“Well,” Mackenzie says, “hope to see you soon.” And with that, she sashays off, no doubt vowing never to darken the door of this terrible place again.

Once she’s gone, I try to get back to studying, but I’m too distracted to concentrate, thinking about tonight and how I’m going to play it. After five minutes of futility, I gather up my books and carry them to the student behind the circulation desk, waiting while she checks them out and slides them across the counter to me.

“Due back in two weeks,” she says.

“Thanks.”

“Not that it’s any of my business,” she says, still looking at the screen in front of her, “but you might want to sit this one out.”

I look at her closely for the first time. She’s wearing black-framed glasses with lenses that reflect the screen in front of her, and her dark brown hair is pulled back into a ponytail. Her lips are full and coral-pink, and her eyes gleam bluish gray, slanting just a little. Is she smiling? From this angle I can’t tell.

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t know you”—she looks up at me, and I feel the intensity of her gaze—“but you really don’t want to get involved with Casino Night. From what I hear, Brandt only invites people he knows he can fleece at the tables.”

I glance back at the carrel where I’d been sitting, halfway across the stacks. “You heard all of that?”

“What can I say?” She points to the sign reading quiet please. “Some people don’t know how to whisper.”

“I’m sorry.” I take a step toward the desk, trying to catch her eye. “Have we met?”

“Not yet.” At last she glances up from the monitor and extends one hand across the desk, her chipped black fingernails looking like they might have been painted with a Magic Marker. “Gatsby Haverford.”

“Gatsby.” It takes me less than a second to muse over what kind of parents would name their daughter after one of American literature’s most elegant train wrecks, and then decide I’d rather not ask. “Nice to meet you.”

“You too.” She nods at her computer, where my information is still up on the screen. “Will Shea. You’re the transfer student from the Marshall Islands.”

“Is that why you work at the library, so you can blackmail the students with their personal information?”

“I guess I just couldn’t resist the glamour of the job.”

“You’re a student here?”

“A junior,” she says. “We’re in the same English Lit class. But listen, Will. You seem like a decent-enough guy, so take my advice.” She leans across her desk and lowers her voice. “If you’re so determined to throw your money away, you should just flush it down the toilet. That way there’s at least a chance some of it might come back up.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I say, “but we don’t even know each other. Why are you so concerned about me?”

“Maybe I just don’t like seeing anyone get taken advantage of.”

“It hasn’t occurred to you that maybe I’ll win?”

“No offense,” she says, looking me up and down, “but that seems highly unlikely.”

“Why’s that?”

“Let’s just say that when Brandt’s running the tables, the odds are forever in his favor.”

“Well,” I say, “I appreciate the heads-up, but I’m going to take my chances.”

“I figured.” Gatsby looks at me from between towers of books with a combination of fascination and pity. “But when you walk back in here tomorrow wearing nothing but a barrel and suspenders, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Well, my barrel’s out for dry cleaning, so . . .”

Gatsby taps a few keys on the computer, scribbles a note on a scrap of paper, then stands up and comes around from behind the desk. “Stay here.” And before I can say anything, she disappears into the stacks, moving through the deep jungle of the Dewey decimal system with all the confidence and authority of a lioness.

While I wait, I find myself looking down at her workspace, at the half-finished cup of coffee and the cracked first-generation iPhone abandoned so trustingly next to the keyboard. I can hear music playing through the ear buds—it sounds like either punk or techno, with some twangy guitar mixed in—and for a moment I’m tempted to pick them up, just to see what she’s been listening to. But I’m glad I don’t, because when I turn around, Gatsby’s already back with an armload of books.

“What’s all this?” I look down at the one on top, an old hardcover that looks like nobody’s checked it out in decades, and read the title stamped in gold across the spine: Tips for Winning Poker. It’s resting on two even dustier tomes—The Mental Game of Poker and How to Win at Cards.

“Look, I appreciate all this, but—”

“Here.” She’s already checking out the three books, sweeping them under the bar-code reader along with A Beginner’s Guide to Self-Defense.

“What’s this one for?”

“Just take it,” she says, and checks out the last title, which I realize is an ancient edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

“And this one?”

“Transcendental logic.” She smiles. “You never know when you’ll need it.”

“Thanks,” I say, shoving all the books into my backpack. “But I think what I really need is a bigger bag.”

“Happy reading,” she says, then goes back around to the other side of the desk, placing the buds in her ears and checking in books again.

Ten

BY THE TIME I GET BACK TO MY DORM ROOM, I’VE ALREADY forgotten about the books that Gatsby gave me. Mentally, I’m prepping for tonight, and my mind is so preoccupied that when the dinner hour comes, I have to force myself to eat. Voices around me are excited and laughing, discussing weekend plans. I don’t talk to anybody. I keep my head down.

After dinner I go back to my room alone, where I sit on the edge of my bed and stare at the wall, running through hypotheticals in my mind, trying to think of everything that could go wrong tonight and how I’d respond. Making sure I’m ready. Figuring the angles. This is the hardest time for me: the waiting.

Outside in the darkness, the hours drag by, doled out by the occasional distant chime of the bell tower. Sometime around ten o’clock, I remember the library books and get them out. Gatsby’s choice of the self-defense book and the Kant don’t make any sense at all, but I glance over the poker books, more to satisfy my own curiosity than anything else. As I expected, the strategies are fundamental, most of them so simple and outmoded that they’re totally useless. Opening the third book, I find a yellow Post-it stuck inside the front cover. It reads:

Will:

If you’re reading this, it means you haven’t written me off as a total whack job. If you still decide to go tonight, good luck. And be careful around Brandt. If you haven’t figured it out yet, he cheats.

—G

I peel the note off and stick it up on the corner of my empty bookshelf, then look at it for a second. Sometime later, the bell tower chimes again.

It’s time to go.

Students at Connaughton have a strict eleven o’clock curfew on Fridays, so I check to make sure the coast is clear before slipping out the window with my jacket buttoned up to my chin. The temperature’s already plunged to what feels like single digits, and late-October starlight is so sharp that it feels like I could snap off whole chunks of it and suck on them like icicles. My breath smokes out behind me as I duck below the eaves of my building, keeping to the shadows.

Crowley House is only three buildings away, but it still takes me ten minutes of island hopping to get there, since I’m trying to avoid stepping out into the open. When I reach the dorm, I stop outside the door and look in at the tall, red-haired campus security guard shooting me a look of dead-eyed indifference.