Chapter Thirteen: Tuesday
2098 Words
Marcus Reid had a theory about himself.
The theory, which he had held since approximately the seventh grade and never once questioned, was this: he was simple.
Not in the diminishing sense — not slow, not unsophisticated. Simple in the way of things that are exactly what they appear to be. He liked people. He showed up for people. He bought the jacket before he asked because that was just how the feeling moved in him — fast and forward and without strategy.
He knew who he was.
He had always, always known who he was.
Until Tuesday.
He got to the cafeteria at 12:11.
He got a tray. He got the Tuesday thing — the pasta situation that wasn't good technically but had become good through familiarity, which was what he'd told Kenji, which was why he was thinking about that sentence now as he carried his tray to the table by the window.
His table. Serena's table, technically, who had claimed it by existing at it and never explicitly invited anyone but had also never told Marcus not to sit there the three times he'd sat there this week, which he was choosing to interpret as permission.
He sat down.
He put his fork on his tray.
He looked at the door.
He told himself he wasn't looking at the door.
He looked at his pasta.
The door opened.
He did not look up for four full seconds.
This was, he would later understand, the last four seconds of his theory about himself.
Kenji was wearing his uniform — the Westbrook black, same as everyone — but today without the chain.
Just his face.
Which was, without the chain, a different kind of thing entirely — not lesser, not unfinished, just — open. The jaw clean, the line of it uninterrupted. His hair was down today too, fully down, past his jaw, the dark straight weight of it moving slightly as he walked.
He wasn't wearing the chain and Marcus noticed this immediately and then noticed that he'd noticed it and then looked extremely carefully at his pasta.
Kenji got a tray. He looked at the cafeteria with the assessing calm he brought to all spaces — found the window table, found Marcus, and walked toward it the way he walked toward everything: like he'd already decided and the walking was just the formality.
He set his tray down across from Marcus.
He sat.
"The pasta," he said.
"Yeah," Marcus said.
"It's better than yesterday's."
"Tuesday is always better."
"You mentioned," Kenji said, and there was something at the corner of his mouth that wasn't quite a smile and was in the general vicinity.
Marcus looked at his tray.
His hands were completely normal. He checked. Yes. Completely normal hands.
It started approximately six minutes in.
They were talking about something — the assembly, the Hargrove speech, Serena and what the file had revealed — and Marcus was talking the way Marcus talked: openly, easily, with his hands, with the particular warmth of someone who didn't edit himself before speaking because he'd never needed to.
And then Kenji laughed.
Not at something Marcus said — at something he himself said, a dry observation about the cafeteria's architectural commitment to making every surface beige — and it was the same laugh Marcus had heard in the corridor when Serena said something sharp and brilliant.
Real. Head slightly back. The kind of laugh that happens before the person decides to have it.
Marcus heard it and felt something he had no file for.
It started in his chest.
A warmth, specific and located, the kind that doesn't radiate outward but sits in one place and pulses there, and he registered it the way you register something unfamiliar — with the mild confusion of someone who has touched a surface they expected to be cold and found it warm instead.
He looked at his pasta.
He picked up his fork.
He put it down.
The goosebumps started at 12:24.
He could not explain them. He was not cold — the cafeteria was, if anything, slightly overheated the way institutional cafeterias tend to be. But they rose on his arms, under his sleeves, the specific involuntary texture of skin that has received information from somewhere and is processing it physically.
He pulled his sleeve down slightly. Casual. Like he was adjusting.
Kenji was talking about Vancouver — the particular quality of the rain there, how it was different from Tokyo rain, how rain had a personality in every city if you paid attention to it.
Marcus was paying attention to it. He was also paying attention to the way Kenji's hands moved when he talked — not expansively, not performatively, just naturally, in small precise gestures that said exactly what they needed to say and stopped when the saying was done.
His hands were — Marcus looked at them.
He looked at his pasta again.
The pasta was doing nothing to help.
The girls at the next table noticed first.
Two of them — the Westbrook variety of girl who noticed everything social and processed it at speeds that suggested some kind of gift — looked at the window table and then at each other and then back at the window table.
One of them said something to the other that made the other cover her mouth.
Marcus did not notice this.
He was busy not noticing Kenji.
At 12:31 Kenji reached across the table.
Not for anything on Marcus's tray — he had his own. Not to demonstrate anything. Simply because he had finished making a point and his hand ended up at the edge of the table and then, in the way of things that happen without being fully decided, continued from the edge of the table to Marcus's forearm where it rested, briefly, with the light undemanding pressure of someone who touches things the way they do everything else — without needing permission from the thing.
He was still talking.
He didn't appear to notice his hand was there.
Marcus stopped hearing the words.
The warmth in his chest moved. It did not become less warm. It became significantly more warm. It became a warmth that started in his chest and went immediately to his face and then down his arms and settled in his legs, which were now — this was new information — not still.
His left knee was doing something.
He looked down at his left knee with the expression of someone who has received unexpected news from a body part.
His left knee was doing what he had only ever seen knees do in movies — the faint, involuntary tremor of something that has been asked to remain neutral and cannot.
He looked up.
Kenji had finished the point. His hand was still on Marcus's forearm. He was looking at Marcus with those dark, unhurried, completely unalarmed eyes.
"You've gone red," Kenji said.
His voice was completely neutral. The sentence was an observation, delivered the way Serena delivered observations — as information, not as a weapon.
Marcus opened his mouth.
"I—" he said.
His face was, at this point, several degrees warmer than it had any right to be. He could feel it. He could feel the specific heat of his own face which was a thing he had not experienced since approximately the fifth grade when he'd given a presentation about volcanoes and knocked the model off the desk.
"I'm fine," he said.
Kenji looked at him.
"I'm not questioning that," Kenji said, and he said it so gently, so without edge, that Marcus had the extremely specific sensation of someone who has been given a door and is standing in front of it and has not yet decided whether to open it.
Kenji removed his hand from Marcus's forearm.
Marcus's forearm was noticeably cooler than it had been six seconds ago.
This was, objectively, worse.
The girls at the next table were no longer subtle.
Three of them now. One had her phone out.
Marcus was completely unaware.
He was busy having, quietly and privately and without any of the vocabulary he would have needed to describe it accurately, the single most disorienting twenty minutes of his seventeen years.
Not bad. He needed to note that clearly. Not bad. Not wrong. Not anything with a negative charge.
Just — the complete and total collapse of his theory about himself, which had been so foundational to his understanding of his own existence that its absence left a space in the shape of everything he thought he knew and filled it with something warm and unnamed and slightly terrifying and not at all unpleasant.
He was looking at his pasta.
The pasta had been fully unequal to today's challenges.
"Marcus," Kenji said.
He looked up.
Kenji was looking at him with the expression he'd worn in the corridor — not demanding, not performing patience, just — there. Fully present. Like he had time. Like Marcus could take the time he needed. Like the thing that was happening between them at this table on this Tuesday was something he had some form of coordinates for and was therefore not alarmed by.
"Yeah," Marcus said.
Kenji tilted his head slightly. "You don't have to classify it," he said.
Marcus stared at him.
"Whatever you're — doing," Kenji said. "In your head right now. You don't have to put it in a box immediately." He looked at his own tray. Looked back. "Some things take time to have a word for."
Marcus looked at him.
His knee had stopped doing the thing. Or he'd stopped noticing the thing. He wasn't sure which.
"You knew," Marcus said.
"I don't know anything," Kenji said, which was the kind of sentence that meant the opposite of what it said and both of them understood that.
Marcus exhaled. Long. Slow. The sound of something that has been held tightly becoming, slightly, less held.
"The pasta's cold," Kenji said.
"It's always cold by this point."
"You said it becomes good."
"The cafeteria one is better warm."
Kenji looked at his tray. Then he stood up, picked up both their trays, walked to the microwave at the far wall — the one nobody used because you had to know it existed, which required having been shown — and stood there for ninety seconds with the quiet focused patience of someone who considered this a reasonable use of time.
He came back. Set Marcus's tray in front of him. Sat down.
Marcus looked at his pasta. It was warm.
He looked at Kenji.
Kenji was eating, looking out the window at the grey Tuesday sky, completely unbothered, as though he had not just, in the space of one cafeteria lunch, gently and without agenda rearranged the entire interior of Marcus Reid's understanding of himself.
Marcus picked up his fork.
He ate the pasta.
It was, warm, considerably better.
The girls at the next table had four different screenshots.
Marcus, for once in his life, didn't notice them.
He was busy looking out the window at the same grey sky Kenji was looking at — and noticing, for the first time, that it was the same sky from where they both sat.
He didn't have a word for what that meant.
He thought maybe he was okay with that.
For now.
For right now he was completely okay with that.
Across the cafeteria, at a table near the door, Vivienne Castellano watched the window table with an expression that had moved, somewhere in the past ten minutes, from its usual composed calculation to something that was almost, almost genuinely surprised.
She looked at the window table.
She looked at her phone.
She had a plan for Friday. She had revised it twice since Saturday.
She looked at the window table again.
Marcus Reid was looking at the grey sky. Kenji Hayashi was looking at the same sky. Their shoulders were four inches apart and neither of them had moved away.
She put her phone face-down.
For the first time in a long time she thought about something that wasn't strategy.
She thought about whether the thing she had been doing for three years with Zavier Lennox was the jacket in the closet or something else entirely.
She thought about this for approximately thirty seconds before she filed it away in the place she put things she wasn't ready to look at.
But it had been thirty seconds.
Which was twenty-nine seconds longer than she usually gave anything that didn't serve a purpose.
- Writer
