Chapter9
884 Words
AP English, third period, Tuesday.
I sit in my usual seat — same seat I’ve taken since the first day of school.
I open my copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God, find my page from last class and I prepare to spend fifty minutes in non-participatory observation of a discussion about Hurston that will probably not say anything I haven’t already thought about and which I will attend anyway because I have nowhere else to be.
Mr. Pearce calls the class to order. I scan the room out of habit —exits, faces, the usual inventory.
I stop.
The boy in the far left corner.
He is reading.
He is always reading — I have a sudden, very clear memory of seeing him reading in this same corner and dismissing it as background, part of the furniture of the class, the way certain students become furniture when they’re quiet enough and still enough for long enough.
He is reading a copy of Middlemarch, which is not on any syllabus I’m aware of.
He was here last class.
And in the class before that.
I go back through three weeks of AP English in my memory, the way I do most things.
He was there on the first day.
I have a specific image: the corner seat, a book, the impression of someone choosing their position deliberately.
He was there the second day.
The third.
He has been there every single day that I have been at Westfield High and I have not seen him once.
He has been in my peripheral vision for three weeks and my mind processed him as a part of the background and I am usually good at processing threats.
It dawns on me that I’m not as good at processing things that don’t immediately register as threats.
He doesn’t register as a threat.
He registers as something I can’t categorize yet, which is different.
Mr. Pearce begins talking about the horizon metaphor.
I write the date at the top of my notes.
I look at the corner.
He turns a page.
His eyes don’t move from the page.
He is trying not to look at me with deliberate effort, not the vacant, blank stare of someone genuinely unaware of my existence.
This is controlled.
This is a decision.
Which means he knows I’ve finally noticed.
I look at Mr. Pearce.
I write notes about Hurston.
I look back at the corner.
He turns another page.
He has been in this class for three weeks and I’ve never spoken to him.
Neither has he spoken to me.
There is a boy in my English class who reads Middlemarch and chooses not to look at me with the effort of someone who is aware of me enough to choose it, and I have been walking past him every day for three weeks without registering his face, and that is — I want to be honest with myself here — unusual.
I notice faces.
I notice exits and threat levels and the subtle tells of people who are performing calmness when they are really not calm.
I notice Jasper’s manufactured ease and Roman’s controlled intensity and the five different ways Damon’s face announces exactly what he’s feeling.
I notice everything.
I did not notice him.
I think about what it would take to be that invisible to me.
He is very good at not being seen.
This is a skill, and skills are chosen, and that has to mean something.
The class ends.
I pack up slowly, which I don’t usually do as I watch the corner.
He finishes his chapter, closes the book slowly, which tells me something about his patience and puts it in his bag.
When he stands up, he is taller than I expected, and he moves toward the door.
At the door he stops and turns back.
Not at Mr. Pearce, who is erasing the board.
At me.
He looks directly at me for approximately two seconds with dark grey eyes and an expression of someone who has been waiting to do something and has decided this is the moment.
He doesn’t smile or nod. He just — looks, and then he leaves.
I look at the desk he occupied.
There is a folded piece of paper on it.
He left it on purpose.
I go to the corner, pick it up and open it.
It is a copy of a pack genealogy record.
My bloodline section is covered in black ink — the redaction is thorough and recent and looks like something that was done in a hurry.
At the bottom of the page, in small handwriting that is neat is written:
“This was altered three weeks ago.
Before that, it said something that would have explained everything.”
Below that, two initials: E.C.
I fold the paper back along its creases and put it in my bag.
He has been in this class for three weeks and found a copy of my genealogy record.
Elias Cross has been watching me for three weeks and this is the first thing he has said.
I look at the corner, then the empty chair and the door.
I go to my next class.
I think about his eyes for the rest of the day.
- Writer
