Offside

Jasmine knew every tile on the bathroom floor.

Forty-two full tiles, eleven partials where the wall cut them off mid-square, one cracked diagonally under the radiator like a fault line waiting for permission. She knew them because this was the fourth time in six weeks she had ended up down here, back against the cold curve of the tub, knees to her chest, counting.

One. Two. Three. Four.

The tiles didn’t ask her anything. That was their entire value as a species.

Outside the bathroom door, the apartment had gone quiet again. Mackenzie had stopped knocking twenty minutes ago—a soft, awful knocking, the kind people did at hospital doors—and retreated to her room, and now the only sounds were the radiator ticking and Jasmine’s own breath doing that thing where it climbed up her throat and got stuck behind her sternum like a bird that had flown into a house and couldn’t remember windows.

It wasn’t Mackenzie’s fault. Jasmine wanted that on the record, in the official transcript of her own disaster. Mackenzie had done nothing but come home. At 1:47 in the morning, keys scraping the lock, a shape moving in the dark hallway past Jasmine’s open door—a shape where no shape should be, a person arriving unannounced into space Jasmine had believed was empty, was hers, was safe—

And Jasmine’s body had made a decision without consulting her.

That was the part nobody understood. The body just decided. Some ancient committee in her brainstem convened an emergency session, reviewed the evidence—footsteps, a silhouette, the specific soft sound of someone trying to be quiet—and ruled, unanimously, that she was sixteen years old again and the house was not safe and never had been.

By the time the rational part of her caught up—it’s Mackenzie, it’s just Mackenzie, she texted you she was coming home early, you literally have the text—Jasmine was already on the bathroom floor with the door locked, heart going like a trapped animal, and Mackenzie was on the other side saying Jasmine? Jasmine? Oh my god, are you okay, what happened, in a voice that was climbing toward panic, and there was no way to explain. There was no sentence in English or any language that could bridge the gap between you came home and this.

Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.

The crack under the radiator, that made fifteen, if she counted it as its own tile. She always counted it as its own tile. It had earned that.

Her phone buzzed against the tile between her feet. She’d brought it in with her—some part of her always grabbed the phone, even mid-collapse, the way people in fires grabbed photo albums.

Sam: mackenzie texted me

Sam: Jas

Sam: pick up

It rang. She stared at his contact photo—Sam at nineteen, mid-laugh, wearing a Santa hat in July for reasons neither of them could reconstruct—and her thumb hovered, and the bird behind her sternum flapped once, hard.

She picked up. Didn’t say anything. Couldn’t yet.

“Hoy.” His voice came through low and even, and she could hear it immediately—him deliberately gearing down, the way he did, the way he’d learned to do over years of these calls. Behind him, faintly: bass through a floor, a video game, someone shouting about pizza. The hockey house on a Thursday night. A whole other planet, four miles away, where people came home at 2 a.m. and it meant nothing at all. “Nandito ako.”

I’m here.

Her breath hitched. He heard it. Of course he heard it. Twenty-one years of sharing first a womb and then a bedroom and then a childhood that required them to be each other’s early warning system—Sam could read her breathing the way meteorologists read pressure fronts.

“Hinga,” he said. Breathe. “Kasama mo ako. Hindi ka nag-iisa.”

I’m with you. You’re not alone.

It worked the way it always worked, which was slowly, which was not like a light switch but like a tide. English couldn’t reach her when she was down here on the tile floor. English was the language of the aftermath—of guidance counselors and gentle-voiced therapists and relatives at the funeral saying if there’s anything we can do. But Tagalog was before. Tagalog was their mother singing in the kitchen, was Sam narrating cartoons in two voices, was the world before it broke. When he spoke it, some hallway in her opened back up.

“Kuya,” she managed. It came out wrecked. He was eleven minutes older and had leveraged those eleven minutes into a lifetime title, and she only ever called him it sincerely when things were bad, which meant the word itself had become a flare fired over dark water.

“Andito ako,” he said again. I’m here. “What happened? English or Tagalog, whatever’s working.”

“Nothing happened.” Her voice cracked on happened, which undermined the message somewhat. “That’s the—Sam, that’s the whole problem, nothing happened. Mackenzie came home. She lives here. She came home to her own apartment and I heard the keys and I —” The bird flapped. She pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum, hard. “I ended up in here. Again. She was knocking on the door asking if I was okay and I couldn’t even answer her, she probably thinks I’m—God. She probably thinks something is really wrong with me.”

Sam was quiet for a second. In the background, someone yelled REYES, YOU’RE UP, and she heard the muffled sound of him covering the phone, saying something short, and then a door closing and the bass going distant. He’d left the room. He’d left the party, for her, without a beat of hesitation, and the guilt of that landed on the pile with all the other guilt, the whole sedimentary formation of it.

“Nothing is wrong with you,” he said.

“Sam.”

“Something was done to you. That’s a different sentence. Different grammar and everything.”

She laughed, one broken syllable, because that was Sam—smuggling grammar jokes into a crisis like contraband, making her laugh on the bathroom floor because he knew that laughing and breathing used the same muscles and he was tricking her lungs back into service. She hated how well it worked. She loved how well it worked.

“This is the fourth time,” she said. “That I know she’s counted. Kenz has been so nice about it and that’s worse, honestly, the niceness—she tiptoes now. In her own apartment. She texts me before she comes home, like she’s requesting permission to exist in her own space, and I know she’s going to stop wanting to live like that, and I don’t blame her, because I don’t want to live like this either.” Her eyes were burning now. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty tiles. “I can’t stay here, Sam. It’s not fair to her. And I can’t—I can’t be somewhere alone right now, I know I can’t, and I can’t go home, because home is —”

She didn’t finish. She didn’t have to. Home was their mother’s house, and their mother’s house was three blocks from a house that no longer had their aunt in it but would always, always have their aunt in it, the way certain ground stays poisoned long after the spill. Home was the parish where everyone knew. Home was the cemetery where Camille was.

They did not say Camille’s name on bathroom-floor nights. That was an old treaty between them, unwritten, absolute.

“Okay,” Sam said, and his voice had changed. She knew this voice too. This was Sam shifting from comfort to logistics, from I’m here to I’m handling it, and normally she would fight it—she had a whole speech about how she was not a project, she’d delivered it at Christmas—but it was 2:30 in the morning and she was so tired. Nobody warned you about that—that survival had hours, that it clocked you in at dawn and never clocked you out.

“Okay?” she echoed.

“Give me tonight,” he said. “Can you sleep at Priya’s?”

“Priya’s in Boston till Sunday. I have her key. For the plants.” Jasmine closed her eyes. An empty apartment. Empty was fine. Empty was actually the only thing that was fine—it was the surprise of other people that pulled the fire alarm in her chest, never the absence of them. The loneliness of that fact was so complete she’d stopped being able to feel its edges.

“Perfect. Water a fern, sleep in a bed, and tomorrow you’re not solving anything alone. Deal?”

“Sam, you don’t have to —”

“Jasmine.” Full name. He deployed it maybe twice a year. “You carried me down a hallway once. You remember that?”

She did. Freshman year of high school, his ankle, the away game, the empty parking lot, their mother’s car in the shop, Jasmine fifteen years old and furious and hauling her six-foot brother down a corridor with his arm over her shoulders while he hissed in pain and made jokes about her form.

“That was different,” she said.

“It really wasn’t.” A breath. “Let me carry something. Once. You never let anyone carry anything.”

Jasmine looked at the tiles. Forty-two full, eleven partial, one cracked. She thought about the duffel bag in her closet, and the shoebox on the shelf above it that she would carry herself, that she always carried herself, that no mover or brother or God would ever be permitted to touch.

“Okay,” she said. Quietly. In the smallest voice she owned.

“Okay,” Sam said, and she could hear him already moving, already three steps into some plan she couldn’t see the shape of yet. “Go to Priya’s. Text me when you’re inside. Mahal kita, dumbass.”

I love you, dumbass. The Reyes twins’ official seal, stamped on every important document since childhood.

“Mahal din kita, dumbass,” she whispered, and hung up, and sat there one more minute on the cold floor of a bathroom in an apartment she was already, in her heart, moving out of.

Then she got up, unlocked the door, and went to find out where her life was going next—not knowing that four miles away, her brother was about to make a phone call that would detonate the whole thing, and that the wreckage would be the best thing that ever happened to her.

She counted the tiles one last time on her way out.

Still forty-two. Still eleven. Still one, cracked, holding.