Episode:7
1013 Words
JOANNE FATE – EPISODE 7
When Quiet Stops Being Safe
The first sign that something was wrong was laughter.
Not the happy kind.
Not the kind that floated freely across campus like it usually did.
This laughter startled Joanne because it came from her own mouth, and she did not recognize the emotion behind it.
She was standing in the cafeteria line with Mira, tray in hand, listening to a story that was supposed to be funny. Mira was animated, describing an awkward encounter with a lecturer who had mistaken her for someone else entirely. The story had a punchline. People around them laughed.
Joanne laughed too.
But the sound felt delayed, like an echo that arrived seconds too late.
She stopped laughing abruptly and stared down at her tray.
Mira noticed. Mira always noticed.
“You good” Mira asked, nudging her lightly with an elbow.
Joanne nodded too quickly. “Yeah. Just hungry.”
It was a lie, but a harmless one. At least, that was what Joanne told herself.
She had been lying harmlessly for days.
The peace she had built at the university was not loud. It never announced itself. It existed in routines, in quiet mornings, in the way her shoulders no longer stayed tense without reason.
She protected that peace fiercely.
She did not take unfamiliar calls.
She avoided conversations that felt like emotional traps.
She stayed away from places that stirred memory.
It worked. Until it didn’t.
The second sign came in the form of a dream.
In the dream, Joanne was walking through campus, but the buildings were wrong. Taller than they should be. Bent at impossible angles. The sky was too close, pressing down like a ceiling.
People passed her, but none had faces.
She called out, but her voice did not make sound.
Then she saw it.
A bench at the far end of campus, the one she visited when she needed quiet. Someone was sitting there. Their back was turned. The posture was familiar enough to make her chest tighten.
She knew who it was before the person turned around.
And that was when she woke up.
Joanne sat upright in bed, heart racing, breath uneven. The room was dark, silent except for Mira’s steady breathing across the room.
She pressed a hand against her chest.
“It’s nothing,” she whispered to herself.
But her body disagreed.
She did not tell Mira about the dream.
She did not write it down.
She pretended it did not matter.
That was the third sign.
Joanne had always written when something mattered.
The comedy of her life continued regardless.
She spilled coffee on her notes and laughed too hard about it.
She wore mismatched shoes to class and pretended it was intentional.
She forgot a presentation deadline and blamed the campus calendar.
People found her charming.
They said things like “You’re funny without trying” and “You always look like you know something the rest of us don’t.”
If only they knew.
Inside, Joanne felt like she was carefully balancing a tray stacked too high. One wrong step and everything would fall.
The message arrived on a Tuesday.
No dramatic alert.
No warning vibration.
Just a quiet notification lighting up her phone while it lay face-down on her desk.
She noticed it without meaning to.
That was the problem.
She turned the phone over slowly, like it might burn her.
The name on the screen belonged to a part of her life she had sealed away with deliberate care.
Her stomach dropped.
“No,” she said aloud, her voice calm and steady in a way that scared her.
Mira looked up from her book. “What”
“Nothing,” Joanne said quickly. “Just spam.”
Another lie. This one heavier.
She did not open the message.
She did not delete it either.
She placed the phone back down and stared at it as though it might speak on its own.
Her peace did not shatter.
It cracked.
That night, the campus felt different.
The walkways seemed longer. The lights harsher. Conversations around her blurred into noise without meaning.
She tried to distract herself by watching something funny on her laptop. The jokes fell flat. She laughed in the wrong places.
Fantasy slipped in quietly.
As she closed her eyes, she imagined a version of herself walking into a room where the past waited patiently. In this version, Joanne was calm. Unbothered. Immune.
She imagined saying all the right things.
She imagined leaving without consequence.
When she opened her eyes, the room felt colder.
Reality did not follow scripts.
The broken bond did not demand attention loudly.
It waited.
In silence.
And that silence was worse than any confrontation.
Joanne found herself avoiding places she loved. The bench. The library corner. The quiet path behind the old building.
She told herself she was busy.
She told herself she was fine.
She told herself a lot of things.
Mira watched her with narrowed eyes.
“You’re doing that thing,” Mira said one evening.
Joanne looked up from her book. “What thing”
“The pretending thing.”
Joanne smiled. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Mira sighed. “You never do.”
The dream returned.
This time, the person on the bench spoke.
They said Joanne’s name the way they used to.
Not accusing.
Not pleading.
Just familiar.
Joanne woke with tears on her face and laughed at herself through them.
“Get a grip,” she muttered.
Comedy and pain shared the same breath.
She finally opened the message the next day.
It was shorter than she expected.
It did not ask for forgiveness.
It did not explain.
It did not beg.
It simply said they were in the city.
That was all.
That was enough.
Joanne stared at the screen until the words lost meaning.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said softly.
And for the first time since she arrived at the university, she meant it with her whole chest
- Writer
