Work Text:
The plan was simple: Zoey read books; Maya sat in her room all day. These were - Coco had decided - compatible activities.
She had not consulted either party.
—
It was a solemn Saturday afternoon in October; the clouds seemed to reluctantly drag themselves across the sky and the trees stood half-dead and haggard with brown leaves hanging limp from their limbs. Even the shadows seemed to be a shy, monotonous gray. Maya sat solitary in her room, lights dim (save for the piercing blue glow of her monitor), blobfish plushie - affectionately named “Greg” - propped up against the wall on her bed, watching Maya with what seemed like half-baked intent. In a house where so much had changed against her will growing up, Maya had decided this room and the state it was in was her comfortable sanctuary, the last place she had real control over. That is, until Coco decided to knock on her door.
“Aegh”, Maya responded with a groan that sounded somewhere between a frog’s ribbit and a goat’s grunt. Coco opened the door.
“Hoi Maya!” Coco said, slightly more casual than usual. Maya felt something cold move down her chest. “I thought that you might like to come downstairs with me!”
Maya’s gaze stayed glued to the monitor. “No.”
“Zoey’s here!”
There was a slight pause as Maya adjusted her posture.
“Who’s Zoey.”
Maya spoke flatly without the shape of a question. The all-familiar wash of uncomfortable warmth spread across her forehead and trickled down her face. She recognised a trap when one was being set up.
“Oh you know, she’s in the band. Bass player. She’s, you know–” Coco made a gesture with her palm at around shoulder height, suggesting Zoey’s short stature. Maya blinked, the cogs turning in her head. Coco leant against the doorframe. “She reads a lot, so… I thought you two–”
“No.”
“-might have some things in common–”
“No.”
“-and it could be nice if–”
“No.”
Coco sighed. She looked at Maya with a patient, slightly sorrowful expression. “Look, she’s already in the living room, so…”
Maya finally peeled her gaze from the monitor and swiveled to face Coco. “You told her I’d be coming down.”
“I told her I’d ask.”
“Coco.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“Coco–”
“Five minutes.” Coco held up five fingers. “Five minutes, that’s all I ask. And then you can come back and–” she gestured at Maya’s monitor amongst the dimly lit room and the desk with its menagerie of snack wrappers, “-continue on with, uhm, what you normally do!”
Maya looked at her screen. She looked at Coco. She looked at the ceiling, which didn’t really offer much.
Maya bit her lip and pondered for a moment. Coco’s chipper tone irked her. Was this some sort of cruel humiliation ritual? Was Coco tossing Maya into the colosseum with a lion for her own amusement? She thought about Zoey. She had noted, on occasion, Zoey’s apparent seclusion from everyone else, always seeming to be nose-deep in a novel, shutting the rest of the world out. Maya did feel a slight twinge of relatability - solidarity even. And, indeed, it would be nice to have something of an acquaintance in school - if not a friend - other than her sisters, whom she’d rather not be seen with most of the time. Maybe this time it wouldn’t be so difficult. Besides, Coco does seem to be unwavering; Maya thought it might be equally as embarrassing to keep stubbornly refusing to come out of her room.
“Ugh, alright. Fine.”
Coco smiled. Mission accomplished.
“Thank you, Maya. Seriously.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Come on.” Coco said, heading for the stairs.
Maya, feeling a deluge of regret course through her bones, looked back at her monitor - the glow in the comfortable dark, the world that required nothing of her - and swallowed. She was being extracted from that sanctuary, the only haven amongst the wretched waves of the world’s waters, the only shelter where she can function. She stood up, pulled her hoodie sleeves down over her hands, and followed.
—
Zoey was sitting on the sofa.
This already posed an issue. She was already there, already installed in the living room, which meant Maya had to enter an already-occupied room and decide upon a position within it and inevitably that position would end up communicating something. She couldn’t position herself too close - that would seem too eager. She couldn’t position herself too far away - that might read as hostile. Maya sighted the armchair across the coffee table. It was close enough that she’d be technically present, but far away enough to cling onto the pretense that this wasn’t actually happening. The only problem was that she’d have to walk across the room to reach it, which meant being watched while in transit. Maya did not like being watched while in transit.
Maya stood solid like a sentinel at the doorway for probably four or so seconds. It felt considerably longer. Zoey remained still, reading a book.
Maya crossed the room, socks shuffling across the rug, and sat in the armchair, arranging herself in such a way that it looked like she had always been there and hadn’t just performed a series of anxious micro-decisions about furniture. She put her hands in her pocket. She took them back out. She put them back in.
Zoey turned a page.
At this angle, Maya could just about make out the cover of the book - there seemed to be two figures foregrounded by a castle, with the title in italic font. She couldn’t quite read the title, but caught a word that might’ve been Desire. She raised an eyebrow - inwardly, of course; she wouldn’t display that amount of emotion outwardly.
“I’ll make tea!” Coco shouted cheerfully from the kitchen.
Maya darted her eyes toward the bookshelf. Then the window; she could see through the curtains the grey sky in the shape of a triangle, beneath which was a row of terraced houses characteristic of the average Zuid-Holland estate. She noticed a red car in a driveway and a silver car canted between the pavement and the road. These observations were irrelevant to the matter at hand. Maya was painfully aware that she had yet to say anything and the faint hope of Zoey speaking first had wistfully dissolved away. Each passing second brought a mounting regret to the fact that opening her mouth would become an event, one that would draw the attention to the oppressive silence preceding it. The window of opportunity was closing rapidly. Perhaps it had already closed.
She absolutely needed to say something.
She had absolutely no clue what to say.
Within her mind, she desperately went through the list of options available to her: “Nice weather.” Terrible choice. And the weather isn’t nice. “Do you go to…–” No, she knew she attended the same school, she'd seen her there. And telling Zoey this would mean that she noticed her which would mean she had been watching her which meant…
"Haegh–" An utterance sounding approximately like ‘hi’ eventually came out of Maya's mouth.
Zoey flipped a page and without looking at her said: “Hi.”
The silence reconstituted itself, as if, despite Maya’s monumental efforts, the brief exchange had made no dent in it whatsoever.
Maya once again shifted her attention to the window. The same gray sky, the same red and silver cars. A bicycle bell could be heard. A faint clattering came from upstairs - no doubt it was Mymy in her room probably violating various international conventions.
She became aware that her right knee was bouncing up and down and she stopped it.
She looked at the book again.
She looked at the window again.
Why the fuck did I agree to this…
Maya thought she should say something else. She knew she should say something else; that’s how conversations worked after all. Though the content of the next exchange was entirely unclear to her and every option she traversed in her scattered mind felt either too much or too little or too interested or too distant and now the silence was so established that attempting to puncture it felt like an act of war.
“Uh– good boo– uhm, is the book good?”
The question practically flew out of Maya’s lips before her brain had a chance to process it. Perhaps this was a good thing, considering if she had evaluated it beforehand, she would have recognised it for the extremely generic and mundane option within the arsenal of conversation that it is - a question so generic that all it communicates is “I see you’re reading a book and I felt that I should acknowledge that”. This wasn’t particularly the impression Maya wanted to give, if she wanted to give an impression at all, which she didn’t.
Zoey considered the question - but not in a hostile way, in the way of someone genuinely considering whether the question merited a complete answer - running, in her head, a cost-benefit algorithm to analyse the expenditure of words.
“Decent,” she said.
“Oh,” Maya said, and then upon registering what was actually said: “That’s good– that’s… yeah.”
Zoey said nothing.
Pain. Maya looked at the bookshelf again. She started to count the books and got to eleven before getting bored. She looked out the window. Gray sky. Red car. Silver car. She looked at her own hands. She thought: Okay, okay, three minutes and forty seconds, roughly, and then this is over. She began to weigh whether she’d feel better or worse having made no impression on Zoey at all and remaining invisible in school. She thought: Stop looking at your hands.
“Is it– what’s it about,” she said, again with the flat non-question intonation. It had come out wrong, too blunt, as if she were conducting a dry and emotionally distant interview, something of an interrogation. She felt her shoulders do some weird involuntary thing.
Zoey looked up for the first time.
Maya had never seen her face so directly since she’d always clock her presence in her periphery and make sure to never look a fellow pupil in the eye. She saw the dark-gray scarf wound up to Zoey’s jaw; her dark-brown hair, similarly effortless to Maya’s own, but exuding a much cooler, disaffected aesthetic; her face, with the expression of someone who wasn’t annoyed at any one particular thing but had made a general philosophical settlement with annoyance as a condition of existence. Her shirt with a banana on it. Zoey regarded Maya with a calm and unremarkable directness.
“Knights,” she said.
“Ah–” said Maya.
The conversation hung for a second.
“That’s cool, ahaHA!” Maya forced a laugh to appear more relaxed and affable, but instead it came across more like a dysfunctioning android. She cringed.
“Historical,” said Zoey, who then looked back at her book.
“Yes,” said Maya, who then wondered why she went for the strangely formal yes rather than an ‘oh yeah!’ or an ‘interesting!’. She looked at the curtains. Gray. Cars. “Was– uh, were there a lot of– in history. Uh, knights…”
The question Maya just asked felt as if it were hanging in the midst of the silence, neither of the two interlocutors not really knowing exactly what to do with it.
“Yeah,” said Zoey, without looking up. “Quite a lot.”
“Oh. Obviously…” Maya trailed off.
She pressed her back more firmly into the armchair and stared at a fixed point on the opposite wall. She thought about her computer and the comfortable dim lights of her room and the fact that none of it asked anything of her and offered everything and did not require her to discuss medieval military history in the living room on a Saturday.
She thought: Two minutes fifty.
She thought: Don’t say anything. You’ve said enough. You’ve said too much. Stop–
“Is it, uh… s– is it… spicy?”
The room remained excruciatingly unmoving. The light, the sofa, the bookshelf, the view outside - all the same. Maya didn’t know herself whether that was her own attempt at a joke or a genuine question. She hoped that the armchair she was sitting in would immediately plunge itself hundreds of thousands of metres beneath the foundation her home rested upon, nestling in the mantle of the Earth, taking her with it.
Something happened in Zoey’s expression. There was a fractional movement, a small yet detectable recalibration in the layers beneath the ambient dissatisfaction. She looked up at Maya again, this time her face more measured and attentive, the look of someone slightly taken aback and managing this information with care. Maya’s entire cardiovascular system made a decision she hadn’t authorised.
“No,” said Zoey, “not really.”
“Ah– ahaha– yeah…” responded Maya. She was aware of her own facial expressions in a way that was deeply unhelpful. “I don’t– uh, I don’t know why I said that. That was– it was weird, b-but I just saw the– I mean I was looking at the cover and I saw a word and–”
Maya cut herself off. If she hadn’t made a fool of herself beforehand, she certainly had now. She momentarily thought about the concept of temporary death, figured that wasn’t much too different from sleeping, and realised she had to sit in the unbelievably cavernous hole she had dug for herself. Zoey watched her.
“It’s fine.”
“No– I… it was weird”
“It was a bit weird,” Zoey agreed, in a tone that wasn’t particularly disapproving yet didn’t really soften the assessment.
Maya was now thinking about the concept of teleportation.
“It’s just– the cover, it looked–” she said, knowing full well this was not an improvement, “there was a word, and I just thought–”
“Desire,” Zoey confirmed.
“I wasn’t implying–”
“That’s the word on the cover.”
“Aeuh.”
“The Kingdom of Desire”
“Oh.”
“It’s romance.”
“Oh.”
Maya swiftly put her hands in her pocket and took them back out again and then looked at them as if they belonged to an alien and she had never seen them before.
The sound of mugs and Coco moving with the elaborate quietness of someone pretending quite hard not to be listening could be heard from the kitchen.
Another silence fell upon them, like the tarp of a tent collapsing unceremoniously. This one was slightly different; it felt less like a deafening vacuum and more like an open space that had been used recently, with some residue remaining. Maya could not decide if that was better. It probably wasn’t.
“It’s good, actually,” Zoey said without prompting and without looking up. “Better written than you’d think.”
“Oh.”
“Most of them aren’t. In this genre.”
“Oh,” Maya paused. “Do you– Do you read a lot of… this genre? Of. Romance.”
“Yes.”
“Good. I mean– that’s good. That you have a genre. That you like.”
Zoey looked at her. Maya looked back.
“UH! I mostly uh, watch things,” Maya blurted out, because apparently she’d decided she had to keep talking. “Online. I don’t… I don’t read much.”
“What things.”
“Wh– uh. Just… stuff.” Maya paused for perhaps a bit too long. “Uh… anime.” Maya felt a twinge of shame hearing that word physically being said in real life, amplified by the fact it was coming from her own mouth.
Zoey received this information without any visible reaction. “Are they good?”
“Uh… yeah. Well– some. Some of it.” Maya looked at the bookshelf, and then the window. She couldn’t bring herself to meet Zoey’s gaze. “Some of it is very bad and I watch that, too.”
Something shifted at the corner of Zoey’s mouth, an almost microscopic movement. Not exactly a smirk or a smile, but more like the idea of one, considered and then silently set aside.
“Same principle,” said Zoey, holding the book up slightly.
Maya let out a cautious smile. Another silence, but one that was - fractionally - better than the ones that came before it.
Coco appeared from the kitchen, two mugs of tea in her hands. She bore a luminous expression, one of a scientist whose hypothesis yielded unexpected, yet satisfactory, data.
“Are we getting on well?” she asked.
Maya looked at her. The look contained several things, all moving in various directions, that had not yet coalesced into a coherent message.
“I think I’ll go back upstairs,” she said, “in uh–” she recalculated, “now.”
Coco set the mugs down and sat next to Zoey on the sofa. “Of course, Maya,” she said, smiling.
Maya quickly got up, nodded, and walked with haste, practically lunging, to the bottom of the stairs. She paused. She grasped her arm, tilted her head down, and shuffled back into the living room, towards her mug of tea.
“I forgot–”
Coco looked at her, smiling. Maya sipped a bit of the tea, looking back at Coco, initiating some awkward stand-off, Coco’s smile remaining, and then she proceeded to walk back to the bottom of the stairs, slower this time, managing to say “bye” to a point that was roughly equidistant between Zoey and the bookshelf. She made her way back to her room.
Maya sat on her bed, staring at the wall, and then pressed her face into her blobfish and made a sound into it she hoped no one else could or would hear. She decided not to think about it.
—
Three days later, on a Tuesday, the clouds decided to break apart and let through a golden autumn sun; through the window in the kitchen beamed a shaft of light illuminating the table, and resting solitary on top of it, a novel. Maya went to inspect: lying upon the book’s front was a small, ripped piece of paper with the word “Maya” written on it in fascinatingly good handwriting. She looked at the cover: a castle, in front of it two figures, the title in italics.
Maya stood there for a moment. She looked around, slightly bewildered. She picked up the book and tucked it under her arm, carrying it to her room, feeling a slight buzz of connection in the air - a feeling she rarely felt.
She read thirty-two pages before dinner.
It was - she thought - better written than she expected.