Chapter Six: Practice Runs
"You're doing the thing," Felix said, quiet, hurt threading through the words even though his voice stayed level. "The thing where you decide something's ending before it actually has, so you can be the one who saw it coming."
Harper opened her mouth to deny it, and found she couldn't, because he was right, and being right about it didn't make it hurt any less to hear out loud.
That was Tuesday, day ten, in the school parking lot after last period. First, there was Sunday night, and her mother's kitchen table.
Harper had gone home from the Marsh family's dinner still turning over the porch conversation, still holding the strange, unfinished shape of Felix's half-formed decision like something warm she hadn't decided whether to keep, and she'd found her mother at the kitchen table doing the crossword she did every Sunday since the divorce, the same ritual she'd built for herself out of the wreckage of a life that used to include another person at that table too.
"You've been quiet," her mother had said, not looking up from seventeen across. "Good quiet or bad quiet?"
"I don't know yet." Harper had sat across from her, the way she had a hundred Sunday nights before, and found herself saying more than she'd planned to. "Felix might go away for the summer. Some program. He hasn't decided."
Her mother's pen had paused over the puzzle, just barely, before continuing. "And how do you feel about that."
"Scared," Harper admitted, surprising herself with the honesty of it. "Like if he goes, and it's good for him, that's somehow the same as it ending. Which doesn't even make sense. People go places. It doesn't have to mean anything."
Her mother had set the pen down slowly, giving Harper the particular, undivided attention she usually saved for report cards and college applications, not Sunday night crosswords. "Can I tell you something I've never told you quite this plainly before."
"Okay."
"When your father left, the hardest part wasn't actually losing him. It was how quickly I decided, without ever really choosing to, that I would rather feel nothing large again than risk feeling that particular kind of loss twice." Her mother's voice stayed even, practiced, the tone of someone who had turned this thought over many times before finally deciding to say it out loud to her own daughter. "I told myself it was strength. Self-sufficiency. For a long time I was almost proud of it. It took me years to understand it was actually just fear, dressed up nicely enough that nobody, including me, questioned it."
"It didn't with your father and me," her mother had continued, gently. "For the record. Nineteen years, and it wasn't a summer program that ended it. It was two people who stopped choosing each other on purpose, every day, the boring unglamorous way you have to keep choosing someone. That's not the same thing as distance. I need you to actually believe that, because I watch you build your whole life around not needing anyone specifically so you never have to test whether they'd choose you back, and baby, I did that too, for years after your father left, and it is a very lonely way to keep yourself safe."
She sees it too, Harper had thought, feeling something in her chest crack quietly open, the same crack Felix's honesty had started in the vending machine alcove. The exact same thing Felix said about himself, except in me instead.
She had not slept well again that night, and by Monday morning she had already, without quite admitting it to herself, started building a small, careful distance between herself and the thing that scared her most, the same way she always had.
It started small. She let Felix's texts sit an extra hour before answering. She sat with Maren at lunch Monday instead of finding him first, telling herself it was normal, that couples didn't have to spend every lunch together, that this was healthy independence and not a rehearsal for something worse. She caught herself, twice, drafting a text that started with maybe we should and deleting it before finishing the thought, unwilling to look directly at what she'd actually been about to suggest. By Tuesday, when Felix caught up with her in the parking lot after last period, jogging a little to close the distance, she watched herself do it again, the small, reflexive step back before he'd even reached her.
"Hey," he said, slightly out of breath, smile faltering when he registered the step. "You've been weird since yesterday. Did I do something?"
"No." Harper shifted her bag on her shoulder, buying a second she didn't need. "I've just been thinking. About Cherub. About the script on Friday. Maybe we should, I don't know, not put so much weight on all of it. Keep things a little more casual until we know what's actually happening."
Felix went very still, the particular stillness she recognized now as the one that meant something had landed somewhere real.
"Casual," he repeated.
"I just mean, there's a lot up in the air right now. Maybe it's smart to not get too, you know. Invested. Until things are more settled."
"You're doing the thing," Felix said, quiet, hurt threading through the words even though his voice stayed level. "The thing where you decide something's ending before it actually has, so you can be the one who saw it coming."
Harper opened her mouth to deny it, and found she couldn't, because he was right, and being right about it didn't make it hurt any less to hear out loud.
"I talked to your brother about it, sort of," she said instead, deflecting toward the wrong target entirely. "Well, my mom, actually. About how you build a whole life around not needing anyone so nobody gets the chance to disappoint you. Turns out I do the exact same thing, just louder about it."
"So you know what you're doing right now. While you're doing it." Something in Felix's voice cracked, not angry exactly, just tired in a way she hadn't heard from him since the counselor's office. "I told you the actual, honest, embarrassing truth about myself eleven days ago and you kissed me by a broken vending machine and told me you weren't going anywhere. Now the second something feels uncertain, you're building the exit before anyone's even asked you to leave."
"That's not fair."
"You said that to me too, day seven. And I said it's just true." He wasn't smiling now, none of the easy performance left in him at all. "I get it, Harper. I really do, better than almost anyone could, because I've spent my whole life doing my own version of the same thing. But I can't be the person standing still while you practice leaving me on a schedule, over and over, every time something scares you. That's not fair to either of us."
He's not wrong, Harper thought, feeling the truth of it land somewhere she couldn't argue with, no matter how badly some old, well-worn part of her wanted to. You've spent two days rehearsing an ending so you wouldn't have to feel surprised by one. That's not caution. That's just fear wearing caution's clothes.
"I don't know how to just trust that this doesn't end badly," she said, quieter now, the armor cracking properly for the first time since Sunday. "I've never actually seen it work. Not up close. Not for longer than eleven days."
"Neither have I." Felix reached for her hand, and this time she let him, feeling the familiar warmth of it steady something in her chest that had been quietly shaking since her mother's kitchen table. "I don't have proof this works out either. Nobody gets proof in advance. You just have to decide you're willing to find out, every single day, the same boring way my parents apparently still do it after twenty-five years, and my mom still remembers you hate mushrooms after a decade, so clearly somebody in that family knows how to keep choosing people on purpose."
Harper laughed, small and unsteady, and felt some of the tightness in her chest ease for the first time since Sunday night.
"I'm sorry," she said. "For the casual thing. That wasn't honest."
"I know." Felix squeezed her hand, gentler now. "For what it's worth, I'd rather have the scared, honest version of you than the careful, casual one. I've had ten years of the careful version being my friend. I like this one better, even when she's actively trying to break up with me over a parking lot."
"I wasn't trying to break up with you."
"You were absolutely rehearsing it. I've got a front row seat to rehearsing things badly, remember. I recognize the genre." But he said it gently, no real accusation left in it, just the particular relief of two people who had both, separately, almost made the same mistake in different directions.
They stood there a while longer, the parking lot emptying out around them, buses pulling away in low diesel groans, and Harper found herself leaning into him without deciding to, the way she used to lean into her mother at that kitchen table, except this felt like the version of that comfort she'd been too scared to let herself want.
"You know what's strange," Felix said, after a while, his chin resting lightly against the top of her head. "A month ago I would've made a joke right now. Something about how at least we're consistent, both of us sabotaging things in our own specific, well-rehearsed ways. I actually had one loaded and ready."
"Why didn't you say it."
"Because you'd have laughed, and it would've been a real laugh, and then we'd have moved on without actually fixing anything, the way we always used to." He pulled back just enough to look at her properly. "I'm trying to get better at not doing that. Turns out it's a lot of work."
"Tell me about it," Harper said, and meant it in every direction at once.
"Six days," Felix said eventually, into her hair. "Friday's going to happen whether we're ready or not. Whatever's in that envelope, whatever I decide about Cherub. I'd rather face it with you actually here than with you halfway out the door pretending it's for my own good."
"I'm here," Harper said, and made herself mean it all the way through, no careful exit rehearsed anywhere behind it. "All the way through Friday. Whatever Friday turns out to be."
Her phone buzzed against her hip as she said it, and she felt Felix go still against her before she'd even reached for it, some old instinct in both of them already bracing for bad news out of habit.
It was a message from Mr. Okafor's class group chat, the one the whole cohort had been added to for logistics, and it took her only the first line to understand why half the parking lot around them had suddenly gone quiet with the collective sound of forty phones buzzing at once.
Reminder: due to unexpected interest from the district office, Friday's Unit 7 presentations will now be open to observers. Please come prepared to present your termination scripts in the auditorium rather than individual classrooms.
Harper read it twice, the words rearranging nothing about their actual meaning no matter how many times she looked at them, and felt Felix's arm tighten slightly around her shoulders, both of them staring at the same six sentences that had just quietly rewritten the size of what Friday was going to be.
"Auditorium," Felix said finally, flat. "Observers. What district office cares this much about a high school psych elective."
"I don't know," Harper said. "But I don't love that we're about to find out in front of an audience."
Around them, the parking lot had gone strange and quiet in the particular way a crowd goes quiet when it senses something it doesn't yet understand, phones lighting up in a dozen hands at once, and Harper felt the whole shape of Friday shift under her feet, no longer just a private reckoning between two people and a sealed envelope, but something the entire school would apparently be watching happen.