Chapter 2: Her Name Is Prisca
945 Words
The next morning I woke up with unusual purpose.
That alone was suspicious. I am not, by nature, a morning person. My alarm and I have a complicated relationship built mostly on mutual resentment. But that Tuesday I was up before it went off, showered, dressed, and out the door with enough time to grab coffee from the small café on Harlow Avenue before the registrar's building even opened.
Peter noticed immediately.
"You're early," he said when I met him outside, visibly alarmed. "You're never early."
"People change."
"Not in twelve hours they don't." He looked at me. Then he looked at the registrar's building. Then back at me. The slow grin that followed was deeply annoying. "The girl from yesterday."
"I have unfinished registration business."
"You completed your registration yesterday. I watched you."
"There are forms."
"Daniel."
"Drop it, Peter."
He dropped it. But the grin stayed the entire walk inside.
---
The hall was quieter than the day before. The first-day chaos had settled into something more orderly — shorter queues, fewer panicked freshmen, the administrative staff looking marginally less like they wanted to resign.
I told myself I was just going to handle some supplementary paperwork. A perfectly normal reason to be there. I was not scanning the room. I was not looking for anyone specific.
I was absolutely looking for her.
She was not by the window this time.
I felt a drop of something — disappointment, probably, though I refused to name it — and turned toward the nearest desk to at least look purposeful. That was when I heard a voice behind me.
"Excuse me — sorry, do you know which table handles course add-ons?"
I turned.
It was her.
Up close she was different from the impression the distance had given me — not less, but more specific. Her eyes were a warm brown, alert and direct. She had a small notebook tucked under one arm and a pen behind her ear, and she was looking at me with the politely expectant expression of someone who had asked a simple question and was waiting for a simple answer.
My brain, unhelpfully, took a moment to load.
"That one," I said, pointing to the table at the far left. "Table seven. They handle add-ons and late substitutions."
"Perfect." She glanced over, then back at me. "Thank you."
She started to move past me.
And I thought — *Abdullahi said tomorrow. This is tomorrow. Do something.*
"I'm Daniel," I said.
She stopped. Turned back with a slightly surprised look, like she hadn't expected the conversation to continue. A beat of silence passed between us — not uncomfortable, just brief — and then the corner of her mouth moved.
"Prisca," she said.
Just like that.
*Prisca.*
It landed quietly, the way the right word does when you finally find it — like it had been waiting to be said.
"Good name," I said, and immediately wondered why that was the sentence my brain selected.
She raised an eyebrow. Not unkindly. More like she was deciding something. "Is it?"
"It's — yes. Distinctive. You don't hear it often."
"My grandmother's name," she said. There was a softness when she said it, brief but real. "I was named after her."
"That's a good reason to have a name."
She smiled then. A real one — small and unhurried, the kind that reaches the eyes without making a production of it. "I think so too." She shifted her notebook to her other arm. "Thanks again for the directions, Daniel."
She walked toward table seven.
I stood exactly where I was for approximately three seconds, doing nothing.
---
Peter materialized at my shoulder from nowhere in particular.
"Prisca," he said quietly, testing the name. "Nice."
"Were you listening the entire time?"
"I was standing four feet away. Acoustics in here are excellent." He paused. "You said *good name*."
"I know."
"Of all the possible responses available to a grown adult human—"
"I am aware, Peter."
"—you selected *good name*."
"Thank you for the recap."
He laughed, but there was no real cruelty in it. He clapped a hand on my shoulder. "She smiled though. Whatever you said after must have recovered things."
I looked across the room. Prisca was at table seven now, speaking to the administrator, her pen already out, writing something in that small notebook. Focused. Capable. Completely unbothered.
"She did smile," I said, mostly to myself.
"So what's next?"
I thought about it honestly. I had her name now. That was more than I had twenty-four hours ago. The conversation had been forty seconds long and I had said *good name* like a man who had never spoken to another person — and she had still smiled.
That felt, cautiously, like something.
"Next," I said, "I learn something other than her name."
Peter nodded seriously, like we were drawing up military strategy. "Solid plan."
---
That afternoon I told Abdullahi.
He listened without interruption, as he always did, and when I finished he was quiet for a moment.
"You introduced yourself," he said.
"Yes."
"She gave you her name."
"Yes."
"And she smiled."
"Yes."
He nodded once, with the measured satisfaction of someone reviewing a project that was proceeding on schedule. "Good," he said. "Keep going."
---
I wrote her name in my notebook that night.
*Prisca.*
Just that. No explanation needed. Outside, the Boston evening settled in around the campus — streetlights flickering on, voices fading across the quad, the semester deepening into itself one quiet day at a time.
I closed the notebook.
Smiled at nothing in particular.
And slept better than I had in months.
- Writer
