Boys Don’t Pray For this.

The First Wound

The library at St. Augustine's was older than the country it stood in.

That was what the brochure said, anyway, in the careful way brochures said things. The truth was less poetic. The truth was that the library was cold even in September, that the radiators hissed like something wounded, that the long oak tables had been carved over a century by bored boys with penknives and worse intentions, and that the lamp on the table Father Brennan had assigned to Elias and Julian for their translation work flickered every few minutes as if it, too, were thinking of leaving.

Elias arrived first. He always arrived first. He had been raised to believe that punctuality was a small, daily prayer a way of saying I respect your time, I respect this room, I respect the God who gave me both. So he sat at the table with his Latin grammar open and his pencils sharpened and his hands folded in his lap, and he waited.

Julian arrived twenty minutes late.

He did not apologize. He did not even slow down. He dropped into the chair across from Elias with the boneless grace of someone who had never once, in his life, been told to sit up straight, and he tossed his bag onto the floor with a heavy, deliberate thud that made the librarian look up over her glasses three tables away.

"Cicero," he said, by way of greeting. "Tedious old windbag. Let's get this over with."

Elias did not look up.

"You're late."

"Mm."

"Twenty minutes."

"Mm."

"Father Brennan said "

"Father Brennan," Julian said, opening his book to a page that was not the right page, "has been threatening to fail boys with my surname for forty years and has not yet succeeded. Shall we begin, or would you like to write me up first?"

Elias set down his pencil.

He looked at Julian properly for the first time since Latin that morning, and he found to his small, private surprise — that his hands were shaking. Not visibly. Just enough that he had to press them flat against the table to make them stop. He didn't know why. He had been bullied before. He had been condescended to, dismissed, mocked for the cadence of his English when he was tired and his mother's accent slipped through. None of that had ever shaken him.

This boy was not bullying him. This boy was not even trying.

That, Elias understood suddenly, was the thing.

"I'd like to begin," he said. His voice came out steadier than he felt. "Please open your book to page forty-two."

"Forty-two."

"Yes."

"Why forty-two?"

"Because that's where the assigned passage starts, Julian."

It was the first time Elias had said his name aloud. He hadn't meant to. It came out before he could stop it, and the moment it landed in the air between them he felt the shape of it on his tongue like something he had stolen. Julian's eyes lifted from his book — slow, lazy, suddenly interested — and Elias understood, with a sinking feeling, that he had just handed this boy a small and terrible piece of leverage.

Julian smiled.

It was not a kind smile. It was the smile of someone who had just been given a present he had not expected and intended to enjoy slowly.

"Say it again," he said.

"Page forty-two."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know what you meant. Page forty-two."

Julian leaned back. The library lamp flickered. In the dim, amber light, the small white scar through his eyebrow looked almost silver. He laced his hands behind his head, and his blazer fell open, and Elias saw — without meaning to see — the line of his throat, the loose-knotted tie, the hollow at the base of his neck where a thin gold chain caught the light and disappeared under his collar.

Look at the book. Look at the book. Look at the book.

Elias looked at the book.

"You don't like me," Julian said. It was a statement, not a question. He sounded almost pleased by it, the way a child is pleased to find a new and complicated toy.

"I don't know you."

"That's not the same thing."

"No," Elias said. "It isn't."

He picked up his pencil. He wrote the date at the top of his page. He wrote Cicero, In Catilinam I underneath in his careful, even hand, and beneath that, in smaller letters, the opening line of the passage. Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra. How long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience.

He thought, distantly, that Cicero had clearly never met a boy like Julian Ashford-Vance.

"Translate the first sentence," he said.

"You translate it. You're better at Latin than I am."

"That isn't true."

"Isn't it?"

"No," Elias said. "You're third in the class. I'm second. The ranking is posted on the board outside Father Brennan's office. You walk past it every morning."

A pause.

"You memorized the rankings?"

"I memorized my ranking," Elias said. "Yours was adjacent."

Julian laughed.

It was a real laugh, this time — short, surprised, almost startled out of him — and it changed his face entirely. The cold, watchful quality fell away for half a second, and underneath it Elias glimpsed something else. Something younger. Something that looked, briefly, like a boy who was tired.

The laugh was gone before Elias could be sure he had seen it. Julian sat forward, picked up his own pencil, and pulled his book toward him.

"Fine," he said. "Adjacent. How long, Catiline, will you continue to abuse our patience. Acceptable?"

"It's abutere. Future tense. Will you go on abusing."

"Pedant."

"It's the assignment."

They worked.

For a while, it was almost peaceful. Julian's Latin, when he bothered, was good — better than third in the class, Elias suspected; he was the kind of student who hid his intelligence the way other boys hid cigarettes. He translated quickly, made small dry jokes about Cicero's ego, corrected Elias once on a case ending and was correct, and the lamp flickered and the radiator hissed and somewhere in the long aisles between the stacks a girl was laughing softly at something a boy had whispered to her.

Elias began to relax. He did not mean to. It happened anyway, the way relaxation always happened to him — by accident, when he wasn't watching.

Then Julian said, without looking up:

"Why were you crying yesterday?"

Elias's pencil stopped.

"I wasn't."

"In the corridor. By the laundry room."

"I wasn't crying."

"Your eyes were wet."

"I wasn't —"

"All right." Julian shrugged, mild, still not looking up. "You weren't."

The silence that followed had a shape to it. It pressed against Elias's ribs from the inside. He stared down at the page in front of him — at his own neat handwriting, at Cicero's two-thousand-year-old anger — and he felt, distinctly, the moment when something inside his chest closed its hand into a fist.

"Don't," he said, very quietly.

Julian looked up.

"Don't what?"

"Don't pretend you care."

"Who said I cared?"

"Then don't ask."

It came out sharper than he meant. Sharper than he had ever spoken to anyone in this school, sharper than he had spoken to anyone in years, and the moment it was out he wanted to take it back, and he could not take it back, and Julian was watching him now with a still, intent expression that made the library feel suddenly very small.

"Scholarship," Julian said softly, "I'm going to give you some advice."

"Don't call me that."

"Boys here — boys like the ones in my corridor — they're going to make a sport of you. You know that. You felt it yesterday. They'll do it for the next two years if you let them, and then you'll graduate, and you'll go back to wherever you came from, and you'll spend the rest of your life telling your wife about that one school, and she'll feel sorry for you, and you'll hate her for it."

"Stop."

"You have to make them afraid of you, Elias. Just once. You don't have to win. You just have to —"

"Stop."

"— make them think twice. Otherwise —"

Elias slapped him.

It was not a hard slap. It was barely a slap at all — more of a strike of an open palm against a cheek, the kind of thing that would have embarrassed anyone watching. But the sound of it cracked through the library like a small, dry branch breaking, and for one suspended second neither of them moved.

Elias's hand was still raised.

Julian's head had turned with the impact, slowly, and he held it there — chin tipped, eyes lowered — for one long, considering breath. There was a faint pink shape blooming on his cheekbone in the shape of Elias's palm. Elias had never hit anyone in his life. Not his sister. Not the boys in his neighborhood who had once thrown a soda can at his head. He had been raised on the other cheek. He had been raised on forgive them, for they know not what they do.

His hand was shaking again. He lowered it. He could not seem to make himself breathe.

"Julian," he whispered. "I I'm —"

Julian turned his face back toward him.

Slowly. The pink shape on his cheekbone darkening already toward red.

He was smiling.

Not the cold smile from earlier. Not the amused one. This was something new. This was a small, private, astonished smile, the kind a person wears when they have just discovered a door in a wall they have walked past every day of their life.

"Do that again," he said, almost gently, "and I might start liking you."

Across the library, the librarian had stood up. Her chair scraped against the floor. She was already crossing the room, her sensible shoes silent on the worn red carpet, her face arranging itself into the expression of a woman who had worked at this school for thirty years and seen everything, everything, except a scholarship boy striking the heir of the Ashford-Vance bank in the second-floor reading room on a Tuesday afternoon in September.

Elias's mouth opened. No sound came out.

Julian held his eye. He did not turn toward the librarian. He did not move at all. He just looked at Elias with that small, astonished smile, as if Elias were the only thing in the room — as if the librarian, the library, the school, the country itself had narrowed down to this single oak table and the boy across it and beneath the table, where no one could see, his foot pressed, very slowly and very deliberately, against Elias's own.

And kept it there.