Dead To You

46. totally fine, very fine

In the spirit of Anything but a Backpack Day, Noel Preston was using his backpack for a backpack, which really didn't come as much of a shock after he came to school on pajama day in his uniform, and again yesterday for Throwback Thursday, and scoffed in response when Jenna asked him in the hall before the end of his lunch period if he planned on buying a ticket for the homecoming dance on Saturday. 

The hair falling out from behind my ears while I reached down to grab my textbooks from the front pocket of my backpack hid my cringe at the secondhand embarrassment I felt as Jenna sputtered out a quick response about how the theme was supposed to be really good this year, something celestial she thought, and I sped down the hallway to my next class before he responded, feeling a little too much like I had just seen a reenactment of basically every interaction I had with him in the ninth grade.

Since the funeral, and our late-night dinner at Sub Type later that night, Noel and I hadn't really talked, although we were wordlessly in the midst of a new kind of battle that had taken me by surprise when on his first day back, I found the folded ten-dollar bill that I had slid into his locker the day after the funeral back in my own locker, next to my corduroy toiletry bag and partially tucked underneath the binder for all my syllabuses. 

I promptly returned to his locker, glancing over my shoulder before slipping it back between the slits in his locker door, but the next afternoon I discovered it teetering on the spine of one of my textbooks, back in my locker. 

Currently, the nomadic Alexander Hamilton was in Noel's procession, but after over a week and a half of swapping this bill back and forth, I fully expected it to be back in my locker before the end of the school day. Neither one of us acknowledged this whenever we sat in class together or passed the other in the hall during our lunch period, the frost that had been permeating the air between him and me slowly beginning to thaw with a nod, maybe a subtle wave, I even offered him another smile once, but that was it. 

I wasn't sure if that night made us friends, or if we were still enemies who had just raised their white flags for a momentary ceasefire, or something in between. It wasn't like Noel was himself that night, his stoicism cracked from the moment he cried during his eulogy, and it only continued to splinter in the wine cellar then back at the bluffs when he nearly collapsed, before he ended the evening with dinner with me and a smile of all things. 

I wondered if maybe the reason he hadn't wanted to reach out after that was because he felt embarrassed, or maybe he regretted everything he shared with me. I wasn't sure what other conclusion to come to after I basically confessed that I cared about him just before I got out of his car and then heard nothing after that, nothing but a thin ten-dollar bill shoved back in my locker.

Still, I found myself in the hall outside of the AP English classroom, leaning against the wall beside the water fountain with my picnic basket down my feet as I waited, because earlier I overheard the teacher whispering to Noel that she wanted to see him after class while handing out the results for our first exam of the semester. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as Noel lifted his test up by the corner for a fraction of a second before dropping the paper back facedown on his desk and rubbing his temple. 

I chewed on the inside of my lip, taking in the dark shadows under his eyes that only seemed to have deepened since the funeral, guarding a hollow gaze that used to be so sharp as the PowerPoint slides filled the whiteboard, furiously scribbling notes the entire class but now his hands were still on his desk, occasionally writing one or two sentences down in his notebook before his back slid further down his seat. 

His eyelids looked alarmingly heavy the one afternoon the teacher dimmed all the lights and played a video, and I thought for a second that he might actually fall asleep in class, something I remembered him admonishing before, claiming that it appeared lazy. A little part of me wanted to snidely remind him of this, but the rest of me was too concerned to point out his double standards.