I Fell in Love with Hope(41)

“It’s why he likes reading,” I whisper, fond memories behind it.

C chuckles a dry laugh. “I never liked reading. Neo made me want to read even though I couldn’t and–I don’t know. Everybody liked me because of my looks, the swimming, the shallow stuff. Neo trudged through all that and looked for me in the deep end.” C stutters when he talks. Like he’s searching through a maze for the answers and suddenly hits a dead end every sentence.

“I like him,” he whispers. “I guess I thought he liked me too.”

The picture comes together behind the fog of their history. This goes further than an altercation in a hallway against lockers and foul-mouthed bullies. There are words and moments that came before that.

Neo’s single tear didn’t belong to those boys, his father, or broken bones.

It belonged to C.

“You’re compassionate,” I say. “That’s why I like you. Neo likes you too. More than you think.” I stand up and push in my chair.

“Wait,” C calls. “How do you know? Did he tell you that?”

I imagine how hard Neo must’ve fallen for someone who cares so much. I imagine how smitten he must’ve been as C tried to read despite not being able. I imagine, from the hope in C’s eyes, that he didn’t fall quite so soon, but when he did, he fell so much harder.

I smile curtly as he does.

“No.” The last piece of advice in my quiver from all the years I’ve spent watching escapes like a loose end, a finish to the melody. “But he wouldn’t be so hurt if he didn’t care about the person who hurt him.”

—

Neo tells me about the first time he met C on one of his worse days. His body is sore and heavy beneath his sea. His medicine renders him drowsy and pale.

He eats less than enough to sustain his body weight. The toll it takes on his nerves pulls its strings near snapping.

In his daze, Neo tells me that he met C long before C met him.

He wrote a story, he says. About a boy in a rowboat, searching for land to no avail. He says that’s how it began.

Neo isn’t tall enough to reach the textbook cubbies in most classrooms. In his first year of high school, when he was already out sick half the time, he’d hear snickers behind his back. He’d get shoved aside. The chair he stood on to gather books would get kicked out from under him.

It was crowdsourced bullying. When you’re small and a little different, you’re expected to be the punchline. Nobody protects you from a few faceless flicks and bad jokes.

Neo is rude, standoffish, a little pretentious, but he isn’t hateful. He wishes no harm to anyone. His worst bullies didn’t care. A group of boys from the swim team in Neo’s grade looked for reasons to bully him. They spat slurs passing him in the halls and subtly pushed him so he’d trip.

Neo says it wasn’t till the whole school found out he was sick that teachers finally decided to speak up, and the population of his attackers thinned. Not even the swimmers targeted him much anymore.

Still, Neo couldn’t reach those cubbies.

Then, one day, someone new joined the class. A boy from the swim team Neo had never seen before who sat in the back row and stared out windows.

When the teacher instructed that everyone go get a textbook row by row, rather than watch Neo grab a chair, the new boy reached over Neo’s head and grabbed two books. He handed Neo one of them and went back to his seat without a word.

“He never paid attention, so he had no idea who I was,” Neo says, clutching my hand as more spasms of pain travel through his muscles. “He didn’t know I was sick either.”

Neo noticed early on that C had trouble. When the class read excerpts, C dragged his finger across the lines and stalled. Some words were bumpy. He couldn’t just glide across them as effortlessly as everyone else.

The teacher called on C for answers, and he would freeze up. He was paying attention, or at least trying to, but words he couldn’t read sat in the back of his throat without a voice. It happened a few times. The teacher stared at C over the line of his glasses, and C could only sit there in the awkward intermission between question and inevitable embarrassment. What C didn’t realize was that he wasn’t alone in the pool of the silently pitied. The boy next to him swam the same waters.

The next time the teacher called on C for an answer, he, of course, didn’t know what to say. He and the teacher looked at one another. He curled his lips back in apology and waited.

The sound of a piece of paper sliding across his desk interrupted the silence. C looked down to see a yellow note written in Neo’s handwriting.

The theme is love, it said. Love and Loss.

C’s attention flickered to Neo, whose eyes were steady on the board. C swallowed and read the answer Neo wrote for him. Surprised, the teacher nodded and went on with the lecture.

C said thank you. Neo never answered him.

Over the course of that year, even if Neo was out half the week, the two fell into a routine. C grabbed their textbooks every day, and when C had to answer a question, Neo would give him hints beforehand and lead him in the right direction. Even if he ended up being wrong sometimes, C didn’t care. He was just happy to understand.

Neo got curious the closer he and C got. He asked where C’s name comes from. C said he was the youngest child, his mother’s last, and she wanted to name him after her heart. C asked where Neo’s name comes from. Neo said his parents were religious, and they named things for reasons he didn’t care to understand.