Against the Script

By ten past two on Wednesday, I had been refreshing the registrar’s portal for forty minutes, and the portal had been “experiencing high volume” for all forty of them.

I was fourteenth on the waitlist for Statistics for the Social Sciences, section 03, the only section that didn’t meet at eight in the morning or clash with my Thursday work-study shift. My colour-coded schedule, which I had built on Sunday night while Nia watched me like a woman observing a hostage situation, depended on section 03. If I lost it, the whole week fell apart.

“You can’t pray your way up a waitlist,” Nia said, dropping into the chair across from me with a tray of fries.

“I’m not praying. I’m monitoring.”

“Your lips are moving.”

“I’m monitoring quietly.”

The Commons was packed, the way it always was during add/drop week, when everyone’s schedule was somehow both finished and falling apart. At the next table, three guys were arguing about whether “attendance is encouraged” meant attendance was mandatory. Outside the long windows, someone’s step team was rehearsing on the Quad, the stomps coming through the glass in a steady thump. A first-year with a lanyard was selling raffle tickets for the Debate Society and had been turned down by every table so far.

I loved it. I’d loved it since freshman year, when I realised Crown Hill ran on gossip, good food, and a deep belief that everybody should know everybody’s business and also show up for it. Even with the portal crashing and the bookstore line wrapped around the building, I felt the little hum I always felt at the start of a semester: this is mine, I know how it works.

I was also in a very good mood. My phone had buzzed with an email from Dr. Carter, and I’d read it three times.

Zara, I’d like to confirm you as logistics lead for this year’s Founders’ Weekend. Planning meeting is Thursday at 4 p.m. in Founders’ Hall. You’ll be keeping everyone honest.

Logistics lead. Not assistant, not a coordinator who gets to staple things. Lead. The person who would know where every table, extension cord, and shuttle van needed to be, hour by hour, while the alumni filled the campus and the whole university put its best face forward. When it worked, and I would make sure it worked, the people who mattered would remember whose name was on the schedule.

I had printed the email. I had put it in my planner. I was not going to tell Nia I had put it in my planner.

“You’re smiling at your phone,” Nia said. “Is it a boy?”

“It’s an email.”

“A boy in the email?”

“Dr. Carter is not a boy.”

“You’ve still got boy energy.”

I was opening my mouth to defend my energy when I heard Devon Marsh laugh.

I knew it was him before I looked. He had the kind of laugh that wanted to be heard across a room, a big, easy bark that said come see what I found. He was standing by the drink station with three other guys, holding his phone out like a man displaying a fish. Ethan was beside him.

Ethan had a cold brew in one hand and his book bag over one shoulder, looking the way he always looked, like someone had styled him on the way to a campus tour. We had been officially broken up for nine days. That conversation had happened four days after I sent the message, once it was clear he wasn’t going to answer it. I had spent most of those nine days being extremely fine about it.

“No, no, listen to this one,” Devon said, loud enough that the next table turned. “’I know I’m probably being a lot, but I’d rather ask than pretend I don’t care.’”

He read it in a high, breathy voice.

The words were halfway through me before I understood why they sounded so familiar. Then I understood, and everything in me went still and cold.

I had written that at one in the morning. I’d typed it, deleted it, typed it again, and sent it to exactly one person, because for once I’d decided to say a true thing out loud instead of acting like I didn’t need anything. I had asked Ethan, as plainly as I knew how, whether we were still trying or not. I had asked him to just tell me.

He never answered. I’d taken that as an answer.

“There’s a whole paragraph,” Devon said. “She says she ‘doesn’t want to guess anymore.’ Zara! Zara, are you there? Did you want a response?”

People laughed. Not the cruel kind, which would have been easier. It was the laugh people do when they aren’t thinking about the person on the other end. A girl from my old study group covered her mouth. Somebody said “Oh, no” in the voice of someone enjoying it.

And Ethan stood next to him. He looked at his coffee. He looked at his phone. I watched him run through his options, on a face I had loved and could read like a spreadsheet: say something, don’t say something, say something and make it worse. He picked the quiet one. He gave a small, awkward half-smile, the kind you give a waiter who’s brought the wrong order, and looked away.

That was the part. Not the screenshot. I could survive a screenshot. It was that he’d had one clear second to say “Dude, stop,” and he’d spent it checking who was watching him.

I put my hand flat on my laptop. The portal had refreshed. I was still fourteenth.

“Well,” I said, and I was pleased with how it came out, light and a little bored, like someone interrupted at work. “Thank you to Devon for the dramatic reading. The pacing was off, but the commitment was there. Bring a prop next time.”

A few people laughed, and this time they laughed with me, which was a relief and a disappointment at once. Devon grinned and lifted his phone like a toast. “Respect. You’re a good sport.”

“I’m a great sport,” I said. “Ask anyone.”

Ethan’s eyes met mine for half a second. There was something in them that might have been an apology. Then he turned to say something to the guy next to him, and it was gone.

I shoved the laptop into my bag, picked up a tray, and walked out of the Commons at the speed of someone with somewhere to be.

* * *

I made it as far as the Quad before the first-year with the lanyard stepped into my path.

“Hi, sorry. Raffle?” he said. Then, quickly, going red: “I was in there. I heard the, um. For what it’s worth, I thought it was a good message.”

I looked at him. He was maybe eighteen. He was holding a roll of tickets like a shield.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Like, it was honest. That’s all.”

“I appreciate it.” I bought three tickets for the Debate Society raffle, mostly so he would stop being kind to me, and he thanked me twice and went back toward the Commons looking relieved. I stood there holding three pink tickets and understood that this was how it would go. Not a scandal. Just a lot of people who now knew, and who would be nice about it.

Nia caught up with me by the bench near the step team, who were still going. Fifteen people moving in perfect unison, and not one of them looked like they had ever been humiliated.

“Zara. Zara. Stop walking. You’re carrying my fries.”

I looked down. I had Nia’s tray. I had walked out of the Commons with her tray.

“Take them,” I said.

“You’re so fine you stole my lunch.”

I started laughing, a bit too long. Nia put a hand on my arm, and the laugh came apart in the middle.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re about to be nice to me. I can feel it.”

“I can be nice and also furious,” she said. “I’m going to find Devon and put hot sauce in his shampoo.”

“You don’t know where he lives.”

“I know where everybody lives.”

“Nia.”

“And honestly, Ethan probably didn’t even hear it right. You know how he is, he freezes. Maybe he just didn’t know what to say, and it’s not that he didn’t care—”

“Don’t do that.”

It came out sharper than I meant. Nia stopped. The step team hit a heavy count behind us, and somebody yelled, “Again!”

“Sorry,” she said quietly. “I was trying to make it smaller.”

“I know.”

“It’s not small.”

“It’s a screenshot, Nia.” I wiped my face, quick and impatient, the way you’d brush a crumb off a table. “I wrote some words and people read them out loud. I’ve survived worse. I got locked out of the dorm in a towel once. I’m not going to cry over a group chat.”

“You don’t have to cry.”

“Good, because I’m not.”

“But you’re allowed to be upset. In front of me, I mean. I’m basically furniture.”

“I don’t want to be upset in front of furniture.”

Nia opened her mouth, closed it, and handed me a fry. It was cold. I ate it anyway. It was the most useful thing anyone had done for me all afternoon.

We sat on the bench without talking, which was how I knew she was really worried. Nia can’t go ninety seconds without a comment.

“You know what’s weird?” I said eventually. “I’d rather he’d laughed. If he’d laughed along, I could have hated him for it. I’d have known where I stood.”

“Okay,” Nia said carefully. “That might be the realest thing you’ve said all week.”

“It’s a one-time offer.” I stood and brushed off my skirt. “I’m going back to the room. I have a waitlist to monitor and a weekend to organise.”

“That’s, what, ten weeks away?”

“Eleven. And it won’t organise itself.”

She watched me, head tilted. “Zara. Whatever you’re about to decide, it’s going to be a bad decision, isn’t it?”

“I’m not deciding anything.” I took the printed email out of my bag and pressed it flat against my chest. “I’m just going to be very good at my job.”

* * *

That night I sat on my bed with the lights off and Nia’s rain sounds playing on her laptop, though it wasn’t raining, and I tried to be fine.

I wasn’t. It sat in my chest like something I’d swallowed. For nine days I’d carried it alone, and part of me was almost relieved to have it out where people could see it. Then I heard Devon’s voice again, and the laugh, and saw Ethan’s small smile aimed at his coffee, and the relief went sour.

Nobody was going to see me hurt again. Not Devon, not the people who’d laughed, and especially not Ethan. He didn’t get to know where he’d landed.

I opened my planner, found tomorrow, and wrote it in pen so I couldn’t talk myself out of it: 4:00 p.m. — Founders’ Hall. Planning meeting.

Half the people who had laughed in the Commons today were on that committee.

I underlined it twice anyway.