one day we'll all get still
(ao3 link in the notes! title from a world alone by lorde)
The summer is quiet.
Impossibly quiet, really; it’s like the whole world decides to hold its breath and count to ten, like everyone is so used to the silence that the globe itself slows its rotations and stills, stretching out the days until everyone’s shadows are long on the sidewalks and the sky is painted in a million colors. The humidity in the air clings to everything and weighs it down until it rests on the burnt-out grass, watching, waiting.
Quiet is not quite a large enough word to encompass what the summer is.
Even in the hum of air conditioning units working overtime to provide some relief to those inside of their houses, there’s a peace that will never be felt in the autumn or the winter or the spring. That peace can’t be found unless you’re sitting with the sun hot on the back of your neck and the top of your head, full of worries, yes, but without any true care.
Zoe sits on one such day. Her converse stretches out into the street with her legs, and from where she perches on the curb, she can see only what is immediately in front of her: houses that look the same as the houses next to them, rows of minivans and gardenias and shrubbery. She hears the hum of the air conditioners and she wishes she were inside, benefiting from their overtime instead of sweating through her class t-shirt like the eggs everyone always jokes about cooking on the sidewalk, but she knows she won’t. Shouldn’t. Can’t. There is too much turmoil, too much dust settling, and she doesn’t want to choke and accidentally set off another mine.
Is this house her childhood home or a cleverly disguised game of Minesweeper? Probably both.
Someone sits next to her, and she knows it’s Evan before anything else. She’s always known when it’s him; she can sense the difference between him and everyone else with eerie clarity. Evan sits, as though there’s nowhere he’d rather be than sitting beside her on the dusty, rough curb. As though he were designed for this and nothing else. Zoe doesn’t quite look at him, but from the corner of her eye, she sees everything he does. She couldn’t stop seeing him if she tried.
He offers her his hand. In the grand scheme of things - of all the contact they’ve shared, hours they’ve clung to each other, years they’ve spent sharing beds and curling up on furniture and breathing in the same breaths - it’s nothing. But somehow it feels like something as she places her palm atop his, still not quite looking at him, and lets her fingers lock with his, trapping the heat between their sealed hands.
Because, in all the years before that, they were Zoe Murphy and Evan Hansen, all sharp elbows and gangly limbs and bare feet pounding on mid-July pavement and the faint smell of sugar that seemed to follow them everywhere. They were flickering street lamps illuminating nothing but some weeds poking through blacktop, hands covered in chalk and rainbows of drawings blooming across the crumbling sidewalks. They were the feeling of a playground ball rough under your uneven fingertips, and the sound of small hands tearing at the brittle, dried grass, and swinging so high up on a swing that the swingset groaned under the weight of it. They were handfuls of moments trickling from between their fingers like sand on a beach, a collection so bright and so mighty that it seemed inevitable it would explode.
But they were sixteen and seventeen, respectively, far from the days of running carefree without any adults to look after them. They would sometimes watch reruns of the Andy Griffiths’ Show at the Murphy’s with glasses of Cynthia’s town-famous lemonade (which was really just half a pack of Crystal Light mixed with lemon juice, though Cynthia admitted this in whispers so low and conspiratorial to both kids that they would think they were guarding a national treasure of a secret), and they joked that they were Opie - between Zoe’s huge, monument-like home with her parents and brother and Evan’s tiny, cluttered house where his mother was never home, always picking up another shift at the hospital an hour’s drive away in the city, they rarely had any adults checking their whereabouts or any home to post up in just like their 1960s idol. Their laughs are more restrained but no less bright as teenagers, their smiles just as wide but more difficult to coax out, the smatters of freckles dashed across their faces just as strong from hours spent in front of the sun.
Summer brings out the children in them, even though you have to squint to see it.
Summers also used to be spent loudly, all the kids in town creating a general hum of excitement and wonder at the warm days and short nights. But when the summer before Zoe’s junior year hits, there’s no laughter to be heard echoing down streets with the chimes of bike bells, no smacks or shattering sounds accompanying ball games on the elementary school’s playground, no fire hydrants busted open to give everyone an impromptu pool party. It’s like the town itself can sense that something bad is coming and has silenced itself preemptively, like by keeping everyone taciturn and silent nothing bad can befall them. It’s no peaceful silence, either. It’s a loud silence, one that takes up space in every crack in every road; and it leaves everything looking off-kilter. Heidi is gone almost constantly, and Larry and Cynthia’s blow-out fights have peaked at least three times a week, and Connor...well, Connor would always be a whole other story.
Despite the silence that weighs over the town like a blanket, Zoe is far from comforted by the town-wide hush. She’s filled with unbidden energy, leaving her restless and fidgety and ready to crawl out of her skin at almost every moment.
So she stands up, yanking Evan with her. He follows as though there is nothing else he’d rather do, as though she is the only force that can move him despite the fact that he stands a good 6 inches taller than her even slouched as he always is.
There’s a little cafe in the next town over. They rarely go there - there’s not exactly a reason to, since they can do just fine finding their own food, and it’s a ripoff anyway. But occasionally, when the oppressive heat (one only a small town and the height of the summer can create) forces them into their lightest clothes and has them practically tearing their hair out, they make the trek just for something to do.
That day, they take Zoe’s car - she’s technically not allowed to drive with just another teenager in the car, but no one’s enforced that for as long as Zoe can remember. So they drive in her shiny, brand-new black Audi with paint you could practically eat off of and blast Lorde with the windows firmly shut, singing along because they know every word. They’ve been living off of her two albums ever since they’ve come out, and she can’t help but smile as she thinks of all the hours spent stretched out on her back on Evan’s bedroom floor, giggling as he dramatically mimics her deep tone in Ribs or sitting on her back porch where he tries to sing Liability in a high falsetto, forcing her water come out her nose with the strength of her laughs. He’s quieter that day, but the whole summer has felt that way, not just him. Everyone seems to be pressed down but some invisible force, words poised on the tips of their tongues without ever breaking free.
Normally, she’d be clinging onto his arm or throwing some limb around him to drag him towards the café, but the temperature in her car reads a toasty 96 degrees before even factoring in the humidity. She settles for dramatically opening the door for him, hiding a wince when the smooth flesh of her palm grills against the sun-heated metal door.
At first sight, the café appears to be empty, but as they look for another moment they see patrons dotted at the tables; they’d blent so seamlessly in with the walls of the shop, as though they did nothing but sit there always, that their brains could not help but write them out of the initial picture. True to form, there is no one behind the counter, but Zoe and Evan wait in front of it all the same; there was a chime when the door opened, and they are far too used to the way businesses operate when there’s little demand to expect anything more than this.
A woman barely three years older than them emerges from the back some minutes later while looking as though she stepped out from a sepia photo. Like the customers, she blends in. When she greets them, her voice is full of false cheer even though she seems to be wilting at the edges just like the poppies in their planters on the sidewalk.
“Hi,” Zoe replies, tearing her eyes away from the small menu nailed to the wall. “Uh, could I have a small blackberry iced tea and-” she glances at Evan, who fiddles with his shirt and lets his eyes jump around the air beside the server and decides to order for him. “And a small English Breakfast tea with cream?”
When the color-void server returns with the drinks and they take them out to the car, he thanks her from the passenger seat, but she just shushes him and starts up the ignition.
Zoe glances at him a lot over their drive home. It’s nothing she hasn’t seen before, but she still can’t stop. She can’t help but think that he’s so wildly different and so completely the same as he’s always been, even uncharacteristically silent on a car ride. He reaches one hand to adjust the sound on “A World Alone” and Lorde’s voice swells with his fingers twisting the dial.
“Maybe people are jerks, but not you.”
He starts to hum, then. His hair starts to fall into one eye, but he doesn’t move it; he simply taps one hand against his thigh. Between sips of tea, he hums a harmony to Lorde’s main melody, and the sound soothes her heart more than anything else. His lashes flutter against his cheek as they get into the chorus.
“You’re my best friend and we’re dancing in this world alone...”
At once, Evan sputters out a “Zoe!” around a mouth of tea and she slams the break just in time to see the red light bright above them. A horn beeps one long, prolonged honking sound from the intersection immediately to their right.
Evan speaks, his voice pitching up to be high and breathless. “Could’ve been worse, I guess.”
She’s reminded, suddenly, of the time after Connor’s birthday party in middle school when they helped her parents take down the blue and white balloons taped up everywhere. Evan had untied one of the balloons, his fingers exceptionally nimble for someone so incapable of staying still, and inhaled the helium inside so he’d get a funny voice, and Zoe followed suit. His voice is almost the same in her car, albeit from fear rather than helium, but she gets a sudden urge to laugh anyway.
“I guess so,” she says at length, and before she knows it the two of them are looking at each other and laughing. “I’m - I’m sorry, I did not mean to do that-”
“Ah, really? I thought you were finally acting on your plans to get rid of me.”
She pulls a face. “For what motive?”
He grins quickly before it fades again. “Annoyance.” Evan points ahead of them towards the light, which is newly returned to green. “Speaking of which, if we don’t want to get honked at or rear-ended…”
“This town would,” she mutters darkly, resuming her driving.
Pulling into the Murphy’s driveway is achingly familiar. Her mom’s tiny silver sedan gleams in the sun, contrasting the freshly-trimmed grass nicely. The imposing white of their house seems to melt into the air around it, making all edges soft and fuzzy as though distorted through water. (“You could swim through this air,” she remarks lightly as she steps out of the car, and going by Evan’s small yuk of disgust, he agrees.) Her car slides to a stop across the uneven gravel of their driveway, and with that, their journey is over.
They practically glide past the perfectly-manicured shrubs and flowers, moving determinedly towards the door. Although Zoe’s key is warm in her hand, the condensation from her iced tea still cooling on her palm, the door is hot enough to burn and scar. It takes a moment for her to brave the temperature and open it.
The sunlight reflects harshly off of the freshly-painted white walls, nearly blinding them as they stumble in. Zoe blinks as she makes her way down the hallway, letting the sound of her sneakers against the hardwood ensure her that she moved in the right direction. Her vision starts to adjust just as she enters the kitchen, Evan just behind her.
Connor is in the kitchen, clearly intending to pass her and take the route out the front door, but when he catches sight of Zoe and Evan he stops short with his hands rested in the pockets of his black hoodie. The siblings freeze at the same time, memories of a thousand old fights in the kitchen surfacing at once.
The problem with their fights is that neither seeks them out. They don’t know a storm is coming until the wind knocks them down.
“Hey, Connor,” Evan says, his hands already jumping to his shirt hem, probably in an attempt to diffuse the sudden tension in the air.
Connor nods briefly in Evan’s direction. He might mutter a “hey” back, but if he does it’s barely audible. He watches her as though gauging her mood when she finally regains control of her limbs and crosses to the kitchen table. She’s watching him, too, even if she’s more subtle about it. The July heat still clings to her skin, and it’s all she can think of as she looks at Connor’s outfit.
“You’re going to broil to death in that, Con,” she says before she can think to do otherwise. She stiffens almost immediately, and suddenly she can look anywhere in the room except her brother. Mentally shaking her head, she forces her hand to move and drop her sunglasses to the table, an action that is too nonchalant for the sudden tense air in the room. She just lets her fingers curl around her tea and waits with unavoidable acceptance for the blow-up to happen.
But it never comes.
“You’re going to burn to a crisp in that outfit,” is all Connor mutters in reply. Zoe gets the sudden urge to grin, but she suppresses it, electing instead to glance down at her tank top and shorts combo.
“There’s, like, a 90 percent humidity rate.”
Zoe finally meets Connor’s eye, and she could swear his muscles twitch as if with the urge to smile. “You, like, burn to a crisp in two seconds of sunlight.”
“That’s true,” Evan says just as Zoe exclaims that she “doesn’t burn,” she “freckles.”
She just throws a faux glare in his direction, examining the dark, freckled skin of her forearm at the same time. Curse her brother and his ability to not burn in the sun; despite their skin being the same shade, she was infinitely more susceptible to the sun’s strength.
Connor clears his throat suddenly. “Well,” he says, with a brief nod. “I’ll just…” and, with that, he slips out the front door.
Zoe shakes her head in his wake, clutching her tea tighter. She looks at Evan. His mouth is shaped as though he’s about to say something, but she brushes past him to move towards the stairs, effectively cutting him off. Footsteps sound behind her on every stair, so she knows he follows.
He trails after her into her pastel-splashed room, shutting the door behind them. Cynthia or Larry being home is unlikely, but the illusion of privacy is nice all the same. She crosses the carpeted floor to crack a window open almost immediately, nearly spilling her drink in the process. Her room is stiflingly hot, leaving the air clinging damply to them. Evan pulls a face, falling into the desk chair while completely indifferent to the fact that it’s covered in hoodies.
“I forgot your room is actually a greenhouse,” he says, watching as she feels the slightly cooler air from outside settle on her cheeks.
“It’s like the air conditioning is actively avoiding it,” she agrees. She turns back around to face him, leaning against the window sill and readjusting her drink in hand.
The edges of Evan’s dark brows pull together, and she sees as his jaw clenches and unclenches in rapid succession. “So, with C-”
“No,” she cuts him off before he can even begin. “I don’t think I can…”
Although she’s used to how heavy her head feels in the summer, the weight of her curls feels heavier than normal, and she tugs at the ends near her shoulders uncomfortably. When she doesn’t move them, they cling to her shoulder blades and refuse to budge. Evan’s eyes, the infinite pools like aged whiskey that are almost as intoxicating that she knows so well, study her as she fidgets until he can’t take it anymore and looks away. “Of course,” is all he says in response.
She drains the last of her tea and tosses it into the trashcan in one fluid motion.
At some point she puts some music on, no longer trusting Evan’s music taste even with her continued influence on him. They shift from activity to activity as they always do, sometimes speaking and sometimes just enjoying being with another person. Dodie’s voice fades to Paramore fades to Jasmine Cephas Jones fades to Hozier and then Zoe grabs her guitar to play along while perched on the edge of her bed. Evan, with his voice of an angel, sings as best as he can, laughing at the low notes and his attempts at a falsetto.
She’s so used to this, the notes of her guitar and the timbre of his laugh and the duvet under her legs, but in a summer that has felt entirely shifted just left of what she feels it should be something feels off all the same. Evan joins her on the bed, crossing his legs under him like a little kid, and she’s so used to being close to him but like everything else it feels different. More charged. More conscious. Like if she’s not careful she’ll tilt and land directly where she knows she can never be, her hands settling at the base of his jaw and sliding over his skin and his hair until there’s even less space between them.
They fall asleep on top of the covers of her bed anyway, sometimes after they tire themselves of singing. Their bodies manage to curl just short of each other, just as they’ve been sleeping since they were little kids. Zoe drifts off without any blankets or even a pillow under her head since it’s far too hot for anything on her. Her fingertips lightly brush Evan’s and that’s the last sensation she is aware of. Similarly, she’s vaguely aware of the fact that he pulls away at some point, and she feels his absence like the weight of a necklace around her throat, but although she’s aware of it, she isn’t roused till the taps come from her window.
She mentioned, once, that she wanted to be awoken one night with someone throwing rocks at her window while she was still in high school. Zoe never thought Evan would do more than laugh it off, but she’s proven wrong that night. The clock is barely gone eleven when quick, insistent taps sound at her windowpane, and she rouses - she’s always been a light sleeper. Evan’s grinning face meets her gaze from about four feet below her, and she takes a minute-long detour to throw a flannel on and brush her teeth before coming back to the window with a bottle of red wine she knows her parents won’t notice is missing. She drops down the half-flight and lands like a cat on her feet.
Well, not quite. She feels her ankle buckle beneath her as her converse make contact with the ground, and her whole body follows it. Letting out an involuntary hiss, she reaches her free hand to Evan and he’s in front of her before she can fall at all, his hands finding her elbows and hoisting her upright. She and Evan are genuinely worried she’s hurt it for a moment, and she hops into a more-standing position while leaning on Evan and bouncing on her good foot. But the pain passes quickly, and Evan laughs once he’s sure she’s okay.
“Wow, such an adult,” he says as she brandishes the bottle for him. She lightly shoves at his shoulder and just tells him to lead the way to wherever they’re going.
Evan is in rare form; he’s never this confident, surging forward along cracked sidewalks only half-illuminated in the dim streetlights the town never decides to fix. One flickers out as they pass beneath it, and she almost stumbles before he reaches out and wraps an arm around her waist. She leans into the touch, letting out an involuntary shudder that she blames on the night chill, and they continue the walk in the same fashion.
When Zoe sees the familiar sign of Ellison Park, she just looks to him, her eyebrows furrowing, but he grabs her free hand and drags her through their normal haunts in the park - the huge oak towards the entrance, the lone statue of a kid reading a book, a bench Zoe once got stung by a bee on - and through a thick crop of trees.
“If I get triple E from a goddamn mosquito, I’m blaming you,” she grumbles, swatting at imaginary bugs.
He shrugs, still leading her to destinations unknown. “Go for it.”
She has another snarky reply posed on the top of her tongue, but it slides away as they break away onto what appears to be the side of a hill surrounded by trees. Above them, the stars shine down as though to smile at them, brighter than anywhere else in town. The whole place is bathed in a faint silver light like something out of a dream.
“Holy shit,” she breathes, but it comes out croaky and near-silent because her breath can’t find its way out around the lump that has grown in her throat. “What is this place?”
Evan shrugs as a small half-smile crops onto his face. “Found it the other day. I can’t believe we haven’t seen it before.”
Wordlessly, Zoe trails over to the slight incline, letting herself flop over until she lies sprawled on her back. “Holy shit,” she says again, beckoning him over. He’s over in an instant, lying at a slight angle to her so his head is right below hers and his feet trail away to her left. “I haven’t seen Orion since I was a kid…”
And that’s how time moves, for them. The bottle of wine passes between them like a game of hot potato and Zoe points out constellations she knows Evan can’t see, even when he tries his best. There is nothing to do but lay there with your best friend and see the universe stretched out in front of you, and Zoe is all at once breathlessly thankful for this little town and its glacial pace.
“It looks so peaceful out there,” he mumbles as the wine starts to take effect in her brain.
She turns her face away from the sky for the first time that night; she’d felt his gaze on the side of her face while she spoke, even when he pretended to be looking at the constellations, but now he really seems to just be looking at the stars. The silvery light gives his dark skin an almost pearlescent sheen, and Zoe thinks he’s never looked so beautiful as he does then, all the glow of the moon captured in his face and the shine of the stars reflected in his deep brown eyes like a long-lost galaxy.
For a moment, she wonders if she’s been wrong this whole time. Maybe she’d thought she was looking at the sky when the whole sky she’d ever need was inches from her face.
“Like everything is where it’s meant to be,” he continues, indifferent to the way her thoughts have derailed. “Balanced. Purposeful. On some...predestined track, just thousands of particles and stars and novas being drawn together so we have something to look at and know that something larger exists.”
He doesn’t turn to face her, but she wishes he would. Zoe longs to feel his breath hot against her cheek like an errant star falling from the sky, to feel the tingle of his lips so close to the skin of her face that entire galaxies bloom across her skin, to feel the star shine words he utters without any air between them. She wishes he would turn his face, let their noses brush in some pseudo kiss. She wishes he would kiss her, or she would kiss him, but they’re caught in limbo instead.
And, tipsy under the stars in Ellison Park, Zoe reckons with the fact that she might be a little in love with Evan Hansen.
