Don't Let Them See Us

Chapter Two — Ryan

I've been awake since six, which is unusual for me on a day with no morning lecture, no gym session I actually intend to keep, no reason at all to be conscious this early — except that I lay in bed for an hour trying to talk myself out of being this excited to show a girl around a campus she's going to figure out on her own within a week anyway.

I don't succeed.

She's in the kitchen when I come down, hair still damp, wearing a t-shirt that says nothing about her and somehow tells me everything — soft, unbothered, comfortable in her own skin even when she clearly isn't comfortable in this house yet. She's reading the label on a cereal box like it's going to reveal a secret.

"Cinnamon flavored ones are Greg's," I say. "Fair warning, they taste like the idea of cinnamon. Not the actual thing."

She looks up, and something crosses her face — surprise, maybe, that I'm capable of being awake and coherent before nine. "Noted."

"There's real coffee. I can make it if you don't already have a system."

"I have a system."

"Of course you do." I lean against the counter, watching her measure grounds with a precision that suggests she's the type of person who alphabetizes things, who color-codes a calendar, who has never once in her life shown up somewhere without a plan. It's the opposite of how I move through the world, and I find I like watching her do it. A lot. More than is probably wise for six-forty in the morning, seventeen hours into knowing this girl exists.

"You're staring," she says, without turning around.

"I'm supervising."

"There's nothing to supervise. It's coffee."

"You'd be amazed how often people ruin coffee." I grab an apple from the bowl, mostly for something to do with my hands. "Ready for the grand tour?"

She turns, finally, mug in hand, and there's something guarded in her expression that wasn't there last night in the kitchen — like she spent the hours between then and now building a wall I didn't know I'd need to get past. "I really can find my own way."

"I know. I'm coming anyway."

The campus is quiet in the way it only is for the first week before classes actually start — the kind of quiet that won't last, that's already counting down. I walk her past the buildings that matter and skip the ones that don't, and somewhere between the library and the quad, the wall she built this morning starts to come down without her seeming to notice it happening. She laughs at something I say about my Intro to Statistics professor, and it's not the careful laugh from dinner last night — it's real, surprised out of her, and I feel it land somewhere in my chest like it means something.

I should be more careful about that. I'm choosing not to be.

"Okay," she says, as we cross toward the science building, "why does everyone keep looking at you like you owe them money?"

"They don't."

"They really do."

I glance around — a couple of girls near the fountain, definitely watching, definitely not being subtle about it, whispering behind cupped hands the second they think we've noticed. I know both of them. One of them, Ashley, I went on exactly two dates with last spring before deciding we made more sense as background characters in each other's lives than as anything more.

"I have a reputation," I admit. "It's mostly exaggerated."

"Mostly."

"There might be a small factual basis."

She rolls her eyes, but there's a smile underneath it she's trying not to give me. "So you're the guy."

"What guy?"

"The one every girl on campus has a theory about. The one people talk about like he's a rumor instead of a person."

It lands closer to true than I want to admit out loud, so I deflect the way I always do. "You say that like it's a bad thing."

"I say that like it's exhausting."

"It is," I say, and mean it, and something in my voice must give that away because she looks at me differently for a second — like she's recalibrating something. "It's easier to let people believe whatever version of you they want. Saves everyone the disappointment of the real thing."

"That's a very sad way to live, Ryan."

"Yeah, well." I shrug, uncomfortable with how much truth just slipped out before ten in the morning, to someone I met yesterday. "Nobody asked me to be well-adjusted."

She studies me a beat too long, like she's deciding whether to push, and then — mercifully — lets it go. "Show me where the good coffee actually is. The real stuff, not the campus center swill."

I grin, grateful for the exit ramp. "Now you're speaking my language."

We end up at a place three blocks off campus, small and unpretentious, the kind of spot most freshmen never find because it isn't listed on any of the orientation maps. I've been coming here since sophomore year. It's mine, in the quiet way certain places become yours without you deciding it on purpose.

Mia sits across from me with her mug wrapped in both hands, and in the better light — not kitchen light, not porch light, but real daylight, unfiltered — I notice things I didn't let myself notice yesterday. The way her nose scrunches slightly when something amuses her. The small, determined line between her eyebrows when she's trying to seem unaffected by something. She's trying to seem unaffected by me right now, and doing a worse job of it than she thinks.

"Can I ask you something?" she says.

"Depends what it is."

"Are you going to be weird about this? The whole—" she gestures between us, vague, careful, "—sibling thing."

The question lands harder than she probably means it to. "Define weird."

"I don't know. Awkward. Distant. Pretending I don't exist in group settings because it's easier than figuring out what we're supposed to be to each other."

"No," I say, before I've fully thought it through. "I don't think I'm capable of pretending you don't exist."

It's too honest. I know it the second it's out of my mouth, watch her face do something complicated in response — surprise, then something warier underneath it, like she heard exactly what I meant and isn't sure what to do with it.

"Ryan."

"I'm just being honest."

"You're being—" she stops herself, exhales, looks down at her coffee like it might have better advice than she does. "This is a bad idea. Whatever this is. You know that, right?"

"What's 'this'?"

"Don't make me say it."

"I think you should say it," I say, quieter now, leaning forward slightly without meaning to. "I think it'll be less scary out loud than it is in your head."

She looks up at me, and for one unguarded second I see exactly what she's thinking — it's written all over her face, the same thing I've been feeling since the porch yesterday, since the box, since the accidental brush of fingers that wasn't actually accidental at all. And then she blinks, and the wall goes back up, brick by brick, faster than I can stop it.

"We should head back," she says. "I have unpacking left."

I let her have the exit. It's the first thing I've done all day that resembles restraint.

We're crossing back through the quad, close enough that our arms brush occasionally, not quite talking, both of us thinking about the conversation we didn't finish, when someone calls my name.

"Ryan! Hey — Ryan Alden!"

I turn, and it's Jess, a girl from my econ elective last semester, cutting across the grass toward us with the kind of purposeful energy that means she's about to ask something she's been waiting to ask. Beside her, Mia stiffens slightly, almost imperceptibly, but I feel it anyway, standing this close.

"Hey, Jess."

"I heard you got a new stepsister." Jess's eyes go straight to Mia, assessing, curious, already cataloguing details to report back to whoever she's going to text the second this conversation ends. "This her?"

"This is Mia," I say, careful, neutral, aware of Mia going very still beside me.

"Hi," Mia says, polite, guarded, every inch the careful stranger she was determined to be this morning before I ruined it at the coffee shop.

Jess smiles, but it's the kind of smile that has an agenda behind it. "So it's true, you guys actually live together now? That's so—" she pauses, choosing the word deliberately, watching both our faces while she does it, "—interesting."

"It's just a normal family thing," I say, too fast, and immediately regret how defensive it sounds.

"Sure, sure." Jess's gaze slides to Mia again, sharper now, more interested. "Hey, so — random, but is it true what people are saying? About you two?"

Beside me, I feel Mia go rigid.

"What people are saying?" Mia asks, careful, even, but I can hear the current underneath it — the exact thing she spent all morning trying to avoid, standing right here in the open quad, about to happen anyway.

Jess's smile widens, delighted to be the one delivering it. "That you're already all over each other. That it's basically an open secret. I mean—" she glances between us, taking in whatever it is our faces are doing right now that neither of us can control, "—is it true?"