The absence of smell, nothing, just the cold, neutral air of an empty house meant I had time. Time was the most precious thing in that house. I measured my safety in the minutes it bought me.
I still do it. I didn’t realize until I got here and started noticing that I was cataloging the hallway by scent every time I walked through it—the cedar of someone’s laundry detergent, the sharp citrus of a perfume from two doors down, the staleness of a room where someone has been sleeping with their windowshut. I notice when something is out of place, when a smell doesn’t belong.
Roman smelled like leather and sandalwood.
After I left, those two things together sent my nervous system into full emergency response. I couldn’t walk into a department store. Couldn’t sit in certain cars. Couldn’t for a while breathe near anyone wearing the wrong thing.
I know what it’s called now. I know the name for the way my body files certain sensory information directly into threat, bypassing the part of my brain that could make a rational assessment. I know it’s not a character flaw. I know it’s the residue of prolonged exposure to fear in proximity to a person.
I know all of this, and it helps approximately 40 percent of the time.
The other 60 percent, I just manage.
The thing nobody tells you about the label is how quickly it becomes your skin.
Scholarship student.
It is, technically, a neutral descriptor, a category of funding, and nothing more. But at Kenyan, it means something else. The way Victor approached me. The scholarship sweater they give you at orientation. The dorms. The way certain people look through you at lunch rather than at you, as if your existence has already been established.
I have always known what I am in every room I have ever entered.
Except this is different.
Yes, I’m the girl with no money. The girl with no family. The girl who came from somewhere bad and carries it in the set of her shoulders and the quickness of her exits and the way she never puts her back to a door if she can avoid it.
The girl nobody would make noise for.
Roman said something to me once, in the early months, when I was still grateful enough to be soft around him. He said, “Nobody is going to come looking for you, Amy.” And the thing that made it devastating wasn’t that it was cruel. It was accurate. He wasn’t threatening me. He was simply stating the truth of my life.
I think about that a lot, about the afternoon in literature class when Saint said, and the word came back at me from behind like a hand pressed between my shoulder blades.
Accurate.
I haven’t been able to put it down since.
There is a girl on my floor named Rose who has been watching me for two weeks.
Not like Saint watches me. Rose watches me the way girls sometimes watch other girls when they recognize something.
She is two doors down. Her name written on her door. She has the Kenyan scholarship sweater folded on her windowsill, visible from the hallway when her door is open.
She eats alone in the dining hall at the same time I do. She takes the long route back to the dorm after late classes, the one that stays lit and passes the security office.
I know all the tells.
We haven’t spoken. But sometimes, crossing paths in the hallway, we exchange a look. Not a smile. Something more specific than that. The acknowledgment of two people who have looked at the same wall from the inside.
I don’t know her story. She doesn’t know mine.
But we know that about each other, at least. That there is a story. That it is the kind that doesn’t get told easily.
That some silences aren’t empty.
I find the poem on a Tuesday.
Not a note this time—printed text, a library copy of a Sylvia Plath collection left on the table at my usual corner spot, opened to a page. The poem is called “Lady Lazarus.” I know it.
I studied it in high school, in the one English class I genuinely loved, taught by a woman who had the quality of someone who had lived inside difficult things and come out the other side still capable of finding them beautiful.
