Four-Eyes
1655 Words
Ethan
Tuesday · 9:15 AM
Hartwell University, Los Angeles
He didn't think about her in the morning. He was very deliberate about this.
He was up at six for conditioning — forty minutes in the campus gym before anyone else arrived, the weights room empty and echoey and smelling of rubber and effort, the way he liked it. No teammates, no performance, no being Ethan Calloway. Just the bar and the burn and the specific blank quiet of a body doing what it was built to do. He had discovered at fourteen that physical exhaustion was the most reliable method he had found for turning the volume down on everything else, and he had been using it ever since with the commitment of someone who had tried other methods and found them wanting.
He showered. He went to class. He did not check his phone until after nine, which was later than usual and which he was also very deliberate about.
There was nothing from the wrong number.
He put his phone away. Sat in the third row of his Urban Infrastructure lecture — the one class he actually wanted to be in, the one that made the most sense to him, structures and systems and the way cities held themselves together under pressure — and took notes in the focused, unhurried way of someone who was paying genuine attention rather than performing it.
He did not think about the stranger.
He thought about the stranger twice before ten o'clock.
— — —
It happened in the campus coffee line at ten-fifteen.
He was behind Jordan and Dev, half-listening to a conversation about the upcoming away game in Seattle, when he saw her. She was three people ahead in the line, her bag over one shoulder, glasses on, a paperback held open with one hand while she waited — actually reading, in a coffee line, with the complete unselfconsciousness of someone who had long since stopped caring what she looked like to other people. She had a pencil behind her ear. There was a faint ink mark on her left wrist that hadn't been there yesterday, which meant she'd been writing something this morning before the library shift.
He noticed all of this before he'd decided to look.
Becca Crawford was two people behind her, with two girls from Isabelle's circle, talking loudly enough that it carried. He didn't register what was being said until he caught the word scholarship delivered in a particular tone — the tone of someone using a word as a weapon disguised as a fact — and then he registered the small tightening in Nora Ashworth's shoulders that told him she had heard it too.
She didn't turn around. Didn't respond. Just moved forward in the line when the space opened up, ordered something without looking at the menu, and stepped aside to wait.
Becca's group laughed at something. The sound was the specific bright social laugh of people performing for one another.
Ethan looked at Nora. She was looking at her book again — or looking at it, at least, her eyes on the page in a way that was slightly too still to be reading.
Jordan said something about the Seattle game. Ethan said something back that he immediately forgot. The line moved forward.
He reached the front. Ordered. Stepped aside.
He was standing three feet from her waiting for his coffee when she looked up from her book and found him looking at her. The expression on her face moved through surprise and landed immediately, efficiently, on something flat and unimpressed — her default, apparently, specifically for him.
"Are you going to say something," she said, "or just stand there."
"I wasn't going to say anything," he said.
"You were staring."
"I was thinking."
"About what?"
He had absolutely no answer to this that he was willing to give. "Your book," he said instead.
She looked at the cover. Looked back at him with an expression that indicated she found this answer approximately as convincing as he'd intended it.
"You read Toni Morrison," she said. It was not a question.
"I've read Toni Morrison."
"Interesting."
"Why is that interesting?"
"It isn't, particularly," she said. "I'm just recalibrating."
Her coffee came up. She took it without looking away from him for just a half-second longer than necessary — a look that was not hostile exactly, more like the look of someone filing something away — and then she picked up her bag and walked out.
Jordan appeared at his elbow with his coffee. "You keep ending up near her."
"It's a campus," Ethan said. "It's not that large."
"You know her name now."
"I know everyone's name."
"You were looking at her like—"
"Jordan." He picked up his coffee. "I will genuinely end you."
Jordan smiled the smile of someone who had known him long enough to know that particular threat was empty. Ethan walked out into the Tuesday morning sunshine and did not look in the direction she had gone.
He thought about the word recalibrating. Who used that word in a coffee line? Who read Toni Morrison while waiting for a flat white and used the word recalibrating in casual conversation and looked at him like he was a mildly interesting data point she hadn't expected?
He thought: nobody has ever talked to me like that in my life.
He thought: I don't know what to do with that.
He went to his next class and paid absolutely no attention to any of it.
— — —
Ethan · Tuesday · 11:38 PM · Calloway House
Practice had gone well. This was the one uncomplicated part of his life — the court, the ball, the play unfolding in real time, the specific full-body intelligence of it that had nothing to do with his last name or his father's expectations or any of the things that made everything else feel like wearing a costume. On the court he was just the point guard. Fast hands, good instincts, the ability to read the play three moves ahead. His father had never understood why he loved it. That was possibly part of why he loved it.
He was lying on his bed, lights off again, phone on his chest, when he opened the thread.
He read back through what he'd sent the night before. Read her responses. Only on Mondays. Go to sleep, wrong number. Whatever it is — it'll still be there tomorrow. So will you.
So will you.
He hadn't noticed that part last night. Or he had noticed it and hadn't examined it. There was something in it — something small and specific, the difference between it'll be fine and so will you — that felt like the kind of careful word choice you only made if you meant it precisely.
He typed before he'd finished deciding to.
(iMessage · Tuesday 11:38 PM)
Ethan:
Still there. For the record.
Nora:
I know. You texted me.
Good practice?
Ethan:
How did you know I had practice?
Nora:
You mentioned basketball last night. It's Tuesday. Most teams practice Tuesday and Thursday.
Also you sound like someone who just had practice.
Ethan:
What does that sound like?
Nora:
Like someone who is tired but not the bad kind of tired. The kind where you actually did something.
Ethan:
That's accurate.
How was your day?
Nora:
Long. Fine. I have a paper due Thursday and a tutoring session at 6 AM tomorrow which I deeply regret agreeing to.
Ethan:
6 AM.
Nora:
The student is a morning person. I am not a morning person. We are working through this together.
Ethan:
You tutor at 6 AM and work in a library and edit things.
How many jobs do you have?
Nora:
Enough.
Ethan:
That's not an answer.
Nora:
Four. It's four jobs. Go to sleep, wrong number.
Ethan:
You first.
Nora:
I have two hundred pages to finish before Thursday.
Ethan:
Then I'll let you get to it.
Good luck with the paper.
Nora:
Thanks, wrong number.
He put his phone down. Lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought about a girl with four jobs and a 6 AM tutoring session who said enough like it was a complete answer, which somehow it was.
He thought about the coffee line that morning. About her shoulders tightening at Becca's voice and then releasing — deliberately, consciously, the specific discipline of someone who had decided not to let a thing land. He recognised that particular discipline. He had practiced it himself for years. He just hadn't expected to see it on her.
He thought: she carries a lot. More than she says.
He thought: so do I.
He went to sleep before midnight for the second night in a row, which was either a coincidence or wasn't, and which he decided not to examine too carefully yet.
In the hallway on Wednesday morning he passed her coming out of the Lit building just as he was cutting across to the courts. He almost said something — felt the impulse form and rise and almost arrive at his mouth.
Instead he said, without thinking, the thing he always said, the reflex of two and a half years of campus hierarchy operating faster than anything else: "Watch where you're going, four-eyes."
She didn't break stride. Didn't look at him. Just said, perfectly evenly: "Original," and kept walking.
He stood on the path for a second.
Felt something that was not quite shame and not quite frustration and was possibly, uncomfortably, both.
He walked to the courts and did not think about it.
He thought about it for the rest of the day.
"He had said the reflex thing — the campus hierarchy operating faster than anything else. And then stood there feeling something that was not quite shame and not quite frustration. Possibly both."
End of Chapter Three
- Writer
