The Second Wren

Chapter 4: The Old Classmate

## The Old Classmate

The thread had ninety-one replies. He read all of them twice, the way you check a lock you've already checked, and only one did any damage.

*Are you sure she likes you? Or do you just like that somebody might? If it's the second one, I've got nothing for you.*

He sat with it a while. Then he opened the bottom drawer and took out the notebook.

Composition notebook, marbled cover. On the front, in silver marker, in handwriting that had not improved in four years: **THE PROTOCOL.** He had been thirteen. It had been funny then. He kept it anyway.

Page one.

1. Forget her.

2. If rule 1 fails, see rule 1.

3. No woman, clear mind, full magazine.

4. Wants are not needs. You need four things: food, water, sleep, wifi.

5. The best part of any game is the trailer. Keep it that way.

He said them out loud, quietly, the way other people said prayers. "Rule one. Forget her. Rule two. See rule one."

It worked about as well as it worked every night. That was why there was a page two, and a page three, and a page eleven where he had written STEADY in letters big enough to fill the line.

He put the notebook back, shut the drawer, and turned on the console.

The screen came up with the chime it played whether or not you deserved it. He leaned back. "Lights. Warm."

The speaker on the shelf heard him, and the room changed—the strip under the desk, the one behind the monitor, both coming up amber, then orange, so the apartment stopped looking like a place where a person lived alone and started looking like a place where something was about to happen.

"Play my list."

The music came in with the drums already going, somebody hitting something like they were angry at it, and by then the game had reached the title screen and the voice was already talking, that low, worn-out voice it used for everything.

*Good morning, Vantage City.*

"Good morning, Vantage City!" Ethan said, out loud, to his living room. Louder than he needed to. There was nobody to hear it. He said it anyway.

In there he had a body with a job and a car and a gun that needed cleaning. The city reset every time he opened it—the same first call, the same street, the same empty apartment with his name on the lease—and every time he walked out of it with nothing and the whole thing waiting to be done over. He had never once thought of it as a second chance until this week.

Nobody in that city had ever looked at him the way the whole second period had looked at him the day the substitute read the roster and got to his name. Next to his name was the word TRANSFERRED. He had not transferred. He had been sitting in the third row the entire semester. The sub said, well, that's what it says, and somebody in the back laughed, and then the room did, and the sub went on to the next name.

He could be a coward in Vantage City. He could be a coward with a car and a full tank, and the game would still hand him the next thing to do.

He played for a while. Then he thought about tomorrow, which was Friday, which meant school, which meant Wren Lennox would be in the building.

Monday was the thing she had announced. She'd said it the way she said everything, like both parties had already agreed and he was only now being informed. He was going to say no. He had until Monday to find the words, and he wanted them ready before he saw her, because a slow no was the kind she would take and build a house on. He needed one with a reason in it. Reasons were hard. He had spent most of his life constructing reasons other people would accept, and the problem with all of them was that they never held any weight.

He'd think of something. He always thought of something.

His mother had asked him once, on the phone from Arizona, in the voice people use for charity, whether he wasn't lonely in that apartment. He'd said no, and it was even true. People had a whole genre of worry about kids like him. Leaving the house was the part that cost something—being a person other people could hold a conversation with cost all day, and at the end of it you were tireder than when you started and you had said *yeah, totally* about forty times about things you did not care about. Staying home required keeping one person happy. Him. He had very low standards and he met them every time.

He liked Cora Bennett. It sat in him, filed, dusted occasionally. He did not want to say it and he did not want it said to him. Some things got worse when they were true out loud. The best part of any game is the trailer—rule five—and as long as the trailer ran, he could go on liking Cora Bennett at no cost to anybody, including her, especially her.

At eleven-thirty he gave up on the game, brushed his teeth, and got into bed with his phone.

Her page was public. He was not going to look at it. He had already looked at it. It was that kind of night.

Her last post was three days old. Two words and a photo.

*i'm back.*

In the photo she was squinting into the light with her eyes almost shut, laughing at something just off the edge of the frame, her hair doing whatever it wanted. It was obviously a picture taken by somebody who had never once worried about a picture of herself.

He looked at it for a while. Then he saved it.

*Three days ago. So three days ago she came back. Fine.* He tilted the phone, as if the angle might tell him something. *Saving the photo is to establish the timeline. You can read a lot from micro-expressions. This is research.*

He looked at it again. The face was not doing anything a face couldn't do.

He kept scrolling.

Weeks back, months back, her page was the usual. Food she was about to eat. A dog she'd met on a walk. Her feet in the air above a pool. And Julian Pryce.

Not all at once, and not in a way you'd catch if you skimmed. He wasn't skimming anymore.

A shoulder in the corner of one. The back of a head, three tables away in the lunchroom, blurred. A profile in a hallway, half turned, saying something to somebody out of frame. In every picture she took of herself except the newest one, there was Julian Pryce—some part of Julian Pryce—tucked in at the edge like a signature.

Julian Pryce, whose father played piano for a living and had done it in rooms with better lighting than most people's weddings, who had grown up in a house with a grand piano in it and had never once had to mention it. Julian, who did not know he was good-looking, which was somehow worse than if he'd known and worked at it.

He had never noticed Ethan in his life. Not in a cruel way. In the way you don't notice the third streetlight.

Ethan went back to the newest photo and looked again.

It was a classroom. The teacher's back was to the room, writing something. Wren had her phone out at arm's length, chin down, pulling a face. And in the row in front of her, turned around and looking directly into the lens without knowing it—

The only full face in a year of pictures. The only time Julian Pryce had ever been caught head-on.

He was extremely good-looking. That was the part he hated. Even from here, even at this size, it wasn't a matter of taste. It was a boy in a classroom who didn't know his own power and would probably be told about it by somebody else before the semester was out.

Below the picture, the caption: *the pipes are blooming, the chairs are somewhere else, the leaves have wings*

Ethan read it three times. It was familiar. Not familiar like he'd read it. Familiar like he'd heard it.

He opened the music app and typed the line into the search.

A song. An artist named Marla Keene. The title was *The Person I Am Around You.*

He set the phone down on the mattress and looked at the ceiling.

"That's a tweet about a song," he said out loud. "That's a lyric. That's her quoting a lyric called *The Person I Am Around You* under a photo with Julian Pryce's face in it, and that's—"

He stopped. He picked the phone back up and read the title again, in case it was a different title than he thought it was. It was not.

He held the phone over his chest with both hands and stared at the ceiling, and what he felt was not really triumph. He imagined telling Marc. He imagined four words in the group chat—*she likes Julian Pryce*—and how fast it would go, and how Marc would do that thing where he laughed once and then got quiet, and how by first period there'd be a version of it that Wren would hear and hate, and how she'd look at him when she heard it. Cora too. Everybody looking.

He'd have the whole school interested in him for a week. That was real currency. A week of not being the roster mistake.

No.

He turned it over, looking for the flaw the way he looked at everything. It was good information. If he traded her private feeling for one week of being interesting, then everything anybody had ever said about him would be basically correct, and he would have helped say it. He would be doing the thing to her that people did to him.

Also—and he was trying not to be honest this late at night—he wouldn't be doing it for the information. He'd be doing it because the information didn't put him any closer to any of it. He'd just know it. Alone. In his room. At midnight.

He put the phone down. Then he picked it up again, because of course he did, and the music app was still open, and he scrolled through his own library instead.

There it was. *You, Later.* Kettle & Crow.

He'd found it in ninth grade, in a thread about albums people wished they could hear again for the first time, and he'd listened to it in the dark on the floor of his room with headphones on until he could hear the room noise at the start of track four, the chair creaking, the thing somebody said that wasn't a word.

He hit share and sent it to his account.

Eleven followers. Three of them were relatives. He had blocked his father and his mother, so two of those three were only technically there, and the rest were people he had met once and who had never unfollowed him, out of politeness. Years of things he did not say to anybody—half sentences about the people in his chemistry class, screenshots of games he was good at, a picture of a sunset he'd taken from the third-floor landing when nobody was in the hall.

The like came before he had put the phone down again. Then the comment.

The account was called **@oldclassmate.** The avatar was a cartoon magical girl—pink hair, a wand with a heart on it, the kind of thing somebody picked when they wanted you to know they were joking and also never wanted you to mention it.

*ha — you've always liked Kettle & Crow. future you too. you play them in the car when you're tired and you don't even notice you're doing it. they don't last though. by your time they play together maybe once a year and it's a whole thing*

Ethan sat up.

He typed *who is this* and deleted it. Too much.

He typed: *You know their schedule?*

The reply came in under a minute. *i know a lot of things*

*That's a very useful answer.*

*you also liked junie park and hollis ream and marla keene. well. you liked marla keene*

Marla Keene. He had typed that name into a search bar six minutes ago.

He looked at the ceiling. Then: *What do you mean, liked.*

*you hate her now. future you. i asked why once and you wouldn't say. you said i wouldn't get it*

He sat with his thumb over the keyboard.

*Present me doesn't hate her,* he typed. *It's late. Going to sleep. Don't reply.*

He added *now I do, a little* on the inside, where it stayed.

Then he turned the phone over in his hand and put it down on the blanket, and picked it up again when it buzzed, fast, like he'd been waiting. He had been waiting.

It wasn't the account.

**Wren Lennox:** *you can't just END a conversation like that. with a girl. you really have to fix that about yourself*

**Wren Lennox:** 😐

He watched the screen.

*typing…* appeared under her name. Went away. Came back.

He didn't answer. The music was still on, the last song in the list, the one about the you from later showing up early, and in the chorus the singer lets him in anyway. He turned the volume down with his thumb but didn't stop it.

*I shouldn't get close to a girl like Wren Lennox. I really shouldn't.*

He pulled the blanket up over his head. It was a defensible position. His phone glowed under there and the blanket held the light in and his breath made the fabric warm.

It buzzed twice more and then stopped, and he lay in the dark under his own blanket with his eyes open.

Then he looked.

**Wren Lennox:** *ok so you're actually asleep. that's so fake. you're a night person. this is when your brain is loudest*

**Wren Lennox:** *i think maybe i'm being a lot. i just got back and everything is — i'm just glad. seeing you. don't be weird about it*

**Wren Lennox:** *see you tomorrow ok*

And then two seconds of audio.

He put the phone to his ear like an i***t, under the blanket, and pressed play. Her voice came out soft and close, the way it did when she wasn't performing anything.

"Sweet dreams, Ethan."

He lowered the phone.

*Goodnight, old classmate,* he typed back.

He sent it, and then he looked at the name on the screen a second longer than it deserved. At Cade's, Darlene had leaned over the counter and asked how the two of them knew each other, and Wren had said *old classmate* before he could get his mouth open.

Two people could use the same two words in one night. It didn't have to mean anything.

He turned the phone face-down on the nightstand and reached over and turned off the lamp, and the room went dark except for the strip under his desk, still amber, still on, humming very faintly at nothing.