The Stranger
1836 Words
Nora
Wednesday · 6:14 AM
Off-Campus Apartment, Los Angeles
The 6 AM tutoring session ended at seven-fifteen, which was fifteen minutes late because her student — a sophomore named Tyler who was genuinely trying and genuinely terrible at close reading — had finally, finally understood what she meant by the difference between what a text said and what it was doing, and she hadn't had the heart to cut it off mid-breakthrough. She walked back to her apartment in the grey early morning light with her bag over one shoulder and her coffee going cold in her hand and the particular feeling of having actually helped someone sitting quietly in her chest, which was the feeling she worked four jobs to find and never had enough time to fully enjoy before the next thing started.
She had a nine o'clock lecture. An editorial feedback deadline at noon. A library shift at two. A bookstore shift starting at six that would end at ten, after which she had approximately two hundred pages of manuscript notes still to finish for Friday.
She had also, somewhere between Tyler's breakthrough and the walk home, thought about the wrong number twice.
She was aware of this. She was very deliberately aware of it, the way you're aware of a sound in a building you thought was empty — noted, catalogued, not yet explained.
Four jobs. She had told him that. She hadn't meant to — the number had come out before the part of her brain that managed what she said to strangers had caught up with the part that was just talking. He'd asked and she'd answered, which she didn't normally do, which was the part that bothered her slightly if she let it.
She let herself into her apartment. Put the cold coffee down. Looked at her phone.
(iMessage · Wednesday 7:22 AM)
Wrong Number:
How was the 6 AM?
She stood in her kitchen in her coat, bag still on, and read it.
He had remembered. She had mentioned it in passing — the 6 AM tutoring session, the student who was a morning person — and he had remembered and asked about it, which was the kind of small thing that wasn't small at all if you paid attention to it.
She paid attention to things. It was both her best quality and the source of approximately seventy percent of her problems.
(iMessage · Wednesday 7:24 AM)
Nora:
He finally got it. What close reading actually means. Took three weeks but it landed today.
Wrong Number:
That's a good feeling.
Nora:
The best one, actually. When something clicks for someone.
You sound like you know what that feels like.
Wrong Number:
On the court sometimes. When a play works exactly the way you saw it in your head before it happened.
Nora:
That's the same thing. Recognising a pattern before it fully exists.
Wrong Number:
I've never heard anyone describe basketball like that before.
Nora:
I've never played basketball. I'm working from inference.
Am I wrong?
Wrong Number:
No. You're not wrong.
She took her coat off. Made fresh coffee. Sat at her desk with the manuscript open in front of her and her phone face up beside it, which was against the rules, which she acknowledged and did not fix.
The thing about the wrong number was that he was easy to talk to. She was aware this was a dangerous thing to notice — easy to talk to could mean a lot of things, could be a performance, could be the specific practiced ease of someone who was good at making people feel heard without actually being interested. She had experienced that before. She knew what it felt like from the inside, the warmth of it and then the cold when it stopped.
But this didn't feel like that. There was no angle to it, no direction it was trying to go. He asked about her tutoring session because he'd remembered she had one, not because it gave him anything. He talked about basketball without making it a personality. He said no, you're not wrong simply, without qualification, without the slight pause that preceded a compliment designed to land a particular way.
She was an editor. She spent her days in the space between what language said and what it meant. She knew the difference between honest and performed honest. This was honest.
Which was precisely why she needed to be careful.
— — —
Nora · Wednesday · 11:45 AM · Hartwell Campus
She was cutting across the east quad toward the library when it happened.
She heard him before she saw him — his voice carrying the way it always did, easy and certain and occupying the full available space, the way everything about Ethan Calloway occupied the full available space. He was twenty feet away with two of his teammates, coming in the opposite direction, and she had already decided to not look up, to do the thing she always did which was simply not engage, not give him the reaction, move through the interaction the way you move through bad weather — head down, forward motion, done.
And then: "Watch where you're going, four-eyes."
She kept walking. Said, without stopping, without looking at him: "Original."
And that was it. That was the whole thing.
Except it wasn't, quite, because as she walked away she felt the specific hot pressure behind her eyes that she refused to let become anything, the tightness that came not from him exactly — not from the words, she had heard worse, Becca had said worse before nine o'clock this morning — but from the contrast of it. From knowing, now, after two nights of messages, that there was a person underneath that, and watching him choose not to be that person the moment she was standing in front of him.
That was the thing that stung. Not the name. The choice.
She made it to the library. Shelved twelve books. Helped a first-year find a reference for an essay on postcolonial theory. Ate half a granola bar over the circulation desk at one-thirty because she had forgotten to eat breakfast and this was what was in her bag.
She did not text the wrong number all day.
Not because she was angry. She was, a little, but that wasn't it. More because she needed to think about what she was doing — what the late-night messages actually were, what she was getting out of them, whether she was building something in her head out of text messages from a stranger that had no business being built.
She was good at that. Building things in her head. Filling in the gaps of people with the best available version of them and then being surprised when the actual person showed up differently.
She had done it before. She was not doing it again.
— — —
Nora · Wednesday · 11:12 PM · Her Apartment
She got home at ten-forty, dropped her bag by the door, and called Liam.
He picked up on the second ring the way he always did, which was one of her favourite things about him — the way he answered like he had been waiting, like her call was always the one he was expecting. He was seventeen and brilliant and living in a house where his sister's scholarship was used as a dinner table punchline by a man who had never earned anything on merit in his life, and he answered the phone like she was the best part of his day every single time.
"How's LA?" he said.
"Warm. How's the bio exam?"
"Destroyed it."
"Obviously."
"Mum made your pasta thing tonight. The one with the lemon."
Something tightened briefly in her chest. "How is she?"
A pause that told her everything and that Liam, who was seventeen and brilliant and also fiercely protective of her in the specific way of someone who knew she carried too much, deliberately kept short. "She's okay. Dale's away until Friday."
"Good," Nora said, and meant it more than the word could hold.
They talked for twenty minutes — his classes, her manuscript, a book he'd found at the school library that he thought she'd like, a funny thing that happened at lunch. The ordinary architecture of two people keeping each other anchored across a distance. When she hung up she sat for a moment in the quiet of her apartment with the phone in her lap and felt the specific homesickness that wasn't really for the house — she was never homesick for the house — but for Liam, for her mother, for the version of that life that existed in the twenty minutes of a phone call before she had to put it down.
She picked up her phone. Opened the thread. Looked at it.
Typed.
(iMessage · Wednesday 11:17 PM)
Nora:
Can I ask you something?
Wrong Number:
You're asking if you can ask. You told me not to do that.
Nora:
Fair point. Do you ever feel like the person you are when nobody's watching is completely different from the one you show people?
She watched the three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again. He was thinking about it — actually thinking, not just composing, which she could tell somehow even through a phone screen.
(iMessage · Wednesday 11:19 PM)
Wrong Number
Yes.
Every single day.
Why?
Nora:
Just wondering if that ever gets exhausting. Maintaining both versions.
Wrong Number:
More than I know how to say.
Does it for you?
Nora:
I don't have two versions. I just have one that most people don't bother to look for.
Wrong Number:
Their loss.
She read that last message for a long time.
Two words. No punctuation. No performance. Just the flat, certain, completely unqualified statement of it.
Their loss.
She thought about Ethan Calloway in the hallway that morning, saying four-eyes without looking at her, the campus reflex of it, the ease. And she thought about this — about their loss in the dark at eleven o'clock at night from a stranger who didn't know her face or her name or the fact that she was the person he walked past every single day without seeing.
She thought: one of these is the real one.
She thought: I think I know which.
She put her phone down. Turned off the light. Lay in the dark and listened to the city outside and thought, for longer than she intended, about a boy she didn't know and a boy she did and the unsettling, persistent, deeply inconvenient possibility that they might be the same person.
She told herself she was tired. That it was late. That she was pattern-matching on nothing.
She didn't believe herself.
She fell asleep anyway.
"She thought: one of these is the real one. She thought: I think I know which. And then she thought about the unsettling possibility that they might be the same person."
End of Chapter Four
- Writer
