My First Love

Chapter 11: The Score

Ellis returned the papers the following Thursday.

She did it without drama — walked in, distributed the stack face-down, told us to review our feedback before the lecture began. The room filled with the specific quiet of people turning papers over and processing numbers.

I turned mine over.

87.

A red B+ in Ellis's precise handwriting, with two lines of feedback beneath it. *Clear analytical framework. Argument well-structured. Conclusion could push further — you stopped one step before the most interesting claim.*

I read it twice. The grade was solid. The feedback was fair. The part about stopping one step early landed with the particular accuracy of something true.

I always did that. Pulled back just before the edge.

---

Beside me Prisca turned her paper over.

I did not look directly. But I heard the small breath she released — controlled, barely audible — and I glanced over.

91. A clean A-.

Her feedback was longer than mine, three lines in Ellis's handwriting. I did not read it — that felt like a boundary — but I caught the phrase *genuinely original framing* before I looked away.

"Good?" I said.

"Better than I expected," she said. "The conclusion held up."

"Told you."

She looked at me sideways. "You told me the methodology was interesting."

"Same thing."

The corner of her mouth moved.

---

After class we did the Thursday walk to Harlow Brew with the easy momentum it had developed. The cold had deepened since last week — proper November now, the trees on the quad nearly bare, breath visible in the air.

Prisca had her jacket buttoned all the way up and her hands in her pockets. She walked at a good pace, unhurried but purposeful, the way she moved through most things.

At Harlow Brew we ordered and settled at the window table. Mine. Hers. The distinction had dissolved somewhere in the past three weeks — it was just the table now.

"Ellis's feedback," I said. "What did she say?"

Prisca considered whether to share it. A brief consideration — she was private, not secretive. There was a difference.

"She said the ethnographic framework was applied confidently and that the ethical analysis was the strongest part." A pause. "She also said I argued the researcher-as-instrument point better than most graduate students she's read."

"That's not a small thing."

"No," Prisca said quietly. Not false modesty, just — receiving it carefully. "It isn't."

I looked at her. "Are you going to talk to her? About the documentary work, the direction you want to go?"

"I've been thinking about it." She wrapped her hands around her cup. "Ellis has connections in documentary journalism. A former student who runs a production company in New York." She paused. "It feels early to have that conversation."

"Does it? Or does it just feel presumptuous?"

She looked at me.

"Because those are different," I said. "Early means the timing is wrong. Presumptuous means you're worried about taking up space you've earned."

A quiet moment passed.

"That's annoyingly accurate," she said.

"I learned it from someone who practices generous interpretations."

She recognized her own words. Something moved briefly across her expression — warm and unguarded, gone quickly but real.

---

We stayed until the light outside had shifted to early evening.

The café had filled around us — the usual Thursday crowd, students with laptops, a couple near the back sharing headphones. The familiar noise of a place settling into its evening self.

At some point the conversation had moved entirely away from school. She was telling me about Caleb — her younger brother — who had apparently decided at sixteen that he wanted to be an architect and had spent the past year filling sketchbooks with building designs that their mother described as either visionary or structurally impossible, depending on her mood.

"She's proud," Prisca said. "She just expresses it as concern."

"Does he know that?"

"Caleb knows everything." A small smile. "He's sixteen and completely certain of himself in that specific way. Before the world has had time to complicate it."

"Is that enviable or exhausting?"

"Both," she said. "Definitely both."

I thought about being sixteen. Chicago. My parents in their ongoing negotiation with each other, the house full of a specific kind of noise that was not quite argument but never quite peace.

"I was not certain of anything at sixteen," I said.

"What were you?"

I thought about it honestly. "Quiet. Watching. Trying to figure out which version of myself would work in which room."

She looked at me steadily. "And now?"

"Fewer rooms," I said. "More consistent version."

She held the look for a moment. "I think that's true," she said. "You're the same in every context I've seen you in."

"Is that good?"

"It's rare," she said simply.

---

Outside it was fully dark now, the streetlights making orange pools on the wet pavement.

At the door of Harlow Brew she pulled on her jacket and we stepped out into the cold.

We walked the first block together in comfortable silence.

At the corner I stopped. She stopped too, half-turning.

Something had been building quietly for weeks — not pressure exactly, more like accumulation. All the small honest things, the coffee, the bookstore, the way she said my name.

"Prisca," I said.

She looked at me.

"I want to take you somewhere. Not class, not coffee. Something deliberate." I paused. "If you want that."

The night was quiet around us. Cold air. Distant traffic.

She looked at me for a long moment — the full, direct look that meant she was actually deciding, not performing a decision.

"Where?" she said.

"There's a documentary screening at the Brattle Theatre next Saturday. *Final Cut* — it's about independent filmmakers, the long-form kind. I thought of you when I saw it listed."

A pause.

"You've been checking the Brattle listings," she said.

"Yes."

"For something I'd like."

"Yes."

She was quiet for a moment.

"Saturday," she said. "What time?"

"Seven."

She nodded once. Slowly. With the particular quality of a decision that had already been made somewhere earlier and was only now being spoken aloud.

"Okay, Daniel," she said.

She turned and walked.

I stood on the corner in the cold dark and breathed.

---

I texted Peter when I got home.

*I asked her out.*

His reply was instant.

*WHAT DID SHE SAY.*

*She said okay.*

A pause. Then:

*Daniel. She said OKAY.*

*I know.*

*That's a yes. Okay is a yes. OKAY IS A YES.*

I put my phone down and smiled at the ceiling.

Abdullahi's message came twenty minutes later, unprompted.

*How are things?*

I replied with one word.

*Good.*

His response was immediate, which was unusual for him.

*I know. Peter told me. Well done.*