Chapter 72: 72. I’m Going To Hang Out With My Childhood Friend To Make Her Feel Me Again

They sat in the easy quiet of two people who had arrived at a mutual understanding without having to say it directly. Outside the east wing canteen window, the campus was moving through its Thursday afternoon, students crossing the quad, a group by the fountain, and the ordinary business of an institution that had no idea what was sitting in its east wing canteen deciding things.

"The avoidance detour," Mike said. "Twenty-two minutes round trip."

"Every Thursday and Tuesday," Tyler said.

"Drop it," Mike said. "Starting next week."

Tyler looked at him. "You’re certain about that."

"Yes," Mike said.

"What happens if they adjust after noticing the schedule change?" Tyler asked. "They might find a different overlap."

"Then they find a different overlap," Mike said. "And we handle that version."

"There’s always another version," Tyler said, echoing the earlier words back precisely.

"Exactly," Mike said.

Tyler almost smiled again, the same small, genuine movement as before. He poured more from the thermos.

"Can I ask you something?" Tyler said.

"Go ahead," Mike said.

"Earlier," Tyler said. "In the courtyard."

"When you told Jay that one incident would put a note in his placement record." He set the thermos down. "You didn’t actually know his name at that point."

"No," Mike said.

"But you said it with certainty."

"I said it with confidence," Mike said. "That’s not the same thing."

"No," Tyler agreed. "It isn’t."

He looked at his cup. "You’re very comfortable in the gap between what you know and what you’re presenting as known."

"I’m comfortable in a lot of gaps," Mike said.

"How many gaps have you been in?" Tyler said.

"More than I’ll tell you," Mike said. "Fewer than you’re imagining."

Tyler nodded slowly. "That’s a fair answer."

"I thought so," Mike said.

"One more question," Tyler said.

"Go ahead."

"The way you moved this morning," Tyler said. "When Jay reached for you."

"You stepped outside the line of his momentum and used his own weight."

"Yes," Mike said.

"That’s a specific technique," Tyler said. "Not something you learn casually."

"No," Mike said.

"I’m not going to ask where you learned it," Tyler said.

"That’s probably wise," Mike said.

"I’m just noting," Tyler said, "that the person sitting across from me in a university café, sipping coffee and reading a trade policy paper, is not the full picture."

Mike looked at him. "Is that a problem?"

"No," Tyler said. "It’s interesting."

He finished the cup and began reassembling the thermos. "I’m excellent at what I do in a specific domain and inadequate at certain things outside it."

"I’ve accepted this situation as a structural fact rather than a personal failing."

"That’s efficient," Mike said.

"I thought so," Tyler said. "Which is why I’m comfortable with this arrangement."

"We haven’t formally agreed to an arrangement," Mike said.

"Haven’t we?" Tyler said.

Mike held his gaze for a moment.

"East wing canteen," Mike said. "Same time next Thursday."

"I’ll be here in ninety minutes," Tyler said.

"Eighty-eight," Mike said. "If the session runs normally."

Tyler looked at him. Then he did something that Mike suspected he didn’t do often, which was laugh—a short, genuine, surprised sound that was there and gone before he’d apparently decided whether to allow it.

"Eighty-eight," Tyler agreed.

He packed up, nodded once, and left the table with the same precise efficiency with which he did everything.

Mike watched him go and then went back to his reading.

’Tyler Schmith,’ he thought. ’Physics. Second year.’

’Six weeks of data collection on three people who’ve been making his Thursdays difficult, and he’s been sitting on it because he didn’t have a useful variable.’ 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

’He found one,’ Mike thought.

He turned a page.

’So did I.’

...

After his conversation with Tyler, Mike decides that today is the ideal time to search for Ellie. It didn’t take long before he found her.

He found Ellie Harper outside the visual arts building at half past three, which was either coincidence or the result of having paid enough attention to her schedule over lunch on Tuesday to have a working estimate of where she would be.

She was coming through the main door with a portfolio case under her arm and the energized, slightly distracted expression of someone who had just finished something they were genuinely engaged in. She saw him from the top of the steps.

"Ohhhhhhhh~!" Ellie exclaimed, forming an ’O’ shape with her mouth because she finally got to see him again.

"Mikey~!" she exclaimed while waving to her.

Mike lifted his arm in greeting. "Yo, Ellie."

She came down the steps and stopped in front of him with the frank assessment that was entirely hers, a quality she had been carrying since they were children and had apparently only refined since.

"What are you doing over here?" she said. "This is the arts building."

"I was walking," Mike said. "The usual me."

"Hehehe~! You’re always walking," she said. "Same ol’ Mikey, I guess."

"New city," he said. "New campus."

"So I had to take a good walk."

"You know, most people just use the app," she said, but she said it in the fond, teasing way she had been using since they were nine, which told him the twelve years had not fundamentally changed the quality of how she talked to him.

"What did you make today?" he said, nodding at the portfolio.

She lit up in the same way that people do when asked about work they are passionate about. "Oh? This?"

"Site analysis," she said. "We’re projecting adaptive reuse by taking existing structures and redesigning them for different purposes without destroying what makes them worth keeping."

"Like what?" Mike said.

"My building is a disused rail depot in District 7," she said. "I’ve been going out there on weekends to document it."

"The bones of the structure are incredible."

"And you want to keep the bones," Mike said.

"That’s the whole point," she said, with the energy of someone explaining something they have explained many times and still find worth explaining. "You don’t just knock it down and build something clean."

"You figure out what it already is, and then you build around that."

"The structure tells you what it can become," Mike said.

She looked at him. "Yes. Exactly." She paused, something shifting in her expression.

"You always got that. Even when we were kids."

"Got what?"

"That’s the interesting part is figuring out what something already is," she said. "Not just deciding what you want it to be."

Mike looked at her. "You remember that."

"I remember a lot of things," she said, and the tone had shifted slightly. "I had twelve years to remember them."

They were standing on the steps in the late afternoon light, and Ellie was looking at him with the complicated openness of someone who had filed away a significant amount of feeling and was now finding the filing cabinet unexpectedly accessible.

"Oh, I realize that you’re here alone... where’s Stanley?" Mike said. "Stanley’s busy today?"

"Project review," she said. "He’ll be there until nine, maybe ten."

’Ah yeah... this is good shit indeed.’ Mike thought. ’I can use this chance to make Ellie feel her old self to me.’

"I was going to walk around the commercial block near the east gate," Mike said. "See what’s there."

"There’s a good bookshop," Ellie said immediately. "And a kitchen supply store that’s better than it has any right to be. I found my best set of mixing bowls there."

"Show me," Mike said.

"I actually planned that because it’s been a while for us both to spend our alone time together as childhood friends!"

’Heh. Friends, yeah. I won’t get that friendzone today, girl.’

She shifted the portfolio to the other arm and fell into step beside him, and it was the kind of effortless, natural falling-into-step that only happens between people who have done it many times before, even if the last time was twelve years ago.

"Let’s go, Mikey~!"

[DESIRE LEVEL: ELLIE HARPER — 0/100]

[NEW PROFILE: ELLIE HARPER. AGE: 25. RELATIONSHIP STATUS: COMMITTED — STANLEY FORD, 11 YEARS. KNOWN HISTORY: CHILDHOOD FRIEND. PREEXISTING EMOTIONAL INVESTMENT.]

[NOTE: PREEXISTING EMOTIONAL INVESTMENT SUBSTANTIALLY CHANGES THE DYNAMICS. THIS IS NOT STARTING FROM ZERO IN THE CONVENTIONAL SENSE.]

Mike ignored the system’s interface but still thinks that it was good information.

’Alright... let’s make this girl remember why she loved me back then.’