The inner courtyard after classes went on with its ordinary life.
Jacob stood at the parapet surrounded by his own: Craig, Priscilla, her friend with a coffee. The conversation ran itself — yesterday's practice, somebody's party on Friday — and Jacob took part in it on the surface, on autopilot, nodding in the right places. Inside him, like a swallowed stone, lay "after six." He had told no one anything. Not Craig, not Priscilla. The very thought of explaining where he was going tonight, and with whom, was impossible — he could barely explain it to himself.
And then the conversations around him began to die.
First behind his back, then closer — the way lights go out in sections. Heads were turning in one direction. Jacob turned along with everyone else — and saw.
Across the courtyard, in a straight line, came Simon.
A month ago that distance would have been impassable for him. Twenty meters of open asphalt between the colonnade and the parapet where those people stood — for years his body had plotted its routes in an arc, along the walls, head down: a single glance in their direction could cost him a shove, a word, a ruined day. He had never once in his life walked up to that group. He had never looked their way for longer than a second.
Now he walked in a straight line — and inside him it was level and quiet. The one who had spent years being afraid simply didn't live here anymore.
This wasn't courage. Fear, though, is care for the future: for what they'll do to you later, tomorrow, afterward. Simon's future was scripted down to the last line, and in that script there was no room left for "later." And the people at the parapet, all those faces that for years had decided what his day would be like, had stopped being people. Scenery. Furniture on the way to the one person he needed.
The car could have been asked for quietly, one on one, catching Jacob at the exit. That would have been simpler — and that was exactly why it wouldn't do.
He needed to know for certain. Yesterday, in the empty lecture hall, Jacob had said "fine" — but he'd said it in private, where promising and forgetting cost nothing. Here, though, in front of Craig, in front of Priscilla, in front of the whole courtyard, agreeing was the most expensive thing of all: here Jacob was the master, here he could bark, hit, trample him for his friends' amusement, as he'd done hundreds of times, and no one would be surprised.
So let him choose. If he said "yes" anyway — right here, out loud, in front of them — then it wasn't an excuse and it wasn't tactics. Then , and Jacob would come.
Simon didn't call it a test, even to himself. He simply walked, and watched what would happen.
He stopped a step and a half away and looked Jacob in the eye.
— Hey.
That one word, addressed to Jacob like that, out in the open, was an outrage — and a short, bewildered ripple went through the group: the girls exchanged glances, Craig's eyebrows went up. Jacob froze. Recognition and a dull alarm collided in his face: he knew who this was and what was between them — and he had no idea what to expect from this new Simon in front of people.
— What do you want? — he forced out at last, low, wary.
Simon held his gaze.
— Can we take your car after class?
In a level, emotionless voice — the way you ask what time it is. And that made it ten times worse than any threat. Jacob started to open his mouth — and found nothing to answer: in front of everyone, just like that, out of nowhere, neither "yes" nor "no" would fit the picture his crowd was looking at right now.
A pause hung there — awkward, ringing. Priscilla's friend choked on her coffee.
And Craig did what Craig always did.
He didn't need to think — his training thought for him. Years of the same game: the freak comes into view, the freak gets hit. Hundreds of times he had done it to Jacob's approving snicker, at his silent prompting, at his nod; it was their practiced combination, like a pass and a catch. Craig snorted contemptuously and defused the situation in the familiar, poisonous way:
— Aw. Our freak decided to be the king's personal little whore? — He gave a bark of laughter and turned his whole body toward Simon, limbering up for more. — What do you want from him, faggot?
And out of habit he cut his eyes toward Jacob — for his reward. Like a dog that's brought back the stick.
Before, Jacob would have laughed along with the rest. The laughter was the reward, the currency of that combination — and Craig waited for it with the certainty of a man who has never once been refused.
But the fury came to Jacob before any thought did.
It rose all at once, and it was older than today. "Faggot," thrown at Simon in front of everyone, struck where too much of Jacob's was locked away: the locker room, the purple marks of someone else's fists on white ribs — a trace left by a hand that wasn't his — yesterday's "we're friends," said to the director on his behalf. And at the very bottom, unnamed,
Jacob's eyes darkened.
— Shut your fucking mouth before I smash it in, — he forced out in an icy tone, and took a step toward Craig.
One step — but the kind that made Craig physically sag. The shoulders went down, the palms jerked up, opening, the gaze darted sideways — his whole large frame folded in a second into the posture of easy, easy, we're friends here.
— Bro… come on, I was just— — he mumbled, and shut up.
— Jacob, what's going on with you? — Priscilla said quietly, at a loss, touching his elbow.
— Nothing. — He shook her hand off harder than he meant to. — Everything's great.
It came out in a way that convinced no one — and her least of all.
The years in which Craig had learned to hit on a nod had taught him something else as well: to obey instantly, without questions, when the master shows his teeth. He didn't understand what he'd gotten it for. He didn't even try to understand — he simply obeyed, as he always had, and backed off, staring at the asphalt.
The group stood frozen in mute shock.
And the explanation drove up to Jacob right behind it — obliging, convenient, ready-made: the director is watching. Any "faggot" thrown around in front of witnesses is a noose around his own neck; he hadn't been protecting Craig from his own stupidity just now, he'd been protecting himself from the committee. The explanation settled neatly on top, like a lid. The real thing stayed underneath, in the dark, unnamed.
Priscilla stood a meter and a half away and saw everything.
Her latte had frozen halfway to her mouth. First — this one, the one from the video: grey, pale, walking straight across the courtyard as though he were in the same department and did this every day. Walks up. Looks Jacob in the eye. Asks for the car — Jacob's car — in the tone you use to ask someone to pass the salt.
Then — Craig with his standard-issue joke. The usual number; she'd heard it a hundred times and a hundred times had smiled at it lazily.
And then her boyfriend, who was supposed to smirk and forget it, turned to his best friend with a face that made her go cold under her own ribs. "Before I smash it in." Over this one. Over the grey freak from someone else's video.
Priscilla slowly lowered her cup and began to count. She wasn't a fool, whatever her girlfriends might think: counting was something she could do. "Baby," in the corridor, let slip so carelessly that he hadn't noticed it himself. The practice where he played as if he were settling scores. The gaze that kept snagging on the same grey figure in the crowd. And now — this: Jacob, ready to smash in Craig's face over a word he'd been slinging around himself for years.
Priscilla tried substituting the convenient answer: he's defending his victim from other people's hands — kings don't like it when their prey gets touched. The explanation almost fell into place. Almost. One short word got in the way, the one she'd just thought herself: "his."
She said nothing. She only watched Jacob take the freak roughly by the shoulder and lead him aside — and memorized it. All of it. Down to the last detail.
— I thought we were meeting at your place, — Jacob tossed out under his breath once they'd gone a dozen steps from the group. He was nervous, and angry at himself for it; his fingers tightened on the other's shoulder harder than they needed to. — It's right around here, isn't it.
— My father's got friends over tonight, — Simon lied calmly, without blinking. — They'll be drinking beer and watching football. But we have a great house out of town. It's close too, we'd just need to drive a bit. It's a perfect… quiet place.
Jacob drilled him with a look for several seconds, hunting for the catch. There had to be a catch — there was obliged to be one — but in front of him stood nothing but an absolute, smooth, impenetrable calm, and there was nothing to catch hold of. He gave up.
— Okay. I'll be waiting for you in the university parking lot after six.
He turned and walked back to his own — to Craig, to Priscilla, to the familiar circle he still considered his and which was already coming apart at the seams — a little faster than he should have.
And Simon stayed standing there, watching his back. Watching the broad figure return to that circle. And on his pale face something slowly surfaced that only distantly resembled a smile: thin, crooked, mean — the shadow of a smile, not a smile.
And meanwhile, inside him, something strange was happening.
Jacob had just stood up for him. Out loud. In front of everyone. Cut Craig off, stepped at him, threatened to smash his face — for him, for Simon. Words the old Simon would have prayed for; a scene the Simon of a month ago would have replayed for weeks afterward, warming himself at it. He listened inward — attentively, with a cold, investigative curiosity, the way you listen to a numbed limb.
Nothing.
Between him and that scene hung a film — dense, grey, long since a part of his eyesight. Through it Jacob was visible as one thing only: a hand on his throat, soda in his hair, the word "faggot" spat out in the locker room. Through that film, protection read the only way it could: that's how you drive someone else's dog away from a thing of your own. A proprietor's gesture. Nothing more.
Maybe once, those words could have changed everything. Maybe there had been a day when Simon would have forgiven him everything for one such step. But . There was no one left to accept the protection.
He adjusted the strap of his backpack and walked away. There were several hours left until six, and he needed them.
The main things he had managed over those two days — silently, methodically, in that same left-leaning handwriting with which he had once written entirely different lines in a notebook.
He'd gone to the pharmacy the day before yesterday — deliberately to the other end of town, to a far one where no one knew him. Cold neon light, a queue of two old women with prescriptions, a bored girl at the register. He stood his ten minutes calmly, looking at the floor, and his hands didn't shake — not when he paid, in cash, in small bills, nor when a package of strong sleeping pills disappeared into an olive backpack, between a notebook and a statistics textbook. The most ordinary purchase by the most ordinary student. No one looked at him twice.
The hardware store took longer. He picked the one on the way out of town, by the highway — big, echoing, with rows of tools to the ceiling, where the customers are many and the staff are few. He moved between the shelves unhurriedly, with a list, weighing links in his hand, testing fastenings for give, checking diameters. Thick steel chains. Carabiners. Anchor bolts. Collars from the "everything for large dogs" aisle. When he dumped it all onto the counter with a dull metallic clatter, the middle-aged salesman in his work coat looked over first the heap of metal, then the skinny pale boy with the empty eyes, and swallowed.
— So what sort of beast are you after, then? — he asked, attempting a joke.
Simon raised his eyes to him and stayed silent exactly long enough for the joke to die a natural death.
— A big one, — he said.
And paid. In cash as well.
And yesterday there had been the house. Before, he hadn't gone near it — and there'd been no reason to: as recently as three days ago no plan had existed at all, only a blunt, hopeless pain. The plan had come all at once, whole, there in the director's office, sitting beside Jacob — and from that minute Simon had simply been carrying out what he already saw finished. He'd gotten out to the house exactly once, yesterday: a bus to the fork in the road, then on foot through a forest still soaked from the downpour. What he did there until full dark, only the walls knew. He left when everything needed was already prepared and waiting.
All that remained was to pack the bag. Simon : on top — two blankets, a pack of beer, a bag of sandwiches. Truth for the inspection. Everything else went underneath, beneath it, and clinked dully when he pulled the zipper shut.
At six, dusk was already settling over the empty university parking lot.
Simon stood motionless under a dead lamppost — a dark figure on grey asphalt. The massive gym bag dragged heavily at his arm; he didn't shift it or set it down. He simply stood and waited, watching the exit from the roundabout.
The harsh light of headlights cut the dusk. Jacob's car swung smoothly into the lot and stopped right in front of him — hood toward him, headlights in his face. The window rolled down.
Jacob sat behind the wheel. He looked over the boy standing outside — and immediately cut a suspicious glance at his burden.
— What's that for? — he asked through the half-open window.
Simon tilted his head slightly. His face, in the headlights, remained serene.
— I brought a couple of bottles of beer and something to eat. And blankets. There's no heating out there right now, — he answered lightly, matter-of-factly.
The suspicion in Jacob's eyes smoothed out. Beer — that he understood; beer put everything in its place, turned a strange outing into a comprehensible one. So they'd sit, drink, sort their shit out like human beings. So at least it wouldn't be boring.
— Well, chuck it in and get in, — he tossed out, nodding at the back seat.
A pause. The headlights burned into Simon's face, and he didn't squint.
His lips twitched, folding into a barely perceptible, frightening half-smile.
The beast had driven up to him of its own accord.
The screen goes dark.
Continued in the next episode.