Chapter 30 THE FOLDER
POV: JUSTIN
The folder was in his bag under his history textbook and his copy of the Gatsby unit reader and a broken pencil he hadn't thrown away yet.
Justin sat at his desk and did not open his history textbook.
He'd had the folder for three weeks. Two pages, photographed on his phone, transferred to paper because having it on his phone felt like the kind of evidence that could disappear. Paper he could control. Paper he could put in his bag under his history textbook and carry around a prestigious academy for three weeks while he tried to figure out what a person was supposed to do with something like this.
His father's handwriting. Names he recognized from Thornfield's current enrollment. Notes that weren't grades or assessments. Dates that corresponded to things he'd heard about in the corridors over the years, things that had been explained away with words like transferred and withdrew and family circumstances.
He'd been looking at this for three weeks and he still didn't know what to do with it.
He knew what he was supposed to do with it. There was a number in his phone, listed as a family contact, that he'd been raised to understand was the number you called when you found something significant. His father had explained it when Justin was fourteen as a simple family loyalty thing. You see something that matters, you let us know. That's all. Just keeping the family informed.
He hadn't called the number.
He kept not calling it.
A knock at his door.
He closed his bag.
"Come in."
Nikki opened the door with the ease of someone who had decided long ago that closed doors were a suggestion. She was still in her school clothes, blazer perfect, hair precise, the whole presentation maintained with the specific effort she put into looking effortless. She had a paper coffee cup from the east wing machine in each hand.
"You disappeared after dinner," she said. Not accusatory. The version of concerned that had a question inside it.
"Had some reading to do."
She held out one of the cups. He took it. She came into the room and sat on the edge of his bed the way she'd been sitting on the edge of his bed for eighteen months, familiar and easy, and looked at him with that focused attention of hers that usually made him feel known and tonight made him feel like he was being read for information he hadn't agreed to share.
"You're doing the thing," she said.
"What thing."
"The thing where you're in the room but you're somewhere else." She wrapped both hands around her cup. "You've been doing it since the dining hall."
"I'm just tired."
"You're not tired." She said it simply. Not a fight. Just a correction. "You've been off since before the dining hall. Since the first week honestly." She looked at him steadily. "What's going on with you?"
He looked at her.
Nikki was sharp. That had always been true and he'd always valued it. She saw things other people missed and she moved through social architecture with a precision that was genuinely impressive. He'd been drawn to that when they started dating. The specific intelligence of her.
He was sitting here with a folder in his bag that contained evidence of something his family was involved in, and she was sitting on his bed asking him what was wrong, and the thing was — he couldn't tell her. Not because she'd react badly. Because she might not react badly. Because she might look at the folder and help him figure out what to do with it in a way that served the system rather than questioned it, and he couldn't tell anymore which direction she'd go and that uncertainty was its own kind of answer.
"I'm just stressed about the Gatsby essay," he said. "It's due Friday and I haven't started."
She looked at him for a moment longer than the answer required.
"Okay," she said.
She stood up. Smoothed her blazer. The automatic gesture of someone putting themselves back in order.
"Text me later?" she said at the door.
"Yeah," he said. "Of course."
She left. The door clicked shut.
He sat in the quiet for a moment.
Then he opened his bag and took out the folder.
Two pages. His father's handwriting. Names and dates and the word resolved appearing next to entries that had no other explanation attached to them.
He looked at his phone.
Whitney Stephens. He'd told her tomorrow, library, I'll find you.
Tomorrow felt too far away.
He put the folder back in the bag. Put the bag on the floor next to the desk. Picked up the Gatsby reader and opened it to a page he wasn't going to read.
The family contact number sat in his phone unsummoned.
He didn't call it.
He read the same paragraph four times.
Outside his window, the quad was dark and the October air was pressing against the glass and somewhere across the campus a red light was blinking in an empty studio and a girl with purple streaks in her hair was sitting in her dorm room trying to figure out whether the best thing she'd ever made had just been turned into a weapon.
Justin didn't know about the camera.
He didn't know about the painting.
He just knew that the folder in his bag was the kind of thing that changed what came after it, and that he'd been carrying it for three weeks already, and that tomorrow he was going to have to decide whether to hand it to someone who might know what to do with it.
He turned the page.
Read the same paragraph five times.
Didn't sleep until two.
Author's Note: Three boys carrying things they don't know what to do with. Cameron carries his by filing it away. Justin carries his by not sleeping. And somewhere in between those two responses is the whole question of what kind of person you decide to be when the thing you're carrying has weight. Drop a like if you felt all three differently. Save this one. The folder and the camera and the notebook are all going to matter. — J