Chapter 1:

The thing about a cafeteria is that it is never actually loud.

It just sounds loud. What it actually is — what it actually is, if you sit with it long enough, if you press your back against the wall the way I do and let your lunch go cold and stop pretending you're reading the back of a water bottle — is a collection of separate silences all happening at the same time, each one at a different table, each one belonging to different people, and what you hear is all of them vibrating against each other. That's the noise. Not sound. Just — the friction of all those quiet things rubbing together.

I've been sitting here for eleven minutes.

I know because I counted.

I count things now. It's not interesting, I'm not going to pretend it's interesting, it's just something that happens when you give your hands nothing useful to do and your mouth even less. Eleven minutes. A cold sandwich. Seventeen ceiling tiles if you count the broken one as a whole tile which I've decided to, because the alternative is that it's a partial tile and I cannot — I genuinely cannot spend the mental energy deciding what fraction of a tile it constitutes today, I have other things to prosecute myself over and there is a hierarchy, there is always a hierarchy, and a ceiling tile does not make the list.

Across the room —

no.

I'll get there. I'm not ready to get there yet.

The thing about counting minutes is that it gives you something honest to do. Minutes don't negotiate. They don't tell you that you're overreacting. They don't look at you across a hallway and rearrange their face into something neutral in approximately 0.4 seconds in a way that is almost — almost — perfect, except that you used to know that face well enough to see the 0.4 seconds happening, to see the decision being made, and now you carry the knowledge of that 0.4 seconds around like a stone in your back pocket and it is heavy and it is yours and you put it there so you keep it, you keep carrying it, that seems correct, that seems like the appropriate —

Someone laughs.

Loud. Three tables to the left. I don't look. I've gotten good at not looking.

I used to be the one who made people laugh like that. I want you to know that. I want to put it on the record early because I'm going to tell you things about myself and some of them are going to sound like I'm performing humility and I need you to understand I am not. Performing humility requires an audience you're trying to impress. I'm not trying to impress you. I'm trying to make sure you have all the evidence before you reach a verdict, because the verdict I've already reached about myself is probably the correct one and I just want the record to reflect that I knew. That I knew first. That I didn't wait for someone else to tell me what I was.

That's not noble.

I know that's not noble, I just want you to know that I know.

Eleven minutes and forty seconds. The sandwich is still there. I'm not hungry and I bought the sandwich anyway because standing in the lunch line gives you something to do with your body and your body needs things to do or it starts doing things on its own — fidgeting, tensing, that particular way my jaw used to set when I was about to say something loud and stupid and crowd-pleasing, when I was still the kind of person who needed crowds to feel like a person —

Across the room.

Okay.

Across the room there are two people I used to know so well that I could tell you — I could tell you, I have this information stored somewhere, it takes up space that I could theoretically be using for something else but I'm not, I'm just carrying it — I could tell you that one of them chews the inside of his cheek when he's thinking and the other one tilts her head exactly 15 degrees to the left when she doesn't believe what you're saying. Little details. The kind of details that only accumulate over years. The kind of details that are supposed to mean something.

They mean that I paid attention.

They don't mean I was good.

Those are different things and I used to think they were the same thing and that particular confusion has consequences that I am — we are all, everyone in this cafeteria who doesn't know my name or knows my name and prefers not to use it, everyone whose name I know — we are all living in the consequences of my particular confusion.

I'm not going to tell you their names yet.

I'm going to tell you their names when I can say them without my chest doing what it's currently doing, which is a specific thing, not pain exactly, more like pressure, more like something heavy just resting there permanently, like it moved in and didn't bring very much furniture but the furniture it brought is enormous and takes up all the space.

They're talking about something.

She laughs. Not loud. Not the way the person three tables to the left laughed, which was a performance, which was for something, which was sound looking for an audience. Her laugh is — it's small. It escapes rather than announces itself. It used to, anyway. I'm assuming it still does. I'm looking from far enough away that I'm mostly filling in the blanks from memory, which is — which means I'm not actually seeing her, I'm seeing a composite of her, a version assembled from things I recorded before I lost the right to keep recording.

That seems like something I should acknowledge.

That my perception is compromised.

That as a narrator I am not to be trusted, not because I'm lying — I want to be very clear that I am not lying, I have made myself a single rule in the last two years and the rule is that I don't lie, not anymore, not even the small comfortable ones that everyone agrees to tell each other so the day feels possible — but because what I see is always filtered through what I did, through the weight of it, and a filter that heavy changes the color of everything.

So.

For the record.

I am not lying.

I am also not reliable.

Hold both of those. I'll wait.

Twelve minutes.

The broken ceiling tile has a crack that runs diagonally from the upper left corner to approximately the center. I've decided it looks like a river on a map of a country I'd probably never visit. Small country. Landlocked, probably. The kind of place nobody writes songs about. The kind of place that just — persists. That just continues to exist without anyone making a particular case for it.

I think about that more than I should.

Things that persist without anyone making a case for them.

She tilts her head.

I see it from here. Fifteen degrees. She doesn't believe whatever he just said, or she's thinking about it, or both, those have always been the same gesture and I never figured out which was which and now I don't get to ask. Now I sit with a cold sandwich and a broken ceiling tile and the knowledge that I am looking at someone I turned into someone more careful, someone who keeps track of exits, someone who builds things quietly and alone because I taught her that the alternative was —

I taught her.

That's — I need to just sit with that sentence for a second.

I taught her that people are not safe.

I was eleven years old and I thought I was funny and I taught someone that people are not safe and she learned it and she still knows it and she will probably always know it because that is how learning works, that is the whole problem with learning, once you know a thing it becomes part of the architecture, it holds up the ceiling, you can't just remove it without the whole —

Someone sits down two tables away. Not near me. Not anywhere near me. Just — in the same general geography. A freshman, probably. He has headphones in and a book open and he eats his lunch with the specific efficiency of someone who has decided lunch is a logistics problem rather than a social one.

I recognize the strategy.

I invented the strategy.

Or — I didn't invent it, people have been eating alone with headphones since headphones existed, I'm not claiming credit, I'm just saying that I recognize the shape of what he's doing, the way you build a small perimeter of objects around yourself so that anyone approaching has to cross visible distance first, so you can see them coming, so you have time to —

Prepare.

So you have time to prepare.

He's fine. He's probably fine. He's probably just a kid who likes his book more than he likes the people in this room, that's allowed, that's a legitimate way to move through a Tuesday. Not everything is damage. I need to — I have a habit of looking at other people's loneliness and seeing my fingerprints on it, and that is a specific kind of arrogance that I'm trying to —

She laughs again.

Fifteen degrees.

I look down at my sandwich.

Twelve minutes and fifty-five seconds.

I am trying.

I want that on the record too, not because it excuses anything — it doesn't, I know the math on that, trying doesn't cancel, trying is not a currency you can spend backwards in time — but because you're going to be inside my head for a while and you should know what you're walking into. You're walking into someone who is trying. Very quietly. In ways that probably don't show. In ways that might not matter. In ways that I am still deciding whether they matter, whether I matter, whether the distance between who I was and who I am now is large enough to mean anything or whether it's just — movement. Just displacement. Just the same thing slightly rearranged.

The cafeteria vibrates.

All those quiet things rubbing together.

I eat the sandwich. It tastes like nothing. I chew. I count. I keep my eyes level and my face neutral and inside my head there is so much noise you would not believe the noise, you would not believe what it sounds like in here, I barely believe it and I've been living in it for —

Thirteen minutes.