Problem was, I wasn’t sure I could take another step closer to save the bee without losing my balance on the slippery rocks and falling ass-first into the water.

So I stood there, in over a foot of water cold enough to make me shiver, trying to figure out how to get to the bee and bring it back to dry land, without getting myself soaked in the process. Not exactly how I thought my quick trip from my dorm room to the campus store for a supply of self-pity-party candy was gonna go.

I waited for him to mock me. Which would be understandable. This was a situation ripe for mockery.

Instead, he asked, “So why aren’t you saving it?” His British voice was clipped and precise, like he was a fifty-year-old member of Parliament. Which was one of the many reasons he got shit from our classmates for whom a New England boarding school education wasn’t something to be achieved as much as a birthright.

“Because I can’t move.”

“What?” He cupped his ear. To be fair, he was about fifteen feet away and I had mumbled.

I raised my voice. “I can’t move!”

He seemed puzzled. “Just step back.”

“I can’t.”

The lampposts along the pathway and bridge cast shadows in a way that I couldn’t fully see his face. Not that I needed to. He was clearly looking from the land surrounding the pond, which was two feet behind me, back to me and finding the gap to be undaunting.

But I was daunted.

He shook his head and continued across the bridge. I assumed he’d gone on to wherever it was he was headed. Which was a relief, because I was feeling like a huge dork and no one needed an audience for that.

I glanced back at the bee, now closer to me than a few moments earlier, but also still out of my reach, and wondered, What the hell am I doing . . . ?

“Here.”

My head whipped around to find Arthur on the edge of the pond, extending a long, reedy tree branch toward me.

“Use this,” he continued, nodding in the direction of the water.

I stared at him, surprised and uncertain. In the six months since I arrived at Barrington, we hadn’t had many interactions outside of occasional classroom activity and one tipsy conversation at the Halloween party thrown by Bronwyn Campbell. But he’d never struck me as the sort of person who would give a second’s consideration to the welfare of a bee. It felt beneath Arthur Chakrabarti Watercress, whose British Indian mother was a world-renowned scientist of some kind (don’t ask me the field) and whose white, London-businessman father’s lineage could be traced back to the Wars of the Roses.

He frowned in irritation and waggled the branch. “Do you want to save it or not? Because it’s not going to last forever, given the circumstances.”