Chapter Text
Tutoring was a way to pay the bills. It wasn’t the most ideal way -- the most ideal way to pay the bills, Linhardt thought, would be to participate in a few hundred sleep studies, especially if they could be completed in nice hotels. But it was a way, and it sure beat a lot of other ways one could pay the bills.
“And then,” Ferdinand said, collapsed back against the cream sofa as if it could somehow devour him whole, “the jerk had the nerve to request a double shot of espresso after I had already completed making his drink! And when I told him so, do you know what he said to me, Linhardt? Do you know?”
“I do not know,” Linhardt said. His bookbag hit the floor with a crash; he probably should take better care of his stuff, but, well, it’s fine. It’s fine. “I am sure you are going to tell me, though.”
“Of course!” Ferdinand said, with a flourish of his hand that suggested that he may have been doing Linhardt a favor. “As I said, this jerk -- the usual jerk, you know the one of whom I speak…”
Linhardt nodded. “Yes,” he said, “you’ve made that clear.”
Ferdinand huffed. “Well, he wished for me to remake his drink, but I told him, he was not precise with his ordering! And he said… oh, I cannot believe what he said to me.” Linhardt could see Ferdinand’s body tremble, as if the thought of the same dark and handsome jerk’s most recent insult was enough to terrify him to his bones. “He said… next time, you should pay more attention to what is left unsaid. ” Ferdinand looked up at Linhardt, his golden-brown eyes wide. “Can you believe the nerve?!”
“Mm.” Linhardt started emptying the contents of his bag. Two sets of notebooks. Three or four textbooks. He left the handfuls of pens floating around the bottom unattended. Let them have their freedom. “Doesn’t sound any worse than usual, honestly.”
“It was the worst ,” Ferdinand moaned, slinking down against the sofa until his rear slid to the edge.
Linhardt smiled. “Did he leave you a tip, at least?”
“Oh, yes,” Ferdinand said, his expression suddenly brightening. “Five dollars.”
Linhardt chuckled. Yeah, tutoring had its ups and downs, but at least he was being paid specifically to deal with idiots.
“Oh,” Ferdinand said, sitting up, his doom and gloom coffee-shop romance suddenly forgotten, “I just remembered. The tutoring company called you not so long ago.”
Linhardt groaned. “They know where I am,” he said. “Why do they always call when they know I’m working?”
“Why do you refuse to get a cell phone like the rest of society?”
Linhardt felt his face tighten. “Not worth it,” he said. “Anyway. Thanks for letting me know. I’ll give them a call back.” He yawned. “Eventually.” It was probably something stupid that Linhardt absolutely would not want to (or, to be honest, be able to) deal with, like double-checking a pay stub or inquiring about the improvement in little Bernadetta’s grades. It could wait for later. It could wait forever.
Ferdinand nodded. “They said something about a new student.”
This, however, piqued Linhardt’s interest. He blinked. “Oh,” he said. “Huh.” He took his coat off and left it on his recliner, as if it were a blanket for his collection of books and notebooks. “Thanks. I’ll give them a call.”
A new student could be incredibly helpful. Linhardt had been tutoring with Eagle Education for about a year, and while business was initially very good, recent competition with other tutoring companies had dried up the well of clients. Linhardt was still able to make ends meet, but only with financial support from his parents, and, well…
The sooner they were off his tail, the better.
He dragged himself into the kitchen and picked up the phone. His fingers dialed the number in by muscle memory -- why would anyone need a cell phone if they could use their brains? Sheesh. He listened to it ring once, twice, before a familiar voice called out from the other end of the line.
“Good afternoon! Eagle Education, Dorothea speaking. How may…”
“Dorothea.”
“Oh!” The woman’s voice somehow took an even more chipper tone. Linhardt never understood how she could do that. “Linhardt! Thank you for calling back!”
“If this is about a pay stub, Dorothea, I swear…”
The woman giggled. “Now, Lin, am I the kind of person to trick you into calling?”
Linhardt considered this for a second. “Absolutely,” he said.
Dorothea broke character and snorted . “You got me there,” she said, chuckling. “This time, though, I’m not tricking you. A new student was just registered, and we think you’d work well with him.”
Linhardt did not miss the way Dorothea worded this -- a new student was just registered. He frowned. “Don’t tell me it’s a kid, Dorothea…”
“Not any more than you are, Lin,” she replied. “No, his father is… well, it seems like a complicated situation. Suffice to say, he could use some Hevring magic.”
Linhardt nodded. So, a boy, probably around his age… so college-aged. With an overbearing father. He can understand that. “All right,” he said. “What subjects?”
“Reading, primarily,” Dorothea said.
“Reading… what?” Linhardt paced through the kitchen. “Law, literature..?”
“Just reading, Lin,” Dorothea said, and there was a certain tone to her voice that he knew was trying to hint at something, but Linhardt hated the entire concept of hints, so he usually chose to ignore it. However, this time…
“Wait,” he said, stopping. “You mean, like, how to read?”
Dorothea sighed. “If you’re going to force me to spell it out for you,” she said, and he could almost hear the frown in her voice. “He has difficulty decoding words. I am sure that’s not beyond your capabilities to teach, though?”
Linhardt hummed. He, theoretically, knew how to teach reading. He knew, at least, the basic components of reading instruction. Or, at least, he knew one theoretical framework for teaching reading, and while it sounded legitimate from a layperson’s perspective, he was not entirely sold on it for reasons he could not elaborate on further than it is just how I feel. He let out a breath. Well, whether or not he was qualified, he could at least use this as an opportunity to test a pre-existing theory, and perhaps even revise it, and that sounded a lot more interesting than watching Bernadetta fret over dividing fractions for the tenth week in a row.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it. What’s his name?”
Dorothea was smiling. He could feel it through the phone.
“Caspar,” she said. “Caspar von Bergliez.”
Caspar von Bergliez, apparently, wanted (or, was forced to want, or was coerced into wanting) to meet the very next day. That worked for Linhardt, who didn’t have nearly as busy a schedule as he liked to pretend he did. (He liked to pretend he had a busy schedule so people would leave him alone. It worked half the time.)
Dorothea had given Linhardt the address to rendezvous with his newest student, but it wasn’t until Linhardt was halfway there that he realized his feet were leading him to Ferdinand’s coffee shop. He felt his shoulders drop. Public lessons were difficult enough as it was -- why couldn’t people just rent use of a room in a library like the gods intended?! -- but coffee shops were notoriously tricky, especially with Ferdinand snooping around.
The sight that greeted him as he entered the coffee shop did not put him at any sort of ease.
“Mister von Hevring?” a booming voice bellowed across the room. Linhardt didn’t have to look to find the source of the voice; it was a man, broad and built, with a mess of pale blue hair on his head and an even thicker mess on his chin. His presence was so overwhelming that Linhardt almost didn’t notice the much smaller man sitting beside him, his eyes fixed on the edge of the table, hands in his lap, foot wagging soundlessly in the air.
Linhardt nodded and headed toward the table. The younger man -- Caspar, Linhardt assumed -- did not even look up. The older man did not seem to mind, instead thrusting his hand out for Linhardt to shake.
“Ernest von Bergliez,” he said. It was more than a simple offer of information; it was a declaration, although of what Linhardt had no idea. His handshake was firm, steady, and Linhardt knew his own was woefully inadequate in return.
“Linhardt von Hevring,” he replied, giving a polite nod of his head.
This was followed by a hollow stretch of silence, broken only by the sound of Caspar yelping as his father elbowed him in the side.
“Manners, boy!”
Caspar lifted his eyes from the table and looked up.
Oh. Linhardt swallowed. Caspar had an extraordinary mop of bright blue hair, and even brighter blue eyes, lined with enviably thick and dark eyelashes. He smiled, and Linhardt felt something in his stomach quiver.
Gods, Linhardt thought, I must be constipated.
Caspar reached one hand out from beneath the table and extended it toward Linhardt. “I’m Caspar,” he said, and, oh no, he had dimples. He suddenly wondered whether or not Dorothea was playing a terrible trick on him. Heh. Well done if so .
Linhardt’s face, thankfully, did not betray any of his inner turmoil, and he took the offered hand gently. This time, his handshake was equally matched. “My pleasure,” he said.
“Sit,” Ernest von Bergliez said, and, again, it was not an invitation, but rather an order. Before he knew it, Linhardt found himself sitting on the rickety, uneven chair. This would be distracting. He’d have to ask Ferdinand about it later.
Speaking of Ferdinand… he didn’t seem to be around. He probably had told him his schedule at some point, but Linhardt had never had any reason to pay attention until, well. Now.
“My son,” Ernest said, and Linhardt did not miss how Caspar seemed to shrink at the sound, “is nineteen years old, a sophomore in college , yet is still reading at a sixth grade level .”
“Dad,” Caspar whispered, “do you have to…”
“What?” His father looked over at Caspar, and Linhardt watched the color run out of the young man’s (cute) cheeks. “Are you embarrassed? Are you ashamed of yourself? Do you not want everyone to know you can’t read ?”
“Okay,” Linhardt said, “I understand.” It was an attempt at subtly cutting in and, hopefully, ending the conversation. While Caspar’s father did not shout, his voice was loud enough that he did not need to; by this point, even the florist next door would know that there was a barely literate college student somewhere in the vicinity.
Ernest shook his head. “Pathetic,” he said, before looking back at Linhardt. “I was told you’re some kind of miracle worker.”
This surprised Linhardt. He spoke before he realized. “O-oh?”
Ernest snorted. It was not a kind sound. “Oh, indeed.” He leaned across the table; unlike his son, Ernest’s eyes were a dull, lifeless blue. Cold. No, not cold. The absence of temperature all together.
Tepid.
“Look here,” he said, “I paid for a month's package. Three lessons a week. Four weeks. Twelve lessons.” He sighed. “It wouldn’t be the first time I wasted money on this one, but let’s give it a shot. It’s not like you can do any damage, at any rate.”
Caspar’s eyes flickered toward Linhardt for a second before moving back to the table. It was a small, subtle movement, but Linhardt caught it all the same.
“All right,” he said with a nod, doing everything within his power to keep his voice steady. He had the sinking feeling that he was the prey at the end of the hunter’s rifle, and he did not want to let Mister Ernest von Bergliez see him flinch.
That was seemingly the correct answer, as Ernest stood up a moment later, pushing the chair in with a terrible screech. “I’ll return in an hour,” he said, before turning to look at his son. “Don’t waste his time, you hear?”
“Yes, Father,” Caspar said.
Linhardt busied himself in his backpack as Caspar’s father stormed out of the coffee shop. He… did not have any sort of special plan, especially as first lessons were usually used to, well, get to know the student, their goals, and their abilities. But something about the beast of a man that his student called his father made him feel like he had to hit the ground running, so he pulled out a blank notebook (blue cover, like Caspar’s hair, and college ruled, because Linhardt was not an animal ) and a random pen snatched from a bank.
When the door shut behind Ernest and his shadow disappeared from the view of the windows, Caspar looked up.
“I am so sorry,” he said, and his voice was… a lot higher than Linhardt had expected. A little on the nasally side. Cute. “I told him, he didn’t have to come, but he can’t help himself, he wanted to make sure you were a real person and not, like, I don’t know, some sort of crazy robot teacher or something…” Caspar paused for a second. “You’re not, right?”
This was not a question Linhardt had been expecting. How do I read these letters together? Sure. What does this word mean? Of course. But are you a robot teacher..?
“I,” he said, with none of the grace and poise a proper robot teacher would possess. The rest of the sentence didn’t follow. Just “I,” sitting alone in the universe, floating in the space between them, singular and unmodified.
Caspar didn’t seem to notice. He laughed -- another high-pitched sound, straight from his nose, and just as trumpeting as his father’s voice, but far more charming -- and hit the table, shaking his head. “Of course you’re not!” he said. “Robots aren’t real. "
“Robots are real,” Linhardt said before he could catch himself. “There are some stores in Japan that only employ robots.”
Caspar’s eyes went wide. “Are you serious?!” He had the distinct look of some sort of nocturnal marsupial, all bug-eyed and incredulous. “Whoa. What do they do during their lunch breaks?!”
Again, Linhardt could not resist. “Their lunch breaks? They’re robots, they don’t need…”
“Ah,” Caspar interrupted, tapping his chin. “Got it. They probably use that time to refuel.”
Linhardt pictured it suddenly -- a line of robots, ranging from hyperrealistic ones with humanoid faces to weird boxy ones from antiquated cartoons, all standing in a cafeteria, guzzling jars of oil. He wanted to smile, but as soon as the image came to him, it was replaced by the shadow of Caspar’s father’s face, peering down at him, the smell of tobacco on his breath and some bits of french fry in his beard, demanding to know what it was his son learned today, and Linhardt did not think the use of robots in Japanese retail society would be an acceptable answer.
“So Caspar,” he said, looking back down at his notebook, “reading doesn’t come easily to you?”
Caspar sighed. It seemed that he, too, had escaped the thrall of the robots. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.”
Linhardt looked up at him. “Why are you apologizing?”
Caspar had the paper wrapper of a straw wrapped around a finger and was tugging at its end. “Because you gotta deal with me instead of, I don’t know.” He tore his eyes away from the wrapper and peeked up at Linhardt. “It is pathetic, isn’t it?”
Without thinking, Linhardt responded. “I don’t think so,” he said, busying his hand by writing CASPAR down on the top line of the notebook in large, clean block letters. “There could be lots of reasons you didn’t learn how to read when you were younger, but ‘being pathetic’ isn’t one of them.” He skipped a line on the page. “When’s your birthday?”
“July 1st, 2000,” Caspar said. “But you don’t have to get me anything.”
Linhardt snorted. “I’ll remember that,” he said, writing the date down. A few months older than me, he thought. He tried to imagine it -- being his age and struggling to read, with a father who felt about as warm as a sheet of ice. He couldn’t.
“He’s not always like that,” Caspar said. Linhardt startled; he didn’t think he’d said anything out loud. No, he was sure he hadn’t. “My father, I mean. I’m sorry about him.”
“Again,” Linhardt said, “you don’t need to apologize.”
“It’s just,” Caspar continued, spinning his empty ice coffee cup in his hands, “with my brother and all, and everything, he’s just been really busy, and he doesn’t really have time to worry about me, and the school is saying I’ll lose my scholarship if my grades slip, and they’re already slipping, they’ve already slipped, and…”
“Wait,” Linhardt said, putting his pen down. “Scholarship?”
Caspar’s head snapped up. Linhardt suddenly wondered if he’d realized he’d been rambling at all. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s not an academic one, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
It had been what Linhardt was wondering. He smiled. “Athletic then?” Looking him over again, no longer in the shadow of his imposing father, Linhardt could see it; Caspar had a lean physique, and the definition of his biceps were clear even through his t-shirt…
“Nah,” Caspar said, laughing. “Anyway, don’t worry about it. It’s not a huge scholarship, but my family’s been stretched thin lately, and…”
Linhardt nods. “I understand.” He filed the issue of Caspar’s mysterious scholarship away for another day. There were more pressing things to attend to. He pulled his backpack up on his lap and fished through his belongings, looking for anything that might be appropriate. Physics book, no… chemistry, absolutely not… he frowned. He really had come ill prepared for an actual lesson. He could see Caspar at the edge of his peripheral vision, looking at him curiously. Think, Linhardt, think.
He put his bookbag back on the floor and pushed the notebook across the table. “Here,” he said, handing him his pen, “write a quick paragraph about yourself. Introduce yourself to me.”
Caspar took the pen. His eyes glanced at the paper before glancing back up at Linhardt. “I can just tell you…”
Linhardt shook his head. “Writing,” he said, entirely aware that he was making this all up as he went along, “is very much connected to reading. If you can write something, you can read it, and vice versa. Let me see what you can do on your own. Then we can work from there.”
Bullshit. Utter bullshit. But Caspar seemed to buy it, and his brow furrowed as he looked down at the paper, pen held tensely in his hand. “Sorry,” he said again, before beginning to write.
Linhardt watched with a strange sense of curiosity as Caspar frantically moved his pencil over the paper. Usually, if he were the one writing so quickly, it would be because he had a lot to say and his mind needed his hand to try and keep up. But Caspar was very actively writing very little, his hand more engaging in the show of writing than in actual writing itself. For every five or six ‘strokes’ done, contactless, in the air, his pencil would make a single mark on the page. Often he would sit, hunched over the paper, one hand tangling in his bright blue hair, and Linhardt could hear the sound of him softly sounding out words that ought to have been second nature to him by his age.
What felt like a short eternity later, Caspar peeked up, his blue eyes slowly meeting Linhardt’s. There was an obvious flush to his face.
“Um,” he said, quietly, “is this enough?”
Linhardt slid the notebook back over toward himself and looked at the page. On the plus side, Caspar had extremely neat handwriting. On the less-good side, he used his very neat handwriting to write, well….
my name is Caspar and i am 19 yeers old i liv with my dad in my big brozer. i am not good at reeding or riting but i am good at carate. well ok i am not good at carate but i am tring to be good at carate so i can be stron. i studdy comunicashon at collig.
Linhardt’s eyes widened as he read Caspar’s introduction. Across from him, Caspar was looking down at the table, flicking the balled up straw wrapper between his index fingers. Something about the sight made Linhardt’s chest clench; he looked back down at the writing, trying to determine some course of action.
“Okay,” he said, quietly, looking back up. He smiled, ignoring how unnatural it felt. It wasn’t for his sake, anyway. “I think we can work with this.”
He immediately regretted his choice of words ( think we can work with this ), but Caspar didn’t seem to notice, looking up at him, wide-eyed, like a puppy who had just realized what the word walk meant.
“Really?” he said. His eyes crossed over Linhardt’s face -- and oh, that did something to Linhardt’s chest (or, perhaps, he thought, it was simply indigestion) -- and hooked onto his smile, which he returned in kind. It looked much more natural on his face than it felt on Linhardt’s. “You think you can help me?”
Linhardt looked back down at the writing. He had to look away, and the writing seemed like a good place to start. “Y-yes,” he said, brow furrowing in thought. “Yes, I think I can.”
Honestly, he was a little frustrated. He was not trained in reading, at least not at this sort of basic level of decoding, and yet he could still see the patterns in Caspar’s text that revealed to him the sort of gaps he had in his knowledge. How had Caspar presumably gone through twelve years of school without a single teacher doing the same for him?
He pointed at the text. “So your command of English is fine. I can tell you are probably using simplified language here because it is easier to spell, yes?”
Caspar nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “and because… I don’t know.”
“It takes you awhile,” Linhardt offered. He saw it with his own eyes, after all. Observations are the heart of scientific research. “The act of spelling the words out is so arduous for you that you can’t keep your mind on a more complex sentence.”
Caspar didn’t say anything. Linhardt grit his teeth; had he been too presumptuous? He always had a bad habit of being presumptuous. But when he looked up, Caspar was blushing.
“I… I don’t think spelling is amorous,” he said, one hand reaching behind himself to scratch at the nape of his neck. “I don’t love it.”
Linhardt let out a loud, unseemly snort, holding back the crack of laughter threatening to spill out from his chest. “Arduous, Caspar, not amorous. It means difficult.”
“Oh!” Caspar somehow went even redder, although he was, thankfully, smiling. “Then why didn’t you say that?!”
Linhardt let out a trickle of the laughter he’d been holding in, shaking his head. “My apologies,” he said. He looked up at him, grinning. “That mea…”
“I know what that means,” Caspar said, rolling his eyes. He was also grinning, though, so he at least had managed to catch Linhardt’s playful tone; that was another thing people sometimes had trouble with when he was involved. “Look, I may be stupid, but I’m not a moron.”
“You’re not stupid.” The words came out of Linhardt’s mouth before he had time to even think them. He blinked, startled by the sound of his own voice, before processing the words he’d spoken out loud and realizing that, yes, they were true. ‘You’re not stupid,” he said again, folding his hands on the table and looking over at Caspar. “I have the distinct impression that most of your teachers were, how can I put it… bad.”
Caspar stared at Linhardt. The flush of his skin clashed terribly with his eyes and hair, but it was still… something. It was still something. “I mean,” he said, itching his neck again, “they tried…”
Linhardt shook his head. “They obviously didn’t try that hard,” he said, looking back down at the paper. “Look. You know your letter sounds. This all makes sense phonemically. That means the letters and the sounds match. It’s just spelling patterns you have to learn. Like…” His eyes darted over the lines Caspar wrote again. “This, here. Yeers. That makes sense! We often write the long e sound with a double e!” He reached into his bag and grabbed one of the pens floating around the bottom, pulling it out and circling the word. “However,” he continued, “in this case, we would use ‘ea’ to make the same sound. Like this.”
Next to yeers he wrote years. He looked up at Caspar. “See?”
Caspar looked as if he was in a trance. “Ohhh. Like, my teachers taught me, when two vowels go a-walking, the first one does the talking, right?”
Linhardt groaned. “It’s not always that simple, but yes, for now, we can think of it that way.” Doesn’t work for words like friend or food , he thought, but they could get to that at some point. “Here, try these.” He wrote some more words on the page before looking up at Caspar expectantly.
Caspar bit his lip and looked down. “Y-years,” he said, nose wrinkling. “T… tears? F...ears?”
Linhardt smiled. “There you go. Now, that’s not always the case. Like this..” He wrote down pears and wears . “In this case, these words don’t make a long e sound. You eat pears, not peers, right? And…” He thought for a second. “That woman over there,” he said, pointing at a lady at another table. “She wears a dress, not weers, correct? But with time this will become second nature to you.”
Caspar watched him write, his eyes darting with every moment of Linhardt’s fingers. When Linhardt stopped, Caspar looked up at him, mouth gaping open, eyes practically alight.
“You’re amazing!”
Linhardt froze. “What?”
Caspar traced his fingers over the words on the paper, mouthing them to himself silently. Tears, fears, pears, wears… “I get it,” he said finally, looking back up at Linhardt. “It makes sense to me!” He reached over the table and snatched the pen out of Linhardt’s hand, despite having a perfectly good one right next to him, and began to write.
Linhardt bent over the table to watch.
He wears pants. She eats pears. He fears pears! He crys tears.
Caspar peeked up, not lifting his head, and grinned, his eyes meeting Linhardt’s. “Right?”
At that moment, Linhardt split into three separate people. One of them bemoaned the spelling crys, wanted to teach him desperately about words with ‘ie’ in them, about how to add the suffix ‘-s’ to verbs ending in ‘y’. Another part felt absolutely thrilled, that deep ache of success, the rush of seeing a student grasp something for the first time. And the third…
Well.
Enough about that.
Linhardt (the body, Linhardt, that held the three Linhardts in tow) mirrored Caspar’s grin.
“Brilliant,” he said.
By the end of the lesson, Linhardt had taught Caspar a handful of vowel pairs and the sounds they made. They’d gone over basic words whose spelling defied all rhyme or reason, like are and do and, at Caspar’s insistence, dragon . (“What does it drag on?”) They practiced reading simple sentences over and over until Caspar’s reading became more fluent, and by the end the boy sitting across the table was no longer sheepishly apologizing for his choppy reading, but rather trying, quite bravely, to tackle new words.
When the time was up -- evidenced by Caspar’s father, broad and terrible (or so Linhardt had decided), standing outside the door like some sort of reverse bouncer, Caspar practically leapt to his feet.
“Are you a hugging person?” he asked.
Of all the questions Linhardt had expected from his new student, this was not one of them. “Pardon?”
Caspar laughed. He scratched at the bridge of his nose with his index finger. “Guess not,” he said. He reached out his hand -- the one he hadn’t just used to itch the dead skin off of his snout -- and smiled. “See you on Thursday?”
Linhardt took his hand. It was shockingly dry, and larger than he expected; his own felt dwarfed in comparison. He tried not to think about that too much. “See you on Thursday,” he replied, shaking his hand.
Then he watched as Caspar disappeared through the door, and from the window he watched him shrink.
When he got home, Ferdinand was sitting on the couch, a bag of Goldfish crackers in one hand, a can of fancy beer in the other.
“Linhardt,” he said, his voice the exhausted drone of misery, “come, sit with me. Listen to what happened today…”
“You sound like my old grandmother,” Linhardt said, tossing his bag on the ground and walking into the kitchen to grab a can of seltzer. (Peach-flavored.) “Anyway, you weren’t at work today, so I doubt it has to do with Mister Big and Brooding.”
“But it does,” Ferdinand said, before pausing. “Wait, how do you know I was not at work today?”
Linhardt sighed. “New student,” he said, flopping into his armchair and opening the can with a hiss . “We met at your shop. You weren’t there. So I surmised.”
Ferdinand frowned. “Was…”
“No,” Linhardt said, taking a slow sip from his can. The bubbles felt good on the way down, but only if you gave them space to breathe. “He wasn’t there.”
Ferdinand laughed. It was a soft, hollow sound. “That was not what I was going to ask,” he said, “as I already knew that.” He gave Linhardt a look, and Linhardt knew that the look was him quietly begging him to take interest in his mysterious story, but Linhardt found it difficult to care.
“Then what?” he asked, sidestepping Ferdinand’s frustratingly redundant love life and returning to the original query. “What were you going to ask?”
In his credit, Ferdinand only looked a little put out. “I was going to ask,” he said, “if everything was all right? You seem quite glum for someone who just had delicious coffee and made some money.”
Huh. Linhardt paused his thoughts to let himself feel his feelings, and he had to admit that Ferdinand might have been right. He did feel glum. “You’re right,” he said. He tried to keep the disappointment from his voice. “I suppose I do feel a bit down. Hm.” He sipped his seltzer, brows furrowed. “Wonder why.”
Ferdinand’s eyes were fixed on him. Linhardt tried to ignore it, but Ferdinand was stubborn, like some sort of idiotic retriever, and he knew he wouldn’t back down until he was satisfied.
Linhardt sighed. “What?”
“What?” Ferdinand replied, blinking. At least those big amber eyes were off of him. “I am simply concerned about y…”
“Tell me,” Linhardt said, turning his body toward Ferdinand and putting his half-finished can of seltzer on the end table. “What happened with whats-his-face?”
“Oh no!” Ferdinand said. “Do not think I will fall for that, Linhardt!”
Linhardt waited two beats.
A stupid smile spread over Ferdinand’s face, and his cheeks pinked. “Well,” he said, “if you insist… ”
And so Linhardt was sucked into Ferdinand’s story, something about a text message, a mistakenly-sent Facebook request, an awkward crawl through his crush’s Instagram, attempting to figure out who each person in his pictures was. Was that his girlfriend? His sister? A sickly cousin? A slideshow of saved tweets. A screenshot of a last.fm.
“Do you see?” Ferdinand was saying, waving his phone in the air. “He was listening to Rigoletto , and that was after I had mentioned to him that I had recently seen a production…”
Vowel sounds. Blends. Consonant clusters. Multisyllabic words, broken into small pieces. Prefixes, suffixes, and reading them on sight. Morphemes. Bright blue eyes and a dazzling smile. The top of the mountain, and the sudden fall. A back, small and withdrawn, disappearing beyond a cafe window.
That night, after Ferdinand had finally drunk himself to sleep (two beers and a single frozen margarita), Linhardt opened his laptop and created a new tab on his perpetually open incognito window.
He opened Google. He took a deep breath. He typed in Caspar’s name.