Chapter 10:

The after-school air is the after-school air.

I've described this already. I'm not going to describe it again. It's the air of a building releasing people, of a day that has been spent and is now in its closing minutes, of the specific freedom of a space that is becoming not-a-school again for the next sixteen hours —

I take the east exit.

Obviously.

My left shoulder still has opinions about the baseball. Dull, insistent, the body continuing to file reports about an event I've already acknowledged and processed and filed and am not going to keep revisiting — yes, shoulder, something happened, I know, I was there, I was the one it happened to —

The side street.

The vending machines. The one with the delay. The one with the stuck button. The one that drops everything three inches lower than it should. All present. All running their usual programs.

I am twenty meters down the side street when I become aware of footsteps behind me.

Not threatening footsteps. Not the footsteps of someone who doesn't know where they're going. These are footsteps with intention. With direction. With the specific rhythm of someone who knows exactly where they are going because they are following someone who knows where they are going —

I don't turn around.

I know who it is.

I know because the footsteps have the same quality as the hand that closed around my wrist this morning — certain, unapologetic, completely unbothered by whether the situation was expecting them —

She falls into step beside me.

Just — beside me. As if this was always the plan. As if the route was always going to include her. As if the four extra minutes of the long way around were specifically designed to accommodate a person I met this morning who threw a baseball at my face and then waited for me after class and received instead a thirty second delay followed by a full absence that I have not explained and she has not mentioned —

She doesn't mention it.

She just walks.

I keep walking.

The silence lasts approximately forty seconds which is longer than most silences last with most people because most people treat silence as a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be inhabited, but Sky walks in the silence the way she does everything else — without apparent concern for whether it's comfortable, without running any background process to manage it —

"Your route is longer than it needs to be," she says.

"I know," I say.

"The main road would save you four minutes."

"I know."

"But you take this one."

"I know."

She considers this. I watch her considering it in my periphery — she tilts her head slightly when she's thinking, not fifteen degrees, more like ten, a different angle entirely, a different kind of not believing —

"Okay," she says. And drops it.

Just like that. Okay. Filed. Moving on. No follow-up questions about why, no probing the deviation, no constructing an interior life for me from the data point of a longer route —

Or she's constructing one and just not showing her work.

I can't tell.

The model keeps breaking.

---

"Can I ask you something," she says.

We're past the vending machines now, into the stretch where the commercial district starts thinning into the residential edges, where the buildings get lower and the foot traffic gets lighter and the specific quality of the afternoon light starts doing the golden thing it was doing yesterday —

"You're going to regardless," I say.

"True," she says, without embarrassment. "But I'm asking anyway. For form."

I say nothing. Which she has correctly interpreted as go ahead.

"The mysterious handsome man thing," I say before she can ask whatever she was going to ask. Because it's been in the back of my processing since this morning, filed under structurally unsound but not fully discarded. "Where did that come from. Actually."

She laughs.

Not the performative laugh. Not the social laugh. Just — actual laughter, the kind that arrives before the decision to laugh, that is just a response the body produces to something it finds genuinely funny —

"I made it up," she says.

I look at her.

"I made it up," she says again, completely unapologetically, still smiling. "I wanted to see how you'd react. If you'd get weird about it or brush it off or — you brushed it off. That was interesting."

I process this.

The mysterious handsome man. Constructed. Deployed. Observed. The result noted.

She runs experiments.

So do I.

I don't say this.

"I see," I say instead.

"You're not annoyed."

"No."

"Most people would be annoyed."

"Most people," I say, "care more about what other people think of them than I currently have the bandwidth to."

She tilts her head. Ten degrees. "That's either very healthy or very sad."

"Noted," I say.

---

We walk.

The residential streets receive us. Lower buildings. The occasional tree doing its tree thing with complete indifference to the human traffic passing beneath it. A dog behind a fence who watches us with the specific alertness of a creature that has decided we are worth monitoring but not worth barking at —

"So how did you actually hear about me," I say.

She puts her hands in her jacket pockets. "A friend," she says. "Most specifically an old friend of yours."

I run the available data.

Old friend.

The phrase arrives with the specific weight of a thing that should mean something and doesn't quite — old friend, as if the friendship is just vintage, just aged, just a thing that has been in storage rather than a thing that ended in a specific way at a specific cost to specific people —

"I don't have any old friends," I say.

She looks at me sideways. "Okay. Does the name Sarah Kim do anything for you."

The name arrives.

I know the name.

Of course I know the name. I know the name the way I know the east stairwell smell and the sound of my mother's keys and the specific texture of a ceiling with no broken tiles — I know it completely and immediately and without having to look for it —

"I don't know her," I say.

Sky looks at me.

The look lasts approximately two seconds.

"You're lying," she says. Simply. Without accusation. Just — stating the classification. Filing the data point under confirmed lie rather than possible misremembering. "She told me. How you hurt her. Quietly. The jokes about her appearance, her hobbies — the slightly awkward social habits, in front of other people. She told me the whole thing." A pause. "Anyway I don't really care about that nonsense. So did something come up in your memory just now."

I look at the road ahead.

"Forgot," I say. "Bad memory."

Sky says, "Oki."

Just that.

Oki.

One syllable. Completely neutral. Carrying nothing on its surface and everything underneath — she's filed it, she's updated the model, she knows exactly what I did just then and she's decided not to make a scene about it and the not-making-a-scene is in some ways more precise than a scene would have been, it's a more accurate instrument, it doesn't require raising the temperature to deliver the information —

She knows I know.

She's letting me know she knows I know.

And she's moved on.

I carry the oki for the next thirty meters without saying anything.

---

"If she's your friend," I say eventually. "You don't seem — you don't seem particularly concerned. About what happened to her."

Sky tilts her head. Ten degrees. "I care about Sarah."

"You don't seem like it."

"I don't care about the past," she says, and her voice does something I haven't heard it do yet — not softer exactly, not the surgical register Chloe uses when she touches the live wire, something different, something that is just — warmer, just the specific warmth of someone speaking about something that is genuinely true to them. "What I care about is that right now, today, Sarah Kim is okay. More than okay. She's doing her thing. She's moving. She's somewhere good." A pause. "She's already moved on. She deserves my respect for that. The past is hers to carry however she wants. It's not mine to keep revisiting on her behalf."

I look at her.

"That's —" I stop.

"What."

"Despite your personality," I say carefully. "You speak about her with genuine warmth. And you don't seem to have any difficulty getting along with people. Generally."

She grins. The self-explanatory grin. "Was that a compliment."

"It was an observation."

"It was a compliment wearing an observation's coat," she says. "I'm logging it."

"Don't."

"Already logged." She looks at me. The grin settles into something more considered. "You know why it's easy for me to get along with people."

"Tell me."

"Because," she says, "unlike you —"

She says it simply. Not cruelly. Not with the weight of a weapon being deployed. Just — simply, just the flat delivery of a thing she has assessed and confirmed and is now reporting accurately —

"I am not pointless."

The words land.

I don't say anything.

My face does —

My face does something.

Not the left corner involuntary thing. Not the micro-expression bleeding through after six minutes. Something else. Something that comes from a different place than the places I've been monitoring. Something that the twenty-two seconds of confirmed neutrality this morning did not prepare for because you can't prepare for something that lands in a location you forgot existed —

She watches my face do it.

"Angry?" she says.

I look at the road.

The road is the road. The residential street doing its residential street thing. The tree. The dog behind the fence who has concluded we are no longer worth monitoring. The golden light doing the golden light thing. All of it just — there, just continuing, just the world persisting at its standard rate —

"Nothing," I say.

She waits.

I look ahead.

"Continue," I say.

The word arrives from somewhere I don't examine. Not an invitation exactly. Not permission. Just — the only word available for what I mean, which is: I'm still here, I'm still walking, the route is still the route, the conversation is still the conversation, whatever you have I'll take it, I've been taking things for two years, I've developed significant structural tolerance for things that land hard —

Continue.

Sky looks at me for a moment.

The model breaks again.

Her face does something that is not the grin and not the ten degree tilt and not the warm Sarah voice and not the flat data-reporting delivery — something I don't have a name for yet, something that might require additional observation before classification is possible —

She keeps walking.

We walk.

The route continues.

The four extra minutes of it still ahead of us, still running, still being the long way around for reasons I built into it a long time ago that have nothing to do with the person currently walking it beside me —

The dog behind the fence watches us go.