The Things He Remembered

Three days after the lake, I fell out of a tree.

There was no graceful way to tell that story, although I tried very hard to find one.

Gavin and I had finished our presentation and taken the long trail back to campus. He climbed onto a broad, low branch to rescue a paper lantern caught there after a student event. I climbed up after him because he said the view over the water was good and because, apparently, possessing a tail had given me unjustified confidence.

The branch beneath my left foot shifted.

I landed badly on the path, heard something give, and discovered that my vocabulary was far less suitable for elementary school than I had hoped.

Gavin called for help from beside me. I remember gripping his sleeve and asking him not to let anyone pull off my hat.

“I know,” he said. “I’m here.”

At the hospital, I asked to speak to the clinician alone. She saw my ears while checking me over. For a terrible second, I waited for her face to change.

She blinked, asked whether touching near them would hurt, and continued her examination.

I didn’t become brave because one stranger was kind. I did stop shaking long enough to answer her questions.

There was a fracture near my ankle, a scraped palm, and a future involving crutches. My head, thankfully, had missed the ground. By the time they fitted a temporary support around my leg, I was exhausted and furious with the entire concept of trees.

Micah arrived carrying my jacket.

He stopped so abruptly in the doorway that Gavin stood up.

“What happened?”

“I fell,” I said before either of them could start. “It was an accident.”

Micah looked at my leg.

For a moment, I could actually see him trying to find something useful to say.

“Really committing to the outdoor lifestyle.”

I laughed, then unexpectedly wanted to cry.

He sat beside the bed.

“Hey,” he said, quieter. “You’re okay?”

“I will be.”

He nodded, but his hand stayed clenched around my jacket.

Miyu drove us home after discharge. Gavin helped collect my things, apologizing three times, until I told him I would invoice him for the next apology.

Back in our room, Micah moved his shoe pile out of the walkway without being asked.

I noticed.

Over the next week, I noticed a lot of things.

Water appeared beside my bed before he left for class. My phone charger moved within reach. He brought food, then started texting pictures of the cafeteria options so I could choose rather than accept whatever he thought looked good.

He still stole my fries.

I found that reassuring.

“You don’t have to skip lectures,” I told him on the third afternoon.

“I’m not skipping. I downloaded the recording.”

“You’re sitting beside it while it plays.”

“Absorbing information through proximity.”

I threw a clean sock at him.

He caught it and put it in the laundry basket.

“Mobility’s improving.”

I had never hated and liked someone so efficiently at the same time.

Being helped was difficult. Being helped by him was worse. Every time he reached for something I needed, I wanted to lean toward him. Every time he came too close to the clothes concealing my tail, I pulled back.

Once, trying to change alone, I knocked my crutch against the desk and swore loudly enough to bring him to the bathroom door.

“What do you need?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay.” A pause. “I’m putting a chair outside. You can pretend it grew there.”

I sat on that chair for ten minutes after he went away, hating the relief in my throat.

On Thursday, he came back with three movies and a bag of snacks.

“If I watch another movie,” I told him, “I’m going to start answering attendance with an actor’s name.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Nothing. Sit down.”

He sat.

For a while, we listened to somebody practicing a guitar very badly across the courtyard.

“What music do you actually like?” he asked.

I told him. He argued with one of my choices, accepted another, and stole my phone to add a song to the queue.

We talked about school, then home. I told him I wanted to teach because my second-grade teacher had once let me eat lunch in her classroom for a week without making me explain why I was hiding.

He didn’t ask what I had been hiding from.

“She sounds good,” he said.

“She was.”

He asked what my hometown was like. I told him about the grocery store where everybody knew my mother, the summer heat, and the treehouse my dad had built behind our old house.

“I used to do homework up there,” I said. “Or pretend to. Mostly I sat by the window and listened to people walking past the fence.”

“Good hiding place?”

“The best.”

“Mine was the garage. Until my dad started charging rent in the form of passing him tools.”

I smiled. “You got a terrible deal.”

“Learned which end of a wrench to hold, though.”

I looked at the telescope case under his desk.

“Why aerospace?”

He leaned back against the wall.

“My dad.”

“Is he an engineer?”

“He was a mechanic. Could fix pretty much anything.” Micah rubbed a thumb along the edge of his phone. “He liked stars. We had this awful little telescope. Half the time we were probably looking at a streetlight.”

I smiled.

“He died when I was nine,” he said.

My smile faded.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.” He looked toward the window. “Afterward, my mom said he was up there. I knew what she meant. I wasn’t actually expecting to find him behind Saturn.”

His mouth twisted.

“But learning how things got up there made me feel better. Still does.”

I looked at his hands. There was a burn near his thumb from the floor kitchen, a little ink on one knuckle. Those hands had held a telescope with his father. They had picked my bag off the hospital floor. They had stopped reaching the moment I panicked at a party.

I wanted to know him so badly it hurt.

“Come here,” I said.

He looked at me.

I caught his sleeve and kissed him.

He went very still, then his hand settled against my cheek. The kiss was soft and uncertain in a way our first one hadn’t been. I could feel him waiting for me to decide whether I meant it.

I did.

That was what frightened me.

When I pulled back, he rested his forehead against mine.

“Loui.”

I closed my eyes.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

I didn’t know how to answer without saying something cruel.

He leaned away enough to look at me.

“Was that a mistake?”

“No.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

I stared at the wrinkle in his sleeve where my hand still held it.

“Give me a minute.”

He waited. I could hear his breathing, the guitar outside, a door closing down the hall.

The minute became something I couldn’t bear.

“I think I need to be alone,” I whispered.

His face changed so slightly somebody else might have missed it.

“Okay.”

He stood and picked up his jacket.

I let go of his sleeve.

At the door, he turned back.

“I can stop flirting,” he said. “I can be your friend. But you can’t keep kissing me and then asking me to act like you didn’t.”

He left quietly.

I sat on the bed, ankle throbbing, mouth still warm.

For once, I couldn’t blame him for misunderstanding me.