Archive of Our Own

The hallway smelled like every school that Colt had ever been in. That particular institutional cleanliness - floor wax and dry-erase markers and a hint of body spray that some tweenage boy had applied a little too aggressively - that didn't seem to vary regardless of what coast you were on or what decade it was. He'd walked down a hundred hallways that smelled like this one. He'd been pushed, dragged, and had fallen down more than a few of them for work.

Colt didn't feel like himself, walking down this one.

The secretary - he'd already forgotten her name, she'd told him twice - had peeled off at the intersection a few paces behind Colt. It's room 12, right at the end of the hall, can't miss it. Take your time. She'd said it gently, the way you said things to strangers you were worried about, and Colt had nodded and kept walking and was grateful when he heard her footsteps go off in the other direction. He didn't really want to be seen right now.

The plastic tubs in his arms were were light, neatly stacked together.  He'd bought them at a Walmart on the way over, standing in the storage aisle for longer than he needed to, trying to figure out how many was the right number.  Too few and he'd have to make a second trip. Too many and he'd be left in an empty room with still-empty containers, a man who'd overestimated how much he would have to remember his brother by.

He'd bought ten. He didn't know yet if that was the right amount.

The hallway was empty. Classes were in session - he could hear, muffled through closed doors, the ambient sounds of dozens of teenagers being taught things they may or may not remember. For not the first time, Colt wished that he had chosen to come on a weekend. On a weekend, where the building would have been quiet and he could have moved through it without the ever-present awareness of all these living, ongoing people on the other sides of these walls, dozens of people who might have known his brother in ways Colt hadn't. The thought made something ugly twist in his chest, but it wasn't jealousy. Something worse.

He passed a bulletin board covered in posters about the water cycle. Passed a trophy case filled with pictures of school sports teams. Passed a closed bathroom door that he was pretty sure he could hear girlish giggling behind. His footsteps were the loudest thing in the corridor, and he found himself walking softer, like he was trying not to be caught, like he was somewhere he wasn't supposed to be.

Colt rounded the corner, and stopped.

The door at the end of the hall was covered in paper.

He walked toward it slowly, and saw that it wasn't just paper. They were notes. Hundreds of them, layered and overlapping, some held on with tape that had dried out and curled at the edges, some pressed on so hard the tape had bonded to the paint underneath and wasn't going anywhere. Some clearly old - fallen off at some point and stepped on accidentally and then stuck back on, creased and dirty at the corners - and some that were brand new and bright and yet to be damaged. Some written in the careful penmanship of a kid who'd taken their time, and some that were clearly dashed off in a hurry, half-legible, the letters pressing down harder at the start of each word than the end.

Some were stained with spots that were clearly from tears.

Sticky notes in yellow and pink and green. Torn pieces of notebook paper. The backs of graded worksheets. A few folded into shapes - a fox, a circle colored like Earth, a heart signed with dozens of names. There were drawings, too. Colt could see one of a rocket, lopsided, trailing cartoon fire as it arced over the Earth, three little stick figures standing on top of it with big smiles as they waved down at the planet, the words 'Save the world Mr. G.' written across the top of the paper. Another one had a sketch of Colt's brother peeking out from the window of a spaceship to look at a stereotypical green alien in a UFO hovering above him. Looking at it, Colt couldn't help the smile that pulled at the corner of his mouth.

The colorful rainbow of paper covered every single bit of the door, from the window, to the handle, even spreading out across the doorframe and the wall surrounding it.

Setting the tubs down at his feet, Colt stood in front of the door to his brother's classroom, and read what he could.

And then there were the notes he couldn't fully make out - fragments, overlapping edges where one note had been stuck partially over another: -ber when you said that thing about the- and -still think about that time that you tripped and ate it in front of the entire audit- and something that had been written in purple gel pen and then gotten rained on or cried on, the ink spread and the words had gone, now just the shape of handwriting left behind. Some of the notes were clearly references to an inside joke he'd never know the context for, the punchline of a day in class he hadn't been there for. Years of accumulated moments and memories, pressed against this door in scrap paper and scrawled notes.

Some of the handwriting looked like it belonged to a group older than the others. Taller letters. More careful pen pressure. Former students, maybe. Kids who were in college now. Kids who had still taken the time to come back to this middle school to leave their contribution, to come back to this, this... memorial.

There were notes from kids who had clearly been in Ryland's class when he left. And then - and this was the thing that hit Colt somewhere behind his sternum, somewhere deep and painful - there were notes from kids who hadn't been at all. Kids who'd written I never had you as a teacher but everyone says you were the best and my sister was in your class and she talks about you all the time. There was a whole ecosystem of second-hand grief, a reputation that had outlasted the man who'd built it.

Colt stood in front of the door until his vision went strange at the edges, and he couldn't read the words on the notes as they blurred.

His brother had been so loved.

Colt hadn't known. He should have known - he'd known Ryland, known his personality, had grown up next to him - but Colt had never been here to see it like this. He'd never seen the evidence of it laid out like this, hundreds of pieces of paper pressed against a door because a group of teenagers had needed somewhere to put the immense grief that losing Ryland had brought.

After a long moment, Colt looked away, found the lock (which was half-hidden underneath a drawing of his brother fist-bumping an alien) with the key the secretary had pressed into his hand, and let himself into his brother's classroom.

The room was dark. He didn't reach for the lights at first.

He set the empty tubs down by the door and stood with his hand still on the light switch, and let his eyes adjust. The afternoon sun came sideways through the blinds, laying stripe patterns across the rows of desks, across the board at the front, across the cluttered surface of the teacher's desk.

There was a layer of fine dust on everything. Not much - the building was climate-controlled, of course, it wasn't an apocalyptic ruin - but enough to show that nobody had been in it for a long time. That the air had been sitting, undisturbed, as the room became more of a museum of Ryland Grace's life than a functional classroom.

From what the secretary had told him, after his unexpected leave Ryland's students had been split among the other science classes rather than a long-term sub being brought in. The classroom had been locked ever since he left, and nobody knew what to do with it. The staff didn't want to throw everything away - it felt wrong, the secretary had said, and her voice had done something complicated as she looked away, and Colt had nodded because he'd understood - and so they had reached out to Colt and he had traveled to California, forcing himself to finally face what his brother had left behind of his life on Earth.

And now Colt was here. He was going to deal with it.

He flipped the light switch.

After a long moment, the fluorescents buzzed and flickered on, and Ryland Grace's classroom came into the light.

The thing Colt noticed first was that it looked like a classroom. Obviously. That was what it was. The rows of standard-issue black tables, a standard-issue whiteboard, standard-issue plastic chairs that Colt was pretty sure were the exact same brand as the ones he had used to pop his back all those years ago in a middle school of his own.

But, looking past the standard-issue parts of the classroom, it was undeniable that the room was Ryland's.

He had covered the walls with so many science-related posters and infographics that clearly came from a place of genuine enthusiasm rather than the decorative obligation of a teacher who'd ordered a few things from Amazon to pretty up an empty room.

Everywhere Colt looked, he was reminded of moments with his brother. Of early mornings with flashcards fanned across the kitchen table as they ate breakfast, Colt running Ryland through vocabulary in exchange for Ryland keeping an eye out for Mom while Colt jumped off the roof and made successfully it into the pool. Countless summer nights with the two of them stretched out on the flat part of the roof with the good sightlines, Colt thinking up new stunts to impress his friends while Ryland pointed out the constellations and explained what the planets were and which direction they were moving and why. Ryland's voice in the dark, certain and quiet, naming things, Colt humming and nodding along to his words.

Neither of them had known, back then, how much suffering the things they loved would cost them.

Colt looked away from the posters, and his gaze settled on the whiteboard at the front of the room. The date on the was still there, in the corner. A date long passed.

Underneath it, scrawled in black dry erase:

Quiz Friday :)

For some reason those words made something in Colt's chest twist painfully, and he had to look away.

The models hanging from the ceiling tiles were impressive. The entire solar system represented in carefully painted spheres hanging on fishing line, clearly arranged with the specific fussiness of someone who wanted to get a model to scale - as much as was realistically possible in a classroom.

Colt stood underneath the solar system and looked up at it for a long time. And as he did, he realized something.

He had never quite known that Ryland had loved this. He'd known his brother was smart, obviously - it would've been pretty difficult to miss, considering the doctorate - but smart and passionate were different things, and standing under those models, perhaps in the same spot his brother had once stood while teaching twenty or so students, Colt felt something akin to vertigo as he realized he'd mistaken one for the other for most of his adult life. He'd always thought of Ryland's teaching as Ryland's work.

He realized, with a strange flash of shame, that he had always thought of teaching as the thing Ryland had just settled for after losing his spot in the research world.

This room told him that he had been wrong. This room was not the room of a man doing his work. This was a man in love with something.

Colt made himself go to the desk in the front of the classroom.

The stacks of papers were worse than he'd expected, not because there were so many - there were, three or four neat piles, binder-clipped - but because they were graded. Most of them. He shuffled through the top of one stack and found check marks, red pen corrections, letter grades written in careful circles. Almost every one of them had feedback in the margins - not just quick grades, but full sentences of useful feedback. Great hypothesis, needs more evidence - where's your data? Cite!! Don't forget to include the diagram. and I can see you understanding this, keep going and come talk to me before Friday, I want to talk through this with you. Keep up the good work!

Colt turned over one quiz and found a small red drawing of a stick figure giving a thumbs up next to a particularly good answer, and he had to set that one face-down as he blinked away the sudden moisture that gathered at the corners of his eyes.

At the bottom of one stack, he found a paper with a comment unfinished in the margin. Red pen, Ryland's handwriting, the words stopping mid-sentence in the middle of a line: Really strong work here - I can see how much thought you put in. If you expand the conclusion to include what we discussed about sound waves in class on Monday, I think-

Nothing after that. The sentence had never been finished. 

Colt set that one face-down too.

Looking past the stacks of graded papers, Colt could see that the lesson plan on the desk ended three months ago.

It made him uneasy, seeing how... intact the room was. It had the unbearable feeling of a place waiting for someone who was only running a few minutes behind. It almost felt like Ryland could walk in any second, carrying coffee and apologizing for being late.

Colt looked at the sticky notes on Ryland's monitor. Most of them were practical - reminders, notes about upcoming events, little 'to-do' items that were still waiting for Ryland to come back and complete them.

The notes were the small detritus of a working week that had kept running after the person living it was gone.

Evidence of a life Colt had known so little of.

Then, half-hidden behind the other colorful bits of paper, a note that he nearly missed:

Colt stared at that one for a while.

He didn't know if the call had happened. If he'd missed it. If Ryland had looked at the note and then looked at his phone and put it back in his pocket and told himself he'd do it later.

Later had run out. For both of them.

After a moment, Colt pulled the note off the monitor and put it in his pocket.

He hadn't even started packing things up yet.

With a sigh, Colt forced himself to turn away from his brother's desk, and went back to where he had left the tubs he had brought.

If he had any hope of making progress before the day ended, he'd better get started. He grabbed one tub from the stack, set it on the first row of tables, and got to work.

Colt wasn't sure how long he'd been in the classroom when he heard movement out in the hallway.

He didn't think much of it. The period must have turned over - he had heard a bell - and for a few minutes there was shuffling and laughter from beyond the closed door, and then it quieted down again.

He had cleared off the top of Ryland's desk and was going through the drawers by then, finding the particular signs of his brother in every item: a stress ball in the shape of the planet (obviously), a birthday card that read you're not old - you're vintage! with a cartoon test tube on it and a bunch of messy signatures that Colt guessed were from his students, and a box of sour skittles. He picked up the Skittles. Turned them over in his hand, thinking about the countless trips and movie nights and christmas stockings from their childhood, all of which Ryland got sour skittles for. His favorite. He set them back down.

Then, at the back of the middle drawer, attached to a fox-printed keychain, was a set of keys.

Colt picked the keychain up.

He'd gotten it more than a decade ago as a crew gift on some shoot early on in his career that he barely remembered, and he'd given it to Ryland because Ryland had always liked foxes, ever since they were kids. He hadn't thought about it in years.

He hadn't known Ryland still had it.

As he held the keychain in his hand, his thumb absently moving across the little foxes that he had known Ryland would love, Colt heard a group of footsteps slow outside the door.

He heard whispering voices go quiet.

He thought: probably just a bathroom break, wrong hall, someone reading the notes on the door.

But, after a long moment, the door creaked as the handle turned.

He looked up.

"...Mr. Grace?"

Colt froze.

He had turned instinctively at the voice - and for a single moment he saw three or four kids crowding the doorframe of the classroom, and one of them, a girl in a bright yellow jacket, had her hand over her mouth in shock.

"Mr. Grace!"

She ran across the room.

Colt barely caught her - she hit him at full speed, wrapped her arms around him, and he got his arms up purely through reflex. She was shaking. He stood there with his arms around a teenager he had never met, and she was crying - no, sobbing - into his shoulder, and he didn't know what to do.

After a moment of standing completely frozen, Colt managed to pat the kid on the back, murmuring some words that he hoped came across as comforting. Instead, she went still, and Colt felt the exactly moment she understood that he wasn't who she had hoped he was.

She pulled back from the hug. Looked up. The resemblance was there, of course, but Colt and Ryland had their differences when you looked up close. Colt had more little white scars dotted across his face from accidents across the years, his nose slightly bent in a way Ryland's wasn't due to a bad break before he even officially got into the stunt business. Ryland wore glasses, and Colt would never be caught dead without his contacts in. And his brother had always looked more... well-groomed, than Colt did.

Colt was someone who looked like someone, and no more, and this girls face said she knew that now.

"You're not-" she started, and the hope had left her face so quickly Colt almost had to look away.

"No," Colt said. "I'm... sorry. I'm not."

The kids in the doorway behind her hadn't moved. One of them, a boy in a science pun t-shirt - I've got my ion you - had his jaw set tight in the way teenagers did when they were trying very hard not to look like they were about to lose it. A girl in overalls was gripping the doorframe, her cheeks visibly wet. Another boy hung back behind them, his brow furrowed as he glared at the tub Colt had been halfway through filling.

"Who are you?" the girl in the yellow jacket said. Her voice was steadier than he expected, considering the crying. "What are you doing in our classroom?"

Our classroom.

There was a sinking feeling in Colt's chest as he put the dots together on who exactly these kids could be.

"I'm Colt. Colt Seavers. I'm-" He stopped. Tried again. "Ryland- I mean, Grace, he was my brother. Twin brother."

"Mr. Grace never mentioned he had a brother," the girl with the overalls said, quietly.

Colt didn't say anything for a moment.

He thought about the sticky note behind the model spaceship. The question mark at the end. He thought about how many times he'd been the one not to call first, over all those years, and how easy it had been to mistake their mutual silence for equilibrium.

Colt thought about how much he had taken for granted, over the years.

"No," he said, finally. "I guess he wouldn't have."

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, the kids shifting as they looked at each other, as if having a silent conversation on their next move.

"You can come in," Colt offered. "If you want."

They came in.

They sat in the spots that were still theirs by some unspoken law - the girl in yellow, whose name was Olivia, sat next to the middle aisle at the second-to-last table. The girl in overalls, Rekha, sat across from her. The boy in the science pun t-shirt sat in the front row and introduced himself as Parker. The fourth kid, Josh, came in last, choosing a seat in the last row and immediately leaning his chair back at an angle that Ryland had undoubtedly told him to stop doing, probably more than once, and had clearly never succeeded.

They all looked to Ryland's desk like they were waiting for someone to sit in it.

Colt pulled a chair from one of the tables to the side instead, sitting under the models and looking at the kids he knew, without question, had been his brother's.

"You're boxing up Mr. Grace's stuff. Are you going to throw his things away?" Olivia asked. Direct. He could see, looking at her, that she had probably been the kid who emailed questions after class. A very smart kid, he could tell.

"I was going to figure out what to keep," he said. "I couldn't bear to throw all this away without... I don't know. I needed to see it first."

She nodded, mollified. "Well. He'd want you to keep the solar system model, at least. He made it, you know."

Colt looked up at the model rotating gently over his head. "Really? I figured it was bought."

"No- he told us he made it in his apartment because he ordered one online and when it arrived it wasn't right at all." Olivia paused. "He talked about how bad it was for like a week before he finally brought that one in."

Colt looked at the model. He tried to picture Ryland in an apartment he'd never seen, in a city he'd only passed through for work, carefully suspending a DIY planet from a piece of string at whatever ungodly hour Ryland had considered a reasonable time to be doing this. Spending his own time and money on something he absolutely didn't have to do, because he'd wanted to, because there was a class full of kids he wanted to show something to.

It sounded just like his brother.

"He did that a lot," Parker said. "Made his own models and posters because ones he found online were wrong. He'd usually bring in the wrong one he bought and we had to find what was wrong with it."

"Drove us crazy," Josh said, from the back. He didn't sound like it had driven him crazy. He sounded like he was telling Colt something he thought Colt should know, something important about the relationship Ryland had with them.

"He was annoying about it," Parker said. Then, immediately: "I mean. Not like, like... he was funny about it. He'd stand at his desk while we were losing our minds trying to point out what was wrong and he'd be like, hm, interesting, maybe that's it! or you're getting closer! and you could tell he was enjoying himself."

"He absolutely was," Colt said, before he'd even decided to.

They all looked at him.

"He was exactly like that when we were kids," he explained. "He'd find something wrong and he wouldn't tell you what it was, just that something was wrong." He paused, remembering with a soft smile. "Of course, he stopped doing that after I proved I was strong enough to tackle him to the ground and noogie him until he told me what it was."

He watched the mental image of their science teacher being noogied land. Parker snorted first, then Rekha, and then Olivia was giggling with her hand over her mouth, and Josh had his face turned toward the window but his shoulders were shaking.

The sound of joy in the dusty room felt wrong and right at the same time, and they let it linger before anyone said anything else.

"You know, he stayed late," Olivia said, after a while. "Like, a lot." She was looking at her desk. "I missed my bus once and it was past five and I was sitting outside and he passed me on his way to the teacher parking lot. He told me to come back inside while I waited for my mom to drive over from work. He said he had papers to grade anyway." A pause. "I saw his desk when I was in here waiting. The papers were all in his already-graded stack. But he still sat with me for, like, forty-five minutes and just... talked."

"What did you talk about?" Colt asked.

She thought about it. "He started explaining the nitrogen cycle because I'd missed part of the unit because I was out sick. And then I asked him how he got into science and he told me about this summer program he'd done in elementary school, and then somehow we ended up talking about movies." She shook her head slightly. "I'm sorry, but he had terrible taste in movies."

"He really did," Colt agreed with a laugh. He was sorry to Ryland's memory, but even a loving brother could only watch all nine of the Rocky films so many times before he went insane. "Between you and me, I always had the better taste in movies when we were growing up."

Olivia looked at him - surprised, then not surprised, and then something in her face settled, a smile crossing her lips.

"He wrote me a recommendation letter," Parker said. Not looking at anyone. "For this super cool summer science program that's supposed to be for high schoolers, but I got in because he wrote that I was so good at science." A pause. "I... couldn't wait to tell him about it. I knew he'd be proud."

"Did you get to?" Colt asked, even though he knew the answer.

Parker shook his head. "He'd already gone when I found out. I-" He stopped. Looked at his hands on the desk. "I wrote a note about it out there. On the door."

He'd already gone.

"...he was scared," Colt said. He hadn't meant to say it, and then he found he wanted to keep going. "Of speaking in front of people. When we were young. He wanted to be a scientist for as long as I can remember and our dad kept asking him how he was going to talk at conferences, defend his research, get grants and all that, and he used to just... go very quiet." Colt tried to remember the exacts of it. "So he practiced. He practiced everything. I always knew he could do anything if he put his mind to it. But still, if you'd told me at eighteen he'd end up being a teacher I would've thought you were joking."

"He still got nervous," Olivia said. Quietly. "Like, you could tell sometimes. On the first day of class I walked by in the morning before the bell rang and I just saw him him pacing back and forth in here."

"Really?" Colt asked.

"Yeah. I could see him through the window." She jerked his chin toward the door and its paper-covered glass. "It wasn't even just the first day of class, either. Just some days he would pace up and down in here for like ten minutes. Then I'd come to class later and he'd be completely normal." She paused. "I thought it was kind of cool, you know? That he still got nervous and he did it anyway." Olivia shrugged, "I always think about him when I get nervous about presenting projects in my other classes. Like - if he could do it, I can do it. That's what he always said, that we could do anything, if we just put our minds to it."

Rekha, who had been quiet for most of the conversation, said: "He remembered things." She said it like she'd been working herself up for it "Not just, like, class stuff. Like, personal stuff. I mentioned once that my grandma was in the hospital. It was just something I said, it wasn't - I wasn't making a big deal of it. But then like two weeks later he asked how she was doing, that he hoped she was recovering well." She paused. "I... don't think I'd ever had a teacher remember something like that before."

Colt looked at the classroom surrounding them - at the posters and hand-drawn diagrams covering the walls and the annotated periodic table in the corner and the model of the solar system his brother was no longer in, spinning slowly over Colt's head. At the stacks of papers waiting to be returned to students who had moved on to other classes, other teachers, other schools.

He'd missed this. All of it.

Years of his brother building something here, and Colt had been in Philadelphia and then Toronto and then New York, falling off things and getting back up, and somewhere in California Ryland Grace had been pacing back and forth in a small room, working up his nerve, and then walking through that door and capturing the hearts of these kids like it was nothing. Like it was the easiest thing.

Colt didn't feel angry at himself, exactly. He'd been sitting with his - their, it had been silence from both sides - failures for long enough that it had moved past that sharp instinctual anger and into something more like a feature in his soul. The guilt was just part of the landscape of his life now. Something he lived with, something he couldn't go back and change.

But sitting in this room with these kids - who were giving him their stories like they understood what it was to need them, who were looking at him with the careful generosity of people who'd also loved the same person but very differently - he thought that maybe this was also the landscape. This was also what Ryland had left of himself.

"The puns," Rekha said, suddenly. "Oh my gosh. Did you know about the puns?"

"The... puns?" Colt asked. "I mean, my brother always liked those ridiculous science joke shirts, if that's what you mean."

She turned to look at him with an expression of absolute gravity, as if the topic held life or death stakes. "There were so, so many puns."

"He had this one," Parker said, sitting up straight. "He saved it for whenever someone said something was impossible. He'd wait until you said the word 'impossible' and then he'd go-" Parker adopted a very serious face, straightening his back, holding out his hand to wag a finger in Colt's direction: "Nothing is impossible. The word itself says 'I'm possible!'"

Colt laughed. It surprised him - the sound of it in his own chest, real and sudden. He laughed and the kids laughed and the room that had been shut and airless for months had loud laughter in it again, and that was wrong and right at the same time, and Colt let it be both.

It was far past the end of the school day when they helped him pack.

He hadn't asked, but Olivia had stood up, looked at the empty tubs stacked by the door, and started explaining what things were without being asked. The other kids had followed her lead. Rekha somehow found a ladder and took down the models carefully, one by one, while Josh held the ladder steady and Parker took the models and carefully settled them in one of the tubs, cushioned with outdated and crumpled up pages of the school newspaper that had been stacked near the door.

Colt worked on his brother's desk, continuing to empty out the drawers, finding all sorts of knick knacks and trinkets that his brother must have collected and been gifted over the years: a spare phone charger, a tube of hand lotion, three red pens, a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST SCIENTIST that still had a ring of dried coffee at the bottom. He wrapped them each in newspaper, placed them in a tub. He picked up the fox keychain from earlier last, holding it for a moment, and then put it in his pocket, nestled next to the note from the monitor.

When the room was almost empty, Olivia picked up a Sharpie from the desk and stood in front of the last sealed tub.

Olivia wrote: Grover Cleveland Middle School, Room 12.

She handed it to Rekha, who drew a small star in the corner.

Rekha handed the Sharpie to Parker, who added, after a moment's consideration: Property of Mr. Grace.

Parker handed it to Josh, who exchanged it for a green marker and drew an alien peeking out from behind the star, one three-fingered hand raised in greeting.

Olivia laughed at that.

Colt picked up the tub and looked at what was written on it. He stood in the now empty room, under the bare ceiling where the models had hung, in front of the blank walls, and he thought about a man who had practiced every hard thing until he could do it, who had gotten nervous and gone in anyway, who had stayed after work for no reason except that there was a kid who needed it, who had remembered a student's grandmother in the hospital two weeks later, and cared enough to ask about her.

He thought about his brother, who had cared for so much more than had cared for him.

After a moment, he turned to the kids and they picked up tubs of their own, and then, one by one, Ryland's brother and Mr. Grace's kids carried what remained of him out of Room 12 at Grover Cleveland Middle School.