Volume Six: The Nerd Takes Off His Glasses
Chapter 6
Noah never told me what the texts were about. I noticed him get quieter after that night by the fountain — not sad exactly, just more contained, like he'd started keeping something folded very small and very carefully in his back pocket. I asked once, gently, if everything was okay. He said "fine," in the specific tone people use when they mean the opposite, and I let it go, because I didn't yet have the right to push. We'd been an unwilling team for weeks. We were not, as far as I understood it, the kind of team that got to ask each other about family.
Whatever was happening in that folded-up part of his life, it seemed to make him restless in a way I didn't expect. He started running in the mornings. I know this because I run in the mornings too, badly, purely for the Instagram of it, and I nearly collided with him on the quad path three days in a row before I admitted to myself it wasn't a coincidence.
"You're everywhere lately," I said, jogging in place beside him, deeply unwilling to actually stop moving in front of him and reveal how out of breath I was after four minutes.
"I joined the club team," he said, not even breathing hard, which felt like a personal insult. "Rowing. Turns out I'm decent at it."
"Since when do you row?"
"Since I decided I was tired of feeling like my body was something that happened to me instead of something I was in charge of." He said it plainly, the way he says everything, like it wasn't a big deal, which somehow made it a bigger deal.
I want to be honest about the next part, because I promised myself at the start of all this that I'd stop editing myself into someone more flattering. I noticed things about him that week. I noticed the sleeves of his sweater fitting differently. I noticed he'd started eating actual meals instead of vending-machine approximations of meals. I noticed, with a specific, unwelcome little jolt, that he'd started standing up straighter, like a question he used to ask the floor had finally gotten an answer he liked.
And because noticing things about Noah Bennett was new and uncomfortable territory for me, I did what I always do with new and uncomfortable feelings. I made fun of them.
"Look at you," I said, when he showed up to our study session with his hair actually styled instead of just existing on his head. "Did a stylist attack you, or was this consensual?"
"You're allowed to just say you like it," he said, not looking up from his notes.
"I didn't say I liked it."
"You didn't have to." The corner of his mouth did that thing again, the almost-smile he still hadn't fully given himself permission to have around me. I hated how much I looked forward to it.
* * *
The Fall Formal happened on a Friday, in the same gymnasium that gets turned into a ballroom twice a year through the sheer, punishing labor of the events committee. I went the way I always go to these things — early, photographed, radiant, surrounded by a rotating cast of people who wanted to be seen next to me. Blair and I had made a fragile, unspoken peace since the library incident; we weren't what we used to be, but we were something, and that night she stuck close, gossiping about everyone's dress choices with the specific energy of someone determined not to think too hard about anything real.
I didn't notice the room go quiet. I noticed Blair go quiet, mid-sentence, staring at the doorway like she'd forgotten how faces worked.
I turned to see what she was looking at.
It was Noah.
He wasn't wearing his glasses. I found out later he'd finally caved and gotten contacts, mostly, he told me, because his eyes had started watering from the new workout routine and the fogging lenses had become genuinely unbearable, which is such an aggressively unglamorous reason for a scene this dramatic that I believe it completely. He had on a dark, well-fitted jacket that actually belonged to this decade. His hair — that dark auburn I'd apparently never really looked at properly — was combed back from his face instead of hanging into it, and without the heavy frames in the way, his eyes were sharper than I remembered, more deliberate, like he'd been looking at everyone clearly this whole time and simply choosing when to let them see it back.
The gymnasium did the thing gymnasiums do in movies, which I did not expect to happen in real life and found deeply irritating that it did. People actually turned. A girl I vaguely recognized from the rowing team's fan club — yes, apparently that already existed — actually put her hand over her mouth.
"That's Noah Bennett?" Blair said, to no one, to the air, to God.
"Obviously," I said, in a voice that came out sharper than I meant it to.
* * *
I want to tell you I handled the rest of the evening with grace. I did not handle the rest of the evening with grace.
Noah got swarmed almost immediately — girls who'd walked past him in hallways for three years without a flicker of recognition, suddenly remembering they had always found him fascinating, actually. I watched from across the room, holding a plastic cup of punch I had no intention of drinking, doing complicated, humiliating math about how many of them were touching his arm and how long each conversation was lasting and whether he was laughing at anything any of them said, and I hated every single number I was keeping track of, and I could not, for the life of me, stop keeping track.
Blair caught me staring. "You okay?"
"Fine," I said, in the exact tone Noah uses when he means the opposite, which I only realized after I'd said it.
Somebody — I don't even remember who, some sophomore whose name I never bothered learning — made an offhand comment near me about how "the nerd glow-up" was "kind of unfair, honestly, some people don't deserve that kind of glow-up," and something ugly and entitled reared up in me before I could stop it.
"He's not a glow-up," I snapped, louder than the comment deserved. "He's a person who's always looked like this. You just weren't paying attention."
The sophomore blinked at me like I'd bitten her. I felt the heat before I understood why — a small, tight pinch blooming somewhere along my jaw, brand new, entirely undeserved by anyone except myself.
I excused myself to the bathroom so fast I nearly took out a chaperone.
* * *
The mark was small — smaller than the ones before it had ever been, more like an ember than a fire, which told me something about how much had actually changed in six weeks even when it didn't feel that way. I stood over the sink, furious at my own face for keeping such precise, humiliating score.
The door opened. Noah, of course.
"This really is becoming a pattern," I said, not turning around.
"You ran out of the gym like the building was on fire." He hesitated at the doorway the way he always did before deciding a rule wasn't going to apply to him tonight. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened. Someone said something rude about you and I got annoyed on your behalf. That's it."
Noah studied me in the mirror, and I watched him do the math I'd been too proud to do myself — my face, the mark, the timing, the fact that I'd fled a room the second another girl so much as leaned toward him.
"You're not annoyed on my behalf," he said, gently, which was somehow worse than if he'd said it meanly. "You're jealous."
"I am not — " I stopped, because the lie wouldn't finish forming in my mouth, which had never once happened to me before this entire cursed semester started teaching me to be, God help me, honest. "Okay. Maybe a little. Is that insane? Three years, Noah. Three years I didn't know you existed past a punchline, and the second you take your glasses off, half the school suddenly wants to know your major."
"I didn't do any of this for them," he said. He came further into the bathroom, careful, like he was approaching something skittish, which — fair. "The running, the contacts. None of it was about being looked at. I did it because I was tired of hiding behind things. The glasses. The sweaters. All of it. It wasn't really armor against being seen. It was armor against being wanted and then losing whatever wanted me the second they found out what my last name actually opens the door to."
"I don't care what your last name opens," I said, before I could think better of it, which is a sentence I would spend the next several chapters proving true in ways I couldn't yet imagine.
Something shifted in his face — not the almost-smile this time, something steadier, more frightened and more certain at once. "I know," he said quietly. "That's sort of the problem."
* * *
He took me up to the gym's old equipment loft afterward, a narrow balcony above the dance floor that the events committee never bothers decorating because nobody's supposed to be up there. From above, the Fall Formal looked smaller — just a room full of teenagers under string lights, pretending the biggest thing in their lives was a playlist.
"I'm not trying to replace anything," Noah said, leaning against the railing, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him without either of us doing anything about it. "I'm still the guy who reads footnotes nobody else reads. I still think Dr. Alvarez's class is the best forty minutes of my week. I didn't change to become someone else. I think I just finally stopped hiding the person I already was."
"I liked that person," I admitted, quietly, surprising myself with how much I meant it. "Before all this. I just never let myself notice him."
"I know," he said again, and this time there was no problem attached to it, just a kind of careful, unguarded relief.
We didn't kiss. I want that on the record, because everything in me wanted to, and everything in me was also terrified of what it would mean if the mark on my jaw was still glowing faintly under the string lights, proof that I was still exactly capable of being the worst version of myself even while falling for the best version of someone else. So we just stood there instead, shoulders almost touching, watching the party happen below us like it belonged to some other, simpler pair of people.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. I felt it more than saw it — the small, sharp intake of breath he tried to hide, the way his whole body went taut for half a second before he even looked at the screen.
He looked anyway. I watched his face change in the blue light of it, watched the easy, unguarded version of him I'd just spent twenty minutes falling for fold itself back into something careful and closed, brick by brick, right in front of me.
"Noah?"
"It's nothing," he said, in the tone that meant it was absolutely not nothing, and slid the phone back into his pocket before I could see the screen.
I didn't push. I told myself it wasn't my business yet, the same lie I'd been telling myself since the night I saw the car. But standing there in the loft, string lights below us and his carefully blank face beside me, I understood, with a certainty that had nothing to do with curses or mirrors or magic of any kind, that whatever Noah Bennett was hiding was about to stop being something he could hide from me at all.