Page 84 of Open Water
Worth it's the wrong question,Frankie said, somewhere in a Vermont bar with a box of wine and combat boots.That's their question. Cost-benefit. Did you get a return?She'd looked at me like she could see the whole machine running behind my eyes.It's just my life, kid. I like my life. That's the whole answer.
You can't putI like my lifein a Con Law exam. There's no doctrine for it. It doesn't follow from any holding, doesn't cite to anything, isn't precedent and isn't reasoning. It's the thing left over when you stop arguing the cases, and I'd spent twenty years being taught it had no standing at all.
I picked the pen back up and finished. I'm not an idiot, and the discipline is the one thing he gave me that's actually mine to keep, the only inheritance I'm not handing back. I wrote a clean, ruthless analysis of when a court may overturn settled law, and I understood every word of it, and I understood that the whole doctrine was a beautiful machine for never having to ask whether the precedent should have been the law in the first place.
I moved on to question two.
I carried the blue book down to the front twenty minutes early, which would have horrified me in September and didn't anymore. Dr. Merritt looked up when I set it on the desk. Really looked — the cutting gaze, the one that had landed on me for exactly one second on the first day of the fall.
For a second I thought she was going to say something. She'd asked the room in September what it stood for, and I'd had nothing, and some stupid part of me wanted to tell her I'd finally started to find out, even if it would never fit in a blue book.
She just squared my exam on the pile.
"Have a good break, Mr. Harrington."
"You too, Dr. Merritt."
That was all. But she'd asked the question on the first day of the semester, and I'd spent the whole semester being taken apart and rebuilt into someone who could almost answer it, and I think she knew, the way coaches know, that the kid walking out in December was not the one who walked in in September.
The cold hit me on the quad. The trees were down to black branches and the sky had that flat pewter look it gets before snow, and half the campus was already gone for the break, the paths emptier than I'd ever seen them.
"Harrington."
I turned. A guy from the class… Devlin, maybe, or Devin, a quiet kid who sat two rows over and had said perhaps a dozen words to me all semester. He had his bag over one shoulder, headed somewhere, and he'd stopped for no reason I could see.
"Hey," I said.
"That was brutal," he said. "Question three was not on the review."
"It was not."
He nodded. Shifted his bag. And then, just before he turned to go: "Hey, good luck over break, man. With, uh." A small pause. "With everything."
He didn't say whateverythingmeant. He didn't have to. There's a photo of me kissing Liam Moore that everyone knows about, and everyone in that room knew exactly who I was, and this kid I'd exchanged maybe a dozen words with had decided, on his way out of his last final, to stop and say a kind thing about it. To acknowledge the whole mess of my life with three words and a nod and then keep walking.
"Thanks," I said. And meant it more than the word could hold.
"Yeah." He lifted a hand. "See you next semester."
See you next semester.Like it was nothing. Like of course there'd be a next semester, of course I'd still be here, of course the world just kept going and had a place in it for me. He walked off across the quad and I stood there a second longer than I needed to, because I'd spent so long braced for the world to be Marcus and my father that I'd forgotten most of it is just people.
Harmless, kind, regular people.
The footbridge was empty.
I'd crossed it more times than I could count this semester — back and forth, back and forth, Kingswell on one bank and Riverside on the other and me in the middle, hauling a secret across in the dark before dawn. The river ran below, dark and high and loud with December, and the lamps were already on at four in the afternoon, the early dark coming down at the edges of everything.
I stopped in the middle, the way I always did without meaning to. Behind me, Kingswell — the stone, the towers, Whitaker Hall, Wexler, the hallway of faces with the empty space where mine was supposed to go. My father's institution, my father's path, my father's beautiful machine for never asking the question. Ahead of me, across the water, the flatter lights of Riverside, the boathouse, a too-small bed in a room with a potentially broken heater, a guy with nothing to offer but himself, which had turned out to be the only thing worth having.
I'd been telling myself, all semester, that I was crossing back and forth between two worlds. That I was the bridge.
Standing there in the cold, I knew the truth, which is that you don't get to be the bridge forever. Soon the choice gets made. Christmas was coming, and my father, and the long table at the lake, and whatever he'd been building in two weeks of silence — and one way or another the bridge was coming down.
I looked at my own feet. They were pointed at Riverside. They'd been pointed at Riverside for a while now. I was just slow.
I crossed the rest of the bridge, and I didn't look back at the stone behind me, and I walked toward the lights on the other side with the only thing my father ever actually gave me — the discipline, the refusal to quit a hard piece — finally bent toward a question that was mine to answer.
Chapter 21: Liam
