Page 24

The thing we usually do is he walks me down the back stairs and out the side door by the mudroom, quiet, unseen, and I’m gone before anyone’s the wiser and the secret stays a secret. That door is off the kitchen. The kitchen currently contains three Division-One hockey players and a debate about cookware. There is no version of this where I creep out the side door unseen.

Which means the only way out is through. Down the main stairs, past the kitchen, in full view — which means we need a reason for me to be here that isn’t the real one. And there’s exactly one that holds up.

“Get dressed,” I tell him, already moving, already scrambling for my leggings. “We’re working on the ethics project. That’s the story. I came over to work on Adler’s thing, we lost track of time, we come down normal, we grab our stuff, I leave. It’s completely plausible. We’re literally partners, we literally have a project, this is the most boring possible explanation and boring is what sells.” I’m talking fast, pulling my hoodie over my head, and I catch myself doing it — the managing, the crisis-handling, the bright competent problem-solving voice — and I don’t stop, because right now it’s genuinely useful. “You go deal with the — “ I gesture vaguely at the condom situation “ — and I’ll fix my face and make us look like two people who’ve been arguing about a branching narrative, which, to be fair, is also just true.”

He huffs something almost like a laugh, pulls his plaid bottoms on, and heads for the little bathroom off his room, and I hear the water run.

And I stand up, and I put myself back together, and I turn around to grab my bag off his desk chair.

Which is when I actually look at his desk.

I’ve been in this room a dozen times now and I have never once looked at his desk, because every previous time I was in here I was extremely occupied, and it turns out Theo Mercer has a whole command center over here that I’ve been too busy climbing him to notice.

Three monitors. Not laptop-plus-one, not a gamer-with-RGB-lights situation — three proper monitors mounted in an arc, plus his laptop closed and pushed off to the side, a real mechanical keyboard worn shiny in the letters he uses most, a headset hung on a hook he screwed into the wall himself. It’s the setup of someone serious. Someone who spends real hours here. The one corner of this whole messy room that’s arranged with actual care, and I never saw it, because I’ve never been vertical in here long enough to.

And the screens are awake.

I know I should look away. I know that whatever’s up there is the thing he keeps behind the biggest wall he owns — the game he closed on me in the library, the world nobody’s allowed into. Snooping is a violation. I’m a good enough person to know that.

I’m not a good enough person to look away.

Because it’s not code. That’s the first thing that stops me. I braced for a wall of numbers and symbols, the incomprehensible machinery of a thing I don’t understand — and instead the middle monitor is full of words. A branching map, boxes connected by lines, and inside the boxes: prose. Dialogue. Scene. It’s a story, laid out in the shape of the thing he built for our class, all those choose-your-path nodes forking off each other —

And then I read one, and my stomach drops straight through the floor.

Because I know this story. I helped build the bones of it. Coward or caretaker — the secret-keeper, the person who holds a hard truth to protect someone they love. That was our concept. That was the thing we argued into shape at eleven at night over black coffee, the dilemma with no clean answer.

This isn’t that anymore.

I lean in, and I read, and I feel the whole room go quiet and enormous around me, because at some point in the last three weeks Theo took our project and it drifted, and I don’t think he even knows it drifted, and here’s where it went:

There aren’t two answers anymore. There aren’t a coward and a caretaker. There are two people. A girl and a boy, and they’re keeping a secret, except the secret isn’t a truth one of them is protecting the other from — the secret is each other.The secret is the thing they are and won’t say. And I read the girl’s node, the one he’s clearly still drafting because there’s a cursor blinking in it, and she’s — she’s me. She’s not named me, he’d never be that obvious, but she runs every room she walks into. She fixes things with her hands when she can’t fix them with her mouth. She has a bright voice she keeps for exactly the moments that would hurt without it, and the boy in the story can see straight through it and hasn’t told her he can.

And the boy. The boy doesn’t lie. That’s his whole architecture, right there in a character sheet in the corner of the screen — will not say a thing he can’t take back. He builds things nobody sees. He keeps a wall up so nobody clocks how much he’s already lost. And there’s a rule between them, an arrangement, five things they agreed to — I can see them, he’s listed them — and a sixth one, and the sixth one just says, in his blunt little all-lowercase font: the one neither of them will say out loud.

He wrote us.

He wrote us, and I don’t think he meant to, I don’t think he sat down and decided to confess — I think he opened a school project three weeks ago and his hands just started telling the truth, because that’s what he does, he can’t lie, he said so himself, he’d rather be a lot of ugly things than a liar — and it turns out that when a boy who can’t lie builds a story in the dark where he thinks no one’s looking, the story he builds is the one he can’t say to your face.

The coward-or-caretaker dilemma didn’t disappear. It just got honest. It became something simpler and worse: two people, one secret. And the only real choice in the whole branching mess of it is whether either of them is ever going to be brave enough to say the true thing out loud. Every path forks off that. Say it, or keep it. Name it, or protect yourself. He built a whole architecture of ways for these two idiots to almost-say-it and swerve. And I know every single one of those swerves, because I’ve done them. Because we do them to each other every night at one in the morning in a library study room.

My eyes sting. I blink it back — I’m not doing that, not here, not with the water running ten feet away — but God, it’s right there, the thing I built my entire fortress to keep out.

This is more naked than anything we’ve done in this bed. I could handle the sex. The sex I could shelve under stress relief, adults, pressure valve, means nothing, see clause six. You cannot put this anywhere. He accidentally wrote a love letter in the shape of homework and left it up on three monitors, and I walked into it looking for my bag, and now I’m standing in it and I can’t get out and I don’t want to.

The water shuts off.

I don’t have time to arrange my face. That’s the thing about getting caught reading the inside of somebody — there’s no bright voice fast enough.

He comes out of the bathroom, and he sees me at the desk, and he sees what I’m looking at, and I watch it happen in real time: the exact half-second where Theo realizes I’ve seen the one thing he never meant to show me. His whole body goes still. The wall slams up so hard and so fast I can almost hear it, and his jaw does the thing, and his hand twitches toward the mouse like he’s going to reach past me and close it, kill it, pretend —

“Don’t,” I say. Soft. Not managing. “Just — please.”

He stops. He stands there, four feet away, half-dressed and caught, and I have never seen him look like this. Not angry. Exposed. Like I peeled him. Like I walked into the one room in the whole house he doesn’t let anyone into and turned the lights on.

And I could make this so much worse. I could name it. I could say Theo, this is us, you wrote us, do you know you wrote us — and it would be true, and it would be the bravest thing I’ve ever done, and it would blow the whole arrangement to pieces on a Thursday afternoon with three hockey players in the kitchen.

I’m not that brave. Not today. Maybe not ever.