The morning had passed in a kind of fragile miracle. Jeremiah kept waiting for the other shoe to drop—a shoulder check in the hallway, a muttered comment as he walked past a cluster of boys, a spitball aimed at the back of his head during second-period history. But nothing came. Not even a look. By the time the bell for lunch rang, his shoulders had unclenched just enough for him to notice the ache in his neck.
Don't jinx it, he told himself, packing his binder into his backpack with careful, quiet movements. Just keep your head down and don't jinx it.
Half the school emptied out in the usual exodus. Sneakers squeaked on tile, lockers slammed, voices rose and fell in a chaos of laughter and cursing and plans for the next few hours that Jeremiah didn't want to know about. He waited at his desk until the hallway thinned, then stood and stretched. His spine popped. He'd been sitting rigid all morning, afraid to take up space.
He didn't go to the cafeteria. He never went to the cafeteria. Too loud, too many eyes, too many chances for someone to spill a tray on him "by accident." Instead, he stayed right where he was—Ms. Chen's classroom, third row by the window. The afternoon sun slanted through the grimy glass, warming the dust motes that floated lazy in the air. He pulled out his first sandwich, the peanut butter and banana, and unwrapped it slowly.
That was when he noticed he wasn't alone.
Four girls sat scattered around the room: two at a table near the whiteboard whispering over a shared phone screen, one curled in a desk with her hood up and earbuds in, and one by the door, idly braiding her hair and staring at the ceiling. Normal. Familiar. He'd seen them all before, quiet kids like him who preferred the classroom to the chaos.
But in the back corner, slumped so low in his chair that his spine looked like a question mark, was a guy Jeremiah didn't expect.
He was scrolling on his phone, thumb moving slow and unhurried. A red bandana was wrapped around his head, knotted at the front, a few dreads slipping out from underneath. His jaw was sharp, cheekbones high, skin a warm deep brown that caught the light even in this dim room. He wore a plain white tee that stretched a little across his chest, and his sneakers—Jordan retros, Jeremiah noticed, the kind that cost more than his mom's weekly grocery budget—were propped up on the empty desk in front of him.
Handsome, Jeremiah thought, before he could stop himself. The word landed soft and dangerous in his chest.
He knew who it was. Everyone knew who it was. That was Darnell—well, everyone called him "Dre." He ran with the 60s, or maybe the 80s, Jeremiah could never keep the sets straight, just knew the bandana colors and which blocks to avoid after dark. Dre had a reputation. The kind that made teachers lock their laptops when he walked into the room. But also… the kind that came with test scores in the high nineties and essays that Ms. Chen once read aloud as an example, her voice full of surprised admiration.
How does he do both? Jeremiah had wondered before. How do you stay alive in the streets and still know the quadratic formula?
He'd never seen Dre stay after lunch. Not once. Dre was always gone by the time the second wave of kids shuffled back in, off to wherever it was he went—probably to meet up with his boys, probably to do things Jeremiah didn't want to picture. But here he was. Slumped. Scrolling. Existing in the same quiet air as the rest of them.
And then Dre looked up.
It was quick—just a glance, lazy and unbothered, his eyes sweeping the room like he was cataloging who stayed and who left. His gaze landed on Jeremiah for half a second. Maybe less.
Jeremiah's face went hot. He looked away so fast his neck cracked again, shoving half the sandwich into his mouth even though he'd stopped chewing. His heart hammered against his ribs like a caged thing.
Stupid, he thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
He was already too feminine for these halls—small, pretty in a way that drew the wrong kind of attention, soft where boys were supposed to be hard. And now he was blushing like a girl over some gang member who probably thought he was a freak. If Dre ever found out—if anyone ever found out—Jeremiah didn't want to imagine what would happen. The bullying was bad enough when they just thought he was weak. If they knew he was gay?
He bit down on the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper. Then he forced himself to chew, to swallow, to stare at the crumbs on his napkin like they held the secrets of the universe.
The rest of lunch passed in a blur of small sounds: the whisper of phone screens, the crinkle of snack wrappers, the distant thump of music from someone's earbuds. Jeremiah finished his first sandwich and started on the second, slower this time. He didn't look at the back corner again. Not once. But he could feel Dre there, a warm weight at the edge of his awareness, and the vanilla on his wrists suddenly seemed too loud.
When the bell rang for fifth period, the teacher walked in.
Ms. Rivera. She taught math—Algebra II, the bane of Jeremiah's existence even though he studied it more than any other subject. She was a heavyset woman with gray-streaked braids and a voice that had gone hoarse from years of yelling over teenagers. Today she looked tired. Her blouse was wrinkled, and there was a smudge of what might have been coffee on her chin.
"Alright," she said, dropping her bag on her desk with a sigh. "Anyone want to keep going on the chapter? Or are we done for the day?"
Silence. The four girls glanced at each other. Dre didn't look up from his phone. Jeremiah pulled his hoodie sleeves over his hands.
Ms. Rivera waited five seconds. Then ten. Then she exhaled through her nose and said, "Yeah. That's what I thought."
She sat on the edge of her desk and pulled out her own phone, scrolling absently. The class settled into a low hum of nothing. Jeremiah, grateful for the quiet, unzipped his backpack and pulled out his math homework—a worksheet on systems of equations, due tomorrow, half-finished and smudged with erased pencil marks.
He bent over it, chewing on the end of his pen, trying to remember the substitution method. His scratch paper was a mess of false starts. He'd solved for x but got a negative that didn't make sense, and when he plugged it back in, the whole thing unraveled. He erased. Tried again. Erased harder, until the paper thinned.
He didn't notice Ms. Rivera get up. He didn't notice her cross the room, grab a spare chair from the corner, and drag it across the linoleum with a soft scrape. He didn't notice anything until the chair settled next to his desk and her shadow fell across his worksheet.
"Mind if I sit?" she asked, but she was already sitting.
Jeremiah looked up, startled. "Oh. Uh. N-no, go ahead."
She pulled the worksheet toward her, squinting at his work. Her nails were short and unpainted, her hands warm and solid on the paper. "You're close," she said. "But you're making the same mistake a lot of kids make. Look." She pointed with the tip of her pen. "You substituted the y-value into the wrong equation. See? Here. Try it again, but use the second one this time."
Jeremiah nodded, his cheeks flushing a little. Not from embarrassment this time—or not the bad kind, anyway. Ms. Rivera had a way of making you feel like the math wasn't a wall but a door, and she was just handing you the key.
He erased the last few lines and started over, her pen hovering nearby to guide him. She didn't take over. She never took over. She just waited, patient, while he fumbled through the steps, and when he got to the end and found that x equaled something that actually made sense this time, she tapped the paper once.
"There you go."
Jeremiah let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. "Th-thanks, Ms. Rivera."
"You're a good student, Jeremiah," she said quietly. Not loud enough for the others to hear. "Don't let anyone make you feel like you don't belong in here."
He didn't know what to say to that. So he just nodded, and she squeezed his shoulder once—brief, firm—before standing up and dragging the chair back to its corner.
The room was still quiet. The afternoon sun had shifted, now casting long rectangles of light across the floor. In the back, Dre had put his phone down and was watching—not Jeremiah, exactly, but the space where Ms. Rivera had been. His expression was unreadable.
Then his eyes flicked to Jeremiah. Just for a second.
Jeremiah looked down at his worksheet so fast he nearly gave himself whiplash. His heart was doing that stupid thing again, the one where it forgot how to beat in a normal rhythm. He pressed his pen to the paper and pretended to work on the next problem, even though he couldn't see the numbers anymore.
Don't look up, he told himself. Don't. Look. Up.