Chapter Sixteen
Quoth the Raven “Neverbore.”
So you agree? Poe is never boring?
“Hey,” Hayes says as I open the door.
I’m not timid. That word haunted me, even though Esha took it back.
She still said it, and I can’t strike it from the record, because my brain isn’t a court transcript.
(That would be nice, actually. There would be stenographers trained to understand me, and that sounds significantly less exhausting than the way I currently operate.)
I spent the weekend thinking of all the words that mean the opposite of timid.
Bold. Brazen. Fearless. Courageous. Confident.
Dauntless. I wrote them all down on index cards, just to know how putting the words to paper felt.
I picked my favorite one: Courageous. Written in blue ink on a mint-green card.
Then, I decided to do something just that. In an exercise of complete recklessness, I invited Hayes over to my house. Where I live. With many other people. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, I guess.
It’s to talk about our midterm project. No other reason.
When Hayes arrives, and I greet him on the front porch, he’s as awkward as I’ve ever seen him, his hands thrust deep in his pockets.
Behind him, I see his car parked beside mine: his nice BMW SUV next to my beat-up Honda.
Such a weird image. Mine has a V-6, though, so at least I could probably beat him in a street race.
As I mentally picture him and me drift racing, I realize he’s still standing there.
“Sorry,” I mutter, stepping aside and letting him into the house. “Um. Please.”
Hayes follows me to the dining room where everyone is sitting, working on their laptops or in their workbooks, and I am already regretting this. He’s just looking at everything, and my mind tells me he’s finding my space and my home and my entire life lacking. We don’t have money.
“Everyone, Hayes.” I gesture to him standing next to me, getting the uncomfortable part over with. “Hayes, everyone.”
My dad nods. My mom smiles. Gage leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. Dash pulls a face so pinched he looks disgusted. It’s like he smelled his own gym bag.
“I know you,” Dash says, through that gross face.
“Me too,” Gage mumbles.
I don’t know what they’re talking about.
They’re freshmen at Campbell, the regular high school, the one I would be at now if I hadn’t gone to Endeavour.
They’ve almost definitely never met Hayes before.
But it’s a small town, I guess. It’s possible his reputation extends beyond the early college program.
They could have friends-of-friends who know him through their older siblings, or something.
“You’re the one who messed with Nova’s car,” Gage clarifies. “Nice.”
Right. I almost managed to forget about that.
“What are you doing hanging out with her?” Dash asks. He’s taunting me, because he’s my little brother and that’s what he does. It’s basically the foundation our relationship is built on.
For the first time, Hayes speaks.
“What do you mean?” He looks at me, smirking with his whole damn face. “I need her help on a midterm. She’s the smartest girl in Hickory.”
I … don’t know how to respond to that, so I don’t. I can’t trust it, so I won’t.
Once my brain reboots, I wordlessly walk down the hallway to my room, and I assume Hayes follows. My fingers wrap around my door handle, and I open it in a flourish. There’s a rush of air from the open window, and I feel the tranquility this room brings sweep over me like the breeze.
I’ve had boys in my room before. This is not a Moment or anything. That this boy is the person who has annoyed me the most in the world for the past four years is an unimportant detail.
“Wow,” Hayes mumbles, looking around the tiny room. “It’s actually kind of normal in here.”
Offended, I scoff and throw myself into my desk chair. “What did you expect?”
“I don’t know.” He flops into the faded gray beanbag in front of my old red bookshelves.
It’s the only other furniture in the room besides my desk and bed—those shelves the color of North Carolina clay.
“I either thought it would be almost pathologically spotless or, like, so cluttered you couldn’t move. ”
I laugh and roll my eyes. I’ve always done that around him, that combination of motions. They’re evolving, though. Into something softer. Fond, even.
Scary.
“What’s that?” He points to the wall behind my head.
Beside the window, there’s a triptych of pictures, framed in antique shades of wood that match my desk and shelves. And the images? Three printouts, all nearly the same image.
“It’s a scene from Pride and Prejudice.” I turn around, looking at those pictures. “The good version. Pride and Prejudice is kind of my religion.”
Hayes tilts his head, curls of hair falling over his ears at the motion. It does things to me I can’t explain. “Okay … But how is anyone supposed to know that? They’re just pictures of some guy’s hands.”
I barely contain a gasp. It’s like I walked into his beloved chemistry lab and said his favorite microscope slides were just still images of some plant’s gross cells. Maybe that’s true, but that’s not the point.
“It’s not hands. It’s a moment. It’s about the tension of that moment. The yearning.”
Hayes smiles at me, not the whole-face smirk or the confident grin but a real, honest smile. I hadn’t noticed it before, but he’s unusually slapdash today: just jeans and a T-shirt, like a regular boy. Bizarre. It’s like he’s academically off duty.
“Nova.” He says my name in a serious tone I’ve never heard him use. “Are you a hopeless romantic?”
“Absolutely not.” I throw one leg over the other, resting all my weight on one hip and one elbow on the arm of my desk chair. I hope I look super relaxed. Super chill. “I’m not hopeless.”
There’s another moment of pointed silence. We sort of look at each other for probably way too long.
“Alright, whatever you say.” He looks away from the wall; his eyes drift back to me.
After a few heartbeats of silence, I’m about to suggest we get started on our project when I hear a faint jingle.
“What is that?” Hayes leans back on his beanbag far enough that I think he might roll off into the floor.
“That’s Raven!” My tiny, pure-black cat jumps onto the desk. She’d just emerged from the crack between the closet doors, quietly enough to startle Hayes. That’s why we put a bell on her.
“Raven? Like Poe? Why do you like that guy so much? Did you get a black cat because of ‘The Black Cat’? Isn’t that his story that’s really spooky and violent?” He asks all this as Raven, unblinking like a statue, perches herself on the corner of the desk to stare at him better.
“Yes.” I pet her black fur, and she starts to grumble. She doesn’t purr, really. “One of them. You just don’t understand the appeal of gothic literature.”
“Where did she come from? I didn’t know you had a cat. She’s so silent. Is she a ghost?”
“She came from the closet. She likes closets because they’re dark and quiet, and she likes mine the best ‘cause it smells better than the boys’.”
Raven tiptoes over the stuff I have spread across the desk with her precious little toe beans.
She reaches the opposite corner near the window where my jewelry display is, and she bats at the tail of one oversize white satin bow that’s rippling in the breeze.
I chuckle. That one’s her favorite for some reason. It has tiny bite marks all over it.
“Do you not wear those, or am I not paying attention?” Hayes asks, eyeing Raven’s attack on the bow.
“I used to,” I tell him. “I don’t anymore. I want people to take me seriously, and ribbons made me look younger.”
“I get it,” He shrugs. “But don’t you like them?”
I do. I love them. Bows, ribbons, slips, headbands. Maybe I should wear them again. They’re in. Everybody else is. Why am I denying myself, really?
“It’s weird how I’ve known you this long, and I’ve never been to your house before.” Hayes reaches behind him, pulling a random book off my shelf. He better put it back exactly where he found it. I have a delicate shelving system that would take way too long to explain.
“I guess so.” I lower one foot to the ground, spinning around in tiny arcs in my desk chair. “But it’s not like we were ever friends.”
“I guess not.” His voice lowers, and he suddenly won’t look at me. I don’t like it. For someone who has to force eye contact to appear normal, I’m really starting to hate these little moments where he averts his gaze.
I wince. The breezy air in the room has turned cold.
“So, we’re still enemies, but you don’t hate me? You want to be … like … friends?” I ask. “How does that work?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “It just does.”
For a split second, I let myself melt a little. And I finally open my notebook, like I meant to do the moment he got here.
“Okay, well. Let’s start working,” I say, clearing my throat.
“I know we have all of your big ideas, and they’re great, but what do I need to do?”
I pick at the skin around my pinkie. The cuticle starts to bleed. Shit. I’ve got to stop doing that.
“I’m not sure,” I mutter under my breath. It’s not that I doubt him. It’s just that I don’t know how to give this up.
“Okay, but I have to do something. I have to pull my weight somehow. I’m not gonna be that guy.”
A chuckle falls from my lips without my permission. I know what he means: He’s not going to be the guy who does nothing but gets a good grade anyway.
“Well, I basically made an outline for the paper. That’s what you read in the notebook the other day.”
“Right.” He nods. “ ‘Comparing darkness and light. Life and death. Horrific and romantic.’ I get it. We’re arguing that contrasts give power to gothic fiction. Very smart.”
I nod back. If my heart does the tiniest little dance across my chest, it’s because of my stellar ideas. Absolutely nothing else.
“Could you handle the slide deck? Like if I make an outline of our argument. I’m not good at the aesthetics or breaking up what I want to say into manageable chunks. If you could take the presentation off my plate so I can focus more on that—”
“Sure,” he says. Like it’s that easy. “Should we shake on it? Pinkie promise? Put our hands in the middle and yell ‘American Lit’ on three?”
I roll my eyes. Each time I do that around him, it feels more and more affectionate.
So privately, internally, I keep wondering: If we’re not really enemies and we’re definitely not friends, what are we?