Chapter Ten: Walls and Heartbeats
2152 Words
The thing about grief is that it doesn't warn you when it's going to ambush you in a corridor.
Marcus had been doing better.
Comparatively. On paper.
He had responded to Jade's text — three lines, honest and clean the way Serena had told him to be, saying he needed time and that he wasn't ignoring her and that the texts weren't nothing. She had responded with two words: okay and thank you. He had looked at those two words for twenty minutes and then put the phone face-down and decided that two words were enough for today and that tomorrow existed for a reason.
He had eaten breakfast.
He had gone to class.
He was doing better.
And then he turned the corner on the second floor at 11:14 AM, looking at his phone because he was looking at his phone, because the hallway was the hallway and he'd walked it a thousand times and didn't need to pay attention—
And walked directly into Kenji Hayashi.
The collision was the kind that happens when one person is moving at full pace and the other is not moving at all — Kenji had stopped to check the room number on the wall and Marcus had approximately zero seconds of warning.
The phone flew.
Marcus's feet left the floor — not fully, just the specific lurch of a body that has lost the geometry it was relying on, the half-second of pure aerial uncertainty where everything recalibrates.
Kenji's arm came out.
Not slowly, not with any performance of rescue — just the fast, automatic extension of someone with good reflexes who had processed what was happening before it finished happening.
He caught Marcus by the forearm. Then by the shoulder. Then — because momentum is a committed force and Marcus's full weight was already in motion — he pulled him in, both arms, the way you catch something you weren't fully prepared to catch but catch anyway because the alternative is watching it hit the floor.
Marcus landed against his chest.
The hallway continued around them.
It lasted approximately four seconds.
Marcus's hands were against Kenji's jacket — gripping it without having decided to grip it, the reflex of someone who has nearly fallen and is establishing that they haven't.
His face was against Kenji's shoulder.
He could hear — and this was the detail that would stay with him, that he would think about at 2 AM three days later without knowing why — he could hear Kenji's heartbeat. Steady. Unhurried. The heartbeat of someone whose body hadn't panicked because nothing about this had alarmed them.
Four seconds.
Then Marcus straightened up. Stepped back. Put the distance of two reasonable people between them and looked at the middle of the hallway wall while his face did several things he had no control over.
"Sorry," he said. "I was on my phone."
"I stopped without warning," Kenji said. "It was my fault."
"No it wasn't—"
"Equally," Kenji said. A diplomatic answer.
Marcus finally looked at him.
Kenji looked back with those dark, unhurried eyes that didn't ask anything of the person they were aimed at — didn't demand explanation or performance or a particular recovery speed. Just waited.
The chain caught the corridor light.
Marcus looked at the chain. Looked away.
"Your phone," Kenji said, and bent down and picked it up from the floor and held it out — screen-up.
Marcus took it. Looked at the screen.
Jade's name. The thread open. The last two words — okay and thank you — still visible.
He turned it face-down.
"Breakup?" Kenji said.
Marcus looked at him. "That obvious?"
"The expression," Kenji said. "Not the phone. When you saw the screen." He paused. "My jaw used to do the same thing."
"Used to," Marcus said.
"For about two months after." Kenji said it without dramatics, just the clean information of someone who had been through a thing and arrived at the other side of it. "Then it stopped."
"Two months," Marcus said.
"Some days are faster," Kenji said. "Some are slower. It's not linear."
He said this like it was something he'd learned rather than something someone had told him to believe, and Marcus, who had heard a version of this sentence from approximately six people in the past week and dismissed it every time, did not dismiss it.
He wasn't sure why.
"What class?" Marcus said, because he needed the conversation to move toward something navigable.
Kenji looked at the room number he'd been checking. "History. Fourteen B."
"That's—" Marcus turned and pointed. "Down there. Left. The door that's always slightly open."
"Thank you," Kenji said.
He picked up his bag. Adjusted it. Began walking in the direction Marcus had pointed.
He was three steps away when Marcus said, without planning to: "Hayashi."
Kenji turned around.
Marcus looked at him. His jaw was doing the thing — not because of Jade this time. He didn't have a category for what it was doing it for.
"Nothing," Marcus said. "Good luck. With — the class."
Kenji held his gaze for exactly one moment longer than the exchange required.
"Thank you, Marcus," he said.
He used his name. He didn't ask for it. He'd known it already — from someone or from class or from simply paying attention — and he used it the way people do when they want you to know they registered you.
He turned and walked to fourteen B.
Marcus stood in the corridor for a moment that he would not be able to account for the duration of if asked.
The empty classroom on the third floor — the one that wasn't used until afternoon, that had a working radiator and a window that faced west and therefore caught the midday light at the angle that made it look like something out of a photograph —
Kenji found it at 12:06.
He didn't know it was empty. He'd been looking for the library extension and turned down a corridor that dead-ended here and tried the door because it was there and unlocked.
He went in. Set his bag down. Stood at the window for a moment and looked at the light doing what it did.
He was thinking about the corridor.
Not about the collision — that was nothing, a hallway arithmetic problem, completely solvable. He was thinking about the four seconds. About a heartbeat that matched his rhythm and then stepped back and looked at a wall.
About a jaw doing something involuntary.
He unzipped his bag. Took out the Kawabata. Held it without opening it.
He heard footsteps in the corridor. Not coming in — passing by. Then stopping.
Then the door opened.
Marcus stood in the doorway.
He looked at Kenji. He looked at the empty classroom. He looked at Kenji again with the expression of someone who has followed a thing without admitting to themselves that they were following it and has now arrived somewhere that requires admission.
"I was looking for the library," Marcus said.
"The library is the other direction," Kenji said.
"I know where the library is," Marcus said.
A beat.
"I know," Kenji said.
Marcus came in. Didn't close the door — left it the way it was, slightly open, the way you leave a door when you are not prepared to close it — and crossed the room and stood at the wall beside the window, shoulder blades against the brick, looking at the light rather than at Kenji.
Kenji leaned against the same wall. A distance between them that had been chosen carefully by both of them without discussing it.
The radiator hummed.
"I saw the text," Marcus said. "The screen. When you picked up my phone."
"I didn't read it," Kenji said.
"I know. But the name was there."
"Jade," Kenji said.
"Yeah."
"How long?"
"Three months." He paused. "I bought a jacket."
Kenji didn't ask what that meant. He waited to see if Marcus would explain.
"For winter formal," Marcus said. "I was going to ask her. I already had the jacket. I bought it before I asked her." He laughed at himself — the short, honest laugh of someone who has decided to find it at least slightly absurd from the outside. "Who does that."
"Someone who was sure," Kenji said.
The laugh went quiet.
"Yeah," Marcus said.
He was still looking at the light. His shoulder was against the wall. His jaw was not doing the thing.
Which was interesting.
He registered this from a long way inside himself — the absence of the tightness, the specific non-occurrence of the physical response that had been following him for a week — and filed it away in the category of things he was not going to examine directly today.
"Two months," he said.
"Give or take," Kenji said.
"Is that from experience."
"Yes."
Marcus finally looked at him.
Kenji was looking at the light too — the long dark hair falling slightly forward, the chain resting against his jaw, his profile in the westward light the specific kind of thing that Marcus's brain registered and his common sense immediately told him to look back at the window.
He looked back at the window.
"You're from Tokyo," Marcus said.
"Originally. Also Vancouver. Also Paris."
"Paris," Marcus repeated.
"My mother."
"Right." He shifted his weight. "Did you eat lunch?"
"Not yet."
"The cafeteria has a thing on Tuesdays. It's not good, technically, but it's the kind of not-good that becomes good once you're used to it." He paused. "Like most things at this school."
Kenji turned his head and looked at Marcus with those dark unhurried eyes.
"I'll be there tomorrow," Marcus said, which was not the sentence he'd started building.
"Tuesday," Kenji said.
"Tuesday," Marcus confirmed.
They stood at the wall with the radiator humming and the light doing what the light did and between them the distance they'd both measured without using any instruments.
The bell rang.
Marcus pushed off the wall. Picked up his bag from where he'd set it by the door.
"Fourteen B," he said. "Left at the corridor. Door that's always slightly open."
"You mentioned," Kenji said.
"Right." He stood in the doorway. "See you Tuesday, Hayashi."
"See you Tuesday, Marcus," Kenji said.
Marcus walked out.
He walked the full length of the corridor and turned left toward the stairwell and went down two flights and out into the east corridor where Serena's bench was and he sat down on it and looked at the river through the far window.
He wasn't thinking about Jade.
He noticed this. Filed it. Did not examine it.
The river moved. He sat.
After a while his jaw did the thing. But it wasn't the same thing. It was a different thing. He didn't have a word for the different thing yet.
That was okay.
Words arrived when you were ready for them.
Across the school, in AP English, Zavier and Serena were presenting the first section of their project — thesis, evidence, close reading, proposed argument — and it was, by any measure, exceptional.
They moved through it without looking at each other any more than the presentation required. They answered Ellis's questions cleanly, occasionally building on each other's answers with the fluency of two people who had spent enough hours at the same table to understand how the other one thought.
Ellis looked at them over his glasses at the end of the session.
"Best thesis I've received in three years," he said. "Come back Friday with the close reading section."
Serena wrote a note in her notebook. Zavier nodded.
They didn't celebrate. Didn't look at each other.
She picked up her bag. He picked up his pages.
"Friday," she said.
"Friday," he said.
She walked out.
He stayed one moment longer — looking at the empty seat where she'd been sitting, at the page she'd annotated in the handwriting he now recognized across a room — and then walked out after her.
Down the corridor, left, toward the exit and the afternoon and the specific, unnavigable feeling of someone who has everything he needs for a thesis and no framework at all for what comes after.
In the third floor empty classroom, the light had shifted west.
Kenji stood at the window alone now with the Kawabata still unread in his hand.
He was reading the dedication page. He read it three times.
For those who arrive late to the feeling and find it waiting.
He put the book in his bag.
He picked up his bag.
He went to find the cafeteria.
And three floors down, in the student lounge, Vivienne Castellano received a text from one of her orbit girls that contained four words and a screenshot.
She read it.
She set the phone face-down.
She looked at the window.
Friday, she thought.
It would be Friday.
- Writer
