Page 85 of Open Water
Ihanded in my Anatomy and Physiology final at 2:40pm on a Thursday and walked out lighter than I'd felt in three months.
A&P was the one I was actually good at. Other people sweated it. To me it just made sense. How a muscle fires, how a joint takes load, how the whole machine of a body holds together and moves. Same as a boat. Either it works or it doesn't, and it tells you which. After a semester where nothing went the way it was supposed to, there was something almost funny about sitting down to the one thing that held still long enough to study.
Outside, the campus was half-gone. Trunks open in the lots, kids hauling duffels, the dining hall near empty. By the weekend I'd be on a bus home.
I got back to the room and Noah was already half-packed, suitcase open on his stripped bed, his whole side of the room dismantled down to the cinderblock. Noah didn't own much. A poly-sci's major's worth of paperbacks with cracked spines, a coffee maker that had no business being as loud as it was, and the dock for his phone with the whale sounds app he'd playedevery single night since September. He was jamming books into a duffel like they'd personally wronged him.
"You're going today?" I dropped my bag. "Thought it was tomorrow."
"Priya's catching a ride home and there's room. They're dropping me on the way." He shoved another book in. "I'm not paying for Amtrak when carpooling exists."
"Good call."
He zipped the duffel, stood, and looked around the half-empty room, and for a second neither of us said anything, because the room had that end-of-semester look like a place that had held something and was about to let go of it.
I'm bad at this. I want it on the record. I can take a boat through a headwind, I can run a practice, I can stand on a dock and tell a freshman he belongs. But I cannot, to save my life, say a real thing to a person I care about who's standing three feet in front of me. It locks up somewhere under my sternum. Always has.
"So," I said.
"So," Noah said.
"This was a semester."
"It was asemester." He huffed. "You came out, your boyfriend got arrested by UP, and I helped you wipe a video that could've ended your whole career. My mother thinks I spent the semester reading Kant."
"You did read Kant."
"In the cracks. Between your crises." He sat down on the bare mattress, and the smart-ass slid off his face the way it did maybe twice a year, when he actually meant something. "You good? Actually."
And there it was — the thing about Noah. He never flinched. Not once, all semester. The night Alex showed up at our door shaking with blood on his face, Noah looked up from his book,read the room in about a second, and got up and walked out so we could have it. No questions. No speech. Didn't make it weird. He watched me fall apart and fall in love in the space of a few months, and the only thing he ever said about it wasthat's not weird, that's Tuesday.The whole campus was looking at me like a headline, and Noah just kept looking at me like a roommate.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm good. Genuinely. First time in a long time."
"Good." He nodded once, like he was checking a box. "Because for what it's worth — and I've actually thought about this, so it's worth something — you spent two years acting like the best thing that could happen to you was nobody noticing you existed. And then everybody noticed, all at once, in the worst possible way." He shrugged. "And you're still standing. Better than standing. You run the place now."
I wanted to bat it away, I felt the joke load up and I didn't say it.
"That means a lot coming from you," I said instead. It came out rough. "You're the first person who ever just… let me be whatever I was, without needing it to be anything. I didn't have that before you. I didn't know I was allowed to."
Noah blinked. I'd surprised him. I'd surprised myself.
"Huh," he said. "Look at you. Using your words."
"Don't make it weird."
"You made it weird. I was being normal." But his voice had gone thick, and he covered it by standing up off the bed, sticking out his hand, and pulling me into the rough one-armed hug thing that guys do. "Take care of yourself, Liam. And tell Alex good luck at the lake."
"I'll tell him." I held on a beat longer than I meant to. "Thanks, Noah. For all of it."
"That's what the rent's for." He grabbed the duffel, then paused at the nightstand, reached for the whale soundsheadphone dock — and set it back down. "Keep it. You sleep better with it than I do."
"I don't need—"
"You snore less. It's documented." He grinned from the doorway. "See you in January, Captain."
Then he was gone.
I sat on my bed about a minute. The whale dock blinking on the empty nightstand across from me.
