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Chapter Text

Sara had always been ‘the smart girl’ at school.

Her girlfriends treated her to that label with a dismissive tone, when they found the rules of teenage life did not apply to Sara – say, she didn’t like shopping, or, more incredible, wasn’t interested in boys – yeah, but you’ve got all these ‘smart-girl’ hobbies, Sara, you’ve got Mozart playlists on your iPhone, and you read Shakespeare for fun.

So what if she did?

Apparently, that was breaking away from the path of normal adolescents, and all deviations from it were generally blamed on ‘what a smart girl’ she was.

But even then, some transgressions were held to be more serious than others.

It was nearly the end of September when Sara did something that shocked her group of friends beyond the usual. By that time, summer was already a fast-fading sunset, the habits of high school life just around the corner. It’s like riding a bicycle, some people say, you don’t forget how (as she’d never actually been on a bike in her life, Sara would have to take their word for it). Getting up at six in the morning, having to choose between fast-forwarding through your morning shower and skipping breakfast, being so bored during class because the teacher’s just rehashing a bland version of something he’s already said, and, last but not least, that intimate circle of girlfriends that Sara somehow loved but didn’t like, the girls that had been her truest friends since middle school.

Gretchen Morgan, Lisa Tabak and Nika Volek were the most prominent members, with Gretchen as their uncontested Queen Bee.

It was an unchallenged law of nature that, by the time the clocks struck twelve inside the vast private school rooms, Gretchen had already teased at least one of her close friends, without mentioning the other yet more criticism-prone students. Though no victim or masochist, Sara had accepted this and often greeted the slights with a remark provocative enough to further shock her friends. It was a way of making it so Gretchen became the butt of her own joke, and the only way for Sara to tolerate this cruel habit.

Too little too late for her to look for a clean break.

Sara had simply been friends with the girls long enough that, at this point, the bond would hold through thick and thin, and any attempt to sever it would only lead to avoidable suffering and – which was much worse to Sara – high school drama.

“I don’t believe you, S.”

Sara had been fishing through her drawer for her history notebook when she heard Gretchen’s voice behind her.

Sure enough, the two other girls, Lisa and Nika, were standing on each flank, like two pretty armed weapons Gretchen was holding ready to aim and fire.

“I wish you’d humor me and start using my full name again,” Sara said, unfazed. “S is a little sophomore, don’t you think?”

This was only part strategy to change subject. Sara really had been growing increasingly annoyed of that nickname.

“No need for secrets,” Gretchen ignored the argument altogether. “I heard all about it from Nando. You know Linc tells him everything.” She added as if, logically, that meant Sara should have assumed Gretchen would have been made aware of what had happened.

Not that much had happened, by any reasonable standards.

Sara shrugged. “Well, I didn’t really think being turned down was bragging material.”

“Good, thank you for putting it out there.” Gretchen sighed. “I swear, I don’t know why you’re so intent on throwing away all the best opportunities that come at you.”

“Again, it didn’t strike me Lincoln Burrows was an opportunity. I must have missed the signpost.”

“Yeah, and it was a big shiny red one, you know, the way signposts try to look when your life depends on it.”

That was pushing it too far for Sara to hold back a laugh. “I’m not interested in boys, Gretchen. As I remember, you’ve already settled that was weird a long time ago – can we move on now?”

“It was weird four years ago, S. Since you turned seventeen, though, it’s just been getting a little more beyond words with every second.”

Sara rolled her lips together, without managing to feel annoyed. Honestly, she just wanted for the four of them to get to class and start talking about something else.

“What’d you want me to say?”

“That you’re interested in girls. Or older men. Anything other than getting into med school and your little social justice battles.”

“It’s for your own sake,” Nika agreed. “You know high school’s supposed to be a special time. We just – we don’t want you to feel later like you’ve missed out on it.”

“And yet,” Sara exhaled, “all you’re doing is giving me plenty of something I definitely won’t miss.”

“Lincoln Burrows’s a catch, Sara.” Gretchen spoke her full name as she slipped into deeper seriousness. “Even you can’t not see that.”

“Why? Because he’s handsome, because he plays in the basketball team?”

Sara did hope once out of high school, these things would not be markers of value to any sane mind in the vicinity.

Sara added with a let’s-cut-the-bullshit look. “Or because you want to date him?”

“Well,” Gretchen admitted, without looking bruised in the slightest, “it would have been considerate of you to at least go on a couple of dates with him to fix something up. Rapprochement. Aren’t you supposed to be diplomatic?”

Those words were thrown at her every once in a while, understood to be vague synonyms of ‘smart’.

“Honestly, Sara.” Gretchen sighed.

Sara felt relieved, because the bell had just rung, and Gretchen looked like she was just about done with the subject, at least for the next few hours – naturally, she would hear about it again at lunch.

“Sometimes, I think you’re just trying not to do what’s expected of you.”

Sara shrugged her shoulders.

It was more strategic to allow Gretchen to have her way. Sara had learned long ago that fighting against labels only led to the label being shoved more forcefully down your throat.

To be fair, she wasn’t trying to do what was expected of her – which didn’t mean she was deliberately aiming for the reverse.

Gretchen, naturally, would not understand this as she was the strictest follower of social etiquette, the performer par excellence, who acted her own character variably depending on the seasons – whatever the new black was, Gretchen was sure to be among the first to wear it – her one never-changing feature was her capacity to adapt to her environment so as to ensure her chances of survival.

“I don’t understand you,” Gretchen said again, after taking Sara by the arm as a sign of truce while they were walking to their classroom. “You can at least see that he’s handsome.”

Now, her perception rather than judgment was under scrutiny.

And yes, Sara did have eyes enough to see Lincoln Burrows was as close as teenagers could get to the male definition of ‘handsome’ – that is to say, strongly-built, with fortunate green eyes and even a smile that looked authentic rather than an imitation of older men, actors, publicity models. That smile that’s meant to hint at the unspoken treasures he’ll pour on the lucky woman who catches his eye. Most of the teenagers who tried to smile like this achieved nothing but ridicule, but there was something about Lincoln Burrows’s matter-of-fact behavior that hinted he was the kind to mean business. He, for all that may be said against him, was his own person, which was a compliment Sara also liked to treat to herself.

Indeed, Sara even liked Lincoln, though they had few occasions to really talk to each other. Their relationship as friends had only taken off last summer, when Lincoln’s grades had gotten deplorable enough that his parents left him no choice but to at least appear to take his graduation seriously. That he would ask for her help hadn’t struck Sara as all that shocking – she was, after all, reputed to be the smartest girl in school – or, mind you, as any attempt from Lincoln to make a move on her.

He had actually behaved admirably, on the evenings when they met up at the school library to study, showing himself to be enough of a quick-learner that Sara was at once settled on the fact that his alarming grades had been the result of neglect and disinterest rather than strict unintelligence. Really, Sara didn’t doubt his motives had been as plain as he had put them to her when he first asked for her help.

And he had taken her refusal to go out with him pretty well, all in all.

Disappointed, and with enough confidence to own his disappointment rather than draw up his defenses and aggressively dismiss her.

“Wow,” he’d said, as if this hadn’t happened to him a lot, at least since he’d grown taller and bulkier than most of the adult men Sara knew. Then he’d started laughing to himself softly, rubbing the stubble on his chin with his thumb. “That’s too bad. I mean, I really like you. I could have sworn you liked me back.”

“I do,” she said.

He had treated her answer like one of the equations they studied together, an intricate unfathomable piece of mystery he didn’t know what to make of.

Her own fondness for him made itself undeniable and symptoms soon started to spring within her – pangs in the chest, a rush of heat in her cheeks. She was sorry to hurt him.

But Sara honestly had no remote interest in the oh-so-desired state of ‘having a boyfriend’, whose unquestioned popularity she actually wondered at.

Wasn’t your natural state aloneness, weren’t you born without a companion attached at the hip? Therefore, shouldn’t it be your wish for a change in that state that would be considered strange rather than the reverse?

People interested Sara as a cluster of signs to be read like enigmas, pieces in her ever-widening study of social behavior and human nature.

So far, her interest in relationships had generally stopped there.

“Sara?” Gretchen nudged at her lack of response.

“Yes. Sorry.” She shook her head. “It’s not so bad. I mean, we’re going to stay friends.”

Sara hoped this would actually be true. Though Lincoln’s pride hadn’t been wounded enough that he’d refused to cancel their study-sessions right there and then, Sara did dread some new awkwardness between them that would just prove impossible to stifle.

The girls managed to sneak into the history classroom tailing after the last wave of entering students, so that their teacher could pinch his lips at them but not outright accuse them of being late.

As usual, Sara sat at the front row, which was the more desolate, while her girlfriends took their habitual seats in the back.

Sara noticed Lincoln was already seated, and she cast a glance his way, almost expecting that his eyes would follow her as she made her way through the classroom, which no doubt would give Gretchen and the girls something to feed their gossipy talk and keep them going until the matter was further explored at lunch.

But Lincoln was not looking at her.

Indeed, he did not acknowledge her presence at all, not with that becoming smile he usually saved up for her when they saw each other in class.

There was an icy air of vexation on his face, which Sara first thought she was responsible for.

It was only when she reached the front row that she noticed where Lincoln was looking, a green glare more outwardly displeased than she had ever seen on his face before.

On the seat next to Sara’s, normally vacant, there was a young boy she didn’t remember ever seeing at school, tall – though you couldn’t really tell how tall while he was sitting – and looking frail for his medium-sized clothes. Indeed, he was a peculiar sight, with a shock of dark brown hair like wool to the touch, and eyes unhinging blue.

“Miss Tancredi.”

“Sorry.”

Sara took her seat, annoyed at herself that she’d been arrested by the presence of intruder on the neighboring seat.

His sitting there, she assumed, was by all means accidental.

The front row was the least crowded of all, probably he had only meant not to draw attention, if he had not been directed by the teacher himself, who was known to bemoan students’ lack of bravery when it came to their enduring his presence directly, face to face, for the full class.

Still, surprise had piqued its way into Sara’s chest, and she felt oddly more annoyed for it.

A newcomer, this late in the season? And no one at all had been talking about it?

Indeed, as Gretchen considered herself the center of any influx of gossip that was of the least importance, Sara felt she would have heard about this if anyone had been sharing the news.

They were talking now.

The whispers behind them was like the chirping of insects on a summer night, where the sheer absence of silence and brewing life about you keeps you from sleep.

Their questions penetrated Sara’s brain despite her will – Who was the strange boy? Strangers are strange by definition, and boys, to girls’ minds, especially. How could he have arrived here so silently, without perturbing the perennial flow of chattering talk in the school in the least?

And why was Lincoln Burrows staring daggers at him?

…

End Notes: This popped out one morning as I stood at my desk. I’ve never written an alternate-high-school story before, and yet I find myself full of ideas as to where this is going. I’d love to know yours, so do share your reactions in the comment section. See you soon!

Chapter Text

Empathy had always been one of Sara’s curses. Though herself capable of a steel confidence when she gave an oral presentation, the visible distress of her classmates, their reddening collars, sweaty hands on the chalk, and stammering series of ‘hums’ and ‘ohs’ as they struggled through their notes, could send Sara into a state of embarrassment at least equal to the one the poor students were themselves experiencing.

Therefore, as murmurs began breaking about the newcomer, Sara braced herself to share into the boy’s turmoil, but when she stole a discreet glance toward him, she saw that his face was impregnable, visibly unmoved.

What a great deal of nonsense, she thought suddenly, all that agitation about a boy.

Granted, he did not look common. His eyes, for one, were a too direct shade, his hair looked an extraordinary texture, and there was something about the vastness of his forehead, the straight arrow-line of his nose, that made Sara think of the Greeks and their tragic heroes.

But there was nothing to account for the frenzy that took over the students for the full hour that history class lasted. No horn on the boy’s forehead or hooves for feet, nothing spectacular. Though you could not call the boy ugly, he wasn’t handsome, to borrow the word which Gretchen usually used to label the boys worth her interest. He did not look like a model straight out of a fashion magazine, the way unexpected newcomers often look in Hollywood movies. The girls would not be lining up for his phone number at the end of class or wage war on one another for his attention.

Yet he was not plain.

It was not that Sara meant to study him, only the teacher had started going on about the civil war and she’d already read half a dozen books on that topic last summer, when she got interested in it, as she sometimes got interested in random topics – Renaissance Europe or ancient Egypt or the medieval burning of witches.

Therefore, every word out of the teacher’s mouth was about as appealing as pre-digested porridge, and aside from the times when he would ask the class a few questions, and she, out of a mix of intellectual honesty and pity, would propose an answer, there was nothing going on even remotely interesting to steer her attention away from the boy.

His handwriting was the prettiest she’d ever seen for a man. Generally, a careful attention to the curve of letters is considered a breach in virility, and boys from an early age get used to a nearly undecipherable hand, one of the first problems Sara had encountered when she’d taken Lincoln as her protégée student during the summer.

But Michael’s letters were neat and the result of a careful carving. Not precious – nothing superfluous about them.

It must all be in order, in control.

Part of her felt it was wrong to do this – to read him.

But, to kill the tediousness of the hour, glances went both ways, and she could tell he was reading her also.

He, too, was bored with the class.

Though he didn’t raise his hand once, he scribbled the answers on his notebook before anyone could volunteer to say them.

Really.

Sara felt, from instinct as well as from the deductions she could draw of her hour-long appraisal of him, that she and the boy must be alike at least in some respects.

Once or twice, after pretending to drop her pen or feigning the need to stretch, Sara turned back for a discreet glance toward Lincoln Burrows’s table, only because it actually felt as if he was trying to pierce holes through their heads with the sheer force of his gaze.

He hadn’t stopped staring since the class began.

At some point, the teacher asked him a question directly – sighing as he did when he got tired with teenagers’ attitude, and he must have decided Lincoln’s freezing anger was a case in point.

“Mr. Burrows, why don’t you tell us what your thoughts are on the matter?”

“Don’t have none to share.”

The classroom buzzed with delight. Smoldering voices such as Lincoln’s and delinquents in general, bad boys, were a la mode these days.

Sara herself felt a rush of heat fly to her face.

Though Lincoln had occasionally been known to fool around during class, it was nothing mean-spirited, and he would never say something outright defiant or disrespectful.

“What about President Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg? We’ve just played it. Nothing you’d like to say about it?”

“Nope.”

“Nothing, really, that would at least make it look like you’ve been paying attention at all?”

A long, raw exhale sounded behind Sara’s head.

She hadn’t dared turn around to look at the exchange.

“Well, you know, now you mention it I think he wasn’t such a neat character as you’re painting him out to be.”

“Oh no,” Sara whispered inaudibly.

Naturally, the eyes of her seat neighbor, the peculiar new arrival, fixed on her with revived interest, but he seemed to be the only one to have noticed.

It was just that Sara had rambled on about the civil war to Lincoln, the way she rambled about things she’d just read, when he would take an interest in her latest reads – and he often did.

Now, she was starting to wish she’d kept her mouth shut.

Professor Pierce wasn’t a bad teacher, but his view of history usually implied a thick layer of polish that glossed over the more embarrassing irregularities. Like a lot of historians, he believed in the national myth and American heroes, of which Abraham Lincoln was one, most certainly.

But it was too late to do anything to help it.

Soon, Lincoln started spitting back all of the inglorious things she’d told him about the famous president through the course of summer, things she hadn’t expected he’d even remember.

“Freeing the slaves sounds right to me, but I wonder why you don’t tell us what a nasty racist good old Abe was.”

“I beg your –”

“It’s in all the letters he wrote to his equally racist friends. That naturally he believed in the superiority of the white race. Naturally, he wouldn’t want a black man for a neighbor. That’s without mentioning his tyrannical use of executive powers during his term, how he suspended the habeas corpus when it came to separatists, and how he used the emancipation of the slaves to justify the slaughter that his war was turning into. Honestly, Professor, I wish you had said some of those things. Maybe then some of us would be paying attention. Not me,” he admitted. “Right now, I don’t give a fuck about Abraham Lincoln. I wish we didn’t have name in common is all.”

Sara’s eyes were squeezed shut by the time Lincoln finished.

There was a moment of silence – time for Professor Pierce to gather his authority and stammer the obvious word, “Detention!”

“Wait,” Sara said. No matter if it made it look to the whole class, including her girlfriends, that she was taking Lincoln’s side which must mean she was secretly in love with him. “This is my fault, I’ve been reading Howard Zinn during the summer –”

“Thank you, Miss Tancredi, I don’t think Mr. Burrows needs anyone’s help to be impertinent. If you’re so keen on sharing his fate, it’ll be my pleasure to see you both in detention next Saturday.”

Sara was too startled to protest.

She should have been expecting it. Professor Pierce had never liked her, despite her being one of the only students who so much as feigned an interest in his class. Probably, she eluded his definition of a proper teenager – immature and incapable of intelligent criticism.

The class started again without further ado, while Sara stretched her fingers over her forehead and sighed.

That was just what she needed, really – to be confined in a room with Lincoln Burrows just a few days after she’d turned him down.

With the corner of her eye, Sara caught her seat neighbor looking at her but he looked straight back at his textbook when she shot him a glance at him.

Surprisingly enough, she thought, he was smiling.

…

Lincoln was in a vile mood all day, and even playing ball with Fernando Sucre after class in the school gymnasium didn’t manage to clear it away.

That was uncharacteristic. Linc usually had a way of taking things coolly, of letting the gross mass of high school drama sweep over his shoulders; but this was very different, of course.

“Jesus, Linc!”

Nando exclaimed when the ball whistled past his ear and bounced angrily against the wall.

“You’re trying to kill me?”

“Sorry.”

“Look, how about you be straight with me? Not like I don’t know what this is about.”

Lincoln shot him a look and couldn’t control the vipers in them – he was such a useless shit when he was in one of these moods. Hated it, every second of it, how his vision seemed to blur around the edges, how his voice would spark up every time he spoke, like he was about to spit out gallons of fire.

It was one of the most embarrassing things in the world, he reckoned, to be unable to keep your own self in check.

What was more infuriating was how some people could just keep a lid on their emotions, however they raged and raged below the surface.

People like his brother.

Lincoln clenched his teeth and looked at the ground, going to fetch the ball rather than answering Nando’s question.

“Come on,” he said, but Lincoln could hear the tentativeness in his voice. This wasn’t your regular annoying prick of a pal trying to squeeze the juice out of you. Nando wasn’t a prick, to start, and he only meant to help. “Since that new guy sat in the class room you ‘been looking at him like he had horns coming out of his forehead.”

“Nothing to say about it.”

“So, you don’t know him?”

Lincoln sighed, his throat burning with the poison that wasn’t coming out of it. It was only a matter of out before the truth was out in the open. “He’s my brother,” he said.

He started dribbling the ball against the ground not to look at the way his friend’s jaw dropped open.

“Your brother?”

“It’s no big deal, Nando. I mean, we don’t get along. When our parents died we got split up and put into different foster families, and we hardly saw each other since.”

“You have a brother?”

Lincoln grunted in annoyance. “Yes. Can we move on now?”

“Well, why didn’t you ever –”

“Like I told you, we don’t. get. along.”

“But – why?”

“If I tell you, will you be off my ass?” Lincoln tossed the ball on the ground. “Not much to say, anyway. We’re just two different materials, like oil and water. We don’t mix at all.”

“That’s it?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

Lincoln grabbed one of the towels from his backpack and wiped the sweat off his head with one quick move.

“Look, Michael’s just the sort of kid you don’t want to grow up alongside to when you don’t have the tools to compete, you know. Before he was four, he could read the newspaper at the breakfast table next to my dad. Corrected mistakes in the math copybook in his first year in school.”

Fernando shrugged his shoulders, like he was missing the point. “So, he made you look bad, is that it?”

Lincoln shook his head. “We’re two different teams is all. Got nothing to do with each other. Anyway, I barely saw any of him back when we still lived in the same house – I had school going on, and he was always up in his room, anyway, always studying the stuff mom got for him ‘cause he was gonna be a genius. He was nine when we were taken to foster care. We barely spoke to each other since. I don’t know what I could say to him now, for the life of me. I don’t wish him bad or anything, but he’s a stranger. I’d hate to think he’s expecting brig-brother love, that’s all.”

Their eyes crossed, and the flash of shock and disapproval Nando clearly couldn’t shake off fueled the anger burning in the pit of Lincoln’s stomach.

Right.

Because Michael was younger, because he’d landed in a few unlucky families, people somehow got it into their heads that he was Lincoln’s responsibility – never mind that he himself had only been thirteen at the time.

It was all, Poor child, being orphaned so young, and he’s such a delicate boy – delicate, Michael sure was; Lincoln remembered thinking sometimes the boy just wasn’t cut out for planet earth. How he’d crawl under the table sometimes with both hands cradling his head, only when there was a little too much noise in the room, like he just couldn’t cope with everything that was happening at once.

And what was Lincoln supposed to do? Devote himself to the kid entirely, sweep him under his shoulder like a broken-winged bird? Play surrogate daddy, when he’d scarcely seen more of his own father than the back of his head? Make this strange child into his new sun, and orbit around him like his parents had, acting like his brain was the most precious thing on earth?

“I’m sick’a playing. I’m gonna head for the showers. Catch you later.”

“Yeah,” Nando said.

That same helpless blend of disbelief and horror in his voice.

Lincoln turned his heels without looking behind his shoulder.

Go right ahead, he thought. Let ‘em label me a cold son of a bitch if they like. See how I care if by the time high school’s over, I’m not winning any brother-of-the-year awards.

…

Michael as a rule spent a great deal of time observing people, so it wasn’t any surprise that, following that first hour in history class, he would keep watching the girl that had been sitting next to him, and watching him back.

She didn’t fit in the easy categories precut for people at school.

Pretty without putting effort in makeup or clothes, obviously popular though unashamed of raising her hand in class, ready with the answer, and she didn’t seem like the kind of girl he thought would be interested in his brother.

Also, she had a flock of friends around her at lunch that didn’t fit with her at all, somehow making all the irregularities about her stand out more starkly in contrast.

Her friends ate little, their lunch trays composed of the skinny-girl high school diet par excellence, steamed vegetables, one glass of milk, one apple.

The girl kept playing with the apple in her hand, deflecting from troubles of the day.

“He’s still looking at you,” Gretchen told Sara. “The new guy.”

“So weird,” Nika said.

“Maybe he’d stop looking if you girls weren’t staring at his table.”

Sara beat the apple softly against the surface of her tray.

She didn’t need this right now.

Being stuck in detention all Saturday, getting caught in the neatly enmeshed cobweb of teenage drama.

There was still so much learning to do before she could even consider getting accepted into med school. Recently, she’d been trying to memorize the names of all the bones in the human body, starting with the hand, out of whose twenty-seven bones she still struggled with two.

She couldn’t believe she’d even spoken up for Lincoln, earlier in class.

Not because he didn’t deserve it, or because she cared, really, that it was going to get the rest of the students shipping for them at least until the end of the year.

But because Sara had made it a personal rule to go through her years of high school without getting involved in such things.

Lincoln was a big boy. He could get himself in trouble all by himself if he wanted to, and he certainly didn’t need her standing up for him. Ridiculous.

Now, her father would be furious and all the things she’d planned to have learned by the end of the weekend were jeopardized and –

And that new kid really was looking at her.

As Sara felt the heat in her face, glowing, and as she battled for outward casualness, alternatively hiding her face behind her hand as if to mask a yawn, or feigning extreme interest in her apple, she knew Gretchen Morgan wasn’t the least fooled.

Nika and Lisa might be chattering on like it was their last day on earth, with the corner of her eye, Sara could see that Gretchen was staring and grinning redly at her.

“Oh, S,” she sighed, mercifully allowing the girls to keep chirping – a good ruler knows she should be merciful, at least part of the time, and so Sara’s increasing discomfort went on without being unmasked. “We’re going to have such a fun senior year together. You know that?”

Sara pretended the air between them was clear, unclouded by the bittersweet vapors of high school politics and power.

“Well,” she said. “You know how every year flies. I’m sure it’s all going to be over before we’ve had time to do anything memorable.”

“Want to bet on that?”

But Sara did not.

Really.

There was something about that year that just made her feel in her bones that it was going to be –

Different.

Chapter Text

Sara flinched at the overly loud sound of Lincoln Burrows’ cracking knuckles. They were each sitting in their respective seats, close enough that it was impossible for her not to see him in the corner of her eye, even when she was trying not to look. Professor Pierce had made them both sit on the front row, where he could see them – except he clearly didn’t consider himself under any obligation to stand by the blackboard all day, watching over them during their detention.

The only thing he had said to them, after sweeping their unenthusiastic “Hello” with an irritated wave of the hand, was: “Eight pages on Abraham Lincoln’s leadership. That’s the only thing you need to be thinking about today. If it’s not on my desk by five this afternoon, or if I don’t agree with the quality of your essay, you’ll be here again every Saturday of the term, until I’m satisfied that the message’s sunk in. That understood?”

Sara muttered a miserable, “Yes.”

Lincoln just stared straight at him. It was only his stone silence that made her answer sound submissive.

Pierce ignored Lincoln’s defiance; maybe it was too early in the day for him to give up on the impossible task of taming this wild horse.

“Good. Now, as you’re sitting there, I want to hear no talking. No whining. Just the sound of ink on paper and mental labor.”

He smiled as if he had just given the description of a delicious meal.

“Starting now.”

And Sara had started, nearly as soon as he’d finished – while he spoke, she had carefully gotten her pencil case out of her bag along with four sheets of lined paper.

For a while, the essay kept her busy, but she’d done over nine pages after only two hours and a half, and rereading herself became so tedious she couldn’t get herself through it more than twice.

It was now a little before noon. The clock, hanging next to the blackboard, was silent – no ticking. Right now, Sara would have taken ticking, would have taken anything over the lack of words that made everything she or Lincoln did sound deafening-loud.

Her clearing her throat – did she usually do that so often?

His cracking his knuckles.

Pierce had gotten bored of watching them half an hour ago. He’d given them no word of warning before slipping out – just pointed his finger ominously at them.

“D’your dad give you a hard time over getting detention?”

Sara started at the sound of Lincoln’s voice. She’d been so focused on the other sounds their bodies made by just shifting in their chairs, she’d forgotten they could speak at all.

After all, Pierce hadn’t left his ears inside the classroom.

And she was rather relieved he’d make an attempt to show he wasn’t mad.

Things had been weird last week, after her turning him down and that scene in history class.

“Yeah.”

“That’s gotta be your first detention ever, right?”

She shrugged guiltily. It was nice to hear the way he talked to her hadn’t changed. He still liked her. Still teased and invited her to tease back. Their old harmony restored.

She was glad.

“And your folks?”

“Ah, they’re used to it with me. It’s along the lines of, ‘How could you get yourself in trouble, so early in the term?’”

She couldn’t help laughing at his imitation of a shrill maudlin voice.

“Plus, I’m grounded.”

“What does that amount to?”

Then, he laughed, and she realized how she’d given it away that being grounded was just as unfamiliar to her as detention.

“No going out after school with friends. And I have to do my homework. At first, they wanted to add, ‘no practicing basketball in the yard’, but they figured out all on their own that was like shooting themselves in the leg. If I have any shot at a scholarship this year, it’s gonna be thanks to basketball. Even they ain’t dumb enough to take that away.”

Sara was silent.

It was no secret to anyone in school that Lincoln didn’t really get along with his foster parents.

He sighed. “Well, I’m allowed to do boring stuff, like read. Bet you’d like it.” He grinned. “Bet your usual life would feel like being grounded to me.”

She threw an eraser at his head and he dodged it, easy.

It was nice to know they were at peace.

“Maybe we should do that,” she said. “It being our senior year and all.”

“What, more grounding?”

“Trying new things.”

She drummed the cap of her pen against the table obliviously. She had been thinking of picking up some school activity, just so Gretchen would stop harassing her to try out for cheerleaders, and so she could get her head away from biology books at least a couple hours a week.

When she focused on Lincoln again, she realized how earnest he looked –

And how he might be tempted to interpret what she’d said.

A furious blush swamped to her cheeks, making her feel like she’d stepped into a sauna. “I mean – ” She said the first thing that popped into her mind. “I was thinking I’d try out for the drama club.”

“Huh. Would’a pictured you more as a mathletics girl. But if the whole point is getting out of your comfort zone,” she stared intently at her pen as he spoke, certain she could not possibly get any redder, “you ought to try out for basketball. We’d love to have you.”

“Right.”

The very idea of herself holding a ball made her palms dewy.

They were silent again for a while. Sara grew horribly impatient; she hated having nothing to do worse than anything, and she felt stupid for not having brought BRS Gross Anatomy, but she’d expected Pierce would be a whole lot more serious about keeping an eye on them.

“So, what’s your take on the new kid?”

Sara didn’t know whether to be more embarrassed at Lincoln’s question or relieved to have something else to think of than the infinity that filled up every second.

“The new kid?”

“Scofield.”

Sara took a moment to think. These were mined grounds beneath her feet. It was obvious from their last history period that Lincoln had a problem with Michael – if it had been Gretchen, in her shoes, she would have woven a skillful answer so as to get as much of whatever juicy secret there was to discover beneath Lincoln’s cool surface.

Yet again.

If Gretchen had been in her shoes right now, she’d probably think detention was the ideal time and place to try making out.

 “I haven’t really spoken to him.”

“No opinion, then?”

“What,” she laughed, “is he a controversial topic?”

Sara didn’t have an opinion about most of the students here. She didn’t generally think her classmates were interesting enough as subjects to come up with one.

Then it was Lincoln who cleared his throat.

Suddenly, she didn’t care what the secret was or that things had gotten a little awkward between them recently.

It was like last summer, on some nights when he opened up about something real about himself – even just a few words. He wasn’t much of a talker.

She felt like his friend.

“What is it?” She said. “How do you know him?”

But what she’d really meant to ask was, Why do you hate him?

He released a sigh. Didn’t stall for time.

“He’s my brother.”

Sara’s jaw unscrewed.

Suddenly, Michael’s face flashed into her head, all angles and lines, like the sketched design of a monument still growing into itself. Nothing superfluous like pimples or hairs. A somewhat striking face for a boy his age.

And how he’d looked at her when their tables weren’t too far away from each other at lunch. Stared at her, even, without seeming even to register his attitude as weird.

The thought that that boy was Lincoln Burrows’ brother made absolutely no sense.

“I thought I’d tell you,” he explained, “so you don’t hear it from someone else.”

“Does everybody know?”

“No. I’m not in a hurry to publish the news,” he said naturally, like that raised no further questions, “but I don’t know about what he might say.”

Sara thought about this.

Michael hadn’t really struck her as the kind who would be saying much to anyone in the next few weeks.

Then, she thought maybe Lincoln had noticed his brother looking at her sometimes – not only at lunch, really, but in the halls, and sometimes even in class.

And maybe what he’d meant by her not hearing the news from someone else was that he didn’t want her to hear it from Michael, somehow.

“Well –”

“Didn’t I tell you both to be quiet?”

Sara jumped in her seat; she hadn’t realized Professor Pierce had made his way back to the classroom. For the few hours that followed, he sat at his desk, reading Sara’s essay, visibly annoyed that he couldn’t find fault in it.

Throughout the rest of the day, Pierce scarcely gave them more time alone, so there was no chance for them to speak to each other, nothing for Sara to do but process the new information about Lincoln’s relationship with ‘the new kid’, as everyone in school called him.

The bell rang, and they made their way out of the building, Sara walking toward the car that was waiting for her on the other side of the street, Lincoln visibly heading out on foot.

He gave her a smiling “See you later,” and Sara felt the day could have gone worse – much worse.

She didn’t think for a second that, next Monday, at school, as she’d walk by the half-empty list of drama club members in the hall, she’d put down her name, almost as a private joke; or that, after watching her from his locker, Lincoln would sneak toward the sheet of paper after she had gone and add his own name to the list.

Chapter Text

“Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee –”

Lincoln paused in the middle of his line to look at the script.

“Come on, Burrows,” their teacher whined. “We’ve been at it for an hour, and we haven’t even finished the scene. Is it too much to ask you to learn your lines? And don’t try and be clever, Miss Tancredi. If you think I don’t see you mouthing them to him, you’re fooling yourself. And just like I can see it, so will the audience when you’re on stage.”

Sara sighed in a mix of defeat and compassion, trying to avoid looking Lincoln directly in the eye.

To be fair, she couldn’t imagine why Professor Reynolds had cast him as Hamlet when he couldn’t seem to remember more than a couple of lines at a time. Maybe it was just that Lincoln, unlike a majority of the students, even among the seniors, had the distinct advantage of looking the part. Sort of. At least, he could look serious, and deliver an honestly good performance so long as his eyes weren’t glued to his script.

It had been a surprise that Reynolds should choose her for Ophelia’s part, too – but a lesser one. Because, really, she couldn’t even say why Lincoln had auditioned in the first place.

If not for the obvious reason of spending more time with her, which sent her stomach crawling with discomfort, and which she refused to acknowledge.

“Know what?” Reynolds sighed. “It’s no good doing this if you don’t know your lines. The performance is this Christmas, Burrows – at this pace, you won’t know half the play by then. I want the two of you practicing together, all the time if you have to, just as long as you get your act in order.”

A vague, barely audible sneer sounded from behind them.

Sara turned around and saw Michael, dressed in the telltale janitor dark-blue uniform, dragging a mop and bucket of water behind him.

“Sorry.” Somehow, he managed to sound completely at ease before a teacher and two of his classmates, when interrupting what was clearly a rehearsal. “I was told to clean the auditorium at six.”

Professor Reynolds checked at the time on her cell phone and swore.

Sara’s eyes drank in Lincoln’s reaction despite herself – he was smoldering, eyes shooting thunder at his brother, the boy who, as the year was now half-way through October, could hardly still be called ‘the new kid’.

Getting hired as part of the cleaning crew was the smartest thing he could have done, that is, if he had deliberately been trying to get the school to stop talking about him.

Indeed, Sara was in a good position to appraise the state of gossip at school, given Gretchen and the girls never failed to discuss the latest rumor in details at lunch time, and ever since Michael had gone from the ‘weird kid who kept staring at her’ to someone who cleaned the school grounds after class, and taken on the uniform of the cleaning crew, he had become utterly invisible to the eyes of most of the students.

Not hers.

Or, she could hardly fail to notice, Lincoln’s.

“This is a private meeting,” Lincoln hissed, and Sara flinched at the obvious hostility in his voice.

Though she had seen them in each other’s presence before – they shared several classes beside history – the brothers usually adopted a quiet attitude of dismissal, reciprocally treating the other like he was invisible.

And though she could not forget that first hour of class when Lincoln had gotten himself into detention, or the steel harshness in his voice when he had told her who Michael was, it was the first time she ever saw either one of them say a word to the other.

“Really,” Professor Reynolds cut in, “I dare say we’re finished here. If you plan on doing more practice today, Mr. Burrows, I can only encourage you, but I think you’ll be just as comfortable outside.”

Sara stopped herself from looking at Lincoln, who she knew was blushing, and who would feel all the more embarrassed if she did look.

Somehow, her own gaze collided with Michael’s as she was deflecting, and she was surprised to find him smiling and steady. He didn’t flee her eyes, as most boys would have; at least, the ones who couldn’t boast of the privilege of being considered ‘popular’ by their fellow students.

It was strange. Strange in ways she couldn’t explain.

How that smile made her uncomfortable, sent a hot wave of needles prickling down her stomach.

And Sara could not deny that neither the blue janitor’s uniform, nor the fact that Michael had lost the gleam of fresh gossip in the past weeks, had done anything to make him look invisible to her.

“Right,” she said, blushing herself, now, though Lincoln was probably too busy glaring at his brother to notice. “Come on. We can keep practicing in the yard.”

…

Michael never bothered himself with what the school said – or didn’t say – about him. Things like that, superficial things, could find no room even in his adolescent mind. Adults seemed to find that very worrying, like he was displaying mutant abilities. If you don’t worry about what your peers think about you now, then when? As if the limbo of teenage life was a place in which all the passions that are expected to be evacuated from adulthood were given free reign, and it was weird, outright weird, that Michael should feel no need for them.

You shouldn’t be cutting yourself off from kids your age, Michael. That had been the advice which the therapist had given him, during the several sessions before he accepted to put his stamp on Michael’s request for emancipation papers. You should be having fun, going out with people. Like normal kids, you know?

Michael had nodded his head, feeling it was in order, so that he could be done with the process as soon as possible.

But the words didn’t mean anything to him at all.

Normal was just one of the things that he’d given up.

Lincoln’s attitude toward him, though more serious and more deep than mere locker-room chatter, wasn’t something which Michael tormented himself over, either.

Painful, maybe. But Michael had learned to smile under pain’s biting grip, so that his foster father had ultimately turned his back on the whole process of belt-unbuckling and severe whipping, because he was disgusted and a little scared of the wide, defiant grin with which Michael would take it.

Michael didn’t think his brother’s reaction incomprehensible, though, as Sara and Sucre had when Lincoln had told them. The young man had long accepted the world as a hostile place, and it made much sense that his brother should dismiss him as odd and undesirable company along with the immense majority of the people he knew.

By October, Michael was actually fairly satisfied with how things were going. He had found a job, and he had fortunately stopped being of any interest to most of his classmates, which enabled him to live alongside them quite invisible and unperturbed for the main part.

Now – probably not to draw further attention to their relationship, Michael guessed – Lincoln had stopped casting hateful looks his way, at least when people were around, and settled on ignoring him instead.

Michael was aware of, but indifferent to the change. It did give him plenty opportunities to watch his brother, while the latter pretended not to pay attention to him. Lincoln had changed little since the two brothers still lived under the same roof. For as long as Michael could remember, Lincoln had been that taller impulsive boy, and even before he rejected him outright, he had always greeted his presence with a kind of superior disgust, like Michael was an odd species of spider, and the fact of his being in the same room as him made it impossible for Lincoln to be comfortable.

And also, Michael noticed, he kept trying to hang around that redhead from history class.

Sara.

Her Ophelia act was nice, very nice, from what he’d heard of the rehearsals, casually sweeping the corridor that led to the auditorium, although she rushed it, sometimes, struggled to find balance between the emotions the text created and the smooth delivery of her lines.

And Lincoln –

Michael couldn’t stop himself from laughing when he thought about it.

Lincoln was about as believable as Hamlet as a bear gifted with human speech. He couldn’t think of one reason why his brother would have even tried to get the role if not to see more of the girl, Sara.

Michael himself saw plenty of her – it only took being unashamed of looking – although he had never even spoken to her.

Until that day, in Phys. Ed.

They’d just gotten out of the pool, limbs glistening wet, smelling of chlorine. Michael noticed them, not just because his eye had taken to spotting Sara in a crowd, but because her group was always the loudest. The black-haired girl Gretchen was laughing in her rich, deep voice, which sounded more womanly and mature than she looked at the height of her seventeen years.

“Now, Sara, you can fool yourself and some of the ninnies at school, but don’t think you’re fooling me.”

Sara sighed.

Michael was interested in her cool demeanor, in why she tolerated those girls, with whom she seemed to have nothing in common, when she could so clearly benefit from the extra time. Once or twice, he’d seen her sitting cross-legged in the hall, immersed into some huge med school works whose sheer weight would discourage many.

Of course, friendship in high school was always a matter of compromise; you endured the pestering jabs because having no people was viewed as singularly suspect – and it always made you invisible, in the end, even when it started by making you the strange creature in the box who all could gleefully harass in democratic enjoyment.

But Sara wasn’t afraid, and didn’t even look really interested in what the other students said about her.

They hustled past him without a glance, but Gretchen talked loudly enough that he could still hear them.

“That you stand up for him in class, get your angel Mary-Sue ass into detention all for his sake. That you join the drama club just when he signs up –”

“You know,” Sara’s voice was cool, “just because you repeat something enough times isn’t going to make it any more likely to happen.”

“Completely untrue,” Gretchen said. “I’m sure that’s how wars happen. I’m sure every time we say things are bound to get murky between this or that country, that it ultimately makes it so inevitable to everyone concerned that it’s bound to happen.”

Sara thought she’d enjoy Gretchen’s theory more if they were talking about geopolitics rather than her love life.

“What sort of a Hamlet is he, anyway?”

Sara sighed, not so much out of annoyance than to stall – it felt disloyal to give a whole and truthful answer to that question. “Well, he – when he’s putting his head in it, he can actually be quite –”

But an unintentionally loud burst of laughter stopped her before she could finish.

Michael realized, only when the girls’ eyes, including Sara’s, were fixed on him, that the laughter had been his.

“No one asked you,” Gretchen was quick to say, like the intrusive laugh had been an unforgiveable security breach on her part. “And if you would stop staring at us all the time, I’m sure we’d all appreciate it.”

Lisa and Nika were quick to nod their agreement, throwing in a few words for good faith, but Sara was frowning – and it was rather impressive, the authority she could summon with her hair wet, dressed in a one-piece swimsuit.

“Gretchen, don’t be so –”

“What? You like him staring at you?” She laughed her queenly laughter. “That’d be just like you, Sara, throwing away the greatest catch in the school and taking interest in some measly little –”

Sara tugged on Gretchen’s arms and drew her away before Michael could find out just precisely what he was. The two other girls followed obediently, and Michael jumped in the pool when his name got called, in a graceful dive.

It was a shame she minded, the girl, Sara; about his being picked on. A waste of energy.

He wished he could tell her things like that meant nothing to him, nothing. Words disappeared, left no marks like belts, and even those were just flesh wounds, you could will them away if you focused hard enough, created a dark pit where you dropped all the nuisance, the things that slowed you down.

Michael was through with the swimming exercise in no time – he was a good swimmer, faster than the boys he raced against, even the athletic ones who were so at ease with soccer or basketball, and whose bulky muscles were unused to the fluidity of this new environment.

“That was good, Scofield,” the coach said to him with a slightly interested glance as he hoisted himself out of the pool. “You used to swim in your former school?”

“Yes sir.”

“Part of the team?”

He shook his head, and used the back of his hand to wipe the water dripping down his chin. “No. I was part of the cleaning crew there, too. They let me use the pool when I wanted so long as I cleaned up after myself.”

The coach gave a long, half-absent nod. “Y-es. Well – d’you mind doing another round for me? If I pair you up with someone a little more your level. Let’s say,” he scratched his head, “Burrows?”

Michael swiveled in time to catch the glare in his brother’s green eyes, at the other end of the room. Lincoln was wiping his head with a towel, looking ever more towering in his swim trunks, a heap of muscles and sinews.

 “Not afraid of a little competition, are you?” Said the coach, Michael was sure, with no ill-spirit at all. “I got this kid here, seems a natural, wouldn’t mind if I made you race for it, just so I can see how good he is?”

Michael opened his mouth but said nothing.

So he took it his brother had been the best swimmer here, at least, until now.

Lincoln stepped closer, eyes cold as a shark’s. “I don’t mind at all, sir.”

But the sound of the bell ringing signaled the end of the class in a suspiciously appropriate timing.

The coach raised his shoulders, with a smile. “That’s a rain check, then. Next class, I want the two of you in your best shape, okay?” He turned to Michael. “Burrows is plenty busy with basketball, but I’m still missing members for my swim team – sports is the way to good scholarships, you know?”

“Uh – sure.” Michael calculated what words to say so as to get out of this room as fast as possible. “Well, I gotta –”

“Right, boys. Get outta here,” he waved them away with his hand as they walked in silence toward the boys’ locker room.

Lincoln was an odd blend of cold and smoldering next to him. Ignoring each other was their usual mode of treating each other and yet, it never seemed to get easier, with every day that went by.

…

It was only when the school day was over that Michael finally relaxed. After four p.m., when the school emptied, all the rush of the previous hours just vanished from the halls, and every noise became like a ghost, rare enough to startle you.

Unhurried, without feeling the need to whistle or mutter to himself to break the majesty of silence, Michael changed into his dark-blue uniform and started sweeping the floor, emptying the dust bins, mindlessly gathering fragments of the pupils’ life revealed through their debris.

He looked at the floor rather than in front of him.

Kit-Kat wrappers, plastic coffee cups, chewed pieces of gums hardened like the eye of an insect.

He heard her voice before he saw her, as he neared the auditorium.

It wasn’t unusual – he had caught a few whiffs of the play’s rehearsal more than once, but today, because no one spoke back to her, he knew she was alone.

Broom in hand, not looking at the floor now or anything, he followed her voice like a golden thread. The corridor he’d taken led him directly backstage, where he was sheltered behind the thick red curtain that separated him from the stage.

“But, good my brother, do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to Heaven –”

The sound of some clattering made her fall silent, and Michael realized too late he had kicked into some box of props with his elbow.

“Who’s there?”

She turned around.

As things were, he could only see her shadow on the curtain, a slim graceful silhouette cut out of darkness.

Of course, that couldn’t have been more wrong.

She was the one that stood in the light, smart, popular, and unafraid to let the world see her for what she was.

“Er –” He stammered.

His first thought had been to tread back where he had come from hoping for her not to spot him, but that would risk scaring her, and besides, if she did catch him, it would make him look all the guiltier.

“Just me.”

Her hand shot from between the red veil and soon the thick draperies glided up to discover her thin elfin face.

“Oh.”

Her voice betrayed some embarrassment.

“Do you need me to clear the room?”

“No, no. You can stay.” He shot a glance at the empty rows of seats behind her. “Lincoln couldn’t spare the extra time to practice, could he?”

Her face became slightly tighter. “Not today. Listen, Michael –”

A strange tingle spread down his neck.

It wasn’t so surprising she should know his name, but it was a startling, pleasurable thing to hear her say it.

Probably, though, she had heard it from Lincoln. He had to remember she was part of his brother’s circle, that she was bound to look at him from his point of view.

And what am I to him, exactly?

An arrogant brat?

An unrelatable alien-brained freak?

“About what Gretchen said at the pool – that was really rude. I’m sorry she was like that.”

“Why would you apologize for how your friends are?”

That was one of the great mysteries of social life, to Michael. As if affinities translated to shared responsibility in what one member of the group said. As if, in all the small circles that made up the world of high school, every student was like a limb, and if it started to show signs of rottenness, it had to be cut out immediately before it spread to the rest of the organism.

“Well,” Sara said, “then I’m sorry I didn’t speak up.”

“You think I mind what people say about me?”

He didn’t sound defensive but genuinely interested.

Sara couldn’t deny there was something fascinating about how absolutely different he was from other kids at school.

There was an out-of-worldliness about him, blended with a complete ease with what he was, that couldn’t fail to intrigue.

“I don’t know. But I mind, I guess.”

“Why?”

He relaxed his hold on the broom. Forgot the uniform he was wearing.

From the moment he had first seen her, in history class, he had found it inexplicably pleasant to look at her, and now, up close, and without having to wonder whether he was embarrassing her, he appreciated it as a full-blown joy.

Her wide, smooth forehead, strong cheekbones, and the thick locks of auburn hair that framed her face. The hazel eyes that looked almost too wide, too hungry for knowledge. The slim hands that took notes at an impressive speed.

None of this explained his interest in her. Rather, her appearance became interesting because it was hers, because of all the depths it hinted, teasing the curious observer.

Interested as he was in solving problems, it hadn’t yet crossed Michael’s mind to really ponder why he even liked this girl, whose popularity and social standing alone should have placed a barrier between them like a thick ice wall.

Preferences were inexplicable, Michael thought. How could you logically explain why you liked cherries, or hated them?

“I don’t know,” she said again. “It doesn’t seem fair.”

For a second, her eyes lowered to the broom, then flashed back to his face; he pretended he hadn’t noticed.

“You want to do more lines? Don’t mind me. I like listening. Shakespeare’s always good company.”

“You like Hamlet?”

“Sure.”

He didn’t add that he didn’t like Lincoln’s take on him. That would have been unnecessary, and besides, for all he knew, Sara would spread the information and that would give his brother all the excuse he needed to treat him to a nice beating one day outside of school, which was clearly what he was craving.

But that sounded unfair, he thought.

To Sara rather than to Lincoln. She didn’t look like the gossipy type, despite being surrounded by its endlessly-chattering halo all the time.

“Well,” she said, “do you want to read some with me?” With an apologetic smile. “I’m missing someone to throw my lines at.”

“I think I’d like that.” Then, he was the one to look at the broom. “But I’m on the clock.”

“Right. Well –”

The rest of her sentence floated into silence. Easy greetings and goodbyes were hard to give to someone so profoundly atypical.

“See you tomorrow.”

“See you.”

She vanished behind the curtain, and he was sure to be as audible as possible as he walked away from the backstage area.

It’d be more comfortable for her to think he’d gone, so she could rehearse freely. An audience made up of one person only would be worse than row upon row of strangers, whose faces the spotlights would make indistinguishable anyway.

And it was tempting, to only pretend he had gone, to stay and enjoy the river-like sound of her voice, the lines she would speak for his pleasure only.

‘We know what we are, but know not what we may be.’

It would have been something, he felt, to be able to stand directly before her, to hear her say these lines, to him – well, Hamlet – and to speak back, to disappear with her in the world of Shakespearean tragedy, let passion carry them away far away from the blandness of high school and adolescent life.

Over the years, Michael had gotten used to that feeling of not belonging, to being an outsider wherever he wandered, and he supposed, if he had judged rightly, that girl, Sara, belonged inside that school as little as he did.

Where she did belong, or himself, for that matter, he couldn’t say. Just that it wasn’t in this time and place.

And maybe that’s why he liked looking at her; like two odd fishes in a bowl, swimming in the opposite direction from everyone else.

Maybe that was his way of saying, without words, that he’d recognized her; and if she wanted a place where she could leave the burdensome package of her everyday life behind, he would meet her there. Anytime.

Chapter Text

“Okay, then. Here we go. You boys ready?”

Michael and Lincoln exchanged vicious looks.

It was incredible that both achieved that level of seriousness while only wearing swim trunks, Sara thought.

A few seconds later, Gretchen confirmed Sara wasn’t the only one to have noticed the tension between the two brothers when she said, “My God, is it just me, or has Phys. Ed never been so sexy?”

Sara blushed and lowered her eyes to her naked feet and the blue tiling of the ground near the basins.

“It’s stupid,” she said, low enough that only her friends would hear. “To have them do this, now, in front of everyone. Just for the sake of competition.”

“I wouldn’t say stupid.”

“You’ve already said sexy.”

“And I stand by it. My, my. That Scofield kid sure looks more fit than he does under those turtleneck sweaters, wouldn’t you say?”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

Really, Sara tried to avoid looking at her classmates’ bodies when they were in Phys. Ed, and the usually concealed parts were now exposed for all to see. Out of principle. And common decency.

It was true, now that Gretchen had pointed it out, she couldn’t fail to observe that there was more muscle to Michael than she would have imagined. He held his own, even as he stood just next to his brother, who was the bigger man by far. Michael’s muscles were slimmer but looked firm to the touch. The thought of pressing her palm to his chest and seeing whether his skin was as cold as he looked, whether his heartbeat was as quiet as the impassive mask on his face, hit Sara so suddenly, she did not look up, even to see the two brothers dive head first into the pool as the coach blew into his whistle once to give them their cue.

What happened next was over so fast, Sara barely had time to catch a glimpse of the action.

The two boys swam for the finish line in a mad race, splashing water with every move. Though it only lasted a minute, at most, Sara noticed that while Lincoln had opted for a front crawl, Michael swam with his head underwater for the whole time that their race lasted.

Really, he disappeared into the chemical blueness of the swimming pool as if the world above the surface was far from his natural element, and those cold depths were much more like himself than any of the students here could understand.

“Done!”

The brothers hoisted themselves out of the pool, as the coach broke into gleeful laughter.

“Good job, boys! Really good job!”

“Who won?” Sara said in a low voice.

Gretchen hissed sarcastically. “Are you for real?”

Honestly, Sara had been too absorbed by Michael’s body underwater, moving with breathtaking ease, to notice which one of them made it to the other side of the pool first.

“Michael,” Gretchen sounded annoyed. “Michael won.”

Just as she said the words, the coach slammed Michael so hard on his glistening back, Sara couldn’t help but wince.

“Amazing, boy. Isn’t he amazing, Burrows?”

Sara’s eyes flew to Lincoln in a heartbeat.

His gaze was smoldering so, it was a wonder that the water on his body didn’t instantly evaporate.

“Yep.”

The one word sounded rancid with hate.

Sara’s heart tightened in pangs of sympathy for Lincoln, who was so proud, he never let even teachers call him on his being wrong.

Oh, he must hate this, and in front of the whole class –

“What a stupid, cruel thing to have them do this,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

The girls themselves were only wearing their swimming suits. Lincoln and Michael’s little competition had taken place just before class. It was worse, Sara felt, because Lincoln couldn’t even storm into the locker room and cool down on his own.

“Would you relax?” Gretchen sighed. “Your boyfriend won it, didn’t he?”

Sara had been blushing before, a nearly necessary fact when she was barely dressed, and watching two barely-dressed boys compete for success.

But the heat that flew into her cheeks at this moment was beyond anything.

“My what?”

Gretchen looked around, to make sure no one was listening. Nika and Lisa had wandered closer to the pool to talk to the boys.

“You heard me. I’ve seen you steal glances at each other in the halls, in class, in the cafeteria.”

The air tasted of chlorine and impotent silence in Sara’s mouth. She wanted to say something, to laugh, to make it sound like the thought was absurd.

It was.

So why did she look like her parents had caught her with her hand in the cookie jar?

“It’s actually really lovely,” Gretchen said, though her tone had taken that cruel edge of cutting sarcasm that made her one of the most ruthless girls at school. “A little creepy. But creepy’s the new sexy, apparently.”

“It’s not. We’re not –”

“Oh, soften up, S, will you? I won’t tell anyone.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

But Gretchen’s red-painted grin looked unconvinced. Even before she answered, still with that sarcastic tone, Sara knew that, in all likelihood, this was going to be a problem.

“Sure,” she said. “Sure.”

…

Sara didn’t mean to talk to Michael, that day, after the class was over, and they were all getting out of the pool, glistening limbs hurrying to the locker-room.

After what Gretchen had said, she’d sooner not so much as look at him for a very long time.

And yet, she lingered on her way to the showers, took tiny footsteps on the blue tiling, waited until the girls had long disappeared ahead of her.

A few steps away, the coach was keeping Michael behind, saying, “You know, you’ve got to think about your future, boy. Scholarships and such things. Swimming’s not as famous as football, but it can get you into college.”

Michael kept silent, patiently.

Any boy would have been awkwardly nodding by now, but he just waited, as if he didn’t feel the pull of social constraints closing in on him.

“Well,” the coach sounded awkward, as if to make up for the fact that Michael didn’t, “will you think about it?”

“Okay.” Michael said. “Does that mean I can use the pool, if I clean up behind me?”

That put a smile on the coach’s face. He brought his palm over Michael’s shoulder, “Sure thing, kid. Now go on, scram. I don’t want to put you behind.”

Sara suddenly realized almost all the other students had cleared out, and she didn’t want it to look like she’d been listening.

She rushed toward the locker-room, staring at her feet, so she didn’t see Michael coming until she was bumping against him. She’d walked into a straight line while he went around the basins, their paths crossing at the intersection between the girls’ and the boys’ respective locker-rooms.

“Sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

Sara had to crane her neck to look up at him. It struck her how tall he was, up close – they had never stood so close to each other before.

The muscles of his chest had felt warm and slippery when she’d bumped into him, leaving a teasing prickling sensation on her own skin.

She was being ridiculous, just ridiculous. All that awkwardness was just due to what Gretchen had said earlier. Damn her. She was good at that, planting nasty thoughts, all so she could watch and enjoy the show from her throne at the top of the world. Well, not the world – school. But at that age, the two things felt like one and the same.

“You know, the coach’s not going to let you off the hook, now.”

She said it just to break the silence, because Michael looked all too comfortable with it while her own breathing was getting shallow, ragged.

Why did they have to be in their swim suits right now, so every blush, every symptom of her discomfort lay naked and exposed before his eyes?

“You might as well join the team.”

“I’ll see,” he said, with a control that was almost impossible to find in teenagers their age. “I have a lot of things to do just with school and work. And I’m not really a team-player.”

Like Lincoln, she thought.

In football, Linc was the star, the number-one player. It worked, because he was good. But in truth, from what she’d seen of his games, he wasn’t the type to pass the ball, would sooner take the risk of having it fall into the wrong hands than share the spotlight.

Maybe the two brothers were more alike than they realized.

Though, of course, Michael’s place was in the shadows, not the light.

“Are you practicing later today?”

His question took her by surprise.

“You mean, Ophelia?”

“Yes.” He saw her confusion and said calmly, “I like to listen to you, when I’m doing the floor of the auditorium. I thought you’d noticed.”

And she had, although she hadn’t fully acknowledged it.

It hadn’t been just the one time when he’d surprised her practicing, alone.

Now that his words broke the veil of mystery around those late hours, at the auditorium, she realized she had seen him, a shadowy figure moving in the background, and his deep-blue eyes following her, still without a trace of embarrassment or restraint.

“You don’t mind?” He said.

“No.”

It felt surreal, suddenly, to be talking about the very thing she had pushed to the edge of her awareness for the past few weeks.

To be looking at him directly, so close to him, without anything between them.

It struck Sara, suddenly, that she did like this boy, who behaved strangely, and was utterly unashamed of his strangeness.

And what Gretchen had said before class felt unimportant, just a bee sting to be endured and ignored.

“Cool,” Michael said.

The pool area was deserted now.

He headed toward his locker-room. She had no idea she was going to stop him until the words were out.

“Hey, do you want to hang out later?”

He turned back to her, looking surprised. Not nearly as surprised as she was.

She threw herself into an explanation before he could ask, You mean, like a date?

“A bunch of us are going out to the Beehive after class. It’s a coffeehouse near the school.”

“I know.”

A lump hard as rock went down her throat.

“I just thought – it could be nice.”

His silence was not cruel or mocking. Still, she felt like the coach for a minute, with Michael unable to share into her embarrassment.

“Will your friends be there?”

“Probably.”

“Will Lincoln?”

She swallowed. “Maybe.”

He thought for a moment. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea. Your friends don’t like me very much, and I can’t say that I do.”

Before Sara could stop herself, she heard the words pass her lips in one breath of blunt honesty, “I like you.”

A flash of warmth washed over his blue eyes.

Sara’s heartbeat quickened a little, but she wasn’t blushing.

“Oh,” he said. “Then I will. Come.”

She tightened her hands over her chest. What a strange thing, to be there, talking to him like this. Maybe it would feel unreal moments from now.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay.”

She smiled, and he gave her his odd, distant look of admiration in reply.

“Gee,” Gretchen said when she finally made her way to the locker room, “what took you so long?”

The girls had almost finished dressing by this point.

Sara just smiled, a little breathless. “Nothing.”

She didn’t tell them what had happened, not because she found it embarrassing, but because it was just hers, for the moment, and she wanted to wait as long as she could until she had to share it with anyone.

She said, “I’ll tell you tonight.”

Chapter Text

“Come on,” Fernando said, “are you really not going to come tonight?”

They were shooting hoops in the backyard, at Lincoln’s house. Lincoln hadn’t improved his grades as much as his folks wanted and he was technically still grounded, but if Nando came over right after school, they had a couple of hours ahead of them before his foster family came home from work.

“I don’t know,” Lincoln said, and dumped the ball to the ground instead of throwing it. “I’m tired of this. You want to come in for a drink?”

“Sure.”

They both went into the kitchen, and Lincoln grabbed a couple of beers out of the fridge like it was nothing.

He wanted Nando to think it was.

Not that his foster dad knew precisely how many beers were in this fridge, in this house, and there was no way that he wasn’t going to give Lincoln one hell of a lecture about those two missing cans.

“Is it just because of what happened in PE?”

Nando’s voice had gotten earnest and hesitant.

Lincoln leant against the back of the living room couch, opened his beer and drank, pretending he hadn’t heard.

But to his increasing frustration, his friend insisted. “It was just a stupid race, Linc. There was nothing at stake –”

“Jesus, would you get off my back, man?”

“Sorry.”

Lincoln had a couple of sips, but it was no good now. Fernando had pushed the subject in too far, so that Lincoln’s determination to avoid it was too much like showing weakness.

“I don’t care that the kid could outswim me, okay? I wouldn’t care if he could outswim Aquaman. It’s just – it’s so typical. So much like Michael, to just walk in a room and have everyone’s eyes on him, to be good at something without even trying. That’s just our childhood all over, people gawking at him. How fast can Michael read, how many puzzles can he do in one hour.”

“I don’t think he asked for that, though. The coach just made it happen.”

“Didn’t fight it, did he?” Lincoln said. He had to resist not clenching his fist around his can and spilling beer all over the floor. “I’ll tell you what, one of these days, I’d just like competing against him in something I’m good at. Can you imagine that? If I challenged him to a duel, just him and me, with no one around? Michael can’t throw a punch to save his life. He’d probably just crawl into a ball and hope to die.”

Lincoln took a long enough swallow that he finished what was left of his beer in just one go.

Nando’s eyes were embarrassed, trying not to show judgment.

“What?”

“You ever think maybe he doesn’t deserve all the shit you give him?”

“Are you kidding me?”

It didn’t look like he was.

Fernando shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, man. You think he always wins, but that’s not really how it looks from the outside, is it? You’re popular, you have friends.”

For a second, Lincoln was very afraid that Nando was going to add, You have parents.

To which Lincoln would have replied, Foster parents, which would sound shitty, would make him sound like a brat.

But Fernando had no reason to know about Michael’s family situation, or lack thereof.

“You know what, never mind,” Nando said. “We don’t have to talk about this. Why don’t you come to the Beehive tonight, though? The rest of the team’s going. And those girls from history class, including the one you like. Sara.”

“Oh, good,” on a sarcastic tone. “Because I’m not frustrated enough as it is today.”

“You’ve made your move on her or what?”

“Like, ages ago. She said she wanted to be friends. So, I’m playing friends.”

“Heck. I’d tell you there’s a pile of girls waiting for you to ask them out, but since she got you signing up for the high school play, I guess you’re in too deep to backpedal.”

“Shut up.”

But the air between them was all right again.

Telling each other to shut up was their way of saying they loved each other.

“But I forgot,” Nando said, “you’re supposed to be grounded.”

And that was actually what determined Lincoln to go.

…

Sara was so nervous, she barely paid attention to what the girls were saying, in Gretchen’s car, on their way to the ‘Hive, and for the first hour or so that they got there, sat at a small table upfront, and ordered their drinks.

Gretchen always ordered for the four of them without consulting them beforehand. If Gretchen wanted iced tea, then that’s what all four girls were having. Nika and Lisa were too docile to try to go against it, and Sara just didn’t have the patience. Going out for a girls’ night in itself was a way to indulge her friends, and to force herself to take a night out from her studies. What did it matter, what she was having, when she was not having her way in any case?

When she was out with the girls, Sara was already transgressing the rules of her private ecosystem. So it didn’t matter that she never actually tried to get anything she wanted during those evenings.

The way she had invited Michael to join them earlier at the pool flashed through her mind, and she mentally added, At least, not until tonight.

“Yes,” Gretchen said when the waiter stopped by their table, “we’ll have four virgin martinis, please.”

He was wearing such a blasé look, the judgment on his face barely transpired.

“What?” Gretchen said. “It’s virgin.” Sara thought she heard her mutter, “Unlike myself.”

“Sorry. We don’t do non-alcoholic cocktails until eight p.m. Or regular cocktails, as a matter of fact.”

Gretchen sighed, as if the stupidness of that place, of this whole town, existed only to try her patience.

“All right, just – give us chai lattes. Skimmed milk. Sweeteners, no sugar. Can you believe that guy?” She said when the waiter had walked away without a look back.

Sara wasn’t really listening, assuming Lisa and Nika could fill in for her in the conversation. When Gretchen wasn’t in a martial mood, she usually let it slide, or just teased about how Sara’s head was always in the clouds.

It wasn’t; not tonight.

At this moment, if Sara’s head was anywhere, then it was back at the swimming pool, where she could still see herself speak those words – I like you – could still smell the chlorine in the air, see the water dripping down Michael’s skull, drop after drop.

“Sara, are we boring you?” Gretchen asked with a slicing tone.

She was in a bad mood. In such a bad mood, in fact, that Nika and Lisa looked alert on the edge of their seats, like Gretchen might demand a blood sacrifice from them at any time.

“Well –” Sara said.

“Please, do think about it. Every girl in school would only die to sit where you’re sitting.”

Sara scoffed, genuinely amused, without meaning to pour oil on the fire. “I’m sorry, I don’t think my humble self can fully enjoy the queenliness of your presence.”

“You’re making fun of me now?”

“Come on, Gretch, when you talk about girls willing to die to be your friend, you’re making fun of yourself –”

“Hi there.”

The girls looked up.

The boys had arrived.

It was all wrong, too early.

Usually, Lincoln’s team of football players only came after nine, when they were already slightly drunk, and the girls could pretend they were on their way out, so they would have to be coaxed into sticking around longer and hanging out.

One of the boys stepped closer to their table; it was that boy always practicing ball with Lincoln, whether in the yard or in the halls. Nando. “Well,” he said, “Gretch, aren’t you looking fine this evening.”

She gave a disgusted snort.

The waiter came over with their drinks, and the boys had to move away, couldn’t possibly make it look like they were hovering.

Sara’s eyes followed Lincoln, who barely looked at her before he led his group away to the pool table. Indifference was the attitude girls were expected to find attractive in boys.

Tonight, Lincoln looked especially good in his blue jeans, tight shirt and leather jacket. But Sara wasn’t looking at him because she was mentally pining over his handsome looks.

Really, she just wished that they could have talked – talked normally, like they did when there was no one else around.

Sara sighed. That perpetual dance between girls and boys, where the girls feigned disgust, the boys indifference, sickened her beyond belief.

If she’d gotten to speak to Lincoln alone, then she could have said something about inviting his brother to join them. Even if it hadn’t been for that humiliating race in PE, something told her that Lincoln wouldn’t have liked the surprise.

But now, if Sara actually came up to the pool table and asked Lincoln if they could speak in private, then everyone in the ‘Hive would think for sure they had sneaked away from the crowd for a romantic interlude. The rumor would spread around school, and by recess, tomorrow morning, it would be common knowledge that they had had sex in the parking lot behind the Beehive.

Thoughtlessly, Sara punched the cinnamon stick into her drink with her spoon.

There was just no use, no way for her to communicate with Lincoln in the complex tangles of social expectations.

Maybe, one day, when they were both adults, they could have a successful friendship.

“You’re so off tonight,” Gretchen complained.

Lisa and Nika had gone to the bathroom. They always went in pairs.

“Sorry,” Sara said.

But before she had much more time to brood, the door of the Beehive opened and Michael walked in.

The sight of him was absurd, somehow, outside high school. He was wearing another one of his thick long-sleeved sweaters, that just didn’t look the same on him after she’d seen what was under it.

There was no smile on his face, but he looked calm, unbothered by this unusual habitat, and his eyes skimmed the room candidly, looking for Sara.

He found her.

Her heartbeat rocketed at the crossroads of his blue eyes, her hands tightened around her mug obliviously.

“What’s he doing here?” Gretchen scoffed.

Sara didn’t even think to look outraged. She was too numb, didn’t want to look away from that safe, suddenly quiet place she had found in Michael’s gaze.

“I invited him,” she said.

“You what?”

Sara got to her feet.

“What are you doing?” Gretchen grabbed her forearm, and Sara finally looked back at her.

“Saying hello, of course.”

“What gave you the thought it was all right for you to ask him?”

Sara wanted to laugh, to say Gretchen was taking herself way too seriously, as always; but for some reason, she couldn’t help from sinking into seriousness herself.

Nika and Lisa had just walked out of the bathroom and had braked before regaining their seats, as if they had just walked in on a public execution. And, of course, Sara was playing the part of the prisoner who was about to get her head chopped off.

What was worse, though, Sara could see with the corner of her eye that the boys around the pool table were also looking at Michael.

She couldn’t focus on Lincoln right now, but she could imagine the acid hate that must be spreading through his bloodstream, his hands becoming fists around the cue stick.

“This is a free country, isn’t it?” Sara said, meeting Gretchen’s fiery glare with firmness. She was tired of humoring her.

“You don’t just ask people to join us when we go out. You run it through me.”

“I don’t need your permission to do anything.”

“Please,” Gretchen said. “This isn’t a democracy.”

Sara turned back, trying to find Michael; maybe he had watched the ridiculous scene with Gretchen and just left, to hide from the craziness.

Instead, she found he was standing by their table, so close, she let out an incriminating gasp.

“Hi,” he said.

His eyes lowered to her arm, still in Gretchen’s grasp, and Sara broke away from her immediately.

“Hi,” she repeated, feeling stupid.

Gretchen shook her head, her lips widening into a silent laugh of disbelief. In the background, the whole room seemed to have frozen up, Lisa and Nika just standing there, waiting for a cue from Gretchen to know how to react, while by the pool table, the boys were all alert, their eyes going from Lincoln to Michael. They, too, were waiting for his response.

Sara wanted to laugh at how absurd it was.

Look at us, she thought, sheep unquestioningly rallying behind their shepherd.

Why had she ever allowed herself to be a part of this?

Lincoln’s green eyes looked ablaze with anger, and he looked back when he caught Sara glancing at him. All that rage wasn’t meant for her, she knew, still, it shook her to find herself on the other end of it.

It lasted maybe three seconds, her taking in the scene around them, realizing just how explosive the atmosphere in the room had gotten.

Then, Sara looked back at Michael, and his eyes were still that deserted shade of quiet, unbreakable silence.

He looked like an angel, she thought, indifferently floating above the mutilated remains of a battlefield.

Suddenly, Sara realized that she could finally place it, what attracted her so much about Michael Scofield.

It was that air about him, like nothing about the pettiness of their world got to him in the least.

Those kids could hate him, they could point and laugh and do all the cruel things that high school teens do to misfits, but they couldn’t touch him.

They couldn’t touch him.

“I told you,” Michael said, without a trace of reproach or embarrassment. “This probably wasn’t a good idea. I don’t belong here.”

Sara didn’t know what happened with the others, if Gretchen was still smoldering in her seat, if Lincoln was still staring daggers at them from the pool table.

She only looked at Michael, like he was the last sane person in the universe.

“You’re right,” she said.

He didn’t look disappointed.

The cold mask on his face was without a breach.

Then she put her hand in his, without giving herself time to blush at her own forwardness, and she said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Chapter Text

The evening air was cool as they walked, side by side, silent.

The hand Sara had used to take his felt burning hot, brushing against her side stupidly. She had let go of it just after they left the diner.

The more distance they put between them and the friends she had walked out on, the more Sara’s head started spinning, as she took in all the consequences that tonight may have, everything she might have brought upon herself, just by asking Michael Scofield to meet her at the Beehive.

Did Gretchen think she had asked him out? Did Michael?

And had she?

Would Gretchen view her as the enemy now, treat her the way she treated the students she disliked, not just ignoring them but singling them out as free game for the others to humiliate? Yes, Gretchen could be mean, and Sara had always known it, but her long-lasting friendship with her had always seemed to make it her duty to love her anyway.

But what now? Now that Sara had broken the implicit invisible rules of their relationship, by claiming her independence, by betraying the game of make-believe the girls played, pretending everything had to go through Gretchen, that she was ‘Queen Bee’ and they were all docile subjects.

To Gretchen, maybe it had been more than a game.

“You don’t mind to walk?” Michael asked.

Sara wrenched herself from her thoughts, looking back at the boy who had without warning wreaked havoc in the school’s peaceful ecosystem.

And whom she had liked, without knowing why, from the second she had set eyes on him.

“No,” she said.

“Okay.”

It was getting dark enough for the streetlamps to start lighting up, any time now. Sara felt she should add something, but she didn’t want it to sound like she was defending Gretchen – already, it felt ridiculous that she had ever excused her behavior, to herself and others.

“I’m sorry about what happened at the Beehive,” it was trite and easy, but it needed saying anyway. “I don’t understand why they were like that.”

“It’s okay,” Michael said, sounded like he meant it. “I never understand why people do things, either.”

Sara thought he was going to keep going, explain that that was why he preferred to stay alone. But he left it there.

She shoved her hands into her pockets. Her fingers were numb with the cold. She was only wearing a jacket, had neglected to take a coat since Gretchen had picked her up at her house and was supposed to drop her off when they were done with the evening.

It occurred to Sara that she had no idea how she was going to get home.

“Where are we going?” She asked.

“My place.”

Sara froze on the spot.

She didn’t mean to, and Michael stopped also, looking surprised, like he was trying to determine how this could have offended her.

“Is that not okay?”

Sara tried to really think about it, to think past the uproar of screaming thoughts raging inside her head.

What would people say at school? Just being alone two minutes with a boy was enough to spark rumors about them having kissed or touched or in any way shared a romantic moment.

Suddenly, it felt like they could see her now, an ocean of whispering faces, watching her follow a boy she barely knew, follow him home, alone.

For a moment, Sara felt overwhelmed by the sheer flow of voices breaking loose inside her head.

It took her a while to regain the quietness she had felt, at the Beehive, when she’d left with Michael, and for her to realize that she didn’t care, what those people said or thought about her. Not remotely.

Why should she care, when their world was a cobweb of pointless pretense, and each thread could potentially prove deadly if you touched it, so their whole lives became an exhausting routine of jumping through hoops, walking on eggshells, trying desperately to avoid the truth about others and yourself?

“Sure,” she said. “I mean, as long as you don’t –” She tried to think of how she could put this without turning scarlet, and finished by asking. “Aren’t your parents home?”

“They’re dead.” He said.

And then, Sara did blush, because she knew this, ought to have remembered. Lincoln had once referred to his folks as his ‘foster parents’ and she had found out from Gretchen that his biological parents had died long ago; and, of course, his parents were also Michael’s.

“No,” he hurried, “you don’t have to look like that. It’s been years.” He spoke the next words as if they were a timeless, undeniable truth. “I live alone now.”

…

For some reason, the words ‘I live alone’ didn’t fully take their meaning in Sara’s mind until she stepped inside Michael’s apartment; then, the evidence of his words was immediately striking.

Sara had never been inside an apartment this small.

There was one main room, furnished with a sofa, a refrigerator and a sink to wash the dishes. No table. No bed. No cooker. One door that opened on a tiny bathroom, with the shower and the toilet nearly colliding.

“Do you want some water?”

“Sure.”

The utter lack of embarrassment about him made it impossible for her to feel awkward.

“I didn’t realize that’s what you meant, about living alone,” she said.

He laughed. It was so surprising Sara’s arms broke into gooseflesh. The smile on his face brightened every feature on his face, and for a second, she had a flashing vision of the very handsome man he would become.

“What else can ‘alone’ mean?”

Still, she felt no shyness, no embarrassment. “I mean,” she said, “you’re just a teenager. Like all of us.”

And, she implied, all of them lived with grownups. Not that, at seventeen, Sara found it unthinkable to be left to herself. Really, she thought she’d enjoy it; but it didn’t make it any less strange for a high school student to be living alone.

Alone, she thought of the word again, because the way Michael had said it made her rediscover its subtlest shades and nuances.

Sara realized she couldn’t even grasp what it would mean, to have that much freedom. To eat when you were hungry, sleep when you were tired, get out for a walk when you wanted to, without having to warn anyone.

 Although she saw extremely little of her father, Sara’s life was still punctuated by family obligations. In the morning, before school, Sara had to get up half an hour early so she had time to catch a glimpse of Frank Tancredi before he left to work. He never had breakfast, and it didn’t really look like these brief encounters with his daughter in the morning filled him with joy, but they were tradition, and Sara had never thought of trying to do away with them. By then, he would already be wearing a suit, and he’d sip coffee with the morning news covering half his face; he’d acknowledge Sara’s presence formally and she would eat a bowl of cereal or some peanut butter toast in silence while he read.

Sometimes, he made a comment about some article, but it always sounded like he was speaking to himself.

Then, Sara didn’t see her father until dinner at eight, which would last a little longer, and when they would both formally ask each other one or two questions about their day.

It had never occurred to Sara how much of her life her father continued to shape until she realized she could not begin to grasp the freedom that Michael’s solitude must enable.

It didn’t look like her remark had embarrassed him. “Well,” he said, “I emancipated myself when I was fifteen.”

He handed her a glass of water. Sara’s jaw dropped a little.

“You’ve been living alone, for two years?”

“Yeah. It’s nothing impressive,” he said. “You could do it. Maybe not everyone at school, but you could. Easily.”

She could tell he wasn’t trying to flatter her.

“I mean, how long have you been able to cook your own meals? A lot of fifteen-year-olds can take care of themselves, never mind seventeen-year-olds. You’d be okay.” He shrugged. “It’s really okay.”

She said, “Okay,” and blushed from how stupid she sounded.

Michael sat next to her on the couch and she had a sip of water to give herself an excuse for silence.

Silence with Michael had that peaceful quality that suggested it could be pleasant, but he was still a boy she barely knew.

Besides, he was the kind of person that made you economical with words, trimming the unnecessary fat of speech.

With him, she only wanted to sound clever and witty.

What had he said, earlier, at the pool, about liking to watch her practice in secret? Or was it really a secret when both sides knew about it?

It had been an important moment, she felt, putting some limits to Gretchen’s megalomaniac twenty-four-seven pretense, and Michael had been the trigger.

She owed it to him to make this moment matter.

Then she looked up from her glass of water at his cold blue eyes, those eyes that followed her from the shadows in the auditorium, and she felt all this built up importance burst like soap bubbles.

How did he keep awakening this tension inside of her and releasing it, like there was a hidden switch inside her, and he only had the keys to access it?

Because it didn’t matter that what she said sounded intelligent, she opened her mouth and heard herself speak the words she had really been wanting to say.

“What happened between you and Lincoln?”

He didn’t shrug.

Lincoln would have.

Lincoln shrugged all the time, like even the most sensitive subjects slid right off his shoulders. It had to do with that look – indifference.

Michael didn’t have to fake it. He already looked like a being from a different world, who could not be touched by earthly concerns.

“Nothing,” he said.

Disappointment dropped inside her chest.

She was surprised, not at what he’d said, but that he didn’t seem to be lying.

“He hates me. A lot of people do. I don’t understand their reasons, but that’s just my way of not understanding how people think. Lincoln simply isn’t any different from most people I know.”

“He’s your brother,” she breathed.

He stared at her steadily, like he was wondering why she chose to volunteer information he already knew.

“You must love each other,” she heard how the words sounded, but no heat swam to her face this time.

Maybe it was magical that Michael had managed to make her feel comfortable, in a place where there wasn’t a single item of comfort in sight.

“No,” he said.

There was a pause.

“My father and I have nothing in common,” she said. “If we didn’t live in the same house, there would be no reason for us to ever see each other. We hardly talk. I don’t like him. But I love him.”

“I see where you’re getting at.” He said simply. “You and I are different.”

“So there really isn’t any reason? No bad blood between you? You just – you don’t get along, so it makes sense to you that Lincoln looks like he wants to throw you into a wall every time he sees you?”

He laughed again, and it was the same warm prickling surprise in Sara’s chest.

“Lincoln’s jealous of me,” Michael said, on such a natural tone, it was easy to believe him. “He doesn’t call it that. It’s unattractive, I guess. But he’s always been jealous. I drew attention, adults said I was special. It never mattered that he was the one to want it while I hated it.”

“Do you ever think you only hated it because you had it?”

Then, Michael was the one to look surprised. His brows creased into a neat, single furrow.

“No,” he said. “Do you want to practice your Ophelia?”

His veering off topic was so abrupt, Sara took a second to answer. “Uh – yeah.”

She reached down to put her glass on the coffee table, but there was none. Her hand wavered in the air a short while before she put it down on the floor.

“You’re ready?” He said.

“What scene?”

She wondered if he knew the whole play by heart. “One. Act three.” And then, he started. “If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry.”

And Sara’s heart started to pound, her lips dry as she stared at him, vibrant from the sheer thrill of his transformation.

He didn’t speak the words but became them.

Suddenly, as she looked only into the blue deserts of his eyes, the room disappeared, the couch, the unpleasant brown carpet, and he was Hamlet, taking her to places she had only ever visited alone until this day.

This was more intimate, she felt, than if he had kissed her or made love to her.

And it made sense, all at once, that she couldn’t share Michael with her friends or with anyone.

What would she have told them, so they could understand?

We spoke Shakespeare to each other. It was perfect.

…

Time flew faster than she realized, and by the time she thought of getting home, it was past midnight.

“Oh God,” she said, too shocked for actual panic to come into her words. “My dad’s going to notice. I never – I’m always home early.”

Then came something like pride at the thought that she had spent maybe four hours sitting next to Michael, and nothing from the outside world had managed to bring her out of this fragile universe that came into existence every time they looked at each other and only each other.

She didn’t feel hungry then, but when they started walking, the fact that they had skipped dinner altogether became realer, shooting angry pangs in her stomach.

How far was she even from home?

An hour’s walk, two?

This was completely insane.

She could imagine Frank waiting for her, sitting at the huge dining table where he would look more judge than father, with his hands joined in silent reproval.

And yet, part of her was still exhilarated, as they continued the conversation where they’d left off at his apartment.

Not only Shakespeare but other things they liked; other things they’d read, other worlds to inhabit. Sara would have never thought it could be so easy to talk to a boy. The things she said to Michael that night, she had never said to anyone, not because she considered them private or secret somehow, but simply because it was not the sort of things Gretchen and the girls talked about. After a while of their walking the night side by side, when the heat of his body next to hers had gotten familiar, she even talked to him about med school.

He was interested. Asked her what she had learned and she showed him all the bones in his hand one by one and told them what they were called.

It was only when she was done, and she was holding his hand in his, that she realized what it looked like; but there was only the slightest panic-reflex this time. Who else was around to see them, anyway? The deserted night held no judgment for them.

She kept holding his hand, for a while, testing herself rather than him. He didn’t seem to mind or think much of it. Yet again, it never seemed like Michael Scofield minded anything.

Only earlier, when he had been Hamlet, had she seen plain, beautiful traces of emotions on his face.

But then, he hadn’t been Michael. He had been sublime, and what they had shared could never pass into words.

“I am sorry,” he said at some point, making Sara look up at him. “About your folks. I didn’t realize you could get in trouble.”

“Oh. Not real trouble,” she said, although she had no idea whether that was true.

What kind of thing came to Michael’s mind, when she said she would be grounded? What did that imply back when he used to have parents, or at the foster families he had known? No television, no hanging out with friends? Except Michael would hardly do these things of his own volition in the first place. Did he picture her having to go without dinner, or were there worse things he was worried about?

For the first time, she thought life at his foster parents’ must have been horrible for him to ask for emancipation so young.

“I never thought of how late it’d be by the time you got home,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

He had taken a Kit Kat bar out of his pocket.

The mere sight of the red packing felt transgressive to contemplate.

When Sara’s mother was still alive, she had been thorough about the things Sara was never to eat. Everything chocolaty that came in shiny wrappers obviously made the list. Years had gone by, and now, Frank Tancredi hardly minded what his daughter fed on so long as it didn’t make too much noise to disturb his news reading.

Still, she couldn’t look at candy without sensing the invisible net that her mother had neatly placed around her before she died. Her gift for life.

“No,” she said.

He tore the wrapping and started munching it unthinkingly.

Suddenly, Sara thought how amazing it looked, the absolute freedom of a seventeen-year-old. No nets around Michael. Or at least, only those of his own creation.

He only ate half of the bar and put the rest in his pocket. Maybe she would be hungry later. They still had a long walk ahead of them.

What would her friends think, Sara wondered, if they could see her now – if Gretchen and the girls were even still her friends after tonight. Would they say Michael was all wrong, that he didn’t take care of her? It mattered to them, when they went on dates, what kind of food the boys gave them to eat, that they minded to be considerate about the girls’ needs.

Michael hadn’t offered to make her food, but she knew he would have if she had asked him. He didn’t give her his jacket in case she was cold, but if she had been, and she had asked him to take off all of his clothes and give them to her for warmth, he probably would have.

It was better never to talk about this to anyone.

…

“Here?” He asked.

They were still a couple of streets away from Sara’s house, but she wanted to make sure that if her father was watching out the window, he would only see her come home alone. She’d seen that in a movie.

“Yeah,” she said. “Here is fine.”

If Michael had been struck by the fanciness of the neighborhood Sara lived in, his face had been impassive as ever.

It was a little over two in the morning now.

Sara had never stayed up so late with a boy before. Or with anyone. When she was tired at school, it was usually from overreading the night before.

“Well,” Michael said, “goodbye.”

It was only at this second that it struck Sara any girl she knew would have been expecting a kiss tonight.

“Michael?” She called when he had turned around.

She didn’t know what to say when he looked back at her. It was only that it was so sudden, his disappearing like that, when what they had shared already felt fragile, dream-like.

“You won’t pretend none of this has happened tomorrow at school, will you?”

He looked steadily into her eyes. “I never pretend.” He said. “Goodnight.”

She watched him walk away into the dim-lit street, and when she thought he might turn around, sensing her gaze, she hurried through the short distance that remained between her and her father’s house.

It was a tall, impressive house to first comers. The outside agreed with the inside: fancy rather than luxurious. And tonight, it was even a little impressive to Sara, who had lived there all her life, as she expected to find her father waiting for her somewhere.

But the ground floor was entirely unlit and, like a thief in the night, Sara didn’t dare switch on the lights.

With the radiance emanating from her cell phone alone, she guided herself through every room downstairs. Maybe her father had been waiting to catch her off guard, to give her a start. But already, she knew she was pushing it.

It wasn’t his style.

Her search proved the ground floor was empty, and most likely than not, Frank Tancredi had gone upstairs to his study after a quick dinner. Sara had warned him she was going out, and he would have gone to sleep around ten, thinking she wouldn’t be long.

With a sigh of relief, Sara kicked off her shoes, jacket, and padded to the kitchen. If her father caught her right now, she would say she had eaten little at the pub and had woken up early.

In the kitchen, the moonlight was bright enough outside the window that Sara didn’t need to switch on the lights to make herself some toast. Now, it was even more suspicious to stay in the dark, but Sara liked it, liked how it prolonged the whole magical atmosphere that had surrounded her evening with Michael.

She was so hungry, she didn’t bother to toast the first two slices of bread, or even spread jam or peanut butter on them.

If her mind had been focused on herself right now, she would have imagined the ghost of her mother watching disapprovingly as she ate. Sara’s dead mother was always with her to witness the things Sara felt most guilty about doing.

But at the moment, Sara’s mind was still on Michael, and on the text alerts she hadn’t been able not to see, lighting up the screen of her cell phone.

From Nika, some ten minutes after Sara had left with Michael, Sara, WTF R U doing? Come back and fix things. Not 2 late.

From Lisa, almost simultaneously: Gretch is so pissed. Get back quick U might be OK. She’ll forgive U easier if U let her vent her anger.

Nothing from Gretchen, of course. Queenly silence was more dignified than texting.

The bread became a lump in Sara’s throat so quick, she left the fresh slice that she had bothered to butter uneaten.

Alone, it was less easy to be brave than inside Michael’s apartment.

Had she fucked up tonight?

Her friendship with Gretchen had always been something she more or less tolerated rather than fought for, a matter of going through the motions, of making life at school easier. Not more pleasant, but easier, because being alone was hard in there, where the loners were easy targets for bullying.

An absurd vision flashed through her brain, of Lincoln Burrows and his friends tossing her into the dumpster in the yard while Gretchen watched from a haughty distance, with her arms crossed over her chest. I warned you, the smile on her red lips would say.

Was that what was waiting?

And would she be alone?

Then, another thought came and pacified her a little.

The thought of Michael Scofield, walking home to his empty apartment, with the uneaten half of a Kit Kat bar in his pocket.

Chapter Text

“You were home late last night,” Frank Tancredi remarked, as his daughter sat opposite him at the great narrow dining table where they usually had their routine of breakfasting and news-reading.

Sara sought hiding into the task of peeling an apple, which her cramped stomach suggested she wouldn’t be able to eat.

“Was I?” She said. “I didn’t realize. I ate with the girls at the pub. You didn’t mind?”

“No, no. What time did you get back?”

Sara licked her lips. As she didn’t know when precisely her father had gone to bed, it was best to remain vague.

“I didn’t see what time it was, but it can’t have been very late.”

“Before midnight?”

She hesitated, feeling trapped. “Yes, surely before that.”

Frank resumed reading his article.

Sara looked down at her apple, half-peeled, and the white exposed flesh filled her mouth with bile.

All night, she’d tossed and turned, thinking maybe she should pretend she was sick today. This was a bad idea, for many reasons. First, it might have given Frank the idea that she’d been out late or drinking at the pub. Second, it would only be delaying the inevitable, and Sara was always the rip-the-band-aid-straight-away kind of person.

Sooner or later, she would have to face school, and to dig her head in the sand for a while would only show Gretchen how much power she had, anyhow.

Sara was well-placed to know that where Gretchen saw vulnerabilities, she would only press her fingernails deeper into the wound to draw blood.

But what should Sara do, when she saw them in the halls?

Just ignore them? That would be immature. But if she went to them, that gave Gretchen an opportunity to ignore her, and wouldn’t that be worse?

After an interminable while of sitting in silence while her father sat reading the paper, Sara could finally get up and say she was running late to catch her bus.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Frank surprised her by asking. “You didn’t eat anything.”

“I, uh –” Sara tried to think of something that would turn him off and said, “New diet.”

Frank hid his face back in the news as if the mere thought of being his daughter’s confidant when it came to what he no doubt viewed as ‘girly concerns’ were some contagious disease.

“Well, you don’t want to be late for school. Off you go, girl.”

…

It didn’t feel like she was walking into the same building as she had known for three years going on four, that morning, or even a place she was remotely familiar with.

Sara had read about this in some science article last week, how the body reacts to the smell of danger: how, suddenly, the whole world that surrounds you seems to turn into a hostile environment.

Even the bus ride had been off, although Gretchen always drove to school in her own car. Suddenly, the usual chatter of throbbing conversations was no longer just noise to Sara, it was rumors. Every pair of eyes that met hers sent her body into alarm, and she hurried into the first empty seat she could find and shoved headphones over her ears, without even plugging them into her phone.

Whether she was being paranoid or just aware to her new situation, she was probably going to find out soon enough.

At school, on her way to her locker, she thought the groups of students parted to let her through like the red sea.

Am I dangerous to talk to now, poisonous to touch?

Sara grabbed her history text book and the books for her next periods, too, because she’d rather avoid unnecessary trips down the hall.

When she closed the door of her locker, just like in a movie, there was someone’s face waiting for her behind it, though not the face she had expected to see.

Sara gasped and had to tighten her hold around her load of books not to drop any.

“Lincoln. You scared me.”

The young man just peered earnestly at her face. His green eyes squinted into small slits, appraising her anew, as if all this time he had been around her and had only recently found out that she was really an especially dangerous snake species.

“Can we talk?” He said.

“Uh – now?”

There was little doubt that the students in the hall were chattering about them, as their eyes were unabashedly fixed in their direction.

And why did all the students seem to be in groups, why was alone such a noticeable dangerous state in high school?

Lincoln stared back at her, unmerciful. “Yeah.”

Sara swallowed. “Okay. Let’s just not get late for class –”

“Is Michael your boyfriend now?”

Her jaw dropped at the suddenness of it. She’d expected they were going to walk away, to somewhere more private. Though probably, Sara disappearing with another boy would not have made things easier for her.

“No,” she said.

But at the same time, she was wondering just how true that answer was. Though she definitely had not asked him out in any traditional way, and their evening together last night could hardly qualify as a regular ‘date’, maybe they would never be anything that fit the preestablished labels of her schoolmates.

Lincoln’s voice hadn’t softened, nor had the steel green look in his eyes. “Because it looked like that, from a distance.”

“Well, it didn’t feel like that to me. And I don’t think he –”

“No, you don’t really trouble your head about boys’ feelings, do you? Sending mixed messages, as long as your own head is clear, that’s all right with you.”

“You’re being a jerk. Can we not make this about something it isn’t?”

He sighed, “I feel like everything’s about something coded with you. Like it’s all games.”

Now, this wasn’t fair, and Sara wasn’t going to have it. “I’ve been nothing but straight with you, Linc. I said I wanted to be friends, that’s all, and that’s what we’ve been doing. Exactly what is coded about that?”

“So where’d you go?”

“What?”

“With Michael,” he spat the word like it was a disgusting lump of dirt.

Sara slammed the door of her locker, vaguely wondering if, from afar, this looked like a quarrel between lovers.

“You know what? That’s really none of your –”

“Burrows.”

Sara felt like Gretchen’s slim hand had snuck into her chest and squeezed at all she could find.

She turned around to find her friend brightly smiling at the scene, her lips red as ever, her grin unforgiving. “Just look at you,” she said, her eyes still on Lincoln. “You look like you’re about to burst.”

“Would you give us a moment, Morgan? We weren’t finished.”

Gretchen’s smile became colder at the harshness in Lincoln’s voice.

Sara herself was getting rather tired. If Lincoln was going to behave like the macho man everyone around school made him out to be, then she had no interest in being his friend.

She hadn’t wanted to hurt him last night, and part of herself suffered for it. But she also thought it was completely unfair for him to act like there’d been a secret agreement between them all along, that though she’d said no to being his girlfriend, they would actually get there in the end, and he got a right to say who she could or couldn’t date in the meantime.

“I think Sara’s finished with you,” Gretchen said. “Aren’t you, S?”

Sara looked back at Lincoln in helpless silence.

The way Gretchen had framed it, there was little more she could do.

If she said no, then Lincoln would only add that to her ‘mixed messaging’. Maybe a clean cut was for the best.

Yet she couldn’t forgive herself for the cruelty of it, like Gretchen had just stabbed Lincoln in the heart and she just stood there, not touching the sword, not trying to help him.

When finally he walked away, Sara felt it had lasted forever, that moment of looking at each other in agonizing silence, and the relief to be released from the grip of his burning eyes was soon blasted away when she found herself facing the girls –

Lisa, Nika, and Gretchen.

“What a loser,” Gretchen sighed, her eyes following Lincoln beneath long blackened lashes. “Never would have bothered to notice him if I thought he was going to join the no-means-yes team.”

Sara found it safer to remain silent.

Instead of studying Gretchen, who was a master at acting, she looked at Lisa and Nika, but their faces were blank and terrified, of little help to figure out what was going on.

“Gretchen, I know you’re angry,” Sara said, because the idea that the four of them could go back to normal after what had happened last night was ridiculous, and she knew Gretchen would only be going with it if could lead her to some greater, meaner finish.

“Angry?” Her voice was the same sweet honey shade as ever. “Nonsense. I don’t tell you who to date, S. It’s your life. Your decision.”

Maybe that’s when it struck Sara she had always seen Gretchen’s performance and yet, she’d never thought to try and break it until now. After all, everyone in school was acting. Gretchen was only the best at it. But now, that syrupy voice felt only like a trap meant to draw small creatures and entangle their limbs into a lure.

As Sara stared into Gretchen’s face, she realized just how deep a predicament she was in.

What could she do now? Walk away, when Gretchen was – visibly – offering friendship? But there would be a sting at the end of it, Sara knew this for certain. Just how bad a sting, only time could tell.

“Well,” Gretchen said when the bell rang, her black shoulder-length hair bouncing supply as she looked behind her. “We should get going. Class is about to start.”

Cautious, Sara followed the girls down the hall, casting glances at Lisa and Nika every once in a while, but their faces were the same brittle masks as before.

What was Gretchen up to? What did she want?

 The only thing Sara knew for certain was what she didn’t want, and that was going back to hanging out as if nothing had happened.

She must think I’m stupid, Sara reckoned.

Or maybe just weak. Maybe just too nice to push away old friends on suspicion and instinct alone, when they themselves were betraying no outward signs of hostility.

Sara still didn’t know what to do about this when she stepped into the classroom, which had already started to fill up.

“Go on,” the teacher said, “take your seats.”

And Sara went to take hers in the front row, when the vacancy of the chair next to hers struck her senses as abominably wrong.

Michael was always there before her, always, even on that first day, when his presence had intrigued her so.

Instead of sitting down, Sara cast a look behind her, scanning until she found Gretchen, but there was nothing to read on her smiling face.

“Miss Tancredi, please sit down.”

“But –”

Sara’s voice seemed to turn solid in her throat.

Giving up on Gretchen, her eyes had found Lincoln instead, and the way his gaze fled hers, staring intently at the window instead, with his hands squeezed into fists above the table, was good enough to give her one unambiguous message.

Michael would not be coming to school today.

Chapter Text

If Sara had been less overwhelmed by the gossiping mouths of her fellow pupils that morning, or if she had brushed close enough to one of the groups to actually listen to what the whole school was saying, then she would have known more about what had happened last night, at the Beehive, after she unexpectedly decided to leave with Michael Scofield.

Namely, she would know that, looking like a charging bull, Lincoln had gone not two minutes after them, after barely saying goodbye to his friends.

Right at this moment, Lincoln didn’t care what it looked like. Didn’t care that storming out of a diner didn’t agree with that whole indifferent posture he more or less consistently tried to adopt, didn’t care that Nando was trying to grab his arm and get him to stay, didn’t care that absolutely everyone in the school might think what he himself was thinking right now: that Sara had turned him into nothing short of a tame toy in the past few months, and now, she was making a fool of him.

He got inside his car, brushing aside the empty beer cans and other debris left over from his hanging out with his friends there before getting to the hive. The car smelled of booze and smokes and stale fries.

Without thinking, Lincoln started the car and rolled into the main street that led out of the ‘Hive.

It wasn’t hard to spot them.

They were wandering into the streets, walking at a strolling pace, holding hands.

Lincoln’s heart was pounding madly inside his chest.

“Idiot,” he muttered. “She had you learning lines, for God’s sake. Always hated Shakespeare. Bloody hell.”

It was difficult to drive slow, not to let the vehicle follow the spot where his eyes were set, burning on the back of his brother’s head.

Lincoln didn’t allow himself to look at him now, when they were at school. It was best to let the rumors die out, if he didn’t want people finding out about their relationship.

The only people he’d told were Nando and Sara, and as angry as he was with her at the moment, he didn’t think she’d gone about spreading that information.

Lincoln kept his distance, making sure the pair never spotted him. It was the first time he followed someone, by car or otherwise, but he thought he did a rather nice job of it.

Why he did it was absolutely unclear to him; it was especially unclear when they snuck into a building that must lead to Michael’s apartment, and Lincoln had to park in the opposite street and sit there and wait, like an idiot.

What had he been thinking?

That he’d confront Sara? Yes, right at this moment, it had felt in order. And say what? That she couldn’t just take off with his brother, that that sounded like the most unfair thing she could ever do to him?

Lincoln waited a long time.

Now that he’d made it all the way here, it would be pointless to leave without getting at least some satisfaction from the ride.

One of his friends had forgotten a pack of cigarette that lay on the floor in the backseat, and though Lincoln didn’t smoke, he considered giving the habit a try, just to have something to do. Nando called him a couple of times and the second time, Lincoln picked up, tried to sound nonchalant.

“Hey, Nando.”

“Jesus, Linc. You scared me a little, storming out of there like you did.”

“Nothing to worry about. I’m home. Just had a nasty headache to nurse.”

“Is that true, or is that what you want me to tell the others?”

“Whichever feels best to you.”

“Right,” Nando sighed.

Sometimes, it felt like his friend was getting truly tired of him; like, if theirs hadn’t been such a long-standing friendship, Nando would have slammed the door on him a long time ago. Lincoln didn’t resent that. Fernando Sucre was a nice kid.

It was Lincoln’s own fault if he pretended he had no dark edge, that nothing from his parents’ death to his estrangement with his brother could get to him. If you hide some of yourself from your friends, then you don’t get to feel betrayed that they don’t like what they see when it comes out.

Maybe if Lincoln was always honest about how he really felt, about that urge to shout that snuck up on him sometimes, unannounced, then he would have no friends at all.

Like Michael.

It was hours before they came out.

By the time Sara’s red head of hair caught his attention, Lincoln had lost all hope, thought she was definitely going to spend the night.

There was a ridiculous look on her face, not exactly a smile; a look some of the girls he knew had on their faces when they got high.

They started to walk and Lincoln turned on the car, cursing. He had waited too long, surprise numbing his senses. He lost them for a moment, panic rising in peaks, but caught them again on the same avenue they’d walked down on their way to Michael’s flat. They were going the same way they had come.

Michael was taking her home, Lincoln realized. On foot?

Lincoln wanted to laugh, but the anger had made his throat too tight.

If one of his friends wanted to have a date with a girl, they borrowed his car, or somehow got their hands on their folks’. It just didn’t do, walking a girl home; and it took hours, too.

Maybe Sara wouldn’t be into him that much after that.

He couldn’t picture any of the girls he’d gone on dates with having to walk more than fifteen minutes without complaining. From where he was, he could only see the back of her head now, her red hair easy to spot in the night, but the look he’d seen on her face as they were getting out of the building kept flashing back into his mind.

They stopped in a neighborhood Lincoln recognized as Sara’s.

Not that he’d ever been at her place, never, but he knew her father was rich, some hot-shot politician, the girls had talked about it on a few occasions.

Lincoln parked his car in some corner and watched transfixed as they said goodbye.

He waited for a kiss and inexplicably felt no relief when there wasn’t one.

Because Sara had that same look of floating happiness on her face, that look he hadn’t known how to create even after playing friends for months and speaking Hamlet lines he’d learnt by heart.

His brother’s face was in full view again as he started walking away. Lincoln’s eyes shot from Michael to Sara – who was just standing there, watching Michael, like a bewitched girl in a vampire movie.

That was just perfect, wasn’t it? And unsurprising, too. When they were little, everyone had preferred Michael; their mother, for one, couldn’t get over how clever he was, how independent. All because he could tie his shoelaces early and read better than Lincoln before he was five years old.

Now though, Lincoln couldn’t say what did it. By becoming popular, becoming what every girl wanted and what every boy wanted to be, he thought he’d gotten rid of that empty pit inside his chest, which filled with burning anger every time he saw Michael.

It was clearer than ever now that he’d been wrong.

Lincoln didn’t hesitate for a second when Michael passed by his parked vehicle without a look back. He got out of his car, slammed the door behind him, and he felt suddenly certain that this was what the whole night had been about.

Seeing his brother, alone.

“Walking home, are you, Romeo?” He heard the fire in his own voice as he spoke.

Michael turned around.

Hate boiled thick in Lincoln’s throat at the sight of those quiet blue eyes, eyes that nothing seemed able to move.

What kind of a little boy doesn’t cry when he finds out both his parents died in a car crash?

But Michael hadn’t; not then, on the spot, nor in the days that followed before he and Lincoln were separated.

Secretly, Lincoln suspected his brother might suffer from some kind of sociopathic disorder. Lincoln kept that secret from himself, because that would take the responsibility off Michael’s shoulders, and then Lincoln’s anger would have nowhere to turn.

And with no target to discharge it, Lincoln thought he might actually burst.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Michael said.

Exasperatingly, he didn’t sound surprised.

“Did you follow us all the way to my apartment and wait for us to come out? I wouldn’t have expected you to have the patience.”

Lincoln evaded the question with a jibe. “In all the books you read, you never got your hands on dating one-o’-one? Spoiler alert, you suck at it, man.”

The laugh Michael let out was genuine and Lincoln felt his hands turn into fists so tight, he knew immediately what was going to happen. It was only a matter of time.

“Is that why you followed me? To give me a lecture on dating?”

It would have been so easy for Michael to go on with that arrogant tone and say that, clearly, what Lincoln had been trying on Sara hadn’t been working and so he’d rather do without his advice.

The obvious fact of Sara’s preference lay thick and smothering in the air between the two men, so clear it almost seemed tangible, but Michael didn’t speak the words.

Lincoln craved to push his brother into a corner, to get him to react in a way he would understand, so he could lead the situation where he needed to.

He could feel the anger bottling up, like water pouring into a glass over the brim.

“Why’d you have to go after her?” Lincoln managed not to raise his voice; it didn’t take that much effort to sound indifferent. He had the practice. Besides, he had known from the moment he had gotten out of his car that this was about Michael, much more than it was about Sara.

“I don’t think I did that,” Michael said. “And I don’t think I need to give you reports about why I do things.”

They looked at each other in silence for a moment.

It struck Lincoln this was the first conversation he had with his brother since he had moved to town – really, it was the first time they spoke in years.

And Lincoln felt a brutal need to look Michael up and down and say he hadn’t changed, to seal his feelings for his brother once and for all, so he could hold on to his anger, his resent.

It just felt like too much a part of himself would be gone without it.

A small voice crept inside his head, Why did you have to find such an unusual target? Kids lose their parents, they get angry at God, at the authorities, at all sorts of people. What kind of a boy sets all his hate on an angel-faced brother?

Maybe it was only that Michael didn’t break down, didn’t feel anything, while Lincoln was prey to such outbursts of rage and tears.

Yes, maybe that was it.

But Lincoln shook off the voice before it could get too deep.

“It’s late,” Michael said, taking his eyes off his brother to sweep the night with his icy gaze. “I’ll go home now.”

Lincoln didn’t move, didn’t say that that wasn’t going to happen.

Of course it wasn’t.

He hadn’t just spent hours freezing inside his car so the night could end without one drop of satisfaction.

“Why’d you move here, Mike?” Lincoln asked. “Was it just to piss me off?”

Again, Michael didn’t seize a window to call him out on his self-centeredness.

What he did was look at him with a calm look of understanding. After a while, he said, “I’m not going to make it easy on you. You’d like to punch me right now, I see that – get it out of your system. But you should know, I’m not going to get angry or start teasing you. I’m not going to prompt you to do it. If you really want to, just go ahead. Or let me go home.”

Silence settled between them once more. Finally, Michael walked past him, and Lincoln was filled with a rage so raw, he felt every muscle in his body tighten.

That was how his brother always made him feel. Disarmed. Disabled. Like the flow of his own feelings was crippling him, while Michael stood pain-free, pain-proof. Impenetrable.

It was not hate for his brother, though, but self-hatred which spread through Lincoln like venomous intoxication, as he got hold of Michael’s arm and dragged him back, before smashing his fist into his face.

Blood spurted out of Michael’s nose, and it was a relief to Lincoln; seeing his brother bleed. Seeing he was made out of flesh and bones just like anyone, that his blood didn’t remain magically trapped below the surface, that he wasn’t completely empty inside.

He only punched him twice, because he was down after the first blow, and hitting any man that wasn’t fighting back was too vile for Lincoln to endure it for long.

Lincoln had been holding his brother by the collar of his shirt to stop him from following, and when he let go, disgusted at himself and at Michael’s refusal to hit him back, Michael collapsed entirely on the sidewalk.

Lincoln checked his knuckles, blood-stained, raw.

I only hit him twice, he thought, but the shamefulness of the act made any reassurance impossible.

Suddenly, he wanted to take Michael by the hand and drive him home. Why had he done this now, here? What was Michael supposed to do, walk it off?

These thoughts must have been visible on Lincoln’s face. His mouth opened, he was about to speak, or maybe extend his hand to where his brother lay on the ground.

Then Michael’s eyes found Lincoln and he saw the anger burning there, unspoken and unspeakable.

“If you touch me again, I’ll kill you.”

The glaring truth in his threat was such, Lincoln took a step back, though his brother’s voice had been free from anger, barely above a whisper.

Michael stared at him from the ground, pushing him to retreat with his icy silence, and Lincoln obliged, until finally he was in his car, driving God only knew where.

He should feel ashamed, terrified at his own violence, but instead for the first time in his life, Lincoln felt at peace.

It was a feeling that couldn’t be helped, and Lincoln enjoyed it, felt it fill his soul with quiet acceptance.

Because he had seen a real glimpse of his brother back there when the rage shone in his eyes.

Because for the first time, he had looked at his brother and seen something he recognized.

Chapter Text

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

It was well past five a.m. by the time Michael got back to his apartment that night.

The door slammed behind him, though his neighbors could attest that he always shut it gently, even during the day. Michael peeled off his clothes and cut straight to the bathroom, turned on the hot water in the shower and stepped right under it.

Pain flashed to his brain and stole his breath as the shower spray hit his bruised face. He could feel his skin loosening under the hot water where the blood had caked, under his nose, on his lips, down his chin.

He couldn’t remember if he’d run into anybody on the way back.

If so, he must have been a sight to behold, and it was no wonder no one had tried to give him a hard time or get a laugh out of the scrawny kid with a bloody face.

Surely, if someone had been tempted to try, they would have stopped dead at the unleashed fire in Michael’s eyes.

The burning water was not burning enough.

He inhaled deeply and his lungs were on fire, the air blasting through the pipes of his broken nose and he felt when he released his breath, smoke might come out, as if he had turned into a dragon.

Motionless, teeth ground tight, he stayed there until he was out of hot water and the spray turned lukewarm. He caught the handle and stopped the flow before it had time to run cold.

There was no room for thoughts in his head.

Ever since Lincoln’s fist had smashed into his face, Michael hadn’t been thinking, hadn’t been himself. His mind was filled with one image alone – red – and every nerve in his body was concentrated on staying in control.

The night was blurring past and present, there was no time, no space. Only red.

Only blood.

Michael kept his eyes closed. He could hardly feel the reality around him, the concreteness of the wet tile beneath him as he sank to his knees, holding his head in his hands.

He started rocking back and forth, trying to soothe away what he no longer remembered to be a memory.

He couldn’t only see the blood, even with his eyes closed. He could taste it. Smell it. Feel its cold sticky kiss on his face.

At no point did he think he needed to go to bed and get some sleep, or that he needed to get to school. His chores as a janitor always made him arrive a couple hours before everyone else.

But none of that entered Michael’s brain just now, because he was no longer a seventeen-year-old high school student.

He was a small boy, strapped tightly into a child car seat. Broken glass everywhere. The smell of death and gasoline.

His cheek, pressed against the tarmac, red with his parents’ blood; it had had time to cool by the time help arrived.

Shivering inside the shower cabin, Michael’s mind longed for sleep, for one minute of rest, but there came no sweeping darkness to force him out of the horrors he usually managed to keep at bay.

So Michael did what any child would do, if a monster crept in at night and cracked his bedroom door open: he stared unblinkingly at the chilling eye of what made him drunk with terror, and he waited for the monster to go away.

…

Sara got straight home after school that day, with a feeling of foreboding inside her chest. Gretchen had been the same honey-sweet shade of gentle with her, and Sara didn’t know what she resented most. That Gretchen found her too stupid to know that something was up, or that though she did know, she couldn’t bring herself to cut the girls out of her life without further evidence.

After all, what had Gretchen done, really? Nothing. So how could Sara walk up to her and say, I can feel you’re angry at me, that you’re playing games, and so if you don’t mind, you’ll stop or I’ll leave.

But what really made it hard for Sara to focus all day, what filled her with dread and anticipation, was Michael’s empty seat in every class.

He’d even missed PE, and the coach’s disappointment not to see his best swimmer almost pushed her over the brim.

All day, she thought she’d just leave, play sick for the day, and go see what this was about.

It was horrible to wait in complete uncertainty. Half a dozen times, she had the reflex to want to text him or call him on his cell phone, but she remembered that they had never exchanged phone numbers.

So, at the very second that the ring chimed for the end of class, Sara jumped to her feet, scrambled her books from her table and rushed for the bus stop. There was a glint of malice in Gretchen’s eyes, watching her, and she didn’t want to risk her trying to slow her down.

The great Tancredi house was empty, Frank wouldn’t be home from work for several hours and so Sara hurried to the garage, grabbed the keys for the spare car they kept shiny and scarcely used all year long, and she started to roll down the same direction where she and Michael had walked yesterday night.

At the time, it didn’t occur to her to think this was the single most rebellious thing she’d ever done, that the reason why her father didn’t use this car much – it was a Bentley – was that it was such an expensive and rare edition, but Frank Tancredi had never thought to keep the keys somewhere Sara wouldn’t find them, so absurd it was to think she would ever want to take it out for a ride herself.

It was strange how faster the car could go than their two legs. When Sara recognized the building, it felt like she’d only been driving for a minute. It had been like a dream, going from her father’s house to Michael’s street, and when she got out, her knees wobbling, she still felt like the place she was walking into was more dream than real.

There was no security at all in Michael’s building. She had noticed that last night. Just a broad wooden door, which she pushed open, and then, threw herself into the staircase. He lived on the sixth floor, no elevator.

Then it was no wonder she was breathless when she got to his door and started knocking. The first few times came out as such a terrified pounding, she rectified herself in mid-course to try to give a more appropriate, moderate knock.

But there was nothing on the other side of the door. Only silence.

“Michael,” she called out, without thinking. “It’s me.”

A moment that seemed a glimpse of eternity went by as she stood alone, facing the wooden door, her lungs on fire, her cheeks colored from climbing the stairs, her hair tousled.

There was the sound of some movement inside. She could picture Michael getting up from the sofa he must also use as a bed, then take a few steps toward the door.

It slid open without ceremony, and Sara realized he mustn’t have locked it.

Then he stood before her, and her jaw slackened despite herself. Stop it! She thought, the part of her that had deeply integrated the fact that when people had scars or nasty-looking wounds, staring was always rude. But it was beyond her to stop.

First, the look on her face was one of sheer horror, before compassion flooded in, unheeded, a warm wave of affection because it was Michael, beneath the blood-stained eye and burst nose, the quiet boy from school who never bothered anyone, who never asked anyone for anything.

“Oh!” She cried.

He opened his mouth, maybe to speak. She didn’t know what on earth he could have wanted to say. For some reason, she couldn’t imagine him going for any of the easy answers – It’s not as bad as it looks, or The other guy looks worse.

But she never gave him time to go through with whatever he was planning to go with.

Instead, crude instinct took control and, before Sara could feel surprise at her own boldness, she threw her arms around him and held him to her, hard enough to knock the breath out of them both.

She heard a stifled groan seep from his throat at the suddenness of the contact. It had never struck her until this second how tall he really was. Sara was tall herself, had been hit by puberty early and towered over the bunch of her classmates at least until high school. It was more of an advantage than anything else, as it discouraged a great deal of boys, shorter than her, from asking her out on dates.

Stupid things like that mattered to kids her age.

But Michael was at least one head taller, as she had to stand on tiptoe to rest her head in the crook of his neck.

After a moment, he put one arm around her shoulder blades, and she felt suddenly very small.

It was the first time she was held by a man.

Though his embrace was somewhat stiff, it was not awkward. She could feel the warmth of his body through his clothes and for the first time, standing close enough to breathe him in, she realized just how much she liked him.

He smelled like early mornings, like ground coffee and libraries. Sara had never tasted coffee before but thought it smelled like a dream, like the glimpse of a new and adult life that would unwind for her in due time.

Even before Michael wrapped an arm around her himself, a feeling of complete rightness and freedom swamped Sara’s whole being. She felt she had never been around someone she understood so well yet knew so little, someone that it felt so absolutely right to touch.

They didn’t move for a long time, standing on the threshold of his apartment, Sara’s feet still into the hall.

At some point, he said, “Your hair smells like cherry blossoms.”

His tone was so factual, she drew back, wanting to laugh, but the sight of his face immediately sucked all the humor out of her.

“My God, Michael. Your face.”

Blood brimmed the white of his left eye in a strange sight, unlike the image Sara had of violence. In films, they showed actors with a black eye, but never that disturbing, intrusive red.

Michael took in her words, her silent shock and compassion, he took all of it steadily, without moving.

Obliviously, she thought again that his brother would have shrugged it off if he had been in his shoes.

And the thought of Lincoln filled her with sudden anger, taking over the rest.

“Did Lincoln do this?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

It surprised her he would be so forthright. And it was too much, for her to know it for certain so quickly, to imagine Lincoln could actually be so violent to his own brother. The boy who sat docilely with her in the library while she helped him with his homework. Her friend.

“Oh,” she said, “the brute.”

Suddenly, she wanted to slam her fists into the wall, to hammer every surface she could reach with tiny punches until this wildfire had evacuated her system.

“The vicious brutish caveman!”

“I wonder if that’s the names girls usually use to insult boys.”

“Why aren’t you in the least angry?”

“I am,” he said. That pacified her instantly. “Come in.” He moved aside and soon, they were both sitting on the couch, one of the very few pieces of furniture in his minuscule apartment. “I think he must have followed us out of the Beehive,” Michael said. “He waited until you’d gone back to your house before he came to me.”

Sara’s mind worked despite her will. She thought of how she had sneaked into her father’s mansion, terrified of making a noise, then eaten some sliced bread, her stomach knotted at the thought of what would happen the next day at school, with Gretchen.

And all the while, Michael had been bleeding on the pavement?

“How did you get home?”

“I walked, of course.”

Sara was going to launch herself on some other wild rant about what a despicable ape Lincoln was when Michael cut in, surprisingly calm. “Do you want some pasta?”

“I – what?”

“I haven’t eaten all day. Didn’t think what time it was. I think I should probably eat. Are you hungry?”

Sara was going to answer no out of polite habit when she realized she was half-starved herself, having eaten nothing at breakfast and barely managed a couple of bites for lunch.

“Yeah. Sure.”

Michael sprang to his feet and got some water boiling in a small pot.

“I missed the whole day at school, then,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Hum.” He took it in with grave seriousness. “I’ll call tomorrow. Try to explain.”

“If they only take one look at your face –”

“That’s rather going to be a problem, I think. Maybe they’ll fire me.”

Sara’s mouth opened in shock. “The school?”

“I mean, as a janitor.”

“Oh.”

He poured in half a pack of spaghetti into the pot and started stirring.

“I’m sure – maybe they’ll be understanding,” she said. But that sounded lame. Sara wondered if she should say Michael could get another job, that plenty of families hired kids to mow their lawns or such things, that she’d talk about him around her neighborhood.

For a flashing second, she actually imagined him working for her father, replacing their seventy-year-old gardener. It was easy to picture him on a lawn-mower, shirtless, or walking around the garden cutting hedges with a great pair of sheaths, his eyes secretly following her, as at the auditorium.

When she came out of her reverie, she realized Michael’s blue eyes were staring fixedly at her, and she hurriedly feigned a deep interest in the cracked polish over her fingernails.

He she just been fantasizing about Michael? Did that count as a fantasy?

After a while, Michael gave her a bowl of spaghetti and a fork. He ate his own lunch standing up by the counter, looking deep in thought. Sara was so hungry she ate it all, although it was bland – no cheese, no butter or olive oil, no tomato sauce. Just pasta and salt.

“I can’t believe Lincoln would do something like that,” she said. It was easier to speak her mind looking at her bowl of spaghetti.

Michael was silent for such a long time, she thought he wasn’t going to answer at all. Her remark felt stupider with each passing second.

Then, he said, “I told you it was nothing special, the fact that Lincoln hates me. Maybe it is a little special.”

He sounded ashamed, like he’d lied to her. She looked up at him in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“A lot of people hate me because I don’t fit in, and Lincoln hates me. But he doesn’t hate me because of that. Maybe he thinks he does, but I don’t.”

“What do you think?”

His plate was empty, and he put it on the edge of the sink. “I think I’m a reminder of what’s darkest about him,” he said. “I think when he looks at me, he sees what he’s most ashamed of. Not me as such. Lincoln’s always been jealous but it wasn’t all bad between us, before. He used to sit on the floor with me and do jigsaw puzzles. He’d get annoyed that I managed better than he did, but he’d laugh, too, and we’d play sometimes. We didn’t like the same games but I humored him and he humored me back.”

He paused. Sara wanted to egg him on but her tongue was lead in her mouth. To picture the both of them as boys, as Michael was describing, was unhinging somehow.

“It all changed when our parents died.”

When he didn’t go on, she couldn’t help but prod him, “How?” She said. “Why?”

“I suppose, because we both reacted to it in different ways.”

“But that’s not – you’re his little brother. You’re the only family he has left.”

“I’m a reminder,” Michael said.

Sara fell helplessly silent. She wanted to say that that made no sense, that he and Lincoln should have become closer as a result. But why? Because that was how movies and books said it happened?

Then, Michael spoke again, and Sara forgot her thoughts altogether.

“I was in the car with them,” he said. On a matter-of-fact tone, but with some surprise showing on his face. Like he couldn’t understand what thread of logic had led him to this statement. “My parents, during the accident. I was in the car. Lincoln doesn’t know that. I mean of course he knows it, but he forgot. I remember. I remember policemen taking me home, after the accident. I hardly had a scratch on me. I remember how Lincoln looked at me, when he understood I was all that was coming home to him, and I think right there and then he hated me, for being alive, or maybe for being there inside that car when he was at home, waiting.

“He became like a wild animal. He broke out of our sitter’s grip and threw himself on the floor, he beat his fists on the ground and he screamed, he screamed like he was broken mad. And I think he was enraged because I wasn’t. That he hated me because his pain was ugly, and mine was inside. And I knew, right from this moment, that Lincoln and I would never understand each other, because we didn’t speak the same language.”

Sara felt like a stone statue on the couch. There was nothing to say. Nothing smart, nothing appropriate. Nothing right.

“Michael –”

“I know that’s what it is,” he said, like he thought she was going to try to persuade him it wasn’t. “I could see it when he first saw me at school. That he’s still burning with that same anger and shame. He doesn’t know it, doesn’t want to know it, but that makes no difference. Underneath the surface, he’s still screaming his heart out in grief and to him, my silence is intolerable.”

Sara got to her feet. She didn’t think. There was little distance to break before she reached him, it was such a small room. Soon, she was standing very close to him, and she put her hand over his, leant against the counter.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

There was a while of silence.

“Do you hate him?” She asked.

“No. I just wish he’d leave me alone. I think that’s all I’ve ever wanted from anyone, and all would be fine with me if I could just be alone.”

“And me?” She was barely conscious of saying the words.

“You’re alone, too,” he said. “I see it. You’re around people but never really with them. That intrigued me.”

“Is that why you kept staring, at school?” She felt disappointed somehow.

“Maybe,” he said. “No.”

“Then why?”

“I don’t know,” he was honest. “What do you think?”

She was going to say she didn’t know, either, but instead said, “I think sometimes we see people and they draw us, inexplicably, before they’ve even spoken a word.”

His eyes were like blue abysses, unlimited depths. When he looked at her like that, Sara felt like she was standing on the edge of a precipice, only the fall would be a delight. Inevitable.

“Yes,” he said finally. “I think so, too.”

His hand felt warm under hers.

If she looked back on this, later, maybe she would think it would have been logical for him to kiss her, but at the moment her head was void from doubt and expectations.

She touched his cheek with her other hand. The skin didn’t look bruised but he flinched slightly at the contact.

Their bodies were almost touching again, as they had when she hugged him in the doorframe.

“You should go to a hospital,” she said.

“No money,” he answered.

Sara suddenly wanted to scream. A flash of anger flew to her brain when she realized how much money she had, still she couldn’t offer to drive him to the hospital and pay for his bill, because she had no bank account, no savings of her own. Her father had never seen the point in giving her a regular allowance. Instead, he bought her what she wanted and she asked for little; her books on medicine were costly but good investment to his mind. She had no other expensive hobbies. When she went out with the girls, he gave her a fifty dollar-bill like it was a penny and she was grateful, that was all.

It struck her that Michael’s money was entirely his own, earned, not given. If he wanted to help a friend, he would do what he could to do it, all by himself; he wouldn’t need to ask anyone for anything.

“Are you going to come to school tomorrow?”

“Of course,” he said. “I didn’t mean not to go today.” Honestly, for a while there Michael had completely forgotten that school existed. “Your skin is soft.”

Sara was so surprised she drew back a step. Until he acknowledged it out loud, she only thought of how soothing the feel of his hand was under hers, the smoothness of a cheek he probably didn’t shave yet; it didn’t really strike her what they were doing until he said it.

“I should be getting back,” she looked at the door. His own eyes were still fixed unashamedly on her. “My dad will be home from work soon.”

“Sure. I’m happy you came.”

The absolute honesty in his voice filled her with such a brutal wave of affection, she nearly threw her arms around him again.

But she had spoken the truth.

It may be all right for her to come home late one night, even if her dad had noticed; she was a teenager after all. But if he came home on the next day and she was gone, the Bentley gone – that might actually get her in trouble.

“Thanks for lunch,” she said, couldn’t think right at this second what else to say.

“My pleasure. Did you walk here?”

“No.”

He said he’d walk her to her car and Sara felt like she was floating through the flight of stairs, like she and Michael had stumbled into space.

Nika had told her that being in love felt like having butterfly wings in your stomach. Sara thought it felt like flying but with no wings at all, just like walking into a dream, where all everyday life concerns felt remote.

She couldn’t say yet whether she liked it. It was too strange, a little disturbing; Sara liked keeping both feet on the ground, and there was something frightening about how everything she used to care about seemed to have shrunk to the size of a thimble. Med school felt far away, and the drive to learn all the bones in the human body was drifting peacefully astray down the ocean of life, while she was headed –

Where?

She couldn’t say.

But there was little time for her to linger on the frightful fact that Michael had become so important so fast, because as they stepped out of his building, shock punched into Sara’s chest at the sight of her father’s Bentley, thrashed, the outside rearview mirrors left and right ripped off, a hole spreading cobweb patterns across the windshield.

“Oh no,” Michael said, reading the expression of horror on her face. “Is this your car?”

“But –” Sara couldn’t believe this. She kept thinking, This is not happening, and she was sure at some point she would open her eyes and the car would be brand-new, reality would apologize for its own rudeness and she would drive it home safely into the garage, her father never knowing she’d taken it.

“Nice cars don’t have good longevity prospects in this neighborhood,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that’s what you’d used to come here.”

Past the initial shock, Sara tried to react like a responsible adult. Deep breaths. Except she couldn’t play the adult now, because if she had been one, this wouldn’t have been her father’s car, she wouldn’t have borrowed it without asking, and she wouldn’t be in trouble.

“Oh God,” she said. “My dad loves this car.”

Michael nodded in silent sympathy. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Hide me in your apartment forever?”

He gave a genuine laugh that made the whole affair feel worth it to Sara, broken car and all.

“Really,” he said, “I think I’d like that.”

She realized she would too and pretended to look at the damages.

“But that wouldn’t do you any good. It might actually make things worse. Things will be all right,” he said. And it felt strange, coming from a boy whose face looked like it’d been through a boxing match. “Parents forgive.”

Sara let out a plaintive sigh at the sight of the Bentley. As she had never given her father a reason to ground her before today, she supposed she would have to take Michael’s word for it.

…

It was Sara’s first serious scolding, and her father was at least as embarrassed to be delivering it as she was.

“I don’t know what took over you,” he said.

The clock in the living room had just struck half past seven. Normally, they’d be having dinner, sitting silent opposite each other; she couldn’t remember the last time anything had come to disturb their routine.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

She’d apologized over three times in the past two minutes, but instinct told her self-deprecation would be the best attitude to adopt.

“I shouldn’t have taken the car. It’s just there was – an emergency.”

“Yes,” he sounded exasperated, “you told me. The boy who got in a fight.” He sighed and started massaging the ridge of his nose. A good thing they didn’t go through this a lot, Sara thought, because Frank Tancredi seemed to have had enough of scolding his daughter for a lifetime. “You know, I really don’t get where this is coming from. You’ve always been such a good kid, Sara. Now, you get home late, you steal the car to go after strange boys?”

Sara opened her mouth to protest but ultimately closed it. First, she’d wanted to say Michael wasn’t strange, but he unquestionably was, and she didn’t see herself explaining the attraction of that to her father.

“I didn’t even know you dated boys,” he said.

“I don’t. I mean – it’s recent.”

“Well, Sara, I don’t see what else I can do, given the position you’re putting me in.”

Sara steeled herself; of course, she knew what was coming, but it felt surreal, like she was watching it happen to an actress in some movie.

“You’re grounded,” he said. “No more hanging out with friends after school, no more parties, and no more boys. I don’t want you dating if it’s going to take your head away from your studies like this.”

“But dad –”

It wasn’t that she wanted to sound like a protesting teenager. Honestly, she was just going to make the reasonable argument that she was a free individual, nearly a grownup, and her father simply couldn’t tell her what kind of relationships she was allowed to have.

Only when Frank interrupted her did she realize how it sounded, “We aren’t negotiating, Sara. You’ve always had your freedom, and now you can’t be trusted with it, I have to do something about it. I don’t like it any more than you do.”

Sara stared blankly at him. There was no room for anger in her astonishment.

After a while, she volunteered, “Do you want me to go to bed without dinner?”

He considered this. “That doesn’t seem like a good idea. You didn’t even have any breakfast. Maybe you could take dinner up to your room?”

Sara hurried to do just that, without pointing out this sounded much more like a reward than punishment.

And so Sara sat cross-legged on her bed and ate some mushroom risotto that their cook and house-cleaner, Dolly, had left ready on the cooker this afternoon. It was actually a good evening, taking some distance from the craziness of school and Gretchen and Lincoln punching Michael. Sara opened her biology book in front of her and read all throughout dinner, and she felt at home, at peace.

Before sleep, she wanted to write Michael about what had happened – not in a complaining way, of course. Michael had it too hard for her not to feel embarrassed to complain to him about anything. But she could have passed it off as humorous, somehow; ‘Guess who’s been grounded and sent to bed early like a twelve-year-old?’ It was a little unfair, though, considering she’d been the one to suggest that last one to her father.

Besides, she couldn’t text Michael and she would have to wait to see him tomorrow, at school.

Sara let out a sigh.

If things were going to go on like this, they were going to need to trade phone numbers at some point.

Chapter Text

“Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.”

It was hard to say whether Sara’s eyes or Lincoln’s gleamed with deeper anger as he spoke the line.

The next day, at school, they had cordially managed to avoid each other until they were due to practice in the auditorium at four.

And it was hell getting through this scene.

All the while, Sara’s teeth were grinding hard, her fists clenched tight. All she could think of was Michael’s face, the blood in his eye, the unusual lump of his broken nose.

Lincoln had fewer reasons to be really angry, more to be ashamed, but looked angrier for it as a way to hide the more embarrassing truth of what he felt.

Sara was too focused repressing her own fire to see it, and if she had, she couldn’t say she would have pitied him at this moment.

When they were done, their teacher, Caroline Reynolds, stared at them in unreadable silence for a while. Her eyes went from Lincoln to Sara and back and forth until she burst out, “This was really good. Without a doubt, your best performance, Lincoln! All this time, you were holding back, but you need to put life into that character! And that edginess you give him is the most interesting thing about your act!”

Sara saw Lincoln roll his eyes, but she wasn’t in the mood to smile.

“And you!” Professor Reynolds turned to Sara, her face bright. “I love how angry you played her, Sara. Ophelias are often spineless girls who look like flowers that’ll die with the next hard weather. But you gave her a real backbone! At some point, I almost thought she was going to hit Hamlet – you could have, you know. Don’t hesitate getting carried away. Improvisation is the mark of true actors.”

“Really,” Sara hissed through her teeth. “Suppose we try it again?”

Lincoln answered laconically, “Gotta practice with my basketball team now.”

Caroline Reynolds sighed. “How children multitask! Always fascinates me. All right then, off you go. Good job, both of you!”

Sara and Lincoln left the auditorium without exchanging so much as a look.

In her mind, Sara was practicing what best to say to condemn his actions, but nothing sharp enough would come. Anyway, it was best save this for when she had her anger under control; she didn’t want to get carried away and make a scene at school.

He didn’t even say goodbye or look at her before he cut toward the gymnasium, right after they reached the yard. Sara watched him walk away, a look of shock on her face.

How was it he got to act like he had reasons to hate her as much as she did him?

He’d attacked his brother, for Christ’s sake.

Surely a wounded pride was faster to heal.

“Hey.”

Sara turned around at the sound of Michael’s voice. He was dressed in a plain jeans and shirt, and she looked immediately apologetic. “Not working today?”

He smiled. “I’d say my days as a janitor are over.”

“Oh no. They fired you?”

“Yep.”

“All because you missed one day?”

His laughter was so genuine, Sara blushed, not really from embarrassment but by the sheer warmth of him.

Coming from another guy, it would have made her feel stupid, like a little princess who doesn’t understand how the world really works, that people don’t go out of their ways to make your life easier, they don’t say Sure, I understand. They don’t forgive.

“I think they took one look at my face today and it gave them the impression that I was trouble.”

“You’re not.”

It had never struck Sara to think of Michael like that. At least, not traditional trouble.

Would she say that to her dad if she ever brought him over?

“Well, anyway,” Michael said. “There’ll be other jobs. Can I walk with you?”

The whole stress of the day fluttered away from Sara’s chest, as light as it had seemed heavy a moment before.

She liked how he phrased it. Not, Can I walk you home but Can I walk with you.

“Sure.”

Sara usually took the bus, but considering that there would be no getting out of her room today, she might as well linger on the way back.

She didn’t tell him about her day, though there was plenty time to. Too pleased it had disappeared to bring it right back on the table.

Besides, she could already guess Michael’s advice if she talked to him about the weirdness of hanging out with the girls, the big bad wolf lurking in Gretchen’s Red Riding Hood smile. You think they’re going to mess with you? Michael would say. Then just leave. Disengage.

It was that simple to him.

And she couldn’t even think of bringing up Lincoln. Not when Michael’s face still looked like it’d been painted for Halloween.

Instead, they picked up the conversation where they’d left off the other night, before anything bad happened. It was easy to do that; grab a thread they’d both left untouched for days on end, as if conversation was never really dead between them, even in silence.

At some point, she said. “By the way…” She took a mature voice, trying to detach herself as much as possible from all the boys who had asked her that before. “Don’t you think we should trade phone numbers?”

“Oh, sorry.”

Slight panic crept in. Surely, Michael wasn’t going to say that she’d misunderstood, that he had a perfect girlfriend outside of school, she was a grownup like him, independent and working, so she wouldn’t know her.

“I don’t have a phone.”

“What?”

Sara tried to swallow back her surprise as soon as she heard it in her own voice. It was too hateful that she really couldn’t imagine any teenage boy wouldn’t have a phone.

Privilege.

Sometimes, she thought it was the most despicable thing about her, beyond her control as it was.

“Well, then forget it. I just thought – if you did it’d be easier if we could text, you know.”

“Yeah. That makes sense.”

Sara looked down at her feet, crestfallen. What with her being grounded, she supposed the only place where they could see each other for some time was school. Which was the worst of places for them, really. Everything complicated, gossip, and people getting in the way of the inexplicable simplicity of her attraction to him.

She hadn’t told him about being grounded.

Right now, with him getting fired and all that, she would have sounded too much like a child.

…

“Burrows? Mind if I have a word with you?”

Gretchen’s voice made the boys freeze in the middle of their basketball practice. They had been so caught in the game, they hadn’t paid attention to the sound of high heels on the floor of the gymnasium.

For a second, the team only stared at the intruder, her body sheathed into a black dress that made her look like some kind of weapon.

Sucre had been holding the ball, ready to take a leap toward the basket, despite Lincoln’s standing in his way, trying to block him.

But he let the ball drop and it rolled toward Gretchen, who avoided it as if it had been a grimy street animal.

“Now,” she said.

The authority in her voice drew Lincoln out of his surprise. His jaw stiffened and he said, “Get lost, Morgan. We’re in the middle of something here.”

“I’m sure your boys could use a break.”

“I said get lost.”

She sighed.

Maybe she had pushed it a bit far by humiliating him like that in front of Sara.

Then this was fair enough, that he should humiliate her before they could have a real conversation. Gretchen would take it impassively.

Her gaze skimmed over the team of sweating boys, who could hardly take their eyes off of her. How much respect would it gain him, to send her away while they watched?

Her lips broke into her usual red grin. She watched as Lincoln’s lip quivered ever so slightly, though his green eyes betrayed no desire. He wasn’t bad at this. A pity he’d lowered in her esteem so much, chasing after Sara like a tame dog.

“Your loss,” she spoke the words barely above a whisper, but she was certain all the boys in the team caught them and believed them without question.

She was aware of every move of her body as she walked away, her whole posture adapting to the fact that she was being looked at.

You could have heard a pen drop in the dumbstruck silence that saw her to the door.

When she had gone, sighs started breaking loose, and Sucre turned to Lincoln. “Man, you ain’t in your right mind. I mean, Sara’s cute and all –”

“Shut up.” He squared his shoulders and summoned his captain-of-the-team tone. “A’right boys, back to work.”

But his authority was shy in comparison to the mark that Gretchen’s brief apparition had left behind.

While Sucre went to pick up the ball, Lincoln heard him mutter, “Hell of a woman.”

Annoyed, Lincoln was about to point out Gretchen was hardly a woman when he decided it was best to let the subject die out. He went to the bleachers instead to get some water from his backpack, but immediately noticed a text lighting up on the screen of his cell.

The number was unknown, but he had no trouble identifying the sender.

When you’re done playing tough with your gorillas, meet me at the bus stop outside the yard. Or don’t you want to get back at Sara?

…

It was around five thirty p.m. when Lincoln arrived at the rendezvous spot, hands in his pockets, his looks as casual as ever; but deep down, he was cautious as a U.S. politician meeting with an especially slippery opponent during a diplomatic showdown.

There was no one from school around at this hour, as Gretchen must have intended. She cast Lincoln a playful glance when she saw him. Maybe there was no mischief meant by those blue eyes today, maybe it simply came naturally to her now.

Still, Lincoln had decided to show no vulnerabilities.

“I’m not here to fuck around,” he said before she had time to speak.

Her face painted with a pretty look of surprise. “My,” she said, “you are a brute. It’s all business and no foreplay with you.”

“You came here because you had something to say. Say it. Or I’m out of here.”

“Okay,” but she was still smiling that same smile, like she was in on a joke he’d never have the brainpower to get. “Okay. I’m not going to make this long. Simply put, I want you to do something for me.”

He gave a bitter laugh. “I don’t see why I’d be doing you any favors, Morgan.”

“Not a favor. It wouldn’t cost you. Really, it’d be a relief to you.”

“Why don’t you let me decide that for myself?”

“I want you to quit the school play.”

Surprise momentarily overwhelmed his façade of nonchalance. “Wait, what? Why?” He remembered what she had written, that this was a way of getting back at Sara. “You think Sara cares about the play so much? She doesn’t. Back during rehearsal today, she could barely stand to look at me. I’d be doing her a favor by bailing.”

“You’d be doing yourself a favor. I mean, what are you really doing, spending hours on some school play every week? And all that so what? So you can make a fool of yourself on stage come December?”

Lincoln had to admit she had a point. He had dragged himself painfully to rehearsal today, and he didn’t see how the following sessions would be any more pleasant. Some of his friends had been cracking jokes about his new hobby, but so long as it was just about trying to get into a girl’s pants, they could understand it. Now though, considering that girl looked like she might set his head on fire with her eyes, and he was nowhere near sealing the deal with her, as the boys in his team would put it, the affair was getting downright humiliating.

That was without mentioning that at this stage, Lincoln’s flirtation with theater was some abstract thing to his boys. If they actually came to watch him struggle over his lines during the mid-year representation… Would they ever let him forget it?

Still, he was cautious as he appraised the look in Gretchen’s eyes. “And what do you stand to gain?”

She shrugged.

“Give it up,” he said. “It doesn’t suit you to act innocent.”

Her eyes sparkled slightly. “Just some idea I’d like to see play out.”

“What idea?”

“If you do this, you’ll see for yourself.”

He shook his head. By this time, he felt sure it’d be safer for him to wriggle his way out of the play one way or another, but it felt rookie to make it look like he was caving in to Gretchen.

“Like I said. I don’t want to fuck around. Give it to me straight, or no deal.”

A scowl so hateful found its way on her face, Lincoln felt a little awed for a second. He didn’t think she caught it though and, thank god, no one else had been around to see.

“I’ll tell you what, Burrows. If you don’t quit the play, I’ll make sure everyone worth a damn in this school is here to watch. We’ll have rotten tomatoes ready, iced drinks, the whole thing. By the time we’ve reached Act two, you’ll be so filthy, you’ll look like something that washed out of the sewers.”

“Is that what you’re planning to do to Sara?”

The features on her face relaxed into her old smile. “Let’s just go our separate ways, Burrows. You give up the play, go back to being a full-time basket-ball player. You have your plans, and I have mine.”

Lincoln looked her up and down, stalling for time. Really, he didn’t see what other choice he had. “You’re a fucking psycho, you know that?”

And for some reason, Gretchen looked at him like he’d paid his respects to her.

Maybe because, for the first time since they’d known each other, he had looked at her and seen her as the formidable tyrant everyone said she was.

Chapter Text

It was terribly unfair that teenagers were the class of people that most often got grounded, when they were the ones who most fully appreciated the punishment.

Sara was never so bored in her life as in the weeks that followed her getting her father’s Bentley trashed by accident. On the upside, Sara finished BRS Gross Anatomy in just one week, and learned not only the names of all hand bones but got through foot bones as well.

The worst thing was, if she hadn’t been dying to see Michael, she might have enjoyed being grounded. She might not have even noticed she was grounded. But the thought of walking side by side with Michael in the cold, taking his hand, marveling at her own boldness, or sitting in his apartment and reading lines with him… Until recently, there wasn’t much in the outside world that could draw Sara’s eye.

“That boy!” Caroline Reynolds hissed, drawing Sara out of her thoughts.

She shifted on her feet, arms wrapped around herself, because it was always cold in the auditorium.

“Did he tell you he couldn’t make it today?” Caroline asked her.

“Um – no.”

“There must be a mistake. We’re a month away from the show. Please, call him and tell him we’re expecting him.”

To call Lincoln, ever, was about the last thing in the world that Sara wanted. In truth, a breath of a relief had seeped into her lungs as she realized he was bailing on their Hamlet rehearsal today. While Reynolds fumed and bemoaned the selfishness of teenage boys, ‘especially sports team captains’, Sara tried not to think of all the things she could be doing instead of standing there, alone with her drama teacher.

If she had skipped drama, she could have walked home with Michael. They could be talking right now, and she could steal glimpses of him – the dimples in his stubble-free cheeps, the hot intensity of his blue gaze.

“Sara?”

Sara snapped out of her thoughts. “I don’t think that would help, professor. I mean – Lincoln has kind of lost interest in the play lately.”

Caroline Reynolds acted like Sara had just said Lincoln considered getting a Hello Kitty tattoo on his bicep.

“Lost interest?”

“Y-yes.”

“What does he think this is, volunteer work!”

Sara didn’t point out that technically, they had volunteered for the school play. Instead, an idea sprouted inside her head – one way she could manage to see more of Michael while still being grounded.

“Actually” she said, “I know a boy who’d make a terrific Hamlet.” It sounded almost wicked when she said the words, like the idea would bring Sara so much satisfaction it must be selfish and shameful.

Caroline squinted suspiciously. “What boy?”

“Michael.”

“Michael?”

“Scofield,” Sara volunteered.

“Isn’t he the janitor?”

Sara couldn’t see how to answer without specifying that, actually, he’d been fired, so she stayed silent altogether.

“Hum,” Caroline said. “I suppose nothing can be worse than no Hamlet.”

“He’s very good,” Sara said, and couldn’t get over how stung she sounded to her own ears. “Ten times better than Lincoln. And he’ll be there on time to rehearse, you can be sure about that.”

Exactly why was she selling Michael to her drama teacher, before she’d even asked him if he wanted the part?

“Fine,” Caroline said, “get him here as soon as you can for an audition. If we don’t get a Hamlet soon, we’ll have to cancel the performance. Can you think of a bigger disaster?”

Sara shook her head, no, to humor her.

A few months from now though, she’d wished she hadn’t saved the school play. Wished more than anything that the performance had died before it’d even started.

…

Michael never saw a smile like the one on Coach Hopkins’ face when he told him he’d given it some thought, and yeah, if the offer still stood, he’d like to join the swimming team.

“Damn right the offer still stands!”

The coach slapped a beefy palm on Michael’s naked shoulder. Michael repressed a groan. It’s not that he was uncomfortable to be touched while he wore nothing more than swim trunks. He could be covered from head to toe right now and still, he’d think of nothing but that huge palm on his shoulder, the weight of it pressing him into the earth, digging into his skin like acid.

Only when the coach removed his hand did Michael start breathing again.

“That might prove to be the most important decision you’ve ever made, kiddo,” the coach said. “Might get you to college.”

Michael nodded. “Cool.”

Fortunately, he was strategic enough to save this for the end of class. If not, he wasn’t sure the coach would have left him alone for the whole hour.

“Well,” he looked behind his shoulder toward the lockers, “I’d better get going.”

“Right, right. Er – kid?”

Michael looked steadily into his eyes as the coach wetted his lips. What remained of Lincoln’s beating – the purple bruise below his eye and the one that engulfed his broken nose – didn’t prickle under the coach’s stare. Michael didn’t feel ashamed, and shame seemed precisely the thing Coach Hopkins was waiting for. Maybe, if Michael had shifted from foot to foot and looked at the ground, the coach could have slapped him on the back and given him a paternal lecture.

But under Michael’s steady gaze, his confidence ran thin. What a weird kid, he thought. A good swimmer, and for sure he was glad to have him in the team. But if Coach Hopkins had been back in high school, he couldn’t help but think Michael Scofield was the last kid he would have hung out with.

“Nothing,” the coach said.

“Okay,” Michael turned back and disappeared into the locker room without another word.

Michael was alone in the locker room by then, which was lucky enough. After what had happened, Michael would rather not see his brother for a while, and it was just easier to avoid him in the halls or in class, rather than in a locked room full of their classmates.

The bell had rung, and Michael slipped his pants on even though his thighs were still wet and his whole body smelled like chlorine. Now that his face looked the way it did, he couldn’t afford to be late for class.

He dashed out of the locker room, so focused he wouldn’t have seen Sara if she hadn’t spoken, “Hi.”

Michael stopped his tracks, the importance of punctuality diminishing increasingly with each second – her smile, the smell of her lemony shampoo, even the color in her cheeks was quite charming.

“Hi,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were waiting for me.”

“Well…” She seemed about to make up some excuse but decided against it.

“I was just talking to Coach Hopkins about joining the team,” he said. “Since my days as a janitor are over.”

“About that,” Sara said, “I was thinking since you’ll have a lot of time on your hands – maybe you’d like to join the school play.”

In how she blurted the words and looked breathless, Michael could tell she’d been given a lot of thought to them.

“You were just thinking that,” he said, “randomly?”

“No.”

He appreciated her honestly. “Didn’t the casting take place in September? Who would I play?”

“Hamlet.”

“Hamlet?”

Sara sighed, and when she took his hand and had him sit down with her on a bench nearby, the thought of his next period vanished from his mind entirely.

She told him then, about everything. How Lincoln dumped them without warning. How the school play was ‘doomed’ if someone didn’t step up to fill those empty shoes.

Michael tried to listen to her, because she obviously took the whole thing very seriously. But details kept grabbing at his attention: the strand of hair that hung loose from her ponytail, and that she kept pushing back behind her ear.

What dimension was this that the Sara Tancredis of this world would wait up after class for him?

“So will you do it?”

Sara looked back at him, and he didn’t pretend he hadn’t been lost in his contemplation of her. By now, she must be used to it – his looking at her. From some table at the cafeteria. Mop in hand, at the auditorium.

For what was maybe the first time in his life, Michael wished he could do the chivalrous thing. To his brother, it probably came naturally. A girl asked for his help, she became a damsel in distress. Had it been Lincoln standing here, he would have pushed up his pecs and said Yes automatically – except Lincoln had been the one who created the whole mess to begin with.

Michael looked down. Sara still held his hand firmly, and he ran his thumb over her wrist. Her chest filled up with air, and he thought he’d like to hold her flush against him, the way she had when she stopped by his apartment last week.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The school play – it sounds like a lot of visibility.” Her eyes worked hard at containing traces of disappointment. “It’s not that I wouldn’t want to do it – to be Hamlet with you, in private. But it’d be different with the whole school watching.”

“Right. You mean – you’re afraid of how they’ll react.”

He shook his head. “I mean, it might not play out like you expect.”

Her gaze steadied, and he knew she was thinking about it too: the way her girlfriends reacted when he walked up to them at the Hive.

“You might think Lincoln’s a brute,” he said, “but playing Ophelia to his Hamlet on stage wouldn’t get you into trouble.”

“What kind of trouble are you talking about?”

He shrugged. Though she hadn’t talked to him about it, he had seen her become stiffer around her girlfriends, and how the girls’ smiles looked bright as knife blades now.

It was only when she spoke and he heard her anger that he knew what to make of the turmoil in her eyes. “You think I’d be ashamed to be seen with you?” Her hand squeezed his. “Anyone can walk by and see us. I’m not doing a very good job at hiding you, am I?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I just don’t want you to get hurt. It’s not just that, though. I don’t like the spotlights much.”

Sara’s eyes lowered to her white trainers. Such clean trainers, Michael thought. Since he’d gotten emancipated, he’d owned exactly two pairs of shoes, and had only thrown the first one away when hours of walking on asphalt had melted the sole right through. The pair he wore now had cracks at the bottom, and he could feel the end getting thinner against his toes. The mildest rain soaked them through, but they’d last him a few more months if he was careful. Not that Sara would ever look at his shoes. But for a moment, the pure whiteness of her immaculate trainers seemed to encapsulate the whole world that existed between them.

“This is very important to you,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, and though no blush rose to her cheeks, he could tell she was surprised by her own honesty. “I don’t know why. I think ever since we practiced Hamlet together at your apartment, I’ve started falling in love with you.”

She looked up, and Michael’s heart somersaulted up to his throat.

“I don’t know why I said that,” she admitted. “You make it so easy.”

His hand felt burning hot around hers, and without thinking he raised it to his mouth and kissed her fingers. Her skin still smelled like chlorine.

Part of him felt he should say something back, something meaningful. Like an exchange. Those words had come from the deepest of her. Maybe she hadn’t even known they were there until she spoke them, and it had cost her, because the truth always costs you. As if she had taken a scalpel and cut her skin clean through to pull out something from inside her and handed it to him, bleeding and dark. Now he had to reciprocate.

Yet when he opened his mouth, a terrible fear spread like ice through his entrails. He realized he wanted to tell her to run, to get away from him.

Like her, he hadn’t been aware this truth existed until he almost spoke it.

She should stay away from him. Because the only people who had ever loved him had died. Because he brought about disaster.

Instead, he said, “Then I will do it. If it matters to you.”

Chapter Text

Sara’s hands sweated around her tray, as Gretchen picked a red apple from shelves, and observed every angle of it like it might turn into a crystal ball.

The words lay thick as peanut butter on Sara’s tongue. I’ll sit with Michael today. Such a casual sentence, but of course, it would stop being casual as soon as she’d said it, and it exploded between Gretchen, Lisa and Nika.

Ridiculous. How could Sara have been so blind as to think that, for all these years, she’d managed to stay out of high school drama, and her friendship with the girls hadn’t weaved her into the cobweb thread by thread?

Sara picked the items randomly, not seeing the food or hearing a word of the girls’ droning chatter.

I’ll sit with Michael today.

Not like she was waging war on the world. Besides, Sara was appalled at her own cowardice when she realized how difficult it seemed. After what had happened at the Beehive, hanging out with the girls had become unbearable. The air sickening-sweet like honey, and every time Gretchen smiled, Sara could only think of the sting at the end of it – there would be a sting. Did Gretchen think she was that stupid?

Her father was so upset about the Bentley, she expected he might wear the colors of mourning as he had done when her mother passed, so Sara couldn’t begin to see the end of her ‘grounding’. She saw too little of Michael already, so the half-hour they got at lunch weighed as a very real advantage, well-worth shaking the boat over.

God, she was tired of this. Tired of the pretense, tired of watching her back all the time around the girls. She wanted to do what she wanted for once.

She wanted to be with Michael.

The thought brought her back to yesterday afternoon, and how the words had slipped past her despite logic and caution.

I’ve started falling in love with you.

Thank heaven, no one had been around to overhear. All too clearly, she pictured Gretchen’s pursed lips dripping with sarcasm: Way to go, S. Dumping the L-word on a guy before he’s ever taken you out on a date. You were trying to scare him away, of course? You didn’t think he’d say it back or anything?

“Excuse me?”

Sara realized the line had moved to the main courses, and she was still blocking the fruit shelf. “Sorry,” she shuffled along, glancing around for the girls. They hadn’t waited up for her.

A knot crept up Sara’s throat like a long finger. It shouldn’t hurt. Part of her never wanted to be around the girls again, and she was only looking for a diplomatic way out – right?

Tight grip around her tray, to make sure it wouldn’t slip from her sweaty hands, Sara entered the cafeteria. The smell of industrial food hung thick in the air, the kind of smell where you can’t get any more specific than ‘food’, not when you smell it, sometimes not even when you taste it. Only hospitals, schools, and prisons knew how to make such food.

Sara spotted the girls, first. Gretchen, Lisa and Nika sat at their usual table, obviously in the midst of conversation; but not so deep that Gretchen’s lynx eye didn’t rise to meet Sara’s with a glint of challenge.

A shudder ran down Sara’s spine. Sweat broke down her temples. Students who stood motionless in the cafeteria longer than they had to usually had a death wish. Might as well draw a big red arrow on your forehead and spread your arms, waiting for the kids to start throwing food at you. A dozen pairs of eyes had already started to turn to Sara, and among them, she found Michael’s.

At the far end of the room, by the window. The comfort of his steady gaze blew a breath of warmth throughout Sara’s body. Her shoulders relaxed. It was like Michael had thrown to her a golden threat that she could follow out of this labyrinth.

She walked to him without stopping by the girls’ table. By now, all students had stopped paying attention either to their friends or their food.

Sara said, “Can I sit with you?”

“Always,” Michael answered.

And Sara felt he might as well have said he loved her, too.

The rattle of her tray against the table came out too loud. The cafeteria had seldom been so silent. It was only when she sat there opposite Michael that guilt crept in. Hadn’t it been awfully rude of her to just dump the girls without a word of explanation?

Her back was turned to the rest of the room, but she could feel four hundred eyes burning holes through the back of her head. Especially the girls.

“Just a sec,” she told Michael and grabbed her phone. She texted Gretchen: Forgot to tell you I made plans with Michael today. Talk later?

When she looked up at Michael, a shaky exhale escaped her before she could think to hold it back.

“That was a big deal,” he said, deadpan. “What you just did?”

“Uh – I think so. But then again before I met you, I thought no one understood high school worse than I did.”

Michael chuckled. He didn’t smile a lot, but the dimples that crept up his cheeks and the glow it gave his whole face gave Sara a glimpse of the very, very handsome man he would be someday.

“People are looking at us,” he said. “Do you mind?”

“More than I’d like to.”

“I feel like taking your hand.”

Sara’s breath hitched. “I’d like that.”

“Under the table?”

“No.” A flash of yesterday’s anger found its way back to her through the turmoil. For maybe five seconds, she really didn’t care about what everybody thought. “I’m not ashamed of you, Michael.”

As if to prove that, she reached out for his hand across the table and he slid his thumb over her wrist. Could he feel her pulse climbing? The world faded away when she focused on him and only him. Never mind holding his hand. For a second – through that same route of bravery that had led her to this to begin with – Sara wanted to kiss him.

“I’m afraid,” he said. That he would speak at all right now shook her back into her senses.

“What?” she said. No boy had ever confessed such a thing to her, especially not with that kind of ease. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I’m afraid I’ll bring about trouble for you. It’s funny – I was never afraid before. Maybe it felt like if you never chose me, I couldn’t lose you.”

Sara tried to curb the panic that threatened to spill all over her thoughts. What was he talking about? Clearly he was serious – deadly serious – but he wasn’t worried about high school reputation or having to live the rest of his senior year ostracized. Like all of him, the roots of his concerns were well out of Sara’s world.

She thought about his parents, what he’d told her the other day at his apartment. I was in the car with them.

She said, “You’re not going to lose me.”

…

Lincoln’s hands balled into such huge fists on his lap that he could feel the surface of the table biting into his knuckles.

No way.

No. way.

Nando cleared his throat, “So, they’re an item now, aren’t they?”

A whistling sigh slipped through Lincoln’s teeth. Whatever he liked about Nando, it sure as hell wasn’t his sense of tact.

The rest of the boys waited for Lincoln’s reaction to give them their cue. Should they start howling, and thus incite the whole cafeteria to burst into boos? Should they throw food? Over-boiled vegetables lay untouched on the sides of their plates, and what better to throw at a loser couple than stinking veggies?

With all eyes at the table set on him, Lincoln didn’t even think of what he did feel, if Sara and Michael were indeed dating. His whole reaction tailored itself to the fact that the boys were looking at him. His face betrayed nothing.

For a second he couldn’t believe Sara would want to humiliate him like this, even after all that happened. Then clarity sliced through the thought – much worse – and said: She hasn’t done this to nag you. It’s been weeks since she thought of you at all.

“What?” Lincoln said, like he couldn’t understand why the boys had stopped eating. To finish the act, he crammed what was left of his energy bar into his mouth. “What you lookin’ at?”

They all sat silent, not daring even to shrug. Shrugs were Lincoln’s go-to-answer.

“Losers are like all people,” Lincoln explained. “They cluster.”

“Didn’t you want to get into her pants or something?”

“Get into her pants, not go steady. The girl reads Shakespeare for fun, for fuck’s sake.”

The boys wouldn’t point out Lincoln himself had been reading Shakespeare lately, had even been willing to play one of the old bard’s most iconic character at the mid-term performance. They had never seen him carrying the book; Lincoln would have cut off his hand sooner than taken it to school. They’d never seen him blundering his way through rehearsal, either, so it mustn’t be real in any sense that mattered to them. Gretchen was right. Best for him to drop the play, no matter what she had planned for his brother and Sara.

Through his anger, the thought even made him smile as he said, “They’ll get what’s coming to them.”

…

End Notes: Please share your thoughts in the comment section. Take care!

Chapter Text

Sara jittered on the edge of her seat as Michael stood in the auditorium, script in hand, ready to audition.

He opened his mouth. Sara’s heart leapt – what if the magic only worked when they were alone in his apartment? What if he stammered under Caroline Reynolds’s hawk eyes?

Ridiculous. Sara wasn’t this nervous even when she auditioned.

“O God! God!” Michael said. “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world!”

His eyes barely strayed toward the script. Sara’s body relaxed immediately. She wiped her palms on her seat, and let go of a sigh she hadn’t realized stopped all oxygen from coming in.

One line, one word, and he was Hamlet. Caroline let him go through the whole monologue. Her ring-clad hand pressed to her lips, she watched Michael in absolute, religious silence.

When he finished, Caroline yelled, “Sara! Get on stage, I want to do a chemistry read. Act three, scene one!”

A chemistry read? Sara tried to roll her eyes like it annoyed her, but her cheeks flushed so red no one probably noticed what her eyes did.

Okay, okay. It’s just you and Michael – and Professor Reynolds. Not like the whole school was watching – yet. Why had she thought this was a good idea again?

“I, uh –” she cleared her throat as Caroline handed her a worn edition of Hamlet. “I didn’t need to do a chemistry read with Lincoln.”

“I didn’t think you needed one. Word has it, all the girls in your class are attracted to Lincoln Burrows – yes, we do overhear you sometimes.”

Sara feigned a sudden interest in the text and all but covered her face with the book. Oh God, you could probably light a candle on her cheeks. How would she ever meet Michael’s eyes, yet alone read with him?

“But then,” Caroline went on, “the way you played it went really well. He was all heat, you were all ice. It worked.” She shrugged. “Now, let’s see how this plays out.” She sighed as she handed Michael another Hamlet. “Are you sure this is your senior year?”

“Quite sure, ma’am,” Michael said.

“Where have you been all those years? I would have loved to have you to last year when we staged Lady Macbeth.”

“I just moved here last September,” Michael answered, like she had asked a reasonable question.

“Right. Well?” Caroline looked at Sara expectantly.

Sara lowered the book from her face, still shame-red. Please let the land of adulthood be filled with less blushing.

Michael’s eyes met her immediately – and as it happened yesterday at the cafeteria, a pool of quietness flooded her bloodstream. He started to speak, and Sara let herself get carried by the current of his voice. Caroline stared at them, jaw slack. Not only was Michael worth a hundred Lincolns – Sara was better, too, when she played to his Hamlet. Sara had known this from the moment they practiced together at his place.

Soon, all embarrassment flushed into oblivion as they acted it out. Sara felt Ophelia’s bittersweet feelings for her old friend and lover, and when Michael said, “I did love you once,” her throat jammed with very real power.

“Indeed, my lord,” she said, “you made me believe so.”

“You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it: I loved you not.”

“I was the more deceived,” Sara answered.

Her heartbeat rocketed. How right, how right. With Lincoln, she had restrained herself – acted the part of Ophelia like the distant girl who curbs her emotions. Now, she could barely speak through the torrent that unleashed inside her. Her voice cracked from the pressure.

And Michael – Michael.

Yesterday, his smile gave her a glimpse of the man he would become.

Today, he was a man plucked from the very depths of her imagination. He was the ideal voice she had pictured for Hamlet the first time she read the text. The voice she didn’t even know existed until she recognized it.

His cold, his madness, his cruelty, opened an abyss inside her where only she and him could meet.

Why should she play Ophelia so cold? Hamlet was long known to her. It was natural she should want to touch him, and that holding back from it should torture her, that the whole audience should feel that if she could have only kissed him right at this moment, the whole tragedy would have been averted.

Applause broke in the room when they finished the scene. It bothered Sara – for a second, she had forgotten this was an audition turned into an impromptu rehearsal, forgotten Caroline Reynolds stood there watching them.

Wait – had Professor Reynolds ever applauded before?

“Well I am sold,” she said. “Brilliant. You guys are going to kill it in December! Sara, maybe if you could downplay the sexual tension? At some point it felt like you were going to tear his clothes off – I’d be all for it if you played it at a regular theater, but this is a high school performance.”

And the blush was back with a vengeance, the magic vanished in an anonymous grave.

Sara’s eyes shot toward her white trainers. A chuckle broke into the room – Michael’s? She had to look up, just to make sure, and the beam on his face parted her lips into an O.

“Well, you should hurry out!” Caroline told them, checking her watch. “I kept you here long enough. Tomorrow, same time? We’re going to have to double down on the rehearsals, I never cast a Hamlet so late in the game.”

Sara only managed to nod while Michael said, “Sure.”

They bolted out of the auditorium, and sadly, the blush didn’t fade from Sara’s cheeks once they were alone. “If I had known this would make you so cocky,” she said, “I would have never pushed you to do it.”

They didn’t usually tease each other – but again, the whole week was packed full of firsts.

“You didn’t push me,” Michael said. “And you know you would have. I wasn’t laughing at you, you know.”

“I know.”

“It’s just –” He shook his head. The cold outside at least had the advantage of making his cheeks equally red. His hands sank all the way to his pockets. Winter edged closer every day still he wore only a jacket, no proper coat. “You’re so much bigger than this school. This town.”

“I never thought of it like that.”

“You never thought you didn’t fit in with these people?”

“Yeah, but – I guess people are about the same anywhere, right? But maybe I’m just afraid that the dream of doing better in a big city is a lie. That even out of high school, it’ll be the same old pretense, the same old game.”

“You ever thought of where you wanted to go after high school?”

“Med school.”

“But where?”

“Oh,” Sara said. “You mean, will I go to the nearest school so I can visit every weekend, or will I get away from here and not look back? I don’t know yet.”

Except she did know. She realized it as soon as she said the words – those hours spent scrolling through pictures of great universities hundreds of miles away from her hometown should have taught her as much, yet somehow she had passed it off as mere fantasy.

Michael smiled. He really needed to do that more often. “Me too,” he said.

…

Michael lowered the lever on the milkshake machine and a thick squirt like cream lava squished into the glass. When the Beehive called him back to say they’d looked at his résumé, and yes he’d do the job nicely if he could start this weekend, Michael had felt so relieved. Thank God, the ‘Hive took him, or he would have had to try for the McDonald’s an hour’s walk away from his apartment. Not that he minded the walk – but even as a teen who needed money to pay his bills and put a little olive oil in his pasta every now and then, Michael needed a job. Bad. And yet thus far, he managed to stay away from that giant of first jobs, McDonald’s, and would rather stay away from it for the rest of his life.

Little did he know that smaller diners like the Beehive had needed to get ‘McDonaldized’ in order to stay alive – his boss’s own words. Wasn’t that terrific?

So Michael need hardly come into contact with the customers – that was the good news – since his only task consisted in squishing either milk shakes or ice cream into a recipient, and placing it on a platform where another coworker would take them and serve them to customers.

He was the ‘milk shake man’, or as his coworkers soon started to call him, Milkman.

Michael didn’t mind the monotony of the task all that much. After all, to scrape chewing gum off school desks, bathroom walls, school floors, hadn’t been a pleasure cruise either. At least, he had full freedom to wander off in his own head.

It was mainly during those shifts at the ‘Hive that he had time to memorize Hamlet. What with his joining the swimming team, the school play and getting a new job, maybe he’d taken on a bit more than he could chew.

If he didn’t need to rehearse at the auditorium from four to six from Monday to Friday, he could have worked extra shifts at the ‘Hive and made more decent wages. Yet again, wouldn’t the dullness of the milkshake machine have killed him by now if he couldn’t replay those rehearsals with Sara?

Thud. Pop. Squish.

“Milkman!”

Michael looked up. Great. Now even his manager had taken up the nickname.

“Stuart’s late for his shift, come on over to the counter.”

Michael left the thick-aired kitchen area. Without windows, without a clock, and given the repetitiveness of his job, he could never tell whether ten minutes had gone by or two hours. The light outside the bay windows in the dining area indicated late afternoon, maybe five o’clock. The demanded for ice cream tended to go down along with the sun.

“You ever manned the counter before?”

Michael shook his head. His manager showed him the essentials in a record time of twenty-three seconds, slammed him on the shoulder – again – and with a wink, slid back to the kitchen.

People who really looked at Michael tended to think twice about these touchy-bonding gestures, but Michael doubted that the manager of the ‘Hive, Gary Evans, really looked at anyone.

I might actually have been better off at McDonald’s, Michael reflected. At least, not a full third of the customers there would have been students from his school.

It took ten minutes before the odor of frying steak left his lungs and he could breathe anything else.

Michael imitated every aspect of politeness when he spoke to clients, but for some reason they frowned or puffed at him, like he was making fun of them.

He had his back turned, getting two Americanos started on the coffee machine when a client rang the bell – one more insufferable thing about this place. At least, fast-foods didn’t have a bell customers could use to hurry the person behind the counter. But the ‘Hive had a sense of humor. The bell buzzed, like a bee.

And the rule said: when someone rang the bell, Michael must turn around and say, “What can I do for you?”

Michael had barely spoken the words when the wind slammed out of his lungs. His mouth shut. The customer who stood with his finger on the bell was his brother.

Lincoln’s jaw obviously wanted to hang slack, but he screwed it back in place with a vengeance. Michael’s face still bore the traces of his beating. The crooked nose, purple where Lincoln’s knuckles had smashed it, and the bruise below his left eye, probably explained why Michael’s manager hid him in the kitchen area as much as he could.

Michael tried to focus on what he felt. To see Lincoln had sent a white flash stabbing its way through his gut. Anger? Violence? In any case, it had gone as quickly as it’d come.

Michael repeated, “What can I do for you?”

Lincoln’s hands balled into fists. For the first time, Michael noticed the girl who stood alongside him – a pretty dark-haired girl, with green eyes and soap-white skin. Maybe Michael had seen her at school before, hanging around the library.

“Uh –” she said, “I’ll have an orange soda. Thanks.”

Lincoln managed to say, “Coke.”

Michael gave them their orders as he had done with all the other customers. They walked to the table farthest from the counter, and Michael shook his head.

He beat me up, and he’s the one who’s angry.

…

Lincoln wrapped his hand around the can of coke so tight, he was afraid he’d crack it and soda would come pouring down his knuckles.

“Uh – you okay?” his date – the brunette with the nice eyes – wanted to know.

Lincoln didn’t care very much what she thought of him. Not very much. He’d asked her out today, not because he wanted to but rather because he had never not asked a girl out in that much time before, and if he didn’t watch his back the guys would start saying he was love sick over Sara.

But the girl – what was her name again? Vera? Vanessa – looked nice enough. When Lincoln paid her a couple introductory compliments and asked if she wanted to go out sometime, she said, Yes, because that’s what a bookworm does when a stud asks you out, FYI, Sara.

Plus, from up close, she had very good skin and one of those tight faces a lot of boys found pretty. Not Lincoln’s type – Lincoln liked curvaceous women, and this girl was almost on the wrong side of skinny. Yet again, Sara hadn’t been his type either.

Just face it, Linc, he heard Nando’s voice in his head. She’s a second Sara, or why else would you have picked her out of the library?

“Yeah,” Lincoln said, eyes still on his brother who stood behind the counter, dealing clients their orders, not giving a second look at him. Lincoln willed his gaze back to the girl – shit, he should have written down her name on a piece of paper or something.

Her orange soda stood between them on the tray, and Lincoln considered pouring it for her – you’d be surprised how chivalry still worked on girls nowadays. But given the violence trembling in his hands, he worried he’d be taking on too much of a risk.

“Yeah,” he repeated, “so, why don’t you tell me about you?”

That felt like a safe shot. Everyone liked to talk about themselves, right?

The girl’s eyes narrowed on Lincoln. “Sure,” she said. “Right after you tell me what your problem is with that guy.”

“What guy?”

“Do you think I’m an idiot? The guy with the broken nose.”

Lincoln stiffened. For starters, why wasn’t this girl acting like she’d just won the lottery? What happened to those freshmen girls who giggled, too dazzled for words, merely because they sat at a table opposite him?

Holy fuck, Lincoln thought, did I lose my touch? Way to go. He really had wasted too much time on Sara and Hamlet and all that nonsense.

Lincoln took two seconds to calm down before he came up with his killer smile. “Hey,” he said, eyes boring into the girl’s, “that guy’s nobody, babe. I wanna talk about you.”

Now, that was it. Any second, she would melt like a microwaved Mars bar before Lincoln’s eyes.

The girl drew her hands off the table, like she was afraid Lincoln would try to take them. A chuckle came out of her throat – nothing like a besotted giggle.

“You know what?” she said. “This was why I didn’t want to go out with you.”

“Wait, what?”

“I knew I should have said no,” she shrugged. “For the past four years, you acted like I was invisible, so why would I give you the time of day? But I really liked how you talked back to Professor Pierce last September. I didn’t think you knew anything about Abraham Lincoln. So I thought, what the hell. Why not give you a chance.”

Her chair raked against the floor as she got on her feet.

Lincoln had to bite his tongue to hold back from saying the words. Was this girl in his history class? Had she been going to the same school as he had for four years?

“I don’t blame you,” she said, picking the coat that hung on her chair and zipping it up. “I didn’t turn pretty until last summer. Pity I didn’t wait until college, so we could have done without that embarrassment.”

“Wait, I don’t just –”

“Don’t just see the girls you think look fuckable?”

Had this bookworm just said fuckable to him?

“Yeah, you do, Burrows,” she said. “And I’m not just going to be another one of your babes.”

“I don’t call every girl babe,” Lincoln said, though he did. Shit, he’d raised his voice and now people were starting to look at them. “You just – you look like a babe.”

The girl’s eyes didn’t soften one bit. And damn. They were nice eyes. She said, “I’d rather look like my name. It’s Veronica.” She grabbed the can of orange soda from the table. “Thanks for the soda.”

And just like that, she walked out of the diner.

…

Michael couldn’t get his eyes to close that night. He lay on his sofa bed, as his eyes counted the cracks in his ceiling. On good nights, he managed to find sleep after three or four counts. Not tonight.

Tonight was different, though. Thoughts of his parents didn’t pick at his brains like scavengers. He didn’t hear, over and again, his mother’s cry just before their car crashed, Watch out! Nor did he think about his brother with the huge angry fists, his brother who suffered so much, he hated Michael for not suffering. What makes him think I don’t?

Michael knew insomnia like an old friend, but it had never worn these colors before – the colors of passion.

His latest rehearsal with Sara looped in his mind, and he couldn’t dull it with the routine of the milkshake machine.

That unmatched form and feature of blown youth, Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me, To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

Her voice. How had he never thought much of her voice before? To look at her was one thing, and he had enjoyed that from the first. Why, why not, none of that mattered. You like the taste of cherries or you don’t, why has nothing to do with it. But had he really heard her voice before?

Through the cracks of the ceiling, he saw her as Ophelia again. Vulnerable. Bursting with tragedy and want. Some people might fall in love with an act, but Michael knew himself – and Sara – better than that. It was just that Ophelia gave her so much more room to explore herself than that sad little school did.

Weren’t twenty-first-century tragedies stories of boredom and wasted talent? At school, Sara was a girl who buried her head in books, tolerated her friends, and tried to lie low. But give her the stage, and she owned it. Give her a part, and the most minute intricacies that weaved her soul together opened up for you a world of wonders.

It mattered to her to have me onstage with her, for the whole school to see. Michael looked away from the cracked paint on his ceiling. Maybe she doesn’t belong, and I don’t belong, but we sure as hell aren’t from the same world. Different from the others. Different from each other.

He imagined the look on her face Monday at school if he said, I stayed up all night thinking about you.

His legs twitched, the throb of his heartbeat racketed.

“I can’t wait till Monday,” he said.

…

Sara gasped as she awoke, her fists drawing the covers up to her neck – why was she afraid? Her dream came back to her in fragments: her mother at the breakfast table, telling her what to eat, what not to eat.

A hard thud sounded, tiny, almost inexistent. Pebbles against glass.

“What?”

Sara kicked the covers off her and tiptoed toward the window. As a little girl, Sara had hated that window, waken from nightmares to see clownish faces looking back at her. Part of her wanted to stay tucked in bed and just ignore it but what good would it do?

No, she wouldn’t be a coward. She’d go and if a perv stood in her backyard jerking off, she’d call the cops, because she was mature now, almost a woman and –

“Michael?” she gaped for a moment, unable to think.

There he stood, in the same clothes he had worn yesterday at school. No scarf, no coat. His blue eyes beamed at her even through the distance.

No sight more absurd could have awaited her. If she had seen a little green alien in her backyard, she would have reacted just about the same way.

Only when she saw Michael did Sara think about what she was wearing. A knee-length night gown, because her father was conservative and in case they crossed paths on their way to the bathroom at night, he shouldn’t see his daughter dressed indecently.

Her brain whirled back to work and she lifted her window – it jammed a little, because she hadn’t opened it until summer. A breath of air so cold entered the room, her lungs caught fire.

Still she leaned in toward the ground – toward Michael – ignoring the sensation of vertigo that tickled her toes. “Is everything okay?” she said.

“Yes.” He wiped his hand on his jeans, probably the hand that had been fishing for pebbles. “Did I wake you?”

“Uh – yeah.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

Sara had no idea what time it was and couldn’t care less. “Why are you here, Michael?”

“I wanted to see you.”

Her throat tightened. “Did you have something to say to me?”

He stared deep into her eyes. “Do you want to go out with me? Like, right now?”

Chapter Text

It was so cold, Sara started to think she was an idiot. A boy comes by in the middle of the night to throw rocks at you window, you stay home. But Michael wasn’t just any boy. Besides, if he’d walked out in the cold from his place to hers, couldn’t she do him the courtesy to walk with him a while? She had a coat, unlike him, and had slipped inside some thick tights before she tiptoed her way out of the house.

He had his hands sunk deep in his pockets to shield them from the cold, but his shoulders didn’t hunch, and he met the wind with his chin raised.

“So –” she started.

“Do you want something to eat?”

They walked from the glow of one streetlight to another. On the other side of the streets, closed diners, closed bars, closed shops. The only store that still looked open was a 24-hour supermarket. Honestly, her stomach was twisting and knotting so bad from excitement, she couldn’t tell if she was hungry. But something in Michael’s eyes told her this mattered to him.

Was he nervous? And did he keep his hands in his pockets because of the cold, or to keep them from shaking?

“Sure.”

She followed him into the shop. At the checkout, a twenty-something boy was popping zits, and didn’t interrupt himself for their benefit. Michael cruised between the shelves, and she tried to wrench her eyes away from him. Obviously, he had not taken a two-hour walk and thrown pebbles at her window in the middle of the night because he wanted to buy her a chocolate bar.

She’d never known Michael to have communication problems before. It was like that hidden boy language had never got into him. Buying a girl a hot meal, parading her around in his car and shoving his tongue in her mouth didn’t mean a date, the way it would to Lincoln. Michael had never needed to use other things to say what he meant.

“Snickers?” he asked.

“Okay.”

Her eyes narrowed on the gleaming plastic, like she could decrypt the whole absurdity of the situation if she looked hard enough.

The cold air slapped them on their way out and Sara clutched his hand without thinking when he tried to hand her the chocolate bar. “Michael,” she said, “what are we doing here?”

His eyes shot toward the ground, and a boulder the size of a house dropped down her stomach. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Tell me. Please.”

His face looked strange from the greenish glow of the store behind them. Sara wanted to move, to retreat to darkness of the night, but her feet seemed to have taken roots in the sidewalk.

“I was gonna tell you that I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking about you.”

Sara’s pulse rocketed. Her hand had balled into a fist before she realized she was squeezing the Snickers into mush.

“It’s weird. I didn’t think how selfish it was, that you’d be asleep, that you were grounded. It felt like I had to see you or I was going to go crazy. On the way to your house, I kept seeing this, us, thinking of what I’d tell you. If you asked me to rehearse Hamlet I’d say no, because I wanted you to be you. I didn’t want us to play at being lovers. Then I got to your house and you came down and I –”

The words stopped. His mouth hung open, his eyes staring into the distance.

“And it’s that same fear you told me about at school,” she said. “The fear of losing me.”

He met her eyes. “Yes.” The muscles in his cheeks twitched.

“What does it feel like?”

“It hurts to look at you.”

“You don’t have to.” But his gaze didn’t waver.  “Close your eyes,” she said.

He obeyed, and for a second the disappearance of these blue abysses left her feeling gutted. She took a step forward. Then another.

She stood on tiptoe, angled her face upward and he bent down, just a little, not enough to bridge the distance. The warmth of his breath prickled her face and she closed her eyes, too. “Okay?” she said.

“Okay.”

She kissed him. His lips were soft, like a girl’s, so that but for the raspy feel of his face, the invisible stubble on his cheeks, it could have been like the time she’d let her girlfriends teach her how to kiss.

Except –

He opened his mouth. The taste of him sent jolts of adrenalin to her brain so fast the world would spin if she opened her eyes, and as if he sensed this, his hand shot around her waist to steady her and clamp her against him.

Before she could think her hands were on him and she felt the stiff tweed of his jacket, the hardness of his chest against hers. With her eyes closed, she saw the muscles rippling across his upper body at the swimming pool, could even smell the chlorine deep in her lungs. She craned her neck higher, her hands reaching for the back of his head. He was tall, even for her. A groan rose from his throat as he gripped her hips – gently – and lifted her so that his face was level with hers.

The move caused them to break apart and she watched him watch her behind long lashes, millimeters away.

“Does it still hurt?” The hoarseness in her own voice startled her. “To look at me?”

“No. Can I kiss you again?”

“Yes, please.”

He did. Open-mouthed, but almost without tongue, and so tender Sara felt her heart melt like microwaved ice cream. This was a better world to disappear to, even, than Shakespeare.

…

Michael didn’t know why it was that when he got to her house, a hole in the ground opened, swallowed up his confidence, and suddenly when he looked at her all he could see was the blood. His parents’ blood, whose cooling stickiness still crawled on his skin when he woke from a nightmare, those rivers of blood streaming down the tarmac, everywhere, red, engulfing his whole world.

Her face bubbled with excitement until she took him in. He’d wanted to take her hand and fly away with her, cruise throughout the night and give free rein to the passion that’d kept him awake all night. He blinked, looked at her again, but it was no good. The blood was still there.

It was like looking at her through a red rain curtain.

The only people who ever loved me are dead.

Maybe Lincoln made the smart choice. Better to hate me. Better than the blood.

Until she kissed him, and every vision that ever haunted his mind was sucked out of his head. She tasted like minty toothpaste.

“Did you –” his words hushed, almost against her mouth. “Did you brush your teeth before you joined me outside?”

“Uh – yeah.” If they were at school, she would have blushed. Now, she hardly look flustered – more annoyed than anything, that he would stop kissing her at all.

“That’s cute. And weirdly sexy.”

He kissed her again, took a step forward without thinking, and something squished under his foot.

“Hum,” he said, and looked down. “That was your Snickers.”

“Oh, no.”

Her eyes shot behind him, and her face tautened. “What? Is the guy from the store looking at us?”

“It’s not that. Gosh, Michael, the sky.”

He put her down and looked up. Orangey shades of red bled through the lightening sky. It was almost dawn.

“We have to get back to your house,” he said. “You’re grounded.”

She bent over and the flash of her red hair in the sunrise dazzled the speech out of him for a while. He blinked, and caught the gleam of her chocolate bar. “You don’t have to eat that. I stepped on it.”

She shrugged. “Is it stupid if I want to keep it?”

“Nothing about you is stupid.”

They walked back side by side, without holding hand. Could he even touch her now without sparking the need to kiss her to life? They didn’t speak, either. For the main part, Michael was too shaken for words. Once his eyes darted toward her face in the increasing morning light and he saw the same numbness, the same stun.

She’s thinking about it, too. The kiss, he realized, and didn’t wrench her from her thoughts. What they’d shared was theirs, but the way they revisited it now was private. Was it happening to her, too? Michael felt like a whole different boy from the one he had been the first seventeen years of his life. It was the same skin on his back, the same mind to process information, except –

Yes.

It was like a whole new limb had been grafted onto his skin, pulsing, red, burning at the touch, and he kept looking at it, fascinated, wondering if it was here to stay.

Is that what she means when she says she loves me?

Sara stopped. “Wait,” she said.

“What?” Michael snapped into his senses and looked around. “Oh,” he said, when he caught her meaning.

They’d missed her house by about five minutes’ worth of walking.

A wonderful sound burst like brittle glass exploding in a thousand pieces. Michael felt it explode in his own chest as he turned to look at her. He’d never heard her laugh like that at school.

“God, it’s like we’re drunk!” she said. “Do you feel it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been drunk.”

She shook her head, and the gleam in her eyes made his heart squeeze, because it said she wanted to kiss him again.

“I really, really have to be home before my father gets up.”

“Right.”

They started back the way they’d come from, and Michael tried to push back against the tide of thoughts that threatened to spill into his head, so they wouldn’t miss the house again.

She stopped him a couple of houses away, pressing a small palm against his chest. He shivered, and when their eyes met, he saw the tremor there, too.

“In case my dad’s up,” she said, “I’ll be in less trouble if he sees me walk home alone.”

“Okay. I, uh – I’ll see you at school then?”

She groaned, like it was impossible they had a whole weekend to go through before they could see each other again. He felt it, too. But at least, he’d have ten hours at the ‘Hive tomorrow to revisit that kiss in all its intricacies, its shades and nuances.

“I –” she opened her mouth.

He heard the haze in her voice and wanted to say, It’s okay. You don’t have to. I know.

But his reflexes were shot.

“Thanks for the Snickers?” she said.

“Thanks for the kiss.”

Every muscle in his body cried out that he should stop her when she turned around. Press his lips to hers just one more time, or he would go crazy by Monday morning.

“Sara?”

She looked as relieved as he felt. “Yeah?”

“Tonight was – ” He swallowed. In his mind, he tried the words, I love you, but even there they shook him from head to toe, like he’d released a curse.

Suddenly, he saw the blood again, wrapping her into a red shroud.

He wouldn’t love her because the people he loved died.

“‘Tis in my memory lock’d, and you yourself shall keep the key of it,” he said.

It was one of her lines in Hamlet. She smiled, but a sharpness in her eyes told him she knew that he was running.

“Goodnight,” she said, and this time he watched her walk away and slip into her house.

Goodnight, he thought, and wanted to laugh. He felt like he’d never sleep again for as long as he was alive.

Chapter Text

Sara’s eyes skimmed over the line, one more time, a headache creeping in from how the light from the chandelier bounced back against the white page.

Anatomy is interesting.

She repeated the words to herself, like a mantra, as she pushed back against the flood of–Michael–thoughts gnawing at her concentration.

You need to read this, Sara, she told herself, using her mother’s voice to self-reprimand as always. Med school is only a semester away now. Remember the plan, no getting distracted–Michael’s lips, his neck, his beautiful face–keep your eyes on the finish line.

She read aloud, “Knowledge of human structure at both the macroscopic and microscopic levels serves—”

Her wrist brushed against the hard rind of the book and suddenly she felt the roughness of Michael’s jacket against her upper body, the strength of his fingers as he lifted her from the ground and his lips crushed against hers and—

And she was reading that same line again, and still it was not connecting as more than ink on paper, utterly meaningless.

Sara snapped the book shut.

How was she supposed to last a whole weekend?

…

“Jesus, Milkman, you listening?”

Michael willed his gaze to settle on his manager, Gary, with something that resembled attention. “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, I’m listening.”

“Then why the heck are you still doing shakes? Stu needs you behind the counter. You got ice for brains son?”

“Yes—no.”

Gary rolled his eyes. Michael was so slow today he didn’t even see the pat arrive until Gary’s large palm was slamming onto his shoulder. And even then, he barely felt it, like water sweating off an ice cube.

I’ve got coals for brains, Michael thought. Hot, very hot coals.

“I’ll be right there,” he said.

Overnight, Sara’s kiss became shrouded in his mind in crimson red. Everything that had anchored him away from that image of his parents’ death—the warmth of her skin on his, the minty taste of her mouth—crumbled as hour upon hour stole the magic of last night, leaving place to a vacant hole. No matter how hard he tried to avoid that hole, its wet red mouth kept drawing him back, like a whirlpool. It ate at the memories of the kiss, which he had been so sure would keep him floating in a blissful haze all weekend long. It ate everything Michael tried to put between himself and the hole—rational thoughts, deep inhales, reason itself.

It was like by kissing Sara, he had opened up a chasm inside himself that threatened to swallow them both. An eye of terror that never blinked, never closed, and that would stare him into submission if it was the last thing it did.

“Milkman?”

Michael shuddered.

Gary stood in the doorframe of the kitchen, expectant. “You coming, or am I gonna have to fire you?”

Michael followed his manager outside to the dining area. At four o’clock, the Hive was buzzing with noise, life, teens gobbling the pie-weekly and slurping vanilla shakes.

Orders poured in as if raining from the skies and Michael managed to go through the motions. Only there was this voice, a woman’s—Sara’s?—that rose from the red abyss gaping inside him. Close your eyes, she said. Instead of a kiss, when he obeyed, his body got sucked in by the hole and his body shattered, something sharp stabbed him mid-section, and a scream like raw meat came bursting out of his throat.

“You’re sure this is decaf?”

“Yeah.”

The girl squinted at him. It was one of Sara’s alleged girlfriends. Ex-girlfriends? Nika. She said, “As in, sure-sure? One drop of coffee and I’m not getting any sleep tonight.”

Michael repeated, “Yeah.”

Scoff.

Gretchen’s black hair glinted under the neon as she looked him up and down. “I don’t think he’s listening, Nik. I mean, maybe if you started quoting Shakespeare and turned into a major bore. Hey, retard,” she snapped her fingers in front of his face, “paying customers here. You think you can handle making a cup of decaf?”

The girls laughed when Michael jumped back and bumped against the shelves, milk bottles tumbling at his feet. Michael’s skin prickled, hot, though not from shame. He didn’t like it when people looked at him. Usually, he made people uncomfortable enough for their eyes to avoid him, but a teenager with milk bottles shooting at him is basically begging for stares.

One pair of eyes struck him like red lasers and Michael’s gaze shot to a table at the other end of the room, where his brother hurried to look down at his order of fries and burgers.

Without thinking, Michael started toward him.

A red fist punched at his ribcage where his heart should be.

Lincoln’s presence suddenly seemed like the most appropriate thing in the world. After all, he’d been there when the police brought Michael back home to tell them their parents had died in a car accident. Even back then, the words had sounded ridiculous. Their parents had not died in a car accident. Michael was there. He’d seen what happened. Did the cops think he’d let them tell lies? It was a truck.

The detail hit Michael like a pebble thrust at a spinning wheel and he stopped dead in his tracks. Lincoln, only a few steps away now, and the whole diner staring at him.

A big yellow monster of a truck had sprung from the road out of nowhere and eaten their parents. Michael remembered the glass of the passenger seat where his mother sat splintering into cobwebs before it smashed and his father screaming and his mother’s voice—

Michael close your eyes.

“What in the hell are you doing, Scofield?”

Michael swiveled toward his manager. Fear had hung thick over his words so he didn’t need to look, really, to see it on his face. Time got rolling again, a Britney song playing in the background. Was it always so loud, or had everyone gotten very silent?

The girls, Gretchen, Nika, Lisa, eyed him no longer in delight. A moment ago, they’d been visitors at the zoo, tossing dirt at a panther in a cage to get a reaction. Now the panther was out, fangs bared, claws out, and they stood petrified.

He opened his mouth. For a moment, it felt like he might actually say, I was just going to tell my brother our parents didn’t die in a car accident. A yellow bus sprung from nowhere and ate them alive.

He took a step back, glass grinding under his shoe. Something moist clung at his scalp where the bottled had knocked into him. Milk? Blood?

Before he could string together an explanation, his feet were carrying him out the door.

…

Michael was home before he could taste the outside air. Two hours’ walk just glided by, like he was in another dimension. He’d left his jacket at the diner, where he knew he wouldn’t go back for it any more than he’d beg Gary for his old job.

The spray of hot water hit him, too hot, and it was only after a few minutes that he registered he hadn’t taken off his clothes.

Blood throbbed at his temples, daylight too bright although it was no more than a streak leaking through the ajar door.

He tried to conjure Sara’s face, the taste of mint toothpaste on her breath, the twinkle of the crushed Snickers bar she tucked carefully into her jean pocket.

But the thought was unbearable, shrouded in red.

Michael stepped out of the shower cabin, dripping. The water had done nothing to clear his mind. His jeans felt like they’d been molten to his skin. Before he could think, he started pulling clothes out of his drawers, books, everything that made up his meagre belongings into the backpack he used for school.

Slowly, one distinct thought emerged from the chaos in his head and he knew that he was leaving.

Where to? No idea. Why? He couldn’t say exactly, only that if he lingered here one hour more his blood might crawl out of his skin.

He’d lost his only money income when he stormed out of the Hive earlier, so if he didn’t find a new job by the end of the month, he couldn’t scrape together enough savings to finish high school. That didn’t matter. He’d wait until his face shed the evidence of Lincoln’s beating, then he’d start anew somewhere else, get hired and wait until he had enough money to graduate. As long as he disappeared from this town—from Sara’s life.

A salt-coating wrapped itself around his heart, when he thought of her coming to school Monday morning, and not seeing him next to her in history class.

Part of him must have known he’d set all this into motion when she told him to close his eyes and he let her kiss him, like it was going to make everything all right. He should have known when she told him how she felt that day by the pool. The minute he heard her play Ophelia.

All his life, he had been alone, and it had been fine. His own captain, steering his boat to safety. Then that girl came along and he wanted her like ripe summer cherries, and he wasn’t alone anymore and everything terrified him. The waves, the whirlpools and sharks waltzing around him.

He’d escaped that yellow bus, had escaped death when it took his parents, and he had never known that the monster was only waiting for this one girl to press her lips to his and get the machine whirling again, the wheels of tragedy unfolding under his feet.

Maybe he should leave a note, but how could he explain coherently?

I’m sorry. I can’t lose you. I don’t want to leave but if I don’t—

“It’ll eat you, too.”

A chill went over him. His clothes were still soaking wet, and all his belongings probably damp by now. If he got out like this, he was likely to catch his death.

A laugh tore out of him, so cold he wanted to plug his ears.

What was he doing?

What would Sara think—

He opened the door, and stilled like his entire body had turned to stone.

Fist raised, looking a mess of confusion and bruised pride, his brother stood on the other side of that door.

Chapter Text

Lincoln would never have chased after Michael, no way, because who actually did that? At least, he wouldn’t have, if he was in his right mind. Must have been some kind of fever, that stupid song that bellowed in the diner—You’re toxic, I’m slippin’ under. The look in Michael’s eyes like an ice desert as he walked toward him and glued Lincoln to his seat.

When was the last time Michael had really looked at him?

Not since the beating.

And then, the seething scorch of his gaze, that anger Lincoln felt in his bones, their first ever common ground.

If you touch me again, I’ll kill you.

Why had it felt like Lincoln was gaining a brother, not losing one, and like that gain was all pain and fire, a new limb grafted onto his skin prickly and sore and his body rejecting it even as the skin blended into his own?

“Hey,” Lincoln said.

Cleared his throat.

Well, isn’t that a swell thing to say when you show up at your brother’s place after you broke his nose, and he stared at you like he was gonna kill you?

Maybe. Bur Lincoln had to say something.

Michael didn’t move, his eyes pale blue marbles, glossing over him but not seeing him. The light in the hall flickered—this had to be the sleaziest building Lincoln had ever seen. A kind of dew dripped down Michael’s forehead and Lincoln stepped back. Holy shit. His brother was soaking wet, shirt clinging to his body, jeans like he’d painted them on his legs.

“Are you—” Lincoln stopped short of finishing the question, Are you OK?

It didn’t feel like he got to ask that, after what he’d done.

Then his eyes lowered to Michael’s hand and he noticed the backpack, not even zipped shut, packed full of clothes.

“You’re leaving?” Lincoln looked up just in time as Michael shouldered past him. “Hey!”

Surprise made him slow. When his legs finally agreed to move, Michael’s footsteps were already halfway through the stairs.

“Hey,” Lincoln repeated, dashing after his brother. Without thinking, he reached to grab his forearm, and Michael lunged for him like a snake shooting out of the sand.

The hands that gripped at his throat were titanium. No thoughts could squeeze through Lincoln’s mind before Michael pushed him into the wall, the stale air of the building trapped into his lungs, where oxygen was no longer coming in.

Thud, thud, as the backpack rolled down the stairs.

Michael’s face was so close Lincoln could make out the pores in his skin, the rabid fear in his eyes.

“Don’t touch me. Don’t you fucking touch me.”

Part of Lincoln wanted to grab his brother and rip him off him, right now. But for some reason, some miracle, he managed to calm down.

Without an ace up his sleeve, without dying to get the upper hand, without so much as air in his lungs, Lincoln did not fight back.

He raised his hands in the air, but didn’t disturb his brother’s hands from his throat. And he did not break eye contact.

The hate he had felt for Michael, inexplicable as a law of physics, the day that he came home without their parents, was boiling still boiling under his skin. But for once, Lincoln did not struggle against the sting, did not resist the coating of salt that laced around his heart.

Michael let go of him and stepped back, catching himself against the rail.

“Fuck,” Lincoln let out. His fingertips brushed against the skin of his throat.

He looked at Michael, and he wouldn’t think the boy would hurt a fly—literally. Last he’d checked, every day at the school cafeteria, his brother never put anything on his plate that used to have a heartbeat. Lincoln had thought that he never got angry. Never pulled a tantrum. That his emotions were kept on such a tight leash, if Lincoln had taken a knife to his face, he wouldn’t have been a hundred percent sure that his brother would bleed.

And then he went and did something like this?

Michael’s eyes shot toward the ground. A pool of water was forming at his feet. “You should go,” he said.

Lincoln was too stunned to move. “Michael—”

“I don’t want to fight you.”

“You—you think I came here to fight?”

“Why else?”

A lump of clay went down Lincoln’s stomach.

“Look, Michael—” he halted, half-hoping his brother would interrupt. How was he supposed to finish? Lincoln never had a way with words. “I’m sorry. About—about what I did. The other night when—fuck.”

He ran a hand over his scalp. If his team could see him right now they’d howl with laughter, and he could almost hear it, turning his cheeks purple.

“I should never have done what I did, okay?”

When he looked up, Michael was staring at him, unfazed.

“What?” Lincoln said.

Michael shrugged. “Just wondering what it’s like. To be you.”

Heat cracked at the base of Lincoln’s neck. He didn’t like his brother’s tone. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“To act, and not think about consequences until they’re sinking their teeth into your eye. Just let it all roll down your shoulders.”

“I came here, didn’t I?”

Michael laughed, and it was as unexpected as it was chilling. “Quite right.”

“You wanna tell me what the hell’s the matter with you?”

“And what’s it to you, Lincoln?”

Lincoln opened his mouth to say, Nothing.

Then it struck him how hollow that would sound, like an empty beer can rattling across the sidewalk.

“All right,” Michael said. Anger flared into his blue eyes. “You want to know what my problem is? Maybe I’d just like to know what it feels like to be in my big brother’s shoes—big, nice, comfortable shoes. To know just for a second what it’d feel like never to have been in that car, to have lived, Lincoln. Not to have survived. To be able to kiss Sara without the world coming apart and swimming in blood.”

“You kissed Sara?”

Lincoln’s mind latched on to the first thing that made sense. The rest smashed against the walls of his brain like lead bullets. To have been in that car, to have lived.

The words made no sense to him.

Yet his arms broke into gooseflesh beneath his leather jacket.

“I mean—” Lincoln started. What did he mean? Good for you, man? Wouldn’t that reek of hypocrisy? Did he even care who Sara kissed? If she hadn’t wanted his brother, if she hadn’t been just one more thing he fell short of while his brother shone bright—would he even have wanted her that bad?

“Forget it.”

“Wait!” Lincoln called after his brother again as he swiveled toward the stairs, but this time, knew better than to touch him.

Michael paused, back to him, stiff as an arrow.

Lincoln didn’t know what to say, was too surprised, for a second, by the fear in his gut to remember how to speak.

For a flash, he was a kid again, and Michael was disappearing at the other end of a tunnel of grief and hate and foster homes.

He had hated Michael, from the beginning—right?

Right. The pinch beneath his breastbone as he thought of his brother’s quiet, icy eyes.

And if there had been love as well as hate, in the hot tears that soaked into his pillow at night, Lincoln had flooded enough water under that bridge to swallow it whole so it did not matter whether or not it had all been hate. The hate was what was there to last.

He heaped anger atop the more confusing feelings—was too taken aback to know what else to do. “So what? You’re just gonna leave town? Disappear on everyone?”

“Who’s everyone?”

Me.

The word burned like blackening sugar on Lincoln’s tongue. If his brother did take off without saying goodbye to anyone, who but he and Sara would even notice?

Sara.

Lincoln grabbed hold of the thought and almost smiled, when he sensed how to reel his brother back in. He let out a low whistle that, to his own ears, sounded like the noise only a jackass would make.

“Well. After all that brain connection you guys got, you just leaving me the floor, brother?”

Michael whipped back toward him, face black.

It won’t work, the thought flashed through Lincoln’s mind. His brother was too weird for jealousy to take, surely.

Nonsense, a voice reassured him from within. Michael’s a man, just like any other. Beneath that cool façade was flesh and bones and a heartbeat. Even  Superman wasn’t made out of steel.

“Sara doesn’t want you,” Michael said, not with anger, but confusion, like he didn’t get how even someone as dumb as Lincoln could have gotten that wrong.

“Nah,” Lincoln said, “she wants you. But you’re just taking off like a coward, aren’t you? After a first kiss, too? Wait. Was she that bad? Were you?”

Michael still did not look angry, but somehow, his bones seemed to glow through his skin. Radioactive. The skeleton of anger.

“I mean,” Lincoln pushed, “don’t you worry what everyone’s gonna do to her if you take off like that? She burnt all her bridges to be with you, man. You leave her stranding, the other kids will eat her alive, right? School’s one mean place to be alone.”

Lincoln started down the stairs, and pretended he didn’t shudder as his shoulder brushed against Michael’s. His brother’s eyes drilled holes in the back of his head—the large caliber kind.

He’s not gonna say anything.

It didn’t work.

Lincoln kept walking, just a tad slower than he should, giving his brother a chance to stop him.

What if he went to school next Monday and Michael was gone and all he’d said was just empty and cruel?

“Why would you—”

Lincoln turned back at the sound of his brother’s voice. Michael’s eyes were hot as coals, blue, impenetrable.

“Why would any of you want to hurt her? Why would you after—don’t you care for anyone but yourself?”

Lincoln did not allow the bullet to go through to his heart. Did not look down from his brother’s eyes. “I’m not the one who’s dumping her without a word of goodbye, am I?”

Michael’s jaw clenched. Hard. “I don’t get you. I don’t get the first thing about you.”

Lincoln jumped the last steps off the stairs and darted out of the building.

Didn’t say, Good. So we do share one thing other than blood and mutilated memories.

Chapter Text

The kiss was like a smell of Christmas cookies that embalm the house, down to its dreariest corners, and make you forget about the rain.

All weekend, Sara slept with the crushed Snickers beneath her pillow, like a weird tooth fairy tradition.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, as if maybe to hear the words would break the spell. “I’m being ridiculous.”

But she couldn’t help the joy that filled her at the sight of the gleaming plastic.

In moments such as these, it was hard to deny it.

I’m falling in love with Michael Scofield.

Head over heels.

Romeo and Juliet.

Well, she thought. Really, more like Ophelia and Hamlet.

The closer she got to Monday morning, the harder it got to conceal her excitement. Even her father got suspicious, half a frown above the screen of his phone. No teenager is that excited to go back to school.

“Everything all right, Sara?”

“What? Yes.”

Frank squinted at her. Before she could help herself, she was babbling—exactly when did she become such a lousy liar?

“Just excited about rehearsal. You know, the play. Hamlet.”

“Oh, yes. I’m very eager to watch you perform.”

Sara did not let that throw her off. She had been cast in school plays since she was a little girl, and so far, Frank had promised to attend all her shows, and made it to a grand total of zero.

His thumb twitched over his phone—she could tell he wanted to go back to scheduling a meeting or whatever else he was doing. Before phones made it possible for Frank to bring his work home, it used to be files, stacks of papers that Frank never forgot to take with him at the dinner table. How Sara used to hate those. Felt more alone with her father than she did by herself, reading a book or doing homework.

Now, though, she could really use the invisibility cloak that had kept her father from noticing her throughout her childhood.

But Frank did not go back to his phone. His eyes appraised her, for a long time, as if Sara had turned from a little girl to a seventeen-year-old sometime since he had last looked up.

“Is there anything you want to tell me?”

Sara’s jaw loosened at his honesty. Forthrightness was not the Tancredi MO. Passive aggressive, ignoring the elephant in the room—sure.

But not this.

She was so disarmed and startled that the words almost came out.

I met someone, I’m in love, all the songs make sense now.

“No,” she managed.

Before she had time to regret it—not seizing that window to bridge the gap between them, to grab the thin rope he had tossed at her in the abyss where affection should be—Frank nodded his head. There was such a look of relief on his face, as he started typing on his phone, that Sara didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad that she had turned invisible again.

…

By the time she got to school, her excitement had turned solid, a huge ball of nerves that made her bounce instead of walk, and brought her heartrate to a fever pitch. Her first class was history.

At this point, she couldn’t even say why she needed to see Michael so much. Couldn’t make sense of the fact that looking at him sounded like an activity, ten times as interesting as school usually was. I’m not going to moon over him while we’re in class. Sara was never that girl, one day in her life. Yet she was mooning over him right now. Had mooned over him all night.

All she knew was, the sight of him would appease her, as it always did.

When she got carried away in a rehearsal, when nervousness threatened to shake her voice. Michael’s eyes—so quiet—would ease her back to solid ground, like a safety net all made of gemstones.

She trotted through the halls, forbade her feet to break into a run. Then froze dead in her tracks as she entered the classroom.

Michael was there, all right.

He sat at the table they shared, eyes toward the ground.

She wasn’t sure what about him struck her. What smashed it into her that his weekend had been very different from hers. Every line on his face looked cut out of iron. The slant of his hands, joint on the table, the angles of his cheekbone and jaw and the curve of his scalp, bent in a downward slope. She could make him out, but not see him.

Something was wrong.

She knew, immediately.

It wasn’t any rational thing. Like, why wasn’t he compulsively checking the door to see if she’d come in? Why hadn’t he waited for her outside the classroom so they could touch, finally, so she could wrap him into her arms and breathe in the raw-Michael smell of his body?

“Uh, scuse me?”

Sara realized she’d frozen dead in her tracks. Halfway through the door, one foot into the classroom, one foot out.

Now she’d torn her eyes off Michael, she could see Gretchen and the girls, in their usual seats, smiles cutting into their cheeks.

Professor Pierce was looking at her, too.

“Getting used to the stage, Little Miss Actress?” Gretchen said, in that voice she used for mockery. Always on the safe edge of cruelty, because the best mean girls never sounded mean. “You miss being the center of attention already?”

Sara’s face felt hot enough to fry eggs on.

Professor Pierce cleared his throat, not unkindly. “Why don’t you sit down, Miss Tancredi?”

“Sorry,” she said, and etched toward her seat. Her heart still hammered against her ribcage, but now, it pulsed through an ocean of warm clay, everything soft and murky and pointless.

Michael still hadn’t looked at her.

The past forty-eight hours swam up her throat, a taste of bile and anger.

I don’t do that, Michael. I don’t spend a whole weekend thinking about a boy. I don’t stay up all night because I kissed someone and my whole body feels like it’s been touched by a star.

She dropped on the seat, next to him.

What else could she do? The whole class was staring at her.

His proximity made every nerve-end in her tingle with want. Oh God. Suddenly, she was lying in bed again, eyes wide open. The kiss had been worse than if she’d drank an ocean full of coffee. Thinking about his face, his beautiful neck, the way his eyelashes brushed against her cheek when she held his face in her hands.

The past two days had felt long enough to kill her.

Not being able to text him, to talk to him, to see him except behind her closed lids.

And this whole time, he’d been alone, in his apartment, wishing he could take it back. It was plain from how he avoided her eyes. He wished it all back.

A ball of shame crawled down her throat.

Idiot.

Yet she couldn’t help looking at him. Professor Pierce started the class. They’d moved on to the Salem witch trials. Sara didn’t catch a word of it.

Michael hadn’t even opened his notebook or taken out a pen.

His silence, the coldness of his whole behavior hurt. But he was hurting, too. She could tell, from how he had shut her out—from how he had metamorphosed since the kiss. From fire to ice.

No. He’s always been ice. Even when he’s Hamlet, and he speaks the line in half-crazed grief, ‘I loved Ophelia’. Ice. There is no room for fire in the deserts of his eyes.

“Michael?” she whispered, with her lips only.

Under the table, she moved her hand closer to his. Inch by inch. So he’d see her coming. The fear of rejection swelled up her chest. If he jerked away from her, or pushed her hand off, she didn’t know what she’d do.

But his pain hurt too much, like a bone jutting out of her own flesh.

He didn’t move.

The rough fabric of his jacket brushed against her fingertips.

“Professor.”

She started at the sound of Gretchen’s voice.

“Yes, Miss Morgan?”

“I’ve just got to say, I know it’s like, the popular thing nowadays to really feel for the so-called witches of Salem. Of course,” Gretchen drawled. “These girls didn’t deserve to die or anything.”

Sara shuddered. She could picture Gretchen’s ravenous grin, glistening with lip-gloss.

“Still, I don’t think we’re looking at the whole picture.”

Professor Pierce exhaled, patiently. “What do you have in mind?”

“Well, for starters, no one talks about how these girls who got killed were, like, attention-seekers.”

Lisa and Nika chuckled. They hung out with Gretchen enough to know, as Sara did, that if she hadn’t been in front of a teacher, “seekers” is not the word she would have used.

“I mean, all those fits of hysterics, all that gossiping about so and so? Sure, it was mean White patriarchs who burned the witches. But there wouldn’t have been any burning if us girls hadn’t turned and told on each other. Right? If we hadn’t behaved like attention-craving lunatics, if we’d just had each other’s backs, no one would have dragged us on a pyre.”

“Where are you getting at, Miss Morgan?”

Sara swallowed.

Don’t look at her.

She could feel Gretchen’s eyes, bubbly-blue, ice-cold, drilling into her back.

“Well, just that we shouldn’t forget whatever men will do to women they can’t control—it’s not as bad as what women will do to other women. If they betray us. Isn’t that worth its place in history books?”

A pinched expression on Professor Pierce. “That’s an interesting theory.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

Sara realized her hand had fallen away from Michael. For what remained of the hour, she didn’t dare move. When the bell rang, he bolted to his feet. His speed surprised her. He had been sitting so much like a statue, she almost forgot he could move.

She went after him, shouldering through crowded halls. “Michael!”

He didn’t turn, but froze on his way out the door. They’d reached the short-cut toward gym class, a corridor nobody used because of the weird smell. For some reason, blame it on the paint, the rot in the walls or whatever, but this place always smelled like something burning.

“Would you look at me for God’s sake?”

Sara didn’t know she was angry until the words passed her lips. Her hands were fists, pressing into the pockets of her jeans.

Michael stood still, for a moment, then pivoted, so stiff she didn’t quite know how he was moving.

The force of his gaze knocked the breath out of her. The first science textbook she opened had this picture in it of the milky way. Sara remembered thinking nothing could be more beautiful. Spirals of shimmering pink and white and blue that made you feel like a speck of dust. Not insignificant, the way God made her feel, the few times she tried to believe in him. But lost into the infinite significance of everything.

As Michael turned to face her, his eyes were two pieces of black space, and she was thrown into gravity, a tiny piece of meteor orbiting around the sun.

“Do you hate me or something?” she said.

He seemed not to hear her. Now that he was looking at her, she could see every inch of him was concentrated on—what? She didn’t know exactly. But he was focused, deeply focused on keeping it together, and perhaps he couldn’t be bothered to answer her.

Well, fuck that.

“I asked you a question, Michael.”

Silence. Every second that he didn’t speak was a whip slashing down the raw flesh of her heart. Beating in the palm of his hands. Ever since the kiss.

She thought of the chocolate bar tucked under her pillow and she wanted to die.

How could I be so wrong?

The butterfly feel of his lips on her lips. His nose against her cheek. The rasp of his stubble when she reached for the back of his head.

The way she felt when she opened the first page of a book. You never know when it’s going to be that good, that it’ll suck you in so you can’t put it down, that all you’ll do is read for the next three days, until you’ve binged it to the last page. That’s what kissing Michael felt like. Only so much better. The instant she felt the wetness of his mouth on hers, she felt it. A whole universe waiting inside Michael, a world she was just discovering and yet, that she knew by heart, that she just knew she could make her way around blindfolded, hands tied.

She had felt a connection with Michael, much sooner than that.

But in that kiss, in that world, she knew that they could drop the masks. That they could be each other, put down the roles of Hamlet and Ophelia.

“I don’t—I don’t hate you, Sara.”

She sucked in her bottom lip until blood filled her mouth.

After what they shared, after she felt he had opened up a whole uncharted galaxy before her eyes—that’s all he had to say to her?

“I’m not—I don’t think I can do this.”

“Right.”

“Kiss you.”

She laughed. It took her by surprise. Frightened her. Sara didn’t usually deal in anger. When she was upset, she forced herself to calm down, waited for it to pass. Her mother taught her that.

Whatever battle raged inside Michael still seemed to take up much of his focus.

“You know what?” she said. “I think that’s pretty fucking unfair.”

He blinked. Not at the swear word, probably, so much as the crack in her voice.

“You know I had a life before you showed up, right? It may not have involved boys all that much. But it was fine. Then you—you just come smashing into it, out of the blue. You stare at me, and you talk to me, and you’re you. You say things like your hair smells like cherry blossoms, and you make it so easy to have feelings for you, and then you just—you disappear behind a fucking wall, and I can’t get through. You won’t let me through, Michael. What’s wrong with you? Who do you think you are that you come tossing rocks at my window in the middle of the night and kiss me and just cut me off like this? Oh God.”

She caught her breath.

The torrent of words wanted to keep going, and there were awful things in there. When she stopped thinking for a second she’d want to disappear into a hole for letting it all out.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Michael, I know this is hard for you. I know you lost your parents. But I lost a parent, too. I don’t—God. Just… Do you ever think for a second of what you do to me? What this—does to me?”

He watched her. Quiet as a picture.

No one in the whole world, never mind a teenager boy, should be this quiet.

“No,” he said.

There was no shame in his voice, yet she heard how shaken he was. How serious.

“You’re right. Somehow, I—I never really think about anyone but myself.”

She squashed the need to play the nice girl, to stop him in his stride. The way he said it was so real.

He shook his head. “I mean, I think about you. All the time. I just—I think about how you make me feel, and how great you are. I think about what you smell like when you hold me. I think about how scared I get when you—when you say you love me. And since we kissed, I haven’t been able to sleep. I’ve been thinking of my mom. The last thing she told me. Of how safe I felt, before the accident, how I never questioned her love was forever and I belonged in the world, and home existed. But—”

His eyes darkened.

“Then it all burst into pieces. All the love I knew in the world was just snatched away. Lincoln hated me, and I got by, alone. I learned to be alone, Sara. And I never unlearned that, I suppose. Ever since, I—I looked after myself. Only myself.”

She licked her lips. “Then, you’re not angry?”

“At you? Why?”

“Uh—for calling you a selfish bastard?”

“You didn’t phrase it like that.” He pondered. “But I suppose I am selfish.”

Graveness returned to his eyes, and she held back from touching him. She wanted to steer him away from the hell he had been stuck in this weekend. Whatever dark waters he had waded in, alone—always alone—she wanted to hoist him back to the surface. To her.

Maybe she’d be selfish, too, if she’d had no one to take care of her. No one but books. No one to put clothes on her back or food in her plate, to give her all the things she took for granted.

Yet she had had no one to really love, too. She knew how the absence of love felt crippling, how sometimes you just wanted to scream, and let the avalanche of love pour out of you, because if you kept it inside, you felt it was just going to rot and poison you.

“Please,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”

“I always do.”

“Then talk to me.”

He looked into her eyes. “I’m so afraid.”

“To lose me?”

“To love you.”

She took a step back. Breathless, like he had just speared a sword through her chest.

“To belong again. To rebuild that sense of safety and happiness. To have it again, and feel it’s not just me against the world. To care.”

He laughed. It sounded surreal, like something breaking, like something broken. She had never heard him laugh like this.

“God, I am selfish. Do you know I almost left town?”

An egg all made of liquid ice cracked over her scalp. “What?”

“I thought I’d leave this place, and be alone again. That you’d be safer like this.” He shook his head. “But that’s a lie. I’d be safer. I’d be safer if I didn’t have to rebuild all those things that died in the car with my parents. I’d be safer if I could be by myself, and not love you, and not feel like a bone had snapped inside me when you leave the room. I’d be so much safer, Sara.”

Though her mouth was open, no words would come out.

You almost left town?

She planned on saying that, and wanted to toss something at him, for the way he’d said it. Like it was nothing. While she obsessing over his beautiful face, his beautiful hands, his beautiful neck, all weekend, he had been ready to dump her, without a word of goodbye?

But really, she was very much stuck on the love part.

“You’re right,” he said again. “I’ve been acting like this is all about me. Like I’m the hero of my own tragedy, and you’re Ophelia—but you’re not. I don’t get to just live in my brooding thoughts and leave you like Hamlet does, because he’s all caught up in the death of his father.”

“I—”

He took her hand.

Her heart plummeted down her stomach.

“Let’s build it.”

“What?”

“The world,” he said. “It’s all made of glass, and fragile, and exposed to bad weather. It’s the stupidest thing in the world, like growing a limb that anyone can take a hammer to and destroy. Let’s do it anyway. What if Hamlet and Ophelia had said to hell with tragedy, to hell with revenge and madness? What if they’d just eloped together and lived?”

“That would have made for terrible writing.”

“Terrible,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

She eyed him. Though he sounded cool, there was a kind of excitement in his eyes she’d never seen. Not even when she kissed him.

“Are you still afraid?”

“Terrified.”

“What’s changed?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it—” she paused. “Is it because I said you were selfish? Are you just trying to do this for me?”

“No. No, I do plan on doing a lot of things for you, and make room for you into every choice. But right now it’s still very much a selfish motivation. This is what I want. You. You’re what I want, Sara.”

He tightened his palm around hers.

“I want to run. I want the safety of not caring about anyone in the world. But I want you so much more. Let’s just be together, and not let anything get in the way. If that’s what you want.”

She grabbed his face and put his mouth on hers.

A million lightyears away, the school bell rang. She kissed him and saw stars, planets aligning, as they both floated down the milky way.

Chapter Text

“You’re staring at them.”

Lincoln looked back at Veronica. A few months ago, with another girl, he might have gotten defensive. What? No, I’m not. You’re imagining things.

But you did not bullshit Veronica Donavan. He hadn’t known her long. It didn’t take long to know that.

“Sorry.”

The December air had turned Veronica’s cheeks apple-crisp. Lincoln felt slightly ridiculous, with a wool hat sunk all the way to his eyebrows, but winter gave Veronica a Russian-dull look that, he had to say, was not hard on the eyes at all.

“It’s not—” he said. “I mean, the reason I’m staring—”

“Your brother. Not Sara. Yeah, I get that.”

He exhaled. Seeing as he hadn’t gotten much better at expressing what he felt, it was a good thing Vee always seemed able to guess.

It was no mystery to anyone at school that Lincoln had shown some interest in Sara, early in the school year. And that that interest had been unreciprocated. That would have been humiliating to his mind, once. But a couple of months with Vee had changed that.

When she gave him another chance after that awful, ten-second date at the Hive, Lincoln was surprised to realize little mattered to him, other than what she thought. Not because he liked her. Though the way his heart pounded at her featherweight step, how the saliva evaporated from his mouth when she burst with laughter—all that made it impossible to deny he did.

It wasn’t this, though, that put all measure of high school gossip into perspective. Veronica was just one of these people so authentic, it’s like they never had to go through the excruciating experience of putting themselves under the eye of public scrutiny. The torture of not knowing who you are, and where you belong, so that you throw yourself to the wolves, constantly, hoping their tongues will lick and shape you into something that resembles fixed identity.

Three weeks into their relationship, a guy from the football team made a crack at her. Well, not at her. Veronica wasn’t even there, and Lincoln just happened to overhear.

“That brunette who stays at the library all the time? Yeah, I seen her. Nice ass. But I hear she’s with Burrows, now. Weird. Pegged him for the kind of guy who dates chicks into, like, action, not theory, if you catch my drift. Yet again, maybe she’s a real wildcat in the sack. Sometimes the bookworms are worse than—”

That’s as far as he got before Lincoln smashed his fist into his face.

Didn’t think, before he punched.

That was just the language he spoke, what he thought it meant to be a man.

Some dude insults your woman, you defend her.

Then came Veronica’s reaction, as she waited for him outside school, when he was finally released from the principal’s office.

She planted eyes on him so green and cold, he stepped back, like he’d been bit by a snake.

“Is it true?” she said.

“Damn it, Vee.”

He put a hand on her shoulder. He’d needed to touch her, to anchor them both back into the familiarity of the wonderful time they’d had together, since they started dating. Long evenings in his car, listening to the radio, talking about any one of the ten thousand things Veronica was passionate about. Lincoln loved to listen, to pop caramels into his mouth while she unwound before his eyes. This girl is out of my league, he’d thought, from time to time, and that he couldn’t bring himself to give a damn.

“Did you punch that guy?” she said. “I want you to tell me the truth, Linc. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, but you better not lie to me.”

He sighed. “Look. That guy just—he said things about you that were unacceptable.”

She looked at him like he had the mental capacities of a hamster.

“Unacceptable to whom?”

At any other time, Lincoln would have teased her, repeated, to whom, because who even wrote ‘whom’ anymore?

But she was so serious he didn’t dare.

“Well,” he said. “Just—unacceptable.”

“And you get to decide that? Because, I’m what? Your girl? Is that it?”

He opened his mouth, fished for the right answer. He wanted to say yes. That’s what made sense to him. But he had enough instinct to suspect that would be an error in judgment.

“Vee—”

“What do you think you’re proving, Linc? When you go about punching people like that? Do you think that you’re standing up for me? Because I don’t care what anyone in this school says about me.”

That made Lincoln’s world collapse, just a little bit.

Not so much because she said it. Everybody pretended they didn’t care what everybody said. But because she so obviously meant it, and it had never struck Lincoln that was a real possibility.

“I like you, Lincoln,” she said. “I really do.”

Lincoln looked her in the eyes as she said this, trying to stop his face from showing that his insides had melted to microwaved bread dough.

“But I don’t want to be with someone who thinks they own me. Or who goes about punching people. It’s just not something I’m okay with.”

“Yeah—no. I mean, yeah.”

His brain fuming, haywire beneath the surface. She likes me she likes me she likes me.

She’d eyed him, cautious, and he forced himself to be more articulate. “I don’t want to do something to hurt you, Vee. Ever.”

He was startled to realize how much he meant the words. How easy it was to let go of the things he thought mattered—his school rep, what the boys thought, being the man, all the time, always. With Veronica, it all just seemed to roll down his body, like dew, the sort that bows leaves of grass in the morning and evaporates come noon.

Even when a guy from the swimming team had the gall to say, last Friday, “You hanging out with us tonight, man?”

“Can’t. I’m seeing Vee.”

“Aw, what are you man, whipped?”

Lincoln found himself grinning at the guy. “Sure, man. Whatever. You have fun without me.”

Lincoln shook his head, emerged from his thoughts. Some relationships changed you, and there was little doubt that Veronica had changed him.

Or, for that matter, that Sara had changed Michael.

They were sitting on the edge of a fountain in the yard, which all the students used as a bench. For the first time since Lincoln could remember, his brother looked happy. Sara’s head, rested against Michael’s shoulder. His hand, buried in her curtain of sunny red hair. They never seemed to be talking, when Lincoln caught glimpses of them at school. Yet a kind of quietness radiated from the two of them, a kind of glow, of rightness. Even when they weren’t holding hands or kissing or walking shoulder to shoulder, you could tell they were together. A magnetic pull that drew them together, somehow discernible to the naked eye.

“Do you want to talk to him?” said Veronica.

Lincoln’s gaze dropped toward his shoes. “That’s not a good idea. I’ve done things. Said things.”

“You’re his brother.”

“Not like that. I mean—we didn’t grow up together, really. Our parents died and we got split up—”

“Do you love him?”

The breath went out of Lincoln’s lungs. It was a good thing he was staring at his feet, because he had no literal idea what his face showed right now.

Love Michael?

The weird boy, who looked so haughty and sure of himself, who’d stolen Sara from him?

Well, he didn’t really mind that. Not anymore, and it was no real reason to dislike him.

But Michael, with his strange ways, that everyone made fun of? Not that Michael cared. Because, truly—

I don’t care what anyone in this school says about me.

The thought smashed into Lincoln, a cold, brutal reality.

That Veronica was like Michael, somehow. She had this same quietness, this same confidence, that couldn’t be shaken by gossip or mockery. That she was maybe the one kid in school most like his brother.

And he was falling in love with her.

He raked the heel of his shoes against the tarmac.

“Of course you love him,” she said. “You should tell him that.”

“You don’t—I mean—”

“I know you’re the one who broke his nose.”

She didn’t look angry when he looked up at her.

“I can guess, Lincoln. I have eyes.”

“Yeah. That you do.”

The prettiest eyes in the world, he thought. But just now wasn’t the time to woo her. Veronica was not the kind to be distracted by wooing.

“You should go apologize, at the very least.”

“You’re right. I should.”

She squeezed his hand into hers. “People make mistakes.”

There was something about the way she said it. A great rock, rolling off Lincoln’s chest. So easy. He looked back at Michael, whose smile dug a crater through his cheeks. He would have looked so carefree, if not for the bump of his broken nose. Bitterness swam up his throat.

“I don’t know.”

Veronica offered a patient smile when he looked back at her. “Come on, then. Walk me home.”

…

There was never a moment when Michael positively stopped being afraid. When Sara pressed her lips to his, the gap of terror inside his chest vanished for a time, filled with her presence. Her soft-caramel taste, the smooth of her skin like butterfly wings. But then she drew back and it yawned open. Always.

Yet he learned, somehow, to stop minding the fear.

To wake up, sweat-soaked, and know he had dreamed of his mother’s voice. His parents had been his world, a place as safe and sure as the skin on his bones. If he could lose them, he could lose anything. He could lose Sara.

Still he chose her. Fear over flight. Day after day. Night after night.

Nights. They didn’t have nearly as many of those as they both would like.

“Just how long are you going to stay punished?”

Sara shrugged, when Michael rubbed his thumb over her shoulder. Only part of him managed to focus on her words. His heart, his blood, throbbed at the thought of her skin, beneath the fabric. Warm. Peach-soft. Strange, how being with Sara made no sense at all. He would have traded a chance to have dinner with Shakespeare, for only five minutes of watching her, in silence.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’m pretty sure Dad forgot he grounded me, to be honest. I keep wanting to bring it up. But then, he’ll just remember, and won’t that make me even more grounded?”

Like there were shades of grounded, Michael thought. With his head.

With his blood, he thought, Your rose-petal lips, your lemon-pie smell, your beautiful face.

“You mean,” he said. “Grounded enough that he won’t notice you sneaking out the window at night?”

She gave him a guilty, not-so guilty smile. Her face was in his neck, and he felt the smile bloom against his shoulder and thought, This is what it must be like to die from joy.

“Something like that.”

She kissed him then. Maybe he kissed her. Sometimes he swore neither of them made the first move, that it was a law of the universe, gravity drawing them inexorably toward each other.

A warm glow wrapped around him until she pulled away. It was only after that he felt her effect on his body. Pulse racing. Mouth dry.

“When high school’s over I’ll go with you,” he said.

She laughed. “Where?”

“Anywhere.”

Her index ran down his hand. “Not having to hide from my father all the time sounds nice. Maybe we don’t have to keep doing this, though. Hiding. I don’t think he’d mind me seeing someone.”

Michael said nothing.

Did not want to say, I think he’d mind you seeing me.

There was no use in explaining to Sara, that her father would not approve of him. He knew this, although she seemed oblivious, and he had never met the man.

Money made a lot of things invisible, Michael knew. He’d noticed, how Sara bought things without looking at the price first. How the swipe of a credit card came as easy to her as drawing breath.

Maybe Frank Tancredi was not the most loving father. But he’d take one look at Michael, take in his clothes, his broken nose—thanks a lot, Lincoln. And he’d know, as a jeweler knows gold from iron, that this boy was not for his daughter.

“You’ll have to meet him, eventually,” Sara said, apologetic. “My father. He’s boring and pompous and—” she sighed. “A Republican. You’ll have to promise you’ll still love me afterward.”

He laughed. She’s worried what I’ll think, not the other way around.

“I don’t care who you’re related to. You could have been brought up by a coven of witches, Sara. I’d still be chasing after you.”

“I’m pretty sure a coven is less embarrassing than a Republican. Actually, it would have been kind of cool.”

A breeze slithered through the cracked window—kids had tossed rocks at it a few weeks ago, and Michael didn’t have the money to fix it up. A whiff blew to his nostrils, lemon pie shampoo and cherry deodorant and Sara. He had to kiss her again. It was a while before they talked.

“Besides,” he said, “you want proof that blood bonds are overrated? Look at my brother.”

She brushed her thumb against the lump on his nose. “I’m so angry he did this to you.”

Michael said nothing. Sensed there was a but coming. “What?”

“I just—he’s been acting different, lately. I mean, not that we talk. After this,” her finger stroked butter-soft against his nose, “I don’t think I could talk to him without losing my calm. But since he started going out with this girl—I don’t know,” she shrugged. “He looks more at peace with himself, I guess. You know how Lincoln’s always putting on an act, always trying to impress the guys?”

Michael said nothing. If there was an act, his brother had been playing it too long for Michael to be able to tell it apart from what was underneath.

“It’s why I agreed to help him, in the beginning,” she said. “It always felt like, when it was just me and him, he wasn’t half the douche bag he pretended to be.”

“Maybe that was the act,” Michael said. “Being nice to you. Maybe he was just trying to—”

He swallowed the words back, but Sara cleared his awkwardness with her champagne-bright laugh. “To get in my pants?

Michael tasted hot coals in the back of his throat. After all that brain connection you guys got, you just leaving me the floor, brother?

“Maybe,” she said. “But it’s not the feeling I got. Some people have to put on a mask before they say something nice, but then with other people it’s the other way around.”

Michael stayed silent, his hand absently stroking the golden-red strands that smelled like lemon pie. It entered his mind, for the first time. If Lincoln hadn’t stopped me, that day, at the apartment, after I kissed Sara—I would have left town.

Sure, Lincoln had been an asshole. Had all but threatened he’d make a move on Sara if Michael left him the floor—

But why would he do that? If he really wanted Sara all to himself, why tell me those things? He had to know it’d make it seem like I had to stay.

Michael had never looked at it from that angle before.

“Not that it’s any excuse,” Sara said. “Who he is, deep down, beneath the attitude. What matters is what he does, what he chooses.”

She kissed him on the nose.

He should tell her that it didn’t hurt anymore, that she didn’t have to treat him like a broken-winged bird. He really should.

“But you think he’s different, now?”

“Yeah. For one thing, I don’t think Veronica would date him if he weren’t.”

“Who’s Veronica?”

She smiled, like he’d just asked who the president was. Michael’s social skills just didn’t expand wide enough for him to learn the names or faces of his fellow students.

“A girl from history class. She’s cool.” Sara chuckled. “Though I might be the only person at school who thinks so.”

Michael stared into the wall. A crack splintered the white paint, clean in the middle. It always looked to him shaped like a Zeus lightning.

“Do you think I should talk to him?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Sara straightened into a half-sitting position. His shoulder prickled with the ghost of her warmth, her hair tickled his cheek on her way up. She licked her lips, so he knew she was going to give a serious answer. “When school’s over, when I leave town, I’m not sure my dad and I will have much of a relationship. I don’t think we have much of a relationship now. And honestly? I’m not that sorry about it. I mean, part of me is. Part of me wishes we had fond memories, that we’d bonded over neutral grounds—things that have nothing to do with politics. So I might roll my eyes every time he opens his mouth, but at least I’d do it fondly. Thinking of how he played with my dolls, made an effort to get interested in me. But now?”

She shrugged. Her hair caught the light. So beautiful. So smart and precious and intoxicating, like everything that was right with the world, everything that made you cry and laugh when you read a good book. All rolled into one.

Michael couldn’t imagine how Frank Tancredi, or any man, wouldn’t have the common sense to realize what a wonder Sara was.

“I don’t have any of this,” she said. “We share nothing, me and my dad. So I’m not saying that because Lincoln’s your blood, you should save the relationship. Just—just ask yourself, if there’s something to build here. Something you want.”

“Linc and I have nothing in common,” he said. Not really thinking.

Sara gave him a teasing smile. “Well, for one, you have the same taste in girls.”

“God, don’t. That’s gross.”

He brought her against his chest, and gravity happened, and for a while kissing her was the only thing that mattered. They didn’t talk about his brother again.

But after Sara was gone, after he’d walked her back to her father’s house, he lay into bed. Looking at the crack on his wall.

The things Lincoln had said to him, when he found Michael at his apartment, ready to leave.

Don’t you worry what everyone’s gonna do to her if you take off like that? She burnt all her bridges to be with you, man. You leave her stranding, the other kids will eat her alive, right? School’s one mean place to be alone.

What kind of person would tell him to leave, when what he meant was, Stay?

Who would get under his skin like that, shove a knife in his throat, and not mention that he was really doing it because Michael was smothering, and that cut was the only way to let the air in?

If it was some twisted way to get Michael to stay, then it was the only good thing that Lincoln had ever done for him in his life. Why wouldn’t he be straight about it? Why act like an asshole, instead of admitting he cared?

Some people have to put on a mask before they say something nice, but then with other people it’s the other way around.

Michael half-smiled. He himself never acted, never pretended to be anything other than what he was. He’d thought all along Lincoln was a bad actor—but maybe he was just a bad Hamlet.

“Nothing in common,” he repeated, to his empty bedroom. “Nothing at all.”

The smile followed him into obscurity, and he slept a dreamless sleep.

Chapter Text

Sara stared at Frank Tancredi as they sat at the breakfast table, over the pile of toast, pots of jam and fruit basket.

“What?” he said.

Sara could not have been more surprised if he had grabbed a bottle of milk and poured it onto the floor.

“You just said, ‘See you at the show’,” she spoke cautiously. Maybe her dad was having some sort of stroke.

“Yes,” Frank looked up from his phone. “It’s tonight, right? Your Hamlet performance.”

Shock congealed all the oxygen in her lungs. He remembered it was tonight? Remembered that it was Hamlet?

“What is it?”

“But—don’t you have work?”

“You warned me months in advance. I booked my evening.”

I always warn you months in advance. You never make it. Sara rolled the words back into her throat and swallowed.

“You look very surprised.”

“I’m—very surprised,” Sara couldn’t think of what else to say.

Frank did not look offended. His phone beeped and snatched his attention, the way a dog’s does when you toss a frisbee.

“Well, I’m looking forward to it.”

His dismissive tone had slipped back on. They were not going to have this conversation, she realized. All the times he’d let her down, had proven how little her life mattered to him, so long as she got good grades and didn’t get into trouble.

Sara licked her lips.

Maybe that was fair. After all, did she care what her father did at work? She used to. Used to worship him, as all little girls worship their parents.

But that was before she understood the basics of Republican politics. Then it was a mercy she and her father didn’t talk, or try to get along. Because she would have invested hours in trying to change him, and even a father with fewer pride issues would have felt humiliated by it.

There’s no common ground between us. There never was.

Sara contemplated her father. The piece of toast between her index and thumb had turned soft. She had agonized over how best to broach the subject of Michael, whose thought alone still sent her pulse into high alert, whose name she couldn’t imagine letting out in this house.

Michael was the boy whose kisses opened windows inside her heart and tasted like stars. The raspy feel of his stubble when she rubbed her hands over his scalp, the wave of steadiness that rocked through her when he held her in his arms. It felt so private, she couldn’t understand how girls talked about the details so much in the bathroom or in the halls.

It’s all mine, Sara thought.

Both a treasure and a burden, to think no one in the whole world truly understood Michael Scofield, except for her. And when she met him, she truly understood herself.

At times, it seemed a miracle that they had found each other, drawn each other. Some say ‘chosen’, but that was the wrong word. Where had there been a choice in all of this?

The clock on the dining room wall struck eight. Frank had not glanced up from his phone.

What if tonight was the first time he met Michael—at the performance? Seeing him play, he would have to see something of the real Michael. As would everyone. He wore the part like a glove, but all the cracks in the leather, all the scars splintering at the seams, were Michael.

Maybe it was the naivety of a school girl in love.

But Sara could not fathom how her father could disapprove of him, if he saw him act.

“I’m looking forward to it, too,” she said.

…

The first time Veronica agreed to follow Lincoln at the gymnasium when he went there to practice, by himself, his jaw actually dropped. She sat on the bleachers, her backpack tucked between her legs, so effortlessly beautiful he could not breathe for a second. And pulled out a book.

“You don’t mind?”

He laughed. “Vee, you could run me over with your car and I’m not a hundred percent sure I would mind.”

“I don’t have a car.”

“So, that makes it out the picture then.”

“Wait till I turn eighteen.”

“Oh, I am.”

She tossed him a pack of gum, a surprising un-Vee response when he sucked her into his teasing. Some say when you fall in love, all the songs start making sense. And they do. But Lincoln reckoned, sometimes, when you fall in love, bookworms who don’t have a teasing bone in their bodies will start tossing things at you.

He practiced a few spin moves, stretched a little, then drained a shot, a second, and a third. “Whatcha reading?”

She showed him the front cover. A worn, well-read copy of Hamlet, which bore the stamp of the school’s library.

“Oh.” He looked at his shoes, the dam-dam-dam of the ball dribbling. “You know, I was terrible in that role.”

“Oh, I know.” She looked up over the book. “I mean, I imagine. Wrong part for you. You need an Othello or a Ferdinand.”

“A Ferdiwhat?”

“It’s in another play, by Webster.”

Lincoln shook his head. “I don’t think you get it. I’m a terrible actor.”

“That’s not true. For four years, you acted like somebody I wouldn’t give the time of day to. And look at you. Look at me.”

His heartbeat picked up. “I am.”

He made out half a grin protruding from the book. “You’re a great actor, Burrows.”

Silence settled, and he started dribbling again, to give his hands something to do. “What are you reading Hamlet for, anyway?”

“Refreshing my memory for tonight.”

The ball bounced back against the dome of his hands, but he let it slip, and it rolled all the way to the bleachers. “The play’s tonight?”

She laughed. “Are you for real?”

Lincoln stayed silent, a lump of congealed porridge going down his stomach.

“What?”

“Nothing. I—”

But he found he couldn’t put words on it, exactly.

How to tell her he’d been so wrapped up in her, the past few weeks, that he’d completely forgotten about the play—and that chilling encounter with Gretchen Morgan.

I want you to quit the school play. Just some idea I’d like to see play out.

Falling in love with Vee had felt to Lincoln like he’d finally stopped swimming against the tide. For as long as he could remember, everything had been a struggle. Looking tough, earning respect, making sure his peers got the right message from his clothes, his face, his words, his silence. Then the gleam of those green eyes had sliced into his world, like forgotten treasures winking at him from the bottom of the ocean. And he’d realized, everything could be easy. That if he stopped trying so hard, fighting against the current and the waves that hammered him into exhaustion, he could just sail down those waves and the world didn’t end, nothing apocalyptic happened. At the end of the day, when he came out of those waters, all that was left was Vee—and himself. A self he had never suspected to exist, had never thought existed under the pressure of that cold ocean.

The easiness of letting go had swept everything in its wake.

He’d barely run into Gretchen this whole time—was not looking at the students he brushed against in the halls. They say love is blind, but it’s really closer to tunnel vision.

For a while nothing else exists.

“Goddamn idiot,” he mumbled.

“What is it?”

“I don’t—I don’t know exactly,” he shook his head. “Maybe nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“Just—Gretchen said something weird a while back, about the play.”

“Weird how? Mean?”

“No. Well, yeah. But all the air that comes out of her is toxic. More like—shady weird.”

“She made fun of you?”

“No. Actually, she wanted me to give up the part.”

A vertical line shot between her perfect brows. For a moment, he could not focus on anything but the infinitesimal change in her face, the beauty of her. No matter how many hours he spent looking at her, he could not wrap his mind around it. Every move she made splintered his frozen thought of her open like a kaleidoscope.

“Why?”

“I guess so Michael would play Hamlet.”

Veronica licked her lips. “You’re right. That does sound shady.”

“Probably nothing. I mean, it’s Gretch we’re talking about, not an army of fascists.”

“To be frank, I think she’d make a great fascist.”

“What can she do?”

Veronica laughed. She was not amused. He knew the words out of his mouth were bullshit the minute she called him out on it. “Come on, Linc. You’re too smart to act like you don’t know that fucked up shit can happen in high school.”

A cobweb gauze fell over his chest.

“You’re right. Of course, you’re right.”

He scraped his foot against the ground, wishing he could kick at something. How much shittier could he get at being a brother?

It was plain as rainwater Gretchen was up to no good. Veronica hadn’t needed more than two seconds for a diagnosis.

And what did I do?

Did I worry about Mike, give thought to what might happen to him? Nah. Too busy being in love. Too happy.

“Hey,” Veronica closed the book and walked up to him. In an instant her face was on his face, and he relaxed, despite himself, thawing into her touch.

“I’m such a jerk.”

“No.”

“You really think Gretchen would try to mess with the play?”

“I think you think it, too.”

He sighed.

“Whatever she’s got planned,” said Veronica, “the play must give her opportunity. She’s not interested in Hamlet, or ruining stage night for everyone. She’s not even interested in your brother.”

Lincoln nodded. “She’s interested in Sara.”

Veronica gave a shrug. “I taught my brain to strain out gossip since junior high, and even I couldn’t miss the drama that sparked up when their friendship ended. So, yeah. I’d say her beef’s with her.” She looked at her watch. Vee was the sort of person who still wore a watch, instead of checking the time on her phone like every other kid. “We still have three hours. It’s not too late to warn them.”

…

Michael sank his wool hat over his forehead, all the way to his eyebrows. The December air bit at his cheeks like a wild animal. The hat had been a gift from Sara. Michael preferred the cold to the texture of wool, which made his whole body itch. That was without getting into the whole animal aspect of it, because he’d read from several sources wool was just as cruel as leather to the poor creatures.

And Michael’s whole life revolved around making his way in the world, while causing the least amount of harm as possible.

But he had not been able to refuse the gift as they passed a shop, and Sara teased him about his ears frosting over. She looked so happy to do it. Pop inside, swipe her credit card, and get him a hat. “Now you’re not cold,” she said.

Even as he allowed it, allowed her to bask in the illusion of simplicity, he was aware of the gap between them, as wide as ever. Aware, too, that she thought she could bridge it just by snapping her fingers, fishing into her purse. Getting him a wool hat.

Although the texture chafed against his skin, and made him think of the animal that had died for it, Michael began to treasure that hat, as he suspected she treasured the chocolate bar they’d stepped on when they first kissed.

The hat was not a bridge between her world and his.

But it was a token of how easy it seemed to her, how much she wanted to be able to open all doors and all windows so that they could walk into each other’s lives as easy as hello.

Because it was easy for her to follow him, she did not understand he would need to tightrope his way through every interaction with her family and friends, did not understand that he would never belong.

Sometimes when she lay asleep on his shoulder, he thought the words so hard it was almost like she could hear. Loving you is the easiest thing I’ve ever done, Sara. But that’s where all the easy stops.

Michael picked up his pace, counting the footsteps to the auditorium. To Sara. They weren’t scheduled to be there till five, but Sara wanted to run over her lines again. “I know it’s too late to make changes. But there’s this one line—I think I should try it angrier. I want your feedback.”

“Sure,” he’d said.

Thinking, Your beautiful face, your summer-night voice.

“Hey!”

Michael froze before he swiveled. The sound of his brother’s voice stiffened the hairs in the back of his neck. Before he could help it, his jaw was clenched iron-tight. Part of him knew Lincoln was not about to attack him again. But Michael had endured too much violence, could never get his body to be as trusting as his brain.

A look dropped down Lincoln’s face, like a curtain of rainwater. Oddly transparent. Are you that good an actor, Linc?

“Shit,” Lincoln closed his eyes, halting at three feet of distance from Michael. His fists bulged from his jeans pockets. Maybe he could remember punching them into Michael’s face a few months ago, one cold autumn night. “I didn’t—I didn’t really think of what I’d say next.”

Michael sighed. “Well, you better think fast. I’ve got somewhere to be.”

“Look, I—” his tongue travelled over his lips. “I know I’ve been an asshole to you.”

“So, I’m special then. I just assumed you were an asshole to everybody.”

Lincoln had the decency to meet his stare, dead on. If Michael remembered well, his brother wasn’t very good at making eye-contact. At the crossroads of each other’s eyes, Lincoln would shift from foot to foot and look at the ground, as if Michael were a strange beetle that might bite if goaded into aggression.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

Michael laughed. Joy-free, a sound that ricocheted against the winter air. “Don’t see why I’d give it a try, seeing as you never apologized.”

A beat of silence. Lincoln sucked in his bottom lip. Five seconds. Ten.

“I’m sorry, Mike.”

“Don’t call me Mike, like you know me.”

The words got out before Michael could stop them. Yet a vague memory clawed at his chest, of days before any complication strained his relationship with Lincoln, before they were even old enough to realize they were different. Three and five years old, putting together puzzle pieces in a cloud-colored room. Michael thought he remembered Lincoln getting annoyed with him for finishing the puzzles before he had time to identify all the pieces. But he couldn’t be sure whether he was making it up.

“Look, I know you got no reason to trust me. I just—I’ve got to tell you something.”

Michael wasn’t sure he was expecting anything until the words came out of his brother’s mouth, and he was left staring at him in bemusement.

“You’ve gotta drop the play.”

“I gotta—what?”

Lincoln drew in a breath. “Gretchen Morgan. She’s planning something. I don’t—I don’t know what, but it’s got to do with the play.”

Michael studied his brother. Water and salt pricking at the corner of his eyelids from the frosty breeze that blew into his face.

“I came out sounding like a conspiracy theorist, didn’t I?” Lincoln said.

“I don’t even know why you’d make up something like that.”

“I’m not making it up.”

Michael shook his head. “You want me to bail, hours before the show, letting down dozens of people, including Sara?”

“Yeah. And it’s not some scheme to get her to break up with your or something. Shit,” Lincoln sighed, “I just made it sound like that’s what it was.”

“Sara wouldn’t break up with me over the play.”

“Good,” he said, too emphatically. “I’m happy about that, man. I swear.”

Michael took a step back to gauge his demented-looking brother. “Sara’s right about you. You’re awful at being honest.”

Silence settled for a while, long enough that Michael could see Lincoln’s cheeks turn crimson.

“I’m not dropping the show.”

Lincoln sighed. “Then be careful, all right? Just—I don’t know what Gretchen’s up to, but I know it’s not good.”

“How do you know she’s up to anything?”

Michael waited. And waited.

To his credit, it looked like Lincoln tried to answer a few times, at least if you trusted the opening and closing of his mouth. But in the end he just stood there, shuffling snow with his feet.

“Right. Well,” Michael said, “it was good talking to you.”

Sarcasm. He’d picked that up from Sara, mimicking the way she teased him somehow—except she never did it with the ice he directed at Lincoln right now.

“Michael?” his brother said once he had turned around.

Michael didn’t glance over his shoulder to look at him. Maybe that made it easier for Lincoln to say, “I really am, you know. Sorry.”

It was a few seconds before Michael could move.

How surprising.

He found, when he wasn’t looking at his brother face to face, he could actually bring himself to believe him.

Chapter Text

“Oh my God,” Sara said.

She had been peeking through the red curtains, a recurrent activity since the seats at the auditorium started filling up. It punctuated her restless pacing, wringing her hands together, going to the bathroom, looking at Michael as if he had just sprouted wings and saying, “How can you not be nervous?”

Michael was never nervous.

A serious defect, if he trusted how extraordinary Sara seemed to find it. A good thing he’d joined the swimming team instead of football or some other sport. That way, at least, when the time came for competition, he could pretend to be sweating.

Just now, though, Sara’s tone was not the shade of stage fright he had got used to in the past hour. Her jaw dropped with—horror? Shock?

Lincoln’s warning swung back into his mind. “What is it?”

She couldn’t answer for a moment. Just stared at the slit between the curtains, before yanking it closed and facing him, eyes wide as watch dials. “My father’s here.”

Michael took in the information.

“He’s here. As in, he’s actually here.”

Sara tended to repeat information that her brain found especially difficult to process. Michael wished he didn’t notice these things—at least, that he didn’t shelve them for later use. But mimicking the way people expected you to behave was a useful trick to keep up your sleeve. And though dating Sara was the most extraordinary experience he’d ever known, though it was in and of itself a purpose greater than he could have imagined life to have in store—it was also an undeniable opportunity to study human behavior.

“My father’s here.”

The information propelled Michael into concerns of his own. Playing Hamlet was not an ideal first impression to make on the father of a girl you were dating. True, on the one hand, Mrs. Reynolds vouched he had talent, and talent was a valuable quality to men of Sara’s class. Hamlet was a respectable part, but it was a dark part. It got Michael to delve into some less-than-savory aspects of the human psyche.

Besides, what if Frank walked out of the show thinking Michael was too good an actor? What if, after watching him slip into Hamlet’s skin like a glove, he looked into his blank face—which he’d been told, many times, he had—and decided Michael was a fake? A boy only good for impersonating people, but devoid of genuine feeling?

A scene with Ophelia crossed his mind. The last time they’d rehearsed it, they had stopped just short of kissing. The heat between him and Sara was always something he marveled over, but he was actually quite good at separating their chemistry from that between Ophelia and Hamlet.

Bad news, though? Sara wasn’t.

Mrs. Reynolds even instructed her to be ‘more family-friendly’ in her performance.

That was the point which settled the issue for Michael.

A rich politician could admire a talented actor, yes. But he could only hate a boy that his daughter struggled to keep her hands off.

Sara frowned. Michael realized he had been staring at her in silence for too long, and her ‘my father is here’ monolog required a response.

“Do you need to pee?”

She treated the words like they were puzzle pieces. “Why would I need to pee?”

“You’ve been going to the bathroom at very close intervals.”

“No—” she shook her head. “Michael, my father’s here.”

“You’ve mentioned that.”

“He’s never made it to a single one of my performances before. Ballet, theater, singing—”

“That’s a long list. So, you just know how to do everything?”

“It’s not funny.”

“I didn’t say it was funny.”

“This is good. Right?”

Michael considered. Telling her that he didn’t share that interpretation might distress her further. It was for that reason he hadn’t mentioned what Lincoln said, about Gretchen Morgan. Of course, he wanted to believe his brother had been honest, and wanted to save him from embarrassment. But Lincoln had proven nothing but unreliable and hostile since he’d come to town. He couldn’t just ‘trust his gut’, as the expression went, because Michael didn’t have a gut when it came to people.

He'd been called naïve as a result, but it wasn’t his fault if people so often said things they didn’t mean and thought things they didn’t say. And anyway, he couldn’t be bothered to tolerate most of them.

Bottom line, if you trusted empirical evidence, Lincoln had most likely made this up to disturb the performance or unsettle Michael, maybe as a form of payback for losing Sara, maybe just to be an ass, a domain in which Lincoln had a lifetime’s experience.

Telling Sara would upset her, and she was already upset to a degree Michael could not imagine sustaining much amplification. Keeping silent had seemed the thing to do.

Though this was different. She had asked him a direct question, and he could never tell her a lie.

She spared him from going deeper into deliberation as she answered her own question, “Right. You’re so brilliant as Hamlet, my dad is bound to fall in love with you.”

“Ah.”

“He’ll see how amazing you are.”

She grabbed his shoulders, and he interpreted this to mean she was trying to kiss him. That seemed like the best idea she had had all afternoon, and he promptly moved in toward her when she screamed, “Michael, no! Makeup!”

He drew back. Being a boyfriend was decidedly an intellectually challenging experience.

She peeked out the curtain again, as if to satisfy herself her father had not been sucked away by a black hole.

When she turned back, she let out a sigh. “We’re about to start.”

“I know.”

“You should go to the bathroom.”

“I don’t need to.”

“You might when you’re onstage.”

Michael didn’t find the point worth arguing over and went to the bathroom. The backstage area was a treasure chest of props, Renaissance costumes, blunted swords, cardboard backgrounds of all sorts.

He passed a few fellow actors, remembered to smile when they made eye-contact, as he’d seen Sara do. But they only stared at him like he was being weird, so maybe that only worked when you did it from the start instead of picking up the habit halfway through the school year.

A queue roughly the length of a crane heralded the girls’ bathroom, but the boys’ was empty. Or seemed to be.

Michael swung in, and frowned at the mane of toffee-brown curls bent over the sink.

The girl started as the door closed.

Michael recognized her. It was one of the two girls who followed Gretchen around like lapdogs, one of the girls who had made up Sara’s former circle of friends.

“Nika?”

She backed off and kicked into one of the urinals. This caused her to release a sharp yelp of disgust.

“What are you doing backstage?” he said.

Her whole posture was weird, and she was holding her hands up—wet. She’d been washing them at the sink, but this wasn’t the way you left your hands out to dry. More like when you didn’t want to get a stain on your clothes.

Michael looked down at the sink. The water down the drain was soapy and pink.

“You—nothing.” She slithered away from him, holding eye-contact the way you would with a wild animal. “Don’t come near me.”

“Why would I come near you?”

She backed off, circling around the room, an index pointed at him. Yanking the door open, she threw herself out, leaving Michael to blink away at the strangeness of the encounter.

His mind went back to Lincoln’s warning. Gretchen Morgan. She’s up to something. If what Sara told him about Lisa and Nika was to be believed, they didn’t sneeze without the authorization of the Queen Bee.

Michael grabbed the edge of the sink, peering into the pinkish foam as if it would stream out a string of answers.

He shot out the door, looking left and right, trying to find evidence of something amiss.

“There you are,” Mrs. Reynolds grabbed his forearm. “Sara was worried you’d drowned in there. Come on, the show starts in five minutes.”

“Mrs. Reynolds, I think something might be wrong.”

“Now’s not the time for second guessing yourself, Michael. You’re a talented young man. Trust me, this is the beginning of a lasting career in theater if you want it.”

He shook his head, scrounging for words that wouldn’t make it sound like his confidence was the issue. “I think somebody is planning a hoax.”

“A hoax?” She stopped, finally giving him a probing look. “Based on what?”

Michael thought for a moment. If he told her a girl had been in the boys’ bathroom, she would find it very slim evidence to stand on. After all, Nika might have only gone there to skip the queue. If he told her she was washing something red off her hands at the sink, she would say, “You’re playing Hamlet, Michael. Not Macbeth.”

He couldn’t tell her that this particular girl’s presence was suspicious without getting into the drama that had been going on all semester, and that would take longer than five minutes.

By the time he finally started on an answer, he could tell from the look on her face that he’d waited too long. “I just—”

“Look, I know what’s going on. In the world of the theater, we’re always afraid something is going to go wrong at the last minute. Trust me. You’ll be fine.”

“But—”

“Not a word of this to Sara.” Her face turned stern. “She’s nervous enough as it is.”

Before Michael could protest, she was thrusting him backstage. Sara shot him a smile, and he could tell it was meant to steady his nerves. She looked jittery, burning to start, as if the performance were a swarm of fireflies she had to contain between her palms.

Onstage, he could hear Barnardo and Horatio warning of the specter that haunted the castle.

His mouth dried.

What could he do?

Tell Sara, seconds before he got onstage, that he thought something bad was going to happen? Mrs. Reynolds was right. Her nerves couldn’t take more rattling.

“You’re all right?” she mouthed.

He nodded. They could talk during the interval. Anyway, there were only a few more seconds before Scene Two started, and he stepped onstage.

2

“I don’t like this,” Lincoln said.

He and Veronica had made it to the auditorium forty-five minutes early, to make sure they could get front-row seats. In case—in case what? Lincoln wondered.

“You did all you could,” Vee said. “It was a long shot to think we could get them to bail on the show just based on hearsay.”

“Maybe you should have done the talking.”

“You think your brother would have been more likely to listen to a complete stranger instead of you?” she paused. “Actually, that would have been a good move.”

“Thanks, Vee.”

“You know I can’t tell a white lie, Linc.”

He grabbed her hand and kissed it, aiming for casualness. But she read right through him. “I’ll try to go talk to Sara, if you want. Maybe there’ll be time during intermission.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

But there was no shaking the feeling in Lincoln’s gut.

That something bad, real bad, was gonna happen tonight.

As Hamlet would have put it—there was something rotten in the kingdom of Denmark.

Chapter Text

WhatsApp Conversation: Lisa, Nika, Gretchen.

Nika: Gretch, I don’t know about this.

Gretchen: What don’t you know? You’re not about to sit for a test.

Nika: Typing…

Typing stopped.

A few minutes later, an audio dropped into the convo. “I mean, I just don’t feel right about it. Like, what if they get an allergic reaction? Things like that happen, you know? Or maybe the bucket falls down and they get concussed or something. Gosh, I just don’t—em. I don’t like it.”

Lisa: You’re SUCH a drama queen.

Gretchen: I didn’t ask you to like it. I asked you to do it.

Lisa: What do you think’s gonna happen? Last I checked neither of those nerds has telekinetic powers.

Gretchen: I can’t believe you can spell ‘telekinetic’. *wink*

Nika: Girls, for realsies. We could get EXPELLED. This is the sorta thing people go to jail over.

Audio, Lisa: “Relax, things’ll be fine. We didn’t even use real blood, so they can’t get AIDS or anything. Just take a deep breath. Show’s about to start.”

***

Sara did not calm down until she heard Michael’s performance from backstage. A few lines in, and already, the throb of her heart quieted down. She was hooked.

A little more than kin, and less than kind.

It got her thinking about Lincoln, the way Michael said that line. If you looked at the whole semester, Michael’s estranged brother had really earned himself that line.

At first, when Sara had peeked between the curtains, the presence of her father in the audience had made her blind to everything else. She still couldn’t believe that, right now, he was discovering Michael’s presence onstage—he was bound to be impressed by how his talent towered over that of most teenage actors.

But after stealing a few more glances, she’d noticed Lincoln and Veronica, in front row seats. Weird, she thought. If Lincoln had been here, alone, her mind would have been on high alert. No way could he have wanted to see his brother outplay him as Hamlet by a million miles, for the whole school to see—and with the girl he’d tried, unsuccessfully, to date for several weeks.

The only way for Sara to make sense of Lincoln’s presence included some form of tomato-throwing.

But he was there with Veronica Donavan.

Sara licked her lips.

She didn’t know Veronica well, but she knew enough. If Lincoln liked her—and it seemed obvious to anyone who had eyes that he did—he would not risk doing anything to lose her for good. And Veronica would have no tolerance for humiliation. If Lincoln started throwing tomatoes at them, or sodas, whatever, she’d dump him faster than he could say Jack Robinson.

What was going on?

A warm ball of butter melted in her stomach.

Could Lincoln have genuinely come because he wanted to make amends? Support his brother? That was something she could see Veronica getting behind.

And Lincoln did seem like a different person now.

Flashes from Michael’s face came back to her. Bruised and bloodied, after Lincoln beat him up. Her fists dug into her thighs. She could never forgive Lincoln for that.

People made mistakes, yes. Especially teenagers. Having read book upon book about human anatomy, she knew that the prefrontal cortex, which among other things dealt with impulse control, took around twenty-five years to develop in full.

She tried to think about that when she did something that could be considered impulsive—like, climbing down her window to meet Michael in the middle of the night. It didn’t stop her, sure, but at least she was conscious as she did it that if she had a woman’s brain instead of a girl’s, she might be acting differently.

It didn’t sound satisfying to explain away Lincoln’s violence toward his brother with the fact that ‘teenagers make mistakes’.

But if Lincoln was trying to do the right thing, now, and apologize—it was up to Michael to forgive him.

The thoughts had absorbed her so deep, she almost didn’t perk to alertness when her cue came to step onto the stage.

Adrenaline stabbed through her ribcage.

Okay.

She counted to three, closed her eyes. And glided through the curtain.

***

You would think, after dating him for weeks, that Michal’s beauty would no longer cut the breath from her lungs. Except it did.

Especially when he was Hamlet, so distant from her. The sight of him shattered her into thousands of pieces that she needed to glue back together.

Rehearsals had taught her there was nothing to do but roll with it, make it part of her character.

“To be or not to be,” Michael chuckled, his smile a wound cracking his cheeks open. “Ay, there’s the point.”

And their dance began, the way they usually played it. She was all restraint. He was all madness, breaking away from her like a flock of ravens you’d try to hold on to as you fell into the void.

She’d stopped thinking about her nerves. Hardly remembered they were playing to an audience. Michael was Hamlet, so she became Ophelia.

Just like the first time he had practiced lines with her.

“I did love you once.”

“My lord, you made me believe so.”

“You should not have believed me.”

Michael stopped.

Improvisation?

Tonight of all nights, when a hundred eyes were staring?

Caroline Reynolds was going to kill him.

Sara’s heart lurched, not in fear but excitement. It did not occur to her that Michael was not in character.

Only when chatter broke from the seats did she begin to worry. Michael’s eyes had wondered to the ceiling. Like he’d seen something.

Pivoting a few inches, so only he would catch the words, she mouthed, “Michael?”

With another actor, she would have thought he needed a prompt. But Michael had never forgotten his lines before.

He turned his back on her, like she’d drawn him from a dream. Suddenly, his faltering became part of his character. How strange, that a boy so unconcerned with what other people thought about him could make himself into anything, toss magic powder into the eyes of the audience and make them see what he willed.

“If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry. Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery! Or if thou will marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.”

Sara had time to open her mouth before a groan thundered above head. It sounded primal, animalistic. Something heavy being hauled into place.

She and Michael looked up in time to see it before it happened.

There was a moment, slim but tangible, when Sara felt she could stop what was happening. Like when you kick a glass off a table with your elbow, and you think: I can catch it. But you don’t move, your hands glued into this strange state of not-quite-knowing, and the CLING of glass exploding into pieces feels like your own doing.

She didn’t know what she was seeing.

A bucket, hanging from the ceiling, the diagonal of a wire stretched taught, glinting in the stage light.

She thought, We should move, but didn’t move.

The glass spiraled closer and closer to the ground.

She opened her mouth as the bucket swung, clearly about to spill. A stab of protest hit her in the chest.

Hey, I’ve read that story. I know how it ends.

She grabbed Michael’s hand, opened her mouth, and tried to yank him out of the center of the stage. Too late.

When she opened her eyes again, the entire world was red.

***

Michael closed his eyes when the paint hit them. He knew it was paint, from the pungent smell of chemicals and solvent.

If he’d been seeing this from afar, he would have remembered that old movie his parents watched on their living room couch after they thought their boys had gone to bed. The prom king and queen got doused in a thick red goo onscreen and four-year-old Michael asked, “Is that blood?” His mother screamed, and his dad sent him to his room and spent a good chunk of the evening with him. He explained some images were TRAUMATIZING, and Michael was too young to PROCESS them. If he wanted to talk about what he’d seen, though, he could go to either him or his mother.

But Michael would never talk to his parents about his blood phobia, of course. Because Michael would not develop a blood phobia until both his parents died in a car accident, and his entire world was painted crimson.

His body reacted before there could be room for rational thoughts.

Come on, it’s only a little paint. Only—

Michael’s knees gave.

He was not onstage, he was not Hamlet, he was not a teenager. His hands gleamed as he raised them and he saw the blood drip down his hands, felt its warmth and its salt-stickiness, although the paint was cold. His memory was filling all the blanks.

And there the paint was not paint and it smelled like iron, like the screams of his mother and the absurdity of opening his eyes to find his father’s arm stranded on the asphalt.

Close your eyes.

Michael did.

His body shut down, and he felt his spirit float into the sky as if he had been touched by a magic wand.

It was quiet here. All very quiet.

I’m not coming down this time, was the last thing he remembered thinking before he hit the ground.

***

Sara had time to close her mouth and eyes before any of the paint hit her. Her arms went up into a crucifix above her face, but it didn’t do as much good as vampire movies suggested. The paint spilled down her face, her hair, her clothes.

The amphitheater was so silent, you could have heard the flap of a butterfly’s wings.

Sara wiped paint from her eyelids, not daring to open them. Talk about going down in theater history.

And so the audience gets the crossover they never asked for, between Shakespeare and Stephen King.

But there was no room for humor in her mind. It didn’t matter that she knew the liquid was not going to hurt her. Her body was on high alert, her sympathetic nervous system taking over.

The pound of her heart drowned out any reasonable thought.

Didn’t the paint smell especially pungent? What even told her this was paint at all? In her mind’s eye, she pictured acid hitting her skin, melting all the way to the bone, flashes of the chemical burns she’d studied in her thousand-plus-pages medicine book.

She could almost feel the pain, the acid bite of the liquid penetrating her flesh.

It all faded as Michael collapsed next to her.

She opened her eyes, blinked back the beads of red rolling down her lashes. “Michael!”

Her knees hit the ground. He was covered in red, too, and the texture was so much like blood that a silent scream stabbed through her breastbone.

Her fingers traced down his face. “Michael,” she spoke gently, “Michael, please.”

His eyes were closed, religiously tight. And he was stiff, stiffer than a body should ever be outside an autopsy table.

Before she had time to think of what to do, a thud sounded next to her as Lincoln leapt onto the stage in a surprisingly gracious move. “Jesus fuck,” he said.

Sara’s heartbeat hadn’t calmed down. Though it was mildly reassuring to remember she wasn’t alone, that the stage wasn’t actually a desert island with only her and Michael on it, she couldn’t stop her eyes from spearing through Lincoln’s face.

“Did you do this?” she asked.

The words sounded feral to her own ears.

He shook his head. “Your friend Gretchen.”

Sara couldn’t believe how much sense it made. There was no second of doubt, no tremor of hesitation inside her saying, surely, the girl who had been one of her closest friends throughout high school wasn’t capable of something that wicked.

“Mike? Jesus, Mike wake up!” Lincoln started giving his brother timid slaps.

Around them, Sara could hear the audience buzzing to life. Solutions floated about. Ambulance. 9-1-1.

“This won’t help,” she caught Lincoln’s wrist.

“What’s happening to him?”

“He—” She stammered. Didn’t want to betray the things Michael had told her in confidence, or which she had intuited from his behavior. “He has a bad case of PTSD. From…” It felt wrong to talk about the death of their parents when Lincoln had never opened up about it to her.

A look screwed into his face, of hurt and amazingly childish shock. “No. I mean—no, he never remembered any of it. He was too young. He—”

What remained of her anger against Lincoln splintered as she heard the cracks in his voice. They simply didn’t have time for this. She needed to wash the paint off Michael, to get him somewhere clean. He wouldn’t get any better while he was covered in what looked like blood.

Sara squeezed Lincoln’s hand. He shuddered. They hadn’t touched since the old Hamlet rehearsals. “Lincoln, I’m sorry, I know this is hard. But I need you to look after him. I’m going to get some water. Will you stay with him? Make sure he knows he’s not alone?”

“I—yeah.”

The nod he gave her was almost solemn. Sara ran her thumb down Michael’s cheek one last time before she got to her feet and ran.

***

In that car, Michael is not really a child, and he isn’t really Michael, either.

He is a sliver of horror and panic frozen in time, a pulsing heartbeat squeezing out blood and venom and spiders and ghouls.

There are as many metaphors for trauma nowadays as there are traumatized people.

Some people say it’s like having a wild beast stitched to your back, living with demons that are always ready to come knock-a-knocking when you fall asleep at night.

But Michael knows the wound of his parents’ death is not a monster or a toxic tide of rage that he needs to quell, like Lincoln does.

When he watched his parents died—

Close your eyes, baby.

A second heart squeezed through Michael’s ribs and nestled there between bones and organs. That heart is black as ink and cold as ice, and it doesn’t beat most of the time—it’s just there, dormant, a fossil inside his chest that he never needs to think about.

But when it opens its eye, there is nothing Michael can do to resist. That second pulse drowns out every sound, every other layer of reality, until Michael is in that car again—because of course he is. How could he have ever been so deluded as to think that he had ever left it?

In that car, the world is red and Michael is bathed in blood and every breath tastes like copper pennies.

Michael won’t open his eyes. His mother knows what’s best for him.

Before he collapsed onstage, he feels he glimpsed her when the paint dripped down Sara’s face, glimpsed her even though he knows this girl is not his mother, although she too has a voice like summer skies and hair the color of painted sunsets.

That second heart sees what it wants to see, hears what it wants to hear.

He knows she is trying to draw him out of it, to wake him up. He wishes he could appease her, show her that it’s pointless.

It’s okay, Sara. I’m in the car. I’ve never stopped being in that car. Part of me is always there and it’s time I stopped pretending.

How funny it seems to think that he went to school every day, had a job, and he never noticed that every room he walked in really had walls of leather seats, that it smelled like old cigars and bananas because that was what his father would snack on during long trips. How could he have been fooled into thinking the whole wide world was more than a fantasy, a layer of polish painted over the diamond-hard reality of his parents’ car, his parents, dying. At any time, what he had mistaken for the real world would explode and there would be the sound of that truck hitting the driver’s side of the car, his mother’s screams, the grinding of metal against asphalt.

Michael accepts with a kind of numb distance that he’ll never get out of that car. That everything he thinks is real, everything he loves, even Sara, can always be sucked into a black hole that’s really red and then, there will be nothing standing between him and that ocean of death. Only that dark icy heart, pounding inside his chest.

But then, something strange happens.

Hands wrap around his own, and they’re huge, not Sara’s. Iron-strong.

“Michael,” a voice says.

And it’s so weird, because the voice is his brother’s.

And his brother can never be in the car with him, was never there to protect him, or to bear witness to the same violence that breathes in Michael now with every heartbeat.

The car accident cleaved through the brothers’ lives like a guillotine, but it also cleaved through their love, through all feelings of affection and kinship.

How could Michael look at his brother after that and feel that they were bound by blood? The only blood that Michael was bound with was his parents’. Lincoln was a stranger to that horror, to that new baptism. He could never be there in the car with Michael, he couldn’t protect him or save him or even touch him.

Lincoln still lived in the real world, a world that couldn’t collapse any moment to reveal that it had only been painted over the interior of their parents’ car which Michael had never left, would never leave.

And yet Lincoln’s grip is strong around Michael’s hands. So strong that even from across a different world, Michael feels it.

“I’m here,” Lincoln says. “You can beat this, Mike. You can beat it.”

It’s strange and vaguely absurd—does he think Michael is one of his friends from the basketball team?

What’s even more absurd is that it’s working. Because Michael’s mind has managed to conjure the image of basketball players, and every scrap of reality begins to build a bridge away from that fissure in time which he just fell through, which always brings him back to the car, the truck, the screams.

“I’ve got you,” Lincoln says. “I’ve got you, Mike.”

And Michael can actually feel himself grasping his brother’s hand, holding on as hard as he can as his brother’s arms wrench him from that mass of blood and panic.

It’s as if his brother had taken Michael’s hand and plunged it through his chest to show him that beneath that hard layer of muscles and tough guy attitude, a second heart also beats inside Lincoln’s chest. And it’s just as black as Michael’s. Just as icy, too.

Michael opened his eyes.

Lincoln bent over him, immaculate, untouched by the blood that Michael could still feel dripping down his face. It’s only paint. Of course, it wasn’t.

Yet Michael sensed that though Lincoln did not wear traces of it, none that Michael or any of the rest of the world could see, he had been a part of that baptism. He had been baked into this cauldron of violence and tears.

Lincoln’s hands were fists around his. Although Michael had woken up, now, he did not let go. Did not break eye contact or release an easy sigh of relief.

“You were there, all along,” Michael let out. “With them. With me.”

Part of him thought Lincoln would shrug this off or deny it. That he wouldn’t even know what Michael was talking about.

But he held his gaze. Steady. And Michael knew that he’d been right.

“I’m always with you,” Lincoln said. “I’m always with you now.”

Chapter Text

When Sara ran backstage in her ruined Ophelia costume, the thought took hold of her for the first time.

I’m going to be a good doctor.

She knew this, because although her heart jackhammered against her ribcage, she didn’t panic. A clear path cleaved through the chaos of her brain. Get water. Clean Michael up. He couldn’t think or get better as long as he was dripping red.

The backstage area was an Ali Baba’s cave of theater props. Daggers, dresses and hats, patches of fabric that drew her eye with winks of tangerine or turquoise. Finally, she narrowed down on the pack of water bottles at the bottom of a shelf. Professor Reynolds always kept one somewhere, because dehydration didn’t sit well with line delivery.

Sara tore through the plastic wrapping, all nails. Her hands were steady. Though she wasn’t slicing through a human chest, her mission felt just as important.

Michael isn’t dying. His life isn’t really on the line here.

But it felt like it was, because of how stiff he had gone in her arms, because of the horror that bit into her at the sight of him, bathed in crimson, cold as the sea.

“Oh, no.”

Sara whipped back around, bottle in hand.

From the doorframe that connected the auditorium to the hallway, Gretchen flashed her the cherry-dark grin that had put the fear of God in many a high schooler.

“I can’t believe this, S. Your big night. And you were doing so well.” She pinched her index and thumb together. “I was this close to believing you could lose your head over a loony Denmark prince.”

Sara heard the plastic crumple against her palm.

Like most of the things that made up the teenage experience, anger had never been a big problem for her. Acne, hormones, boy drama, girl drama. ‘I’m just not cut out for it’, she’d told herself. On TV, when seventeen-year-olds exploded into tears or shouts, she cringed. Hated that no one was seemingly aware of the fact adolescents could be reasonable, that—the development of their prefrontal cortex not withstanding—they could usually hold back on their impulses as well as any adult.

“But then, S,” Gretchen once told her, “you’re not a real teenage girl.”

“Oh really?”

“No. You’re like—I don’t know. The un-spiced equivalent of that.” Gretchen had speared a manicured nail at her. “You are to teenage girls what tofu is to red meat.”

“Um. Cruelty free?”

They had been sitting at the cafeteria, eating—or trying to—the puréed mess that passed for pasta. Nika and Lisa had gone to the bathroom, a task which always took forever when more than one of the girls went together. 

Gretchen had run a finger down the length of her diet soda. “A travesty,” she said.

“A what?” Sara laughed.

“I mean that as a compliment.”

And though her friend looked as much the mean girl as ever, Sara knew she meant it.

Gretchen was never nice, but she was one of the few people in school Sara could be bothered to take an interest in. Sometimes when it was just the two of them, with no one to impress, glimpses of the real her poked through the veneer. She lay down all instruments of power—removed her crown, slapped off the gloves that could go from velvet to steel.

“You wanna know why I like you, S?”

“So you do like me,” Sara teased. “Half the time, I can’t tell.”

“Half the time, I’m just pretending.”

“Are we gonna address the fact that you compared me to the blandest food on the planet?”

“I meant, you don’t look or taste like the real thing. You don’t fool anyone. And my favorite thing is, you’re not even trying.”

Gretchen swept the other tables with one clean look. “Just listen to them. Everyone here, even Lisa and Nik, bless them—they’re all saying whatever they think they should. When I joke, they laugh, not because it’s funny. But because they know it’s their cue.”

“The whole world’s a play,” Sara said.

Gretchen smiled. Away from prying ears, she could afford to acknowledge a reference to Shakespeare. “But you, S. You don’t play by the rules. Heck, it’s more serious than that. You’re not playing.”

“Nobody’s making us.”

Gretchen had laughed, as if she’d heard her. “Oh, S. I keep forgetting, we don’t live in the same world. Trust me. Out there when you come down from the clouds, or wherever you are, it’s the law of the jungle.”

“Like you said, I’m not playing the game. And last I checked, I was still breathing.”

“Because you’re with me,” Gretchen winked. From behind, the singsong notes of their friends’ voices joined the ambient chatter. “If I let you go—well, S. I’m pretty sure they’d eat you raw.”

It was as far as she got before Lisa and Nika came back from the bathroom, and an invisible gate came slicing down on that sliver of honesty.

Already, Sara could see Gretchen tilting her chin upward, widening the smile. Putting on the crown.

Now, as they both stood in the backstage area, surrounded by blunted swords and glue-smelling décors, Sara felt it stab through her chest and explode.

Anger.

Anger, stronger than she’d ever felt before. Fights with her father paled in comparison. This was worse even than what she’d felt when Michael had gotten beat up by his brother.

Because though Lincoln’s actions were inexcusable, Sara could at least understand a boy losing his temper.

There was nothing to understand about this.

The way Gretchen’s eyes stared coldly at her, even as her lips smiled.

She didn’t do it out of cruelty.

She’d done it because Sara had broken the rules, disrespected the invisible hierarchy that lay buried inside the school walls, as bones did inside a human body.

She’d done it because if she hadn’t, word would have gotten around that you could mess with Gretchen Morgan.

This wasn’t a cruel prank or a mean girl getting her kicks.

It was politics.

Sara clenched her jaw. The smears of paint on her face were dry.

In some cultures, red paint is used to declare war.

How about that.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Gretchen laughed. Her mock casualness fueled the pit of fire in Sara’s stomach.

“You know, I consider it a victory that I got the F-word out of you.”

The slap came so fast, Sara heard it before she felt the tingles break out across her palm. There was time to enjoy the shock on Gretchen’s face, the glimpse of vulnerability before the mask came back on.

Except Sara didn’t enjoy it.

She was too horrified at the violence that had seized her hand, at the hand that had moved of its own volition.

At the voice that spoke in her ear, Hit her again.

She dug her nails into her palm to stop herself.

“Oh, S.” Gretchen shook her head. “You are sooooo deep into trouble now, you won’t know up from down.”

Her palm was still tingling from the impact. Part of her couldn’t believe she had done this. Violence was part of the things she viewed from a distance, as an observer. Part of the perks of living out of the jungle.

Sara had never felt so protective of anyone before she met Michael. The desire to hush, to comfort, to build a wall between someone and everything wrong with the world.

He’s suffered enough.

Not anymore. Not on my watch.

Not because of Gretchen fucking Morgan.

“You ever do anything to hurt him again,” Sara said. “I’ll show you trouble.”

The girl said nothing, but Sara sensed in the way those blue eyes flickered that she was appraising her anew.

There was some comfort in the fact that they were both serious, go-into-church, drop-on-your-knees serious.

If this were a movie, it would be a cat fight.

Sara’s dress would tear at the shoulders and thighs, Gretchen’s makeup would smear. They would pull on each other’s hair, a blend of funny and cute and hysterical.

At least, there was no doubt that Gretchen measured the weight of her adversary.

“We both know,” Gretchen said, “that you had it coming. That boy was just collateral.”

“I had it coming. Why? Because I don’t date whoever you tell me to? Because I decide who I hang out with outside school hours? Jesus Christ, Gretch, you have any idea how pathetic you are?”

“You know, I’d slap you right back. But I think it’s better not to muddy the waters. When I go to the police tomorrow, it’s better I look like the innocent victim who doesn’t return the blows.”

Sara shook her head. “You think you’ve won. Don’t you? This is actually what you wanted.”

“Oh, no. Not anymore. Your public humiliation was proportional to your publicly humiliating us. And S, I am nothing if not reasonable. Everyone in this school knows you were one of us. I can’t believe I need to explain this. When you associate with a boy, everyone else associates him with us. But now, for this? I think suing you for assault is much more appropriate.”

Sara didn’t answer. Partly, she was still recovering with how much her hand still wanted to slap Gretchen.

Had she ever really considered her a friend?

Gretchen liked her for being different from most high schoolers, for being on the margins, almost an outsider. When you’re rich, and smart, and beautiful, it’s okay to ignore the rules a little. What did I like about her? Just now, Sara couldn’t say, couldn’t justify to herself all the hours she had spent with this girl, week after week, year after year.

Was it only that Gretchen was smart, too, that beneath that carefully constructed appearance, there was a person worth getting to know, worth getting to trust?

Sara pressed her lips together. She didn’t have time for this. She needed to get back to Michael, Michael was the relationship that mattered.

Yet it hurt in a place she thought had been sealed off, that her friend would go through all this trouble, that she would value her own power so much. That all those afternoons at the Beehive, sipping lattes, crumbling cranberry cookies into napkins, all those movies watched on Saturday nights, all those private jokes, could be guillotined through without remorse.

All those moments that compiled into friendship, even if that friendship didn’t make sense anymore. They were nothing to her. Dead weight. Collateral.

“How can you use people like that?”

“Gimme a break.”

“No, you know what, I’ll give you advice.” Sara heard the sharp in her own voice. The words spilling out might have been scalpels. “Nobody will care what happened in high school once high school is done. That people get out of the way when you walk through the hall, that they let you go first when we’re standing in line. None of this matters in the real world, Gretch. No one cares who I sit with at lunch, no one cares about a teenage Hamlet performance. No one cares about me and you and Michael. The rules aren’t real, the game isn’t real, and no one’s counting the score.”

Gretchen gave her a look that was full of icy smiles and spiders.

It was hard to see anything through the mask.

“I feel sorry for you,” Sara let out.

Silence settled for such a long time, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t get a reply.

“So,” Gretchen said, finally, “we at least have one thing in common.”

Chapter Text

When Sara rushed back onstage, it was empty, save for the décor and the remains of the bloodbath Gretchen had orchestrated. Her eyes scanned the stage, frantic.

Rationally, she knew the rabid spike of her pulse didn’t make sense.

They weren’t in the jungle, and Michael hadn’t just been dragged into a lair by a predator.

But it was all so new to her—worrying like this, feeling so protective of someone she wanted to grow claws and fangs. Reason did nothing to stop the adrenaline shooting through her veins.

The future med school student in her said, Fascinating.

But every other part of her was too busy screaming, Where is he, where is he, whereishe.

“Hey.”

Sara jumped as a hand hit her shoulder. The bottle of water she’d taken from the backstage area dropped in a pool of red.

Veronica Donavan raised both palms into the air. In her peripheral vision, Sara could tell the entire auditorium had emptied. Veronica and her were the only ones there.

“Sorry, I stayed behind to let you know. Michael’s at the infirmary.”

Sara tried to contain what her face was saying. “I’ll go. He shouldn’t be alone.”

Veronica sounded her usual self when she answered—calm, composed, music-sweet. “He’s not alone. He’s with his brother.”

Sara thought of the last time Michael had been alone with his brother, which had ended with him being severely banged up. Veronica’s mind seemed to travel to the same place. “They’re okay. I think—I think they’ll both be okay.”

“Well. Thanks for letting me know.”

Sara took a step toward the stairs, leading down the stage. When Veronica’s hand reached around her forearm, that strange animal instinct took hold of her again, to get rid of every obstacle, to run and not stop until she could see for herself that Michael was fine.

“Look, I don’t mean to be a hassle. But you should probably wash up first.”

Sara’s eyes went down to what she was wearing. Her Ophelia costume, a dress that had been white a just an hour ago.

“I don’t know much about Michael, but it’s pretty clear he’s having some sort of post-traumatic reaction. Seeing you like this. It might—”

“Yeah,” Sara managed.

Slowly—very slowly—the rational person in her was starting to take over.

Veronica was right.

Michael suffered from a very severe form of hemophobia, with the mere color red being enough to plunge him back into a catatonic state. The last thing he needed was to see his girlfriend covered in crimson paint.

“Let me.”

Veronica took some tissues out of her purse. Though standing still was the last thing Sara wanted, she uncapped the water bottle, cleaned her face, neck, arms. There was nothing to do about the dress, stained beyond repair.

“Here.” Veronica took off her coat. “Put that on. You can give it back to me tomorrow.”

“You’re very nice,” Sara let out.

Their eyes met over damp balls of tissue paper.

It was the first time Sara looked at Veronica Donavan up close. There was something reassuring about the uncompromising extremes of her looks: very black hair, very white skin, very green eyes. It suited the way her gaze never wavered from Sara’s.

“Is that surprising?” Veronica asked.

“What’s surprising is that you’re dating Lincoln.”

Her mouth accommodated a dry laugh. “Yeah. Doesn’t have ‘nice’ tattooed on his forehead, does he? But he’s all right.”

Sara didn’t really want to hear about Lincoln just now. But something buried deep in her gut trusted Veronica.

One day, she thought, I’ll take her out for coffee and we’ll talk about something other than guys.

Until then, she only asked what she needed to know, “Is he really changed?”

Veronica gave it real thought. Another girl would have probably gotten defensive. In high school, the person you date becomes an extension of you. Any attack on them is an attack on you.

“I think so,” she said.

“Is Michael safe with him?”

“Yes.”

“Sara!”

Both girls turned back toward the rows of seats, where all the families and students had cleared out. Near the exit door, Sara saw a very worried-looking Frank Tancredi, rushing toward the stage.

A sigh built inside her.

Of all the school events that her father had missed, he had to attend the one that ended in absolute disaster.

“Dad,” she said, climbing down the stage.

“Where on earth were you? I looked everywhere.”

His arm shot around her shoulders before Sara could think of a comeback. It disturbed her so much, she was out of things to say. The only times her father touched her was when their hands brushed reaching for the salt at the dinner table.

Veronica traipsed down the stage, brushing past them. “I’ll see you later at the infirmary.” She aimed a polite smile at Sara’s father. “It was nice meeting you, Mr. Tancredi.”

Her father grunted rather than replied, “Likewise”.

When Veronica had gone out, Sara met her father’s eyes, and she could feel in her bones how alien it was. That they never really looked at each other now.

They spoke at the same time:

“I have to go.”

“I’m taking you home.”

Frank blinked in surprise.

“Sorry,” Sara said. “I just—I have to go.”

Part of her expected obdurate refusals. Her father was nothing if not obdurate. Even a slab of steel would have a little flex on him.

Instead, he looked at her, and she didn’t feel the need to launch into an explanation.

A weird sense of comprehension seemed to pass from her to him.

Ridiculous. We’ve never seen eye to eye about anything.

Yet the thought made it into Sara’s head, for the first time ever. A thought that should have been obvious, but that had never occurred to her before.

That once upon a politician’s career ago, her father had also been young.

He said, “So.”

She licked her lips. “So.”

“It’s that boy. The one who played Hamlet. He’s the reason why you’ve been acting so much like a typical teenager.”

There didn’t seem to be an appropriate reply to this. Anything Sara would say to defend herself would make her sound even more like a teenage girl in love.

Which—it occurred to her—is exactly what you are.

“Not a bad actor,” Frank finally said.

“No,” Sara agreed.

A manic beat was still punching at the walls of her chest. She needed to go. But her father was still the adult. If she made a mess of this, he could make it incredibly harder for her to see Michael in months to come.

Sara could have cursed the time that still separated her from eighteen years old.

Someday soon, she’d be an adult, and no one could tell her what to do anymore.

“What do his parents do?” Frank asked.

“He doesn’t have parents.”

Her father’s brows did the light jump that they did, when someone made him an I’m never going to take this deal proposition.

Might as well come clean.

“He just has me,” Sara finished.

“I see. Well. I really want to take you home, now. It’s been a trying evening—”

“Dad, I need to be with him.”

He fell silent.

Frank had never been good at dealing with opposition from the women in his family. Fellow Republicans, Democrat adversaries? He would go at them like an armored knight, spear at the ready.

But Sara remembered now, the old arguments before her mother died. How he would shrug, or look away, or simply extract himself from conflict.

The same must have occurred to him, because he said again, “I see.”

For a second, she thought he would fold, felt absolutely sure that he wouldn’t add anything. They had already gone several inches beyond the layer of veneer that had cushioned all their interactions in recent history.

It would have been insolent to hope for something even more real.

Yet at the so-alien crossroads of her father’s gaze, Sara felt craters of warmth break into her skin. She felt seen. For the first time in a very long time, she felt like she was seeing him.

“You kids.” He laughed. “You need to go easy on us. We should know better, of course. But when we see you shaking loose from what remains of childhood—” He stopped.

Sara couldn’t remember him ever talking to her about such things.

“Just the way of life,” he said. “But it’s hard to remember.”

“To remember?”

He shrugged. It was a small miracle that he still hadn’t broken eye-contact with her.

“That you won’t be young forever.”

Sara was too surprised to hold back an honest answer. “Thank heaven.”

He laughed, a full blown laughter—the sort of laugh that made her wonder if she’d ever really heard him laugh before.

“All right. Go.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I want you at the car in fifteen minutes, so you better make it count.”

Yet she could do nothing but stare at him in astonishment.

He shook his head. There were still embers of that strange laughter in his eyes. “Go, Sara. Fifteen minutes. Then we’re both going home. All right?”

She managed a nod. It took all she had not to run out of the auditorium.

“Sara?” he called.

Row upon row of red-theater seats stood between them now.

Still when she met the line of his gaze, she could feel that same alien connection, resisting rupture.

“Do me a favor, girl.”

“Um. Sure.”

“When normal life hits you and you grow out of all the things you thought mattered. Save one or two. The ones that are worth it.”

Sara considered the real possibility that her father was drunk, or high, or suffering a stroke.

It didn’t seem possible that all it would have taken was a bucket of paint to break the ice that layered every interaction.

Didn’t seem possible that when she stood onstage splashed in what, for all he knew, could have been blood, it’d occur to him, finally, to look at her. To take the time and effort to really see the person she’d become.

“Sure,” she repeated.

“Okay then. I’ll see you at the car.” He checked his watch. “You better run.”

And for the first time since she could recall, she and her father were absolutely in agreement.