Chapter 3

Lookmhee woke up on the floor.

Not in a dramatic way. She had known she was going to wake up on the floor — she had planned for it, folded her thickest blanket into a makeshift bed the night before, arranged her duffel bag as a pillow, and told herself it would be fine. It was only one night. The mattress was coming tomorrow.

It was fine.

Mostly.

Her back had opinions about it.

She lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the building waking up around her. Somewhere below, a door opened and closed. Someone was running water. A faint smell of coffee was drifting from somewhere — maybe the hallway, maybe the apartment next door — and it was the most comforting thing she had smelled in twenty-four hours.

She picked up her phone from the floor beside her.

Seven-twelve in the morning. Four messages from her mother. One from her younger sister that just said so did you survive with a ghost emoji. And one from a number she didn’t recognize that said:

Engfa gave me your number. I’m making soup. Do you want some? — Engfa’s note: this is Freen btw she’s not great at texting.

Lookmhee stared at the message for a few seconds. Then she typed back: Yes please, thank you. And then after a moment she added: Also hi Freen.

The reply came in four seconds: HI!!!! okay coming up soon!!! also I put a note on the elevator so people know it’s broken!! it wasn’t there before which is so bad!!

Lookmhee smiled at her phone. It was seven in the morning and she was lying on a blanket on the floor of her empty apartment and someone she had met exactly once was making her soup and had also, apparently, taken it upon herself to fix the elevator signage situation.

She thought: I think I am going to like it here.

✦ ✦ ✦

By eight o’clock she had managed to find her towel, take a shower in the small bathroom that had exactly one shelf and zero hooks for anything, get dressed in whatever was least wrinkled from her duffel bag, and make a cup of tea with the small kettle she had packed specifically because she had known the first morning would be rough and tea was non-negotiable.

She was sitting cross-legged on the floor with her cup when there was a knock at the door.

She opened it to find Freen, holding a large pot with both hands, beaming like she had just done something very heroic, which, Lookmhee supposed, she kind of had. Behind her, one step back and leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, was TK, holding two bowls and a pair of chopsticks.

“Soup!” Freen announced. “TK helped carry things. TK, say hi.”

“Hi,” said TK.

“See. She said hi.” Freen stepped inside without waiting to be invited, which felt completely in character for someone Lookmhee had known for less than a day. “Where do you want to sit? Oh — do you not have any furniture yet?”

“Just the boxes,” Lookmhee said. “And the floor.”

“We sit on the floor!” Freen declared, already lowering herself down with the pot. “TK, floor.”

TK looked at the floor. Then at Freen. Then at Lookmhee. “Sure,” she said, and sat down with the economy of motion of someone who had long ago made peace with whatever Freen decided.

The soup was good. Better than good, actually — it was warm and a little spicy and tasted like something someone’s grandmother had made, the kind of food that sat in your chest and made everything feel more manageable.

“Did you make this yourself?” Lookmhee asked.

“Engfa taught me,” Freen said happily. “Well. She taught me the recipe. I made it by myself this time. TK had to stop me from adding too much pepper.”

“There was a lot of pepper.” TK confirmed.

“It would have been fine.”

“It would have been a crime.”

Freen pointed at her with her chopsticks. “You are so dramatic.” She turned back to Lookmhee with the easy warmth of someone who had never once in her life made a stranger feel unwelcome. “How was your first night? Was the floor okay? I felt so bad when Engfa said you didn’t have a mattress yet.”

“It was fine,” Lookmhee said. “My back has some notes but I survived.”

Freen laughed. TK made a small sound that might have been a laugh or might have been nothing — it was hard to tell with her, Lookmhee was learning. She was very still in a way that wasn’t cold, just — contained. Like someone who kept most of themselves tucked away unless they decided you were worth showing it to.

“So,” Freen said, wrapping both hands around her bowl, “tell us about you. Properly. Last night Becky was asking all the questions and she always asks the wrong ones first.”

“She asked where I went to school,” Lookmhee said.

“See. Wrong first question.” Freen shook her head gravely. “What I want to know is — why here? Why this city?”

Lookmhee looked down at her soup. It was a fair question. It was the question her mother had asked, and her sister, and her friends back home, all with slight variations of the same worried undertone — are you sure, why so far, what are you running toward, what are you running from.

“There was a job,” she said. “At a bookstore. And I thought—” she paused, choosing her words. “I thought it would be good to be somewhere where no one already knows who I am yet. Where I get to decide what I’m like before anyone else decides for me.”

Freen looked at her with bright, serious eyes. “That’s really brave,” she said. Not in a hollow, polite way. In the way of someone who actually meant it.

Lookmhee felt her face go a little warm. “Or just impulsive.”

“Brave and impulsive are basically the same thing,” Freen said. “Right, TK?”

“Sometimes,” TK said. Which was, Lookmhee was beginning to understand, about as enthusiastic as she got.

✦ ✦ ✦

They were halfway through their soup when footsteps stopped outside the open door.

Lookmhee looked up. Sonya was standing in the doorway, dressed for work, bag over one shoulder, already looking like she had been awake and organized for hours. She looked at Lookmhee. Then at Freen and TK on the floor. Then at the pot of soup in the middle of the room.

She said nothing for a moment.

“Good morning,” Lookmhee said.

“Morning,” Sonya’s gaze drifted around the apartment — the boxes, the bare walls, the blanket still folded by the window. Something moved briefly across her face. Not quite pity. More like the expression of someone doing a quick mental calculation.

“You really did sleep on the floor.”

“I did.”

“The mattress is coming today?”

“This afternoon, hopefully.”

Sonya nodded once, like this resolved something. Then she looked at Freen. “Did you cook?”

“I made soup!” Freen gestured proudly at the pot. “Do you want some? There’s enough.”

“I have to go.” But she didn’t move. She looked at the pot again. Then at Lookmhee. “Has she eaten anything else this morning?”

Lookmhee blinked. “I had tea.”

“That’s not food.”

“It’s a start.”

Sonya looked at her for a beat too long. Then she stepped fully into the apartment — just two steps — set her bag down, and disappeared into Lookmhee’s kitchen. Lookmhee heard the cabinets open. Then close. Then open again.

“You have nothing in here,” Sonya called.

“I just moved in yesterday.”

“I know that.” The sound of the fridge opening. “I have bread. And eggs. I’ll leave them outside your door before I go.” She came back into the main room, picked up her bag, and looked at Freen one more time. “Make sure she actually eats something.”

“I will!” Freen said brightly.

Sonya looked at Lookmhee one last time. There was something in her expression that Lookmhee couldn’t fully read — something brisk and certain, like a decision that had already been made before she even knocked on the door. Then she left.

The sound of her footsteps went down the hall. Then the sound of her own door opening and closing.

Freen turned to Lookmhee with huge eyes.

“She’s going to bring you bread and eggs,” she whispered.

“I heard.”

“Sonya.” Freen pointed at the door. “That Sonya. Out there.”

“Yes, I know which Sonya.”

“She has never once in three years offered me bread and eggs.” Freen turned to TK. “Has she ever offered you bread and eggs?”

“No,” TK said.

“Bread,” Freen repeated, still staring at the door like it had done something remarkable. “And eggs.”

Lookmhee looked down at her soup so Freen wouldn’t see her smiling.

The bread and eggs were outside her door forty minutes later, in a small paper bag. There was no note. Of course there was no note — that would have been too much, too obvious, too something. It was just a paper bag with bread and eggs, left by someone who had decided without being asked that this was a thing that needed to happen.

Lookmhee stood in her doorway holding the bag for a moment.

Then she went inside, made scrambled eggs on the little stove, ate them standing up over the counter because she still had no table, and thought about the way Sonya had looked around her empty apartment with that quick, assessing expression. Like she was already solving a problem.

She was strange, Lookmhee thought. Or not strange exactly — precise. Like every word she said was chosen and every action had a clear reason behind it, even when the reason wasn’t obvious.

Lookmhee found this, for reasons she did not examine too closely, extremely interesting.

✦ ✦ ✦

The mattress arrived at two in the afternoon.

The delivery came with two men who looked at the stairs, looked at the broken elevator sign that Freen had taped up, and sighed in a way that suggested this was not the first time today. Lookmhee helped as much as she could, which was not very much — the mattress was large and the stairwell was narrow and there was a lot of apologetic shuffling.

By the time it was in and the men were gone, Engfa had appeared in the hallway with a broom and a box of cleaning supplies.

“You don’t have to—” Lookmhee started.

“The floors need a sweep before you put anything down,” Engfa said simply, already inside. This was, Lookmhee was learning, just how Engfa operated. She identified what needed doing and did it, quietly and efficiently, without drama.

They swept the floors together. Engfa showed her where the building’s storage room was, which switches controlled which lights, and which tap in the bathroom took a moment longer to run warm. Small things. The kind of things that turned a place from a space into somewhere you actually lived.

“Thank you,” Lookmhee said, when they were done. “For yesterday too. And — all of this.”

Engfa looked at her with calm, kind eyes. “This building is full of people who showed up alone,” she said. “Most of us did. You get used to it faster than you think.” A small pause. “And then before you know it, someone’s making you soup at seven in the morning and you realize you’re not alone anymore.”

Lookmhee thought about the soup. About the bread and eggs in the paper bag. About Freen’s easy laugh and TK’s quiet presence and Becky’s sharp grin and Sonya standing in the doorway in her work clothes doing a mental calculation about whether Lookmhee had eaten.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “I think I’m starting to see that.”

That evening, she pushed her mattress to the spot by the window — the one that faced the thin strip of park Engfa had pointed out. She made up the bed with the sheets from one of her boxes, put her notebook on the floor beside it, and sat on the edge looking out the window at the darkening city.

The streets below were busy and bright. Somewhere in the building she could hear music faintly. She thought she could smell coffee again — from the hallway, from 4C maybe, she wasn’t sure.

She picked up her notebook. Opened it to the second page, past the three words she had written last night.

She wrote:

the soup was good. the eggs too. the floor is swept now. someone left bread without a note.

She paused. Then:

I think this city might be okay. I think these people might be something.

She closed the notebook. Lay back on the mattress. Looked at the ceiling.

The fan with the bent blade turned slowly in the evening air.

Somewhere down the hall, someone laughed — loud and unself-conscious, almost certainly Freen.

Lookmhee closed her eyes.

For the first time since she had packed up her whole life and driven six hours toward something she wasn’t sure about, she did not feel small.

She felt, very quietly, like she was exactly where she was supposed to be.

✦ ✦ ✦