The Recipe For Disaster

Not About Him

Mia spent two days deliberately not thinking about Theo, which mostly meant thinking about him in fifteen minute increments instead of constantly, and Priya watched her do this for the fourth time over dinner and finally said she was allowed to have a personality that wasn't currently processing a boy, and Mia said she had a personality, and Priya challenged her to name one thing about herself that wasn't related to Theo or Vanessa right now, and Mia opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, and came up with absolutely nothing, which was exactly the reaction Priya had been expecting, and she said gently that she understood it was a lot, but Mia had declared herself undeclared for a reason and had a handful of credits left before she had to pick something real, and maybe it was time to put some of this very dramatic energy toward figuring out what she actually wanted instead of just reacting to whatever everyone else around her was doing, and Mia hated when Priya was right because it happened so often, so she did something almost embarrrassingly small, she went to the campus radio station's open call for new segment pitches, something she had bookmarked back in August and never followed up on because life had gotten loud, and she sat in the back of a room full of strangers and didn't say a single word the entire meeting, and she left feeling like she had done something that belonged entirely to her, not a reaction to Theo, not a move in whatever game Vanessa was playing, just hers, completely hers, and it wasn't a plot twist, it didn't fix anything that was broken, but it felt like the first full breath she had taken in weeks, and three days later Vanessa found her there, which was its own kind of plot twist, because Mia was alone in the station's equipment closet failing badly to understand a soundboard when the door opened and Vanessa stepped in looking like she'd had to talk herself into the walk over the entire way, and she said she needed five minutes, and she needed Mia to not say anything until she was finished, because if she got interrupted she would lose her nerve and the whole thing would have been for nothing, and Mia, too startled to do anything else, just nodded, and Vanessa began, her voice flat and controlled like she had rehearsed this in front of a mirror until it stopped shaking, she said her older sister had gotten into every school she applied to, valedictorian, full ride, the entire package, and Vanessa had gotten into exactly one school on a partial scholarship, and her parents had not stopped comparing the two of them since she was fourteen years old, and Theo had been the first person who ever looked at her like she was the interesting one instead of the almost, the backup, the also ran, and when he ended things it hadn't even been dramatic, he had simply gotten bored the way people eventually do, and then she had watched him fall for someone who didn't even try, who just showed up with a disco ball and got everything Vanessa had spent years performing for without ever needing to perform at all, and Mia tried to say her name but Vanessa said she had asked for five minutes and she meant it, she kept going saying she had told herself the screenshot was about honesty, but it wasn't, she had wanted Mia to feel as unstable as she had felt for years, and that wasn't an excuse, she knew it wasn't, she just needed Mia to understand that none of it had really been about her specifically, it had been about every single thing Vanessa had spent years trying not to feel, and Mia happened to be standing in the blast radius when it all finally went off, and the room stayed quiet except for the low electrical hum of the soundboard Mia still hadn't figured out how to use, and finally Mia said that what Vanessa had done still wasn't okay, it had hurt, it was still hurting, and Vanessa said she knew, and Mia exhaled slowly, feeling some tight knot in her chest loosen by half a turn, and said that it was still the first true thing Vanessa had said to her since orientation week, so thank you for that, she supposed, even though she was still mad at her, and Vanessa said she was allowed to be both, and for the first time the smile that crossed her face wasn't glassy or performed, it looked almost like relief, she said she would be mad at herself too, and it wasn't forgiveness exactly, it wasn't friendship yet either, but it was the first conversation between them that hadn't been a performance for someone else's benefit, and standing in a closet full of cables neither of them knew how to use, it felt like the actual beginning of something, just not the something either of them had expected when the semester started.