When Sunshine Meets Silence

One Elena Vasquez had a system. It wasn't complicated. It wasn't written down anywhere. Yet it ruled her every hour as if she had written God's own law in the dark month, as someone who knew in her bones what happened when she stopped. Wake at six. Coffee before speaking to anyone. Take the east way to class, never through the central courtyard, where small clusters of people stopped to laugh and cackle wisdom as laughter ricocheted off red brick walls like a challenge she had not been adequately prepared for. You always sat in the back of every lecture. Exit before the professor finishes dismissing them. Sitting alone at the far window seat of Hartwell Dining, a book propped open as armor to eat lunch. The Oakhurst Student Housing in Apartment 4B Lock the door. Breathe. And the system worked because the system kept people at arm's length and distance Elena had learned was the only coin that never lost its value. At twenty-one she believed intimacy was a fraud perpetrated by purveyors of the self-help aisle until the truth set them free. Oakhurst Student Housing was a squat, four-storey building on the west edge of Calloway University's campus; one of those places you know by the smell, faintly instant noodles and ambition. It was not beautiful. The corridor carpets were a shade of green that had not been fashionable since 1987, the lift took four minutes to get there, and the communal laundry room on the ground floor held precisely one machine that did not rattle the walls. But it was quiet. That was what mattered. Or it had been quiet. That was until the morning of September the third, when Elena woke up to hear someone moving into Apartment 4C. It had registered just below her unconscious Ramen induced stupor, a muted but frantic thumping against the mutual wall, furniture rearrangement she could only describe as downright picaresque. Then music. Not quiet, contemplative music. Not music that you play within a building in which other people live, at an appropriate volume. This was music with bass. Music with opinions on itself. Which rattled the small framed picture of Elena on her bedside table against the wood. For a moment, she just lay there and looked at the ceiling. Come on, stop it, she told it. It did not stop. She stood up, wore her grey cardigan, the baggy one that engulfed her frame in a boil washed hug and stood between me and the wall of her living room with an expression on her face measuring how much patience she could muster. Not much. This was her third year at Calloway. She had been two of them for that long and lived in Oakhurst, at Apartment 4C for all the time. The silence slipped back into place, something Elena had felt bad, guilty for feeling relieved about when her last tenant had left, a postgraduate named Theo who'd moved to Edinburgh in April. She had grown used to it. She relied on it. She made her coffee. She resumed her seat at the desk beside the window. Once she sat down, she opened her laptop and attempted to read the forty pages of developmental psychology due for comment in Dr. Anand's seminar on Thursday. The music continued. Knock knock on her door at ten past eight. Elena went still. Not when people came knocking at her door. Parcels were sent to the building's reception. Her bestie, Priya always let her know before she came to visit as well ensuring that Elena knew this was absolutely required since last time it took twenty minutes to respond and Priya almost had campus security called on herself. It was not programmed into the system to knock unannounced, with cheerful-sounding knocks. She walked slowly across the room, as if the floor might suddenly decide not to support her. She looked through the peephole. That figure across the way was tall. That was the first thing. He stood just too close to the door so he seemed taller still and held what looked like a box of cereal in one hand and wore an uncomplicated cheerfulness that Elena was immediately weary of. He knocked again. She unlocked the door, because not unlocking it seemed somehow worse. "Hey!" he said. He said it like some people say good morning, really as though that was so nice, as if morning were a gift, and someone should be thanked for its being there. He had dark hair that looked as though he'd run his hand through it three or four times already today, two rough lines at the corners of warm brown eyes suggesting a smile that was becoming habitual and a university hooded top which zipped up with the grain like it was practising to be denim. "Hi," Elena said. The word was smaller than she intended it to sound. Liam, next door, he said unnecessarily pointing at the door that read 4C. Liam Chen." He put out the hand not holding the cereal box. Then appeared to only just realise he was clutching cereal. Then, switched it to the other hand. Extended the right one again. "Sorry. I've got a lot going on." Because acting like it would be wrong so he extended his hand and she shook his because to refuse was also rude and being rude had consequences. That lesson lived in her bones, was one she had learned from the inside of an imprint on her heart. "Elena," she said. The name "Elena," he said again, as though reducing it to a folder in some file cabinet. "Great name. Sorry for the mess of noise this morning, I really am. I'm a terrible unpacker. I do it in one go and then I fall down on the floor for two days straight; not moving. I swear it won't be a daily thing, though. He paused. "The chaos, I mean. I can't make any promises about the music because I really need the music to survive, but I'll try and play it quietly. Elena blinked. In thirty seconds he had said more words than she would say in a morning. "It's fine," she said. "It's obviously not fine," he said, interpreting something in her expression with an unsettling precision. "That was a nice thing to say and I appreciate it, but *you had no f--king idea of who you were about to meet in September 2015. Also do you have milk? I'm a cereal and no milk, and the shops still aren't open for the day and this can't be how a day starts. Elena stared at him. Again, "Milk," he said while waving the cereal box. "I have oat milk," she said. "Perfect. I love oat milk. Most people find that weird." "Most people haven't pondered very deeply. He stared at her briefly, and she felt that subtle recalibration in his expression, nothing too drastic, just a search for the right station on a radio. "True," he said. "Can I borrow some? I promise I will exchange it today. I'll get you two cartons." Elena considered this. The reasonable, contained life she had created. She thought of the wall and the music and the knocking and that he was already standing in her doorway asking her for something which was precisely what people did before they started demanding more. But he was looking at her in such a straightforward, uncomplicated way—no angles to it, no trying on for size—that she found herself moving over to her fridge before she'd even thought about doing so. She handed him the oat milk. Even if that is all he said, it was so warm with gratitude, one would think there was a lot more going on than simply completing the transaction. "You've saved breakfast. That's not a small thing." He half turned to leave, but spun back around. "I'll be quieter," he said. "Promise." He retreated into 4C again, a minute later the music had subsided to being there but not insisting. Elena stood in the middle of her living-room floor and gazed up at the closed door, as if from a great distance, for reasons she could not articulate and would never have disclosed to anyone small and strange travelled through her like a single piano note sounded in an empty house. Returning to her desk, she opened her laptop. She read her forty pages. But for the first time in what felt like years, she noticed the silence tingled differently