The Equipment Room

Touch three happened on a Thursday and touch four happened nine days after that, and by the time October ended I had stopped telling anyone about what happened when I scored on Ilan, because the first time I tried, the school nurse shone a light in my eyes and asked if I'd ever been diagnosed with epilepsy.

"No," I said.

"Any history of it in your family?"

"No."

She wrote something down anyway, the way adults do when they've already decided what box you belong in. I sat on the paper-covered table with my sleeve pulled down over the mark on my wrist and did not tell her that four days ago I had been a boy running through a burning field, that I still, if I let myself, could smell the smoke that wasn't there. She wanted a diagnosis. I didn't have one to give her that would fit on her clipboard.

"I'm going to recommend a full workup," she said. "EEG, bloodwork. Standard when we see repeat episodes like this."

"I don't need an EEG."

"You collapsed twice in one month, Marisol."

"I know what happened to me," I said, too sharp, and she looked at me the way you look at a kid who's clearly not going to cooperate, wrote something else down, and let me go with a pamphlet about seizure disorders that I threw away in the first bin I passed.

Touch three gave me a market square and a language I didn't speak but somehow understood while I was inside it, a boy's hand closing around a coin his mother had given him for oranges and nothing else, spend it on nothing else, she'd said, and he hadn't, because he was that kind of child even then. Touch four gave me a woman's hands braiding a smaller version of Ilan's hair while he complained the whole time that it was too tight, and I felt his mother's laugh land somewhere behind my own ribs like it belonged there. Both times I came back to myself on the strip with the overhead lights swimming and somebody's hand under my head, and both times, when I looked for Ilan across the piste, he was already looking away, jaw set, like a man reading a letter he already knew the contents of.

He never asked if I was all right. That was the thing that started to sit wrong in me, worse than the memories themselves. Étienne asked, once, gruffly, like it cost him something he resented paying. Coach Fontenot asked, in her flat unbothered way, mostly so she could write it in a log. My roommate Priya, who didn't know anything about the Under-Salle and thought I had a seizure disorder I was too proud to talk about, asked constantly, until I started telling her I was fine so often the word stopped meaning anything even to me.

"You say fine like it's a period at the end of a sentence," Priya told me one night, not unkindly, painting her toenails cross-legged on her bed while I stared at the ceiling. "Nobody's fine that many times in a row."

"I'm tired," I said, which was at least true.

Ilan never asked. Ilan just waited, very still, until I could stand again, and then he'd say something practical, like drink some water, or we're done for tonight, and walk off toward the boxes on the roof like none of it required comment. I started watching for the moment he did that, the way you start watching for a tell in an opponent, because I was certain by then that it was a tell, that the not-asking was doing work I couldn't see the shape of yet.

I caught him in the equipment room on a Tuesday, three days after touch four, putting practice blades back on their rack in that unhurried way he did everything. The room smelled like leather and metal polish and the particular mildew that lived in a five-hundred-year-old building no matter how many times they aired it out. I shut the door behind me harder than I meant to, and the sound of it made him go still without turning around.

"I want to know what's happening to me," I said.

"You should ask Coach Fontenot."

"I did. She told me to rest more and stop asking questions she's not authorized to answer, which is the kind of sentence that makes me want to set something on fire." I crossed the room and stood close enough that he had to look at me. "You know. I've watched you not-ask me if I'm okay four times now. A person who didn't know wouldn't do that. A person who didn't know would be worried, out loud, with words."

"I am worried," he said, quiet, and something in the way he said it almost stopped me. Almost.

"Then tell me why I keep waking up on the floor thinking I'm somebody else's little sister. Why my own mother's laugh doesn't sound as loud in my memory as some dead woman's from two hundred years ago braiding your hair too tight."

For a long moment he just held the blade he'd been racking, turning it over once in his hand like he was deciding something, weighing it. Then he set it down, carefully, the way he did everything, and looked at me with an expression I hadn't seen on him before. Not gentleness. Something closer to resignation, the look of a man putting down a bag he's been carrying too long and knowing his shoulders won't remember how to feel right without the weight.

"Every touch you score," he said, "you take one of my memories. Not a copy of it. The thing itself. Whatever you saw, I don't have it anymore. It's yours now."

The room tipped a little, the way it had that first night in the Under-Salle. "You're saying I stole a piece of your childhood off you with a fencing blade."

"I'm saying it's built into the bond. It was always going to happen, whether you understood it or not." His voice didn't rise. It never rose. "You didn't do it to me. It's simply what winning does, in this house, under these rules. It happened before you existed to do it and it'll happen after, to somebody else, unless something changes."

"And you let me keep scoring. You trained me to be better at it. You caught my wrist and told me to breathe quieter for the bees and the whole time you knew exactly what I was doing to you."

"You're not sick." He said it fast, the first quick thing he'd said the entire conversation. "You're not losing your mind, Marisol. What you're feeling is real, it happened, it just didn't happen to you first."

"That's not comforting. That's worse."

"I know." He looked, for once, like a boy my own age instead of whatever ancient, careful thing he usually was, and I hated how much that softened something in my chest even while I was furious at him. "I didn't tell you because there wasn't a version of telling you that would have made any of this easier to carry. You would have known the same thing, just sooner, with more time to be afraid of it before you had to fence anyway."

"That should have been my choice."

"You're right," he said, simply, no argument in it at all, which somehow made me angrier than if he'd fought me on it. "It should have been."

I wanted him to defend himself so I'd have something solid to be furious at. He wouldn't give me that.

"It's only fair," he said instead, after a silence that went on too long, his eyes not quite meeting mine. "You're paying for them with something too. You just can't see it yet."

"Paying with what?" I said. "What am I supposed to be losing?"

He picked the blade back up and slotted it into the rack, careful, final, and didn't answer, and I understood, standing there in a room that smelled like metal and old stone, that I had just learned the first true thing about this bond nobody had bothered to put in the contract.