The clock in the corner of his screen said two-forty in the morning, and Karl had no memory of it ever saying anything else.
He had opened the conversation with a purpose. That was the part that annoyed him, looking back. He had gone into her inbox with a single question sitting ready in his mouth, and somewhere between the fortieth message and the sixtieth, the question had quietly stood up, dusted itself off, and left the room without telling him.
{Elsa- You’re wrong about the wind lattice btw. It doesn’t scale off spirit. Whoever told you that was reading a two-year-old guide and lying to you with confidence.}
{You- Two-year-old guides are the only guides worth reading. Everything written after the rework was written by people farming clicks.}
{Elsa- Says the man who just admitted he hasn’t logged into a forum since the rework.}
Karl leaned back until his chair creaked, one arm draped over his head, staring at the ceiling where a water stain had been slowly conquering the plaster for the better part of a year.
’She’s fast,’ he thought. ’How does she reply to chats this quickly? I have to stop to think about how to respond.’
He caught himself smiling and stopped, which did not help, because the moment he stopped he noticed he had been doing it for a while.
They went another twenty minutes like that. She dismantled his build, he dismantled her dismantling, and neither of them mentioned that it was nearly three and both of them were still typing. It was only when she made an offhand comment about qualifiers filling up that the original question finally remembered where it lived and came back for him.
{You- How do you know about the tournament? Registration isn’t public. It isn’t even announced.}
There was a pause. Long enough that he watched the little indicator appear, vanish, appear again.
{Elsa- Are you seriously not in the community boards?}
{You- No.}
{Elsa- Horizon Online has the largest player forum in the country and you, a person who plays Horizon Online, are not in it.}
{You- That is what I said, yes.}
{Elsa- Everything leaks there first. Patch notes, event calendars, qualifier brackets. Half the time the developers find out what they’re doing from us.}
{Elsa- So what happened? You get banned?}
Karl looked at that message for longer than he needed to. His thumb found the edge of the desk and tapped it once, twice.
{You- I left. There were one or two issues. I’ve kept to myself since.}
He did not elaborate. She did not ask him to, which he noticed, and filed away, because most people would have.
{Elsa- Fine. Keep your ghosts. I’ll help you get in.}
{You- Just like that?}
{Elsa- No. Not just like that.}
The next message came quickly, like she had already decided before she asked.
{Elsa- Meet me tomorrow. There’s a place on Wren Street, the one with the green awning. Six o’clock. We talk properly, and then I tell you everything I know.}
Karl read it twice.
{You- We’re already talking properly.}
{Elsa- We’re typing. It isn’t the same thing.}
{You- You could tell me now and save us both a trip.}
{Elsa- I could. But some things I don’t put in writing, because writing gets screenshotted, and I like my life the way it is.}
He sat with that. It should have bothered him more than it did. A stranger, a restaurant, a condition attached to information he needed and could not get anywhere else. Every part of it had a shape he recognized, and none of the shapes were comforting.
’And I’m going anyway,’ he thought.
{You- Six o’clock.}
He closed the laptop before he could talk himself out of it.
He slept for three hours and woke to the sound of the kettle he had not put on.
His mother had, of course. She was standing at the counter in her robe with one hand braced against the edge for balance, and she had the guilty look of someone caught doing something forbidden, which she was, because she had promised him a week ago that she would stop getting up before he did.
"Sit down."
"I’m making tea."
"Sit down, and I’ll make the tea."
"You’ll be late."
"I’ll be late either way." He took the kettle out of her hand with the gentleness of long practice and steered her, unresisting, to the chair by the window where the morning light was warmest.
Her wrist felt like a bundle of dry reeds under his fingers, and he did not let his face show that he had noticed it, because she watched his face the way scholars watched the sky.
"Did you eat?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Karl."
"I’ll eat at school."
"There you go lying again." She said it with enormous affection, and reached up to press her palm to his cheek, and he let her, and for a moment he closed his eyes and let himself be nineteen years old in a warm kitchen with nothing else in the world going wrong.
Then he put her medicine beside the cup, wrote down the time he had given it in the notebook on the fridge, and left.
...
The school swallowed him the way it always did, and he moved through it the way he always did, which was to say he did not look up.
He was aware, distantly, of the effect. He had been aware of it since he was fifteen and had long ago sorted it into the category of weather. The conversations that dropped half a tone as he passed a stairwell.
The girls at the lockers who found something extremely interesting on the floor and then, three seconds later, found it extremely interesting again over their shoulders. The way a whisper always seemed to be finishing itself somewhere just behind him.
He had not slept or shaved; his shirt had been ironed by nobody, and it made no difference at all.
’Fuckass school,’ he thought, and kept walking.
He almost made it to the end of the day.
Until-
"Karl."
The infirmary door was open, and Miss Vera was leaning in the frame of it with her arms folded beneath her chest in a way that could not possibly have been an accident, because nothing about Miss Vera was ever an accident.
She was the school nurse; she was 28, and she conducted herself with the serene confidence of a woman who had never in her adult life had to ask a room to look at her.
"Ma’am."
"Come in a moment, i need to speak to you about something important."
He came in. She shut the door behind him, which he noted, and crossed to sit against the edge of her desk rather than behind it, ankles crossed, one heel dangling loose off her foot.
"You’ve been missing. Whats going on with you?" she said.
"I’ve been bus-"
"That isn’t an answer, sweetheart. That’s an answer-shaped object."
"It’s the honest one." He remained standing, hands at his sides, spine straight, and met her eyes without difficulty. "There are things at home that need doing. They don’t schedule themselves around the bell."
Something moved behind her expression, quick, and then she covered it with a smile.
"You know," she said, "when the other teachers talk about you, they say you’re arrogant."
"They’re welcome to."
"I tell them they’re wrong. I tell them you’re just tired." She reached out and adjusted his collar, which had not needed adjusting, and her fingers stayed there a half-second longer than the task required. "Nobody your age should be that tired."
"You say that as though tiredness respects age."
"Careful," she murmured. "That was almost charming
"Why are you adjusting my collar?"
Her breath caught, once, and colour rose along her throat, and she laughed to cover it, low and warm, the way a woman laughs when she has just discovered she is not the one steering.
Then she leaned in.
It was small. A shift of weight, a hand coming to rest on his forearm, her face moving closer and closer, close enough that he could smell the antiseptic on her hands and something soft and expensive underneath it.
The room got very quiet.
Karl did not move. He did not lean in and he did not pull away, and after a moment that stretched about two seconds too long, she was the one who felt the silence turn, and she straightened, and let go, and smoothed her skirt with both hands as though the whole thing had been a wrinkle she was correcting.
"Well," she said brightly. "You should go."
"Ma’am."
"Karl." He stopped at the door. Her voice had lost the performance in it, and what was left underneath was almost gentle. "If you ever need anything. Anything at all. I’m here. That’s all I meant."
"I know," he said. "Thank you."
He walked out into the corridor and did not look back, and he did not think about it again, because he had made that decision years ago and saw no reason to reopen it..
Half the men in that building would have set themselves on fire for the woman, and the ones who had tried had all learned the same lesson, which was that attention like hers never arrived alone.
’And I have enough problems,’ he thought, shouldering the school gate open into the evening. ’I don’t need to collect more.’
Wren Street came up on him faster than he expected. The green awning was exactly where she had said it would be, the windows warm and gold against the darkening street, and there, standing off to the side of the entrance with her hands in her jacket pockets and her hair loose in a way it had never been in any profile picture, was a girl who could only be Elsa.