A Girl and Her Annotations

The café was the kind of loud that pretended to be ambient. Espresso machines hissing like cats who'd been stepped on, a barista calling out names she had clearly invented on the spot — Brangela? Toph? — and behind Iyla, two men were having the sort of argument about cryptocurrency that made her grateful her headphones were broken and therefore visible, which was almost as good as them working. People left visible-headphone people alone. It was one of the few mercies of the modern world.

Iyla had claimed her usual table by the window, the one with the wobble she'd learned to lean into rather than against, and spread her things out with the territorial sprawl of someone who knew she'd be there for hours. Tea, going cold on principle. A pen with a chewed cap, because she had opinions and teeth. And the book — a paperback of Jane Eyre so battered the spine had given up and lay flat like a dog in summer, pages fanning open wherever they pleased.

She was arguing with it.

Reader, I married him, Charlotte Brontë had written, and Iyla had underlined married twice and put in the margin, in her cramped, slanting hand: Reader, you settled. He had ONE eye, Jane. ONE. And a house that kept catching fire. Run. Then, beneath, in smaller letters, because she was fair if nothing else: Okay, fine — he listened to you. That's rarer than two eyes.

This was how she read. Never silently — silently was for people who thought a book was a monologue. Iyla treated every book like the author had pulled up a chair across from her and was waiting, with some impatience, to be told whether they'd pulled it off. She praised. She heckled. She drew arrows from one sentence to another three pages back and wrote see? you DID know. She crossed out adverbs with the grim efficiency of a woman culling weeds. In the margins of a Dostoevsky she'd once written Fyodor. Babe. Breathe. and felt seen by no one, which was, she had come to understand, the price of a real conversation with a dead Russian.

The lonely part she didn't say out loud, because saying it out loud made it bigger, the way water makes a grease fire bigger, and she had learned not to do that. But it lived in the margins too, if you knew how to look. The exclamation points that were really please-don't-stops. The questions to characters that were really questions to anyone. The way she'd close a good book and sit very still for a moment — the way you sit when a friend has just left the table and you are not yet ready to be alone with the cup.

Across the café the barista shouted what might have been Iyla and was probably Isla and was definitely not her order, because she hadn't ordered anything in twenty minutes; she'd brought her own tea in a thermos like a small criminal. She didn't look up. She'd reached the part where Jane hears Rochester's voice across the moors, and she was loading her objection — Charlotte. CHARLOTTE. Telepathy? After three hundred pages of social realism? — when the noise of the café did something it had never quite done before.

It thinned.

Not stopped. Thinned. As if someone had taken the volume of the room between two fingers and pinched. The espresso hiss went distant. The crypto men sounded suddenly underwater. And the page in front of her seemed, for one breath, brighter than the lamp above it — as though the light were coming from inside the paper and not from the ceiling at all.

Iyla blinked. The room snapped back, loud and ordinary and smelling of burnt milk.

She looked down at her pen, still pressed to the margin, and at the half-finished word she'd been writing — tele — and then, slowly, the way a scientist notes a result she doesn't yet trust, she finished it.

telepathy?

And underneath, smaller: we'll come back to this.