2 - The Wrong Answer

[Cairo's bedroom. October 10th. 6:47 AM.]

The alarm came up out of the dark like a hand around her throat.

She arrived back in pieces. The sweat first, soaked through, the shirt stuck down her spine and the sheet damp under her. Her mouth tasted like something had died in it and been left. Her eyes were gummed shut with sleep or with dreams she couldn't get back but knew had been bad.

The alarm was still going. She hit at the phone. Missed. Hit it again. Quiet.

Her own smell came up off her with the blanket. Musky sweat, the chemical ghost of a deodorant that had given up hours ago, stale pizza grease, and under all of it the funk of clothes slept in too long. She was still wearing yesterday. The jeans had put red welts across her waist. Her bra had twisted in the night and the underwire was digging into her ribs like a second set of teeth.

The rat stirred. Of course it did. The rat was always awake before she was.

Don't disappear. Baxter's voice, uninvited, lodged somewhere behind her sternum like a fish hook.

A knock. Sharp. Her mother's knuckles.

"Cairo, you're going to be late."

Calm. Pleasant. The voice of a woman who had done this ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more. No follow-up. No where were you last night, no you didn't come home, no I called Tia's house and you didn't pick up. Just the knock and the information and the footsteps going away down the hall.

She lay there and listened to them go.

Years of asking for exactly this. Stop hovering. I can handle it. I'm not a kid. Two years of pushing at that door with both hands. And they had opened it, the way reasonable people do, and now here she was on the other side of it in her own sweat at ten to seven with nobody coming.

The gnawing found something tender and settled its teeth into that.

You wanted this.

I know.

You got it.

Getting up took eleven minutes and she did not spend any of them deciding to. She lay on her back and let the ceiling do what the ceiling did, and then at some point her legs went over the side of the bed without consulting her, and the floor was cold, and that was that.

The mirror on the closet door caught her on the way past. Yesterday's clothes. Hair on one side flattened into a shape that would not come out without water. The welts across her waist where the jeans had been.

She looked at herself the way you look at a car you are not sure will start.

Clean shirt from the pile that was probably clean. The gray hoodie over it because the gray hoodie was the closest thing she owned to not being present in a room. Her hand went past the green sweater on the hook and did not stop, because green was a color and color was a thing people commented on, and being commented on was six hours of work she did not have in her.

*

[Cedar Falls, Iowa. October 10th. 7:23 AM.]

She didn't go to the quarry.

Her feet wanted to. That was the part she couldn't explain to anyone and had stopped trying to explain to herself. At the Hendersons' mailbox the left turn came up the way it always came up, and everything below her knees leaned into it, and there was a small sick leap of joy under her ribs like a dog hearing a leash come off a hook.

She went right instead. Toward school. Toward burnt polymer and bacon grease and six hundred people pretending to be fine.

The rat went back down its hole. Sulking. Waiting.

Don't disappear. Living behind her sternum now. Paying rent.

Her phone went off against her thigh.

Tia: come get coffee w me or i'll die

Her thumbs moved before her brain caught up.

where

corner of 5th. hurry up im literally decomposing

Five blocks. The October air had gone sharp overnight, wet leaves and car exhaust and somebody burning something in a backyard three streets over. The sky was the color of dishwater.

Tia was already there, against the brick outside the gas station, one leg bent with the foot flat on the wall like she was posing for an album nobody had commissioned. Two cups in her hands, plastic, sweating. Hair in a bun coming apart. Yesterday's eyeliner. A flannel that ate her whole.

"Took you long enough. I almost drank yours."

"You would've."

Cairo took the cup. Cold and wet against her palm, the condensation already going into her sleeve.

They fell into step. Close enough that their shoulders knocked, close enough to trip each other, which they did constantly, which was the point.

"My mom's back is bad again," Tia said. She said it the way she said everything that mattered, which was fast and flat and in the middle of a sentence about something else. "She's been sleeping on the floor. There's a whole thing about whether she can get her prescription renewed because the doctor moved to Waterloo or retired or died, I don't know, she gets weird about it." A shrug that moved the whole flannel. "Anyway. She made me watch a documentary about crabs."

"Crabs."

"Two hours. Crabs." She bit the straw. "Did you know crabs keep evolving into crabs? Like independently. Nature just keeps arriving at crab."

"That's horrifying."

"Right? Anyway." A shoulder into Cairo's arm, hard enough to move her off the line of the sidewalk. "You wrote something."

Not a question. The straw was clamped in her teeth so the words came out slightly mashed.

Cairo's stomach dropped. "What makes you think that."

"Because normally you're shrinking. Shoulders up around your ears, eyes down, whole body trying to fold in on itself like a dying star or whatever." Another shoulder, harder. "Today you're like. Here. Looking at shit. That tree. That mailbox. Me, occasionally, which is honestly the bare minimum of friendship but I'll take it."

She sees me. She always sees me.

"So." Tia pressed. "What was it."

"Just stuff. For Baxter's class."

"Bullshit." She stopped walking. Cairo had to stop too, or leave her behind, and leaving Tia behind was not a thing her body knew how to do.

"You don't write stuff. You write like you're trying to bleed onto the page. It's intense. It's kind of scary, actually."

"Thanks?"

"It's a compliment, idiot."

She started walking again, slower. The school came up at the end of the block.

"I just mean. Whatever you wrote, it did something. You're different today. Less."

"Less dead inside?"

"I was gonna say less like a ghost haunting your own body, but sure."

Cairo drank her coffee. It was terrible, gas station coffee that had been sitting since five, and it was hot, and she was outside, and her best friend was walking next to her being disgusted by crustaceans.

"It was about a typewriter," she said. "My grandmother's. I took it after she died and then I just let it rot in my closet. For six years."

Tia was quiet a second. Chewing the straw. Working on it.

"That's sad as fuck."

"Yeah."

"But like. Good sad. The kind that means something." She glanced over, quick, almost shy. "You should show Baxter."

"Maybe."

"Not maybe. Do it." Her voice went firm. "She asked you for real shit, right? That's real shit."

They came up on the gates. The chain-link was cold under Cairo's fingers.

"I'm proud of you," Tia said. Quietly. Like she was embarrassed to mean it.

Cairo didn't know what to do with that, so she put her shoulder into Tia hard enough to knock her sideways.

Tia grinned. Sharp, ugly, beautiful. Breaking glass.

They went in together, shoulders knocking, elbows catching. Neither of them said anything else about Tia's mother, because Tia had already moved on and Cairo had not thought to go back.

*

[Cedar Falls High School. Second-Floor Corridor. October 10th. 11:53 AM.]

She didn't plan it.

There was a bathroom on the second floor and it was the closest one, and the second floor was where the faculty offices were, and that was coincidence in the way gravity is coincidence. An invisible thing pulling you somewhere you were going anyway.

The faculty lounge door was open. Not open. Ajar. The gap between door and frame was maybe four inches. Enough to hear through. Not enough to see through.

Cairo slowed.

Keep walking. You need the bathroom. This is a hallway and you're a person in it and there is no reason on this earth to stop.

But the voice coming through the gap was Baxter's, and Cairo's feet, those dumb stubborn feet that had turned away from a quarry that morning, planted themselves on the linoleum and refused.

She wasn't saying much. Fragments. Half of a conversation, and Cairo took the halves and built the rest the way you build a picture from the pieces on the floor of the box. Edges first. Then the parts that make sense. Then the gaps, filled in with whatever you want to believe.

"Since April, I know. I know. I just."

A sound. Not a sigh. Something more compressed than that, the noise a person makes holding back the sigh they actually want.

"No, he hasn't. He said he'd call after he got to. Yes. Des Moines. Again."

Des Moines. He. A husband. Somebody who goes somewhere and doesn't call.

"It doesn't matter. I'm not doing this here, I'm at work, I."

A pause. Whatever came back through the phone made her go quiet for three full seconds. Cairo counted them.

"The kitchen's still. No. No, it's been since April. The contractor ghosted and Greg just. I don't want to talk about it."

Greg.

The name went into Cairo's chest and sat down and started sinking, slowly, looking for the bottom.

Greg. She has a Greg. Of course she has a Greg, she wears a ring, you've seen the ring, the thin gold band she turns with her thumb when she's reading at her desk, the way you turn something you're not sure you still want but aren't ready to take off.

Greg is in Des Moines. The kitchen stopped in April. She's standing in a faculty lounge at lunch telling somebody about a man who left and a room that isn't finished, and she sounds like a person holding a cracked glass. Carefully. Because if she adjusts her grip it goes.

And somewhere in the middle of that, without deciding to, without noticing she had done it, Cairo stopped calling her Baxter.

It was not a promotion she granted. Nobody granted it. The woman on the other side of four inches of door had said a man's name in a voice with a crack running through it, and by the time the sentence finished, the person standing in the hallway had a first name for her, and would never once go back.

She walked away fast. Not running. The measured deliberate walk of somebody who has heard too much and knows it and needs physical distance from the knowing.

In the bathroom she ran the tap and put her wrists under it. Cold. The trick her mother had taught her for nausea, cool the pulse points, it slows the heart. But it wasn't nausea. It was something else, something without a name she had, or with a name she'd read in books and never once felt in her own body.

She's lonely. She's married and she's lonely and her husband is in Des Moines and her kitchen has been broken since April and she told me not to disappear and now I know why. Because people keep disappearing on her. Because Greg disappeared to Des Moines and the contractor disappeared with the kitchen and she is standing in the middle of a half-finished life telling a girl not to do the thing everyone else has already done to her.

The water ran. She watched her own wrists under it, the blue veins going up under the skin, the tendons moving when she flexed her fingers.

You don't know that.

You heard thirty seconds of a phone call and you built a whole cathedral out of it. That's what you do. You take a fragment and you turn it into a story, because stories are the only thing that makes fragments bearable. You did it with the quarry. You did it with the notebook. And now you're doing it with a married woman's phone call, because you are eighteen years old and you have never been in a relationship and you do not know the difference between understanding somebody's pain and wanting to fix it and wanting to climb inside it and live there.

The counterargument was good. That was the trouble with it. It was well constructed and it was correct and it had all the moving parts in the right places, and she stood there with her wrists going numb and watched it fail to change one single thing about what she wanted.

Fine. So it's a story. So I made it up out of thirty seconds.

Make me stop.

Nothing in her had an answer for that. The rat did not even bother to sit up.

She turned off the tap. Dried her hands on her jeans. Went back to class.

But that night, lying in bed with the ceiling crack going northeast to southwest above her, she thought about a kitchen renovation that had been going since April. She thought about how long seven months is. She thought about a woman coming home every night to a room that was supposed to be finished by summer, and about the word Greg, and about the way Joanne's voice had thinned out around it, like the name was a blade she'd been swallowing for years and had finally stopped pretending didn't cut.

*

[Cedar Falls High School. Athletic Field. October 15th. 6:51 AM.]

The mornings were getting colder. Iowa October, which doesn't announce itself, just seeps. Through the seams of a jacket. Through the laces of boots. Through the cracks in a plan she had stopped having, the plan that used to end at a limestone edge and now ended here, on aluminum, in the dark, alone.

She could not have said when it started. Tuesday. Maybe Wednesday. She had turned left at the Hendersons' mailbox, the wrong left, the quarry left, and then turned again through the parking lot and come out at the athletic field, and had sat down, and had not been able to give herself a reason.

Third row, far end. The metal bit through her jeans into the backs of her thighs.

By Friday she had a spot. That was the word her head used for it, a spot, which was a word for something you had chosen, and she had not chosen anything. She had simply arrived four mornings running and sat in the same place, and on the fourth morning she had noticed a bottle cap wedged in the seam of the bench below her and felt something absurdly like recognition, the way you feel about a chipped mug in a house you have started sleeping in.

Wednesday she had brought coffee. Thursday she had brought coffee and a book she did not open. Friday she had left the house eleven minutes earlier than Thursday, and had not been able to make that eleven minutes mean anything except the obvious thing.

Why am I here.

But she knew, in the same place she knew the quarry route. Muscle memory. Wanting dressed up as habit. The body walking toward the thing the mind won't name.

The lot was across the field, a hundred yards maybe, close enough to know a car and too far to know a face.

At 7:04 the Honda came in.

She saw the headlights first through the gap in the chain-link, the same gap every morning, and she had learned to watch that gap the way you watch a door. Dark green. Aging. Rust starting along the wheel wells. The automotive version of the oatmeal cardigan. It parked third from the end, next to the lamppost, the same slot, and Cairo had a small vicious thought about how a person who parks in the same slot every day is a person who has stopped expecting anything to be different.

The engine cut. The door opened.

Even at a hundred yards the silhouette was unmistakable. One hand on the door, the other going for the bag on the passenger seat. And then the pause. The thirty seconds where she just stood there in the cold not doing anything, like she needed the time to put together the version of herself that could walk into the building and teach.

She lit a cigarette.

Cairo's breath caught. The flame first, tiny and orange, cupped in both hands against the wind. Then the ember, a small hot point in a gray morning. The smoke went up and came apart. Joanne leaned back against the car and didn't check her phone and didn't hurry, and smoked, and looked at nothing.

She smokes.

You didn't know that. You know the coffee. You know the cardigan. You know the thread pulling loose at the left cuff and the sound her shoes make and the name Greg and the kitchen and the way her voice drops when she's saying something true. And now you know she smokes, and you're sitting on frozen aluminum at seven in the morning taking inventory of a woman's routine like you're writing a character study instead of living your actual life.

The cigarette took four minutes. Cairo counted, and the counting happened the way breathing happened, without permission.

Four minutes is longer than people think. It is long enough to watch a woman shift her weight twice. Long enough to see her put her free hand flat against the roof of the car and leave it there, the way you steady yourself on furniture in the dark. Long enough for the cold to come up through aluminum into the backs of a girl's legs until the legs stop reporting anything at all.

Nobody was watching Joanne. That was the part Cairo could not get past. There was no class in front of her and no colleague beside her and no husband in the passenger seat, and out here in an empty lot at seven in the morning she was still standing up straight, still holding the cigarette between two fingers at the exact angle she held a red pen, and Cairo thought: that's not a performance, then. That's just what she's like when there's no one to be like it for.

And I'm the no one.

Joanne dropped it. Ground it out under her heel. Then bent down and picked the butt up off the asphalt and carried it to the bin by the entrance.

She picks it up.

She doesn't litter. In an empty parking lot at seven in the morning with nobody watching, she walks the butt to the bin. That's not a thing you do for anyone. That's a thing you do because of how you are.

The door swung shut behind her.

Cairo stayed six more minutes. The aluminum had warmed under her, her own heat going into the metal and staying there, the slow transfer from the living to the dead.

She opened the notebook. Purple. Unicorn. Page seventy-one.

Page seventy-one already had things on it. A line about the sound the quarry made when there was wind on the water, which was not a sound so much as an absence of one. A list of words she liked the shape of. Half a sentence about her mother's hands that she had abandoned because it had started going somewhere she did not want to follow.

She turned the pen over twice.

Then she wrote the name. Small letters, bottom corner of the page, the size you write something you do not want found by a person going through your bag.

Four letters and it looked ridiculous down there, marooned in white space, obviously a thing that had been put on the page by somebody with a problem. She looked at it for a while. The cold had gotten into her hands and the pen was harder to hold than it should have been.

She crossed it out. One line, straight through, the way you cross out a wrong answer.

The crossing-out was worse. Now it was a name that somebody had written and then tried to take back, which said everything the name alone did not, and she sat on a freezing bench in an empty stadium at five past seven in the morning and understood with total clarity that she had just made the evidence twice as bad.

So she wrote it again underneath. Bigger this time.

Then she shut the notebook and put it in the bag and went to first period.

*

[Cedar Falls High School. Room 114. October 15th. 3:44 PM.]

The room was empty except for the two of them. Tia had gone to rehearsal, still furious about Helena.

Cairo had stayed. Not because she was asked. Because her backpack was open and her books were on the desk and leaving required a sequence of movements, zip the bag, stand up, walk out, that her body would not begin while Joanne was at the front of the room with a red pen going through a stack of papers.

"Cairo." Not looking up. The pen still moving. "I have your paper."

Her stomach dropped. The typewriter piece. Her grandmother's Olivetti. The one Tia had told her to turn in, which she had turned in four days ago at eleven at night with the particular recklessness of that hour, when overthinking finally goes to bed.

"Here."

Joanne held it out, and their eyes met, and Cairo took it, and Joanne's index finger slid against her knuckle.

Two tenths of a second. Skin on skin, incidental, the amount of contact involved in handing a person a piece of paper.

Cairo felt it in her knuckles and her wrists and the backs of her knees. Heat radiating out from one square centimeter like heat off a match head, tiny and completely disproportionate, the physics of wanting something making the small enormous.

She touched my hand.

She touched my hand and it was nothing and it was everything and I don't know which reading is right because I have no index for this. Is that how adults hand each other things? Do they all touch? Is that the normal amount of contact for a two-second transaction in an empty classroom, and I'm making it seismic because nobody has ever put their hands on me in a way that meant anything?

The paper, then. Joanne's handwriting was small and leaned slightly left, the letters made with the deliberate pressure of somebody who had cared about penmanship once and had never entirely stopped. Red ink down the margins.

And at the top, four words.

This is real writing. Don't stop.

Cairo read them. Read them again. A third time, in case they rearranged themselves into something less complete.

Real. Not good. Not nice work. Not the grade-inflated encouragement teachers handed out like currency to keep the machine running. Real. A statement of fact. An identification.

Don't stop. The twin of don't disappear. Both of them negatives. Both of them instructions to keep going.

"Your line about the keys being cold even in summer," Joanne said. She had come around and sat on the edge of the desk, one foot on the floor, the other swinging a little. The posture of a person not performing authority. "That was the best sentence I've read from a student this year. The thermal memory of an object outlasting the person who used it." A small movement of her mouth. "That's writing, Cairo."

Cairo nodded. She did not trust her voice with anything more complicated than vowels.

"Are you sleeping?"

The question came with no preamble at all.

Cairo's whole body went still.

She asked.

She asked me something. Not about the paper. Not about the sentence. About me. She asked and she's waiting and the waiting is the thing she does, the thing I've watched her do to other people, and it's pointed at me now and I have to put something in it.

The lie was sitting right there, smooth and ready, five syllables polished by four years of use. Yeah, I'm fine. It would take nothing. It cost nothing. It was what you said.

"Not really," Cairo said.

It came out at half volume, in the gap between two heartbeats, and it was the truest sentence she had said out loud to an adult in three years.

Joanne's expression didn't change. But something behind it moved, some small internal rearrangement of a woman who had just heard a teenager say not really and was deciding how much of her professional distance to take down.

The silence went on.

Cairo counted it, because counting was what she had instead of nerve. One. Two. Three. Four. The tube overhead buzzing on its bad frequency. A door banging somewhere on the floor below. Five. Six.

She had her bag at her feet, and inside the bag, under the biology text and the anthology with the missing pages, the purple notebook was sitting there with page seventy-one in it. Seven. All she had to do was reach down. Eight. The reaching would take a second and a half and after that it would be out of her hands, literally out of her hands, on a desk, being read.

Cairo waited.

Ask me the next one. Ask why. Ask since when. Ask what happens when I don't sleep, ask where I go at four in the morning, ask anything, ask one more and I will tell you, I will tell you the whole thing, I have it right here.

The bag was at her feet. The notebook was in the bag.

"Write about that too," Joanne said. Quiet. Almost gentle. "Whatever keeps you up. Write about it."

And that was the answer.

Cairo's hand had gotten as far as the strap. She could feel the canvas under two fingers. It would have taken nothing, it would have taken less than nothing, one pull and the zipper and the notebook would have been out and in the world where somebody could look at it.

"There's other stuff," she said. "That I've written. Not for class."

She heard how it sounded coming out. Not brave. Just small, and slightly desperate, a hand going up at the back of a room.

"Good." Joanne was already reaching for the next paper on the stack, and the red pen was already moving, and the warmth in her voice was completely genuine, which was what made it unbearable. "Bring me some of it. I mean that."

Cairo let go of the strap.

She does mean it. That's the thing. She's not lying and she's not being polite, she wants to read it, she genuinely wants to read it.

Bring me some of it.

Bring me some of it.

The two of them were having entirely different conversations and only one of them knew.

Cairo walked out holding the paper. Down the hall, past the lockers, out through the doors into an October afternoon that hit her in the face and let her breathe.

She looked at the four words again. Red ink. The pressure of the pen visible in the small indentation on the back of the page. Joanne had pressed hard. Joanne had meant it.

The paper went against her chest, held there with both hands, the way you hold a letter you have been waiting for. The way you hold proof.

Don't disappear. Don't stop. This is real.

She sees me. She sees me the way nobody else sees me. Not the performance, not the grades, not the girl who shows up and sits in her seat and does fine. She sees the thing underneath.

And she wants more of it.

The rat was quiet. Not the exhausted quiet, and not the suppressed quiet. The watchful quiet of an animal that has caught a scent and gone very still.

Somewhere behind her in the building, in a room she had just left, a woman put a stack of papers in a canvas bag and did not think about the question she had asked, or the answer she had been given, or the fact that she had not asked another one.

The walk home took fourteen minutes and Cairo did not put the paper in her bag for any of them.

She carried it. Flat against her chest with both arms crossed over it, through the gates and down past the diner where the vent was pushing bacon grease out into the cold, past the vacant lot, past the Hendersons' mailbox where the left turn came up and went by without her noticing it had. A car went through a puddle near the corner of Third and she turned her shoulder to shield the pages and did not think that was a strange thing to do.

At the house she stood in the hall a minute working out where to put it. Her desk had things on it. The drawer felt like burial. In the end she slid it between the mattress and the box spring on the side of the bed she slept on, which was where she had kept things since she was nine, and lay down on top of it with her boots still on, and looked at the crack in the ceiling going northeast to southwest, and for the first time in a long time did not particularly want the ceiling to be somewhere else.

*

[Cedar Falls High School. Room 114. October 20th. 3:38 PM.]

The room was emptying. Cairo packed her things. Tia was next to her, mid-monologue about Friday, "so I was thinking we raid my parents' liquor cabinet, because there's this bottle of vodka he definitely won't notice is missing, and also I need you there, like actually there, not there-but-somewhere-else there."

"Cairo."

Joanne's voice cut across it. The way she said her name. Not the way she said anyone else's.

"Did she just call you over?" Tia whispered. "What'd you do."

"Nothing."

"You're blushing."

"I'm not."

"You absolutely are."

Cairo took her bag and went to the front.

Joanne was against her desk. Casual. Something in her eyes that was not casual at all.

"I've been thinking about your midterm. The creative component." She let that sit a second. "I think you could do something with it."

"Okay."

"I want you to pick a writer whose style speaks to you. Someone whose work makes you feel something. Learn it. Absorb it. Then put it through your own voice." Her eyes came up. "I want something that pushes you. Something that scares you a little."

Something that scares you.

The room had gone quiet behind her. The last of them were out. It was the two of them and the flickering tube and thirty empty desks.

And Cairo, who had been carrying a question around for five days like a stone in her shoe, asked it.

"Why do you care?"

Joanne's eyebrows went up a fraction.

"About my writing." Cairo's voice was not steady and she kept going anyway. "About me."

There it was. Out loud, in a room, in the air between them, the two halves separated so there was no way to answer one and leave the other. She had put both on the desk and she was not going to take either back.

Joanne looked at her for what felt like a long time.

Something happened in her face while she did it. Not a decision exactly. More the look of somebody checking the weight of a thing before picking it up, and Cairo watched it happen and could not read a single part of it, and wanted to be able to read it more than she had wanted anything in weeks.

"That's two questions," Joanne said.

"I know."

"Do you want me to answer both."

"Yes."

It came out flat and immediate, without any of the softening she would have put on it if she had given herself a second, and Cairo heard how bare it sounded a half beat after it was already in the room.

Joanne set the red pen down on the desk. That was all. She just put it down, and it was the first time Cairo had seen her stop holding it in that room, and the small sound of it going onto the laminate was enormous.

"Because you remind me of someone I used to be," she said. "Someone who had things she wanted to say and was terrified of saying them."

Her voice had dropped on the last part.

She knows. She can see it. She's telling me she was me.

"I don't want that to disappear," Joanne said. "Because of life, or circumstances, or whatever it is that gets in the way. I want to see what you become."

Cairo nodded. She had asked about me and been handed a sentence with the word me in it four times, and every one of them had been Joanne, and Cairo heard none of that, because she had been given something warm and she was very cold.

"I'll do it," she said. Stronger than she expected. "The midterm."

Joanne smiled. The real one. The one that lived behind the professional face and came out maybe twice a semester, and cracked Cairo's chest open every time.

Tia was in the hall.

Not gone. Leaning against the lockers across from the door with her bag between her feet and her phone in her hand, waiting, the way she had waited outside a hundred rooms since they were eleven, and Cairo came out and saw her and felt something go wrong low down in her stomach.

"Okay, so," Tia said, pushing off the wall. "What."

"Midterm stuff."

"Midterm stuff."

"She wants me to do a style thing. Imitate a writer I like and then, I don't know. Make it mine."

That was all true. Every word of it was true and Cairo could have said it under oath, and she watched Tia's face take it and file it as a complete answer, and something in her went cold and pleased at the same time, which was the worst feeling she had ever had about herself.

"Okay, that's cool though." Tia fell into step. "That's like an actual assignment. That's not busywork." She unlocked her phone, glanced, locked it again. "Are you still coming Friday? Because I meant the thing about needing you there. Like actually."

"Yeah."

"Because you say yeah and then you get this face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have a face right now."

Cairo laughed, and it came out fine, and they went down the stairs together with their shoulders knocking, and it was not until the parking lot that she realized she had been holding the strap of her bag hard enough to leave a mark across her palm.

*

[Cairo's bedroom. October 20th. 11:47 PM.]

The text had gone out at eight.

not feeling well, rain check?

She had typed it without letting herself think about it and hit send and felt the guilt go in like a splinter under a nail, small and deep and impossible to get at.

Tia's reply had come back in under a minute. ok. feel better. text me tmrw? And then, forty seconds later, a second one: i did want you there tonight but its fine. its dumb. tmrw.

Cairo had read it twice and put the phone face-down and not answered.

The house was dark. Her parents had gone up at ten. She was at her desk with her knees pulled under her and the laptop throwing white light into the room, and the cursor was going on and off in an empty document.

Something that pushes you. Something that scares you a little.

On the desk, face-down where she had put it two hours ago and left it, the phone had gone dark. She turned it over. No new messages. The last thing on the screen was still i did want you there tonight but its fine. its dumb. tmrw.

Answer her.

Say sorry. Say I'll come tomorrow. Say what did you want to tell me, because she wanted to tell you something, that's what "i needed you there" means, that's what it has always meant, and you have known her for seven years and you know exactly what that sentence is.

Her thumb hovered over the message. It stayed there long enough for the screen to dim again.

She put the phone in the drawer and shut it.

The idea came the way the good ones always came, not in pieces but whole, one burning image with all of it already inside.

A teacher. A student. Not by name. Never by name. Fiction, and everybody knows fiction is a room with a door you can close behind you.

But the wanting. The need to be seen and touched and known by somebody who has looked at you and found something real. That part would be true. That part would be the truest thing she had ever put down.

She thought about the four minutes in the parking lot and the hand flat on the roof of the car. She thought about not really and the eight seconds after it. She thought about a red pen going down on a desk.

Her hands were shaking.

She put them on the keys.