Chapter 35 There's Nothing To Fix

Chapter 35 There's Nothing To Fix

Cole

Jade found me at my locker before first period.

She was alone. Jade almost always had someone nearby. Monday morning she was alone and she had clearly been waiting because she was already there when I arrived.

I opened my locker and started exchanging books.

"The photo is a problem," she said.

"Good morning," I said.

"Cole."

"Jade." I kept sorting books. "Say what you have to say."

She was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again her voice was lower and more controlled. "That photo has your face on it in a way that needs to be addressed publicly. If you do not say something about it the story it is telling is going to be the only story anyone has."

"What story is it telling."

"You know what story it is telling."

I found the right textbook and put it in my bag. "And what would you like me to say publicly."

"That it was nothing. That you were looking at the crowd. That it is being misread." She paused. "Something simple and clear and immediate."

"It is being misread," I said.

She studied me. "So say that."

"I just did."

"To me. Not to the school." She looked at me steadily. "Cole. I need you to make a statement. Not to me. To the people who saw that photo."

I closed my locker and looked at her.

She was very calm. That was what made this harder than if she had been angry. Jade calm was Jade having already decided something and presenting you with the decision as if it were still open for discussion.

"I am trying to help you," she said.

"I know you think you are."

"The photo puts you in a position that is going to cost you. Not just socially. With the scouts. With Coach." She held my gaze. "If you do not address it, people are going to assume something. And assumptions are hard to undo once they are set."

"I told you," I said. "I looked because something was wrong and I looked."

"You need to say that out loud to more people than me."

"Why."

"Because the photo already said something else to a few hundred people and your silence is confirming it." She looked at me straight. "I am not asking you to do something wrong. I am asking you to manage the situation before it manages you."

"What you are asking me to do," I said, "is tell people that the photo means nothing."

"Yes."

"It does not mean nothing," I said. Jade calm was Jade having already decided something and presenting you with the decision as if it were still open for discussion.

"I do not make statements about things that are not false," I said.

"Wren Davis is your business," she said. "This photo made her your business whether you intended that or not."

"I looked," I said. "I looked because she was up there with my siblings and something was wrong and I looked. That is not nothing. That is not a misread. That is what happened."

Jade was quiet for a long moment.

"So you are not going to fix it," she said.

"There is nothing to fix," I said.

The bell rang.

Jade looked at me for another second. She looked at me the way she looked at things she was reassessing, carefully and without expression. Then she said think carefully about what you are doing in a voice that was quieter than controlled, something closer to honest, and she walked away.

I stood at my locker.

I thought about the photo and what it had shown and what I had just said to Jade and the fact that I had said it without planning to. I had said I looked because something was wrong. That was true. It was also not the whole truth and we both knew it.

Something had shifted in that conversation and I could feel the shift like a physical thing, solid and irreversible.

I did not want to reverse it.

Whatever Jade was going to do with that answer was going to happen fast. She would want the narrative set before I could say anything more. She would want things arranged before I had time to prepare.

First period was English. I sat in the back and the teacher talked about structure and I thought about a different kind of structure.

Jade's structure. The layers of it. The way it operated in the gap between what happened and what could be proven. Priya and Chloe and the note and the anonymous accounts. All of it at one remove. All of it with her hands clean.

I had always known the structure. I had been telling myself it was unbeatable because I was the person inside it and the person inside something can't see past the thing landing on them.

I was not inside it anymore.

I had twenty-three items in a folder and a witness name and a pattern that was only invisible if you looked at each piece alone. Looked at together by the right person it was clear and documented and hard to dismiss.

Between first and second period Marcus found me in the hallway.

"The scouts," he said.

"What about them."

"Coach wants to talk to you after school today. Not tomorrow. Today." He paused. "I think it is good news."

"I think so too," I said.

"The photo is also circulating."

"I know."

"People have questions about it."

"People can keep having questions," I said.

He looked at me for a moment. "You are very calm about this."

"I am focusing on the things I can control."

"And the things you can't control."

"I am going to deal with those today as well." I picked up my bag. "Tell Coach I will be there after school."

Between third and fourth I saw Jade at the other end of the hallway and she saw me and the look she gave me was not the composed controlled look from the morning. It was something closer to calculation. She was already building the next move.

I was going to be faster.