Off The Record

The beckett house was a lie told in beige stucco and manicured hedges.

It sat at the end of a cul-de-sac called Morning Glory Lane, which was the kind of name that made you think of old women pruning roses, not seventeen-year-old quarterbacks who walked through the world like it owed them an apology. I stood on the front porch, clutching the strap of my backpack so hard the nylon bit into my palm, and stared at the brass knocker shaped like a lion's head. Even the door hardware looked like it belonged to a different tax bracket than my family.

My mom's voice echoed in my head from that morning. "It's just a job, Mar. You've babysat the Henderson twins. How much worse can one toddler be?"

The Henderson twins had tried to microwave a hamster. I was pretty sure this was going to be worse, because the toddler wasn't the problem. The problem was the toddler's brother, and the fact that I had spent the last three years of high school perfecting the art of being invisible specifically to avoid people like him.

But Vermont.

The Vermont Young Writers' Workshop cost $4,200 for the summer session. My parents could contribute exactly zero dollars after my dad's second knee surgery and the subsequent layoff from the warehouse. Financial aid covered two-thirds. The Beckett job—live-in nanny, Monday through Friday, room and board included—covered the rest. In exchange, I got to live in the enemy's house for four months and pretend I didn't flinch every time someone said his name in the hallway.

Leo Beckett.

Star quarterback. Future of Northwood High football. Owner of a smile that made teachers forget he hadn't turned in a single homework assignment since sophomore year. And, as of last spring, the guy whose friends had started a group chat called "Marlowe the Marshmallow" that circulated for three days before someone screenshotted it and sent it to me anonymously.

I hadn't cried. I'd just added their names to a list in the back of my journal under the heading: People Who Will Die First in the Apocalypse.

The door swung open before I could touch the lion knocker.

The woman standing there was exactly what I'd expected from the Beckett family photos that populated the local news whenever Leo threw a game-winning pass. Blonde highlights, yoga-toned arms, a smile that was warm but somehow still managed to look expensive. Celeste Beckett. She was wearing linen pants and holding a travel mug that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe.

"Marlowe! Oh, thank goodness." She reached out and squeezed my shoulder, her rings cool against my skin. "You're a lifesaver. I know this is last-minute, but the agency said you were available for immediate start, and honestly, we're drowning over here."

I forced a smile. "Happy to help, Mrs. Beckett."

"Celeste, please. Mrs. Beckett is my mother-in-law, and she's not nearly as nice as I am." She stepped aside, ushering me into a foyer with ceilings so high I felt like I'd shrunk three inches just standing under them. "Leo mentioned you go to Northwood together? Small world."

My stomach dropped into my sneakers. "He mentioned me?"

"Oh, just that he'd seen you around. Said you were in AP English with him." She laughed, a light, airy sound. "I'm not sure how that's possible, since Leo hasn't opened a book since The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but it's sweet that he pretends."

So he hadn't told her about the group chat. Or the fact that he'd watched his friends call me a beached whale in the cafeteria line last March and hadn't said a word. Good. I could work with neutral ground.

Celeste led me through the house, pointing out the kitchen ("Fully stocked, help yourself to anything, I mean it"), the laundry room ("Detergent is in the cabinet above the washer"), and the guest room that would be mine for the next four months. It was small but clean, with a window that overlooked the backyard pool and a desk that was already making me want to write.

"This is perfect," I said, and meant it.

"And this," Celeste said, pushing open the door at the end of the hall, "is the reason you're here."

Maisie Beckett was three years old and sitting in the middle of her bedroom floor, surrounded by a massacre of crayons and construction paper. She had her mother's blonde curls and her brother's stubborn chin, and when she looked up at me, her entire face split into a grin that was missing one front tooth.

"You're big," she announced.

Celeste winced. "Maisie, honey, we don't—"

"Big is good," I interrupted. "Big means I can carry more dragons."

Maisie's eyes went wide. "You can draw dragons?"

"I can draw dragons that breathe fire and have unicorn horns."

The next ten minutes involved me sitting cross-legged on the floor, a purple crayon in my hand, while Maisie dictated exactly how many spikes a proper dragon required. Celeste watched from the doorway, something softening in her expression.

"She doesn't warm up to people this fast," Celeste said quietly. "You've got a gift."

What I had was years of practice being a human shield for smaller, weirder kids in elementary school. But I didn't say that. I just smiled and added another spike.

By the time Celeste left for her charity gala meeting, Maisie was calling me "Mar-Loaf" and showing me her collection of rubber ducks. It was easy. Comfortable. The kind of afternoon that made me forget, for whole stretches of minutes, whose house I was actually in.

Then the front door slammed.

It wasn't a dramatic slam. It was the sound of someone who was used to entering a space without announcing themselves, the casual thud of ownership. Heavy footsteps crossed the foyer, heading for the kitchen. The refrigerator opened. A long pause. The refrigerator closed.

"Mom?" The voice was deeper than I remembered from the cafeteria. Rougher around the edges.

I stayed frozen on Maisie's floor, a rubber duck clutched in my hand. My heart was doing something stupid and traitorous in my chest. Not attraction. I refused to call it attraction. It was just... awareness. The kind of awareness prey animals felt when a predator entered their territory.

The footsteps moved toward the hallway.

"Mom, I told you I needed the car tonight. Coach wants—"

Leo Beckett appeared in the doorway of his sister's bedroom and stopped dead.

He was taller than he looked at school. Broader. His practice jersey was dark with sweat, and his hair was plastered to his forehead in a way that would have looked pathetic on anyone else but on him just looked like an Abercrombie ad. He was holding a Gatorade bottle and staring at me like I was a piece of furniture that had suddenly started speaking.

"You," he said.

"Me," I agreed.

Maisie looked between us, sensing the shift in the air. "Leo, Mar-Loaf can draw dragons. Look." She held up my masterpiece: a purple dragon with seventeen spikes and a lopsided unicorn horn.

Leo didn't look at the dragon. He was still looking at me, and I could see the calculations happening behind his eyes. The quarterback brain. Assessing threats. Evaluating plays. Trying to figure out if the fat girl from his English class being in his house was a problem he needed to solve.

"The nanny," he said finally. Flat. Not a question.

"The nanny," I confirmed. "Try to contain your excitement."

Something flickered in his expression. Surprise, maybe. Or annoyance. It was hard to tell with someone whose face was so practiced at giving nothing away. Then he did the thing I'd seen him do a hundred times in the hallway: he disengaged. Looked away. Erased me from his field of vision.

"Whatever." He pushed off the doorframe. "Just stay out of my way."

He was gone before I could respond. His bedroom door, two rooms down the hall, closed with that same careful softness I'd noticed when we first walked in. Like he was trying not to make noise in his own house.

Maisie tugged on my sleeve. "Leo's sad."

I looked down at her. "What?"

"Leo's sad," she repeated, matter-of-fact. "He doesn't sleep good. I hear him walking at night."

Before I could process that, my phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from an unknown number.

Unknown: If you tell anyone at school about this job, I'll make your life hell. Not a threat. A promise.

I stared at the screen, my thumb hovering over the keyboard. Outside, I could hear the distant rumble of a lawnmower. Maisie was humming something off-key, arranging her ducks in a circle around the purple dragon.

I typed back: I don't talk to anyone at school. You're safe.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Unknown: Whatever.

I locked my phone and turned back to Maisie's ducks. But I couldn't stop thinking about what she'd said. Leo's sad. And the way he'd closed his door—not with anger, but with something that looked, from the outside, an awful lot like exhaustion.

The house settled around us, all its expensive silence pressing in.

And somewhere down the hall, I heard it: the faint, rhythmic creak of a floorboard. Back and forth. Back and forth. Like someone pacing. Like someone who couldn't stand still long enough to let the quiet win.

At nine o'clock, after Maisie was asleep and the house had gone dark, I crept out of my room to use the bathroom. The hallway was cold. The Beckett house had central air that worked a little too well, the kind of cold that seeped into your bones.

Leo's door was cracked open.

I shouldn't have looked. I knew I shouldn't have looked. But there was a sliver of lamplight spilling out, and my feet stopped moving before my brain could tell them to keep going.

He was sitting on the floor, his back against his bed. Not on his phone. Not watching TV. Just sitting. And in his hands, illuminated by the dim desk lamp, was a book.

Not a playbook. Not a magazine.

A book. A thick one. The Count of Monte Cristo.

Leo Beckett—the boy who couldn't spell "Wednesday" without autocorrect, the boy who laughed when his friends called me a marshmallow, the boy who moved through the world like he'd already won—was reading Dumas in the dark, his lips moving silently over words he was clearly struggling to sound out.

He looked up.

Our eyes met through the crack in the door.

And for one breathless, impossible second, Leo Beckett looked terrified. Not of me. Of what I'd seen.

Then his face went hard. Quarterback face. Armor up.

"Get out," he said. His voice was ice.

I didn't move.

"Get out."

I pulled the door closed and walked back to my room on shaking legs, the image burned into my brain: the golden boy of Northwood High, alone in the dark, fighting his way through a book he could barely read.

And I understood something then, something that made my chest ache in a way I didn't want to examine.

Leo Beckett wasn't a monster.

He was just a boy drowning in a house full of people who thought he was already swimming.