Picture Us In The Light(20)

“Uh—same.”

He jostled his shoulders up and down a few times. “It’s freezing out here, though. I can’t feel, like, ninety percent of my body anymore.”

“How long have you been sitting out here?”

“An hour, maybe. Two.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Aren’t you going to get in hella trouble if you get caught?”

“Aren’t you?”

I mean, yeah, okay. “Touché.”

“Well, anyway—” To this day, what he did next surprises me: he reached into his jacket and pulled out a small metal flask and offered it to me. Harry was not—he was absolutely not—the kind of guy you found drinking alone in the snow after curfew, and I blinked at him, my eyes trying to make sense of all the pieces. “Uh—I’m not sure if—”

“You don’t drink? Don’t worry about it, it’s cool. I brought it for my cabin, and then we just—there was never a good time.”

“It’s not that, I just—” I looked at him closer. “Are you, like, okay and everything? Is something wrong?”

“No, yeah, everything’s fine.” He flashed an extremely unconvincing smile. He pocketed the flask again without drinking from it. “Everything’s cool. I just couldn’t sleep.”

I could’ve gone back inside. There were a lot of things I could’ve done, actually—I could’ve left him there, or I could’ve reported him to someone or held on to the information to dole out like currency. And he knew that, I think. It didn’t feel like arrogance that had made him say hi or ask me to drink with him; it felt more like, for whatever reason, while he was sitting there on that log knowing I wasn’t alone as I thought I was, he made some kind of choice to trust me. Or not trust me, maybe, but at least to put some small part of his fate in my hands. And I owe the past four years to that decision, honestly. I don’t think I would’ve done the same.

Anyway, it felt like I owed him, at least a little bit, for that. I said, “How come you couldn’t sleep?”

It felt like a risk. Maybe it always does talking to someone you don’t like, because they could turn it on you in any of several ways. I spent the next few seconds of his silence regretting it, picturing a way to extricate myself from this conversation. Then finally he said, “Sometimes—” He stared out into the dark. “Do you ever get tired of all of this?”

“All of what?”

“You know. Just the always—just everything. Like school. Cupertino. You know.”

“Tired of it how?”

“Just having to do all of it all the time. Even when you’re worried you’ll never pull it off or it feels like what’s your reward in the end—you just get to do more of the same for longer? You know? And then nothing you do is ever good enough anyway. You ever feel like that?”

“Sometimes, I guess.” Then I added, “It never seems like you do.”

“Why not?”

“You’re so, like—peppy all the time.”

He cocked his head and grinned at me. He has a grin that can change the whole mood in a room; I’ve seen it happen so many times, but that was the first time it happened to me. “Peppy?”

“Ah—maybe that’s not the best word. I’m just surprised, that’s all. You play the game pretty well.”

“Peppy, huh.” He rubbed his hands over his arms, then tucked them under his armpits. “Regina told me you want to be an artist.”

Was he thinking of the picture I’d drawn of him? I was glad it was mostly dark. “Yeah.”

“That’s kind of cool. It’s like a big F-you to the system, right?”

“Nah, it’s just that I suck at math.”

He laughed. “Like Asian suck, or actually suck?”

“No, like actually suck. I still don’t understand how to graph a line.”

“What do you mean you don’t understand? You just take the slope—”

“I know, I know. Or, I mean—I don’t know. But I can recite the words like that too. Slope-intercept. Rise over run.” This was unexpected—maybe it was just the weirdness of the whole situation—but I was kind of smiling. “I can draw a line. That’s good enough.”

“No, that’s not good enough, what the hell?” He looked around. “Find me a stick or something. I’ll write it out for you in the snow. This night is going to end with you learning how to graph a line.”

“That’s not—”

“No. I’m on a mission. We’re doing this.” He propelled himself off the rock in an athletic kind of way and went for one of the trees until he found a stick to snap off. This was that same condescension, wasn’t it? But why did it feel so different all of a sudden?

He did it, too—he drew his axes in the snow and explained it about a dozen times until—small miracle—I did mostly understand. Then he tossed the stick to the ground and raised his arms in triumph. “Mission accomplished.”

And that was the first time I had the same feeling I’ve felt probably thousands of times with him since then—that small panic about the moment ending. My heart felt kind of strange, sort of galloping against my chest. It made me wonder if maybe quantum entanglement felt like a prickling extra-awareness, like all your atoms poised for action and humming with desire—like a thing between you that’d never quite lie still. I felt hyperaware of how, if I leaned a few inches closer, our arms would brush together.