Group Project

Mr. Reyes announced the group project on a Monday, which felt, to Caspian, like a small personal betrayal, Mondays were hard enough without the added labor of coordinating with three other people on a presentation about the Industrial Revolution that nobody in the room, including Mr. Reyes himself, seemed especially excited about."Groups of four," Mr. Reyes said, consulting a clipboard with the weary authority of a man who had announced this exact assignment for eleven consecutive years and had stopped pretending to enjoy it around year four. "I'm assigning them, so don't bother trading seats to sit with your friends. I see you, Marcus. Sit back down."Marcus sat back down, grumbling.Caspian's group turned out to be himself, a girl named Sasha he'd shared maybe four total sentences with over the course of the semester, a boy named Theo who played first-chair trumpet in band and radiated the specific anxious competence of someone who'd never turned in an assignment late in his life, and, mercifully, Mike, who threw both arms up in silent victory when the names were read and mouthed *we're so back* across the room in a way that made Sasha laugh before they'd even moved their desks together."Okay, team," Mike said, once the four of them had dragged their chairs into a loose circle, "I move that I be assigned zero actual responsibilities and instead serve purely as morale officer. All in favor?""That's not how group projects work," Theo said, already writing *ROLES* at the top of a fresh page in his binder, underlining it twice."It's exactly how group projects work, Theo, you just haven't been in the right groups." Mike leaned back in his chair, hands laced behind his head. "Caspian, back me up.""I don't think Mr. Reyes will accept 'morale officer' as a section of the rubric.""See, this is betrayal. This is what betrayal feels like." Mike said it with such wounded dignity that Sasha laughed again, and even Theo cracked something close to a smile before going back to carefully dividing the topic into four even sections, causes, key inventions, social impact, legacy, with the focused seriousness of a general planning a campaign.They ended up meeting twice that week to work on it, once in the library during a free period, once at Mike's house on Thursday because his mom had made too much of something and insisted everyone stay for dinner, an invitation that had apparently been extended to the entire group before Caspian even had a chance to object. He didn't object. There was something almost easy about being folded into somebody else's noisy, ordinary household for an evening, Mike's mom asking Sasha about her older sister, who apparently used to babysit Mike, Theo carefully explaining the trumpet fingering for a song playing on the radio to anyone who'd listen, the whole kitchen full of a kind of warm, chaotic normalcy that Caspian found himself, unexpectedly, wanting to stay inside a little longer than the project actually required.It was during the library session, though, two days earlier, that the exhaustion had caught up with him hardest.They'd been at it for maybe forty minutes, Theo assigning research, Sasha typing notes into a shared document with impressive speed, Mike ostensibly "finding images" but mostly finding memes he insisted were "thematically relevant to the coal industry", when Sasha turned to Caspian and asked, perfectly reasonably, what he thought about splitting the "social impact" section into two parts.He hadn't heard the question. Not really. He'd been staring at the library's carpet, at a pattern of interlocking hexagons that had, for the last several minutes, become the entire content of his attention, his mind somewhere else entirely, somewhere gray and quiet and very far from a table full of people discussing the Industrial Revolution."Caspian?""Sorry, what?""The social impact section. Splitting it. You okay?" Sasha asked it lightly, not unkindly, the way you'd ask anyone who seemed to have drifted off mid-conversation, no particular weight behind it, but Caspian felt the question anyway, felt it land somewhere tender, felt the sudden, exhausting effort of having to reconstruct interest and attention from nothing, on command, in front of three people who were all, reasonably, expecting him to be a person who was simply present."Yeah, sorry. Long day. Split it however works, I trust you guys.""You sure you're good?" This from Mike, meme momentarily abandoned, watching him with that same too-perceptive look from the cafeteria days before."Yeah. Just tired. Let's keep going."They kept going. Caspian pulled his attention back into the room by main force, contributing three fairly solid points about factory conditions that he pulled from a half-remembered documentary, nodding along to Theo's increasingly detailed outline, laughing at one of Mike's memes because it actually was sort of funny, a cartoon coal miner with the caption WHEN THE 14-HOUR SHIFT AIN'T EVEN THE WORST PART. The performance held. Nobody pushed further. The library session ended with a reasonably solid draft and a plan to reconvene Thursday, and everyone packed up their things and drifted toward the exit in the loose, unhurried way people do at the end of a free period.But the effort of it, the sheer, grinding effort of hauling himself back into a conversation he'd fallen out of, of manufacturing the right amount of interest and energy on a schedule that wasn't his own, stayed with him the rest of the day, a low ache behind his eyes that no amount of blinking seemed to fix. He'd read once, in some article he couldn't remember the source of, that this was a real thing, that pretending cost actual energy, measurable energy, the same kind you'd spend running or thinking hard about a math problem. He believed it. He was, by his own rough estimate, spending most of every day paying that particular tax, and some days, more and more days, if he was honest with himself, which he mostly wasn't, he wasn't sure how much longer the account would hold.At Mike's house on Thursday, though, something about the noise of a full kitchen, the specific chaos of four teenagers and one determinedly hospitable mother all talking over each other about trumpet fingering and coal mining and whether the presentation should open with a joke, made the tax feel, briefly, more affordable. He didn't have to perform quite as hard there. Nobody was watching him closely enough to notice the gaps, and the gaps, when they came, got filled in by somebody else's noise before they had time to become visible.He left that night with a solid rough draft of the presentation, a container of leftover casserole Mike's mom had insisted he take home, and a feeling he didn't examine too closely on the walk back, something almost like being full, in a way that had nothing to do with dinner.He didn't know yet that this small, ordinary group project, four kids and a library carpet and a kitchen too loud to think in, was one of the last unremarkable weeks he'd have for a while. The cracks in him had been widening for months already, quiet and mostly invisible, and they wouldn't stay quiet much longer.