I can hear the footsteps quicken behind me before he even opens his mouth.
"Atala!" The steps again, getting louder to show that he's caught up with me. I slow my walk to the library just enough to let him and pull a headphone off of one of my ears.
"Hey Sinclair."
"How's summer been?" He asks, and admittedly I'm relieved to see that whatever goes on at his school hasn't seemed to dampen his spirits. The way we catch up with each other as our families prepare for shows or during school breaks is almost like practicing how our parents talk to collectors, archaeologists, and any of the other experts that come around. Polite. A bit distant. He cheers up when he sees me though, and I'm kind of wishing I could put on more joy as well. Everything on my mind though is too much for him though; he's still a kid in a lot of ways.
"Fine," I say in that practiced, distant politeness. My ex started dating someone else before we officially broke it off and I just kinda had to be okay with it, I think to myself. I gave too much too fast and it meant nothing. But hey, having a break from school is nice. "Not a lot happening. What about you?"
"It's been fine," He says. I can see out of the corner of my eye that he doesn't seem to look up at me how he used to, having finally hit a long-coveted growth spurt. Annoying to be the same height as a preteen, I think to myself with a frown. He's going to be taller than me by next week probably.
Sinclair has been summarizing how the end of the year had gone, how the next one seems like everything is "going to get more serious" because high school is only a year or two ahead. He talks about the classes that he's hoping to have, what he's heard about some of the teachers, but not much else. He's almost excited, but there's a badly concealed nervousness there that I could pick up on almost immediately. He's usually just regular excited when he talks about anything else, like when he goes with his folks onto archaeological digs. I try to think about what middle school was like for me, and it's mostly dissolved into an awkward blur. Maybe for him it's been tougher.
"Taking your knitting to the library?" Sinclair asks, spotting the yarn I have in my arms.
"Yep."
I was hoping for a bit of solitude, but that'll have to be later I guess. I pull the walkman out of my pocket to stop the music before pulling the other headphone off of my ear. There's a spring in Sinclair's step as we walk together, and once we reach the doors of the library he's content to start browsing the stacks by himself for a while. I settle down onto a couch and put my headphones back on. Rather than Saw Strobe, I've put on an old favorite band whose EP I've already listened to probably hundreds of times by now, but I'm comforted by it's familiarity.
The hat that I'm working on is easy enough for me to look up and watch him clamber up and down on the ladder to grab books off of the higher, slightly dustier shelves and carefully bring them back down. After a few minutes, he's accumulated an impressive stack but hasn't cracked one open yet. I pull a headphone away again.
"Are you gonna be able to read through all of that and put them away?"
He wilts just a little bit, and I realize I probably sounded more annoyed than I meant to and try again. "I'm just sayin'... I guess you could probably ask my dad and he might let you borrow some if you can't get through them." I say.
"Really?"
I shrug, and he looks to the pile of books as if cataloguing which ones he'd be able to reasonably haul home. Sinclair finally picks one and sits down at the opposite end of the couch, scrunching his knees up to his chest to prop the book up on. It seemed like yesterday he was still scrawny and small; the way he sits to read is still the same but now in this awkward, suddenly long-legged sort of way. I squint at the spines of the books that he's picked out to read and I feel an ache deep in my chest. It's mostly novels, some books on Neweman lore, an archaeology tome nearly as thick as my arm. Some of them I can remember enjoying at his age, which was only about three years ago. I would've been right in the stacks with him then too.
We're close enough in age where, if things were a bit different, we would've been schoolmates. The past several months of my life have been such a confusing maelstrom that the gap between us feels enormous; Sinclair still has such an earnest innocence, whereas mine has been hollowed out with something cold and blank. Part of it, I suppose, is what someone could call heartbreak but it doesn't seem that enormous. Thorn and I weren't in love. Whatever it was that got taken from me has yet to be replaced with anything substantial.
I get lost in the knitting rounds and the music and start thinking about the next hat. There's probably enough yarn for a matching one for Phoebe, unless she decides that she doesn't want anything matching with Physis anymore--There's a voice just past the music I can't catch, so I fish around for the walkman to stop it again.
"What?"
"You seem sad." Sinclair's stopped reading at some point. Our separate but peaceful bubbles have collapsed and whatever he's seen on my face has his attention now.
"I'm fine," I say a bit too quickly, trying to look focused on the hat.
"No really, you do." He sits up more. I pointedly don't look at him. Without a response from me, he sighs and props his head up on one hand and keeps staring at me.
"Boy troubles?" He says, and I almost snort with laughter.
"Whatever," I say. It's such a ridiculous thing for him to say, but I do crack a smile. "What do you even know about that anyway? You're like, ten."
"I'm not--" He's indignant.
"I know." I keep knitting. He's still hoping that I'll say more, and when I don't he presses on.
"Is it the summer blues?" He asks. My hands pause in the yarn, my eyebrows furrowing up as I try to see if I can intuit what his idea for 'summer blues' would be. "I know that sometimes people just get extra sad sometimes during some times in the year and then it can get better."
"Nah, it's not summer blues," I say. My feelings over the last few months have been noticably flatter. Any extremes in emotion that well up when I try to examine what went wrong, try to dissect my layers of confusion, try incrementally to pry open the pieces that I've forgotten all feel too big. My shoulders slump, and my voice is very quiet. "I guess you could say it's something like boy troubles."
"But you're so cool." He says.
I can feel myself draw in a breath, but I can't exhale. My thoughts, my small movements; everything goes completely still. It takes a long, gruesome moment for everything to start moving again. It was that earnestness again, said in much more of a sincere way than I've heard it as of late. Cool in the eyes of a kid that does not know better.
"There's sooooo much more to it than that. It's not that simple." I say. It's the truest statement I could give. I can feel my pulse in my neck.
"Like how?"
I scoff. "I don't want to talk about it." I say. "It's stupid anyway, you'd get bored with it."
He makes a face. "It can't be any more boring than whatever our parents talk about whenever they're all in the same room."
"It's actually more boring. A snooze-fest." I really want him to drop it.
He's gotten up and paced around a bit, draping over the arm of the couch restlessly. "So, is it that you're just so bored thinking about it and not actually sad?" He asks.
"It's none of your business, Sinclair," I say sharply. When I do finally look at him, his eyes are wide and his ears are drooping a bit.
"Sorry," He says, in a very small voice. He leans back down into the couch and opens his book up, but I could tell he's not really focused on the pages anymore. When I think I could glance without him noticing, I can see there's no tears in his eyes but his face is now sporting a barely-contained stress. His eyes are darting across whatever he's reading, careful to not try to look anywhere else, and I sigh. The knitting gets set aside. The walkman too.
"I'm sorry," I say. He doesn't look up at me yet. "That was mean."
"Yeah." Sinclair says. When the tension leaves his face, he ends up just looking tired. "...You weren't, like... You weren't this snappy last summer."
I'm not sure what to say just yet.
"I guess it hasn't been as good as it was then." I finally reply.
"Yeah." He says again.
We both fall quiet. I don't put my headphones back on, but I do keep the hat set aside and start trying to quickly work on something different. Sinclair's focus finally redirects properly into his reading, and we remain like that for the duration while I knit. The needles I've been working with make it go by fast, and beforelong I'm holding a small, rectangular strip of yarn. I hold it out to Sinclair, who looks at it with confusion.
"Bookmark," I say. "You'll get annoyed if you lose your place after all the trouble you went pulling these down."
That imaginary distance between us never quite went away. If I think about it often, it could be easy to point to even earlier memories: Sinclair being enrolled in private school, giving him a broad range of experiences I just couldn't relate to. Me with my public school. The ways we grew up, how we were raised. The Lovells are generational legends of archaeology, so his passions were practically pre-built for him upon birth. For me, I've had to wrench what seemed interesting enough to keep my attention on, my own passions harder to grasp and keep hold. Our families worked well together with a symbiosis of deep roots too entwined to ever cut. The valley of his expertise of my people versus the lived experience of it from my own life--through fragmented and sewn together from outside sources--was the biggest gap of all.
I would focus on reproductions of the traditional Neweman designs, trying to track down any that were unique to my family and evolving them with contemporary retellings of the modern age. Sinclair would compliment it, in earnest as he does, but he understands it the way that anyone who has just experienced it through books and lectures does. I know that he knows the designs go back for centuries, but what memories does he have attached to them? Mine are of lonely hallways, silent libraries, the leftover pieces of Neweman history that are hiding in plain sight if you cared to look. I could only presume his would be the synapses in his brain drawing connections from the past to present in his lecture notes.
He has a true passion for it. That's never been a doubt in my mind. Passion and professional knowledge are also different from the experiences of a lived life and culture.
I'd do my weavings, I'd tell my family stories, and he would compliment it. He'd point out the small details that maybe the average person wouldn't notice, the points of history that I'd find and introduce back into the world. Each time--
Each and every time--
The gap grew wider, and I started to realize more that it felt like when something was taken. I would start to question why didn't my family have the knowledge he does? Do they care as much as him? Why wouldn't they? My father, happily letting the pieces of Neweman history be auctioned off to sustain our modern life. My mother, born and raised in this very house but probably the one that knows the least about some of the secrets I'm still uncovering about it. Sinclair hosts his own lectures now, runs his shows, mingles with society much like how we would witness as kids, and is known as an expert. He'd been such a star in his family's field that he was able to graduate early, especially with a whole childhood as a head start. I am here still in the shadows, with my whispered designs and unfinished college credits, trying to figure out when the space between us got so wide. Envy always felt like such an ugly thing, but the only person it felt right to blame for it was myself.
"Another success for you, Lovell." I say with a half-tipped glass. There's too many people in my house, but I managed to still slip away outside to get some air and distance from all the noise. Sinclair has too, taking a break from the stuffiness to catch a breath before diving back in.
"Thank you Atala." He says, beaming. The prestige always suited him the way my solitude seemed to suit me.
It's chillier than usual tonight, and I tighten the shawl around my shoulders more to protect from it. I could also just as easily try to tune out the sensation with my magic, but with Sinclair nearby I wouldn't want him in the crossfire. "They're keepin' you busy, huh?" I ask. "I heard some talk that you're going to be leaving again pretty soon."
He sighs and sits down next to me on the porch. "Yes, but I'm heading somewhere that's already been picked clean. One of the researchers at the university was insisting that he may have uncovered some records that could lead us to somewhere nobody else has seen. The last time he did this, all we found was literally just rocks and nothing else." He says.
"Probably a dream site for the geologists though," I say, and he chuckles.
"No doubt."
Over the years, the stretches of silence shared between us have become common but not unwelcome. He's gotten more used to my tendency to quiet, sometimes interrupting it with a fun bit of trivia or something silly that crossed his mind. That's one thing about Sinclair that's stuck with him over the years: not missing an opportunity to try to make me laugh. We enjoy that silence for a bit before he starts telling me some of the gossip I've been missing out on since coming outside, and I let him keep talking. As he does, I keep watching his face and how he holds himself; even here with just us, he has a confident, poised demeanor that traps other peoples' attention.
Watching him sometimes feels like I'm peeking in through a window, observing the life of somebody who had some big secrets of the universe figured out. Merin often gave me that same sense. Just from private conversations alone I know that sometimes their confidence had to be faked at times, but it still seems like it comes with no effort at all. Anything looks easy when it's done well. I'd lost that skill ages ago after leaving college, and the memories of whoever that Atala was who maneuvered through parties and bars with an unearned ease feels like a whole different person by now.
Yet, with his magnetism, he comes to these events unattached. Once or twice he's talked about dates he's been on that never went well, but there's some unspoken quality in those stories that I've never felt sure if I should ask about or not. Likewise for me, romance never comes up. It's hard to date when you don't leave the house much anymore.
Uncannily on cue, there's a half second where he looks at me unguarded and I see it. His gaze lingers. I know this look, I've seen it tons of times on other faces, but this time I've caught it on his. I blink, breaking away from his look and finish the last sip of wine in my glass. I don't know what to do with this sudden bit of information. Surely not.
"You should go keep celebrating," I say. "I'll be back in soon."
"Don't be too long, you'll catch your death of cold," He says and I sigh, exasperated.
"That was terrible. Your sense of humor is really on the rocks now."
"Ouch," He mimes clutching his chest.