The conversation had been going well.
That was the thing she kept coming back to afterward. It had been going genuinely, uncomplicatedly well: no charged questions, no moments that required careful handling, just Seth being ridiculous about something a coworker had apparently said to him at the café he'd been studying at, and Alya telling him he was being dramatic, and him insisting he absolutely was not being dramatic and that she didn't understand the full context.
Seth: the full context is that he said it with his whole chest. no hesitation. no shame. just said it
Alya: what did he actually say though?
Seth: he said pineapple on pizza is objectively good and that people who disagree are just following the crowd
Alya: …Seth
Seth: I KNOW
Alya: that's not even a controversial opinion anymore. the discourse is over. it's been over
Seth: tell him that. he said it like he was dropping new information
Alya: 💀💀 what did you say?
Seth: I said "interesting" in the voice I use when I think someone is wrong but I don't have the energy
Alya: the customer service interesting
Seth: exactly. the customer service interesting. he didn't pick up on it
Alya: they never do
Seth: they never do
She was lying on her stomach across the bed, feet in the air, phone propped between her hands. The door was closed but not locked. Her room didn't have a lock, which was a detail she had stopped mentioning to herself because mentioning it made it feel more like a fact than it already was.
Seth: okay I have an important question that I need an honest answer to
Alya: those are never actually simple
Seth: this one is simple. pineapple on pizza. yes or no
Alya: absolutely not
Seth: THANK YOU. see this is why we get along
Alya: our entire friendship is built on having correct opinions
Seth: is that what this is? a friendship?
She began typing. The door opened.
Her mother didn't knock. She never knocked. It was her house, as she had mentioned on several occasions, and knocking implied a level of separation between parent and child that she did not recognise as necessary. She walked in the way she always did, with the particular energy of someone who had come to say something specific and intended to say it.
Alya flipped the phone face down in one motion. Smooth, automatic, the reflex of someone who had been managing this for years.
Not smooth enough.
Her mother stood in the doorway with her arms folded, looking at the phone on the bed and then at Alya's face with the expression she reserved for situations where she already knew the answer to the question she was about to ask.
"Who are you talking to?"
Not what are you doing or I need you for something. Straight to it. That was her mother. She didn't circle, she didn't ease in, she simply arrived at the point and stood there until you arrived too.
"Nobody," Alya said. "I was watching something."
"You flipped the phone."
"The screen was bright."
Her mother looked at her for a long moment. Alya held it. This was the thing people didn't understand about her mother. She wasn't loud about her suspicion. She was quiet and direct and she looked at you until the silence became the pressure, and most people cracked inside it. Alya had spent nineteen years learning to sit inside that silence like it was a perfectly comfortable chair.
"Are you talking to someone?" her mother asked. More slowly this time, each word placed deliberately. "A boy?"
"No, Ma."
"Alya."
"I was watching a video. The phone slipped."
Her mother's eyes moved from her face to the phone to her face again. Alya kept her expression exactly where it was: calm, slightly bored, the face of someone who had nothing to hide and was mildly inconvenienced by the implication that she might.
Inside, her heart was doing something loud and unpleasant.
"You've been in this room all evening," her mother said.
"I know. I'm tired."
"You were laughing earlier. I heard you from the hallway."
"The video was funny."
Another pause. Her mother had a particular way of pausing that felt less like silence and more like she was giving you time to correct yourself before she did it for you. Alya did not correct herself. She waited.
"I don't want you talking to people we don't know," her mother said finally. "You understand? It's not safe. You don't know who's on the other side of a screen."
"I know, Ma."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
Her mother looked at her for one more moment. Then she said: "Come and have something to drink before bed. You haven't come out of this room in hours."
"I'll come in a few minutes."
"Now, Alya."
She got up. She followed her mother to the kitchen and accepted the glass of warm tea and sat at the counter and answered the questions about how she was sleeping and whether she'd called her aunt back yet and what her plans were for the following week. She answered everything calmly and completely and without a single crack in the surface.
She was very good at this. She had always been very good at this.
It was only when she was back in her room, door closed behind her, that she picked up the phone and sat on the edge of the bed and let herself feel the full weight of the last twenty minutes.
The phone had four messages from Seth.
Seth: hello?
Seth: you good?
Seth: okay I'll assume something happened
Seth: take your time
She looked at them for a moment.
Alya: sorry. my mum came in
Seth: the doorway appearance?
Alya: full walk in. mid conversation
Seth: oh. did she see the phone
Alya: she saw me flip it
Seth: …what did you say?
Alya: that I was watching a video and it slipped
A pause.
Seth: did she believe you?
Alya: she didn't not believe me
Seth: ...
Seth: are you okay?
She looked at the question. Simple and direct, the way he asked things when he actually wanted to know.
Alya: I'm fine
Seth: Alya
Alya: I said I'm fine
Seth: okay
He left it there. She appreciated that, mostly. There was a small part of her that didn't appreciate it, the part that had been running on adrenaline for the last twenty minutes and had nowhere to put it now that the situation had resolved. She was fine. She was completely fine. She was sitting in her room in the dark with the door closed and her heart still doing something slightly too fast and she was absolutely fine.
She lay back against the pillow.
The thing was, and this was the part she was having trouble filing into its correct folder, she hadn't felt guilty exactly. She'd felt defensive. Which was different. Guilt implied she believed she'd done something wrong, and she wasn't sure she did. She was nineteen. She was allowed to talk to people. The fact that she had to hide it was not a problem she had created.
But her mother's face. The specific look of it: not angry, not hurt, just watchful and certain in the way of someone who loved you too much to trust anyone else with you.
You don't know who's on the other side of a screen.
She looked at the ceiling.
She knew who was on the other side of the screen. She knew he had locs he'd been growing for two years and a sister who was ten and said things that were too profound for her age. She knew he wrote things she said in a notes app and looked up things she described because he wanted to understand them better. She knew his laugh from a voice note and the way he typed when he was being sincere versus when he was performing unbothered.
She knew him. That was the thing her mother didn't know she knew.
Seth: hey
Alya: yeah?
Seth: for what it's worth. I know this is complicated. the whole thing
Alya: yeah...
Seth: I'm not trying to make it harder
She read that twice.
Alya: I know
Seth: okay
Seth: goodnight Alya
Alya: goodnight
She plugged the phone in. Lay in the dark.
She thought about her mother's voice saying you don't know who's on the other side of a screen and the absolute certainty in it. The love underneath it, dense and immovable, the kind that believed it was protecting you even when it was the thing you needed protection from.
She thought about Seth saying I'm not trying to make it harder and that he'd meant it, and that it was true, and that it didn't actually change anything.
She closed her eyes.
Defensive internally but fine on the outside was a thing she had perfected over years of practice. The problem, she was starting to realise, was that she was so good at it that sometimes she couldn't tell where the outside ended and the inside began.
She wasn't sure what to do with that.
She filed it away for later, the way she filed everything, and went to sleep.