Chapter 20
Carter
Ifind Jules at the back of the team bus at eleven at night doing economics flashcards by the light of his phone, which is the most Jules thing a person can do, and this time I don’t rib him about it.
I’ve ribbed him about the flashcards for a year — the professor, the future Secretary of the Treasury, the kid who’d rather know what a marginal cost is than enjoy the best night of his life.
Tonight I sit down across the aisle and I ask the question I’ve never actually asked, because asking real questions has never been my event.
“Why econ, though. Really.”
He doesn’t look up right away. Flips a card. Opportunity cost. “Backup,” he says. Light. Too light. I know light. I invented light.
“Jules.”
He flips another card and then he stops, and the bus hums under us, and he tells me, in the dark, in the careful formal English he uses when the thing’s too big for the casual kind — the accent that’s three countries deep, Lagos under London under Atlanta — what the flashcards actually are.
“My mom cleans offices in Lagos,” he says.
“Two jobs. She did it so I could come here and try this.” A pause.
“Everyone at home thinks I’ve made it. Jules is in America, Jules is a footballer, Jules will take care of everyone.
My uncles. My cousins. There’s a — list. Of who I take care of, when the money comes.
” He turns a card over and over without reading it.
“And the thing they don’t know, that I can’t say to any of them, is that one bad tackle and it’s over, Carter.
One knee. I’ve watched it happen to better players than me.
The whole thing is one ligament from gone, and if it goes, the list doesn’t go with it.
The list is still there. My mom’s knees are still there.
” He taps the flashcard. “So. Econ. Because if the football stops, I need a thing that pays that nobody can take with a tackle. I’m not studying to be smart.
I’m studying so my mom can stop cleaning offices either way. ”
And I sit there in the dark of a team bus with a nineteen-year-old who’s been carrying a continent on his back while I’ve been ribbing him about being a nerd, and every easy thing I’d normally say — every deflection, every you’re gonna be fine, kid, every bit of wattage I’d usually throw across exactly this kind of silence to make it survivable — arrives on cue, and I don’t reach for a single one of them.
Because here’s the thing I’m learning, two years and one notebook late: the wattage isn’t a kindness.
I always told myself it was. I make it light so people don’t have to carry the heavy thing near me.
But making it light just means the person carrying the weight has to carry it and perform okay about it for my comfort.
The bright thing I do is a tax I charge other people for the crime of being heavy in front of me.
And Jules has been paying it for a year, smiling, doing his flashcards, never once letting me see the list — because I trained him to. Because I’m the fun one and the fun one doesn’t do weight.
So I do the hardest thing in my whole repertoire, which is nothing. I don’t fix it. I don’t lighten it.
I let the weight sit there in the aisle between us, real and unfunny and his, and I just — stay in it with him. The way one person used to stay in it with me, before there wasn’t one.
“That’s a lot to carry,” I say, finally. Not light. “For anybody. Forget nineteen.”
“You carry stuff too,” Jules says, quiet, not a question — the kid reads people, it’s why he’s going to be better than me. “You just do it where nobody can see. At least I’ve got flashcards.”
I could deflect that. The opening’s right there, gift-wrapped, the self-deprecating joke that turns it back into a bit. My jaw does the old thing, the brace, two years of architecture holding up a wall.
“Yeah,” I say instead. Just that. The truest two-letter word I’ve got. “Yeah. I do.”
It’s not the notebook. I’m not going to open the whole thing for a kid on a bus.
But it’s the first time I’ve ever answered you carry stuff too with anything but a grin, and Jules hears it land, and he doesn’t push, because somewhere in the last year the kid learned the not-pushing from somebody, and I have a sick proud feeling about who.
“Call your mom tomorrow,” I tell him, standing, because the moment’s done and dragging it would wreck it. “Tell her about the channel ball. Not the list. Just the ball. Let her have ninety seconds where her kid’s just a kid who did a beautiful thing.”
“She’ll cry.”
“That’s allowed. Crying’s allowed, Jules. Somebody should’ve told me that about a hundred years ago.” I clap his shoulder. “Do your flashcards. Opportunity cost. It’s what you give up to get the thing you actually want. You’ll use that one your whole life.”
I go back to my seat. Jules goes back to his cards.
And I sit in the dark with the engine humming and a kid four rows back carrying a list with his mother’s knees at the top of it, and I think about how the heaviest people are always the ones doing the lightest impression of fine — how I’d know one anywhere, because I built the prototype — and how the only thing that ever helped was somebody refusing to make me perform okay about it.
I didn’t fix anything tonight. I’m starting to understand that was the whole job.
You don’t take the weight off people. You just stop charging them rent for setting it down in front of you.
I’m learning. A bus at a time.
A kid at a time. Two years late and getting there.