The flight from Paris to New York takes eight hours and twenty minutes. I know this because I counted.
I am not a good flyer. I don't tell people this — it doesn't fit neatly with the version of myself I prefer to present — but somewhere over the Atlantic, with the cabin lights dimmed and everyone else apparently capable of sleeping through seven miles of open air, I sat very still with my hands in my lap and thought about the fact that I had chosen to do this. That no one had made me. That I had looked at the acceptance letter with its full scholarship and its neat university letterhead and thought, yes, this is the thing I'm going to do, and here I was, doing it.
Arthur had cried at the airport. Not obviously — Arthur has too much dignity for obvious crying — but I had seen it, the particular brightness in his eyes when he pulled me into a hug that lasted slightly longer than usual. He'd held the back of my neck the way he always does and said, in French, don't be an idiot and call me when you land and eat something on the plane, Léo, you look like a ghost already.
I had not eaten anything on the plane. But I had called him when I landed.
He picked up on the second ring, which meant he had been waiting, which meant he had been awake since whatever hour my landing translated to in Paris. I did the math and felt briefly guilty and then decided he had made his own choices.
"T'es arrivé," he said. Not a question. (You made it.)
"Je t'avais dit que j'arriverais," I told him. (I told you I would.)
"Ouais." A pause. "T'as mangé quelque chose?" (Yeah. Did you eat anything?)
I didn't answer immediately, which was answer enough.
"Léo."
"Je mangerai à l'université," I said. (I'll eat at the university.)
He made the sound he makes when he has decided not to argue about something but wants me to know that he has noticed it. I know that sound very well. We said goodbye and I stood in the arrivals hall for a moment afterward, phone still in my hand, listening to the particular noise of a place that doesn't know me yet.
Then I picked up my bag and went to find the shuttle.
---
The university is in the particular way of American universities — sprawling and self-important, every building named after someone with enough money to have a building named after them. I navigate it with the map on my phone and the specific determination of someone who will not ask for directions on principle.
My room in the dormitory is small and smells faintly of the person who lived in it before me, a ghost of someone else's life that will fade in a week or two. I unpack methodically. I make the bed with the sheets I brought from home because I knew, correctly, that the ones provided would not be adequate. I put the photograph of Arthur and me on the desk, in the corner where I can see it without looking for it.
Then I sit on the edge of the bed and look at the room.
Alright, I think. Here we are.
---
I presented as omega at sixteen, on a Tuesday in November, during what I had assumed was a particularly bad bout of flu.
It wasn't flu.
My mother had sat with me through the worst of it, quiet and practical in the way she always was, and afterward she had explained the situation with the same directness she brought to everything. My father had said very little, which was also typical. Arthur had knocked on my bedroom door that evening and sat on the floor with his back against my bed for two hours without saying much of anything, which was the most useful thing anyone did.
I had started the suppressants two weeks later.
They were standard issue — the kind any omega doctor would prescribe, low dose, one per day, perfectly managed. They worked well, in the beginning. My cycle regulated. The pheromones became undetectable. I went back to school and no one knew and nothing changed, outwardly, and I decided that this was the correct outcome and stopped thinking about it very much.
The bottle I keep now is the same brand. Same label. The dose is different, but that is a later development — a slow accumulation of adjustments made over years for reasons I understood clearly and chose anyway.
But that comes later.
Here, in this small dormitory room that smells of someone else, I am eighteen years old and the dose is still one per day and the pills still work the way they're supposed to. I take one now, with water from the bottle on my desk, and set the rest of my unpacking aside for the morning.
I sleep well that night. Deeply, without interruption, the way I always sleep in those years before the pills begin to cost me things I haven't yet agreed to pay.
That, too, comes later.
---
The cybersecurity program is competitive in the specific way of things that attract people who are very good at something and know it. I register this within the first ten minutes of the first lecture — the quality of attention in the room, the way certain people answer questions with the quiet confidence of those who have been doing this since before it was curriculum.
I don't say much. I listen. I take notes in the margins of my notes, connections and questions I'll follow up on later. This is how I have always learned — by collecting until the shape of something becomes clear, and then moving quickly once it does.
The boy who sits two seats to my left introduces himself after class.
"Tu es français?" he asks, which startles me enough that I answer before I think about it. (You're French?)
"Ouais. Toi aussi?" (Yeah. You too?)
His name is Étienne. He grew up in Lyon, transferred here after a year at a school in Bordeaux, and has the particular energy of someone who is very pleased to have found a compatriot in foreign territory. He talks more than I do, which I don't mind. Most people talk more than I do.
We fall into a loose companionship of proximity — sitting near each other in lectures, eating in the same general area of the dining hall, defaulting to French in the spaces between English. It isn't a deep friendship, not yet. But it is comfortable, and comfortable is enough for now.
---
Three weeks in, I have a routine.
I wake at six-thirty. I take the pill with the first glass of water of the day. I run for forty minutes along the route I mapped in the first week, the one that loops past the east side of campus where it's quiet enough in the early morning to think. I shower, eat something that qualifies as breakfast, and am in my seat before the lecture begins.
In the evenings I call Arthur. Not every evening — we are not, either of us, people who require constant contact — but often enough that he stops prefacing the calls with is everything alright and starts prefacing them with nothing, just picking up and waiting to hear what I have to say.
It is on one of these calls, about two weeks in, that he asks me if I've made any friends.
"Étienne," I say.
"C'est tout?" (That's it?)
"We've been here two weeks, Arthur."
"J'avais trois amis après deux jours." (I had three friends after two days.)
"That's because you'll talk to anyone."
"C'est un compliment." (That's a compliment.)
"I know. I'm working on it."
He makes a sound that means he doesn't entirely believe me but is choosing to let it go. "Et les cours?" (And the classes?)
"Good. Hard. The program is serious."
"Tu aimes ça." (You like that.)
"Yes," I admit. "I like that."
He tells me about his week — a regatta he almost won, a disagreement with a colleague, something our mother said at dinner that made our father laugh for the first time in weeks. I listen and ask the right questions and feel, in the particular way I always feel during these calls, both very far away and not far away at all.
"Tu me manques," he says, toward the end, with the casual directness he has always had about these things. (I miss you.)
"Toi aussi," I tell him. (You too.)
We say goodbye. I set the phone down and sit for a moment in the quiet of the room, the photograph of the two of us visible in the corner of my desk. Then I open my laptop and get back to work.
---
The first group project is assigned three weeks in.
Network security fundamentals. Four people per group, assigned rather than chosen, which I prefer — chosen groups reveal too much about social architecture and I have no interest in navigating that yet. The professor reads the names from a list with the brisk efficiency of someone who has done this many times.
"Zhirui, Étienne, Lexin, Qingxue."
Étienne finds this tremendously funny for reasons he explains in French on the way out of the lecture hall: apparently he has been watching Lexin answer questions in class for three weeks and has formed strong opinions about the experience.
"Elle est terrifiante," he says, with what I can only describe as admiration. (She's terrifying.)
"You've never spoken to her," I point out.
"I don't need to. It's in the way she types."
I file this away without comment.
---
We arrange to meet in the library on Thursday evening. I arrive first, which is a habit I can't seem to break — I am constitutionally incapable of being late to things, a trait Arthur calls very you and means as a compliment, mostly.
I find a table near the window, set out my laptop and notes, and wait.
Étienne arrives next, dropping into the chair beside me with the looseness of someone entirely unbothered by the world. Then Qingxue — small, quick-eyed, carrying more books than the project requires, which tells me something about how she works. She sets them down with a decisive thud and looks at me.
"Zhirui?" she asks.
"Yes."
"Good." She opens her laptop. "I looked you up after the professor announced the groups. You got the highest mark in the entry assessment."
"So did you," I say, because I had done the same thing.
She blinks. Then she smiles — quick and genuine, the smile of someone who has just recalibrated. "I think we're going to work well together."
Étienne makes a small sound of either agreement or mild intimidation. Possibly both.
The fourth chair is still empty.
I become aware of her arrival before I see her — not because of anything dramatic, but because Étienne sits up slightly straighter, which is the kind of involuntary adjustment people make when someone with a particular quality of presence enters a space. I look up.
Lexin sets her bag down on the back of the empty chair and scans the table once — laptop, notes, the stack of Qingxue's books, Étienne's expression, my face — with the efficiency of someone assessing a situation rather than entering one. She does it in about two seconds. Then she pulls out the chair and sits down.
"Sorry," she says, without sounding particularly sorry. "Class ran over."
"It's fine," I say. "We haven't started."
She looks at me then — directly, the way some people do and most people don't, like she's decided looking at something properly is more efficient than the alternative. Her eyes are purple, which I notice and then set aside as not relevant to the project.
"Lexin," she says.
"Zhirui."
"I know." A pause. "You got the highest mark in the entry assessment."
"You're the second one to tell me that."
"Qingxue told you." It isn't a question. She glances at Qingxue, who shrugs without looking up from her laptop. Something passes between them — the shorthand of people who already know each other — and then Lexin looks back at me. "She looked everyone up too."
"I did," Qingxue confirms pleasantly.
Étienne introduces himself at this point, which Lexin acknowledges with a nod and a brief, assessing look that makes him sit up straighter again. I file this away as well.
"So," Lexin says, opening her laptop. "Project structure. Who wants to take the lead on the proposal, and who's doing the technical breakdown?"
And just like that, we begin.
---
It is not, by any measure, a remarkable first meeting.
We divide the work efficiently. We discuss the project in the careful, functional way of people who don't yet know each other's rhythms — polite, direct, slightly formal at the edges. Lexin asks precise questions and listens to the answers fully before responding, which is rarer than it should be. Qingxue works fast and annotates everything. Étienne contributes solidly and makes one joke that lands reasonably well.
I say what is necessary. I listen more than I speak. I do what I always do in new situations — collect, observe, wait for the shape of things to become clear.
At the end of two hours we have a solid outline, a divided task list, and a follow-up meeting scheduled for the following Tuesday.
We pack up. We say the normal things people say. Lexin and Qingxue leave together, already talking about something else before they reach the door.
Étienne watches them go. "Alors?" he says. (So?)
"So what?"
"Terrifiante, non?" He grins. (Terrifying, right?)
I think about the way she listened. The two-second scan. The directness of her gaze.
"Peut-être," I say, pulling on my jacket. (Maybe.)
I pick up my bag and head for the door.
Outside, the campus is quiet in the particular way of evenings in early autumn — the air just cool enough to notice, the light going amber at the edges. I walk back to the dormitory alone, and somewhere around the halfway point my phone buzzes in my pocket.
Arthur. Of course.
I pick up. "T'es pas censé dormir?" I ask. (Shouldn't you be sleeping?)
"Je voulais savoir comment s'est passée ta journée." (I wanted to know how your day went.)
"It's eleven o'clock in Paris."
"Je sais compter, Léo." (I know how to count, Léo.)
I almost smile. I tell him about the lecture, about the project, about the table in the library and the four of us dividing the work. I describe Qingxue's stack of books, Étienne's opinions about people he hasn't spoken to, the way the work settled into shape efficiently and without friction.
"Et la fille?" Arthur says, eventually. (And the girl?)
"Which one?"
"Celle que t'as pas décrite." (The one you didn't describe.)
I stop walking for a moment. The campus is quiet around me. "Elle s'appelle Lexin," I say. (Her name is Lexin.)
"Et?"
"Et rien," I tell him. (And nothing.) "We have a project to finish. Go to sleep, Arthur."
He laughs — the easy, unhurried laugh of someone who has all the time in the world and knows it — and says good night.
I put the phone in my pocket and finish the walk back.
In my room, I go through the end-of-day routine without thinking much about it. Change. Wash up. Take the pill with a glass of water, the same as every morning, same as every evening now. Set the alarm. Turn off the light.
I lie down and close my eyes and sleep comes quickly, the way it always does in those years — easy and uncomplicated, a body that knows how to rest.
I don't think about Lexin specifically.
But in the morning, when I try to remember what I dreamed about, I find I can't recall it. Just a vague impression of a library table. Amber light. Someone looking at me directly, like looking at things properly is more efficient than the alternative.
I get up. I take the pill. I go to class.
It is a beginning. That's all it is.
For now, that's enough.