Spring came to Astoria the way it always did, slowly and then all at once, and by the time the last of the frost had gone out of the ground, Arthur had been training for the better part of five months. He did not think of himself as different. That was the strange part of it, the part he would only understand much later, looking back. The change had come so gradually, one form at a time, one small correction at a time, that he had never once woken up and noticed it arriving. He simply woke up one morning in early spring and realized, almost as an afterthought, that Felix's words did not cost him what they used to. Felix noticed it faster than Arthur did, and liked it a great deal less. It started small, the way most cracks did.
FEL: Nothing to say, Lyerm?
ART: Not really, no.
He said it plainly, without heat, the same way he might have commented on the weather, and kept walking toward the well where Elsie was waiting, and Felix stood there a moment, caught off guard by the sheer unremarkable ordinariness of the response, the particular absence of the flinch he had grown so accustomed to provoking. He tried again the next day, sharper.
FEL: Must be nice, not caring about anything. Easier than actually being good at something, I suppose.
ART: Maybe.
He did not stop walking. Felix's jaw tightened, though Arthur, already three steps past him by then, did not see it. By the second week, Felix had stopped relying on words alone. He knocked Arthur's books from his arms in the schoolhouse corridor, an accident, he said, though his tone made clear he expected no one to believe that and did not particularly care whether they did. Arthur knelt and gathered them without comment, stacked them neatly, and stood back up to find Felix watching him with an expression that had lost some of its usual ease.
FEL: You're supposed to say something.
ART: What would you like me to say?
FEL: I don't know. Something. Anything. You used to at least look bothered.
ART: I'm sorry it's less interesting for you now.
He said it without a trace of the sarcasm the words could have carried, delivered flat and genuine, and something about that, the total absence of the reaction Felix had spent a year training himself to expect, seemed to unsettle him more than any retort could have.
FEL: You think you're clever.
ART: I don't think anything. I just want my books back before the bell.
Felix shoved the last book at him hard enough that Arthur had to step back to catch it against his chest, and turned and walked off without another word, and Arthur watched him go, and felt, distantly and without much investment, that something in the exchange had shifted in a direction he did not fully understand. The moment that mattered happened in front of witnesses, though none of them, Arthur included, understood at the time how much it would matter.
It was a small thing. A group of the older boys were comparing the range of their abilities near the fence, the way they often did, and Felix, holding court as he always held court, had been in the middle of a story about a lightning arc he'd thrown clean across the practice field the week before, embellished, probably, the way all schoolyard stories were embellished, when one of the younger boys, not thinking, asked a question that had nothing to do with anything.
BOY: Is it true Lyerm's not scared of you anymore?
The question landed in the middle of Felix's story and stopped it cold.
FEL: What?
BOY: Denner said he saw you shove him last week and he just picked his books up and walked off. Didn't even look upset.
FEL: He's still scared. He's just better at hiding it.
BOY: Denner said he looked bored, actually.
A few of the other boys laughed, the particular careless laughter of children who had no idea they were standing at the edge of something, and Felix's face did something none of them had seen it do before, a tightening around the eyes, a flush climbing from his collar, the unmistakable physical signature of a boy who was, for perhaps the first time in his young life, genuinely and visibly rattled.
FEL: He's not bored. Nobody with nothing in them gets to be bored of me.
The words came out harder than he'd intended, sharper, and the laughter around him died fast, the particular abrupt silence of children realizing a joke had accidentally found something real underneath it.
FEL: Forget it. It's nothing.
He turned back to his story, forcing the easy confidence back into his voice, but something had cracked, visible now to anyone paying close attention, and Arthur, walking past at exactly that moment on his way to the well, heard enough of it to understand, distantly, that he had become the subject of a conversation he had not meant to start. He did not stop. He did not smile, or gloat, or feel any particular satisfaction in it. He simply kept walking, and behind him the schoolyard settled back into its ordinary noise, and if he had looked back, which he did not, he would have seen Felix watching him go with an expression that had nothing casual left in it at all. Elsie was waiting at the well, as she always was, and she looked at him with the particular assessing look she'd been giving him more often lately.
ELS: You heard that.
ART: Some of it.
ELS: Felix looked like he wanted to set the fence on fire.
ART: I noticed.
ELS: Doesn't that worry you? A little?
Arthur considered the question honestly, turning it over the way he had learned to turn things over, and found, somewhere underneath the easy calm he had worn all afternoon, a small quiet unease that he had not examined closely until she named it.
ART: A little, maybe.
ELS: Why?
ART: Because I don't think Felix likes losing something, even something he never wanted in the first place. And I don't think he's the type to just let that sit.
Elsie was quiet for a moment, the spring wind stirring gently at her ankles the way it always did around her without her seeming to notice.
ELS: What do you think he'll do?
ART: I don't know.
He looked back toward the schoolhouse, toward the fence where the group of older boys had already scattered back into the ordinary business of the afternoon, and felt the small unease settle more firmly into place, quiet and patient, the way a weather change announced itself before the sky had fully decided what it wanted to do.
ART: But I don't think it's finished. Whatever this is. I don't think it's finished at all.