Office Hours

Detention was in room 114 with Ms. Okonkwo, who read paperbacks and did not care what you did as long as you did it silently. Devon brought his planner. Mateo brought nothing, which Devon was starting to understand was less a system and more a fact about Mateo, the way some people don't bring an umbrella because the umbrella is at a house they no longer go to. Devon had spent the first twenty minutes of detention doing his chemistry homework, which was due in two days and which he had brought specifically so that the detention would not be a total loss of a productive hour. This is the kind of person Devon was. He had also, while doing it, become slowly and uncomfortably aware that he was working a problem set Mateo was failing to hand in, eighteen inches from Mateo, who was balancing a dead pen on his lip — and the awareness had a texture to it, a low itch, the itch of a system running while one of its inputs sat broken and untouched right there on the next desk. Devon did not enjoy that itch. Devon's whole self was built to resolve itches like that. He had held out for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes was, for Devon, a heroic display of minding his own business. "You should let me help you," Devon whispered, twenty minutes in. Mateo, who had been balancing his capless pen on his upper lip, let it fall. "With what." "Chemistry. You're at a thirty-one. You don't have to be. You know the material — you answer Hollis fine, you just don't hand anything in. That's not a knowledge problem. That's a logistics problem." Devon kept his voice down, kept it efficient, the voice he used for things that could be solved. "Logistics I can fix. I'm extremely good at logistics." Mateo looked at him for a long moment. Across the room Ms. Okonkwo turned a page. "It's not logistics," Mateo said finally. "Then what is it." And Mateo, who deflected everything, who had a slow unbothered face built by the universe specifically for not answering questions, didn't deflect. Maybe it was the room. Maybe it was that Devon had shoved him off a stool and then refused to sell him out, twice, in one day. He turned the dead pen over in his fingers and said, "My mom works two jobs. My little brothers are eight and six. I get them from after-care, I make dinner, I do their stuff with them — their reading logs, their spelling, the diorama, whatever the diorama is that week. By the time that's done it's like nine-thirty and I've got nothing left. Homework's the thing at the bottom of the list, and the list never ends, so." He shrugged, but it wasn't his lazy shrug. It was a tired one. "I'm not failing chem. I'm just failing chem last." Devon sat with that. He looked down at his planner, at the rainbow of stress, green and blue and red, every block of his life slotted into a color because his life had enough room to be slotted. He thought about how he'd diagnosed Mateo on day one — no equipment — and how wrong that was, how exactly backwards. Mateo had all the equipment. Mateo was running the whole household on it. There was just none of it left over by the time it reached a worksheet. "Okay," Devon said slowly. "Then we don't fix your logistics. We fix mine." "What does that mean." "It means I have a free period when you have after-care pickup. And I do my homework at a table doing nothing, alone, like a loser." Devon was already turning to a fresh page, already reaching for a pen that had a cap. "So you do chem with your brothers. At nine-thirty, whatever's left, you photo it and send it to me, and I check it before Hollis sees it, so it's never a zero, it's just late, and late we can fix. You keep your borders. I just — open a trade route." Mateo stared at him. The lopsided face did something Devon hadn't seen it do yet, something that started as suspicion and didn't know where to go. "Why," Mateo said. Devon considered several efficient answers. He discarded all of them. "Because you wore the goggles," he said, "when I asked you to. People don't usually do the thing when I ask. I'd like to find out what you're like when you're not failing chem last." Ms. Okonkwo turned another page. The detention clock ticked toward four. And Mateo Cruz, very slowly, picked up his one capless pen and held his hand out across the desk, palm up, for Devon to put a working one into it — which Devon did, a blue one, blue for deadlines, and neither of them said anything else, but Devon added an entry to his planner on the walk home, and this time he knew exactly what color it was.