Have a little thing I wrote a few months ago that I think was meant to become something longer but very likely never will.
Ilya’s confession about his mom still lingers, the raw truth of it mingling with smoke rising up from the fire. Shane’s not sure if he should say anything else – and Ilya seems happy to let the cry of a loon snuff the conversation – so he doesn’t. Their fingers slip through each other on Ilya’s shoulder as Shane thinks about how Ilya is funny and beautiful and sometimes he thinks he might be sad.
Ilya’s eyes have drifted closed and Shane thinks he might almost be asleep, until he says, “Tell me a secret.”
“Like what?” Shane says, thinking he doesn’t have anything to give that could possibly match ‘I was witness to my mother’s lifeless body’.
“I dunno. I told you one, you tell me one. Baby Shane secret, when he was twelve.”
Rose had asked him something similar, when they first met. Where was Shane Hollander at eight years old? – the same age she had been her first time on screen, the same age as Ilya when he still had his mother. Having fun on the ice, had been his answer. Maybe not having so much fun off it. He grapples for something to share, a piece of information that seems worthy, from a period in his life he really only remembers in disjointed scraps of blurry emotions, insignificant events and things he used to own.
“Uh…I ate lunch in my gym teacher’s office every day for like six months.”
Ilya shifts in his lap, turns onto his back, looking up at him. His eyebrows climb into his loose curls. “He touched you?”
“Ew, no! What the fuck? No, gross. It was a woman, anyway, Coach Waters.” The question gives him pause just for a second. He’s heard enough about Ilya’s childhood; what’s one more horrifying thing at this point. “Wait, no one ever–”
“No, no. I was just kidding.” Shane gives a flick to his pec for the poor-taste joke, a sharp sting right over his nipple. “Why was your teacher your only friend? You were bullied? All the other children said you were boring? Or you were too cool for them? They were jealous because you were so good at hockey and they all could barely walk without falling over like toddlers.”
“Shut up,” he volleys back, with little heat, thinking that all of Ilya’s proposed reasons are approaching the truth but not quite there. “I don’t know, I had a hard time making friends, I guess. I had hockey friends…teammates, but at school I wasn’t cool enough for the popular kids and I wasn’t enough of a loser for the unpopular kids.”
“Mm, I think having lunch on your own makes you a pretty big loser.”
“Fuck off. You wanted to hear a secret, you don’t get to be mean about it.” At the last second, he stops himself from saying ‘I wasn’t mean about yours’. He’s reaching out to pull at the eyelashes on his left eye before he can stop himself, a tick he’s trying to bury. “Anyway, it was whatever; I kind of liked the quiet.”
“Then what happened, after six months? Other children realised they were missing out?”
“Oh, I went to a new school. An athletic academy.”
“Fancy. And you made friends?”
“Yeah,” he shrugs off the memories and pulls at one of Ilya’s curls, straightening and releasing. “I guess hockey friends and school friends were the same thing after that. Some people seemed to like me, anyway.”
“I would have had lunch with you, I think,” Ilya sighs, turning back to face the fire, ”when you were twelve.”
It’s a nice thought, even if Shane’s not sure it’s true. He had been quiet, awkward, singularly obsessed with hockey and occasionally a little too confident about it in a way he hadn’t recognised had probably been perceived as arrogance until years later. And Ilya – before his mother died – Shane is sure was confident, loud and gregarious in that way that Shane would have worshipped from afar or resented for seeming so effortless. After, he wouldn't have known what to do when faced with Ilya's grief.
“I would have shared with you,” he says anyway, because that sounds even nicer.
