Chapter 43 The Phone Call

Chapter 43 The Phone Call
Caleb: Can I call you tonight?

I'm in the middle of an organic chemistry problem set when it comes through the kind that requires your whole brain and resents interruption. I finish the mechanism I'm on, cap my pen, and type back: How late?

Caleb: Whenever. I'll be up.

Mira: Nine.

Caleb: Nine.

At nine-oh-three ,I was deliberately not watching the clock, which meant I watched it constantly my phone lights up with his name. I answer on the second ring. First ring is too eager. Third is a performance neither of us needs.

"Hey," he says.

Just that. Just his voice, warm and specific and nothing mediated by text and it does something to me I don't try to name. We've been careful with each other in the right way for weeks, but careful doesn't make the thing between us quiet. If anything the patience has made the pull more precise, the way a note held long enough becomes distinct from all the noise around it.

"Hey," I say back.

A beat of comfortable silence.

"I don't have an agenda," he says. "I just wanted to hear you."

I pull my knees up on the bed and lean against the headboard. Aunt Bisi's house is quiet around me — January proper now, bare window, garden dark, just the lamp in the corner.

"How's Okafor?" he asks.

"Difficult and worth it. He made me work through a substitution mechanism on the board Thursday."

"In front of everyone?"

"In front of everyone."

"And?"

"I got it right."

"Obviously." There's a smile in his voice the real one, easy. "And Dara?"

"Currently reorganizing our entire midterm prep system. Nobody asked her to. She decided it was inefficient."

He laughs the chest laugh, low and real, the one I've learned is different from the social version he uses in rooms full of people watching him. I catalogued the difference without meaning to. I notice things about Caleb Hart against my will and always have.

"Sounds like someone I know," he says.

"Don't."

"I'm just—"

"Hart."

"You both fix systems that weren't broken," he says, completely unrepentant. "That's a compliment, I promise."

I lean my head back and let the warmth of it sit without answering.

"Tell me about the game," I say.

"Which part?"

"Any part. The part you're still thinking about."

A pause, he's deciding, I can feel it and then: "Third quarter. We're down by four. Rowan's been off all night, keeps running his route half a beat slow, and I've been compensating for it instead of just telling him. So at the break I pull him aside and I say “you're running scared, stop it” and he looks at me like I slapped him. But then he nods. And in the third quarter he runs it clean. First time all season we hit that particular play the way we drew it up."

"Did you win?"

"Yeah. But that's not the winning wasn't the part."

"The play was the part."

"The play was the part." Another pause. "Does that make sense?"

"It makes complete sense," I say. And it does. It's the same thing as getting the mechanism right in front of Okafor the grade, not the applause. The moment of the thing itself working.

We're quiet for a moment, the comfortable kind.

"Mira." His voice drops a register.

"Mm."

"I want to see you." Clear, honest, no dressing on it. "Not as pressure. I just keep talking to you and I want to be in the same room."

My heart does something loud and unhelpful.

"I know," I say carefully.

"Is that on the horizon? Or still too soon?"

I think about it for real. Not the reflexive not yet I've been living in but genuinely, sitting in it. I am grounded. I have my schedule, my study group, my running path, my own sense of weight in the world. I've been tending the Mira that existed before Whitmore complicated everything, and she's solid now. She can walk into a room where Caleb Hart exists and not lose herself.

"It's on the horizon," I say.

The silence on his end has shape — the shape of someone absorbing something they'd hoped for but refused to count on.

"Okay," he says. Low. Quiet.

"I'm not putting a date on it," I add. "But I'm not protecting myself from you anymore. I just want to bring the right version of myself."

"The right version."

"The one that doesn't need you to hold her together. The one that chooses you because she wants to — not because she's afraid of who she is without you."

He's quiet for longer than usual. I hear him breathe — just that, just the fact of him existing on the other end of the line, processing.

"Mira," he says finally.

"Yeah."

"That's exactly what I want this to be. When it gets to be something." A beat. "Exactly that."

"Good. Then we're on the same page."

"Yeah." Another beat. "Yeah, we are."

We talk for another hour after — lighter, easier, the way a hard conversation clears the air and leaves room for everything else. He tells me Rowan named one of her stuffed animals Mira. He claims no involvement. I tell him about the essay for my narrative nonfiction class, describe it only as something true because I haven't decided yet how much of it belongs to me alone.

At eleven-twelve he says, "You should sleep."

"So should you."

"I will when we hang up."

"That's not what that means."

"Goodnight, Mira."

"Goodnight, Caleb."

Not Hart. Caleb. I hear the small catch in the air on his end when I say it.

I fall asleep with my lamp still on and chemistry notes spread across the foot of the bed, warm in a way that has nothing to do with the blanket.