006 The Second Message

She woke up at six-fourteen.

She wasn't woken up by the alarm, her body apparently was no longer interested in sleeping past the point where the thinking started.

The room was grey with early light. Theo was still asleep on the other side, turned toward the wall, one arm hanging off the edge of the mattress. His sketchbook was closed on the desk. The courtyard outside the window was empty and quiet and smelled like lavender that needed water.

Paris.

She lay there for a moment letting it be true. She was in Paris. Away from Ohio,from Sofie and most especially from Marcus.

She picked up her phone.

Sofie: Isla I need to explain. Please just let me explain. It's not what you think.

12:01am.

And then below it, sent four minutes later:

Sofie: I'm sorry. I know that doesn't fix what I did. I hope you know that it was an accident and I am sorry.I have known you for six years and I knew you would figure out the second you saw your journal on the internet.I just — Marcus texted me. Two weeks ago. He asked if you'd mentioned him. He asked if I thought you still felt the same way about him. And I read that and I just — I don't know. I posted it before I thought about what I was doing. That's the truth. That's all of it.

12:05am.

Isla read it twice.

Then she put her phone face down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling.

Marcus texted me.

She picked the phone back up. Read it again. Put it down again.

Two weeks ago Marcus had texted Sofie to ask if Isla still had feelings for him. And Sofie's response to that information had been to take Isla's journal which was filled with writings about Marcus and put it on the internet.

She lay very still and worked through it slowly and quietly.

Sofie hadn't done it because she was careless. She hadn't done it because her finger slipped. She'd done it because Marcus had asked about Isla and something in Sofie had decided that if he wanted to know how Isla felt, she could let him find out in the worst possible way. A controlled explosion. Isla's most private self, detonated on Sofie's schedule.

She thought about her friendship with Sofie.They have been friends since sophomore year. Sofie knew her more than her mother and yet she betrayed her.

She thought about Sofie's face. Carefully neutral. The specific tell meant she was performing nothing very loudly.

She thought about Marcus asking.

She thought about what it meant that he'd asked. She'd been trying not to think about that part. She was thinking about it now.

Her phone was still face down on the mattress. She left it there.

Across the room Theo shifted in his sleep. He didn't wake up. He pulled his arm back from the edge of the mattress and went still again.

She got out of bed.

The floor was cold. She found her cardigan on top of her suitcase where she'd left it last night and put it on and sat at her desk. The blank notebook was exactly where she'd left it, closed and waiting for something to go in it.

She opened it.

The first page. She picked up her pen.

She'd told herself in Ohio that she was done with journals. That was the old version of this. The one that got her into trouble. But this wasn't a journal — she'd been very clear with herself about that. This was a notebook. There was a difference. Journals were where you hid. Notebooks were just paper. Places for things to go when they needed somewhere to be.

She wrote the date. Then below it, because she needed to start somewhere:

Paris. Day 2.

She looked at that for a moment. Then she kept writing.

Sofie didn't slip. I knew she didn't slip the second I saw her face but I wanted to be wrong about it. I'm not wrong about it. She did it because Marcus asked her about me and something broke loose in her and I don't know what to do with that except put it down somewhere and look at it.

Marcus asked about me.

I don't know what that means yet. I've been trying to figure out what it means for the past twelve hours and every time I get close to the answer I find something else to think about instead. That's probably a sign.

I'm in Paris. I'm at a desk in a room in Paris and outside there's a courtyard with lavender and through the wall there are eleven other people who don't know anything about me and that is — that feels like something I didn't know I needed. To be nobody's story for a while. To be the girl with the window seat who's never been to Paris before. Just that. Nothing else.*

Theo is still asleep. He's very quiet when he sleeps. I don't know why I noticed that.

She stopped.

Read back what she'd written. Did not cringe. Or she cringed at the Theo part, slightly, and then left it anyway because it was the truth and this was just a notebook and the whole point of a notebook was that it was hers.

She didn't write back to Sofie.

She wasn't ready. She might not be ready for a while and she was going to have to be okay with that.

She closed the notebook and looked at the courtyard through the window. Everything was beautiful.

She sat there with her notebook closed and her phone face down and the city getting lighter outside and let herself have exactly this — one quiet morning before the day came in with all its noise.

Behind her, Theo woke up.

She heard the shift of the mattress, the careful quiet of someone who registers they're not alone before they've fully surfaced. She didn't turn around.

"You're up early," he said. His voice had the low rough sound of someone not quite in the world yet.

"Couldn't sleep."

A pause. Then the sound of him sitting up. "Is it—" He stopped.

She waited.

"Okay," he said instead, which wasn't what he'd been going to say but was apparently what he'd decided on.

She turned around. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, hair slightly wrong from the pillow, looking at her in the particular way she was starting to recognise. Just noticing.

"There's a café two streets over," he said. "Camille told me. Opens at six-thirty."

She looked at him for a second.

"Okay," she said.

She got up and went to find her shoes.