Chapter 1

Nicole had learned that there were many different ways of being invisible. There was the obvious kind, the kind that came from sitting alone in a crowded cafeteria while everyone else seemed to belong to somebody, and there was the quieter kind, which was much harder to explain because nobody could see it happening. Nicole was surrounded by people almost every day. She attended lectures, answered questions, laughed with classmates, exchanged messages with friends, and occasionally spent an entire afternoon in the library with three other students. People knew her name. Professors recognized her. Someone was always asking to borrow her notes. Yet she often had the peculiar sensation that she was passing through college like a shadow, present enough to be useful but never important enough to be truly seen. Perhaps it was because she was so small. At twenty-one, Nicole was very short, so short that she sometimes felt the world had been designed at the wrong scale. Taller girls could lean against the shelves in the library and look effortlessly elegant; Nicole had to reach upward for books. In group photographs, she disappeared behind shoulders. At parties, she could spend ten minutes looking for someone she had been standing beside because a taller person had stepped between them. People called her cute, and she hated that word more than she could explain. Cute was what people called kittens, children, small handbags, and little cars. Nicole did not want to be cute. She wanted to be noticed.

And then there was Simon.

Simon seemed to belong to a completely different physical universe. He was one of the tallest students on campus, a member of the college basketball team, and the kind of young man whose presence was noticed before he had actually done anything to attract attention. He had broad shoulders, long athletic limbs, an easy smile, and the loose, confident movements of somebody who had spent years learning exactly what his body could do. When he walked across the courtyard with a basketball beneath his arm, people moved around him almost instinctively. Nicole had begun noticing him during her first year, although at the time she had told herself it was nothing. Then she began noticing the days when he was absent. She learned when the basketball team practiced. She recognized the sound of his laugh from halfway down a corridor. She knew that he drank his coffee black, that he always seemed to lose pens, that he tapped his fingers against a desk when he was trying to remember something, and that after practice his dark hair was usually damp and slightly disordered. She knew these things without ever deliberately deciding to learn them, which was perhaps the most embarrassing part. Simon, meanwhile, knew very little about her beyond the things that any friend might know. He knew she was intelligent. He knew she was funny. He knew that she was exceptionally good at organizing group projects and that she hated being late. He knew that she was short. He simply did not seem to understand that there was anything remarkable about that fact.

Their friendship had developed naturally, and that was precisely what made it painful. They talked often enough that Nicole could not pretend they were strangers, but never often enough for her to believe there was something deeper between them. Once, they had worked together on a presentation and Simon had leaned back in his chair, looked at the impossibly neat notes she had prepared, and said with a grin, “You know, Nicole, I’m beginning to suspect that you secretly enjoy making the rest of us look incompetent.”

Nicole had laughed because the teasing was exactly the sort of thing she liked about him. She had pushed one of her papers toward him and answered, “Only when you make it particularly easy.”

Simon had laughed too, and for a few seconds the exchange had felt strangely intimate to her. She had noticed the warmth in his eyes and the way he had leaned slightly closer across the desk, and her imagination had immediately begun building something that did not exist. Then Simon had reached for his notebook and added, almost casually, “Could you send me your notes tonight? I forgot to save my copy.”

That was Simon.

There was never anything wrong with him.

That was what made it so difficult.

He was kind to her. He listened when she spoke. He remembered small things she had told him. He treated her with the easy respect he gave everyone he considered a friend. But there was no hesitation in his voice, no nervousness, no searching glance, no sudden silence when she came near. He never seemed to wonder what she was thinking about him.