Chapter Fifteen: The Library
2273 Words
Marcus had the chain on his nightstand.
He wasn't sure exactly how it had gotten there.
The factual answer was this: Tuesday, after the cafeteria, walking back to class, Kenji had reached into his own jacket pocket looking for his student ID and the chain had come out with it — the fine silver link, delicate and precise — and landed on the corridor floor.
Marcus had picked it up.
He'd meant to give it back immediately.
He had not given it back immediately.
It sat on his nightstand now, catching the dim light of his bedroom lamp in the specific way silver catches light — quietly, without announcement, just doing what it was made to do.
He lay on his bed and looked at the ceiling and was aware, without looking at it directly, that the chain was there.
His sister found him at 6:45.
Amara Reid was twenty-two and home for the week, and she had the particular gift of older sisters who have been gone long enough to see their younger siblings clearly — which is to say, she knocked once, opened his door, leaned against the frame, and looked at him with the expression of someone reading a page she'd read before.
Marcus was on his bed, chestnut hair scattered across the pillow, hazel eyes dim in the lamp-light, one hand behind his head, the other resting on his chest.
He looked like someone had unplugged him from something and he was deciding whether to find another socket or just — rest here for a while.
"Dinner," Amara said.
"Coming," he said.
"You've been coming for twenty minutes."
He sat up. His hair fell forward. He pushed it back with one hand — the particular motion of someone who'd been doing it since he was twelve and it had never once fully worked.
Amara looked at the nightstand.
At the chain.
Then at Marcus.
Marcus looked at the chain. Then at his sister. Then at the wall, which was neutral and asked nothing of him.
"Whose is that?" Amara said.
"Someone at school."
"Someone," she said.
"A new transfer," he said. "I picked it up. I meant to give it back."
Amara looked at her brother with the twenty-two-year-old eyes of someone who had already had the version of this evening herself — who knew what it looked like, from the outside, when someone was lying on their bed in the lamplight thinking about a chain that wasn't theirs.
She said nothing.
This was, Marcus understood, the loudest thing she could have done.
"Dinner," she said again. And went back down the hall.
He carried the chain downstairs in his pocket.
He didn't know why he'd put it in his pocket. It wasn't his. It didn't belong in his pocket.
He ate dinner quietly — their mother's Wednesday soup, which had been Wednesday soup since he was approximately eight years old and had never required improvement. He answered questions. He passed the bread. He was present in the way of someone who is physically at the table and substantively somewhere else.
Amara watched him across the table with the patience of someone who has decided to wait.
His phone was face-up on the counter — he had started doing this since Tuesday, this small adjustment, turning it face-up without particularly deciding to — and at 7:34 it lit up.
He saw it from the table.
The notification was a t****k comment.
He didn't check it immediately. He ate two more spoonfuls of soup.
Then he checked it.
The comment was on a video he'd posted three weeks ago — one of those things you post without thinking, a twelve-second clip of the cafeteria Tuesday-pasta situation, just the tray and the overhead light and a caption that said technically food.
The comment was from an account he hadn't followed back yet because he hadn't known it existed until approximately now.
@khayashi.jkt: hey. how are you.
Not a question mark. A period. The way Kenji delivered everything — as a statement he was interested in the response to.
Marcus read it twice.
His mouth did something.
He was smiling.
He was sitting at the dinner table with his mother's Wednesday soup and his sister watching him from across the table and he was smiling at his phone in the specific way of someone who has not smiled like that in eleven days and had forgotten it was something they could do.
Amara said nothing.
She was very loudly saying nothing.
He typed: i'm fine
The response came in four seconds. Four seconds was a very fast response.
hmm
He stared at this.
what he typed.
do you miss me
He read this sentence four times.
The soup was getting cold.
He typed a heart emoji.
He put the phone face-down.
He picked up his spoon.
He was still smiling.
Amara, across the table, looked at her soup.
She was also smiling.
She had the good grace not to mention it.
Thursday morning arrived with the particular quality of a day that knows something is going to happen in it.
Marcus walked into Westbrook with his hair properly done — not the scattered lamplight version but the version he did when he was going to see someone he wanted to see — chestnut and clean, the hazel of his eyes brighter somehow than they'd been in eleven days, like a light that had been turned back up to its correct setting.
He had the chain in his pocket.
He found Kenji at 8:36 in the east corridor — Kenji who was leaning against the wall reading something on his phone, without the chain today as well, the smooth clean line of his jaw in the morning light.
He looked up when Marcus arrived.
"Hey," Marcus said.
"Hey," Kenji said.
They stood for a moment.
The chain was in Marcus's pocket. Marcus did not take it out.
"Good soup?" Kenji said.
Marcus stared at him. "How do you—"
"t****k suggested your account," Kenji said. "Three weeks of posts. The soup video is from last month."
"You went through three weeks of my posts," Marcus said.
"The algorithm suggested," Kenji said, in the tone of someone who was technically being accurate.
Marcus looked at him.
Something in the corridor made the specific quality of adjustment it made when something was happening in it.
"After algebra," Marcus said. "Library."
Kenji looked at him.
"Meet me," Marcus said. "After algebra."
"Okay," Kenji said.
He said it the way he said most things — without edges, without conditions, just: the answer, directly, because it was the answer.
They went to class.
Algebra lasted fifty-five minutes.
Marcus was aware of every one of them.
Not badly. Just — aware. The specific awareness of a person moving toward a thing they've decided and finding the distance between here and there longer than usual.
He wrote down one equation correctly.
He wrote down the rest approximately.
The bell rang at 10:15.
He was in the library at 10:17.
The north corner table. The heating vent humming. He sat down facing the door.
He put the chain on the table.
Looked at it.
Picked it up. Put it in his pocket. Took it back out. Put it on the table again.
Kenji came in at 10:19.
He walked to the north corner with the same quiet certainty he brought to every room — found the table, found Marcus, sat down across from him.
He looked at the chain on the table.
He looked at Marcus.
Marcus looked at him.
He had prepared words.
He had the words arranged in a specific order that was supposed to make it easier — a sentence structure, a kind of scaffolding, something to stand behind while he said the thing.
He had prepared for approximately twenty-three minutes in algebra while writing down wrong equations.
He looked at Kenji.
Kenji looked back with those dark unhurried eyes that didn't demand and didn't fill the silence and didn't ask him to be ready before he was ready.
The scaffolding dissolved.
Marcus stood up.
He went around the table.
He stood in front of Kenji who looked up at him from his chair and said nothing and waited.
Marcus put his arms around him.
His head went to Kenji's chest — not his shoulder, his chest, the specific place where, in a corridor three days ago, he had heard something steady and unhurried that his body had apparently been thinking about ever since.
He heard it again.
The heartbeat.
Steady. Unhurried. The heartbeat of someone whose body didn't panic because nothing about this alarmed them.
His arms were around Kenji's shoulders and Kenji's arms came up and held him — both of them, fully, the specific embrace of someone who had been waiting for this with the patience of a person who understood that good things arrived in their own time and not before.
And Marcus stood there in the north corner of the Westbrook library with his head on Kenji's chest and listened to the heartbeat and breathed.
And felt something he had no word for yet settle in him like furniture being moved into the right room — the specific quiet of a thing finding where it belongs.
Kenji held him.
One hand at his back. One at the back of his head — gentle, present, completely certain in the way he was certain about everything.
The heating vent hummed.
The library was quiet around them.
Marcus's jaw was not doing anything.
For the first time in as long as he could remember his jaw was not doing anything at all.
The library door opened at 10:26.
Zavier came in —
With two girls from the junior class who had asked him something about the project that had apparently required a library trip — talking over his shoulder at something one of them had said —
Stopped.
Looked at the north corner.
At Marcus.
At Kenji.
At the two of them.
Marcus heard the door. He heard the footsteps. He processed the new presence in the room the way you process weather — acknowledged, not alarmed.
He did not move.
He stayed exactly where he was — head on Kenji's chest, arms around his shoulders, listening to the steady heartbeat — because he had spent eleven days in various states of not being okay and this was okay and he was not interested in performing anything else right now for any audience including his best friend of ten years.
Zavier stood at the library entrance.
The two girls went quiet.
Marcus, from the north corner, without lifting his head: "Hey."
Zavier looked at him.
At Kenji, who was looking at Zavier over the top of Marcus's head with those dark, calm eyes and the expression of someone who was holding something important and had no intention of putting it down.
Kenji, as usual, said nothing.
As usual, his silence contained everything.
Zavier looked at his best friend of ten years — his best friend who was standing in the library with his arms around someone who had caught him in a corridor and warmed his pasta and texted him a question mark on t****k at 7:34 PM —
And his best friend who was not moving.
Who was calm.
Who looked, from across the library, like someone who had found the exact right place to stand.
Zavier's face did several things.
Then it settled.
He looked at Kenji.
"You bastard," he said.
And his voice — under the performance of the words, beneath the Westbrook composure — was the voice of someone who was completely, genuinely, looking at his friend being held and finding it the most right thing he had seen in a long time.
Kenji looked at him.
And smiled.
Not the small corner-of-mouth version. The real one — full, unhurried, the smile of someone who is holding something they are glad to be holding and is not going to pretend otherwise.
The two junior girls looked at each other.
Looked at the north corner.
Looked at Zavier.
One of them said, quietly, "I think I need to go to a different library."
They went to a different library.
Zavier stood at the entrance for a moment longer.
He looked at Marcus.
Marcus finally lifted his head. He looked at Zavier with the hazel eyes that were fully bright now — not dim, not the lamplight version, the actual version, turned up to exactly where it was supposed to be.
He looked at his best friend.
Zavier looked back.
Ten years of friendship in approximately four seconds of eye contact.
"You good?" Zavier said.
Marcus thought about it.
"Yeah," he said.
"Yeah?" Zavier said.
"Yeah," Marcus said. Quietly. Certain. "I think I'm really, actually, yeah."
Zavier nodded.
He looked at Kenji one more time.
Kenji looked back.
Something passed between them — not words, not even a full expression, just the specific acknowledgment of two people who have arrived at a mutual understanding about something that matters.
Then Zavier turned around and walked out of the library.
Into the corridor.
He stood there for a moment, hands in his pockets, looking at the ceiling — the particular expression of someone who has just watched something good happen to someone they love and is privately, quietly, wrecked by it in the best way.
He thought about a bench in the rain. A forehead on a shoulder. A hand pressed once against his chest.
He thought about a hand pressed once against his chest.
He took a breath.
He needed to find Serena Voss
- Writer
