Keaton shrugged, his arm rising and falling in my peripheral vision. “It’s nothing. I just found some people talking about it online. I copied their suggestion, so it’s not my idea, really.”
“You still had to do the research,” I pointed out. My heart ached. Keaton was so kind. He was doing all this for me for no good reason. Just to help. Would I ever have done the same for someone else?
I would do the same for him. No question. Whatever he needed.
But wasn’t that only because he’d helped me first?
“Anyway,” Keaton said. I looked up to see he was blushing a little. So cute. He was like a little kid. “Let’s see, I think we’re on the third chapter now…”
He reached out for the next page of my notebook and I went to turn it for him at the same time. Our fingers brushed against one another.
And lingered.
Just for a moment – the smallest of moments. As soon as Keaton pulled away I wasn’t sure it had really happened. But…
Didn’t we both pause for just a moment, feeling our hands touch?
I cleared my throat. “Yes,” I said, my voice sounding odd in my own ears. “Third chapter.”
What was wrong with me?
I was thinking Keaton was cute. Getting all frozen up if our fingers touched. Feeling sad at the thought of him leaving. Of not being able to look over in the night and see him sleeping on the other side of the room.
We barely knew each other. Like Keaton was so keen to point out, we weren’t friends.
Why was I having these thoughts when I knew he hated me and was leaving soon?
Why did my fingers itch to grab his hand again and hold it tight?
“You know,” Keaton said. His voice sounded so strange that it made me look up at his face. He was staring off into the distance at nothing. “I always wondered something.”
I waited. Nothing else came out. “What?” I prompted. My mouth was dry at the distant look on his face. I had a bad feeling in my gut.
“Why you left,” Keaton said. He turned to look me right in the eye. “Was it really because of a football scout?”
I furrowed my brow. “The school I transferred to has the best football team in the state. Going there is why I managed to get my partial here.”
“Yeah, but…” Keaton paused, looked away, and then looked me right in the eye again. “You’re sure it wasn’t because of that day in the locker room?”
Oh, no.
I knew he would bring it up someday. I didn’t want to think about it. Deep down, though, I knew.
We had to talk about it. It was the worst thing I had ever done. Maybe the worst thing anyone had ever done to him.
Imagining that we would just go on as if it never happened was just a fairy tale.
I swallowed and looked down. “There was a recommendation from the principal. The idea was that I would leave before I was asked to leave. So it wouldn’t ruin my football career.”
Keaton scoffed. It was an ugly sound. I didn’t blame him. “And just fuck me, right? I didn’t matter.”
My head shot up. “You mattered,” I said. “You matter. I just – I’m sorry. I’m sorry about that day. I’m sorry about how other people acted. I’m sorry about what I did.”
Keaton’s head hung down for a second. He looked back up at me. All I could think about was how brave he was. How incredibly brave. “You beat me unconscious,” he said.
He’d said, ‘you’. I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t the one that knocked him out.
But I’d been there. That was enough.
