Chapter 3

　　Saturday arrived the way first Saturdays somewhere new always do, slowly, with a kind of spaciousness that weekdays never have.

　　Quin woke before both her roommates, made coffee, and sat at her desk with her secret document open.

　　She had written a lot in the past days and she has begun to wrap her head around what she would do with it.

　　She liked this hour. The dorm was quieter. Outside the window, the Hargrove campus caught the early light at a specific angle that made it look the way it looked in the brochure: deliberate, almost cinematic, as if the architecture knew it was being admired.

　　She wrote everything that has been happening since she resumed school in even letters and told herself she was not thinking too much about the conversation from the night before and wasn't thinking about their thing and wasn't thinking about Mara's voice saying there's no right time and most definitely was not thinking about the wicked plans that was forming in her head for her secret document.

　　She was thinking about all.

　　Mara woke at nine. Jade at ten. By eleven they were all three in various states of weekend morning: Mara on her phone, Jade reading something she'd printed and annotated, Quin back at her document, and the comfortable proximity of it was something Quin noted with a kind of quiet gratitude she did not express out loud.

　　She hadn't expected to like them this fast.

　　She hadn't expected to like anyone this fast. It wasn't something she'd been good at, the rapid trust, the easy opening of space for new people. She'd had friends in Clearbrook, technically speaking. Acquaintances she'd been warm toward. She'd never had this: the feeling of sitting in a room with someone and the room being better for it.

　　Two someones.

　　They talked for three hours.

　　They told her about how they lived together for a year before her arrival and how it was hard for them to understand themselves; she told them about her high school life and talked a bit about her family.

　　Mara talked about her father, who was the funniest man she'd ever known and also completely unreliable, and how those two things had coexisted in her for so long she'd stopped trying to separate them. Jade talked about her parents' marriage; she had compared it to a battlefront and how it reminded her to not ever consider marriage.

　　Quin talked about her mother, not about Douglas, her stepfather, and not about her father either, but about the experience of loving your mother whose happiness sometimes felt like a door closing in your face without either of you meaning for it to.

　　"That's very specific," Mara said, her eyes steady on Quin. "What do you mean?" "My mom remarried when I was fourteen. He's not a bad person. He's…" She paused.

　　Chose words. "He's exactly what she needed. And watching her be exactly that happy, with exactly that person, just made me feel like I was watching something through a window. Like happiness, like that wasn't something I was going to get to have in the same way."

　　Wow! She needed to include this in her document.

　　"Because you were excluded from it?"

　　"Because I understood, at fourteen, that the version of love she'd found required giving something up, which happened to be me. And I haven't found anything yet that made giving something up feel worth it," she said, something fragile slipping through her tone.

　　A pause. Mara and Jade exchanged a look, brief and unreadable to Quin, and then Mara nodded slowly.

　　"That makes sense," she said carefully, her voice cool and precise. "Does it?"

　　"No, it doesn't." Mara replied to her.

　　Quin went still for a moment. She had not made that connection herself, not explicitly, not out loud. She sat with it.

　　And she would definitely write it down. Maybe, a whole chapter dedicated towards that. "Maybe," she said.

　　"Not a criticism,"

　　Mara said, quickly. "Just, you've been protecting something. And you probably had reasons for it. And you probably still do."

　　"But?"

　　"No but. I don't have a but. I just think,"

　　She stopped. Started again. "The thing you're protecting. It might be yours to keep. Or it might be something you built a wall around before you knew what you were actually building a wall around. And you won't know which until you let someone close enough to find out."

　　Quin looked at her. Then at Jade, who was watching quietly with her legs tucked under her, her expression unreadable but attentive.

　　"That is incredibly presumptuous for four days," Quin said, her voice dry.

　　"I know," Mara said, completely unapologetic, …her chin lifting slightly. "That's also just who I am."

　　Something loosened in Quin's chest. It was minor, a single stitch, not a seam, but she felt

　　it go.

　　That afternoon, alone in the room while Mara and Jade went to visit the girls next door, Nia and two others, she knew Nia because she had met her in the hallway. Quin sat on her bed and did something she had not done in years: she let herself watch porn.

　　She sat with her back against the wall, watched it and touched herself. It was the second time she was touching herself; the first time was very brief. This time, she put her fingers inside herself just as she had seen Mia do to Jade.

　　Her moan filled the room along with the moans of the actors she was watching on the screen; she felt a kind of sensation, she had never felt this way before.

　　Never.

　　She felt it first; she didn't understand it. The sensation rose too fast, too intense, an overwhelming wave that rushed through her and left her trembling. Her breath caught as her body reacted on its own, every nerve lighting up in a way that startled her. For a moment, her thoughts disappeared completely, replaced by nothing but feeling. And when it faded, she lay there, shaken, trying to make sense of something she hadn't known she was capable of.

　　Afterwards, she laid there quietly, thinking about home. Her father had left when she was twelve. She did not have a dramatic story about it, no scenes, no final argument she'd overheard. He had simply become, over the course of one winter, a person who called less and then called rarely and then sent cards on birthdays that arrived three days late and trailed off entirely by the time she was sixteen. Her mother had not made him a villain. Her mother had been, in all things, remarkably undramatic about pain.

　　And then Douglas had arrived. Good, present, reliable Douglas, with his reading glasses and his careful hands and his way of watching her mother like she was the answer to a question he'd been asking his entire life.

　　Quin had watched him watch her mother and felt something she'd spent years classifying as discomfort and was only now, in this dorm room in this new city, beginning to consider might have been something else.

　　Envy. Not of her mother. Of the certainty with which someone could want another person.

　　The uncomplicated, open-faced want of it.

　　She had never wanted anything that openly.

　　She wasn't sure she knew how, but she wanted him to want her just as he wants her mom. Her phone buzzed. A text from a number she didn't recognize:

　　Hey, Nia from 212. Mara gave me your number. We're having some people over tonight if you want to come by. Just low-key.

　　She stared at the text for a long time. Then at the wall. Then back at the text. And something in her chest, quiet and precise and certain as a compass needle, swung toward yes.

　　After all, she needed to fill her secret document.