Chapter 6 Pip

CHAPTER SIX: PIP

Adaline Voss slept like she was waiting for the floor to fall out from under her.

Pip had watched her do it for ten minutes now, long enough to name the pattern. This was not the heavy, boneless sleep of a person who trusted the room. Her body had agreed to rest and kept one hand on the door the whole time, ready to take the agreement back. Pip had known people who slept like that. The ones who worked out early that the world did not stay safe just because you shut your eyes.

She kept the thought to herself. Keeping things to herself was the one skill Mirren had never had to teach her.

It was a proper morning now. The grey had burned off the curtains and left real light behind. Pip was halfway through her cereal, bowl balanced on her crossed legs, and she went on watching her roommate sleep without feeling odd about it. She had spent enough hours in this room that it had started to feel like hers, which was either a character flaw or a survival trick depending on who you asked.

Adaline's eyes opened with no startle or slow swim up out of a dream, no half second of not knowing where she was. One breath she was under, and the next she was not.

Her eyes were on Pip with an unreadable expression.

Pip liked her more in that second than she had in all the days before it.

"Morning." She lifted her spoon in a small salute.

Adaline looked at her. Then at the bowl. Then back at her.

"You've been watching me sleep."

"Yes." No point dressing it up.

The corner of Adaline's mouth moved. Barely. Pip caught it and let it go by without comment, which felt like the right way to earn the next one.

Adaline sat up, pushed her hair back, and studied her like she was working out what a thing was before she decided how to answer it.

Three days they had shared this room, and this morning had a different feeling to it. The first days had been nods in the corridor and a common space split down the middle like there was a wall nobody had built yet. Since the first morning Pip had known things about Adaline that Adaline did not know she knew. The gap had been sitting between them, getting wider, and neither of them had said so.

Adaline swung her legs off the bed and sat on the edge, her elbows on her knees.

"What house are you?" Pip asked.

Adaline's eyes came up. "I don't have one. No affiliation."

"I'm Mirren."

Adaline nodded at Pip's wrist. "I know."

Pip looked down at the gold bracelet on her left wrist. It was so thin that she had stopped seeing it years ago. "Most people don't clock it."

"I'm not most people."

"No." Pip set the bowl on the nightstand and pulled her knees up to her chest. "You're not." She held Adaline's eyes because this was the important part, and it deserved a straight face. "Third Vein. Put in this room as your roommate since orientation, and not by accident. I like you, and I mean it. Both of those are true. I'm not going to sit here and pretend either one away."

The words came out level. She wasn't apologizing for any of it.

Adaline went quiet. She was already three moves past the thing she'd heard, working out what to do with it.

"Why tell me?"

"Because you've got half of it already. And because I'd rather you hear the whole of it from me, plainly, than build it yourself out of scraps and decide what it means before I get to say what it means."

"Which is?"

"That I like you." Pip did not look away. "The assignment is real. I won't pretend it isn't. I also won't let it be the only true thing in the room." She let a beat go. "Do what you want with that."

Adaline watched her for a long moment, standing. She took the spare bowl and the cereal off the shelf over her books, lifted the milk straight off Pip's desk without asking, poured, and sat back down on the edge of her bed. She did all of it without a word.

They ate in silence for a while.

In Pip’s conclusion, it was the most comfortable silence she had sat in months. It came from the plain fact that neither of them had anything left to prove to the other. She had braced for a wall this morning. She had lain awake sharpening the tools she would need to take one apart. She had not planned for a person who could simply sit there and ask nothing of it at all.

"How much do they know?" Adaline asked.

"Less than you'd think." Pip kept her voice level. "The scan put you down as Dormant. That's what Mirren has. That's what everyone has, minus whatever Solken had, and Solken never shared."

"And what do you think?"

Pip chewed on that, and on the way Adaline held the bowl, and how her eyes crossed the room without ever resting too long in one place. She had been hunting a word for it since Adaline woke.

"I think Dormant's the wrong word for you," she said quietly, though there was nobody to keep it from.

Adaline did not react. She kept eating. 

Not reacting, told Pip everything and nothing in the same bite. 

Adaline was not about to hand the game to a girl she'd known for three days, assignment or no assignment.

Pip let it lie.

They talked after that. Really talked, which Pip had wanted since day one, without ever finding the door. Not about the campus this time. Other things. The kind that only comes up once the careful version of a conversation has been set aside. Pip heard herself saying things she had not planned to say, which did not happen to her often. Planning what she said was practically the family trade.

"Does it feel strange?" Adaline asked. "Liking someone you were sent to watch."

Pip sat with it. Another one she had not prepared for.

"Yes," she said. "It does."

"But you're still here."

"But I'm still here." Pip laughed, and meant that too.

She had not finished turning the question over when her phone lit up.

She saw the sender before she saw the message, and her face went ahead of her, the way it always did. The warmth dropped off it. Her jaw set. The laugh died halfway out. 

She put it all back together fast, figuring from the look on Adaline's face that fast had not been fast enough.

"House stuff," she said. Her voice came out loose. It was the best she had on hand.

She set the phone face down on the desk.

Adaline's eyes went to it. Then to Pip. She said nothing, which was somehow worse than if she had picked the whole thing apart out loud.

Pip left her face where she'd put it. She did not reach for the phone. She already knew what it said. Since the moment she chose, this morning, to tell the truth instead of the version she had rehearsed on this bed, she had been waiting for it to come.

The choice had felt like solid ground when she made it. Now, the message felt like the ground moving under it.

She reached for her cereal and found the bowl empty. She put it back down.

Adaline had gone back to her own breakfast, eyes on the bowl, for all the world done with it. But Pip caught the tell. Adaline's gaze had not quite dropped back to level. She had seen the whole thing. She was already working it, and she was not going to say so.

Pip looked at the face-down phone.

She knew what it said. She knew what it would ask of her. She knew that telling a girl you were assigned to watch that you actually liked her was not a free thing to say, and that Mirren would not treat it as free.

She also knew she had meant it.

Both were true at once. She had said as much this morning, and she planned to keep saying it as long as she could, as long as it was still possible to mean it out loud before everything on the other end of that face-down phone came in and drowned it.

She reached out and turned the phone face up. Read it. Turned it back over.

She smiled at Adaline.

And Adaline, who missed nothing, smiled back.