Never Sweeter(8)

As though friendship was supposed to be this effortless.

Watching out for the insults hidden in every word was the aberration.

Life could be normal, she thought.

And then she went through the double doors that led to the south-side stairwell, and there he was. Just sitting on the steps that led up to the library, as if lying in wait like he used to. What other reason could he have for being here? Though even as she thought it, she was taking in all the little details that told a different story. He wasn’t just sitting on the stairs, primed to leap as soon as the doors opened. He was hunched over something, oblivious to anyone who might come through.

And that something was a notepad. He was writing with all the care and attention of someone who definitely did not think trying hard was for losers. She could see from here how much he had writtenhis tiny, blockish handwriting smothered page after page, each word so firmly rendered it created a kind of jagged Braille on the other side. In places he had even torn the paper.

But he appeared as oblivious to that as he did to her.

He didn’t look upnot even when she started backing away. Usually he seemed to sense when she tried to escape, yet somehow that didn’t happen here. He was too intent on his task, to the point where she was able to figure out that they were class notes. He was copying class notes from the page he had clenched in his left hand, occasionally squinting at the even shittier handwriting of the owner before painstakingly transferring it to his own notepad.

Even more astonishing: he sometimes referred to a book Harrison had put on their reading list. That was open on his broad knee, too, just beneath the pad. And when he got to a certain point, he ran a finger underneath a particular line. Like the line was vital.

Like all of this was vital.

It made her wonder seriously terrifying things, like what if he’d always been this creature underneath? Certainly he reacted differently from the Tate she knew when he noticed her presence. He almost jumped up, spilling everything off his lap in the process. Then, when he realized how this looked, he tried to hide it. He snapped the book shutThe Monstrous-Feminine, she saw, and tried not to goggleand flicked the cover of the notepad back over.

But he did it all very poorly. He lost pages; he screwed others up. His bag refused to take everything all at once, and more things spilled all over the ground.

As they had once for her, about a thousand years ago.

Now she was supposed to laugh and say look at the nerd studyingonly she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The words cleaved to the roof of her mouth. Even simpler ones were a struggle, in this brand-new and baffling territory. But she eventually got them out.

“Are you trying to take Harrison’s class in this stairwell?”

He took a while to answer her.

So long, in fact, that she could see the lie before he said it.

“I have no idea what would give you that impression.”

“The…fact…that you…are clearly trying to take his class in this stairwell. Those are the hipster kid’s notes, right? I see his name thereBartleby Winnamaker.”

He immediately tried to cover the ornate writing at the top of the page with his thumb, but the damage was done. And he knew it. He even rolled his eyes in that way she remembered from various classes, when he mispronounced a word or answered a question wrong.

Come on Tate, it seemed to say. Get it together.

And then he tried to do just that.

“Maybe he was just helping me out. Maybe my eyesight is super bad and I need someone to see the shit Harrison scribbles on the board in his crazy small handwriting.”

“I think your problem might be that you’re trying to read his crazy small handwriting from outside the lecture hall. Maybe even farther than thatyou’re never there when I come out.”

“You said you wanted me to not be there when you come out.”

“That isn’t how I remember our conversation at all.”

“Oh holy fucking fuck, am I lamplighting you again? How do I keep doing this?” He threw up his hands, while she did her best not to roll her eyes and correct him. Gaslighting, she wanted to say. The term was gaslighting. “Look, okay I know you did not exactly say thatyou said stay away. So I have stayed away. I have stayed as far away as I can humanly get without slipping into another dimension.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to say something snarky back. Something like I wish you would slip into another dimension. It was what she would have told him back then, after all. Yet when she went to, something happened. The words caught in her throat. They got all tangled up in that eye roll he just did and his expression now: like someone trying to scale the sides of a glass building after a sudden rainfall.