Boston High

Tricia

Tricia stood in the driveway, bag strapped over her shoulder, waiting the way she always did. On the surface it looked like any other morning. Same street, same pale sky, same four blocks between her house and James's. But nothing had felt ordinary since the shooting. What had once been a simple routine now carried a quiet weight she couldn't set down — the awareness that ordinary things could stop being ordinary without warning, without reason, without giving you time to prepare. She had been looking forward to this weekend more than she'd admitted to anyone. She'd planned a proper date — takeout from Shouncle Miliano, their usual order, eaten at their spot in the old park where the grass grew thick and the city noise softened to something almost bearable. They would lie on their backs and stare up at whatever stars Boston's light pollution allowed them. No hospital. No recovery schedules. No careful conversations held just out of her father's earshot. Just the two of them and a patch of sky. She needed that. She suspected James needed it more than she did.

The past few weeks had tested them in ways she hadn't anticipated. Not their feelings for each other — she had never been more certain of those. But there was a kind of strain that came from both people carrying weight in silence, each trying to protect the other, until the silence itself became the problem. She had watched James move through the last two weeks with a steadiness that had renewed something in her — a deep, settled respect for who he was when things were hard. But steadiness wasn't the same as being okay. She knew the difference.

She saw him before he reached the end of his street. Recognised his walk, his jacket, the way he kept his hands in his pockets when something was on his mind. She had learned to read him the way you learn a language — through so much repeated attention that recognition becomes instinct.

Then he moved under the streetlight and she saw it.

The bruise sat high on his left cheekbone, dark at the centre, yellowing at the edges. Fresh enough that it still looked angry. He was holding himself slightly differently too — the way people do when they're managing pain and trying not to show it, which always ends up drawing more attention than the pain itself.

Her heart dropped.

He hadn't mentioned anything. Not last night, not this morning. Not a single text.

She waited until he reached her, watching his face the whole time. He was already arranging his expression into something relaxed and easy, the way he always did when he was carrying something alone.

"Morning," he said, leaning in to kiss her cheek.

She let him. Then she took a small step back and looked at him directly.

"What happened to your face, James."

It wasn't a question. She had learned that too — that asking gave him room to deflect, but stating made the deflection visible.

He didn't miss a beat. "Caught an elbow in practice. Marcus cut inside and I didn't move fast enough." He almost smiled. "You should see his elbow."

Tricia looked at the bruise. Then at his eyes.

"Marcus is left-handed," she said.

James blinked. Just for a second — barely a flicker — but she caught it.

"The bruise is on your left cheek," she continued, keeping her voice even. "If Marcus elbowed you going to his right hand side, it would land on your right."

Silence.

A car rolled past on the street behind them. Somewhere down the block a dog was barking at nothing.

"Tricia—"

"You don't have to tell me right now," she said. "But don't insult me with a story that doesn't add up." She picked up her bag and started walking toward school. "Come on. We'll be late."

He fell into step beside her and for a while neither of them spoke. She could feel him working through whatever calculation he was running — how much to say, how much to hold back, what he thought she could handle. She'd felt him doing this more than once over the past week and she'd let it go, because they'd both been managing things in their own ways.

But a bruise he'd tried to hide was different.

They were halfway to school when he spoke.

"I'm fine. I just need you to trust that I'm handling something."

"I do trust you," she said. "That's not what I asked."

He went quiet again.

Tricia looked straight ahead, watching the school gates come into view at the end of the street, students filing through in ones and twos. The metal detectors glinting in the morning light. A security guard with a coffee cup, barely watching.

She thought about her father sitting in his recliner three days ago, staring at a point on the wall just above the television. She'd asked him if he wanted her to change the channel. He'd said no. Then, after a long pause, he'd said something that had been sitting in the back of her mind ever since.

"I knew it was coming, Tricia. Not that day specifically. But I knew."

She hadn't asked him what he meant. He'd closed his eyes immediately after, the way he did when he'd said more than he intended to. And she'd sat with it quietly, the way she sat with most things.

She hadn't told James.

She wasn't sure why. Maybe for the same reason he hadn't told her about his face.

They stopped at the gate. James turned to her, and she could see him searching for words that were honest without being the whole truth.

"After school," she said, before he could speak. "You and me. No deflecting."

He looked at her for a long moment. Something moved behind his eyes — relief, maybe, or the particular exhaustion of someone who has been carrying something alone for too long.

"After school," he agreed.

She held his gaze one moment longer. Then she went through the gate ahead of him, her mind already turning.

Someone had wanted her father gone. James was hiding an injury he hadn't mentioned. And somewhere inside this school, behind ordinary faces and metal detector beeps and morning routines, something was still moving.

Tricia intended to find out what.

They met after the last bell at their spot — a narrow alcove at the far end of the east corridor, tucked behind the language block where the foot traffic thinned out and nobody had reason to linger. They had found it two years ago by accident and claimed it quietly, the way you claim things that have no official owner. It had been where they first admitted what they were to each other. It felt right to come back to it now.

Tricia got there first. She sat on the low windowsill and waited, her bag in her lap, watching the corridor empty out as students peeled toward exits and buses and the relief of being somewhere that wasn't school.

James appeared around the corner two minutes later. He looked tired in a way that practice alone didn't explain — the kind of tired that came from holding too many things in too small a space for too long.

He sat beside her. Close but not quite touching.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

Then Tricia turned to him and said, simply and quietly, "Tell me."

Something in him shifted. She felt it before she saw it — a loosening, like a knot finally giving way after being pulled too tight for too long. He pressed his hands flat against his thighs, and she noticed they were trembling slightly.

"James."

"I'm okay," he said. Then, almost immediately: "I'm not okay."

He tried to say something else and couldn't. His breathing changed — shallow and rapid, catching in his chest in a way that alarmed her. She had never seen him like this. In all the time she had known him, through everything they had been through together, he had always been the steady one. The one who held on. The one who managed.

She didn't think. She just reached for him — pulled him toward her, her arm around his shoulders, her hand at the back of his head the way you hold someone when words aren't the right tool.

He broke.

Not dramatically, not loudly. James Monroe did not do anything dramatically. But he pressed his face against her shoulder and the tension that had been building in him for two weeks finally had somewhere to go. His shoulders shook. His breathing came in ragged, uneven pulls. She felt the dampness against her collar and held him tighter.

She didn't say anything. She had learned that too.

After a while — she couldn't have said how long — the shaking in his hands got worse before it got better. She felt him trying to control his breathing, counting something silently, a rhythm she didn't recognise but understood instinctively was something he'd taught himself.

"How long has this been happening?" she asked softly, when the worst of it had passed.

He pulled back slowly, wiping his face with the back of his hand. He looked exhausted and lighter at the same time, the way people do after they've put something down they've been carrying for too long.

"The panic attacks?" He exhaled. "A while. Since before us."

She absorbed that. "And you never said anything."

"I couldn't." He stared at his hands, still unsteady in his lap. "I couldn't afford for it to become something visible. The scholarship, the scouts — if anyone thought I was falling apart—"

"You're not falling apart," she said. "You're human."

He looked at her sideways, and she could see the years of managed silence in his expression — the careful, exhausting work of appearing fine.

"Now tell me about your face," she said.

He told her. All of it — the locker room, the shove, the voice behind him that knew his private nickname, the threat about his hands. He told her about the headline he'd read the night before the attack. He told her about walking home alone without texting her back, and why.

When he finished, the corridor was empty and the school had gone quiet around them.

Tricia sat with it for a moment. Then she told him what her father had said.

"I knew it was coming, Tricia. Not that day specifically. But I knew."

James went very still.

"He knew," James said slowly. "Which means whatever this is — it didn't start with the shooting."

"No," Tricia said. "I don't think it did."

They looked at each other in the thin afternoon light coming through the corridor window. Outside, Boston moved on without them — buses, footsteps, the ordinary noise of a city that didn't know what was sitting inside one of its high schools.

"We should have told each other sooner," James said.

"Yes," Tricia agreed. "We should have."

She reached over and took his hand, still trembling faintly, and held it in both of hers until it stilled.

"We do this together from now on," she said. "Whatever it is. Together."

James looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded — not the careful, managed nod he used when he was agreeing to protect someone. A real one.

"Together," he said.

Outside, the last bus pulled away from the kerb. The corridor fell completely silent.

Neither of them moved yet. There was something still and necessary about the moment — the feeling of having finally arrived at the same place at the same time, carrying the same knowledge, facing the same direction.

Whatever was coming, they would face it with open eyes.

Both of them.