Chapter 14
Amy
There is a type of morning that belongs only to people who did not sleep.
Not insomnia. Insomnia is restless. This is different.
This is the morning after a night spent entirely conscious, watching the ceiling shift through its gradations of dark, thinking thoughts you have promised yourself you are done thinking.
By the time the first gray light comes through the gap in the curtain, you are not tired so much as emptied. Scoured clean of everything that isn’t necessary.
I have had a lot of these mornings.
I shower before five, the way I always do, when the bathrooms are empty, and I don’t have to manage the performance of being fine in front of anyone. The hot water runs long.
I stand in it and let it do what it does—not comfort, exactly. More like reset. Like washing the residue of the night off so the day can start with a clean surface.
I don’t look at the mirror above the sink when I get out.
I haven’t looked at a mirror properly in years. Not the kind when you actually see.
I look at my face, wondering whether I look presentable enough to move through the day without anyone asking questions. But I don’t look at the rest.
The rest is what my father left.
Not all of it is his. Some of it is mine—the small pale lines on the inside of my left forearm at fourteen, when his were the only marks on my body, and I needed something that belonged to me.
Something I had chosen. The logic of it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and I know I’ve sat with a therapist, named it, and put it in its proper clinical container.
But at fourteen, you don’t have the vocabulary. You just have the unbearable pressure of a body that doesn’t feel like yours and the desperate need to interrupt it.
I stopped at fifteen.
Roman found out at sixteen and used it, as he used everything, as information. As leverage. Something he knew about me that I couldn’t take back.
I pull my sleeves down, and I get dressed.
I learned to read rooms through smell before I understood what I was doing.
In my father’s house, you learned which version of him was home before you saw him. The combination of whiskey and Old Spice meant the bad kind of night. Whiskey alone meant he might fall asleep before he got to me.
The absence of smell, nothing, just the cold, neutral air of an empty house meant I had time. Time was the most precious thing in that house. I measured my safety in the minutes it bought me.
I still do it. I didn’t realize until I got here and started noticing that I was cataloging the hallway by scent every time I walked through it—the cedar of someone’s laundry detergent, the sharp citrus of a perfume from two doors down, the staleness of a room where someone has been sleeping with their window shut.
I notice when something is out of place, when a smell doesn’t belong.
Roman smelled like leather and sandalwood.
After I left, those two things together sent my nervous system into full emergency response. I couldn’t walk into a department store. Couldn’t sit in certain cars. Couldn’t for a while breathe near anyone wearing the wrong thing.
I know what it’s called now. I know the name for the way my body files certain sensory information directly into threat, bypassing the part of my brain that could make a rational assessment.
I know it’s not a character flaw. I know it’s the residue of prolonged exposure to fear in proximity to a person.
I know all of this, and it helps approximately 40 percent of the time.
The other 60 percent, I just manage.
The thing nobody tells you about the label is how quickly it becomes your skin.
Scholarship student.
It is, technically, a neutral descriptor, a category of funding, and nothing more.
But at Kenyan, it means something else. The way Victor approached me.
The scholarship sweater they give you at orientation.
The dorms. The way certain people look through you at lunch rather than at you, as if your existence has already been established.
I have always known what I am in every room I have ever entered.
Except this is different.
Yes, I’m the girl with no money. The girl with no family. The girl who came from somewhere bad and carries it in the set of her shoulders and the quickness of her exits and the way she never puts her back to a door if she can avoid it.
The girl nobody would make noise for.
Roman said something to me once, in the early months, when I was still grateful enough to be soft around him.
He said, “Nobody is going to come looking for you, Amy.” And the thing that made it devastating wasn’t that it was cruel.
It was accurate. He wasn’t threatening me.
He was simply stating the truth of my life.
I think about that a lot, about the afternoon in literature class when Saint said, and the word came back at me from behind like a hand pressed between my shoulder blades.
Accurate.
I haven’t been able to put it down since.
There is a girl on my floor named Rose who has been watching me for two weeks.
Not like Saint watches me. Rose watches me the way girls sometimes watch other girls when they recognize something.
She is two doors down. Her name written on her door. She has the Kenyan scholarship sweater folded on her windowsill, visible from the hallway when her door is open.
She eats alone in the dining hall at the same time I do. She takes the long route back to the dorm after late classes, the one that stays lit and passes the security office.
I know all the tells.
We haven’t spoken. But sometimes, crossing paths in the hallway, we exchange a look. Not a smile. Something more specific than that. The acknowledgment of two people who have looked at the same wall from the inside.
I don’t know her story. She doesn’t know mine.
But we know that about each other, at least. That there is a story. That it is the kind that doesn’t get told easily.
That some silences aren’t empty.
I find the poem on a Tuesday.
Not a note this time—printed text, a library copy of a Sylvia Plath collection left on the table at my usual corner spot, opened to a page. The poem is called “Lady Lazarus.” I know it.
I studied it in high school, in the one English class I genuinely loved, taught by a woman who had the quality of someone who had lived inside difficult things and come out the other side still capable of finding them beautiful.
I sit down and look at it for a long moment without touching it. Then I pick it up. The page is clean, with no annotations or underlining. Just the poem about dying and coming back, and the exhaustion of the cycle. The woman has done it enough times that she has become an expert at it.
I read it three times.
Then I close the book and put it back exactly where it was and sit with my hands flat on the table and breathe.
He knows I studied it. He was in the room when I answered the professors question. He heard which lines I reached for.
Saint left this here.
I don’t know what to do with a man who listens closely enough to know which poem to leave. Who watches carefully enough to know which table is mine. Who has never once, in all the weeks of this, made me feel like his attention is something I need to escape.
I have been wrong before. I have been catastrophically wrong before, and I have the sleeves pulled over my arms to prove it. I have Roman as Exhibit A, and my father as Exhibit 0.
But I also have this. Saint has never once asked me for anything.
Every man who has ever watched me this closely wanted something in return. Every man who ever made me feel found turned out to be building a cage around the finding.
He knows where the line is.
I sit in the library for a long time after that. Long enough that the afternoon light changes against the window and the other students thin out and the building goes quiet around me.
I leave the poetry collection on the table.
But I fold the page. Just slightly. Just enough.
So he’ll know I read it.