Chapter 6
Signal Noise
Austen
I sat at my desk grading a stack of Linear Algebra quizzes that suggested the first-year students believed numbers were decorative. The room was quiet, but not peaceful.
Luke was pacing.
He’d come back from the athletic center twenty minutes early, skipping the post-lift meal he usually treated like a religious rite. He hadn’t greeted me. He hadn’t lined his shoes up. He’d dropped his bag and started pacing the six feet of floor between our beds.
Step, step, pivot. Step, step, pivot.
I kept my eyes on the red pen in my hand, but my peripheral vision tracked him. He was vibrating. Not the usual post-practice adrenaline, but something jagged. He kept checking his phone, screen lighting up, thumb hovering, then screen dark again.
I considered putting my headphones in. Noise-canceling technology was my primary defense mechanism against the chaos of shared living. But curiosity—or maybe a survival instinct that wanted to know when the explosion was coming—kept them on the desk.
Then his phone rang.
Not a ringtone; a jarring, standard-issue buzzer. Luke stopped mid-pivot. He stared at the screen for exactly one second, his posture snapping from agitated to rigid. He looked like a soldier called to attention.
He swiped answer.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
The “sir” scraped against the air. Not respectful; fearful.
I capped my red pen. I shouldn’t listen. The roommate social contract demanded I pretend to be deaf, or at least deeply absorbed in vector spaces. I turned a page, staring at a student’s illegible proof, but the room was too small.
“I know the stats,” Luke said. His voice was tight, stripped of the easy confidence he wore. “I’m on the depth chart. Harper said—”
He stopped. Cut off.
I couldn’t hear the words coming from the other end, but I could hear the cadence. Staccato rhythm. Sharp. Loud enough that tinny distortion leaked from the speaker.
Luke flinched. Physically flinched, his shoulders curled inward.
“I am focused,” he said. “I’m at the rink six days a week. My grades are…” He swallowed, throat bobbing visibly. “My grades are fine. I’m handling it.”
More tinny shouting. I caught a word this time. Investment.
Then another. Waste.
My stomach twisted. I knew this tone. I’d heard it from three different foster dads and one caseworker too burned out to care who heard her screaming in the kitchen. The sound of a stakeholder managing a failing asset.
Luke wasn’t having a conversation with a parent. He was undergoing a performance review where the penalty for failure was total liquidation.
“I won’t,” Luke whispered. He turned away from me, facing the corner, pressing the phone so hard against his ear his knuckles turned white. “I won’t blow the knee out again. It’s strong. I’m… I’m the starter, Dad. I promise.”
Dad. The word sounded like a plea bargain.
The voice on the other end delivered one final, quick burst of static. Luke didn’t say goodbye. He lowered the phone slowly, like it weighed fifty pounds.
The silence that rushed back in was deafening.
I waited for the release. I expected him to throw the phone, kick the bedframe, yell—something to discharge the kinetic energy the call had loaded into him.
He didn’t.
Luke sank. He didn’t sit; he let gravity take him, sliding down the wall until he hit the floor. He pulled his knees to his chest and buried his head in his arms. His breath hitched—a ragged, wet sound that he tried to choke back immediately.
He was shaking.
I sat frozen, pen hovering over a quiz. This was data I wasn’t supposed to have.
If I acknowledged it, I shamed him. Luke Carter—Division I goalie, campus celebrity, guy who didn’t color-code his closet—was hyperventilating on the rug because his father treated him like a broken racehorse.
If I looked at him now, I’d be breaking the only rule that mattered: don’t see the weakness.
But ignoring it felt like leaving a crash victim on the side of the road because you didn’t want to get blood on your upholstery.
Calculate, I told myself. Variable X is Luke’s dignity. Variable Y is Luke’s current respiratory distress. Solve for equilibrium.
I needed a third variable. A distraction.
My eyes landed on the radiator. The antique cast-iron beast that Facilities had turned on yesterday. We’d traded the drone of the AC—which sounded like a jet engine during takeoff—for a heating system that clanged like a ghost dragging chains through the pipes.
I moved. Deliberate. Noisy.
I scraped my chair back against the linoleum—a harsh screech. Luke’s head jerked up, but he didn’t look at me. He wiped his face aggressively with his sleeve.
I stood, grabbed the small steel wrench I kept on the windowsill, and marched over to the radiator. I crouched down, turning my back to him, granting him the illusion of privacy.
Clang.
I hit the pipe with the wrench. Hard.
“Stupid valve,” I muttered, loud enough to cover the sound of him sniffing.
Clang.
Clang.
“First the AC sounds like a Boeing 747, now this thing thinks it’s a percussion section.” I rattled the metal cover. “Can’t concentrate.”
I gave the valve a meaningless twist and banged it one more time for good measure. The noise was abrasive, filling the room, drowning out the jagged rhythm of his breathing.
I stayed there for a full minute, crouching by the heater, staring at the peeling paint, giving him time to reassemble his face.
When I stood up and turned around, Luke was off the floor.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, back rigid. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face pale, but the mask was back in place. A fragile reconstruction, taped together, but there.
“Radiator acting up?” he asked. His voice was wrecked—hoarse and raw.
“Yep,” I said, not looking at his face. Instead, I turned to the fridge. “I’m getting a seltzer. You want one?”
He hesitated. “I’m okay.”
“Lime or plain?” I asked, ignoring the refusal.
“…Lime.”
I opened the fridge, light spilling out. I grabbed two cans before walking over and setting one next to him.
I stood there for a second. The air between us felt different now. The membrane had thinned.
“My foster dad in eighth grade,” I said, keeping my eyes on the seltzer tab as I cracked it open. Click-hiss. “He used to call me into the kitchen to review the grocery bill. Would circle every item I ate in red marker. Tell me what my ROI was for the month.”
I took a sip. The bubbles burned pleasantly.
“Some people,” I said, looking at the wall, “don’t want kids. They want portfolios.”
I risked a glance at him then.
Luke was staring at me. Shocked, exposed, and—slowly—relieved. The tension in his shoulders dropped an inch.
He reached out, his hand shaking a little, and cracked his own seltzer.
“Portfolios,” he repeated. The word sounded heavy in his mouth.
“Bad investment strategy,” I said. “High volatility.”
Luke let out a breath that was almost a laugh, though it sounded painful. “Yeah. High volatility.”
He took a drink. He didn’t say anything else about the call. He didn’t have to.
I went back to my desk and picked up my red pen. I didn’t look at him again, but I could feel him there. Sitting.
I graded a quiz. I marked a question wrong, then hesitated, and drew a small smiley face next to the correction.
We sat in the quiet, drinking lime seltzer, listening to the radiator tick.