Once Percy has walked her to the front steps of her residence hall, Indy tells him good night and that she'll text him tomorrow, then lingers in the vestibule, just out of view of the door. A group of girls passes by as she waits, a few of them tossing confused looks in her direction as they step out into the cold rush of the night. Indy hardly notices. She's preoccupied, wondering if maybe it would've been best if she'd just ignored Jude's text, wondering what it is that compelled her to reply at all.
It isn't long, just under ten minutes, before a Jude-shaped shadow appears in front of the door. She waits for a second, watching him bounce up and down on his toes, breath leaving his mouth in clouds, frowning down at the phosphorescent glow of his phone screen.
She opens the door, and he thanks her and steps into the vestibule's nearly stifling artificial heat. He's in an oversized puffy green coat, his hair curling up from underneath a woolen cap with a pom-pom on the top. Indy forgets to speak. She's still stunned that he's here; she was sure that the night he slipped out of DuBois, leaving her and Percy there in that attic, was the last she would see of him.
"Jude." She's whispering, though she doesn't know why. "What are you doing here?"
She sees the smart-ass answer flicker over his expression, and shakes her head at him before he can utter it. "I left things off on an...awkward foot, I guess," he amends. "That was shitty of me."
"I agree with what Percy said."
"Percy?"
"This doesn't really involve you, Jude. The second we got done speaking with your grandmother, really, this was over," Indy says. Beyond the glass door, the night is pitch black, suffused here and there with the bright blue gleam of a campus emergency station. It must be late, and yet her eyes are wide open, body fidgety with an energy whose source she doesn't know. "You really didn't have to come back."
Jude tugs his hat off, leaning his weight into the wall, shaking his hair back from his face. "On the contrary," he says. "I did. I wanted to."
To that, Indy says nothing.
"I had time to think about it, Indy," Jude goes on, filling the silence before it can fully settle. He closes the hat's pom-pom in his fist. "And when I did, it's like you said to me once. I just thought it'd be dumb not to do something when I know that I can, right? My grandma was never able to call attention to this case like she wanted to, either; they just treated her like some random batty neighbor. Maybe this way I can finish what she started."
It is a risk in simplest terms; as far as she knows he is still what Percy deemed him: an unknown variable. And even more unknown is how, in fact, to know him.
Maybe tonight, if she lets it, can be a start.
Indy sighs, pushing a hand up into her curls. "What time is it?"
Jude looks confused, his pale face still faintly pink from the cool breeze, but he still fumbles to pull his phone back out from his pocket. "Just past eleven, I think."
"Good," Indy says, heading for the door. "There's a coffee shop not too far from campus that stays open until midnight. We can still make it if we walk fast."
"Coffee?" Jude steps in, holding the door for her. Frigid air nips at her face; she crinkles her nose and tries not to sneeze. "At this hour?"
"It's cold outside, and it's necessary," Indy says, tossing a glance at him over her shoulder. "You've missed some things, Jude. We need to be awake if I'm to fill you in."
As always, Indy orders something sweet and strongly cinnamon, with just enough espresso to leave behind the ghost of a bitter aftertaste. Jude still seems confused that a coffee shop is open this late, and after mulling over the menu for way longer than necessary, he orders a very pink-looking tea.
They are the shop's only patrons. They take a booth in the far corner, beneath a chalkboard Indy figures was intended for positive messages and community events, but is quickly becoming home to shameless social media plugs and questionable doodles. There, hot cinnamon steam rolling up into Indy's face, Jude stirring the pink depths of his tea with a plastic stirrer, she tells him everything: the invoice and the revelation it might mean for them, the narrow brush with law enforcement, the eerie cloud of mystery surrounding Lydia Rice.
Jude listens, intent, and Indy decides not to notice how naturally expressive his eyebrows are, furrowing and raising in tone with the events of her story, or his eyelashes, how they curve thick and bold and faultless towards the sky. Even if she does notice these things, she decides there's no harm in noticing; people in general are pretty, and she has always thought so. The way some people's hair shifts hue in sunlight or how other people speak so much more with their hands than their mouth or the stunning, unique sculpture that is the human noseâthese things have always inwardly fascinated her.
There's no harm in noticing. It's the same as admiring a museum piece, or a nice sunset.
"I can't believe a cop was sent after you," Jude says, continuing his stirring, silver rings glinting in the overheads. "And he really just showed up, broad daylight, in front of everybody. I would've shit my pants."
"I'm surprised I didn't."
"How'd he find you, anyway? Whoever pulled up at that warehouseâit's not like they ever saw us."
Indy pauses, taking a long sip from her coffee. It'll keep her up tonight, she knows, but there is comfort in this: in the long, dark hours that stretch in front of her, promised and malleable. "Whoever they are might have seen your car. I figured you might have said something to tip him off."
She waits for the hurt, the scorn, but Jude brushes the sentiment off like it's no more than a slightly incorrect arithmetic equation. "Funny," he says, his lip twitching up in genuine amusement. "I'm an asshole sometimes, but I'm not an asshole. Besides, this Kelso guy never even talked to me."
Indy sets her drink down. "He didn't?"
Jude shakes his head. "No. Unless Dewey just decided not to mention it. Now Dewey is in fact an asshole. I wouldn't put that past him, actually."
Indy hears the words but they filter through her ears without comprehension, like overheard snippets of a conversation in a foreign language. She only tunes in again when a jolt passes through her nerves and her eyes flick down, finding Jude's bejeweled fingers resting over hers. Veins climb from the slender taper of his wrist up to his knuckles. His palm is both rough and smooth, interspersed with callouses.
"Indy," he says. "Don't worry about it. I'm sure he has bigger things to deal with than some college kids looting an abandoned building. College kids do that shit all the time."
Maybe he's right, but there is still a part of Indy that can't be so nonchalant, that wants to explain to him the difference between the sort of kids who can do that and get away with it, and the sort who can't. The difference between the two of them, now, sitting across from each other at a coffee shop ten minutes till closing. But Indy is quiet. She doubts he would understand her anyway.
She says, "You aren't, though."
Jude's eyebrow ticks up. "I'm not what?"
"A college kid," Indy clarifies. "Are you? You hang around a college town, you're college-aged, but I've never heard you talk about class, or anything."
"Oh yeah, no. Not my thing."
College, the mythical location at which guaranteeing a place was her sole purpose for most of the years she's been alive. It began with Sterling, Indy traipsing half-heartedly along behind him at all of his college tours, drawing smiley faces in the corners of the SAT study books she would eventually have to erase all his answers from to reuse. She never understood why he turned down all her offers for movie or game nights, why every time she wanted him to take her to the mall on the weekends, he was lost behind the shut door of his bedroom, slouched over a textbook. She never understood, until it became her reality, too, and now she can see nothing else.
Not my thing. In the Helaire household, there had never been any question of whether Indy wanted to go to college or not. It was just understood that she would.
She tries to wrap her mind around the concept, and finds herself failing. "So what do you do?" she asks, trying to keep anything like judgment out of her tone. "Like, what's your plan?"
"For now?" Jude smiles. "I want to make music, and stay close to my grandma. That's the plan."
"For now," Indy repeats. "Is there a plan for after?"
It happens so quickly she can almost convince herself it didn't happen at all, but for a moment, Jude's expression falls. It's pain, regret for something that hasn't happened yet. And then it's gone, swallowed by a shrug and another playful smile. "Not at the moment. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it."
The soft, instrumental hip hop beats that have been playing overhead stop abruptly, and the tired barista leans over the counter to let them know the store's officially closed. Jude grabs his coat and his hat, and though leaving this warm, caffeinated safe haven is the very last thing Indy wants to do, she follows him back into the night as it ages into morning.
"You look disturbed, Indy."
"I'm not disturbed," she says, but the words come out too quickly, too defensive. "It's just different. You're just different, Jude."
His smile cracks wide open. "Is different a bad thing?"
How quickly his nose goes bubblegum pink from the cold. I am only noticing. "No," Indy says. "I don't think so. Not always."
He makes a little humph noise to himself, though Indy is unsure whether it's because he's satisfied with this response, or the opposite. "I think you miss a lot of things when you get too caught up in a routineâespecially one someone else decided for you. Sounds cheesy as hell, but I mean it. There's all sorts of little tiny adventures that you just don't see if you take the straight path, you know? I just don't want to miss anything."
It sounds idealistic, like something someone who has never tried the straight path would say. Still, as they walk on and the words settle in Indy's chest she finds there is an unmistakable layer of truth to them anyhow, a crop of fertile earth hidden beneath concrete.
"I'll walk you back to your dorm, then. Sylvie's your roommate, right?" Indy nods, and Jude pumps a fist like he's just won a prize. "Sick. She'll probably be looking for you, then."
She probably won't be. Sylvia is probably asleep, if she's not absorbed in one of her cozy farming video games.
"Your ears are red," Jude says.
Indy looks up. "Hm?"
Without another word, Jude tears his hat from his head, and plops it down on hers instead, pulling it snugly over her afro until it covers the tops of her ears. "There," he says. "That way they don't freeze and fall right off your head. I read about that happening once."
Indy remembers the forecast reading something close to forty degrees, certainly not close enough for that to be a real threat, if it's even possible. Still, she keeps the hat on, moving her head a bit to swing the pom-pom around, just to make Jude laugh.