Chapter 2: Password

The light above them went last, and then it was the window and the two of them.

“Okay,” Wren said. “That’s a yes.”

“It’s not a yes.”

“You put the broom down.”

“I put the broom down,” he said, “because my arm was tired.”

She hopped up and sat on the edge of the teacher’s desk, heels knocking the drawer, and looked at him the way somebody looks at a car that’s finally started in the cold: relieved, and already impatient with the engine.

“Three thirty-four,” she said, nodding at the clock. “You’ve got until three thirty-six.”

Ethan stood where he was.

No hopes, no disappointments. That was the arrangement.

“Sit,” she said.

He sat. Front row, center, because that was where he sat, and because if he sat anywhere else in this room he would have had to think about why.

“Here’s how this works, Hale,” Wren said. “You ask me things. Anything you want. If I get one wrong, I go, and I never bring it up again, and you can go back to sweeping the track and being invisible and being fine.”

“And if you don’t get one wrong.”

“Then you owe me two minutes of not walking out of a room.”

He had a whole list of reasons to say no and he could feel all of them stacked up behind his teeth, and what came out was: “What’s my favorite movie.”

“That’s not a question, that’s a category.”

“What’s my favorite movie.”

“Second Unit.”

She said it before he finished the word movie. She didn’t do the thing people do, the little upward tilt at the end, waiting to be told she was close.

He sat there.

“You tell people it’s the last twelve minutes,” she said. “It’s not the last twelve minutes. It’s the part where he’s standing on the corner and the marquee’s got his movie on it and his name isn’t up there. You said you’ve never once gotten through that part without standing up.”

Ethan looked at the clock.

He had, in fact, never once gotten through that part without standing up. He’d stood up in his own apartment, alone, in the dark, with a bowl of cereal in his hand.

“And you said the guy who plays him is the only man alive who could turn you,” Wren said, “and then you made me promise I’d never say that out loud. So.” She spread her hands. “I’m saying it out loud.”

“You could have not.”

“I could have not.”

“Because that’s a thing you say at two in the morning. That’s not a thing that gets repeated.”

“Noted,” she said, and she wasn’t even smiling.

“A song,” Ethan said. “What’s my favorite song.”

“Halden Ross. ‘Somebody Else’s Year.’” She tucked one ankle behind the other. “You listen to everything. You listen to garbage on purpose so you can have an opinion about it. But that’s the one. And it’s not because of the melody, even though it is because of the melody, it’s because — and I’m quoting you — because you can’t hear it without building the whole movie in your head. Two people who are right for each other by about ten minutes. Ten minutes the entire time. And at the end—“

“—she gets on the train anyway,” Ethan said.

“She gets on the train anyway.” Wren nodded slowly. “You told me you could see the whole thing. Shot for shot. You said it was the best thing you’d ever made and you hadn’t made anything.”

“I’ve never told anybody that.”

“No,” she agreed. “You haven’t.”

The clock said three thirty-five.

“The book,” Ethan said. “You already did the book.”

“I did the book.”

“So this is—“ He stopped, because the sentence he was building had no good ending. “You’re saying I told you all of this. At some point. In the future. Where I’m a screenwriter and you’re a star and we’re—“ He gestured at the space between them, at nothing. “This is a joke. It’s a very long joke and the setup is insane but it’s a joke.”

“I told you what I am,” Wren said. “You’re allowed not to believe me. You’re not allowed to act like I didn’t say it.”

“Two stars on season three,” Ethan said, “was generous.”

“Two stars on season three was generous,” she said, in his voice, and then in her own, “and you’re changing the subject, which is fine, because—“ she checked the clock, “—that’s three thirty-six, and I don’t care.”

She slid off the desk and stood.

“Ask me what we are,” she said.

“What?”

“In the future. Ask me what we are.”

“I don’t want to ask that.”

“I know,” she said. “Ask anyway.”

Ethan looked at his knees. He could feel the shape of the trap and he stepped into it anyway, carefully, both hands out.

“We’re not together,” he said.

Wren didn’t move.

“I mean, come on.” He laughed, and it came out wrong. “There’s four hundred and something people in my grade and about eleven hundred in the building, and statistically there is no version of the next ten years where a person like me and a person like you are anything. I’m not being sad about it, I’m being accurate. It’s not a value judgment. It’s just counting.”

“Say the rest of it.”

“There’s no rest of it.”

“You started a sentence and cut it off,” she said. “You do that in class too. You get to the part where you’d have to say a true thing and you put the pencil down.”

“Because it’s not going to happen,” Ethan said. “Because if I say it out loud and it doesn’t happen, then I said it. Then I’m the guy who said it.”

Wren put her hand flat on the desk.

“Bingo,” she said, very quietly. “Correct.”

“See,” Ethan said, “that’s not—“

“He said it exactly like that.”

“He said there’s no version of it.” Wren was looking at the blackboard now, at her own two exclamation points. “He did the math out loud. He laughed at the end of it so it would be a joke if anybody got mad. The you standing there right now and the you I’m talking about are not similar. Not a little. Not in a way where you could say, well, people change. You are the same person with the same haircut and the same number of reasons.”

“That’s not fair,” Ethan said. “I haven’t done anything yet.”

Wren turned around.

He had seen her cry on television. Everybody in the building had — she’d been in a miniseries when she was nine and there was a scene in a hospital hallway where she sat on the floor for four minutes and didn’t say a word, and people still posted the clip. In interviews she said she could do it on the first take, any time, like a card trick.

So he knew exactly what it looked like when she did it on purpose.

This wasn’t that. He didn’t have a reason for thinking so. He just didn’t think it was.

“Do you want to know what you do?” she asked.

“The good parts,” Ethan said. “You’re giving me the good parts.”

“It’s not a horoscope, Hale.”

“The good parts.”

She came over and sat on the desk in the front row, next to his, one knee up. Close enough that he had to choose where to look. He chose the floor.

“You’re a writer,” she said. “You’re good. You’re not — you’re not a guy who got lucky one time. People quote you. People in rooms repeat things you said in other rooms, and they don’t know where they got them.”

“How good.”

“You’re the guy other people want to be sitting next to at two in the morning.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the true one.”

Ethan put his hands on the desk.

“What kind of writer,” he said. “You said it like it had a shape. What kind.”

Wren was quiet for a second, and then she said, “Second Unit.”

He didn’t understand it at first. It took him maybe a second and a half, and then it went through him like a step that wasn’t there.

The film was about a man who wrote one good script. The studio bought it and hired him back at scale to shoot the inserts on his own movie. That was the job, for the rest of his life: standing in for the actual director, framing other people’s close-ups, going home at night.

“It’s a movie,” Ethan said. “It’s a movie in the world. Somebody wrote it in a room.”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re saying,” he said, and cleared his throat. “You said I was alive. At the start. You said it like it was a question.”

“It was.”

“Why was it a question?”

“Because it’s a long story,” Wren said, “and you’re going to ask me for the short one, and the short one is going to be true and you’re not going to like the shape of it.”

“Give me the short one.”

The short one was this.

At thirty-one, he’d saved money — years of it, the good years, the ones where people wanted him in rooms — and he’d decided to stop writing other people’s movies and put his own money into his own. And then somebody took the script. Not bought it. Took it. The years were gone, all at once, in a way that doesn’t come back, and he was standing in a room he’d paid for and there was nothing in it.

“And then you—“

She stopped.

Ethan looked at the blackboard. HEROES COME BACK. Two exclamation points, chalk dust on the tray, one light still on in the hallway, and a girl sitting on a desk next to him with her knee pulled up and her mouth shut.

He did not ask.

“Who took it,” he said instead.

“I’m not telling you that.”

“Why not.”

“Because you’d spend a year on it.”

“I’d spend a year on it anyway. I’m going to spend a year on it starting tonight, so you might as well—“

“Ethan.”

“Okay.”

“You’re doing it right now,” Wren said. “You’re sitting there doing the thing where you make it a puzzle so it can’t be about you.”

“It can’t be about me. I’m seventeen. I haven’t done anything.” He heard his own voice get high and stupid. “Everything you’re describing, I haven’t done. I’d have to be a person who’d do it first. Right? I’m — look at me. Am I going to hold a set together? Am I going to tell forty people where to stand? I can’t tell the pizza guy my address without writing it down.”

“That’s not what this is.”

“Then what is it,” he said, and then, because that had come out too loud, “what is it.”

Wren stood up.

“You’ve never once made anybody angry by accident,” she said, “and you’ve never once gotten a thing you wanted. You think those are two things.”

“Here we go.”

“You could fix a problem with one sentence and you sit there with your mouth shut, because the sentence might come out wrong, and then somebody somewhere might have a feeling about you, and you’d have to be in a room where a feeling was happening.”

“I’m not—“

“You check the door. Every time. Before you say anything, you check where the door is.”

“It’s not a crime.”

“It’s not a crime, it’s a life.” She was standing over him now. “It’s a whole life, and you’re going to get to the end of it and there’ll be nothing in it, and it won’t be anybody’s fault, and that’s the part I can’t—“

She stopped and breathed.

“Say you want more than this,” she said.

“More than what?”

“Than a seat in the front row and nobody looking at you.”

Ethan opened his mouth.

“Say the sentence,” she said.

“I’d like—“

The bell went off down the hall. Neither of them moved. It rang itself out.

“I’d like,” Ethan said again.

He didn’t finish it.

Wren waited four seconds. He counted them.

“Okay,” she said, and something in her voice had gone quiet and businesslike. “Then we do it the other way.”

“The other way.”

“You’re not going to say it, so you’re going to do it, and then you’ll have said it with your feet.”

“That’s not a saying.”

“It is now, I invented it, get your bag.”

“I have to—“ Ethan pointed at the broom, still leaning on the wall where he’d left it. “That’s a school broom. It goes back in the—“

“Leave it.”

“If it’s missing Monday, I’m the one who has to explain it.”

“Leave it.”

He left it.

“From today,” Wren said, “you change. Not the whole thing, not tonight, I’m not insane. One thing. The first thing is you do something you have never done.”

Ethan put his bag on his shoulder.

“Can I think about it.”

“No.”

“I’m going to need a minute to think about it.”

“You can think about it while we’re walking.”

“That’s not how thinking—“

“First thing,” she said. “You’re not going to study hall.”

“I’m not at study hall,” Ethan said. “I’m technically in violation of study hall right now. As we speak. I have already committed the crime.”

“Nobody saw.”

“That’s—“ He stopped, because she had him.

“Nobody saw,” Wren said, “so it didn’t happen. You’re hiding in a building with nobody in it. That’s not rebellion, that’s a nap. Tonight you’re going to walk out the front door of this school with me, and everyone’s going to see it, and you’re not going to explain it to anybody.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll be walking.”

She held out her hand.

Ethan looked at it.

“Why are you doing this,” he said.

“Because I’m the girl,” Wren said, “and girls get the feelings plot. Boys get—“ she gestured at him, up and down, “—whatever this is. Hand.”

“You didn’t answer.”

“I know.”

“You know I know.”

“I know.” She wiggled her fingers. “Hand, Hale.”

He gave her his hand.

She did not hold it the way you hold a hand. She held it the way you hold a rope you’re about to pull, and then she pulled, and the door banged open on its little arm, and they were in the hall.

Eleven steps to the corner. Twenty-three to the stairwell. He knew. He’d been walking them for three years. He counted anyway.

She went left at the stairwell.

Left was the long way. Left went past the art wing, past the display case with the ceramics, past the library doors and the trophy case and the second-floor landing, and then all the way down the main stairs and out through the front office corridor, which was four times the distance of the right-hand stairwell that came out nine feet from the front doors.

“You’re going the wrong way,” he said.

“I know.”

“You know, or—“

“I’ve been in this building for three years too,” Wren said. “I know where the stairs are. I’m going this way.”

The first phone came up on the landing. A girl with a green backpack, sitting on the floor with her legs out, phone already in her hand — the little shutter sound, deliberately not muted.

Two juniors outside the art room stopped talking.

Somebody behind them said his name. Not to him. About him. Where the whole sentence is just the name.

“Wren,” Ethan said, low.

“Mm.”

“That was—“

“That was four people,” she said. “Now it’s nine.”

“Now it’s— you’re counting?”

“I’m always counting.”

They came around the corner to the main hall, and the doors to the library were propped with a chair, and the whole corridor had that end-of-the-day smell to it, floor wax and somebody’s microwaved food from the teachers’ lounge.

Becca Lund was at her locker with two other girls and a phone face-up in her hand.

Wren stopped.

“Becca.”

“Wren.” Becca’s eyes went from Wren’s face to their hands and stayed there. “You’re back. You’re — that’s Ethan.”

“That’s Ethan.”

“You and Ethan.”

“We’re going to get food,” Wren said. “Study hall’s not happening. Whatever else you want to ask me, ask me Monday.”

She leaned in and blew a kiss — a real one, exaggerated, hand out and everything.

“Love you,” she said. “Mean it.”

“Wren—“

“Monday.”

And she was walking again, and Becca was still standing there with her locker open, and Becca looked at Ethan. It was maybe a quarter of a second. Her eyes went to his hand, then to his face, and then down to the phone in her own hand.

Ethan looked at the floor and kept walking.

They went out through the front office corridor, past the counter, past the glass, past the sign taped to the glass that said all visitors must sign in, and out through the double doors into the afternoon, which was bright and stupid and full of that September light that makes everything look like it’s about to be over.

The doors swung shut behind them. Outside, the noise dropped off all at once.

Wren let go of his hand.

Ethan stood on the walk with his bag on one shoulder.

No hopes, no disappointments.

Ten seconds later she switched to her other hand and took his again.

He made a small sound.

“You’re sweating,” Wren said, conversationally. “The first hand. It’s very rude.”

“I’m going to have to repeat the year,” Ethan said. “I’ve done the math. Everything I had is in this hand and I’m going to fail precalc and repeat the year and my dad is going to—“

“Come on,” she said. “There’s a place two streets over. You’re going to hate it.”

“Why am I going to hate it?”

“Because the food’s good and you’ll have to have an opinion about it.”

She started walking. She didn’t let go.

He followed.