Chapter Eight #2
“Not Thursday, too?” Yael pouts. “I thought I was doing so well.”
And then, goddamn it, Ravi laughs. An actual laugh—it comes from his belly; the lines by his eyes deepen, his head tilts back, his mouth opens. His leftmost incisor just barely overlaps the front tooth next to it. Yael has never noticed it before.
“I might love The Black Flamingo even more than the last one,” Zoe says, plopping herself down a couple of chairs away from Ravi. Her dirty, pin-covered yellow messenger bag makes a secondary thunk as it hits the floor.
Yael flicks her gaze toward Zoe immediately, but she can feel Ravi’s eyes still on her for several more heartbeats.
Like he’s in no rush to look away. “I’m glad you like it,” Yael says.
Zoe has said this about almost every single book they’ve read.
She falls quick and hard for literature, just like Yael did at that age.
“Well, I mean, I have to get to the end first to know for sure. But it’s so good,” she says.
“I’ve never read a whole story in poetry before.
When you said a hundred pages in a week I was like, no way, I have a precalc test, JQ is definitely going to spoil it for me and they’ll say it’s my fault, which will be even worse, but I read it the first night. ”
Yael can’t help it; she beams. Getting buy-in for this club from administration took a semester of pleading.
Principal Harrison had been convinced that the average teenage attention span couldn’t handle reading for class, let alone for pleasure.
And maybe there’s some truth to it—Yael feels like her own attention span has suffered, and she can’t imagine what it would be like to be a kid now.
But she also firmly believes that reading for pleasure made it easier for her to do the assigned reading when she was in school.
That she has a crowd of eight to twelve twice a week is a win on its own, but the fact that they seem to be actually reading the books makes the hours she spent arguing with Principal Harrison worth it many times over.
“I did, too,” Ravi says.
“Yeah?” Zoe asks. “And?”
“I really like the flamingo motif—how he felt like the misplaced egg in the prologue, then later the bit about how when flamingos fight, it might look like kissing. Good imagery,” Ravi says.
“Imagery?” Jaxon walks in, hand in hand with Eli.
“I thought we didn’t have to do literary analysis here,” Eli says.
“Well, it wouldn’t kill you,” Yael says.
JQ joins then. “Ms. Koenig said that what matters most is how it makes you feel.”
“That’s true,” Yael says, nodding at Leo, Ana, and Grace as they approach the circle of chairs. “How did it make you feel?”
Ravi points at himself, eyebrows lifting.
“Yes, you,” she says. “Unless you didn’t read it?”
“I just talked about the flamingo motif!” he protests.
“The fighting-slash-kissing poem is page sixty-two,” she says. “Who knows if you read further.”
When she gets a flash of that crooked incisor again and that dimple to match, Yael sees her mistake. She knew the exact page without checking—she’s told him it was her favorite part, too.
GOOD QUESTION, HE thinks. At roughly the same volume in his mind: So you loved it, too.
Of course, he says neither. In his pause to think, he can feel gazes flicker between him and Yael, and dimly, he wonders if all their exchanges are watched with such avid interest. Or maybe there really is that much curiosity about his feelings.
“It made me feel empty,” he says finally.
Yael frowns. “You felt nothing,” she says. The words come out flat. A disbelieving sentence, not a question.
“No,” Ravi says. “Michael feels empty, and I feel empty with him.”
Her lips purse just slightly, her mouth an almost O. “I think he feels too full for the world around him,” she says.
“Maybe sometimes,” he says.
She hums, regarding him with an unfamiliar expression. Bemusement, maybe. Except it’s less like she’s puzzled by him and more like she’s puzzling him out.
“It made me feel amazing,” Zoe says. “And sad.”
“You think every book is amazing,” JQ says.
Yael’s line of sight cuts toward JQ, sharp and silent, and they apologize.
During book club, Yael hardly looks at Ravi. Which is normal—she only ever spares him a glance when he’s talking or one of the students has asked a question. But now, when she does, it’s with that same expression on her face.
They stay on topic for a while, do the read-aloud of the first page of their next reading chunk, and then, as usual, things somewhat devolve.
They talk about fan fiction for shows he hasn’t even heard of, about what happened at Homecoming last week, who kissed whom and where and when (Yael plugs her ears and la-la-las for this).
At those first couple of meetings, he’d wondered why Yael didn’t make a stronger effort to get the students back on track. He’s seen her in action; he knows she could if she wanted to. Now, Ravi understands that this is as much part of it as the reading is.
Today Leo approaches Ravi as he’s putting chairs away. Yael must have decided this was a solo task, he guesses, because she’s back to stocking shelves like she was when he walked in earlier.
“Have you read the next section yet?” Leo asks.
Ravi shakes his head. “Nah, I try to stick to the rules,” he says. “Have you?”
Leo nods vigorously, his hair bouncing against his forehead. “Yeah, I read the whole thing. I’m going to read it again, though. So I remember.”
“Did you like it?” Ravi asks.
Color tinges the high points of Leo’s cheeks. “Can you tell me what you think about it when you read it?” His voice is quiet.
“Of course,” Ravi says.
“Okay, see you Tuesday,” Leo says, and he turns away.
When he’s gone, Yael’s voice comes from behind Ravi. “What was that about?” she asks.
She’s on her tiptoes, slotting another book into place. “I don’t know yet,” Ravi answers honestly.
In response, she only hums out a note. She nudges the cart away from her with her foot.
“So, did I ruin your good day?” he finds himself asking.
That note again. “No, but there’s still time,” she says. And then she drags the nearest chair toward her and climbs onto it.
“Oh Lord, what are you doing?”
“Stocking my newly cataloged titles,” she says. The tone is obviously.
“Do you not have a step stool for that?”
“It’s several inches shorter than the chair, and it’s all the way in the office.”
“I’ll get it for you,” Ravi says. Call it a hazard of living with a four-year-old, but all he can see right now is imminent bodily injury. “Is the office unlocked?”
“I’m fine,” Yael insists.
Ravi doesn’t respond. Doesn’t see the point. But he doesn’t leave, either, just watches on with his arms folded across his chest.
Yael rises to a tiptoe, and when she leans forward, the chair wobbles.
She catches herself, pressing her heels flat and bracing a hand against the bookshelf, then looks down at the chair as though it’s sold her out in court.
The tension in her shoulders is so visible, Ravi can feel his own neck ache.
“Let me get the step stool,” he says.
“I already told you,” Yael says. “It’s too short.”
“Right. Then let me put the books away,” Ravi says.
Her “I don’t need your help” overlaps with his “Come on, you clearly need my help.” And his laugh overlaps with her glare. He tries to cover it with a cough, but then he’s laughing more, and there’s a light in her eyes like she can’t decide whether she’s amused or furious.
“You’re what”—she scans his body—“two inches taller than me? Three?”
“Enough to make a difference,” Ravi says, starting toward her.
“I’m not getting down from my chair just because you told me to,” Yael says. The look she gives him, he supposes, is meant to intimidate him into submission, but it’s severely undercut by the way she’s still bracing herself against the bookcase.
“Okay, then,” he says. He picks up a chair along the way and plants it right next to Yael’s.
Her sightline fixes on him, catlike, as he rounds and steps onto his chair.
She seems to track him with her whole body, her chest and chin lifting along with her eyes when he stands to his full height.
She’s right—he’s not all that much taller than she is.
Yael probably likes it that way, the playing field even. The space between them small.
Ravi likes it, too.
Slowly, he reaches for the book in her left hand—the one not gripping tightly onto the purple-painted plywood. His fingers close around the edge of the book, and when he drags his eyes away from hers, he watches her thumb twitch. Like she’s genuinely considering yanking it out of his grip.
“May I?” he asks, looking back at her face. At the crease in her bottom lip, which gives the barest purse under his gaze, at her eyes moving over his features so carefully. Widening—guiltily, he thinks—when they meet his again.
She doesn’t respond, and it feels like a dare.
Ravi loops his free hand loosely around her wrist. Then gently, gently, tugs it away from the book.
He lingers without meaning to, or maybe it feels like he lingers.
It’s only a split second before he releases her, but that’s all it takes for him to register how soft and warm she is against the pads of his fingertips.
He was right, too; he slots the book easily onto the highest shelf, his feet still safely flat atop the chair. At the sound of it sliding into place, Yael’s eyes flutter shut.
They blink open, and the dreamy look in them dissipates. Like she remembers where she is. Who he is. “If you say ‘I told you so,’” she says through gritted teeth, “so help me God, I will push you off that chair.”
Ravi feels his pulse in his neck. He tracks the rise and fall of Yael’s chest—her breathing is rapid, irregular. “I’d say the same,” he says, “but I don’t think you need any help falling off.”
She lets out a tiny, frustrated groan, and he feels it in his chest. “This has to be some sort of test,” she says, stepping down from her chair and plucking another title from the half-filled cart.
“What?” he demands, following her to ground level.
“You,” she says. “You know how many queer faculty there are here? Enough that when I came up with this club, I didn’t even think I’d need a volunteer. And then it took me weeks to find one, and it’s you.”
“This again?”
Yael’s eyes cut skyward, then back to him. “Well, you haven’t exactly improved, so…”
Ravi laughs through his nose. “What have I done?” She makes a sound of pure disbelief. “No, I’m not just asking about Charles,” Ravi says. “What have I done here that’s so bad?”
“It is just about Charles, except that’s not a ‘just’ to me!” she says. “That’s more than enough.”
He takes a half stride toward her, making the space between them small once again. Exactly as before, all her points pull up toward him. He lets his eyes trail up her face, searching for a tell. “You’re lying,” he says. “There’s something else.”
“You know nothing about me,” Yael replies.
“I know this much,” Ravi counters.
A bared-teeth smile. “You are unbelievably frustrating,” she says.
He swallows. “And how exactly do you think I’d describe you?”
Ravi holds her angry gaze until he can’t bear it anymore, and then, fuck, he breaks first. He backs away, shaking his head as he goes, and practically rips his chore coat from the chair where he left it.
“If you’re going to keep doing that,” Ravi says without turning to look at Yael, “at least wait until tomorrow, when someone will be here to make sure you don’t break your neck.”
He doesn’t wait for her response.