MUSHROOM SOUP by Rossella di Pietro

I knew the girls in the videos. I had seen them on campus before.
Their hair was mythical golden or auburn. They wore it long to their waists or scrambled in messy buns at the top of their crowns. When they sat down in class, they crossed their legs and hugged their knees comfortably, their chunky cardigans wrapped around their tiny bones, as they offered their insights crafted over the previous night. In the student canteens or in the pubs around the campus, the girls showed their bare faces with no make-up on, no chemical scents but those of their shampoos, hand soaps or their own skins’; purple roses would blossom on their cheeks as they kept sipping on cheap beers. Their eyes always clear, a strip of blue velvet, a ribbon of mist over the lake.

I would spend weekends trying on saggy cardigans from second-hand shops, browsing the haircare sections of drugstores to give my hairdo the effortless unkempt vibe they seemed to sport carelessly. It looked to me they guarded a secret, but a secret would imply the inherent possibility to crack it, to own it and use it in one’s favour. In truth, there was hardly any secret, they were simply born with that inexplicable charm. They were who they were, and they seemed to know it, carrying that knowledge without second thoughts, and imbuing anything they touched with it. That’s the reason why everybody knew them, like one would intuitively know what the sun or the moon are, an ancient awareness passed down as a family heirloom.

In the videos they all looked so young and beautiful in a way that felt almost permanent. When she combed her fingers through their hair, almost casting spells into it, she applied a delicate pressure that would lift, smooth, slacken whatever muscular tension they kept holding to perform their tight and compact beauty in front of the camera. When they finally forgot it was there, deep into relaxation, their presence warped, overstretched, now ready to become something larger than life, and melting into the room. They pulled faced, mouths agape, breathing from the back of their throats. She pressed her hands on their shoulders and unlocked something the girls weren’t even aware of with their eyes closed. Well into the night, their features did not look like their features any longer, and they could be, without seeing they were. Every time I reached that plateau, like a constant wall I would hit during every session, I found the creeping thought both crushing and endearing; not that one day I would die, but that one day I would be old. And yet, I only from my laptop could witness those blissful moments of youth with eyes open.

On her ASMR YouTube channel, she went by the name of floatinghands, but her real name, Mira, was written on the door of her room, at the end of my very same corridor. Her videos wouldn’t reveal her voice immediately, rather she would go straight into scratching, massaging, pressing on shoulders, braiding the girls’ hair, or gently pulling it aside. The acoustic was good, but the microphone close to her mouth would emit a subtle rasping sound, as though she had bottled the wind in her lungs. After a couple of minutes, she would whisper hi guys hi guys hi guys, spray a peppermint mist in the air, the droplets of which would gently land on the guest’s skin, all the while breathing and swallowing loudly into the microphone. It soon became the only way I could fall asleep to, a dense sleep departing from my body every morning, just in time to see dashes of blue and fuchsia get smeared by an invisible hand across the sky, scratching the pinnacle of the church right outside my window.

During school breaks, she disappeared in the ether, only to return when a new term began. Her tray of natural oils in round glass bottles flared in her room, the pretty frame revealing a huge fabric of splattered colours miming butterflies, elephants, pregnant women, mum and dad’s profile, above her bed headboard.

Whenever I spotted her waking past my door, in the communal kitchen, or in the student cafeteria, I felt a pang of excitement, as though an actress had just emerged on stage right at the end of a play to scoop the audience’s ovations. A few times, we criss-crossed in front the shower room closer to her when the one on my side of the corridor was occupied, or out of service. In those moments, she usually banged the door behind her shoulders and slightly nodded in acknowledgment, without meeting my eyes. She would always leave small clumps of dark hair behind.
I couldn’t tell if she was exceptionally good. In my extensive nocturnal research, I learnt all the ASMR practitioners shared the same grammar, swiftly rubbing the tips of their fingers as though they were seasoning a dish. In my head, they were all sprinkling salt in a soup, a potion evoking good omens as per an ancient ritual. Mostly, I just needed a quick fix that would put me to sleep leaving no room for the self-sabotage to kick in. Then she talked to me.

II

It was an early evening. I had spent the whole day reading a paper to hand in the day after, when at some point the hole in my stomach had eaten through my tissues. I rummaged in the fridge in the communal kitchen with no success, until I eventually found a ready-made powder soup in the cupboard, I must have bought the day I moved in. As I was pouring the water and a muddy concoction rose in my tea mug, the door swayed and the air of somebody storming in twirled around me. She was there when I turned. I gasped slightly, and she must have seen the look on my face, as she noted ‘You’ve seen a ghost?’. This time she didn’t skew my sight, although she soon busied herself up with crockery and cutlery. The clanging went on for a while, and when she didn’t find what she seemed to have lost, she crouched under the sink next to my feet and resumed her quest. I looked down to the crown of her damp hair brushing against her jawline and unlit cigarette behind her ears. ‘You lost a lighter?’

She gave me a harsh look, defying the proxemic power our positions gave away, and registered my comment without addressing it. I shrugged and made for the door, thinking her natural voice—not that fictitious soft-spoken butter melting in my brain at night—flattened out the vowels in a vulgar way, to the point I found hard to reconcile with the idea they were both coming out of the same throat. I was nearly on my way out when a waft of honey and bergamot landed on me one more time. She must have moved again.

‘Hang on a second.’ I turned and the soup in mug wobbled precariously. I thought about my dirty hair, the jumper two sizes bigger than mine hung around my body amorphously. She was taller than I remembered, standing long and pouty, her arms crossed around her chest, and a teaspoon hanging from one hand.

‘Do I know you?’ I looked around. For a second, I wondered if there was any way she knew I followed her channel.
‘Well, I don’t know, we live in the same building. . .’
‘Yes, that’s right, but maybe I know you from somewhere else.’

‘I doubt it, I never leave my room.’
She nodded.
‘What are you up to now? That looks like a hell of a lot of milk in your tea,’ she peered into my mug standing on her tip-toes.
‘It’s not tea, it’s mushroom soup.’
‘Oh, you, too?’ she grinned. ‘Looks like you know how to take care of yourself. Have you got a little time to spare?’
‘I . . . have a paper to submit tomorrow—'
‘So, what? Me, too. Come on, it won’t take long, I promise. I just need to fix something in my room.’

I followed her along the corridor to the lift, taking small steps to avoid any spillage. ‘You know, you shouldn’t drink that shit. It won’t help your mood.’
‘What do you have to sound so nice and cheerful instead?’
‘Well, the real thing, obviously,’ she laughed, shaking the teaspoon in the air ‘Also, clementine’s make me happy if you truly want to know. What’s your major?’
‘Gender Studies.’
‘Oh,’ she widened her big eyes, two wells of black pupils ‘why so bitter then? Aren’t you all big-hearted humans over there?’

‘It’s my right to be rude like anybody else,’ I declared, but she ignored me altogether. ‘My major is in Law,’ she nodded proudly, getting out of the lift.
‘I reckon your bar of integrity must be pretty high, then.’
‘My dad is in prison for fraud,’ she admitted after a while.

‘Now, that’s a quite an inventive way to show your rebellious streak!’ I said and immediately regretted about it afterwards, afraid I had pushed it a little too far.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to—’
‘Bullshit. Come on in,’ she added when we found ourselves right in front of her room.

In we slipped, and it felt like the place couldn’t be any more familiar. The set of lights pinned around her headboard. The creamy-coloured curtains that shut from the viewer’s sight the back of an ugly building. A cactus in the corner added a splash of greenery, love unrequited.
The door of her wardrobe was upholstered with something I wasn’t previously privy to. A bunch of polaroid’s arranged both vertically and circularly. She was in all of them, her image spread over the years with coloured hair, plucked out eyebrows, thick eyebrows, no eyebrows at all. She looked at me taking in her life and the people that so obviously made it. She furrowed her brows—now two regular curved lines—revealing a pack of small waves forming across her forehead.
‘Do you think I’m obvious?’
I sipped on my mushroom tea, looking for a specific word that would encircle her essence, as it manifested to me.
‘What do I know,’ I said eventually instead, and meant it.

She sat on her bed, spreading the sheets around her. She suddenly struck me as small, a little pathetic, like we all are when we pretend to have mastered the rules of navigation, right after being spatted out into the world from our minuscule pockets of darkness. She clasped her sunglasses from the bedside table and put them on, running her fingers through her hair. Then she let herself drop backwards, poking the pillows with her stretched fingertips.
‘I know I’m basic,’ she said slowly after a pause, ‘and frankly, what is wrong with that?’

I placed down my mug on to the carpet and sat on her bed.
‘Well, be my guest. So, what’s the problem?’
She propped back up and removed the sunglasses.
‘I had a magic tea,’ she said dead eyed, in self-assured way children use to casually relay stories that make perfect sense to them only.

‘A magic tea,’ I repeated after her, ‘Oh! A magic tea! Are you alright? You look alright-ish to me?’ ‘This is because I am totally alright-ish. If anything, I’m a super-human now. Haven’t you ever read studies on how shrooms augment your brain capacity to penetrate the inexplicable?’ ‘Mmm, yeah? Whatever. So, I don’t understand what you want me to do?’
I just don’t trust myself being left alone.’
‘So, you’re not OK after all? You said it’d take a couple of minutes.’
‘Please. I’m sure you can read your paper on how to be a good person from here?’ she squeezed my shoulder tentatively.
‘I’ve just had a flashback from my last trip that sent chills down my spine, you know?’ She fished the teaspoon out of her pocket and went on ‘That’s why I grabbed this,’ she held it close to her nose, as though inspecting the oblong refection of her face melting on the curved scuffed surface. ‘Leo in Inception gave me the idea. It makes me feel grounded in the present as we sail into the future.’ She put her sunglasses back on and plopped on her pillow.
‘What if the future is bleak though? What if we don’t want what we’re moving towards?’
She turned to the side, in a motion that implied the expectance of an answer to a discernible question. ‘But the future is just the same pattern of ebbs and flows as the present. It’s ever permanent, thus not permanent at all. Don’t you have any best friends that would be willing to monitor you?’
‘Aren’t you willing?’
‘I barely know you.’
‘I could sense you were a mixed bag.’

I felt heat rising to my cheeks and quickly dived into my mug of mushrooms.
‘You know,’ she carried on, ‘people staring at others move through the world thinking they’re the only ones living on the margins. But they very much aren’t. They don’t know the people they’re staring at’ ‘I’m not sure I follow,’ I said after a while.
She shrugged. ‘You don’t seem to hang out a lot.’
‘I’m conscious about where I invest my energy.’
‘This is what I call “lack mindset”.’
‘I gave it all,’ I said after a while.
‘None left for you?’
‘The gush is still open. I don’t like other people poking it.’
‘What’s their name?’
‘Relevance?’
‘Relevant. Nomen est omen, isn’t?’
‘Wouldn’t a rose be a rose still?’
‘Whatever,’ she raised her eyebrows, ‘that’s your garden.’
‘It is unrequited,’ I said after a pause. ‘It has always been.’ She turned towards me and pointed at my soup.
‘Can I have some?’ I passed it on to her. She guzzled it down, and then sighed heavily. ‘Snap, this is disgusting. Did they tell you?’ she wiped her lips with the back of one sleeve.
‘That it’s unrequited? They didn’t need to. We were walking down the street one night. A few of us. There were electric snowflakes in the trees, steady giant white balls. Somebody asked him if he thought there were plugs somewhere, he didn’t know. I was in my head, you know. Half listening to the conversation, half partaking into the conversation among my parts. I don’t know what the general contention was, just a confounding noise, as per usual. And right then I understood the nature of what I felt, how stubborn that was, and how no intervention from my conscious side could ever have altered that truth.’ I let myself fall back onto the pillows. I adjusted it under my neck and turned on one side.

‘How’s penetrating the inexplicable?’
‘Your voice is very soothing. You should consider working in ASMR.’ I laughed wildly and rubbed my fingers swiftly in the air. She mirrored the same gesture at first, but then moved her hands inside and outside, as though her wrists were waltzing. They made me think of a pair of twigs bending in the wind. The motion was soft and hypnotic, haloed by the dimmed, pinkish light her room was cocooned in. I felt a gentle pressure over my eyes coming from nowhere, as though someone was forcing darkness onto me.
‘I see a fluorescent energy coiling around your body,’ she said, directing an invisible orchestra with her hands with her eyes shut. ‘I see myself with arms heavy like tree branches, dripping honey all over the floor. But it’s like one of those dreams where you can never keep the focus through and through. There’s a smudge of my retina and I’m forever trying to keep the focus tight, forever trying to see.’ ‘Can you not see me?’
She turned towards me again and studied my face, drawing my eyebrows with her fingers, the profile of my nose, contouring my lips.
‘No, I can’t. There’s a cloud all over you, as though a waterfall were to befall you shortly.’ ‘Nothing ever happens to me.’
‘That’s incorrect,’ she pushed her sunglasses on to my nose. ‘For a start, existence happened to you, and it is happening to you every day. So, they were rambling about snowflakes in the trees, and that to you amounted to a confession of unrequited love?’
‘Oh no. That truth had nothing to do with him. It was, you know, something I realised about myself. A casual sentence, with no future—the mere succession of sounds. A coat hung in the hall. The sight of sheets spread on a rack to dry out, something that gets closer to the skin. That all this was enough for me—that was enough to love somebody. For me, at least.’

The thought perished in my mouth, grappling with vowels, resisting hard to be pushed out. My voice dimmed and I looked at the radio sat on her bedside table instead, the rectangles changing shapes and forming new numbers each minute that went by. Her bed felt warmer than mine. ‘What’s behind the curtains? I resumed.
‘The laundromat,’ she said quietly. ‘Which side are you on?’
‘The churchyard.’

She nodded.
‘So why did you take mushrooms again?’
‘To enhance my nurturing feminine side, I guess. Sorry if that doesn’t sit well with your feminist agenda.’
I laughed hard, snatched the sunglasses and put them back on her nose. ‘I don’t hold anything against nurturing human beings.’
‘And yet, you’re cautious about your energy? You don’t waste it, huh? And what about this chap, then? Isn’t that wasted if it’s unrequited?’
‘It’s not wasted. I produce that. That love is for me, it bounces back to me—’
‘Oh, I see, so you don’t actually care about people. You’re just interested in indulging in your little pool of love. Sounds pretty selfish to me!’
Her voice pierced me like a scorching needle. I propped back up and knocked the tea mug over in the process. The creamy coloured liquid made a tiny paddle on the carpet right next to her slippers.
‘Oh shit, I’m so sorry.’

I jumped out of the bed, and I was already on my knees, when someone flung the door open. I could just make a spread-out hand palm on the door panel, and the burgeoning profile of a wrapped towel around someone’s head.
‘I’ve been looking for you all over my goddamn dorm, aren’t we meant to stick together whilst tripping?’ a feminine voice stormed in.

In the meantime, the paddle was growing bolder, licking the border of Mira’s slippers, as well as a bundle of papers strewn all over the floor, thick with footnotes and dotted names, word count and module title in darker strokes in the header section.

The carpet under her bed stored other random objects: an unglued white envelope, an anti- stress ball, college zines, a red sock, and snack wrappers. Bent forwards, I spotted the glistening rim of an unmistakeable Hershey’s chocolate bar, tucked underneath a mauve foulard. My aunt used to bring those back from America when we were little. Her house back home looked like a giant maze. Over the summer, people would flock to hers to watch the fireworks on the 15th of August, nibbling on chocolate, and second-handed tales on how big everything in America was alike.

I kept working at it, swiping the objects aside in little heaps to save the salvageable, but Mira seemed completely oblivious. She lay in bed, making circles with her hands, whispering an it’s alright in her ASMR voice, a giveaway of the serene worlds she was trespassing on her trip. The girl with her hair wrapped in a towel was now more visible at the feet of Mira’s bed.
‘And what’s going on in here?’ she pointed at me, crouched on the floor. She wore no make-up, eyes smudged, like painted clouds. Finally, Mira got out of the bed, putting her glasses away.
‘You’re stressing me out. Aren’t you supposed to chill, why so heavy, Lilliput?’ she grabbed the girl by her shoulders, squeezing them and improvising a little dance.
‘Oh man, if you bug me when you call me like that—can you please not just go and vanish all the frigging time? I’m sick of chasing you around when you’re having flashbacks.’
Lilliput, or whatever her name was, had quickly gotten over my existence. A fair triangle of blonde hair popped out of her towel, as Mira squeezed her and dragged her around the room. She reminded me of a pigeon. I sensed a seal had just been broken, and the gap between our species Mira’s invite seemed to have seamed, had now come apart again. I looked at my hands pointlessly blot the pool with a tissue, and as I was collecting all the objects off the floor and placing them on her bed, I caught a glimpse of a post-it note slipped out of the envelope.
‘I’ll go fetch my stain remover,’ I raised my voice to cover the noise of objects shuffling. She laughed.
‘Of course, you’ve got one,’ she teased to my surprise, as though she had just remembered I did, in fact, exist in that room.

‘I cannot not elope, you smother me! That’s why I’m reliving shitty trips’ she cried out, turning to the new girl again.
‘But if I wasn’t even there!’ said Lilliput earnestly.
‘I’ll be right back,’ I dashed out of the room, as I heard Mira hiss heavily. Hard and soft objects snagged haphazardly from under her bed, bulged the pockets of my baggy jumper.

III

Back in my room, the bed was neatly made, with two grey cushions filed right in front of the pillows to create a pleasing asymmetry. The duvet a swath of unwrinkled pale green. I didn’t have polaroid’s stuck to the door of my wardrobe, nor tiny lights draped around my bed frame. The evening was falling over the church tower, the trees foliage turning dark blue, like the distant mountains in the first perspective Renaissance paintings.

I rummaged through the soft boxes in my wardrobe searching for the stain remover with such desperation, that I felt dizzy for a moment. As though the ecosystem at the end of the corridor were doomed to crumble if it took me any longer. I finally found it and yanked it in my jumper fold, eventually dropping all the content to the floor. The wrap of the chocolate bar shone a miniature lilac light. Her scarf smelled of timber, the heart of a forest in the thick of winter.
The thin paper of the post-it peeked through the battered envelope; her name daintily handwritten on the back. It read: Hope it sounds law-savvy enough- give me a shout if there’s anything to amend, and I’ll invoice you :) Mathew x. It meant nothing to me, that string of words; yet I felt like my own audacity had just stung me, sending a burning touch straight to my head.

I scrambled for the carpet stain remover and glued the post-it to the inside of the rectangular bag, hurrying back to Mira’s bedroom, unsure whether my presence was even a thing any longer.

IV

The door was ajar, as I had left it, but when I peered in after knocking, she wasn’t there. I figured she may have popped to the loo at the other end of the corridor. I kneeled and brushed away the mushroom soup residues. When I was done, minutes later, I looked around again, and noticed drawers were open, as well as her wardrobe doors. It looked like she had been ransacking her room in search of something.

I took out the white bag, feeling its weight in my open palm. I rubbed it hard, smoothing the corners between my palms, and I placed it back where I found it, just a couple inches above the soupy stain, under her bed. I paced the room, went to the kitchen, but she wasn’t there. I went back to her room and pulled the curtains overlooking the laundromat. A boy and a girl lashed out silently against each other, then crossed their arms and gaped at their dirty clothes, like muted marshmallows, spinning in the giant washing machines.
On her desk a few notepads bearing the course titles were stacked messily one on top of the other, one reading the same as the header on the paper. Another bore doodles all over the cover—circles and triangles aggressively pencilled into the thin cardboard cover. I never felt prying was an unethical deed. My aunt from America passed me down the notion If you’re willing to hide something, you’d never go to the trouble of writing it down. I remember a cousin came visit once for the summer holidays, at the house by the lake. Her hairdo curled in a shiny wave, as she spoke very little words cloaked in a tender azure halo, as though descended from a cloud. She read hardbacks borrowed from a local library—codes taped on the spine—and when she went out for long solitary walks through the pine forest, I’d slip in her room, permeated by her soft, baby blue presence. However, when my mum explained what adrift meant in English and I asked where I had picked that up, I didn’t tell her the foreign word pulsed repeatedly in one of the cousin’s diary entries amidst a sea of letters twirling like crashing waves.

Mira’s notepad, on the contrary, didn’t reveal anything personal, just notes sprawling sideways, quick sketches of sad faces, and a list of essential oils and their properties. The wrapped head popped into the room again.

‘Here you are,’ she said, as I slapped the notepad closed. ‘I’m waiting for Mira.’
‘That much she said.’
‘Did she? Where is she now?’

‘Tagging along, she’s gone checking on a thing.’ She fixed the towel on her hair, covering the blonde triangle, leaning against the door. She looked more familiar now, with her facial features resting, her forehead smooth and feathery. She had starred in Mira’s videos, of course. I could picture her without towel, her enlarged forehead in the middle of the shot. Her impression exactly overlapping with the girl Mira had introduced to the online community as Eloise. Mouth gaping and silky hair kept away from her straight nose.

‘And who are you again?’
I told her I lived at the end of the corridor.
She shrugged. ‘Doesn’t mean much to me. This is not my dorm, she told me to wait here,’ she crossed her arms, pushing against the door frame, her legs further stretched ahead.
‘I’m. . . my name is Marni by the way,’ I added after a pause, ‘perhaps she shouldn’t be alone?’ ‘Shouldn’t she?’
‘If she’s tripping. . .’
‘Oh, that. I wouldn’t worry about that. She’s a Leo Sun. Natural attention seeker. But don’t be fooled. She’s a pro. She does it all the time, you see. It expands the imagination. She’ll be back soon. How could anyone vanish anyway? It’s not possible to disappear in the folds of the world, you know?’
‘So, you know where she is?’
‘I told you, sweetheart,’ she shot back in a mocking tone, uncrossing her arms, and peering through the curtains. The boy at the laundromat was now alone, slouching down on the hard plastic chair. ‘She went to see about something. What’s the matter anyway, she’ll be back! I’m sure you’ll survive without her for five minutes?’
I said nothing, as she fished an electronic cigarette out of her pocket and wedged it in between her lips.
‘I know you’ve got a crush on her,’ she gave me a Jean Paul Belmondo kind of wink and pushed the window open. ‘What? Are you out of your mind?’ I protested. She puffed swiftly, the fruity-scented vapour blowing out from her mouth like thick wintery air, eventually pocketing the electronic device in a single neat gesture. ‘And why not? Everybody has a crush on Mira since she started that YouTube channel.’
‘Well, I don’t. It’s just that she asked me to keep an eye on her. . .’ She laughed wildly.
‘Did she? Well, well, well. . . I guess she likes you then,’ she concluded, ‘that happens sometimes.’ Lilliput kicked off her Oxford shoes and sat on the floor. She unwrapped her head and rested the neck on the duvet, rummaging a bag of Maltesers with a free hand and eyes shut. The empty package momentarily enveloped her wrist. She shook it a couple of times to release the volatile grip. After a while she rose again, as suddenly hammered by a horrific thought. She stared at me, as though taking in all the bones in my face.
‘Hey, you, what did you say your name was again?’ she asked after a while. I could detect a frazzled urgency in her mushy voice, as though it had come a long way, piercing a thousand of dimensional walls.
‘It’s Marni.’
‘What? Money?’ She dropped her hair on the side, cascading like a waterfall of blinking coins at the bottom of a rainbow. ‘Money, you said? That’s a curious name’ she looked at me with sudden interest. ‘No, it’s not Money. It’s Marni,’ I said, ‘like the Japanese film,’ I sighed curtly.

‘Whatever,’ she shrugged after nodding very slowly, ‘my point is, are we sure you’re somebody we can trust?’
‘Trust me?’
‘Will you snitch on us? But first and foremost, how do I know you’re not a needy weirdo with anxious attachment style?’ she asked me, the syllables mingling and melting in her mouth. I stood up and mumbled I had no clue what she was talking about.

She laughed uncontrollably bending sideways, sweeping dust particles, breadcrumbs, and cotton threads off the floor with her glowing, freshly washed hair.
‘People go literally nuts about her’ she stated solemnly, eyes wide open.
‘How do you mean?’

Lilliput squeezed her eyes, two neat, identical glass pebbles. She fixed the neck of her jumper and motioned towards me.
‘I want to see which ways the corner of your eyes point,’ she announced in her soupy voice, raising my chin smeared with evening light.

‘This Elaine,’ she started after the inspection, ‘she was obsessed with Mira, you see’.
They were in the same course during the first year. They would hang after class, spend the breaks on the neatly trimmed grass, skirting the lectures buildings and the stoned fountains. ‘I had seen Elaine before. She was nothing special, but when they met Mira would never shut up about her. She said she was one of those people with a dazzling mind,’ she made a grand gesture, big-eyed, flailing the ten fingers to mimic a sparkle. ‘They were a strange combo, Mira and her. Mira is so expansive. She walks in a room, and she bloody sets that on fire. Whereas Elaine. . . I don’t know, she made me think of. . . an ambient candle.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She dropped out at the end of last year, when all the rumours started. You know, the online comments.’ She paused.
‘Mira deletes them manually. She thinks it’s still her. But I don’t know, she seems to attract all sorts of haters these days,’ she paused, and I felt her eyes on me again.
‘I would never have thought she could turn so nasty, though’ she said, puffing again into the open night. ‘It felt a little bit like a dainty flower had wilted precociously.’
‘But why?’ I ventured.

Lilliput rubbed her eyes with her knuckles, and I heard her stomach rumble.
‘Mira said it was because Elaine got certain ideas about them in her head. That, or that infamous bad trip they once had, and that still comes back for her. Sans moi, clearly. I mean, one of the two, she often changes version, I reckon she’s still a little bit sore about it. One day she’ll say it was the crocodile,’ she shook her head, another puff.
‘Anyway, Elaine turned batshit crazy. She would leave aggressive post-it’s stuck to her door, then create a bunch of YouTube accounts with no picture just to smear her. She accused Mira of plagiarism; can you imagine? Mira was worried sick about her scores.’

Lilliput finally shut the window. The boy at the laundromat stood up and left, his clothes still looping in the washing machine. On the threshold he kept the door open for another student swinging in, balancing a giant bag of dirty laundry on her splayed legs. She tied her hair with a ruffled scrunchie, then scavenged through a stranger’s moistened clothes in the only available machine that had just ended its cycle.

Eloise went back to Mira’s bed, sit down, and complain she was hungry. I went quiet, just quickly glanced at the round mirror propped against the desk, wondering what she made of my eyes curling downwards like cashew nuts.

V

‘Man, I was starving,’ Mira stormed in without knocking, lengthening, and rolling her r. She carried two large cardboards of pizza, her fingers dancing along the rigid rim to avoid burning. When she placed the cardboards on her desk, she rubbed her fingers on the legs of her pants and slipped a bundle of papers out of her jacket on top of one of her notepads. A soaring waft of hot tomatoes swelled up in the room, like a sudden salty mist biting away at my guts. She looked excited, somehow less relaxed, like someone who had run for a mile, or had just recovered from an innocuous scare. Yet, she smiled at me, whilst tearing at the line of studs along her jacket.

‘Perhaps you’ve had enough of your shoddy beverage?’
Mira charted the ingredients. In her watery mouth tomatoes mingled with aubergines, as Eloise snatched a slice and sat down on the floor. She did the same and for a moment I watched them both, ebullient and flush-cheeked. They looked like the children they must have been once, this time though akin to one another, as though sprouting from the same big family, sprawled on the living room floor on Christmas Eve. The radio would be on, the hissing sound of a soft-spoken woman introducing a poem by Dylan Thomas. Parents would stich the lips with their index finger, quietly asking the children to cease any noise, to remember, and reiterate in future conversations, what a time they had, what a beautiful, perfect time indeed.

Eloise tugged at the hem of my jumper and pulled me down. I joined that banquet of sinewy cheese and pearlescent peppers, and in the warm, greasy steam I suddenly relished a curious sensation. I wonder if that was what belonging felt like.
‘Where have you been?’ I asked Mira, twisting a long stretch of cheese around my finger. She exhaled, put a slice away, and lay back on the floor with one hand covering her face.
‘I panicked a little when I couldn’t find my essay. I searched everywhere, so I went back to the library to print it off again.’
‘Did you? I thought you went around to Mat’s---didn’t you say he has a printer?’ Eloise blew over her pizza.
Mira didn’t say anything, then raised from the floor and shrugged.
‘I felt like walking in the moonlight a little,’ she said earnestly, with a shy simplicity. She went to her desk and pulled a phone out of her drawer.
‘Let’s get a pic,’ she said, and I felt the muscles freeze in my jaw. Both Mira and Eloise posed with ease, they stood half-seated with protruding bums for several minutes, swapping angles, and tilting heads ever so slightly.
‘If you want to follow me, you have to send a request. My profile is private,’ Mira explained looking down at her screen, fidgeting with colour balance and sharpness.

When I said I wasn’t very active, Eloise rolled her eyes first and then frowned.
‘Got something to hide, Cash?’
I shook my head no.
‘She doesn’t,’ Mira chimed in. ‘She can’t, she’s graduating in Gender Studies,’ she announced. ‘Oh yeah? Shouldn’t you be a digital activist or something, then?’

‘Shush, Lilliput, will you? She’s OK’. Mira kneeled against her heels and stared at me.
‘You know, I can hardly see that cloud any longer,’ she nodded convinced.
‘Which cloud?’ Eloise asked, swinging the window open and blowing passion fruit vapor outside. ‘Nothing, just a shadow over her face’ her eyes pulled in on me, flowing over mine from right to left, ‘it must have been a passing cloud,’ she shrugged eventually.

When Lilliput was done with her e-cigarette, she lay back on the floor again. In the compact room our bodies were strips of warm flesh, beady eyes following the path of invisible particles above our head or fixating far-away dots in the sky we knew as stars. At the laundromat the boy had come back, emptying out the basket of his washing machine, as the scrunchie girl flipped the pages from a massive volume and gestured hello. Something in my head tickled and suddenly, a sweet hot torpor crushed and pressed against my eyelids. The room fell quiet, tuning in to the wind and the animal screeches outside.

Eventually Mira stretched her arms, brushing her fingers against the heap of objects strewn under her bed. I saw her eyes widen and a deaf shriek came out of her mouth, when her fingers caught a paper cut. She rolled on her chest and swept the bundle of papers, along with the envelope. As she examined the content closely, she looked down and finally saw the stain my rubbing action had left, uncertain for a moment on what it was, how it had gotten there.
She looked up at me and her motionless eyes took a long time to curve and smile, as though due a slow calculation.
‘Gosh, the only place it didn’t occur to me to check,’ she said cheerful, after some time. She got up and dropped the ream atop the other. When she came back, she was rubbing the inside of her hands.

‘Maybe you want a massage before going back to your essay?’ she asked, the heat from her fingers already approaching the nape of my neck. I remembered an interview I had recently watched between a journalist and a famous physic, relaying the story of where he was when the idea that had earned him a Nobel prize suddenly struck. Had the tiles on the wall been a different colour, he might have never had that precise thought.

‘I’m actually OK, I don’t want to--‘
She ignored my resistance and stood up behind me, her fingers fluttering right before my eyes. The skin rubbing against the skin sent tingles to my brain, and I felt like hot honey was drooping on a twirl of shiny white yogurt.
‘Really, I’m all good, I should get going now,’ Mira shushed me, or maybe her fingers did. ‘Please, it’s just to say thank you,’ she said softly.
I tried to push away the mental image of dense dribbling desserts, but they kept cropping up, along with plush pillows, furry pets, and lines of glass vials tapped with round manicured fingers. I squeezed my eyes to overcome the slumber, desperate to be present in the sort of activity especially designed to seduce and overwhelm, but the heat from her body chafed against my ears and wrapped all around me. I felt gobbled up wholly by her voice, the air she moved with her limbs creating a sound scaffolding against tiny doubts feebly cramming my mind.
She uttered each word slowly, each injected with a raucous flux of breath, clicking hard her tongue, unlocking yet again the image of a solitary lighthouse walled by a stormy sea in the howling wind. When an hour passed, I got up and felt a feathery thing behind my ears, like new-born wings.

Outside the window in my room, I watched the sky as though dangling off the church pinnacle turn a shimmering pale pink. Sticky bits of dark chocolate clogging my wisdom teeth.

Rossella Di Pietro is a London-based storyteller, bookseller, and filmmaker. She is the author of the novelette ‘La Villa’ (Edizioni Albatros, 2021), and contributor to the White Room Magazine and Pepe Magazine. Her religion is Ingmar Bergman.