“David feeds me.”
“That boy’s a saint. You tell him Martha says he’s got a standing invitation for pot roast if he ever makes it to Nebraska.”
“I’ll tell him.”
A pause. The kettle. The creak of Daddy’s chair. The specific, particular silence of a mother listening to the things her daughter isn’t saying.
“Elsa, honey.” Softer now. “You sound thin again.”
“I’m fine, Mama. Just busy with the thesis.”
The lie comes out smooth. Practiced. I’ve been lying to Martha Lively for weeks now, and each time the skill of it horrifies me a little less, and that’s how I know I’m losing something. Not weight, not sleep, not grades, but some essential Elsa-ness, some honesty that used to live in my voice like a second pulse, and it’s going quiet.
“You’d tell me.” Not a question this time. A statement. Martha Lively, who can read her daughter through a phone line the way a farmer reads a sky, isn’t asking. She’s holding up a mirror and waiting for me to look.
“I will, I promise.”
I hang up. I sit on my bed. The phone is warm in my hand. My fingers are wrapped around it, perfectly still, no circle on the case, no absent tracing of the edge.
Iowa watches me from the ceiling. It has no opinion.
THURSDAY. THIRD ROW.
He enters at two minutes past the hour. He’s wearing the navy suit, the one I catalogued during the first semester asformal, no rolled sleeves, closed. His hair is perfect. His posture is the posture of a man who hasn’t lost a single minute of sleep, who hasn’t hit his desk with his fist, who hasn’t written a note in Italian that his control couldn’t contain.
He looks the same.
I hate that he looks the same.
The lecture is on vulnerability scanning. How to search a system for weaknesses before an attacker does. His voice moves through the hall with its usual authority, low, accented, pulling two hundred students into attention, and I write every word and I don’t look up and my hands don’t move except to write.
Thirty minutes in, David’s pen stops.
I feel it more than see it—the cessation of motion beside me, David’s constant idle scribbling going quiet. I glance sideways. He’s not writing. He’s looking at me. Then at the podium. Then back at me.
He doesn’t say anything. David, who always has something to say, who fills silence with easy warmth and protein bars and batting averages, is quiet. He’s looking at my hands.
My hands are still. No circles.
After class, he falls into step beside me. Doesn’t speak for a full block, and it’s unusual enough that I notice.
“Lively.”
“Burnes.”
“You stopped doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The circle thing. With your finger.” He’s not looking at me. He’s looking straight ahead, hands in his jacket pockets, cap pulled low. “You used to do it all the time. On your notebook, your coffee cup, your bag. You did it constantly. And now you don’t.”
My hand is at my side. My fingers are loose. They don’t reach for my strap or my wrist or any of the surfaces where my circles used to live.
“I didn’t know you noticed that.”
“I notice stuff about you, Elsa.” No edge. No agenda. Just the plain fact of a friend who has been paying attention. “You stopped about two weeks ago. Right around the time you stopped eating lunch unless I physically bring you food and started looking at me like you’re hearing me from underwater.”
My throat tightens.
