That’s the part that keeps me on a window ledge at two in the morning instead of in my room running the perimeter security patterns the way Valen wants.
I pull out the folded piece of paper I’ve been carrying since the first night.
I wrote seven drafts before I got it right. Not because I struggled with the words, but because I struggled with how much to give. How much to withhold. How to be honest enough that she feels found without being so direct that she locks the door and never opens it again.
She picked it up.
She kept it.
I know because I would have seen it in the hallway. Or in her trash if she’d discarded it, and it wasn’t there.
She’s carrying it. Right now, in whatever bag or secret place feels close enough to her chest that she’ll feel it when she breathes.
I know this the way I know certain things, not from evidence, but from the same place the rage comes from. The deep, pre-verbal place where I am most honest.
After three hours of sleep, I fold the paper back up and look at the empty quad.
First period literature is in twenty-one minutes. I know she registered for it. I made sure I’m in the same classes.
I wonder if she’s still awake.
I wonder, in the quiet, what she sounds like when she isn’t afraid.
I want to be the reason she gets to find out. Even if I break her, at least I would have the satisfaction.
Amy
Advanced Literature is not my best class.
I’m better at science or art, at things that can be proven. Literature requires you to sit with ambiguity, to inhabit interpretations that can’t be confirmed, to say “perhaps the author meant” and feel comfortable with the perhaps. I’ve never been comfortable with perhaps. Perhaps is the space where bad things hide.
But the class fits my schedule, and the professor, an older woman named Dr. Chaudhary who wears reading glasses on a chain and has the air of someone who’s heard every possible wrong answer and found it instructive, doesn’t seem like the type to call on people without warning.
I take my now standard middle-row seat. Notebook out. Pen uncapped. Date written across the top of a fresh page.
I look at the door when it opens. He has to enter slightly sideways to clear the frame. This is not an exaggeration.
The doorframes in the older buildings are narrower than those in the newer construction, and he is wide across the shoulders in a way that only happens when width is made of pure muscle, not performance.
Dark hoodie again.
No bag.
He scans the room in a single sweep, the way you scan a room when you’re assessing it rather than looking for a friend.
His eyes find me in approximately four seconds. and he takes the seat directly behind me. Not across the room. Not at the back. Not any of the eleven other empty seats distributed through the space.
Directly.
Behind.
Me.
I feel him settle into the chair. I feel the weight of him, not literally, the chairs aren’t connected, but in that same way I felt him yesterday in the lecture hall. Like proximity to him is its own climate.
Dr. Chaudhary begins class by asking if anyone has thoughts on the Plath excerpt assigned for this week. I have thoughts, but I keep them to myself.
My hand is wrapped around my pen so tightly the cap is leaving an impression in my palm.