The Second Wren

Chapter 8: The Third Floor

He got the door open with his elbow on the third try, and everything stayed in the bags.

Inside, he set them down in the entry of the apartment his father paid for and lay down on the couch, face first, arms hanging off the side where they couldn't bother anybody.

"Are you dead," Wren said.

"I'm thinking."

"About what."

"Whether I can get up." He turned his head far enough to breathe. "First results are in. No."

"You carried five bags up one flight of stairs."

"I carried five bags, a guitar, and a hundred and forty pounds of myself for five hours. There was a lunch break. It was eleven minutes."

"Eleven."

"Maybe nine."

She stood over him with her arms folded and her mouth doing something that wasn't a smile, and then she turned her face away, which was how he knew it was close to one.

"Your cardio is a joke," she said.

"It's not a joke. It's a lifestyle."

"It's a joke." She walked to the door, crouched, and set his shoes side by side in front of him, toes out. Then she picked his backpack up off the floor and hung it on the hook. "Get up."

"No."

"Six hundred and sixty."

He opened one eye. "Left of what."

"Left of seven hundred." She pushed the second shoe toward him with her toe. "Standing up is forty of it."

"That's not—"

"It is, though. It's forty, it's gone, and the number doesn't go back up." She said it the way she'd said the price of the guitar, which was to say without any interest in an argument. "Shoes are free."

He sat up and put his shoes on. He did the arithmetic while he did it, because the arithmetic was the only part of this he was any good at. Six-sixty left, and six-sixty was the distance between him and being a person who owed nobody anything.

"Where are we going," he said.

"My father's gym."

He sat back down on the arm of the couch.

"That was the forty," she said. "You spent it. It doesn't buy you anything now."

"You said your father's gym."

"Up."

"Wren."

"You can walk down or you can be carried down, and I'm not carrying you."

He got up. He had a lot of things he could have said to that, and he said the truest one instead. "I'd rather beat Greyfall ten times than do one push-up. I want you to understand that isn't a joke. That's a whole personality."

"I don't know what that is."

"Of course you don't."

"Is it long?"

"It's a weekend. It's the best weekend you'll ever—" He stopped, because she was looking at him. "Why."

"Bring the guitar."

"Why?"

"Because it's yours."

That was how he ended up on a bus at four in the afternoon with a secondhand Yamaha on his back, going to meet a man who ran the hardest class in the county. Becca Lund said so, and Becca Lund knew everything, and so did every boy who had ever signed up and quit.

The Hollis Building was brick and old, and the elevator had a folding gate and a smell he couldn't place: tape, cold rubber, a ghost of chlorine from somewhere, and under it cigarettes from a decade ago. Wren pressed 3 and stood with her bag against her leg.

"My family's up on twenty-two," she said, in the tone of somebody naming a street she'd grown up on, and then the elevator started, and she didn't say anything else about it.

The third floor was the whole floor. The gate rattled open onto the smell all at once — tape, canvas, sweat, cold rubber — and a gym laid out like a map of who was allowed where: a line of little kids by the front window doing something with their knees, older ones working in the middle, and at the back, past the bags, past the mirrors that doubled everybody in the room, the ring.

By the door, behind glass, a laminated schedule and a logo he didn't recognize and three names with a line under each: the coaches.

Nobody in the room had heard them come in. Nobody except the man holding the mitts.

He was holding for a kid with his mouthguard in and his gloves up, both mitts at chest height, and the kid threw a jab, a jab, and wound up for the right hook — and the man looked at the door and his hands came down.

The kid swung through empty air hard enough that his own shoulder turned him around. "Hey! What the hell, I could've—"

Then he saw where the man was looking, and his whole face changed.

"Wren!"

The radio kept playing. Everything else stopped.

"Fourteen months," a woman on the bench said. "Fourteen months, and she walks in on a Saturday in a tank top."

"Oh, don't." A guy came off the wall of bags with one hand half-wrapped and pulled his hoodie off over his head, then held it out at arm's length. "Here. Cover your legs. These animals haven't been socialized."

"Get out of here," someone else said, laughing.

And then the room worked it out, all at once, that there was somebody standing behind her.

Wren didn't move out of the way. She set her bag down on the bench and said, pleasantly, "This is Ethan."

Ethan, holding the guitar strap in one hand and one of her shopping bags in the other, said, "Hi."

The half-wrapped guy stopped where he was. "Ethan Hale." He said it the way he'd read it off a form. "You've got to be kidding me."

"Marc."

"What are you doing with her."

Ethan opened his mouth.

"He told me," Wren said, "that he wanted to meet my family today."

The room made a sound. It was not one sound. It started low, the way a radiator starts up in a big old house, and then it came apart.

"He said that."

"He said that out loud?"

"Fourteen months—"

"Does Coach know?"

"Nobody tell Coach."

"Somebody's going to tell Coach."

"Okay. Okay, hang on." The oldest one in the room — heavy through the neck, shaved head, gray coming in at the temples — put both hands up. "As the senior student here—"

"Here we go."

"—as the senior student, this is a family matter now. This kid—" he pointed without looking—"walks in here with a guitar and a shopping bag. Which, by the way, I want to talk about the shopping bag—"

"It's her bag."

"—and I'm supposed to just stand here?"

"You're twenty-eight," the woman on the bench said. "She's seventeen in February."

"I'm a child at heart."

Wren lifted her chin and said, in a voice she must have practiced in a bathroom mirror, small and shy and sweet, "Ethan. Go on. Spar with one of them. Just for fun."

He turned to leave. She got a fistful of his hoodie before he finished the turn.

"Don't," she said, in her own voice.

"You're out of your mind—"

"Nothing's going to happen."

"He's going to kill me. That one." He jerked his chin at Marc. "He's been waiting for permission since Friday."

"You'll be fine."

"Fine."

"Fine."

At the far end of the floor, the elevator gate rattled.

Everyone came off the bags and the bench at once, out of habit, the way a room stands up when somebody's mother walks in.

Marc stepped forward, hand already up, half-wrapped, the whole weight of him coming off his back foot —

"What is this." The voice came down the length of the floor with no effort in it at all. "Whole gym standing around watching."

He was bigger than the room had made him look from the door. Six-three, maybe more, built like something the county had decided not to move. His hair was cut down to the scalp at the sides, gray coming through the stubble along his jaw, and his nose had been broken and set in a hurry.

He looked at the room, and the room looked at the mat.

Then he saw her.

Everything in his face came off it at once. "Birdie." He crossed the mat and put a hand on top of her head and left it there. "You didn't call."

"Dad. People."

"People." He looked around at the people. "What people."

She ducked out from under his hand, and he let her, and then he remembered he was in a gym. He turned, and he looked at Ethan, and whatever had been there a second before was gone.

His hands were taped. Two fingers of the left, one of the right, old gray tape rewrapped more than once.

"Who are you," he said.

"Dad," Ethan said.

The word was out before he knew it existed. He heard it leave and he heard it land.

Nobody breathed. Then somebody at the back of the room let out a long breath, all at once. Somebody else took one in.

And Marc Boyd said, very softly, "Oh my God."

The man's eyebrows came together into one flat line. "What?"

"No—" Ethan's hands came up. The guitar slid off his shoulder and he caught it by the neck, one-handed, badly. "No. That's not — I don't know why I said that." He heard how loud he was and got louder. "I'm a classmate. I'm her classmate. A friend. We're friends. Just friends."

"Just friends," the woman on the bench said, gently, the way you agree with a child.

The radio was still going. He could hear the little kids by the window, and his own blood in his ears.

"Who are you," her father said again.

"Ethan Hale."

Her father stood there and looked at him. Not a glare; nothing that simple. He had his weight on one hip and his taped fingers hooked into his belt, and he looked at Ethan the way a man looks at a car that's been parked on his street for three days with nobody coming out to it.

Beside him, Wren had turned her head away and was looking at the window, and she did not look back.