Chapter 7: Not Him

“Nothing,” Milo said. “It’s nothing.”

He was already moving when he said it, off the last step and down the drive, because standing there under that question was worse than anything the next ten minutes could do to him.

Adrian turned and went down ahead of him, unhurried, and by the time Milo caught up, the passenger door stood open and Adrian was beside it with one hand in his pocket.

He didn’t tell him to hurry. He didn’t check his watch or look back at the house or do any of the small things a person does to make you feel late. He stood there with the door open and watched Milo come.

Milo had to step past him to reach the door. He stopped there.

“Thank you,” he said. It came out smaller than he meant it to, which was how most things came out around this man.

Adrian didn’t answer. He watched him get in, and then he shut the door. Normally. The way doors get shut.

Then he walked around the front of the car to his own side, and in the turn his mouth flattened once and let go. Nobody was there to see it.

Inside, the quiet closed over the two of them.

Milo put his hands in his lap and looked at the window. Glass, road, houses going by, and his own face laid over the top of it, faint. Better than looking left.

They left the city behind. The houses spaced out, then got bigger, then got hidden behind trees, and the light coming through the branches kept the inside of the car moving.

He had a rule for this car. His rule was to be easy to sit next to: no questions, no long answers, nothing that needed anything back from the man driving. He had kept that rule for a month, and it had kept him exactly where he started, which he supposed was the point of it.

Twice he got a sentence ready. The second one was about the weather. He let it go.

“Half an hour yet,” Adrian said.

Milo took his head off the glass, because he had no idea what that was supposed to be — an apology, a countdown, a piece of information he was expected to do something with. He blinked at him and left it there.

Adrian looked back one beat longer than the sentence needed. Then he put his right hand over the top of the wheel, loose, and ran his thumb once along the side of his finger, slowly, and stopped.

“I can put music on, if you want.”

Milo stared at him. The profile against the moving light at this distance was unfair — the straight nose, the mouth, nothing moving in it. He had a rule about that, too, and the rule failed, and he looked away first.

“Okay,” he said.

That was out of his mouth before he had anything to do with it. He opened it again to take it back, and Adrian’s hand had already moved, and the speakers had already started, so Milo closed his mouth and sat back and took it.

The song was in English. A piano, a voice, nothing else in it. Easy on the ear. The kind of thing that asks nothing of you.

It was four bars in before he understood that it was about a person who had wanted somebody from across a room for a very long time and had never said so, and that this was the whole song. No story in it. Just a voice saying that one thing over and over, in a key that wouldn’t let him out of the car.

He could have said something over it. Traffic. Weather. Whether they were going to be late. There was a whole vocabulary for that and he knew all of it.

He looked at his hands instead and let it come.

He had been carrying this around since before he could drive. Usually he took it out on purpose, on the bad nights, looked at it, put it back. This time it came out on its own and sat down between them.

The first time, he came around the corner of the school building, and there it was: Adrian Hale with his back against the trunk of the tree, head tipped up, eyes closed, the afternoon coming down on him through the leaves in pieces. Milo stopped in the middle of the path and stood there like an idiot until the bell rang. He didn’t know him yet. He knew exactly what to call the feeling, though, and there was nobody alive he could have said it to.

The second time was the court. Somebody fouled him — somebody always fouled him — and the crowd came off the bleachers and got loud about it, and he went up off two feet with his face exactly the way it had been a second earlier, put the ball in, and walked back down the floor like it had cost him nothing. Milo thought about that one for two weeks.

That was how it went. One afternoon of the same feeling, and then the same afternoon again, and again, for years, until he had to stop lying to himself about the word for it.

He learned where he sat. He learned which hallway to take and which door to come in by, and which of those choices were accidents and which ones he was making on purpose, and he was honest about that, at least, in his own head. He never spoke to him. He got very good at being a person at the edge of the frame.

When the applications went out, he filled in one school. That was the entire plan, and it worked: same school, same year, in the end some of the same rooms.

And then there was already someone standing beside Adrian Hale.

He never found out what that was. Nobody told him and he didn’t ask, because there are answers you don’t need spelled out. He had worked out the important part fast enough. He had spent four years walking toward a door that had been open the whole time for somebody else.

The name in Adrian Hale’s heart was not his.

He had known that for a long time. He packed it up, stopped taking it out where people could see, got through school. He quit, and it held, for a couple of years. He found out you could have a life in the same city and never once turn up in the same room.

Then there was the accident.

After that the lines crossed again. There were papers, and arrangements, and a set of choices handed to him, and everyone within shouting distance of him told him not to take them. He took them. He came into that family married in, and he paid for it with the last clean thing he had, which was that he had been the boy those people took in out of kindness and nothing else. He walked back in through the same front door as a man married into the house. In the arithmetic of that family, that was not a step up. He had known it before he did it.

He had told himself it was enough just to be in the room.

For one month it wasn’t even that. Same roof, same hallways, the same staff moving around the two of them. Adrian was not cruel to him. Cruel would have been something to work with — cruel has information in it. This was nothing. A man being civil to the furniture. Milo’s coat on the rack and Milo’s footsteps on the stairs did not land on him anywhere at all, for one month, until Milo started doing the arithmetic of a person who was going to leave. What he could afford. Where he would go. What he would say when he said it. He had it about half worked out.

And then Adrian Hale touched him.

It was a second, three weeks ago, and Milo still had not decided one single thing about what it meant. He had been happy for a stretch of time he never managed to measure afterward. And then he had been afraid.

Because he had never once been lucky. Not at school. Not in the lottery of families. And this — the one thing he had ever wanted handed to him, arriving now, after he had already decided to put it down — had the exact shape of a joke.

He would rather not have it. He would rather have the month back. The not-looking, the clean ordinary nothing, a month in which he knew exactly where he stood and it was not on the carpet in front of the fireplace, waiting for somebody to say a word to him.

He wouldn’t have said any of it out loud if you paid him. Could you put something down and still be carrying it? He had never worked that out, or found anybody to ask. He had never said it — not to anyone, not out loud to himself, and never to the man driving.

“We’re here,” Adrian said.

The car had stopped. Milo looked up and out: ironwork, a gate standing open, the drive going up between old trees, and the house at the end of it with its windows lit in the middle of the day. He had come through this gate at fourteen with one bag and no idea what he was walking into. The trees looked the same.

He got his belt off and got out. The door shut behind him and he was walking, gravel under his shoes, up the drive, fast, both hands, not stopping to wait for anybody, not looking back at the car.

Adrian didn’t get out.

He watched him go up. Milo walked it like a man who had been sent rather than brought, and halfway along he reached up and adjusted a bag strap that wasn’t there, and kept walking.

Adrian put his head back against the seat and half closed his eyes and left his hands where they were. The sun on the windshield had made the car warm, and under him the engine ticked as it cooled.

He had seen the face in the car. Not one Milo wore in that house; in that house Milo’s face was a front-hall face, careful and blank and usable. This one had come up on him somewhere under the song and stayed for less than a minute, and then he had put his hands back on his knees and looked at the window and it was gone.

He had noticed. He had not asked.

Who had he been thinking about?