Normal
Gotham Academy started in September and smelled like old wood and new money. The hallways were paneled in oak that had been there since 1847 and the lockers were brushed steel that had been installed last summer and the combination of old wood and new metal and floor polish created a smell that was specific to buildings where rich people sent their children to learn the same things other children learned, except with better lighting and smaller class sizes.
Mrs. Calloway's third-grade classroom was on the second floor, east wing. Twenty-two desks in four rows. A periodic table poster on the wall that was slightly crooked and had been slightly crooked since August and nobody had fixed it. The windows looked out on the courtyard, where a groundskeeper was blowing leaves into a pile that the wind kept undoing.
Julie Madison sat at the desk next to his.
Ponytail. Brown hair, the shade that didn't try to be anything other than brown. A small enamel horse pin on her blazer, gold on blue, that she touched sometimes when she was thinking. She chewed the end of her pencil, just as a thing her mouth did while she worked. The pencil had teeth marks on it going back to September.
She got all the long division right. Every problem. He watched her work because he sat next to her and because watching people work was what he did, and she wrote her numbers in neat vertical columns and carried the remainders and got every answer right without looking at anyone else's paper. She didn't make a show of it. She just did her work and moved on to the next problem.
People required the performance. Julie Madison wasn't measuring anything. She was just sitting at her desk doing long division and chewing her pencil.
They became friends through proximity and repetition and small shared events that didn't mean anything individually but added up. She stole his eraser the first week because hers was out of rubber and she needed to fix a seven that should have been a nine. She didn't ask. She just took it, fixed the number, and put it back on his desk. "Thanks," she said, after the fact. He sat at her table for lunch because the other tables were full and she was eating a peanut butter sandwich and reading a book about horses and didn't look up when he sat down. "There's room," she said, without looking up. There was. By October they had a routine. Lunch at the same table. The walk to the parking lot after school. Arguing.
She told him about her horse and her dog and her older sister who was in seventh grade and "thinks she's better than everyone." He told her about the manor and the sixty rooms and Alfred and she said "you have a butler?" and he said "he's more than a butler" and she said "that sounds like something someone with a butler would say" and he didn't have a good answer for that one either.
They argued about everything.
"Dogs," Julie said. This was November. They were sitting on the low wall outside the cafeteria during recess. Marcus Webb was twenty feet away eating a sandwich in a way that made it look like the sandwich had personally offended him. "Dogs are loyal. They're happy to see you. They remember you. You come home and they act like you've been gone for a year even if you went to get the mail."
"Cats."
"Why cats."
"They choose to be near you. A dog has to love you. It's what dogs do. A cat chooses to. That means something."
"No it doesn't. Cats don't choose anything. They just go where the food is."
"People do that too."
"People aren't cats, Bruce."
"Some people are cats."
"You're describing codependency."
"You're describing a dog."
She stared at him. Her eyebrows went up. Then she threw a pencil at him. Gentle. Underhand. It hit his shoulder and bounced off and landed on the concrete between them. She'd been throwing pencils at him since the eraser theft and the pencils were how she punctuated things. A tap on the desk meant she agreed. A throw at his shoulder meant she didn't. If the pencil went down carefully and stayed on the desk, he'd actually made her mad.
"You're weird, Bruce Wayne."
Flat. Certain. She didn't need to figure out why he was weird. He was weird. That was the whole thing. She picked up her pencil and went back to eating her apple and that was that.
He didn't know what to do with someone who said "you're weird" and meant exactly that and nothing more.
Marcus Webb finished his sandwich and started on a bag of chips, eating them one at a time with his whole mouth open. Julie looked at Marcus and looked at the boy and said "he eats like a cow" and that was also just an observation and also the funniest thing anyone had said to him in weeks.
The stables were Julie's place.
The Madison family had a property outside the city, not a farm exactly, more like the amount of land you bought when your family had been in Gotham finance for three generations and someone along the way decided horses were a personality. The stables were red, wooden, and smelled like hay and leather and the warm animal smell of horses. Pleasant enough. Very present.
Butterscotch was a palomino. Caramel-colored, with a pale mane and an expression that conveyed, even to someone who didn't know horses, a deep and abiding contempt for most things. Julie loved Butterscotch. Butterscotch loved Julie. Butterscotch looked at the boy the way cats looked at furniture they had no intention of sitting on.
"She doesn't like me."
"She doesn't know you yet."
"She knows me enough."
Julie adjusted the saddle. Her hands were quick and sure, the way Sofia's hands had been with the napkins, except this was a girl who liked what she was doing.
"You have to relax," Julie said. "Horses know when you're tense. You're tense."
"I'm not tense."
"You are literally the tensest person I have ever met and I say that as someone who's met Marcus Webb before a spelling test."
He got on the horse. Butterscotch shifted under him immediately, a lateral correction that put him off-center, and his hands tightened on the reins and his legs clamped and Butterscotch stopped moving entirely, which Julie explained was the horse's way of saying no.
"Loosen your hands."
He loosened his hands. Butterscotch didn't move.
"More."
He loosened them more. His fingers were barely touching the reins. Butterscotch turned her head and looked at him with one large brown eye and the brown eye said, very clearly, that loosening his hands was not the same as relaxing and the horse could tell the difference.
He tried again. Squeezed gently with his calves the way Julie had shown him. Butterscotch walked three steps and stopped. He shifted in the saddle and Butterscotch corrected again and he leaned the wrong way and Julie said "other way" and he leaned the other way and Butterscotch sighed. Full-body exhale.
Three more attempts. Each one got him a few strides before Butterscotch decided she'd had enough. The last time, she walked him directly to the fence, stopped, and turned her head away from him entirely.
"She's done with me."
"She's done with your hands. Your hands are arguing with her."
His hands were always arguing.
"You're overthinking it," Julie said. She was standing at the fence with her arms crossed, coaching. Martha would have been reading the failure for what it said about the boy. Julie just watched him be bad at riding and told him how to be less bad at it.
"Sit back. Let your hips follow. She'll walk when she trusts you."
Butterscotch did not walk. Butterscotch stood in the middle of the paddock, breathing. The boy sat on top of her and breathed and they accomplished nothing together.
"It'll come," Julie said. "She's stubborn. You're stubborn. You'll figure it out."
He got off the horse. His legs were sore from gripping and his pride was in worse shape. Julie met him at the fence and split a granola bar in half and handed him the bigger piece without comment. The granola bar was the kind with chocolate chips that were too small to taste like chocolate but big enough to see.
They sat on the rail and ate. The sun was going down behind the tree line and the stables smelled like hay and the air was getting cold. A crow landed on the fence post three sections down and sat there doing nothing. Another one joined it. They sat together the way crows do, close but not touching, facing different directions.
"Butterscotch liked my sister on the second try," Julie said. "She hated my dad for a month."
"So there's hope."
"There's always hope with horses. It's just slow." She bit into her granola bar. "Kind of like math. You do the steps and eventually it works."
"I'm good at math."
"You're good at everything. That's why you're bad at this. You don't know how to be bad at something."
He looked at her. She was watching the crows and eating her granola bar and she'd said it plainly, without looking to see if it landed.
Julie swung her legs and chewed and ate her granola bar and watched the sun go down and let the failure be nothing more than a kid being bad at something.
He sat next to her on the fence rail and breathed and the breathing was easy.