THE ART OF BEING UNREMARKABLE
1183 Words
Three months in a row,” Nora said. “You’ve volunteered for the kitchen supply run three months in a row.”
“I like helping.”
“Nobody likes helping that much.” She handed me a coffee and sat on the community center table instead of a chair, legs swinging. “You show up for everything. Every committee, every run, every communal dinner. It’s starting to look like a personality disorder.”
“Or good character.”
“Or something to prove.” She smiled when she said it so it landed like a joke, and I smiled back so it stayed one.
That was how Nora and I worked. She got close to the edge of something real and I redirected with enough warmth that she never felt pushed away. Four years of friendship and she still thought she knew me. In the ways that mattered to her, she did. She knew how I took my coffee. She knew I went quiet when something was wrong instead of loud. She knew which pack members made my shoulders tighten and which ones made me genuinely laugh.
She did not know anything that could hurt me.
I kept it that way because I loved her, not in spite of it.
“Check-in notices came,” she said, tone dropping into mild complaint.
“I saw.”
“Wednesday. My one free morning.” She picked up a pen and turned it between her fingers. “I don’t understand why it has to be him personally. Why can’t one of the junior officers do it?”
“He runs them himself every quarter. It’s always been that way.”
“It’s the way he does it that gets me.” She looked at her coffee cup. “He asks the normal questions but the whole time you’re talking you get this feeling that your answers aren’t really the point. Like he’s listening to something you’re not saying.”
I kept my expression easy and open. “Has he ever been unfair?”
“No. Never. Everyone respects him.” She paused. “They just don’t relax around him. Even the people who genuinely like him. There’s something about him that keeps a room at a certain temperature.” She shrugged. “Maybe that’s just what Betas are like. I wouldn’t know.”
I stored every single word of it.
At ten I loaded the supply cart alone. Nora had committee minutes and I had spent two years making sure this particular errand never needed company. I took the main path out past the gardens where it turned to gravel and the neat edges of the compound gave way to something quieter and less tended.
The margin housing sat at the far end of that quiet. Six small units, plain and functional, the kind of buildings that said nobody had spent much time thinking about comfort when they built them. Four occupied. I knew all four names.
Ferris answered his door with paint on both hands and his sleeves pushed up, mid-project same as every month. He was sixty and had been out here for eleven years and he had the specific energy of a man who had decided to fill every available hour with something he built himself. He helped me with the boxes and talked about the shelving he was finishing for his front room, detailed and cheerful, and I listened and asked the right questions because I genuinely liked Ferris and because genuine interest was the only kind worth having.
Bette was in her small garden when I reached unit three. Fifty-three, bad shoulder, the kind of quiet gratitude that never made you feel observed for receiving it. She took the delivery and thanked me the way she always did, like it was a private thing between the two of us and nobody else needed to know.
I worked down the row and saved Petra’s unit for last.
She was at her bench when I pushed the door open. Cedar and bitterness and that underlying green smell that meant a new batch was finished. She did not turn around.
“Second shelf,” she said. “I strengthened the joint compound in the recovery vials.”
I found the vials and put them in my bag. “Supply of the base herb?”
“Sufficient.” A pause, and then, same flat voice, same tone she used for everything: “The Beta spoke to Ferris last week.”
I stopped moving.
“About what.”
“Who moves between here and the main compound. What comes in from outside through informal channels.” She kept working. “Ferris was unhelpful, which is what Ferris does best.”
“Does he have anything specific?”
“He has a pattern of questions that points toward something specific.” She turned then and looked at me straight, the way she looked at things she wanted to make sure landed. “He is not guessing randomly. He is building toward something.”
I picked up my bag. The vials sat at the bottom of it, wrapped in a spare scarf, six of them.
“Go home the long way,” she said. “And be exact at the check-in. Not just careful. Exact.”
The long way added ten minutes and took me around the back of the garden wall, behind the last two units, and up to the eastern gate path. Two and a half years and nobody had ever questioned why I walked it.
I came around the last bend and stopped.
Damon Reeves was standing at the exterior wall of Bette’s unit with a clipboard. Close enough that I had already committed to the path before I registered he was there.
He heard my footsteps and turned his head.
Not a startled turn. The unhurried turn of someone who had already placed the sound and was just confirming.
His eyes moved to my face. Then to my bag. Then back to my face.
The bag had six vials in it.
“Miss Maddox.”
“Beta Reeves.”
Still. Steady. That quality he had of taking up exactly the right amount of space without effort. He did not ask what I was carrying. Did not look at the bag again. Did not shift his weight forward.
He stepped to the side.
I walked past him. Same pace I had been walking the whole path, shoulders level, breathing through my nose. Twelve steps to the corner. I know because I counted every one.
I turned it.
And then I walked faster, and faster, until the margin housing was out of sight and my hand was pressed flat against the outside of my bag and my heart was going so hard I could feel it in my jaw.
He had looked at the bag.
He had said nothing.
And in five days I had to sit across a table from him and answer questions about my health.
- Writer
