“Owen.”
Aoife watched the steady blinking of the caret on her screen. It blinked in the same monotonous flash, appearing for half a second, disappearing for another half a second, and then repeating. It blinked in the text box where she would usually write a response, like an open invitation to respond to Witchofthew3st in the usual eagerly expedited way that she did. Never before had she hesitated for so long.
She questioned whether or not it was even right to refer to this online friend as Witchofthew3st if it was actually just Owen. But… was it? Aoife felt stupid for even doubting the obvious conclusion before her very own eyes, but she felt like it would bring her more comfort if she was able to explain it away. Two people could have the same nickname for her, even if it was incredibly coincidental.
But it wasn’t just a nickname, Aoife thought. As she scrolled back through the chat logs that Nintendo Femicom and Witchofthew3st had shared, there was a clear history to draw from. Months of jokes and banter all catalogued within her monitor showing joke after joke that the two tossed to one another like hot potatoes. Each one that she read through brought an intense mixture of emotions up through her throat to rest upon her tongue as unspoken words. The memories they shared were sweet and tender. They were dangerously flirtatious at times in the way that made Aoife wonder if reciprocated feelings lay just beyond the screen. Those memories, as nice as they were, felt spoiled. There was a layer underneath that soured their previous conversations, pickled in the brine of time to leave what was once cherished memories behind for more confused feelings.
Owen had done more than omit details about his gender. As Aoife looked back through their talks, he had even leaned into it. He had called himself a girl on multiple occasions, phrased things in a way that seemed to include himself in feminine mentions. One of the messages in particular stood out as she scrolled through their text logs.
[Witchofthew3st: ya it can just be a girls night tonight then :3]
It wasn’t an accident. It had to be deliberate. But if it was deliberate, it brought on a further brigade of questions to address. The most important being why. Why had he put on the act, why didn’t he tell Aoife when they had first met in person, why had he gone through the effort of constructing an entirely different online persona?
Aoife began to wonder where it left her in this situation. Had she been a part of some shameful fantasy that Owen kept a secret from everyone in his life? He clearly hadn’t shown anyone in his personal life Witchofthew3st. No one in the esports meeting recognized him as having an existing account, he had lied about playing UMDK in every conversation until today. He hid that secret from everyone with a precise measurement of guilt.
Aoife had enough of shame. It was the poison that laced her entire childhood. The shame that taught her that certain thoughts should not be spoken aloud. When expressed, they would lead to reprimand or embarrassment. Oftentimes both. Shame became a habit. A habit that Aoife swore off entirely when she had come out to her father and her step-mother, which she had every intention of ignoring when possible. She was done with shame, and the burden that it placed upon her shoulders to mold into someone else. Aoife’s father had not taken it well, with her step-mother taking it even worse. Her step-mother taking it poorly didn’t matter at all to Aoife. Ever since she refused to accept her as a “new mother” their relationship was non-existent. But her father’s reaction was filled with enough spurn that Aoife had left and refused to look back under any circumstance.
Shame was not something that Aoife wanted to be a part of, and if that was the way that Owen viewed their friendship, it felt like a tainted relationship. Her initial instinct was to type back a response to Owen’s UMDK account. A witty, snappy, and sarcastic way to get back at him for lying to her face every moment since they had met. It didn’t feel productive to vent the anger in such a way, so Aoife instead opted to wait for Owen to come back into their apartment. That way she could give him a piece of her own mind directly for lying to her face, betraying all the trust she placed in him, and leading her on in some strange lie all for what? To get to roleplay online as a lesbian at the expense of another?
“Oh shit.”
He was ashamed. At least it seemed like that to Aoife. Was it possible that he was ashamed for the same reasons that she used to be when she was younger? Aoife began to recall her high school years, a miserable stretch of time where she had opted to live her life almost entirely within the online space, one where she could be more comfortable. More herself. In that time, she had gone under a pseudonym in all of the online spaces that she occupied. Nintendo Femicom was the perfect username for Aoife. No way to tie it back to herself, but with every implicit feature designed to make everyone else view her as a woman. It wasn’t too dissimilar from Owen's own strange behavior. The pieces began to slot together in Aoife’s mind to form a complete picture.
“Oh Owen…”
Aoife felt a sickly guilt wrapping its way around her stomach. She began to wonder if he knew. Was it presumptuous for her to assume that Owen was closeted? Did he even know he was in the closet at all? Or was it so dark in there he hadn’t realized there was even a door to be opened. Aoife gripped the arms of her gaming chair, her nails softly digging into the fake leather. Even if that was the case, and Owen is soon to be on his own journey of self-discovery, Aoife felt deeply uncomfortable with the idea of swallowing all of her emotions in order to facilitate it all. She had just been lied to in nearly every conversation that the two of them ever had together, her own infatuation with Witchofthew3st pulling her along through heartbreak because Owen was too careless to understand how abrupt he was killing off a part of himself with Witchofthew3st. A part that Aoife had fallen in love with.
Aoife felt like she was obligated to be happy at the prospect of helping Owen, yet every part of herself wanted to pull away from the person that hurt her. It was instinctual for her. Pulling away from people who had hurt her was the only way that she had been able to keep going through college. It was her safety mechanism, one which she felt like she was being forced to either turn off, or risk stuffing Owen further into a closet that he might never find his way out of.
Knock Knock
“Can I come in?” Owen asked sheepishly from the other side of the door.
“Come in, why are you even asking?” Aoife responded quickly, the high speed train of thoughts coming to a screeching halt as Owen returned from Frisky Frogs.
Owen opened the door and closed it behind him, locking it with a shaking hand. His left hand held his phone. It was just as shaky as the right hand that locked the door. Clearly his return visit to the frozen yogurt store in the freezing cold had done a number on him. “Oh. Uh, you said to knock whenever I come in? The whole privacy thing.”
“Yeah. The privacy thing. We wouldn’t want to be infringing on privacy now would we?” Aoife responded, her tone laced with a sharpness that even she didn’t expect to come out of her mouth. Her emotions were swaying her lips in ways that she hadn’t expected.
“No?” Owen responded, visible confusion across his face as he picked up on the stark change in her tone without any clear indication of why. He began to wonder if there was something that he had missed in their earlier conversation that had set her off. When it was clear that Aoife had no intentions of following up with another response, Owen decided to break the silence as he hung up his coat near the door.
“Found my phone. I- uh, I’m sure you can see that. But I’m glad it’s back in safe hands, isn’t that right, Hand Lawyer?” Owen spoke, lifting his left hand to move it into the same hand puppet from before.
“That’s right, Owen! You’re the best defendant I’ve ever had to plea bargain for!” Owen didn’t even attempt any kind of ventriloquism as he spoke and moved the hand lawyer up and down. With his cold hands, the motions were far more sloppy than they had been before.
“...Not as good as before, I know. Don’t tell his other clients but I’m worried my hand lawyer has gotten in bad with the mafia and abuses some substances to cope.” Owen gave a short laugh to his own joke under the assumption that Aoife would join in with him as she had always done before. The stark silence forced him into an uncomfortable stance in the center of their room. After enough time in the weary silence, Owen moved back towards his side of the room and sat down in his chair.
The small digital clock in the bottom right hand of his monitor slowly ticked by as Owen twisted words around in his mouth, feeling and tonguing the right words and correct tone of voice to use. Something was obviously wrong, yet nothing immediately came to mind as the solution to the perplexing cold shoulder he was receiving.
“Are you mad at me?” Owen let the words fall out of his mouth in nervous wait for an answer he wasn’t sure he wanted.
“Wrong hand.” Aoife replied, seemingly ignoring the question entirely.
“Huh?”
“The hand lawyer was on the wrong hand. It’s supposed to be your right hand.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Exactly. Not the left.”
“And my question? I feel like we left that behind.”
“Left it? Right.” Aoife hummed aloud, the kind of hum that is clearly meant to audibly express consideration rather than a true absent minded hum. “What’s the left?”
“The left?”
“Right. The left.”
“You mean my left hand? It doesn’t have a character yet. I guess I’m still deciding what the left hand will be. Court reporter, maybe?”
Finally, Aoife left out a soft laugh, very short and very quiet, but audible enough to send a wave of relief through Owen.
“Funny. Anyway, I’m not mad, I just have a really bad headache and I think it’s affecting my mood more than I thought. I’m gonna turn in early for the night.” Aoife was already crawling into her own bed as she spoke. The headache excuse was just that, an excuse. But it would be enough for the night and would give her the distance she needed from Owen while she was lost in thought.
“Oh. Okay. Have a goodnight then, Buttercup.” Owen replied, slipping his own headphones over his ears as he prepared to matchmake for a round of UMDK as PertinentHorse. If he wanted to have any good gear, he’d have to work for it quickly before the results of the tryouts were announced and the first meeting started. That is if he found himself on the team.
Aoife gripped her pillow tightly as she heard the nickname once more. It was kindling on the fire in her mind, a fire that burned bright through the night as she replayed the past two months in her mind in hopes she could differentiate the lies from the truths.
* * * * *
“Catch!”
Rather flippant phrasing considering the current situation, Witch thought. The grenade that Femicom had thrown towards her landed squarely within her palm, pin already pulled.
The smaller punk hands of Witch seemed to know exactly how to handle the situation. Before the thoughts had even crossed her mind, she was already acting to dispatch the Machnum operative that sat before her. The left arm that held the Machnum operative in a headlock shifted to yank his head to the side, exposing a gap between the shiny black armor that each operative wore to be indistinguishable from one another. The right arm, which now held a freshly primed grenade, capitalized on the brand new weakpoint and shoved the grenade deep into the gap of the armor. With only a few more seconds until the device detonated, Witch wrapped herself around the shoulder of the Machnum solider to leverage his own weight against him as she pivoted along the ground to throw the operative towards a group of his allies.
The sound of Machnum armor colliding into itself as the operatives tumbled to the ground reminded Witch of the satisfying clunk of a bowling ball sending pins slamming into one another. Backstepping away from the pile of Machnum operatives just for safety, Witch awaited the imminent explosion. The rush of heat it provided brushed through the pink hair that fell out of place between her eyes.
“Well would you look at that, butterfingers finally managed to catch something!” The familiar voice of Castle emerged from behind a fallen stack of metallic boxes. They were sporting a cybernetic eye and enough chains to make a medieval jailer blush.
“She doesn’t always mess up the catches!” Femicom came to Witch’s defense, both verbally and physically as she sidled up towards her, placing a hand on the spiked shoulder plate that Witch wore. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
“Name a single time she hasn’t fumbled a grenade catch?” Castle asked as they crouched down near the pile of recently detonated Machnum operatives.
“A few weeks ago? At that power plant! The grenade went right in the vent like it was supposed to!” Femicom retorted as she leaned into Witch’s shoulder, and uncomfortable shift in weight for Witch due to Femicom’s height advantage over Witch.
“Wasn’t a catch.” Castle shrugged as they began to pry apart a gauntlet of one of the more intact operatives.
“Of course it was a catch! How else would it have slid down the vent to knock out their security?” Femicom asked, confident in her ability to stump the fidgeting chain-laden killer that was ripping apart the operative’s gauntlet with a shocking amount of precision.
“I mean… we don’t need to talk about that catch. Do we?” Witch let out a nervous laugh, deliberately avoiding eye contact with the woman that was leaning into her.
“What am I missing here, R3BELS? Why are you looking at me like that, Castle?” Femicom was narrowing her eyes towards Castle.
“It wasn’t so much a catch as it was a ricochet of pure luck. I threw the grenade towards Witch and it slipped right through her hands.”
“...how did it get in the vent then?” Femicom asked, only to receive no verbal response from Castle. Instead, they simply gestured towards Witch who was doing her absolute best to shrink into herself. Femicom and Witch locked eyes, and with only a few moments of an expectant stare from Femicom, Witch responded with a hand over her eyes.
“It bounced off of my forehead and into the vent…”
“...are you serious?” Femicom let out a snicker before she managed to slap a hand over her mouth to hide the growing smile.
Witch practically drew into herself on the spot, hands firmly placed in front of her face as if she were a child that had yet to understand the concept of being viewed by things that you cannot see.
“Oh that’s rich!” Femicom laughed for the next minute as Castle finally stripped the gauntlet from an operative's arm. Eventually, Femicom’s laughs abruptly stopped as she made a realization.
“Wait, that was to disable the security before I broke into the power plant! I could have died if it didn’t get disabled in time!” Femicom looked back and forth between Witch and Castle in utter disbelief.
“You didn’t though! I got the security disabled like I said because I’m a pro!” Witch, having regained some level of confidence, spoke with her chest out in front of her.
“A pro that gets domed by a grenade…” Castle quipped, their tongue gently squished between their teeth as they focused on infiltrating the security measure put in place to protect the information within the gauntlet.
“Only to land it in the vent! I’m so fuckin’ good that even when I do a bad job I do a good job!” Witch bragged, poking Femicom squarely in the sternum with a finger, the woman still clearly processing her close call from a few weeks ago.
“Well you caught it this time, so hopefully it’s a sign you won’t be headbutting anymore explosive devices in the near future.” Femicom muttered between an outward sigh of relief.
“Ahhhh… mint. Looks like they’re dropping off the goods not too far from here. 13th on Westrin at that Hardlight armory that’s set to open in a few months.” Once they were done with the datachip, Castle flicked it away onto the ground and crushed it beneath their boot.
“Then what are we waiting on? Let’s get our giddy gooey groove on!” Femicom finally latched her sniper rifle onto her back to allow both of her hands to assist her in crossing the city blocks towards the meeting place. “Castle, you break off towards the local grid, we’ll need to know when Machnum is about to land. Witch, you’re with me. I hope you’re ready to crash a party that hasn’t even started.”
Castle nodded and unfurled the length of chains along their left arm. They moved towards the edge of the rooftop and lept from the metallic surface. As they fell the chain was swung towards the nearest building, latching into the metal with a brutal screech. Castle’s mode of transportation had never been good for the buildings they swung from, but they always treated it as a bonus. The ability to traverse the city while simultaneously committing mass vandalism.
“Of course you want to ruin their party. Still upset you never got invited to any when you were younger?” Witch smirked as she moved towards the edge of the rooftop next to Femicom.
“Ha. Ha. We both know I’ve been to far more parties than you.”
“How come?”
“I’m better at kissing.”
“Seems irrelevant and inconclusive.” Witch rolled her eyes as she spoke. She was taking the current break to make sure her shoes were fully latched and secure. It wouldn’t be pretty if they slipped off of her feet when she used their burst of speed to jump from one building to another.
“Irrelevant? What kind of parties do you go to if you think that’s irrelevant?”
“What kind of parties do you go to if you think kissing is the most important element?”
“The better ones, apparently.” Femicom replied crouched down next to Witch at the edge of the rooftop. “The ones where I learned this.”
“Learned wha-” The swift locking of lips between the two women prevented any sort of response. Not that Witch wanted to respond anymore. She was far too occupied with the flutter of emotions that spread throughout her as Femicom pushed her onto her back to straddle her, her own knees on both sides of her stomach. Femicom’s right knee in particular was only a foot away from the edge of the building where an absolutely lethal drop lay in wait. The proximity to danger made the exchange of kisses back and forth all the more enticing and electric.
Witch’s hands danced across Femicom’s back as they kissed, every inch of her back suddenly needing to be mapped by Witch. In between long drawn-out kisses, Femicom took in breaths and blew the hot air across Witch’s exposed neck. Witch’s spike-covered armor was absolutely not ideal for the intimate experience they were engaged in, but neither of them made any moves to fix the problem. The passion was a fire between the two of them, and any diversion from that fire would risk it dying out.
A few minutes passed in which the two breathy women locked lips on the building’s edge, relishing in every single bite of the lip until Femicom dared to break the rhythm and speak.
“Meeting spot, remember? We can continue this afterwards, darling.” She spoke in a sultry tone as she pushed herself off of Witch to prepare her own traversal method, a short range teleport.
“Yeah, we’ll have a rematch later, I don’t think we quite reached a verdict on who the better kisser is.”
“Best of three? For fairness sake of course…” Femicom smirked as the small circle on her chest began to glow, signaling it was online and ready for use.
“Maybe best of five?” Witch smiled as she knelt down into a sprinter’s position, like she was ready to run a fifty meter dash.
“Deal.” Femicom responded just before she leapt off of the building and vanished into a ball of blue light.
Witch followed her teammates motions and leapt off of the side of the building with the speed of a skyracer, enough force packed into the jump that the metal where she once crouched had crumbled inwards as she pushed off of it. She had done this jump thousands of times, the calculations of how hard to jump to land at certain distances had become a kind of muscle memory. Only the building she was quickly flung towards suddenly appeared to be much further than before. With a sickening surge of vertigo that Witch had never felt before the gap between the buildings grew larger and larger by the second. Her stomach twisted and churned with fear as she began to plummet towards the ground hundreds of feet below. The high pitched scream that slipped from her throat was stolen away by the air racing by, a rising panic that caused her to close her eyes and pray that something might save her.
* * * * *
Owen’s eyes flung open as his head hit the ground. The sudden shift in every one of his senses was beyond disorienting. The rapid beating of his heart was the tempo with which he followed while he gained some level of grasp on his bearings. A dream, he realized fairly quickly. Falling through a futuristic skyline towards his death had just been a dream he was caught up in before waking up in his dorm room.
It made some level of sense to Owen that he would have a dream about UMDK with the previous day filled with so much discussion of the topic. The puzzling aspect was how visceral and real the dream felt. He had rarely, if ever, had dreams that felt so real. Even as he lay splayed across the carpeted floor next to his bed, he thought back to the conversation that he had with Femicom and Castle in the dream, how authentic it felt to be interacting with people that he knew. Even the kiss, especially the kiss. All of it felt so real to him that there was even a level of physical discomfort and confusion when he picked himself up from the floor to catch a glimpse of his reflection. It wasn’t the shorter pink haired girl that he had just been. It was the same sad looking college guy that always stared back at him.
A deep, unsettling pit in his stomach took root. The seed of a bizarre emotion was planted within him and began to grow into a rotten sensation. It took a while to decipher it, uncover which emotion was digging into his gut and leaving him clenching his fists at his own standing mirror.
It was a sickly envy, he found. It slithered through his veins as he thought back to the moments he shared with his friends in the dream. The moments where they talked about him. The amount of “she”s and “her”s that were used, and how they turned sour upon the realization that Aoife and Castle hadn’t actually said those things about him.
But why did he even want them to? It’s not like he was walking around as an anarchist punk girl in his day to day life, so it wouldn’t make any sense for others to address him that way. He was Owen, a college gamer who often overslept, it made sense that they would address him as such, rather than his online personality. Yet, that thought didn’t sit right at all in Owen’s gut. He wondered why he couldn’t seem to get over the dream. It was just some fevered dream about a video game he sunk far too many hours into. It probably wasn’t healthy at all to be thinking so much about it now that he was awake. Especially because the more he thought about the dream, the more it made him want to curl back up in his bed.
“Sorry for yelling, Aoife.” Owen finally decided to speak up for the first time since screaming himself awake at the prospect of flattening himself into a gorey pancake on a futuristic sidewalk.
“Aoife?” Owen asked again as he rummaged through his dresser drawers to grab a new shirt to go with the same pair of jeans that he wore every day. When she had yet to respond again Owen moved towards her side of the room. She was usually better about waking up than he was.
When Owen walked over to her side of the room, clothes and towel in hand for the imminent shower, he encountered a stark absence of Aoife. Her bed was empty, but neatly made. Had she left early for a class? Owen wondered if there was something different about her schedule today. He decided to ask over text as he walked towards the Freidrich Hall showers on his floor. This story is hosted at novelping dot com.
[Owen: early class today??? good luck bein smart]
After sending the message, Owen moved the phone to his side to slip it back into his pocket. As soon as it sunk into the pocket with a soft thump, the phone vibrated.
“Damn that was fast, don’t tell me you’re texting in class now, Aoife.” Owen muttered to himself as he reached back into his pocket to pull out his phone.
[Richie?: yo!!!! You see the announcement yet?]
Owen let out a soft laugh at the contact information that he had still neglected to change. Part of him wondered how long his phone would continue to ask him about Richie’s name like it was seeking validation for being correct.
[Owen: announcement?]
[Richie?: yea its on the discord dude. teams are official]
[Owen: oh i forgot to take a picture of the qr code my b]
[Richie?: here’s the link then silly!!!! You gotta join so you can see it]
[Richie?: Join the Everett ESPORTS]
Owen looked at the link that appeared in their text conversation. His brief consideration as to why he had signed up for all of this in the first place was immediately quashed when he remembered Aoife’s excitement the day before. She seemed to be convinced that it would be a good time, and Owen trusted her. Clicking the link, Owen was instantly brought into the server. It had clearly just been made, but despite that, the server announcements channel had a list of the team that had just been announced.
A quick scroll got Owen to see the list of UMDK players.
EVERETT UMDK TEAM:
DEACON MOORE
SARAH WHITMAN
CASTLE
AOIFE ALLANACH
RICHIE STANSMERE
MALIK PETERSON
EVERETT UMDK SUBSTITUTES:
OWEN FAIRMOORE
STEVEN STEGMAN
Owen read through the list a few more times as he entered the bathrooms and walked towards the back where the showers were held. Nothing changed. Owen hadn’t expected it to, necessarily, but he was still surprised to have made it on the team at all. Sure, he was a substitute for the team, but it was better than nothing.
[Rich4life: If you’re on the team, congrats! We’ll be meeting this Saturday for our first practice, we’ll need to really kick it into gear if we want to be ready for the first match against another team.]
After reading the message, Owen set his phone down with the rest of his clothes and entered the shower. Making the team was a pleasant surprise for the morning, though it certainly brought up a plethora of new issues that needed addressing. What does a substitute even do in an esports team? Owen wondered if he’d be sitting around watching people play, or if he’d be asked to switch out for people in order to actually practice. If he did play, what would he do? He wouldn’t be able to play using Witchofthew3st to avoid Aoife discovering who he was, which meant he would have to default back to PertinentHorse. An unappealing idea, especially after last night’s dream that lingered in the forefront of his mind like a post-it note stuck to his frontal lobe, forcing him to remember what it was like fighting Machnum operatives in the lithe punk form of Witch.
Compared to his own body that stood awkwardly underneath the showerhead, it was night and day. The water spilled down across his skin in frayed streams, cresting the corners of his elbows that had been drawn together across the front of his chest to splatter on the floor below. In every sense of the word, it was him, yet Owen couldn’t help but feel the same way that he had when randomizing the appearance of PertinentHorse. None of it mattered. There wasn’t a random combination of physical characteristics out there that would come together to give Owen the strong sense of self like the glimpses of himself in the dream as Witch. Owen felt silly. Ridiculous, even. Seeing more of himself in a tailored online character he had made rather than his own body was ridiculous. It must have been due to the pure amount of time that Owen had spent staring at loadout screens with Witchofthew3st looking back at him that caused such visceral attachment.
No matter how he spun it, there wasn’t a way to change it. Life wasn’t so simple as a character creation screen.
Though… Aoife stood as proof that it was possible. She had come out as trans and made that substantial decision for herself. It sounded incredible. Owen had been incredibly impressed by her last night. Perhaps someone more educated on the subject would have picked up on clues earlier, but it didn’t matter anymore since she had told him directly. She had trusted him enough to divulge that information, and what a wealth of information it had been. Owen made a mental note to spend the evening looking up more information on trans people like Aoife. Perhaps even send a few questions her way if she was comfortable with it.
Aoife was living proof that Owen had more options at his disposal than he ever imagined. Owen thought that with Aoife by his side, he might be able to answer some long buried questions.
* * * * *
Aoife thought that with Owen by her side, she was mere moments from a panic attack. She had made sure to leave earlier than ever before that morning, finishing her routine and leaving to go to the union while Owen was still squirming in his sleep as if he was fighting off demons in his dreams.
She’d finally reached the halfway point in her day of classes, both a blessing and a curse. She would always be thankful to be done with the day’s classes, but today was different. Instead of a cozy evening waiting for her after the final class broke, it was a whole night of sitting around with Owen. She didn’t want to avoid him like some sort of leprosy stricken person, but there was a bucket full of thoughts she wanted to sort through before talking to Owen again, and she had yet to address a single one.
[Owen: congrats on the spot on the team!!! You deserve it :3]
Aoife quickly read through the text that had appeared across the banner of her screen. Speak of the devil.
[Aoife: thx]
It was all the response she could think of sending in the moment. The congratulations confirmed something she had yet to check for herself, however. She had been in classes the whole morning and completely forgot to check the discord before her first class started. After skimming through missed messages, Aoife had caught up with the current state of affairs. Owen was a substitute player. Aoife was on the team.
Aoife had expected elation upon receiving this news. None came. Instead, brewing concerns about how she would need to practice UMDK with Owen bubbled up inside of her. It was Thursday, and their meeting was in a few days on Saturday. Would that be enough time to overcome, process, and move past her current slate of feelings? Unlikely. Aoife decided that she’d stay in the union after her last class, work on some homework by herself in order to show up at her dorm later in the evening before bed. The less time she had around Owen right now, the better.
* * * * *
A soft click emanated from the door as Aoife turned the knob and walked into the dorm room just after ten o’ clock.
“There you are, Aoife! You had me worried for a bit. Did you have to stay late to clean up the blood after your latest Evertt dorm killing?” Owen joked as he minimized the current tab of research he was conducting about trans people.
“I can neither confirm nor deny…” Aoife half-heartedly responded as she shuffled to her side of the room to sit on the edge of her bed. Rather than taking off her shoes near the door, she slid them off at her bedside.
“Still got that headache? I’ve got some Tylenol if you need it. Maybe you should visit the Everett student clinic if it doesn’t clear up tomorrow?” Owen asked, immediately picking up on the dramatically dulled attitude of Aoife. He had never seen her so quiet and dour before.
“Yeah, maybe. I’m just gonna try to get some sleep right now.” Aoife replied, already slipping under the covers on her bed, still wearing the clothes that she had worn throughout the day. Changing at the current moment didn’t inspire the most amount of comfort in her, and she certainly didn’t want to ask Owen to leave just so that she could get changed.
“Oh. Okay. Sleep well, Buttercup.” Owen responded in a soft tone. He slowly opened back up the browser tab and continued reading the page. He knew something was up with Aoife, but he also knew that prying further would most likely make the situation worse.
“Yeah, you too.” Aoife moved her hand over the side of the bed to grab her phone charger. As she plugged in her phone to charge overnight, the screen flashed to reveal a text message that had just come through.
[Dad: I need to talk to you. Call me tomorrow?]
Aoife let her phone fall to the floor before rolling to face the wall of her dorm room. Two years of absence broken tonight of all nights, Aoife thought. She felt like she was moments away from the cameras coming out to reveal it was all an elaborately cruel prank. No such cameras broke the silence of the room as Aoife drifted off to sleep.