Chapter 38: Chapter 37: Second Nature

Mia had her phone in both hands, thumb hovering over Neiry's name, for about the fourth time since she'd gotten home.

She kept starting the same message and deleting it before it went anywhere. Hey, you were being weird at lunch felt like an accusation. You okay? felt like something he'd deflect with a joke before she even finished reading his answer. She'd watched him do it enough times now to know the move — the half-beat pause, the joke, the subject already changed before you could circle back. She was getting tired of losing that particular race.

She was mid-delete on attempt number five when the phone buzzed in her hand and made her flinch like she'd been caught doing something.

Neiry: hey

Neiry: you good? you got quiet after 6th period

She stared at it a second too long.

He noticed, she thought, which shouldn't have surprised her — Neiry noticed everything, that was practically his whole personality now that she thought about it — but there was something different about being on the receiving end of it instead of just watching him do it to other people.

Mia: I'm fine. you're the one who ditched a full conversation at lunch to talk about your shoe

Neiry: well the shoe deserved commentary

Neiry: but seriously. you good?

She looked at that for a while. You good. Four letters short of an actual question, and somehow it still felt like one of the more direct things he'd said to her all week.

Mia: yeah. long day. tell you tomorrow

It wasn't a lie, exactly. It just wasn't the whole thing, and she noticed herself doing it — noticed the exact shape of the deflection, because she'd just spent the last ten minutes being annoyed at him for doing the same thing to her, and here she was, doing it right back, smooth as anything.

Neiry: ok

Neiry: goodnight mia

She put the phone face-down on her comforter and lay there a second longer than she meant to, feeling the small, warm, complicated thing that happened whenever he used her actual name instead of a joke.

Downstairs, dinner was already loud by the time she came down, which meant her little sister had gotten into the good gossip before Mia had even sat at the table.

"—and then he just left, Ma, in the middle of the presentation, like he had somewhere better to be," Lily was saying, hands going a mile a minute, eleven years old and already better at telling a story than half the adults Mia knew. "It was so embarrassing. For him. Not for me."

"Mm-hm," their mother said, not looking up from the rice, the universal tone of a parent who'd learned a long time ago that most of what came out of Lily’s mouth needed exactly this much attention and no more.

"Mia, tell her it was embarrassing."

"It was very embarrassing," Mia said, sliding into her chair, not having heard a word of the actual story and knowing it didn't matter. Sofia beamed like she'd won something.

Their father came in from the living room already mid-sentence about something on the news, which was how he entered every room, and for a while the table was just noise — good noise, the kind Mia had stopped being able to imagine living without, plates passed without anyone asking, her mother switching between English and Spanish mid-thought without noticing she'd done it, her father laughing at his own joke before he'd finished telling it. Mia loved this house with an intensity that sometimes embarrassed her a little, because she knew — some deep, unprovable part of her knew — that none of this was supposed to have been hers. She didn't know where that certainty came from. She'd stopped trying to chase it down a long time ago. She just knew that whatever she'd been before she landed in this kitchen, she was grateful, every single night, that this was where she'd landed instead.

"Walter's coming by after his shift," her mother said, halfway through the rice, like it was an afterthought and not something she'd clearly already planned around. "His dad's got him working late again. I told him there's a plate."

"There's always a plate," Lily said. "Walter basically lives here."

"Walter does not basically live here."

"He has a specific mug."

"That doesn't mean anything."

"It means a lot, Mia."

Walter showed up forty minutes later, letting himself in through the side door the way he'd done since he was old enough to be trusted with the code, dropping his backpack by the door with the exact same tired, controlled motion he did everything with. He was quiet in the way that made people think he was unfriendly until they actually spent time around him and realized it was just — quiet. Contained. He said "hey" to the room in general, said something dry under his breath to Lily that made her cackle, and sat down across from Mia with the specific posture of someone who'd learned a long time ago not to take up more space than necessary.

"Long one?" Mia asked.

"It wasn’t so bad," Walter said, which was as close as he ever got to complaining. He didn't say anything about his dad. He never did. Mia had stopped asking a while back, not because she didn't care, but because she'd learned that with Walter, caring meant not pushing.

"You look like you haven't slept since June," she said instead.

"I slept Tuesday."

"That's not funny."

"I wasn't joking."

Lily snorted into her cup. Mia's mother reached over and put a plate in front of him without being asked, and Walter said thank you the way he said everything, low and brief, and ate like someone who hadn't in a while, and the table went back to its noise, and for a second Mia just watched her family — cousin included, cousin practically permanent — and let herself feel the specific, uncomplicated good of a Tuesday that hadn't asked anything of her yet.

She thought that Walter reminded her a little of Neiry. The stillness. The way both of them had learned, somewhere, that the safest amount of yourself to show a room was less than all of it.

She didn't examine that thought very hard. She didn’t want to think of it too hard. If she was honest, one of maybe three rules she actually kept.

The next day started, like most days did at school, with someone apologizing to her for something that didn't need an apology.

"Sorry, sorry," said a sophomore whose name Mia didn't know, backing out of her way in the hall with both hands up like she'd committed a crime instead of just briefly being in the same six feet of hallway. "I wasn't trying to — sorry."

"You're fine," Mia said, and meant it, and kept walking, and thought, not for the first time: why do people always apologize for bothering me?

It happened constantly. Someone asking to borrow a pencil prefaced it with three sorries. Someone asking a genuine question in class apologized for taking up class time. A freshman had once apologized to her for accidentally making eye contact. Mia had spent actual time trying to figure out what she was doing that made people brace like that before they talked to her, and had never landed on an answer that made sense, because as far as she could tell she wasn't doing anything. She smiled at people. She said hi. She remembered things about them, usually — birthdays, a bad week they'd mentioned once, the name of somebody's dog — because it had never once occurred to her that this was optional. It just seemed like the correct way to treat a person you shared a hallway with.

It should have felt nice, being the person people didn't want to bother. Mostly it just felt exhausting, in a way she didn't have a clean word for. Like she'd been quietly voted Least Annoying without ever getting to weigh in on the campaign.

And — this was the part she really didn't say out loud, not even to Destiny, who would've had eleven opinions about it in ninety seconds — sometimes it made her want to snap at someone. Not the sophomore in the hallway. Not really anyone specific. Just the idea of it, the constant soft-footed carefulness people used around her, like she was something breakable or something holy, when what she actually wanted, some days, was for someone to just talk to her like a regular annoying person and not apologize for it first.

She never said any of that. She smiled at the sophomore's retreating back and went to first period and put it away, the way she put most things away, in the drawer she didn't open during school hours.

"Okay, but hypothetically," Kaleb said at lunch, dropping into the seat across from her with the specific energy of someone who'd been building to a sentence all through third period, "if I hypothetically wanted to fake my own death to get out of the chem test Friday, would you help me, or would you rat me out to Mr. Fielding."

"I'd help you," Mia said. "Badly. On purpose. So you'd get caught in like four minutes."

"That's so mean."

"That's called being a good friend, actually."

"It's really not."

Neiry slid in a minute later with his tray, said nothing about the fake-death plan, and somehow made it clear with just his eyebrows that he'd heard the whole thing and had opinions. Mia watched him do the thing he always did lately without seeming to notice he was doing it — catch her eye for exactly as long as it took to check something, then look away like he hadn't. She'd started keeping count. She didn't know what she was counting toward.

"You good today?" she asked him, quieter, under the noise Kaleb and Destiny were making about something else entirely.

"I’m fine," Neiry said. Smooth. Easy. The exact tone she'd used on him the night before, and she recognized it landing on her now with an odd little jolt, like hearing your own voice played back wrong.

"Right," she said, and let it go, because pushing wouldn't get her anywhere today and she'd learned that much at least.

Kaleb, meanwhile, had gone quiet in the specific way he sometimes did that people mistook for him just eating, and Mia clocked it out of habit before she'd even decided to. "Are you guys both okay?" she asked him too, because apparently that was just what she did, checked on everyone within a four-foot radius whether they'd asked her to or not.

"Yeah," Kaleb said, too fast. "Some junior asked me today if I was 'Neiry's friend,' like — like that's my whole job description. 'Neiry's friend.' Cool. Great. Very fulfilling."

"That's stupid," Mia said, immediately, a little too forcefully, already halfway into fixing it before she'd even asked if he wanted it fixed. "You're not — Kaleb, you're literally the smartest person at this table, you built half the base's systems, you're not anyone's guy, that's—"

"Mia." Kaleb was almost laughing. "It's fine. And we both know technically it was me and Neiry building all that but thank you I wasn't asking you to go to war about it."

"I know. Sorry." She caught herself doing it — the leaning in, the immediate fix-it reflex, before he'd even said whether he wanted comfort or just wanted to vent — and felt a small flicker of the same tiredness from the hallway that morning, except aimed at herself this time. You do this to everyone, she thought. You can't just let a thing sit there. You have to go pick it up.

She didn't say any of that out loud either. She just softened it into a smile and stole one of his fries, which was the closest thing to an apology either of them needed.

By last period she'd forgotten about it, mostly, the way she forgot about most of what she carried during the day — not because it stopped mattering, but because she'd gotten frighteningly good at setting things down somewhere she didn't have to look at them until later. It was a skill. She knew it was a skill. She wasn't totally sure it was a good one.

She thought about her mother, who noticed everything and said nothing until exactly the right moment. She thought about Walter, quiet at the dinner table, keeping the worst of his day folded up small enough that nobody had to carry it with him. She wondered, sometimes, if that was a family trait or just something people did when they'd learned early that their feelings were, on balance, one more thing somebody else had to manage.

She thought, unhelpfully, about Neiry not answering her question at lunch. About the two-word fine that matched her own two-word fine from the night before so closely it was almost funny. Two people who apparently couldn't tell each other the actual thing, taking turns not telling each other the actual thing, and calling it being fine.

She looked across the courtyard on her way to the bus and caught sight of Kaleb sitting alone on the low wall by the gym doors, headphones in, not really looking at his phone, just sitting there in a way that read, to her at least, like something more than tired.

Destiny caught her by the arm the second the final bell rang, which meant Mia didn't get a vote.

"Nope," Destiny said, already steering her toward the front doors, Marjory and Aaliyah falling into step on either side like this had been planned days ago and Mia was the only one who hadn't gotten the memo. "You've had a face on all week. We're doing a thing."

"What thing?"

"Girls' day," Marjory said, adjusting the stack of books in her arms like it was self-explanatory. "Destiny texted the group chat at lunch. You were sitting right there."

"I was distracted."

"You're always distracted lately," Aaliyah said, not unkindly, just observationally, the way she said most things. "It's concerning. We're staging an intervention. The intervention involves snacks."

Destiny's room smelled like the same vanilla candle it had smelled like since freshman year, and her bed was exactly as chaotic as always — three different chargers tangled together, a laptop still open to a hero forum thread, somebody's hoodie that definitely wasn't Destiny's. Mia folded herself onto the mattress the way she'd done a hundred times before, Marjory claimed the desk chair and spun it once experimentally before deciding it was acceptable, and Aaliyah dropped onto the floor with her back against the bed frame like sitting in furniture was a concession she wasn't in the mood to make today.

"Okay, but did you see the footage from the substation thing," Destiny said, painting a stripe of blue-gray across Mia's thumbnail with more confidence than accuracy. "Beacon's flight pattern is getting so much cleaner. Six months ago she was basically just falling with style, and now watch this—" she pulled it up on her phone one-handed, tilting the screen without ever once slowing down the nail polish— "look at that landing. That's control. That's someone who's been putting in actual hours."

"You have an unhealthy relationship with that hero forum," Aaliyah said.

"I have a healthy interest in local vigilante labor conditions."

"You have a crush on a girl who wears a full face mask."

"I do not have a — okay, maybe a little, but that's not the point—"

Mia watched a shaky, grainy clip of herself land a sunstride dash outside a burning building and made a noise she hoped sounded like casual interest instead of a girl watching a home video of herself. "She's, um. She's really come a long way."

"See, Mia gets it," Destiny said. "Mia's always had good taste."

"Speaking of taste," Marjory said, entirely too innocently, "can we please talk about boys now, I've been holding this in since French."

"Oh, thank god," Destiny said, capping the polish. "Okay. Rules. We go around. No lying, no 'I don't really think about that stuff,' Aaliyah, that means you."

"I never said that."

"You were going to."

"I was going to say I don't participate in reductive social rituals, which is different."

"Same energy. You're going third. Marjory, you clearly have something, go first."

Marjory turned a truly spectacular shade of red for someone who'd brought this topic up herself. "Okay, so, hypothetically, purely as an objective observation, I think Kaleb is — he's funny. In a way that's, structurally, quite charming. That's all. That's the whole statement."

"'Structurally quite charming,'" Aaliyah repeated. "You wrote that down beforehand, didn't you."

"I workshopped it, yes."

"Wait, Kaleb?" Destiny sat back on her heels, delighted in the specific way she got delighted about literally anything that qualified as news. "Kaleb-Kaleb? Neiry's Kaleb?"

"He's not 'Neiry's Kaleb,' he's just Kaleb," Marjory said, a little sharp, and Mia felt something small and pleased settle in her chest at that, because it was exactly the correction Kaleb deserved and she hadn't had to be the one to make it. "He's very smart, actually, people just don't ask him things because he talks fast and wears bad jokes like armor."

"Wow," Destiny said. "Okay. Noted. Filed. Continuing — Aaliyah."

"I don't have one."

"Aaliyah."

"I genuinely don't participate in—"

"Aaliyah."

Aaliyah exhaled through her nose, the exact sound of someone conceding a point under protest. "Fine. Ezra. Occasionally. When he's not doing a bit. Which is rarely, which is the whole problem, so it doesn't count, and I will deny this in any future context."

"You have a crush on Ezra Santos," Destiny said, slow, savoring it. "The human bit machine."

"I said it doesn't count."

"It counts so much."

"Darius," Destiny said, before anyone could ask her, apparently unwilling to let anyone else land the reveal on her own crush. "There, I said it first, nobody gets to be smug about it. He's just — he's easy to be around. It's not that deep."

"That's the most normal answer anyone's given," Marjory said.

"I contain multitudes," Destiny said, which made Mia laugh out loud before she could stop herself, because it was such a strange, specific echo of something Neiry had said in history class that she hadn't told anyone about, and for a second the coincidence of it nearly undid her.

Three heads turned toward her at once.

"Mia," Destiny said, sweet as poison, "your turn."

"I don't have to go if Aaliyah didn't want to."

"Aaliyah went. Everyone goes. That's the rule I just invented."

Mia looked down at her half-painted nails and thought about how to answer a question she'd been avoiding answering even to herself, in a room with three of the most perceptive people she knew, one of whom had already guessed most of it out loud once before.

"I don't know," she said finally, which felt like the safest true thing available. "Maybe someone. It's complicated."

"It's Neiry," Destiny said instantly, not even a question, just laying it down like a card she'd been holding all week, and Mia's face did something before she could stop it — some small, involuntary thing — and Destiny actually gasped and threw a pillow at her.

"It's Neiry. I called this. I have been saying this since the locker hallway in September—"

"You didn't call anything—"

"I have a timeline, Mia, ask literally anyone—"

"It makes sense, though," Marjory said, thoughtful, the perfectionist in her apparently unable to resist analyzing the data even mid-ambush. "The way he watches you when you're not looking. It's very — specific. He does this thing where he catalogues people, but with you it's different, it's less like he's studying you and more like—"

"Okay, that's enough analysis," Mia said, too fast, and Marjory, mercifully, let it drop.

Aaliyah, from the floor, hadn't said anything yet, which was somehow worse than if she had. When she finally spoke it wasn't teasing at all. "Does he know?"

"I don't think so. I don't — I don't know what there is to know, honestly. It's not like anything's happened."

"Something's happened," Destiny said, gentler now, some of the giddiness draining out into something closer to actual care. "You don't get that face over nothing."

Mia looked at her half-painted nails, blue-gray and a little uneven at the edges, and thought about all the things she couldn't say — about the base under the city, about the mask, about the way he'd looked at her once on a fire escape like she was the only unclaimed thing left in the world, about a thousand small true details she'd never be able to hand her best friends without handing them everything else along with them. She thought about how much easier this would be if she could just say yes, and also, here's the whole rest of it, and how she couldn't, and probably wouldn't be able to for a long time, maybe ever.

"I don't know," she said again, because it was the truest thing she was allowed to say, even if it wasn't the whole truth. "Maybe."

Destiny, for once, let it be enough. She bumped Mia's shoulder with her own, said "okay, well, when you figure it out, I want details, in order, chronologically," and let the conversation drift back toward safer water — whether Ezra's bit-to-sincerity ratio was actually improving, whether Marjory should say something to Kaleb or die with the secret, whether Darius had noticed Destiny existed as a person and not just a fellow homeroom attendee. Mia let herself be pulled along with it, laughing when she was supposed to laugh, grateful in a way she couldn't fully explain for three people who'd gotten close enough to the real thing to touch it and still, somehow, hadn't gotten the whole truth, because the whole truth wasn't hers to give.

She loved them fiercely for that — for how easy this was, how normal, how completely unaware they were that the friend painting her nails badly was also, on paper, the single most-discussed unidentified vigilante in three boroughs. She just wished, some nights, that fierce love didn't have to come with quite so many locked doors behind it.

Tomorrow, she told herself, filing it the way she filed everything, in the drawer, for later. I want to talk to him tomorrow.