Saturday does not have the decency to arrive slowly.
It arrives at six fifty-two in the form of Ori's phone, which has been lighting up with such regularity through the night that the screen has functioned as a low and persistent lamp in the dark of the dorm room, pulsing at intervals too frequent to ignore and too relentless to do anything useful about. He has been awake for most of it. Not the kind of awake that is restless or agitated, not the kind that paces or checks the time repeatedly, but the flat and still kind of awake that is simply the absence of sleep, the body lying in its correct position and the mind somewhere else entirely, doing something that does not resemble rest.
He picks up the phone at six fifty-two because he is tired of the light.
The number at the top of the notifications screen takes him a moment to process, not because it is ambiguous but because it is large enough that his brain attempts to insert a decimal point somewhere in it to make it more reasonable. There is no decimal point. The notifications are real and numerous and distributed across four separate platforms in the specific way that things distribute when they have outgrown their origin and begun traveling under their own momentum.
He opens the first platform.
His profile, which contained ninety-three followers and seven months of silence as of yesterday morning, now has four thousand two hundred and eighteen followers, a number that is still climbing in the peripheral data visible at the edge of the screen, incrementing in small jumps while he looks at it, the way a thing that is still happening increments. He watches it go from four thousand two hundred and eighteen to four thousand two hundred and twenty-three in the time it takes him to process what he is seeing. Then he closes the app.
He opens the second platform.
The video Sela posted has been viewed two hundred and nineteen thousand times.
He closes the second platform.
He puts the phone on the desk and stands up and goes to the window. Outside, Vaelmund on a Saturday morning is quieter than on a weekday, the streets below moving at a weekend pace, unhurried and loose. The sky is doing something complicated with the light, the early sun working through cloud cover in a way that cannot decide if it is going to commit to morning or retreat back into grey. A delivery vehicle parks below and a person in a yellow jacket gets out and opens the back of it and begins moving boxes. The boxes appear to contain something ordinary. Everything below the window appears to contain something ordinary. The street does not know what has happened.
Ori stands at the window for a while.
Then he picks up the phone and calls Kael.
Kael answers on the second ring, which means Kael has been awake, which means Kael has seen it, which means the eleven messages from yesterday afternoon that Ori did not read were about this and not about the rice dish in the cafeteria. Ori knew this already. He knew it when he chose not to read them. But knowing and confronting are different experiences, as he has had occasion to reflect on before.
"Hey," Kael says.
"Hey," Ori says.
A pause. Not a long one, but a real one, the kind that acknowledges that the thing they are about to talk about is a thing of a certain size and deserves a second of recognition before being discussed.
"How long have you been awake?" Kael asks.
"Most of it."
"Me too." Another pause. "I saw it at around four yesterday. Someone in the group chat sent it."
"Which group chat."
"Ori." Kael says his name the way he sometimes says it, not as an address but as a gentle indication that the specific question being asked is not the useful question. "All of them. It's in all of them."
Ori already knew this. He knew it from the notification count and from the view count and from the way the number was still incrementing while he looked at it. But there is something about hearing Kael say it that makes it land differently, more specifically, in the way that things become more real when a person who knows you says them out loud.
"Okay," Ori says.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm standing at my window."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know." Ori watches the person in the yellow jacket carry another box from the truck. The box is heavy enough to require two hands. "I don't know yet. I think I don't know yet."
Kael is quiet in the particular way he is quiet when he is being careful, when he has things to say and is choosing the order of them. Ori has learned to read the quality of Kael's silences the way you learn to read weather, by the specific texture of them rather than their duration.
"I'm coming over," Kael says.
"You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to. I'm coming over." The sound of movement on his end, the rustle of someone getting up. "Don't read the comments."
"I've read some of them."
"Don't read any more of them."
"Kael—"
"I know you're going to read them anyway," Kael says. "I'm just doing my due diligence as a person who is telling you not to. For the record. Officially. Do not read the comments." A pause. "I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Do you have coffee?"
"I have the kettle."
"That's not what I asked either. I'll bring coffee." The sound of a door. Then: "Ori."
"Yeah."
"It's going to be a thing for a while. And then it's going to be a different thing. And then it's going to be something else. That's what things do."
Ori does not answer immediately. He looks at the street below, where the person in the yellow jacket has finished with the boxes and is locking the back of the truck.
"Okay," he says.
Kael hangs up.
Ori sits on the edge of the bed with his phone in his hand and reads the comments anyway, because Kael knew he would and he knew Kael knew he would and the knowing did not change anything, which is a fact about human behavior that neither of them invented.
The comments are arranged in the way that comment sections arrange themselves when something reaches a large audience quickly: in layers, the topmost ones generated by the people who arrived earliest and whose reactions set the initial tone, and then the subsequent layers building on that tone or departing from it depending on the emotional weather of the day. The initial tone of Sela's post was set by her caption, which was found a poet in my study room this morning, and which landed with the warmth she intended, charmed and amused, and the first several hundred comments reflect this: people saying that it is sweet, that it is somehow sad and sweet together, that they would give anything to be spoken about like that, that he sounds like a main character, that she should give him a chance, that this is the most romantic thing they have seen on this platform in months.
This is the layer Ori expected.
Below it, things shift.
The shift is not dramatic. It is gradual and follows a pattern that is common to large comment sections, where the initial warmth generates a counter-current of people who resist warmth on principle, who find sweetness cloying or who are simply in the mood for a different register. The counter-current is not dominant. It does not represent the majority of the comments. But it is louder than its size, the way counter-currents usually are, because the people generating it are motivated by the specific energy of people who want to puncture something rather than simply respond to it.
He reads the words for his face, for his profile photo, for the ninety-three followers and seven months of silence, for the specificity of his observations about Sela, which some people find poetic and others find unsettling. He reads words for the way he was sitting in the video, the open and unguarded posture of someone who does not know they are being filmed, and some people find this vulnerable and others find it funny and a smaller number find it, in a word he sees repeated three times in five minutes of scrolling, creepy.
He stops scrolling at creepy.
He sits with the word for a moment. He turns it over. He tries to be honest with himself about whether it applies, because Ori Ashveil, whatever else he is, is someone who makes an effort at honesty when he is alone with something difficult. He has been watching Sela Miren from a distance for two years with a level of detail that he has never, until yesterday, said out loud. He has catalogued her habits and her expressions and the specific sound she makes before she laughs. He has done none of this with any intent to harm, with no agenda beyond the private experience of it, without ever bringing it to her in any form.
But it was also never meant to be brought to anyone.
The bringing of it is what changes the nature of it. The video is what changes the nature of it. Without the video, it was something that existed only inside him, which is where it would have stayed, which is where he always intended it to stay. With the video, it is something that exists in the world outside him, stripped of the context that makes it what it is and presented to an audience of two hundred and nineteen thousand people who have only the forty seconds and the caption and the comment section to understand it by.
He is still sitting with this when Kael knocks.
He opens the door. Kael is standing in the corridor with two coffees from the place down the street that opens early on weekends, the good one, not the kiosk. He has clearly dressed quickly, his jacket on but not fully zipped, and his expression is the specific expression of someone who is being deliberately neutral so that the person they are visiting gets to set the emotional register of the interaction.
"Come in," Ori says.
Kael comes in. He hands Ori a coffee. He looks at the room with the brief assessing glance of someone checking for signs of acute distress, which Kael does without appearing to do it, the practiced check of a person who pays attention to the people he cares about. He finds the room in acceptable condition: no lights left on, no excessive disorder, the bed slept in at least partially. He sits in the desk chair. Ori sits on the edge of the bed.
They drink their coffee.
"Tell me the actual number," Ori says.
Kael looks at his own phone. He has clearly been tracking it, which is what Kael does with things he cannot fix directly, he monitors them, keeps a running account, believes that knowing the scope of something is better than not knowing even when knowing does not help. "The video is at two hundred and forty thousand. The clipped version that someone else posted is at eighty thousand separately. There are six different meme formats running, I've counted six, there might be more. The university forum thread has four hundred and twelve replies. Someone made a fan account for you."
Ori looks at him.
"A supportive one," Kael clarifies. "It's called something like vael-main or ori-appreciation or I don't remember exactly. It has three hundred followers. They're calling you the confession boy."
"The confession boy."
"The confession boy." Kael drinks his coffee. "There is worse nomenclature available in the comment sections, so in context it is not the worst outcome."
Ori absorbs this.
Outside the window, the delivery truck from this morning has gone. The street is doing its Saturday morning things without reference to anything happening in this room. A pair of students pass on the pavement below, both looking at their phones, and Ori wonders, in the specific and involuntary way that a person wonders things when they have become the subject of a widespread conversation, whether the things on their phones are his name or something else entirely. He cannot know. He will not know, because the city is large enough that most of the things on most people's phones are other things, and this is both a comfort and, at this specific moment, oddly beside the point.
"Sela posted again," Kael says.
Ori looks at him.
Kael turns his phone to show him. Sela has posted a short video, this one of herself, filmed in what appears to be her room, sitting cross-legged on her bed with her hair down and her expression set to the register she uses for direct address, the one where she looks at the camera as though she is talking to someone specific. The caption says: for everyone asking — no, I didn't know he was going to say that. yes, it was real. yes, he's fine. treat people with kindness today.
"That's twelve words," Kael says. "She gave you twelve words and the twelve words are about her experience of your experience and they will generate forty thousand responses about her kindness."
He is not angry when he says this. Kael Dross does not do anger with any frequency or ease. He does observation, and the observation is precise, and this is an observation that is precise.
Ori looks at the second video. He watches it once without sound. Sela's expression in it is genuine in the way her expressions are genuine when she has prepared them. She looks like someone being kind, which is different from someone being kind, and Ori knows the difference because he has spent two years learning her expressions and the differences between them, and this particular difference is one he has identified before without ever having a use for the identification until now.
He hands the phone back to Kael.
"She filmed me without telling me," he says.
"Yes."
"While I was talking."
"Yes."
"While I didn't know I was talking."
Kael is quiet.
Ori looks at his coffee cup. He looks at the water stain on the ceiling, which is still there, still shaped like the country he has never identified. "She could have said something. When I was still doing it. She could have said something and I would have stopped and it would have been embarrassing in a normal way, between two people, and it would have ended there."
"She could have," Kael agrees.
"She chose not to."
"She chose not to."
They sit with this. It is a simple fact and it is a damning one and it does not require embellishment or extended analysis because it is clear enough on its own. Sela Miren sat three chairs away and recorded one minute and fifty-three seconds of Ori saying things he did not know he was saying and then waited forty minutes and posted it to ninety thousand people with a caption that made it charming and shareable and hers. These are the facts. They are not in dispute. They require no interpretation.
What they require, Ori is discovering, is somewhere to put.
Because alongside the facts is the other fact, which is that he was in that room saying things he did not know he was saying, which is a thing that happened and for which there is no version of events that does not include him. He cannot be entirely the acted-upon in this. He was also the person who sat in a room and spoke two years of accumulated watching out loud into the air without checking first whether the air was occupied.
Both things are true.
He is finding that both things being true at the same time is one of the harder configurations to sit in.
"What do I do?" he asks.
It is a genuine question and Kael treats it as one, which means he does not answer immediately. He looks at the window. He finishes his coffee. He sets the cup on the desk beside him with the care of someone who has just organized his thoughts into an order he is satisfied with.
"Today?" Kael says. "Nothing. Today you do nothing about it. You stay here. You eat something. You watch something that has nothing to do with any of this. You let it be what it's going to be today without trying to manage it." He looks at Ori. "Monday is a different conversation."
"Monday I have to go to campus."
"Monday you have to go to campus," Kael agrees. "But that's Monday. Today is Saturday."
Ori looks at him. Kael looks back with the steady and unremarkable face of someone who has decided what they are doing and is simply waiting for the other person to arrive at the same decision. It is the face of someone who sat on a floor outside a door for five days and talked to it without requiring anything back, and who showed up this morning with the good coffee from the place down the street, and who has been awake since four o'clock tracking the view count of a video of his best friend because he believes that knowing the scope of a thing is better than not knowing.
Ori nods.
"Okay," he says. "Today is Saturday."
Outside, the Vaelmund morning has made its decision: it is going to be grey. The cloud cover has won the argument with the sun and the light through the window is flat and even and without opinion. Somewhere in the city, in four universities and a hundred group chats and comment sections still multiplying, people are saying the name Ori Ashveil to each other with the casual familiarity of people who feel they know someone they have never met.
He does not open his phone again until evening.
When he does, the view count is at three hundred and six thousand.
He puts it face down.
He looks at the ceiling.
The water stain is still there.
He does not sleep again until nearly dawn, and when he does, it is the flat and still kind, the body in its position and the mind elsewhere, doing something that does not resemble rest but is at least quiet.
Sunday passes without event.
He eats. He does not leave the room. He watches three episodes of something he was already halfway through and does not begin anything new, because beginning something new requires a kind of openness to experience that he does not currently have available. He texts Kael twice and Kael responds immediately both times, which means Kael has his phone in his hand, which means Kael is checking on him from a distance with the subtlety of someone who has decided that subtlety is the correct instrument for today.
By Sunday evening, the video is at four hundred and twelve thousand views.
By Sunday evening, his follower count is at six thousand eight hundred and twenty-four.
By Sunday evening, the term confession boy has appeared in eleven separate articles on entertainment and campus culture platforms, each of which uses it as though it is a thing that has always existed and which everyone already knows, which is how language works when it finds a shape it likes and begins to spread.
Ori reads none of the articles.
Monday is coming.
He knows what Monday is going to be.
He closes his eyes in the dark of his room on Sunday night and does not think about Monday yet, because Kael told him that Monday was a different conversation, and Kael was right, and he is going to honor the boundary of that because it is the only boundary currently available to him that he can actually hold.
Sunday night.
Then Monday.
He waits for Monday in the dark.