“No, don’t. I mean, come the fuck on. That was like responding to a spitball with a shotgun. I want them sorry.”
Nihal straightened in his seat. “If we do anything, Trav’s going to lose it. Remember yesterday? ‘This is not a discussion’? Nothing’s changed.” Nihal sighed. “You really want to make this situation worse for him?”
Everyone else started laying out opinions. The Nest filled with voices trying to batter each other down.
“Marcus,” Isaac called. His clear tenor broke through the noise. “What?”
Marcus had his hand raised. It stayed high as everyone looked to him.
“What if we voted?” Marcus said with more confidence than I’d ever heard from the kid. Democracy at work. “There’s seven of us, so it won’t be a tie.”
A spark of amusement darted across Isaac’s face. “Great. Sure.” He stuck his hand in the air. “All in favor of getting the Minuets back?”
Erik raised his hand. I hesitated, remembering Trav’s expression last night, the one that left no room for debate. Unless you’ve thought up any other ways to waste my time.
I met Isaac’s eyes. They urged me to take the risk. I thought of the quietness of his voice in the field when we’d snuck out, the way he’d talked Trav down, and I realized the hardness in his expression came from loyalty. This wasn’t on Trav’s time. It was meant to make the Minuets pay for wasting it.
I raised my hand. Jon Cox and Mama traded a look. I saw a whole conversation in the second of eye contact. When they looked away, neither of their hands budged.
“All opposed,” Nihal said. Three other hands joined him.
Isaac’s lips thinned.
“All right,” Nihal said, standing. He didn’t look at Isaac. “It’s settled.” The perpetual amusement in his voice had faded. He sounded tired. “We’ve got a performance in two weeks. We should keep our eyes forward.”
The others filed out, but Isaac and I didn’t move. He was staring at the floorboards, one foot tapping in slow, deliberate rhythm, as the door closed behind Marcus.
After a minute, Isaac looked over at me and said, “You going home?”
I shrugged. “Are you waiting for me to leave?”
He shrugged back, a tight roll of his narrow shoulders.
“You all right?” I said.
He ruminated. I waited for words. It was Isaac; words were coming.
After a second, he said, “Yeah. I mean, I’m fine. Just, this is bullshit, right?”
“Right.”
“And, I mean, I did want them to stop. After a point, I figured they’d—but now Trav has more to deal with on top of everything.”
“Is he okay? Is something going on?”
Isaac closed his eyes. I could sense the explanation building up, a rising tide held back by a weakening wall. Finally, he caved. “Yeah, it’s college stuff, family stuff. His parents went through this shitty, messy divorce last year, and they’re both kind of scary. Not even regular Kensington-parent scary, seriously unreasonable.” He tied his hair back up, twisting it into a bun. “It’s not applications, so much. He’s going to get in everywhere, obviously. He’s a genius. But his mom’s this famous movie critic, his dad’s an oncologist, and his mom’s all like, ‘Pursue music, only the arts matter!’ and his dad’s literally said, ‘If you don’t do pre-med, your mother’s going to be shouldering your college bills alone.’ It’s really fucking with his anxiety, trying to pick a track.”
“God,” I said.
“Yeah.” Isaac grimaced. “Obviously, it’s not really my business, but I think leading up to them separating, he got this totally unrealistic concept of what he needs to do to be a person, you know? His whole thing with feeling like he has to do everything—that’s got to be some sort of holdover. Like, if he isn’t totally adjusted and responsible and on top of his shit all the time, he’s the reason his parents didn’t end up happy.”
“He knows that’s not true, right?”
Isaac shook his head. “I don’t know. They’ve never done anything to reassure him. I kind of hate them, dude. They haven’t come to a single concert, even though they live in the city. It’s not that bad of a drive. I do it every break. Six hours out. And you know how much he cares about this stuff.”
“They sound awful.”
“Yeah. I don’t know. He frustrates the absolute shit out of me half the time, but the guy’s one of my best friends, and most of the time I feel like I can’t do anything to help.”
Isaac pushed the sleeves of his sweater to his elbows, accordions of charcoal wrinkles. His sneaker tapped the floor faster and faster, and the longer I sat in my armchair, the more pressure piled onto my shoulders. The storm crackled in my chest, rolling thunder, ladder lightning. Images flashed. Connor’s smirk as he backed away from the fire; the way he’d looked at me with pitying disdain when we’d first met. Trav rubbing the scar on the back of his hand so hard, the healed gash faded from brown to pale. All those handwritten arrangements, hundreds and hundreds of painstakingly written pages, some of them dated years before I was born, incinerated in a matter of seconds.
“Look,” I said quietly, “I’m still down to get them back.”
Isaac went still. After a moment, he glanced up at me, his eyes dark. There was that hesitant look, the weight and the measure.
“Yeah?” Isaac said.
“Yeah.”
He cracked a smile. “All right, then.”
The week flew by. Nihal learned that his sister had been accepted early-decision to Yale Med School, and he bragged about it so often, I started to suspect he felt sort of insecure by comparison. Marcus badgered each of us individually to volunteer for the Democratic Senate candidate, irritating Trav to the point that he vowed not to vote at all. And one evening, on a dare, Isaac climbed halfway out a window of the Crow’s Nest, aiming for the roof (“I’m going to get old-style initiated!”). Before he could get there, Marcus’s protests escalated so much that a librarian stormed up and ordered us to stop being so disruptive, and also what are you doing dangling out of a fifty-foot-high window, Mr. Nakahara, are you trying to break your neck.
Meanwhile, I turned in a long essay for The Greek Monologue, finished mapping a project for Lighting Design, and delivered a biweekly critique for Character and Humanity. All fine.
The world outside Kensington wasn’t as manageable. The only interview Mom had gotten for a job came and went without a word, and I knew what that meant. Sometimes, when I ate, my mind ended up back in California, imagining my mom or dad at some cash register, swiping our EBT card quickly so the people behind them in line wouldn’t give them judgmental looks.