“So what are you good for, then?” Henry heard the boy say as he gathered up his backpack and headed for the door. “You know what, just save it. Keep your help, I’ll figure it out on my own.” He scoffed and stormed out, leaving the door open to the chaos of the hallway, with students flooding the space on their way home for the day.

He knew he should go after the boy, tell him to come back and sit down, pay attention and do as he was told. I have to try. Henry repeated to himself. The boy had classes he needed to take, and pass, in order to graduate on time. If he didn’t listen to . . .

Oh, who was he kidding?

He looked around at the stacks of papers on his desk and allowed the weight of his job to move in on him like a sea of trouble for which he had no solutions. The boy had already failed most of his classes because he had stopped caring about them last year, and honestly, Henry had been amazed he even showed up to his guidance appointment. That was more than most of his fellow students had ever done. Even so, as soon as it had become obvious that there were no easy solutions to his problems, Henry had seen the same change in him that he’d seen a thousand times before. The situation looked immediately pointless. Not hopeless, exactly; that was a distinction he had learned to draw earlier in his career. Most of the kids he counseled knew there were ways to improve their situation. They could get better grades, work really hard, pass their classes, get their diploma . . . they just didn’t see the use.

He left the piles of paperwork and student files behind, though he carried them with him in the back of his mind no matter where he went. Jessica Marshall, who had been honor roll through her sophomore year and given birth to a beautiful baby boy at the beginning of eleventh grade. Every support program for teen mothers had done its best to help her, but she had been waiting tables full time since the fall of what should have been her senior year. The odds were against her ever doing anything else. Arthur Cunningham, who had been dealing on the west side of Denver since he was in middle school, and would be doing time until he was old enough for a mid-life crisis. Jamie Schultz, valedictorian and class president, who had graduated magna cum laude from the University of Colorado in business, waiting tables right beside Jessica, with no prospects of doing otherwise.

He turned as he shut his door, unable to shut out the thoughts of the children. Henry Conrad, the plaque read. Graduate of East End High School, UC graduate in Education, guidance counselor for fifteen years. Educator, student advocate, respected colleague, esteemed mentor.

Divorced, a hundred grand in debt, credit score in the toilet, a subsidized apartment, credit limits maxed for over a decade, and an income that allowed him to keep breathing, but nothing more.

“Good night, Carolyn.” He mumbled by rote with a wave to the guidance secretary.

“You’re doing it again.” Carolyn wagged a finger at him, looking over her glasses at his departure. “Letting them get to you.”

“Yup, I definitely am.” He leaned against the door to push it open. I have to try. It was a mantra that had lived in his brain for more years than he cared to admit. “But the day I stop is kind of when I become part of the problem, isn’t it?”

“Or when you stop letting the problem be part of you.” She shrugged and went back to her paperwork. “Kinda depends on how you look at it.”

Henry shook his head. That definitely wasn’t the way he looked at it. “Have a good weekend, Carolyn. Tell Mitch I still want my grill back.” He managed a smile on his way out the door for her sake, and disappeared into the dwindling flow of students heading for the parking lot.

It took a physical effort to ignore the bulletin board just outside the guidance office, a shotgun blast of papers that advertised success on a dozen websites, thousands of dollars in scholarship money, summer programs . . . he hoped that some of them led to success. He had heard about a few. He needed to remind himself of those. Without them, there was nothing. But even with them . . . he moved past it, and almost had to close his eyes in the final hallway leading out of the building.

Start here, go anywhere! One of the bright posters read. Learning for life. Education gives you wings. The path to success is paved with hard work. The posters hadn’t changed in the twenty years since he had walked the same halls as a student. Neither had the realities they failed to mention.

Excrement. Henry thought as he shoved out the doors.

“Afternoon, Mr. Conrad.” The voice that had snuck up behind him dripped with flirtation, and Henry knew from past experience that she wasn’t even trying that hard. “Heading out early for the weekend?”

Short. Blonde. Majored in English, Minored in Delta Zeta extracurriculars and frat boys fit for membership in Beta Alpha Omega. Third year teaching Romeo and Juliet and other wildly inappropriate texts for high school freshmen. Had he decided to return her interest, he would be the seventh teacher at the school to do so. That he knew of.

“Afternoon, Ms. Fields.” That was suitably neutral and professionally distant, right?

“One of my freshmen came back from your office earlier singing your praises.” Eyelids heavily shadowed under eyebrows freshly waxed. Was she really permitted to wear a dress that revealing as a teacher?

Oh, right, seventy-year-old principal with a twenty-six-year-old wife. That explained that.

“Mr. Harrelson, yes. I’m glad he felt . . . well-guided.” That was what he was there for, right? Was that his purpose at the school? He wondered sometimes.

She laughed a great deal louder than the joke deserved, and fell into step beside him. “He seemed like he had a lot that needed worked out. I’m glad he’s got somebody like you around to talk to.” For an English teacher, she had a bad habit of ending sentences with prepositions. “What are you up to this weekend?”

“Oh, I won’t be going too far.” He wondered briefly how vague he could be, since normally telling people what he actually did on weekends was a good way to start getting weird looks and unintentionally making people feel guilty. “Might go see some friends tomorrow in the city, church on Sunday, the usual.” Good, suitably vague and mildly pious. Maybe that would throw her off.

“Well are you busy later?” Nope, definitely not thrown. “There’s a concert up at the Center I’m going to with some friends, and I’ve got an extra ticket if you want it.” She smiled up at him and dug in her pocket with one hand as if she had them on hand to flash in front of him to tempt him, among other things. “We go up there early to see the openers, get set up with some drinks beforehand, it’ll be fun.”

It’ll be fun. How many times had those lovely little words preceded terrible, life-alteringly bad decisions throughout human history? Almost as many, he was willing to wager, as “hey, watch this!”

“It sounds great.” No, why had he said that? “But I can’t tonight. I’ve got somewhere to be in about half an hour that I can’t miss.” Good, back to being vague. He’d get out of this yet.

“Shame.” She stopped walking next to him, but her smile was no less inviting as she accepted momentary defeat. “Well, there’s always next time. If you change your mind, just give me a call. Friday night’s the longest night of the week, and wherever you’re going can’t take all night, can it?”

“Sometimes. If you’re doing it right.” He gave her a smile at that word, and turned to leave her thoughts spinning. Let her chew on that for a while and take it whichever way she wanted.

He wasn’t interrupted again between attempted temptation and his car, but his satisfaction over stumping the woman only lasted a few steps. His thoughts began circling around the futility they hadn’t quite left behind, glancing over the departing student body with a lingering sense of despair about the entire cloud of them.

But as usual when his thoughts turned so dark, they turned back on themselves the farther he got from the school doors. What was the alternative? Giving up on education, the various possibilities that enabled success in life, was not an option. Most of the children he worked with came from families who were just as talented at treading financial water as he was. Maybe a little worse. None of them had been born with a silver spoon in their mouths. If they were lucky, it had been a hospital-issue pacifier and a knockoff-brand bottle with bulk-store baby formula in it. They had nothing but the best their parents could do for them. It wasn’t their fault, but it wasn’t exactly a head start, either.

Success for most of them, for most people, it seemed to Henry, was a lottery ticket, at best. Do everything right, get a degree, try like hell to get a decent-paying job, work hard every day, and maybe, maybe a person could break even. Anything more seemed like an act of chance or grace, depending on a person’s religious convictions.

His door shut and the handle rattled, reminding him once again that he needed to get Carl, the PE teacher, to look it over for him, see if it was anything to worry about. The silence of his car was a security blanket after the low roar of student voices outside on their way home, each one reminding him that the voices would be saying different things in a few years. They would be fighting with spouses, arguing with employers, asking people if they wanted fries with their meals or a refill on their coffee.

They had to try. He had to try. Success in school, programs that offered hope, extracurriculars that encouraged dreams and the dreamers who gave them the only life that they were ever likely to know. All of it. To do otherwise was to give up, and no one wanted that. The hamster wheel was the only course available in life, not because it went anywhere, but because it provided the illusion of running farther than the rest of the cage allowed.

Errands were more routine. Ordinary, even comforting, in their own way. Food was always a comfort, even when it got more expensive every year. Grocery shopping and the piped-in music that came with it was soothing. The bakery would always smell like temptation and the candy aisle would always be at least two holidays ahead of where it should have been. Even the questioning look on the face of the checkout clerk was always the same, but Henry expected that. He didn’t imagine many people went through the line with an entire cart filled half with value-packs of personal grooming supplies and half with discount-priced, store-brand, pre-cooked, mixed frozen vegetables.

The drive to Lady of Refuge was soothing too, but for different reasons. The world was getting darker quickly, dinner would be served soon, people would come in for the night, take what was offered, find a bed, lay their head down and get some much-needed rest. Children would cry, hope would be reflected in almost none of the eyes he saw, but at least those eyes would be open. The souls behind them would be warm and fed and clothed.

Driving reminded him of escaping, when there had still been a need to escape.

It was a comfort to remember the fights. Once they had been a fire of rage inside him, but they had burned lower over the past few years since the divorce, until the memory had lost the personal pain, and only the cause was left to warm him.

Did he know how much time he spent away from home? Cooking dinners, cleaning up in the mornings, moving boxes at the food bank, running booths at clothing drives? Yes, he did. He spent it trying to help people instead of running with her to the latest restaurant opening or the most exciting new club downtown.

So he would rather spend time with homeless people than with his own wife? Yes, by all that might have a chance at being holy, after five years of marriage, including four years of sleeping mostly on his own couch, he would rather spend time anywhere but with his wife.

Right before their college graduation, he had given her a ring, encouraged her to follow her dreams. But when her perceived calling in life never called her back, instead of ringing up a second choice, she had rung up a credit card bill, chasing a feeling she was running too fast to recognize. Money talked, and a lack of money had shouted him out of grad school and into public school, a guidance counselor in six months instead of the professor he had planned to be in six years.

Did he know how much he could save by not doing what he did for those ‘charity places,’ as she had lumped them? How much more he could have made if he had accepted a part-time job that actually paid instead of volunteering everywhere? Yes, he knew how much he spent. He also knew how much it had cost for her to fill her side of the closet with shoes and tight skirts, nevermind that those skirts and the heels that went with them were part of what had hooked him in the first place. They had also hooked the man he’d found her in bed with when he came home sick one morning a few hours early from his usual day at the homeless shelter.

He actually smiled at that memory, though he knew that doing so marked him incurably insane. He had actually been relieved. It had made so many things so much simpler. He had never looked back. Cold and lonely as his apartment was during the necessary hours he spent there, normally only to sleep and shower, it was still better than the sweltering emotional battlefield he had avoided at all costs.

He had to try. She had never understood that. He had to try and make a difference, no matter how small it was, no matter how replaceable he was in the long run. The more she had refused to understand that, the wider the distance between them had grown.

The alternative had been to allow himself to be selfish, the way she had. To feel as though all the work he did, all the struggles he went through, left him entitled to hold onto every scrap of comfort and luxury he could fool himself into thinking he could afford. It had never been an option. Not for a moment.

The radio was talking. Most of the time, it was a voice in the back of his head that he could ignore, but it was still on NPR from the day before when he’d turned it there on purpose to listen to an interview about homelessness in the Rocky Mountain states. It caught his attention as he drove when it mentioned the Empty City.

Construction continues on the massive project covering mile after mile of southern Colorado. A new phase of the project appeared to begin this week, after more than two years spent clearing space and appearing to lay out subterranean works for the city, teams began pouring huge foundations on an unprecedented scale. The scope of the project continues to draw speculation and comment from economists and developers the world over, a trend fueled by the near-absolute secrecy under which the nearly-nine-hundred-square-mile city has been laid out.

Henry felt his stomach twist, but he couldn’t stop listening. The Age of the Supercity, it had been called. The new age of the world in which billionaires across the globe were creating newer and shinier palaces where their own kind could dwell in luxury and secure condescension. The cities in Dubai had just been the start. Brazil had jumped into the race just three years ago, then India and Japan. Some of the new construction outside of Tianjin also fit the same mold, though it had started off as a means to house millions of workers closer to their place of employment. In each place, the world had stepped back and marveled at the beauty of the new age, where a few square feet sold for a few million pieces of paper humanity thought to be valuable. It was just another kind of cloud for the rich to live on while they looked down at the rest of humanity. The Empty City would be no different.

Eye-witness accounts of the city continue to be limited to satellite imagery and anonymous reports from workers, who state that a thorough non-disclosure agreement is required of all staff who participate in the project. The most recent beginnings appear to be construction of roadways and subterranean mass transit, similar to what has been seen in the so-called pre-fabricated cities of the middle east. There has been no report yet confirmed of the project’s owner and coordinator, Jared Overton, meeting with any outside investors or inviting outside city planning groups, as had been previously speculated would occur well before this point. Some investor groups who had previously shown interest in the project have begun to speculate that there will be a policy of rejecting all outside involvement, though many question the wisdom of such a shut-out.

Henry finally turned off the program, since he didn’t want to listen to any more about the scar in the earth only a few hours from his home. The rich want what the rich want, I guess. The rest of us aren’t generally the ones making headlines.

Lady of Refuge still bore some of the trappings of the bank it had once partially been. A wall of teller windows stretched across the entry, and a corridor led past them on one side toward the storage rooms. The once-impregnable vault had been turned into a storeroom for donated clothes. The shelter had become a much larger operation a few years ago when they acquired the old roller rink next door and remodeled the space into two massive sleeping rooms. Things were already well under way for the night by the time Henry parked and hefted the two large bags of supplies down the block to the back entrance.

Home didn’t mean an address where bills piled up in the mailbox and the rent went up every year. Home meant belonging somewhere, sharing a life with people who mattered, doing something important. The kitchen was a chaotic mess of a home, where smells from stew to unwashed bodies vied for the title of Most Outrageous Assault on the Senses, where everyone he considered a close friend was scurrying around busily giving a part of their life to someone who needed it more. He fell into step the moment he was through the door, vegetables deposited on one table, hygiene kits on the other, Adrian thanking him for grabbing the vegetables, Donna thanking him for the hygiene kits. Henry himself started moving through the kitchen, getting tallies from everyone on their status for the night. Everyone had a different idea of how much they would be able to serve, and it was Henry’s job to run things back and forth to the front office to make sure they didn’t give out more promises than they could keep.

There was no such thing as a slow night at the shelter. There were always some new people, some familiar faces, some faces that had gotten worse since he saw them last, even a few faces that had gotten just a little cleaner. Dinner tickets and bedsheets were handed out systematically. He could hear sleeping pads hitting the floor with a plastic slump, echoing through the hallways to reach him over the low hum of voices and the hiss of pots in the kitchen. The metallic scrape of hangers being shoved aside en masse as workers sifted through donated clothes to find items in a scrawny man’s size. The line of people out the door never seemed to end, but that didn’t dissuade them. Henry could remember a time when he couldn’t believe that the economy had undone so many. That time was long gone.

A splash of color broke the sea of brown and grey and unkempt clothes. Eyes came first for Henry, hazel greys and blues and greens untwisting themselves from the unidentified mass of an un-labeled stranger to bore into Henry’s own with a look of clear recognition. The eyes were followed by a set of reddened cheeks flecked with freckles. Dark brown hair framed the face and the smile it contained, above a sky-colored blouse and a long blue skirt. Henry’s mind had been racing through the same depressed thoughts that had inhabited him since leaving work, and it took a solid three attempts on the part of the woman, calling him by first and last name, before he managed to blink and take her in, the contours of her face finally finding themselves in his memory.

“Long time no see.” She was saying as she slipped into the kitchen with him. Obviously not homeless, obviously not destitute or otherwise in need. She stood there looking him over expectantly, waiting for the machinery behind his eyes to catch up and place her in context. “Oh come on, I haven’t gotten that fat, have I?”

“No, no, you’re not . . . you’re . . . Katie? Bowen?” Tall. Gorgeous. Played clarinet in high school but spent most of her time running Honors Society service projects. They’d sat together for three years in math and English classes, both of them harboring a thing for the other they’d jokingly admitted to, right before graduation sent her to the east coast and kept him there in Colorado. He hadn’t heard from her since, despite his efforts to look her up the following summer.

Her smile confirmed that she wasn’t just a figment of his imagination, but when she returned the hug he initiated, he started to wonder again if he wasn’t dreaming. “I mostly go by Kit nowadays.” She half-released him, but her eyes knew something her smile wasn’t telling as she looked him over, then stepped away sharply. “Come on, hand over the sheets, there’s a line out there. We’ll talk once the rush is over. Adrian’s dying back there, go on and help out.” She waved to Adrian and a few of the other workers in the kitchen, all of whom seemed to recognize her since they waved back.

“Um, okay.” Eloquence had fled the moment he recognized her, and he couldn’t even feel guilty or awkward about it. He handed over the sheets and watched her take up the station checking people’s bedding tickets and pointing out sleeping assignments. She looked like she’d been doing it all her life.

“Friend of yours?” Adrian said behind a massive pot where the vegetables Henry had brought were defrosting. His grin was half a leer, but kind-spirited.

“Um, yeah, we went to high school together.” Henry got to work setting up bowls for when the soup would be ready. Friday nights meant a hot meal and Saturday morning would mean a hot breakfast, both of which meant a whole lot more work than usual to be done in the kitchen. “I’ve never seen her here. When did she start volunteering?”

“She started . . . shit, when did she start . . . Last April, something like that? She brought in a bunch of clothes one time and started helping Donna get ‘em sorted, I’m talking eight, nine big bins of clothes. So she worked distribution a couple days doing that, then she’d come in maybe once, twice a week, help out wherever, figured out the way things move around here. Couple months ago she started showing up for a few hours here and there whenever she said she had time, so we put her to work, just like anybody else.” Adrian’s leer had only intensified while he watched Henry’s face as he spoke. “So you went to high school with her, huh? You take her to prom, too?”

“Shut up, man.” The star-struck look on Henry’s face finally vanished into a smile as he smacked his friend on the shoulder. They started getting the soup into containers in a two-step that was more than habit after their years working together, the bowls flowing down the assembly line that ended with the people who needed them. “We were friends. I just never heard from her after high school. Certainly never thought to run into her in this place.”

“Yeah, not exactly the place you want to run into old friends. At least most of the time.” Adrian’s voice had lost its mirth at that notion. He’d been homeless himself once, and had been helped by Lady of Refuge to get back on his feet, get a job, put some money away and finally get his own place. He lived with three other guys in a less-than-perfect house and spent his nights working graveyard shift cleaning floors at an office building downtown, but he made his rent, and his car payments, and always made time to help out at the shelter. He had more than a few old friends he saw on a regular basis, mostly when he was handing them soup through the pass window.

“Hey, you’re old. I run into you all the time.” Henry shot him a grin to get him out of the cycle of thoughts he knew the guy was in, and the laugh he got in return told him he had succeeded.

“Shut up and get back to work, Counselor. There’s mouths to feed.”

There was no such thing as a normal dinner shift. Things very rarely went completely according to plan, and as always, they ran out of food before they ran out of mouths that needed it. A few phone calls to some local organizations who were normally reliable in a pinch eventually came through, and three hours later, the last of dinner was served to the last of those they were legally allowed to admit for the night.

Most of the time, when dinner was over, an awkward kind of half-silence fell over the entire shelter. Concrete walls echoed everything said in every corner of the place to every other ear; voices were always hushed, either in shame or in some semblance of private conversation. The sound of dishes being washed and food being cooked in preparation for the morning breakfast dominated the entire building. It wasn’t until the last of the pots had been cleaned and locked up that Henry saw Katie . . . no, Kit, again, coming down the hallway from the main sleeping room with two other men from the shelter in tow. Henry knew them both, and smiled at the fact that they had appointed themselves her unofficial bodyguards. A beauty like her needed them in a place like Lady of Refuge, unfortunately. Henry had heard, and been present for, more unfortunate stories than he wanted to remember.

“Long night.” Henry said once she got close, then silently began berating himself all over again. Was he incapable of forming a complete sentence around her? What was happening?

“Aren’t they all?” She smiled and moved past him to a staff locker where she retrieved her purse. She slung it over one arm and shut the locker in the same motion that she turned to face him again, the same knowing smile on her face as earlier in the night. “So are you busy tonight? It’s been a while.”

People didn’t ask him if he had plans later. That wasn’t his life. He worked, he helped out at the shelter, he watched the news, he went home, he occasionally slept, then he got up and did it all over again. People didn’t ask him about his life. Twice in one day was . . . maybe it was a full moon or something. “Yeah, no, I’m not busy.” There. Full sentence. At last. Maybe he wasn’t brain-dead after all. “There’s a coffee shop a couple blocks down that’s open all hours. I usually go over after my shift to get a drink and catch up on my reading for the night until I wind down and go home.”

“Sounds perfect. I could use a chai.” Her smile was the same weapon that had bombed his language functions back to the stone age, but she turned and waved to Adrian as she started for the door, releasing him to regroup before he followed.

Adrian gave him a broad grin and two thumbs up on the way out the door, but Henry just rolled his eyes and went after her, still brushing off his shirt and pants as they made it out onto the sidewalk. There were still a few people waiting near the doors, in the hopes that some of the residents who were down for the night might suddenly abandon their pallets and move somewhere else in the city, freeing up a place for them. Henry and Kit passed them quickly, heading into the dark sidewalk of downtown Denver at night.

“So what happened to you?” Henry said as he finally managed to gather his wits about him. All he had to do was keep from looking at the way her skirt slid around her legs as she walked, or how the streetlights lit up the multitude of colors in her eyes. Easy. “You were one of the central mysteries of our fifteenth reunion a couple years ago.”

She laughed and kept her eyes on his, making it difficult for him to ignore the hypnotic effect of them. “Really? I was a mystery? What were the popular theories?”

“Well, naturally there were a few who thought you turned stripper and worked your way out to California on a pole.” She had been gorgeous even in high school, and that theory had been mostly put forward by their female classmates. “Then there were a few people who seemed to have actually heard about you going to work for a defense contractor or something like that. Some people thought you had just never looked back after high school, and a few said they thought you were dead.” He shrugged, since he was particularly glad the last one wasn’t true. “Myself, I thought the never looking back option was the most likely. You never had much of a problem figuring out what you wanted and finding some way to go for it.”

She smiled over at him, and moved to link her arm with his. They were walking together, after all, and they had been friends once upon a time. It was a fairly cool night. There were all kinds of excuses for her to do that. Right? “Everybody’s been a little right. Except the stripping. Though I did work at a Hooters for a while in college, so I guess that sort of counts?”

I give up. Henry focused intensely on the sidewalk in front of him. I’m going to have the verbal dexterity of a two-year-old the rest of the night.

“Right out of college, I did actually get a job working with a defense contractor. Working payroll, mostly. I stayed there six months before I got involved with a different contractor in the private sector. I met him at one of the parties my boss was always throwing, when he decided to throw me a bone and invite me to one. I think he hoped I would sleep with him on account of the opportunity, but that wasn’t happening.” She rolled her eyes at the memory. Or did they dance? No, shut up, she was saying something. Focus. “So I went to work as an admin for a real estate development contractor, moved up in the company over time. It does a lot more than just real estate. For the last five years, I’ve been the assistant to the chairman. It’s been fun.” She smiled over at him as they walked, looking at either him or something unseen far in the distance ahead of them, visible only to her. Henry had to wonder what it would be like to be able to see the world like that. “What about you? I heard through the grapevine that you got married after college.”

“Yeah, that didn’t last.” He didn’t mind talking about it, especially since it was several years in the past and he didn’t regret the fact that it was over one bit. “Different directions, same old story. I’ve been a guidance counselor back at the old stomping grounds for coming up on fifteen years now, and single for the last . . . seven years.” He had to actually do the math in his head. As happy as he had been to see his divorce come through, he could say honestly and truly that time had more or less stopped for him ever since. He had been working the same job, for the same principal, for roughly the same pay, in the same apartment, ever since. He had learned to cook and had read hundreds of books. Not so much in terms of life accomplishments.

“I’m sorry.” There was real sympathy in her eyes as she looked at him, and for the first time during the conversation, she didn’t look as though she knew some kind of secret she was keeping from the universe for fun. She looked at him, really looked at him, and in so doing became the first person in longer than he cared to remember who had done so. It was even more disarming than just being around her. “I never got married, but I was in a relationship with a guy for about seven years. We finally broke it off for kind of the same reason. We both realized that where we wanted to go wasn’t the same place. Same zip code, maybe, just . . . not the same.” She looked away and hung onto him a little tighter, turning her attention back to that unseen point across town that seemed to constantly draw her eyes.

“That sounds a lot worse than mine.” He turned the corner with her, and the coffee shop came in sight halfway down the block. “Mine at least I knew was pretty well doomed from close to the start. A lot harder to be seven years in and realize there’s . . . well, I’m sorry.” He didn’t want to rehash it with her if it obviously still hurt. “But it sounds like otherwise, things have done really well for you. When did you get back to Denver? Adrian tells me you’ve been coming down to Refuge for months now.”  

“Oh, I travel a lot for my job, and Denver’s been a pretty major hub for my boss for a while now. I spend a lot of time here, so I wanted to find something where I could do some good while I’m passing through.” She hesitated with a smile before she went on. “Some of my work deals with the homeless population in general, so it seemed like a natural fit just to jump in and do what I can to help out.”

“Ah. Well, that makes sense, then.” He held the door to the coffee shop open for her, and managed, he thought, not to make a complete ass of himself while they ordered drinks and found a table.

The shop was dark enough that a casual passerby would be within their rights to question whether the place was open or not, but Henry had always found it peaceful. Judging by the way she immediately relaxed when they settled into a low booth along the windows, so did Kit.

“Things get pretty quiet right about now.” She said with her eyes on the silence outside the window. “Even in a city this big, where something’s still moving, still changing this time of night, it still gets quiet. Still feels just a little bit empty.”

“That’s just because people aren’t out in the city, they’re in their homes.” He sipped at his coffee and shrugged, trying to place the origin of her comment. But chasing down the origins of someone else’s thoughts was hard enough when life was shared, let alone with a girl he’d known a long time ago and the woman she had become in the meantime. “Them that have homes to go back to, anyway.”

“Which is not everybody.” Kit agreed, turning the starry look in her eyes on him with a knowing smile. He might have been having a hard time following her thoughts, but she had the look of a woman who had no trouble at all reading him like a news headline. “You haven’t changed, you know that?” She sipped at her tea quietly as he floundered for something to say to that, but she didn’t seem surprised when he came up with nothing. “You were always a dreamer. Even in high school. Back then I thought you were really stupid for it.” Her smile finally faded as she admitted that. “I hope you can forgive me for that.”

“You were just as much a dreamer as I was.” His laugh was as incredulous as the rest of his expression. “I mean, half the shit I did, I was just trying to keep up with you, Ms. I’m Going to Organize a Service Project Every Weekend.”

She actually blushed, looking down into her chai. “It all looked good on a resume, that’s the only reason I did it. You did it because you believed in it. Obviously you still do.”

His dreams were a topic that was certain to become depressing if they talked about it for too long, so he just shrugged. “I do what I can. It’s not much, but if it puts a sandwich in somebody’s hand or a pillow under somebody’s head that wasn’t there before, I sleep a little better that night.”

“Me too.” There were ghosts in Kit’s smile, though she had obviously gone a long way toward silencing them. Still, they lingered, and there was no telling how much of a distance she managed to keep from them. Anything at all could have happened to her since they had last seen each other. “I’m really glad I ran into you tonight, Henry, and I’m sorry that I’ve been . . . sort of off the grid for a long time. I wanted to get some distance from high school, and I kind of never looked back. At least not for a long time.”

“Well, you certainly got some distance.” He had to laugh. “Being thought of as deceased by most of your classmates . . . yeah, it doesn’t get much more distant than that.”

She smiled quietly, then sat back in the booth with an apology on her features before her lips began moving to produce words. “The truth, if there is such a thing,” she chuckled quietly, though the joke was one that only she seemed to be on the inside of, “is that I came back to Denver mostly to find you, Henry.”

“To find me?” Okay, they had admitted they had a crush on each other in high school, but come on, that was almost twenty years ago. Coming back to reconnect with an old flame was one thing, but coming back twenty years to someone you barely admitted you liked? “Well, I’m not difficult to find. I’m pretty sure I’m in the phone book. And on the school website. You could’ve found me all kinds of ways. Why the shelter?”

Her smile brightened, not ashamed of the answer for once. “I wanted to see you at work. You’re fun to watch.” She giggled, and the sound could have been straight out of his soundtrack for their high school years together. “The way you boss everybody around without actually bossing anybody. You walked into the room with your vegetables and everybody immediately started working . . . better. You don’t even notice it. But as soon as you show up and get into the mix, it’s like everybody else suddenly remembers why they’re doing what they’re doing.”

It was Henry’s turn to examine his coffee closely. “Everybody there is doing something they believe in, not just me. I don’t think anybody forgets that, if they walk in the door planning to help out.”

“They lose sight of it sometimes. But you help them find it again. Because as far as I’ve seen, you never lose it like they do.” She leaned forward on the table with her hands on her mug to warm her fingers. “I want to ask for your help on something, Henry. Something a little bigger than spending a night serving meals or handing out clean sheets.”

Henry felt the world shift a little under the booth, and he sat back a little in his seat. She had an agenda. Of course she did. People asking if he had plans later apparently always had an agenda. “What is it you need help with?”

She sighed at the distance that had opened up between them, but she seemed to understand it. “It would be a lot easier if I showed you instead of telling you. I’d like to take you somewhere to show you tomorrow. Can you trust me that far?”

“You can’t show me tonight?” He didn’t appreciate the growing feeling he had of being toyed with somehow, and by someone he had once considered one of his closest friends, no matter how fleeting the season of that consideration had been in his life.

She smiled as if she could have taken the question to mean something else, and only continued when she saw him start to turn red and fumble with his words, which wouldn’t leave his mouth. “Showing you is going to make for a long day, and it’s already been one of those for you, I’m sure. But I’d like to get a start late tomorrow morning.” She took in a deep breath and almost reached out to take his hand, but then pulled back at the last second, returning her hands to her mug as her eyes met his. “What I can tell you tonight is that there’s a . . . position . . . of sorts, at my company. It’s just not the kind of position I can really go doing interviews for. It’s kind of a . . .”

“I’m not going to get involved in something illegal, Katie. Kit.” That was going to take some getting used to, though if she wanted him for some kind of illegal operation, maybe it would be a moot issue, and he could just remember her as his friend Katie from high school.

“No, no, it’s nothing like that.” She fidgeted and sat up a little straighter, suddenly more nervous than he could ever remember having seen her. “I’m sorry, you can tell recruiting isn’t really my area. At least not like this. Anyway, it’s nothing illegal. I give you my word that everything my company does is not only legal, but it’s worthy. It’s . . .” she shook her head, but her eyes believed everything she was saying with the entire soul behind them. “It’s like I said, it really will be easier to show you. If I don’t, you’re not going to believe me. You need to see the job, and the need, for yourself.”

The world wasn’t finished shifting in place beneath them. If an alien had stepped out of the booth beside him and begun singing Elvis songs, Henry didn’t think he could have been more confused. “The need? What are you talking about? A job with a need you can’t tell me anything about?” He shook his head as she fumbled, and sat back in the booth. “I have a job, Kit. It may not be the best job in the world, but I’ve gotten pretty good at it. Twenty years ago, if you had told me right out of high school that you had some kind of a job lined up for us, I would’ve gone with you, no questions asked, sight unseen. Even if the job had been on the moon or in Timbuktu. But this?” Henry shook his head. “I don’t . . . I don’t do shady, Kit. It’s just not the kind of guy I am. And this definitely qualifies.”

Kit’s eyes were no less pleading, though, as she leaned on the table between them. “Just give me tomorrow. That’s all I’m asking. Go with me tomorrow, and I’ll be able to answer any questions you have, show you exactly what the job would entail. Then, if it’s not for you, just walk away.” She could still see that he wasn’t thrilled with the idea, and after the way she had approached him, that was less than surprising. “When I realized this job was necessary a few months ago, Henry, I started looking for someone who I thought could handle it. No one I’ve worked with since high school fits the bill, and believe me, I went through a hell of a list. You’re the only person who’s come to mind who I think could handle what we need. If it’s not you, it’ll be someone else, but someone else won’t do the job like you would. Yes, I’ve done my homework on you, what you’ve been doing these past twenty years. I’ve heard everyone at four different shelters talk about you, and I’ve heard just about everyone at the school talk about you. Even some of your old students who you helped get moving in the right direction after graduation. I thought about you because of high school, but since then, you’ve turned into someone more qualified to handle what my company needs than anyone else I’ve ever heard of.” She finally ran out of things to say, and sighed, since his face hadn’t softened at any of it. “Just one day, Henry. It’s still me. I wouldn’t invite you if it wasn’t something I believed in. Just like I wouldn’t be inviting you if you weren’t someone I believed in.”

He looked back and forth between her eyes, watching the light from the street lamps out the window play through the various shades within them, turning them to beautiful shadows that concealed more than they revealed.  “I hate being played, Kit. I hate games, and I hate secrets.” He lifted his cold coffee and finished off the last of it, since he hated letting things go to waste as well, especially good coffee. “I also hate wearing suits. Is that a requirement for tomorrow?”

She shook her head quickly. “No, wear whatever you want. It’s not an interview. Not for you, anyway.”

He sighed, rubbing at his forehead with one hand as he considered. He had to look at the table and hide her from view in order to think straight. If anyone else had shown up offering him a shadowy job out of nothing, stalking him to see if he was qualified and showing up at a place where he volunteered to draw him in, he would have walked out and gone home without a second thought. But this was Katie. He knew he should hate the fact that she still had the kind of hold on him to make him ignore his instincts, but that was definitely the fact of the matter. “I hope you’re not playing me, Kit.” He looked back up at her once his decision was made. “One day, for an old friend.”

Her smile brightened up the entire booth as she nodded. “One day. You won’t regret it.” She reached into her purse for a pen and grabbed a napkin from the dispenser at the side of the booth, scribbling quickly. “I’m staying at Spring Hill Suites. There’s a baseball field right next door. We’ll start there in the morning. Ten o’clock okay?”

Once she slid the napkin over to him, he saw that she had written not just the name of the hotel, but her room number and her cell phone number. “Yeah, ten’s fine. I didn’t have anything set in stone for tomorrow.” Their drinks were finished, and with the acceptance of the mysterious show-and-tell set for the next day, Henry slid out of the booth, taking Kit’s cup for her along with his own. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride back to your hotel, if you need it.”

“Thanks.” She took what looked like a business card out of her purse and left it on the edge of the table, then followed him out without explaining it or looking back at it. He looked at it as she walked away, but then just shook his head. She had given him enough mysteries for one night. He needed to sort out what he already had to deal with before he went looking to unravel more of his mysterious friend.

The drive over to the hotel was quiet, since Kit had made it clear she either wouldn’t or couldn’t answer any more questions about the next day’s job overview. Henry was leaning toward wouldn’t. “I missed you.” He said as he turned onto the right street to take them past the hotel and the baseball field she had mentioned. “I went looking for you the summer after high school, but your parents had moved away and your university didn’t exactly give away its students’ contact information freely. I even tried to look you up on Facebook when our tenth reunion was ramping up, but I could never find you on there.”

He could feel her sigh in the passenger seat, could feel her looking at him like a weight, the power of those eyes moving straight through him even when he wasn’t looking at her. “I missed you too, Henry. Things just got complicated for me. Especially after college. After tomorrow, I promise you’ll understand.”

“You mean tomorrow is going to solve all your mysteries and unravel all your secrets? It sounds like you’ve got plenty. That would be quite an undertaking.” He tried to make his tone light, since, in spite of the secrecy around her, he couldn’t just forget how glad he was to see her again.

He caught a glimpse of her smile out of the corner of his eye and began to return it until he felt her slide her hand into his as he drove, holding onto his arm as it rested on the center console between them. “Sometimes people get wrapped up in one secret after another, but in my case, they’re all the same secret. You’re the first person I’ve gotten back in touch with from high school, and you’re the only person I would honestly want to. I’ve been looking forward to tomorrow for a long while now. I hope by the end of it, you understand why.”

“You and me both.” He laughed once sharply, since he’d had about all the confusion he could take for one night. He pulled up along the sidewalk just outside her hotel and put the car in park. “Well, I’ll see you in the morning, I suppose. Good luck with the eternal fight against hotel pillows and scratchy hotel towels.”

She giggled at that, and the sound had him back in high school all over again, with a smile on his face, dropping her off at home after school. Just like old times.

Instead of getting out of the car, she turned in the passenger seat to face him, holding tighter to his hand. “I’ve made a lot of promises over the years, and I’m pretty proud of the fact that I’ve kept all of them. There’s a promise I made to myself right after graduation that I’ve never had a chance to keep, though.” She bit her lip as she looked at him, and the space between them disappeared, replaced by a kiss that had happened a thousand times in his thoughts, but never in real life.

The world was no longer spinning beneath him. He was on Mars, or maybe Pluto, somewhere with much less gravity than dirty, crowded old Earth. Somewhere that had much less of a hold on him. He was aware enough to return the kiss, but it only lasted a few rotations of the new, unbound world before she pulled away, biting her lip again as she slowly settled back into the passenger seat.

“I promised myself I would do that if I ever saw you again. I didn’t know it would take another eighteen years of my life to keep it, but better late than never, I think.” She smiled and squeezed his hand again, then pulled away to look for the passenger door handle. “I had to keep it now in case you don’t show up tomorrow.”

“I keep my promises too. The vast majority of the time, anyway. I can’t say all and be completely sure about it.” Henry could still taste her on his lips, and he took in a last deep breath of her scent, since it filled the car, as well as his entire unhinged world. “I’ll be here tomorrow. Ten o’clock.”

“Ten o’clock.” She smiled back at him and stepped out of the car, leaning down into the window afterward. “I’m glad I found you, Henry. Tomorrow you’ll understand. And I hope you’ll say yes when you hear the job offer.”

“We’ll see.” He wouldn’t commit to that with everything about the offer left ridiculously vague, but he would certainly consider it. “Sweet dreams, Kit.”

“You too.” She watched him for another moment through the window and then turned away, sashaying down the sidewalk toward the hotel doors with the same confident walk she’d had in high school, only fully developed into the strut of a woman who lacked nothing when it came to self-esteem. She didn’t look back once, right up until she got the hotel door open, glancing back at him with a smile. She knew that he knew that she knew that he would wait, just like he had always waited outside her house to make sure she got in safely. Nothing had changed, and everything.

He drove home, but left the radio in silence. He locked the door behind him and took off his shoes without truly seeing anything in front of him. His apartment was clean by virtue of being empty. His bed was made by virtue of being nothing more than a fitted sheet over a mattress with a fleece blanket lying haphazardly where he’d thrown it that morning.

He was still the same person who had gotten out of that bed that morning, wasn’t he? Was something different, just because Kit had shown up out of nowhere? That couldn’t flip the world upside down on its own, could it?

She had said her company worked with homeless people sometimes. That meant she worked with some kind of charity, right? It had to mean that. Nothing else would make sense. The world had to make sense.

If her company worked as some kind of charity, it might be an opportunity for Henry to do something he could finally be proud of himself for doing. It had been so long since that had been the case. Too long. Long enough.

If it was a good cause, and Kit wasn’t lying to him, then his choice became very simple. If the opportunity to do some real good was placed in front of him, he wouldn’t hesitate.

He had to try.

Next Chapter: 2 - It Has to Change