Not Doing

Chapter 6: Diagnostic

Someone had taken the photo from a second-floor window of the athletic wing, which meant someone had spent their Saturday night with a very good zoom lens.

It was grainy and slightly orange under the parking lot lights. Two figures, standing too close. His hand at the side of my face.

Priya Nair, my best friend since fourth grade, sent it to me at 6:41 Sunday morning with eleven exclamation points and no explanation. By Monday, it had been shared in four group chats, and a sophomore I'd never met had told me, with real reverence, "Your ponytail looks really good in it."

"Nothing happened," I told Priya at my locker.

"The photo disagrees."

"The photo is blurry."

"The photo is emotionally very clear." She squinted at me. "Emilia. Are you blushing? You don't blush. You have a spreadsheet for blushing."

"I do not."

"You do. It's called Stress Responses."

I shut my locker harder than necessary.

On Tuesday, I got to the library at 3:10, mostly to be alone with my dread. I sat under the broken clock and arranged my highlighters and did not think about the parking lot.

At exactly 3:15, the door opened.

Leo Moretti walked in, on time, for the first time in recorded history.

Mr. Okafor lowered his newspaper. He peeled the sticky note off the wall, uncapped a pen, and wrote a large, deliberate 0. He underlined it twice and stuck it back up.

"Don't," Leo said, dropping into the chair across from me.

"I didn't say anything."

"Your eyebrows are doing it."

"Your eyebrows are also doing it."

The corner of his mouth twitched, and then the silence started, that awful, thick, radiator-hissing silence of two people who each knew exactly what the other was thinking about.

"I saw the picture," he said finally.

"Everyone saw the picture."

"I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"If people think..." He scrubbed a hand through his hair. "I don't care what they say about me. But you've got the scholarship and the plan and the whole thing, and I didn't want it to turn into a story about you."

It was a strange sensation, being worried about. I pretended to study my packet.

"It's not your fault. It was a study session that got out of hand."

"We weren't studying."

"We were," I said, "in a very broad sense."

He laughed, quick and surprised, and just like that, the air loosened. "Chem midterm's Friday," he said. "This library closes at five. That's not going to be enough."

"So?"

"So Marino's Diner. Open till midnight. The coffee is terrible, but nobody will look at us."

"Everyone looks at you."

"Not at Marino's."

I should have said no. I had a schedule. Instead I heard myself say, "Thursday. Eight o'clock. Bring your notes."

"I'll bring the rainbow," he said, and the worst part was that he sounded like he meant it.

Marino's smelled like grease and old coffee and heaven. We took a cracked red booth near the back, and a waitress with silver hair and a pencil tucked behind her ear set down two mugs before we'd asked.

"Leo, sweetheart." She looked me over. "New friend?"

"Tutor, Dot."

"She's cute for a tutor."

Leo turned the color of the booth. I studied the menu with great concentration.

We worked for an hour. Real work, the kind that only happens after everyone else has gone home, where the only sounds are the pie case humming and the pencil scratching.

He asked good questions. Once he explained a concept back to me in his own words, badly, with hockey metaphors, and got it right.

That was when the bell over the door jingled.

Madison Pierce swept in with three friends and a cloud of vanilla perfume, took in the room, and found us like she'd been told where to look.

"Leo!" A hand landed on his shoulder and stayed there. "You never text me back."

"I've been busy."

"So I see." She looked at me, at the highlighters, at the eight neat index cards fanned across the table. "Studying? At nine o'clock on a Thursday?"

"Midterm," I said pleasantly.

"How dedicated."

She drifted off with her friends to a booth two rows away, close enough to watch. I realized I was gripping a pink highlighter hard enough to bend it, and I set it down before I snapped it in half.

"We went out for two weeks," Leo said, low. "Last spring. It wasn't..."

"You don't have to explain."

"I know." He met my eyes. "I want to."

I waited.

"She liked the guy in the stories," he said. "The one from the roof and the fight. When I turned out to be somebody who mostly watches movies alone and falls asleep on the couch, she got bored. Which is fair. I'm not saying it as a complaint."

"It sounds like a complaint."

"It's a very quiet complaint."

His phone buzzed on the table. The screen said Ma. This time he didn't silence it. He picked up, and his whole voice changed, softer, younger.

"Hey. Yeah. No, I'm at Marino's. Actually studying. I swear. Did you eat? Eat something. Okay. Love you. Get some sleep."

He hung up and found me staring.

"She works doubles at St. Anne's," he said. "Nights, mostly. I get four hours a day with her if I'm lucky, and most of those she's asleep." He shrugged. "That's why I can't study at home. It's too quiet."

"My house is the opposite of quiet," I said, and I hadn't planned to. "My parents have this picture of the college on the fridge. It's not that they push. They just look at me like I'm already gone. Like I'm a very successful ghost."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It's fine."

"Hart."

"...It's exhausting."

"Yeah." He turned his mug in a slow circle. "So you're the one who never gets to be bad at anything."

Nobody had ever said it that plainly. It landed somewhere under my ribs and stayed there, warm and terrifying.

"Give me the diagnostic," he said.

"What?"

"The ten questions. From two weeks ago. You never made me take it."

I dug the crumpled packet out of my bag, and he took it and a pencil and bent over it without another word. I pretended to read my notes. Across the room, Madison had gone quiet. In the pie case, a slice of lemon meringue rotated slowly under the light.

Nine minutes later, he slid it back across the table.

I checked it against the key. Then I checked it again.

"Nine out of ten."

"I missed seven."

"You missed seven because it's a trick question. Mr. Dunn does it to everyone." My voice came out strange. "Leo. You're not failing chemistry. You've just never been taught by someone who says line change."

He said nothing. He looked at the paper the way you'd look at a door you'd assumed was painted on the wall.

I took the green highlighter and drew a small, lopsided star in the corner.

"What's that?"

"A gold star. Everyone gets one."

He ducked his head, but I saw it, the real one, crooked and helpless and completely unguarded. He folded the paper carefully and tucked it into the front pocket of his bag.

At the car, a cold wind tugged at my scarf. Leo stood with his hands in his pockets, careful, keeping a foot of space between us like a promise. He didn't touch my hair. He didn't have to.

"Thanks," he said. "For not fixing me. For just... helping."

"See you Friday."

"Less late."

"Don't be on time. I'll get suspicious."

At home, I opened my Macbeth to review Act 1, and a scrap of paper slid out of the pages. Torn from a chemistry worksheet. Slanted, impatient handwriting.

Everyone else looks at me and sees how the story ends. She keeps looking for the next sentence.

I read it four times.

Then I did something I had never done in my entire life. I didn't file it. I held it against my chest in the dark, and I let it stay a mess.