Sweet Romance10 min read
The Neighbor Who Could Cry — and Then Lead a Crowd
ButterPicks14 views
I told myself I'd keep my cool.
"I got it," I said through the phone, pinching the bridge of my nose.
"You're home? Good. Just—rest."
Remy Brady's voice bubbled with bravado even though it came muffled through the line.
"Relax, Iliana. I can take care of myself."
He could not. He had just finished his first fight after college entrance exams, and I drove to the hospital because the idea of him in a ward made me itch.
The hospital corridor smelled like antiseptic and cheap coffee. I walked slow, scanning faces until I saw him—this boy on his phone, leaning against the wall, voice low and rough.
"No big deal," he was saying. "He hit me hard. I—" He sniffed, then tucked his face into his palm like he wanted to hide.
He raised a hand. His eyes were wet in the hollow way someone who'd been cold and feverish might have. He blinked and rubbed at his lashes, and I thought—poor thing. He looked fragile, like paper.
"Are you okay?" I asked, stepping closer with a packet of tissues.
He turned. He was taller than I expected. He had that soft, clean look everyone uses to call someone 'innocent'. "I'm fine," he said. "Really."
Remy came out of the doctor's room then, rubbing his jaw like he regretted his life choices. "Thanks, doc. We're leaving."
But when Remy saw us, the smile smashed. "You here too?" he spat. "Come on, don't run. Fight me."
The boy didn't rise to it. He faced Remy with his head slightly bowed and said, "I won't fight you."
Remy sneered. "Why not? You scared, huh? Coward."
That word made something hot and ugly flare in my chest.
"Remy, shut up," I snapped, and before I knew it my hand had met his arm in a sharp, corrective clap. "You picked a fight for no reason."
Remy blinked then softened. "Sis—"
The boy looked up, and the water glinting on his lashes made him an image I couldn't forget. "I'm sorry for the trouble," I told him quickly. "My brother is...reckless. I'm really sorry. Are you hurt? We can pay."
He shook his head. He hesitated, then added, "It's okay. I'm alright." His voice had a brittle edge.
I took his wrist like it was fragile china. "What's your name?"
"Noah Hassan."
"Nice to meet you, I guess under better circumstances." I handed him my phone. "Add me. If you need anything—call."
He accepted. He didn't smile much. He had tired kindness in his face, and something in me softened.
Back outside, Remy declared loudly, "I am eighteen. I will not be bossed around by my sister."
I rolled my eyes. "Then study, don't fight."
"I was defending my stuff!" he protested.
"Stuff doesn't come with hospital bills," I said, and tossed the conversation away as we walked to the car.
Days after that night, Noah kept appearing like punctuation marks in my life—unexpected but appropriate. He was Kelly Haas’s son, my old teacher. He came over because Kelly asked me to check on him during a training trip. He was polite; he said "sister" with a quiet respect. He ate my sister meals like it was the best thing he had that day. He drank boxed milk like it was a small ritual.
"Iliana," Kelly said one afternoon, "could you help Noah with some test prep? He needs someone to keep him focused."
"No problem," I told her, and I didn't expect to mean it as much as I did.
Remy and Noah were both college-bound, but Remy had spent his three-year stretch of serious moodiness getting loud and tough. Noah? He read through the evening, sat tidy, and sometimes his lips trembled as he swallowed words he didn't need to say.
"You're getting tall," I said the first time I really noticed how much he'd grown.
"Noah": he flushed a little, and looked down. "I am? Thanks."
I started bringing him soup when he was sick, and one night when his fever hit, I brought him to my apartment. He protested but quietly let me insist. He slept like a child on the couch with the drip in his arm. He woke up only to ask, "I can help with the dishes later."
"No," I said. "You rest."
"You're bossy," he said, smiling while his eyes still shimmered.
"Good," I said.
He stayed a couple of days. He helped Remy with vocabulary lists. Remy feigned disgust but secretly lobbed questions and learned.
"You're good at this," Remy admitted once, and Noah only shrugged.
"Remy," I warned, "behave."
Remy rolled his eyes. "I am the model college student."
I pretended to believe him.
Noah and I grew used to each other—he'd bring me little things from the campus store when he'd stop by. Once, he knocked on my dorm with a yogurt, and when I opened the door, he looked sheepish. "Traffic," he said. "I brought this."
"You're always on time," I said, and we both laughed.
He told me, one cold night under a thin streetlamp, "Iliana, if you ever need me—text. I'll come."
"That's quite the promise," I said.
"It's not a promise," he corrected, "it's a habit."
Then the summer left us and the fall term started. Noah went to a school nearby; he came to campus more often than expected. He wasn't just polite anymore. He looked out for me. He made sure I'd get home safely on the dark walks. He watched games but didn't play much—until he did.
One Saturday I wandered past the backstreet courts. I saw rowdy groups from different schools sharing space. Then a flare of shouting. The place split in two like someone had drawn a line.
"Who the hell took our court?" someone yelled.
A cluster moved with a leader—tall, with a face like carved stone. He pulled others with him like gravity. I recognized the leader's voice. It was Aldo Mueller.
Aldo mocked a boy in the center. "You think you can take our time? Say sorry."
Noah stepped up. He held the basketball like it meant something to him. He folded his mouth into a line I had never seen before.
"Get out of the line," Noah said. "This court is open. We play fair."
Aldo laughed and circled like a jackal. "Who are you to tell us? You? Little wannabe champ."
Noah's friends bristled. "He won't back down," someone muttered.
Remy, who'd come to watch, looked suddenly small in the crowd. The air tightened. I felt my throat close.
"No run-around," Aldo said. "We play. Winner takes the court."
There was the soft sound of fists rubbing palms and the hollow breath of boys waiting for chaos.
Noah folded his fingers around the ball and said, "Fine. Play."
The game started like a rope pulling taut, and then the first shove came. Shouts echoed. When Aldo went beyond words, someone pulled a phone and recorded. At first it looked like a fair clash—two teams and a heated argument. But then Aldo pushed too far and struck a kid who was not on Noah's side. Aldo's hand slapped a student's face in front of everyone. The crowd gasped.
Noah shoved back, then Aldo pulled a pocket knife.
"No!" someone screamed. It was an ugly second. Phones pointed, lights flicked. Noah moved between Aldo and the knife better than anyone could have expected. He didn't escalate. He protected.
Security sirens arrived, the usual campus guards pushing through. People were shouting. People were filming. The clip would be everywhere soon.
After that day, things changed.
Noah's image—the quiet, polite boy who cried once in a hospital and took my tissues—cracked in my mind. He could be calm and also stand like a wall. He could be gentle and also fierce. Everyone loves a neat label. Noah refused to be neat.
A bull scene blew up over the coming weeks. The opposing school's team claimed Noah's crew had "stolen" the court. Aldo rallied more boys. Their leader had more than bravado—he had a reputation to lean on. He used slurs I'd never imagined, and he made sure the campus knew who he was.
I should have kept my distance. But I couldn't.
One evening, the university arranged a sports assembly—the kind of event that draws crowds and faculty, full of lights and cameras. They wanted to promote campus safety after the incidents. Kelly told me about it and said, "They want someone to give the student perspective." I went because it meant being near Noah.
Aldo and his group were there. They pulled off scowls that tried to be casual. People were milling, conversation thick with the last scandal.
The moderator called up campus security to explain the incidents. "We have footage," she said. "We also have student testimonies."
Aldo rolled his eyes and smirked at his friends. "This is a circus," he hissed.
"No," I said from my seat. "This is on you."
I wasn't supposed to be speaking, but my words slipped out loud, "He started it."
Aldo's laughter was like gravel. "She says it started with me? Who are you to say that?"
On the big screen, the footage from weeks of phones and CCTV stitched together. I watched it live—the late night push, the knife flashing, Aldo's shove, the panic. The auditorium shifted. The faces in the audience—the teachers who had praised Aldo, the parents who had thought him a "fine boy"—tightened.
"Watch the clip at 3:12," I said. My voice trembled but didn't stop. "The one where he hits the other student's face in front of everyone. And where he tried to pull a knife."
Aldo's expression deflated in the slow embarrassing way of a man realizing his act had no audience. He stood, hands shaking for the first time. "This is fake," he spat.
A dozen phones raised. "Show the whole clip," a chorus called. The screen rolled, this time longer. Aldo tried to turn denial into performance. He laughed again, but now the laugh had a cracking edge. "It's staged. I'm being set up."
A voice from the crowd—one of the junior teachers—took a step forward. "We have receipts. The security feed, and the audio we captured. You'll need more than words, Aldo."
The room reacted. Murmurs became louder. The parents in the first rows stared. Aldo's mother, in the audience, stood as if the wind had knocked her. Her face was white. She mouthed something to her husband—a string of denial that couldn't hold.
Aldo's cheeks burned first with anger, then with panic. "You can't do this! We—"
A student lifted his phone and played a slowed-down clip where Aldo's hand reached into a cubby and pulled out a knife. Even Aldo's friends shifted.
"You hit a student in front of the whole court," Noah said quietly from his seat, standing with his jaw steady. "You exposed everyone to danger. You used words and then a knife."
The auditorium fell quiet. Faces turned to Aldo, and the expression there was no longer smug; it was small and raw. "I—" he started.
"No," his coach said from the panel. "You will face the disciplinary board. The police will also be involved. This is not playground stuff."
People began to clap—at first tentative, then louder. It felt like a sudden audience turning on a failed actor. Students who had been intimidated by Aldo before now stepped away and watched with a strange satisfaction. Phones kept rolling.
Aldo's face went through stages. First denial. Then anger. Then bargaining—"I'll explain, it was a misunderstanding"—and then collapse. He realized there was no crowd to back his lies. He slumped into his chair and covered his face.
"What about me?" one of his followers whispered. "We were just following him."
"You chose," a girl in the crowd said. "You always choose."
Aldo tried to stand again, to plead, to scream. His words were thin threads thrown into a room that had closed up.
"Don't you see?" someone shouted from the back. "You used fear to run the group. You made people do what you wanted by scaring them."
More than once, I watched him look at his parents in the front row. There was shame so big it made his shoulders fold. A woman behind him—an older student who had once told me quietly about being punched on the same court—stepped forward and laid a hand on his shaking shoulder. "You hurt us," she said. "You made us live afraid."
The auditorium wasn't silent after that. People whispered, some recording, some simply watching the transformation. Aldo stood no chance of making his image whole again in that place. Security led him out; I watched his face go pale as he passed between groups of students whose whispers cut sharp. He tried to hold his chin up, but the lights were too bright.
We all felt the crowd's moral weight press down. People cheered Noah later, not for violence, but for standing safe and steady. Aldo's punishment would include the disciplinary panel, athletic suspension, and perhaps police questioning. But the humiliation—more public and immediate than any administrative record—was in the auditorium where his father and mother sat watching their child strip of the armor he'd built.
That night, Noah texted me: "Sorry you had to see that."
I typed back: "No. I needed to see it. People need to be held accountable."
He replied: "You were brave."
"You were brave too," I answered.
Later, as we walked under strings of campus lights, Noah reached and took my hand. "Iliana," he said, "thank you for speaking up."
"Thank you for being honest," I said, because the more I saw of him—the fierce patience; the hand that covered mine for a second in the dark; the way he had refused to be boxed in—the more I liked him.
Then he said the words that stopped me like the first snowfall had months ago. "I like you," he said. "Would you be with me?"
I remembered when he had been the boy in the hospital with moist lashes, and I remembered the auditorium where he stood calm like a lighthouse. I nodded, and he smiled like he had just been given permission to breathe.
We were careful after that. People still talked. Remy gossiped like a proud, irrational brother. "You picked a winner, Iliana!" he crowed. "You got the big honor: my enemy turned husband material!"
I laughed and pushed him. "Shut up."
Noah and I measured out the small days—books, dinners, silent walks after library runs. He would still play basketball sometimes; people still remembered that day in the auditorium with a grainy clip and a dozen different comments. Aldo's case moved through the system; people took sides; some of his followers apologized and stood on the wrong side of pride.
I was not blind to the complications. Lovers get angry, life gets messy. But there was something to the quiet that remains when a crowd chooses right over spectacle. And in that quiet, Noah's hand in mine was steady.
One winter, with the sky like a slate, he knelt with a small ring in the warm light of a simple temple, and said, "Iliana—will you?"
I remembered the hospital tissues, the nights he watched my back, the day the court split and how he stood between danger and someone else's panic. I remembered his face at the assembly when the lights turned on someone who had lied.
"I will," I said.
We tied a red ribbon on the temple board that day. We wrote small wishes for the future and tied them to a rail. The ribbon was bright, tied where a thousand others had been. People walked by and left crumbs of their own stories, and ours sat among them.
We left the temple hand in hand, and when a student recognized us, they smiled and waved. The campus had changed in small ways. A few people who had been afraid now said hello out loud.
"Hey," Noah said softly, as if naming something true, "you remember when you gave me tissues that first night?"
"Yes."
"You saved me a long time ago," he said. "You didn't know you did."
I squeezed his hand. "You did the same for me."
We walked away together down the lane, snow barely dusting our shoulders like a soft promise.
The End
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