Chapter12
1142 Words
It happens in the east hallway between second and third period, on a Wednesday, which means I’ve been at Westfield for four weeks and I have so far managed to maintain the careful invisibility I intended for my time here.
I know the hallway timing now — the crowded paths and the clear ones — and I use the clear ones the way I use everything available to me, which is efficiently.
I am on a clear path.
Or at least I think I am.
He comes around the corner at a speed that suggests he also thought this was a clear path, and we collide at full walking speed, shoulder to shoulder, the kind of collision that happens when two people turn the same corner from opposite directions at the same moment and neither has sight of the other in advance.
My bag goes sideways.
The shoulder strap fails — the clasp has been loose for a week, I’ve been meaning to fix it — and the bag swings and catches the wall and the main zipper, which was also not fully closed because I was in a hurry this morning, opens, and my entire organized bag disperses across the east hallway floor.
A journal.
Three pens.
My annotated copy of the genealogy record from Elias, folded, now sliding under a locker.
The novel I’ve been carrying. Lip balm. My phone, which thankfully lands face up and doesn’t c***k.
A tampon, which skids across the floor like something that wants to be seen by everyone.
I don’t say anything because I’m still shocked.
I just stare at the floor.
“Oh — oh no, I’m so sorry, I’m—” He’s already crouching. Already picking things up.
He moves fast and without deliberation, gathering things with both hands, and he says sorry two more times while doing it, which makes three, and he sounds like he means all three of them.
I crouch, collect the phone, the journal, the pens.
He hands me the novel, the lip balm, the tampon — handed without hesitation or commentary, which I note, because a lot of people make a thing out of the tampon but he doesn’t — and then he reaches under the locker for the folded paper.
He comes up with the genealogy record and hands it to me.
Our hands make contact — fingertips, brief, the paper passing between us — and something happens that I don’t have vocabulary for.
It is not the bond-hum I lost, the pull Jasper described, or the electric nature of Roman’s attention or the precision of Elias’s.
This feels older than all of those.
Something that cracked open my silent wolf and she now responds to with total, immediate recognition that is completely unasked for.
I look at his hands.
Then his face.
He is looking at me.
He has amber eyes.
Deep, warm amber, the kind of color that is not common in the pack world, not common in any world — the specific shade that I have only ever seen in one place before, which is my own mirror.
I look at his eyes and he looks at mine and something passes between us in the east hallway on a Wednesday morning that neither of us initiates and neither of us knows what to do with.
“Are you okay? I didn’t see you, I was — I’m sorry about the—” He gestures at the hallway. The dispersal of my belongings. “I’m usually more aware of my surroundings.”
“It’s fine.”
“Your bag clasp—”
“I know. I’ve been meaning to fix it.”
We both stand.
We are approximately two feet apart in the east hallway, students flowing past, the ordinary Wednesday traffic going around us like water around two rocks that appeared in the current without warning.
“I’m Damon.”
“I know.”
He blinks.
Then he smiles — wide, easy, the smile of someone who finds things funny even when they’re not funny.
I can tell he’s the kind of person who decides to be amused by most things, as a coping mechanism.
“How do you know?”
“You’re in my calc class. Third row.”
“You noticed.”
“I notice everyone.”
“Is that a good or a bad thing?”
“Both.”
He laughs.
It’s a real laugh — the unchecked kind that doesn’t care about its surroundings.
It fills the hallway for a moment and then contracts back to just him, grinning, with amber eyes that are almost identical to mine in the east hallway light.
I can’t help but smile before looking away. I close my bag — the main zipper, the faulty clasp held shut with my thumb.
“I have to get to class.”
“Right, me too. Sorry again about the— all of that.” He gestures at the general east hallway.
“I’ll be more careful next time.”
“That makes two of us.”
I go to class, sit in my seat, open my notebook and write the date.
My mind wanders to my father’s journal in the locked room.
The entry I read once and closed about the year I was born.
I stop myself from thinking about it, at least not here in third period, on a Wednesday morning, with Damon Pierce two floors over in his own class, because if I think about it here I am going to have to sit with what I think I already know taking shape in my chest like something that was always there and is only now being named.
I focus on what the teacher is saying.
I think about it the entire rest of the day, and I think about it on the walk home, and I think about it through dinner with Mira who says you’re quiet tonight and I say I’m always quiet and she says you’re a different kind of quiet tonight and I say nothing because she’s right and I’m not ready to say why.
I take my father’s journal from the locked room, sit on the floor and open it.
This time I do not close it.
I read until past midnight.
I read until I know what I want to know, until there is no more room left for doubt.
I close the journal.
I sit in the dark and I think: I have been missing something my whole life and I didn’t have a name for it.
It has amber eyes and a laugh that fills a hallway and it bumped into me in the east corridor this morning and handed me a piece of paper with its two hands.
I am not ready for what this means.
But I know.
I already know.
- Writer
