Tyler Chase
The past doesn’t stay in the past. Sometimes it comes back wearing its old letter jacket.
Tyler || Past || Pain || Alex
Tyler Chase came back to Jefferson in October, which was something nobody had told me to prepare for. He had moved to Seattle at the end of eighth grade — moved abruptly, mid-semester, his family relocated for his father’s job, which was what the official story had been. I had been fourteen when he left. I had been simultaneously relieved and broken by it in the specific way that you could feel two completely contradictory things about the same event when the event was complicated enough. Three years later, without warning, he was in the hallway outside the debate room on a Tuesday morning, which was a hallway I used every Tuesday morning, and we were face to face before I had built any architecture around the encounter.
He looked the same and different. He was still broad-shouldered and easy in his body the way some people were, with the reflexive confidence of someone who had always been found good-looking. But there was something around his eyes that hadn’t been there at fourteen — some awareness, some complexity, the look of someone who had grown into something that required more from them than they’d expected. He saw me. He stopped. “Alex,” he said. His voice was lower than I remembered. “Tyler,” I said, and I was proud of my voice, which was entirely steady, because my hands were not entirely steady. “You’re back,” I said. “My dad got transferred again,” he said. “Back to Portland.” He had the specific quality of discomfort that people had when they had done something and knew you knew it and hadn’t decided yet what to do about the knowing. I had four minutes until debate practice. “Okay,” I said. “I have to — ” “Wait,” he said. I waited. Not because I wanted to but because something in his expression stopped me — not manipulation, not the specific charm he’d used at fourteen when charm was his whole strategy. Something more like genuineness. “I owe you — ” he started. “You don’t,” I said. “Alex.” “Tyler. I was fourteen. You were fourteen. It’s done.” It was not entirely done. But I was late for practice and the hallway was filling up and the specific combination of this boy’s face and this hallway and the memory of being fourteen was too much to manage standing up. “I’ll see you around,” I said. I went to practice. I sat across from Jamie and opened my notebook and my hands were steady by the time I got to the first index card. Jamie looked at me when I sat down. “You okay?” they said. “Fine,” I said. “Practice face,” they said. I looked at them. “Whose?” “Yours,” they said. “You look like someone managing something.” I looked at my notebook. “I’m always managing something,” I said. “I know,” Jamie said, with the patient quality. “I just want you to know that you don’t always have to.” We started practice. I managed. Underneath the managing, something that I had sealed at fourteen cracked slightly at its edge — not breaking, not yet, but admitting the light the way very old wood admitted light through its grain. I noticed it. I filed it. I practiced.
On the walk home I passed Tyler’s old house — he had, apparently, moved back into it — and the lights were on in the second-floor bedroom that had been his. I didn’t stop. I thought about the three weeks we had spent at the end of eighth grade, conducting an experiment in private that neither of us had the vocabulary for yet, and about the specific way it had ended — not with cruelty, not with drama, but with the worse thing: silence. The particular silence of two fourteen-year-olds who had felt something real and then chosen, mutually and without discussing it, to pretend they hadn’t. I had spent three years working backward from that silence, understanding retroactively what it had been about. I had understood it as evidence of something true about myself that I was not ready to say out loud. I thought about whether Tyler had arrived at the same understanding. I thought about his expression in the hallway — the complexity that hadn’t been there at fourteen. I walked home. I did not look back at the house with the light in the window. But I thought about it all evening, with a feeling that was not quite grief and not quite relief and not quite hope — the specific emotional territory of something that happened a long time ago whose consequences were still, quietly, organizing the present.