All Of It

Wednesday morning there were more clumps on my pillow than the morning before. I lay there for a minute looking at them, then got up and video-called Chandler.

He answered on the second ring, still in his room, faux hawk not yet done, and I didn’t say anything for a second and neither did he. He looked at my face on his screen and said, “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

He was there before I’d finished putting the clippers on the counter.

I’d gotten the clippers from under the bathroom sink, the ones Dad used for his edges, and I’d set them on the counter and then stood there not touching them until I heard the front door. Chandler came upstairs. I was sitting on the bathroom floor with my back against the tub, the same position I’d been in the last time he’d found me here, which felt like something but I wasn’t going to name it.

He looked at the clippers. Then at me.

“You sure,” he said.

“I’m losing it anyway.”

He didn’t say anything else. He picked up the clippers, and I sat on the closed toilet lid, and he stood behind me, and neither of us talked. The clippers were loud in the small bathroom and The middle distance. Chandler worked in sections, careful and unhurried.

When it was done he set the clippers down and put his hand on the back of my head, briefly, the way you settled something you’d been careful with. Then he stepped back.

I stood up and looked in the mirror.

My head was the shape I’d always had without knowing it. There was a small scar above my left ear from a fence when I was nine. My eyes looked bigger, or maybe I was just looking at them more directly. I stood there for a while. Chandler stood behind me in the mirror and didn’t make a face and didn’t say anything and didn’t look away.

I went to my room and got Chandler’s dark green beanie from the chair. I pulled it on.

He picked up the clipper case and put it back under the sink. I stayed at the mirror for another moment.

He cleaned up the bathroom while I went to sit on my bed, and then he came and sat beside me on the edge of it, and we were quiet for a while in the way that had gotten easier, and that was enough.

Thursday I wore the beanie to school.

Nobody said anything. Noelle had texted at seven-fifteen to say she was walking over and did I want coffee, and when she saw the beanie she looked at me for a second and said “green’s your color” and that was the whole conversation. I’d worn it through English and Calc and lunch and it had been unremarkable.

The hallway between fifth and sixth was where it happened.

Tahni was near the lockers with Kelo and Gemma, the twins from the squad, and I was passing without looking, and then her voice carried the way it always carried when she needed it to: “Some people just find a way to make everything about themselves, even this.”

I stopped.

The hallway kept moving around me, the between-class current of it, but I stopped and I turned around.

Tahni’s expression didn’t change when she saw me looking. That was the whole thing about Tahni: she never looked caught because she never let herself be.

“Sorry?” I said. Which wasn’t a question.

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“You were talking near me. That’s the same thing and you know it.”

Kelo and Gemma had gone still. The hallway was starting to slow, the current snagging the way it did around anything worth watching.

“I was having a private conversation,” Tahni said.

“You have a lot of those.” I took a step toward her. “The one where you told everyone I was brave for coming to school. The one where you were so worried about Evan putting his life on hold. The one where the bench was the right call. All of them private, all of them just loud enough.”

Something shifted in her face. Not guilt. Tahni didn’t do guilt. But something recalculated.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“You do,” I said. “You’ve been doing it since September and you’re good at it and I’ve been letting it go because I didn’t have the energy for this. I’m telling you now that I see it. I’ve always seen it. And I’m done letting it go.”

The hallway had gone mostly quiet. Twenty, thirty people at least, slowed or stopped. I was aware of them the way you were aware of weather.

Tahni’s expression settled into something smooth and corporate. “I think you’re going through a really hard time and I feel for you, I genuinely do, but you’re projecting.”

I heard someone behind me exhale. Not a laugh. Something else. The crowd had its own read on this and I didn’t need to look to know which way it was going.

And then her hand moved.

It was fast, the grab and pull in one motion, the beanie off my head before I’d fully processed her arm moving. She wasn’t laughing. Her face hadn’t changed. That was the part that made it so much worse, that she’d done it without expression, like a demonstration.

The hallway went completely silent.

My head was cold and twenty-odd people were looking at it and Tahni was holding the beanie with the same neutral expression and something in my chest that had been a very controlled temperature for a very long time went all the way to nothing and I reached out and grabbed her wrist.

Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to make her stop.

“Give it back,” I said.

Her eyes went wide, just for a second, the first real expression I’d gotten from her all year. Then she yanked her arm back and said, low enough that only I could hear: “You really want to do this here.”

“Yes,” I said. Out loud. “Actually.” I took the beanie out of her other hand.

She grabbed for it back.

I don’t remember deciding to scream. I just did. And then I lunged.

What followed was not clean or quiet or anything like the confrontation I’d been playing out in my head since September. Her nails caught my cheek, a fast bright sting. My hand found a fistful of her hair and I pulled with everything I had, all of it, all the months of it, and Tahni Haughton screamed.

We went down. Limbs and tile and someone’s shoe catching my elbow, both of us hitting the floor in a way that knocked the air out of the moment and left only noise: the crowd shouting, Kelo’s voice high and sharp, Gemma’s hands on my shoulders trying to get purchase. Curses I didn’t know I knew coming out of my mouth in a voice I didn’t recognize as mine. My knee caught Tahni somewhere in the stomach, accidental and hard, and she made a sound I’d never heard her make before.

Gemma and Kelo were pulling at me. The resource officer got there fast, both hands, real weight behind it, hauling me back and up and away from her. Someone else had Tahni. The hallway was a wall of sound. I was breathing in the specific way of someone who has just done something they cannot undo, chest heaving, cheek burning, hands still half-clenched.

The beanie was on the floor between us. I didn’t pick it up. I looked at the officer’s shoulder and waited for whatever happened next.

The principal’s office had chairs with the scratchy fabric and the smell of old coffee and the specific quality of quiet that came from being a room where bad news happened regularly. Dad was there when I arrived. He’d left a deposition to be there and he was in his suit and he looked at me once when I sat down and then looked at the principal and said, “Let’s hear it.”

The calm was worse than anger would have been. I’d known that about Dad my whole life.

Seven days, out-of-school suspension. The principal said it with the expression of someone who understood the situation was complicated and wanted that understood without saying it. Dad said nothing.

Dad thanked him. That was it. We stood up.

In the hallway outside, Tahni and her dad were waiting their turn. They went in as we came out. Dad’s hand was on my back and I should have kept walking. I didn’t. The door didn’t latch and the principal’s voice came through, even and deliberate. Seven days. Captaincy suspended for the rest of the season. Probation on the squad.

Mr. Haughton’s voice after, low and controlled. Phone confiscated. Allowance cut. They didn’t raise her to be a bully.

Tahni’s face was the most expression I’d ever seen on it. Not remorse exactly. Something closer to the look of someone who’d made a calculated move and discovered the calculation had been wrong.

Dad put his hand on my back and steered me toward the exit without stopping.

We didn’t talk on the drive home. He pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine and sat for a moment.

“You’re not in trouble,” he said. “Not with me.” He got out of the Suburban.

I got out too.

Pops was on the front step.

He was still in his work clothes.

I walked up the path. He opened his arms. I walked into them and stood there with my face against his shoulder and he didn’t say anything, which was exactly what I needed, because I wasn’t sorry and I knew I should be and I wasn’t and that terrified me more than the suspension.

We stood on the front step for a minute. The December cold was exact.

He didn’t say anything. He was very good at that.

On my bed afterward, I put my phone on my stomach and looked at the ceiling.

Two texts.

Evan: heard what happened, you okay?

Chandler, from an hour earlier, no context: you home?

I’d said yeah. He’d sent okay.

I lay there holding both of them. Seven days. I couldn’t do anything about that right now.

My cheek still stung where her nails had caught it. I’d checked it in the rearview mirror on the drive home, a thin red line below my cheekbone, already fading. Hers would be worse. I didn’t know how I felt about that.

I texted Evan: fine.

Chandler’s okay was already in my pocket. It had been there all afternoon. It was enough for tonight.

I put the phone face down on the bed and looked at the ceiling and waited for my chest to feel like something I recognized.

It didn’t happen right away. I stayed there anyway.