Chapter 39: Chapter 38: The Splinter

Kaleb woke up to his alarm going off for the fourth time and the specific, dawning horror of a kid who has just done the math on how late "four snoozes" actually is.

"No, no, no—"

He was out of bed and into his jeans in one motion that would've looked impressive if anyone had been there to see it, phone already in hand, thumbs moving before his brain had fully caught up with the rest of him.

Kaleb → THE GROUP CHAT (11)

Kaleb: EMERGENCY

Kaleb: not a real emergency

Kaleb: but also kind of a real emergency

Kaleb: i slept through 3 alarms someone tell fielding i died

Destiny: lmaooo

Mia: you're going to be fine, first period doesn't start attendance till 8:20

Kaleb: MIA MY GUARDIAN ANGEL. literally. thank you

Marjory: she's not being nice she's just factually correct, the tardy sweep starts at 8:20

Kaleb: let a man have his moment marjory

Neiry: you're going to be late

Kaleb: i KNOW that's what the emergency is ABOUT

Neiry: I meant you're already late. I can see you out the window. you're standing still texting.

Kaleb looked up, genuinely startled, half-expecting to find Neiry actually outside his bedroom window like some kind of extremely specific stalker, before remembering that Neiry's apartment was nowhere near his and the joke had just landed clean anyway.

Kaleb: okay first of all thats terrifying if true

Kaleb: second of all im MOVING

He was, in fact, moving — down the stairs two at a time, shirt half-buttoned, backpack straps still loose over one shoulder — and it wasn't until he hit the kitchen that the morning slowed down without his permission.

The kitchen was quiet in the specific way it was most mornings, which was to say: occupied, but quiet. His mom was at the table already, still in her scrubs from the night before, a mug of coffee gone lukewarm in front of her, the kind of tiredness that came from a twelve-hour shift and not from any one thing Kaleb had done.

"Morning," he said, grabbing a granola bar off the counter.

"Morning, baby." She didn't look up from her phone, but she reached out on autopilot and smoothed down a piece of his hair that was sticking straight up, the way she'd done since he was six, muscle memory outlasting the energy to actually comment on it. "Your dad already left. There's coffee if you want it, I don't recommend it, I made it wrong."

"I don't drink coffee."

"I know. I said it anyway. Force of habit."

He grabbed his backpack, gave her a quick one-armed side-hug that she leaned into without fully waking up for, and was out the door into a house that would sit empty and quiet until she dragged herself upstairs to actually sleep. It wasn't sad, exactly. It was just the shape of most mornings — his dad already three job sites deep before the sun was fully up, his mom running on fumes from keeping other people's kids alive all night, everybody loving each other in the specific quiet way people love each other when talking about it takes more energy than anybody currently has. He didn't resent it. He'd just noticed, recently, that he did most of his actual talking somewhere else these days.

The walk to school always cleared his head a little, and this morning it mostly cleared it into a loop about the same thing it had been looping about for a week: you're funny, everyone likes you, so why does it feel like nobody's actually looking at you.

He didn't love that thought. He shoved it down the way he shoved most thoughts he didn't love, which was to say, by immediately deciding to be as loud as possible about something else.

First period, Mr. Fielding was mid-lecture on stoichiometry when Kaleb, half paying attention, muttered a joke under his breath about the mole concept being "the most emotionally unstable unit of measurement in chemistry," and Fielding, who never laughed at anything, actually laughed.

"You're hilarious," Fielding said, shaking his head, going back to the board. "Genuinely. You should do stand-up."

Kaleb grinned the rest of the period.

By lunch, three different people had asked him to tell the mole joke again — word for word, apparently it had made its way around faster than any actual chemistry content ever had — and he did, gladly, milking it a little more each time, because it was easy and it worked and it made people laugh, and making people laugh was the one thing he was reliably, unquestionably good at.

"Okay but for real," said a kid from his gym class, sliding onto the bench across from him, "where's Neiry today? He's not answering the group chat."

"He's around somewhere. Probably being mysterious in a hallway."

"Tell him Devon says hi."

"Will do."

It happened again twenty minutes later — a girl from his history class, different question, same shape: "Hey, is Neiry doing anything after school? I wanted to ask him about the ranking assembly thing." And again after that, from a junior he barely knew: "You're always with Neiry, right? Does he even talk to people who aren't you guys?"

Kaleb answered all of it easily, automatically, the way he answered everything, and it wasn't until he was alone at his locker between fifth and sixth period that he actually did the math on his own day. Nobody had asked how the chem test went. Nobody had asked about the group chat emergency, or whether he'd made it to first period on time, or how he was doing, generally, as a person who existed independently of anyone else's schedule.

You're hilarious. Tell that joke again. Where's Neiry.

Nobody had asked how he was.

He noticed it the way you notice a splinter — small, specific, easy to ignore until you pressed on it directly, which he did now, once, on purpose, just to see how much it actually hurt.

It hurt more than he expected.

"Okay, but you guys had a whole night," he said at lunch, mostly to redirect his own brain off the splinter and onto literally anything else, "and I heard NOTHING about it until third period, which honestly feels like a violation of at least one friendship rule."

"It wasn't a secret," Destiny said. "You weren't invited because it was a girls' night, Kaleb, that's the whole—"

"I could've been an honorary girl for one evening."

"You absolutely could not have."

"Marjory, back me up."

Marjory, three seats down, turned an interesting shade of red and suddenly found her lunch tray extremely fascinating, and Kaleb — who noticed things, even when nobody gave him credit for noticing things — clocked it immediately.

"Wait." He sat up straighter. "Something happened. Something happened and nobody's telling me."

"Nothing happened," Marjory said, too fast.

"Marjory. Your face is doing a thing."

"My face does not do things."

"It's doing a thing right now."

Aaliyah, deadpan, didn't even look up from her book. "She has a crush on you. There. Now everyone can stop being weird about it."

"AALIYAH."

Kaleb sat there blinking for a second, genuinely, completely thrown, the kind of surprised that didn't have a joke loaded up and ready, which almost never happened to him. "Wait, really?"

"It's not — it was a hypothetical statement made in a private context that was clearly supposed to stay private," Marjory said, somehow managing to sound both mortified and extremely precise about it, which was, Kaleb thought, deeply on-brand.

"No, I just—" He was still recalibrating. "That's genuinely really nice to hear, actually. Like, thank you. That's a compliment. I accept the compliment."

"Please stop talking about it."

"I'm just saying, this is the nicest thing that's happened to me all day, and today has had a lot of Neiry-related content, so that's saying something."

He meant it as a joke. It came out a little more true than he meant it to, and Mia, across the table, looked at him for a second longer than the joke really called for, like she'd heard the part underneath it, and he was suddenly very interested in his fries.

It wasn't that he didn't get it. He got it completely, actually, which was the annoying part.

Neiry was — he didn't even have a clean word for what Neiry was. Neiry had pulled him out of a garage full of hurt feelings and made him a suit. Neiry had spent an entire afternoon tracking down a photograph of a grandfather Kaleb had barely talked about, once, in passing, months before he even knew Neiry was listening that closely. Neiry let him be exactly as loud and as ridiculous as he wanted to be and never once made him feel like the volume was a problem, which was more than Kaleb could say for most people. Being Neiry's friend was, genuinely, one of the best things that had ever happened to him, and he wasn't going to sit here being bitter about a guy he loved like a brother just because the guy also happened to walk into a room and rearrange the gravity in it without trying.

That was the part that made the splinter so annoying. It wasn't resentment, exactly. It was closer to standing next to the sun and being grateful for the warmth while also, quietly, wondering if anyone would notice if you weren't standing there at all.

He didn't say any of that out loud. He wasn't sure he had the right words for it yet, and even if he did, saying it felt like betraying something, like admitting the friendship came with math attached.

He ate his fries and let the bell end the thought for him, the way bells were good for doing.

The last bell let out into a gray, ordinary afternoon, and Kaleb ended up on the low wall by the gym doors with his headphones in and his phone doing nothing in his hand, not really scrolling, just holding it, because his legs hadn't felt like moving yet and nobody was waiting on him specifically.

He sat there longer than he meant to. He walked home alone.

The house was quiet again, his mom finally asleep upstairs after her shift, the TV the only thing making noise in the whole downstairs. He turned it on out of habit more than interest, flipping past two shows and a commercial before landing on the local news, and there it was — grainy phone footage, some kid's shaky upload, a subway platform, a stalled train, and a black shape moving through the crowd with the kind of unhurried, total competence that used to make Kaleb's whole chest light up when he was just a fan watching from the outside.

Dark rescues six from stalled L train, the caption said. Vigilante activity increasing across Queens.

He watched the whole clip twice.

It hit him differently than it used to, watching it now — not the wide-eyed hero-worship thing from the start of freshman year, the poster-on-the-wall thing, but something quieter and more specific. I know him. I know exactly what that felt like from the inside, probably. I know what his hands are doing right now, that's not even hard for him, that's a Tuesday. And underneath that, smaller, harder to look at directly: I want to be able to do something like that. Not for the footage. Not for anybody to say my name in the caption. Just — I want to matter like that, somewhere, in a way that isn't just being funny at lunch.

He grabbed his jacket before he'd fully decided to.

The base was quiet when he got there, the good kind of quiet, humming servers and low light, and Neiry was on the mat doing something slow and deliberate with a length of shadow that didn't look like training so much as thinking with his hands.

"Hey," Kaleb said.

"You saw the news."

"How do you always know that."

"You have a very specific walk when you've seen the news." Neiry let the shadow dissolve, sat down on the edge of the mat, and looked at him properly, which was somehow the thing that actually cracked something open, because Neiry rarely looked at anyone that directly unless he meant to.

Kaleb sat down across from him. "Can I ask you something and you don't make it weird."

"I make everything weird. It's part of my charm."

"Yeah, no, I know." Kaleb picked at a loose thread on his sleeve. "Do you ever think I'm just, like — around? Like, useful, but not — I don't know. Do people ask you about me the way people ask me about you?"

Neiry was quiet for a second, which from him counted as an entire paragraph.

"People ask me if you're always this loud," Neiry said finally. "I tell them yes. I tell them it's the best part of my day, most days, which is true, and which I don't say enough, so I'm saying it now instead of later. You're not just around, Kaleb. You helped build half of what keeps us alive down here. You saw the syndicate's tracker exploit before I did. You gave up your own version of a normal life the same week you found out mine wasn't one, and you didn't blink. I don't think anyone else in this city would've done that."

"That's a lot of nice things to say at once, I'm gonna need a second."

"Take your time."

"Also man 'I don't say it enough,' which, buddy, you really don't—"

"I'm aware. I'm working on it."

Kaleb laughed, and it came out a little wet, which he blamed entirely on allergies, and Neiry, mercifully, let him have that.

"I just," Kaleb said, quieter now, "I want to actually be good at something. Not tech support good. Not 'the guy who's with Neiry' good. Like — my own thing."

"You already are," Neiry said. "You just haven't run out of room to prove it yet. Give it time."

Something shifted in the shadows behind the server racks — not threatening, just present, the way it always was these days.

Neiry then spoke “that thing in my head infinity it has some words” and Neiry repeated He is not wrong, Infinity said, and its voice, as always, landed somewhere between amused and entirely too old for the room. For what it's worth, vessel, since you never ask me — I did not give him water because you needed a spare set of hands. I gave it to him because his soul had loyalty in it that had never once been asked to be anything grander than itself. That is rarer than strength. It is certainly rarer than yours.

"Wait, is that a compliment or an insult," Kaleb said, to the room in general.

Both, Infinity said. I contain layers.

Kaleb pointed at Neiry, delighted, betrayed, thrilled. "You TOLD it to say that."

"I didn't," Neiry said, and for once, he actually looked like he meant it — a little surprised himself, even, like Infinity had gone and done something warm entirely of its own accord and he wasn't sure what to do with the evidence.

And then it was gone, the way it always went, leaving the two of them sitting on a torn-up mat in a bunker under the city, and Kaleb — still a little wet-eyed, still deeply unqualified to explain why, still, underneath all of it, a kid whose parents loved him quietly and separately in a house that didn't ask many questions — found that the splinter from earlier, the one he'd pressed on just to see how much it hurt, had gone from an ache to something closer to a thing he could actually carry.

Not gone. Just lighter. Which, some days, was the most anyone could ask for.

"Okay," he said, standing up, brushing off his jeans, already reaching for his usual volume again because that was just how he came back from things. "Teach me something cool. I want to learn the thing where you catch a punch and make it look like the other person just tripped."

"That's not a technique, that's just timing."

"Teach me the timing, then."

Neiry, for the first time all day, smiled like he meant it all the way through. "Get on the mat, Tempest."