The Recipe For Disaster

Actual Easy Quiet

Vanessa showed up at the radio station again on a Thursday and this time she didn't look like she had talked herself into anything, she just knocked on the open door and held up two cups of coffee like a peace offering and said she had figured out that the soundboard wasn't as complicated as it looked and Mia raised an eyebrow and Vanessa said she had watched three tutorial videos the night before which was either impressive or concerning depending on how you looked at it and Mia stepped aside and let her in because she was curious and also because the coffee smelled good and they stood side by side at the board and Vanessa pointed out which channel controlled the main feed and which one Mia had been accidentally muting every time she thought she was turning up the volume and Mia stared at it for a moment and then said that explained a lot and Vanessa almost smiled and it was different from every other smile Mia had seen on her, smaller and less constructed, the kind that happened before a person remembered to manage their expression, and they stayed in the closet for an hour that neither of them had planned on and somewhere in the middle of it the conversation shifted from the soundboard to other things, small things at first, what they were studying, what they had expected college to feel like versus what it actually felt like, and Mia found herself saying things she hadn't said out loud yet, that she had come here with no plan on purpose because every plan she had made before had been about what other people expected of her and she had needed one year of not knowing before she could figure out what she actually wanted, and Vanessa was quiet for a moment and then said she understood that more than Mia might think, because everything she had done for the past four years had been a plan designed to impress people who were always going to compare her to someone else anyway, and the plan had never once made her feel like enough, and Mia said that sounded exhausting, and Vanessa said it was, it really was, and there was something almost relieved in her voice saying it, like she had been waiting for someone to just agree with her instead of telling her to try harder, and Mia didn't push the conversation further than that, she had learned by now that Vanessa opened like a door with a stiff hinge, slowly and on her own timeline, and pushing only made it worse, so she just handed back the coffee cup she had borrowed and said same time next Thursday and Vanessa said she supposed so and picked up her bag and left, and Mia stood alone in the closet for a minute thinking that this was possibly the strangest friendship she had ever accidentally started, if friendship was even the right word yet, and across campus in a completely separate development Priya had started spending suspicious amounts of time studying with a boy from her biology lab named Daniel who she described exclusively as her study partner despite the fact that she checked her phone every four minutes and had laughed so hard at something he texted her that she had knocked her cereal off the table and Mia pointed this out and Priya said she was projecting, and Mia said she was deflecting, and Priya said they were both communication majors now apparently, and Mia said she was still undeclared, and Priya said for how much longer, and Mia didn't have an answer to that yet but the question sat with her the rest of the day in a way that felt less like pressure and more like something waking up, and the radio station was part of that, she had gone back every week since the open call and had started helping with the Friday night segment, nothing on air yet, just behind the scenes, learning how the whole thing worked, and she liked it in a way that felt different from anything she had liked before, not because she was good at it immediately but because she wanted to get better, which was its own kind of sign, and Theo had been leaving her alone in the way she had asked him to, taking the normal route, showing up at the same hall dinners and common room evenings without making it a thing, and it should have felt like enough, and mostly it did, except for the occasional moment when she caught him looking at her from across the room with an expression that was trying very hard to be casual and failing, and she would look away first because she had promised herself she would stop letting that look do what it wanted to do to her until she was sure, really sure, not just swept up in the specific gravity of him, and then one evening she was alone at the common room table working on a paper that wasn't going well, everyone else had drifted off to bed or study rooms, and Theo came in to get water from the kitchen and stopped when he saw her, and she said he didn't have to leave, and he sat down across from her with his water and his own laptop and they worked in silence for an hour and it was the most comfortable Mia had felt in weeks, not the charged uncomfortable silence of two people pretending not to feel something, but actual easy quiet, the kind you can only have with someone once you have already been through something real with them, and at some point without either of them planning it they started talking, not about the screenshot or Vanessa or any of it, just about normal things, the paper she was writing, the philosophy class he was barely surviving, the professor who assigned forty pages of reading every single night as though students had no other obligations, and Mia said the paper was about whether art could be considered honest if the person who made it was lying about everything else in their life, and Theo thought about it seriously instead of just giving her a quick answer, and he said he thought maybe the art was the only place where the honesty could survive, like if everything on the outside was performance then the thing you made in private was where the truth ended up, and Mia looked at him for a moment and said that was actually a good answer, and he said he had his moments, and she said she was starting to notice that, and they looked at each other across the table and something settled between them, not a resolution exactly, not a declaration, but a quiet acknowledgment that whatever this was it wasn't going away and neither of them actually wanted it to, and Mia went back to her paper and Theo went back to his philosophy reading and they stayed there until the common room lights dimmed automatically at midnight and they both packed up at the same time and walked back down the hall in the same direction because they lived three doors apart which they had both somehow managed to temporarily forget, and at her door she said goodnight and he said goodnight and she went inside and leaned against the closed door in the dark for a moment, and Priya's voice came from her bed saying well, and Mia said nothing happened, and Priya said something happened, and Mia said go to sleep, and Priya said she was just saying, and Mia said she knew what she was just saying, and she got into bed and stared at the ceiling for a while with the disco ball catching the light from the window and scattering small quiet shapes across the walls, and she thought about what Theo had said about art being the place where truth survives when everything else is performance, and she thought about Vanessa rehearsing her confession in front of a mirror until it stopped shaking, and she thought about herself sitting in the back of a radio station meeting not saying a word but feeling more like herself than she had in months, and she thought that maybe the thing about finding out who you were was that it happened in small unremarkable moments that only made sense when you looked back at them, and she was probably in the middle of several of those right now without fully understanding them yet, and that was okay, she was starting to think that was actually okay, and the disco ball kept turning slowly in the dark and Mia closed her eyes and for the first time since the semester started, she didn't feel like she was waiting for the next thing to go wrong.