The word "talk" hangs in the air, charged with the weight of everything we haven't said. The rest of the art class is a low, meaningless buzz around us. Newly-formed pairs are chattering, laughing, negotiating who has to draw whom. But at our table, a pocket of intense, concentrated silence has formed.
Sophia sits across from me, her back straight, her hands clasped on the table in front of her. She looks less like a high school student and more like a detective about to begin an interrogation. All that's missing is the single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.
"So," she begins, her voice a careful, measured monotone. "The project. We have to draw each other's 'essence,' apparently." The faintest hint of sarcasm curls the edge of the word, a small relic of her usual armor.
"Apparently," I echo, my own voice coming out a little hoarse. My heart is beating a steady, heavy rhythm now, like a drum before a battle. "Which is a pretty tall order for two people who have exchanged approximately fifty words in this lifetime."
"Fewer, I think," she corrects, her gaze sharp, analytical. "But that's the point, isn't it? The universe seems to think we know each other." She gestures vaguely, encompassing the art room, the bookstore, my sudden and inexplicable appearance in her life. "This whole… situation."
This is it. We're not talking about the project. We're talking about the project. The big one. The one I've been living and breathing and dying in for a week that feels like a century.
I decide to meet her head-on. No more hiding, no more cautious orbiting. We're partners now. Partners in art, and partners in this weird, shared cosmic mystery.
"I think the universe is a bad writer," I say, leaning forward slightly, resting my elbows on the table. "It keeps forcing the protagonists together with a series of ridiculously improbable coincidences instead of letting their connection develop naturally."
A flicker of surprise crosses her face. A genuine, unguarded reaction. She hadn't expected me to play along. She'd expected me to deflect, to be weirded out. She wasn't prepared for me to validate her reality.
A tiny smile, a true one, ghosts across her lips before she can stop it. "And the dialogue is terrible," she adds, her voice losing some of its rigid control. "It's all subtext and meaningful glances. Nobody ever just says what's going on."
"Exactly!" I say, feeling a rush of exhilaration. We're on the same page. We're speaking the same secret language. "It's all metaphors and quantum entanglement lectures from mysterious teachers. It's like, just tell us the plot already!"
We both fall silent, the weight of what we've just said settling between us. We've managed to turn the terrifying, isolating weirdness of the past week into a shared joke. It's a massive breakthrough. The tension in Sophia's shoulders eases, her posture softening. She finally looks less like an interrogator and more like… a girl. A girl who is just as confused as I am.
"Okay," she says, her voice returning to something closer to her rooftop vulnerability. "So. The real question." She looks me directly in the eye, and her gaze is so intense it feels like it's piercing through every one of my carefully constructed defenses. "Why do you look at me like that?"
My breath catches. "Like what?"
"Like… like you're remembering me," she says, her voice barely a whisper. "From somewhere else. Somewhere… warm. It's in your eyes every time you see me. Even the first day. It's the whole reason I…" She trails off, gesturing at her still-closed sketchbook. The whole reason she'd become obsessed.
This is the precipice. I can't tell her the truth. But I can't lie to her either. Not now.
So I give her the only thing I have left: a different kind of truth.
"There's this thing in Portuguese," I start, my voice low and steady, trying to anchor both of us to the moment. "My grandmother used to talk about it. Saudade."
She listens, her expression rapt, her head tilted slightly.
"It doesn't really have a direct translation in English," I continue. "It's more than just missing someone. It's… it's a deep, melancholic longing for something or someone you love that's absent. A kind of nostalgia for a past that might not have even happened. Or for a future you know you'll never get to have. It's the love that remains."
I let the word hang in the air between us. Saudade. The feeling of loving something that is gone. It's the perfect, most accurate description of my entire existence. I am living in a state of perpetual saudade for a girl who is sitting right in front of me.
Sophia just stares at me, her gray eyes shining. She doesn't say anything. She just… understands. I see it in her face. The word clicks into place for her, a key to a lock she didn't even know she had. It's the name for the feeling that's been haunting her, the sadness she woke up with after our dream. The missing piece.
"That's…" she starts, her voice thick with emotion. "That's what your eyes look like."
I give her a small, sad smile. "Yeah. I guess it is."
We're not just two particles entangled anymore. We've just consciously observed the entanglement. We've given it a name. And in doing so, we've changed its nature, just like in Dr. Morse's lecture. It's real now. It's something we can talk about, even if it's only in the language of Portuguese melancholy and bad literary tropes.
"So," she says, after a long, quiet moment, pulling her sketchbook towards her and opening it to a clean, white page. "How am I supposed to draw that?"
I laugh, a real, genuine laugh. It feels like breaking a fever. "I have no idea," I admit, opening my own sketchbook. "But I think we have to try."
She looks down at her blank page, then back at me, a new, tentative determination in her eyes. The fear is gone. Replaced by a shared, artistic challenge. She has found a way to frame the impossible. A way to process it.
"Okay, writer boy," she says, a flicker of her old wit returning. "Sit still. Try to look less cosmically heartbroken for five minutes. I have an essence to capture."