Denita had gone to her hometown just before school reopened.. some things at home needed attending to and she could not leave until they were done.. so while the rest of her class walked back through the school gates on Monday morning, she was still away.. Seven days she missed..
It was during the first period on the day she finally returned.. except she had not made it to class yet.. she had run into something on the way and was delayed, her bag half sorted, her timing completely undone.. The class sat waiting for the teacher.. that loose, noisy stretch of time before a period properly begins.. and somewhere in the middle of all that noise, a boy glanced at the
empty seat where Denita usually sat and said casually to no one in particular.. Denita hasn't come yet..
But from one desk ahead, without turning around, without missing a beat..
Avet said.. "you don't need to care about that."!!.
A silence followed that was approximately one second long and felt much longer.. A few heads turned.. a few looks were exchanged.. the kind that pass between people who have just witnessed something small but revealing.. and then the noise resumed and everyone moved on.. Everyone except Mian, who stored this away too, very carefully, right next to everything else..
Denita arrived somewhere in the middle of the second period.. slipped through the door quietly, head slightly down, mouthed sorry to the teacher who waved her in without interrupting the lesson.. She made her way to her seat beside Mian.. One desk ahead, Avet did not turn around.. But she noticed his shoulders settle.. just slightly.. the smallest possible exhale of tension she would not have caught if she had not been paying the kind of attention she always paid to things she never admitted to paying attention to.. She opened her notebook and looked at the board.. Mian leaned over and whispered.. I will tell you everything later.. Denita whispered back.. what happened.. Mian just smiled the smile of someone holding something very good..
Nobody knew about her and Avet.. that was how they both wanted it.. kept between them like something too new and too careful to hand to the world just yet.. In school they were what they had always been to everyone else.. classmates.. people who talked
in the corridor.. nothing to see.. Only they knew what the talking meant now..
Even in class, Denita was trying to sit behind Avet .. giving some or the other excuses just to find that place.
It was Mian who first said something..
They were sitting together the way they always did — close, easy, the particular comfortable collapse of two people who have shared enough silences that they no longer need to arrange themselves carefully around each other.. and Mian said it casually, the way she said most things.. but with something underneath the casualness that Denita noticed immediately..
There is a girl.. Mian said.. in the athletics practice.. She is always very close to him.. whispering things.. only to him.. like the rest of us are not even there..
Denita heard it.. let it sit for a moment.. did not react the way Mian perhaps expected her to.. She was not the kind of person who caught fire easily.. she needed to think first, to hold something up to the light and look at it properly before she decided what it was..
She asked Avet that evening.. simply, directly, the way she always asked him things.. without accusation, without building it into something larger than it needed to be.. just.. there is a girl in practice.. Mian mentioned her.. who is she..
Avet answered just as simply.. She is like a sister to me.. he said.. she has some personal things she tells me sometimes.. that is all.. nothing more than that..
And Denita believed him.. not blindly, not because she needed to.. but because she looked at his answer and found nothing in it that did not make sense.. He was the kind of person people came to with things.. she knew that about him.. she had been one of those people herself, once, at midnight, when the lockdown world was too quiet..
She told Mian.. Mian nodded.. and Denita thought that was that..
But it was not that..
The next time they sat together, Mian said.. he has been talking very rudely with me at practice.. like I have done something to him.. like he has some problem with me being there..
This one landed differently.. because Mian was her person.. Mian was three knocks and voice notes and the knowing look across the classroom.. Mian did not deserve rudeness from anyone..
So Denita said something to Avet again.. gently, without making it a confrontation.. just.. please talk nicely with Mian.. she is important to me.. He agreed.. straightforwardly, without making a fuss about it.. okay.. I will..
But then Mian said something again..
And this time Denita went quiet..
Not because she stopped caring about Mian.. she never stopped caring about Mian.. but because she had listened the first time and asked and received an answer that made sense.. and she had listened the second time and asked and something had been done about it.. and now here was a third complaint arriving and she found, somewhere inside herself, that she had run out of the right way to receive it..
She did not argue.. she did not defend Avet loudly or push Mian away or make it into a fight.. that was not who she was.. She just.. went still.. the way water goes still when it has been stirred too many times and finally decides to simply stop moving..
She heard Mian's words and she sat with them and she said nothing.. And that nothing was not cold.. it was not a withdrawal of love.. it was just the quiet of someone who is confused and does not yet know what to do with the confusion.. someone who loves two people and cannot quite understand why the world seems to be asking her to choose a side when she has not done anything to deserve that question..
She did not choose a side.. She just went quiet.. and let the confusion sit in her chest alongside everything else she was carrying that year..