Chapter Five: The Cherub Program
"Wait," Harper said, setting down her fork very carefully, like the table itself might tip if she moved too fast. "What Northwestern thing."
Felix's face did something complicated and fast, somewhere between panic and the specific, cornered look of a person who has just watched his own brother hand a live grenade across the dinner table without noticing it was armed.
"It's nothing," he said. "Grant, can you pass the rolls."
"It's not nothing, you've been agonizing over the reply email for two weeks." Grant, twenty-two and unfairly comfortable in his own skin the way Felix had described him, passed the rolls without a trace of malice, entirely unaware of the size of the thing he'd just dropped. "I just assumed you'd told her. My bad."
That was Saturday evening, at the Marsh family's dinner table. First, there was the invitation, three days earlier, that had made Harper's stomach do something complicated of its own.
"My brother's home for a long weekend," Felix had said Wednesday, at her locker, with the careful casualness of someone who'd rehearsed the sentence more than once. "My parents are doing the whole big dinner thing. I want you there. Not for the assignment. For real, this time, if you want."
He's never asked me to meet his family as an actual thing before, Harper had thought, feeling something warm and slightly terrifying unfold in her chest. Ten years of knowing this family from the driveway and the back porch, and this is different, and he knows it's different, and he's asking anyway.
She'd said yes before she could talk herself into a more careful answer, and had spent the three days since alternating between excitement and a low, persistent nervousness she didn't fully understand until she was standing on the Marsh family's front porch Saturday evening, smoothing down a dress she'd changed out of and back into twice.
The dinner itself had gone easier than she'd braced for. Felix's mother remembered, with unsettling specificity, that Harper didn't eat mushrooms, a fact from approximately age nine that had apparently survived a full decade in family memory. His father asked about her college plans with the mild, genuine interest of a man who had clearly decided, on principle, to like whoever his younger son brought home. And Grant, when he arrived twenty minutes late from the airport, dropped into the empty chair across from Harper with an easy, unbothered warmth that made it immediately obvious where at least half of Felix's charm had come from, and none of his anxiety.
"So you're the famous Harper," Grant had said, unwrapping his napkin with the confidence of someone who had never once worried about making a good first impression. "Felix has mentioned you approximately four hundred times since Christmas, for someone he claimed for six months was strictly a childhood friend situation."
"Grant," Felix had said, in the exact tone Harper recognized from every time she'd ever embarrassed her own brother in front of company, if she'd had a brother, which she didn't, which made watching Felix squeak with secondhand embarrassment strangely delightful.
"I'm just saying, the frequency was notable." Grant had grinned, unrepentant, and reached for the salad. "Anyway. Tell me everything. Is he still doing the thing where he makes a joke exactly four seconds before anything gets emotionally real?"
"Constantly," Harper had said, before she could stop herself, and Felix's mother had laughed so hard she'd had to set down her fork, which had bought Felix exactly zero sympathy from anyone at the table.
It had been going fine. It had been going, if anything, better than fine, right up until Grant, midway through a story about his roommate's disastrous attempt at cooking Thanksgiving dinner in a dorm kitchen, had turned to Felix with the easy carelessness of an older brother who had never once had to think before he spoke.
"You still deciding on Cherub, or did you turn it down again?"
The table had gone quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the mushroom story ending.
"What's Cherub," Harper had asked, into the silence, because someone had to, and it clearly wasn't going to be Felix.
Felix's mother and father exchanged a glance that told her this was, in fact, a whole thing the family had opinions about. Grant, sensing too late that he'd stepped on something, reached for the bread basket with sudden, focused interest.
"It's a summer journalism and debate intensive," Felix said finally, not looking at her, pushing rice around his plate with more attention than rice generally warranted. "At Northwestern. Six weeks. I got in back in March. I haven't decided if I'm going."
"March," Harper repeated. "That was before any of this. Before the assignment, even."
"Yeah."
"And you didn't tell me."
"There wasn't anything to tell. I didn't decide anything." Felix's jaw had that tight, defensive set she recognized now from the counselor's office, the one that meant he was one wrong word away from retreating fully behind a joke. "Deadline's not until the fifteenth. I've got time."
"When's the fifteenth."
Nobody answered right away, and it was Grant, of all people, who finally said it, quiet now, clearly aware he'd already done the damage. "Next Friday."
Day thirteen, Harper thought, and the number arrived with a horrible, precise clarity, landing in the exact same place in her chest where the sealed envelope had been sitting all week. The same day as the termination script. He has to decide whether to leave for six weeks on the exact same day we're supposed to stand up and read a script about ending things.
She did the math without meaning to, the way her brain had apparently decided to do math on everything lately. Six days from tonight. Six days to figure out what either of them actually wanted, before a teacher's carefully worded envelope and a university's carefully worded acceptance letter both demanded an answer on the exact same morning.
The rest of dinner passed in the particular, brittle politeness of a family working hard to smooth over a conversation that had gone somewhere none of them intended, and Harper excused herself to the back porch the moment dessert was cleared, needing air, needing a minute away from Felix's careful, unreadable face across the table.
He found her there five minutes later, the porch light throwing long shadows across the same yard where they'd built a blanket fort at age eight and argued about a garden hose at age eleven.
"I should have told you," he said, without preamble, leaning against the railing beside her. "I kept telling myself there wasn't a reason to, since I hadn't decided, but that's not actually true. The real reason is I didn't want you to watch me agonize over something and then find out I turned it down because I was scared, the same way I turned everything else down for the same reason my whole life."
"Or," Harper said carefully, "you didn't want me to watch you agonize over it and realize you might actually go."
Felix went quiet at that, and the quiet told her she'd landed closer to the truth than his first answer had.
"Cherub's a big deal," he admitted finally. "It's the kind of thing Grant did, the kind of thing that looks good on an application to the schools he went to. If I go and I'm good at it, that's one thing. If I go and I'm just fine, just ordinary, in a program full of people who are better than ordinary, that's a very public way to find out I'm not actually as impressive as everyone assumes I am for being funny in a hallway."
There it is again, Harper thought, watching him say it, recognizing the shape of the fear from the counselor's office, from everything he'd told her about his brother. The same fear, different envelope.
"For what it's worth," she said, "your brother didn't get into that program by being scared of it. He got in because your parents let him try, and probably because failing at seventeen felt survivable to him in a way it apparently doesn't feel to you."
"Grant's never had to feel it not survivable. That's the whole problem." Felix let out a short, humorless laugh, staring out at the dark yard. "I used to think if I just never tried the big, real version of anything, nobody could ever actually confirm I wasn't enough. Turns out that's a pretty lonely way to get through high school. Ask me how I know."
"And if you don't go," she said slowly, "you get to keep not knowing. Which feels safer. Except now there's also me, and six weeks away from me two days after we finally said the real thing out loud, and I bet some part of you is using that as a much more comfortable excuse to say no."
Felix's head turned toward her, sharp, something unguarded moving across his face in the porch light.
"That's uncomfortably accurate," he said.
"I've had a lot of practice reading you today." She reached for his hand, lacing their fingers together the way he had in the counselor's office, except this time it was her choosing it first. "I'm not going to tell you what to decide. But I'm not going to be the reason you turn it down either. If you stay because of me, and then spend the rest of the year wondering, that's not exactly the future I want to be responsible for."
"What do you want, then."
"I want you to decide based on what you actually want, not on what scares you least." She leaned her head against his shoulder, feeling him go still, then slowly relax into it. "Whatever that turns out to be, we'll figure the rest out. We're apparently very good at figuring things out under pressure. It's kind of our whole thing now."
Felix laughed, quiet and real, and pressed a kiss to the top of her head, careful and unhurried the way he always was, no packet requirement anywhere near this one.
"Same deadline as the envelope," he said, after a while, his voice gone thoughtful in the dark. "Friday. Whatever I decide about Cherub, and whatever's written in that script, it all lands the same day."
Harper thought of the sealed envelope sitting in her desk drawer at home, FINAL ASSIGNMENT: SIMULATED TERMINATION printed across the front in Mr. Okafor's neat, merciless font, and felt the whole shape of the coming week settle over her like weather she couldn't outrun.
"Then I guess we find out everything at once," she said. "Whether you're staying. What the script says. Whether either of those things is something we get to choose, or something that just happens to us."
"I don't want it to be something that just happens to us," Felix said, quiet but certain, the porch light catching the small, familiar chip in his front tooth as he turned to look at her fully. "I've spent a lot of years letting things just happen to me because it was easier than deciding on purpose and risking being wrong. I'd like this to be the first thing I actually choose, whichever way it goes."
"Then choose it," Harper said. "Not for me. Not because of what's in an envelope some teacher wrote to study our nervous systems. Because you actually want it."
Felix was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Harper wondered if she'd said too much, pushed too hard toward an answer he wasn't ready to give out loud yet. When he finally spoke, his voice had lost the last of its careful, joking edge entirely.
"I think I already know what I want," he said. "I'm just scared of how much it's going to cost me to actually say it."
"Welcome to the club," Harper said softly. "I hear the membership fee's brutal."
Neither of them had an answer for that beyond the answer they were already holding, hand in hand on a porch that had known them both since they were small enough to need a boost onto its railing, and from inside the house, faint through the screen door, Grant's voice carried out to them, apologetic and a little too loud, asking their mother if he'd just ruined his little brother's actual life over a bread basket.