A long time after Caskey’s footsteps faded, I leaned over and jabbed the first floor button with a thumb. It left a red smear on the clear plastic that came off with a swipe of my sweater sleeve.
I sagged against the paneled elevator wall. Everything felt swollen: my lips, my stomach, and my brain, which pressed against the confining walls of my skull as if trying to squeeze its way out into the open air. I slid a hand clumsily over my aching lips. Red kept running between my fingers. My vision was narrower than usual, bright and uneven around the edges.
The mirrored elevator doors slid shut and showed me myself. The bruise on my cheek was already darkening, and the lower half of my face was a bloody mess. For a moment it occurred to me that I’d never looked more like a man.
Then I couldn’t look at myself anymore. I’d done it. I’d gotten there. I’d trampled out every last vestige of who I used to be. Rest in Peace to my former self. It had taken this for me to miss anything of what I’d had before, when I’d been unsure and awkward—but God, at least back then I’d been able to recognize myself in a fucking mirror.
And then tears rushed hot to the inside corners of my eyes, and I began to cry. Some gasping spot of relief uncurled in the center of my chest, cathartic, freed. I held myself against the wall, my shoulder slipped down the paneling, and I crouched right there and sobbed until I couldn’t breathe. My mouth stretched wide, and the blurry world jerked and sharpened as the tears unfastened themselves from my eyes, molten down my cheeks. I felt stupid and small, caught up in the pursuit of something I had no business chasing down. Victory, or honor, or selfish vindication. All this bullshit that guys were taught to care about.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t capable of it, or that it was too much for me to carry. It was that it didn’t matter, did it? Did it really matter at all?
I drifted over a stamped-down track of snow connecting Wingate’s back entrance and the music quad. The thoughts in my head moved like treacle. Ice, went one. I scooped up a handful of wet, heavy snow and pressed it to the bridge of my nose. Nest, went the next. Home. I sniffled a bit, and tight pain shot up from my nose, dispersing over my forehead.
Blood droplets hit the snow, marring the shadows with school-spirit carnelian. I left a trail in my wake. The cold numbed my face and froze my fingers around Isaac’s guitar. By the time I reached Prince, the bleeding had slowed, almost stopped. The punches I’d taken to the side and stomach had roared into prominence on the way over, making every step feel like one of Hercules’s labors.
My glasses steamed up when I walked in. Stern silence wallpapered Prince Library, punctured by the clicking of keys and scratching of pens. Music kids occupied every chair, filled every sofa. Others huddled in groups on the oaken floor, clustered around outlets with laptop screens illuminating their faces, like survivalists after an apocalypse gathered around their campfires.
I steadied my stride and breathed quietly through my mouth, keeping my face aimed down. Nobody even glanced at me. Final papers were due at 7:00 p.m. In the last academic sprint of the semester, everything else turned transparent.
In the stifling air, sweat beaded on the back of my neck. They’d turned the heat up in every building, overcompensating for the ten-degree weather. I climbed staircase after staircase. In the antechamber that led up to the Nest, I had to stop halfway up the stone steps. I thought I might throw up, my stomach hurt so badly.
At last, I turned the knob and all but collapsed into the Nest. It was blessedly temperate, the only warmth issuing from the space heater beneath a window.
The only other person there sat at the piano, his back to me, scribbling a paragraph on a pad of college-ruled paper. Looking at him, navy sweater stretched over his narrow shoulders, his horrible posture and the way his head was always tilted a fraction to the left, I thought I might cry, and I wasn’t sure why.
Isaac clicked his pen and turned around. His eyes fixed on my nose, my mouth. The blood coating the ridges of my upper lip. His mouth drifted open.
“Hey,” I managed.
“Holy shit.” Isaac snatched the tissue box off the top of the piano and crossed the room in five long strides. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“Careful,” I said. “Your guitar.” My voice came out thick. It made the top of my nose buzz.
In one impatient motion, he took the guitar from my hand and chucked it onto the sofa. “Who did this?” he said, his eyes darting from my cheekbone to my nose to my mouth.
I glanced back to the door and twisted the lock. It took time. My clumsy fingers wouldn’t respond; it was like trying to control someone else’s hands. I wiped my mouth with the flat of my palm, feeling like a child.
“I caught Connor trying to ruin your guitar,” I said, unzipping my coat. “In Wingate. We—I don’t know. Fought.” I gestured at my face, and a twinge of discomfort flashed across my torso. I swayed and sat down on my armchair’s arm, sliding my glasses off.
“Caskey did this?” Isaac said. A murderous look twisted across his face. “When I see him, I’m going to—”
“No,” I said heavily. My eyes closed. “Don’t. No more fighting, no more anything. Please.” I took a few deep breaths. “He’s just confused. He’s just trying to figure his shit out. Let’s just let each other get better for a second.”
When I cracked my eyes back open, Isaac was giving me a strange look, curious and fierce. He turned away the second I saw. “Okay,” he said. “Right.”
Isaac unlatched the nearest window and scooped up a handful of snow from the sill outside. I maneuvered my way out of my backpack, moving gingerly, and Isaac moved back to my side, stretching out a cloud of damp tissues. I reached up, but he was already pressing them against my chin.
I closed my eyes and tried to ignore my stabbing headache, my throbbing bruises. The tissues passed over my mouth, against the creases of my nose, so gently I felt no pressure, just the cold sapping the heat from my skin. I took breaths past my aching teeth.
“Is it still bleeding?” I asked. A nasal hum edged my voice.
“Doesn’t look like it,” he said.
The tissues skirted my lower eyelids, pressing away the tear tracks that had crusted up as I walked. When he slid the tissues over my cheekbone, pain burst open on the spot like a bitter flavor. I flinched back.
“Shit. Sorry.” His voice was close. I opened my eyes. My face prickled with cold evaporation. A chill blustered through the open window, at odds with the sunset that smoldered like coal in the clear sky.
“What happened to the talking thing?” he said, flicking the tissues into the trash. “Beating each other up is kind of eye-for-an-eye.”