The last bell detonates and the hallway swells like a wave. Sneakers squealing, lockers slamming, someone yelling across the quad like we’re all auditioning for “Most Alive.” I let it wash around me without touching. My body knows the route so well it could do it in a fire drill with my eyes closed: left shoulder angled to avoid the football guys who think space belongs to them, backpack strap gripped tight so it doesn’t slip, chin lifted just enough to read as confident instead of… whatever it would be if I let it fall.
Phone out. Calendar. Color-coded blocks stacked like Tetris: library shift, tutoring texts, AP calc problem set, scholarship essay edits, dinner, translate that “FINAL NOTICE” envelope I shoved in my drawer like it might evaporate from shame alone. My thumb hovers over the tiny empty space at nine-thirty. A joke. A trap.
“Hey, Nhi.” Someone says it like they’re greeting a mascot. I make my face do the thing. Small smile, eyes attentive, shoulders relaxed. Fine. I’m always fine.
The air by the gym smells like sweat and citrus cleaner. A cluster of athletes lingers, loud in that effortless way that makes teachers grin instead of shush. I catch a flash of Minh Nguyen’s profile near the doors. Lean frame, jaw tight, laughing too hard at something someone says. His knee brace is visible when he shifts, black and clinical against his tan skin. He notices me noticing because of course he does. His smile hooks at one corner like he’s about to say something, like he’s collecting ammo.
I look away first. Not because I’m scared. Because I don’t have time.
My feet keep their rhythm, rails, exactly. The library is two buildings over, quiet like a held breath. As I push through the glass doors, the fluorescent hum turns everything into a spreadsheet. Good. Spreadsheets don’t panic. Spreadsheets don’t have parents whisper-fighting in Vietnamese at 2 a.m. Spreadsheets don’t have knees that betray them.
I tuck my hair behind my ear, roll my shoulders back, and step into my shift like it’s a costume I can’t afford to tear.
At the circulation desk, I pin on my library face like a name tag. Smile: small, professional. Voice: low enough to be “helpful,” not loud enough to be “attention-seeking.” My hands move on autopilot. The stamp lands with a soft, final thunk that makes my brain feel weirdly calmer, like closure is something you can manufacture if you do it often enough.
“Have a good one,” I say, and mean a generic version of it.
A freshman drops a stack of graphic novels and asks if there’s a limit. I tell him the policy, and I even let my mouth tilt like I’m amused when he groans dramatically. The laugh that slips out of me is quick and contained, the kind you can fold back into your throat before it costs you anything. I don’t let it spread. I don’t let it get greedy.
Every time the door opens, I look up on reflex, expecting, what, exactly? A teacher needing a favor. A counselor summoning me. Some new disaster wearing a human face.
But it’s just books. Just barcodes. Just my careful, rationed breathing.
Between shelving carts, I carve out minutes like they’re something I’m allowed to own. I wedge my notebook behind the monitor where the security camera can’t judge my handwriting and bang out homework in blocks: ten AP calc problems, then an English outline, then a scholarship portal tab I keep refreshing like it might spit out a miracle if I stare hard enough. Each finished task is a tiny stamp of proof: see, still functioning. Still the kind of girl adults can point at like a brochure.
I write fast, neat, almost angry. No doodles. No wandering thoughts. Just answers boxed, thesis underlined, citations queued up like obedient little soldiers. Control isn’t a feeling anymore. It’s a checklist, and I’m scared of what happens when I run out of boxes to tick.
My phone buzzes against the underside of the desk, a mosquito I can’t swat in public. Screen down, I glance anyway: late fee reminder from the utility site, Mom: Con ơi cái giấy này nói gì? and a missed call from an unknown number that might be nothing, might be everything. I swallow the spike of panic and translate it into steps: call, explain, negotiate, don’t sound desperate.
By the time I shut down the computer and slide my notebook into my tote, I’m already auditioning for the evening shift of myself. The one who says, Dạ, con biết, and means, Don’t worry about me. Useful. Calm. Lightweight. If I let the strain leak through, one crack, one shaky breath, it feels like I’m handing the universe a reason to press harder.
I catch my reflection in the dark phone screen because I don’t trust the bathroom mirror anymore. Too honest. Too bright. The phone is kinder. I tilt it, angle it, check for the obvious failures: mascara tracks, the thin red line at the rim of my eyes, the way my mouth looks when it forgets to perform neutral.
No smudged eyeliner. Good. Nothing to confess to an auntie’s casual scan. My lips aren’t shaking, not if I keep them pressed together like that. I practice a micro-smile that doesn’t reach anything important.
The buzzing under my skin doesn’t show up on a screen, which feels unfair. My heart is doing that rabbit thing again while my face stays politely assembled. Like my body wants to bolt and my skin is the only reason it can’t.
I smooth my blouse anyway. One palm down my sternum, like I can iron the panic flat. Fabric obeys. Buttons stay straight. The gesture is automatic, muscle memory from years of presentations and piano recitals and church events where you’re supposed to look “together” even if you’re thinking about how your stomach might crawl out of your throat.
I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear and freeze for half a second, listening. Nothing but the fluorescent hum and the distant scrape of a cart wheel, maybe the custodian, maybe my imagination trying to give my anxiety a shape. The unknown number in my call log sits there like a dare. The late fee reminder sits there like a bruise. Mom’s text, Con ơi cái giấy này nói gì? is the worst because it’s soft. It’s trust. It’s responsibility disguised as a question.
I lock my phone without answering any of it. Not yet. I can’t go home with my face doing something uncontrollable.
I inhale through my nose, count to four like the counselor poster says, exhale slow like I’m a person with time. Then I stand up straighter (because that’s what I know how to do when everything is slipping) and walk toward the exit with my expression set to “fine,” like it’s a uniform I can’t afford to take off.
The second I step into the kitchen doorway, my body clicks into “useful” like it’s a setting on a rice cooker. Shoulders back. Chin level. Smile assembled. Mom is at the counter with a pile of coupons and that same white envelope, the one that has been migrating from table to counter to table like a bad omen. Dad’s in the living room, the TV too loud, pretending noise is the same thing as peace. I don’t let myself look tired. Tired is a conversation.
“Con về rồi,” I say, voice bright enough to pass. Before Mom can even ask, I’m already reaching for the sink. Plates stacked. Water running. Steam on my wrists. I make my hands busy so my face doesn’t have to be.
“Đưa con coi,” I add, nodding at the letter. I don’t wait for permission; I take it like it’s my job, like if I’m fast enough the words inside won’t be real. “Con dịch cho.” And then, because silence is dangerous, I volunteer more. “Để con rửa chén luôn.”
Outside, I move like I’m made of apology. Steps light, shoulders tucked, tote hugged close so I don’t swing into anyone’s path. The street is still sun-bright, still normal, which makes my chest feel even louder. Mrs. Le from three houses down is watering her sad succulents, and I give her the crispest, safest greeting I own. “Hi, cô.”
Her eyes skim me the way aunties do, like they’re looking for loose threads. I keep my smile small and my answers smaller. Every detail is a risk: the envelope in my bag, the tiredness around my mouth, the fact that I’m outside when I’m usually studying. One wrong thing and it turns into a story by Sunday. At church, at the market, at Mom’s salon while someone’s getting their eyebrows threaded.
So I walk faster, like speed can outrun gossip.
At school, I choreograph competence like it’s a survival skill. I get there before the bells so no one can watch me rush. I raise my hand first so the silence doesn’t pick me. I laugh when other people laugh, soft, controlled, not too loud, not too quiet, like volume has rules. The safest me is the one who never asks for anything.
When panic flares, it’s never dramatic. It’s a thin blade under my ribs, a sudden heat in my throat like I swallowed bad tea. I clamp down hard, tongue to teeth, nails into my palm, until my face remembers how to behave. I label it private, like a file I can lock. Because if it leaks, it becomes content: screenshots, whispers, “concern” that sounds a lot like judgment.
Minh moves through the day like his knee is a headline everyone can read. Even when he tries to hide it, looser sweats, the brace tucked under fabric like a secret, the way he favors one side gives him away. There’s this fractional hitch in his stride, like the floor has opinions. Like gravity is choosing him, specifically, to be petty.
And everyone’s eyes go there first. Not to his face. Not to the easy grin he keeps loaded like a weapon. To the joint that’s supposed to be unbreakable because it’s Minh Nguyen’s joint, and Westbrook only knows how to worship bodies that perform.
In the hallway by the gym, I catch him in my peripheral vision and then immediately wish I didn’t. Because watching him is like watching a magic trick go wrong. Your brain keeps trying to fix it. His teammates slap the back of his shoulder too hard, loud with their encouragement, and he laughs like it doesn’t sting. Teachers do that careful-voice thing, the one reserved for injured athletes and dead grandparents. “How’re we feeling today, Minh?” Like his knee is a group project.
He answers with the same two words, every time: “I’m good.” Not “I’m okay,” not “It hurts,” not “I don’t know.” I’m good, as if goodness is something you can grit your teeth into. As if saying it enough times will turn it true.
Between classes, he pauses at the stairs and does the math in his head. You can see it. His eyes flick, his jaw tightens, his hand finds the railing like he’s casually being normal and not negotiating with pain. When he catches someone looking, his smile sharpens. Don’t pity me. Don’t count me out. Don’t make me say the word injured out loud.
I’m not supposed to notice. I’m the safe bet, the girl whose problems are invisible because they’re made of paper and pressure and silence. But his limp has a volume to it, and in a school that runs on witnesses, being seen hurting is its own kind of failing.
His life looks like a color-coded schedule now, except the colors are all variations of bruise. Before first period he’s already done a round of rehab, bands, slow extensions, tiny movements that feel like a cruel joke when you remember he used to explode down a field like physics didn’t apply to him. In PE he runs modified drills at the edge of the gym, pretending it’s strategy and not exile, laughing too loud when someone claps like he’s a rescue dog learning stairs.
Between classes, he vanishes into the training room with the door that never fully closes. I’ve seen the ice packs stacked like lunch bags, the roll of athletic tape spooling out in endless pale ribbons. He sits on that crinkly paper and stares at his leg like it’s an enemy he has to convince, not a part of him.
And then there’s film. In the library sometimes, he’s got his laptop open, headphones on, eyes dead-focused. He rewinds the same second over and over (the cut, the slip, the moment his body says no) like if he studies it hard enough, he can prove it wasn’t him who failed.
In the hallways, eyes track him like he’s still on a highlight reel, like there’s an invisible red dot on his jersey even when he’s in sweats. Teammates do these drive-by scans, quick, pretending they’re not checking if his swagger still fits, if the limp is worse, if he’s still “Minh” or just a cautionary tale. Underclassmen hover at the edges, starving for a nod, a fist bump, proof that proximity to him counts as something. Teachers soften around him in a way they never soften around me: extra time, gentler tone, little jokes that say, We’re on your side. It’s not kindness exactly. It’s investment. Westbrook loves him most when he looks like a season that can be saved.
Confidence isn’t a mood for him; it’s a uniform he can’t take off. He wears it like team colors, creased, practiced, mandatory, laughing too fast when his knee stutters, talking loud about “next week” like the future is a locker he can just open. But I’ve seen the flicker when he thinks no one’s watching, the way uncertainty chews at him in the gaps between pain.
Every adult conversation about him comes back to what his knee can still produce. Not how he’s sleeping. Not whether the rumors are eating him alive. It’s all numbers dressed up as concern, minutes, points, “projection,” scholarship odds, said in that careful, optimistic voice like they’re reading weather. And the witnesses matter most: coaches, trainers, boosters deciding if he’s recovering… or already replaceable.
Westbrook’s values aren’t subtle. They’re laminated and mounted and backlit, everywhere you turn: glass cases stuffed with trophies like teeth, TV screens looping the same three highlight reels between morning announcements, booster banners flapping in the gym like flags in a country I don’t technically belong to. Even the hallway murals feel like an argument: PRIDE. TRADITION. CHAMPIONS. The academics stuff is there too, sure, but it’s always quieter. A list of AP Scholars taped crooked near the counseling wing, a congratulatory tweet with thirty likes, a “College Acceptance” bulletin board where the font gets smaller the less prestigious the school is.
I used to think that meant something simple, like: sports get attention because they’re loud, and grades get attention because they’re expected. But the longer I’m here, the more I understand the fine print no one reads out loud. Some students are futures the school wants to sell: poster kids, living proof that Westbrook produces winners. The rest of us are the scaffolding. We’re the tidy GPA averages. We’re the “Look, our system works” statistics.
It shows up in tiny things you can’t complain about without sounding crazy. The way the front office lady smiles like it costs her nothing when Minh’s name comes up, like she’s speaking to a donor. The way security never seems to notice an athlete’s “forgotten” ID but somehow clocks the exact day my lanyard snaps. The way teachers will bend deadlines for a game trip because it’s “representing the school,” but my debate tournament is “an extracurricular you chose.”
And I keep playing my part because it’s safer. Because if I’m perfect, nobody asks what it’s costing me. Because if I ever stop being useful, I don’t get protection. I get disappointment dressed up as advice. I get told, gently, that I should’ve planned better.
When Minh misses class, the language around it turns soft and padded. Let’s make sure he’s supported. Did someone loop him in? Teachers email him like they’re checking on a relative in the hospital, not a kid with a swollen knee and a reputation problem. Someone prints him packets. Someone signs off on “excused” with a sigh that says, of course, of course. You’re carrying so much.
When I miss one homework assignment because I fell asleep sitting upright at my desk, the air changes. The kindness snaps into something sharper, like a ruler rapped against a table. This isn’t like you, Nhi. Which sounds like praise until you hear the warning underneath: don’t make me revise the story I tell myself about you.
And they call it the same thing: concern. That’s what makes it maddening. The exact same mouth can say “we’re here for you” in the gym hallway, then turn to me outside AP Calc and say “standards matter” like my entire life is a spreadsheet slipping out of alignment.
The difference is what they think is worth salvaging.
Consequences don’t disappear here: they just take a different hallway. A due date doesn’t get forgiven, it gets “adjusted” with a smile that says we’ll fix it for you if you’re the right kind of broken. Absences don’t count, they get “handled,” stamped into paperwork like a formality, like the school is doing math to keep someone eligible. Doors open faster for a swollen knee than they ever do for a brain that won’t shut up at 3 a.m. Panic doesn’t limp, so it’s invisible. Burnout doesn’t get ice packs and trainer notes.
And everyone plays along, calling it compassion, calling it support, because admitting it’s triage would mean admitting they’ve already decided whose problems are worth the trouble.
It’s like we’re both standing under the same fluorescent spotlight, getting scored without a rubric. Every stumble turns into a question: are you the kind of kid they can “help,” or the kind they have to manage? Minh gets assumption, cushion, time. I get follow-up emails and that tight smile: show me you’re trying. Prove you deserve air.
And under it all is the part nobody says out loud: grace isn’t a right here. It’s a limited resource, like printer credits or counselor appointments, rationed to the kids who can still pay it back with trophies, scores, headlines. If your suffering can be framed as “overcoming,” you get softness. If it just looks like slipping, you get corrected.
We start orbiting because the school is built that way. Hallways like tracks, schedules like gravity, everyone looping the same choke points until you learn who to avoid and who you can’t. I keep trying to make Minh Nguyen a blind spot. I fail.
He shows up in the library checkout line when I’m balancing a stack of AP books like penance, the spines digging into my forearm. I feel him before I see him: the shift in air, the way conversations tilt. Someone laughs too loud. Someone says his name like it’s a headline.
He’s leaning on the counter with that careful, not-careful posture injured athletes do, half casual, half bracing. His knee is wrapped; the swelling makes the brace look like armor. The librarian is already softening her voice, like he’s a skittish animal.
I look down at my barcode, at the list in my Notes app, at anything that isn’t the way his gaze flicks over me and sticks. Recognition. Not friendly. Not nothing.
“Tran,” he says, like my last name is a category.
I should ignore him. I don’t. My mouth runs ahead of my brain because that’s what happens when I’m tired. “Nguyen.”
His smile cuts sideways. “You always got a plan?”
I almost laugh because yes, obviously, I have seven. I also have no plan for why my heartbeat is doing this. “It’s called being prepared,” I say, and hate how it sounds like an accusation.
Then it’s tutoring sign-ups in the counseling wing, my clipboard, my carefully color-coded schedule, and his name appears on a list he’s not supposed to be on: priority slot, limited space, stamped in by someone with authority. I stare at the ink like it’s an error that won’t admit it’s an error.
In the athletic hallway, he moves through a crowd like water parts for him. I move through crowds like I’m apologizing for existing in them. We keep crossing at corners, at doors, at those narrow spaces where you can’t pretend someone isn’t there.
And every time, it feels less like coincidence and more like the school is testing how close we can get before one of us cracks.
I start noticing the bends in the hallway like hairline cracks in glass: only visible once you know to look. Minh drifts in ten minutes late to third period and the teacher doesn’t even finish the sentence she starts to scold him. She just… gives up. Waves a hand like shooing a fly. “Get your notes from someone,” she says, gentle, as if the tardy is an injury too.
In the main office, the attendance lady’s voice goes syrupy when he limps up, brace squeaking, backpack slung low. A late pass prints without the usual lecture. No “You need to manage your time.” No threat of Saturday school. Just a quiet, “How’s the knee?”
Even when he’s sharp adults translate it for him. A coach’s palm lands on his shoulder, heavy with ownership and permission. “He’s under a lot of pressure,” they say, to each other, to the room, like it’s a magic phrase that makes accountability optional.
And I stand there with my planner and my perfect attendance and my invisible problems, learning exactly what kind of kid gets elastic rules.
Minh watches me the way you watch a rigged game: like if you stare hard enough, you’ll catch the trick. I feel it in the pauses adults make around my name. “Nhi Tran,” they say, and it lands like a scholarship announcement, like a clean receipt. When I’m five minutes late, someone asks if I’m okay. When I forget a form, it’s “That’s so unlike you,” said with a soft frown, like my failure is a temporary weather event, not a verdict.
He doesn’t get that language. He gets warnings, conditions, “don’t waste your potential.” He gets “attitude,” even when he’s in pain.
His jaw flexes when a teacher hands me a make-up pass without blinking. Like my competence is a kind of immunity he can’t decide whether to hate or steal.
Our first real collision is stupidly small, which somehow makes it worse. I’m outside counseling, catching my breath, when I hear an aide say, “Athletics needs him cleared,” and then, softer, “You know how boosters get.” My stomach goes acid. I step in anyway. “That slot is full,” I say. Minh turns, slow, eyes locking onto mine like a dare. “So make room,” he says, and the look he gives me lasts one second too long: long enough to confirm he thinks I’m part of the rigging, and I think he’s the reason it stays rigged.
After that, every encounter turns into a pop quiz I didn’t study for. His limp makes adults soften, and it makes me go sharp: like fairness is something I’m responsible for enforcing. Meanwhile my straight-A calm sets his teeth on edge; I can feel it, the way he scans me for cracks. We keep circling, both of us too broke to lose.
I learn to measure risk in decimals because whole numbers are too dramatic, too honest.
A zero-point-two for turning in an assignment at 11:[^59] instead of 11:[^00]. A zero-point-five for a quiz I should’ve aced but don’t, because my brain blanks like it’s protecting me from something. A one-point-zero for a B. Just one letter, just one grade, technically still “good,” except I can already hear the way that word changes shape when it’s said by an admissions committee versus an auntie at church.
Good becomes why not better.
And then there’s the kind of risk you can’t see on a transcript. One rumor, one screenshot, one “I heard” sliding through an auntie group chat like it’s nothing. Nhi is stressed. Nhi is acting weird. Nhi is dating someone. Nhi thinks she’s too good. Nhi’s parents are struggling. The order doesn’t matter; it all lands the same. The scholarships I’m counting on are always framed as rewards, merit, excellence, leadership, service, like they’re gold stickers you earn for being shiny and agreeable. But I’ve read the fine print. I live in the fine print. “Maintain.” “Demonstrate.” “Good standing.” Words that smile while they hold a knife behind their back.
Conditional is the scariest word in English because it sounds polite. Conditional is an email that starts with “Congratulations” and ends with “Unfortunately.” Conditional is someone deciding I’m not a safe investment anymore.
Sometimes I do the math in my head while I’m brushing my teeth: FAFSA estimates, textbook costs, my parents’ tiredness, the way the car makes that noise when you turn too hard. The numbers don’t add up unless I stay perfect.
And I can’t afford to be dramatic about it. I can’t even afford to be tired.
So I keep my face calm and my voice bright and my hands busy, like if I move fast enough, no one will notice the floor under us is thinner than it looks.
So I tighten my schedule until it squeaks like a cheap hinge. Color-coded blocks on my phone, alarms stacked on alarms. Before school: library, cram one more chapter. Lunch: peer tutoring, because “service hours” looks like virtue when it’s just me trying to stay useful. After school: club meeting, then another meeting, then a meeting to plan the next meeting. Weekends: the plaza tutoring center, fluorescent lights and dry-erase markers, my smile pulled on like a uniform.
I keep adding “extra” like it’s free.
My body starts charging interest. Headaches that bloom behind my eyes like bruises. Caffeine making my hands shake when I’m trying to write neatly. My stomach going hollow in the middle of class because I forgot to eat and I can’t admit it without sounding (what) fragile? Spoiled? Dramatic?
At home, I rinse dishes fast so my mom won’t look too closely at my face. I laugh on cue, answer in Vietnamese with my best, most obedient tone. If I say I’m struggling, it feels like sliding a receipt across the table: proof I’m costing them more than they already pay.
So I don’t say it. I just adjust the straps and carry it tighter.
Minh’s margin is thinner in a different way: less GPA, more cartilage. A week where his knee stays puffy, where he “just pushes through” and then can’t, where he misses one rehab appointment because his ride falls through or his mom needs him to pick up his little cousin, and suddenly it’s not “injury” anymore. It’s “attitude.” It’s “work ethic.” It’s “he’s distracted.”
One coach says he’s not committed, and that sentence sticks like gum under a desk. One trainer logs “noncompliant,” and it becomes a story adults can repeat without feeling cruel. The scouts don’t have to be dramatic; they just stop calling. His future gets quietly edited down to a warning: talent, wasted.
Minh limps like it’s optional, swallows the wince, then fills the air with jokes and swagger so nobody can hear the fear underneath. He talks over the injury the way I talk over my exhaustion, fast, polished, preemptive. Because he’s seen how narratives get assigned: a clipped video, a coach’s shrug, a teammate’s “bro, you soft,” and suddenly the blame has his name on it.
Neither of us can afford to mess up where people can see it. My mistake comes dressed as “wasted potential,” stamped and filed, forwarded to counselors and aunties. His comes as “soft,” replayed in slow motion on someone’s phone, with a coach’s disappointed silence doing the rest. So every time we pass in the hallway, it’s like bargaining without words: don’t expose me, and I won’t expose you.
My pencil tracks the margin of my notebook like it’s a lifeline (9:[^05] hook, 9:[^12] context, 9:[^20] counterargument, 9:[^31] conclusion) tiny timestamps boxed in highlighter the color of safety vests. The page is a grid of decisions already made, a future that behaves if I keep my hand moving. I can’t control FAFSA forms or my mom’s hours getting cut again or the way my dad goes quiet when the mail comes, but I can control this: thesis, subpoint, evidence, analysis. My breathing syncs to the checklist. In. Out. Don’t look up. Don’t let your brain wander into the dark hallway where it keeps asking, What if you’re not enough?
Around me, the library hums with contained panic: pages turning, keyboards clicking, a cough muffled into a sleeve. Test-prep corner means everyone here is pretending their lives can be reduced to practice questions and college essay prompts. It’s my favorite lie.
I flip to the next page and smooth it down. My knuckles are faintly stained with ink; I’ve been gripping too hard. I tell myself I’m just focused, not… whatever this is. The headache behind my eyes pulses like a second clock.
A librarian’s cart squeaks somewhere. Someone whispers. I underline “transition sentence” twice because apparently one underline isn’t enough to convince my brain to obey.
The world narrows to the paper. If I keep writing, I don’t have to think about the B- on my last chem quiz like it’s a moral failing. I don’t have to picture my auntie’s face when she asks, smiling too hard, “So, Nhi, Stanford or Harvard?” as if those are the only directions a life can go.
I’m halfway through outlining my third body paragraph when a shadow falls over the table. I don’t look up: looking up invites conversation, and conversation invites questions I don’t have time to answer.
Then the air changes, like a door left open.
A sudden crackle of speakerphone splinters the quiet; the sound bounces off the low shelves and into the test-prep corner like it owns the place.
The noise slices through my outline so cleanly it’s like someone takes scissors to the thin thread I’m hanging from. Speakerphone, actual speakerphone, in a library. The sound is tinny and overconfident, bouncing off laminated tables and book spines, multiplying itself until it feels like it’s coming from everywhere at once. A few heads lift in the periphery. Someone’s sneaker squeaks against carpet, a tiny protest. The librarian at the front desk doesn’t look up yet, but I can feel her patience shifting, the way air changes right before rain.
My pencil freezes mid-stroke. Ink beads at the tip, threatening a blot. I swallow and try to pretend it’s not happening, like ignoring it will make it dissolve back into the acceptable hush.
It doesn’t.
There’s a harsh burst of laughter then a voice I recognize without meaning to. Not because we’re friends. Because everyone recognizes him. Because he takes up space like it’s a right, like rules are optional if you’re fast enough.
My jaw tightens so hard my teeth ache.
Minh’s voice rides over it. Tight and clipped, like he’s biting down on every other word. “I was there,” he says, and there’s this hard edge under it, the kind that dares someone to call him a liar. The assistant coach’s voice crackles back, too loud and too calm, all policy-speak: check-ins, protocol, compliance. Minh repeats rehab like it tastes wrong. Attendance, like it’s a character flaw instead of a schedule. I can’t hear everything, but I hear enough: him insisting he texted, him saying his knee swelled up, him asking if they want him to crawl in on it.
His laugh is quick and ugly. “Yeah, okay. Got it. So I’m a problem now.”
I stop with my pencil hovering over the page, mid-thought, like my brain hits a wall. My pulse kicks hard against my ribs. Around me, the corner shifts: chairs pause, pages hesitate, a couple of heads tilt toward the noise. I can feel the attention recalibrate, hungry and bored at the same time. One moment of disruption and suddenly you’re a headline: that girl, that table, that drama.
I make myself keep moving, one more bullet, one more subpoint, like discipline can drown him out. But the call swells again, the coach’s calm turning into that weaponized disappointment, and Minh’s voice snaps back, too loud, too raw. Something hot and petty breaks loose in me. My hand stills. I lift my head. My eyes catch on him and don’t let go.
My pen freezes mid-sentence, ink pooling at the tip like it’s waiting for permission. The word I’m trying to write (therefore) blurs into a dark smear when my hand twitches. Great. Even my notes are getting dragged into this.
I don’t even realize I’m turning until my chair gives that soft squeak I hate, the one that feels louder than it should in the test-prep corner. My jaw is clamped so tight it aches up into my temples, and the muscles in my neck pull like I’m bracing for impact. I fix my face into something neutral, something adult, something that says this is beneath me: because that’s what you do when you’re the kind of student teachers use in emails as an example. You don’t make a scene. You manage it.
Except I’m not managing anything. I’m barely containing the spike of irritation that hits like caffeine on an empty stomach.
He’s sprawled like he owns the table, phone out, voice cutting through the hush like a blade. There’s a faint smell of athletic tape or menthol or whatever they rub on injuries, mixing with library dust and cheap highlighter ink. The assistant coach’s tinny voice keeps leaking out, all rules and reminders. Minh’s knee is stretched out, and even from here I can see the tension in it: his foot bouncing, the restless anger traveling through his leg like he can’t help it.
People are looking. Pretending not to, but looking. A girl across from me stares very hard at her SAT vocab list. Two juniors at the next table lean in a fraction like they’re listening to a podcast. I feel my own cheeks heat with secondhand exposure, like his drama is contagious and I’m about to get quarantined with it.
I meet his eyes (dark, sharp, already defensive) and try to communicate an entire warning without words. Stop. Not here. Not like this. My expression is supposed to be a lid slammed down on a boiling pot.
His mouth curls, not quite a smile, like he can smell the control on me and wants to see if it cracks. My throat tightens. I hate how my body reacts before my brain finishes forming a plan.
My pen stays suspended. My heartbeat gets loud. And I decide, suddenly, I’m done being polite about it.
I lean forward just enough to make it clear this is on purpose, not an accident. My voice stays low, the kind of low teachers use right before they write a referral, but it comes out sharper than I intend.
“Minh. Take it outside.”
His name tastes like a line I shouldn’t cross. I don’t even know him like that: just the highlight-reel version, the hallway version, the version adults sigh about like he’s a stock they’ve invested in. But right now he’s a real person with a real phone blasting a private fight into the one place on campus that’s supposed to be quiet on purpose.
The coach’s voice crackles again, tinny and relentless, and I can feel each syllable ricochet off the tables, off my skull, off everyone’s carefully stacked flashcards and practice essays. It’s not just annoying; it’s invasive. Like someone turned on a siren inside my chest.
I keep my expression flat. Professional. Dead-eyed.
“Or at least,” I add, barely moving my lips, “somewhere your drama isn’t everybody’s problem.”
Minh doesn’t move at first. He just goes still, like my words hit a wall he’s deciding whether to climb or kick through. The phone screen throws a pale rectangle of light over his knuckles, over the sharp line of his wrist, and the coach’s voice keeps bleeding out in clipped bursts like a metronome for my rising pulse.
Then Minh tips his chin up, slow on purpose. His eyes drag from my mouth to my face like he’s taking inventory, like he’s seen this type of girl in a hundred classrooms and already knows what I’m going to do next. The confidence in it is rehearsed, athletic, the same energy that makes teachers laugh off things they’d punish anyone else for.
My stomach drops anyway.
Recognition flashes over his face like a match struck: my straight spine, my neat stacks, the color-coded binder I didn’t even realize was screaming try-hard. I know that look. Teachers get it right before they say my name like a compliment. He gets it like an insult. His mouth hooks to one side, a smirk with teeth behind it, like he’s finally found the button to press.
He leans back like the chair belongs to him and the whole library is just background noise he’s entitled to. His knee juts out, the phone still up, coach-voice still leaking. Then he tilts his head, eyes glinting, and says it, loud enough to slice through the hush, “Relax, perfect little planner.” The word perfect hits first, like a slap.
My eyes drop before I can stop them, like my body is trying to gather evidence to justify the heat climbing my throat. The knee brace is matte black and tight, strapped down with Velcro like a warning label. It looks expensive. It looks official. It looks like a reason that can be translated into sympathy in five seconds flat.
His varsity jacket is half-zipped, sleeves pushed up, Westbrook stitched across the back in that smug, looping font that shows up on banners and morning announcements. He’s sprawled the way boys do when they’ve never been told they’re too much. One leg angled out, shoulders wide, elbows making borders on a table that isn’t his. Even sitting, he takes up room like it’s a birthright.
Around us, the test-prep corner stays frozen in its fake calm. Keyboards click too loudly. Someone flips a page with exaggerated care. The girl two chairs down stares so hard at her SAT vocab list I can see her pupils flicking toward us and back like windshield wipers. Nobody looks up. Everybody listens. That’s the rule in places like this: you don’t witness, but you remember.
Minh’s phone is still on speaker, coach-voice crackling with that tight, authoritative patience adults use when they’re pretending not to be annoyed. Minh’s thumb taps the edge of the screen, not ending the call, just… keeping it alive. Keeping the audience.
I catch myself holding my breath, like if I stay perfectly still I won’t become part of the scene. Like I can rewind the last ten seconds and swallow my words before they hit air.
My binder sits in front of me, obnoxiously neat, my highlighters lined up like little soldiers. I hate how it makes me look right now. I hate that he gets to glance at it and decide I’m a type, the same way I just looked at his brace and decided he’s a different type.
His comment hangs between us, sharp and bright. My face feels hot. My ears feel hotter. And even with my mouth closed, I can tell I’m already too loud.
A sour, familiar thought tightens behind my ribs: this is the kind of noise that gets translated into something flattering the second you’re wearing school colors. If I raised my voice like that, it would be “inappropriate,” “unbecoming,” “a distraction.” If he does it, it’s “competitive,” “fired up,” “advocating for himself.” Passion, not entitlement. Leadership, not rudeness.
I can already hear an adult chuckle (half scolding, half fond) like boys who take up space are weather you can’t blame. Like the rest of us are supposed to carry umbrellas and call it maturity.
My fingers curl under the edge of my binder, nails pressing into cardboard. I tell myself I’m being fair, that I don’t know the whole story, that maybe his knee actually hurts and his life is actually collapsing in ways I can’t see. And then his voice spikes again, and my sympathy snaps back into something hard and petty.
Protected. Buffered. Allowed to be messy in public.
Meanwhile I’m over here measuring my breathing so no one can accuse me of existing too loudly.
I feel it happen. The automatic straightening, like someone yanked an invisible string threaded through my spine. Chin up. Shoulders back. Hands still on the table, fingers tucked where no one can see them shake. My face goes blank in that practiced way, the one that reads calm when it’s really containment, like I’m sealing something volatile in a glass jar.
And of course he notices. Of course his eyes flick over me like I’m a scantron, looking for wrong answers.
In his stare I can almost hear the label snapping into place: teacher’s favorite. The quiet judge. The girl who makes everyone else look sloppy just by sitting there with her color-coded life.
The unfair part is I’m not even trying to be perfect right now. I’m just trying not to break.
His eyes track my mouth like it’s a tell, like the moment my lips flatten he can read the whole verdict: problem. obstacle. something to organize and shove aside. The look hits anyway, hot, defensive, like I’ve just accused him out loud of being a nuisance. Whatever is burning in his chest (injury, rumors, adults breathing down his neck) flares, and he decides I’ve never had to ask anyone to let me be human.
My pulse is suddenly the loudest thing I can hear, thudding up into my throat even though the library is doing its best impression of peace. I feel everyone “not looking” the way you feel heat. Something that’s been simmering all week, every late notice and swallowed panic, surges up. Before I can smooth it, my mouth fires first. “Could you not do this here?”
My pen freezes mid-underline. The tip hovers over a sentence about slope-intercept form like it’s suddenly written in another language, and my highlighter (uncapped, stupid) keeps bleeding a neon bruise into the margin. Minh’s voice slices through the test-prep corner, too bright, too familiar, like he’s on a bench outside the gym and not in the only place on campus that still pretends quiet means something.
“Yeah, I know, Coach,” he says, dragging out the syllables like he’s chewing them. “I’m telling you I was there. I signed in.”
Speakerphone. Of course it’s speakerphone. The tinny reply crackles out: rehab attendance, missed sessions, consequences. Words that should be private ricochet off the low shelves and drift over the SAT vocab flashcards and college essay books like a cloud of someone else’s problem.
Except it isn’t someone else’s problem when it’s loud enough to make Mrs. Patel at the front desk glance up. It isn’t someone else’s problem when the girl across from me stops tapping her pencil and looks at Minh like he’s a live feed.
My throat tightens. Not in a dramatic way. In the way it does when I’ve been swallowing things all day and there’s no room left.
Minh leans back in his chair like he owns the corner, one leg stretched out too far into the aisle. His knee is braced, bulky under his sweats, and still he’s performing, voice pitched for an audience he refuses to admit is there. His fingers drum on the table, impatient, like the world is late to him.
The coach’s voice spikes, muffled but sharp: “You don’t get to pick and choose, Minh. “I’m not choosing. I’m literally here, aren’t I?”
My page swims. All I can hear is the unspoken script: rules are flexible if you’re valuable. Deadlines shift. Consequences become conversations. And I feel something in me catch, jealousy, maybe, or just exhaustion pretending to be righteousness, because my mistakes don’t get meetings. They get stains.
I wait for him to notice the room. For him to look up, see the bowed heads, the hunched shoulders, the fragile peace we’re paying for with our silence. But the volume doesn’t drop. The phone keeps spilling.
My grip on the pen tightens until my fingers ache. Then my mouth moves before my brain can file the thought into something safe. “Could you not do this here?”
I give it a beat (one, two) like maybe he’ll glance up and realize there are other people in the world besides his knee and his coach and whatever invisible scoreboard he’s still playing for. Like maybe the sheer weight of fluorescent quiet will press his thumb down on the volume button without anyone having to say anything.
It doesn’t.
The phone keeps coughing out that tight, adult disappointment (attendance, commitment, consequences) each word clipped like a nail. Minh answers with that same too-loud ease, the kind that dares someone to challenge him. The speakerphone turns the whole thing into a public service announcement about how close you can get to losing everything without admitting you’re scared.
My chest goes rigid, thread-pulled tight. I can feel my spine doing that automatic honor-student thing, straighten, contain, don’t react, while my brain does math: how many heads are turned, how fast this will travel, how quickly Mrs. Patel will decide to intervene. My pen is still in my hand, still poised over a line I’m not reading anymore.
And all I can think is: I don’t get to be this loud when I’m falling apart.
I’m standing before I’ve fully decided to move, my chair legs whispering a betrayal against the carpet. Every muscle in my back locks into that good-student posture like it can keep my voice from shaking. It doesn’t. The words come out too precise, clipped at the edges, like I practiced them in my head for years. “This is a library,” I say, and my own tone surprises me, flat, sharp, not even polite. “Not your training room.”
His phone keeps barking, tinny and relentless, and I hate that I can hear the coach’s disappointment like it’s my business. I hate more that Minh is making it everyone’s. My throat burns with things I haven’t said all week, all semester, all my life. I don’t look at the faces lifting around us. I can’t afford to.
Minh Nguyen. Varsity. Scholarship. The holy trinity that makes adults’ voices soften and policies suddenly develop “wiggle room.” It all stacks behind my teeth. Every time I’ve watched deadlines turn into gentle reminders for boys in jerseys, every time I’ve swallowed my own panic in silence. “You’re lucky,” I say, too sharp, too loud, “the school bends rules for athletes.”
The air in the test-prep corner shifts like someone opened a door to winter. The click-click of a mechanical keyboard dies mid-thought. A kid’s thumb hovers over their phone, frozen on a scroll. I feel eyes lift without anyone meaning to, chairs suddenly too loud in their stillness. The library doesn’t get quieter; it gets sharper, the silence curving inward until I’m standing in the center of it.
Minh’s face tightens for a fraction of a second, so fast I almost convince myself I imagined it. But it’s there. This ugly, unguarded flash in his eyes, like pain that doesn’t know where to go. Not just the knee. Something deeper, something that looks a lot like being caught. Like being reminded he’s not untouchable.
Then it vanishes.
His jaw sets, the muscle jumping once like he’s biting down on the part of him that wants to flinch. He smooths his expression into something flatter and meaner, irritation snapping into place with practiced speed. Like anger is the only thing he’s allowed to be in public. Like if he lets even one softer emotion leak out, everyone will circle it and name it and use it.
I hate that I notice. I hate that my body reacts to it anyway, my stomach dropping, my hands going cold, because I know that look. I wear a different version of it every day. The second before the mask goes back on.
He looks at me like I’m not a person, like I’m an obstacle he can shoulder past. Like I’m a teacher’s laminated example, a GPA with legs. His mouth curves, not quite a smile, more like he’s sharpening his teeth. “Wow,” he says, voice pitched just loud enough to carry. “Perfect little planner has opinions.”
A couple of heads tilt, subtly, like flowers following sun they don’t want to admit they need. Heat crawls up my neck. I can feel how I must look: standing there, too rigid, too righteous, like I’m auditioning for Valedictorian of Moral Superiority. I want to swallow my words back down, chew them into something smaller.
But he’s already stepping into it, leaning into my insult like he can turn it into armor. It’s infuriating. It’s almost impressive.
His eyes flick briefly to the people watching then back to me, daring. Like he’s decided if he’s going to be judged, he’ll make sure he’s the one holding the gavel.
He shifts like he’s trying to make pain look like posture. One careful redistribution of weight, the smallest hitch in his breath that he pretends is nothing. But I see it anyway, the tightness around his mouth, the way his fingers clamp a little too hard around the phone. Then he raises it higher, speaker still blaring, and turns his wrist so the sound projects, a deliberate broadcast.
It’s not an accident. It’s theater.
The phone becomes a spotlight he aims at himself, at me, at anyone close enough to hear the adult voice on the other end talking about “attendance” and “commitment” like Minh’s knee is a moral failing. He angles it outward like a shield and a dare, like he’s daring me to flinch first, daring the library to listen harder.
My skin prickles. I can almost feel the invisible circle tightening, everyone pretending they’re not watching while they absolutely are.
His gaze locks on mine, steady and ugly-bright, like he’s already decided what I am: another person keeping score. Another person who wants him to pay.
Go ahead, his posture says. Make me the spectacle.
I don’t move. That’s the thing: my body knows how to lock into place like a good photo. Shoulders back, spine straight, chin level, the version of me teachers point to when they say “responsible” like it’s a compliment and not a cage. I’ve spent years learning how to look unbothered while my insides sprint in circles. I use that muscle now, even as my pulse hiccups against my throat and my palms go damp around my notebook.
Minh’s phone keeps talking, adult words turned into a public verdict, and I refuse to give him the satisfaction of watching me shrink.
My mouth tastes like coffee and metal. I breathe in, slow, like I’m about to answer a question on an exam instead of a person who’s looking at me like a target.
The last sentence snaps out of me like a rubber band breaking: too tight, too fast. It comes out sharper than planned, louder than safe, and it skates across the tables, slicing through the library’s practiced quiet. A few pens pause mid-scratch. Someone coughs like they’re covering for me. My frustration, my bitterness, suddenly has an audience.
The second my words hit the air, gravity seems to double. My stomach drops so hard I swear my organs rearrange. The quiet in the test-prep corner isn’t quiet anymore. It’s a held breath, a collective pause. I can feel eyes lifting without looking, ears perking behind screens. I see tomorrow’s version of this already: auntie-style recaps in group chats, “Did you hear. I walked into the spotlight with him and handed people a reason to keep watching.
Minh’s head turns like he’s tracking a sound he’s been waiting for. For half a second I think. Instead he clocks me. Fully. Like my volume is a challenge and not a mistake.
He shifts his weight, slow and deliberate, the way runners do when they’re finding the exact spot their foot wants to strike. One shoulder rolls back. His chin lifts. That guarded smile tightens into something sharp enough to qualify as a weapon, and I hate how practiced it looks, like he’s done this a thousand times and gotten rewarded for it.
He leans his hip against the end of the table, not quite lounging: more like claiming territory. His phone is still in his hand, the speakerphone still a tinny presence, but his attention is on me now, on the soft part under my ribs.
“Whoa,” he says, light, like he’s impressed. Like I’m entertainment. “Didn’t know you had that in you.”
A couple heads definitely tilt. I can feel it without looking. The air tastes like paper dust and caffeine and my own stupid adrenaline.
My fingers tighten around my pen until it hurts. I’m suddenly aware of every detail I can’t control: my voice still echoing, my cheeks heating, the way my notebook is open to a color-coded schedule that screams exactly what he’s about to say next.
He lets his eyes flick down at it anyway. Of course he does. “Perfect little planner,” he adds, casual, like he’s reading it off a label. “You gonna write me up? Detention slip? Maybe a spreadsheet?”
The words are thrown like darts, aimed at the part of me that’s always bracing: always trying to stay in the right lane, the right tone, the right version of myself.
And the worst part is my body reacts like he wanted it to: a quick, humiliating flinch in my stomach, like I’ve been tapped where I’m bruised.
Heat crawls up my neck in a slow, humiliating wave. I don’t have to look up to know people are looking; I can feel the tilt of attention like a spotlight shifting, the way the air gets thicker when a quiet room decides you’re the problem now.
Fix it. Fix it fast.
I inhale paper-dust and cheap library air and force my mouth into something that should sound reasonable. Crisp. Adult. The voice I use with group projects when everyone’s spiraling. “This is a library,” I say, like I’m reading a rule off a laminated sign. “If you need to take a call, there’s literally a hallway. Or outside.”
It comes out clipped. Too neat. Each word stacks like bullet points. I can hear myself getting sharper, and instead of stopping, I keep going: because stopping feels like losing.
“And maybe,” I add, quieter but somehow worse, “don’t put it on speaker. Some of us are trying to study.”
Some of us. Like I’m the spokesperson for Every Responsible Person Here.
My grip on the pen is white-knuckled. My pulse is loud in my ears. I can’t tell if I’m trying to be fair. Or trying to put him back in his place where he can’t make me look messy.
Something in my tone, my calm, managerial little “some of us”, lands like I’ve stepped on a wire.
Minh’s jaw flexes. The smile disappears. His fingers tighten around his phone, knuckles whitening, like he’s trying to crush the screen into silence. And I see it, just for a flicker: not cocky athlete Minh, but a boy with a busted knee and a deadline he can’t outrun. A boy who hears “rules” and translates it into “you’re disposable.”
He pushes off the table too fast; his weight catches wrong and he covers it with anger.
“You think I don’t know it’s a library?” he snaps, voice jumping an octave, cutting clean through the hush. “You think I’m doing this for fun? They’re tracking my rehab like it’s a damn attendance sheet.” He lifts the phone like evidence. “One missed session and I’m nothing.”
Something in me snaps: not loud, not messy, just razor-clean. “Must be nice,” I say, and my voice is too steady, too specific. “You can yell in a library and still get excused because Coach will call it ‘pressure.’ Anyone else misses a deadline and it’s ‘personal responsibility.’ You miss rehab and it’s ‘support.’” The words land. I realize I’ve just handed them a headline.
The room seals shut around us. Minh’s mouth parts like something real is about to come out (an apology, a confession, anything) but his eyes flick to the tables and the truth shutters down. I swallow the shake in my throat and go into emergency mode: counting witnesses, clocking the girl with the NHS lanyard, the auntie-looking volunteer by the copier. This is already turning into a version of us neither of us can control.
It starts with a screenshot: someone’s mom forwarding an email like it’s evidence in a trial. Subject line in all caps, as if the district might miss it otherwise: CONCERN: ATHLETIC ELIGIBILITY & ACADEMIC INTEGRITY. By lunch, it’s already a rumor with legs.
I hear it first in the library test-prep corner where the air always smells like dry-erase markers and panic. Two juniors whisper over a SAT book, eyes darting like they’re afraid the trophies in the case can hear. “A booster parent,” one says, like that explains the entire ecosystem. Like money with a logo on it doesn’t get to talk.
By seventh period, teachers are using the word “audit” with a fake-calm smile. Like it’s a normal thing to tell teenagers that adults are going to comb through their lives and decide whose effort counts. On the hallway bulletin board, the AP Honor Roll poster is curling at the corners, and someone has already taped a new flyer over it: Academic Compliance = Student Success. Same energy as a threat wrapped in a bow.
The thing about Westbrook is that we love a crisis as long as it’s procedural. If someone’s struggling, it’s messy. If someone’s struggling and we can make a spreadsheet about it, it’s “proactive.”
Within days, it’s not just the usual suspects. Kids with Ds who are always “turning it around.” It’s everyone on the edge. Every athlete who missed an assignment because they were on a bus. Every kid whose gradebook is a graveyard of zeros labeled “late.” Every injured player who can’t distract people with touchdowns anymore. Suddenly, being borderline isn’t a private problem; it’s a potential headline the school wants to choke off before it breathes.
I watch coaches hovering in doorways, too friendly, too attentive. I watch counselors close their office doors like they’re hiding oxygen. And I can feel the whole building shifting: like we’re all holding our breath, waiting to see who gets labeled a risk.
Westbrook’s response hits like a fire drill nobody practiced for: fast, loud, and designed to look responsible in front of whoever wrote that email. A new “peer accountability” initiative appears overnight: announced in a chirpy all-staff memo, printed in color like that makes it kinder. It isn’t optional. It isn’t even pretending to be.
There are rules stacked on rules. Weekly grade screenshots: actual proof, not “I’m doing better, Coach, trust me.” Attendance sheets with time stamps and initials like we’re clocking into a job. Improvement plans with bullet points that read like confessionals: what you did wrong, what you’ll do to fix it, what you’ll never do again. Everything needs a student signature at the bottom, because apparently teenagers are more credible when we sign our own surveillance. Then an adult countersign, because adults don’t trust ink unless it comes with authority.
They call it “support.” It feels like being wrapped in tape. The kind that tightens when you move.
The paperwork doesn’t stay in a folder the way normal school forms do, abandoned at the bottom of a backpack until someone’s mom finds it months later. This stuff moves. It has a route. We fill it out in pen like it matters, like ink is morality, and then it gets scanned, timestamped, uploaded. Sent to the athletic director’s office in neat little packets that say: Look, we handled it. Look, we’re responsible. Look, no one can accuse us of letting “those kids” slide.
Support, but with receipts.
I can practically see the binders lined up in some locked cabinet, names tabbed like evidence. Progress tracked, absences explained, excuses minimized. The school doesn’t want messy stories. It wants documentation that can stand up in a meeting.
They tap me to run it, dressed up as “student leadership” like it’s a sash I should be proud to wear. Coordinate the pairings. Reserve the rooms. Text reminders that sound friendly but are basically summons. Chase down signatures from kids who don’t want to be seen needing help and adults who want proof they “did something.” Keep the documentation airtight: so no one can call it optics.
Minh Nguyen’s name pops up on the flagged spreadsheet like a bruise blooming, there, sudden and ugly against all the neat columns. Injured. Benched. GPA “monitor.” The kind of labels adults slap on when they’re pretending to be concerned but really just preparing a file. Without touchdowns to buffer him, he’s just risk: a scholarship kid with a limp and a narrative someone else can rewrite.
The flagged list isn’t a list so much as a trapdoor. One minute I’m color-coding volunteer shifts and pretending I’m not nauseous from my third coffee, and the next I’m staring at names that come with footnotes. Eligibility. Intervention. Monitor. Words that mean adults are already drafting the story they’ll tell about you if you don’t perform correctly.
Minh Nguyen is the loudest one, even on paper.
I open my calendar like I can brute-force time into behaving. NHS coverage is a jigsaw puzzle. Everyone has robotics, band, work, “family stuff” they don’t explain. Athletics has its own gravitational pull: film study, treatment, meetings, booster nonsense. Rehab blocks are non-negotiable because they’re medically backed, which means they’re the rare thing in this school that gets respected without being questioned.
Of course the only overlap is a stupid, razor-thin window right before physical therapy. Thirty-five minutes. Not even a full period. Just enough time to look like we tried.
The room the system spits out is one I didn’t even know existed. Not a real classroom. More like a storage room that got tired of being storage and someone slapped desks into it for “overflow.” It’s tucked beside the athletic training room, down a hallway that smells like bleach and sweat and that lemony disinfectant they use to pretend bodies don’t leak.
The walls are bare except for a fading poster about concussion symptoms and a paper sign taped to the door: PEER ACADEMIC SUPPORT. Like a warning. Like a joke.
I stand there with my clipboard and the attendance sheet, listening to the muffled thump of someone dropping weights somewhere nearby, the squeak of sneakers on polished floor. Every sound feels like it’s measuring me. Like if I mess up the schedule, it won’t just be “oops”. It’ll be proof that I wasn’t actually as responsible as everyone thought.
My phone buzzes with a reminder I set for myself anyway. Because if this goes sideways, it won’t be Minh who gets called “disappointing.” It’ll be the girl who was supposed to have it handled.
I check the room number again on my phone even though I’m already standing in front of the door. C-114B. The “B” is the kind of detail that ruins you. One wrong hallway turn and suddenly it’s, Oh, Nhi didn’t show, as if I’m a flake, as if my whole personality isn’t basically a laminated checklist.
The sign on the door is crooked. PEER ACADEMIC SUPPORT in thick black marker that’s already bleeding into the paper fibers. Someone taped it up in a hurry and now it’s my job to make it look intentional.
I straighten it anyway. Like that fixes anything.
Inside, the room is cold in that institutional way, fluorescents, scuffed desks, the faint smell of disinfectant drifting from the training room next door. I set my clipboard down and line up the attendance sheet, the progress log, the stupid little “goals” form the vice principal insists on, because optics love paperwork.
My stomach does that tight fold it’s been doing lately, like it’s bracing for impact. I picture adults in an office, voices lowered, my name used like a cautionary example.
So I check the time. Again. Twenty minutes early. Like punctuality can be armor.
Minh shows up three minutes late, which somehow feels deliberate. The door bumps the wall and he limps in like the hallway personally offended him: knee wrapped, jaw tight, backpack half-zipped with papers sticking out like he lost a fight with his own schedule. He doesn’t look at the PEER ACADEMIC SUPPORT sign. He looks at me, then at my clipboard, like I’m the one who taped it there.
“Let’s make this quick,” he says, already dropping into a chair with the controlled care of someone trying not to show pain.
I keep my pen steady. “You need to sign in.”
His laugh is quiet and mean. “I don’t need a babysitter. I need a signature. Whatever gets them off my back.”
The rules make the room feel smaller, like the fluorescents are pressing down. If Minh skips, it auto-triggers a report. And if my logs aren’t perfect, the whole initiative looks fake. Guess whose name gets attached to “mismanaged”? Not the vice principal. Mine.
There isn’t a trapdoor for either of us. If Minh decides to ghost, it ricochets. If I try to swap in another NHS kid, it becomes a story about me cutting corners, me being “too busy,” like responsibility is optional. So we fall into a routine: twice a week, same cold room, same clock, pretending we chose this.
The vice principal doesn’t bother pretending this is about learning.
He stands at the front of the counseling conference room with a slide deck like we’re a startup and not a public school held together by donated granola bars and kids running on four hours of sleep. The slide behind him is all hard lines and bold font: TARGETS. TIMELINES. ACCOUNTABILITY. I can feel the NHS cord at my neck like a leash.
“Recruiters,” he says, tapping the screen with a capped marker, “are looking at the whole picture. Eligibility profile. Trends. We can’t have surprises.”
Surprises. Like a seventeen-year-old’s brain and life are supposed to behave on a neat upward graph.
He clicks again. Minh Nguyen’s name appears in a table: no photo, no context, just two columns shaded red. Algebra II: C-. AP U.S. History: C. My stomach tightens on instinct, like I’ve been called out too, even though my name isn’t on the screen. Yet.
“These two,” he says, as if they’re minor infections, “need to be brought up by the next progress check. At minimum. Clean. Consistent.”
Someone laughs softly behind me: one of the assistant coaches, probably. Like this is easy. Like all you do is add effort and watch the numbers obey.
“And,” the vice principal continues, voice bright in that way adults get when they’re about to make a threat sound reasonable, “any dip becomes documented. Not handled privately. We have to demonstrate intervention.”
Intervention. Like we’re putting out a fire that might embarrass the school, not helping a kid who might be drowning.
I scribble notes because my hand needs something to do besides shake. Documented means emails, signatures, a paper trail. It means if Minh’s grades don’t move fast enough, it’s not just his problem; it becomes a file with dates and names and what was done, what wasn’t done, who failed to “follow through.”
The vice principal looks right at me when he says, “We need a student leader to verify compliance.”
Verify. Like I’m a witness in court, not a classmate.
They hand me the clipboard like it’s a compliment.
“National Honor Society officer,” the vice principal says, smooth and loud enough for the counselors to hear. “Detail-oriented. Reliable.”
Reliable. Translation: convenient scapegoat with neat handwriting.
My name goes at the top of the packet, Peer Academic Support Initiative, and suddenly I’m not just “helping.” I’m the official verifier. Attendance collector. Log keeper. The person who initials each session like I’m approving a loan. There’s a box for weekly progress, a box for teacher comments, a box for my “narrative summary,” like I’m supposed to turn a human being into bullet points that sound reassuring.
I can already see the email chain if this turns ugly: subject lines with words like COMPLIANCE and FOLLOW-UP, my initials circled in red in some forwarded PDF. If the dates don’t line up, if a teacher forgets to reply, if Minh decides to make a point by not showing: none of that will read like “teenagers are messy.”
It’ll read like I was sloppy.
And sloppy is the one thing I’m not allowed to be.
Minh gets pulled aside after practice that isn’t really practice for him anymore and whatever conversation happens, it lands in his face like a rule, not a suggestion. Participation isn’t optional when you’re benched. Not if you want the adults to keep saying “unfortunate” instead of “undisciplined.” Not if you want your injury filed under bad luck instead of bad judgment. So he’s ordered into my little program with the kind of smile athletes use when they’re swallowing panic.
And the signatures, my initials, my dates, become this stupid, fragile currency. Proof he’s compliant. Proof he’s trying. Leverage he can’t afford to misplace, because without it, the story rewrites him.
The weekly requirements are surgical. Minh needs my initials like stamps on a passport. I need him to do enough real work that when I email his teachers, their replies don’t contradict my neat fiction. If he half-asses it, my handwriting becomes perjury.
We don’t say it out loud, but a shared goal snaps into place the second I cap my pen. His grades have to climb (fast, clean, undeniable) or the rumors turn into “concerns,” and “concerns” turn into consequences. I need his work to be real enough that my logs aren’t a pretty lie. He needs my initials like oxygen. If the story slips, someone chooses a villain.
I get there eight minutes early because eight minutes early is the only kind of early that counts in a building where adults love paper trails more than people.
The classroom they picked is one of those forgotten side rooms wedged near the athletic training hall. Close enough that the air always smells faintly like disinfectant and sweat, like the school is trying to sanitize desperation. The fluorescent lights buzz with that thin, headachey electricity. I unlock it with the borrowed key the vice principal pressed into my palm like a favor I didn’t ask for.
First thing: I make it look official.
I drag desks into a clean line, not because it matters, but because it makes my chest feel less tight. I square the chairs. I wipe a faint ring of old boba off the teacher’s desk with a tissue from my backpack: because of course I have tissues. I clip the sign-in sheet to a folder, the kind with a hard spine, because flimsy folders scream “optional.” I set my planner open beside it, pen aligned with the edge like I’m about to perform surgery.
My phone goes face-up. Timer app ready. Twenty-five minute focus blocks, five minute breaks. Theoretically humane.
I write the date in block letters at the top of the sheet, MM/DD/YYYY, clean and unarguable. Then I underline it. Then, because my brain is a small anxious animal that believes in rituals, I underline it again.
Proof later, if someone asks.
I’m here. I’m prepared. I’m doing my part.
The door stays shut, but my eyes keep flicking to it anyway like I’m waiting for a pop quiz or a car crash. It’s stupid. It’s just one athlete with a bruised ego and a busted knee. It’s just a signature program dressed up as “peer support” so the school can say they care while keeping eligibility math tidy.
Still.
I roll my shoulders back into the posture my mom likes. I inhale, tasting dry marker and industrial cleaner. I check the timer. I check the sign-in sheet. I check the door again.
My leg bounces under the desk. I stop it with my own hand, like I can physically pin down the part of me that wants to run.
Minh limps in at 3:[^12] like he’s late on purpose, like tardiness is a personality trait instead of a choice. His knee is wrapped in beige athletic tape and he’s got one of those crinkly blue ice packs tucked under it, already sweating through the plastic. He doesn’t look at me: he looks at the room like it insulted him first.
His jaw is locked so tight I can practically hear enamel complaining.
He drags a desk out with his good leg, the metal legs screeching against the tile, and drops into it with an exhale that’s just a little too loud to be accidental. Not quite a sigh. More like a performance: See? I showed up. Clap.
He slides his phone onto the desk face-down, a dare. A boundary. A threat. Then his eyes cut past my shoulder to the hallway by the training room, like he’s expecting Coach to swoop in and rescue him from… what, worksheets?
My pen pauses mid-air.
“We doing this,” he says, voice flat, “or are you just here to take attendance?”
I don’t bite. I just slide the packet across the scarred laminate like it’s evidence, not homework. His name is already on the top in my neat block letters, MINH NGUYEN, because if I don’t make it impossible to argue with, someone will try. I tap the first page with my pen. “Start with the practice set. I need to see what you actually know.”
He gives me a lazy shrug, flips his pencil like it’s a coin trick, and starts circling answers without even tracking the questions. Like guessing is a personality.
My throat tightens. I lean forward anyway, close enough to smell mint and ice pack cold. I point once. “That’s not how you solve it.” My voice comes out the way it does in NHS meetings: calm, efficient, done.
His chair grates back an inch, a warning sound. “I’m not your little tutoring project,” he says, voice flaring too quick, like he’s talking to someone who isn’t in the room. I keep my eyes on the paper anyway, explain it again, slower, like that will keep my pulse from climbing. He lets out a laugh that’s all teeth. “This is community service for athletes. You get your hours, I get my signature, everyone goes home.”
My pen goes rigid between my fingers. I let my polite face stay on, like a mask you don’t tug at in public, and reach for my folder instead. Attendance log. Eligibility checklist. Boxes, lines, consequences.
“It’s not personal,” I say, steady enough to convince a stranger. “But if you don’t do the work, I document it. If you don’t comply, it’s your name on the report.”
His eyes drop to the form like it can bite. I slide the packet back to him anyway and click my timer on.
Minh drags his chair back with a slow, deliberate scrape, the kind that announces him without him having to say anything. He stretches out like a cat in a sun patch, too long, too loose, like the classroom belongs to him and not the stack of forms on my side of the table.
His pencil hovers over the worksheet, not touching it. Not even pretending.
“So,” he says, and the word comes out lazy, almost bored. “If I just sit here and vibe, you still sign me in?”
My jaw tightens so hard it clicks. Vibe. Like this is a podcast. Like I’m an unpaid intern in whatever PR campaign the vice principal is running to keep Westbrook’s trophy cases shiny.
I keep my eyes on the attendance sheet because if I look at his face, I’ll give him what he wants. I flip a page in my folder with the tips of my fingers, precise, quiet. The paper makes a soft shhk sound that feels like control.
There’s a checklist. There’s always a checklist.
He watches my hands, not the worksheet. I can feel it like heat.
His knee is angled out under the table, brace peeking from under athletic shorts like a secret he’s daring me to acknowledge. The injury everyone whispers about, the one they build excuses around. He taps his heel once, impatient or anxious, and the chair vibrates. My coffee breath tastes like pennies.
Part of me wants to say: If you want to “vibe,” go do it somewhere else. Part of me (smaller, meaner) wants to ask if college recruiters also accept vibes.
Instead I breathe through my nose and make my voice the same tone I use when adults are listening.
“You’re marked present when you participate,” I say, mild enough to be harmless. I tilt my pen toward the printed line without looking up. “If you’re unclear on what that means, it’s printed.”
Silence, then his low chuckle, like I’ve told a joke on purpose.
“Damn,” he says softly. “You talk like a contract.”
I don’t look up. Looking up is how you give someone a foothold.
Instead I smooth the corner of the attendance log like it can iron out my blood pressure, turn a page with the careful pads of my fingers, and let the paper make that soft, obedient sound. There. The checklist. Black ink, bullet points, a system that doesn’t care if you’re varsity-famous or falling apart.
I tap the line with my pen. One clean, measured point. Like a metronome. Like a gavel.
“You’re marked present when you participate,” I say. My voice comes out even, almost sweet, the kind counselors love because it sounds reasonable. It’s the tone you use when you’re trying not to scream in a fluorescent-lit room.
He doesn’t move his pencil. He doesn’t even fake it. He just watches me like I’m the assignment.
“If you’re unclear on what that means,” I add, still not lifting my eyes, “it’s printed.”
My stomach twists, waiting for the pushback. Waiting for him to make this about power, about ego, about whatever story he needs to tell himself.
His chair shifts. A quiet scrape, closer. Like he’s testing distance. Like he thinks proximity is leverage.
Minh leans in like he’s about to share something private, like we’re not in a dead classroom with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. His gaze darts to my timer, twenty-eight minutes left, like it personally offended him, then lands on my face with that sharp, practiced confidence that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Do you ever. “. Breathe?”
The question hits wrong, not because it’s clever, but because it’s too close to something I’ve been avoiding naming. My lungs lock for half a second just to prove him right.
I don’t give him that satisfaction. I keep my shoulders square, my spine perfect, my expression neutral.
But my pulse jumps anyway, loud in my ears, like it’s trying to answer him.
My pen taps once (clean, controlled) like punctuation I can hide behind. I let my eyes lift to his, steady enough to pass for calm, even though my ribs feel too tight. “Do you ever,” I say, keeping his lazy cadence, “read the instructions before you start negotiating your way out of them?” The corner of his mouth twitches like he’s amused. Like he’s not.
The air goes tight anyway, like the room has opinions. I keep my voice bright because footsteps could pass any second and I refuse to be the story an auntie tells. Minh drags his pencil like it’s a punishment, then “forgets” a term he absolutely knows, mangling it on purpose. I correct him, crisp and clinical. His smile says managed. Mine says: not today.
I keep my binder hugged to my chest like it can hold my organs in place. The plastic cover is warm from my hands, edges biting into my forearm where I’ve gripped too hard. The hallway by the training room smells like industrial cleaner and that weird sweet-rubbery thing from athletic tape. Fluorescent lights flicker overhead, turning everything a little too sharp.
My eyes do the thing they always do: clock, door, clock again. There’s a bell schedule posted crooked on the wall and my brain tries to solve it like a math problem. If we start now, if he doesn’t stall, if I don’t have to chase him down later for a signature, if no one walks by and clocks the scene. Always measuring. Always calculating what this costs me in minutes, in energy, in reputation.
I walk like I’m supposed to be here. Like I’m not dragging a varsity problem behind me. The classroom door at the end of the short hall sits shut and innocent, the little window dark. I can already picture myself inside: whiteboard, timer, attendance log, my handwriting neat enough to pass as unbothered.
The training room door swings open somewhere behind us and a blast of noise spills into the hall. Reflexively, my shoulders pull back, chin up. A posture that says: nothing to see.
I don’t look at Minh, not yet. I don’t give him the satisfaction of knowing I’m hyperaware of the way his presence changes the air. But I feel him anyway, like a shadow that insists on having weight.
“Two minutes,” I say, to the clock more than to him, because I can’t stop myself. “We start on time.”
It comes out clipped, managerial. The kind of voice adults reward.
My grip tightens on the binder, and I hate that my first thought is not about him learning anything. It’s about the log. The signature. The paper trail that proves I did my job if this turns into someone else’s mess.
Minh trails after me with that loose-shouldered swagger like he’s walking into a highlight reel instead of detention-lite. It’s a performance: easy grin, lazy pace, the whole “I don’t care” vibe he wears the way some people wear cologne. Except the hall dips into that stupid single stair step near the training room, and the act glitches.
His foot lands wrong. Not dramatic, not enough for anyone to gasp, but enough for me to see it: the smallest hitch in his rhythm, like a scratched CD. His hand slides to the rail and stays there a fraction too long, fingers curling around the cold metal like it’s the only honest thing he’s touched all day. His jaw goes tight, teeth pressing together, the muscle in his cheek jumping once. He swallows hard. Like he’s trying to shove the pain back down his throat before it turns into a sound.
I keep walking because I’m not his nurse and he’s not my responsibility, except he kind of is, on paper. My eyes flick forward, my posture stays perfect, but my brain is already cataloging: limp disguised as swagger, pain disguised as attitude. Of course. That’s how everyone here survives.
Inside, the classroom air is colder, stale like dry-erase dust and old carpet. I flip the lights on, drag a chair out with one controlled scrape, and click my clipboard open like it’s a shield. Attendance log. Date. Time. His name already sitting there in my head like a typo I can’t delete.
I start writing fast. Then my pen stalls on the curve of an M. The ink pools, a tiny bruise. My fingers do this stupid, microscopic shake, like my body is laughing at me.
I press harder. The paper dimples under the tip. Force the line straight. Force my hand steady. Force my breathing quiet. If I can keep my handwriting perfect, maybe everything else will stop slipping.
He acts like nothing happened. A smooth little pivot, weight sliding off the bad knee with the kind of choreography you only learn by hurting in public. Still, his breath snags. Barely there, like he thinks I won’t hear it over the hum of the lights. Energy crackles under his skin with nowhere to go. It spills out anyway: a hard exhale, fingers flexing, his foot twitching like it wants to bounce and remembers it can’t.
I drift too close to the whiteboard until the tray bumps my hip, like I’m trying to merge with the glossy surface and disappear. Shoulder squares. Chin lifts. Armor on. The pinch between my brows digs in deeper, a thumbprint of a headache I’ve been pretending isn’t there. We trade a couple cheap shots and then the silence swells, packed with his grimace and my shaking pen.
Minh is already there when I arrive, planted at the corner table like he picked it off a tactical map. Back to the wall, line of sight to the entrance, knee stretched out under the chair like it’s fragile glass. His backpack is on the inside, not dangling in the aisle. There’s a half-melted iced coffee sweating onto a napkin, untouched except for a single sip line on the lid.
For a second I hesitate, because I’ve spent the last week telling myself he’ll flake. He’ll show up late with some loud excuse. He’ll make it a joke so nobody can see how scared he is.
Instead, he looks… contained. Not relaxed (Minh doesn’t do relaxed) but prepped. His jaw works like he’s chewing on something he refuses to swallow. Foot tapping, yes, but it’s the kind of impatience that comes from wanting to start, not wanting to leave.
He glances up when he catches my reflection in the window, and that guarded smile flickers on like a reflex.
“You’re on time,” he says, like it’s an accusation.
“Miracles happen,” I reply, because if I say anything softer my voice might crack. My stomach is doing its usual tightrope act: caffeine, sleep debt, and the fear of being seen.
He doesn’t ask about my day. I don’t ask about his knee. We both pretend we’re above small talk, like it’s extra credit we’re too busy to earn.
I slide into the chair across from him and set my notebook down, aligning it with the table edge without thinking. Control the little things. Don’t let the bigger ones eat you alive.
His eyes flick to my hands, then away fast, like he caught himself noticing. Like noticing is dangerous.
“So,” he says, rolling his shoulders once, like he’s about to sprint. “How do you want to do this?”
Not can you do this for me. Not tell me what to write. It lands weirdly in my chest. I exhale through my nose. “We follow the rubric. Exactly. No drama.”
His mouth twitches. “You’re the drama expert.”
“Shut up,” I say, but there’s less bite than usual. And when he doesn’t push it, when he just turns back to the table like work is the only safe language we share, I realize I might actually get through this without wanting to throw my laptop into the nearest trash can.
His laptop is already awake, screen angled so the glare doesn’t hit it. Like he’s thought about everything that could ruin his momentum. A shared doc is open, not blank, not “we’ll figure it out,” but structured: Title. Claim. Context. Evidence. Analysis. Counterargument. Conclusion. The headings sit there like scaffolding, like he’s building something that won’t collapse if someone breathes wrong.
Next to it, a stack of printouts is squared so perfectly it makes my fingers itch. Rubric on top, of course, highlighted in thick yellow strokes that don’t just mark. They patrol. Criteria boxes lit up like checkpoints: thesis clarity, integration of sources, sophistication, MLA formatting. He’s even written tiny notes in the margins. Question marks, arrows, short commands to himself. Define. Connect. Don’t assume.
I should feel annoyed, like he’s trying to control this the way he controls his body on a track. Instead, something hot and uncomfortable loosens in my chest. Prepared means he’s scared. Prepared means he’s taking me seriously.
Or worse. Prepared means he can’t afford to be anything else.
He doesn’t look up right away, and I hate how that relieves me. Like eye contact is a pop quiz I didn’t study for. He’s locked in, clicking between tabs with the kind of focus teachers mistake for maturity. PDF. Article. Another PDF. The cursor moves fast, decisive, dragging a quote into the Evidence box and snapping it into place like it belongs there. He switches to the rubric, highlights a line, then back to the source, cross-checking like he’s afraid the words might betray him if he turns his back.
When he underlines a sentence on the printout, the pen squeaks (sharp, almost angry) like he’s trying to carve certainty into paper. His jaw tightens on the squeak, then releases. He scribbles a note in the margin: link to claim. Not ask Nhi. Not let her handle it.
The only tell that he’s actually waiting for me is his foot, bouncing under the table in tight, irritated bursts, tap, tap, stop, like he’s trying to burn off a sprint he isn’t allowed to run. Everything else is locked down: papers squared, tabs labeled, highlighter caps lined up. The tapping feels like impatience on a tiny leash, strangling itself quiet.
When he finally looks up, it’s not that smug, crowd-ready grin. It’s flat, direct, almost… careful. He pushes the packet toward me with two fingers like he’s sliding a truce across enemy lines, rubric, articles, his notes, no commentary, no “my bad,” no charm. Just this silent, stubborn message: I showed up. I did the work. Don’t make me say it.
I brace for the usual Minh Nguyen production: the softened voice, the careful “Yes, ma’am,” the self-deprecating laugh that makes teachers want to pat his shoulder and excuse whatever didn’t get done. Borrowed humility, rented accountability. The whole “I’m trying, I swear” energy that magically appears when an adult is within ten feet and a rumor is within one.
It’s a script I know too well, because I’ve watched it work.
Athletes get to be “promising.” They get to be “still figuring it out.” Their mistakes are “growing pains.” If I mess up, it’s “uncharacteristic.” If I fall behind, it’s “concerning.” If I ask for help, it’s “maybe you’re taking on too much,” said with that thin smile that means, but also don’t take on less.
So I tell myself this is just him doing damage control. Rehab’s got him stuck, his knee’s got him benched, and suddenly he needs to look like more than a limp and a highlight reel. He needs a paper trail of responsibility he can hand to anyone who asks, See? I’m not an attitude problem. I’m a good kid. I’m coachable. I’m scholarship-safe.
My fingers tighten around my tote strap until the canvas bites my palm. I can already feel the familiar irritation lining up in my chest like pens on my desk: I’ll have to reword everything. I’ll have to make his vague thoughts sound like “analysis.” I’ll have to keep my voice even while he jokes about how his brain is “fried,” like it’s cute.
And the worst part is. Because that’s what I do. I preempt disaster. I patch holes before anyone notices there were holes.
I slide into the chair across from him, spine straight like posture is armor, and I don’t let my face show anything. Not annoyance, not pity, not curiosity. Just neutral.
I reach for the packet like it’s going to burn me, like the moment I touch it I’ll confirm what I already “know” about him.
She opens the packet anyway, prepared to find blank margins and a halfhearted highlight job that she’ll have to translate into an A for both of them.
I crack the packet open like I’m unsealing evidence, already annoyed at my future self: at the hours I’m going to spend turning his laziness into something presentable. I expect the usual: one fluorescent swipe across a paragraph, maybe a sad little “important” written near the top, margins wide and empty like he never met a thought he wanted to keep.
The first page stops me.
Not because it’s pretty. Because it’s… intense. Pencil pressed hard enough to score the paper, lines everywhere, but not messy. Organized like he’s mapping a field. He’s got the thesis boxed. He’s labeled each paragraph with a one-word function, “context,” “turn,” “pushback”, like he’s trying to learn the skeleton instead of just the skin. There’s a note in the margin that says, textbook summary oversimplifies this. Author’s actually doing X, and for one humiliating second my brain stalls on the fact that he caught it before I did.
I flip another page, slower. My throat tightens, the way it does right before a test I’m supposed to ace.
I glance up at him, ready to accuse him of copying, and all I get is that flat stare, daring me to say it.
Instead, his pages are crowded with tight, disciplined notes: no neon highlighter haze, no “idk” excuses. He brackets claims like he’s fencing them in so they can’t run away. He circles transitions and draws arrows between paragraphs, tracking the argument’s movement the way I’ve seen athletes diagram plays on whiteboards. Counterarguments are underlined, then stabbed with little margin questions: Why does she assume this? What if the opposite is true? Like he’s actually pushing back, not just collecting quotes to sprinkle like glitter.
My irritation stutters, trips over itself. This isn’t decorative effort. This is someone trying to learn the rules of a game he’s already being judged for losing.
I hate how much I respect it.
I stop on the paragraph where our handout smooths everything into a clean little moral, like history ever behaves. Next to it, Minh’s handwriting cuts in: Not exactly. He’s written the author’s actual line out, word for word, and circled the phrase that twists the whole point sideways. No jokes. No cushioning. Just a blunt correction and a page number, like he’s daring the paper to argue back.
Something in my chest shifts, not soft exactly. More like a dial getting turned against my will. I came in ready to catch him in a performance, ready to be the responsible one so he could stay the charming disaster everyone excuses. But this isn’t that. This is him showing up like he can’t afford to fail. Like failing has teeth.
I uncap the marker and angle my wrist the way my math teacher drilled into us, steady, deliberate, like even my handwriting should look calm. The tip hits the whiteboard with a soft tsk and then… nothing. Just a ghost of gray, a line so faint it might as well be my imagination.
I try again. Same useless squeak, like the board is protesting me personally.
Of course. Of course the one tool I need decides to die right when I’m trying to keep this study session from turning into a headline in someone’s group chat. Honor student loses it on injured athlete, featuring my face mid-eye twitch.
I press harder, my fingers tightening around cheap plastic. The line darkens by a fraction, but it’s still pathetic: more smudge than symbol. My careful calm slips at the edges. I can feel it, like a seam popping.
“Seriously?” I mutter, mostly to myself, because talking to the marker feels safer than talking to him.
Heat climbs up my neck. I’m not even mad at the marker. I’m mad at the way my brain translates tiny inconveniences into proof. Proof that I’m not actually in control, that I’m one dried-out marker away from falling apart in public. Proof that I can’t afford to look stupid, not here, not when everyone already assumes I’m effortless and he’s a mess.
I scrub at the board with the side of my hand, trying to clear the faint marks, and it just leaves a cloudy smear. Great. Now it looks like I attempted something and failed, which is basically my worst nightmare in dry-erase form.
I twist the cap back on too hard. It clicks with a sharp little snap, satisfying in the way slamming a door is satisfying when you don’t have permission to slam doors.
I glance at the marker tray, as if a miracle will appear there. Two other markers sit like dead fish, uncapped and crusted at the tips. Someone’s idea of “community supplies.”
My mouth opens to ask if he has one. Then I stop. I hate asking. I hate needing. I hate that my pride is as stupid and loud as everyone else’s.
Minh’s eyes track the board, then my hand, like he’s watching a play break down. His gaze drops to the stalled equation like he’s clocking a missed step in practice; without comment, he reaches into his backpack and pulls out a new marker.
Minh’s gaze drops to the stalled equation like it’s a bad rep caught on film: something small but unacceptable. His jaw flexes once, not annoyed at me exactly, more like at the idea of wasted time. He doesn’t say use mine or did you seriously come unarmed, which is what I’m braced for, the little jab that makes everything feel like a scoreboard.
Instead he just moves.
His backpack hits the tabletop with a soft thud, zipper rasping open. I catch the organized guts of it in a quick flash: folders squared, a spiral notebook with neon tabs, a printout clipped to a corner like he actually plans ahead. He digs once, like he knows exactly where it is, and comes up with a marker so new it still looks glossy.
He tests the tip on the edge of his notes, a quick swipe, then angles it toward me.
The motion is so practiced it almost hurts to watch, like he’s been trained to solve problems before anyone can accuse him of making them. Like he can’t afford to waste a second looking like he doesn’t belong here.
He presses the marker into my palm like he’s passing off a relay baton. No eye contact. No little “here you go,” no opening for me to say thank you and make it weird, like gratitude is a trap that turns into debt. His fingers are warm from whatever pocket he kept it in, and for a second my skin registers the contact before my brain can translate it into a whole moral failing.
I curl my hand around it, surprised by how clean it feels. New plastic, dry and un-smudged. Minh is already looking back down at the board, at the half-born equation, like the exchange didn’t happen. Like this isn’t kindness. It’s logistics. It’s him refusing to let me derail, the same way he refuses to let himself look unprepared.
Then his hand slides again, no drama, no commentary, and two pens and a neon highlighter glide across the tabletop toward me. He lines them up against the edge of my notebook like he’s setting starting blocks, parallel, precise. The message lands in my ribs before my pride can deflect it: he didn’t just show up. He came stocked, like he expected me to run out.
I freeze for a half-beat, like my brain needs to verify what just happened: not a flex, not a joke, not a performance for whoever might walk by. Just…prepared. Quietly. On purpose. My irritation has nowhere clean to land, so it leaks out into something steadier, unfamiliar, almost infuriatingly useful. I uncap the marker and keep going, writing like the world isn’t tipping.
Minh’s pencil hovers over the margin like a needle over a record that doesn’t want to drop. He’s already annotated the passage, tiny, cramped notes in the corners like he’s afraid the page will judge him for taking up space, but his hand stalls at the prompt.
He taps the paper once. Not impatient. Not dramatic. Just…a signal to himself.
“Okay,” he says, low enough that it feels like he’s trying not to summon a witness. “What is this actually grading?”
I keep my eyes on my own notebook because if I look up, I’ll read too much into the way he said actually. Like he’s been burned by rules that pretended to be simple. “It’s grading your response to the prompt,” I say automatically, the robot answer I’ve repeated to freshmen I tutor.
His pencil makes a short, controlled line, then stops again. “No. Like. “Argument? Evidence? Or is it just…sounding smart. Like writing a bunch of big words so the teacher thinks you get it.”
There’s no smirk. No lazy “just tell me what to do.” It’s almost…wary. Like he’s trying to step around a trap he’s already fallen into before, where someone decides he’s dumb because he asked the wrong question.
I feel something in my chest shift, irritatingly soft. “They want a claim,” I say, flipping the rubric toward him. “A specific one. Not ‘the author uses symbolism’. Everyone can say that. You have to say what the symbolism does and why it matters.”
He leans in, eyes scanning fast, not showy-fast, just practiced. “So if I have the evidence but my wording is. His mouth twitches like he’s deciding whether to take the hit. “Yeah.”
“It doesn’t have to be poetic,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than my brain feels. “It has to be clear. You can write like you talk. Just…organized. Point, proof, explanation. Repeat.”
He nods once, like I’ve handed him something he can actually use. Then, quieter, almost to the paper: “So they can’t say I didn’t try.”
The question isn’t flippant, and that’s what throws me. How carefully he packages it, like he’s wrapping glass. Minh doesn’t look at me when he asks, not really. His gaze stays glued to the assignment sheet, the corner of it pinned under his thumb as if paper can bolt. His voice comes out controlled, almost neutral, the way people talk when they’re trying to prove they’re not a problem.
I’ve seen boys ask for help like it’s a dare, like they’re testing how much you’ll do for them. This isn’t that. This is someone measuring each word so it can’t be clipped and replayed later as proof he’s “disrespectful” or “doesn’t care.” Like he’s learned that confusion is only allowed if it’s humble enough.
He points at the prompt without touching it, hovering, careful not to crease anything. “When it says analyze,” he starts, then pauses, swallowing the rest like it might taste like an excuse. “Do they mean…what I think, or what she thinks?”
My brain tries to file him back into the usual categories but none of them fit this posture. This is defense, not swagger. This is strategy.
I start answering like I’m on rails (rubric, thesis statement, quote sandwich, MLA citations, blah blah) because my mouth knows how to do this even when my brain is buzzing. But then I notice he isn’t watching my face for approval. He’s watching my hands. The marker. The way I draw arrows from claim to evidence. The little boxes I make around key verbs like they’re checkpoints.
Like he’s memorizing the safest path through a room full of people ready to call him careless.
I slow down. “Look,” I say, tapping the rubric where it says analysis, not summary. “You’re not mind-reading the author. You’re showing your thinking. That’s what they grade.”
His shoulders drop a millimeter, like permission to exist. “So…show the work,” he mutters, and finally writes.
He doesn’t stop there. His pencil lifts again, hovering like a white flag he refuses to wave. “If two sources, like, say different things,” he asks, eyes fixed on the rubric like it might bite, “am I supposed to make them agree? Or can I say they don’t?” He swallows. “Which one sounds…sloppy. To adults who already think I am.”
It clicks, sudden and sharp: he’s not hunting for a way out. He’s bracing for a verdict. For a teacher’s raised eyebrow, a coach’s “see?” that turns into a rumor that turns into a label. So I stop talking like I’m teaching down and start talking like I’m translating. The unwritten rules, the traps, the parts they pretend are “obvious.” The stuff he can actually control.
I flip my notebook open to a clean page like it’s an operating table. If I make it neat enough, maybe the panic won’t crawl up the edges.
“Okay.” I draw three thick columns and label them before my brain can start negotiating. TERMS. PROMPT. ARGUMENT. Underneath each one, I add a smaller box: CHECK. Like I’m building him a handrail, like I’m building myself one too.
First: terms. I circle the words the prompt thinks are “obvious,” the ones teachers love because they can pretend confusion is a character flaw. I write them out, simple, almost embarrassingly plain. Not dictionary-definition plain. Teacher plain. The kind you can defend if someone tries to act like you’re making stuff up.
Then: map the prompt. I put a star next to the verb. Analyze. Compare. Evaluate. The verb is the whole game and nobody says that out loud. I draw arrows. What the question is actually asking, what it’s not asking, what’s bait. “If it says ‘to what extent,’” I say, tapping the words, “you’re allowed to say ‘some’ and then prove it. You’re not trapped into ‘always’ or ‘never.’”
My voice sounds too calm, like I’m reading instructions to defuse a bomb I’ve defused a hundred times and still don’t trust.
Finally: build the argument. Claim, because. Evidence, because. Analysis, because. I sketch it like a ladder. “You don’t climb if you skip rungs,” I tell him, and the second it leaves my mouth I want to laugh. Because I’m always skipping rungs, I just land and pretend it was on purpose.
I point to the little CHECK boxes. “After each part, you do a ten-second scan. Can you say your claim in one sentence? Can you point to where the quote proves it? If not, you fix it now instead of at midnight when everything feels like it’s screaming.”
My chest tightens on that last word. Midnight. Like it’s a place we both know too well.
Minh doesn’t make a joke. He doesn’t lean back like this is some charity session he’s tolerating. He tracks me the whole time, eyes flicking from my page to his and back like he’s syncing two videos. His pen moves in short, disciplined bursts, not the loopy doodling people do when they’re pretending to listen. It’s more like: yeah. Film study. Like he’s breaking down a play I can’t see.
In the margins he builds his own little code: arrows, brackets, a tiny “??” that lands exactly on the spots teachers love to pretend are neutral. The “however” that means you’d better not sound too confident. The “context” sentence that’s actually a loyalty test: do you know the approved opinion. He circles the rubric language (complexity, nuance, sophistication) like it’s an opponent’s jersey number.
Every time I pause to breathe, he fills the silence by underlining a word I didn’t even think to underline, like he’s mapping where the ground will give way.
It’s irritating. It’s impressive. It makes my stomach twist, because it means he’s not here to be saved.
He’s here to win.
I land the conclusion like I’m setting a glass down on a coaster, careful, practiced, done. My pen stops. I’m already halfway to the next step in my head when Minh’s chair creaks and I feel his gaze finally lift off the paper.
“Why.”
One syllable. No attitude, no smirk. Just a clean blade slid between my sentences.
My first reflex is heat: annoyance at being paused, at being questioned, at the tiny crack it puts in my perfect little outline. Like: because that’s how it’s done. Because the rubric wants it. Because if you don’t, you bleed points.
I swallow it. I force my brain to reverse-engineer myself.
“Because,” I say slowly, “we’re assuming the author’s choice is intentional and connected to the claim. That’s the hinge.” I tap the line I treated like air. “If we can’t show the hinge, it’s just a summary wearing a suit.”
I pause with my pen midair, irritation flaring on instinct. Like he’s daring me to prove I’m not just reciting. I inhale, count it down, and pull the outline apart like a machine. “Okay. The claim rides on one assumption,” I say. “If that assumption’s wrong, this quote stops working.” I circle the weak point. “So what evidence would break it? And if the prompt swerves, we don’t panic. We reroute.”
Minh nods, sharp and quick, like a judge stamping a form, then drags his pen to the margin and draws a clean little arrow. “So if they change this part,” he says, tapping the hinge sentence, “we pivot here.” Not you pivot. We. My instinct is to bristle, control is my oxygen, but it catches. He’s not collecting my answers like trophies. He’s building the map with me.
Minh flips to the passage like he’s about to argue a case in court. His book looks abused in a way mine never does: tabs bristling out of the pages, yellow and blue and one neon pink that’s probably a mistake he couldn’t unsee. Notes crawl along the margins in tight block letters, not the lazy doodles I expected from someone who’s always coasting on charm.
He doesn’t look at me when he asks. He looks at the sentence.
“So,” he says, tapping the line with the cap of his pen, “if the narrator’s unreliable here, why would the author give us this detail right after?”
The question lands clean. No fishing. No “I don’t get it.” No waiting for me to swoop in and do the thinking while he nods along like it’s teamwork. He actually expects an answer: like I’m not a human answer key, like we’re both responsible for getting to the right place.
My automatic response rises anyway, that reflexive little snap of correction: It’s not “why would,” it’s “what effect does,” and also you’re skipping the transition, and also. Hard.
Because he’s already halfway there. The tab he’s pointing to is on the exact paragraph I would’ve flagged. His note in the margin, shift in tone? sympathy manipulation?. Isn’t wrong. It’s not even vague.
I feel my posture go stiff, like my body’s bracing for the usual dynamic where I pull and he resists. But he doesn’t resist. He waits. Patient, which is almost worse. Like he knows I can’t stand dead air.
“It’s a credibility move,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than my pulse. “If the narrator’s making you doubt them, the author drops something concrete so you don’t throw the whole story out. It’s… an anchor.”
Minh’s pen pauses. Then he underlines the detail and writes anchor in the margin, like it’s a drill cue. “So it’s not proof,” he says, quieter. “It’s a leash.”
A laugh almost escapes me because that’s actually good. Dark, but good.
“Yeah,” I admit. “A leash.”
He tries it anyway: of course he does. He leans back in his chair like he’s found a crack in the rules, pen hovering over the page, eyes bright with that same dare-I-can’t-help-it energy I’ve been grinding my teeth over since September.
“But if the prompt says argue,” he starts, dragging the word out, “couldn’t I just, like, pick a side, throw in two quotes, and. Not loud. Just final.
For half a second I brace for the usual. The shrug. The joke. The performative helplessness that makes teachers soften and makes me want to scream because it’s always easier for everyone if I carry the weight.
But Minh doesn’t bristle.
He blinks once, then tilts his head like he’s recalibrating a route, and drops his gaze to the paper. His jaw works, tight and focused, the way it probably does when a coach tells him his form is off. He crosses out the sentence without drama (one clean line) and rewrites it the way I meant, not the way he hoped he could get away with.
When he slides the page back toward me, it’s not perfect.
It’s honest.
When I circle the transition Minh’s mouth twitches. A quick grin flashes and dies like it’s muscle memory, more reflex than flirt, and he lifts both hands an inch off the table in surrender.
“Okay, okay, Coach.”
I should roll my eyes hard enough to sprain something. I do roll them, but it’s lazy, almost fond in a way that annoys me on principle. Because there’s no audience. No teammates to impress, no teacher to charm. Just the two of us and the fluorescent hum and his book bleeding ink.
“Don’t ‘Coach’ me,” I say, sharper than I mean to.
He nods once, already rewriting, like the word didn’t sting and the correction didn’t bruise his pride. Like he’s here to get better, not to win.
He pushes back once, and it’s so controlled it catches me off guard. “No: explain why that’s not evidence,” he says, pen hovering. “Like, what would you accept?”
I pause, throat tight, then flip to a clean margin and write it out in blunt bullet points: specificity, corroboration, motive, context. He watches the list like it’s film study, then nods as if I’ve finally handed him a playbook he can actually run.
We settle into a rhythm that actually works, he asks, I cut it down, he rebuilds it, over and over until the snap in my voice turns into something like propulsion. When I reach for his study log, my fingers already braced for a tug-of-war, he just slides it across. No joke. No posture. Just trust, like I’m not his enemy, just the person drawing the map.
The pen hesitates, then catches, leaving a dark hook at the edge of a perfectly ruled box; I press harder like force will fix it, and the ink blooms into a bruise on the page.
My throat tightens anyway, as if I’ve just been caught cheating on a test I’m acing. The log sheet is stupid, minutes, chapters, problem sets, little boxes that are supposed to look like control. Minh’s stupid rehab routine translated into my stupid neat handwriting because I volunteered, because of course I did. Because if I can keep his mess organized, maybe my own won’t spill out.
My fingers don’t listen.
The tremor is small at first, almost polite. A flutter under my skin. Then it pulses again and the line I’m drawing turns into a shaky ladder. I try to laugh it off in my head: too much coffee, obviously. Only I didn’t even finish the second cup. Only my stomach feels like it’s full of gravel and my ears are ringing like the library is suddenly too loud for a place that smells like paper and old carpet.
I angle my body, blocking the page like someone might grade it. Like the librarians will come over and whisper, We’re disappointed in you, Nhi.
I glance down to reset my grip and my phone screen lights up with a flash of red that makes my heart lurch. LATE NOTICE. Under it, three missed calls stacked like accusations: Mẹ. Mẹ. Mẹ. The kind of repetition that means something is wrong but no one is saying it out loud yet.
I flip my phone face-down so fast the plastic clicks against the table.
“Just had too much coffee,” I hear myself say, too light, like I’m tossing a joke into the air and hoping it lands somewhere safe.
Minh’s across from me, half-slouched, one leg stretched out under the table like he’s guarding his knee from the world. His eyes aren’t on the worksheet anymore. They’re on me, and that’s worse than any late notice.
He doesn’t ask what the calls are about. He just slides his water bottle over, the condensation leaving a slow crescent on the wood, and says, casual like he’s commenting on the weather, “You don’t have to act like you’re fine all the time.”
For a beat I manage it. Freeze my wrist midair like I can order my body into obedience. My thumb pins the page so hard the paper dimples, and I tell myself: steady. Just steady. Like I’m lining up a ruler edge, like this is an easy problem with one right answer.
Then the tremor comes back anyway, not dramatic, not the kind anyone would rush over for. Small pulses, a glitchy Morse code under my skin. The pen tip skates microscopically with each one, and the neat columns start to wobble like they’re printed on water. I tighten my grip until my fingers ache, which is stupid because tight is not the same as calm.
I blink once: slow on purpose, like I’m rebooting. Like if I close my eyes for exactly one second, I can reopen them into a version of me that isn’t shaking in a library at three-something in the afternoon over a worksheet that isn’t even mine.
My vision clears, but the buzzing doesn’t. I can feel my heartbeat in my fingertips. The ink smells sharp. My mouth tastes like coffee and panic pretending to be normal.
I pull air in through my nose like I’m sipping composure through a straw, slow and stingy, and lock my shoulders back the way Mom taught me for church photos: straight spine, no slouching, don’t look tired, don’t look like you need anything. My chin stays lifted on instinct, a tiny act of defiance against my own body. If I hold myself right, maybe the rest of me will follow.
It doesn’t.
My hand keeps doing its jittery little rebellion, the pen scratching a faint, stuttering rhythm that makes the numbers wobble. I press my wrist to the table like I can pin the tremor down, like it’s something physical I can trap under bone and stubbornness. The harder I try to look controlled, the more my skin hums with how close I am to not.
I don’t look up. If I meet his eyes, something in my face might give up first. Instead I let out this tiny, practiced noise that I’ve perfected for teachers and aunties and anyone who needs me to be “fine.” “Just… too much coffee,” I mutter, like labeling it makes it smaller, manageable, a choice instead of a leak.
I snap the cap on anyway, too quick, too hard, and the click ricochets off the library hush like I just fired a starter pistol. Heat crawls up my neck. I force my fingers to uncurl, to behave, and take the pen back with this painfully careful grip, like I’m defusing something. I set the tip down and keep moving, neatness by brute force.
I clear my throat like I can scrape the panic off the inside of it, like it’s just phlegm and not: whatever this is. “Too much coffee,” I say again, because apparently I’m a broken record with one acceptable excuse. The words come out thin and papery, the kind of lie you can fold into a pocket and pretend you forgot about. It doesn’t even sound like my voice. It sounds like something I’ve watched myself say in a mirror a hundred times, a line memorized for an audience that demands I stay convenient.
I keep my eyes on the study log, on the boxes and columns that don’t care if I’m unraveling. Minutes studied. Pages read. Pain level. All controllable things. I fill in the blanks like if I make his rehab look orderly, my life will start acting accordingly.
My phone vibrates against my thigh, a dull insistence that makes my stomach drop. I don’t have to look to know. I can feel the shape of the name through the denim, the weight of it. Mẹ. Again. Again. Again.
I shift in my chair to pin the phone between my leg and the seat, like I can suffocate it. The motion makes the late notice banner flash in my mind. Red and polite and unforgiving. FINAL REMINDER. Past due. Please remit payment. It’s not even a dramatic message. That’s the worst part. It’s boring. It’s routine. It’s proof the world doesn’t stop because I’m tired.
Across the table, Minh’s gaze isn’t on the paper anymore. I can feel it the way you feel sunlight through blinds, striped, unwanted, too revealing. I pretend the library air isn’t suddenly too sharp.
I swallow and keep writing, but my hand stalls at the end of a word, pen hovering like it’s waiting for permission to make the next mark. My breath catches on nothing. I hate that he’s here for this. I hate that anyone is.
The phone buzzes again. I don’t move. I can’t decide which is worse: answering, or letting it ring.
I straighten like it’s muscle memory, like posture is a password that keeps the world from asking questions. Spine tall. Chin level. The version of me that can walk into an awards ceremony without tripping over her own pulse.
My hand doesn’t get the memo.
The pen digs into my fingers, plastic biting, and I watch my knuckles bleach out one by one. The pressure makes the ink come out darker, the lines too heavy, like I’m trying to carve certainty into paper. My handwriting, my stupid, reliable, teacher-complimented handwriting, starts to fray at the edges. A loop collapses. A line tilts. A number leans like it’s tired, too.
Heat prickles behind my eyes. I blink hard, not because I need to, but because I’m buying time. One more second where nobody can see what’s happening inside my head.
I force my wrist to move slower. I loosen my grip by a millimeter, then another, like letting go is an actual skill and not just… stopping. I rewrite the last word, carefully, pretending it’s about perfection and not about keeping my hand from shaking apart.
My eyelids feel heavy, like someone swapped them out for wet sand, and when I blink it’s not a normal blink: it’s slow, syrupy, the kind where the world smears at the edges for half a second too long. The fluorescent lights above the tables flare and blur. My vision catches on the grain of the paper, on the blue lines, on the dark ink pooling where my pen paused, and for one suspended beat I’m just… not here. Not in the library. Not in my body.
Then I snap back like a rubber band, eyes locking onto the next empty box with that automatic, good-student focus. Attention like a vice. Like if I let my gaze drift even an inch, to Minh, to my phone, to the life waiting outside this chart, something inside me will tip, and everything I’ve been holding in with straight posture and polite answers will finally spill.
I draw in a breath through my nose, slow and controlled, like I’m practicing for a doctor’s office. It catches halfway up anyway, an ugly little snag, so I turn it into movement. I slide the notebook, nudge it until its corner kisses the desk edge, straighten the pen parallel to the margin. Order, order, order. My lungs refuse to cooperate.
I keep my face arranged in the version teachers like. My voice even comes out normal when I mutter something about too much coffee. But the lie sits wrong on my tongue. Under the calm there’s this thin, vibrating hush, like my whole body is waiting for a door to slam. My shoulders don’t relax; they lock. My smile feels painted on.
My phone does that subtle little shimmy against the laminate: screen waking, then dimming, then waking again like it’s annoyed I’m ignoring it. I keep my wrist planted, pen moving, like if I don’t look then it isn’t real. Like the table can’t carry bad news if I don’t give it my eyes.
But the light spills anyway, a cheap neon glow at the edge of my vision. For a second I catch the words without meaning to, the way you catch a punch before you feel it: LATE NOTICE in a boxy font, the kind designed to be impossible to miss. Under it, the stack of calls lined up like accusations. One name repeated until it becomes less a name and more a sound.
Mẹ.
Mẹ.
Mẹ.
My throat tightens on reflex, the same way it does when a teacher says we need to talk after class or when the mail comes and my dad’s hands go still. I keep writing anyway, date, minutes, chapter, because my hand knows how to do competent even when my brain starts fuzzing at the edges.
Across from me, Minh’s pen pauses. Not dramatic. Just… stops. He doesn’t reach for my phone or make a thing of it, but I feel his attention shift the way you feel someone step into your personal space without touching you. His eyes flick down, quick, then away, like he accidentally saw something he wasn’t supposed to.
I want to snatch the phone, flip it facedown, laugh it off. My mom just worries too much. That’s the script. That’s always the script. Except my fingers don’t quite listen; they’re a little shaky, my grip too careful, like the phone is hot.
The screen lights again (another buzz that rattles straight through my bones) and I hate myself for the flash of panic that wants to show on my face. I clamp down harder, jaw aching, and keep my expression smooth. Perfect. Fine.
But Minh doesn’t look amused. He looks… tight. Like he knows that kind of buzzing. Like he’s counting the missed calls and hearing all the words that aren’t on the screen.
A familiar heat climbs up Minh’s neck, and it isn’t nosiness. It’s recognition: like his body already knows the shape of a problem before his brain gives it a name. The way trouble doesn’t kick the door down; it just taps, taps, taps until the whole room starts vibrating. One notification, another, a tiny electric insistence that says pay attention, and you don’t, because attention is admitting it’s real.
His jaw flexes. His eyes go flat for half a second, like he’s looking past me at something he hates. I’ve seen athletes do that when a ref makes a call and they can’t argue without getting benched. Control your face. Swallow it. Don’t give anyone a reason.
He doesn’t ask what it is. Doesn’t tilt his head like he’s entitled to an explanation. He just breathes out through his nose, slow, and his hand shifts on the table like he’s resisting the instinct to grab something and fix it. The silence between us tightens, not judgment exactly: more like an unspoken, ugly understanding: this is what it looks like when you’re failing in private but still trying to look unbreakable in public.
Something in Minh’s face goes distant, like he’s watching a replay only he can see. I catch it in the way his mouth goes hard at the corners, in that tiny lift of his shoulders like he’s bracing for impact.
He knows this kind of quiet. The kind that isn’t peaceful: just careful. Money getting quiet in a house is never silence; it’s knives wrapped in paper. It’s adults talking in lowered voices that still scrape through walls, numbers replacing names, arguments swallowed whole so the kids can pretend not to hear.
And in that kind of quiet, you learn fast what gets rewarded. Not honesty. Not panic. “Fine.” Fine gets you dinner without questions. Fine gets you a ride. Fine keeps people from looking at you like you’re a problem they might stop helping.
So you perform fine until it feels like a second skin. Until you forget how to take it off.
For a second, I can almost feel the old reflex in him: the little jab that keeps score between us, the smirk that says see, you’re not perfect either. It’s his armor, same as mine. But it stalls, mid-swing, like he runs into something solid. Whatever that banner is, whatever those calls are, it isn’t competition. It’s gravity.
His grip on the pen goes slack, like even his hand is deciding not to make a thing out of it. He doesn’t do the polite-look-away move, and he doesn’t lean in like he’s collecting evidence. He just watches me, steady, unreadable, choosing a quiet that isn’t punishment. It’s almost worse, how careful he is with his attention, like he’s holding it out flat-palmed instead of throwing it at me.
Heat crawls up my neck the second I clock where Minh’s gaze landed. My phone, lit up like a confession I didn’t mean to make. The banner is still there in my peripheral vision, bright and blunt, the kind of notification that doesn’t care how hard you’ve worked or how neat your planner looks. Late notice. Like the universe sending me a red stamp.
And the calls. “Mẹ” stacked one on top of another, each missed ring its own little indictment. I can practically hear her voice underneath them, not angry exactly. Worse. Tired. Tight. Trying to keep the edges of our life from fraying in front of me.
My hand keeps moving like muscle memory, pen scratching Minh’s study log, but the letters wobble. The line I’m writing starts to tilt, like the whole page is slipping downhill. I tell myself it’s the coffee, the energy drink I chugged between AP Chem and tutoring like it’s fuel instead of self-harm. My fingers disagree. They tremble anyway, tiny and traitorous.
I swallow and it feels like swallowing sand.
I want to laugh it off. Make a joke. Snip something sharp and tidy into the air so it doesn’t turn into a conversation. Relax, it’s spam. It’s just my mom being dramatic. Anything that keeps him from looking at me like I’m breakable.
But Minh doesn’t do the usual thing. Doesn’t grin like he caught me cheating on being perfect. He just… registers it. His eyes flick from the phone to my face and back again, like he’s checking the facts without turning them into a weapon.
The silence stretches. My heartbeat starts counting it.
I hate that my body is reacting like this is danger. Like the late notice is a predator and Minh is a witness. Like being seen is the same as being exposed.
His water bottle shifts across the desk, nudged toward me with an almost careless motion. And when he speaks, it’s too quiet to be a performance.
“You don’t have to act like you’re fine all the time.”
My thumb snaps my phone facedown so fast it’s muscle memory, like I’ve been training for this exact moment my whole life. Like the glass is a stain and if I cover it quick enough, it never happened. The vibration dies against the wood of the desk, muffled but still there: still present, still accusing, like a heartbeat I can’t control.
The screen is dark now, but I can still see it. The blocky banner. The stacked missed calls. The way “Mẹ” looks when it’s not wrapped in jokes and emojis, when it’s just a name that means answer me and we need you and please don’t make this harder.
My fingers clamp around my pen harder than necessary. The plastic digs into my grip; the pain is clean, manageable. I keep my eyes on the paper because if I look up, I’ll have to deal with whatever expression Minh is wearing, and I don’t have the bandwidth to calculate and counter it.
I force a breath through my nose, slow, like I’m calming a skittish animal.
“Yeah,” I say, too bright, too automatic. “I’m fine.”
I wait for it: the familiar edge. The little lift of his eyebrow like a judge calling the case. The “wow, Nhi Tran has problems too?” smirk that would let me shove him back into the safe box in my head labeled enemy, slam the lid, and go back to pretending my life isn’t quietly on fire.
I even brace for it, shoulders tight, chin angled the way I do when I’m about to take a hit and refuse to flinch. My brain starts drafting comebacks automatically, neat and poisonous. Something that makes him laugh and everyone forgets the tremor in my hands. Something that turns this into a game again.
Because if he stays kind, or whatever this is, I don’t know where to put it.
Minh doesn’t take the opening. No smirk, no sarcastic little “sure” to make me defensive. His mouth stays flat, like he’s physically holding back a comment, and his eyes don’t dart away like he’s embarrassed for me. They stay on me. Just… awake. Like he’s suddenly older than the loud, hallway version of him.
The space between us shifts, like someone quietly moved the furniture when I wasn’t looking. He saw the late notice, the missed calls, the little crack where my perfect-girl routine is supposed to seal airtight. And he doesn’t reach for it. Doesn’t weaponize it. Just lets it sit in my lap like something I’m allowed to own. My chest hiccups on a breath before I can smooth my face back into place.
Minh’s gaze flicks once, so fast it’s almost a reflex, toward my phone. The screen lights up again, that ugly little vibration rattling against the tabletop like it’s trying to shake my secrets loose. I angle my wrist automatically, a stupid, practiced move, like I’m on some kind of game show where the prize is nobody noticing you’re falling apart.
The notification banner is bright enough to burn: Past Due. Under it, my call log stacks like a Jenga tower I’ve been pretending isn’t wobbling. My stomach clenches hard, like it’s trying to fold in on itself.
I wait for the moment where his mouth turns up. Where he files it away as ammo.
But he doesn’t.
He looks away like he never saw anything at all, like the phone is just a phone and not a live wire sitting inches from my hand. His eyes go to the notebook between us, the one I’m using to rewrite his study log because he refuses to write more than three words without acting like the pen is personally insulting him. He rolls the cap of his own pen between his fingers, slow and deliberate. Like he’s giving me space without making a big deal out of it. Like he knows what it feels like when the whole world is suddenly too bright and you’re trying not to flinch.
Another buzz. This time I feel it in my bones.
My fingers tighten around my pen until the plastic bites. My handwriting (usually neat enough to be framed and hung in the counseling office as an example of “good habits”) goes jagged. The letters wobble and smear as my hand shakes.
I swallow, tasting coffee and panic.
Minh shifts in his chair. The air changes. His knee bounces once under the table, then stills, like he notices and forces it down.
His shoulders lift and drop in a quiet breath.
When I finally risk a glance, he’s not looking at my phone anymore.
He’s looking at me, but not like a spotlight. More like… a guard dog pretending he’s just sitting there.
Minh’s arm moves like he’s reaching for something that belongs to him, like he’s just adjusting the geography of the table. Two knuckles tap the side of his water bottle and it glides over the scratched laminate, squeaking once before it stops right in front of my notebook: right in front of my shaking hand.
No ceremony. No “are you okay?” that would make my throat close and my pride flare. He doesn’t even look at me when he does it. His gaze stays on the half-finished log, on the dumb little boxes I drew for “time studied” and “pages read,” like this is the only problem in the universe: hydration and accountability.
I stare at the bottle like it’s a dare. The clear plastic is fogged with condensation, cold enough to raise goosebumps in my brain. My mouth is dry anyway, cottoned up with espresso and swallowed words.
He nudges it a fraction closer with the same lazy pressure, like he’s saying, Take it. Like it’s normal to offer something without demanding a debt back.
My chest tightens at how easy he makes it look.
My pen freezes mid-stroke like it hit a patch of invisible ice. The ink pools, a dark bruise on the paper, and for half a second I can’t tell if my hand is shaking because of the caffeine or because my body is finally sick of being lied to. I force the tip forward again. The line moves, but it doesn’t obey. Wobbles into this pathetic zigzag that makes my perfect little boxes look like a joke.
I clamp down harder, like pressure can substitute for control. My fingertips go numb; when I glance down, they’re pale, almost gray, knuckles sharp. The cheap pen creaks. I keep writing anyway, because stopping feels like admitting something. Because if I pause, I might not start again.
Minh leans back like he’s bored, like none of this matters, but his foot hooks the chair leg and stills. Controlled. His eyes stay on the worksheet, not my face, like he’s refusing to pin me down with sympathy. When he speaks, he makes it sound like an offhand observation, a joke he won’t claim. “You don’t have to act like you’re fine all the time.”
He doesn’t tack on a lecture. Doesn’t ask what’s wrong like he’s entitled to an answer. He doesn’t even glance at my phone again, like he already decided it’s not his business. The bottle sits there, sweating onto the table, cold and quiet. Minh just waits (shoulders loose, jaw tight) letting the silence be his, too, instead of a trap I have to decorate.
The sentence drops into me with this heavy, clean thud, like someone set a weight on my chest and then stepped back. No flourish, no warning, no angle I can block. I’m so used to dodging. Deflecting. Turning everything into a competition I can win by being faster, better, quieter. This isn’t that. There’s nothing to prove against it.
My mouth opens on autopilot, the polite response already lined up (I’m fine, it’s nothing, just tired) but the inhale catches halfway, snagging like my throat suddenly remembers it’s a body part and not just a tunnel for lies. My lips stay parted. No sound comes out.
I stare at the margin of the study log, that strip of blank paper like it’s a lifeline. White space. Room where nothing is demanded. If I can focus hard enough, maybe I can squeeze myself back into the shape everyone recognizes. The competent one. The girl who always has extra pencils and extra answers. The one who doesn’t make things messy.
The air in my lungs feels too thin, like I breathed in through a straw. My vision does this tiny shimmer at the edges, the fluorescent lights above us turning slightly harsher, slightly farther away. I blink once, slow, and it doesn’t fix it.
Across the table, Minh doesn’t move in a way that says look at me. He doesn’t soften his face into pity. He doesn’t pile on with more words, like he’s afraid if he talks he’ll ruin whatever fragile non-thing he just handed me. He just sits there with that annoying athlete stillness, like his body has been trained to hold a position even when everything inside it wants to bolt.
And my brain, traitor that it is, keeps replaying his line: not as an accusation, not as advice, just as a fact. You don’t have to.
I swallow. It’s loud in my own ears. My fingers tighten around the pen until the plastic bites, and I hate that the first emotion I can name isn’t gratitude.
It’s relief.
I tell myself to just keep writing. Muscle memory. Ink. Lines. Boxes checked. If I can get the pen to move, maybe my brain will follow and everything will slide back into place like it always does.
But the pen stutters, the tip catching on the paper like it’s snagged on something invisible. My hand doesn’t feel like mine: like someone swapped it out for a cheaper version that rattles when you tap it. A tremor ripples from my knuckles into my wrist, small but undeniable, and heat crawls up my neck in that familiar, vicious way: embarrassment first, then anger at being embarrassed.
I adjust my grip. Looser. Tighter. I press harder, like force can bully my body into compliance. The letters come out slightly jagged, like they’re bracing for impact.
The water bottle sits in my peripheral vision, condensation beading and sliding down the sides, making a tiny dark halo on the table. A quiet offering. Not a favor, not a question: just there.
And I hate how badly I want it.
Not because I’m thirsty. Because for one second I want to hold something that isn’t a responsibility. Something cold and uncomplicated, something I don’t have to earn.
My fingers close around the plastic anyway: too hard, like I’m afraid it’ll float away if I don’t clamp down. The cold bites my palm, clean and sharp, and for a second it’s all I can register: temperature, texture, the faint give of the bottle under pressure. Something real. Something that doesn’t ask me to explain myself in bullet points.
I don’t look up. I keep my eyes on the paper like it’s my job to pretend this is normal, like I’m still in control of the scene. If I meet his gaze, I’ll have to deal with whatever’s there (pity, triumph, curiosity) and I can’t afford any of those.
But he doesn’t fill the quiet. He doesn’t dig. He just lets me hold the bottle like it’s nothing, and somehow that makes it feel like everything.
A nod slips out of me before I can stop it. Not a thank-you. Not permission. Just proof of life: I hear you. My throat tightens around everything I don’t know how to say. That he clocked the difference between being capable and just… making it to the next minute without cracking in public.
Minh doesn’t pounce. He doesn’t lean in with that sharp little smile like he’s collecting ammo. He stays back in his chair, one knee angled like it hurts, like he’s suddenly remembering he’s human too. His gaze flicks away, giving me room to stitch my face back on. The silence he leaves, unclaimed, unweaponized, makes my chest ache. Seen, and not sentenced.
I tell myself it’s just reflex. What any decent person does when someone’s knee gives out on a staircase. Catch. Stabilize. Don’t let them crack their skull open in front of God and everyone. It’s practically a liability issue.
My hands don’t buy it.
All through last period, my palms feel wrong, like they’re still imprinted with heat. Not the sweaty kind, nothing gross like that, just…human warmth through fabric, the solid reality of him under my fingers. I keep flattening my hands against my jeans under the desk, pressing until my knuckles ache, like friction can erase memory. Like I can scrub off the exact place my thumbs hooked at his sides to keep him from folding.
It’s stupid. It’s a hoodie. Cotton, probably. Maybe whatever brand athletes wear because they get free stuff. I should be thinking about calculus, about the quiz Mr. Dinh is definitely going to spring on us because he thinks suffering builds character.
Instead my brain keeps rewinding the half-second where everything went quiet. The moment his weight tipped into me and I didn’t have time to decide to be composed. My body chose for me. My body, traitor, overachiever, always doing extra credit, stepped in like it knew what it wanted.
And the worst part is how fast I noticed the change in him. The split between Minh Nguyen, varsity golden boy, and Minh (just Minh) when his face tightened and his mouth went thin, like he was bracing for laughter, for pity, for someone to make him a story. There’s a kind of panic you can’t fake. It shows up in the micro-movements, the flick of the eyes, the way someone tries to pull their dignity back over themselves like a blanket.
I keep seeing that, too. Not the stumble. The look.
My pen scratches useless loops in the margin of my notes. My leg bounces under the desk like it’s trying to run away without me. I’m annoyed (at him for existing in my head, at myself for letting him) until the annoyance thins into something sharper and quieter.
Because when he asked me not to tell anyone, he sounded like he meant it the way my parents mean don’t worry: as a command and a confession at the same time.
I try to shove my brain back into the only lanes it understands: assignments with point values, rubrics with checkboxes, the kind of stress you can at least quantify. My planner is a wall of color-coded obligations. I flip to tonight like the act of looking at it will sedate me. Calc problem set. History reading. Volunteer hours log. Email Ms. Hernandez about the scholarship recommendation before she forgets I exist.
On my laptop, my scholarship essay draft sits open in a tab like an accusation. The title, “Overcoming Adversity”, makes me want to laugh and gag at the same time. My cursor hovers over it, blinking, patient. I can’t click. If I click, I have to be the version of myself who knows what to say, who can turn my life into a neat narrative with a hopeful ending.
Instead I stare through the screen until the words in my notes go soft at the edges, and behind them he’s there again. Bare. Startled. Too young for how hard he tries to look untouchable.
And then there’s me, hands steady, voice not. Like my composure is something that can just…slip. Like it was never bolted down.
In the hallway, I move like I’m remotely controlled. Shoulders back, chin level, mouth set in my safest neutral, “Nhi’s fine, Nhi’s always fine”, while my brain keeps swiveling off-script. Lockers blur past. Someone calls my name and I answer automatically, like a prerecorded message.
And then, without permission, my eyes start taking inventory: corners, doorways, the stairs I’m suddenly mad at. I’m scanning for him before I even decide to, and irritation flares hot and fast. At Minh for existing, at myself for letting him, at the way his name keeps popping up in my head like an unskippable ad.
Then I hear it. His laugh, sharp and familiar, bouncing off cinderblock from somewhere ahead, around a corner I haven’t turned yet. My stomach tightens like it’s bracing for impact.
I try to be practical about it. Minh is a complication, a static-y kind of noise that turns into a rumor with legs in this school, in this neighborhood, in my aunties’ group chats. But when I catch him across the quad (crutch angled wrong, jaw clenched like he’s daring the world) I feel this hot, stupid protectiveness. Like if he falls again, it’ll be on me.
That night I lie on my back, eyes glued to the dark like it’s a screen I can rewind. His knee buckles. My hands catch. Too close. I rewrite it over and over. Release him faster, step back like I’m offended, make my voice ice. But the real version won’t stay edited: I don’t let go because I don’t want to. And that wanting is starting to feel less like a mistake and more like a debt I can’t pay.
The next tutoring session ends too cleanly, like we’re both trying to prove something to the air. Answers boxed. Formulas circled twice. My handwriting stays neat even when my brain keeps skipping like a scratched CD. Minh’s pencil scratches hard enough to sound like judgment.
We sit in the library’s back corner where the fluorescent lights buzz like they’re gossiping. The test-prep shelf behind me is all SAT vocabulary and “SUCCESS HABITS,” which feels like a personal attack. I slide my notebook toward him anyway, polite and automatic. He doesn’t lean in the way he did last week. He keeps his bad knee angled out like a warning sign, foot planted, shoulders squared like he’s about to sprint even though he can’t.
Every time his breath changes, my body remembers my hands on his sides on the stairs. Too solid, too warm, too human. I hate that my pulse does that, like I’m the one with an injury.
“Check number four,” I say, because if I say anything else I might accidentally say, Are you okay? like it would matter.
He looks. He nods once. No smile. No “got it.” He’s all edges today, the kind you cut yourself on if you reach.
When the bell rings, the whole library shifts. Chairs scraping, backpacks zipping, the collective panic of people who have somewhere else to be. I start stacking my papers in the same order I always do, because order is the only thing that’s ever held.
Minh’s hand comes down on his folder like he’s pinning it. For a second I think he’s going to leave without a word, and relief and disappointment collide in my chest.
Then he shoves his papers toward me with a sharp, unnecessary force. The folder skids across the table, plastic rasping, loud enough that the girl two tables over glances up. Heat crawls up my neck.
His eyes stay on the table. His jaw flexes like he’s bracing for impact, like any second now something is going to hit him and he’d rather tense than flinch.
I reach out and stop the folder before it drops off the edge, my fingers brushing the corner. I don’t pull it back. I just hold it there between us, like a line neither of us wants to cross and neither of us wants to erase.
“You don’t have to. His throat works, Adam’s apple jumping once, twice. He doesn’t look at me. He looks at the paper, at the numbers I wrote like they’re safer than my face.
His finger comes down on the edge of the worksheet and taps. Tap. Tap. Not impatient. Like if he keeps his hand moving, he won’t do something worse, like admit anything.
The library noise swells and recedes around us. Someone laughing too loud, the printer whining, the soft thump of a book dropped into a return bin. My skin feels tuned to only him anyway.
“What you did…” he says, and there’s a pause where I can almost hear him calculating the cost of the next word.
His mouth tightens. “Thanks.”
Clipped. Sharp. Not a gift, more like a transaction. Like he’s handing me exact change across a counter and daring me to say I deserve more. His knee is still angled away, his shoulders squared, trying to shove the moment on the stairs into a file labeled doesn’t matter.
But his fingers shake when he pulls them back.
I drag in a breath, reaching automatically for the safe script, No problem. It was nothing. Happy to help: like I’m answering a teacher, like I’m returning a borrowed pencil. My mouth even shapes the first syllable and then… blanks. Like my brain yanks the file out of the cabinet and there’s just an empty folder.
My pulse bangs hot against my eardrums. I can hear it louder than the library, louder than the stupid printer whining, louder than the part of me screaming, Be normal.
Minh keeps his eyes down and starts reconstructing distance with microscopic movements: straightening his papers, squaring his shoulders, angling his knee away. Brick by brick. Controlled. Practiced.
And the thing that twists in my chest isn’t pity.
It’s irritation. Like he’s taking something from me by pretending it didn’t matter.
I’m on my feet before my brain can file it under bad idea. Chair legs scrape too loud. I step around the table, into his orbit, where his cologne and library paper dust mix in my throat. My voice comes out low: no teacher tone, no polite-girl buffer. “Stop acting like you’re alone.” His eyes snap up, heat first, pride flaring: then it cracks, and something like relief turns immediately into fear.
He doesn’t smirk. No joke, no swagger, no easy escape hatch. Minh just… tilts forward, slow enough that it feels like he’s offering me an out, like he’s asking permission without using words. My lungs forget what to do. I don’t move back.
His mouth brushes mine, light, careful. Heat, then stillness. He pauses there, breathing me in, waiting like the answer is mine to give.
At home, I go straight to the bathroom like there’s a fire I can put out if I move fast enough.
The faucet squeals when I twist it. Cold water slaps my skin, and for a second that’s all I let myself feel, temperature, pressure, the clean, uncomplicated physics of it. I pump soap into my palm. The scent is generic “cucumber” that my mom bought on sale, and it shouldn’t mean anything, except it does, because it’s what I use before dinner prayers and after temple events and every time I’m supposed to look like a good daughter with good habits.
I scrub.
Palms first, then between my fingers, then my knuckles like I’m prepping for surgery. I drag the foam up my wrists, higher than normal, like his mouth touched there too. Like his breath can leave fingerprints.
The mirror catches my face at an angle. Eyes too bright, lips slightly swollen, hair still perfect because of course it is. I look like someone who knows what she’s doing. I look like someone who made a decision on purpose.
I rinse. Suds spiral down the drain and disappear. Relief should follow. It doesn’t.
So I start over.
Water turns lukewarm, then warmer, then almost hot. My skin goes pink, then angry. The sting feels deserved, like punishment I can manage. My brain tries to file the moment into a category with a label I can live with: stress response. adrenaline. bad boundaries. temporary lapse in judgment due to sleep deprivation and caffeine.
A logical explanation is supposed to make things stop existing.
But when I close my eyes, it’s not academic. It’s not a mistake I can circle in red and correct.
It’s the pause right before, like he was waiting for me to say yes without making me say anything at all. It’s the way my body didn’t flinch. It’s the terrifying part: I didn’t pull away.
Down the hall, the TV murmurs. Somewhere, a cabinet closes. Normal life continues, loud and innocent, while I stand here scrubbing evidence off my hands that isn’t even on my hands.
In my room, I perch on the edge of my bed like I’m waiting to be called in for questioning. I don’t even take my backpack off. The straps cut into my shoulders, a small, steady punishment. Across the room, my planner sits open on my desk, its neat little boxes lined up like teeth.
Tomorrow is perfect on paper. AP calc problem set, color-coded in blue. Tutoring slot in green. Club meeting in purple with a star because I’m “leading.” The kind of day that makes teachers nod approvingly and my parents exhale like they can finally unclench for a second.
It looks so clean it feels like it’s judging me.
My fingers hover over the pencil cup, like I might actually write it down. Like it’s another task I can manage if I name it.
8:15–8:[^17] p.m.: kissed Minh Nguyen.
The thought hits wrong. Funny and not funny. A laugh tries to escape and gets stuck halfway, turning into something sharp in my throat. My mouth still remembers him. My schedule doesn’t have a box for that.
I swap jeans for my softest pajama shorts and an old college sweatshirt my cousin left here, like cotton can insulate me from consequences. I slide under the blanket and turn my phone face-down, but my brain doesn’t follow. It clicks into that mode. If this turns into a thing, it leaks. It always leaks. Scholarships don’t ask if you’re distracted; they just move on to the next perfect kid. Recommendation letters don’t mention complicated. Aunties don’t say I heard: they say I’m only asking because I care, and it’s the same blade with a prettier handle. I can already see my mom’s smile going too tight at the edges, her eyes scanning me for what went wrong.
Nhi Tran and that boy. My stomach folds like paper.
My body plays it back like a glitch I can’t swipe away. The split-second softness, the way his breath stutters like he forgets his own lines, the unfamiliar quiet where a joke is supposed to patch everything up. I press two fingers to my mouth. Not to savor. Never that. Just to confirm it happened, to prove I didn’t hallucinate it out of caffeine and zero sleep.
I flip my phone over anyway, like it’s a confession I can control. Messages. His name sits there, irritatingly normal. My thumb hovers, aches, retreats. I open, close, open again. I send nothing. No one can know, I tell myself, and it lands as fear wearing my responsibility like a borrowed blazer. When I roll onto my side, I don’t pray, don’t promise. I just listen to the house settle and wait for the silence to start talking back.
Morning yanks me out of my bed and shoves me back into the school’s machinery like I’m a worksheet someone forgot to staple. Fluorescent lights flatten everything into the same exhausted color. College pennants hang from the ceiling like flags in a country I’m supposed to immigrate to by merit alone. People move in loud clusters and I do the thing I always do: I straighten my spine, tighten my face into calm, and walk like I’m not carrying anything sharp inside me.
It doesn’t work.
The calm I tried to practice last night won’t settle into place. It sits on my skin like someone else’s jacket, too stiff at the shoulders. Every time I pass a reflective surface, trophy case glass, dark phone screens, the chrome edge of a drinking fountain, I check my expression like it’s a grade. Normal. Fine. Golden child. No visible crack.
In AP Lit, I take notes so aggressively my hand cramps. The teacher’s voice slides over symbolism and motifs, and my brain keeps snagging on a different image: two hands on his sweatshirt, the heat under my palms, the weight of him for half a second like he trusted me without meaning to. I blink hard like that can erase it. My pulse does that dumb sprinting thing anyway.
At my locker, someone bumps my shoulder and says, “Sorry, Nhi,” like I’m a hallway fixture. I murmur, “It’s okay,” on autopilot, but my stomach stays tight, waiting for impact that never comes.
By the time I reach the library, it’s already packed: test-prep binders fanned open, laptop chargers snaking across tables, whispers that aren’t whispers. Rankings. Scholarships. Who’s taking which SAT date. Who “only” got a 1500. I slide into my usual seat like it’s armor, arrange my pens, open my planner.
The page stays blank for a beat too long.
I stare at my own neat handwriting from yesterday and feel, for a sick second, like I’m looking at someone competent I’m impersonating.
Between classes, I cut past the gym because it’s the fastest route to the library, and immediately regret it. The training room door is propped open with a busted orange cone like it’s inviting the whole school to witness who gets fixed up and who gets told to walk it off. Inside, the air looks colder: white paper on exam tables, rolls of tape lined up like candy, a stack of ice packs sweating through plastic.
Bodies drift in and out in that effortless way, limping as a performance and then laughing like it’s nothing. Someone’s shin is wrapped in fresh gauze; someone else sits on the table swinging a leg like they’re bored at brunch. The trainer’s voice is gentle, unhurried, like time is a resource athletes are allowed to spend.
I slow without meaning to. My jaw locks. It’s not even jealousy, exactly. It’s the unfairness of knowing the building bends for them, quietly, automatically: extra chances, extra patience, doors held open. Like pain becomes valid the second it can be taped.
I look away before anyone can catch me looking.
Minh shows up at the far end of the corridor like a mistake the hallway tries not to acknowledge. He’s still tall, still broad-shouldered, still wearing that effortless athlete uniform, team hoodie, backpack slung low, but his walk has a stutter in it now, a tiny hitch like a skipped beat. It’s subtle enough to deny if you want to be polite. It’s obvious enough to feel cruel.
Two guys posted by the water fountain shift without thinking, bodies angling the way magnets do. Their eyes drop to his knee, then jerk up to his face like they got caught staring at something private. Minh’s mouth tightens. He keeps moving anyway, faster than he should, like speed can outrun shame.
I keep my face flat, like I’m reading a poster or counting ceiling tiles, but I feel the stare before I pinpoint it. A girl from my APUSH class looks at me, then at Minh’s limp, then back at me like she’s tracing a diagram. My body answers on instinct: shoulders back, chin up, eyes forward. Become boring. Become unreportable.
I tell myself it’s nothing, just basic caution, just me avoiding drama like I avoid cafeteria pizza, but the lie sits on my tongue, metallic and old. My feet keep moving, autopilot perfect, and I hate how fast my brain snaps back to damage control. Like my hands on him can’t just be hands. Like the hallway already has a version of it, and it isn’t mine.
My phone buzzes like it’s offended I’m asleep, like it’s the kind of emergency you can’t ignore. The screen flares against the dark, a rectangle of accusation that paints my ceiling and the underside of my eyelids.
You told me you wouldn’t tell. You won’t, right?
My throat closes around nothing. It’s stupid: stupid that a text can make my pulse jump into my ears, that my first thought is not Minh is hurting but Who will see this? as if my mother is already standing over me with her quiet, disappointed eyes, as if some auntie has already forwarded a screenshot into a group chat labeled “Kids These Days.”
I didn’t do anything. I caught him. That’s it. A human reflex. Two hands, his weight, that shocked heat through fabric, the second where he looked at me like I had stolen his dignity and held it for ransom. My palms remember it anyway, like they’re still pressed to his ribs.
I read his message again and again until the words lose meaning and it’s just the shape of panic. You told me. Not please. Not sorry for texting late. Just the line drawn in the dark.
Because it isn’t about a knee. It’s about being watched. It’s about school corridors that turn people into headlines. It’s about the way adults smile at athletes until they don’t. It’s about how fast a weakness becomes entertainment.
And it’s about me, apparently. About the fact that I’m now part of the risk.
My thumb hovers. The room smells faintly like Tiger Balm from the headache I pretended wasn’t there earlier. In the kitchen, the refrigerator hums; somewhere down the hall, a floorboard settles like a sigh. The whole house is sleeping, and I’m wide awake holding someone else’s secret like it’s a live wire.
What does he think I am? A gossip? A ladder he can climb if he pushes hard enough? Or, worse, someone safe.
My fingers curl tighter around the phone, like that could stop the story from happening.
I type Of course and watch it sit there, too soft, too automatic. Like I’m already on his side in a way that has nothing to do with tutoring. Backspace. The letters vanish but the warmth doesn’t.
Why would I? pops up next, sharper, defensive, like I’m offended he’d even ask. That feels like a lie too, because a part of me is offended. At him, at myself, at the fact that this matters. Backspace again, until the text box is a blank mouth waiting to be fed.
The cursor blinks. Patient. Cruel. Like a metronome counting out consequences: screenshot, forwarded, misread, spun. A story that starts as a private thread and ends up in someone’s Instagram Close Friends with a caption like lol she’s all up on him or guess who’s trying to get athlete clout. Or worse. Something about injury drama that crawls to a coach, a counselor, an uncle who knows an uncle.
I could just not answer. Pretend I fell asleep. But silence is an answer too.
My mom’s footsteps pad down the hallway. I go completely still, phone dimmed against my chest like contraband. She doesn’t open my door, but the air changes anyway, like her presence presses a hand flat to the whole house and reminds it to behave.
In my head, the aunties show up before morning: voices sweet as condensed milk, questions shaped like prayers. Ủa, nghe nói…? Is he okay? Poor thing. And then, the pivot. Minh’s text doesn’t feel like a secret. It feels like a test I’ve been trained to fail the second it threatens our name.
But when I picture telling anyone. Ortega in counseling, Jenn at lunch, even some watered-down version that keeps my hands clean, I see him on the stairs again. That split second: panic flaring, jaw tightening, pride locking everything down. He swallows the humiliation like it’s a pill he’s learned to take without water. And I get it, don’t tell isn’t gossip-policing. It’s armor. It’s him begging not to be left open in public, not again.
I stare at his message until my thumbs ache, then I type it like I’m stepping off a curb I didn’t see coming: I won’t. I mean it. Send. My stomach drops, then loosens, like relief can’t decide if it’s allowed. It doesn’t feel heroic. It feels like choosing him over the rulebook I live by. Like I just spent something invisible and can’t unspend it.
Between second and third period, the girls’ bathroom is a rotating cast of perfume clouds and slammed stall doors, the kind of chaos I usually ghost through like a good student who doesn’t have time for bodily functions. Today I claim a sink like it’s a territory dispute.
Water. Soap. My hands move on autopilot, palms, knuckles, under nails, because if I keep doing steps, maybe my brain will follow the rules too. The mirror is smudged with fingerprints and the ghosts of girls who checked their lip gloss like it was oxygen. I lean in anyway, close enough that I can’t pretend I’m seeing someone else.
Fluorescent light turns everyone into a crime scene. My eyes look too bright, like I’m about to argue with a teacher. My cheeks are flushed in a way that doesn’t match the temperature of the water or the weather outside. I lift my chin, smooth my hair back into its obedient part, press flyaways down with damp fingers until my scalp tightens. It’s ridiculous, trying to iron myself into the version people can count on. Like if my hair behaves, I will too.
“Fine,” I mouth at my reflection, silent. My reflection doesn’t even nod. She just stares back, unimpressed, like she’s watched me lie for years.
A cluster of freshmen bursts in laughing too loudly, and I stiffen without meaning to. My shoulders lock. The sound ricochets in my skull, and suddenly I’m not here, I’m in a hallway stairwell with his weight shifting wrong, with my hands automatically catching, with the shock of him being human and breakable in my grip. I blink hard, like I can blink out a memory.
I pat my face dry with a paper towel and it drags over my skin, rough. My mouth still feels… off. Like it’s been holding something it wasn’t supposed to. I press my lips together, then release them, as if I can test-drive normal. The girl in the mirror doesn’t buy it. Neither do I.
My mouth feels wrong, tender in a way that makes zero anatomical sense, like I’ve been clenching a secret between my teeth so hard it bruised. I turn the faucet colder and run water over my wrists, over the thin blue veins there, like I can shock myself back into my normal setting: neutral, efficient, unbothered. The kind of girl who doesn’t get derailed by a boy’s stupid, stupid proximity.
It doesn’t work.
The memory cuts in anyway, sharp as a notification: his knee giving out, the sound he makes when he tries to swallow pain without letting it touch his face, my hands finding him before my brain decides it’s allowed. The weight of him, real, warm, not an idea. The way his chest jerks on an inhale and then freezes, like he’s counting to three so he doesn’t fall apart in front of me.
And then his voice, low and rough, like a threat that’s actually a plea.
My pulse answers like it’s still happening, like my body thinks we’re still on those stairs and I’m still holding him up. I stare at my own reflection and wonder when my instincts started choosing him.
What does this make me? The question lands under my ribs, sharp like a snapped rubber band. Wanting him (even in the tiniest, quietest way, even only by choosing silence) feels like I just stepped over a line I didn’t know was electric until it burned.
My brain starts prosecuting me in my own voice, neat and efficient: reckless. selfish. disloyal. Like they’re bullet points on a college rejection letter.
I hear my mom’s warnings dressed up as concern (con gái, don’t invite trouble) and my dad’s tired pride, the kind that turns every good grade into repayment. I hear the aunties too, laughing too loud at the church potluck, the laughter that always has teeth. A good girl doesn’t get tangled. A good girl doesn’t choose anything that can’t be explained.
I try to litigate myself back into safety. It was reflex. It was basic human decency. It meant nothing. Except nothing won’t adhere to the memory no matter how many times I press it there. Because it wasn’t just that I caught him. It’s that I didn’t resent it. I liked being necessary for once in a way no transcript can prove. I liked the way his eyes found mine when his guard slipped. The thought is tiny, bright, illegal: maybe I want something that doesn’t come with a certificate.
I let out a slow breath like I’m defusing something, then practice my face in the mirror, calm, capable, untouchable, until it clicks into place. Armor. I press a paper towel to my mouth, like I can blot away whatever he put there without touching me. I crack the door, scan the hall, then slip out, phone white-knuckled. If I look normal, maybe I can be normal. If I move fast enough, maybe nobody sees the soft spot that showed up anyway.
By second period, the first comment lands like lint: easy to brush off: a classmate smirks, “Didn’t know you hung out by the training room now.”
I keep my face in its usual locked setting, the one teachers call “mature.” My mouth does the small, correct curve. Not a smile. Not a frown. Neutral is safer.
“Oh, yeah?” I say, like I’m too busy to understand. Like I don’t care.
She lifts her eyebrows, a little performative, like she’s doing me a favor by letting me know I’m being watched. Her friends giggle into their sleeves. I can feel the moment try to stick to me, like gum on the bottom of a shoe, waiting for me to step wrong.
I don’t. I pivot around them with my backpack pulled tight against my spine, posture straight because my mother’s voice lives in my shoulders: đi đứng cho đàng hoàng. Walk properly. Be a person people can’t accuse.
The hallway smells like floor cleaner and sweat and whatever syrupy vape flavor someone thinks is invisible. My steps are fast but controlled. I don’t look back, because looking back is admitting it hit.
My phone vibrates once in my pocket. Twice. A third time as I slip into AP Lit.
I don’t check it until the bell rings and everyone’s settling, because checking is also admitting. My fingers still move on their own, though. Thumb tapping the screen under the desk, brightness turned down like shame.
Three notifications from three different group chats I don’t even talk in, because I’m “responsible” and “focused” and “not about drama.”
The previews are enough.
👀 u near the training room?
lol Nhi tutoring athletes now??
is that MINH??
My pulse goes stupid, loud in my ears. Heat crawls up my neck, not embarrassment exactly: something sharper. Anger with nowhere polite to go.
I stare at the last message until the letters blur, then force my eyes back to the front of the room, to Ms. Darnell writing themes on the board like the world is still normal.
I inhale through my nose. Exhale like it’s math.
I tell myself it’s nothing. A comment. Lint.
But my phone vibrates again, insistent, like it’s laughing.
By lunch it isn’t a comment anymore. It’s a whole little ecosystem.
Someone has posted a photo, grainy, fluorescent-washed, taken from far enough away that my face is more suggestion than fact. I’m half-turned, backpack strap in my fist like I’m bracing for impact, and in the back corner of the frame Minh is on crutches, jaw set like he’s biting down on pain. The caption is all faux-innocent: aww academic queen visits injured king?? with crying-laughing emojis like that makes it harmless.
Then the screenshots start breeding. Every repost crops it tighter, adds neon arrows, circles, a timestamp slapped on like a receipt. Someone zooms in on the angle of my shoulder. Someone zooms in on his hand on the crutch. Like pixelated body language is a science.
The same image rotates through different group chats with different narratives attached, and it scares me how easy it is. How the photo stops being proof of anything and becomes a blank worksheet people fill in with whatever they already want to believe about me. About him. About us, like we’re a problem set with one correct answer.
I see him again like a bad commercial that keeps coming back no matter how many times you hit skip. He parks himself near the guys in jerseys first, shoulders slumped in fake sympathy. “Man, injuries mess with you,” he says, voice pitched for an audience. “And, like… all this extra stuff? The drama? That can’t help.” He doesn’t say Minh’s name. He doesn’t have to.
Then, somehow, he’s at the AP side, leaning on a chair like he belongs there too, dropping “I’m just saying” crumbs. “Nhi’s always… visible,” he murmurs. “Like she likes being seen doing the right thing.” His eyes flick to me for half a second, quick, satisfied, then away, like he’s already moved on to the next version of the story.
I hear my name in the hallway and it’s not praise anymore: it’s inventory. Like they’re weighing me, deciding if my “perfect” has always been a costume with good lighting. People I’ve studied next to for years look at me too long, eyes sliding to my phone, my mouth, my hands, like they’ll catch a tell. A student government guy pauses by my locker and goes, too light, “You okay?” and I feel the door close before it even shuts.
Across the quad, Minh takes his dose too. I watch it happen in flashes: the way laughter snaps off when he limps up, then comes back louder, performative, like they’re daring him to react. Someone thrusts a phone in his face (“Bro, it’s funny”) and there it is, his ex-friend’s little essay in the comments, packaged as insider truth. Injury becomes character flaw. Pain becomes punchline.
Between third and fourth period, I wedge myself into the seam of hallway traffic and open my phone like I’m checking the time, like I’m normal. The screen lights up and my stomach does that small, practiced drop. As if my body has learned to brace before my brain can lie about it.
Our group chat is frozen. Not dead, exactly. Stalled. A single message sits there like a post-it stuck to my forehead:
u ok??
It’s from Jen, who has never asked me that in our entire friendship unless there was extra information orbiting it. Jen who texts me “what did you get on the quiz” and “do you have the rubric” and “can you send notes” and calls it connection.
I stare at the question until it stops looking like concern and starts looking like a warning label.
Three dots appear under it. Then disappear.
Reappear. Disappear again.
A typo pops up and then vanishes so fast I know she deleted it on purpose. My thumb hovers over the keyboard. I type yeah and delete it. I type why and delete that too. Anything I say feels like evidence.
The bubbles come back, stubborn now, like she’s finally decided to commit.
A second message lands.
just wanted to make sure you saw this
Under it: a screenshot.
It’s one of those blurry, zoomed-in pictures someone took off someone else’s story. Grainy hallway lighting, washed-out faces, the edge of a door that looks like the training room entrance. There’s a circle drawn in neon red around my hair, my backpack strap, like I’m a suspect. Another circle around Minh’s profile, the angle of his jaw, the bend in his leg like the injury is part of the caption.
And on the side is the real point: a thread of comments, stacked and cropped, where my name is typed too many times. Nhi Tran next to Minh Nguyen like they’re ingredients in a recipe people are passing around.
Someone’s message is half-cut off but I can read enough: …always knew she was like that.
My throat tightens. The hallway noise swells and then thins out, like I’m underwater and everyone else is breathing air.
I don’t even notice my nails digging into my palm until it starts to sting.
By the time the bell rings, the hallway has teeth.
Two at a time, people I’ve eaten lunch with for three years slide into formation around me like we’re doing a group project. Jen hooks her arm through mine, casual, right?, and steers me toward the math wing as if I’m about to wander into traffic. Another girl falls in on my other side, blocking line of sight down the corridor. It’s choreography, and I’m the prop.
“Hey,” Jen says, voice pitched low, sweet like she’s offering gum. “Just: be careful, okay?”
“Careful about what?” My smile feels stapled on.
She doesn’t answer directly. None of them do. They trade glances like they’re checking a rubric. “You know how people talk,” someone murmurs. “And like… colleges.” As if admissions officers are perched in the ceiling tiles.
I hear it in the gaps between words: stop hovering around athletes. Stop giving them content. Stop being seen.
Another whisper: “Don’t let a boy mess up your brand, Nhi.”
Brand. Like I’m a product with a warranty they’re trying to keep valid.
I nod because that’s what the golden child does, and my throat burns like I swallowed something sharp.
Minh limps toward the locker room and it’s like someone lowers the thermostat. The air shifts. The guys who were loose a second ago snap into something louder, like volume can pass as loyalty. A couple of them start laughing too hard, too fast, building a wall out of jokes.
Someone slaps his shoulder, hard enough that Minh’s jaw ticks, and goes, “Our guy’s busy, huh?” like Minh owes them an explanation and an apology in the same breath. The word busy lands greasy, coded.
Minh’s smile shows up late and sharp, like a blade he has to remember to carry. He adjusts his brace without looking down, but I see his fingers tremble. Nobody asks how his knee is. They just scan his face for a reaction they can screenshot.
Minh says something back, I don’t catch the words, just the way his shoulders square, and the team’s vibe clamps down like a coach’s whistle. A senior steps in, all fake-brotherly, telling him to keep his head down, stop “adding distractions.” Another laughs like it’s a joke: coaches hate drama. Nobody says the ex-friend’s name, but every eye flicks to the same glowing phone.
Later, outside the training room, we slam into each other like bad timing made flesh. “Why is my name in your mess?” I hiss, because I can’t afford to be a rumor with legs. Minh’s eyes go flat. “You mean my life?” he snaps. “Sorry it’s not cute for your applications.” My pulse skitters. Under it, one ugly rule: choose a side, or get shredded by both.
Mom’s voice reaches me before her face does, drifting from the kitchen like steam. My name comes first, then a pause, then the word that makes my shoulders lock up.
Tiếng tăm.
Reputation. Like it’s a thing you can drop and hear shatter on tile.
She’s not angry. That’s the worst part. Anger I could argue with. This is fear folded into politeness, served like warm soup. She wipes her hands on a dish towel that’s already clean, eyes flicking to the hallway like my dad might be listening, like the walls might report back to Auntie Thảo.
“I heard something,” she says in Vietnamese, gentle the way you touch a bruise. “Not from me. From… outside.”
Outside means the auntie network. Church parking lot. Nail salon chairs. That one lady who smiles too hard while she asks if I’ve decided Stanford or UCLA yet.
I keep my face neutral. That takes effort now, like holding a heavy textbook with straight arms.
Mom doesn’t say Minh’s name. She doesn’t have to. She just sketches the outline of the problem: people saw me near the training room. People are talking. People always talk, because talking is how they prove they still matter.
“You are a good girl,” she says, as if she’s reminding herself. “But people don’t see inside. They only see… picture.”
Picture. Optics, in my mother’s language.
She lists consequences like she’s reciting prices at the market: scholarship committees look at “character.” Donors ask questions. Schools search your name. One rumor becomes a screenshot, becomes a story, becomes the kind of stain you can’t scrub because everyone swears they’re just “worried for you.”
And under all of it: money. Tight like a knot. Unspoken, but tugging.
I nod because nodding is what my body does when home becomes a courtroom. My throat burns with things I don’t say: how unfair it is that I can ace five AP classes but still lose everything to a hallway whisper. How I’m so tired of living like a glass display.
Mom reaches out, tucks hair behind my ear, and her thumb lingers like an apology. “Con,” she murmurs, softer. “Don’t give them a reason.”
Obedience slides into place, automatic as breathing. I hate how fluent I am in it.
The next morning I’m not even there, but I can picture it anyway. Because Westbrook is nothing if not predictable. The weight room corridor is basically a hallway of mirrors and power, and Coach loves a “private” conversation that happens in public. Close enough to Minh that it looks like mentorship, loud enough that the freshman with a shaker bottle can repeat it later like scripture.
“Keep rehab quiet,” I imagine him saying, voice smooth. “Keep your circle clean. Don’t give people optics.”
Optics. Like we’re all walking press releases.
Minh probably nods, jaw working, because what else can he do? His knee is already a headline in adult mouths. The subtext is obvious even from a distance: your body is a question mark; don’t make your attitude one too. Don’t make your friends one too. Don’t make your girlfriend, if you even have one, an issue.
Anger is expensive when your scholarship is conditional, and everybody knows who gets billed first.
By lunch, the rumor isn’t even a sentence anymore: it’s a title. A grainy photo hits Stories: me half-turned near the training room door, Minh’s profile in the edge of the frame, the kind of accidental proximity that looks intentional when you crop out the rest of the hallway. Someone adds a caption with too many laughing emojis, like cruelty needs a cushion.
Then it mutates. Screenshots pile up. Minh’s ex-friend, of course it’s him, doesn’t post first; he just “reacts,” nudges, feeds it little words that turn it mean. Minh’s “spiraling.” I’m “doing damage control.” Like I’m his handler. Like he’s a bomb.
My group chat goes quiet in that weaponized, courteous way: thumbs-up reactions, no follow-up. Across the quad, his teammates’ eyes snag on him and slide away, like watching might be contagious.
I do what I always do when things start leaking: I try to seal the container. In Notes, I draft twelve messages to Minh, short, clean, unemotional. We should be careful. Maybe don’t talk to me at school. Each one reads like an email to a committee, not a person, so I delete it. That night I tell Mom I can take more hours at the tutoring center. She just smooths my sleeve and repeats, softly: don’t be noticeable the wrong way.
Minh’s instinct is always impact: find the mouth that started it and make it choke on the truth. But he’s already seen how fast truth gets translated into drama when you’re the injured star and everyone’s bored. My instinct is to shrink, to step out of the frame before I become a caption. Except shrinking feels like permission. Either way, the fear is the same: pick each other and we’re traitors; don’t, and we prove we were never worth it.
The club room smells like dry-erase marker and someone’s iced coffee that’s been sweating onto the tables for an hour. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead like they’re impatient with us. I’m halfway through my updates, fundraiser numbers, volunteer shifts, the exact wording for the announcement that won’t sound like begging, when my phone lights up.
I don’t touch it. I don’t even tilt my head.
But the glow is a small, perfect spotlight in my lap, and it might as well be a siren.
Mr. Halvorsen stops mid-sentence like his mouth hits a speed bump. His eyes flick down, screen, then me, quick, controlled. He’s the kind of advisor who says he supports student leaders and then treats us like we’re one missed email away from ruining his day.
“Let’s stay focused,” he says, voice too even, too public.
I feel my cheeks heat, not with shame exactly. More like my body is preparing for impact. My thumb curls around my phone until the edge bites my skin. I keep my expression neutral, polite, the one that says I’m fine, I’m always fine, because the second you look rattled, people start narrating you.
Mr. Halvorsen gives a tight little smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “College committees don’t love…” He pauses, like he’s doing me a favor by not saying the word. “…distractions.”
A laugh ripples across the room. Small at first, then more confident, like he’s handed them permission. Someone makes a soft ooh. My stomach drops anyway, hard and fast, like I missed a step.
I smile automatically, because my face has been trained for this. It’s the kind of smile that says message received without admitting it hurt. My jaw locks so tight my molars ache.
“I’m not, ” I start, and then stop, because explaining sounds like guilt. Because defending myself sounds like drama. Because the glow has already done what it needed to do: turned me into a cautionary example.
I slide my phone facedown on the table, slow and deliberate, like I’m putting away a weapon.
“Sorry,” I say, even though I didn’t do anything.
And the worst part is how easily the room lets me.
Minh’s rehab runs long enough that the final bell is a memory, the hallway outside the training room thinning out to stragglers and custodians with keys jangling like warnings. I’m not there, but I can picture it anyway. Because Westbrook loves an audience, and nothing on this campus stays private unless it’s pain.
The door swings open and Minh steps out with that careful, pissed-off limp that says don’t look at me while daring you to try. Two of his teammates hang back by the water fountain, pretending to scroll, pretending not to be loyal to whatever story is trending.
“Nguyen,” the assistant coach calls, sharp as a whistle.
Minh pauses. The coach doesn’t lower his voice; he lifts it, like volume is a lesson. “You’re already a headline,” he says, eyes flicking past Minh to make sure the boys hear. “So don’t give people anything else to chew on. Clean optics. You hear me?”
Minh nods like he’s taking notes, like this is strategy and not a leash. But the flush climbs his neck anyway, hot and humiliating: because everyone understands what “anything else” means, and it’s never about the knee.
The trophy case turns the hallway into a mirror maze. Glass and gold and our reflections stitched together even before we’re close. I’m hugging a stack of flyers and sign-up sheets to my chest like they’re armor. Minh is coming the other way, moving stiff, weight shifted off his bad knee, jaw set like pain is a private argument he’s winning.
Two sophomores slow down, pretending to look at state banners. A girl by the water fountain pauses mid-sip. I can feel their eyes clicking into place.
My brain starts grading my choices. Ignore him: innocent. Also cold. Acknowledge him: polite. Also proof. Speak: human. Also headline.
Minh’s face gives me nothing. Not friendly, not hostile: just waiting. Like he’s daring me to be the first one caught caring.
I give him the smallest nod I can. Market polite, church hallway neutral, the version of me that never gives anyone a hook. Minh answers with a half-smile like a truce, like see, nothing here, but it reads warm in the wrong way. The air shifts. Phones come up. Thumbs start moving. My stomach sinks. One centimeter of kindness becomes proof. Minh’s shoulders go tight, like even caution is something they can call pathetic.
By lunch the rumor has grown teeth and starts chewing on me like it’s entitled. In the quad, Kelsey stages a whisper (stage-whisper, Broadway projection) “She’s totally tutoring him one-on-one,” and the girls around her giggle like it’s chemistry, not cruelty. Across the cafeteria Minh’s teammate calls it “rehab dates,” laughing too loud. The air feels surveilled. I swallow, and realize: silence is a statement. Breathing wrong is, too.
I see it later, the way you see a car accident in your peripheral and your body decides it’s your problem before your brain does.
It’s after fourth period when I’m cutting past the training room corridor. Trying to avoid the main hallway because the main hallway has mouths. The air back here smells like disinfectant and old sweat, like effort that never gets thanked. The lockers by the training room are half-shadowed, a dead-end pocket where the fluorescent lights buzz louder than people think they do.
Minh is there, shoulder against the metal, one foot angled like he’s negotiating with his knee. And in front of him is a boy I recognize without wanting to: Minh’s ex-friend: one of those guys who wears confidence like cologne, too strong and everywhere. He’s close enough that it looks intimate if you’re the type of person who makes stories out of angles.
He talks low, smiling. Not a real smile. A we’re on the same team smile. His hands are open like he’s offering something, like he’s a reasonable person in a reasonable conversation.
Minh’s jaw tightens, and I can’t hear the words, but I can read the rhythm. The ex-friend’s mouth moves like he’s listing options. Like he’s explaining a deal.
Then I catch a few syllables when a door down the hall opens and closes: sound leaking out and in like breath.
“: make it go away,” the ex-friend says, soft, sweet, almost bored. “Just… laugh. Say it’s nothing.”
Minh doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t move. He looks like he’s holding still so he doesn’t break something.
The ex-friend tilts his head, grin sharpening. “And if anyone asks? You say she’s the one who’s been… you know. Trying.”
My stomach drops so hard it feels like it hits my ribs on the way down.
Minh’s eyes flash, anger, yes, but something uglier underneath. Panic. The kind that comes from realizing your name isn’t yours anymore; it’s a handle other people grab when they want to move you.
The ex-friend’s smile stays in place, daring him. Like refusal is a choice Minh can’t afford. Like betrayal is just another kind of leverage when you know exactly where someone is most scared to lose.
Across town, I get intercepted like I’m a flyer someone can pluck off a windshield.
It’s outside my aunt’s nail salon, Saigon Pines Plaza, glass storefront, neon “OPEN,” the smell of acetone and jasmine tea leaking out every time the door sighs. Aunties sit in the waiting chairs and pretend they’re scrolling, but their eyes keep lifting, little periscopes over their phones. I feel my posture snap into place automatically, chin up, backpack strap straight. Golden child mode. Armor.
My older cousin leans against the window like he owns the reflection. He doesn’t say Minh’s name. He doesn’t have to.
“Hey,” he says, casual, like we’re talking about SAT dates. “You’re almost there, Nhi. Don’t get messy now.”
I blink, slow. “I’m not. “Just… step back in public. Let people see you’re focused. For your parents.”
For your parents: the gentlest knife. He says it like it’s love, like loyalty is proven by disappearing before anyone can ask why you were there in the first place.
By seventh period, the rumor isn’t even gossip anymore: it’s a fill-in-the-blanks worksheet people keep sliding under my skin. Everyone acts like there’s a “right” version of me, and I’m supposed to initial it.
When I pass the gym doors, I feel eyes snag on me, then ricochet toward the training room like I’m a directional sign. Teachers do that careful smile, the one that pretends nothing is happening while quietly filing you under potential issue. “Nhi,” they say, softer than usual, like my name is glass. Like my “responsible” reputation has terms and conditions.
Minh gets it from his side too. The team’s attention turns managerial. And I can see it in his posture: the way that ex-friend’s little deal starts to look less like betrayal and more like a lifeline.
We slam into each other after practice hours, in a back hall that reeks of disinfectant and old sweat, and I’m already scraped thin. The panic keeps buzzing under my skin like a bad light. “Do you ever think?” I spit, too loud. “About my name? About what they’re doing with it?” My voice shakes anyway. Scholarships. My parents’ quiet, grinding payments. And somehow I’m the sponge for his chaos.
Minh’s laugh comes out sharp, like a bark he’s been holding in his throat. “Yeah, Nhi,” he says, eyes flaring. “Everything’s a headline with you. Optics. Scholarships. Your perfect little face.” He steps closer, careful on his knee but vicious anyway. “You’d rather let me be the problem than look human.” It hits because he’s not wrong: and neither am I. Truth isn’t what they want. They want payment.
I walk away like I’m the one who did something wrong, like my body has to apologize for taking up air in that hallway. My throat clamps tight around every word I didn’t say, and my stomach keeps doing this slow, ugly roll, like I swallowed a live battery. Not guilt. Something worse. Recognition.
It scares me how fast my spine folds when fear enters the room. Not even fear of Minh, not really. Fear of the version of me everyone has on file. Fear of my parents’ faces when the phone rings. Fear of aunties turning my name into a warning label. I hate that fear has a key to my joints.
I push into the nearest bathroom and lock myself into a stall even though I don’t need it, just to have walls. My hands shake like I just ran laps. I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, like every wellness poster has ever instructed, and my brain immediately starts grading the performance: Good. Controlled. Acceptable.
When I finally step to the mirror, the fluorescent light gives me a face that looks like it belongs to someone better-rested and less messy. Automatically, my features rearrange. Chin up. Eyes steady. Mouth neutral: pleasant if spoken to, not too bright, not inviting questions. The mask slides on so smoothly it’s humiliating.
I hold that calm expression for a beat, practicing it the way you practice a speech you don’t want to give. Then something in me snaps awake, hot and sharp.
What am I doing?
I stare at myself like I’m a stranger trying to pass as me. Like my life is a stage and I’m blocking a scene for an audience that never claps, only evaluates. My cheeks flush. Not with embarrassment, but with anger. Anger at the way I can disappear into “fine” so easily. Anger at Minh for making me feel seen and attacked in the same breath. Anger at myself, mostly, for being so good at surviving that I’ve started confusing it with living.
My reflection keeps wearing the calm face anyway, even while my eyes burn. That’s the sick part: my body knows the script, and it will keep performing it until someone pries it out of me.
At dinner my mom doesn’t raise her voice. She never has to. She sets down the bowl of canh like it’s fragile and looks at me over the steam, eyes soft in that way that means I’m trying not to scare you. “Careful, con gái,” she says, Vietnamese sliding around the English she uses for anything that feels official. “Don’t give people a story. Not now. You’re so close.”
Close to what, exactly? A letter. A number. A door that only stays open if I don’t touch the frame.
I nod, once, and it happens so fast it’s like a reflex test. My neck moves before my brain votes. Yes, Mom. Of course, Mom. The good daughter algorithm running in the background, clean and efficient.
The sting hits a second later, behind my ribs, like I just pressed a bruise to prove it’s real. Because I want to argue, about how rumors don’t need my permission, about how I’m already carrying everyone’s fear like a backpack I can’t take off, but my mom’s voice is gentle on purpose. Gentleness is a leash in our house. It makes pulling away feel like violence.
So I swallow my words with my rice and taste obedience like metal.
Minh stays in the training room after the last coach leaves, the lights buzzing like they’re tired too. His knee is wrapped and iced, the cold seeping past the towel until it’s a dull burn, like his body is punishing him for daring to need it. He stares at the swelling and tries to picture a future that doesn’t depend on cartilage and luck. It won’t come.
His phone glows in his palm. Messages from teammates that used to hit like proof now read like copy-paste sympathy. Recruiters: a thumbs-up, a “keep us updated,” the kind of sentence that already has an exit. Even the adults are careful, like attention is a resource they can’t waste on broken things.
Something in him goes very still.
So that’s what it is. Support isn’t love. It’s a lease.
The next day we almost collide outside the training room, and both of us jerk back like the air itself swings. Minh’s jaw tightens; my pulse trips over itself. “About yesterday, ” I start, but my apology catches on the real confession: I’m scared one rumor can wipe my whole life clean. He scoffs, too sharp, because his truth is worse. Without his body, he’s nobody worth choosing.
Alone, it hits like a drop you don’t feel until your stomach is already in your throat. If I stop auditioning for perfect, do I still fit inside my parents’ sacrifice story: or do I become the cautionary tale they can’t afford? If Minh stops acting unbreakable, who stays when he can’t produce wins like receipts? Our roles aren’t masks. They’re contracts. And breaking them has a cost.
The air outside the gym feels rinsed-out, like the whole campus has been put through a loud cycle and now everything is pretending to be clean. The fluorescent light above the double doors flickers just enough to make my eyes ache. I hover with my backpack still on, phone in my hand, thumb scrolling nothing. An empty reflex. If anyone asks, I’m waiting for a ride. If anyone asks, I’m always waiting.
Minh leans against the brick wall a few feet away, one knee straight, the other bent like the building is holding him up. He looks like he’s studying the pavement the way he studies game film: like there’s proof down there that he didn’t screw up. His jaw keeps working, like he’s chewing something that isn’t food.
Neither of us says hi. We’ve already spent too many days with words that get misquoted.
A couple of guys in practice shorts push through the doors, laughing too loud. One of them glances at Minh, does the half-smirk thing. Pity dressed up as a joke. Minh’s shoulders go tight. I go tighter. When they’re gone, the quiet snaps back into place.
I’m the one who breaks first, because I’m tired of being unbreakable.
“I can’t keep… doing this,” I say, and even to me it sounds vague and controlled, like I’m writing a polite email. My throat burns anyway. “Fixing things. Cleaning up. Acting like I don’t mind.”
Minh doesn’t look at me right away. He laughs once, sharp and humorless. “Yeah. Must be hard, being perfect.”
It hits exactly where it’s supposed to, and I almost let it: almost retreat into the version of myself that takes the hit and smiles.
“I’m not,” I say, because I need him to hear it. Because I need to hear it. “I’m just… functioning. Barely.”
His gaze finally slides over, guarded, assessing. “I’m tired too,” he says, like the admission tastes like metal. He swallows. “Tired of acting like I don’t need anyone. Like it’s not killing me.”
The words hang between us, not a confession, not an apology. Just two people standing too close to the same exit, pretending we aren’t choosing to stay.
I stare at the blue-and-gold banner over the gym doors like it’s going to tell me what to do. Like there’s a script for girls like me and boys like him, laminated and hung up for everyone to point at.
“There are exits,” I say, because naming them feels safer than stepping through one.
Minh’s mouth twitches. “Yeah?”
“I could just, ” My hand makes a neat little gesture, the kind I use in presentations. Controlled. Contained. “Go back to being Nhi Tran, NHS, AP everything, never involved in anything messy. Pretend I didn’t hear the jokes. Pretend I didn’t. “Pretend you’re just some guy from the track team I don’t talk to.”
He snorts, but it’s tired. “And I could go back to being Minh Nguyen, varsity, don’t-care, too-cool-to-get-hurt. Let them say whatever. Let it fossilize.”
The word lands heavy. Fossilize. Like the story turns to stone around him and he has to live inside it.
Saying it out loud shrinks it. These aren’t destinies. They’re old reflexes. The easiest masks in the world to put back on.
Minh’s throat works like he’s about to launch something mean: something precise enough to leave a bruise and clean enough to pretend it’s just truth. I watch it happen in real time: the flare, the calculation, the old muscle memory of winning. Then he exhales through his nose and lets it die.
“Okay,” he says, flat, like the word costs him. His eyes flick up. “What are you actually scared of, Nhi? Not the rumor. You.”
The question lands without hooks. My first instinct is to answer with a resume. A joke. A shrug. Anything glossy.
Instead I feel my face heat. “I’ve been… editing,” I admit. “Acting like I’m fine so no one panics. Because if I disappoint them”, my parents, the counselors, the aunties, “it’s like I’m wasting everything they lost to get me here.”
We don’t make a big speech. We make something smaller and meaner: a pact that’s also a dare. No disappearing halfway through a fight. No punishing silence like it’s discipline. And if either of us feels that familiar yank (golden daughter, tough athlete) we say it out loud before we slip back into costume. It’s not trust. It’s just… not making it worse.
The price tags start appearing immediately. Eyes that linger too long, laughter that isn’t even trying to be quiet, comments disguised as advice. People want me to pick the clean story, the one that keeps my name unwrinkled. They want him to joke it off, swallow it like painkillers. We don’t swear anything dramatic. We just decide: no vanishing. Keep showing up until we can’t pretend we’re doing it for anyone else.
I can’t keep doing this in crumbs.
It’s always the same: my thumb flying over my screen between AP Gov and lunch, his one-handed replies while he’s taping his knee or pretending he isn’t. Asterisked sentences. Half-truths. “U good?” “Yeah.” Like we’re paying by the character for honesty.
“Can we. I swallow. “Can we stop… figuring it out like this? In fragments?”
Minh leans back against the cinderblock wall outside the training room, shoulders loose like he’s bored, like I’m just another thing being scheduled around his life. His jaw tightens once, hard enough I see it, and then he goes still. That stillness is its own kind of answer. His version of not running.
I keep going because if I don’t, I’ll chicken out and go back to managing this like a group project. “One time a week. A standing thing. Not a crisis text thread. Not you disappearing into rehab and me disappearing into… literally everything.” My laugh comes out sharp and wrong. “No audience. No explaining ourselves to people who already decided.”
His eyes flick to me, then away, like looking directly is too much. The hallway smells like sweat and disinfectant, and somewhere inside the gym someone yells, hyped, oblivious. Minh’s fingers tap his phone once, twice, like he’s scrolling through options that aren’t there.
“Why?” he says finally. Not mean. Not soft. Just… bare.
Because I’m tired of guessing. Because I keep waking up with my heart sprinting and no finish line. Because when he goes quiet I assume I did something unforgivable, and when I go quiet he assumes I’m judging him, and we both get to be miserable in private like it’s a virtue.
“Because I don’t want to keep auditioning,” I say. My throat burns. “Not with you.”
The pause after that is long enough for me to regret everything.
Then Minh nods once, small. “Once a week,” he says. “Same time. Same place.” His mouth twists like he hates that he’s agreeing. “No flaking unless you say you’re flaking.”
I exhale like I’ve been holding my breath for months. “Deal.”
He looks at me again, more direct this time. “And no fake ‘I’m fine’ texts.”
My stomach flips. Half dread, half relief. “Yeah,” I say, quiet. “That too.”
We write the rules like we’re installing a handrail along a staircase we keep pretending isn’t steep.
No translating each other into the version that makes other people comfortable. Not “she’s just stressed,” not “he’s just being a guy,” not anything that shrinks us into something easy to joke about. If someone asks, we don’t feed them scraps.
No using our families like knives. Not my mom’s sacrifices, not his scholarship, not the unspoken ledger that sits on both our dinner tables. We don’t get to threaten each other with the things we’re already scared of losing.
And silence isn’t allowed to be a weapon. Not the clean, polite kind I’m good at. Not the shut-down, stare-at-the-wall kind he’s mastered. If one of us needs space, we say it like grown-ups even if we feel like kids: I need an hour. I need until tomorrow. I need to stop before I say something I can’t take back.
Then we set a time to come back. A return time. Proof we’re not disappearing: just breathing.
He says it like it’s nothing, like he’s tossing a pebble and not checking where it lands.
“Whatever,” Minh mutters, eyes on the scuffed tile. “You wouldn’t get it. Teachers always love you.”
My face keeps the shape it’s trained into but it locks there, brittle. The heat crawls up my neck anyway. Because of course that’s the story everyone likes: Nhi Tran, blessed by fluorescent lighting and rubrics and adult approval. Easy. Clean. Not the girl who counts late notices by the fridge.
I don’t laugh. I don’t soften it. I don’t hand him an exit.
“Don’t do that,” I say, careful enough to not shake. “Don’t turn me into a rumor.”
He blinks, like he didn’t expect me to hold the line. Then his jaw works once.
“…Yeah,” he says finally, rough. “My bad.”
At rehab, I do what I always do: I turn him into a schedule. “So: how many sets today? What’s the timeline for cutting? Who signs off? Do you need me to email, ” He jerks his head up, eyes sharp. “I’m not your checklist, Nhi.” My mouth opens with an apology loaded and ready, but I swallow it. “I don’t know how to be here without fixing it,” I say. The truth just sits there, heavy, breathing.
By Friday, the rules stop being something we wrote to feel mature and start being something we do. When my chest tightens and I want to go ghost, I type one sentence anyway: still here. He answers with a stupid dot-dot-dot and then fine, me too. On Monday we walk in with a quiet, specific pact, like a coin in my pocket I keep touching to make sure it’s real.
The joke hits the air by the locker-room-adjacent hallway (half-whispered, half-loud on purpose) and I feel it before I even parse the words, the way my body recognizes certain tones like alarms. It’s that ugly, familiar mix: laughter with teeth, casual cruelty dressed up like team banter. The hallway smells like sweat that never fully leaves and industrial cleaner that tries and fails to kill it. Lockers slam. Someone’s phone plays a bass-heavy beat too tinny to be real music.
I’m here because my route between the library and the counseling wing is basically a bad habit. Because my brain likes efficiency even when it hurts me.
Minh is three steps ahead of me, hoodie up, backpack hanging off one shoulder like he’s trying to look normal and not like someone counting how many stairs are left in the day. He hears it too. I can tell because his shoulders do this micro-flinch that he immediately tries to convert into swagger, like his muscles are trained to translate pain into performance.
“Yo, careful, don’t let Tran trip you, bro,” some guy says, too loud, too proud of himself, “She’ll write you an essay about it.”
Another laugh, this one higher, meaner. “Nah, she’ll email Coach.”
My stomach drops into that cold, clean place where my panic likes to pretend it’s logic. Don’t react. Don’t give them a show. That’s what I’ve practiced my whole life: be uninteresting to people who want to make you smaller.
Minh does what I expect at first. His mouth starts to curve, the automatic grin, the one that says I’m in on it, you can’t hurt me. I see the split second where he could just keep walking. Let it slide. Let it land on me later in whispers and group chats and “concerned” adult faces.
And then something shifts. Like he remembers he’s tired of swallowing things.
He slows. The grin doesn’t fully form; it dies unfinished. He stops anyway. Turns back. Plants his good leg, jaw tight, and asks, flatly, “Who told you that?” not to escalate, but to make it clear he’s listening.
He stops. It’s not dramatic, no big stomp, no shoulder-check, just a sudden absence of forward motion that makes the hallway keep moving around him like water around a rock. He pivots on his good leg with this careful, practiced control that makes my throat tighten, because I know how much the other knee costs him, even when he pretends it doesn’t.
His jaw ticks once. His face is blank in a way that’s almost worse than anger, like he’s put everything messy on a high shelf.
“Who told you that?” he says.
Not loud. Not playful. Just…level. The kind of question teachers ask when they already know the answer and you’re about to realize you’re not as clever as you thought.
The laughter stutters, confused at being treated like it’s subject to cross-examination. Someone does the classic thing: shrugging too hard, looking away, pretending it’s nothing. “Bro, chill. It’s just, ”
“Just what?” Minh’s eyes flick past them, then land, steady, like he’s pinning a rumor to the wall and making everyone look at its shape. “Say who. Or don’t say it at all.”
Someone tries again, because they think the hallway is a stage and his knee is the punchline. “Damn, karma really got you, huh?”
Minh doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t square up. He just turns his head like he’s hearing a wrong answer in class.
“No,” he says, clear as a bell. “I got hit from the side. It’s on film.”
The word film lands heavier than any threat. A couple faces twitch. Processing the idea that facts exist.
“And Tran didn’t do anything,” he adds, voice still even. “She wasn’t on the field. She didn’t tell Coach anything. That’s not what happened.”
He shifts his weight carefully, like his body is a secret he refuses to monetize for them. “My injury isn’t a joke, and it’s not your story. Drop it.”
The hallway does this weird collective inhale, like it’s waiting for the laugh track to cue. Two guys glance over Minh’s shoulder, hunting for Coach or a teammate or literally anyone to tell them it’s safe to keep being cruel. Minh gives them nothing: no grin, no flare-up. He stares straight through the joke like it’s paperwork he’s refusing to sign. He doesn’t look at me either, and somehow that’s merciful. He doesn’t make me evidence.
Someone scoffs, eyes sliding past Minh like he’s scenery, and aims it at me, of course, with that lazy little smile. “Okay, but you know Tran’s got, like, a whole project now. Fixing you or whatever.”
Minh’s head tilts once. Not amused. Not heated. Just done.
“Leave her out of it,” he says.
He doesn’t soften it with a joke. He lets the silence cling to him until nobody can fling it back at me.
The next afternoon I text Minh one line, Where’s rehab?, and my thumb hovers like I’m about to jump off something. Three dots blink, disappear, blink again.
Training room. After 4. Don’t make it weird.
As if I would show up with a banner and a casserole. As if I’m not already sweating through my blouse in fifth period because my brain keeps replaying his voice in the hallway. Leave her out of it.
I don’t answer. If I answer, it becomes a conversation, and conversations invite questions, and questions invite the part of me that either overexplains or lies. Both feel like failure.
By 3:[^58] I’m outside the athletic wing, standing under a faded poster that says CHARACTER COUNTS in block letters. The hallway smells like disinfectant and old sweat, like the school is trying to scrub away the fact that bodies exist.
The training room doors have a narrow window. I can see movement: bodies in compression sleeves, a therapist in a polo, a flash of bright resistance bands. My backpack is hugged tight to my chest, not because it’s heavy, but because my hands don’t know what to do when they’re not holding onto something useful.
I tell myself I’m here for a normal reason. Paperwork. Information. A transaction. It’s easier to be a spreadsheet than a person.
When Minh looks up, his face doesn’t change much. That guarded half-smile isn’t there. He’s sitting on the edge of a table, one leg bent in a brace, the other planted like he’s ready to sprint anyway. He watches me like he’s waiting for a punchline.
I lift my chin, keep my expression blank. The mask that usually reads as confidence.
Then my fingers betray me. Just a small tremor, like my nerves are trying to crawl out of my skin.
His eyes flick down to my hands and back up, quick. Not pitying. Just…noticing.
“You lost?” he says, voice low, like the room has ears.
“No,” I say, and it comes out sharper than I mean. I swallow. “I’m not staying long.”
I step inside before I can talk myself out of it. The door closes behind me with a soft click that feels louder than it should.
I wait for the exact second the therapist’s back turns, when she’s reaching up for a foam roller like it’s the most important thing in the universe, and I move. Quick, quiet, like I’m slipping a note under a door.
A thin folder slides onto the bench beside Minh. Manila, boring, almost aggressive in how normal it looks. My fingers leave it like it’s hot.
Inside, everything is neat because if it’s neat, it’s not emotional. A printed list of low-cost PT clinics in Westbrook and the next two cities over. Hours circled, phone numbers typed, notes in the margin about sliding scales. A page from the scholarship handbook with MEDICAL EXEMPTION highlighted so hard the yellow bleeds through. A single name at the district office with an email address and the words compliance + appeals underlined twice.
He doesn’t open it right away. His knee shifts in the brace, a tiny wince he tries to swallow.
I keep my eyes on the scuffed floor tiles because eye contact makes things personal, and personal is where I start sounding like I care.
“Don’t thank me,” I say anyway, quiet. A warning. A boundary. My voice almost cracks into sincerity, so I clamp down.
His first reaction is predictable. He taps the edge of the folder with two fingers, like it might bite.
“So what,” he mutters, not quite looking at me, “I’m your project now?”
The word project lands wrong in my chest, too close to the way adults talk about me when they’re proud. Like I’m a product.
My gaze goes sharp on instinct. “No.” Flat. Immediate. “I’m not managing you. I’m not fixing you.”
His eyes flick up, challenge and something else flashing behind the bravado.
I keep my voice low, controlled. “I’m giving you options so they can’t corner you. That’s it.”
The therapist calls Minh over like he’s just another body on a table, and he moves with that too-fast confidence that can’t hide the limp. The exercises are slow, stupid, humiliating: tiny lifts, controlled bends, the kind of work nobody claps for. His jaw locks. I don’t hover. I take the far chair, knees pressed together, hands folded over the folder like it’s the only solid thing in the room. When pain makes him hiss, I don’t rush in with “you’ve got this.” I just look up. Meet his eyes once. Hold it. I saw. I’m still here.
After, he tries to slide the folder back to me like it’s cash on a counter, like returning it erases whatever just happened. I push it toward him again with two fingers. Minimal contact. Maximum message.
“Keep it,” I say. “Use it or don’t. I’m not doing that thing where we pretend this isn’t happening.”
I stand too fast, halfway to the door before my throat betrays me. I stop. “Pain isn’t a moral failing.”
By Monday, the pressure has a shape and a schedule, like it got added to my Google Calendar without asking.
First period, I catch Coach in the hallway outside the gym. Technically I’m just walking past, technically he’s just “checking in,” but his body is angled like a blockade. His smile is bright in that practiced adult way, the kind that says I’m on your side while his eyes say don’t make this hard.
He doesn’t even say Minh’s name at first. “We just need everyone to be… you know.” A soft chuckle, like we’re sharing a joke. “A team guy.”
Team guy. As in: quiet. Grateful. Non-complicated. As in: take the hit and call it character-building.
I feel my shoulders lock up. I nod like I’m supposed to. I don’t trust my mouth.
Third period, I finally get a five-minute slot with counseling because I refresh the appointment page like it’s Ticketmaster. The counselor’s office smells like plug-in vanilla and desperation. I mention Minh’s missed classes because of rehab, the obvious accommodations, the fact that “later” becomes “never” at Westbrook if you aren’t loud.
She blinks at me, sympathetic in a way that costs her nothing. “We can revisit accommodations later.”
Later. After playoffs. After grades close. After whatever story about him solidifies into truth.
At lunch, my phone buzzes with a number I don’t have saved.
so what really happened?
No punctuation, like they’re too busy to be polite. I stare at it until the letters feel like they’re vibrating. Another text follows a minute later.
my mom says u guys were together when it went down
My stomach drops in this specific, humiliating way: like someone reached in and pinched a nerve. Auntie gravity. One whisper and suddenly your whole life is an object being passed around.
Across the quad, Minh laughs too loudly at something his teammates say. It’s the same laugh he uses when he’s bracing for impact. People’s heads turn in tiny synchronized motions, like a flock tracking movement.
Everyone wants a version they can repeat.
Adults smile and ask for obedience. Kids circle and wait for content.
And I watch the space around him tighten, invisible but real. Like a net you don’t see until you’re already stepping into it.
Minh does what he’s always done when he can feel the floor tilting under him: he turns pain into performance. His jaw goes tight, and the jokes come out with teeth: like if he can make everyone laugh first, he can decide what the laugh means. Like it’s a choice. Like it’s not a plea.
And me, I go cold and organized. My brain opens tabs. Rehab schedule. Missing assignments. Who to email, what subject line won’t get ignored. I fold myself into silence so clean it passes for serenity. The kind teachers love because it doesn’t demand anything from them.
It should irritate me, his loudness. It should irritate him, my quiet. That’s our usual math. But standing in the hallway with the fluorescent buzz and the smell of sweat and disinfectant, I see the pattern like it’s highlighted.
He dares the world to take him seriously.
I try to make myself too useful to discard.
Same terror. Different packaging.
If we stop delivering (wins, grades, smiles, gratitude) then what’s left? And who still looks at us like we matter?
The rivalry between us starts to feel less like something we chose and more like an argument we inherited. Passed down in hallway glances and ranking charts and the way adults pit “types” against each other like it’s enrichment. Someone laughs a little too loud when Minh’s limp catches on the tile, and my stomach drops with the same hot-sour recognition I get when a teacher says, “You’ll be fine, you’re Nhi,” like my name is a safety net they can yank out from under me.
I don’t even mean to react. It’s just there on my face, the flinch.
Minh’s eyes flick to me. For once, he doesn’t turn it into a joke, doesn’t sharpen it into something I deserve. His jaw tightens, and he looks away: like he recognizes the trap because he’s lived in it too.
In tiny, unplanned beats, we start choosing each other over whoever’s watching. When people try to get me to co-sign Minh’s “attitude,” I let the silence sit there like a dare. When someone laughs and says I’m only helping him for college apps, Minh’s smile goes flat. “Nah,” he says, casual but cutting. Each time, it costs us a little comfort. And makes the truce feel permanent.
The more everyone tries to shove us back into our assigned slots, Minh the star, me the spreadsheet with legs, the more it feels like wearing praise as handcuffs. We stop competing over who can take a hit without flinching. I start noticing the way his laugh dies when no one’s watching, like mine does. So when the next rumor circles close, I’m not angry. I’m weirdly calm, because finding him makes the hallway noise go thin.
After rehab, the athletic wing feels like a mouth that’s finally done chewing. The fluorescent lights buzz. The air smells like antiseptic and old sweat and whatever lemon cleaner the custodian uses like it can erase pain. Minh signs a clipboard with the kind of swagger people think is confidence, but I watch his fingers: how they hesitate when he has to press down.
We don’t talk about it. Not the swelling, not the way he swallows hard when he stands, not the trainer’s too-cheery voice saying, “Progress,” like it’s a grade.
I follow him out before my brain can start calculating how this looks. The pep-rally is happening in the gym; you can feel it in the building, the bass of a chant vibrating through the hallway tiles like a second heartbeat. Someone’s probably on a mic screaming about school spirit and “family,” and I want to laugh because the only family I feel right now is the one I’m not allowed to disappoint.
Minh takes the side stairwell up to the bleachers: half-lit, empty, the kind of place that exists for afterthoughts. He moves like each step is a negotiation. I hover behind him, ready to catch him and resenting myself for being ready.
When we get to a spot where the noise dulls into a distant roar, I set my bag down between us. Not because I need anything. Because it feels like planting a flag that says: I’m not here to ask you to be inspiring. I’m not here to audit your suffering.
Minh sits. He leans forward and pulls his injured leg in carefully, stretching with slow precision. His jaw flexes once. He exhales like he’s been holding his breath since the moment someone decided his body was a public resource.
I sit too, far enough to be respectful, close enough to count as choosing.
The silence is thick at first, like waiting for someone to make it a joke. For someone to fill it with updates and excuses and the kind of self-deprecation that keeps adults comfortable.
Neither of us does.
His breathing evens out. Mine follows, against my will. For a few minutes, we’re just two kids in a place that expects miracles, letting the world be loud somewhere else.
In the library’s back corner, the one that smells like dust and highlighters and old carpet trying to pretend it’s clean, Minh and I make an agreement that would get zero likes if someone posted it. One hour. Same table. Phones face-down like we’re at some weird support group for overachievers who can’t admit they need support.
“No bragging,” I say, tapping my planner like it’s a gavel.
“No self-roasting,” he adds, like he hates that he thought of it first.
We split the hour down the middle without saying it out loud: my laptop opens to scholarship portals and email drafts that start with Dear Committee and end with me begging politely to be allowed to exist. His binder is a disaster zone. Missing assignments, half-printed rubrics, teacher comments that feel like tiny verdicts.
He catches me rewriting the same sentence for the fourth time, trying to sound impressive instead of honest.
“You don’t have to,” he says, quiet, not looking up.
Five minutes later he mutters, “I’m fine,” while his hand shakes over a worksheet.
I don’t even look at him. “You don’t have to.”
And the air between us loosens, just enough to breathe.
We start trading honesty like it’s contraband: small enough to hide in our pockets, heavy enough to matter. I say, “I’m… not okay,” and it comes out like a confession I didn’t study for. Not dramatic. Just true. He doesn’t flinch. A beat later he says, “If I’m not on the field, people forget me,” like the words scrape his throat on the way out.
So we do what we always do when feelings get too big: we make a system.
On a ripped notebook page, we write rules in my sharp handwriting and his blunt arrows. No parent updates unless we agree. No coach meetings alone. If panic hits, we don’t vanish: we text one sentence: here, or not here, or need five. Survivable. Repeatable. Real.
Every week I choose it again, like taking a vitamin I hate but need. I bring forms, rehab clinic numbers, scholarship loopholes. Minh shows up anyway, jaw tight when his knee throbs, even when people’s eyes try to pin him to a rumor. We don’t feed them. We don’t explain. We just hold our little line and keep walking.
The meetings don’t stop; they just change locations like we’re trying not to get caught needing each other. Bleachers after rehab, library when the AC is too cold, the river trail at dusk when the sky goes bruised-purple and nobody’s auntie is around. We sit close enough to share silence. No ranks, no stats, no politics. Just two people allowed to exhale.