11. Calliope
Calliope
The vending machine on the second floor hums like it has secrets and no intention of sharing them.
I stand in front of it with my new phone in one hand, my office keys looped around my finger, and a campus ID that still feels temporary clipped to the hem of my cardigan.
The machine offers pretzels, granola bars, peanut butter crackers, and a row of chocolate I’ve stared at for long enough that the hall light flickers off and leaves me in the glow of the buttons.
I should go grocery shopping. I’ve been telling myself that since Monday, which means I’ve been telling myself that for three days while the mini fridge in the hotel holds a bottle of water, two yogurts I haven’t touched, and the small container of grapes I bought Monday.
The university put me up somewhere nice while I look for housing, an extended-stay hotel with clean carpet, polite front-desk staff, a kitchenette I keep avoiding, and pillows so white they make me feel like I’m leaving evidence every time I lie down.
It’s generous. It’s comfortable. It’s better than a motel room off the interstate with an AC unit that rattles all night, and somehow that makes it harder to hate.
The machine refuses my first dollar. I smooth it against my thigh and feed it back in, watching the little green light accept what I’m apparently still allowed to give.
Peanut butter crackers fall with a thud, then a packet of trail mix after I press the wrong number and decide that counts as variety.
I buy a bottle of water too because the pills in my desk drawer need something better than coffee, and because Dr. Patel’s voice has started living in the back of my mind with the same quiet firmness as every person who has seen the tremor in my hands and pretended not to look too long.
My office is three doors down from the faculty lounge, tucked at the end of a hall that goes silent after five-thirty except for the building settling and the soft buzz of old fluorescent lights.
Someone taped my name to the door the first morning I arrived, Dr. Calliope Monroe printed in neat black letters beneath the laminated title of Visiting Lecturer.
I stood outside staring at it for too long that day, keys in my palm, waiting for the letters to look like they belonged to someone who hadn’t been served paperwork in an administrative wing and told not to return to her own home.
Two weeks later, the sign still feels like a borrowed coat.
I unlock the office and nudge the door open with my hip. The space smells like old paper, dry-erase markers, and dust warmed by the radiator. There is a faint trace of Dash too, nearly gone now, and I hate how quickly my body notices what my mind is trying not to name.
My desk is covered in proof that I’ve been functioning.
Printed rosters. Student emails flagged for later.
A revised syllabus with my notes in the margins.
A stack of library forms I’ve signed in every place someone put a sticky arrow.
There’s an onboarding packet half-filled out beneath the keyboard, the page asking for emergency contact still blank even though HR sent a reminder this morning with three exclamation points and a smiley face I stared at until my eyes watered.
The first day, I wrote Sloane’s name without thinking. Then I crossed it out so hard the pen tore through the paper. Idris' name came next and I had to leave the room.
Now the form sits under a folder, still blank. HR can wait one more day.
I drop the crackers beside my laptop and sit. The chair squeaks, and the sound makes my shoulder seize around the bite until pain shoots down my arm. A low, hot irritation burns beneath the skin.
Sloane’s bond sits in my shoulder like something infected with silence. I’ve kept the door shut as tightly as I know how, and my body keeps reminding me bonds weren’t made to be held closed by stubbornness and medication and fear.
The pill bottle waits in the top drawer beside a pack of sticky notes and two pens I stole from orientation. I take one before I can talk myself into waiting, then wash it down with vending-machine water that tastes faintly like plastic. I swallow the pill and wait for the ache to dull.
My new phone lights when I set the bottle down.
Nothing important. A campus alert about parking lot maintenance.
A reminder from the hotel about housekeeping tomorrow.
One student asking whether “response paper” means one page or “like, spiritually one page,” which might have made me smile two months ago.
The new number should’ve made everything clean.
That was what I told myself when the old service finally died and the screen became a brick I kept charging anyway.
New plan. New voicemail. New digits no one from the old house has.
But the phone restored from backup during setup, and all the old threads slid into place like ghosts invited through a door I thought I’d locked.
Sloane’s name is still there.
Idris’ too.
Theo’s thread has the little photo he took of the blue bowl on the kitchen island the morning after he found it in the cabinet and decided it looked like mine.
There are older messages from Sloane about dinner and meetings and don’t forget your scarf, baby, and a voice memo from Idris I still haven’t been able to delete because the thumbnail alone can wreck me if I’m tired enough.
Then last week sits inside the phone like a wound with timestamps.
We need to discuss the bond removal properly.
I don’t open the message. I don’t have to.
My body knows the wording. My stomach knows the drop.
My hand knows the way it went numb around the phone in the grocery-store parking lot when I read it the first time and thought, stupidly, wildly, that some piece of Sloane had still been coming for me until finding me meant cutting himself out of my skin.
I scroll past it anyway, slow enough to punish myself.
The conversation doesn’t change. There’s no second message saying ignore that, no apology, no frantic explanation, no proof that the man who bit me ever felt the bond go cold and tore the world apart trying to understand why.
There’s only the neat little bubble of words wearing his name and all the silence that followed.
My thumb hovers over Idris’ thread next.
His line never connected right after I left.
At first, it rang once, then died. Later it started going nowhere at all, not even voicemail, just that sterile little tone that made me feel erased more completely than anger would have.
Idris would’ve been cleaner than Sloane if he wanted me gone.
That thought has kept me company in too many hotel nights.
He’d know how to close a door without leaving splinters. He’d make sure the lock clicked.
The office phone rings, and I jump hard enough to knock the trail mix off the desk.
It takes me a second to understand the sound. No one calls the office line except administrative assistants and the occasional student who thinks email is haunted. I grab the receiver after the third ring, my heart high in my throat. “Dr. Monroe.”
“Callie?” Mara’s voice is thin through the campus phone, like distance and bad wiring have stretched it out. “Oh, thank god. Your cell didn’t go through, and I didn’t know if this number would actually connect. The directory finally updated.”
My eyes close. For a second, I don’t care that I’m in an office with my dinner in plastic and a pill dissolving sour in my stomach.
Mara sounds real. Mara sounds like before.
“I got a new number,” I say, though she already knows something like that or she wouldn’t have tried the office line. “I should’ve sent it.”
“You didn’t exactly leave during normal circumstances.
” She lowers her voice on the last words, and I can picture her in her own office back at Briarwick, door shut, blinds angled, one hand pressed to her forehead the way she does when policy is being stupid on purpose.
“I’ve been trying to find out what happened without getting you or myself dragged into something worse. ”
My hand closes around the edge of the desk. “Mara.”
“I know. I know you probably don’t want to talk about it.
I’m not asking for details.” Her breath shakes once, then steadies.
“There are whispers everywhere. Nobody’s saying anything useful, which means the lawyers have been through.
Faculty, admin, security, the people who were in the building that day.
A bunch of them had to sign paperwork saying they won’t discuss the incident unless it’s with police or authorized investigators because there’s an active investigation.
That’s the phrase everyone keeps using. Active investigation. ”
The office tilts in a small, unpleasant way. I press my shoulder back against the chair until the bite throbs. “Investigation into what?”
“That’s the thing.” Mara’s voice gets tighter.
“No one will say. They act like saying your name too loudly will summon legal. I tried to ask whether someone had spoken to your department, whether anyone had checked on you, whether any of this was about a student complaint or campus safety or pack law, and everyone just got careful. You know that careful voice people use when they’ve decided the policy matters more than the person in front of them? ”
I laugh once, but it’s a broken sound. “Yeah.”
“No one has come to talk to me,” she says, and now anger pushes through the worry.
“Not the police. Not an attorney. Not campus security. No one has asked about you. No one asked what you were like the week before or whether you seemed afraid or whether this lines up with anything I know about you. When I tried to reach out and say I had information, they transferred me three times and then told me not to insert myself into an active matter.”
My throat tightens. I look at the blank emergency-contact form under the folder, at the crossed-out ghost of Sloane’s name I can still see through the paper if I know where to look. “Maybe they don’t need character witnesses for someone who already signed the wrong paper.”
“Don’t do that.” Mara’s voice sharpens, then softens immediately, like she’s afraid I’ll hang up.
“Please don’t do that. I don’t know what they showed you, and I’m not asking you to say it over this line, but none of this feels right from here.
People don’t lock down a hallway of academics unless they’re scared of someone saying the ordinary thing out loud. ”
“What ordinary thing?”
“That you wouldn’t just disappear from your life unless something awful happened.
” She goes quiet for a moment, and when she speaks again, the anger is gone enough for the hurt to show.
“You didn’t even clean out your office, Callie.
Your mug is still there. The one with the chipped handle.
I moved it into my cabinet because someone from facilities came by with boxes and a clipboard, and I lost my temper. ”
The image hits harder than it should. My mug in Mara’s cabinet. My books in boxes. My life reduced to items someone can inventory once the person becomes inconvenient to the room. I press the heel of my hand against my sternum, but it doesn’t help. The ache lives too deep for pressure.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“I’m not telling you so you’ll apologize.” Mara’s voice cracks. “I’m telling you because I’m still here, and I’m trying. I don’t know what good it does when no one will listen, but I’m trying.”
Mara already knows what happened in the motel.
She saw the order, the dead cards, the money I wouldn’t touch, and the shape I was in when I still believed Sloane had asked the police to keep me away.
What she doesn’t know is how much worse the silence has gotten since then, or about the messages that have appeared on my new phone wearing familiar names.
I could tell her, but the old terror moves through me before I can start: if I pull her any closer, the damage might learn her name too.
“Don’t get in trouble for me,” I say.
“That’s a ridiculous thing to ask someone who already hid your mug from facilities.
” Mara exhales, but there’s no humor in it, only tenderness trying to survive policy.
“Send me your new number when you can. From a personal email if you don’t want it in the campus system.
Or don’t, and I’ll keep calling this office like a menace.
But please let someone know where you are when you’re not okay. ”
I look at the vending-machine crackers, the pill bottle, the phone full of ghosts, and the hotel key card sitting beside my keyboard. “There are people here,” I say carefully. “They’re nice.”
Mara hears what I don’t say. “Nice isn’t the same as yours.”
My eyes burn. “I’m not sure I have those anymore.”
She goes silent, and I regret the sentence the moment it leaves me. It’s too honest for a campus line. Too needy. Too close to the part of me that still wakes in the hotel reaching for a body that isn’t there and then lies still until the room stops spinning.
“You have me,” Mara says at last. “Even if all I can do right now is keep your mug safe and make legal hate me.”
I press my lips together until the split in my control stops widening. “Send me your personal email again. I’ll send the new number tonight.”
“Okay.” She sounds relieved enough that I feel cruel for making her wait this long. “Eat something that isn’t from a vending machine, all right? I’m saying that with love and also because I can hear plastic crinkling, and I know your stress habits.”
I glance down. My hand has crushed the peanut butter cracker wrapper into a tight little ball without me noticing. The trail mix is still on the floor near my chair, little raisins and almonds scattered across the industrial carpet like evidence of a very sad crime scene.
“I’ll eat,” I say.
When we hang up, the office becomes so quiet that the silence feels physical.
The receiver settles into its cradle with a small click.
The computer screen has gone dark, reflecting my face back at me in the black glass.
I look tired in a way concealer can’t negotiate with.
My hands are shaking, the tremor small but visible now that I’m looking.
I flatten both palms on the desk until the papers beneath them stop rustling.