Chapter 4: Girl Encounter
The mall was a special kind of hell. Taylor hated the forced cheerfulness, the aggressive air conditioning, the way every store piped in different, clashing music that formed a sonic soup of despair. She was here for one thing: a specific, acid-free paper for her charcoal drawings. Get in, find it, get out.
She was cutting through the home goods section of a department store, a labyrinth of throw pillows and scented candles, when she saw them.
It was like spotting a rare, brightly colored bird flock—if the birds were all staring at a stack of towels with intense scrutiny. Soren’s group. They were clustered around a display, a living, breathing obstacle in the middle of the calm, beige aisle. Freya was holding up a towel, assessing its thread count. Chloe stood slightly behind Soren, as usual, her gaze occasionally drifting to him like a compass needle finding north.
Taylor froze, then immediately sidestepped behind a tall shelf unit filled with linens. Her heart did a stupid, panicked thump against her ribs. Why am I hiding? This was ridiculous. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. But the thought of walking through that group, of enduring their collective, questioning stare, made her skin feel too tight.
She peered through a gap between two stacks of bath sheets.
Zoe was laughing, the sound bright and sharp, poking Soren in the side about something. He just smiled that soft, slightly confused smile of his, running a hand through his hair. He looked… comfortable. Encased.
Then Chloe’s head turned. Not a quick glance, but a slow, deliberate pivot. Her eyes, a calm, placid blue, scanned the aisle and landed directly on Taylor’s hiding spot. There was no surprise in them. Just a flat, cool recognition. She didn’t smile. She didn’t frown. She just… looked. And then, ever so slightly, she shifted her body, angling herself more fully between Taylor and Soren.
A hot flush of anger washed over Taylor. Seriously?
“Well, look who it is.” The voice came from her left, and Taylor jumped. Zoe had broken away from the group, a grin on her face that was either genuinely friendly or dangerously mischievous. “Hiding from the fun folks?”
“Just comparing absorbency rates,” Taylor deadpaned, picking up a towel at random. “Thrilling stuff.”
Zoe barked a laugh. “Tell me about it. Freya’s been at it for ten minutes. I think she’s cross-referencing fabric blends with Soren’s skin pH. Come on, say hi.”
It wasn’t an invitation. It was a summons. Before Taylor could refuse, Zoe had looped an arm through hers and was marching her towards the group. The circle parted reluctantly.
“Look who I found,” Zoe announced.
Soren’s face lit up with a warmth that felt entirely too potent for a chance meeting in a towel aisle. “Taylor. Hey.”
“Hey.” Her voice came out tighter than she intended.
Freya gave her a brief, dismissive nod before returning her attention to the towels. “The Egyptian cotton is clearly superior, Soren. Less pilling. Long-term value.”
Another girl, Isla, the one who always seemed to be listening to music only she could hear, offered Taylor a small, dreamy smile. “Your energy is very dense today,” she murmured. “Like storm clouds over the ocean.” It was the weirdest nice thing anyone had ever said to her.
But Chloe said nothing. She just watched, her expression perfectly pleasant and utterly unreadable.
“So what brings you to the seventh circle?” Zoe asked, releasing Taylor’s arm.
“Paper,” Taylor said, shoving her hands in the pockets of her jeans. “I’m leaving now.”
“Oh, don’t,” Soren said, and he sounded like he genuinely meant it. “I mean, unless you have to. We’re just… getting towels.”
“A foundational household item,” Freya stated without looking up.
“We’re getting boba after this,” Zoe said, leaning in conspiratorially. “The place by the fountain. Their tapioca pearls are life-changing. You have to come.”
Five pairs of eyes were on her now. Soren’s were hopeful. Isla’s were spacey. Freya’s were impatient. Zoe’s were challenging. And Chloe’s… Chloe’s were just blue. Calm, deep, and as impenetrable as a frozen lake.
The pressure of their attention was a physical weight. It was everything she hated. The expectation, the groupthink, the silent negotiation of social territory. She felt the walls of the store closing in, the vanilla-scented air becoming thick and hard to breathe.
This was Soren’s world. This constant, smothering togetherness. This was what he called normal.
“I can’t,” Taylor said, her voice firmer now. “I have things to do.”
Soren’s face fell, just a little. “Oh. Okay. Maybe another time.”
“Yeah,” she said, already backing away. “Maybe.”
She turned and walked, not toward the exit, but deeper into the store, needing to put distance and displays between her and them. Her pulse was still racing. She could feel Chloe’s gaze on her back until she turned a corner.
Alone again, she leaned against a cool glass cabinet, catching her breath. The encounter left a bad taste in her mouth, like she’d accidentally swallowed something sour. It wasn’t just Chloe’s silent territorial marking. It was the whole thing. The way Soren stood in the center of it all, completely unaware of the currents swirling around him. The way he looked at her with those earnest eyes, inviting her into the cage.
She thought of her pottery wheel, the solitary focus, the only sounds the whirring motor and the slick slap of wet clay. The only expectations were the ones she placed on herself.
Pushing off the glass, she headed for the art supply store. She needed her paper. She needed the familiar weight of charcoal in her hand, the stark black lines on a white field, a world where she controlled every mark. A world where no one watched, no one judged, and no one offered her a place in their suffocating orbit.
The art supply store’s silence was a balm. Taylor found her paper, the rough texture of the pad a familiar comfort under her fingertips. She paid quickly, the transaction a simple, silent exchange that required no performance.
Back in her dorm, she tore open the packaging. She clipped a fresh sheet to her board, the blank whiteness a challenge and a promise. The first stroke of charcoal was a release, a dark, sweeping line that held all the tension from the mall. She lost herself in the shadows and edges, building a landscape of sharp angles and deep voids.
A sharp knock at the door jerked her back to reality. Her hand smudged the charcoal, blurring a carefully rendered line. She cursed under her breath.
“It’s open,” she called, expecting her RA.
The door swung open to reveal Zoe, leaning against the frame with a grin. “So you do exist outside of classrooms and pottery dungeons.”
Taylor stared, her charcoal-covered hand hovering over the paper. “What are you doing here?”
“Returning a lost item.” Zoe held up a single, high-quality drawing charcoal that Taylor must have dropped in the store. She tossed it onto the desk. “Also, your evasion skills in the mall were pathetic. Admirable, but pathetic.”
“I wasn’t evading. I was shopping.”
“Right. And I’m majoring in underwater basket weaving.” Zoe stepped inside, her eyes scanning the room, taking in the drawings tacked to the wall and the half-formed clay mug on the windowsill. “Look, the boba thing was a group activity. I get it. Too much. But I’m doing my own thing tonight.”
Taylor remained silent, wiping her fingers on a rag.
“There’s this dive bar a few blocks off campus,” Zoe continued, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial tone. “The kind with sticky floors and a jukebox that only plays music from before we were born. My friend’s band is playing. They’re terrible in the best way possible.”
“And you’re inviting me?” Taylor asked, skepticism dripping from each word.
“I’m inviting you.” Zoe’s gaze was direct, no longer just mischievous but oddly sincere. “No towel consultants. No human shadows. No Soren. Just loud, bad music and probably cheap beer. What do you say?”
The offer hung in the air, so different from the suffocating invitation in the mall. This was a side door, an exit from the main narrative Taylor had been trying so hard to avoid. It was dangerous, but the kind of dangerous that felt alive.
Taylor looked at her drawing, at the smudged line that now looked like a deliberate opening. She looked back at Zoe’s expectant face.
“What time?” she asked.
Zoe’s grin widened. “Nine. Don’t wear anything you mind getting beer spilled on.”
She was gone as quickly as she appeared, leaving the scent of her perfume and a crackle of unexpected possibility in the quiet room. Taylor picked up the charcoal Zoe had returned. She looked at her drawing, then at her reflection in the dark screen of her laptop. A faint smudge of charcoal marked her cheek.
She didn’t wipe it away.
The dive bar was exactly as advertised: a low-ceilinged cave that smelled of decades of spilled beer and disinfectant. The air vibrated with the distorted wail of a guitar and the thump of a bass line that felt like a faulty heartbeat. Zoe, true to her word, had secured a rickety table near the back, already littered with empty pint glasses.
“They’re called ‘Static Discharge’!” Zoe yelled over the noise, her eyes bright with amusement. “Aren’t they gloriously awful?”
Taylor took a sip of her beer. It was cheap and bitter. “They’re committed,” she shouted back, a genuine laugh escaping her as the singer missed a high note spectacularly. This was different. This was uncurated, messy, and entirely separate from the structured world of pre-med students and their optimized lives.
She felt her shoulders finally begin to drop, the tension from the mall encounter leaching away into the sticky floor. For the first time all week, no one was watching her.
Soren stared at the equations in his textbook, the numbers blurring into gray lines. The library’s silence felt heavy, oppressive. He’d been trying to study for two hours, but his focus was shot. His phone buzzed on the table, lighting up with a text from Freya. ‘Group study session in 20. I’ve reserved a room.’
He didn’t reply. The thought of being in that small, soundproofed room with all of them felt suddenly, unbearably suffocating. Their constant presence, which usually felt like a comfortable blanket, now itched like a wool sweater. He kept thinking of Taylor’s retreating back in the mall, the finality in her “I have things to do.”
He closed the textbook with a definitive thud. He didn’t know where she lived, not exactly. But he knew the general dorm area. It was a stupid, impulsive idea, the kind of thing he never did. His life was about plans and schedules, not random walks after dark.
He found himself standing outside her building, the cool night air doing little to clear his head. What was he even going to say? ‘Hey, I was just in the neighborhood, thought I’d see if you wanted to… what?’ He felt like a stalker. He was about to turn back when the main door swung open and she walked out.
She wasn’t alone. Zoe was with her, linking their arms and pulling her down the path with a contagious energy. They were laughing about something, their breath misting in the chill. He ducked behind a large oak tree, his heart hammering against his ribs. A hot, unfamiliar feeling twisted in his gut. Jealousy? No, it was stranger than that. It was the shock of seeing a part of his world operate so freely without him.
He followed them.
He kept a full block behind, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, feeling like the protagonist in a bad movie. They turned off the main campus thoroughfare, heading into the dimly lit grid of townhouses and closed shops. The sound of distorted music grew louder, guiding him to a grimy storefront with a flickering neon sign that simply read ‘BAR’.
He watched from across the street as they disappeared inside. The bass line pulsed through the walls, a physical sensation in the quiet night. This was her thing. The messy, loud, un-optimized thing she did. He thought of her in the ceramics studio, covered in clay, completely absorbed. This was the same energy, just louder.
He stood there for ten minutes, maybe twenty, frozen in indecision. He could go back to the library, to Freya’s scheduled study session. He could return to the predictable orbit of his life. The door to the bar opened, spilling a rectangle of yellow light and a wave of guitar feedback onto the sidewalk. A group of people stumbled out, their laughter raucous.
In that moment, he made a choice. He crossed the street, the decision feeling both terrifying and inevitable. He pushed the heavy door open.
The wall of sound and smell hit him like a physical force. The place was packed, a sea of moving bodies and shadows. He scanned the room, his eyes straining in the low light. Then he saw them. At a small table in the back, Zoe was headbanging playfully to the terrible music, while Taylor watched her, a real, unguarded smile on her face. She looked… free.
He took a step forward, then another, weaving through the crowd. He was almost at their table when Taylor’s gaze, which had been fixed on the band, slowly drifted. It swept past the dancing bodies, past the bartender, and landed directly on him.
Her smile vanished. Her eyes widened, not with pleasure, but with pure, unadulterated shock. The connection felt like a live wire. The music, the crowd, the entire noisy chaos of the bar seemed to recede into a dull roar, the entire universe funneling down to the space between their locked stares.
She just looked at him, her expression utterly unreadable.
The unreadable expression on Taylor’s face fractured into pure, undiluted annoyance. Zoe followed her gaze, her own grin widening with delight at the unexpected disruption. “Well, well,” she drawled, leaning back in her chair. “Look what the cat dragged in. And here I thought you had a spreadsheet for ‘fun’ scheduled for next Thursday.”
Soren looked like a ghost who’d accidentally stumbled into a party, his tall frame awkwardly navigating the cramped space between tables. “I, uh. I saw you leave.” He gestured vaguely behind him, his words swallowed by a crashing cymbal. “I was just walking.”
“In a bar,” Taylor stated, her voice flat. She didn’t invite him to sit.
“It’s a free country, Wilhelm,” Zoe shouted over the music, kicking the empty chair opposite her. “Might as well park it. You’re blocking the view of the musical train wreck.”
He sat, his movements stiff. The chair legs scraped against the sticky floor. He looked entirely out of place, his soft features and clean sweater a stark contrast to the bar’s grimy, lived-in chaos. His eyes kept darting to Taylor, then away, as if he’d been burned by the intensity of her initial stare.
“So,” Zoe began, her voice a playful probe. “Freya let you off your leash? Did you tell her you were coming to a place with… unspecified bacteria levels?”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” he said, the admission seeming to cost him something. He focused on a water ring on the table. “I just… left.”
Taylor finally took a long, slow drink of her beer, her eyes never leaving him. She placed the glass down with a definitive click. “Why?”
The single word hung in the air, sharp and direct, cutting through the band’s noise. Soren flinched, just slightly. He looked at her then, truly looked, and she saw the confusion in his own eyes, the genuine lack of a plan. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice quieter. “The library was too quiet.”
Zoe snorted. “And this is your solution? Sensory whiplash?”
“Something like that.” He risked a glance at Taylor again. “You left the mall so quickly. It seemed… final.”
“It was,” Taylor said. The band launched into another song, a marginally more coherent rock anthem that had a few people cheering. She watched the singer clutch the microphone like a lifeline. “I don’t do group activities. Especially not spontaneous ones involving six people and tapioca pearls.”
“It’s not always like that,” Soren said, a defensive edge creeping into his tone she hadn’t heard before.
“It’s always like that, Soren.” Her voice was low but clear. “You’re the sun. They’re the planets. It’s a whole solar system. I’m just a comet passing through, and comets don’t stick around.”
He had no answer for that. He just stared at her, his usual placid kindness replaced by a raw, bewildered intensity. Zoe watched the exchange like a thrilling tennis match, her eyes flicking between them.
“You were covered in clay,” he said suddenly, the non-sequitur startling them both. “In the studio. You looked… different.”
“Different how?” Taylor challenged, leaning forward. “Not like one of your orbiting moons?”
“You looked like you knew exactly what you were doing,” he said, ignoring her jab. His gaze was unwavering now. “You looked real.”
The word landed with a profound weight, silencing even Zoe’s commentary. Real. It was the last thing Taylor expected him to say. It disarmed her, cutting through her prepared defenses. The noise of the bar, the terrible music, the smell of stale beer—it all faded into a dull hum.
Before she could form a retort, a waitress slammed a fresh beer in front of Soren, sloshing it onto the table. “Four-fifty,” she barked.
He fumbled for his wallet, his hands unsteady. He pulled out a crisp ten-dollar bill, a stark contrast to the worn leather wallet Zoe and Taylor used. The simple act of him paying for a cheap beer in a dive bar felt more alien and significant than his actual presence.
Taylor stood up abruptly, the legs of her chair screeching in protest. “I need air.”
She didn’t look back as she pushed through the crowd toward a side door marked ‘EXIT’. The cool night air hit her face like a slap. She leaned against the rough brick wall of the alley, breathing deeply, trying to untangle the knot of emotions in her chest. Annoyance. Pity. And something else, something uncomfortably close to understanding.
The door creaked open behind her. She didn’t need to turn to know it was him.
He stood a few feet away, his hands shoved back in his pockets, a silhouette against the glowing bar sign. “I’m sorry,” he said to her back. “For following you. That was… a lot.”
Taylor kept her eyes on the overflowing dumpster across the alley. “You think?”
“It’s just that you’re the only person who looks at me and sees… a person.” The words tumbled out of him, rushed and raw. “Not a project to manage or a schedule to optimize. Not a center of gravity. You just see me. And I don’t know what to do with that.”
She finally turned to face him. The faint light from the bar window cut across his face, highlighting the confusion in his eyes, the earnest set of his jaw. He was completely serious. The well-oiled machine of his life was breaking down right here in a dirty alley, and he had no idea how to fix it.
“So you followed me to a bar to what?” she asked, her voice softer now, laced with a weary curiosity. “To get a lesson on how to be a person?”
“Maybe,” he admitted, a faint, self-deprecating smile touching his lips. It was the first truly genuine expression she’d seen on him all night. “Is it working?”
A laugh escaped her, short and surprised. She looked at him, really looked at the handsome, kind, utterly lost med student standing in the garbage-scented dark, and she felt the last of her anger dissolve into a strange, reluctant pity.
“You’re a terrible student, Wilhelm,” she said, shaking her head. But she didn’t walk away.