The One's Who Burn

The first thing I noticed was that his hands weren't shaking. Mine are. I'm pressing them flat against my thighs under the table, trying to keep still, trying to look like someone who belongs in a room like this — marble floors, chandelier dripping light, strangers who laugh too loud and mean nothing by it. He's across the room, talking to no one, holding a glass he hasn't touched, and he looks like he owns every inch of air between us. I don't know his name yet. That comes later. Right now, he's just a problem I can feel in my chest. I shouldn't be here. That's the honest version. My roommate, Dani, dragged me out of our dorm room with a dress she'd already chosen and a look that said she wasn't asking. "You've been in that room for three weeks, Zara. Three weeks. You're coming." And I came. Because it was easier than explaining that going outside still feels like walking into traffic — manageable, probably fine, but the risk is always there. The party is for someone's birthday. A junior, I think. Someone with parents who rent out spaces like this for a Saturday night, the way other people order pizza. Dani disappeared twenty minutes ago with a boy who had kind eyes and a bad haircut, and I've been standing near the drinks table trying to look purposeful. Like I'm between conversations. Not between versions of myself. He moves. Not toward me — shifts his weight, angles slightly, enough that now I can see his face properly in the light. There's something wrong about how still he is in a room full of people who can't stop moving. Most people at parties perform. They laugh a little too big, gesture a little too wide, touch each other's arms for no reason. He isn't doing any of that. He looks like someone who came here to observe and already regrets the decision. I know that feeling. I've been wearing it for months. Someone knocks into me from behind — hard, the kind of collision that sloshes my drink down my wrist and makes me lurch forward. I catch myself on the edge of the table. When I look up, he's looking at me. Not with curiosity. Not amusement. Just steady, the way you'd watch something that hasn't finished happening yet. I look away first. I remember thinking: don't let that mean anything. * * * His name is Eli Voss. Dani tells me this approximately four minutes after she resurfaces, breathless, lip gloss slightly destroyed, the boy with the kind eyes now missing from her side. "Eli Voss," she repeats, like I'm supposed to feel something about the arrangement of those syllables. "He transferred in last semester. Nobody knows much about him. He's in the Architecture program, I think. Or engineering. Something with buildings." She pauses. "He's looking at you again." "He's not." "Zara." I don't turn around. "What do people know about him? Besides the major that might involve buildings." Dani tilts her head, the way she does when she's deciding how much truth I can take. She's known me long enough to calibrate. "He transferred from Whitmore. Before that — I don't know. Someone said he had a rough year. But that's the kind of thing people say about anyone who doesn't immediately explain themselves." A rough year. I almost smile. We could compare notes. "I'm going home," I say. "You've been here forty minutes." "I know. It was a good forty minutes. I'm proud of us." I hand her my half-empty glass and pull my bag up onto my shoulder. She doesn't try to stop me — she's learned that too. She just watches with that specific Dani expression, the one that means she's storing this conversation to bring up later, probably at breakfast, probably when I'm not ready for it. I made it to the hallway. Long corridor, white walls, a row of framed prints trying to be art and almost managing it. My heels are too loud on the floor. I'm counting steps the way I always count things now — doors, exits, how many seconds until I'm outside — when I hear him. "You dropped this." I stop. Turn. He's holding out a small silver ring — the one I wear on my right hand, the one my mother gave me two birthdays ago, the one that's been loose ever since I lost weight. I didn't mean to lose. I didn't even feel it fall. Eli Voss in a hallway is somehow worse than Eli Voss in a crowded room. Up close, the stillness is more specific. His jaw is set. His eyes are dark and careful, and they look at me the same way they did from across the room — not like I'm interesting, more like I'm unresolved. "Thanks," I say, and hold out my hand. He drops the ring into my palm without touching me. Careful about it. Like he'd already decided on that before he followed me out here. "You were leaving," he says. Not a question. "Yes." "Good call." He glances back toward the noise spilling from the main room, his mouth going tight for half a second — not irritation exactly, more like recognition of something he'd hoped wouldn't still bother him. "It's a bad party." "It really is," I say, before I mean to. He almost smiles. I see it start and stop, as he caught himself. And in that one second, something in me went quiet — not better, just quiet — the way a room feels right after someone turns the music off. Then his phone lit up in his pocket. He glanced at it. Whatever had been almost on his face vanished. Gone. Like I'd imagined it. "Goodnight," he said, and walked back toward the room he clearly didn't want to be in. I stood in the hallway a moment longer than I needed to, turning the ring over in my fingers, feeling the familiar loose spin of it around my knuckle. I didn't know yet that I'd spend the next six months trying to figure out what it was he saw when he looked at me — and whether it was the same thing that had been keeping me awake at three in the morning, staring at a ceiling I still didn't recognize as mine.