Chapter 5: Somebody Else's Credit

Somebody Else’s Credit

She started in again, and Cal kept walking.

He had heard the opening before. He could have said it along with her, in the same order, with the same small pause in the middle where she wanted him to interrupt.

The walk was more interesting. Two rows of lindens dropping something yellow on the pavers that the grounds crew wouldn’t get to before Thursday. Two juniors on the low wall with a phone held between them, heads together, one of them tilting it flat so the other could see. Marcus with his cello case upright between his feet, waiting on the ride that was late every day of the year. The four freshmen who had made room for him on the steps, thirty feet ahead now, walking at the speed of four people with nowhere to be.

“—because I’ve thought about this,” Tessa said, “and I want to say it once, out loud, in daylight, where you can’t pretend you didn’t hear me.”

“Mm,” Cal said.

“That’s not—“ She made a noise at the back of her throat and let it go. “Why won’t you answer.”

He moved the bag strap from one shoulder to the other.

“No. Forget that.” She came around in front of him, walking backward now, because she had worked out sometime in September that he wouldn’t walk through her. “That was a stupid question. I know why you don’t answer. Let me ask a better one.”

She was good at this. That was the part he never said out loud. Two years, and she had never once repeated herself by accident.

“You keep it,” she said, “because it’s the only thing in your name.”

That was better than most of them. It was better than any of them.

“Not the house.” She counted it off on her fingers, not caring that counting on your fingers was a thing people stopped doing at fourteen. “The house is your parents’. The car’s the house’s. There are three families in this town picking over what’s left of your father’s company, and a nineteen-year-old is holding the lid down on it with both hands, and none of that is you. And then there’s one thing anybody could point at and say, that’s his, and it’s a ring she put on the table when she was ten.”

There was nothing to read. That was the part nobody asked about. Two years, and it had never once occurred to her to ask whether the thing she was defending existed anywhere except in other people’s agreement that it did.

“It’s not even a promise,” Tessa said. “It’s a bill. Your parents took her in and fed her and paid for the—“ a small failure of vocabulary, a flick of the hand, “—whatever she had, and now she wears your name on her hand for the rest of her life because your father said something at a dinner table.”

He could have corrected her. It would have cost one sentence. That his father had not asked for it. That the ring had come down the stairs the next morning before anybody was awake to stop it. That his mother had spent a day trying to give it back and lost to a ten-year-old who would not move out of a doorway. But a correction was a payment. She would carry it out the gate and spend it, and by Sunday the town would know there was a story behind the ring, and somebody would come and ask him what the story was.

“Nobody’s afraid of you,” Tessa said. She had given up on walking backward and was beside him now, half a step ahead, chin turned in. “That’s the part I can’t make anybody understand when I try to explain you. Those four.” A lift of her chin at the freshmen. “They get out of your way every afternoon and you think it’s respect. It’s four kids doing arithmetic.”

He did think that, a little. Not enough to argue about.

“My brother’s in the Advanced Program,” she said. “He says there’s a kid in his seminar does an impression of your well. Holds his hand up like he’s looking into a cup with nothing in it. He does it at parties. You’re the only person in this town who doesn’t know it’s funny.”

The lindens ran out, and the gate stood at the end of the walk with the street behind it.

“Are you going to go?” she said.

He didn’t answer that one either, which she took for an answer.

“You are.” She said it without heat, which was worse. “You’ll book it. You’ll get there early. You’ll sit at a table with both hands on it and wait for a Bell to finish his afternoon, and he’ll be late on purpose, because he can be.”

She was right about that part. Bell had been early to everything, back when being early to it had been worth something to him.

“Can you even—“ She stopped herself, which she almost never did. “Never mind. It’s not the money.”

It was a little bit the money.

“You haven’t earned one thing since the day you were born.”

“That’s fair,” Cal said.

It came out flat, because he meant it. She heard the flatness and stopped walking.

“You did that on the steps,” she said.

He kept going. She came after him.

“You did it on the steps and you’re doing it now and you think it’s the same as winning.” Both arms around the bag, and her ears red. “I have spent two years on this. Two years. Do you think I do it because I enjoy it? I do it because somebody in this situation ought to be saying the true thing out loud, and it is obviously not going to be you.”

Say one true thing. She had meant it as a dare on the steps and she had no idea how close it had come. He had one. He had several. He moved the strap to the other shoulder and said nothing at all.

Somewhere out on Chapel Street a car went by without slowing down.

Tessa started again and talked the length of the walk. Halfway along he stopped hearing the words and heard the shape instead, which never changed, and her voice going up the way it did when she thought she was winning.

He put his palm on the gate bar and leaned until it gave.

Chapel Street came in—a bus idling up at the corner, the crossing guard’s whistle, somebody leaning on a horn two blocks away—and then over the length of one breath all of it went down.

Not off. Down. The way a room goes when a hand turns a dial.

The four freshmen had stopped. Marcus was on his feet with the cello case in his hand and hadn’t noticed that he had stood up. A car door opened once, close by, and shut.

Tessa’s voice ran out in the middle of a word, and her mouth stayed open around the rest of it.

“Tessa,” Cal said. “You were saying.”

She didn’t answer. She was looking past him, down toward the street, and for once she wasn’t arranging her face for anybody.

Cal kept his hand on the gate bar. The quiet had gone to one place, all of it at once, and the place was outside and to his left, and he did not look.

“Tessa.”

Nothing.

He stayed where he was, one hand on the iron, his bag slipping off his shoulder, and looked at her instead.