Page 25 of Spoonful

Aditi stuck out her lip. “Do you know how badly Deepak wants to meet you? Hiro raved all about how smart you are, and Hiro doesn’t impress easily. Deepak’sdyingto shove tech into your hands and make all your teachers suck it.”

“I–” Jaylin didn't have a response to that. Hiro had toldother peoplethat he thought Jaylin was smart? “Thank you?”

Aditi grinned at him. “You’re welcome!” She rubbed her hands together. “You can practice using it while we work on your statistics homework.”

Between Jaylin’s text-to-speech reader and Aditi’s note-taking present, the math was abreeze.Jaylin didn't have to struggle through trying to read the word problems, because the text-to-speech gadget scanned them and then said them out loud for him. Instead of having to squint and sweat to try to write down his work, he just said the steps out loud to the note-taker thing, and the formulas appeared on the screen.

“I could do this stuff with my eyes shut,” Jaylin said astonished, as the last problem set finished writing itself out from his dictation and Aditi gave him a thumbs up for a correct answer.

“Iknow,”Aditi huffed. “That’s the whole point.”

Jaylin couldn't help but beam as he looked down at his work, and Hiro’s words suddenly came back to him.

“If you didn’t have to memorize your textbooks, what else do you think you could do with your mind?”

Jaylin… kind of wanted to find out.

***

“I’m sorry for yesterday,” was the first thing Jaylin blurted out when he dropped into the chair across from Hiro at the cafe’s little table.

“Jaylin!” Hiro smiled at him, but it looked more brittle than his smiles usually did. “Hey there.”

“Hi,” Jaylin stumbled to say. “Sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Hiro said quickly. “But did you walk here? It’s freezing out! And you didn’t…”

Jaylin realized, belatedly, that Hiro was holding up his coat like an offering. Jaylin stood to take it, cheeks hot.

“It’s okay,” he said, hanging his warm coat off the back of his chair for something to do. “It’s not too far. And I walk fast.” Though now that he was inside, after the cold outside and all the moving, he was overheating with all his layers. “Don’t worry about me.”

Hiro opened his mouth, then closed it again. He cleared his throat. “Why don’t I go order? Here–” he held up his phone. “I took a picture of the menu. I could read it out loud for you and you could tell me what you want. If you want?”

“Oh, I…” Jaylin darted a look at him. “Really?”

“Yeah, of course.”Of course.“I do it for Deepak all the time.”

“Oh, okay.” That made sense. And if Hiro was used to it, there was no harm in Jaylin taking the offer. “Then… sure, yeah. That’d be really, um, helpful.”

“Sure thing,” Hiro said warmly, and started to read. He was good at reading out loud. His voice was smooth and easy to listen to, and he didn't pause in weird places.

Jaylin listened as he de-layered, pulling off his hat and gloves and stuffing them in the pockets of Brent’s coat. Then he unzipped said coat and draped it over the coat already on theback of his chair. The caramel mocha sounded really good, so he went with that one. At Hiro’s prodding, he also admitted that he wouldn’t say no to a slice of the lemon loaf. Hiro gave him a salute and set off.

Jaylin watched him go, wondering what he had done to deserve someone like Hiro giving him the time of day like this. Multiple times, even.

He didn’t get less uncomfortably warm as the minutes passed. The area Hiro had picked was right near a vent, which would normally be great, except that Jaylin was wearing a million layers.

He unzipped his hoodie, and eventually just took it off, then unbuttoned the flannel he was wearing over his T-shirt to get some air circulation. That helped a lot, but by the time Hiro returned with a tray, Jaylin had also rolled up the sleeves of his flannel and was seriously considering taking it off and just looking like an idiot in a T-shirt, in the face of ten degree weather.

Hiro blinked at the pile of clothing now draped over the back of Jaylin’s chair, setting the tray down on the table. “I see you’re a pro at layering,” was all he said, as he slid over the plate of lemon loaf and a mug.

“Gotta be, in this weather,” Jaylin said, reaching to take the mug. He had finally removed enough that he wasn't too hot anymore, and the sip of caramel-coffee-mocha was delicious. He sighed into it, closing his eyes to enjoy. “Thank you.”

“Yeah,” Hiro said, sounding kind of odd. “Of course.”

Jaylin opened his eyes, about to ask if everything was okay, if Hiro’s order had maybe got messed up… and realized that Hiro was staring at his wrists.

His bruised wrists. That Jaylin had just exposed like an absoluteidiot.

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