BEAUTIFUL RUIN
Chapter Two: Topography
Senior year at Cresthaven High had the specific quality of a place that had decided it was the last version of something. Cassie could feel it in the hallways, the restless energy of eighteen year olds who knew they were leaving, who were either very good at that knowledge or very bad at it, either expertly performing not caring or, more often, caring so much that the performance kept cracking.
She was somewhere in the middle, and she suspected she always had been.
Reid Callahan was in her AP Literature class. She discovered this on the first Monday of September, when the teacher read through the enrolment list and his name arrived in the middle of the alphabet, and something in Cassie's chest tightened pleasantly before she had decided whether to let it.
He came in two minutes after the bell, not late exactly, the teacher had still been doing administrative things, and folded himself into the one empty seat in the row beside hers. Up close, in the fluorescent ordinariness of a classroom, he looked even more like someone still growing into the shape of himself: the sleeves of his shirt pushed to his forearms, a faint shadow of stubble he had clearly tried and failed to be rid of that morning, dark eyes that found hers immediately and did not look away first.
"Cassie Moore," he said, low, just for her.
"Reid Callahan." She felt the heat climb her neck and willed it not to reach her face.
"AP Literature," he said, glancing at the syllabus the teacher was handing down the row.
"You took AP Literature," Cassie said.
"The teacher at my old school told me to. She said I should do the one that was most like thinking."
"And you agreed with her?"
"She was usually right." A corner of his mouth lifted, not quite a smile, enough to do something unhelpful to Cassie's pulse.
The teacher began. Reid opened a notebook, actual paper, not a laptop, which struck Cassie as unusual and then, immediately, as the kind of detail she wanted to know more about, and wrote the date at the top in handwriting that slanted forward like it was in a hurry to arrive somewhere.
She noticed this. It was an insignificant thing, and she noticed it anyway, the way she seemed, lately, to notice everything about him: the way he tapped his pen twice against the desk before he committed to an answer, the way his attention, when the teacher asked a difficult question, went inward first and outward only once he had something worth saying, the particular low register of his voice when he spoke directly to her and not to the room.
It unsettled her, how quickly the noticing had become a habit. In three years at Cresthaven High she had perfected the art of being unremarkable, of answering questions with the second best version of her actual thought, careful, correct, forgettable. She had never once let herself catalogue a boy's handwriting. She told herself, walking to her next class with her notebook pressed to her chest like a shield, that it meant nothing, that new students were simply interesting by virtue of being new, that her pulse had no business behaving the way it had when his knee had briefly touched hers under the shared table.
Her pulse, predictably, did not listen.
* * *
The first assignment was a personal essay, five hundred words on a theme of your choosing, due Friday. The theme should be something you actually think about, the teacher said, not something you think I want to read about.
Cassie wrote about the reservoir.
It had been her geography since she was six, the place her mother had first taken her to look at something larger than the house, the place she went when the inside of everything became too much, the place she had watched from the roof on the night she turned eighteen. She wrote about what it meant to look at something that did not need an audience. She wrote, carefully, haltingly, crossing out three different versions of the final sentence, about wanting to become the kind of person who was complete without one.
She handed it in on Friday without knowing whether it was good, or whether she had simply exposed something she would regret exposing.
The following Monday the teacher returned the essays with comments written in small, decisive handwriting. On Cassie's she had written: Your voice is very clear. Don't edit it out.
Cassie looked at the words for a long time, feeling something warm and frightening move through her chest, half pride and half the particular terror of being seen.
After class Reid said, "Good comment?"
"How do you know it's good?"
"The way you're looking at it." His eyes were on her face, not the page, and her skin prickled under the attention.
She showed him. He read it, his mouth moving faintly over the words the way some people's did, and when he looked up his expression had gone serious in a way she had not expected.
"That's a specific compliment," he said. "Don't edit it out. What did you write about?"
"The reservoir."
"Watching from the roof?"
She stared at him. "You remembered that."
"You mentioned it once. It seemed specific." He said it simply, as though remembering the small true things people said was an ordinary habit and not, as far as Cassie's experience went, an extraordinary one.
"It's the thing I do," she admitted, "when things are, "
"Too much?"
"Yes." The word came out smaller than she meant it to.
He nodded, something settling in his face, recognition rather than surprise. "Mine was about Boston. The harbour. We used to sail."
"You sail?"
"Used to. My father has the boat. He's still in Boston."
"I'm sorry."
"It's fine. His version of fine." He said it lightly, but Cassie had learned, in three weeks, to hear the seam underneath his lightness.
They walked out into the September morning, still warm, the school around them in the particular rhythm of its first weeks, everyone pretending the year had not yet truly begun.
"Reid," she said.
"Yes?"
"The teacher's comment. Don't edit it out."
"Yes?"
"Do you, " She hesitated, aware of her own pulse. "Do you edit yourself?"
He looked at her properly then, and something about the directness of his gaze made the back of her neck go warm. "In the writing?"
"In general."
He was quiet a moment, and she watched him decide, visibly, to answer honestly. "Yes. Since the move. Since Boston."
"Why?"
"Because when something difficult is happening, the edited version is easier to present."
"And the unedited version?"
"Is harder to explain," he said, and something passed between them that felt, to Cassie, like the first real exchange of her entire senior year.
"I've been editing myself for three years," she said. "I'm trying to stop."
"For university?"
"For, " She stopped, made herself finish it. "For me. I want to know what I actually think. Before I leave here."
He looked at her for a long moment, long enough that she felt the look land somewhere low in her stomach, warm and unsettling.
"Cassie Moore," he said.
"Yes?"
"I think that's, " he said.
"What?"
"Braver than it sounds."
She felt the compliment move through her like warmth spreading from the centre out. "You didn't say ambitious."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because ambition is about what you want to achieve." His eyes held hers, steady, entirely without performance. "And you're talking about who you want to be."
Cassie looked at him and felt something settle into place, quiet and certain. This person is real, she thought. This person actually sees me.
* * *
By October the maple tree in his front yard was doing exactly what she had always known it would do, shedding its leaves in that extravagant, unbothered way, as though it had rehearsed the performance for years and did not need a witness. Cassie was raking the shared property line on a Saturday morning when Reid came out, hands in his pockets, breath visible in the cold.
He looked at the drifts of orange and gold. "The tree."
"Yes."
"It's doing it on purpose," he said.
"That's what I always thought."
He glanced at her, something warm in his expression. "I'll get a rake."
He got a rake. They worked the pile between them in a silence that felt, to Cassie, oddly intimate, two people in a yard doing an uncomplicated thing that required no performance from either of them, her skin cooling in the October air, her chest warm every time his sleeve brushed hers.
"The essay," she said. "The harbour."
"Yes."
"What did the teacher say?"
"That the ending felt like it was protecting something. That I should write the version that didn't protect it."
"And are you going to?"
"I don't know. The protected version was already more than I usually write."
"What were you protecting?"
He was quiet, raking, and Cassie waited, learning already that his silences were not refusals, only the sound of him deciding how much to say.
"Missing him," he said finally. "My father. We used to sail and now I'm here and the boat is there."
"And you didn't write that?"
"I wrote around it."
"The edited version."
"Yes."
They raked for a while longer. The cold had put colour in his cheeks, and Cassie found herself watching the line of his jaw, the way his breath fogged and dissolved, and feeling, absurdly, that she could have stood in that yard with him for the rest of the morning and called it enough.
"Reid," she said.
"Yes?"
"You can miss him," she said, "and still be okay here."
He looked at her, something loosening in his face. "I know. I'm figuring that out."
"Me too. The figuring out."
"What are you figuring out?"
"Everything," she said. "What I actually want. What I think. Who I am when I'm not performing the version that's easiest."
"The roof version?" he said, and her breath caught at how easily he had found the name for it.
"The roof version. Yes."
The maple tree shed another small flurry of leaves, unbothered, extravagant, and somewhere low in Cassie's chest a different kind of warmth was gathering, one she recognised and did not entirely trust.
"Cassie," he said.
"Yes?"
"Can I see the view?" he said. "From the roof."
She looked at him, at the careful hope under the question, and felt her pulse climb. "You want to come up?"
"If you'd let me."
She glanced at the attic window, at the small dark square that had been hers alone for three years, and felt the specific vertigo of being asked to share something she had never shared. "Saturday," she said. "After dark. The reservoir is better in the dark."
"Is it safe?"
"There's a flat section. I've been up there since I was fifteen. It's fine."
"Fine," he said, almost smiling. "The Cresthaven kind."
"Better than fine," she said. "It's actually good."
He held her gaze a beat longer than the moment strictly required, and something low in her stomach tightened, warm and nervous at once. "Good," he said.
"Saturday. After dark."
He nodded, and they raked the rest of the leaves in a silence that felt, to Cassie, charged with everything neither of them had said yet.
Two eighteen year olds raking leaves on an October morning, she thought, going inside at last, her hands cold and her chest anything but. The edited version would not include this.
The real version is exactly this.
She stood in the front hall for a moment after she had shut the door, listening to the particular hush of her mother's house, and let herself feel, without editing it, the full shape of what had just happened in the yard. It was only raking leaves. She knew that, said it to herself plainly, the way she might have explained the afternoon to a stranger who had not been there. Two neighbours and a pile of maple leaves and an invitation to a roof that had, until an hour ago, belonged to no one but her.
And yet her whole body felt different walking up the stairs than it had walking down them that morning, lighter in some places and heavier in others, her skin still faintly, absurdly aware of every point where his sleeve had brushed hers across the width of a rake handle. She caught her own reflection in the hallway mirror and found herself smiling at it, an unguarded, unedited smile she did not remember choosing, and for a long moment she simply let it stay there.
Saturday was five days away. She counted them without meaning to, the way she had once counted days until a holiday, and was startled by how much the counting felt like hope.
* * *