The phone buzzed before I had even got out of bed. "I'm in the library today. I need you before the selection exam." And straight after: "Bring the blue notebook. The one where you draft your essays."
My fingers went cold. The blue notebook. In my first life it became Julian's voice. Every speech he gave, every essay, every answer at the interview that made adults' eyes shine was born on the hurriedly scribbled pages of my blue notebook. I had started it for myself: opening lines, shapes of arguments, ways of telling my own story. Then Julian saw it, smiled as though I had handed him water in a desert, and said, "You're the only one who can turn my thoughts into my own words."
That was the trick of it. He called the theft intimacy, and I spent ten years saying thank you.
I pulled the notebook out of my bag. The cover was still bright, the corners were not yet frayed, and it was still mine. I held it for a while. Then I put it in the bottom drawer of my desk, under some old socks, and locked the drawer with the little brass key from my childhood diary.
The phone buzzed again. Julian. I looked at the letters of his name until they stopped meaning anything at all, and typed, "I'm not tutoring you any more." I offered no explanation: an explanation is a door, and Julian could open any door.
The reply came a second later: "Meaning what?" Two seconds after that: "Klara, this isn't funny." I blocked the number and sat still, waiting for the guilt to come down on me the way it always had.
Of course it came. Guilt is not a switch, guilt is a trained animal. It scratched under my ribs and whined: he'll panic, he'll be lost without you, the nomination depends on this exam, only you know how his mind goes blank when the questions come too fast. I let it whine for a while. Then I got dressed.
In the kitchen my mother looked up from the hob and frowned.
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
"I have," I said.
She snorted and set a plate of toast in front of me.
"Then let the ghost make your lunch. Have you got that boy of yours again today? The scholarship one?"
The toast stuck in my throat. Even my mother knew Julian not by name but by function: that boy I ran halfway across the city for, the one who let dinner go cold. She used to joke that it was time I sent him an invoice. Later, when I started squandering my own chances on him, she stopped joking.
"No," I said. "I've resigned."
The spoon stopped over the saucepan. My mother turned round, slowly, with her whole body.
"You've stopped tutoring Julian?"
"Yes."
"Has he done something?"
"Not yet."
That was the cruel arithmetic of coming back: my unmarked hands carried scars that did not exist here yet.
"I'm just tired," I said.
My mother looked at me for a long moment. She always knew a half-truth when she heard one, and she always decided for herself whether to open it up. Then she pushed the butter towards me.
"Tired girls need carbs. That's that."
She gave me no lecture about loyalty and did not once ask, "But what about him?" She simply gave me toast and cared about my future rather than his. In that minute I loved her so much it hurt.
"Mum," I said from the doorway. "Will you come to the doctor with me? Not now. Soon."
"Whatever for?"
"Because I'm a nuisance and a hypochondriac. Will you?"
"Off you go, nuisance. You'll be late."
It was not an answer. But it was a beginning.
The selection exam was today. And for the first time in either life it was mine alone.
Open in the reader