CHAPTER 6

The problem with walls was that water didn't care about them.

It didn't attack nor fight it neither did it try to break through dramatically. It just found the small places. The tiny cracks that you didn't even know were there. And it came through those places quietly and consistently until one day you looked at your wall and realized that what you thought was solid had been changing for a while without telling you.

Leo understood this on a Thursday morning when he realized he had started looking for Elena before he knew he was doing it.

It wasn't dramatic. That was the thing. It wasn't the kind of moment you could point to and say there, that was when it happened. It was smaller than that. He walked into the school courtyard that morning and his eyes moved across it and found her sitting on the steps outside the main building with her nose in a book and before his brain had formed a single conscious thought about it his feet had slowed down slightly, Just slightly. He caught himself and kept walking.

But the damage, if damage was the right word to use, was already done. Because now he knew. And knowing was the beginning of a problem he could not afford.

It had been two weeks since their corridor conversation. In those two weeks Elena had said good morning to him four times, always naturally, always without making it into something bigger than it was, always in passing. He had said good morning back each time and kept moving. Damon had silently noted every single one of these interactions with the quiet satisfaction of a man watching a prediction come true and choosing not to say I told you so, yet.

In class Leo had spoken twice more when Mr. Carson asked questions that the rest of the room couldn't answer. The second time a girl named Priya had actually turned around and looked at him with undisguised curiosity and said "how do you know all this stuff?" and Leo had said "library" and she had looked at him like that was the most alien word she had ever heard.

His uniform was still the worst in the school. He had found a slightly better second hand shirt at the market on Saturday, still not properly white but closer, and he had swapped it in without telling anyone. Damon had noticed anyway and said nothing which was exactly the right response. He was managing.

He was keeping everything in its right place.

And then Elena Hartwell sat down next to him at the east wall bench during lunch and everything shifted slightly on its axis.

She didn't announce herself. She just, arrived. Came around the corner with her lunch container and her book and sat down on the far end of the bench like it was the most normal thing in the world and opened her container and started eating and reading simultaneously.

Leo looked at her.

She looked up from her book. "Hi."

"Hi," he said carefully. "This is usually…"

"Where you eat alone? Yeah I know." She turned a page. "Grace is doing some committee thing today and the other tables are loud and I have twenty pages left of this chapter and I can't concentrate when it's loud." She said it simply, like she was just explaining a series of facts that had led her here, no subtext, no performance. "I'll be quiet. You won't even know I'm here."

Leo looked at her for one more second. Then he looked back at his food.

They sat in silence for a few minutes. She read while he ate. The school lunch noise carried on at a comfortable distance and the east wall did its usual job of keeping the world at a slight remove.

It was, Leo had to admit, in the privacy of his own head not unpleasant.

"What are you writing?" she asked without looking up from her book.

He looked down at his notebook which he had opened without thinking the habit of his hands. "Just ideas," he said.

"What kind of ideas?"

He paused. "Business stuff."

She looked up now. "Seriously?"

"Yeah."

"Like what?"

He looked at her. Trying to find the angle. The reason behind the question. But there was nothing there except what it appeared to be, genuine interest from someone who found something unexpected and wanted to understand it better.

"Supply chain inefficiency," he said slowly. "I was reading about how most small businesses in this country lose between twenty and thirty percent of their potential profit because of how they manage their supply chains. I was working through a model that could reduce that."

Elena stared at him. "You're nineteen."

"Yeah."

"And you're spending your lunch break working on supply chain models."

"You're spending yours reading," he pointed out.

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Then laughed, a short genuine sound that she clearly hadn't planned. "Fair enough," she said. She looked at the notebook with new attention. "Can I see?"

Every instinct Leo had said no. The notebook was private in a way that was hard to explain, it was where his real self-lived, the part of him that nobody at this school had any business seeing. But something else, something quieter and more dangerous, said something different.

He turned the notebook around and pushed it toward her.

She leaned forward and read. He watched her face as she did, the way her eyes moved across the page, the small line that appeared between her brows when she was concentrating. She read for a full minute without speaking.

Then she looked up. "Leo. This is, this is actually really good."

"It's just rough notes," he said, pulling it back.

"It doesn't read like rough notes. It reads like something a business professor would write on the board." She was looking at him differently now, that recalibration he recognized, but this version of it felt nothing like Mr. Carson's. This one didn't make his throat burn. "Where did you learn all this?"

"Library mostly. Books. Online when I can get to a computer."

"You don't have a computer?"

"No."

She absorbed that quietly without making it awkward which he appreciated more than he could say. "Have you ever thought about what you would actually do? If you had the resources to do something with all of this?"

Leo looked at her steadily. "Every day," he said.

The honesty of it surprised him as it came out. He hadn't meant to say it that directly. But it sat there between them and he didn't take it back because it was true and he had learned long ago that the truth had a way of taking up its right amount of space whether you wanted it to or not.

Elena looked at him for a moment with an expression he couldn't fully read. Then she picked her book back up. "You're going to do something," she said simply. "I don't know what yet. But you're going to do something." Leo said nothing.

But for the rest of the lunch break, even after she finished her twenty pages and packed up her container and said "see you tomorrow" with the ease of someone who had decided a thing without making a ceremony of it those words stayed with him in a way that very few words from very few people ever had.

You're going to do something.

He was still thinking about them when Elvano appeared.

It was after the last class of the day, Leo was at his locker, Damon had gone ahead to the bathroom, and the hallway was in that in-between state of emptying out. Leo heard the footsteps and felt the shift in the air before he saw anything and when he turned around Elvano was standing three feet away. Alone this time. No Marcus. No flanking boys. Just him.

Up close Elvano was bigger than he looked from across a classroom. He had the build of someone who had spent time in a gym not for health but for the specific purpose of being physically imposing. He smelled of cigarettes and something expensive underneath it. His eyes in the direct afternoon light were dark and flat and older than nineteen in a way that had nothing to do with wisdom.

They looked at each other.

"Leo," Elvano said. Like he was trying the name out. Like he had known it for a while and was just now choosing to use it.

"Elvano," Leo said.

"We haven't properly met."

"No."

"I like to know who's in my school." He said MY school with just enough emphasis to make sure Leo caught it but not enough to make it a quote. Smooth. Practiced. "You're smart. I heard about the Carson thing. And the one after that."

Leo said nothing. He waited.

"Smart is good," Elvano continued. "Smart people understand situations. They read things correctly." He paused. "They know which things are available to them and which things are not."

The hallway had gone quiet around them in that particular way again. A few students nearby had slowed down. Leo kept his eyes on Elvano and his face completely still.

"I'm just here to learn," Leo said evenly. "That's all."

"Good," Elvano said. "Keep it that way." His eyes held Leo's for a moment longer, searching for something, Leo thought. Checking for fear maybe. Or maybe something else. Something more specific. "We're going to be fine then."

He turned and walked away.

Leo turned back to his locker. His hand on the combination was completely steady. His heart behind his ribs was not. Not from fear, he knew the difference between fear and adrenaline and this was the second one. The specific electric feeling of a confrontation that hadn't exploded but hadn't ended either. The kind that just paused.

What does he know? Leo thought. What is it about me specifically that is making him this careful?

Because that was what had been bothering him since day one. Elvano was not behaving like someone who was territorially annoyed by a new student. He was behaving like someone who was managing a specific situation. Carefully. Deliberately. The way his father had told him to.

Leo closed his locker.

Damon appeared from around the corner and took one look at Leo's face. "What happened?"

"Elvano came to talk."

"Just him? Alone?"

"Just him."

Damon was quiet for a second. "That's worse than the boys," he said. "When he comes personally it means he's stopped delegating." He looked at Leo seriously. "Leo, I need you to tell me honestly. Is there something you're not telling me about why this boy has it out for you?"

Leo thought about the newspaper clipping in his pocket. The black car on Delaney Road. The headline about Route 9 and the second vehicle that fled the scene.

He thought about Richard Reyes on the fourteenth floor of a building downtown saying we have a problem.

He didn't know how any of it connected yet. He had pieces but no picture.

"No," he said to Damon. "There's nothing."

Damon looked at him for a long moment with the eyes of a person who didn't fully believe that but had decided to respect it for now.

"Okay," he said. "Let's go."

They walked out of the school together into the late afternoon and Leo felt it the whole way, that feeling he had been carrying since the first day. The sense of something moving underground. Something old and buried and patient, shifting slowly toward the surface.

He didn't know what it was yet.

But it was getting closer and he could feel it.