Eli | POV
I didn't plan it.
That's the thing I'd come back to later — I didn't engineer it, didn't manufacture the moment. I was just standing at the 47 bus stop with my earphones in, not really listening to anything, still turning that anonymous note over in my head for the hundredth time, when someone stopped beside me and said:
"Does this bus actually come or is it more of a suggestion?"
I pulled one earphone out.
Jade Calloway. Backpack, slightly out of breath, like she'd jogged to make it.
"It comes," I said. "Eventually."
"Comforting." She looked down the empty street. "How eventually?"
"Twelve minutes, maybe fifteen."
She made a face. Then she looked at me sideways — that direct look she had, the one that felt like actual contact. "We could just walk. How far are you?"
I thought about it. Twenty-five minutes on foot, maybe thirty.
"Not far," I said.
We walked.
Here is what I know about myself: I am not easy to talk to. Not because I'm rude or cold but because I'm careful. I measure what I say before I say it. I've been told I make people feel like they're being interviewed. Sable used to joke that getting a real answer out of me was like finding a parking spot downtown — technically possible but not worth the effort.
Jade did not seem to have this problem.
She just talked. And then she just listened. And she made it feel like both things were equally easy, like there was no performance involved on either end, like we were just two people walking and the conversation was simply what happened when you put us next to each other.
She asked me what I actually liked about school. Not what I was good at — what I liked.
I had to think about it for real. "English," I finally said. "When the book is good."
"What makes a book good to you?"
"When the character does something I wouldn't do but I understand exactly why they did it."
She went quiet for a second. Then: "That's a really specific answer."
"You asked a specific question."
She laughed — the real one, not polite — and something in my chest did a thing I chose not to examine too closely.
She made me laugh three times. Once about the bus, once about something her last school's mascot was that I still can't think about without smiling, and once about something small and stupid I said that she found funnier than it deserved. Each time it happened I felt it — warmth, genuine and uncomplicated, like something I'd stored away and forgotten I had.
When we reached the corner where our routes split she stopped and said, "Same time tomorrow, maybe. If the bus is still just a suggestion."
"Probably will be," I said.
She smiled and turned and I stood at that corner for probably twenty seconds longer than necessary before I started walking again.
I got home glowing. That is the only word for it.
Sable was on my front step.
She was sitting with her knees together and her bag beside her and she looked up when I came up the path, and she smiled. Wide. Immediate. The way she always smiled when she saw me.
But her eyes did something different.
They moved over my face — quick, scanning, the way you read something you're looking for a specific word in. And whatever she found there made the smile stay exactly the same while something behind it went somewhere else entirely.
"You're later than usual," she said.
"Walked home."
"Mm." She stood up. "With anyone?"
"Bus was slow. Started walking and ran into someone."
I don't know why I didn't just say Jade's name. It was available. It was true. I opened my mouth to say it and something made me keep it general instead, and I hated that I did that — hated that I was already managing information around my best friend without consciously deciding to.
Sable held the door while I unlocked it. Her shoulder brushed mine in the doorway. "I made dinner plans for us Friday," she said, easy and light. "That Thai place you like."
"Sure," I said.
She smiled again. That one reached her eyes just fine.
She stayed two hours. We watched something neither of us picked, ate the leftovers from my fridge, talked about nothing. Normal. It was completely normal and I sat in the corner of the couch and felt the note in my jacket pocket from three days ago and said nothing and she said nothing and it was all fine.
After she left I checked my phone.
There was a text from Jade. Sent forty minutes ago.
Weird day. Someone broke into my locker — stuff everywhere. My manager called me about some complaint I know nothing about. And my friend Nina hasn't texted me back since this afternoon which is genuinely not like her. Is it a full moon or something.
I sat on the edge of my bed and read it twice.
Then I typed: That's a lot for one day. You okay?
Three dots. Then:
Mostly. Just feels targeted, which is probably paranoid. Hey — someone's been asking questions about me apparently. Around school. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?
I stared at my phone.
The question sat there, patient and honest, the way Jade did everything. She wasn't accusing me. She was just asking. Directly. Because that was how she was built.
My thumbs stayed over the keyboard and didn't move.
From the kitchen came a sound.
Soft. Familiar.
Humming.
I turned slowly. The kitchen light was on. I'd turned it off when Sable left — I always turned it off — but it was on now, and through the doorway I could see a single mug on the counter, steam still rising from it.
She had a key.
Of course she had a key. She'd had a key since we were fourteen.
I looked back at my phone. At Jade's question still waiting for an answer.
The humming continued, gentle and tuneless, like everything was perfectly fine.
Like it always was.