Unspoken Contracts

Is mairg a bhíonn ag osnaíl i gclúid.

“Pity those who sit and cry in the corner.”

The taste is always the same: synthetic mint and failure.

I let the tablet dissolve under my tongue, sitting motionless on the edge of the single bed, my back pressed against the cold dormitory wall. 6:00 AM in Dublin is the color of wet concrete. Outside the window, the rain doesn't even seem to be falling; it just settles, a fine powder of water blurring the edges of everything, as if the entire city is trying to disappear. Along with me.

I start counting. It helps.

Thirty seconds: the chemical taste floods my mouth.

One minute: the tension releases its grip on my jaw.

Two minutes: my cervical vertebrae stop chipping against one another.

Three minutes: the emptiness becomes tolerable.

It always works. It's one of the few things I can actually bet on.

When I stand up, my legs stop feeling like exposed electrical wire, and even though they are covered in an alopecia of tiny, thumb-sized galaxies, I feel no pain. Just discomfort, caused by the imperceptible glaze of dampness on my room's linoleum floor.

This city penetrates everything: your clothes, your hair, the back of your throat. I grab the gray sweater from the pile on the floor and pull it over my nightgown, measuring every step to avoid the mirror above the sink. Looking at myself in the morning is a mistake I can't afford; it would mean recognizing the missing pieces, inevitably lingering to wonder if I look acceptable, if I should go to the gym, if my haircut is trendy. Only to receive a barrage of negative feedback from my worst enemy: Myself.

And as I systematically rehearse my morning routine, on the other side of the room, Claire is still sleeping, curled up under a blanket illustrated with *Where the Wild Things Are*. I stopped talking to her during the second week. Claire is the kind of person who asks "How are you?" and actually expects an honest answer. But when I told her "Fine," in a tone far too unconvinced, she gave me a smile that was too long, too strained. From that day on, she began moving around me as if I were made of glass ready to shatter. I hate it. It's as if the whole world unanimously decided to treat me like I'm completely unaware of my "fragilities." Fragilities, right. Anyway, today is no different, so there won't be a breakthrough between Claire and me—I just let my notebook drop into my bag, grab my phone and headphones, and walk out.

The dormitory hallway smells of the usual institutional blend: mildew and pine aerosol spray. The neon lights flicker above my head, emitting a low hum that nobody notices anymore. I hear the click of a lock three rooms down; I quicken my pace, eyes glued to my shoes, before anyone can intercept me. Morning conversations are medieval torture: Did you sleep well? Did you see the WhatsApp group? Coming to the pub tonight?

No. No. No. Leave me out of it.

I push open the side door—the emergency exit that nobody uses because the fire alarm has been broken for months—and the open air slaps my face with a taste of salt and exhaust fumes; the Liffey is rotting just a few blocks away. I inhale too deeply and end up coughing. Cigarette smoke. Someone is standing near the dumpsters.

I don't look back. I walk.

Trinity College is a twenty-minute walk. I always walk, even in a downpour, because moving my legs is the only way I have to burn off the static energy accumulating beneath my skin. I keep my hands buried deep in my jacket pockets, my fists clenching and unclenching in rhythm. Count the steps. Count the cracks in the asphalt. Count the illuminated windows in the dark brick buildings. As long as I'm counting, my head doesn't fill up with anything else.

Trinity is beautiful, but it's the kind of beauty that slams the door in your face: Georgian architecture, lawns manicured to the millimeter, and compact packs of students laughing inside colorful scarves, clutching takeaway coffee cups. I pass through them like a ghost, head down, my bag pressed against my hip like a thermal shield. Nobody looks at me, and that's fine. In fact, it's perfect.

By now, I suppose it's clear that I am that kind of painfully ordinary girl—ordinary enough that, lately, phone calls with my mother always center around the hypothesis that I might be neurodivergent. Or rather, that I've always been, quite apart from the panic attacks and long before Maeve died right under my stupid nose. She knows it's not true either, but I let her talk—in a way, I think she finds comfort in wallowing, thinking that by criticizing my routine, something in me might change for the better, unlocking years of therapy that recently hit a quagmire. A dead end.

Before I even realize it, I'm already turning into the drama department in the west wing of the college; a block of gray stone with arched windows that look like empty eye sockets. The senseless rush to arrive before anyone else squeezes my lungs, and I find myself devouring the stairs to get into the classroom and claim, like every day, the very last empty desk. Ah, it's worth it. The sun doesn't hit here, and I can see everyone from the right perspective. As if I were off-stage. “The Meisner Technique—repetition as truth," "Uta Hagen—emotional substitution," "The body remembers what the mind forgets."

Here is a series of phrases you can find inside my notebook, of which I understand very little. Everyone wonders why I'm here, since it's glaringly obvious that acting isn't for me. And indeed, I don't act; I'm completely paralyzed—always. To act would mean letting myself be watched. And being watched, for me, would be the beginning of the end. I forget how to place my tongue against the roof of my mouth to utter the right words; my chest hurts. And then, I start asking myself those questions—the very questions for which I avoid the mirror in the morning.

When the door creaks open sharply, I don't raise my head, choosing instead to listen to her light steps and the sound of a canvas tote bag sliding onto the wooden desk, followed by a low, devastatingly melodic voice: "You're always the first one here."

Niamh. I don't need to look to know it's her, with that way of hers that is always so calculated, almost theatrical: her red hair braided at the nape of her neck and those solid silver earrings that jingle with the slightest movement of her head. She sits two rows ahead of me and immediately turns sideways, resting her chin on the back of her chair to scrutinize me with a curiosity that is far too direct.

"I like getting here early," I reply, using my usual flat voice—the one specifically designed to cut things short.

She hints at a smile that has nothing to do with Claire's pitiful grimace; it is rather the expression of someone who has found an amusing detail that everyone else misses, a nuance of irony entirely her own. "Me too. There's less noise."

Niamh doesn't move. "Did you read the text for today?"

"Yes."

"What did you think?"

I hesitate for a second, my fingers tightening around my bag strap at the memory of that script: Synge’s *The Playboy of the Western World*, a total nightmare of archaic Western dialect and violence masquerading as comedy. During the last lecture, Professor Donoghue had mumbled something about the "profound moral ambiguity of folklore," but I had still stopped at page ten, interrupted the exact moment the words began to dance across the paper, blurring.

"It's interesting," I answer, retreating behind the most neutral word in my vocabulary.

She lets out a soft, almost amused laugh. "You hated it."

"I didn't say that."

"You don't need to," she counters, turning even further in her chair until she invades the space between our desks. Her eyes are an impossible color, somewhere between gray and a dull green, like moss growing on wet stone. "Donoghue uses Synge to test us. He wants to see who has a flexible enough ear."

I feel the wooden tip of my pencil pressing into the center of my palm. "A test for what?"

"To see who knows how to listen to what lies beneath."

Before I can ask her what the hell that means, the door is flung open and the rest of the world pours in: a tide of voices, laughter, the damp imprint of rain-soaked jackets, and the sour smell of coffee in paper cups that fills the room in a single instant. I instinctively shrink back against the spine of my chair, raising my notebook in front of my chest like a shield as Niamh turns back toward the lectern, abruptly severing our contact.

Donoghue walks in his usual ten minutes late; he's fifty, with gray hair that looks like it has survived an electric shock and a raw wool sweater that visibly reeks of wet dog. He thumps his bag onto the desk, takes off his glasses to lazily clean them with the hem of his wool, and scans us all with the air of a man who is paid to ruin our morning.

"Right," he begins, and his Cork accent stretches the vowels until they bleed, "let's talk about Synge. Who can tell me why *The Playboy* triggered a near-riot in Dublin when it was first staged?"

Silence drops over the room like a guillotine, translating into that classic university classroom muteness where everyone, suddenly, finds their own notes fucking fascinating. Donoghue waits with his arms crossed, savoring the general discomfort rising between the desks like fog.

I keep my eyes relentlessly glued to my blank page, repeating a silent mantra to myself: Do not exist. Do not breathe. If you don't move, they won't see you.

"Nobody?" Donoghue exhales through his nose with exaggerated theatricality. "I'll tell you why. It's disturbing because it takes a Catholic, rural, seemingly respectable community and shows it for what it is: a nest of accomplices. A boy shows up, says he killed his father with a spade, and they turn him into a hero. Violence becomes pub entertainment, and the truth doesn't mean shit anymore."

I feel my jaw clenching painfully again, forcing me to bite the inside of my lip until I taste the iron tang of blood.

"Synge shoved a finger into the wound of the Irish soul," the professor continues, pacing slowly in front of the blackboard. "He proved that beneath the varnish of tradition, there is something wild—something that answers to laws that are not human."

"It's just a play," someone whispers two rows behind me.

Donoghue stops dead in his tracks, snapping his gaze toward the student. "Just a play, my boy? Folklore isn't entertainment: it's a contract. It's the fence we build around the things we don't dare name, but that we know are out there, crouching in the dark."

I look up in spite of myself and notice that Niamh is staring at the professor. She doesn't have the focused or lost expression of the others; instead, she wears a half-smile, a smirk of pure and simple recognition, as if they were discussing the furniture in her own house.

"Right," Donoghue says, clapping his hands with a sharp smack that makes me jump in my seat. "Let's move to practice. Niamh, Róisín, step up."

The blood instantly turns to ice in my veins. No. Please, no.

"Scene one, act two. Niamh, you're Pegeen. Róisín, you're Christy."

I stay completely still, fingers clawed into the hard cover of my notebook, my muscles entirely locked, while Niamh stands up with a fluid, almost elastic movement, as if she had been waiting for this exact moment. She turns toward me and shoots me a close look, using a voice that is a whisper capable of piercing through the classroom's background noise: "Let's go."

It isn't an invitation; it's an order.

I stand up with knees stiff as old timber and walk to the center of the room, where Donoghue has pushed two chairs to mark out the space for our scaffold. Niamh is already positioned, arms at her sides, breathing evenly, perfectly at ease.

"Forget the scripts," Donoghue says, leaning his back against the desk. "I want the subtext. Improvise. Pegeen wants to know if she's looking at a hero or a lying madman, while Christy has to convince her that the blood on his hands is real. Begin."

I hold the script in my hand, but the printed lines are just shaking black smudges. My heart beats in my eardrums. A frenzied drum. I feel the eyes of twenty people planted on my back, ready to vivisect me.

Niamh takes a step toward me, the shadow of her hair almost covering my feet. "Tell me the truth," she says, and her voice no longer has the flat tone of the classroom; it has become sharp, heavy. "Did you really do it? Did you really split your father's head open?"

I open my mouth. No air comes out.

"Róisín," Donoghue calls out to me from the darkness behind her. "Answer."

"I..." My voice is a ridiculous rasp. "Yes. I killed him."

"I don't believe you." Niamh takes another step and she is decidedly too close, close enough that I can smell her perfume—something like wet earth mixed with cardamom. "You just look like someone who spends her time running away from something."

Heat rushes up my neck, violent and uncontrollable, giving me the absolute certainty that I am not acting at all and that this situation is ripping the skin right off me.

"Running away doesn't mean being weak," I retort, and this time my voice comes out with a cutting hardness I didn't know I possessed.

Niamh tilts her head, letting her gray-green eyes forage inside me without shame. "No. But it means you are completely alone."

The silence that falls over the classroom this time is different—it's heavy. And while Donoghue makes no move to interrupt us and nobody in the room dares to breathe, I look at Niamh with pure terror that she is seeing everything: the pills in my backpack, the mental math to keep from losing my mind, Maeve's death, every single one of my cracks.

Then, dropping her voice in a way that definitively shatters the character, she whispers to me: "You're much more interesting when you stop hiding."

Donoghue claps his hands, and the anxiety mechanism finally unlocks: "Good! That'll do. Róisín, you need to work on your volume, but the subtext was palpable. Niamh, excellent control. Go back to your seats."

I walk backward to my desk with legs that feel reduced to jelly, and the moment I sit down, I anchor my hands to the table so no one sees them shaking like leaves. My heart shows no signs of slowing down, and I feel that the effect of this morning's anti-anxiety pill has been completely burned away in three minutes of pure adrenaline, forcing me to take another one immediately after class, before I collapse.

The rest of the hour blurs into a long, uninterrupted white noise. Donoghue keeps talking about Artaud, the theatre of cruelty, and that thin "gateway between the sacred and the profane," while I limit myself to tracing random words in my notebook without registering their meaning in the slightest. The moment the bell rings, I shove everything into my bag and burst toward the exit in a desperate attempt to escape.

"Róisín."

I freeze instantly on the threshold. Niamh is right behind me, her bag slung over her shoulder, wearing that indecifrable expression of someone who always seems to hold one more secret than you.

"We're meeting tonight, a private thing," she says, closing the distance between us. "No academic rubbish. We're reading old texts the university cut from the syllabus; strange things, strong stuff." She pauses briefly, studying every millimeter of my reaction before adding: "Come."

I tighten my grip on my bag strap until my knuckles turn white. "I'm not the type for group outings."

"And it's not a group. There are only four of us. And you don't have to do anything—you can just sit there and watch, if you like." She pulls a crumpled slip of paper from her jacket pocket, pressing it firmly into my palm. "There's the address. Eight o'clock. Think about it."

I take the paper without even looking at it, instinctively hiding it in my fist. "Maybe."

"I'm counting on it," she replies, gifting me a different kind of smile than usual: warm, almost conspiratorial, before turning and losing herself in the crowd in the hallways.

She leaves me alone with that piece of paper that feels like it's burning against my skin. I avoid opening it, choosing to just slip it into my jacket pocket before finally stepping out into the open air. The rain is coming down hard on the pavement now, but I walk without pulling up my hood, letting the cold water completely soak my hair and run right down the collar of my sweater. The freezing cold brings me back to life, proving far better than the sensation of having been stripped alive in the middle of a university classroom.

When I get back to the dorm, the room is empty, and I can only say thank God. I immediately lock myself in the bathroom and pull the blister pack out of my backpack with fingers that are still unsteady, popping out a single tablet that stands out round, white, and clean against my palm: my personal kill switch. I swallow it without water, feeling the chemical bitterness trail down my throat as I sit directly on the floor, my back pressed against the wooden door, waiting for the void to finally reclaim its space.

I spend the entire afternoon staring at the ceiling while time dilates, turning into a sort of gray glue, and outside the window, Dublin continues to fade under the water.

Claire comes back around six. Her hair is damp, her cheeks flushed from the cold, and she's carrying a paper bag that radiates an intense, spicy scent. "Hey! I got pad thai from around the corner. Want half? The portions are massive."

"No, thanks."

She takes off her dripping coat, hanging it over the back of the chair. "Sure? Seriously, it looks amazing."

"Sure."

The silence that follows is punctuated only by the metallic click of her chopsticks against the cardboard box, yet I feel her gaze constantly shifting back to me, heavy with that annoying, suffocating solicitude of hers. The pressure in the room rises to the point where my ears start to ring, making it impossible to stay inside here a minute longer.

"I have to go out," I say, snapping upright from the bed.

Claire stops with her chopsticks mid-air, surprised. "Ah. Okay. Where are you going?"

"A study group for the course."

"At this hour? In this downpour?"

I grab my still-damp jacket without answering her. "Yes."