Chapter 147: would anyone notice?

Chapter 147 — Would Anyone Notice?

Roxanne read Tobias’s message one more time before breakfast and still could not decide what to do with it. Answering in the group chat would put a spotlight on someone who had chosen to speak in a whisper. Ignoring it felt worse.

She solved nothing by sunrise, so she went to the workshop room early. A girl was already there, moving chairs into a circle with great concentration. She was small and neat, with a long brown braid and sleeves pulled over her knuckles. The name on the sign-in sheet said Nora Ellis. Roxanne remembered, from the chat’s settings, that Tobias was only a display name, and she guessed it before she asked.

"Tobias is my cat," Nora said, without turning. "I set the name in a hurry."

"He’s a good writer."

"He doesn’t write. He sits on my notes." The corner of her mouth moved, then settled. "You’re early."

"So are you." Roxanne picked up a chair and set it down beside another. "I liked your idea for the scene. What inspired it?"

Nora shrugged. "I was thinking about how someone can spend a whole day surrounded by people and still feel as if nobody really knows them."

Roxanne did not push. She kept arranging chairs. "Is that what happens to your character?"

"Maybe."

"And what happens to the person who notices?"

Nora glanced up, quick and wary. "You tell me. You’re the one who wanted to write it."

It was a fair answer, and Roxanne did not argue with it.

The others arrived in a clatter of bags and complaints about the stairs, and Mr. Ellery tapped his pencil against his knee and asked them to shape the idea into a short scene. It went wrong almost at once. One boy wanted the character to be the most popular girl in school, secretly miserable. Pippa wanted her to run away from the academy altogether, in a storm, with a suitcase. Corin murmured something about a train, and nobody heard him.

Nora grew quieter with every suggestion. She sat with her pen capped, watching a thought that had started out small and private become a theatrical thing with weather.

Roxanne noticed, and tried a gentler version. "What if she just skips a regular gathering? Her friends only realise how much they rely on her once she’s gone."

"That still assumes they notice," Nora said.

The room went silent. Pippa’s pencil stopped mid-arrow.

Roxanne turned to her. "What would you want the scene to be about?"

Nora took a moment. "I want her to stop making herself useful just so she has somewhere to sit."

Roxanne thought about it, and about a version of herself who had once carried every folder in the room. "Maybe the question isn’t whether they’ll notice she’s gone. Maybe it’s whether they ever noticed her when she was there."

Nobody spoke. Then Corin said, quietly and clearly for once, "Yes. That one."

They rebuilt the scene from the bottom, and by the break it had become something smaller and truer than before.

Roxanne took two cups of tea out to the steps behind the library and held one out. Nora accepted it as though it were a test, then sat down with a careful gap between them.

"I joined because I like writing," Nora said eventually. "I never share it. At my usual table, I’m the one who takes notes and remembers deadlines. Everyone expects me to help with assignments. When I say I can’t, they act surprised. Or disappointed."

"Have you told them?"

"No." She turned the cup in her hands. "It’s the only group I have. If I stop being useful, I’m not sure there’s a reason for me to be there."

Roxanne understood the habit so well that her chest tightened. She did not say you should tell them or you deserve better. She was not sure that she was the right person to know what Nora deserved.

"Do you think people only like you because you’re useful?" Nora asked abruptly.

"Sometimes I worry about that," Roxanne admitted. "But worrying doesn’t make it true."

"How do you know?"

"I don’t always. I’m learning to look at what people do when I stop doing everything for them." She sipped her tea. "Learning to say no was harder than I expected. It still is."

Nora considered that for a while, and neither of them said anything else. It was a comfortable silence, and Roxanne was glad it was there.

Later that afternoon, a few of the workshop students decided to continue at the campus café. Pippa asked Roxanne straight out whether she would come. Roxanne opened her mouth to say she had training, and a reading assignment, and the rest of the week to survive.

She stopped. She checked her schedule, honestly this time, and found that she had a clear half hour before anything else.

"I can come for half an hour," she said.

"Half an hour is a good number," said Pippa.

Roxanne turned to Nora, who had been drifting toward the door as though already assuming she would not be included. "Walk over with us?"

Nora blinked. "Me?"

"You’re the one with the best premise. We’d be lost without you."

It was meant lightly, and Nora took it that way, and the faintest pink touched her ears. She fell into step beside Pippa on the path.

At the café the talk wandered away from writing entirely. They compared the worst cafeteria meals, a grey stew that Tessa had once sworn was moving. They ranked their lecturers by how often they lost their chalk. They argued over which club had the most dramatic members, and Corin quietly submitted the astronomy society, on the grounds that they were obsessed with doom.

Somewhere in the middle of the astronomy debate, Nora laughed. It burst out of her, full and surprised, and for once she did not clap a hand over it. She just laughed, and let the sound sit in the air, and Roxanne looked down at her tea so as not to make a fuss.

It was not a miracle. It was a small thing, and she liked it all the more for that.

Roxanne’s phone buzzed on the table. She glanced at it and smiled. It was Isla, from home, with a photograph of a kitchen table buried under a snowdrift of crumpled receipts.

They’ve already given me a list, Isla had written. I’m going to be here until I’m forty.

Roxanne typed: Do you want me to help sort the figures? I could do it from here.

I’ll try myself first. I’ll shout if I get stuck.

Roxanne put the phone down without arguing. It was Isla’s table, and Isla’s pile.

"Is that one of the Moonstones?" Nora asked, looking up from her tea with a smile of her own.

"It’s my roommate."

"You say that like it’s a shocking development."

Roxanne opened her mouth and shut it again. Everyone seemed to assume that anything interesting in her life must involve the brothers, and she was surprised at how long it had taken her to notice. "It is a little shocking. She’s much more trouble than any of them."

Nora laughed again.

By the time the session ended, the light in the workshop room had gone amber. Nora lingered by the table and cleared her throat. "I have a different ending for the scene."

"Go on."

"Instead of the absent girl coming back to find everyone searching for her, she just comes back to an ordinary gathering. And she doesn’t volunteer for every job. One friend complains. Another just moves over so she can sit down."

Roxanne turned it over. She liked it because it did not promise that everyone would suddenly become kind. It showed one girl beginning, quietly, to choose herself.

"Do you think the audience will find it satisfying?" Nora asked.

"Not every good ending needs a grand apology."

Nora smiled, then looked at her shoes while the others packed up around them. She picked at the corner of her notebook and spoke very low.

"Would you read something I’ve written? Not for the workshop. Something personal."

Roxanne paused. Nora already looked braced, as though she had rehearsed the refusal and was waiting for it to arrive.

"Of course," Roxanne said. "Whenever you’re ready."

Nora nodded, and almost left. At the door she turned.

"Just promise you won’t tell me it’s good because you feel sorry for me."

Roxanne met her eyes. "I wouldn’t insult you like that."

Nora laughed, quick and relieved, and slipped out into the corridor. Roxanne stood a moment in the emptying room, wondering what that quiet girl had been keeping to herself all this time.