The Rains That Fell Before Us

011 | What Her Mom Said

The hallway kept moving around them.

Students, noise, someone laughing too loud near the vending machine. All of it continued like normal while she stood there and the word deterioration sat in the air between her and Sora like something that had been dropped and couldn't be picked back up.

She felt Caiden go still beside her.

"What did you just say," she said.

"Your mom called me," Sora said. He wasn't being cruel about it. That was almost worse. He said it carefully, like he'd rehearsed how to say it without it sounding like what it was. "Two weeks ago. She said things were getting worse. She was worried you didn't have anyone looking out for you."

Nora stared at him.

"She called you," she said.

"She knows I know about the amnesia. She thought." He stopped. Started again. "She just wanted someone to check on you."

"She didn't tell me that."

"I know."

"She called my ex-boyfriend behind my back and didn't tell me."

"Nora."

"Don't." She said it quietly. Not angry exactly. Just firm. "I don't care why she called you. That doesn't change what the journal says. That doesn't change what I decided."

Sora looked at her for a long moment. Then his eyes moved to Caiden. "Does he know? About the deterioration?"

"That's not your business," she said.

"I'm just asking because someone should know. Someone who's actually around."

"Someone is," she said.

Sora looked at Caiden again. Something shifted in his face, not quite defeat but close to it. Like he'd come back with a specific plan and was only now realizing it wasn't going to work the way he'd mapped it.

"Okay," he said finally. "Okay. I just." He exhaled. "I'm not trying to cause problems. I genuinely just wanted to make sure you were okay."

"I'm okay," she said.

He nodded. Looked at her one more time like he wanted to say something else. Then he walked past them toward the cafeteria and she watched him go and didn't move until he was through the door.

Then she turned to Caiden.

He was already looking at her.

"My mom called him," she said.

"I heard."

"I didn't know she did that."

"I know."

She looked at the cafeteria door. The noise behind it, trays and chairs and a hundred conversations happening at once. "I need to sit down," she said.

They found a spot at the end of an empty table near the windows, away from most of the crowd. She put her bag down and sat and stared at the table for a moment.

"She must be more scared than she's letting on," she said. "My mom."

Caiden sat across from her. Didn't say anything.

"She never told me she was going to do that." Nora looked at her hands. "She sees me every morning. I read the journal, I get up, I'm fine, she acts like everything is fine. And then behind my back she's calling Sora."

"Parents do weird things when they're scared," Caiden said.

"You sound like you know."

He was quiet for a second. "My mom still sleeps with the hallway light on," he said. "Since my dad. She thinks I don't notice."

Nora looked at him.

"She never said anything about it," he said. "Just started doing it. I think it makes her feel like she can see if something goes wrong."

Nora didn't say anything for a moment. She thought about her mom in the kitchen every morning, making tea, asking how she slept, acting normal. Carrying the weight of what she knew about the timeline while Nora reread the journal and thought today was manageable.

"Does it bother you," she said. "The hallway light."

"No," he said. "She needs it."

Nora nodded slowly.

They sat there for a while without talking and the cafeteria moved around them and she thought about calling her mom after school and what she would even say. She wasn't angry. She understood it, the fear underneath it. But she wished her mom had told her.

She wished she hadn't had to find out from Sora in a hallway.

"I'm going to have to talk to her tonight," she said. "My mom."

"Yeah."

"And then I'm going to have to write about it so I remember I talked to her."

"Yeah."

She looked at him. "Does it ever seem exhausting to you. From the outside."

He thought about it. "Sometimes," he said. "But not the way you mean."

"What way then."

He looked at her across the table. "It seems exhausting that you have to work that hard just to have a normal day," he said. "Not exhausting like I don't want to be here."

She held his gaze.

Then Hana appeared out of nowhere, dropping her tray on the table between them and sitting down like she'd been part of the conversation the whole time.

"Okay so I saw the whole Sora thing in the hallway," she said, unwrapping her chopsticks. "Are we talking about it or are we pretending it didn't happen."

"We're talking about it," Nora said.

"Good." Hana pointed a chopstick at Caiden. "You handled that well by the way."

"I didn't do anything," he said.

"Exactly," Hana said. "That's what I mean."

Nora almost smiled.

Almost.

Because her phone was buzzing in her bag and she already knew before she looked at it that it was her mom and she had no idea what she was going to say when she picked up.