Ethan Flashback, eight months before
The day Ethan met Isabella Mercer, he spilled coffee on himself.
Not metaphorically. Not in some charming, cinematic way where their eyes meet over the mess and she hands him napkins and their fingers brush and the whole thing becomes a story they tell at dinner parties for the next thirty years. No. He just turned around too fast in the school hallway on a Thursday morning in October, caught the edge of someone's shoulder, and dumped the entire contents of his thermos down the front of his own hoodie.
The someone turned out to be her.
- Oh my god.
- It's fine.
- Are you sure?
- Yeah, totally.
He said it while standing in a spreading puddle of lukewarm coffee with absolutely nothing fine about his situation. She had blue eyes. That was the first thing he noticed, which in retrospect was the universe's cruelest joke giving her eyes like that, the kind of blue that isn't just one color but several, shifting depending on where the light hit. He noticed the eyes and then immediately looked away because he was seventeen and covered in coffee and had not yet developed the emotional infrastructure required to hold eye contact with someone who looked like that.
She laughed.
Not at him or maybe a little at him, but not in a mean way. In a way that made it somehow worse, because it meant she was comfortable enough to find it funny, which meant she wasn't intimidated by him, which meant she had absolutely no reason to keep talking to him, which meant the conversation was going to end in approximately fifteen seconds and he would spend the rest of the day reconstructing it in his head, adjusting his lines, giving himself better dialogue.
- I'm Bella, she said instead of leaving.
He blinked.
- Ethan.
- You've got she gestured vaguely at his chest a lot going on there.
- It's a look I'm trying out.
She laughed again. Different this time shorter, more surprised, like she hadn't expected that. Like she'd already decided what kind of person he was and he'd just complicated her filing system.
He felt something shift in his chest. Something small and structural, the way a single brick pulled from a wall doesn't collapse anything immediately but changes the integrity of everything above it.
He didn't know that then. He'd figure it out later. He'd have a lot of time to figure things out later, sitting in his room in the dark, counting the ways he should have known.
But that morning, standing in the hallway with coffee cooling against his skin, all he knew was that she was still there. Still talking to him. And that her name was Bella, and that she was in his AP English class and he'd somehow never properly looked at her before, and that he was an idiot.
He told Liam about it at lunch.
Liam's reaction was to lean back in his chair and look at Ethan with the specific expression he reserved for moments when Ethan did something he found both predictable and entertaining.
- The coffee girl.
- Her name is Bella.
- I know her name. Bella Mercer. He picked up a fry, pointed it at Ethan like a professor making a point. She's in my gym class. She argued with Coach Henderson about whether dodgeball constituted a legitimate athletic activity.
- Did she win?
- Convincingly. He ate the fry. She's trouble, man.
- You say that about everyone.
- I say that about everyone because I'm usually right. But he was grinning now, leaning forward, elbows on the table. Tell me everything. Don't leave out the part where you dumped your entire drink on yourself, because I feel like that's load-bearing information.
So Ethan told him. He told him about the coffee and the eyes and the way she'd laughed and the fifteen seconds he'd been certain she was about to leave. He told him about a lot going on there and how she'd said it like she was genuinely entertained rather than politely enduring him. He told him she'd walked with him to third period even though it was out of her way, and that she'd said see you around, coffee boy at the door to his classroom, and that he'd spent the next forty-five minutes of AP Calculus thinking about what around meant in that context and what the statistical likelihood was of manufacturing a situation where around happened sooner rather than later.
Liam listened to all of it with his chin in his hand, the way he did when he was actually paying attention rather than just waiting for his turn to talk.
- You like her, he said when Ethan finished.
- I don't I literally just met her.
- So?
- So you can't like someone you just met. That's not how it works.
Liam looked at him for a long moment with an expression that was almost pitying.
- Ethan. Buddy. You just spent ten minutes describing her laugh. He held up a hand to forestall the protest already forming on Ethan's face. Three separate times.
Ethan opened his mouth. Closed it.
- That's what I thought, Liam said, and stole a chip off Ethan's tray.
The second time they talked, it was her fault.
He'd been in the library after school, which was where he went when he needed to not be home but also not be around people a paradox the library somehow resolved by providing the presence of other humans who were contractually obligated not to speak to him. He'd been working on an English essay, or pretending to work on it while actually staring at the same paragraph for twenty minutes, when someone sat down across from him.
He looked up.
Bella Mercer set her bag on the table, pulled out a book, and looked at him like he was a piece of furniture she was mildly surprised to find there.
- Oh. Hi, coffee boy.
- Hi.
His essay suddenly felt very important. He looked back at it.
She opened her book. He didn't read his essay. There were approximately two and a half feet of library table between them and he was acutely, unreasonably aware of every inch of it.
- You're in AP English, she said without looking up from her book.
- Yeah.
- Morrison essay?
- How did you?
- Because you've been staring at the same page for twenty minutes and you look like someone's making you eat glass. She glanced up then, a brief flicker of blue. Morrison does that to people.
- She doesn't do it to you?
- She does it to everyone. She turned a page. I just stopped fighting it and wrote whatever the essay wanted to be instead of what I thought it was supposed to be.
Ethan looked at his essay. Then back at her.
- That's annoyingly good advice.
- Most of my advice is annoying. The corner of her mouth lifted. It's still good.
He didn't go back to the essay. He meant to. he had a draft due Friday and it was currently two paragraphs of increasingly desperate literary analysis and a conclusion that trailed off mid-sentence because he'd lost the thread of his own argument somewhere around page three. He had every practical reason to keep his head down and his pen moving.
Instead, he found himself asking her what she was reading. And she told him. And he said he hadn't read it and she looked at him like he'd confessed to a minor crime, and then she was explaining the plot with her hands moving and her voice doing the thing where it changed registers depending on which character she was describing, and he sat there watching her be entirely herself in a way most people weren't, not at seventeen, not in a school library on a Thursday afternoon, not with someone they barely knew.
He thought: oh, this is a problem.
Not out loud. He was seventeen, not suicidal.
But he thought it.
He started noticing her everywhere after that, which was its own specific form of torture.
The human brain, Ethan had come to understand, was less a sophisticated organ of reason and more an elaborate machine for pattern recognition that occasionally got stuck on a single frequency and played it on loop until you wanted to remove it from your skull and leave it somewhere quiet. His brain had found a new frequency. It was called Bella Mercer and it operated entirely without his consent.
She sat two rows ahead of him in AP English. He knew this because he'd sat in that classroom for six weeks without particularly registering where anyone sat, and now he could have drawn a map. She had a habit of clicking her pen when she was thinking three clicks, pause, three more and he'd started timing his own breathing to it without meaning to. She argued with Mr. Callahan about symbolism in a way that was technically disrespectful and somehow completely compelling, and Mr. Callahan, who tolerated nothing, let her finish every time.
She borrowed his notes once. Just walked up to his desk before class and said can I see those and picked them up before he answered and spent five minutes reading them with her hair falling forward and her expression doing something complicated, and when she handed them back she said you think in really strange ways and he couldn't tell if that was good or bad and spent the rest of the class period trying to figure it out.
He dreamed about her twice and woke up both times feeling obscurely guilty, like he'd accessed something he hadn't been given permission to access.
He wrote about her in his journal, which he recognized even as he was doing it as the single most embarrassing thing he'd ever done. Not the journal itself he'd kept one since he was fourteen, notebooks filled with observations and half-formed ideas and the specific texture of days he didn't want to lose. That was just how he processed the world. But filling three pages about someone's eyes and the way they moved and the thing her voice did on certain syllables that was new. That was something else entirely.
He didn't show Liam those pages.
He didn't show anyone.
She came to find him.
That was the thing he'd turn over and over later, when everything had broken and he was sitting in the dark with a stack of letters he'd never send, trying to build a timeline of his own destruction. She came to find him. He hadn't engineered it. He hadn't manufactured a reason. He'd just been in his usual spot at lunch corner table, east wall, the one with the good light for reading and she'd crossed the entire cafeteria with her tray and sat down across from him like it was something she did every day.
He looked up from his book. Looked at her. Looked around the cafeteria at her usual table, where her usual friends were sitting, visibly curious.
- Hi, he said.
- Hi. She set her tray down, shook her hair back, picked up her fork. Is this okay?
- Yeah. He closed his book. This is fine.
She nodded and started eating with the calm efficiency of someone who had made a decision and was not second-guessing it. He found that quality almost unreasonably attractive the absence of second-guessing, the willingness to just act. He spent so much time inside his own head, weighing every word before it left his mouth, that watching someone operate without that particular machinery was like watching a different species.
They didn't talk for a while. Just ate. And it wasn't awkward that was the thing that stopped him mid-bite, the realization that the silence wasn't something that needed to be filled. It just was. She was reading something on her phone and he was reading his book and the cafeteria was loud around them and none of it felt like an emergency.
He wasn't used to that. Not with someone new. Not with someone whose opinion of him was still undetermined, who could still decide she'd miscalculated by crossing that cafeteria.
- You're quiet, she said eventually, still looking at her phone.
- Usually.
- I like it. She looked up. Most people feel like they have to perform. You just exist. She said it like it was a strange and specific compliment, which it was. It's restful.
Ethan looked at her for a moment.
- You're saying I have the energy of a piece of furniture.
- Expensive furniture. The corner of her mouth. Something you actually want in the room.
He looked back at his book. He was smiling at it, which was a new and undignified experience.
- Ethan, she said.
He looked up.
- I'm going to keep sitting here. Not a question. A statement, delivered with the matter-of-fact certainty of someone announcing a change in the weather. If that's okay.
He thought about the brick in the wall. The structural integrity of things. How you never knew what you were building until it was already built and you were standing in the rubble trying to figure out where it went wrong
.
- Yeah, he said. That's okay.
That night, he opened his journal.
He wrote three words at the top of a new page, then stared at them for a long time. Then he closed the notebook without writing anything else and lay on his back in the dark and listened to the rain against his window and thought about expensive furniture and a laugh he'd already memorized and a pair of blue eyes that were never just one color.
He was, he decided, absolutely cooked.
He didn't know how right he was.
He didn't know that yet.
In the end, he'd think about that Thursday morning in October more than anything else. Not the discovery. Not the three words Liam couldn't meet his eyes to say. Not the silence that came after and never quite filled back in.
He'd think about a hallway and a spilled coffee and eleven seconds when none of it had happened yet.
He'd think about how easy it was, at the beginning, to believe that some things were permanent.
He'd think about how much he'd give to go back to a person who still believed that.