Entry Seven

Entry seven happened on a Tuesday and was, objectively, the worst thing on the list. Bea would later refer to it simply as the Vertical Incident and would ask Chloe never to mention it unprompted.

It had been going well. Two more lunch sessions on the project, both perfectly normal. A conversation in the corridor about the robot dog film that had lasted four whole minutes and during which Bea had said coherent things in a correct order. She had started to think that maybe she was getting somewhere, that maybe the honking era was behind her.

And then Daniel had come into the form room on Tuesday morning with his hair slightly different, just a bit, nothing dramatic, and Bea's brain had quietly short-circuited. She had been doing so well. Four days of normal interaction. She had started to feel like a person who had things under control.

He had sat down next to her because the project meant they were sitting together now, an arrangement that Bea thought about exactly the right amount, which was constantly but privately.

"Morning," he said.

"Your hair," Bea said.

Daniel touched his hair. "What about it?"

"It is," Bea said. Her brain searched for a word. It found one. "Vertical."

Daniel looked at her. "Vertical."

"More vertical than usual," Bea said, which was not an improvement. "It looks good. Vertical is good. I like vertical hair. On people. Generally."

"Thank you," Daniel said, very carefully.

"You are welcome," Bea said. She opened her notebook and looked at it. She was not reading anything. The page was blank. She was simply looking at it to avoid looking at anything else.

Chloe slid into the seat on Bea's other side and leaned over. "What just happened?" she whispered.

"I told him his hair was vertical," Bea whispered back.

Chloe made the face. The wide-left-side-grin. She pressed her lips together to contain it. She did not entirely succeed.

"Stop," Bea said.

"I am not doing anything," Chloe said, her shoulders shaking slightly.

"Your shoulders are doing something."

"My shoulders have nothing to do with this."

Bea looked at the blank page of her notebook. Then she opened the back cover and wrote: Entry seven. Told him his hair was vertical.

Then she wrote: This is never going to work.

Then, after a pause, she crossed that last line out. Not because she believed it was wrong but because writing it down felt like giving up and she was not quite ready to give up yet.