Not Doing

Chapter 4: The Promise

On Tuesday, Leo Moretti was early.

Not on time. Early. At 3:14 the library door opened, and I checked my phone twice, because the clock above our table had been stuck at 4:20 since before I was born and I'd learned not to trust anything in that room except the radiator.

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

"I didn't say anything."

"Your eyebrows did."

He set Macbeth on the table, and I stared. The paperback had been through something. Torn scraps of paper bristled from its pages like feathers: strips of chemistry worksheet, a corner of a gym schedule, the back of a pizza receipt, each one covered in that slanted, impatient handwriting.

"You wanted evidence," he said, not looking at me. "So I found some."

I didn't trust my voice, so I uncapped a highlighter instead. "I heard you won Saturday."

"Four-two." One corner of his mouth lifted. A fresh bruise ran along his jaw, the color of a storm cloud. "You didn't come."

"I had a chemistry packet."

"Of course you did."

But he was almost smiling, and for the next forty minutes, something strange happened. We worked.

Not smoothly. He argued with every note I made. He read Macbeth's soliloquy aloud in a flat, mocking voice, then stopped halfway and started over, slower, the way you'd handle something you didn't want to break. When I showed him where the scene proved his point, he went quiet.

"Huh. He talks himself out of it. Then somebody talks him back in."

"Yes."

"So that's the whole play. A guy who never gets to decide anything alone."

I wrote it in the margin. I didn't tell him I'd have paid money to have thought of it.

Chemistry, of course, was a disaster. He stared at the equilibrium problems like they were written in a language he'd sworn never to learn, until I tried the only thing I could think of.

"Forget the formulas. When a system's under stress, it shifts to balance itself out. Push on one side, and the other side pushes back."

"Like a line change."

"...Like a line change."

"Coach pulls a tired guy, fresh legs come on, everything rebalances." He picked up the pencil. "Why didn't Mr. Dunn just say that?"

"Mr. Dunn doesn't skate."

He solved the next problem in under two minutes. The tips of his ears had gone pink, and I pretended not to notice, and he pretended not to notice me pretending.

That was when his phone buzzed against the table.

He glanced at the screen, and his face went smooth and blank, like a window with the shade pulled down. He silenced it and turned it over. "Two minutes. Water."

He stood too fast. His backpack, hooked on the chair, slid to the floor and split open like a dropped lunch tray: tape, gloves, three pens, a mouthguard I very much did not want to touch. He was already halfway across the library, jaw tight. If he heard the crash, he didn't turn around.

"Leo—"

The door swung shut.

I did what any reasonable person would do. I knelt on the carpet and started gathering his things.

That's where I found the notebook.

It had landed beside my shoe: a black composition book, the edges soft and frayed, the cover scarred with tape. It had fallen open in the middle.

I want it on the record that I didn't go looking. I want that next to the laminating.

But I saw the handwriting, and my eyes did what they've always done with words, which is move before I can stop them.

Nobody warns you the loudest room is the loneliest. Forty seconds after the final horn, the arena empties the way a lung does, and I'm standing at center ice in a jersey with my name across the back, wondering who they were cheering for.

Not me. They've never met me. They cheered for the guy in the stories. I just skate for him.

I read it once. Then, God help me, again.

It wasn't a diary. It wasn't something dashed off in study hall. It was a sentence that meant something and knew exactly how to say it, and my chest went tight the way it does when I read something I wish I'd written.

"Put it down."

I hadn't heard him come back. He stood over me with a water bottle in one hand, and his face wasn't angry. It was worse. It was empty, all the color gone out of it, gray eyes flat and very still.

"Leo, I didn't mean to—"

"Put. It. Down."

I set it on the carpet between us. He crouched, swept it up, and jammed it into the bag like he was hiding evidence.

"How much did you read?"

"A page. Less."

"And?"

"And it's—"

"Don't." His voice cracked on it, barely. "Don't say it's good. Don't do the thing where you say something nice so I'll feel better. I've had a lifetime of people telling me what I need to hear."

"I wasn't going to say it to make you feel better." I stood, because the floor was no place to lose an argument. "I was going to say it because it's true. The line on my handout was yours. Nobody in Mr. Hale's class has ever written anything like it, and you did it in five minutes without a highlighter. I've known since Wednesday. I just didn't know there was a whole—"

I gestured helplessly at the bag.

"Nobody knows," he said, low, almost to himself. "Not Danny. Not Coach. Nobody."

"Why?"

"Because I'm Leo Moretti." He gave a short, humorless laugh. "I put a backpack on a roof. I get in fights behind the cafeteria. The guy in the stories doesn't write things. If it's bad, I'm a joke. And if it's good—"

He stopped.

"If it's good?"

"Then it's the only thing I've got that's actually mine." He wouldn't look at me. "And people can take it."

The radiator hissed. Behind us, Mr. Okafor turned a page of his newspaper with great, deliberate discretion.

I thought of the bruise on his jaw and the careless noted he'd tossed at his coach. I thought of a boy who let an entire school believe he was exactly as shallow as he looked, because that was safer than being seen and found ordinary.

"I wouldn't take it," I said.

"You don't know that."

"I do, actually."

He finally lifted his eyes. They weren't flat anymore. "Then promise me."

"Leo—"

"Not 'I'll try.' Not 'I'll make a plan.' Promise. You don't tell anyone. Not Alvarez, not your friends, not anyone."

I could have said something clever. Instead I said the truest thing I had.

"I promise."

"Say it like you mean it."

"I don't make promises I don't keep. I'll put it in the spreadsheet."

The laugh escaped him before he could stop it, ragged and startled and a little wet at the edges. He pressed the heel of his hand against one eye and swore softly at the ceiling.

"Color-coded?" he managed.

"Obviously."

"You're insane."

"You've said that."

"It's still true."

He sank back into his chair, and after a moment, so did I. Neither of us said anything. The chemistry sat unfinished between us, and something had shifted in the small space between his side of the table and mine, something I couldn't have fit into a spreadsheet if I'd tried.

Before he left, he zipped his bag carefully, all the way this time.

"Hart."

"Yes?"

"Thursday. I'll be on time."

"You won't."

"I'll be less late." He shouldered the bag, and for one second, before the smirk came back, he looked at me like I was a door he hadn't decided whether to open. "Thanks for not making it weird."

"It's a little weird."

"It's a lot weird." But he was nearly smiling as he said it.

When he was gone, I sat under the broken clock for a long time.

I had promised to keep exactly one secret. It was the best writing I'd ever read, and I couldn't tell a soul.

I had never wanted so badly to say something out loud.