ONE YEAR AGO
Sony wants to race today. Since she barely has the strength to pace without getting lightheaded, she and I came up with a set of rules. I walk a loop around the atrium, twice around, to make up for my two-lungedness, she says, while she only does one. Whoever crosses the finish line first wins.
A few steps around a corner, I look back over my shoulder to see how much Sony has to catch up. And whoever I knock into this time isn’t as small as Neo.
My front meets with a body as I turn the corner. Seconds later, my back meets the floor, shoes slipping out from under me. A noise I don’t make often rises flatly to my lips.
“Ow.”
“Oh my god! I’m so sorry!” A man bends to my level. His voice is deep but not heavy, light enough to pull you back to where you are. “Are you okay?”
“Sam!” Sony scurries to my side, skidding to her knees like a superhero, sound effects and all. She removes her backpack, pretending to rummage through it.
“Don’t worry,” she says, planting a hand on my chest. “I’m a first-class medic!” She is not.
Making all sorts of phony medical machine sounds, Sony tickles my sides up and down, rousing squirmy, unwilling giggles. “Get up at once, you scoundrel. We have worlds to conquer–wow. You’re big.”
Sony stops when she notices the man standing at our level. She blinks, looking him up and down. “I’m Sony!” Her hand almost hits him in his face as she reaches to shake his hand. It’s when I notice he’s not a man at all.
He’s a boy.
“I’m Coeur.”
Coeur’s hair is curly, eyes big and brown, his most pronounced features. His lips are full, a nose above them with a gentle, broad slope. His skin is dark, paint-splattered, petechial spots and veins spread about his arms.
Sony cocks her head like a puppy with its ears flipped.
“Co-what?”
“Coeur?” Neo rounds the corner behind us. He always follows Sony on races, a single crutch his companion for a spine gradually curling like a fist. About two weeks ago, he got in an accident. He fractured his wrist and among other injuries, and though he assures me it wasn’t his dad, he didn’t want to talk about it.
As soon as he sees Coeur, his expression falls, his shoulders slack, eyes a little wider than usual.
“Neo,” Coeur breathes out his name, standing up straight as Sony helps me back to my feet. “Hey.” His lips curve, slow, kindly. They exchange a wondrous tone only people who’ve met before can share.
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh,” Coeur feigns a scratch at the back of his head, looking at the ground and then back up. “It’s no big deal, I just- uh- almost drowned.”
Neo steps forward. A solid annoyance weighs down his face.
“You look fine to me,” he says through his teeth.
“Neo.” I frown, pulling at his sleeve, but he ignores me.
Coeur must’ve not caught Neo’s tone because he just laughs, relief in its wake.
“Neo,” he says again, enamored by his presence. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you.” The longer Coeur remains in his lighthearted fit, the more Neo’s anger grows. Coeur turns to Sony and me to explain. “We have literature together. Our teacher can’t get enough of him, he’s a genius–”
Coeur doesn’t get to say anything else. Cutting him off, Neo pushes right past him and storms down the hall.
—
The last time Neo had an outburst like that was when he flipped the food tray over in my arms. I open the door to his room warily.
“Neo?”
“I wanna be alone, Sam.” Pulling himself back into bed, he winces till he’s surrounded by pen, paper, and the safety of his paper and ink sea.
“Will you come to dinner with us later, then?” I ask. “I already stole you an apple.”
“Is he gonna be there?” Distaste plays on his tongue. He avoids eye contact, rummaging through pages he isn’t actually reading with more force than necessary.
“You don’t like Coeur,” I point out.
“What makes you think that?”
“You were rude.”
“Sam.”
“Sorry.” I catch myself. “How do you know him?”
Neo throws his pen down, jaw tight. He doesn’t lean back against the wall, he thumps against it, crossing his arms, unable to contain the continued twitches across his cheeks.
“People call him C,” he says. “He’s been on the swim team since middle school. Everyone adores him because he’s good-looking and an idiot. Everyone but teachers, at least. He spends all of class listening to music and staring out windows. His grades probably don’t matter because of his star athlete crap. Girls practically cling to him in the halls like popularity leeches. His taste in friends is just impeccable too. I should know. They beat me up while he watched.”
Neo’s eyes lock with mine. The catalyst of his scars comes to mind with that look. Neo’s father inflicts pain, but there’s distance between them, a distance that nurtures indifference. There’s nothing indifferent about him now.
He’s not telling me the full story. If Coeur were just a passerbyer, someone who ignored his assault, Neo wouldn’t care. He doesn’t push past his mother trembling with rage and she is the greatest bystander in his life. There’s something else I’m missing between the lines.
Neo makes an ugly face at me when I don’t respond. “Anything else you wanna know?”
I blink, my hands flat on my knees.
“What are leeches?”
“Get out, Sam.”
I do. I just feel like a blind bystander turning the doorknob.
Back where I left them, Sony and Coeur gather around our old vending machine.
“No, no. You’re doing it all wrong. You gotta crane kick it first. Like this.” Sony raises both arms over her head, lifting one leg and flicking her foot forward so hard that her shoe almost flies off. She doesn’t even strike the glass, slipping over her feet, and falling backward. Coeur catches her.
Sony blows the hair out of her face and points at the vending machine.
“See, Coor?”
“You can just call me C.”
“Alright. See, C? Wait.”
Sony forgets her qualms over the consonant when she sees me.
“Sam!” she yells, scrambling upright. “Where’s Baby?”
C looks over at me too, expectedly, in a polite way. I don’t like that he’s polite. I don’t like that all I see looking at his face is it turning the other away as my friend gets beaten.
“You let people hurt Neo?” I ask, but it’s more of an accusation.
Sony’s chin draws back. “What?”
“What?” C asks the same question.
“You and your friends beat him up.”
“I–I never beat anyone up,” he says. My brows knit together, but C keeps defending himself. “I’m his partner in class for reading–”
“Neo doesn’t lie.” I remember the ache in Neo’s face when he saw C standing in the hall, so oblivious.
Neo is in and out of this place constantly. One day, not long ago, when he came in with bruises all down his shoulder blades, a black eye, and the wrist he likes to squeeze is broken. That day, he wouldn’t talk to anyone, even me. We lay together in the dark. A single tear rolled down his temple. I thought it was his father at first. But now I’m not so sure. “You hurt him.”
“Yikes. Sorry, dude.” Sony plants her hand on his shoulder, tsking. “I can’t be buddies with a bully. Maybe in your next life, you’ll be likable. See ya!”
“Wait!” C calls out to both of us before we walk away. He swallows a lump in his throat, confusion and memory morphing into a realization. “Can I talk to him?”
—
C, I quickly find, is not unlike Neo. Whatever he’s thinking, it isn’t said aloud. When someone talks to him, only half his attention is on the words. The other half is lost, glazed over behind his eyes.
I don’t think it’s intentional ignorance. I think, like when he knocked me to the floor and missed Neo’s clenching teeth and fists, he simply doesn’t notice.
I lead him to Neo’s room, not only for Neo but also to feed that selfish curiosity. I want to know what Neo didn’t say. I want to help them. And something tells me the rest of the story lies in C’s side of it.
He opens the door.
“Sam, I said–” Neo stills the moment he sees C. There’s no anger in him. Just surprise. It makes him look young, almost his age.
“Hi, Neo,” C says. He tries to close the door behind him. Sony sneaks her foot in the crevice so that it remains just barely open.
I poke her. “Sony, we should–”
“Hush!” she whispers, putting her finger on my lips and pressing her ear to the opening. “I’m eavesdropping.”
“Can I sit down?” C asks, motioning to the chair at Neo’s bedside. Sony and I peek through the blinds. Neo zones in on the seat, then C, then the seat again.
“No,” Neo says. He snaps back to his sea, pretending the boy still standing awkwardly at his door doesn’t exist.
“Listen, I just came to talk.”
“What’s there to talk about?”
“I’m sorry,” C says.
Neo writes with more pressure than needed, swiping his pen across the paper to accentuate the silence. C goes on, “I’m sorry for you know–what my friends did. I didn’t know they were–”
“Ramming me against lockers and calling me a faggot?” Neo’s tone is flat as his features. For the first time, he looks C in the face. “You were there. You knew exactly what they were doing, and you just walked away.”
“I’m sorry. I should’ve stopped them.”
“You didn’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing, I–” Neo stops again, interrupted by his own observation. Since I can’t see C’s face, it takes a sniffle and squint from Neo for me to understand what’s happening. “Are you crying?”
“A little.” It sounds like more than a little.
“Why?”
“Don’t you remember? You’re my English partner.”
“That’s why you’re crying?”
“You’re so mean, Neo.” I won’t argue with that statement. “But we both know I wouldn’t have passed last semester without you.”
Neo may be mean, but he isn’t past recognizing someone genuine. Weakness and gratitude with it pour from C like a dripping faucet.
“I’m sorry I didn’t do anything. I swear I don’t even really know those guys. They’re just on my team, and I didn’t want to–”
“It’s fine.” Neo drops his head.
“No. It’s not fine,” C says.
“No, it’s not, but what the hell do you want me to do?” Neo’s wound energy from the moment he laid eyes on C locks his muscles. The past dances across his eyes, but it’s not the same past C recollects. It’s half of the bigger picture.
“Just go to your room, Coeur,” Neo sighs. “Go hang out with Sam and Sony. I don’t care. Once you’re normal again, you can go back to your life and pretend we never saw each other.”
C lingers even once Neo returns to his writing. His lips remain slightly parted, shelving things he wishes he could say. When Neo’s pen hits the page, the barrier is put back up, and C has no choice but to walk away as I did.
“Well,” Sony crosses her arms, the two of us greeting him back into the hall. “You’re obviously sorry.”
C only stares at the ground.
“I’m such a coward.” The proclamation sounds comfortable coming from his mouth as if he’s said that before.
When C knocked into me, the first thing I noticed was his size. The second thing I noticed were all the signs of cardiovascular disease. He says he almost drowned, but his body temperature is rather cold, and the clothes he wears are too heavy for summer. Skin flakes at his lips and fingers. When he walks, he sometimes falters. His brain needs added time to process the movement. He even leans forward when people speak to him and sometimes doesn’t respond like he can’t hear.
C did almost drown, although that’s not why he’s in the hospital now. Whatever his killer is, he’s been sick for a long time.
“It’s not always easy to do the right thing,” I say. More souls than lost to this place taught me that. “If you can look back and see the mistake you made, you’re not a coward.”
I nod to the stairwell. C may not have books or chocolate bars to give, but at the very least, he’s got an interesting story to tell and manners to pair it.
I take him and Sony to the gardens.
Sony and I settle on our usual cloud-watching bench. C follows. His mind is still on his wrongs, still on the other side of the doors lingering outside Neo’s room.
“Can I ask you something?” he sits, still towering over us. “How did you two become friends with Neo?”
“I wore him down,” Sony says, unwrapping the candies Eric bought her.
“I used to bring him his food trays,” I say.
“He likes food?” C asks like he wants to take notes.
Sony shakes her head. “He hates food.”
“He likes apples,” I say. “I wore him down with apples.”
“Apples?”
“And books,” Sony says. “And being an ass.”
“An ass?”
“A lovable ass. A lovable writer too.” Sony pops a sour candy in her mouth and lifts one to mine. “He’s my favorite writer in the world.”
Asking how you become friends with someone is like asking how the world came to be. It’s a process. It’s not linear, nor cyclic. Not unlike the world, people aren’t always as complicated as we make them out to be. Sometimes you just have to offer a little bit of yourself, a little bit of your time, and as C will soon find, a little bit of your kindness.
—
C is a poor thief. Not only is he too noticeable, but his aversion to being rude means trying to take something without permission goes against his nature. He’s already apologized to the cafeteria attendants three times for my thievery. When I ask him where this compulsion comes from, he says his parents never stood for it and would ‘beat his ass’. I tell him that misbehaving is a part of being human. He tells me this particular part of being human makes him want to vomit with guilt.
I end up stealing most of the apples for him. C never eats them. Instead, he brings them to Neo, Sony and I’s advice in mind.
The first day:
“Hi.” He shuffles into Neo’s room like a parent trying not to disturb a child doing homework. “I brought you an apple.”
He sets it on the side table.
“Thanks?” Neo says, picking it up warily.
C smiles curtly, hands cupped in front of him.
“Can I sit?”
“Uh–No,” Neo says, like his answer is more than obvious.
C is unphased by it. He nods and exits with his resolution intact.
“I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
The second day:
C opens the door, puts the apple on the side table, stands with his hands cupped in front of him, and that same eager smile.
“Hi,” he says.
Neo squints his eyes. “Coeur.”
“Neo.”
“I forgive you, okay?” Neo takes the apple and plants it on his lap. “Now, will you leave me alone?”
“No.” C opens the door. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
The third day:
C opens the door. The apple finds its spot on the side table. C takes his stance, hands cupped, smile dimply and fresh.
“Hi.”
Neo slams his pen onto his papers.
“I don’t remember you being this stubborn!”
C’s smile doesn’t waver. “I learned it from you,” he says.
Neo scowls. “What do you want?”
“To be friends.”
Neo shakes his head like he’s been smacked. “What?”
“I’ve wanted to be friends ever since you started helping me in Lit,” C says. “But you went back to the hospital before I could ask.”
“My bad–”
“Shut up. Be my friend.”
“We can’t be friends.”
“Do you like music?”
“No.”
“Oh c’mon. Everybody likes music.” C takes out his phone from his back pocket along with a tangled pair of headphones. “Here. I’ll make you a playlist.”
“You’ll make nothing,” Neo scolds, although having to point a finger up at the scoldee doesn’t make for a very intimidating warning.
“How do you feel about Coldplay, Bach, and Taylor Swift for an opening trio?” C’s thumbs tap away at the screen.
“Am I going through a 17th-century break-up with a beach?” Neo asks, monotonous.
“That’d make a cool music video, actually.” C looks up, considering it. “We’ll start with classic rock. You can’t go wrong with classic rock.”
“Coeur!” Neo yells. C jumps, startled, catching the pain in Neo’s voice. “I forgive you, but we are not going to be friends.”
Neo bites down on his lower lip to keep it from shaking, and C hears the idea of threading a connection with a few apples and some music fades like a cut-off melody. Suddenly, the space between them seems a lot larger than it did before.
Neo wipes his eyes. “Just leave, please.”
And C does after he lingers. The sound of Neo’s pen carves at his efforts. It tells him that half of an apology and half of an attempt is not enough to stitch the injury he caused, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. I do think Neo doesn’t want to be friends with C. I think, from the sheer sadness that swims in his eyes whenever C tries to apologize, that he wants something more.
The following week, C doesn’t go to Neo’s room. Instead, he spends time with Sony. She’s a delightful companion during dreary times. For all her unintentional insensitivity, she’s understanding. C enjoys her energy. He buys her chocolate and races her all she wants.
I join them sometimes. I listen to C and watch him. He’s simple, but even if he is half there, what is there is kind.
He listens. He watches. He tells a nurse how much he likes the new color in her hair, discusses sports with his doctor, laughing over games C’s missed. With Sony, he visits the oncology unit, plays with the kids, and helps however he can, wherever he can, in a way you know he wants to.
He thinks of Neo every day. When we walk past his room, the other half of him is still outside the door, trying to find a way in.
One night, it preys on him more than the rest.
In the cafeteria, he and Sony sit at an empty table. She sleeps soundly, her mouth open. He lazes, eyes half-closed, chin propped on crossed arms. A single earbud plays tunes in his ear, the other in Sony’s.
“You want one?” he asks, fingering the wire connected to his phone as I sit beside him.
“No, thank you. Let her keep it.”
“I was gonna give you mine,” he says, scooting closer, making sure Sony can still hear.
“No luck with Neo?” I ask. C shakes his head. “How’s your heart then?”
His face scrunches up when I use that word.
“Beating.” He presses a single hand to his chest. “I mean, I think it is. It hurts right now.”
“C,” I say. “Can you tell me what really happened between you and Neo?”
He looks at me, considering the past behind the question, because, I think, he’s never been asked.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I mean–I’m not smart. I’m not good at anything. Except swimming, I guess. That’s all I’ve ever been good at.” The hand on his chest bunches his shirt. “But a few years ago, my chest started to ache.”
“You never told anyone?”
“My parents would’ve made me stop swimming. I wasn’t anything else but a swimmer, and I didn’t want to be nothing,” he says. “After I noticed something was wrong, I started to listen to music all the time, watch movies, stare out windows, just so I could–”
“Exist less?”
C and I exchange a glance.
It’s not easy to acknowledge that something is out of your control. One day, your skin turns to a rash, and your bones start to bend. Your lungs give out, and your mother is no longer there. Your heart hurts and in the depths of a silent, lonely place it stops beating.
It’s sudden. Sometimes too sudden to accept.
“Sorry, I’m not good with words,” C says. He exhales choppily, releasing his shirt.
“Neo was never nice to me like most people are,” he says. “He looked at me longer than everyone else did. He asked questions. He taught me things with every conversation. There’s something rugged but at the same time elegant about him that I’ve always been drawn to, something curious.”
“It’s why he likes reading,” I whisper, fond memories behind it.
C chuckles a dry laugh. “I never liked reading. Neo made me want to read even though I couldn’t and–I don’t know. Everybody liked me because of my looks, the swimming, the shallow stuff. Neo trudged through all that and looked for me in the deep end.” C stutters when he talks. Like he’s searching through a maze for the answers and suddenly hits a dead end every sentence.
“I like him,” he whispers. “I guess I thought he liked me too.”
The picture comes together behind the fog of their history. This goes further than an altercation in a hallway against lockers and foul-mouthed bullies. There are words and moments that came before that.
Neo’s single tear didn’t belong to those boys, his father, or broken bones.
It belonged to C.
“You’re compassionate,” I say. “That’s why I like you. Neo likes you too. More than you think.” I stand up and push in my chair.
“Wait,” C calls. “How do you know? Did he tell you that?”
I imagine how hard Neo must’ve fallen for someone who cares so much. I imagine how smitten he must’ve been as C tried to read despite not being able. I imagine, from the hope in C’s eyes, that he didn’t fall quite so soon, but when he did, he fell so much harder.
I smile curtly as he does.
“No.” The last piece of advice in my quiver from all the years I’ve spent watching escapes like a loose end, a finish to the melody. “But he wouldn’t be so hurt if he didn’t care about the person who hurt him.”
—
Neo tells me about the first time he met C on one of his worse days. His body is sore and heavy beneath his sea. His medicine renders him drowsy and pale.
He eats less than enough to sustain his body weight. The toll it takes on his nerves pulls its strings near snapping.
In his daze, Neo tells me that he met C long before C met him.
He wrote a story, he says. About a boy in a rowboat, searching for land to no avail. He says that’s how it began.
Neo isn’t tall enough to reach the textbook cubbies in most classrooms. In his first year of high school, when he was already out sick half the time, he’d hear snickers behind his back. He’d get shoved aside. The chair he stood on to gather books would get kicked out from under him.
It was crowdsourced bullying. When you’re small and a little different, you’re expected to be the punchline. Nobody protects you from a few faceless flicks and bad jokes.
Neo is rude, standoffish, a little pretentious, but he isn’t hateful. He wishes no harm to anyone. His worst bullies didn’t care. A group of boys from the swim team in Neo’s grade looked for reasons to bully him. They spat slurs passing him in the halls and subtly pushed him so he’d trip.
Neo says it wasn’t till the whole school found out he was sick that teachers finally decided to speak up, and the population of his attackers thinned. Not even the swimmers targeted him much anymore.
Still, Neo couldn’t reach those cubbies.
Then, one day, someone new joined the class. A boy from the swim team Neo had never seen before who sat in the back row and stared out windows.
When the teacher instructed that everyone go get a textbook row by row, rather than watch Neo grab a chair, the new boy reached over Neo’s head and grabbed two books. He handed Neo one of them and went back to his seat without a word.
“He never paid attention, so he had no idea who I was,” Neo says, clutching my hand as more spasms of pain travel through his muscles. “He didn’t know I was sick either.”
Neo noticed early on that C had trouble. When the class read excerpts, C dragged his finger across the lines and stalled. Some words were bumpy. He couldn’t just glide across them as effortlessly as everyone else.
The teacher called on C for answers, and he would freeze up. He was paying attention, or at least trying to, but words he couldn’t read sat in the back of his throat without a voice. It happened a few times. The teacher stared at C over the line of his glasses, and C could only sit there in the awkward intermission between question and inevitable embarrassment. What C didn’t realize was that he wasn’t alone in the pool of the silently pitied. The boy next to him swam the same waters.
The next time the teacher called on C for an answer, he, of course, didn’t know what to say. He and the teacher looked at one another. He curled his lips back in apology and waited.
The sound of a piece of paper sliding across his desk interrupted the silence. C looked down to see a yellow note written in Neo’s handwriting.
The theme is love, it said. Love and Loss.
C’s attention flickered to Neo, whose eyes were steady on the board. C swallowed and read the answer Neo wrote for him. Surprised, the teacher nodded and went on with the lecture.
C said thank you. Neo never answered him.
Over the course of that year, even if Neo was out half the week, the two fell into a routine. C grabbed their textbooks every day, and when C had to answer a question, Neo would give him hints beforehand and lead him in the right direction. Even if he ended up being wrong sometimes, C didn’t care. He was just happy to understand.
Neo got curious the closer he and C got. He asked where C’s name comes from. C said he was the youngest child, his mother’s last, and she wanted to name him after her heart. C asked where Neo’s name comes from. Neo said his parents were religious, and they named things for reasons he didn’t care to understand.
C asked Neo why he had so many books. Neo said books were an infinite source of escapism. C asked if Neo had any friends. Neo said he had two weirdos. Neo asked if C had any friends. C said sure. Neo asked if C had any real friends. C was silent for a while, then he asked Neo if he could borrow a book.
That’s when Neo began to fantasize. He couldn’t wait for class anymore without smiling to himself. He’d let his touch linger over C’s when he handed him a textbook. And it didn’t skate by him that C sometimes got flustered when he caught himself leaning too close, or Neo fixed his hair.
They got in trouble often. Their teacher would scold them for talking too much. According to Neo, the detentions were worth it. During, they played rock paper scissors from across the room.
Neo was happy. The smile that touches his lips when he says that makes my chest cave. But Neo’s happiness ended there.
The rowboat felt empty, he said. So he added another character to keep the other company. The story itself was harmless enough. Just two boys lost in the endlessness of the sea. Neo left the story on his desk in English class by accident when packing his bag.
When he got to school the next morning, he found a group of boys from the swim team waiting for C. They read through the papers, passing them back and forth, spitting cracky chuckles across the desks.
Neo stopped at the door. When they caught sight of him, he didn’t even bother running.
They asked if he wrote the story for his boyfriend. They asked if he did the teacher favors for the grade, that maybe that was who the story was about. Between each insult, they pushed Neo further and further.
The first boy tugged on his hair and ripped his papers to shreds. The second slammed him against the lockers. He grabbed Neo’s thigh and asked if he was into things like that. The third tugged Neo’s belt and threatened to rape him, saying it would be charity to rid him of his perversions. The rest laughed in a chorus.
Neo is familiar with cruelty.
His father’s cruelty is hungry. It always has been. It taught him to dissociate from his body.
When C walked in on the scene, he had his earbuds in.
He was heading to first period, hair still wet from his morning practice. He looked at Neo, at the boys who’d stilled their aggressions to make it seem like nothing was out of the ordinary. A pack of wolves caging a bloodied lamb, waiting for the shepherd to walk away before mauling the rest of it.
“I didn’t even feel those bruises, Sam,” Neo says. “I didn’t care that they punched me or broke my wrist or said they’d tell my parents how disgusting I was or any of it.”
He struggles for his next breath.
“No one ever liked me. No one ever thought anything of me. So, the whole time, all I saw was the back of Coeur’s head when he left me there. I thought he was the one I could sail with. I thought that maybe instead of rowing to the end of the sea, I could row to heaven. Because even if it was just one person, I finally had someone.” Neo’s breath hitches. “I thought I finally had someone.”
Neo doesn’t cry. His jaw aches with how hard he represses it. I kiss him and hug him. He hugs me back till the medicine lulls him to sleep.
I understand why it hurts.
I understand the loneliness of not being seen.
I understand, most of all, from years of watching, that ignorance is worse than cruelty.
—
In time, C finally steals without fear. It’s not very skillful. Like I said, he’s too big, too noticeable. He steals an apple and a book from the library and more determined than ever, he goes to Neo’s room. Without so much as knocking, he opens the door full force and shuts it behind him.
Neo glances up from his writing, legs beneath the sheets, Sony’s stained sweatshirt on his shoulders, and the hood on his head. C waits for his full attention before talking.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me. Denial is my life’s work, and I’ll be damned if I let it ruin this.” He motions between Neo and him. “Every day since the day those guys hurt you, I missed you so much it hurt and I miss you now. I miss you because even if you’re a stubborn pain in the ass, you’re the only person I’ve ever wanted. So I’m sorry and you don’t have to forgive me, ever, but you’re going to get used to me being around because I am not leaving you again.” C runs out of breath, holding the edge of Neo’s bed to regain his balance. “And most of all, I’m sorry I treated you like the shallow end of a pool.”
Neo’s stunned expression shakes till he forces it into a frown. “What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know!” C waves his hand through the air. “But I’m trying here. Because I like you. I really like you. So am I going to have to go steal our old textbooks and a pack of sticky notes from school? Or are you finally going to accept that you like me back?”
Neo stays quiet. So does C. It’s not comfortable, but at the very least, it’s not a quiet that stems from a grudge.
Neo looks at the book in his arms, squinting.
“Seriously? Jane Austen?”
“The theme is love. Love and loss.” C says, twirling his wrist to show off the cover. He lays it on Neo’s lap. “I like love stories.”
Neo raises the corner of his lip in disgust.
“Not another one.”
“Will you read it to me? Like you used to?”
“I’ve already read it.” Neo picks up the book as if he’s ignoring it, ready to hand it back and reject it yet again. The familiar tone hits C in the face. Like when his teacher would dismiss his inability to understand. He wallows in the embarrassment and perhaps starts to accept that Neo may never truly forgive him.
“Okay,” he whispers, turning around and grabbing the doorknob.
“Where are you going?”
C halts. He turns back around. The book isn’t thrown aside or abandoned. Neo slides his hand across the first page, tucking his knees to rest the weight. He takes off the hood and nods at the chair by his bed. “Sit down and be quiet.”
—
Neo reads to C in a different way than I read to him. There’s no monotone drawl over every passage. He works across the chapters with smoothness, sure to side-eye C when he flips a page to make sure he’s paying attention. He is. He props his chin on his arms and every time Neo picks up the story again, C admires him.
They make it a habit to read every day. They exchange numbers. They text each other after hours when they should be sleeping. C sometimes sneaks into Neo’s room, and they listen to music while laughing over the nurses they tricked. When C gets discharged a week later, he messages Neo every single day and visits us every afternoon. He doesn’t swim anymore, he says, so he has no responsibilities anyway.
A month passes of this routine, but one day, we don’t hear from C anymore.
Sony and I worry. We ask Neo if he’s messaged him. Neo shakes his head, his thumb dragging over the edge of his phone.
Two days pass. Neo doesn’t get out of bed, a familiar disappointment settling in his gut. Sony and I stay with him to alleviate it. It isn’t till the sun is about to set on the third night that we hear a voice hopping down the hall, fading in like music.
“Neo! Neo! Neo!” C comes running, almost falling over when he opens the door. The shape of him behind the blinds clears. He enters breathless, some sort of school assignment in his hands. He’s wearing a hospital gown, and what made him trip wasn’t the door but an IV strapped to a pole and connected to his arm under a thin piece of tape.
Neo looks him up and down with horror in his eyes.
C’s fingers shake and with every breath he takes, he winces.
“Neo, look,” he says, no preface, limping over to his bedside and sitting down next to him. “Look, I got an A.” C shows Neo the paper, pointing at the red letter near the top. There’s a giddy smile on his lips. It can’t keep its form, twitching like his muscles.
“What happened?” Neo breathes, touching C’s face with the most delicate reach. He moves aside the gown’s collar, tracing scars atop his veins.
“Nothing, I’m fine.” C takes Neo’s hand. He kisses his fingertips. “Look,” he says. “Read my paper. I wrote it all by myself.”
Neo, with the greatest reluctance, obeys.
C smiles at Sony and me and asks us how we’re doing. We both say we’re doing okay. Neo reads C’s paper, half his attention on the words, half of it lost.
Cardiovascular issues are points on a broad spectrum of severity. What’s nice about the heart is that in most cases, if you catch the problem early, it’s salvageable. What’s more difficult about the heart is that it’s essential, and if you aren’t fast enough…
—
When the night casts a muted blanket, Sony and I go to the gardens. Neo and C sleep inside, tangled like little kids beneath the covers while she and I lean against the great barrier and look at our city. Out there, people always look twice at people like us. They glance at the hospital on their way to work or from their office building, and they see doctors and blood and gray. They don’t see our books or our broken things. They don’t see a disabled poet and broken-hearted composer making promises in the night.
They don’t know what it’s like to drown or to be cut from gardens. It’s uncomfortable for them to witness it. Sick people attract and repulse. Dying is a fascinating idea and a terrifying reality.
“We’re gonna die, aren’t we?” Sony says. Faraway stars reflect her gaze, drawing string lights across her freckles.
A sigh works through me.
I rarely feel anything.
When I do, it’s muted, purposefully, like the dark.
Hearts are essential, though, aren’t they? Everything has a heart. Even books, broken things, and I. Mine is locked away, frozen by the night in the snow. At least, that’s what I’d like to believe.
But love is not a choice.
“Without you, we would all be alone right now, Sam. You know that, right?” Sony says. “We love you.” She takes my hand across the railing. “Don’t ever forget that.”
