Chapter 6.2

He came around the corner at seven forty-four and she was already there.

She was standing at the top of the front steps facing the direction he came from, her backpack over one shoulder, her hair down. When she saw him she didn’t wave or move. She just stayed where she was and let the fact of her being there say whatever it said.

Jack took it in without breaking stride. He came up the steps and fell into place beside her the way he always did, as though she’d been standing there every morning for months.

“You’re early,” he said.

“I woke up early,” she said.

He nodded. They went inside.

He didn’t say anything else about it. But he carried it the whole day — the image of her standing there, facing his direction, having arrived before him for the first time since the stairwell. She hadn’t waited to be found. She’d gone to the place and waited for him to arrive. The distinction was small and enormous simultaneously, and he understood it clearly and said nothing about it to anyone.

Some things were better left to do their work in silence.

The week had a different quality than the weeks before it.

Not dramatic. Nothing you could point to from the outside and call changed. But there was a texture to it that hadn’t been there before the dinner — a slight ease in how Étain moved through the school day, as though something that had been braced had loosened a degree. She still looked back at him in the cafeteria line on Monday. He still held his position and waited. But the look was shorter than it had been the week before. She caught herself doing it and turned back to the line a half second faster.

He noticed. Said nothing.

Tuesday she made it through the hot food station without freezing for the first time. She chose a bowl of soup and a roll and kept moving. Small. Unremarkable to anyone watching. Jack ate the soup without comment when she set the tray down, and the conversation at the table moved on, and Étain sat in her chair with a quality of stillness that was different from her usual stillness — not the stillness of someone trying not to draw attention, but the stillness of someone who had just done a thing and was quietly aware of having done it.

Priya, across the table, glanced at Jack once. He was looking at his soup.

By Wednesday the girls at the table had completed whatever internal assessment they’d been running since the nurse’s office image had circulated three weeks earlier. The conclusion was visible in small ways — the way they included Étain in conversation without making a production of including her, the way they didn’t stare when she froze or stumbled. They’d decided she was worth protecting. They’d also decided, with the particular accuracy of girls who have been paying close attention, that Jack Turner was something they didn’t have a clean word for yet.