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1.
Ash Callenreese showed up in the middle of junior year. The first thing Lilith noticed was that he looked like a Hollywood heartthrob. The type of guy you’d pick in a BuzzFeed quiz, or someone you watch a little too closely in a movie your parents put on from their youth. The second thing she noticed, which came about half an hour after the first, was that he’s kinda weird.
He walks into English class late, administrative note in hand, and doesn’t speak a single word. The teacher, a towering Kazakh man who asked the class to call him Blanca, lets him sit down with just a nod of his head. He walks to his seat in the back corner of the room with quick and calculated strides, hands in pockets and eyes surveying the classroom.
The class recuperates from the interruption quickly, but once again comes to a halt when Blanca calls on the new kid to answer a question. He glances up from the desk he was formerly sleeping on, and the low light casts shadows on the structure of his face.
“I haven’t read it,” he says. His voice, quiet and boyish, juxtaposes the terse tone of his words.
“Then why don’t you introduce yourself instead?” Blanca bulldozes on.
This time, he raises his head fully from the desk and slumps backward in his chair. “My name’s Ash Callenreese. I just moved here from New Jersey.”
There’s a pause where Blanca expects him to continue, but he says nothing else and Blanca just waves his hand at him before repeating the question to another student. Ash doesn’t go back to sleep, but he doesn’t look tuned into the lesson either.
In all honesty, Lilith forgets about him until lunch comes around some hours later and she hears a low whistle come from her left. “Holy crap,” Sam says, “who’s that?”
Now, here’s the thing you should know about Sam: she knows everything worth knowing about everyone in school before they even step foot on campus. So the fact that Ash had managed to evade her attention for nearly four hours was baffling, but even more so was the fact that he went and sat next to Shorter Wong.
Shorter and his group have a reputation: they’re either loud, criminals (allegedly), or both. Lilith pities Ash for landing himself stuck with them on his first day. And, unfortunately for Lilith and her friends, the group (consisting of Shorter, Cain, Soo-Ling, Yut-Lung, Bones, Kong, and Alex) is located at the other end of her lunch table. She’s been privy to overhearing some, to put it nicely, interesting conversations. Today, apparently, is no different.
“Guys meet Ash! He was my roommate in juvie!” Shorter nearly shouts, with more enthusiasm than the sentence deems necessary. “I can’t believe you’re here, man!”
And that, that is definitely a surprise. Samantha briefly chokes on her iced tea, and Lilith’s mind begins running away with ideas of what could have gotten the pretty boy new kid in juvie, but the topic never comes up again
2.
It’s well into February when she speaks to Ash for the first time. Blanca had changed the assigned seating for the second semester, and she and Ash are partnered up for quite possibly the most annoying project Blanca could have thought of. The details are all a little hazy from his rapid-fire explanation, but she knows they have to write at least eleven pages on the most boring book she’s ever read.
Currently, Ash is ten minutes late for their planned meeting at the school library. It’s not that she’s surprised, but she expected someone with his course load (trust her, his classes are insane) to at least be able to tell time.
Finally, he shows up and logs his presence into the database. His hair has grown some in the past few months, and now it ends just a little above his chin. It frames his face well, she thinks, but it also looks like he doesn’t quite know how to manage the length.
“You’re late.”
“I had to walk my foster brother home,” Foster care would explain why he moved states months into junior year, but her intrigue about that factor of his life is overshadowed by the fact that she is still annoyed he left her waiting.
“Why didn’t you tell me beforehand?”
“I didn’t know I had to until half an hour ago. I don’t have your number to text you.”
She guesses that it’s a fair excuse, but she still counts it as a strike against him. After quickly exchanging phone numbers to prevent the incident from reoccurring, Ash shrugs off his jacket and shoves it in his backpack, unsuccessfully trying to zip it a few times before giving up.
In all honesty, Lilith expected to do most of the work. The few times she’s taken notice of Ash were in class when Blanca rapped a ruler on his desk to pull him back to the lesson, or when his friends raise a distracting ruckus in the lunchroom. But the more she and Ash discuss and outline the project, the more she realizes that they might actually get an A on it, even with Blanca’s insane rubric. Ash might be a quiet guy with dubious friend choices, but he knows what he’s doing.
While they’re working, Lilith picks up on some of Ash’s idiosyncrasies; he has a tendency to take his glasses on and off while reading (maybe they’re the wrong prescription?), he spins his pen around deft fingers while not otherwise using his hands, and he always looks like he’s about to fall asleep. She thinks that the last observation makes sense combined with the perpetual dark circles beneath hooded green eyes.
Their session eventually comes to an end, and Lilith grabs her keys before she pauses and decides to be courteous, “Do you need a ride home?”
“I’m walking home with a friend,” Ash says and walks right out of the library without even saying goodbye. Apparently spending three hours together working on a project together doesn’t make you best friends with your school's resident pretty boy possible criminal. Who knew?
There’s a winter chill to the air when she walks out of the building. Despite having been driving for over a year, it still takes Lilith some time to get her car started, and she catches sight of Ash leaving from the gym door exit while she’s pulling out. She recognizes the boy walking next to him as the Japanese exchange student in her photography class. Eddie? Eggie? Doesn’t matter. Even without knowing his name, she can tell that Ash looks different than he did in the library minutes ago, or at the lunch table with his friends in the afternoon.
On an average day, Ash is beautiful in the same way that a star is while it falls to earth— as tired and dangerous as is glamorous, but in the view she has of him right now, he just looks like a normal kid with his friend. He has forgone being unknowable, and Lilith thinks that if she were to look closely she could see whatever it is that he tries to hide away from everyone else. She looks away instead.
Yeah, right. A friend .
3.
Eventually, they finish the project and turn it in for their final grade. Not long after, they return to their unspoken agreement where they only speak to each other to ask for a pen (Ash) or offer a pen (Lilith). They’re friendly, but they’re not friends.
She’s currently at a sleepover. Sam’s hosting, but Lilith doesn’t know any of the other girls in attendance. They’re laying spread out on the living room floor, overflowing popcorn bowls and water bottles scattered all around. The air smells of excitement.
There’s a movie playing. It’s some sort of old rom-com, but Lilith has largely abandoned it in favor of scrolling through her phone. Her attention is called back once again when someone whispers out “Hey, doesn’t that guy kinda look like Ash?” For a few moments, nobody speaks, either no one heard it or they’re all thinking, but eventually, they come to an agreement. Lilith waits until she gets a good glance at the actor's face, but she can see the similarities. The actor’s hair is different, darker and thinner, and his downturned eyes are a calmer brown, but they have the same thin lips and oval face.
Attention quickly diverges from the movie to the elusive only-slightly-new kid.
“Lilith, you’ve spoken to him, right? What’s he like?” someone asks, and Lilith thinks her name is Imogen but she’s not sure.
Lilith thinks back to the month she spent working with him. She hadn’t learned much, Ash tended to steer the conversation away from him and either back to Lilith or the project, but the small glances she got into his life painted an interesting picture.
For starters, there’s the whole juvie thing. She cannot, for the life of her, figure out what he might have done to get in trouble. If she didn’t know better, she’d pass the whole comment off as a joke, but she knows for a fact that Shorter landed himself in juvie over the summer for vandalism, and he’s never been the type to say stuff like that for no reason.
Then, there’s time she headed over to his house because the library was closed for an impending snowstorm and her cousins were being too loud for them to work at her place. It’s a one-story home, with a well-loved yard in the front scattered with toys and plants. They were greeted warmly by his foster father, a man named Max who couldn’t have been older than 35. Ash led them to his bedroom, which was painted a neutral blue, a twin bed shoved against the wall, and a desk to the side.
“You can take the chair,” Ash had said, plopping himself and his laptop down over his bedding, because he apparently does not make his bed before going to school.
First impressions showed a pretty normal image, but when Lilith started to look around the room more, she noticed details that didn’t line up with the image that disinterested, cool Ash tended to project. There was a rosary pinned to the wall, right above a dresser topped off with empty energy drink cans and dust, and over his closet doors was a twine photo display. Lilith must have been looking at it for too long because Ash catches her gaze and says, “Eiji put that up.”
It’s not permission to look, but it’s not condemnation either, and Lilith takes a closer glance at the photos. The majority of them are polaroid selfies. Eiji and Ash as a duo are heavily featured, but sometimes it’s the two of them and Shorter, or an outsider taking a photo of their whole group, somehow managing to fit nine teenage boys into one candid frame. Towards the end of the display is a series, taken in close succession, of Ash and a little boy with brown hair and wide eyes. In the first photo, Ash is staring at him, mid-sentence and a stern expression dancing across his features. The boy looks close to laughter. In the second, Ash gives in and there’s a mischievous glimmer to his eyes as the two of them smile at each other. They’re not polaroids, which means someone took the liberty to print them out themself before hanging them up.
“Is that your brother?”
Ash's eyes shoot up to the rosary on the wall, strangely enough, before following her sight to the photo. His shoulders relax, “Yeah. Michael.”
“Cute picture.”
And they leave the topic at that.
Not long after, the snowstorm that everyone thought was yet another exaggerated prediction came crashing in at full force. Within minutes, inches of white covered the ground outside his window. A woman yells for Ash from outside the room, and he excuses himself with an “I’ll be back,” before leaving to see what she wants. It must be his foster mother, unless he has a sister hidden somewhere too.
A couple of minutes later, he ambles back in.
“If you want to leave you should head out now before the roads get bad. If you want to stay until it stops snowing, Jessica’s making dinner.”
Lilith makes the quick decision to stay, shoots her mom a text that she’ll be late, and excuses herself to the bathroom.
In hindsight, she’s not sure if she should have just held it until she got home.
The thing about teenage boys, you see, is that they couldn't care less about the state of their bathroom. Ash’s seems better than most that she had been in, especially compared to how her brother takes care of his, but the contrast between what she assumes are Michael’s items and Ash’s is enough to make her have to force herself not to laugh, and there’s still a lingering stink from who knows what.
Clothes are just as in the hamper as they are outside of it, the toilet seat is all the way up, and Rubber ducks lay next to a razor and shaving cream, deodorant adjacent to bubblegum princess toothpaste. Funnily enough, she doesn’t see another tube— does that mean Ash uses it too?
Returning to the party from her journey through thought, Lilith looks around the living room and catches the eyes of eagerly awaiting teenagers.
“He’s weird,” she says, and goes back to scrolling through her phone.