Chapter 12: Before Saturday
1108 Words
The week between asking and Saturday moved slowly.
Not uncomfortably — nothing felt wrong or anxious. It was more like the specific patience required when something good is approaching and you cannot make it arrive faster by wanting it to. The week had its own pace and I had to match it.
I went to class. I completed assignments. I ate meals and slept reasonable hours and had normal conversations.
I was also, quietly, thinking about Saturday the entire time.
---
Tuesday's class was good.
Ellis had shifted the course into its second major unit — data analysis and interpretation — and the material was denser but more interesting. Real studies, real data sets, the kind of content that rewarded attention.
Prisca and I took notes and occasionally exchanged brief comments in the margins of nothing — a glance when Ellis said something particularly sharp, a small acknowledgment when a point landed well. The wordless shorthand of people who had been sitting beside each other long enough to have developed one.
After class, walking out, she said: "Are you nervous?"
"About what?"
She gave me a look.
"No," I said.
"That's not entirely true," she said. Not unkindly.
"Maybe slightly," I admitted. "Are you?"
She considered it with genuine honesty. "A little," she said. "But the good kind."
---
I reported this to Peter that evening.
He received it with great seriousness.
"The good kind of nervous," he repeated. "She said the good kind."
"Yes."
"Daniel, that means she cares how it goes. You don't get nervous the good kind about something you're indifferent to." He paused. "This is significant."
"I'm aware."
"What are you wearing?"
I stared at him. "It's four days away."
"Exactly. Four days. Not four weeks. Four days." He leaned forward. "What are you wearing?"
---
Abdullahi weighed in Wednesday without being asked.
We were in the library, study session, and he looked up from his textbook with the unprompted precision of someone who had been running a calculation quietly.
"Wear something clean and dark," he said.
"Hello to you too."
"It's a theatre. Dark clothes read as intentional without being overdressed." He returned to his book. "And arrive before her. Don't make her wait outside alone."
"I wasn't going to—"
"I know you weren't. I'm confirming it." He turned a page. "Also bring nothing. No flowers, no gift. Too much for a first intentional outing. Just yourself, present and on time."
Peter, across the table, pointed at Abdullahi. "He's right about the flowers."
"I was not planning flowers."
"The fact that you had to think about it means you were considering it," Abdullahi said, without looking up.
---
I texted Prisca Thursday morning.
Nothing elaborate — just confirming details the way reasonable people do.
*Brattle Theatre, Saturday. Doors at six-thirty, screening at seven. I'll meet you outside.*
Her reply came quickly.
*I'll be there. Do you want to eat before or after?*
I looked at that for a moment.
*Before. There's a place on Brattle Street, Oleana. If you haven't been.*
A pause.
*I've walked past it. Never gone in. Before sounds good.*
---
I had been to Oleana once, sophomore year, for a friend's birthday dinner. It was warm and specific — Mediterranean, not loud, the kind of restaurant where the lighting was right and the food was interesting enough to talk about without being so complicated it became the whole evening.
I had thought of it immediately when she said before.
---
Thursday class came and went.
No Harlow Brew this week — she had a reading group at five and I had a study group of my own. We parted at the quad fork with the easy shorthand that had replaced the earlier careful formality.
"Saturday," she said.
"Saturday," I confirmed.
She walked. No half-turn, no glance back today — just forward, her jacket collar up against the cold.
I watched her go and thought about what she had said Tuesday.
*The good kind.*
---
Friday passed in a long, quiet way.
Peter dragged me to the gym in the morning, which helped. Physical effort has a way of simplifying a busy mind — the body takes over and the rest quiets down. We ran for forty minutes and lifted for another thirty and walked back to campus in the cold feeling simplified.
"You're ready," Peter said, somewhere on Harlow Avenue.
"For the gym?"
"For Saturday." He looked straight ahead. "I've known you three years, Daniel. I've watched you be careful with everything — your words, your space, what you let matter." He paused. "This one got through the careful. That doesn't happen often with you."
I walked beside him without answering for a moment.
"No," I said finally. "It doesn't."
"Then be present for it. Don't manage it. Just be there."
It was the most direct thing Peter had ever said to me that was not a joke.
I told him so.
"I have layers," he said, and ruined it.
---
Saturday morning I woke up early.
I lay in bed for a moment listening to the city. Boston on a Saturday had a different sound than the weekday version — slower, more irregular, the noise of people who did not have somewhere to be right now.
I showered. Made coffee. Sat at my desk and read for an hour without retaining much of it.
At noon I went for a walk with no destination, the kind that is really just thinking with movement attached. The streets were cold and bright, Saturday shoppers and joggers and people walking dogs, the ordinary Saturday life of a city going about its weekend.
I walked past Parrish & Sons without going in. Stood outside for a moment, looked at the window display.
The bookstore felt like the beginning of something, looking back. The morning I had told myself I was just walking and had not been just walking at all.
I stood there for a moment.
Then I kept going.
---
By five o'clock I was dressed — dark jeans, a navy sweater, the grey wool jacket that was warm enough for November without being heavy. Abdullahi's advice, essentially, arrived at independently.
I looked at myself in the mirror with the brief, assessing look of a person checking that they look like themselves rather than someone performing occasion.
I looked like myself.
Good enough.
---
I texted her at five-fifteen.
*Heading out soon. See you at Oleana at six.*
Her reply came within two minutes.
*I'm already almost ready. See you there, Daniel.*
I put my phone in my pocket.
Took a breath.
Went outside into the cold Boston evening.
- Writer
