Scholarship Boy
882 Words
By the end of the first week, Elias had learned the geography of St.
Augustine's, which was not the geography on the map.
The map showed buildings: the chapel, the library, the Hartwell Science Wing, the dining hall named after a dead industrialist. The real map was different.
The real map was about who walked where, and who walked around whom, and which corridors belonged to whose surname.
The Ashford-Vance corridor was on the second floor of the senior dormitory.
Elias did not know this until he took a wrong turn looking for the laundry room and three boys in identical signet rings stopped him at the end of the hall like he had wandered into a bank vault.
"Lost?" said the tallest one. He was smiling. The smile was not a smile.
"I - yes. Sorry. I was looking for -"
"Scholarship?" said the second one, before he could finish.
Ellas's mouth opened. Closed.
"It's the shoes," said the third, helpfully.
"You can always tell from the shoes." Elias looked down before he could stop himself. They were his good shoes. His mother had polished them at the kitchen table the night before he left, humming an old song under her breath,and afterward she'd said, They look brand new, mijo. No one will know.
Someone always knew.
"Sorry," he said again, because his mother had also taught him that sorry was a door you could close behind you, and he wanted very much to close a door. He turned, and walked, and did not run, and did not look back, and the laughter that followed him down the corridor was a soft, almost gentle sound, which was somehow worse than if it had been cruel.
He found the laundry room eventually.
He sat on the bench while his single load of shirts went round and round in the industrial machine, and he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw stars, and he did not cry, because crying was for boys who had time for it.
That afternoon, in Latin, the seating chart was redrawn.
Father Brennan, who taught Latin and looked permanently surprised to still be alive, peered over his half-moon glasses at the class roster. "Mr. Moreno," he said. "You'll partner with Mr. Ashford-Vance for the year's translation project.
He needs... steadying."
A ripple went through the room. Elias didn't understand it until he turned in his chair and saw who was sitting at the desk by the window.
The boy from the chapel.
Of course.
He was leaning back, one arm slung over the chair, watching Elias the way a cat watches a sparrow it has not yet decided to chase. He was even more striking in daylight - pale, sharp-jawed, with a small white scar bisecting his left eyebrow. He had eyes the color of cold tea.
Elias's stomach did something unwelcome.
"I don't work with charity cases," the boy said, mildly, to no one in particular.
The class did not laugh. They held their breath instead - which was the more telling reaction. Elias understood, then, that this boy was not popular in the way he had been imagining. He was something stranger. He was feared.
Father Brennan didn't even look up.
"Then you may, Mr. Ashford-Vance, work alone, and fail alone, and explain alone to your father why you have failed.
Mr. Moreno, please move your things."
A muscle in the boy's jaw flickered.
Ellas gathered his books. He walked, on legs that did not feel entirely his own, to the desk by the window. He sat. He kept his eyes on his notebook and opened it to a clean page and wrote the date at the top in careful blue ink, because if he was writing he was not looking, and if he was not looking he could pretend he was somewhere else.
"Moreno," the boy said, under his breath, testing it. "Spanish?"
Ellas nodded once.
"Catholic, obviously."
He nodded again.
"Speak, scholarship. I won't bite."
Elias's pen stilled.
He did not look up. He kept his voice very low, very even - the voice he used with his father after a long shift, when the wrong word could turn a kitchen into a war.
"My name is Elias."
A pause.
"Julian," the boy said, after a moment.
His voice had changed, fractionally - less performance, more curiosity.
"Ashford-Vance, but you knew that."
"I didn't."
"You will."
It was not a boast. It was a tact, said tiredly, the way you might say the sun rises in the east. Elias risked a glance sideways. Julian was no longer watching him. He was looking out the window, at a square of green lawn where a groundskeeper was raking leaves, and his face had gone very still, very far away Father Brennan began to drone about Cicero.
Under the desk, Julian's foot tapped a quiet, restless rhythm against the floor.
Elias bent over his notebook and tried to copy the conjugations on the board, and tried not to notice that his pulse had picked up, and tried not to think about the cigarette folded in the handkerchief in his blazer pocket, where the rosary still lay.
He did not, in that moment, do a very good job of any of those things.
- Writer
