This Version of Us · Standalone
The First Impossible Thing
The first impossible thing was not the vision. It was the color.
The window was fogged at the edges, and I had been standing at it long enough to draw a small circle in the condensation with one finger without noticing. My thumbnail had gone white from the pressure. I looked at it, then back out at the courtyard, and the circle stayed where I had left it, a clear ring in the grey.
The library emptied this way, late afternoon in October, in waves. First the undergraduates who treated rain as a personal affront and fled at the first thickening of the sky. Then the postgraduates who stayed until the caffeine ran out and the screens blurred. Then nobody.
My thesis was open on the table behind me. It had been open since two o'clock, which was four hours ago now. The red annotation stopped two-thirds down a page I no longer remembered writing, and the blue ink had not started.
And then the scarf. A slash of purple. Wrong color for that sky. My eye caught it before I decided to look, and I went still.
Priya Shah. I knew her from seminars, from corridors, from the way she claimed a library table three mornings a week with a coffee cup and a notebook written in violet ink. Fine arts, doctoral. Once, before a seminar began, I had heard her correct someone's description of a slide. Not purple, she had said, without heat. Dioxazine violet pretending to be respectable.
⁂
Then she looked up. Not scanning, not glancing at the building by chance. Directly at the library window. At me, or at least at the lit rectangle I occupied.
I pushed through the south exit, and the cold air never arrived. What arrived instead was warmth. It came from every surface at once, and the ground was different, not flagstones but packed earth alongside grass, and the grass was the color green is supposed to be before you live somewhere that mostly forgets it.
She was beside me. A lavender dress. Her hair its natural dark brown. The nose ring gone. There was nothing guarded in her face here. Then her hand brushed mine, and something rose in my chest, unformed and undeniable. I did not know what it meant. I only knew it had happened to me. That was not the same as it belonging to me.
End of sample · This Version of Us, Chapter One of twenty-two
