Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

all along. She began, as well, to miss having a best friend, as Paul had been right from the start.

They had met before classes had even begun, their first year, during orientation week, when herds of freshman had been rounded up, driven down to their dormitory lounges, and forced to play the kinds of parlor games that make more ice than they break. Paired by a ruthless upperclassman, Paul and Rachel had been told to get acquainted and then, when it was their turn, to introduce each other to the rest of the group. “You have five minutes,” he said.

All around them, paired strangers were looking at each other in horror. But Paul looked at Rachel, Rachel at Paul, and with the kind of minute, flickering signals known to timber wolves and deaf-mutes, they made up their minds to escape. It was easy, really. The escalating panic of their classmates made good cover. And within moments the two of them were running along the corridor outside, twisted with laughter, free. They had gone for pizza, survived the inevitable, occasional awkwardness of strangers, and become fast friends. Living in the same dorm that year had made it easier for them to be together at all hours, studying, escaping the relentless companionship of roommates who would never be friends, laughing at anything and everything, eventually baring portions of their souls.

Even after they had spent a summer apart, even after Paul had joined his fraternity and breathed its medieval air, even after Rachel had made other friends and found other diversions, the things that tied them to each other had not frayed. But much had happened since then. Everything had changed. And the things that Professor Greenway had told her that morning stiffened the softening regions of Rachel’s heart and sent her off in search of Paul for the first time since November, grim and suspicious.

She found him sitting on the concrete porch of the fraternity house with several other boys, an aluminum washtub stocked with ice and beer, an enormous can of tomato juice, and a few mangled lemons. They all wore crumpled shorts and sunglasses, nothing else. Behind her, on the grassy plot enclosed by the fraternity houses, other boys were playing breakball, taking turns batting a baseball at windows. Whoever broke the most windows won the game. The losing team paid to replace them. The game had always struck Rachel as senseless and inane. Today it seemed to her nearly criminal. She stood at the bottom of the porch steps and glared at Paul.

“Rachel,” he gasped, as if she had come back from the dead. He didn’t seem able to say anything more.

“Hi, Paul. I need to talk to you for a minute.”

“Sure, sure,” he said. The others watched silently. Paul worked his mug into the ice and grabbed his shirt from the back of his chair. “You want to come up here, have a red-eye?”

“No, thank you. Could you just come with me for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” he said, buttoning up his shirt. He looked around for some shoes but found none. There were millions of shards of broken beer bottles and window glass on the sidewalk that looped through the quadrangle. “You sure you don’t want a red-eye?” he said, smiling. At which Rachel turned and walked away.

Paul caught up with her before she’d left the quad. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Slow down.” She stopped but did not turn around. “My car’s right up the street. We can talk there.”

The sight of the Impala made Rachel’s heart hurt, but she opened the passenger door and slipped inside.

“I didn’t think you’d ever speak to me again,” Paul said, his hands on the steering wheel.

“I didn’t either,” she said. “Now I’m not sure how I feel. But I need to know something, Paul.”

“Anything,” he said, as if she should have known this.

“How did you do on the history midterm last semester?” she asked.

“How did I what?”

“You borrowed all my notes, remember? You said you’d lost your notebook somewhere. So I gave you everything I had. Notes from lecture, from section, from the reading. Everything.”

“Of course I remember. You saved my life.”

“Did you make photocopies?”

“Yes. It would have taken me forever to copy everything by hand.”

“Who else saw my notes?”

Paul opened the car door and put one foot into the gutter. “What gives, Rachel? Why all the questions?”

Rachel turned in her seat so that she faced him. “I want to know how it is that you and six of your friends all wrote midterms that were identical to mine. At least in some respects. And close enough in other ways to make it look like I was cheating.”

“Oh my God, Rachel, did Greenway say something to you?”

“Look,” she said. “I already know that you guys cheated, but I want to know how.”

“Are you nuts?” Paul snorted. “If I say one word, those guys will kill me. I’ll be out of the fraternity, probably out of school.” He looked at her and could not quite keep the smirk off his face. “There’s no way in the world that anyone can prove we cheated.”

It had taken Rachel a mere ten minutes to find Paul, but in those ten minutes she had come up against the truth. “Somehow, one of you guys got your hands on the exam questions last fall. And then, before the exam, you all prepared your answers. And you helped each other, of course. Shared your notes. Shared my notes.” Paul refused to look at her again. “But you were all too stupid to make sure you varied your answers. They were so much alike—especially with the Kissinger quote from my notes—that Greenway was immediately suspicious. And then you did the same thing during the final, only without my help. Didn’t you?”

Paul said nothing. Rachel waited. Then, suddenly, shocking her, “Get out of my car,” he said. “Every time I have anything to do with you I end up sorry.”

“So do I,” Rachel said when she was able. She suddenly