Chapter 44 Step Down
Elias POV
It comes from someone I do not know particularly well.
A girl named Bea who is in my Thursday seminar and who I have maybe exchanged thirty words with total over the course of the semester. She catches me between classes on a Friday, falling into step beside me with the particular energy of someone delivering information they have convinced themselves is a kindness.
"Hey, I heard something," she says. "About Noah."
I keep walking. "Okay."
"People are saying he might step down as captain. Like, voluntarily. To take the pressure off the team."
I stop.
She does not seem to notice at first, then realizes I have and stops too, turning back to face me with an expression that is trying to read whether this is news or not.
"Where did you hear that?" I ask.
"Someone on the track team who knows someone on the soccer team." She shrugs. "I don't know if it's true. I just thought you'd want to know."
I look at her for a moment. I believe that she means it as a kindness. That does not make it land as one.
"Thanks," I say.
Then I keep walking.
I do not text him immediately.
I go to my next class and I sit down and I take out my notebook and I write the date at the top of a fresh page and I do not write anything else for the entire fifty minutes. The professor talks. I stare at the date.
Step down.
As captain.
The thought arranges itself in my mind and I look at it from different angles the way you turn something over in your hands trying to find the part that makes sense.
He would not do it. That is my first instinct and I trust my instincts about Noah more than I trust most things. He has built his identity around that captaincy in a way that is so deep and so long-standing that removing it would not just change his title, it would change the shape of who he thinks he is. He would not give it up.
But.
He sat in a meeting with the athletic director and he nodded. He let a pause answer a question I needed answered out loud. He managed the meeting alone and did not tell me about it until Ivy found out first.
He is capable of making decisions about his life that absorb me as collateral damage without consulting me first.
That is the part I have to sit with.
After class I find a bench near the fountain and I call him.
It rings four times and then he picks up and says my name the way he always does, that slight shift in his voice that I have never found a neutral word for.
"Hey. What's up?"
"Someone told me you might be stepping down as captain."
Silence.
Not long. Maybe three seconds. But I have learned to read the length and texture of Noah's silences and this one is the kind that happens when something true has been said before he was ready for it to be said.
"Who told you that."
"Does it matter?"
"It's not decided," he says. His voice is careful in a way that tells me it has at least been considered, which is already more than I expected. "It's just something that came up."
"In the meeting?"
A pause. "After the meeting. When I was thinking on my own."
"And you did not think to mention it."
"It was not a plan. It was a thought."
"Noah."
"Elias."
I close my eyes for a second. The fountain is running behind me, the soft consistent sound of it, and I focus on that for a moment before I speak again.
"You cannot keep making decisions that affect both of us inside your own head and then presenting me with the outcome. That is not how this works."
"I know."
"Do you? Because this is the second time in a week."
He is quiet. Then: "You're right. I'm sorry."
"I don't want you to step down," I say. "Not for me. Not because of this."
"Why not?"
"Because you have not done anything wrong. And stepping down would make it look like you have. And I will not be the reason you give up something you have worked for your entire time here."
The silence after that is different. Fuller. Like something has shifted inside it.
"Okay," he says quietly.
"Okay meaning you agree, or okay meaning you hear me?"
"Both." A breath. "Both, Elias."
I look out at the quad. Students crossing, bikes, the ordinary motion of a Friday afternoon.
"Talk to me first," I say. "Next time there is a thought like that. Before it becomes a thing that travels through three people and lands with me secondhand."
"Yeah," he says. "I will."
I believe him.
That is the thing about Noah that makes this both harder and easier than it should be. He means the things he says when he says them. The problem is the gap between the meaning and the doing. That gap is where we keep losing each other.
But it is getting smaller.
I hold onto that as I hang up and sit with the fountain behind me and let the afternoon settle around me into something I can carry.