Not Doing

Chapter 8: Warm Socks

The Fall Formal happened on Saturday night, and I wasn't there.

I was at my desk with a cold mug of tea and my personal statement, now in its tenth draft, trying to explain who I was in six hundred and fifty words. So far I had written the word driven four times and deleted it four times.

At 9:07, my phone buzzed with a number I didn't recognize.

It's Leo. Danny gave me your number. Don't be mad at Danny.

I stared at it for a long time. Then: I'm not mad at Danny.

Are you at the formal?

Do I seem like someone who owns a dress?

You seem like someone who owns four highlighters and a color-coded backup plan.

Three highlighters, I typed. I lent one to Priya.

Are you busy?

I'm writing my personal statement.

So yes.

So yes.

There was a pause. Three dots appeared, vanished, appeared again, and I found that I was holding my breath in a completely empty bedroom.

Come to the rink. Wear warm socks.

I did not go to the rink.

I sat there for eleven minutes, and then I went to the rink.

I told my parents I was at Priya's, which was the first lie I had ever told them, and I felt it the whole way, like a stone in my shoe. But the drive was short and the night was clear, and when I pulled in beside the empty arena, its lot was dark except for a single line of light under one door.

Leo was waiting on the steps, jacket collar up, two pairs of skates hanging from his fingers by the laces. He looked, for once, entirely unarmed.

"You came."

"Due diligence."

"That's going to be your answer for everything, isn't it?"

"It's been holding up so far."

Inside, the ice was dark except for a single bank of lights at center, a pool of white in the black. Coach let him practice alone on off nights, he explained, as long as he locked up. The cold here was different at night. Cleaner. Quieter. Like the whole building was holding its breath.

He crouched in front of me and held up the skates. They were small, white, scuffed at the toe.

"They were my mom's," he said. "From when she was a kid. She used to skate at Lake Adair every winter until she got the hospital job. She kept them in the closet for twenty years." He shrugged, embarrassed. "I figured they'd fit."

They fit.

I stood at the edge of the ice for a full minute, one hand locked on the boards, and Leo Moretti, the most graceful person I'd ever seen, watched me with the expression of a man watching a giraffe try to use a revolving door.

"You're staring."

"I'm supporting you emotionally."

"I'm going to die."

"You're going to be fine. Come here."

He skated backward in front of me, both hands out. I took them. Even through gloves, his grip was warm, steady, and completely sure of itself.

"Don't look at your feet."

"Where do I look?"

"At me."

So I did. And for a while, that was all there was, the slow glide, the scrape of blades, my breath fogging between us, and his gray eyes steady on mine, patient and quietly amused, as he towed me around the ice like someone teaching a very determined child to walk.

I fell three times. The third time, I took him down with me.

We landed in a tangle on the cold ice, and I lay there with the wind knocked out of me, and then I was laughing, helplessly, the kind of laughing that hurts. Leo was laughing too, flat on his back, one arm flung over his face, and it was the first time I'd ever heard him laugh without checking who was watching.

When it faded, we lay side by side, looking up at the rafters, at the championship banner hanging in the dark.

"Coach says there are scouts coming in January," I said.

"Yeah."

"Do you want it?"

He was quiet so long that I thought he wouldn't answer.

"I don't know," he said. "That's the truth. Everyone's built their whole lives around me wanting it. My mom. Coach. Danny. The whole school." He lifted his hand and looked at it against the light. "I love this. I just don't know if it's the only thing I love."

"What else do you love?"

He turned his head. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.

The ice was cold through my jacket, but I couldn't feel it. His hand had found mine on the surface between us, no more than that, just the edge of his fingers against my knuckles, and neither of us moved.

"Emilia," he said.

It was the first time he had ever used my first name. It sounded like something I'd been waiting my whole life to hear and hadn't known.

He rolled onto his side. I felt him close the distance an inch at a time, careful, giving me every chance to stop him. His breath was warm against my cheek. His eyes had gone the exact gray of a sky about to snow.

And I panicked.

"I'm your tutor," I blurted.

He froze.

"I'm your tutor. I have five more sessions. If anyone thinks I'm doing anything but helping you pass, they'll pull you off the roster, Leo. Alvarez will have a stroke. And you're so close." My voice cracked. "I'm not going to be the reason you lose it. Not after everything."

Silence. The lights hummed. A long, slow moment passed in which I was sure I'd ruined it.

Then he laughed, softly, helplessly, and let his forehead drop to the ice beside my shoulder.

"Terrible timing," he said, muffled.

"The worst."

"The absolute worst timing of my entire life."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." He lifted his head. His eyes were bright, and his smile was crooked and real and aimed entirely at me. "The quarter ends in ten days."

"So?"

"So ask me again then."

"Ask you what?"

"Whatever you were going to." He pushed himself up and offered me a hand. "I can wait ten days, Hart. I'm very good at waiting. I'll be on time and everything."

I took his hand. He hauled me up, and I stood there, swaying on his mother's skates, my heart going so hard I thought it might c***k the ice.

"You'll be late," I said.

"Probably." He grinned. "But I'll be there."

He walked me to my car, and I did not look back until I was already turned onto the road.

When I did, he was still standing in the lot, hands in his pockets, watching my headlights go.

I want to remember it that way. Exactly that way. A boy in a dark parking lot, ten days from a kiss, with everything still ahead of him.

I didn't look up at the second-floor window of the athletic wing. I didn't think to.

I didn't know yet that some things, once they get that good, can't stay in the dark.

Madison caught up with me at my locker the next morning, which she had never once done in three years of us existing in the same building.

“You’re really tutoring him,” she said. Not a question.

“I’m really tutoring him.”

She looked like she wanted to say something else, and then didn’t. “He’s not what people think,” she said finally, quiet enough that I almost missed it. “Just — be careful anyway.”

And then she was gone before I could ask what she meant, swallowed back into the hallway like she’d never stopped.

I didn’t think about it again until I had a much better reason to.