Day 1: Jada (Coming, Seeing, Not Conquering.. Yet)

He doesn’t check his scores first thing anymore. Doesn’t need to. The stats are locked, the points will land where they land. What he checks now—every damn morning—is Freya’s thread.

Her post on “Mutuality and Ethical Agency in Intimate Transactions” had stirred up more Philosophy undergrads than the last three seminars combined. Dense, biting, brilliant—and not entirely unrelated to the kind of game he’s playing.

He’d left a comment last week. Something honest. Thoughtful, even.

She hadn’t replied.

This morning, she’s been active on other threads. She saw it. She’s just... choosing not to respond.

He drafts a follow-up. Half critique, half question, with a sprinkle of Socratic polish and a quote from Ovid that he hopes won’t make him sound like a jackass. Then he deletes it.

If she wanted his voice there, she’d have made room. No need to perform in someone else's theater.

Instead, he flips open the game tablet and pulls up his Week 5 card.

5♣ – Jada Washington.

A senior History major with a focus on Civil Rights and post-colonial theory. Availability score: 42. He frowns at the number—it feels less like “hard to access” and more like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy telling him not to ask stupid questions.

One check of the history forums and he finds her - on the tutoring list. Mondays and Thursdays. East Student Lounge. And that quote under her picture—“Nobody beats me twice”—suggests she takes her work, and herself, seriously.

There's a poster from one of the trashy 90s soap operas, behind her in her photo. That’s a surprise. He files it away. Everyone’s got their contradictions.

Around midday, he messages someone he’s only spoken to once—at a party where she wasn't even meant to be the point of focus, but became it anyway.

To: Rebekah Flores
You’re not in the game.
But you wrecked a player like you were. Tank didn’t see you coming, and now he’s gone.
So... I’m guessing you know enough to realize what this is.
If you want to talk, I’m here. If not, I'll keep my head down and hope I don’t end up the same way he did.

He doesn’t expect an answer. But if he’s right about her—she’ll respond when she wants, how she wants, and only after she’s already made up her mind.

That afternoon, he heads to the East Student Lounge—not to pounce, not to perform, but to observe.

The space is what you’d expect: modest couches, tired ferns, vending machines that hum with more energy than the students they serve. He finds a corner seat, opens The Wretched of the Earth, and pretends to read.

Jada arrives five minutes early, iced coffee in one hand and a thick spiral planner in the other. She’s calm. Controlled. Methodical. She meets her tutoring partner with a smile that’s polite, not warm.

He watches how she explains things—pen tapping beside points in the margin, gestures trimmed of excess. She doesn’t flirt. Doesn’t perform. She teaches like a woman who has no patience for laziness and even less for bullshit.

After thirty minutes, she packs up, says something encouraging to the freshman, and heads out.

He doesn’t approach. Not today. First impressions aren’t always made in person.

That evening, he returns to the Philosophy forum. Freya’s thread is still top of the board—people arguing in increasingly convoluted spirals about sexual ethics and whether intent can ever fully be parsed from performance. He reads her original post again, then scans the comment chain. Still no reply to his original thought.

He types something new, trying to be clever:

“If there’s no applause, how do we know it was a performance?”

He hovers over the post button.

Then posts it anyway.

He imagines her eyes narrowing as she reads it—imagines her lips curling slightly as she drafts a takedown she won’t sign with a smiley face.

But if she’s going to eviscerate him, at least she’ll be paying attention.