“No,” Noah said quietly. “You’re hard to miss, Eli.”
Eli looked away, his throat tight.
“You wanna know whatIremember about you?” Noah asked after a beat.
Eli blinked. “You…you rememberme?”
“Not clearly,” Noah admitted. “Not like this. But… there was this kid in the art hallway. He always had charcoal fingerprints. He always walked fast. He sat in the back row of assemblies with a notebook.” His mouth curved into a smile. “He never looked directly at people if he could help it.”
Eli’s heart stuttered.
“I used to pass by the art room on the way to practice,” Noah said. “Sometimes I’d see him through the door, his head down, drawing, as if the world didn’t exist the same way for him as it did for everyone else.”
“You never said anything,” Eli murmured.
“I was stupid,” Noah said with a shrug. “I was also busy being my own kind of terrified. I was out-ish, but only the shiny,acceptable parts. I thought if I stopped to look too closely at anyone, I might lose my role.”
“The golden boy,” Eli said.
“Yeah, that.” Noah’s voice dripped with disdain. His gaze dropped to the sketch again. “And now I find out the quiet art kid I noticed in passing was…” He shook his head, smiling a little. “You.” He looked back up, eyes bright. “And that you spent at least one afternoon turning me into…this.”
Eli risked a glance down. The drawing stared back, his past-self’s shaky lines transforming memory into something solid. It was both embarrassing and oddly grounding to see his teenage heart on paper like that.
“I kept it because it felt like proof,” Eli told him.
“Proof of what?”
“That I wasn’t broken. That I could feel things.Wantthings. That there was someone out there whomademe want things.” He exhaled slowly. “For a long time, this was the only evidence I had that I wasn’t just faking being me.”
Noah’s breathing grew ragged. He reached out and with extreme care, he closed the sketchbook. Then he turned his whole body toward Eli.
“Thank you for trusting me with that.”
Eli’s laugh came out shaky. “I almost didn’t.”
“I know,” Noah said. “I could see it on your face. You’ve been carrying this around for days as though it weighed a ton.”
“It did,” Eli admitted.
“And now?”
“It still feels heavy, but less suffocating now I’ve shared it.”
Something tender moved through Noah’s expression. “If it helps,” he said, “I think fifteen-year-old you had excellent taste.”
Eli snorted. “He thought you were some kind of god.”
“I was absolutelynot.”
“Tell that to him.” Eli nodded at the book. “He disagrees.”
Noah smiled. “What about thirty-two-year-old you?”
Eli swallowed.
“What does he think?” Noah asked in a hushed tone.
Eli met his eyes and let himself really look at the man in front of him, his laughter lines, his worry lines, his flannel shirt speckled with sawdust, all of it.
