Chapter 10: It Suits You

He came in with his head down, which was not new, and with a band-aid on his jaw, which was.

There was a geography to that room, and Ethan had spent two years learning the parts of it where nobody looked. The window side was the good light; the front two rows were where the answers lived; the back corner under the pencil sharpener belonged to Marc Boyd and whoever Marc felt like talking to that week. Ethan’s route went down the aisle between the second and third rows, and it asked nothing of him except that he keep his eyes on the floor and not catch anybody else’s eye.

He caught the smell of the room first — floor wax, somebody’s coffee, the radiator that always ran hot — and then, under all of it, the change. Voices dropping. Two girls turning all the way around in their seats to look at him and then turning back.

He kept his head down and waited for it. Somebody leaning over. Somebody doing the kissy noise. Somebody saying so how was the walk, Hale, because the whole grade had seen Wren Lennox holding his hand on the quad Friday night with her fingers laced through his like they did it all the time.

Nobody said anything.

Marc was at the back with his chair tipped against the wall, a pen moving in his hand. He looked up once. He looked at the band-aid, and then at the floor, and then at his pen. That was all.

Ethan sat down. In half the games he played, this was the part before the ambush: the corridor empty, the music too quiet, every health bar full.

“Okay,” Becca said, the second his bag hit the floor. She had turned her whole body toward him, knees in the aisle. “Wren says her dad’s making her bring you to the gym now. She says you’re a natural. Is that true?”

“Something like that.”

He turned around. Wren was three desks back, in the middle of a knot of girls, hair pushed off her face. He looked for it — whatever Marc had been saying to her at the ropes, whatever her face had been doing while he couldn’t hear it — and got nothing. Then she saw him looking and waved, big and unhurried, and the girls around her turned to see who she was waving at and put their hands over their mouths.

So that was the story they’d been handed. A skinny kid with no friends, hauled to a boxing gym by the coach’s daughter. He’d have swallowed it too.

“That’s what I said.” Becca settled back. “Because, no offense, you don’t leave your house. Like, ever. If somebody doesn’t come and get you, you go home and you’re just —“ she gestured at him, at all of him, “— in your room. Doing whatever.”

“Reading.”

“Sure.” She flipped a hand. “Anyway, some of them were saying she likes you. Which is — I mean, come on.” She stopped. Her mouth stayed open. “That came out — I didn’t mean that the way it —“

“It’s fine.”

“No, because that sounded like —“

“I know what it sounded like.” He pulled his notebook out. “I wasn’t thinking that anyway.”

Becca looked at him a second, then nodded, and it was almost worse than if she’d laughed, because of how little was in it.

“Nobody in this class is going to say anything to your face,” she said. “In case you were wondering why it’s so quiet. You’re Wren Lennox’s project now. Nobody makes jokes about that to your face.”

She said it the way she’d have said the lunch schedule, and then she sniffed.

Then she sniffed again, and leaned in, and sniffed a third time with her whole face, close enough that he could see the pen mark on her thumb.

“What is that?”

“It’s cologne.”

“You wear cologne.”

“Apparently.”

That morning he had stood in the bathroom for three minutes with the bottle in his hand, and then he had done the wrist and behind the ears, exactly the way he’d been told, and spent the whole walk to school convincing himself that nobody would notice.

Becca sat back. She looked at the whiteboard. She looked at her hands, and then she turned her face away from him, and said, in a voice with the volume taken out of it, “It suits you. It’s — it smells good.”

“Thanks.”

“Your chin,” she said, still not looking at him, and tipped her own chin at it. “What happened to your chin?”

“Caught one at the gym.”

“Oh.” A pause. “You should be careful.”

“Yeah.”

He opened the notebook to a page with nothing on it. She pushed her hair behind her ear twice, which was once more than she needed to, and the air between them had gone strange, and he very much wanted the bell to ring.

He was still looking for something to say when she said, “The song you posted this weekend is really good.”

“What?”

“The song. Saturday night. The one with the —“ she hummed two notes, badly, “— that one.”

“You have my number?”

That did it. She laughed at him — delighted, entirely herself again — and put her chin on her hand.

“I’m class secretary. I run the group chat. I have everybody’s number. It’s literally on a list.” She turned her hand over, showing him her palm as if the list were written there. “Professional lurker. Three years deep. Nobody calls me the Archive. I call me the Archive.”

“Three years.”

“You post like a monk, by the way. All that stuff about — the one with the swords? And then nothing for a month. I’ve been watching your account since freshman year and I still don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

“Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“Sure.” She leaned in again, dropping her voice. “Also, you’re the worst texter in this school. Wren comments on your post at eleven at night and you go —“ she flattened her hand into a little rectangle and read aloud, “’Get some sleep. Don’t reply.’” She put her forehead down on her desk for a second. “I read it four times. I screenshotted it.”

“It was late.”

“She’s Wren Lennox.”

“Which is why I told her to go to sleep.”

Becca straightened up, wiping the corners of her eyes with her thumbs. “See, that’s the thing. I get that you’re not —“ she shrugged one shoulder, “— but she keeps writing the same word back. On every post. ‘Future.’ What is that? She’s written it like six times. What does it mean?”

He had the answer ready before she finished asking, which was the only part of the whole morning he could be proud of.

“I told her once that I dreamed about her. Before I met her. Like — a whole thing. In the dream.”

Becca’s face did something complicated.

“That,” she said, “is the most embarrassing thing I have ever heard in my life.”

“I know.”

“I mean it. I’m going to think about that tonight. In the dark.” She pressed her fingers to her nose, laughing anyway, and then she looked at him — no mockery in it now, only a sort of baffled fondness. “You’re such a dork, Hale.”

“Yeah.”

He smiled. It felt like holding a door shut with his shoulder. She didn’t ask anything else. The sentence had gone where he’d put it, and the bell hadn’t even rung yet, and it had cost him nothing at all.

Becca glanced left. She glanced right. Then she raised her hand and held it over her mouth.

“Hey,” she said. “Do you know what’s happening today—“

The bell went off over her head.

The door opened on the tail of it, and Ms. Whitfield came in with her coffee and her roll book, and behind her, holding the door and then letting it fall shut, came Julian Pryce with a stapled stack of paper in one hand.

That was all he was doing. He wasn’t posing. He came in behind the teacher, holding a door and a stack of paper, and the room turned toward him anyway, the way a room does, and the girls in the front row stopped pretending to read.

“Settle,” Ms. Whitfield said. “It’s been a month, and the unit test scores went up on the portal this morning, so — you know how this class runs. New unit, new seats. Top score sits in front, and we go down from there.”

Somebody at the back said, “Oh, come on.”

“Take it up with your study habits.” She tapped the stack in Julian’s hand. “Julian’s got the list. Everything off your desks, take your bags, and wait in the hall. He’ll call you in and tell you where to sit.”

Chairs started scraping. Ethan closed his notebook and put it in his bag, pulled the strap up over his shoulder, and pressed the band-aid flat against his jaw where the corner had lifted.

Becca was already in the aisle with her backpack on one shoulder, already at the door, already talking to somebody about whether the order started from the top or the bottom.