I’ve Never

She didn't bring it up the next morning.

That was the practical thing, the careful thing, and Quin had always been both. She made coffee with the small machine she'd packed and sat at her desk while Mara slept peacefully like she had made peace with the world. Jade's bed was not empty. At some point in the night she had returned.

She entered the password to a secret document in her laptop, then she started typing, she's yet to decide what she would do with that document, however, she has some crazy ideas in her head.

Some minutes into it, Mara turned in her bed. Quin quickly shut her laptop down.

She switched to her biology textbook and read four pages and retained absolutely none of it.

She kept thinking about last night.

She still finds it unbelievable. She was 18 and she was not naive enough to believe she'd misidentified that sound. She understood its nature in the abstract, the same way she understood most things she had not experienced: clearly, theoretically, from the outside.

The outside was the only side she had.

This was not something she examined often. It was simply a fact about herself, filed alongside other facts, as neutral as her height or her blood type. She had never had a boyfriend in Clearbrook where she came from. Had never particularly wanted one. The boys there had seemed like incomplete versions of something, and the girls had seemed like they were all performing a role in a play she hadn't auditioned for, and Quin had spent four years of high school on that sort of performance, watching with dry interest from the back row.

She had kissed someone once. Briefly, at a party in junior year. It had felt like pressing her mouth to a question she didn't care enough about to pursue.

So. That was the inventory.

Mara woke up at nine-fifteen, sat upright in bed with her hair enormous and her expression immediately cheerfully awake, no transition, no grogginess, and said:

"Tell me something true about yourself. Something you wouldn't put in your college application."

Quin looked up from her textbook.

"Good morning to you too." her eyes were judgy.

"Good morning. Now answer. It's a tradition. I do this with everyone I live with." there was no guilt in her voice at all; she didn’t act like she was someone who had made out with another in her presence.

"You've lived with other people before?"

"Summer programs. Model UN. My grandmother's house, which was basically a commune. Stop stalling."

Quin considered. She could give a safe answer. She had several cataloged, the kind of answers that read as personal but weren't, a practiced vulnerability, the way her academic counselor had coached her to speak in interviews. She looked at Mara's direct, unapologetic face and decided against it.

"I've never been somewhere where I wasn't already the smartest person in the room," she said, her voice careful and even. "And I'm not sure that's going to be true here, and I don't know how I feel about it."

They started talking about other things. Mara was from New Orleans, pre-law, and had an older brother named Cole, whom she described as infuriating and brilliant in the same breath. Jade was from Los Angeles, international business and had a boyfriend named Dex who played tennis for Hargrove and who, based on the way she said his name, occupied a complicated position in her life.

"What about you?"

Mara said, twirling her fork, her gaze steady on Quin. "Where are you from? What are you studying?"

"Clearbrook, Ohio. Pre-med track, biology concentration."

"Pre-med," Jade said, her brows lifting slightly. "So you're the responsible one."

"I'm the quiet one," Quin said, keeping her voice even. "Not the same thing."

Mara pointed her fork at her. "I like her."

Jade tilted her head, studying Quin with sharper interest now, as if a previous assessment were being revised. She then left the room.

Mara got up and stretched like someone who had worked overnight, arms above her head, spine curving, completely unself-conscious, and Quin observed this with the same attention she gave everything.

She was at ease with herself.

She wanted that. She wasn't sure she'd ever have it.

Jade appeared at noon; she looked at Quinn in a way she couldn’t describe, but she quickly looked away, it seemed like she was feeling a bit of shame, well unlike Mara.

She showered, changed into a crisp white shirt, and sat cross-legged on her bed eating a granola bar while she scrolled her phone.

"Orientation events start at two, aren’t you attending?" she asked, not looking up. "There's a mixer, a campus tour, and a financial aid seminar that you should attend even if you don't need financial aid right now, because the people who run those offices remember your face."

"Okay," Quin replied briefly; she was feeling ashamed after all; she caught her watching.

Quin went to the mixer. So did Mara. The three of them moved through the courtyard event in their distinct formations, Mara orbiting toward everyone, leaving laughter in her wake; Jade making deliberate contact with specific people, collecting them like assets; and Quin standing at the edge of clusters, listening and cataloging.

A boy named Marcus introduced himself. He was tall, had a slow smile, and looked at Quin a beat too long. She noted it. Kept it somewhere. Moved on.

A girl named Petra, a sophomore, told them about the campus's unofficial social map, where people actually went on weekends, what clubs weren't listed in the brochure, and which building had a rooftop you could access if you knew the right stairwell.

Mara and Jade already knew about the rooftop; after all, they were in their second year; they weren’t new anymore.

That night the three of them ordered pizza to the dorm room and ate it on the floor because there were no chairs, and they talked until midnight.

Mara talked about her family warmly, like she had done the work of understanding it. Jade talked about Dex with respect; they had been together for a long time. Quin answered questions when asked and asked questions in return and did not volunteer more than she meant to.

She knew that that night, the three of them bonded.

Quin's first week of classes was everything she'd hoped it would be: demanding, stimulating, and structured to a schedule she'd made with a lot of thought. Biology lecture at eight. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, chemistry lab. Introduction to Academic Research, a class she’d enrolled in because the senior professor was one of the most-published researchers in her field and she expected to be in his advanced seminar by sophomore year.

She was good at all of them. This wasn’t arrogance; this was the truth.

But something was different in the way she spent her days. The first night she came, she heard her roommates having sex and there was a before and after of things she noticed. She began to notice guys, even girls; she had never been attracted to girls before that night, but now she looks at girls' cleavages; she imagines what they would taste like down there out of the blue. she doesn’t scroll past when she sees X-rated images. In the mornings she looked at her own reflection in the bathroom mirror a beat longer than usual.

She told herself it was an adjustment. A new city. New stimuli. Neurologically standard.

She knew it wasn't that.

On Friday evening, she came back from the library at seven to find Mara and Jade sitting on Mara's bed, passing a bottle of wine between them that Quin was fairly certain they were not supposed to have in the dorm, and laughing about something that had apparently happened in Jade's economics lecture involving a TA and a projection screen malfunction.

"Come sit down," Mara said, patting the space beside her without pausing the story.

Quin sat. Mara handed her the wine without asking. She took it without protest.

The conversation moved easily: Jade's lecture catastrophe, Mara's pre-law reading group, a guy named Leo who had apparently been tracking Jade's movements since the beginning of the session in a way that was either flattering or alarming and Jade had not yet decided which. Quin listened and occasionally contributed and felt herself, incrementally, becoming part of the shape of this room, this arrangement, these two people.

She thought about Clearbrook. About four years of being true to herself, without letting anyone in. About the way she had always stood at the edge of clusters at school parties, watching with her arms crossed, thinking, I don't understand what they're all chasing so urgently. I don't feel it.

She felt it now. Or something close to it. Something with the same urgency but a different texture.

"You're quiet tonight," Mara said, watching her.

"I'm usually quiet."

"There's your regular quiet and there's the kind where something's running in the background. This is the second kind."

Quin turned the wine bottle in her hands. "I'm just thinking."

"About?"

She looked up. She was giving her that special look of hers: warm, patient, without pressure. The sort of face that made honesty look like the easiest option.

"About the fact that I'm 18 and I've never..." She stopped.

"Never what?"

Mara asked, softer now.

Quin set the wine bottle down on the floor. She looked at the wall. "Nothing. Never mind."

Mara followed her gaze. Then looked back at Quin, and something in her expression changed, understanding arriving, quiet and complete.

She didn't push. She didn't offer advice or commentary or that cheerful, well-meaning information that Quin had been dreading since the night she'd heard them. She simply reached over and refilled Quin's cup.

"For what it's worth," Mara said, her voice easy, like they were talking about nothing in particular, "there's no right time. There's just the time when you stop waiting for a reason."

Quin looked at her.

Mara was looking at the ceiling, taking a sip of wine, entirely casual.

That night, she watched them again for the second time this week; by the time she went to sleep, her hand was in her panties.