Chapter Three: What Jake Sees
2441 Words
Elliot's POV
The thing about running a fraternity house was that it never actually stopped.
Even at 7 a.m. on a Friday, when the rest of Harlow University was still horizontal and unconscious, Sigma Alpha Delta had a pulse — someone's music bleeding through a floor, the industrial groan of the espresso machine in the common room, a pledge named Connor doing what appeared to be punitive push-ups in the front hall for reasons Elliot had stopped asking about because the answer was always Jake.
Elliot sat at the kitchen table with his laptop open and a coffee going cold beside it and a budget spreadsheet on the screen that he had been staring at for twenty minutes without actually seeing. The numbers were fine. The numbers were always fine — he was meticulous about the numbers because being meticulous about the numbers was the kind of thing that kept everything else from being looked at too closely.
He was thinking about a paragraph.
Specifically, he was thinking about a paragraph he had written on Tuesday in a spiral notebook with too much pressure on the pen, in a room where he had not expected to write anything real, about a morning he had not revisited in six years. He was thinking about the way it had felt to push it across a desk to a person he didn't know — the specific, terrible vulnerability of it, the waiting — and the way that person had read it twice, set it down, and without hesitation or performance or the gentle cushioning that people usually wrap honesty in when they're afraid of breaking you, had said:
The dress shirt. Don't cut it.
Not this is really good or I can tell this was hard to write or any of the dozen comfortable, useless things people said when they didn't know how to meet something true. Just — the one exact sentence that had located the piece's heart with the calm precision of someone who had done this their whole life.
Elliot closed the budget spreadsheet.
He opened a blank document.
He stared at it.
"You're doing the face," said Jake Kelley, materializing from the direction of the espresso machine with two mugs and the unhurried confidence of someone who had never once in his life worried about taking up space. He set one mug in front of Elliot without being asked — black, no sugar, correct — and dropped into the chair across from him with the ease of a man claiming a throne. "What face?" Elliot said.
"The one where you're somewhere else and I'm supposed to pretend I don't notice." Jake sipped his coffee. "I always notice."
This was true. It was one of the things about Jake that was genuinely useful and occasionally exhausting — he had a bloodhound's instinct for shifts in Elliot's internal weather, developed over three years of proximity, and he used it with the same casual authority he applied to everything else. Not maliciously. Jake was not, at his core, malicious. He was just a person who had never learned to want things quietly.
"Budget's fine," Elliot said, which was not an answer to what Jake had said but was the answer to the conversation Elliot preferred to be having.
"Cool." Jake stretched his arms over his head, vertebrae cracking in sequence. "What's the class?"
Elliot looked at him.
"You have that look you get when a class is making you think about something you don't want to think about. Happened with Morrison's seminar junior year. Happened with that philosophy elective you swore you took for the credit." Jake pointed at him with his mug. "What's the class."
A beat.
"Creative writing elective," Elliot said. "Adler."
Jake stared at him. "You're taking a creative writing elective."
"I needed a humanities credit."
"Elliot." Jake set down his mug. "There were forty humanities credits available. I personally watched you register. You chose creative writing."
"The other sections were full."
This was partially true. Two other sections had been full. One had been open. Elliot had registered for Adler's class anyway and had not examined why, because examining why was the kind of thing that led to answers he wasn't prepared to act on.
Jake was quiet for a moment — which was unusual enough to be notable. Then he said, in a tone that was carefully not a tone: "Who's in it."
"Lots of people."
"Who specifically."
"Jake."
"I'm just asking."
"You're never just asking."
Jake smiled, which was the expression he made when he'd been caught doing exactly what he was doing and had decided to be charming about it instead of defensive. It was an effective strategy. It had always worked on pledges, alumni, girls at parties, the dean's administrative assistant. It worked on Elliot about sixty percent of the time.
This was the other forty.
"I have a chapter meeting at nine," Elliot said, and turned back to his laptop.
Jake picked up his mug. Stood. Paused in the way of someone who has decided to deploy a final piece of intelligence and is timing it for effect.
"Saw you walking back from Aldridge yesterday," he said. "With the art kid."
Elliot's hands stilled on the keyboard.
One second. Two.
"We were walking in the same direction," Elliot said. "The path goes through the east quad. It's not a private path."
"Sure." Jake moved toward the door. "He's the one Connor and Mason were messing with last year, right? Fresher. Quiet. The one with the portfolio bag."
The temperature in Elliot's chest did something that he catalogued and did not investigate.
"I don't remember," he said.
Jake looked at him over his shoulder with an expression that said yes you do with complete certainty and zero judgment, which was in some ways more uncomfortable than if there had been judgment. Then he went upstairs, and Elliot sat in the quiet kitchen with his cold coffee and his blank document and the memory — which he had, in fact, kept in a very specific mental folder marked do not open — of a paper cup he'd watched someone throw from the porch. A skinny kid with a portfolio bag who had kept walking like he'd had a lot of practice at keeping walking.
Elliot had not thrown the cup.
He also had not said anything.
He had stood on that porch and watched it happen and taken a long drink of whatever was in his own cup and turned back to the conversation he'd been having, and it had been so easy — the turning back, the continuing — that the ease of it was its own indictment.
He opened the blank document.
He typed one line.
The things you don't do are still things you do.
He stared at it.
Then he saved the document in a folder labeled chapter notes, which was also where he kept his guitar tabs and the three letters he'd written to his father after the funeral and never sent, which was to say: the folder for things that were real and had no place else to go.
The chapter meeting was at nine and ran until ten-thirty because Mason Reid had a grievance about the composite photo scheduling and Jake had opinions about the spring formal venue and Connor the pledge kept accidentally agreeing with both sides simultaneously in a way that prolonged everything.
Elliot ran it the way he ran everything — efficiently, firmly, with the particular authority of someone who had learned that rooms respond to certainty whether or not the certainty is earned. He made three decisions, tabled two debates, and extracted a unanimous vote on the formal venue in eleven minutes, which was some kind of record.
Afterward, Jake caught him at the door.
"West quad at noon," Jake said. "Pickup game. Mason's bringing the wide receivers."
"I have reading."
"Elliot."
"I have reading, Jake."
Jake studied him with the patient, calibrating look of someone doing arithmetic. Then he said: "You good?"
It was the version of the question Jake only asked when he already suspected the answer and was giving Elliot the formal opportunity to lie about it if he needed to. It was one of the kinder things Jake did, and he did it so casually you could almost miss it.
"Yeah," Elliot said. "I'm good."
Jake nodded. Accepted this. "Noon," he said, and walked away.
It was Mason who brought it up.
They were forty minutes into the pickup game — shirts versus skins in the lukewarm October noon, the kind of game that starts as casual and accumulates competitive intensity without anyone officially agreeing to that — when Mason jogged up beside Elliot during a water break with the easy grin of someone about to say something they've been holding.
"Yo," Mason said. "Heads up — that kid's back."
Elliot took a drink of water. "What kid."
"The art one. Quiet. Gay." Mason said this last word with the dismissive flatness of someone deploying it as a category rather than a slur, which was a distinction that meant less than Mason thought it did. "He does that thing where he sits by the fountain and does whatever in his sketchbook. Every Friday." He shrugged. "Connor wants to do the thing again."
A pause.
"The thing," Elliot said.
"You know. The thing. Make some noise, mess with him a little. It's not—" Mason waved a hand. "It's nothing. It's funny."
Elliot looked across the west quad.
Noah Reyes was sitting on the low wall beside the south fountain, which was turned off for the season and held a thin skin of dead leaves. He had his portfolio bag beside him on the wall, his sketchbook open across his knees, and he was looking at something across the quad with the specific quality of attention that Elliot had come to recognize in two class sessions as the way Noah looked when he was deciding whether to draw something — still and slightly inward, like he was measuring the distance between what he saw and what he meant.
He was wearing a dark green jacket two sizes too large. The sleeves came past his wrists. He had pushed one up to draw.
Elliot looked at him.
He looked at him the way you look at a thing when you are trying to find something wrong with it. When you are waiting for the thing that justifies the distance, the category, the clean story you have been using to not think about someone.
He looked and he found: a person sitting by a dry fountain on a Friday, drawing something, bothering no one, wearing a jacket that wasn't his size, and somewhere underneath all the practiced stillness — Noah always carried this, Elliot had already noticed, the slight forward tension of someone waiting for the thing that was coming — there was a wariness. A preparation.
He's already waiting for it, Elliot thought. He came outside on a Friday and he already knows he has to be ready.
The temperature in his chest did the thing again.
"No," Elliot said.
Mason blinked. "What?"
"No." Elliot handed his water bottle to the nearest pledge without looking at him. "Tell Connor no. We're playing. Come on."
Mason processed this. The processing took a moment, because Mason was accustomed to a version of Elliot that ran alongside these things, or turned away from them, or generated a just-convincing-enough objection and then let it happen anyway.
"Dude, it's literally just—"
"Mason." Elliot looked at him. Not the performance of authority — the actual thing, which was quieter and more final. "No. Drop it."
A beat. Mason shrugged the shrug of someone filing something away for later. "Sure, man. Whatever."
They went back to the game.
Elliot ran a route, caught the pass, kept moving.
But he knew — with the specific, sideways awareness of someone trying not to do the thing they're doing — exactly where Noah Reyes was at every point during the next twenty minutes. Not looking directly. Not the obvious thing. Just the peripheral knowledge of a person's location the way you track something you can't afford to lose sight of.
At some point Noah stood, packed his sketchbook into the portfolio bag, and left the way he'd come — unhurried, head slightly down, the jacket sleeves pushed up, earbuds in now, the armor assembled.
He passed within forty feet of the game without looking over.
He did not look over because he had learned not to.
Elliot watched him go.
Jake, jogging back from the end zone, came to stand beside him.
"Nice hands today," Jake said, with the tone of someone commenting on the weather while watching a storm. "You've been tracking him since he sat down."
Elliot said nothing.
"You know what you look like?" Jake said, casual, reaching for the communal water. "From over here?"
Elliot picked up the ball.
"You look like a man staring at someone like they're a problem he doesn't know how to solve," Jake said. "Except." He paused, tilting his water bottle back. "It's not actually a problem-solving face."
"Jake."
"I'm just saying what I see."
"Then stop seeing things."
Jake smiled — the sixty-percent-of-the-time smile, the charming one — and jogged back to the line.
Elliot stood in the middle of the west quad with the football in his hands and looked at the space where Noah had been: the wall by the dry fountain, the compressed impression in the dead leaves where a portfolio bag had rested, the absence of someone who had come and gone without causing a single disturbance.
The thing about hatred — Elliot thought, with the specific clarity of a person who has been lying to themselves long enough to get sloppy at it — is that you can usually say what you hate and why. You can name the offense. You can draw a straight line between the wound and the thing that caused it.
He looked at that empty wall.
He could not draw that line.
Which meant it was not, and possibly had never been, hatred.
Which meant the word for what it actually was had been waiting in a locked drawer in his chest for long enough that he'd stopped noticing the drawer.
He threw the ball hard down the field at no one in particular.
It arced up into the grey October sky — high and clean and briefly, simply beautiful — and then came down.
Everything came down eventually.
The question, Elliot thought, was what you did when it landed.
- Writer
