Locked With His Obsession

So of course I got dropped into a room I can't leave until my grades go up. I have no selfcontrol. None. I wasn't the only one.

They dropped in the number one student in our whole grade. Ivy track. The kind of guy who doesn't take orders from anybody.

The System listed the punishment for not raising my score. [REDACTED] "Can you see that line?" I asked him. He could.

He looked away like he'd been caught at something. "Don't even think about it." "I'm getting your score up." Chapter 1 Some people can sit down and just do the work.

I have never been one of them. Every time I swear the next benchmark exam is going to shock everyone, my hand starts reaching for my phone. I scroll with my heart going.

Then the regret shows up. Ugh. Somebody should build a room where studying just kidnaps me and forces me to love it. Like a captive romance, except the love interest is a workbook.

Oh. If studying is going to hold me hostage, I'm begging. Please don't let it be ugly. I dreamed big. I fell asleep. One second later I was standing in the NoWayOut Room.

Two desks. Stacks of prep books.

And Desmond Locke, who committed to Princeton junior year off the national math olympiad, and who was goodlooking in a way that felt like a personal attack.

He was looking at me with a face that said, and you are? Which brings us back to the top. "So," I said. "What's the punishment?" He was tall. Black Tshirt.

He'd been yanked here straight out of a shower, hair still dripping, and that stayback thing came off him from head to foot. He didn't answer me.

Then he spotted the big red banner on the wall and choked on nothing. The banner said: DO IT. DO IT MORE. DO IT TILL THE END OF TIME. "Do it?" I chewed on that.

The longer I stared, the stranger his face got. "Oh!" It clicked. "The punishment is doing problems?" Score doesn't go up, you do problems. Don't finish them, don't leave.

A deeply problematic room. Desmond gave me a long look and made a sound in his throat. "Doing problems." He pulled out a chair. Done talking to me.

Then he went through my mistake notebook, found my weak spots, and started to explain something. His fingers stopped. There was another guy's handwriting in my notebook.

He didn't ask whose. That afternoon he'd walked past the main office while a teacher chewed me out for letting a boy wreck my grades, so he didn't have to.

The handwriting was Colton Ridley's. Colton was the boy next door. Every friend I had knew I liked him. So did Colton. My grades were lopsided, fine in English, hopeless in math.

He tutored me. We'd agreed we would go to the same college. He treated me a little differently than his other friends. Most of the time, though, I was the one walking behind him.

That fall his scores took off. He got close enough to the Ivy track to touch it. I clawed my way up to second and held on.

Then I came running to tell him about it, and he told me he was done tutoring me. "My girlfriend doesn't want your rank sitting that close to mine." His eyes went past me to Aubrey Sandoval, who sat one desk up.

I got it in one second. All summer, while he was supposedly studying with me, he'd been half watching his phone and laughing at it. I asked who he was texting. He said nobody.

Nobody was Aubrey. He hadn't been chasing those scores because of me. He liked someone.

And I was the only idiot at the table who didn't know it. "From now on," Colton said, "I only tutor her." Chapter 2 "We agreed we'd go to the same school," I said.

I regretted it before I finished the sentence. He shrugged like it cost him nothing. "Yeah. I don't want that anymore." "She's my girlfriend.

You're not." My hands went flat and still on the desk. He picked up Aubrey's water bottle, filled it for her, and walked her out.

On the way past he said it loud enough for me to hear. "Don't stress. You've got me.

Beating her is easy." It took one full evening study hall to get down the fact that Colton had a girlfriend. The other fact would not go down at all.

Nobody was going to teach me anymore. A broken heart, whatever. I could cry about that.

But somebody who scored higher than Colton and was still willing to sit there and walk me through a freeresponse problem? Those do not grow on trees.

God knows my second place was held together with tape. My math teacher taught like he was scared one of us might actually learn something. Problem, next problem, next.

Miss one and you miss every one after it. At home, a single freeresponse problem could eat my whole night. I wanted to ask Mom to put me in a prep center.

Then she came in at eleven off a double, carrying the same purse she's carried for six or seven years, and her eyes crinkled up at me. "Rosie?

What's wrong?" I couldn't get one word out. Right on schedule, Aubrey jumped on the weekly quiz and took second place off me. The room talked about it with me sitting in it. "Wow.

Rosalind Bell went down fast." "Well, she doesn't have a boyfriend like Aubrey's.

Kind of hard to win like that." "Maybe I'll pass her next time too." A few days later my homeroom teacher pulled me in.

Somebody with a big mouth had told her I got shot down by Colton and fell apart over it. "Rosalind Bell. Senior year is right there.

Where is your head?" "You run around after some boy, those two go up every single time, and you're the one who can't get off the floor." Outside, a thunderstorm was going.

Heat came up off the pavement in wet sheets and pushed at the main office door. My head felt packed with sand. I stood there and took it. Then a voice came from the doorway.

Tired, lazy, clear as water. "Excuse me." Desmond Locke. He'd come in with a few Ivytrack guys, looking for their own homeroom teacher. "This is so unfair.

Same earlycommit posters, and Desmond's headshot looks like an album cover." "Can you not hang mine next to his?" They got sent back to their own room and came past me still messing around.

One of them heard what my teacher was saying to me and laughed through his nose. Barely a sound. I knew what I was to them. Bad scores, boyobsessed, not even likable.

Nobody says it out loud. But the better the school is, the more it only measures you in numbers, and the harder that pecking order runs underneath everything.

Girls like me lived at the bottom of it. Desmond heard it too. He gave me one loose look and kept going. None of his business.

They were most of the way down the hall when I caught someone asking him. "So who's she into? You're not curious?" "Not interested." He didn't even slow down.

Nobody could have called what happened next. That night they locked the two of us in the same room. I shut the memory off. By then I had most of the rules figured out.

Every night I fall asleep and I'm in. I can bring whatever's on me. I study until I've got nothing left, and then I'm out. Next time I sleep, I'm back.

To break the loop and get out for good, my score has to hit the target. Real exams are what count. Every major exam cycle. If my score hasn't gone up, the final punishment triggers.

I put my hands over my face. The benchmark exam was tomorrow. At least the punishment was just doing problems. Chapter 3 Honestly, it would help me.

As punishments go, not the worst.

But the guy across from me, the one with all the attitude, had gone weirdly quiet. "At least it's just problems," I said, trying to make him feel better. "Just doing it nonstop." He heard doing it nonstop and bluescreened for a few seconds.

Then he gave me a wounded look. "No." No idea what he thought he was defending with his life. Desmond pulled out a practice test and slid it across to me. I didn't argue.

Head down, pen moving. The front section went fine. Then the freeresponse problems showed up. I looked up at him.

He'd moved his desk and chair further from mine and was reading a book with no interest at all. I didn't dare ask. Back down. Brute force it.

The next time I looked up, he was already looking at me. "Ask if you want to ask." He dragged his chair over and picked up my bear pen like it belonged to him. "You know the concepts.

You just don't know how to get into the problem." On scratch paper, in a way I could actually follow, he laid out the structure and worked the equation around.

Then he showed me three more that ran the same way. When he looked down at the page I could smell him. Fresh out of the shower. Lime, very faint.

After I noticed that, every time he leaned in I wanted to back up. I shifted maybe an inch. He didn't even lift his eyes.

His left hand came up and settled on the back of my chair, and that was the end of that. "Did that make sense?" I shook my head, guilty about it, and braced for him to get annoyed.

When Colton used to tutor me, one sentence in every ten was about how slow I was. Desmond didn't do that. He went through the whole thing again. I don't know how long we worked.

Long enough that my head was swimming.

But every problem in that notebook finally cracked open, and something behind my eyes came unstuck, and the feeling turned into something meaner than relief. I wanted to win.

Whatever was on my face, he read it. "Your grades are lopsided and you still hold second in the regular track.

Have a little faith in yourself." I nodded. "Thank you." He looked away. "Don't thank me. I just want out of this room." Right. Of course. He'd have taught anybody the same way.

Nobody wants to get punished. A week later the benchmark scores came out. I beat Aubrey by two points and took second back. First was still Colton.

Word was, if his class rank moved up a little more next round, he'd transfer into the Ivy track. "Not bad." Colton caught me after evening study hall, lukewarm as ever. "Only because I called the problems for you, though.

That won't happen again." A few of the freeresponse problems on the math section were types he'd drilled with me over the summer. He smiled, slow and easy. "Not fun, is it.

Having nobody to teach you." This was how he always handed me a way back. He'd ignore me for days. Then he'd throw one scrap and I'd come running. He'd had that since we were kids.

He was allowed not to like me. I was never going to stop liking him. I looked him in the eye. And it landed. Beat Colton, and the Ivytrack seat he wanted was mine.

I'd take it off him. I didn't answer him. I went home and studied like I meant it. Finished my homework. Then went and studied in my sleep. In the NoWayOut Room.

Desmond arrived midstep, holding a chocolate milk. "My score went up!" He looked down at me. One corner of his mouth moved. "Oh." He handed me a notebook.

He'd written it out by hand, every problem type I was bad at. "Thank God we don't have to get punished," I said, taking it. His fingers stopped on the cover.

Then that cold, careless thing came back up into his face. Chapter 4 "Yeah," he said. "Lucky us." The words were barely out when the System chimed. [SCORE INCREASE CONFIRMED.

REWARD UNLOCKED!] Reward? What reward? [COMFORT YOUR CLASSMATE.

FINGERS LACED, ONE MINUTE!] Silence. "Why," I said, "would a perfectly good study system hand out that as a reward?" "It was never normal to begin with," Desmond said. "What was never normal?" He turned his head.

Wouldn't tell me. "It's a reward," he said, flat. "We just don't do it." That night his desk sat further from mine than usual, and he was colder than usual with it.

I looked at his hands anyway. Long. Strong. Then I looked away and got back to my problems. The System stayed quiet until I was out.

The next day the school ran the whole grade through the auditorium in shifts for a college info assembly. I took my notebook to the back row and sat by the rear door.

Colton and Aubrey ended up directly in front of me. The Ivy track had the front section.

People filed past me row after row, and Desmond was at the back of his line, impossible to miss. Our eyes met for a second. His class was on a different floor from mine.

We basically never crossed paths at school. This was the first time we'd seen each other outside that room since it started locking us in. I hesitated. Wave or don't wave.

He went past me like I was furniture. Total stranger. Great. Good thing my hand never made it up. My seatmate, on my left by the aisle, patted my hand. "You got tissues?

Bathroom's out of paper again and I gotta go." She took three of the very few I had left.

The seat beside me went empty. "Hey, isn't that Desmond's notebook?" The girl on my right leaned toward Aubrey in the row ahead. "Can I look at it?" That was when I noticed the notebook in Aubrey's arms. "Nope." She turned around, and her eyes flicked over me on the way. "Colton borrowed it for me.

Not lending it out." The girl on my right made a small noise and turned to me. "She's got Desmond helping her now. You're done next exam." I didn't answer.

I put my head down and turned the pages of my own mistake notebook. [Ding!] The System went off inside my head. [COMPLETE YOUR REWARD WITHIN THE TIME LIMIT: FINGERS LACED, ONE MINUTE.] [TIME REMAINING: FIVE MINUTES.] My head snapped up.

The auditorium was packed wall to wall. Wait. Here