Washington Central University’s campus gives the novel a public, everyday setting for the private conflict among Tessa Young, Hardin Scott, and Zed. Its crosswalks, athletic building, locker room, and yoga classroom mark the ordinary passage between classes, but those routines repeatedly bring Tessa into situations where her loyalties and decisions are unsettled. The campus is not simply a backdrop: its shared spaces make personal conversations difficult to contain, while its recurring academic rhythms contrast with the emotional instability Tessa carries between encounters.

Academic Routine and Future Plans

The campus appears as part of Tessa’s student life, structured by walking between destinations, changing for class, carrying a yoga mat, and fitting conversations around her schedule. In one passage, she and Landon wait for a crosswalk light to change. Landon has brought out a list of names as he prepares to make calls to New York University; Tessa responds with enthusiasm and tells him that he would do well there. His hope of entering the summer semester, and his worry that he might not be accepted or might have to take the summer off, bring the prospect of a future beyond their present university into the conversation. The campus thus hosts not only romantic turbulence but also the practical choices through which its students imagine what comes next.

That forward-looking exchange sits beside Tessa’s unresolved feelings for Hardin. She admits to herself that she misses him and that a kiss has revived an attachment she had nearly managed to put behind her. The cold weather and the sweatshirt she is wearing are ordinary details of the walk, but the scene’s movement toward Landon’s plans does not resolve her private confusion. Instead, the contrast makes the campus feel like a place where life continues according to schedules even when Tessa’s emotional sense of direction has become uncertain.

The Athletic Building and Yoga Class

The athletic building is one of the campus’s most clearly defined spaces. Tessa changes in its locker room, retrieves her mat, and reaches yoga only five minutes before the class begins. Someone else has taken her customary place at the front, so she settles in the back row near the door. The small displacement is concrete and unremarkable, yet it establishes her arrival as part of a routine that can be interrupted by other people and events.

Before class, Tessa has been trying to decide how to speak to Zed. She intends to tell him that she cannot feel for him what she feels for Hardin, to apologize for kissing him, and to say that friendship is all she can offer. But Zed’s kindness and manner of speaking unsettle her resolve; she finds herself flustered and unable to hold firmly to the words she had planned. When he tells her that Hardin was at Jace’s the previous night, the information catches her off guard and adds another question to the conversation she expects to have with Hardin. The campus routine therefore intersects with a specific emotional difficulty: Tessa is trying to define one relationship while information about another keeps pulling her attention elsewhere.

Yoga offers a brief counterpoint. After the class is dismissed, Tessa feels clearer and better, rolls up her mat, and leaves the room. That improvement is real but temporary. Near the locker room, Hardin catches up with her, runs his hands over his hair, and nervously says that he wants to discuss something. Tessa resists doing so in the middle of the athletic building, where their problems would be handled in a public institutional space rather than on her own terms. The location shapes the encounter: it brings them face to face, but does not oblige her to accept an immediate conversation.

Public Encounters and Private Tensions

The athletic building also appears in Hardin’s perspective. After Nate and Logan leave him in front of it, he acknowledges his anxiety about seeing Tessa and dwells on how she might have worn her hair. He is surprised by the change in his own attention: thoughts that once would have seemed unlike him now occupy him as he waits for her. The entrance area becomes a point of anticipation, showing how an ordinary campus threshold can acquire emotional weight through the person expected to pass through it.

These campus episodes place Tessa and Hardin in shared surroundings without making their relationship easy or settled. Tessa has to balance classes and her plans for a conversation with Zed against the knowledge that she needs to speak with Hardin; Hardin, in turn, watches for her and approaches when she leaves yoga. The university’s public spaces allow these encounters to happen, but they also expose the limits of what can be resolved in passing. A crosswalk conversation with Landon looks toward an educational future, while the athletic building returns the focus to competing attachments and unfinished discussions.

Narrative Significance

The campus’s significance lies in its repeated association with ordinary movement and emotional interruption. Students walk, wait, change clothes, attend class, and leave for their next obligation; within those routines, Tessa’s intentions are repeatedly revised by what she hears or whom she meets. Her planned rejection of Zed remains difficult to deliver, yoga briefly clears her head, and Hardin’s arrival immediately presents another conversation she does not want to have there. The sequence does not turn the university into a solution to her conflict. Rather, it gives that conflict a recognizable daily geography, where private choices have to be made amid schedules, classrooms, and shared corridors.

Washington Central University also places personal change beside the prospect of departure. Landon’s calls to New York University make the possibility of a different academic future tangible, even as Tessa remains caught in the immediate question of what she feels for Hardin and what she can offer Zed. Taken together, the campus scenes hold two kinds of movement at once: outward movement toward classes and future plans, and inward, less orderly movement through uncertainty. That contrast is what makes the location consequential to the relationship narrative.