Brooke catches disses and Isaiah talking to each other
The Weight of Words
The hallway of Westbrook High smelled like floor wax and old lockers, the kind of smell that never changed no matter how many years passed through those double doors. It was a Tuesday — the kind of Tuesday that felt like it had been going on for three days already — when Brooke Carter rounded the corner near the gym and stopped dead in her tracks.
There they were.
Dessa Williams and Isaiah Monroe, standing close together by the water fountain, their voices low and conspiratorial, heads tilted toward each other like two people sharing a secret they hadn't decided the shape of yet.
Brooke's stomach dropped.
It wasn't that Isaiah talking to Dessa was wrong, exactly. People talked to people. That was what people did. But Brooke knew Dessa — had known her since fourth grade when they used to split Fruit Roll-Ups on the playground — and she knew Isaiah, had sat next to him in AP Chemistry for the entire fall semester, had laughed with him over failed experiments and traded playlists through earbuds while Mr. Hensley droned on about molecular bonds.
She knew them both well enough to know that this — whatever this was — wasn't just two people being friendly.
Dessa's hand was resting on the wall beside Isaiah's shoulder. Not touching him, but close. An intention, not an accident.
Brooke pressed her back against the row of lockers and held her breath.
"You really never told her?" Dessa's voice was barely above a whisper, but the hallway had emptied out between class periods, and sound carried in strange ways through those long corridors.
Isaiah shifted his weight. He was tall — taller than Brooke always remembered when she wasn't standing next to him — and he had a habit of looking at his shoes when he was working something out in his head. He was doing it now.
"It's not that simple," he said.
"It seems pretty simple to me." Dessa tilted her head, and even from thirty feet away, Brooke could see the smirk playing at the corner of her mouth. Not cruel. Dessa was never exactly cruel. But knowing. Knowing in a way that Brooke had always found both comforting and infuriating. "You like her. She's right there. Every single day she's right there and you just—"
"Dessa."
"—choose to do nothing."
Isaiah laughed, short and humorless, and rubbed the back of his neck. "It's not — look, what if it changes everything? What if she doesn't feel the same way and then it's just weird? We have class together. We have the same friends. I'm not trying to blow that up."
"So instead you just suffer in silence and pretend everything's fine."
"I'm not suffering."
Dessa gave him a look. The kind of look that didn't need words.
"Okay," he admitted, "maybe a little."
Brooke's hand found the cold metal of a locker handle and gripped it.
Her.
They were talking about her.
She was almost sure of it — she was maybe seventy, eighty, ninety-five percent sure — but that five percent uncertainty was enough to make her stand very still and keep listening, because the alternative was walking away and spending the rest of her life not knowing, which she absolutely could not do.
"Tell me something," Dessa was saying. "When's the last time you actually talked to her? Like, really talked."
Isaiah thought about it. "Yesterday. After school. She was frustrated about the college application stuff — the essay prompts. She said she didn't know how to write about herself without feeling like she was making herself sound like a brochure."
A faint smile crossed Dessa's face. "That's such a Brooke thing to say."
Definitely her.
"And what did you do?" Dessa pressed.
"I… told her she should write about the time she stayed after a track meet to help the girl from the rival team who twisted her ankle. Because she's the only person I know who would do something like that and not even think to mention it to anyone afterward."
Dessa was quiet for a moment. Then: "Isaiah."
"What?"
"That's the most romantic thing you've ever said, and you said it to me instead of her."
Brooke let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding.
Her heart was doing something complicated — a rhythm she didn't have a name for, something between disbelief and warmth and a low, creeping panic that she was standing in a school hallway eavesdropping on a conversation that had turned her whole understanding of the last six months inside out.
She thought back to September. The first day of AP Chemistry. She'd been late because she'd taken a wrong turn looking for the new lab room — Westbrook had renovated over the summer and the whole east wing was reorganized — and she'd walked in flustered, backpack half-unzipped, hair still damp from the early morning practice. Every seat was taken except the one beside the window. Beside Isaiah Monroe, who she'd seen around but never really spoken to.
He'd looked up when she sat down. He hadn't made her feel stupid for being late. He'd just quietly pushed his copy of the lab instructions a few inches toward her side of the table so she could see, without making a thing out of it.
She'd thought: Oh, he's kind. And filed it away.
She thought about October, when she'd gotten a 68 on the first major test and had sat staring at it in the parking lot after school, and Isaiah had knocked on her car window and said, Hey, you want to study this weekend? I know a coffee place with terrible Wi-Fi so you can't get distracted. And she'd laughed even though she hadn't wanted to, and they'd gone, and she'd gotten a 91 on the next one.
She thought about November, when his grandfather had passed away and he'd come back to school three days later quieter than usual, and Brooke had simply left a small succulent on his desk with a sticky note that said you don't have to talk about it. I'm just here. He'd kept the succulent. She'd seen it later on the windowsill of his bedroom in a photo he posted. She'd noticed. She hadn't said anything.
Oh, she thought, standing in the hallway with her back against the lockers. Oh no.
"I don't know what to do with this," Isaiah was saying to Dessa. "Every time I think about just saying it, I run through every possible version of how it goes and half of them end with things being different in a way I can't undo."
"And the other half?" Dessa asked.
He didn't answer right away.
"The other half are really good," he said quietly.
Dessa pushed off the wall. She was shaking her head, but not unkindly. "I love you. You know that. But you are going to drive yourself insane."
"I already am."
"Then maybe," Dessa said, "the risk is worth it."
She picked up her bag from the floor, slung it over one shoulder, and started walking — in the opposite direction, away from where Brooke was standing. Isaiah stayed by the water fountain for a moment longer, looking down at the floor again. Thinking.
Brooke had exactly three seconds to make a decision.
She could retreat. Duck back around the corner, pretend this conversation had never happened, go to class and sit next to him in Chemistry tomorrow and let everything continue the way it had been. Safe. Familiar. Fine.
Or she could stop hiding.
She exhaled.
And then she stepped around the corner.
Isaiah looked up the moment he heard footsteps. His expression shifted through three different things in the span of a second — surprise, then something guarded, then something she couldn't quite read because her own heart was too loud.
"Hey," she said. Her voice came out more steady than she expected.
"Hey." He straightened up. "How long have you been—"
"Long enough," she said.
The words landed between them like a stone in still water. She watched his face, watched the slow understanding move through it, watched him go through the same calculation she'd just gone through — the retreat or the honesty, the safe thing or the true thing.
"Brooke—"
"You told Dessa I don't know how to write about myself without sounding like a brochure," she said. "And then you told her the story about the girl with the ankle at the track meet. You said that's how I should write about myself."
He was very still.
"And you were right," she said. "Which is kind of annoying, because I handed in a completely different essay last night."
Something flickered in his expression. The beginning of a smile, maybe. Or the beginning of something bigger than that. "You could always revise it."
"The deadline was midnight."
"Oh."
"Isaiah."
"Yeah."
She took a breath. "The other half. Of all those versions you were thinking about. I can't promise you which one it is. But — I don't think things being different is always a bad thing."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he laughed — a real one this time, the kind that started somewhere low and came out like relief. "You definitely heard the whole conversation."
"Almost all of it."
"That's mortifying."
"It really doesn't have to be."
He took one step toward her. The hallway was still empty. Somewhere in the distance, the warning bell rang — two minutes to class — but neither of them moved toward the sound.
"I kept the succulent," he said, like that explained something.
"I know," she said. "I saw."
And in the easy, suspended quiet that followed, both of them understood that this was the beginning of the half that was really good.
The late bell rang. They walked to Chemistry together. Neither of them was on time.
Neither of them particularly cared.
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