21. Eli
TWENTY-ONE
ELI
Itake the long way to Westlake by way of hell.
Instead of taking Main straight up and over like a sane person, I cut inland through the older part of Hunter Harbor where the roads narrow and twist and every stop sign sits at a bad angle.
Past the boarded laundromat, the cracked basketball courts where the nets have been stolen again.
It adds twelve minutes if I catch the lights wrong.
That’s the point.
The direct route is too easy. Too much empty space.
My mind fills it with things I don’t want.
Sage in my bed if I were stupid enough to let that happen.
Sage in hers with Micah’s mouth on her. Micah shoved against a stairwell wall with my hands around his wrists and my own self-control hanging by threads.
The whole mess of it—need braided through duty, guilt threaded through want, all of us pretending we’re not already in deeper than we are.
So I make myself work for every mile.
I run a yellow on Broadhurst. The light goes red while I’m under it, and I check the rearview out of habit even though there’s nothing back there but empty road and the glow of streetlights.
Compartmentalization. That’s the word for it. I’m a pro at compartmentalization, at locking thoughts and feelings behind the mental architecture I’ve spent years building.
Everything has a place. Everything is contained.
Except Micah.
Micah’s the crack I’ve learned to live with.
A draft slipping under one specific door, a hairline fracture I’ve accepted for two years and worked around.
I can hold Micah. I built a room for him eventually—small, locked, load-bearing—and most days I can walk past it without putting my hand on the knob.
He’s a problem I’ve solved. Inconvenient.
Contained. Safe, even, in the way a thing is safe once you’ve measured exactly how much it can hurt you.
Sage is not contained.
Sage is a sledgehammer. There’s no room for her because she doesn’t fit in a room—she goes through the wall, takes the frame with her, stands in the rubble like she doesn’t understand what she’s just done.
Every rule I have about distance and control and not wanting things I can’t have, she walks straight through without noticing they were there.
I can manage Micah.
I can’t manage her.
I’ve barely managed to keep my distance in the three days since her bedroom, and that’s even with Knox bolted between us like a deadbolt.
It’s now Wednesday evening, and Monday morning still lives behind my eyes like it happened ten minutes back.
The two of them. On that bed. Both of them reaching for me at once.
That’s the thing the architecture was never built to survive.
Micah I can hold. Sage I can run from. But Micah and Sage, in the same room, asking me into the same moment—that’s where the blueprint just stops.
No wall, no compartment, no lock. I stood in that doorway and felt every system I’ve ever relied on go quiet at once, and for one unforgivable second I didn’t want control. I wanted in.
Touch me. Her voice is still in my head, shaped around my name. Eli, please.
When she came—when she reached up out of her own undoing, fingers grasping the air for a hand I wouldn’t give her—I broke.
I can admit it now, in this stupid, half-distracted moment, while I’m merging onto the highway with headlights glaring in my eyes: I wanted to touch her.
I wanted to bury my face between her legs and find out if the sound she made at the end was for me, or just the heat of doing something out of character. Something to claw back her own control.
But that’s the thing. I need control.
She was asking for surrender.
I pull into the parking lot of Westlake Adult Learning at 8:15 and sit with the engine running. Westlake is built in a pre-fab sprawl on the old aerospace brownfields. Four single-story rectangles connected by breezeways littered with sad little planters and motivational signs.
I kill the engine, pop the trunk, and haul out the box of teaching supplies I keep for the GED-lifers, then walk slow up the sidewalk, fighting the urge to rehearse my next thousand moves.
There’s no script for Sage, or for Micah, or for whatever the three of us are clawing blindly toward.
The only controlling interest I have is in what comes next—room 111, my Tuesday and Wednesday class, twelve adult students and a chalkboard that stains my hands blue because the eraser is a joke.
I open the door and the room is already half full.
People look up when I walk in. I nod back—maybe even smile.
I run this class like I run every part of my life: zero surprises, zero margin for feelings.
I set everything on the desk then head into the breakroom for a cup of crappy coffee. Time stretching as the machine hums bitter liquid into a paper cup.
Touch me.
I shake my head, trying to make the memory of Monday morning go away.
I need you, too. Okay? Always have.
The coffee finishes and I snatch it up, take a burning gulp as I check the time on my phone. Five minutes before class starts. There are at least twenty messages waiting for me in the group chat. So I force the scalding coffee down and scroll up.
Milo
I signed us up for a thing.
Holden
Dare I ask?
Milo
It’s a recreational activity. Team building, if you will. It’s in your email.
Knox
No.
Holden
You signed us up for bowling?? Why???
Milo
After the recent . . . issue . . . I felt we could all use some bro time.
The top results included a bunch of stuff that none of us enjoy, and bowling.
So I’ve signed us up to the local bowling league.
Our first game is June 14 at 2pm. That’s a Sunday.
Mark your calendars. I already paid the deposit.
Team name is pending but I’m tossing up between Irritable Bowl Syndrome and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Gutter. Open to thoughts.
Micah
I think you’re crazy if you think any of us would 1. Like those names 2. Have time to participate
Milo
But there’s a trophy! It’s shaped like a pin! I need that trophy, Micah. I need it. I NEEEEEEDDDDD IT!!!
Micah
Fine. I’m in.
Milo
THAT’S MY GUY!!! We need three more and we have a team!
Milo
Knox?
Knox
No.
Milo
Too bad, you’re outvoted.
Knox
I didn’t fucking vote.
Milo
I believe in a democratic society, silence can be interpreted as consent
Holden
That is absolutely not how consent works and I’m concerned you think it is. Do I need to have a talk with you?
Holden
Also, absofuckinglutely not to IBS. Gross.
Milo
How about Snakes on a Lane? Or Britney Spares? What about Balls of Fury???
Holden
This is strike one, Milo. I swear to god . . .
Milo
WE NEED TO BOND! AT BOWLING! YOU HAVE WEEKS TO PREPARE! NON NEGOTIABLE! Eli, tell them!!!!
The thread stops. They’re waiting on me. They always wait on me. Somehow I landed the position of leader, of tiebreaker. The man who has to weigh in before the chaos can crystallize into a decision.
I stare at the screen.
At Micah’s last message.
Fine, I’m in.
I look at his name, at the letters of it. Hear his soft voice in my ears.
You sorry sap of a human being . . .
I type.
Absolutely not.
I delete it.
Sure.
I delete that as well.
Me:
Fine. June 14th. 2pm. I’ll be there.
I send it before I can delete it.
Milo
ELI HAS SPOKEN! LOCKING IT IN!!!!! WOOHOO!!
Holden
God help us.
I shove the phone in my pocket and gulp down the last of the coffee, dumping the cup in the trash on my way back to the classroom.
Bowling?
Fuck.
What have I done?
The bell rings as I make it back, and the last of my class files in, a motley crew of teens and adults anywhere from sixteen to fifty-six years old.
GED classes are different beasts from normal schooling. Students show up because a court order said they had to, or because they want their kid to see them finish something. No parents calling to complain. No PTA. Just a pass or fail.
We’re doing The Great Gatsby because every lit class in America does Gatsby, but this year I’m having trouble with it for reasons I haven’t fully articulated to myself.
The trouble is Nick.
I’ve taught Nick Carraway two ways. The first three years I taught him as the reasonable narrator.
The voice you trust because he tells you, on page one, that he reserves judgment.
Then I started teaching him as the honest coward—a man who sees clearly and won’t act, narrating the destruction of everyone around him.
That was last year’s read. I was proud of it.
I thought I’d cracked the book open. I thought coward was the hardest thing you could call him.
Tonight I’m standing at the front of the class, flipping through my notes and I can feel the argument coming apart in my hands.
A coward is afraid. A coward feels the cost. A coward stays awake at night.
Nick doesn’t.
Nick goes home to the Midwest and writes a beautiful book.
“So,” I start once everyone is settled. “Is Nick a coward or is he an innocent observer?”
Hands go up. One of the adults raises her hand and calls out, “He’s a total coward. He lets Gatsby take the fall for Daisy and doesn’t do shit about it.”
“But he’s not really friends with Gatsby, is he?” a kid at the back says. “He’s just watching.”
“He profits from it,” someone else argues, and then it’s off to the races, the class spooling up like it always does, a mess of opinions and energy, no cross-talk rules or shushing, because I like the chaos when it’s about books.
While they’re arguing, I lean back on the edge of the desk and let it run.
Watching their faces, I see all the twitches and microfrowns, the arms crossed or loose, the glances at phones or the clock on the wall. Every room a read. Every room a risk assessment.
“Okay,” I say, when the engine starts to wind down. “Let’s explore the idea he’s a coward. Now, find me the page where Nick is afraid. Take a minute.”
They flip. The room is quiet while they skim the text, pages turning fast. Then an older guy in the back sits up.
“Chapter seven.”
“Read it.”
He clears his throat. “‘Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.’” He looks up. “He’s terrified of getting old.”
“Good. What else?”
A teen mom who’s trying to finish her schooling speaks up. “He keeps saying he’s honest. Like, weirdly often. ‘I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.’ Why does he need to say that?”
“He’s afraid of being contaminated,” another student says. “That’s why he goes back to the Midwest. Not because he learned anything. Because he’s scared if he stays, he’ll become as corrupted as those around him.”
I nod. “So we’ve established that he’s afraid of getting old without ever having lived, and of becoming like those around him.” I let that sit. “But does that make him a coward?”
There’s a long pause as the class considers my question.
Oliver, my quietest student, stops moving his pen across his knuckles. “No,” he says.
The class turns. He doesn’t usually speak first.
“Why not?”
He’s looking at his book but I don’t think he’s reading.
“Because a coward is afraid of things that are outside their control. A coward sees the fight and is too scared to step in for the person getting hit. The fear is about the gap between what they should do and what they can make themselves do.” He shrugs.
“Nick isn’t scared for anyone. He’s not scared for Gatsby.
He’s not scared for Myrtle. He’s not even scared for Daisy.
He’s scared for himself. He’s scared of what staying would cost him.
What watching would cost him. What being implicated would do to his idea of himself. ”
“So what is he?”