“Hey.” He smiled. “Come in.”
Relief doused the fires of worry in my head. I wove through his maze of clutter, found a patch of wall to lean against, and summoned the words I’d planned while trying to sleep. Two plain sentences. Listen, I’m not coming back to Kensington after break. I’m still all in for the competition, but we should talk about replacing me.
I imagined some boy sitting in my armchair in the Nest, and I felt, for a second, as interchangeable as something sent down an assembly line.
My throat tight, I scanned the room. Isaac’s recording setup sat on his desk: the microphone plugged into a preamp with a half-dozen dials, which fed into his computer. In front of the mic, a disk of black nylon was positioned to catch uneven bursts of air, attached to the stand by a goosenecked bracket. “Didn’t you just get back?” I said, nodding at the setup.
“Yep.” Isaac leapt over his suitcase and folded his laptop shut, hiding the screen full of multicolored recording tracks. “I’ve got priorities. The muse waits for nobody, Julian. Um, Jordan.” Unplugging the mic and unscrewing the stand, he glanced at me over his shoulder. “What name should I use?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just don’t call me Jordan in front of the guys.”
“I’ll just call you J,” he said, looping the mic cable in a blur of black rubber. “Like a blue jay. Except that you’re human and stuff.” He gave me a suspicious look. “Supposedly.”
“You are the weirdest person I know,” I said with a grin, and it wasn’t even an exaggeration. Under the misleading layers of being well-dressed and good at guitar, he was very possibly the biggest dweeb at Kensington. I remembered my audition, with that heinous nonjoke about the president of the United States, and it seemed impossible that I’d ever been afraid of Isaac thinking I was weird.
I forced my smile down. Three weeks left, I reminded myself. No reminiscing. Time to start letting go. “How’s it going?” I said, keeping the strain from my voice. “The album, I mean.”
“Not bad. I did all the instrumentals over break, so now I just have to finish up the vocals.” He slid his equipment into a drawer. “I probably should’ve left my guitar home—I don’t really need it now, I guess. Anyway, whatever.” He hopped up on his bed and fiddled with the knotted drawstring of his hoodie. He had crooked fingers from holding pencils and picks and handles too tight. “Why’d you come by? What’s up?”
I opened my mouth and nothing came out. If I told him, it made this real. It would begin the three-week goodbye.
“Just wanted to . . . you know,” I said quietly. “Make sure you didn’t drive off the road.”
He laughed. “Thanks, asshole.” His laugh froze. “I mean, um—”
“Any time.” I smiled back.
His shoulders loosened. “Right. So.” He cleared his throat. “How was staying here for Thanksgiving? We got more snow, right? That must’ve been fun. Did you go sledding? You don’t look dead of boredom, at least. So that’s good.”
“. . . I survived, yeah,” I said past a strangled feeling in my throat.
After a moment, Isaac smiled a confused smile. “Gonna give me any more than that?”
“What?”
His smile skewed uneven. He shrugged. “Well, when we talked—I just. I mean, we talked.”
I know. I know. It had been smooth and effortless, the way talking hardly ever is. We’d talked and it had felt like a song.
I couldn’t hold his eyes. I studied the posters plastering the walls instead. One displayed a gaunt, stubbly man perched on a stool, draped in spotlights, acoustic guitar tucked into his lap. Another showed a slice of black stage with a guitarist on his knees, the red-and-gold face of his electric gleaming. And there was Freddie Mercury, stripe of mustache above his generous mouth, wailing into a sparkling microphone, sweat pearling on his brow.
My thoughts circled back around, apparently determined to remind me how, five days ago, Isaac and I had murmured into the night until it paled with the promise of dawn. Before that night, I hadn’t let myself think of Isaac as anything more than the senior always looking for trouble. Since then, I’d reconsidered. He wasn’t looking for trouble. He was trouble.
“Um,” he said. “So I guess I thought I’d . . .”
I waited.
“Never mind,” he said. “Forget it.”
“No, what?”
He swung his legs, his quick voice coming to life. “Did I tell you I burned the turkey on Thanksgiving?” he asked. “I can’t cook. It’s horrible. I swear I could burn those lazy-person cookies you get in the frozen section. When I was twelve, I basically set our kitchen on fire. My mom still has a grease burn on her forearm.”
I let him swing the subject in a wide arc, far away from anything that mattered. But I kept hoping, as we bantered about dining hall food and competition prospects and our upcoming rehearsal schedule, that he’d steer us back.
I didn’t want to tell him. I knew I had to.
Then, out of nowhere, he said, “I kind of thought I should call you,” and it jarred me back to myself.
“Uh. What?”
“I don’t know. After I got back home, I thought, like, she’s a girl. You’re a girl. That was a weird time at the retreat. Right? So, I should call. Or text. Something.” His eyes were brushing me all over, then meeting mine, then darting away embarrassed. He lay back on his bed, examining his ceiling. “You’re not mad, right?”
“Wh—mad about what?” I said, bewildered.
“That I didn’t get in touch.”
“What? No.” I pulled his chair out from his desk and sat. “What are you talking about?”
“Fuck. I don’t know.” He put his pillow over his face and said something into it.
“That’s, um, not the best way to make words.”
He slid the pillow up until his sharp chin and mouth poked out beneath. “It doesn’t make sense anymore. I don’t know if you would’ve wanted to talk, or if it made me an asshole for not talking, or if you were worried about—”
“Isaac. Hey. It’s okay.” I studied his profile as the pillow slipped from his face. He was still staring at the ceiling.
I wasn’t going to tell him to stop overanalyzing. Not until I figured out how to stop doing it myself.
“You’re not an asshole,” I said, quieter.
He straightened up slowly, a thick lock of hair falling over his forehead. He brushed it back. “Okay. I just . . . I don’t get how girls work.”
I tried not to laugh, disbelieving. “I work like me. Like a person. I’m the same human being, okay? You know me.” Sudden resentment needled me. “And also, I’m not suddenly trailing after you and hoping you’ll call me, just ’cause I’m a girl.”
He made a frantic motion. “What! No, that’s not what I—I didn’t mean—”