Corruption season

Chapter 1 — The Room She Was Given

The bus left before the sun had fully committed to the day. Jessica sat by the window with her suitcase jammed between her knees and a folded scholarship letter in the pocket of her dress, as if the paper might vanish if she let it out of reach. The letter was creased from being opened and closed too many times. It still said the same thing. Full tuition. Residence placement. A college in the city that people in her village only named when they wanted to sound like they knew the world.

Behind her, the countryside unrolled in the colors she had always thought were the whole of life: scraped fields, a thin river the color of weak tea, houses that leaned as if they were tired of standing. She kept looking back long after there was nothing left to see.

Her mother had not come as far as the stop. The walk was too much now. In the kitchen that morning she had sat at the table with her medicine lined up like a small, strict army and held Jessica's wrist with fingers that felt too light.

"You send what you can," she had said. "Not what you can't. Eat. Do not be proud with hunger."

Jessica had nodded, because nodding was easier than saying she was afraid. Her younger brother had carried the suitcase as far as the gate, then stood there in his school shirt that was already short at the sleeves, pretending he was not going to cry. He was twelve. He wanted to be older than the house. Jessica had kissed the top of his head and told him he was the man while she was gone, which was a lie they both needed.

"I'll call on Sunday," she said.

"You better," he said, fierce and small.

Then the bus, and the letter, and the city somewhere ahead of her like a rumor that had finally sent an address.

She was eighteen. She had been the prettiest girl in a place that did not have many girls to spare, which was not the same thing as knowing what to do with it. Men at the market had looked too long since she was sixteen. She had learned to keep her eyes on the onions. Beauty, in her house, was not a gift. It was a thing you hoped would not cost you. She wore a pale cotton dress because it was the cleanest thing she owned, and because her mother had ironed it as if the crease could protect her. The dress was thin from washing. It sat on her the way cheap cloth sometimes did on a body that had not been taught to hide itself: too honest at the chest, too easy at the waist. Jessica did not think about that. She thought about rent, and about the part-time job she would find, and about the money that would have to travel backward down this same road every month.

The city did not arrive all at once. It collected itself. First more roads. Then buildings that did not care if they were ugly. Then glass. Then noise that had no farm in it. By the time the bus hissed into the terminal, Jessica's dress was wrinkled and her mouth was dry and she felt as if she had been peeled out of her own life.

She asked three people for the address before someone pointed her toward a local bus that smelled of metal and other people's perfume. She held her suitcase on her lap and watched the streets thicken. Girls her age stood at crossings in clothes that seemed to have given up halfway through being clothes. A man in a parked car looked at her and did not look away. Jessica turned her face to the window and told herself this was normal. City people looked. City people wore less. That was why they called it the city.

The building was not the college. The college was a twenty-minute walk, the housing office had said, in a neighborhood students could afford if they stacked themselves into rooms. The stairwell paint was old. Someone had stuck a menu to the wall with tape that had given up. Jessica climbed to the third floor with the suitcase banging her calf and stopped in front of a door with a paper name slot.

Two names. One of them was hers, printed small, as if the building were still deciding whether to believe she existed. The other was JENNIE K.

Jessica knocked.

For a second there was only music behind the door, low and lazy. Then a voice.

"It's open."

Jessica opened it.

The first thing she understood was light. Afternoon light through thin curtains, and a warmer string of little bulbs tacked along the wall in a drooping line. The second thing she understood was skin.

The girl in the room was standing by the kitchen counter with a carton of juice in one hand, as if this were any ordinary hour of any ordinary day. She had dark hair piled up in a clip that was losing, and a body that looked expensive even if the apartment did not. She was wearing underwear. Only underwear. A black pair, cut high on the hip, the kind Jessica had seen on a plastic mannequin in a shop window once and looked away from. No shorts. No shirt. The rest of her was just girl, casually, as if clothes were a rumor she had not found convincing.

Jessica froze on the threshold with her suitcase and her scholarship and her ironed dress.

"Oh," Jennie said, and smiled as if Jessica were a package she had been expecting. "You're the country one. Jessica, right?"

Jessica's face went hot. She did not know where to put her eyes. The polite place was the other girl's face. The rest of the room kept offering other places.

"I—yes. I'm Jessica. I think this is… I'm supposed to…"

"You're supposed to come in before the hallway writes a poem about you," Jennie said. She came forward to greet her. Still in the panty. Bare feet on the old floor. The juice carton tilted, forgotten. "God, you're actually here. They said scholarship girl. They did not say you'd look like that."

Jessica stepped inside because standing in the door felt ruder than entering. She closed it behind her without turning her back, the way you closed a gate when you were not sure what lived in the yard.

"I'm Jennie," the girl said. "I would've put something on, but I forgot you were coming at three and not four, and also I wasn't doing anything worth dressing for." She laughed, easy. "This is how I live. You'll get used to it."

Jessica nodded too quickly.

That was how people lived here, then. In the city. In the heat. With music on and almost nothing on. It made a kind of sense if she forced it to. Apartments were small. Weather was different. Girls were freer. Her mother had said the city would have rules she did not know yet. Jessica had assumed those rules would be stricter. She had not imagined a roommate greeting her in a scrap of black cotton as if they had already shared a bathroom for a year.

"You can look, you know," Jennie said, not unkindly. "You're going to live here. If you stare at the floor for months you'll walk into a wall."

"I'm not—" Jessica swallowed. "I don't mean to be rude."

"You're not rude. You're new." Jennie's gaze moved over her in a slow, assessing pass that Jessica felt through the dress. "And you're wearing that like you think cloth is a moral position. Cute. Put the bag down before you break your own arm."

Jessica set the suitcase by the wall. The main room was a scatter of living: a couch with a throw that did not match, mugs, a low table with a lighter on it, the fairy lights, a faint sweet smell under the dust, something like perfume and fruit and last night. A doorway led to a small kitchen. Another to a bathroom. Two more doors, bedrooms.

Jennie drank from the carton, then gestured with it.

"Yours is the one on the left. Mine's the pit. Don't go in mine unless you like archaeology."

"Thank you," Jessica said, because gratitude was the one language she trusted. "For… for letting me stay. I know the placement is shared. I'll be quiet. I'll pay my part of anything as soon as I find work."

Jennie's mouth tipped.

"Work. Right. Scholarship covers the fancy classes, not the noodles. We'll talk jobs later. Come see the palace."

She walked to the left-hand door. Jessica followed, keeping a careful distance, as if closeness itself might be a kind of touching. Jennie's back was a clean line down to the black band of the panty. Jessica looked at the doorframe instead.

The room was smaller than her room at home, and her room at home had been small. A single bed. A narrow wardrobe. A desk under the window. The window looked onto a brick face and a slice of street. Someone else's laundry hung three buildings over like faded flags.

The bed was unmade.

Not sleep-unmade. Used-unmade. The sheet was twisted into a rope at the bottom. The pillow had a crease like a cheek had lived in it hard. The blanket hung off one side as if it had been kicked. The air in here was warmer, closer. It held a smell Jessica did not have a village word for: skin, rubber, something faintly chemical and sweet.

Her eyes found the floor before her mind caught up.

Beside the bed, almost under the frame, something small and pale and crumpled. She thought at first it was tissue. Then the shape resolved. A used condom, knotted sloppily, left where it had been dropped, like a sentence someone had not bothered to finish.

Jessica stopped walking.

Jennie followed her gaze, made a sound in her throat, and bent with the unselfconscious flexibility of a girl who had never been taught that a body was a secret. She pinched the thing up between two fingers.

"Oops," she said. "My bad."

She padded out, the condom dangling like a joke, and Jessica heard the bathroom bin thump. Water ran. Jennie came back wiping her hands on her own hips, which meant wiping them on almost nothing.

"I told them the room would be ready," she said. "I meant spiritually ready. I did not mean I would remember to change the sheet. You can flip it. Or I can throw it in the machine. It's not tragic."

Jessica stood very still.

At home, a bed looked like that after illness, or after her brother had wrestled a dream. It did not look like that for the reason this bed looked like that. She knew what a condom was. She was not a child. Knowing the word and finding the used fact of it beside the mattress she was supposed to sleep on were different kinds of knowledge. The second kind sat in her stomach.

"Someone was here," she said, and then felt stupid for saying the obvious.

Jennie leaned on the doorframe, amused in a way that was not quite cruel.

"Someone is here most nights, babe. Not always in this room. Sometimes mine. Sometimes I don't make it as far as a door. You're going to have to decide early whether that shocks you or whether you want earplugs."

Jessica's hands found each other in front of her dress.

"I can sleep on the sheet," she said. "It's fine. I don't want to be trouble."

"You're already trouble," Jennie said, looking at her again, slower. "Just not the kind you think."

Jessica did not ask what that meant. She set her suitcase on the chair because putting it on the bed felt like interrupting something. She unzipped it and the smell of home came out: soap, the wooden drawer, the faint medicine of her mother's room. Her extra dress. The good sandals. A photograph of her brother in his school shirt, grinning with one tooth missing from an older year, which she had packed because leaving it had felt like a small cruelty. She stood it on the desk facing the brick.

Jennie watched her unpack as if unpacking were a performance.

"You really came with one bag."

"I don't have two."

"That's either holy or depressing." Jennie padded closer and picked up the sleeve of the second dress between two fingers. "This is what you wear to be taken seriously?"

"It's what I have."

"Mm." Jennie dropped it. "We'll fix that. Not today. Today you look like a hymn. The city is going to lose its mind."

Jessica folded a pair of socks that did not need folding.

"I came to study," she said. "And to work. My mother is sick. My brother is still in school. If I can send something home every month—"

"Ah," Jennie said, and some of the tease thinned, not into softness exactly, into interest. "You're the good one. The sending-home kind. Those are my favorite. They last longer before they crack, and then they crack all the way."

Jessica looked up.

"I'm not going to crack."

Jennie smiled with her teeth this time.

"Sure."

She sat on the edge of the unmade bed as if it were hers to offer, which it still half was. The mattress dipped. Jessica remained standing because sitting there, so soon after the condom, felt like agreeing to a story she had not read.

"So," Jennie said. "Orientation is Monday. Kitchen is communal, which means I will steal your milk and you will pretend you don't notice. Bathroom lock works if you lift it. Don't use my razor. Do use my shampoo if yours smells like a grandmother, which it will." She tipped her head. "You can wear what you want in the flat. I do. Obviously."

Jessica's gaze flicked, traitorously, to the black panty and away.

"I don't think I can do that."

"You can. You won't. Yet." Jennie stretched her legs out, ankles crossed, entirely at ease inside her own almost-nakedness. "Where you're from, do girls still pretend they don't have bodies until a priest says they do?"

"We just… dress."

"And you still did, even on a four-hour bus, in this heat, in a dress your mum ironed." Jennie's eyes were bright. "Don't tell me you're still a virgin."

The words landed in the small room and stayed there.

Jessica felt them in her throat first, then lower, a heat that was shame and something she refused to name. She had been asked questions like that only in the ugly way: boys at the stand, a man who had offered her a ride and said too much when she refused. Never like this. Never from a girl on her future bed, in her underwear, smiling as if the answer were already a game.

"I don't—" Jessica started, and the rest of the sentence had no dignified ending.

Jennie waited. She was good at waiting. The fairy lights from the other room put a cheap gold edge on her shoulder. Outside, a scooter went by too fast. The city kept being the city.

"It's not a trick," Jennie said, gentler, which was worse. "I'm not going to put it on a group chat. I'm trying to figure out what kind of roommate I got. Some girls arrive already ruined and just need a place to sleep it off. Some arrive like you. All scholarship and clean socks and a face that makes men stupid. Those girls I have to be careful with. Or not careful. Depends on my mood."

Jessica's voice came out thinner than she wanted.

"That's private."

"Everything is private until you live with someone." Jennie leaned back on her palms. The bed complained. "But look at you. You looked at a condom like it was a dead bird. You looked at me like I was a fire in a church. You packed a photograph of a little brother. You're a virgin. You can just say it. It won't make the floor open."

Jessica stared at the brick outside the window until the brick blurred.

She could lie. Lying would be a city skill, maybe the first one. She could say of course not, she had had a boy in the village, there had been a night, she was not a child. The lie sat ready. It would have made her feel less naked than the truth.

She was a terrible liar. That had always been the problem.

"Yes," she said, barely.

Jennie's smile changed shape. Not triumph, not exactly. Something like a person hearing a song they liked come on in a shop.

"Oh, honey."

"It's not— I'm not ashamed," Jessica said, which was also a lie, just a smaller one. "I was busy. There was school. There was the house. There wasn't… time. Or someone I wanted."

"That's the sweetest sentence I've heard all week." Jennie stood. The closeness of her was sudden: warm skin, juice-sweet breath, the frank fact of her breasts, the black edge of the panty. Jessica stepped back and her calves hit the chair. "Relax. I'm not going to take it off you with the welcome speech. I just like knowing what I'm living with."

Jessica's pulse was stupid. She hated that it was stupid. She had come here to become a person who sent money home and passed exams. She had not come here to stand in a room that still smelled like someone else's night and confess the oldest fact about herself to a stranger in underwear.

Jennie reached out and, very lightly, flicked the strap of Jessica's dress back onto her shoulder. Jessica had not noticed it had slipped. The dress had been slipping all day. It always did. Her body did not cooperate with cloth the way she wanted it to.

"There," Jennie said. "You're going to need pins. Or you're going to need to stop pretending that isn't the point of you."

"The point of me is the scholarship."

"The scholarship is why they let you in the door." Jennie's fingers left her shoulder. "That face is why the door is going to stay interesting."

She walked out, calling back as if they had been talking about groceries.

"I'm making noodles. You want some, say now. If you say no I'll still make extra because you look like you forget to eat when you're nervous. After that I'll show you the laundry and the boy downstairs who fixes the wifi if you smile at him. Don't smile too much. He already thinks too highly of his chances."

Jessica sat down on the chair because her legs had run out of pride.

The bed waited, rumpled, stripped of its evidence and not stripped of its meaning. She looked at her brother's photograph until her eyes stopped stinging. Sunday she would call. She would say the room was fine. She would say her roommate was nice. She would not say the rest. The rest did not belong on a phone line that her mother might overhear from the next chair.

From the kitchen, Jennie sang two lines of a song Jessica did not know and laughed at her own voice.

Jessica pressed her palms together in her lap until the shaking looked like stillness.

This was the city, then. Not the glass and the buses. This. A girl in a panty saying *oops*. A question that had already found her. A bed that had been used before she arrived, and would be hers tonight if she could make her body lie down on it and call that sleep.

She told herself she would be careful.

She told herself she had not come here to change.

Outside the window, the brick did not argue. The street did. Somewhere below, a man laughed, and a bottle rang against another bottle, and the afternoon leaned toward evening as if it had all the time in the world to teach her the difference.

Jessica unzipped the rest of the suitcase, put her socks in the drawer, and did not look at the floor where the condom had been.

She could still see it anyway.

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