Thursday arrives the way Thursdays do: without ceremony, without the manufactured optimism of a Monday or the relief of a Friday, simply as the next thing after Wednesday, doing its job with no particular enthusiasm.
Ori is at his bench by seven fifty. He got here early because sleep left him before the alarm did, peeling away somewhere around five in the morning and not returning no matter how many times he adjusted his position or rearranged the pillow. This happens sometimes. His mind has a habit of staying on after the rest of him wants to stop, running quietly in the background like a process he does not know how to close.
He has his notebook open. He has his coffee in a paper cup from the kiosk near the east entrance, which is worse coffee than he makes in his room but which required him to walk somewhere and speak to someone and exchange money for something, all of which are small acts of participation in the world that he finds useful on mornings when the world feels slightly too large to enter all at once.
He watches the quad.
At eight seventeen, Sela Miren arrives.
She does not arrive the way other students arrive, which is to say she does not simply appear somewhere and begin existing in it. Sela's arrival is an event in the mild but genuine sense of the word: a shift in the social atmosphere of whatever space she enters, the way the pressure in a room changes slightly when a window is opened. Students notice her. Not all of them do it consciously, and almost none of them would admit to doing it at all, but the noticing happens, a small collective orientation, like flowers that do not know they are turning toward the light.
She is with three people this morning instead of the usual two. Ori catalogues them without meaning to. The girl on her left is Pemi, who is in his Wednesday sociology lecture and who he knows only as someone who answers questions with a confidence inversely proportional to their accuracy. The tall one behind Sela is a name he does not have, a boy from what Ori assumes is one of the other universities, because his face is familiar in the way that social media makes faces familiar, seen often enough on a screen to register as known without any actual knowing attached. The fourth person he does not recognize at all.
Sela herself is wearing a cream colored coat that is too elegant for a Thursday morning lecture but which she wears the way she wears everything, which is as though the clothing chose her and is grateful for the opportunity. Her hair is down today. Ori notes this with the automatic precision of someone whose brain has been cataloguing her small variations for two years, down versus tied up, the specific way she walks when she is in a hurry versus when she has time, which earring she favors on mornings when she dresses quickly. He has never once chosen to catalogue these things. His mind simply does it, the way it collects the smell of the bakery and the shape of the water stain, filing details without permission or purpose.
She is laughing again. She laughs easily, which is one of the things people say about Sela Miren when they describe her to someone who has not yet seen her, that she laughs easily, that she makes you feel as though whatever you said was exactly the right thing to say. Ori has read this in comment sections more times than he can count, always with a mild private skepticism, because he has also watched Sela from close enough to notice the fraction of a second before the laugh arrives, the tiny calculation that happens behind her eyes, the decision. She is generous with her laughter but it is a generosity she manages, which is not the same as effortless.
He does not think this makes her dishonest. He thinks it makes her practiced. There is a difference.
Sela Miren has been famous, in the specific and limited way that a person can be famous within the contained universe of a city's university circuit, since before Ori arrived at Vaelmund University. By the time he walked through the admissions gate two years ago, her name was already a reference point. People used it the way they used landmarks: she studies near the Sela Miren building, which is not actually called that but which is the library she is photographed outside of most often. He heard her name in his orientation week, twice, from two different people who did not know each other, both using it casually, as though it were a word he should already know.
He looked her up that night on his phone.
Her profile at the time had sixty-two thousand followers. He remembers the number because it seemed impossible to him then, that a person his age in the same city he was now living in had been seen and chosen by sixty-two thousand people. He scrolled through her posts for longer than he would admit to anyone, trying to understand the mechanism of it, what it was about the images and the short videos that made people want to keep watching. He did not come to a clean conclusion. There was something in the way she looked directly at the camera, not performing directness but actually giving it, as though she were speaking specifically to whoever was on the other side, as though the sixty-two thousand were each one person and she was talking to them individually.
He closed the app and went to sleep and did not think about it again until the following Monday, when he walked into his first literature seminar and Sela Miren was sitting two rows ahead of him.
She was not in his seminar group. She had walked into the wrong room and did not realize it for six minutes, during which time she sat with her bag on the desk and her phone face down and her posture completely comfortable, as though any room she sat in was by definition the room she was supposed to be in. When the seminar leader gently informed her of the error, Sela gathered her things with a small apologetic smile that somehow resulted in three of the other students also apologizing, reflexively, for nothing they had done.
Ori watched her leave. He opened his notebook. He wrote three sentences of notes before realizing they were not about the seminar topic.
That was two years ago.
Now he watches her cross the quad for what is statistically somewhere in the region of four hundred and thirtieth time, a number he has not actually calculated and would not want to, and he feels the thing he always feels when he watches her from this distance: something that is not quite longing and not quite admiration but lives in the space between them, a feeling that does not have a clean name and which he has chosen, over two years, to leave unnamed.
Sela stops near the fountain at the quad's center to say something to Pemi. She turns slightly as she talks, and for one moment she is facing Ori's bench, though she is looking at Pemi and not at the bench and certainly not at the person sitting on it. In the context of her field of vision, Ori is background. He is part of the undifferentiated campus texture: benches and pigeons and students who are not anyone she needs to look at.
He looks at her anyway.
He is doing this, he understands, with the dedication of someone practicing a skill they will never perform. All of this watching, all of this cataloguing, all of the accumulated detail stored in whatever part of his brain has appointed itself archivist of Sela Miren, none of it is leading anywhere. It is not building toward something. It is not a strategy. It is simply what his attention does when she is in range, and he has made peace with it the way you make peace with a habit you lack the motivation to break.
What he does not let himself examine too closely is the question of what the habit is protecting him from.
Across the quad, Sela finishes her conversation with Pemi and turns toward the social sciences building. As she walks, she takes her phone from her coat pocket and glances at something on the screen, and even this, the small private gesture of someone checking their notifications, has the quality of being watched that everything Sela does seems to have, as though she exists in a permanent gentle spotlight that she did not ask for and has simply learned to inhabit.
Ninety thousand followers, Ori thinks. And counting.
He looks down at his notebook.
The page is blank again.
He tries to remember the last time he wrote something in the notebook that was not lecture notes or a shopping list or a sentence started and then crossed out. He cannot remember. There was a period in his first year when he used to write things in it at night, observations about the city and the people in it, nothing with ambition attached, just the small precise notations of someone who notices things and has nowhere in particular to put them. He stopped at some point. He cannot identify when or why.
He caps his pen. He drinks the rest of his bad coffee. He watches the last of Sela's cream colored coat disappear through the social sciences door and then he turns his attention back to the quad, which is full of students who are not Sela Miren and who are going about their morning with the ordinary momentum of people who have not lost any particular part of the morning to watching someone they have never spoken to.
Ori stands. He adjusts his bag. He goes to his first lecture.
In the lecture hall, he takes his usual seat in the fourth row on the left side, third from the aisle. He opens his notebook to a fresh page. His pen is ready. The lecturer arrives and begins talking about media framing theory, which is directly relevant to his degree and which Ori will later summarize in seven and a half lines of cramped handwriting that contain, buried among the academic notation, one sentence that has nothing to do with media framing.
The sentence says: I don't think I'm ever going to say anything.
He crosses it out before the lecture ends.
He crosses it out so thoroughly that it cannot be read back.
But he knows what it said.