Keep A Secret From the System

Wallace sent it at 2:17 a.m., the hour the city learned to leave alone. Streetlights were tired. The last train yawned past the river and shut its eyes. Kai’s phone lit the ceiling, casting a white rectangle that drifted like a raft across the plaster.

Can you keep a secret?

Kai lay there counting the hums in the wall—fridge, neighbor’s fan, the ancient elevator that sighed between floors like a sleeping horse. The city had its own organs. It metabolized night.

He typed back. Depends.

Three dots. Then: Come to the planetarium. Bring the key.

Kai looked at the key on the dresser, the one Wallace had given him two summers ago. Small, brass, no teeth. A key that couldn’t open anything. Wallace had said it was a joke, a keepsake from the locksmith apprenticeship he’d quit. “A key to nothing,” Wallace had said, grinning that broken-bottle grin. “But you can pretend, right?”

Kai got up. Jeans. Hoodie. Shoes without socks. He tucked the key into his palm and left without turning on the light.

Outside, the air had that washed-out look it gets after rain, like the world had been rinsed and forgotten to be dried. The planetarium sat at the end of a block of warehouses, dome like a dull pearl tilted in a cracked ring of parking lot. It was condemned, scheduled to be scraped into history by the end of the month. The letters on the marquee were missing an O: PLANETARI M. The missing vowel was a hole you could fall through if you stared.

Wallace stood by the service door, hands in the pockets of his jacket, haircut he’d given himself in the bathroom mirror. He looked like a promise that hadn’t decided whether to be kept.

“You brought it?” he asked.

Kai held up the key.

Wallace smiled without showing teeth and pushed the door. It opened with the sound of a zipper.

Inside, the planetarium smelled like dust and old velvet. The dome room was still intact: seats like dark mouths, the projector in the center a black mechanical flower. They climbed to the top row and sat. Wallace kept his gaze on the busted star machine as if expecting it to bloom.

“So,” Kai said, “you planning to steal the constellations or just have a cozy crime?”

Wallace ignored the bait. “Do you remember June?” he asked.

Kai felt the name like a splinter. He hadn’t heard it in months, which is not the same as forgetting. “I remember.”

“She called me tonight,” Wallace said. “First time since—since the bridge.”

Kai waited.

“She told me something,” Wallace went on. “And I can’t hold it alone. But if I tell you, you can’t tell anyone. Not then, not later. Not even after it wouldn’t matter anymore. Not as a story. Not as a joke. It has to become a stain that doesn’t spread.”

Kai turned the key in his palm. Brass against skin, cool as a coin. “That what the key’s for?” he asked. “A secret with no teeth?”

Wallace looked at him then. “It’s for what comes after,” he said softly. “Can you keep a secret?”

Kai thought about Wallace at sixteen, running the length of the river walk with wet shoes, laughing as if oxygen was something you could throw to a friend. He thought about June, who collected glass frogs and called the wind by different names. He thought about the bridge, the way it lifted above the water like a shoulder refusing to be touched.

“Yes,” Kai said. “I can keep a secret.”

Wallace exhaled, a sound like a curtain losing its breath.

“It wasn’t an accident,” he said. “What happened on the bridge.”

Every muscle in Kai’s neck drew tight. He fixed his eyes on the seam where dome met wall.

Wallace’s voice kept an even tone, like thread pulled through cloth. “June and I were fighting. You were at the vending machines, you remember? She wanted me to tell you about us. She was tired of being the third thing in our room. I said it would blow up everything. She said maybe it should. We walked to the edge, and she climbed up on the rail. She used to do that to make me nervous. You know how she was. But she wasn’t playing this time. She said, ‘Will you tell him, or will you watch me jump?’”

Kai closed his eyes and saw the bridge by the river at night, the color of a held tongue.

“I said,” Wallace went on, “that I wouldn’t be blackmailed. I said if she jumped, it would be on her. I thought she was bluffing. I thought I knew the weight of people. She let go of the rail. I grabbed her jacket and missed. That’s what I told the police—missed. The part I didn’t tell was that I didn’t miss because I’m clumsy. I missed because I didn’t put my whole hand into saving her. I left one finger on the possibility of being free.”

His words hung there, as if they needed somewhere else to go and the room refused.

Kai inhaled. He counted. One two three. “So your secret,” he said, “is a different angle on the same fall.”

Wallace nodded once. “June called to say she forgave me,” he said. “She said forgiveness is a way to keep breathing when the air’s gone thin. But that’s not the part I couldn’t hold alone.”

“What is?”

“She told me,” Wallace said, and now his voice sharpened, a blade taken out of paper, “she didn’t jump for me. She jumped for you.”

The seats, the dome, the dusty velvet—all of it drifted for a second, like a picture unglued in hot weather. Kai felt the key dig into his palm. He didn’t feel the pain.

“That’s not true,” he said. “June and I were just—”

“She wanted you to be more than just,” Wallace said. “She said you were always pulling the emergency brake in your own head. She wanted to break something you would hear. She thought I would pull her back. She thought I loved her enough to be your witness.”

Wallace looked down then, as if there were a trapdoor in his lap and he was deciding whether to open it.

“She asked me to tell you that,” he said. “She asked me to wait until it would be a mercy.”

Kai put his hand over his mouth. He imagined saying her name out loud, but it felt like dragging a net full of knives across the floor. He let the silence stand up between them and fill the rows, a body of its own.

Wallace spoke again, quieter. “I need you to keep that. For me. For her. I need you to put it somewhere in you that doesn’t leak.”

Kai looked at him. Wallace’s face looked older in the planetarium light—that no-light gray that erases edges. His mouth was a wound that had learned manners.

“Why tell me now?” Kai asked. “Why add this weight?”

“Because I met with the demolition foreman,” Wallace said. “He gave me fifteen minutes with the projector for a hundred bucks. He said I could turn it on one last time. Goodbye tour. I told him I was sentimental.”

“You’re not sentimental,” Kai said.

“I am about this,” Wallace said. “Help me make a sky.”

They went down to the floor. Wallace flicked a switch on a panel. The projector shuddered, coughed dust, and then a scatter of weak stars climbed the dome. They were uneven, a salt spill, but they were stars.

Kai lay back on the cracked vinyl. Wallace lay beside him, shoulder warm against shoulder. The dome breathed over them.

“Say it,” Wallace murmured.

“What?”

“The thing you keep,” he said. “Say it once into the sky. Then we don’t say it again.”

Kai closed his eyes. His tongue felt strange in his mouth, as if it had forgotten the weight of certain syllables. He said June’s name, nothing else. The dome took the sound and thinned it until it barely existed. He wondered if that was what forgiveness sounded like—stretching a word until it was all thread and no knot.

Wallace said, “I left one finger on the possibility of being free.” He said it only once, like a password you can’t afford to repeat.

They lay there while the mechanical stars shook. A leaky constellation drifted across Wallace’s jaw.

After a while, Wallace’s hand found Kai’s wrist. He turned it until Kai’s palm opened. Wallace put the brass key on the small flat valley of skin and bone. “For what comes after,” he said again.

Kai looked at the key. No teeth. A shape that did not know the inside of any lock. He closed his hand and felt the cool weight.

“My turn,” Kai said.

Wallace made a small sound of surprise. “Your turn for what?”

“For a secret,” Kai said. “Sometimes I think I loved you more than I loved either of us.”

Wallace didn’t move. He didn’t inhale for two beats. “When?”

“All the time,” Kai said. “Not in a way that was useful. In a way that made me small so the feeling could be big.”

Wallace turned his face, met Kai’s gaze in the dim star-salt. “Can I keep that?” he asked.

“You’ll have to,” Kai said, trying for lightness and only catching its shadow.

The projector clicked once, a hiccup. The stars gave up, pulled back. The room returned to itself, which is to say it lost something.

Wallace stood and offered a hand. Kai took it. They climbed the steps and sat for a minute where they had sat before confession, before sky.

“Tomorrow,” Wallace said, “this place will disappear. Trucks and hard hats and the big metal jaw. They’ll say it’s progress.”

“Tomorrow,” Kai echoed, “we still have to eat breakfast.”

Wallace smiled. “You always were a practical romantic.”

“You always were a liar who told the truth,” Kai said.

They left through the service door. Dawn was not here yet, but the air had changed temperature, like the world was clearing its throat. Wallace fished a cigarette out of his pocket and didn’t light it, just held it between his fingers as if remembering.

Kai looked at the river in the distance, a black ribbon that had no patience for metaphors.

“Do you forgive yourself?” he asked.

Wallace rolled the unlit cigarette across his knuckles. “Not yet,” he said. “But now I don’t have to do it all alone.”

Kai put the key in his jacket pocket. It was ridiculous and it mattered. He said, “If anyone asks how I’m doing, I’ll say I’m keeping something that isn’t mine, and it’s teaching me how to breathe.”

Wallace nodded. “If anyone asks me who I am, I’ll say I’m someone who almost let go and didn’t, and I’m going to spend the rest of it practicing the other version of me.”

They walked past the marquee with its missing O. Above the skyline, the night thinned at the edges, a wound knitting. They didn’t hug. They didn’t make promises that would spoil.

At the corner, Wallace looked at Kai, as if over a long distance. “Thank you,” he said.

“For what?” Kai asked.

“For getting here fast,” Wallace said. “For saying yes before you knew what you were saying yes to. For keeping this.”

Kai nodded. They split at the crosswalk, each taking a different side of the sleeping street. The city listened as they went. Later, the dome would split like an egg and the machine would be hauled away and the dust would lift and settle in new rooms. Later, they would both cook eggs in small kitchens and watch the day happen.

But the secret would stay where they had put it: inside them, a brass shape with no teeth, heavy enough to feel like a real thing, light enough to carry. And as the morning came in thin and then thicker, they learned the quiet choreography of keeping—how it is something you do, not something you have. How it holds you back from the wrong edge. How, sometimes, it makes a sky where there isn’t one, just long enough to say a name and mean it once and forever.