one

                                        

                                              
FEBRUARY
"IT WAS AN accident."
The quiet in the office was the distant, echoic kind. Every word hung in the air, taking shape in the room; the shadow of each clipped response weighing heavy before fading out under the sound of the next voice
Time seemed to march, then halt with every long pause, as if waiting for the command to keep going. It was like sitting for a painting. Silence was taking on its own form; a fourth figure in that shiny, pale office with all that light wood and the silver chairs and their flat, polished baby blue cushions that held the air of a hospital or old assembly hall.
Outside the windows, white clouds floated lazily across the cornflower sky, shielding the blazing, winking needle of the late winter sunlight. Spring was beginning to break through. The frost on the grass was thawing under that glinting eye and the last piles of snow were melting, and soon the first leaves and flowers would spring out of the ground and from the branches.
Hadley thought about the trees. In one English class, years before, he remembered his teacher sitting at her chair at the front of the room and talking about the element of passing time in a poem they were analysing. She swept her arm towards the windows, her hand holding out towards the trees and she remarked that we never notice the time passing by, we only notice that one day we look at a tree and the leaves are different from the last time we looked.
From then on, he tried to be careful about trees. Every time he went out walking, he tried to notice a change in the bareness of the branch, in the colours of the leaves, and if there were any birds there. He tried to catch the moment like a butterfly in a net; tried to pinpoint the day that things first began to change, tried to notice exactly when the first signs of spring or fall might come through, but it always escaped him. No matter how closely or constantly he searched for it, he would leave unsatisfied and return, only to find that the moment had already been and passed.
Principal Martinez was staring at him.
He had almost forgotten that he had spoken. The last voice to speak did not feel like his and he did not think sounded like his either. It was as though someone else had spoken for him. He couldn't even recall opening his mouth but Principal Martinez was still staring and, out of the corner of his eye, he could see Spencer Hall's right leg bouncing.
"An accident?" Principal Martinez echoed with a pointed look. He furrowed his thick brows and narrowed his dark eyes, locking his hands on his desk like one big fist.  A thin beam of stray sunlight shot across the desk. Hadley could see the dust particles. "How the hell do you punch someone in the face on accident?"
Birds were whistling outside.
Hadley tore away his gaze from the window and forced himself to meet the principal's gaze.
To his right, Spencer Hall was sitting like a pulled arrow, an ice pack pressed to the right side of his jaw. His face might've looked peaceful, but his green eyes were hard and cold, his jaw was locked and set, and his pink mouth was taut. His body was stiff, sealed with quivering fury, except for that endlessly bouncing leg like an elastic band about to snap.
Turning away from them both and facing the left wall of the office, Hadley shrugged and murmured, "It was an accident."
"Like fuck it was an accident!" Spencer burst out. His clipped, clear voice rose as he whipped around in his seat. The silence cracked open. 
"Language," Principal Martinez warned half-heartedly, shifting that same pointed look towards his new object of attention, his eyebrows raised and tanned forehead wrinkled. There was something both curious and impatient in his usually flat eyes.