Chapter Text
The first poem arrived on a Monday, folded into a precise rectangle and slipped through the vents of Lalina's locker as if it had always been meant to live there.
She almost didn't find it.
She had been running late in the way that she always ran late — coffee still too hot, the strap of her bag twisted the wrong way around, her jacket half-on while she tried to remember if she had returned the Ondaatje novel she'd borrowed from the Faculty library or left it face-down on her nightstand again. She opened the locker on instinct, already half-turning away, and the cream-colored paper caught the light and caught her eye in the same instant.
She stopped. She picked it up.
The paper was good quality — heavier than ordinary paper, the kind you chose deliberately because what you were writing on it deserved a surface that took it seriously. The fold was exact. She unfolded it in the corridor and read it there, standing in the morning foot traffic with her jacket still half-on and her coffee going cold in her other hand.
You tie your hair before exams
like you're making a promise to yourself
fingers quick and certain,
the same way you turn a page
when you've found the sentence you needed.
The pen you always leave behind your ear
is still there.
You won't remember it until you reach up
and find it waiting.
I think about this more than I should.
How completely you have been memorized
by someone you have never looked at.
She read it twice. Then a third time, slowly, her thumb moving along the bottom edge of the paper. The corridor continued around her — footsteps and voices and the sound of someone's phone playing a song she half-recognized — and none of it reached her.
She folded the poem along its original creases and put it in the front pocket of her bag, where she kept her keys and her lip balm and the things she didn't want to lose. Then she walked to her first lecture and sat in the third row and opened her notebook and wrote nothing for fifteen minutes.
✦
By Friday there were four more.
The second poem was about the library — the third floor, east wing, the tall window that caught the afternoon light at an angle that gilded whatever page she happened to be reading. It described, with a precision that made her go still when she read it, the way she ran her finger along a line when something in a book stopped her. Not underlining — just touching, like she needed the sentence to know she was paying attention.
She had never noticed she did this.
The third poem was about her coffee. Always the largest size. Always finished too quickly, the cup held for a long time afterward, condensation on her fingers, as though she was reluctant to accept that the good thing was over. The poem called this — gently, without cruelty — a small and beautiful stubbornness. The refusal to put down something she'd enjoyed.
The fourth was about the face she made when a book surprised her. Not the face she made when a book was good — a different one, more private: the slight parting of her lips, the quick blink, the way she'd sometimes close the cover and look at it from the outside for a moment, reassessing. As if the book had turned out to be a person she hadn't expected.
The fifth poem was the one that made her put everything down and stand very still in her dorm room at eleven in the evening.
It described her in the library on a rainy Thursday, specifically. It described how she had sat for two hours reading Marilynne Robinson without moving except for the occasional slow turn of a page. It described the particular quality of her absorption — not blank, not passive, but full, the way a room is full when it is inhabited by someone who is genuinely present in it. It described a faint smile she apparently made at one point, at something she read, that she had not known was visible.
It was written, she understood now, by someone who had sat in that library on that rainy Thursday and watched her read Marilynne Robinson for two hours.
She sat on her bed and held all five poems and thought about what it meant to be seen that completely by someone who had never introduced themselves.
✦
"It's Orm," said Fern, from across the room, not looking up from her laptop.
"It's obviously Orm. She's been making eyes at you since September."
"Orm doesn't make eyes," Lalina said.
"Orm makes statements."
"Fine. She's been making statements about you since September. These are just a quieter version."
Lalina held the fifth poem up.
"Does this sound like Orm to you?"
Fern glanced at it.
"What is it?"
"It describes the face I make when a book surprises me."
Fern looked at her. Then back at the poem.
Then at Lalina with the expression she wore when she was revising an opinion.
"I don't know what face you make when a book surprises you," she said slowly.
"Neither does Orm," Lalina said.
Fern was quiet for a moment.
"So not Orm."
"So not Orm." Lalina looked at the poem.
"Or — it's Orm, and I've been misreading Orm completely, and she has a depth of observation I've never given her credit for."
She paused.
"Which is possible. It's just—"
"Not what it feels like," Fern said.
"No." Lalina folded the poem carefully.
"Not what it feels like."
What it felt like — and she turned this over carefully, the way she turned sentences over when she wanted to know what they actually meant — was intimacy.
Not the performed intimacy of someone trying to impress her.
The real kind.
The kind that comes from paying the sort of attention you only pay to something you love.
She put the poems in the front pocket of her bag.
She thought about the third-floor library.
The east window.
The rainy Thursday.
She thought about whether there had been someone at the table by the window — the east table, the one she had never sat at but always noticed — on that particular afternoon.
She thought about a face she couldn't fully assemble.
Dark hair.
A silver ring.
The quality of stillness that certain people have, the kind that feels inhabited rather than empty.
She let the thought arrive to the edge of itself and then, carefully, did not let it go further.
Not yet.