Beauty's on the Inside, not on the Outside

Gravity

Chapter Four: Gravity

December came in cold and close.

The project went well an A, which neither of them were surprised by, though Kessler had told them afterward that their analysis of narrative distance was, quote, "uncomfortably perceptive for people your age." Priya had celebrated this by bringing snacks to their lunch table, which had quietly expanded to include Alex in a way Jules couldn't track the exact moment of. It had just happened. He sat with them sometimes. Then most days. Then every day, with the quality of something that had always been there.

She learned him in pieces.

He played piano. Not casually seriously, the way you play something when it has your whole chest in it. He'd started at five, quit at twelve when his parents divorced, and picked it up again at fifteen when he "ran out of other things." He didn't perform it. He mentioned it once, in the context of a Chopin piece that came up in a discussion about structure in writing, and that was how she knew.

His mother was a surgeon. His father a civil engineer. They had separated with the specific painlessness of two very organized, emotionally functional people who had decided to stop being married. He saw them both regularly and had what he described as "fine" relationships with each of them in a tone that did not invite follow-up but that Jules had started to translate: fine meant I love them and I don't show it and they accept that and so do I.

He read everything. Not just assigned things everything. He had opinions about books Jules had never heard of and was opinionated about them in the particular way of someone who had been arguing about ideas in his own head for years and had stopped worrying about whether it made him sound pretentious, because he wasn't pretentious, he was just thinking out loud.

She told him things too.

Not all at once. In pieces, the same way. She told him about the swimming she'd started competitively at thirteen, because the pool was the one place where the air felt clean and the water covered everything and she could move through it and be only motion, only speed, only a body that worked. She told him she wanted to study environmental biology, which surprised him in a satisfying way. She told him her favorite book was one he hadn't read, and he went and read it, and they argued about the ending for an entire lunch period in a way that was the most fun she'd had in longer than she could easily calculate.

She didn't tell him about the fire.

Not because it was a secret it was visibly not a secret, it was written on her face but because there was a specific shape to the conversation where someone asked her about it, and she was waiting to see if he was someone who needed to have that conversation, or someone who had already understood that the fact of it was enough and the story belonged to her.

He didn't ask.

That, too, she filed carefully.

The lunch table dynamic shifted in the way of things that happen gradually and then suddenly.

Priya had accepted Alex's presence at their table with the gracious equanimity of someone who had been expecting it since October and was simply glad the inevitable had arrived. She treated him the way she treated everyone directly, warmly, without performance and he responded to this with what Jules had come to recognize as his version of appreciation, which looked from the outside like slightly less guardedness than usual.

They were an unlikely three. Priya talked enough for all of them when the mood took her, which it frequently did, and Jules and Alex existed in the comfortable spaces between her sentences in a way that worked better than it should have. Priya had opinions about everything about the school administration, about the lunch menu, about the specific injustice of AP exam scheduling, about music and films and the correct way to eat a granola bar, which apparently had a correct way that Jules had been doing wrong for years.

Alex listened to Priya with the patient attention of someone who found her genuinely interesting, which Jules noted because it was the same quality of attention he brought to things he actually cared about rather than things he was merely tolerating.

"You like her," Jules said to him one afternoon when Priya had gone to return her tray.

He looked at her. "She's interesting."

"High praise from you."

The almost-smile. "I mean it."

"I know you do." Jules looked at her own tray. "She was the first person who talked to me here. First day. She sat down and just started talking. Like it was the most natural thing."

"It probably was," Alex said. "For her."

Jules thought about this. "Yeah." She looked up. "It's not, for most people."

He held her gaze for a moment. "No," he said. "It's not."

The particular weight of what they weren't saying sat between them in the comfortable way of things that didn't need to be said because they were already understood.

It was the second week of December when Jules stayed late at school.

She'd told herself it was to finish a paper which was true, technically, in the way that the smallest part of a reason can be true while the larger part goes unnamed. The apartment had been quiet in the specific way it got quiet when her mother was working a double shift and wouldn't be home until midnight, and Jules had discovered over the past year that she dealt with that particular quiet better when she was somewhere that was supposed to be quiet rather than somewhere that was quiet by absence.

She had finished the paper by six. She was reading over it for the third time, which was a sign she was stalling rather than editing, when she heard it.

Piano.

From somewhere down the hall faint through the library walls, but unmistakable. Not the practiced, stop-and-start quality of someone running scales or working through a difficult passage, but something fluid and whole and inward-directed. Something being played because it needed to be played rather than because it needed to be heard.

She knew, before she was fully conscious of knowing, whose hands were on the keys.

She packed up her things slowly. She told herself she was going home. She walked out of the library and turned left instead of right, toward the music rooms at the end of the second floor corridor, with the unhurried deliberateness of someone who was absolutely not doing what she was clearly doing.

The music room door was half open. The hallway outside it was dark, the overhead lights on their evening timer, but the light inside was warm the particular warm yellow of a lamp rather than fluorescents, someone's deliberate choice. Jules stopped in the doorway.

Alex sat at the piano with his back to her. He was in his school clothes still, his jacket draped over the bench beside him, his sleeves pushed to the elbow in the way of someone who had been sitting there for a while. His hands moved over the keys with an ease that was completely different from how he moved through the rest of his life where everything was measured and considered and contained, here it was simply open.

He was playing something she half-recognized classical, something with a melancholy in the left hand that the right hand kept trying to answer, the two things in conversation with each other, neither quite resolving.

She stood in the doorway for longer than she should have.

He stopped, between phrases, with the naturalness of someone who had known she was there for a while.

"You're in the doorway," he said. He didn't turn around.

"I'm sorry," Jules said. "I wasn't the door was open."

"It's fine." He turned on the bench then, and in the warm lamp light he looked different from the version of him that existed in classrooms and hallways younger, maybe, or more like himself, as if the playing had stripped away one of the layers he usually kept in place. "You don't have to stand in the doorway."

She came in. She sat in one of the chairs along the wall the ones for audiences, which felt right and looked at him.

"What was that?" she asked.

"Beethoven. Sonata No. 14. The Moonlight Sonata." He turned the information over in his hands before offering it. "I was changing the second movement. Adjusting the rhythm."

"Why?"

He thought about it with the seriousness he brought to questions that deserved it. "Because the way it's usually played sounds like grief that's already finished," he said. "I wanted it to sound like grief that's still happening."

Jules looked at him across the warm room. Outside the window the December sky had gone the particular deep blue of early evening, the first few stars appearing at the edges.

"That's very specific," she said.

"I know."

"What are you grieving?"

The silence was a long one. She watched him decide whether to answer and watched him decide to, and she held very still in the way of someone who understood that certain things needed space to arrive.

"My brother left for college when I was twelve," he said finally. He was looking at his hands on his knees. "Connor. He's five years older. When he left the house went very quiet and then my parents split six months later and it never got loud again." He said it with the flatness of something that had been examined so many times it had worn smooth. "I play when I miss the loud."

Jules sat with that for a moment. "Where is he now?"

"Portland. We talk. Text mostly." A pause. "It's just not the same as " He stopped. Made a small gesture with one hand that finished the sentence without words.

"Distance is real," Jules said quietly.

He looked at her. "Yeah."

"I'm sorry about your brother."

"Don't be. It's fine." The ghost of a smile. "I know I keep saying things are fine."

"I've noticed." She looked at him carefully. "Does it mean fine, or does it mean something you're not ready to say yet?"

The almost-smile became something more real. "Probably the second one."

"Okay." She settled back in the chair. "Play more?"

He turned back to the piano without ceremony. He played the Moonlight Sonata the familiar version first, the way it was meant to be played, and then his version with the altered rhythm in the second movement that made grief sound like a present thing rather than a past one. Jules sat in the audience chair with her hands in her lap and listened to the December dark come fully down outside the window and felt something that she was going to need a different kind of courage to name.

Not yet. She wasn't ready yet.

But it was there.

The week before winter break had a specific quality at Westbridge a collective loosening, the semester's tension releasing itself in the form of louder hallways and more animated lunch tables and the particular giddiness of people who can see the end of something and are already half in the next thing.

Jules felt it differently than most people. Winter break meant two weeks in the apartment with her mother working holiday shifts at the hospital, which meant long stretches of quiet that she had gotten better at filling but never entirely comfortable with. It also meant seeing her father, which she always wanted and always found bittersweet in the specific way of things you love that also remind you of loss.

She was thinking about this on Thursday afternoon, standing at her locker with her coat half-on, when Alex appeared beside her.

Not dramatically. Not the way things happened in the stories she'd read, where appearances were preceded by significant atmosphere. He just materialized in the way he had of being somewhere without making an event of it.

"You're staying through break?" he said.

She looked at him. "Here? Yeah. My mom's at the hospital mostly." She paused. "You?"

"Split time. Mom's first, then my dad's." He leaned against the locker beside hers with the ease of someone who had decided this wall was a reasonable place to be. "Connor's coming home for Christmas. First time in two years."

She looked at him. Something in his expression was different not open exactly, but less carefully managed than usual. Like the thing he was trying not to show was showing anyway at the edges.

"That's good," she said.

"Yeah." He looked at the middle distance. "It is."

Jules finished closing her locker. She held the strap of her bag. "Alex."

He looked at her.

"It's okay to be glad about it," she said. "You don't have to be measured about everything."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said: "I know."

He said it in a way that suggested he didn't entirely know, or knew it in theory but not yet in practice, and Jules recognized that gap between knowing something and being able to do it because she had lived in it for years and in some ways still did.

"For what it's worth," she said carefully, "I think the loud comes back. Eventually." She looked at her bag strap. "It sounds different after the quiet. But it comes back."

She could feel him looking at her. Not the cataloguing look she'd grown used to something with a different quality, something more like the way you look at something you hadn't expected to understand you.

"Yeah?" he said quietly.

"Yeah," she said.

They walked out of the school together into the December cold, their breath visible in the air, the particular stillness of a school emptying for break around them. They walked in the same direction they always walked, the direction of their respective homes, and the silence between them was the warm kind that meant something rather than the neutral kind that meant nothing.

At the corner where their paths diverged Jules stopped. Alex stopped too.

"Happy Christmas," she said. "Or whatever you celebrate."

"Christmas." The real smile appeared then brief, full, the one she'd been collecting since October. "You too, Jules."

She watched him turn down his street. She stood at the corner for a moment in the December dark.

She was in trouble.

She knew it the way you know things you've been not-knowing for a while in a rush, all at once, the moment you stop looking away.

She walked home through the cold with her heart doing something it hadn't done in a long time.

She was in trouble.

And somehow, impossibly, it felt like the good kind.

End of Chapter four!

Get ready for Chapter five!🤭