Guess We'll See

POV: Silver Preston

The challenge sits between us like a dropped puck at center ice.

Neither of us moves to pick it up immediately.

I look down at my notebook and let the ambient noise of Blue State fill the silence. The espresso machine grinding. Students calling out orders. Someone near the back laughing too loudly at something on their laptop.

Normal sounds. Safe sounds.

I write the words identity crisis at the top of a fresh page and underline them twice.

Professional. Neutral. Focused on the assignment.

That is the plan.

"Fitzgerald first or Hemingway?"

Eli wraps both hands around his coffee cup.

"Hemingway. Start with the war injury angle. Physical limitation and creative identity."

I write it down.

He is not wrong. Hemingway's relationship with the wounds he carried from World War One, both physical and psychological, runs through almost everything he wrote. The way he used writing to process what his body could no longer do. The way his public identity became both armor and cage.

I understand that more than I want to.

"We can parallel it with his public persona," I say, keeping my voice even. "The performance of masculinity as compensation. The way he controlled his own narrative after the injuries changed what he was capable of."

Eli studies me for a moment.

Not the unreadable stare from across the classroom. Something more direct. More present.

"You know a lot about performing a narrative."

My pen stops moving.

"It is a literature class," I say carefully. "That is literally what we are discussing."

"Sure."

One word. Completely neutral.

I write three more bullet points without reading them back.

He is doing something deliberate. Saying things that are technically about the assignment and technically about me simultaneously, and doing it with enough plausible distance that I cannot call him on it directly without admitting that I know exactly what he means.

It is infuriating.

It is also, I realize with considerable irritation, exactly what I would do.

"Fitzgerald," I say, moving on. "After Zelda's breakdown and his own public collapse, he essentially became a cautionary tale while he was still alive. Everyone wrote him off."

"But he kept writing."

"Tender is the Night came out in 1934. His reputation was already in freefall. Most of the critics dismissed it."

"He didn't care?"

"He cared enormously." I look up. "He just did not let it stop him."

Eli is quiet for a moment.

Outside the window, Chapel Street moves at its usual pace. Students crossing. A delivery truck idling at the corner. Leaves beginning to collect along the curb, the first real evidence that fall is arriving properly.

"That is the angle," Eli says. "Not just the crisis. The continuation after it. What they made after everyone decided they were finished."

Something in my chest tightens unexpectedly.

I write it down because writing it down gives me something to do with my hands.

What they made after everyone decided they were finished.

"That works," I say. My voice comes out steadier than I feel.

We spend the next twenty minutes actually working, which is both more productive and more uncomfortable than open conflict would have been. He is methodical. Thorough. He asks precise questions and does not volunteer opinions unless they add something, which means when he does speak it carries more weight than it should.

I hate that I notice this.

I organize my notes into a structure we can both follow, dividing the research into sections that we can work on separately and bring back together before the midterm.

Clean. Efficient. Minimal required interaction.

"I can take Hemingway," I say. "You take Fitzgerald. We reconvene in two weeks with outlines and decide how to structure the argument."

Eli looks at the division of labor I have written out.

"Fine."

"Fine."

He picks up his cap from the table and turns it over in his hands once before setting it back down.

"Preston."

I look up.

"You said you don't lose."

"I don't."

His mouth does the thing it did in class, that almost-movement that is not quite a smile and not quite anything else.

"Neither do I."

He stands, picks up his coffee, and moves through the crowded coffee shop toward the door without looking back.

I sit at the corner table with my notebook open in front of me and the challenge still hanging in the air where he left it.

Outside the window I watch him push through the door onto Chapel Street and disappear into the ordinary morning.

I look back down at my notes.

What they made after everyone decided they were finished.

I close the notebook.

I do not know yet if that sentence is about Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

I do not know if it is about me.

Maybe both.