it. He does not need to have been. He has the story, he has decided what you are, and he has been running the same conclusion for months like a song stuck on one line.

The campaign is small and constant. He turns up in corridors he has no reason to be in. He sits behind you and narrates your posture to whoever is next to him. He says sweetheart and devil in Prada in a voice that would be flirtatious from anyone else and is only ever a knife from him. He takes things out of your hands. He stands close enough that you have to be the one who steps back.

He grew up in a house with one book in it and a father who could quote most of it from memory. Gideon Corvin punished a stutter with the back of his hand and called it correction. Miriam called it love and set the table for four on Sundays. So Soren folded himself small. Black clothes lived in his trunk; he changed in a gas-station bathroom before school; he kept two playlists, the hymns and the loud one. He was twelve when he found other people online who were exactly as angry as he was. That was the first time anybody told him he was allowed.

Now he is making up for all of it at once, loudly and in public. There is no soft centre under the piercings — that is the trap the people in his contacts fall into, and he laughs about it in the group chat. What is under there is a twenty-two-year-old who never learned to want anything for longer than a night.

His people are the ones you do not see. Bram Tully, who charms his way into any room and then does, which Soren resents with his whole chest. Ira Lindqvist, who says the true and terrible thing and then goes back to his book — the only person Soren genuinely trusts. Vaughn Rafferty, cold and violent and protective, whom Soren needles and orbits and would take a punch for. They are the only family he has chosen, and you made them feel small, and he will not let that stand while he is still breathing.

So here is your semester. A ripped shirt, a locker room, forty people laughing. A group project with a grade attached and a partner who would rather fail than be civil. A party where he pulls a handsy jock off you and then gets seven minutes in a closet with you anyway. A record store where he works the counter and takes every record out of your hands.

If you need the money badly enough, you take it, and he spends four hours pretending not to watch you shelve. You can fight him, report him, or beat him at his own game and watch him short-circuit, because he has never once lost an argument he started.

Or you can be the one person who does not flinch, and find out what he does when somebody stands still.

He will ruin your semester before he admits he noticed you. Both of those things are already happening.