Chapter Text
Jacob sleeps, and then he keeps sleeping. It’s a protective thing, like a turtle in its shell, a way to guard himself from the harsh reality that things have taken a turn. If he thinks about it, it’s almost definitely a turn for the better, but then if he thinks about it longer than five seconds, it’s still overwhelming to the extreme.
Here and there, Zach and Janine talk to him. He doesn’t pay much attention even though he should. He feels hollowed out. He’s still on fire. He wishes he could put it out by covering his head with his blankets and pushing his face against the pillows, but he can’t.
“You have to eat something,” Zach says gently, stroking Jacob’s hair. “And preferably take a shower.”
Jacob lets out a long breath. He can’t find the energy to lift his head. Maybe this is protective too, not being able to get out of bed. Maybe it makes it harder for him to die.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, and he goes back to sleep.
When he wakes up, Janine is in his room, staring at him, which is weird but oddly comforting. It at least makes him feel like he’s still here. He blinks up at her. “I’m sorry,” he says, an echo of himself.
“For what?” she asks, sounding mildly affronted on his behalf.
“I stopped trying.”
“Nooo, you’re just taking a break before you keep going, Jacob. Everyone needs a break sometimes!”
“I don’t know if I can go to school on Monday.”
“Yeah, uh, I’ve been looking into that. I think you can get ten days paid sick leave before it gets really complicated.”
“Ten days,” Jacob murmurs. “Will I have to say what’s going on?”
“I…I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.”
“Do you think I can get better in ten days?”
There’s a long pause. “Not really,” Janine admits. “But maybe you’ll be able to go back to work.”
He did manage this long. If he can get back to where he was, he can manage again.
“There’s a sub shortage,” Jacob points out. “Not that I’ve actually been doing anything.” He groans, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I’m useless.”
“You’re not useless,” Janine says, fire in her voice. “You’re not!”
“Thanks,” Jacob murmurs in dismissal. He sighs. “Why can’t I do anything?” he wonders hollowly, though he knows the answer.
“I think you just got tired, Jacob,” Janine says sadly.
“I was doing so well.”
“…No you weren’t.”
“Yeah, no, I don’t think I was,” Jacob agrees, because he’s gotten to the point where he can’t find it in himself to argue.
(There’s a lot that he can’t find in himself anymore, starting with everything he used to like, which was, frankly, a lot of things.
He isn’t sure any of it is coming back.)
He doesn’t want to do this.
He’s not sure what this is, but there’s a couple of options.
He’s going to sleep on them for now.
+
There’s more people in the apartment than there were a few hours ago. Jacob is finally awake enough to perceive that.
I can’t believe you told them, Jacob thinks at nobody, a surge of frustrated anger jolting his body before it drains him and is gone.
(He’s much angrier at himself than anyone else. Deep down, even past wanting to kill himself, he wants to hurt himself, as if that’ll shock him to life like Frankenstein.
Sorry, Frankenstein’s monster.)
Of all the people who could know, the ones who are slowly but surely becoming a second family are the ones he doesn’t mind having that information. His other friends are more fair weather types. That was just never a problem before because Jacob’s always lived in fair weather. He was supposed to, at least.
“Thank you so much,” Zach says. “He’s not even eating what I make, so we thought…well, Janine thought, and I thought…sure!”
Jacob’s stomach hurts. He’s not sure he’ll be able to keep anything down. Has he lost weight? He feels diminished. Zach made him a sandwich earlier and he dumped it on the floor like a kid (he never would’ve done that when he was a kid; he was a very grown-up child) and Zach had to take some deep breaths while Jacob went back to sleep.
Jacob wonders if the lack of utensils was on purpose or if he’s just paranoid. Whichever way he slices it (not that he’d be granted a knife right now), he suspects that the apartment has been picked clean of anything he could use to hurt himself. He wonders if Melissa and Barbara will notice that.
This is so embarrassing. He wants to die.
He should get out of bed and go to the kitchen, if they’re going to try to get food into him. He doesn’t usually eat in his bedroom, it’s a whole thing.
Instead he struggles to a seated position and gives up there before Zach comes in.
“Heyyy, honey, you have visitors!”
Visitors. It makes it sound like he’s really sick. There aren’t guests in the apartment, no, perish the thought. There are visitors.
Melissa and Barbara follow Zach, who leaves after giving Jacob a gentle kiss that soothes him for a fraction of a second. Zach seems to think there’s still something of the man he loves in Jacob.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Barbara sighs out. Jacob tries to paste on a smile.
“It’s good to see you. I’m very touched you’d come all this way.” Not touched enough to get out of bed, though.
“Well, we live close,” Melissa deadpans, walking over to him and maneuvering one of the boards he uses for his laptop onto his lap and then putting a plate of soup on it. He grimaces. They’re really doubling down on the sick person comparisons.
“I can’t eat that,” he says. I can’t eat anything. I’m on a hunger strike against life. Solidarity or whatever. “I’ll spill it.”
“Give it a shot. You don’t have to eat the whole thing. And I won’t be offended if you spill. It’ll go down easy, promise.”
“I might throw it up,” Jacob warns as he picks up the spoon.
“I won’t be offended by that either.”
Jacob puts down the spoon before even dipping it in the bowl.
“Okay, I will be offended if you don’t even try it,” Melissa threatens lightly. For a brief, absurd moment, he wants to say, I don’t give a fuck. But he does, and so do they. Melissa made this for him, and that’s nice. It’s caring. They do care. Score one for Jacob Hill.
Barbara and Melissa are sitting on either side of the bed. The humiliation is going to make Jacob choke.
He loves them so much, but if he says that they’ll think he wants to kill himself, so he swallows it down.
“It’s all right, sweetheart,” Barbara says gently. “Don’t cry.”
Jacob frowns. He presses his fingers to his cheek. They’re wet. He’s not a crier. He definitely doesn’t like crying in front of other people.
His heart is breaking. He makes a sad whimpering sound like a dog.
“No, actually—cry if you need it,” Barbara amends. “No one is judging you.”
The tears start even as he scrubs stubbornly at his face. “You should,” he sobs miserably. “I’m not myself anymore and I don’t know if I’m coming back.”
“You need to take a breath,” Melissa says. “Take a rest. Everyone needs a rest sometimes.”
“That’s what Janine said.”
“Well, that was very wise of her,” Barbara says primly. “Didn’t know she had it in her.”
Jacob sniffles. “Be nice to Janine.”
“Eat your soup, kid,” Melissa says.
Jacob isn’t sure how he manages it, but he eats half the soup before giving up and letting the spoon fall.
“That’s it?” Melissa asks, and something about the disappointment in her voice when Jacob was trying hurts more than it should.
He turns to lie on his side without setting the food aside, and the half-full bowl of soup tumbles to the floor, spilling it everywhere. Both Melissa and Barbara make noises of surprise. Barbara even manages an admonishing, “Jacob!”
Jacob fists a hand in his sheets. “I did my best,” he mumbles sullenly.
There’s a heavy sigh from next to him. “I know, kid. Sorry. There’s plenty of soup left anyway. I made some lasagna too.”
“Zach will like that,” Jacob says. He’s calm again, or seems to be. The agitation burning his body is invisible now. His usual energy has been compressed like his low mood is a trash compactor and it’s gotten pretty crushed.
“Let’s get this cleaned up,” Barbara says, probably to Melissa. Jacob closes his eyes.
The bowl didn't break on impact with the hardwood floor. It was made of plastic.
He hears Melissa say, in the kitchen, “Damn, it really is that bad.”
Jacob covers his head with his pillow.
+
He knows he has to get up.
He’s going to have to go to a psychiatrist soon. And a therapist. Both Zach and Janine have been doing a lot of digging about that. Jacob’s impressed. Hasn’t it only been like two days since everything blew up? He thinks it’s Sunday. It might be Monday, which makes him wonder what Janine is doing here.
“Please tell me you didn’t call off work for me,” Jacob says. Some part of him is actually thrilled about that. Most of him is clutching his proverbial pearls. Do they really think the situation is that urgent? It’s not like he took time off when Janine was sick. He just bought her some soup and brought it by and held back her hair when she puked it up.
“Just one day,” Janine assures him.
“Did I call off?”
“You did,” Janine says. The dread in her voice makes him grimace. “Do you not remember?”
Jacob attempts a laugh. It comes out regrettably unhinged. “Of course I do,” he says. “I called off for. A couple of days?”
“Ten days,” Janine says. “I helped you fill out the paperwork. Ten days while you get all settled with the new, you know, mental health professionals. And if it takes longer we’ll…cross that bridge when we come to it! It’s just more paperwork. And also they pay you less.”
It can’t take longer. Jacob isn’t really anything if he’s not teaching, and he needs the money. From what he remembers, therapy isn’t cheap, and he doubts Zach has only been looking within their insurance.
Jacob is leaning against Zach, who’s sat up in bed with him.
“If I was dead, you wouldn’t have to deal with all this shit,” Jacob points out more bitterly than intended, which makes both Zach and Janine cry, which makes Jacob feel bad enough that he cries too, which is a record.
+
Janine leaves.
Wait, that sounds way more dramatic than it is.
Janine has to go to work like an actual adult who is capable of taking a shower and changing her clothes, both of which she hasn’t done since very, very early Saturday, firmly in crisis mode. A different kind of crisis mode than Jacob, but crisis mode nonetheless.
He’s the one who, finally able to sit up and engage with the world for longer than twenty minutes at a time, begged her to go and take care of herself before going to school on Tuesday, because she was going to give him another guilt complex.
“Fine, okay, I’ll text you,” Janine said, and then she was gone and now it’s just Jacob and Zach and calls to mental health professionals.
There’s only one psychiatrist and one psychologist who are able by some miracle to see him in the next couple of days, so hopefully they’re any good at all—can they be, if they’re not already booked up?—because Jacob doesn’t have time to wait for something better. His students are probably already getting behind, provided that they’re not actually thriving without him, which is also a possibility, if a painful one.
He should prep, at least, for when he gets back. The next unit will have started by then, but he’ll have to figure out what the kids learned, what the sub made out of his meticulously crafted lesson plan and…fuck, he’s so behind.
He can feel some of his energy returning, for a given value of energy (maybe all the sleeping is doing something, maybe he needed to hibernate for a little while, hibernate and admit that there might be something wrong, he was so sick of practicing his smile in the mirror, he doesn’t teach literature but he can identify a cliché), but his good spirits are not returning with it.
+
Jacob gets out of bed on his own to do something other than go to the bathroom for the first time in a while, but it’s not really anything productive.
He just paces around, trying to get his head unjumbled, growing steadily more frustrated when he can’t.
He stumbles into the bathroom and stares at himself in the mirror. He’s unshaved, his hair only half-heartedly controlled because he hasn’t been to his barber in way too long, dark circles under his eyes, he absolutely has lost weight, and he feels like he’s waking up. He doesn’t think it’s a bad feeling, but he’s not sure it’s a good one, given what he’s waking up to.
I wish you were dead, he tells the face in the mirror.
Not much he can do about that, though. Maybe break the mirror? Maybe there’s still some medicine lying around? Maybe…
He closes his eyes. He counts backwards from ten.
Maybe someday he’ll forgive himself for being this way, but for that to happen, he has to give himself space for there to be a someday.
He takes a shower.
Whether he feels better afterwards is debatable, but he does feel cleaner, and that’s pretty nice, actually. He rubs a hand over his stubble and winces.
He’s going to have to ask Zach for his razor later, because it is not currently available to him, for regrettably obvious reasons.
+
The good news is that he already took medication for this exact affliction long-term once, and it worked, so there’s something to start with. The bad news is that things change, brains change, and what if it doesn’t work now? Is that a thing? Now that Jacob is starting to be able to think again, his thoughts are spiraling endlessly like before.
The psychiatrist whose name Jacob forgets immediately even though he is not the kind of person who forgets names says that Zach needs to keep a close eye on him, because recovery can be a dangerous time.
Jacob mostly wishes he hadn’t let Zach into the tail-end of this consultation, because it’s just worrying him.
He eats dinner with Zach, though, and takes his medication with food.
+
At the first appointment with the woman who he really has no choice but to accept as his new therapist, Jacob grinds his way through a description of his symptoms, laments about how well he was doing, asks if he’ll get locked up if he says he wants to die even if he’s not active about it and when told no says, plainly, that he wants to be dead; rambles his way through all the secret stories he’s swallowed down for weeks upon weeks. He can’t seem to stop.
It’s like he’s on autopilot, but he isn’t. He’s saying true things, things he feels, and maybe this is a sign that he is as desperate to get better as he thinks he should be.
“I want to be okay again,” he says at the end of his disjointed rant. There are tears on his face, and he wipes them away impatiently.
“And I want to help you with that,” the therapist, who has been taking multiple pages of notes, says. “I think that for now, sessions twice a week would be a good idea, given the crisis.”
Her name is Dr. Bell. Jacob remembers that very suddenly.
“Did you know that Sherlock Holmes was based off of a Dr. Bell?” Jacob blurts out.
Dr. Bell smiles. “Yes, I’ve heard.”
“Right, yeah, I’d be surprised if you hadn’t,” Jacob says. He’d say more, but that’s when the exhaustion hits him and he sinks back against the couch, listless again.
He feels dirty for some reason, like he shouldn’t have said any of that. At least no one important heard. “I have to go back to work soon,” he says. “I’m getting behind.”
“You’ve mentioned that a few times. Is getting back to work your main goal right now?”
“Yeah. And also not wanting to die anymore.”
“Those are good goals,” Dr. Bell says mildly.
“I really have to get back to work,” Jacob says anxiously, surging forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “I just need to prepare, and then the rest is…it’s performance. No, there’s more to it than that, obviously, but that’s. It’s not the point. I just know people are going to think it’s too much stress for me, because it’s…it’s stressful, yes, but it’s also a distraction, a beautiful distraction, most of the time, and it’s—it’s what I do. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I just got so tired and I…I broke. That wasn’t supposed to happen to me.”
“It happens to a lot of people, Jacob,” Dr. Bell says. “And from what you’ve said, you hid it for a long time. That’s a recipe for burning out.”
“I didn’t burn out!” Jacob says defensively, because he didn’t, he loves his job, he really does love his job, it’s just hard to love anything right now, it’s hard to do anything, to concentrate, but he misses his kids and he misses Abbott and he misses being able to impart knowledge to the leaders of tomorrow and he misses—
“I wasn’t talking about burning out on your job, Jacob,” Dr. Bell says calmly.
Jacob hesitates. “Oh,” he says, and then he’s silent again.
“Look, I can see you want to go back to work, and I respect that. I’m not going to try to talk you out of it. I don’t even really think I need to, though I might have to withhold full judgment on that until once you’re back at work and I can see how you fare.”
Jacob grimaces, but he liked most of those words, so he lets the ones that make him uneasy go.
“What I need is for you to work with me and be honest with me so I can help get you into remission. I don’t want you stuck back in this smiling depression of yours. I want you not depressed at all.”
Jacob blinks at her, heart clenching. “I want that too.”
“Good. I’ll see you in three days, okay?”
“Okay,” he says. Maybe he’s finally had a stroke of luck here. He likes Dr. Bell, her kind eyes and her soothing voice and the fidget toys on the table and the pride flag in the corner of the room and the UPenn degree mounted on her wall. He thinks maybe she can be someone he confides in.
“Can you promise me you won’t kill yourself in that time?” she asks, catching Jacob entirely off-guard.
Jacob’s eyes widen. “Of course not!” he sputters out.
Dr. Bell smiles. “I liked that response.”
+
It’s day seven of leave.
It’s been twelve days since he’s so much as left the apartment for anything but appointments.
He thinks it’s time to really put his mind to getting back to work, but then Zach drags him over to the TV, and he’s exhausted, and he falls asleep with his head in Zach’s lap. He sleeps for eight hours, and he feels better when he wakes up.
It’s progress.
He gets himself to a seated position on the couch, untangling himself from the blanket that’s pooled around his feet.
Day eight of leave.
He’s behind, even with the weekends on his side.
He’s going to go back to work soon.
He’s going to go back to work while still adjusting his meds and dealing with side effects and therapy twice a week and fuck knows what Ava will say and if he’ll be able to not lose his mind about it and fuck knows what the kids will say and if he’ll be able to not lose his mind about that and he’s pretty sure he’s triggered Janine’s abandonment issues which was not his intention and Barbara and Melissa text him now and Barbara puts praying hands at the end of like every single message she sends and he doesn’t know why it’s driving him crazy but it kind of is and—
“Honey, breathe,” Zach is saying. He must have noticed Jacob zoning out on the couch.
Jacob sucks in a quick breath, and then another one, and then another one, and…
“Okay, no, not like that; now you’re hyperventilating. I mean slow, deep breaths,” Zach says, sitting next to Jacob. He grasps Jacob’s hand in his and presses a kiss to his knuckles.
Jacob forces a slow, deep breath, and then another, and he manages to breathe through the anxiety.
In spite of everything, a weight really has been lifted from his chest, though sometimes he doesn’t notice until it allows all the once-muted frantic feelings to surge forward.
“You’re too good to me,” he informs Zach once he’s able to speak again.
“I love you,” Zach says matter-of-factly.
Jacob turns his head to kiss him, slow and easy, and then clings to him stubbornly, reassured that Zach is holding on equally tight.
He feels calm now.
Jacob has a lot to live for, and that finally matters to him again.
+
His leave ends on a Friday, which is nice, because it means he gets another weekend. He’s already started and ostensibly finished prepping for his return to work, with help from the existing curriculum (it’s not like he’s just doing this all on the fly) and Janine and the sub Ava managed to scare up, and he’s feeling…hopeful. Okay.
Not quite himself, not yet (sometimes he feels a little like he’s still trying to figure out who he is), and Dr. Bell warns him that this may be a reprieve but there will almost certainly be setbacks, which seems like a huge bummer of a thing to say, but he does appreciate the realism as much as he appreciates the good days, which would probably be low days for anyone not as depressed as he is, but at this point he’s just marveling at the fact that he can actually breathe again and he is only on fire most of the time, and even then it’s more of a smolder than an inferno.
He still feels so nervous he’s worried he’s going to get sick, which he literally can’t afford, when his phone starts vibrating.
The contact that shows up on the screen makes his stomach drop. He considers ignoring the call, but that’s probably not a level of avoidance he can indulge in and he’s really not sure if Ava’s the kind of person who’ll leave a voicemail, so he picks up the phone.
“…Principal Coleman,” Jacob says.
“Mr. Hill,” Ava responds smoothly, a spark of amusement in her voice. “I noticed there wasn’t another leave request. Does that mean you’ll be back on Monday?”
“Yes,” Jacob says, furrowing his brow. “I feel like you could have inferred that?”
Ava snorts. “So you feeling better?”
Jacob clears his throat. He’s not sure how much Ava knows about the details of his absence, and he’s not sure he wants to, so he doesn’t say much in response to the question, only the truth, because it’s an easy truth to tell. “Yes.”
“Hm,” Ava responds. “All the way better?”
Jacob grimaces. He sighs. “No,” he says, though the honesty is like pulling teeth. “But I can do my job.” I think. I hope. We’ll see.
(What happens if he can’t?
He’ll die, he guesses—
No, that’s enough of that, perish the thought.)
“Yeah, yeah, I ain’t here to argue with you, I don’t know your life,” Ava says. “But if you do end up needing an aide or something…say the word, okay?”
Jacob gapes at the empty space in front of him. “We do not have that kind of money,” he says.
“Eh, I have my ways. Hell, maybe I can get the sub who took over your class to keep helping out if you need, I don’t know, she did okay. The kids like you better, though, God knows why.”
“Oh,” Jacob says, struggling to figure out if he should be offended or touched. Probably both. “Okay.”
“Anyway, whatever happens when you get back, just keep my offer in your back pocket. And if you need something else, I don’t know, shoot your shot. Having you gone for all that time was a whole thing. All these kids asking me ‘where’s Mr. C’ this, ‘where’s Mr. Hill’ that, like little broken parrots and whatnot.”
Jacob frowns. “Do you mean broken records?”
“Whatever. See you Monday, Jacob.”
She hangs up before he can say goodbye. He stares down at his phone. He doesn’t know how to feel about any of that, but there’s a reluctant part of him that’s relieved. If things go wrong, he at least knows there’s a (potentially dubious) plan to get them back on track, and he can’t help but appreciate that.
+
Zach’s so anxious on the day Jacob goes back to work that Jacob has to tell him to breathe.
“I’ll be okay,” he says. “I got out of bed all by myself. I have my therapist’s number. I have a support system, which I’m sure you’ll recall is very important from all the books and sites you’ve been reading. I think this’ll be good for me. Something to do. Purpose in life. All that.”
“I’m just worried it’s too soon, Jacob.”
Jacob swallows down the automatic hurt he feels at those words. “I know, but I have to go back, and if it really does just…destroy my mental health like everyone seems worried it’s going to, I guess I’ll reconsider. But I’m not made to rest for long.”
(He’s always been meant to perform.
It doesn’t have to be a bad thing.)
“I know, honey.”
Jacob’s phone buzzes. “That’s Janine.” He gives Zach a quick kiss and attempts a smile. “Love you, babe, see you later.”
“Love you too,” Zach calls after him. Jacob knows he’s going to get about three million just-checking-in texts throughout the day, like he won’t be surrounded by people, at least three of them watching him for signs of distress.
Janine gives him a nervous grin when he gets into the car. He smiles back, though his stomach has started sinking and he’s already tired. But he got out of bed, and if he ignores all the parts of him that want to go back to bed, he’s looking forward to the day.
Janine rambles all the way to school. Jacob doesn’t tune her out, but he lets her words wash over him, occasionally humming in response. She hugs him before they get out of the car.
“You get it, right?” Jacob murmurs. “You’d want to come back too.”
“Yeah, I do get it,” Janine agrees. “I really do. Just check in with me, okay? And please be there at lunch, no hiding in your car.”
“Yes, yes, I will be there,” Jacob promises, holding up his hand like he’s swearing on a Bible.
Janine hugs him one more time before they go to the breakroom, where Jacob brushes up on work, quietly, guiltily worried about what’s going to happen when the brain fog rolls in. Barbara and Melissa actually do seem pleased to watch the news with him, though he isn’t paying much attention. They keep shooting looks at him, but he ignores it.
He ducks out of the break room before his first class—he just wants to sit in his room for a bit, reacquaint himself with the space—and runs right into Gregory.
“Heyyy, Jacob,” Gregory says. “It’s good to see you!”
Jacob frowns suspiciously. Gregory doesn’t usually say things like that to him. Gregory sounds very much like he’s talking to one of his first graders right now.
Thanks a lot, Janine, Jacob thinks, but there’s very little spite involved. He does remember the eviction situation and how he kind of told, like, everyone about that, the actions of a boundlessly exuberant self who sometimes seems like a stranger to the person he’s become, a long-lost friend he’d love to meet again. Maybe with a little more impulse control this time, though.
Jacob fixes Gregory with a wide smile. He attempts to bounce on his heels but only manages a slight rocking. “Hey, bro! How’s it hanging?”
Gregory’s smile twitches. Jacob narrows his eyes. He doesn’t get a try again. He lets his smile fall, allows exhaustion to bleed into his body. “Who told you?” he asks, though he’s perfectly aware it was Janine.
Gregory gives him dinner plate eyes, his mouth opening and closing in an attempt at innocence. “Told me what?”
“Gregory, you are not good at playing dumb,” Jacob announces, and he turns on his heel and starts to walk away.
“Wait, Jacob!” Gregory calls after him.
Jacob swallows. This is Gregory, wanting to talk to him. If he is still himself, he will turn back. He takes a deep breath. He turns around.
Gregory takes a step forward. “Look, don’t be mad at Janine. She didn’t tell me that much. She was just—she’s worried. And she wants your friends to be able to support you. I know it’s not, not good form, I don’t think, but she didn’t mean anything bad by it, I asked and it kind of came out.”
“We’re friends?” Jacob asks, frowning. Of course that’s been a major goal of his since meeting Gregory and he spent a lot of time trying to manifest being besties back when he wasn’t choking on melancholy, but he knows he isn’t Gregory’s favorite around here. Or second favorite. Or third. He can go on.
“Yeah, Jacob, we’re friends,” Gregory says plainly. He doesn’t give more details, doesn’t qualify the statement, doesn’t give an approximation of how much they are friends, but Gregory is honest, unlike Jacob, so Jacob gives him a twitchy smile. He’ll take being the least favorite friend. Gregory sighs. “Look, I don’t have a lot of experience with this stuff. At least not. Talking about this stuff.”
“Well, I don’t want to talk about this stuff,” Jacob says flatly, a distant part of himself squirreling away the entirety of Gregory’s statement for when he has the emotional bandwidth to interrogate it.
Gregory hesitates before inquisitively tilting his head minutely to the side. “What do you want?”
Jacob pauses, turning over the question in his head, but the answer comes pretty easily. “Just treat me normally. Look, Janine and Zach and even Barbara and Melissa all think I’m made of glass now, and they second guess the things I say because I’ve been lying for so long, and they think that if I fall I’ll break. But I already fell, I already broke, and I’m…” That’s where he trails off, unsure where he was going with that statement.
He feels lost. He feels small under Gregory’s gaze, Gregory who is so much stronger than him in so many ways, who will always be that much better than him, who feels so out of place but fits into the world they live in better than Jacob ever can.
“Still here?” Gregory offers, tentatively completing Jacob’s aborted sentence.
Jacob feels his face soften, though he doesn’t manage a smile, because he isn’t trying. “I’m still here,” he agrees. “Still here, and working on sticking around.” Where I’m wanted. Where I’m needed. Where I can do the most good. Is that at Abbott Elementary? Jacob certainly wants it to be. He thinks it will be, one day. He swallows. “I’m trying to get better. I’ve always been.”
Gregory huffs. “I know, man.” He pauses for a pensive beat, and then says, “If you ever want someone to talk to about…not that. Text me.”
Jacob’s eyes widen, a brief spark of excitement actually flaring in his chest even though Gregory is already walking away.
“…But if it’s all liberal memes and white podcasts and giant walls of text, I’m blocking your number,” Gregory warns over his shoulder as he goes to his classroom.
A smile curls over Jacob’s face. “Noted,” he calls, and he makes his way to class, determined to be the best Jacob he can be.
But the last several weeks haven’t been easy on him, and he is bone-tired already, and he knows he sounds weird and mysterious when he answers questions about where he’s been, and he struggles a little, but he’s trying, and it’s not as bad as it could be. It’s enough to keep the hope alive, at least, and the kids seem to get something out of the class, which is the most important part. Jacob was terrified he’d be doing the kids a disservice by coming back, but he’s pretty sure it’s not shaking out that way, even if, maybe, the best Jacob he can be isn’t great right now.
He’s giving himself the chance to get better, though, and, as overbearing as he knows some of the worry and help he’s going to get will be—has already been, occasionally—he can forgive it in advance, because he knows he’d be the same, and it’s a comfort to know he’s got people in his corner.
(Metaphorically, of course.
In reality, he has a lot of ethical qualms re: boxing.)