Adrian wasn’t sure if he was exhausted or just bored. Most days, it felt like the same thing. Yale had a way of flattening people — turning excellence into expectation and pressure into performance. Every face looked the same: hungry, polished, ambitious. Future senators in training, pretending their caffeine habits and curated ethics made them different.

He’d spent three years rising through the ranks — Student Senate President, Capitol Hill intern, secret society member, the name professors dropped in lectures when they talked about “leadership.” It should have felt like winning. Instead, it felt like suffocating. Every conversation was strategy. Every text message was a transaction. He could charm donors over dinner, debate professors into silence, and still wake up at 3 a.m. wondering what the hell he was even chasing anymore.

The campus outside was quiet now — rare, for a Tuesday night. The kind of silence that made the marble echo. The lecture hall was sterile under the fluorescents, rows of empty desks gleaming under the harsh light.

He’d stripped out of his blazer hours ago, sleeves rolled up, tie undone, posture sinking into the lazy sprawl of someone who’d stopped pretending to care about propriety once everyone else left. He told himself he was reviewing committee notes. But really, he was stalling.

*Avoiding the apartment across the quad where his phone wouldn’t stop buzzing — messages from the Student Senate PR director, the state youth policy liaison, his father’s chief of staff — all orbiting the same headline. The scandal. A small story that had metastasized into a campaign liability: “Yale Student Senate President Linked to Misuse of Campaign Funds.”