Apex

The thing about forty-five thousand people is that none of them need you to be anyone.

I’d figured that out by the second week. University of Washington wasn’t a campus so much as a small city that had swallowed a university and kept digesting, spreading into the Ave, into the Burke-Gilman trail, into neighborhoods where you could walk for twenty minutes before you hit a building that didn’t belong to it. I’d come from a twelve-block radius in Greenpoint, where Mrs. Novotná knew what I ate for breakfast, reporting it back to her sister, who then critiqued it for my mother’s benefit. Here, I sat in a lecture hall with three hundred strangers who didn’t glance up when I slid into a seat in the back row, and I breathed like I’d broken the surface of something I hadn’t known I was drowning in.

Late September. The light had shifted into that thing Seattle does in autumn— not golden exactly, more like gold remembering itself through gauze. It came through the windows of Anderson Hall at an angle that made the dust motes look intentional, like someone had staged them. Professor Herrera had just wrapped twenty minutes early because she’d lost her battle with the projector, and three hundred environmental studies students were performing the specific chaos of packing up while pretending they weren’t thrilled.

I slid my notebook, the small one, the one nobody asked about because nobody noticed it, into my bag and pulled the zipper in the same motion. Around me, the auditorium churned. Two guys near the front were already talking about a party on Greek Row with the glazed enthusiasm of people who’d just discovered alcohol was legal if you knew the right house. A girl in the row ahead of me had her phone out before her laptop was closed, thumbing through something with focused boredom.

“Hey… Kyla?”

I looked up. Maren Yee. Third row from the back, two seats to my left, every Tuesday and Thursday since the quarter started. She had short hair and paint under her fingernails and the expression of someone who’d already decided how the next thirty seconds would go.

“You got the reading for Thursday? Maren said something about supplemental pages, but the link on Canvas is deadass broken, and I swear that woman thinks technology is a personal attack.”

“Forty-two to sixty-seven, plus the Hardin essay she uploaded last week. The one that actually works.”

“You’re a lifesaver.” Maren fell into step beside me in the aisle, bag slung over one shoulder in a way that suggested she’d already decided we were walking together. I didn’t mind. She had a quality I appreciated… she talked without requiring anything in return. “So, where are you from? I keep meaning to ask. You’ve got that East Coast thing.”

“Which East Coast thing?”

“The way you hold your bag. Like someone might take it.”

I almost smiled. She was sharper than I’d given her credit for. “Brooklyn. Greenpoint specifically.”

“Brooklyn to Seattle. That’s a move.” She held the door for me, and the September air hit us… that not-cold, the atmosphere still deciding what it wanted to be. “What brought you all the way out here?”

The quad opened in front of us, students scattering across the brick paths like someone had dropped a jar of marbles. The cherry trees were still green, but thinking about it, the first yellowed leaves were curling at their edges.

“The rain,” I said.

Maren laughed. “Seriously.”

“I like grey.” I adjusted my bag on my shoulder. My hands: square-palmed, short-nailed, the left one still carrying a pen mark from where I’d missed the notebook margin, found the strap and settled. “Brooklyn’s got its own version. But it’s an angry grey. Here, it’s more like the sky doesn’t care about you. That’s different. And Olympic is a few hours away.”

“That’s the most depressing sales pitch for a city I’ve ever heard.”

“You asked.”

She studied me for a half-second longer than the conversation required, then let it go. That was the other thing I appreciated about Maren. She knew where the door was, and she didn’t push through it when it didn’t open.

The routine found me before I found it. That’s how it works when you’re new somewhere, and the place doesn’t care whether you stay or go.

Mondays and Wednesdays: seminar at nine, the walk across campus with my hands in my jacket pockets, and the wet air finding the gap between my collar and my hair, the way Seattle weather makes itself personal. Tuesdays and Thursdays: the ecosystem lecture, then three hours in the library where I read ahead because I had nothing better to do and because the quiet there was the right kind. Not empty. Occupied. All those people ignoring each other on purpose, which was the closest thing to a community I’d managed.

Nobody tells you the real texture of college when you’re not living in the dorms. In the movies, there’s always a hallway, a shared bathroom, a built-in proximity that turns strangers into people you know. My proximity was a thirty-minute bus ride and a walk through a neighborhood where the coffee shops were full of people who already had someone to sit with. I saw it happen during those first weeks: the clusters forming, tightening, developing their own shorthand. Inside jokes I caught the tail end of. Plans made in the five minutes before class that I was standing close enough to hear, and far enough away to not be included in.

I noticed. I always notice. That’s the problem.

Maren kept showing up, though. Not aggressively. She’d catch me after a seminar, fall into step, talk about the reading or the weather or whatever band was playing at Neumos that weekend. She didn’t push on the silences I left, which meant I kept letting her walk beside me.

The third week, she brought me to the house.

Fremont. A Craftsman with a porch that sagged on the left side and a yard that had given up. Seven of them lived there, packed into a place built for maybe four, and it showed. Shoes by the door in a pile that had its own chaotic order. A kitchen where no single person owned all the parts of anything: someone’s rice cooker, someone else’s cast iron pan with a handle wrapped in electrical tape, mugs from six different thrift stores.

“Everyone, this is Kyla. Kyla, everyone.”

The living room held five of the seven. A boy named Declan sat on the couch with his legs across the lap of a girl named Sarah, both of them watching Netflix on a laptop balanced on a stack of textbooks. Two more at the dining table that had been pushed against the wall: Soo-jin, who was eating cereal at four in the afternoon, and a broad, quiet kid named Hector who nodded at me once and went back to his sketchbook. In the kitchen doorway, a girl with red hair and a nose ring, whose name turned out to be Birdie, which of course wasn’t her real name, but it supposedly rhymed with it.

“She’s in my ecology seminar,” Maren said, which was her way of explaining me without requiring me to explain myself.

“Cool. There’s beer in the fridge if you want. Bottom shelf, don’t touch the top shelf, that’s Declan’s, and he will literally cry.”

“I will not literally cry.” Declan didn’t look up from the screen. “I will literally make you pay me back.”

“He cried last time,” Sarah said.

“That was a different situation.”

I sat on the arm of a chair nobody was using and held the beer Birdie handed me and let the noise wash over me. They’d all come from Bellingham or the towns around it. Not the popular kids, Maren told me later, though she didn’t need to. I recognized the signs. The ones who’d found each other in the gaps: the theater kids who didn’t act, the athletes who quit sophomore year, the smart ones who weren’t quite smart enough for the smart-kid table.

I went back three or four times over the next two weeks. Always with Maren, always on her invitation. I sat in their kitchen and drank their cheap beer and laughed at the right moments and left before it got late. They were kind. Birdie remembered I didn’t like IPAs and bought a six-pack of pilsner. Hector showed me his sketchbook once without being asked, which I understood was a thing he didn’t do.

But I sat on the arm of the chair. Every time. Never the cushion.

Every night I did the same thing.

It didn’t matter what time I got back. Midnight after the Fremont house, ten o’clock after a library session that went nowhere, two in the morning once when I’d walked the parts of the Burke-Gilman trail until my feet hurt because I couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to lie there not sleeping. I came through the door, dropped my bag, and went to the window.

My apartment was a studio on the fourth floor of a building on 18th Avenue that smelled like other people’s cooking and had radiators that clanked like someone trapped inside them. The window faced west. That was the only thing that had mattered when I signed the lease. I’d told the landlord it was the light.

From the fourth floor, if you stood at the right angle and looked past the roofline of the building across the street, past the construction cranes and the glow of the hospitals on the hill, you could see it. The Olympics. The whole range sat on the horizon like a jaw clenched shut. Snow on the peaks even in September, white against whatever the sky was doing. Some nights, the clouds swallowed them, and I stood there anyway, looking at the place where they should be. Most nights, though, the moon found them. Hit them in a way that made the snow go blue. Made them taller than they had any right to be from sixty miles away.

I knew the route. The G Line to downtown, the walk to Colman Dock, the ferry across to Bainbridge. I’d mapped it on my phone the second week. An hour and a half, give or take. But the ferry only got you to the island, and the island was the edge, not the thing itself. The real peninsula, the old-growth valleys, the parts where the trail maps started using words like primitive and unmaintained, those required a car, time and gear.

I’d get there. Spring, maybe. Once the quarter settled. Once I’d saved enough to rent something with four-wheel drive for a weekend. I had the money already, of course. I always had the money. But that money was for a different person, one I hadn’t figured out how to be, so I’d save the slow way, the way that felt like mine.

The mountains didn’t move. I stood there, and they didn’t move, and I breathed, and after a while, my shoulders would drop from wherever they’d climbed to during the day.

One night in mid-October, I was standing there, forehead almost against the glass, and the cold came through the pane and pressed against my skin, and I smelled lavender.

Not from outside. Not from anything in the apartment. I didn’t own lavender. But it was there, specific and full, the way it gets when it’s been crushed between fingers rather than diffused from a bottle. Bruised. Green underneath the sweetness.

My hands were on the windowsill. I looked down at them. Short nails, a callus on my right middle finger from how I held a pen. The knuckle on my left index finger that clicked when I bent it, which had started the year I was seventeen and never stopped.

I breathed in again. The lavender was gone.

I stayed at the window a while longer. The Olympics held their blue light. The radiator clanked twice and fell silent. Somewhere below me, a door opened and closed.