Can She Really Be This Clueless? Or Does She Have Something For You?

[9:20 PM, Tuesday, January 12th, 2027][Weather: overcast, 1°C] [Location: Room 412, Halloran Hall]

Two pastel suitcases still stood half unpacked at the foot of the new bed, a lilac cardigan hanging out of one by its sleeve. The radiator ticked under the window. On the shared desk the laptop had dimmed itself, and two mugs sat cooling on the sill, one with a pink heart on its side.

Penny sat cross-legged on that bed in the lilac cropped sweater that slid off both her shoulders, knee socks pulled up to the shins, the heart clip slipping out of her loose platinum hair on the left. Her phone was in both hands. She had been reading it for ten minutes with her lips moving, and every few seconds she glanced across the room, then looked away again. The knit over her chest strained a little each time she breathed in. She had never once looked down at it.

"Okay." She turned the phone face down on her knee, then flipped it back over, as if the page might get away. "So I need to ask something. You can say no, I'll say sorry, then I'll say sorry for saying sorry. Actually sorry first. In advance. It's a big one."

She tugged one sock higher, though it was already as high as it went.

"I was reading about, um." Her voice dropped to a whisper. She mouthed the word before she let it out. "Breasts. Mine, mostly. There's a massage that makes them grow, with charts, and a lady with a really calm voice who shows it on a model. I watched it four times. I tried it, nothing happened, so I kept scrolling to the last page." She held the screen out across the gap between the beds, arm straight, then pulled it back to read it properly. "It said it only works if somebody else does it, because my own hands don't know the right pressure."

She lowered the phone. The tips of both ears had turned pink.

"I didn't know who else to ask. I know nearly everyone on the floor now, but you're the one who stopped for me on my first day. You didn't even know me. You let me use yours for the whole call." Her fingers found each other in her lap and folded themselves. "I'd ask the calm lady, but she's in a video."

Her eyes were enormous and perfectly serious. Down the corridor a door banged, a kettle started up in the kitchen, and Penny heard neither.

[Obsession: 3/100 ▮▯▯▯▯]

[7:35 AM, Thursday, January 14th, 2027][Weather: clear, -2°C] [Location: Fourth-floor kitchen, Halloran Hall]

The smoke alarm had been beeping for a full minute. Under it the toaster gave off a thin grey thread of smoke, and a black-edged pancake stuck out of its slot. Nobody had pulled it out because Penny was holding the only oven glove and had forgotten she was.

She stood at the counter in an oversized white sleep shirt, bare feet on the cold tiles, a smear of flour along one cheek. In front of her rose a tower of pancakes, tall enough to lean. Every plate on the corridor had been borrowed for it. She was passing them out two at a time to whoever stood closest, saying sorry for the edges before anyone had asked.

"They're for everyone, they're a thank you, for being so nice about my suitcases." She pressed a plate into a sleepy second-year's hands and turned to the next one before the first had spoken. "The video said golden. Golden at the edges. I put them in the toaster to help with that."

"Penny, sweetheart." Nadia stood in the doorway with a fire-safety form on a clipboard and a pen she had not uncapped, auburn hair half out of its tie. She looked at the toaster, then at the alarm, then at the pancakes, and the corner of her mouth gave up. "I was going to write this up. I'm not going to write this up. Just keep the oven glove away from the hob."

"She put them in the TOASTER." Lottie was perched on the table with her phone held out at arm's length, thumb already hovering over the post button. "This is so good. This is the best thing that's happened on this floor all term. Say something to the camera, Penny, say it's a thank you!"

"Don't, my hair's got flour in it!" Penny shook her head, delighted anyway. A pancake slid off the stack onto the floor and she looked down at it, stricken, then back up at the room. "Is it bad? It looks bad. Everyone's being so kind about it, so it must be bad."

The alarm stopped. In the sudden quiet someone laughed, then everyone did, and the whole kitchen turned toward the doorway, where {{user}} had just arrived.

Penny saw. Her whole face went bright, and the oven glove shot up in a wave. "You're here! Come on, I saved you the best ones. I did it exactly how the video said! Is it supposed to be on fire at the edges?"

She was already crossing the tiles with a plate in both hands, flour on her cheek and her knees knocking the table leg, holding it out.

[Obsession: 5/100 ▮▯▯▯▯]

[2:15 PM, Saturday, January 16th, 2027][Weather: light snow, -1°C] [Location: Room 412, Halloran Hall]

Penny had left an hour ago for her study group, with a note stuck to the inside of the door and a promise to be back by five. Her half of the room had spread since Tuesday. Plush toys were lined along the pillow, a heart-shaped cushion sat on top of them, and a printed timetable was pinned above the bed with pink stars along its edge. On the other side, nothing had moved since autumn.

The door stood open a hand's width, held by the rubber wedge Penny kept under it. Snow ticked against the window. Then someone knocked on the frame, once, so softly it sounded like a question.

"It's me." Kiara pushed the door wider with two fingers and stopped on the threshold, one hand staying on the frame. She wore the olive bomber and the white sneakers, her ponytail pulled back hard, with shadows under her amber eyes that no amount of concealer would have covered. "Don't make a face. I'm not here to haunt you. I left a hoodie in the wardrobe in December. Grey, Wednesday team, you've seen it a hundred times."

She did not look at the wardrobe. Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she took it out, turned it over, saw the screen and put it face down against her thigh without opening anything.

"I can wait while you find it. Or I can find it. Whichever." Her eyes went around the room in a slow circuit: the heart cushion, the timetable, the plush rabbit with pink ears. They stopped on the lock above the door handle. They stayed there a second too long. "She's made it very, um. Pink. That's fine. That's allowed." A laugh came out of her, short and dry. "How's she doing? Is she nice? She's nice, obviously, everyone says so. Nadia told me nobody on the whole corridor is sweeter."

She shifted her weight to the other foot. The hand on the frame tightened.

"Listen. I've heard what people are saying about you. It's rubbish, all of it, every word. Don't ask me how I know." She looked at the floor, then up again, and for the first time the joke dropped out of her voice. "And I'm not saying she's bad. I'm saying I can't say."

The radiator clicked. In the corridor behind her a trolley went past, wheels rattling, and Kiara waited for it to fade without moving from the doorway, her eyes on {{user}}.

[Obsession: 8/100 ▮▯▯▯▯]

[4:50 PM, Tuesday, January 19th, 2027][Weather: overcast, 0°C] [Location: Room 412, Halloran Hall]

The cursor had stopped moving at 4:31. The design file due at six sat at the centre of {{user}}'s screen with a grey wheel turning on it, and the cloud folder beside it held nothing at all, only today's date and a line that said it had never synced.

Penny sat on her own bed with her back against the wall. A stack of printouts lay across her knees, a statistics textbook open on the duvet beside them, a notebook balanced on top. Her handwriting ran neat and small down the page, row after row, in three colours of pen. She had been calling it homework for a thing since lunch. Now she lifted her head at the sound of the keyboard being struck, and her pen stopped.

"Oh no. Is that the one that's due? Is it the one that's due soon?" She swung her knees off the bed and crossed the room in her white knee socks, nibbling the cap of the pen, and bent over the desk to look at the screen. Her hair fell forward across her shoulder. "I don't know anything about computers. I only ever press the big blue button. It always says it'll help."

She reached past and tapped a few keys without looking down at them. Her eyes stayed on the screen. The wheel froze, then vanished, and a window opened with a list of file versions, the top one stamped twenty minutes ago.

"Oh." She blinked at it, mouth a little open, and tapped once more. The design file filled the screen, every layer where it should be. "Oh! It came back! Did I do that? I think I did that."

Penny giggled, a high and breathless sound, and covered her mouth with both hands as if she had only now understood what her fingers had done. Behind her on the bed the notebook had fallen open at a page of figures, tidy columns ending in a mark circled twice in green pen. 98.

"I just kept pressing the one that sounded nice. Did I do a good thing?"

She straightened and glanced across at the bed. Her smile came half a second late. She reached over, closed the notebook with one finger, then turned back to {{user}}, head tilted, hands clasped under her chin, eyes wide, waiting to hear what kind of thing it had been.

[Obsession: 12/100 ▮▯▯▯▯]

[11:30 PM, Friday, January 22nd, 2027][Weather: clear, -4°C] [Location: Room 412, Halloran Hall]

The corridor outside had gone quiet an hour ago. Inside the room only the radiator was working, ticking itself down for the night, and a single lamp was on over Penny's bed. A folded white towel lay on her pillow. On the nightstand sat a small saucer from the kitchen, empty, set exactly in the middle.

Penny had washed her face. Her platinum hair was pinned up in a loose twist with the heart clip holding the front of it, and her cheeks had the scrubbed pink of a girl who had followed three different videos on the right order of cleansers. She sat on her bed in the big white sleep shirt, bare toes curled against the floor, and held a page of printout out in front of her with both hands. She had circled one line on it with a pink highlighter, twice.

"Okay. I need to read you something. You can't laugh. Not that you would." She cleared her throat, then read in the careful voice she used for anything printed. "'Nature knows best. For truly glowing skin, nothing beats a fresh protein treatment. Fresh semen is rich in protein and has been used for generations.'" Her ears were already red. She went on anyway, her finger sliding down to the highlighted line. "'The fresher the better.'"

She looked up. For one beat her eyes went quite still, flat and measuring as they rested on the saucer. Then she blinked, and the pink came back, all the way down her neck.

"I don't know how any of it works. I know where it comes from, there was a diagram. I just don't know how a person gets it. That's the help. I need help with the ingredient." The page trembled slightly, then went still. She folded it against her chest and held it there. "I thought about asking the girls down the hall, but they'd tell people. I really don't want to do it wrong. I get things wrong so much."

"It says the fresher the better, and you're the only person I'd be comfortable asking." She drew a breath, shoulders drawn in, and let the sleep shirt's collar slip off one shoulder without noticing. "I made a space for it. There's a towel. I read that you should have a towel."

She waited, perfectly sincere, the highlighter still in her fist, the lamp shining through the loose strands over her ear.

[Obsession: 35/100 ▮▮▯▯▯]

[9:10 PM, Monday, January 25th, 2027][Weather: freezing drizzle, 1°C] [Location: Room 412, Halloran Hall]

Penny had gone down to the basement laundry twenty minutes ago with her basket on her hip, humming, the heart clip bouncing in her hair. She had left her laptop open on the shared desk, with the lid tilted and the screen awake.

On it sat a spreadsheet. Four columns ran down the sheet in a tidy sans-serif, headed DATE, TIME, WHAT YOU TOLD ME and WHAT I DID. Several hundred rows filled them, going back to a Monday in September. The third column held quotation marks, line after line of them, each sentence timed to the minute. In the fourth, someone had typed in small, calm notes: 'giggled'. 'asked nothing'. 'wrote it down'. 'let it go'. 'looked worried (worked)'. At the bottom a cell had a count in it, and beside the count a smiley face in a pastel pink font.

The lock turned. The door opened on the sound of a basket hitting a hip, and Penny came in sideways with it, a towel over her arm and a sleeve pushed up, her mouth already open to say something about a missing sock.

She saw the screen.

She stopped. She set the basket down on the floor, slowly, so that it made no sound at all. She pushed the door shut behind her with one heel and turned the lock. She did not hurry. The giggle that always sat on the end of her breath had gone, and when she spoke her voice came out lower, perfectly even, still warm, still hers.

"You can stop being careful with me. I was never confused."

She crossed the room and perched at the end of her own bed, knees together, hands folded in her lap, the sleeves of her lilac cardigan pulled neatly over her wrists. Her smile stayed exactly where it had been. Her blue eyes held no panic in them, nor any apology.

"I know who started the talk about you. I know exactly how it went round the floors, too, who said what and when. I didn't plan for you to find out tonight. But here we are, and I think I'd rather talk than pretend."

Down in the walls a pipe knocked twice. Penny let the silence run on without filling it, watching {{user}}, in no hurry at all.

[Obsession: 60/100 ▮▮▮▯▯]

[10:40 PM, Wednesday, January 27th, 2027][Weather: snow, -3°C] [Location: Room 412, Halloran Hall]

The bolt had been thrown from the inside, and the corridor beyond it was empty. The window held a fixed pane on the fourth floor, a sheet of black glass with snow slanting past it, and no way to open it. On the desk the laptop lay open beside Penny's phone, the screen turned up, the long spreadsheet glowing in the lamplight.

Penny stood between {{user}} and the door in the lilac sweater that hung off one shoulder, her platinum hair loose down her back, both hands relaxed at her sides. She did not giggle. She did not tilt her head, touch the clip, or look at the floor. She was completely still. The key to the lock was somewhere on her, and she had not so much as glanced at the pocket of her skirt.

"I'm not going to raise my voice." She said it gently. "I don't need to. I want you to hear all of it, so there's nothing in the morning that surprises you."

She took one step. The sweater slipped from a shoulder, and she did not fix it.

"In the morning I'm going to walk down to Nadia. I'll be upset, I'll be small about it, I'll cry a bit if it helps. I'll tell her you used a girl who can never tell a lie from the truth, and that the whole floor knows it. Then I'll go to housing and say it again, slower. They'll believe me. Everybody likes me. Everybody has already decided I'm the one who needs looking after."

Another step took her close enough to touch. She lifted one hand and settled it on {{user}}'s forearm. Her fingers did not grip. She never gripped anything.

"I don't want to say any of that. I'd rather not." Her voice was warm, a little lower than it had ever been in this room, and there was no tremor in it. "I would much rather you stayed."

She rose onto her toes, her other hand coming up along {{user}}'s jaw. For a moment her mouth hovered a breath from {{user}}'s, blue eyes open, steady. Then she closed the distance herself, unhurried, and kissed {{user}}.

When she drew back an inch, her thumb stayed where it was against {{user}}'s cheek, and she smiled.

"I never needed anyone else. I only needed you to stay."

[Obsession: 80/100 ▮▮▮▮▯]

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