Eli had exactly three rules for surviving junior year:
- Sit near a window.
- Never volunteer first.
- Do not make eye contact with Damian Reyes unless you want to lose your mind or your lunch.
The window was already taken.
By Damian.
Eli stood in the doorway of Ms. Barrett’s English classroom, gripping his spiral notebook like it was a shield. The room still smelled like dry erase marker and the faint, bitter breath of duct-taped air conditioning. Their friend group—well, orbit group—had spilled in before the bell: Naomi with her lavender hoodie and a stack of sticky notes, Priya sorting pens by color like she was about to perform a magic trick, and Ezra, who seemed to be asleep with his eyes open.
And Damian, of course. Window seat, sun crowning his hair like the universe had wired the fluorescents to flatter him. He lounged with one foot propped against the rung of his chair, the hem of his uniform polo untucked like casual defiance. He wasn’t even looking at the view. He was doodling in a notebook, head tilted, the sharp line of his jaw softened by an expression Eli refused to call focused.
Ms. Barrett clapped once. “New seating chart. Check the board.”
Eli checked the board. Then he checked it again, as if the names would reorder themselves out of pity.
Barrett, in her infinite mortal imperfection, had placed Eli Chen and Damian Reyes in the same row, across the aisle, desk to desk—close enough to catch each other’s sighs, far enough to pretend they didn’t.
Damian noticed him and smiled, the kind of smile that had consequences.
“Window’s warm,” Damian said as Eli slid into his assigned seat. “Don’t lean over or you’ll melt.”
“I’ll risk it,” Eli said, placing his notebook down with careful quiet. “Some of us adapt to harsh climates.”
“Oh yeah?” Damian’s eyes flicked to Eli’s perfectly arranged pencils. “Like controlled environments?”
Naomi kicked Eli’s chair leg lightly as she passed. “Play nice, children.”
“We’re not—” Eli started, but Damian had already turned toward the glass, tapping his pencil against an open page.
Ms. Barrett launched into a welcome-back speech about essays being doors rather than walls, about stories as a way of holding hands with future versions of ourselves. Eli listened. Usually he found comfort in the shape of sentences, the way grammar clicked like gears. Today his gears were sanded down by the sound of Damian’s pencil on paper and the occasional shift of Damian’s knee tapping the desk.
“Quick write,” Ms. Barrett said. “Describe the thing you’re most afraid of forgetting.”
Pencils skated. Keys clicked. Eli wrote about the smell of his grandmother’s kitchen in winter: ginger and clove and the oil that never washed out of aprons, the small sink where she rinsed apples and sang under her breath. He wrote about how memory wasn’t a photograph so much as a shadow cast by a moving thing. He wrote because he knew how.
He finished and glanced up. Damian’s paper was mostly negative space, edges dark where he’d rubbed an eraser to exhaustion. The page held the ghost of something he’d been drawing—then changed his mind.
Damian looked up at exactly the same time Eli did. For half a second they just blinked at each other, caught.
“What?” Damian mouthed.
Eli made a gentle circling motion with his finger, the universal sign for you’re dramatic. Damian’s mouth crooked.
“Time,” Ms. Barrett said. “Trade with your aisle mate. Two minutes to give the kindest possible note and one craft suggestion. Go.”
Aisle mate. Eli’s lungs did something unhelpful.
They half-passed, half-tugged their papers into each other’s hands. Damian’s handwriting sloped slightly right, like it was leaning toward the next sentence. The first lines were plain: My cousin moved away last spring, and sometimes I forget the way he laughed when he tried to whistle. Eli’s eyes ran on. The paragraph didn’t stay plain. It swerved into the messy texture of a backyard—chain-link fence, a dying basketball hoop, the rubbery sound of a leash snapping free and a pitbull’s joy off the leash, childhood contained and then briefly uncontained. It didn’t say much, but in the negative space, something rang true. It read like someone who knew exactly what he wanted to say and then made a deal with himself not to say it.
Eli circled a sentence and, because he couldn’t help himself, wrote: Your images are strong. Let this be bigger. You can do “bigger.” And beneath that, in smaller letters: Also, the dog deserves a name.
When he looked up, Damian was reading Eli’s page with a face Eli had only seen in class when a problem threw him: eyebrows drawn, mouth softened, arrogant line of his shoulders temporarily unstrung.
Damian cleared his throat. “Uh. You used ‘silted’ like a person who reads.”
“I am a person who reads.”
“That’s the problem.”
“I’m thrilled to be your problem.”
Damian’s eyes flicked to the margin of his own page where Eli had written. Something complicated moved behind them. He handed Eli’s paper back. In the top corner, next to the title, Damian had drawn a tiny—was that a gingerbread man? No, a dumpling. With a smile. Below it, he had written: This made me hungry and sad. In a good way. You’re good. Try not to hide in the pretty words when the ugly ones show up.
The bell startled both of them. Desks scraped. Ezra woke mid-stretch like a cat. Naomi gathered her sticky notes into a neat constellation.
“Homework,” Ms. Barrett called over the swell. “Read Baldwin. Bring a question. I want something that makes your brain sweat.”
In the hallway, people flowed like a current around the lockers. Damian fell into step beside Eli—accident, Eli told himself. The hall narrowed near the stairwell where the paint always peeled; everyone jammed into the turn.
“Hey,” Damian said, like they’d already been in the middle of a conversation. “Are you going to the club fair today? Priya’s forcing half the grade to sign up for things.”
Eli hugged his notebook. “Might. If I can avoid being trapped into something ‘fun.’”
“You love fun,” Damian said.
“I respect it from a distance.”
Damian’s smile flashed. “So, a restraining order on joy.”
Eli, against his better judgment, laughed. “Something like that.”
They separated at the stairwell. Eli watched Damian take the steps two at a time, energy spilling, and told himself it was only data: the way a rival moved, the pace of his gait, the fact that he never touched the handrail.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
By lunch, the cafeteria had become a climate zone of its own. Warm. Loud. Smelling faintly of oranges and tragedy.
Eli slid his tray onto the end of their usual table. Naomi and Priya occupied one corner with a map of the club fair spread between them, highlighters poised like surgical tools. Ezra nursed a chocolate milk like he was negotiating a contract.
“We’re splitting reconnaissance,” Priya announced as if Eli had been present for the preamble. “Naomi and I will handle arts and humanitarian. Ezra will, shockingly, handle chess and nap club.”
“There’s a nap club?” Eli asked.
Ezra blinked. “It meets in the auditorium. You have to prove you can sleep through the bell.”
Damian arrived late, tray stacked with a criminal number of tater tots. He dropped into the seat across from Eli like gravity had switched directions for him and only him.
“Sports and chaos are mine,” he said, pointing at himself with a tot. “I’m signing Eli up for intramural futsal.”
“Absolutely not,” Eli said simultaneously with Naomi’s “That’s adorable.”
“You’re scared of joy,” Damian said.
“I’m scared of spraining important brain connections.”
“You don’t need ankles to read.”
“Deeply incorrect,” Eli said, but he was smiling into his carton of milk when he said it, and Damian would probably file that away along with every other careless data point Eli had ever failed to quarantine.
The club fair took over the courtyard after lunch, tables bright with Sharpie posters and bowls of candy meant to bribe the uninterested. Band was tuning on the steps. The robotics team had a small robot blinking at passersby like a patient insect. The yearbook table had a sign that read: We See You. (Eli found that creepy on principle and avoided eye contact with the entire table.)
Damian vanished to do his monarchic rounds. He knew everyone—Eli didn’t understand how someone could never seem alone. He respected it and resented it. He stood at the edge of the courtyard beside Naomi and Priya, who were engaged in a multi-front war for signatures on a community service roster.
“Chen,” a voice said.
Eli turned. Coach Morales loomed, baseball cap shadowing his eyes. “You still doing AV?”
“Technically,” Eli said. “I prefer the back of rooms.”
“Front of rooms needs you.” Morales jerked his head toward the gym. “Our projector hates me.”
“Everything hates you,” Damian called as he reappeared like a stage cue, a ribbon from the debate booth tied around his wrist. He caught the look Eli shot him and added, “With respect, Coach.”
“Reyes,” Morales said, unbothered. “Tryouts next week. Bring the new kid you were talking about.”
“Ezra?” Damian said. “He’s allergic to sunlight.”
“Other new kid. The one who looks like he can run. The tall freshman with existential dread.”
“That narrows it down,” Damian said, grinning.
Morales rolled his eyes and moved on. Damian slid a flyer across the table to Eli. “Futsal. Come on. I’ll teach you to toe poke.”
“You just made that up.”
“It’s a real thing,” Damian said, deadly serious. “It’s ugly, but effective. Like your cardigan.”
Eli glanced down at his cardigan. “This cardigan has tenure.”
“Then it can coach,” Damian said. “Five o’clock. Meet at the blacktop.”
Eli opened his mouth to decline. Naomi’s foot pressed lightly onto his. He looked up. Her eyebrows had the exact same shape they had when a sentence wasn’t quite working and she knew it but knew how to fix it.
“Okay,” Eli said. “I’ll show up. But if I die, I’m haunting your locker.”
“Deal,” Damian said, like he sealed pacts for breakfast. “You can alphabetize my ghosts.”
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
The blacktop was all glare and echo by five. The sun had started its fall; long shadows stretched off the fence like something from a sketchbook someone had smeared. A cluster of kids were already passing a ball between them. Damian was easy to spot—bright laughs; a body that knew how to occupy a space like it belonged there.
Eli arrived in unathletic shoes and an expression. Damian jogged over, tossed him a pinnie that smelled faintly like unrequited dreams, and clapped a hand to Eli’s shoulder in a way that would have felt patronizing if it hadn’t been… steadying.
“First lesson,” Damian said. “Don’t apologize for not knowing.”
“I’m not apologizing,” Eli said.
“You’re apologizing with your posture,” Damian said. “Head up, shoulders back. Look like you could outrun your problems even if you can’t.”
“I don’t run,” Eli said.
“You will,” Damian said. “Stance.”
He placed Eli where he wanted him—like moving paragraphs until the cadence clicked. The ball tapped against Eli’s foot, sneaky and light. Damian showed him how to angle his ankle, how not to overthink. Eli overthought anyway. The ball skittered away. Kids laughed, but not cruelly; it didn’t feel like a gym class, didn’t feel like a test. Damian retrieved the ball and told a stupid story about his first game where he ran in the wrong direction and scored on his own goal. The story improved with each telling. Eli kept resetting his feet. The blacktop radiated heat into the backs of his knees. His brain tried to do geometry for him; his body wanted fewer angles and more decisions.
“Toe poke,” Damian said. “Ugly, effective. You’re at the edge of the box. No time for elegance. You just stab the ball at an angle and surprise the keeper.”
“I feel like I’m being lured into something.”
“You are,” Damian said. “Competence.”
They practiced in short bursts, and the world narrowed to the foot, the ball, the angle, the position of Damian’s mouth when he said good, the way praise sounded different when you didn’t expect it. Any time Eli’s chest tightened with the ancient shame of not being “sports,” Damian deflated the moment with a joke or a drill, like he’d learned to interrupt the thoughts before they rotted.
At some point Eli forgot to narrate himself and simply… did it. The ball shot off his toe and thudded against the fence. It wasn’t pretty, but it went where he wanted. Something inside him hopped a fence he’d never climbed.
“See?” Damian said, a little breathless. “Ugly. Effective.”
Eli chased the ball, chest warm. “Don’t impute your aesthetics to me.”
“Vocabulary is a flex,” Damian said, jogging after him. “I respect it.”
By the time the sun slid behind the math building and left the world cooler, Eli’s shirt clung and his hair stuck damp to his forehead. He hated how good it felt. He hated that he wanted to keep hating it and couldn’t.
They lingered as others left, the way people do when finishing would feel like dropping something fragile. Damian leaned against the fence, the chain-link drawing diagonal shadows across his cheek. He pulled the ribbon from his wrist—the debate ribbon—and tucked it into his pocket like a secret.
“So,” Damian said. “Hate me less yet?”
Eli pretended to consider. “Marginally.”
“I’ll take marginal,” Damian said. “That’s where empires begin.”
Eli snorted. “Do you ever turn it off?”
“Sometimes.” A hitch of quiet. “When it’s not working.”
The sky deepened. From the far field came the thud of a kicked ball, the cheer of something small accomplished. The fence hummed lightly under Damian’s shoulder.
“What did you erase in Barrett’s class?” Eli asked. The question slipped out before he could edit it.
Damian’s mouth went still. “You noticed that?”
“You made a confetti storm with your eraser.”
“Yeah.” Damian looked down. “I was drawing the fence in my cousin’s yard. It’s dumb.”
“It wasn’t dumb,” Eli said. “You should keep it.”
“Maybe,” Damian said, which Eli recognized as the exact word people used to put the lid back on something hot.
They walked off the blacktop together, shoes scuffing grit. Past the science wing, someone had chalked an enormous octopus wrapped around the words TRY AGAIN. The evening made everything softer, even the edges of Damian’s grin.
At the bike rack, they paused without deciding to. Damian lifted his chin at Eli’s notebook. “You always carry that thing?”
“Insurance.” Eli tucked it tighter under his arm. “Some of us have to write thoughts down or they go feral.”
“What do they do when they go feral?”
“They eat the ankles of people who try to make them play sports,” Eli said.
“Hot,” Damian said with a laugh that caught on something. “Listen, uh. You were… kind. In your note. About my writing.”
“I was honest.”
“Same difference.”
“Not always,” Eli said, and the line landed gentler than he intended. He cleared his throat. “Your images were good. You kept… not saying the part you wanted to say, but the edges of it were there. That’s harder than it looks.”
Damian’s eyes flickered, then steadied. “I don’t… I’m better with pictures. Or movement.”
“You’re good with people,” Eli said before he could stop it.
Damian went quiet. A bird skittered in the hedge. A car door slammed once, far off. When Damian spoke again, the bravado had stepped out for a smoke.
“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “being good with people just means they don’t look too closely at you.”
Eli looked, then. Not the way you look at a rival to measure his stride; the way you look at a sentence to see if the comma belongs. Damian wasn’t performing—just… standing there. Boy on a sidewalk. Shoulders tired.
Eli’s rule about eye contact betrayed him thoroughly. He didn’t look away. “I looked,” he said, almost a whisper. “You’re still there.”
Damian swallowed. “Well. Okay then.”
“Okay,” Eli said, like they’d signed the same invisible thing. “See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Damian said, backing his bike out of the rack. “Hey—five o’clock again?”
“You trying to accelerate my death?”
“I’m trying to give your ghosts cardio.”
“Fine,” Eli said, and he found, to his irritation, that the word fine came with a small smile he wasn’t in full possession of.
Damian swung onto his bike and pushed off, one foot, then the other, easy balance that made the air around him feel less heavy. He didn’t look back, which is how Eli knew he wanted to.
Eli stood for a moment with the quiet, the way he always did when days felt like chapters ending on a comma, not a period. He opened his notebook and wrote a sentence he didn’t quite understand yet: There are people who are windows and people who are mirrors, and sometimes the ones who are both are the ones who scare you.
He closed the notebook. The evening smelled faintly like cut grass and the distant burn of something sweet. He headed home.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
The next morning, Eli got to class early enough to steal the stretch of desk under the second window. The light fell across his page like a hand.
Damian walked in late, hair damp, tie already loosened as if he’d tried to be formal for five minutes and got bored. He slid into his seat and, without looking, nudged a napkin across the aisle with two tater tots folded inside.
“For the brain,” he said, eyes still forward.
“Bribery?”
“Protection,” Damian said. “I need my rival sharp. Be boring if you weren’t.”
Eli considered the offering like a diplomat presented with an unusual treaty. He ate one. It was warm. He hated that. He hated that warmth had a taste.
Ms. Barrett started class with Baldwin, as promised. People asked decent questions. Eli asked a precise one that made Barrett’s smile go bright and dangerous. Damian, who rarely spoke unless he had the best answer in the room, raised his hand and surprised everyone, including himself.
“Is there a… I don’t know, a point where telling the truth about something hurts the story?” he asked. “Like if you say too much, does it break? Is there… I guess I’m asking how to know how big the truth should be.”
The room went quiet. Eli felt his chest echo, like someone had knocked politely on his ribs.
Barrett looked at him the way she looked at kids who were more than they’d decided to be yet. “Sometimes truth is heavy and you have to build a strong sentence to carry it,” she said. “Sometimes, if you try to carry too much, you drop everything. The work is learning the difference between more and enough.”
Damian nodded slowly, like he was filing the words into a cabinet no one else saw. Eli watched him do it and felt, against all the old rules, something begin.
At the end of class, Damian drew another dumpling at the top of Eli’s page. This one wore tiny sneakers.
“Toe poke,” he wrote in ridiculous bubble letters. Underneath, smaller: Five o’clock?
Eli, traitor to himself, drew a tiny fence next to Damian’s name. Bring the drawing, he wrote.
When he passed the page back, their fingers brushed—meaningless, crowded-room proximity. But Eli felt it somewhere specific, like a stitch taken in.
Damian’s eyes flicked up. Not a challenge. Not a dare.
A question.
Eli looked away first this time, on purpose, so he could keep the power of saying yes.
He had time.
He had time to keep hating him less, and wanting more.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
The second week of the new seating chart was survival by attrition. Eli adapted. He timed his pencil sharpening to avoid Damian’s, he trained himself not to notice when Damian stretched in his chair, and he developed a whole taxonomy of sighs just for Damian’s benefit. Damian retaliated with doodles slipped into Eli’s notebook margins—an army of dumplings, each in increasingly absurd outfits.
By Friday, the dumpling had a cape and a villain monologue written in tiny block letters. Eli caught himself laughing in the middle of Ms. Barrett’s lecture and had to disguise it as a cough.
“Do you two need to be separated?” Barrett asked, more amused than scolding.
“Yes,” Eli said immediately.
“No,” Damian said at the same time.
The class snickered. Barrett shook her head and went on. Eli refused to look at Damian, which was of course exactly when Damian leaned closer across the aisle and whispered, “Admit it, you’d miss me.”
“Like one misses a toothache,” Eli muttered.
Damian grinned as if that counted as affection.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
The Friend Group Orbit
Lunch was always the great equalizer. Their table gathered every day out of habit more than design, a satellite cluster of personalities. Naomi mapped out everyone’s weekend plans like a campaign general, Priya wielded colored pens like she was annotating existence, Ezra floated in and out of consciousness. Damian was the gravity, even when he didn’t try to be.
“Eli should join us for karaoke,” Naomi declared one day, sliding her phone across the table with the sign-up list.
“No,” Eli said, without looking.
“Yes,” Damian said, already scrawling Eli’s name. “His voice is tragic but in a soulful way.”
“I haven’t sung in public since third grade,” Eli said.
“Perfect,” Damian replied. “The world’s overdue.”
Ezra cracked an eye. “Can you at least do Wonderwall? It’s tradition.”
“I don’t negotiate with terrorists,” Eli said.
The others laughed, but Damian was watching him differently, as if Eli’s refusal was just another language he wanted to learn.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Study Session Mishap
By late September, the first big English essay loomed like a storm cloud. The group decided to study at the library after school. Damian sprawled across two chairs with his notes in a chaos spiral; Eli lined his papers in perfect symmetry.
“You know,” Damian said, “you’d save time if you just highlighted everything instead of deciding which parts are important.”
“That defeats the purpose of highlighting,” Eli replied.
“The purpose is to make the page look like confetti.”
Eli reached across and neatly aligned Damian’s crooked stack of handouts. “There. Now it doesn’t look like a crime scene.”
Damian blinked at him. “You just… touched my chaos.”
“It offended me.”
Naomi, overhearing, muttered, “God, just kiss already.”
Eli choked on his water. Damian smirked but didn’t deny it.
The room went quiet for a beat too long. Eli bent furiously over his essay draft, but the words tangled, letters refusing to form. He hated that his ears were warm. He hated that Damian noticed.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
The Locker Incident
One Monday morning, Eli opened his locker to find it stuffed with—of all things—rubber ducks. At least a dozen, bright yellow, beady-eyed, squeaking when he tried to move them.
The friend group gathered instantly, drawn by the absurdity.
“Artistic,” Naomi said.
“Symbolic,” Priya added.
“Quack,” Ezra offered helpfully.
Damian leaned against the lockers, smugness radiating. “Guess you’ve got new fans.”
Eli narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t what?” Damian asked, too innocent.
Eli picked up a duck and lobbed it. Damian caught it easily, spinning it once in his palm before setting it on top of Eli’s stack of books. “Cute,” he said.
“I will end you,” Eli muttered, shoving the ducks into his backpack.
“Promises, promises,” Damian replied.
But that afternoon, when Eli reached into his bag for his notes, he found one duck left behind, a sticky note attached in Damian’s scrawl: Even rivals need mascots.
He stared at it longer than he should have, until the librarian asked him to move because he was blocking the aisle.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Friday Night Lights
Their school football team wasn’t good, but the games were social currency. The group decided to go together one Friday, though Eli only agreed because Naomi promised free hot chocolate.
The bleachers were cold metal, the lights harsh. Damian sat too close, knee brushing Eli’s. The crowd cheered for a touchdown that never quite happened.
“Why do people come to these?” Eli asked.
“Community,” Damian said. “Energy. Tradition.”
“Noise,” Eli countered.
“Noise is half the point.” Damian grinned at him. “Don’t you ever want to just… not think?”
“I don’t know how.”
Damian went quiet at that. For once, no witty retort, no easy smile. Just the hush of a boy who knew exactly what Eli meant.
They sat through the rest of the game in companionable almost-silence, sharing a packet of stale popcorn. At the end, Damian stole the last piece and tossed it in the air, catching it in his mouth. Eli rolled his eyes but felt something soften in his chest.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Closing Beat
The following Monday, Ms. Barrett announced the next big assignment: a group project on contemporary American voices.
“Pairs,” she said. “Check the board for your partner.”
Eli glanced up, scanning quickly. His stomach dropped.
Damian Reyes.
Across the aisle, Damian caught his eye. A slow, wicked smile spread across his face.
“Guess we’re married now,” he whispered.
Eli groaned, burying his face in his hands. “This is how I die.”
But a part of him—tiny, traitorous—didn’t hate the idea at all.