11. Chapter 11
Rory
Order is what I do instead of screaming. It's cheaper than therapy and quieter than arson.
Every file on my desk is color-coded, alphabetized, and squared to the blotter, because between first bell and now I have reorganized every object in this office that would hold still.
I started with the transfer files, which were already alphabetized.
Then I moved on to the pamphlet rack, which nobody has ever read in order.
On a Thursday, the candy dish is down to the flavors nobody wants, and I sorted those too, by wrapper color.
Clearly, I'm doing great.
I went to lunch and sat in the corner of the staff room with a sandwich, making myself eat it. If anyone asks, I was fine. I reapplied this lipstick three times today, by feel, no mirror, and kept smiling whenever somebody looked my way. Nobody asked anything I couldn't answer.
Normally this is where the funny version of my morning would arrive.
That's what I do when things go wrong. I find something ridiculous in it, tell the story, make somebody laugh.
Usually, by the time I'm finished, I can bear it a little better.
There's a joke somewhere about breaking up with a man I was never officially dating, I’m sure.
I just haven’t found it yet.
I sit behind my desk and try, and all I can think about is going home, taking off these shoes, and crying somewhere nobody can hear me. Except home is where I was with Bram last night, and I'm not ready to be alone in that bedroom either.
Gene threatened my job this morning if I pushed the case against Cole, and I have spent the hours since trying not to think about the consequences he could have on my job contract. He can call it a fact instead of a threat all he wants. I heard him perfectly well.
Withdraw the complaint, or risk losing the job I love. It’s blackmail, pure and simple.
He expects me to be frightened enough to do what he wants, and I hate that he got the frightened part right.
And the man standing a step and a half away while he did it, the man I woke up on top of this morning, the man wearing a band of raised stone around one finger that means I am his mate for life, said nothing.
I looked at him. I waited for him to defend me, to defend Eli. To just open his damned stone mouth for me. But he did nothing of the sort.
I’m usually gone before someone gets a chance to hurt me.
This time I stood there and let him see that I needed him.
He didn't have to slay anybody. He could have told Gene to listen to me.
He could have reminded him that he'd seen Cole hurting Eli himself. Heck, he could have said he believed me and I’d have been happy. I just needed him to stand beside me.
He didn't. I told him I wanted nothing to do with him, and I meant it when I said it. I still mean it. That doesn't seem to stop me listening for him outside my door. Every heavy step in the corridor makes me look up, and every time it isn't him, I feel stupid for looking.
Last night he said I was the only woman he would ever want, for the rest of his life. I believed him. I lay in his arms and let myself think about waking up with him again, about what it might be like to have him here, with me.
Then this morning I couldn't get one sentence out of him when I needed it. I don't know how to stop putting those two things beside each other.
Maybe the mark doesn't mean he's chosen me. Maybe it means he's stuck with me. His stone reacted, and there's nothing he can do about that. Wanting me in bed doesn't mean he wants to stand up for me at work, in front of the man who can give him everything he's worked toward.
My hands lie flat on the desk. When I'm not finding something else to sort, that's where they stay.
Usually, I can't tell someone what I had for breakfast without waving them around.
Today I keep catching myself sitting like this, barely moving, until a student appears at the door and I have to look like myself again.
Under the anger, I'm scared. If Gene gets his way, some other adult gets this office. The corkboard comes down. The candy dish goes home in a box. Somebody else sits behind this desk and gets to know my kids, and I'm no longer the person they come looking for when they need help.
But I won’t save my job by leaving Eli to Cole.
The corkboard is behind me, three layers deep in doodles and thank-you notes and photo-booth strips, and somewhere in the third layer is a diagram of the sideline gear cart in the world's tiniest handwriting, drawn for me last year by a boy who knows where every roll of tape in that building lives.
I'm looking at it when the knock comes. Eli stands in the doorway, his hand still raised to the frame.
"Hi, Ms. Hale."
I turn my chair toward him, relieved to see him even before I know why he's here.
His hoodie still has the stretched collar.
His black hair falls into his eyes, and the taped glasses sit crooked on his nose.
It's fifth period. He should be in class, but he's standing here holding his phone in both hands, and I'm not going to send him away.
"Come in." I keep my voice warm and push the files aside.
He comes in. He doesn't sit. He stops in front of my desk, looking down at the phone. His fingers tighten around it, then loosen, and I wait for him to tell me what he needs.
"I need to show you something," he says. "But I have to say a thing first or I'll chicken out. Can I just... say it?"
"The floor's yours. I'm not going anywhere."
He pushes his glasses straight with one knuckle. They settle crooked again.
"I've been putting my phone in the equipment cage.
" His voice is small but it doesn't stop, and I sit back to listen.
"There's a spot on the shelf, next to the helmets, behind the ball bags.
You can't see it unless you look straight at it.
I'm the one who puts everything away, so I know where nobody looks.
" He rubs his thumb along the edge of the phone.
"Nobody looks at me either, so I'm kind of the expert. "
My entire body freezes and I blink repeatedly as my brain catches on to this new information.
"You've been recording him?"
"It's all on there." He says it to the carpet, steady, like he rehearsed it.
"Every time it happened is in there. They're sorted by date.
At first I wasn't going to do anything with them.
I just wanted it to exist somewhere. Because it would happen, and then he'd smile at everybody in the hallway, and it was like it didn't happen.
Like I made it up." His jaw works. "I wanted there to be one place where I wasn't making it up. "
For a moment I can't answer him. My eyes sting, and I make myself take a deep steadying breath. Then he looks up, and I wait. He's still holding the phone close to his chest. His fingers are trembling against the case.
"You said I deserved to stand up for myself." His voice shakes and keeps going. "Not because I'm useful. Not because of the team. Because I'm worth it. You said that was enough."
"I said that." It comes out mostly level. “And you are, Eli.”
"And you said when I decided I was ready, whenever that was, you'd be right there beside me."
"I did."
"Okay." He puts the phone in my hand. His fingers are cold and they are not steady and he does it anyway. "I thought about it. I'm ready."
I take the phone carefully. He's watching my face now, waiting to see what I'll do with it. This is what he came here for, and I don't want him spending another second wondering if I'll believe him.
"I'm glad you brought it to me, Eli." I hold his gaze for a moment. "Show me where to start."
He leans over the desk, opens a folder, and then he steps back and turns to my window and the slice of field in it. He doesn't look back at the phone. I turn the screen toward me and start to scroll.
The folder is named locker room. There are dozens of clips inside it, each date stamped. I scroll back through them. Eli hasn't moved from the window. I glance at him once, then open the oldest video.
The image shows the view from inside the equipment cage, with chain-link soft in the near frame, a stack of helmets, and past them the end of a locker row and a stretch of bolted bench.
Eli's in frame with the laundry bin, sorting towels, hood down, working, and Cole Braddock walks in from the left.
Eli turns toward him. Cole walks straight up to him and knocks him against the lockers with his shoulder.
I watch another clip, then another. The dates change, but each one starts with Eli trying to do his job.
In one, he's carrying a water bottle when Cole slaps it out of his hands.
In another, Cole tips the laundry bin, then stands there while Eli kneels to pick everything up.
Eli keeps his head down. He doesn't say anything I can hear.
He just gathers the towels while that enormous boy watches him.
My grip tightens around the phone. I want to stop the video, but Eli brought it to me so somebody would see what happened. I make myself keep watching. Every time Cole comes into the room, Eli stops what he's doing or tries to move away. Every time, Cole goes after him anyway.
I look up at the boy by my window. His shoulders are hunched, and he's picking at the cuff of his sleeve. He knows what I'm watching. I wish I could reach into the screen and stand beside him there, before Cole gets close enough to touch him.
Gene called it horseplay. Things boys do. Gene is full of shit.
I look back at the phone, at Eli backing away from a boy almost twice his size. There is nothing playful about it. He is trying to get away from danger.
I find the recording from the Monday before last, the morning I found him in the storage room. I open it, and there he is beside the laundry bin. Cole comes into view. I watch him hit Eli, watch Eli bring a hand to his nose and look at the blood on his fingers. At the end, Cole tosses him a towel.
I have that towel in my bag. I know what it looks like with Eli's blood dried into it. Now I know exactly how it got there, and I have to put the phone down for a moment before I can go on.
Eli shifts beside the window. I pick it back up. He waited until he was ready to bring this to me. I can watch it.
Yesterday's clip is the last one. The timestamp says quarter past five.
The bin goes over. The towels fan across the floor. Cole has him against the lockers in the back bay. I knew what Bram meant when he told me. I wasn't prepared to see Eli pulled up onto his toes, his hands clutching Cole's wrist while his collar stretches against his throat.
Then Bram enters the frame.
I recognize him before I can make out his face. He crosses the locker room without one wasted step and pulls Cole away from Eli with one hand. Then he puts himself between them and stays there. Eli is behind him, and Cole can't get to him without going through Bram.
I stop the clip right there, on the frame where seven feet of gargoyle stands planted between a bully and my kid.
I look at his hand on Cole's shoulder. He didn't hesitate. He didn't wait for Eli to ask him for help. It was just him and the two boys, and he stepped in the moment he saw what was happening.
I don't know how to make sense of all this. Watching him protect Eli makes my chest ache, and I wish it didn't. I knew he was capable of it. That was why I looked at him in Gene's office.
I can't work out what happened between us while Eli is standing at my window, waiting for me to help him. I set the phone on the desk and turn toward him.
"Eli." He turns from the window, his eyes going straight to my face. I stand, and I come around the desk so I can speak to him without the furniture between us. "I'm taking this to Principal Oakes. Right now."
He nods, quickly, his shoulders lifting with a breath.
"You don't have to be in the room for it," I say. "What you just did was already the brave part. I can carry it from here."
"No." Fast. Then he straightens inside the hoodie, and when he speaks again, it's the steadiest I have ever heard this kid. “I need to do this.”
I look at him for a moment. He's still nervous. His hands haven't stopped shaking, but he wants to walk into that office with me. I reach for my bag, suddenly impatient to get us there.
"Then we go together." I sling my bag over my shoulder, pick up the phone, and hold the door for him. He steps into the corridor and waits for me.
The main corridor is quiet after lunch, the smell of tater tots still lingering near the cafeteria.
Every classroom door is shut on fifth period.
My heels hit the terrazzo fast, the too-fast click this whole building can identify blindfolded, and Eli's sneakers squeak double-time beside me.
We pass the athletics junction without slowing.
I keep my eyes ahead, past the trophy case with its polished hardware, toward the admin suite.
Gene Thackery told me I had nothing.
This time, he’s the one who’s going to squirm.