For the next fortnight Julian put his appeal portfolio together without me. I learned about it the way I learned about the weather, from conversations around me: he was asking teachers for old essays, sitting in the reading room until closing, lugging home books on social mobility and school reform. His eternal subject was forgotten estates and second chances. In my first life I had helped him forge a blade out of that subject. Without me the drafts wandered: the thoughts were sharp, but there was no frame. He wrote like a man running from shame – every sentence either apologised or shouted.
I knew all this because he left the drafts where I would find them.
The first lay on our table, under the red pen. The title, "The Architecture of the Way Out: Education as a Bridge out of Poverty", was good – and mine, from the first life. I had suggested it when Julian wrote "School saved me" and I told him that was how charity leaflets were written. He laughed for ten minutes that day and added, "That's exactly why I need you. You make my life less pathetic." Now the title lay on the page like bait.
From where I stood I could see the opening sentence, and it began with the word "Sorry". Not in the text – in the tone: "Many people believe that teenagers from poor districts have no place…" There was no need to read further; he was asking permission to exist again. My fingers twitched towards the red pen like a knee under a doctor's hammer. I walked past.
In the evening I came back for a scarf I had left behind. The draft was still lying on the table, and Julian was sitting in the far corner of the room over a fresh stack of pages and did not see me. He wrote, crossed out, wrote again – no question cards, no structure ladders, blind. He looked like a man learning to walk about his own flat in the dark, painfully and slowly, but for the first time without me. I collected my scarf and did not go over.
The second draft turned up in my locker: eight pages folded into quarters, no note. I took it to the scholarship office and said someone had left their materials behind. The secretary was surprised, right up to the moment she looked at my face. Then she wrote Julian's name in the log.
The third time, he caught me by the old art block.
"You don't have to correct it," he said quickly. "I know that. Just read it."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because reading is already work."
He drew his brows together.
"I'm not asking you to rewrite it."
"You always asked for that afterwards, once I'd read it."
"Not always."
I tilted my head.
"Do you remember the essay for the state competition?"
His face changed.
"You sent me a file in the middle of the night called 'Growth'. By breakfast I had rewritten the opening, rebuilt the section on your childhood, cut the paragraph about your father, added the bridge metaphor and straightened the last line. You submitted the entry before lessons. I changed everything."
"You've changed," he said, and looked away.
That tiny retreat, the refusal to argue, cut deeper than any denial. I let out a breath.
"Julian, if you need help there's Hartmann, student support, any teacher you like, a mentor from the upper years. Not me."
"You say it as though it were simple."
"It is simple. It's merely inconvenient."
He looked at me wearily.
"Charlotte says you're doing this out of envy."
"Charlotte needs that to be true."
"And is it true?"
A proper heroine would have said no. But I had been reborn, not purified.
"Yes," I said. He went still. "I was jealous when you chose her, after all the years I spent pulling you out of holes. I was jealous when you were embarrassed to be seen with me and proud when Charlotte took your arm. I was jealous because I believed that you knew the real me, and so one day you would choose me."
He went pale. I finished it.
"But I didn't stop the lessons out of jealousy. I stopped them because even if you had chosen me, I still deserved a life of my own."
He had no answer. And from behind me came Charlotte's voice.
"How touching."
She was standing three paces away with her arms folded, and her eyes shone like those of someone who has just found the right key.
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