Page 36 of Takedown

The bus back was the other kind of bus — not the library, not the republic. The third kind, the best kind: the victory bus at night, half the lights off, everybody wrecked and fed and warm, Miles asleep mid-sentence against the window, Kirby driving us home through the dark with the radio on low like a man sailing a ship full of sleeping cargo.

Danny and I sat across the aisle again. Assigned seats. The republic's laws held even in the dark.

Somewhere in Connecticut, his hand came across the aisle.

Not dramatically. That's what I need you to understand about the bravest things he did — none of them were dramatic. His arm just extended into the dark aisle between us, palm up, open, the same undefended offer as the dropped hands in the Pit, and I looked at it in the passing highway light — the tape scars, the knuckles, the hand that had taken a ranked man's tie away that morning — and then I looked up the aisle at forty sleeping teammates and one driver's rear-view mirror, and I did the math my whole life had trained me to do.

And then I put my hand in his anyway, under the cover of the dark and a folded jacket, and we rode like that through two states — not looking at each other, watching our separate windows, hands laced in the space between like a secret with a pulse — and I memorized it against loss, the way my grandfather's generation catalogued paintings: the highway sodium light going amber-black-amber across the seatback, the diesel hum, his thumb moving once across my knuckles somewhere outside Hartford, the whole sleeping republic around us and the two of us awake in it, hidden in plain sight, choosing which true thing the dark could see.

Rule three had died at a diner. Rule two was on life support in Miles Bellamy's discretion. And I lay my head back on a bus seat somewhere in Massachusetts, holding hands with a boy from a burning town across the aisle of my family's sport, so happy it registered as a kind of fear, and thought: four rules. We're going to need better rules.

Halloran stood up as we pulled through the covered bridge, and the lights came on, and hands returned to their home countries, and he read out the week from a folding sheet: practice times, film Monday, and —

"Saturday. Green Singlet Ceremony." The bus, half-asleep, made its noise; the freshmen looked confused; the seniors grinned. "Formal hall, seven o'clock, dress like your mothers hoped. Starters get their competition singlets. It's a hundred and some years old, you'll behave like it. Kovac." He didn't look up from the sheet. "That means you. Starters bring family if they can travel. Invitations went out Thursday."

The bus rolled up the hill toward the palace, all gold windows in the black, and beside me across the aisle Danny Kovac went very still — invitations went out Thursday — doing arithmetic I could read from two feet away: a loading-dock schedule, a bus fare, a man in a recliner who had never in his life seen the inside of a formal hall.

"Your dad," I said, quietly, under the noise of forty guys gathering bags.

"Shifts." One word, flat, the flatter the truer. Then, because we didn't do the fence anymore, not with each other: "He'd come. If I asked, he'd trade the whole week and eat the overtime and come. That's the problem. It'd cost him three hundred bucks he doesn't say he doesn't have, to sit in a room where—" his jaw worked once, "—where they'd be kind to him. Warm. The whole table nodding along. I've seen how the kindness works now." He pulled his duffel down from the rack. "I'm not doing that to him. He gets the ceremonies where nobody's kind. States. Nationals. Real ones."

I could have said many things. Most of them were about my own father, who would be there Saturday, whose kindness Danny had just described with the precision of a man who'd eaten one dinner at the Hearth Club and understood my entire childhood. What I said was:

"Then Saturday you get the singlet, and Sunday morning you call him and describe it. Slowly. Food-radio rules."

The February in his face broke all the way this time. "Every course," he said. "I'm gonna describe the forks."

"There'll be four."

"He's gonna lose his mind."

And I sat in my seat doing my own arithmetic, which I did not say out loud, because the golden weeks don't read bills, but I'll write it here where it belongs:

My father was on the ceremony list too. He came every year. Eleven lines above the empty space, he came every year — and this Saturday he'd sit in candlelight and watch a boy from Brandt Hollow receive the singlet at my weight, in the hall where four generations of us have dressed like our mothers hoped, with me applauding in the audience.

Saturday. Seven o'clock. Both our fathers' worlds, one room, and us in the middle of it wearing our teammate faces.

Terrible system.

The only one there is.

Chapter 16 — DANNY

"Absolutely not," Miles said, from my doorway, to the funeral blazer.

"It's fine—"

"It is not fine. It's a parole blazer. Toby, back me up."

"It's a parole blazer," said Toby, without looking up from his telescope. "He wore it to dinner at your club and I believe it lowered the building's value."

I'd have argued, except Miles was already inside the room with a garment bag over his shoulder — he'd come pre-loaded, he'd planned this whole intervention, that's the thing about Miles you learn eventually: the sunshine is load-bearing but underneath it he plans like a general — and he unzipped the bag on my bed and there was a tuxedo. Black, actual, real, with a discreet label inside from a tailor whose name even I recognized.

"Whose is it?"

"Mine. My backup. We're the same shoulders — don't argue, I've drilled next to you for three months, I know your shoulders better than my own — pants'll be a half inch short, nobody looks at ankles by candlelight." He was already pulling out cufflinks. "Bow tie's a real one, I'll tie it, don't touch it."

"Miles."