What They Say
828 Words
I heard it the way you hear most things that end up mattering, sideways, unintentionally, from someone who wasn't even talking to me.
I was in the canteen, waiting for Luca who'd gone to get food, half listening to the noise of the room the way you do when you're not really listening to anything in particular. Two people at the table behind me, voices pitched just low enough to feel like a secret and just loud enough to carry.
"...heard she did it on purpose, though. Got the guy kicked off the project just so she could—"
"That's not what happened. I heard she—"
"Whatever, all I know is half the design committee won't work with her now."
I didn't turn around. I didn't need to. The name arrived a few seconds later, dropped casually into the rest of the sentence the way names get dropped when the people saying them have no idea the word is about to land on someone three feet away like a weight.
Nora.
I sat very still.
The conversation moved on, the way conversations do, onto something about someone's exam results, and within a minute the two of them had forgotten the sentence existed. I hadn't.
Luca came back with a tray and dropped into the seat across from me, already talking about something unrelated, and it took him a full minute to notice I hadn't said anything back.
"You good?"
"Do you know anything about a design committee thing?" I asked. "With Nora?"
Luca's expression shifted, just slightly, the particular stillness of someone deciding how much they're willing to say.
"Where did you hear that?"
"Behind us. Just now."
He exhaled, glanced over his shoulder at the now empty table, and set his fork down like the conversation required both hands free.
"Look," he said, "I don't actually know the full story. Nobody does, that's kind of the problem. What I've heard is that there was a group project last semester, design committee thing, and somehow she ended up being the reason a guy got removed from it. People talk like she engineered it. Got him kicked off so she could take more credit, something like that."
"Do you believe that?"
"I don't know her well enough to believe anything," Luca said, which was a more honest answer than I wanted. "But I know how rumors work. Somebody says something once, it gets repeated, gets sharpened a little every time it's retold because the sharp version is more interesting than the boring one. By the time it reaches you, it's barely the same story anymore."
I sat with that for a moment.
"You okay?" he asked, and for once there was no teasing in it.
"I don't know," I admitted. "I don't actually know her. Not really. I've talked to her twice."
"And?"
"And neither of those times felt like someone who'd do that."
Luca studied me for a second. "That's not nothing. But it's also not evidence."
He was right, and I hated that he was right.
I thought about it the rest of the day, in the unhelpful, circular way you think about things you have no actual information about. I kept returning to the version of her I had, the laugh in the courtyard, the pen, the way she'd said I know about my name like it was a small private joke between us before we'd even properly met. None of that told me anything about a design committee or a guy who got removed from a project or whatever had actually happened in a room I wasn't in, months before I knew her name.
That was the uncomfortable part.
I had built an entire version of her out of glimpses. A few minutes total, spread across seven months, stitched together into something that felt complete because I'd wanted it to. And now here was a piece of information that didn't fit the stitching, and I had no idea whether to discard the rumor or the version of her I'd constructed myself.
Maybe both were wrong.
Maybe neither was.
I didn't see her that day. Which was, in a strange way, worse than seeing her would have been, because it left the question sitting there unresolved, taking up space it had no right to.
That evening I thought about it again, lying in the dark with the fan ticking its familiar rhythm above me.
Maybe both were wrong. Maybe neither was.
I didn't see her the next day either. Which was, in a strange way, worse than seeing her would have been, because it left the question sitting there unresolved, taking up space it had no right to.
I didn't know her well enough to defend her.
I didn't know her well enough to believe the rumor either.
I just knew that somewhere between a borrowed pen and a stolen laugh across a courtyard, I had started caring about which one was true.
- Writer
