Back to Issue Fifty-Five

Suitemates

BY HANNAH HAN

The first notice comes in February, just after the snowstorm sinks the Northeast in three feet of gauzy white. Within a night, the snow softens into an ashen slush that bleeds through our shoes and turns the soles of our feet black with leather dye.

Seasons are still foreign to us—at least to Tati and Anika. Tati runs in erratic circles around Cross Campus and crunches on snow crystals that remind her of the passionfruit candies her mother mails from Palo Alto. She shouts, I love it so much, again and again, so ardent that we teeter between endearment and scorn. Anika builds a snowman beside her, packing the snow into glistening globes.

I lean against a lamppost and light a cigarette. Sweet chemicals lick the back of my throat. I tell Tati and Anika I smoke to forget, which feels cinematic, though they think it’s just for the look. Tati chides, You’re making your lungs sad, and Anika doesn’t say anything, just glances at me in a maternal, be-careful-and-look-after-yourself kind of way—warnings that I fastidiously ignore. When the wind snuffs out my cigarette, we trudge through the snowdrifts to the dining hall. I pick up a copy of the local newspaper and leave the a cappella audition packets and literary magazines untouched. Student work is shitty and diluted; it’s all written in the same homogeneous, insufferable voice. We only read the old authors—the ones who have passed through the sieve of time and literary critique: Ovid, Homer, Petrarch.

The dining hall is a cavernous space, interrupted by stone arches carved with gargoyles. Mahogany tables form solemn rows. We sit at our usual spot at the second to last table. I scan the headlines of the Tribune, and one catches my eye: it’s printed in a cramped font, shoved against the margins of the page.

“Unknown avocalization illness spreads among women in Rhode Island,” I read. “What the fuck does that mean?”

We defer to Anika, who is premed. “Avocalization means not talking, right?” she says. “Maybe they’re going mute? I don’t know. They don’t teach us that stuff in bio.”

“It says that a group of women in Matunuck stopped talking all of a sudden. And they couldn’t understand regular English, or any other kind of language. They just went silent.”

“Weird,” Tati says. “Is it a psychological thing? You know, like what happened to the Salem witch women.”

Anika’s attention is already drifting. She turns to the salad bar to make her usual dinner—chopped romaine with three cucumber slices and purple onions, skinless and greasy as candle wicks. Tati copies her but arranges an even smaller plate; she is on a diet again, the second one of the semester.

We sip swampy concoctions of Diet Coke and blue Powerade, a mixture Tati invented sophomore year. I stir the pasta in my minestrone and re-read the article. Pale chunks surface around my spoon like Orphean limbs. When Anika and Tati aren’t looking, I tear the article out of the paper to store in my coat. They often call me neurotic—a trait my mother nurtured once I was old enough to check her taxes. Last week, I spent hours analyzing how we all wrote our ‘l’’s: either a cursive loop or a straight line, which meant that you were either prissy or perky. Of course Tati was perky, Anika was prissy, and I was neither. My “l”’s were slanted, ending with a curl like a cowlick.

Tati diverts the conversation to men. “They’re disgusting, simple creatures,” Anika says. “We’re better off without them.”

Tati shushes her. “What about that guy over there, though? He’s kind of cute. The one with the glasses and the eyes that kind of droop.”

“He just reminds you of Daniel,” Anika says.

“He does not,” Tati says.

I don’t say anything; ranking men is a petty ritual the white girls from Gig Harbor performed during middle school sleepovers. We clear our dishes, and Tati and Anika follow me out into the snow. The flakes fall on us: a faint, loveless mist that clings to our shoulders and cheeks.

—

We met in first semester of our first year, when we were randomly assigned as suitemates. If I hadn’t been assigned to Tati and Anika, I would have been friends with the international Asians, the finance-philosophy majors who travel to Switzerland over winter break and ink Chinese proverbs on their wrists. Tati thinks we would have been close regardless. Anika disagrees; Tati is too sensitive, and I’m too rash, she says. My crude Asian jokes would have offended her.

That year, we lived in a basement suite, its windows obscured by climbing ivy and its floor riddled with cockroaches, belly-up, desiccated by the August heat. Their legs fluttered whenever we opened and closed the door.

For the first month of school, Anika stayed in her room with the door locked, playing modded Candy Crush and drawing organic retrosynthesis reactions. I went to no-cup darties and drank gin and tonic out of a plastic bag. Tati alternated between calling her dad and rushing sororities. We orbited around each other, only exchanging greetings when brushing our teeth before bed. But after a month of school, we woke to Tati crying in her bedroom. Tepid shower water was pouring through the cracks in her ceiling. Liquid darkened her carpet. I called campus security, and Anika set a bucket beneath the leak. Tati sobbed on her bed, then helped mop the floor when I gave her a dirty look. I remembered thinking she was so precious, a Scandinavian princess who had just descended from her tower and learned that not everyone was born wearing Hermès bracelets. My mother would have slapped Ikea rubber gloves on her hands and forced her to do kitchen clean-up for the next month.

After the maintenance crew patched up her ceiling, Tati knocked on Anika’s door every afternoon, and Anika reluctantly let her in. Tati sprawled out on her yoga mat and chatted incessantly as she filled out the Times crossword. When I returned from darties, tipsy and more vulgar than usual, I followed the voices to Anika’s room. I walked in without knocking and told stories of the New York billionaire’s bitchy daughter I’d just bickered with, while Anika complained that I had tracked frat-mud onto her yoga mat. And, with that, our orbits tilted and aligned.

—

My interest in the avocalization cases crystallizes into an obsession over the next weeks. Tati and Anika begrudgingly indulge me. Tati asks occasional questions in a placating tone: “They’ve probably contained it, haven’t they?”

I look up “avocalization epidemic” on the internet, and Google spits out meager, ad-ridden articles in local magazines and tabloids. There is no information about the symptoms, except two lines: “This disease has only afflicted women thus far. The first stage of the illness manifests differently in individual patients; the second and final stage is avocalization.”

“What if the women are making it up?” Tati says.

“What if they aren’t? There’s something fucked up about this,” I tell them. “I have a feeling.”

“You have a feeling about everything,” Anika says.

They fall back into the lull of school. Anika studies the fractal-like spread of melanoma cells under a microscope. Tati hooks up with two big-boned crew boys and a clarinetist from the concert band with calloused hands. We hear her exaggerated moans through our noise-cancelling headphones. I tabulate all of the avocalization cases I can find in a yellow notebook. There’s one website that tracks new occurrences, but I have to go through a firewall, disable my cookies, and click out of a porn site before I can reach it. “There are another three cases today,” I inform them. “It’s in Westerly now. Maybe it’s mutated.”

“You’re not a detective,” Anika says. “Get off that sketchy website and go do your work.”

I ignore her and click out of a foot fetish ad. The electric line of the graph climbs steadily higher.

—

In the dining hall, another notice appears in the local newspaper, stating the disease has spread to Boston. “Avocal” appears as a clue in the back-page crossword of the student-run paper, The Mercury Messenger, a name I’d always found irritatingly redundant.

On a Thursday afternoon, The New York Times finally picks up the story. The icy slush freezes over, coating the cobblestoned walkways in layers of grit. It’s Anika who sees the article first, while scrolling through her feed on her way to physics class. She texts us, ig it’s real now. In lectures and seminars and club meetings, students reshare the link until our Instagram feeds populate with screenshots of the same headline. Avocalization Disorder Spreads Through Northeast.

The afternoon that the Times posts the article, the school issues a vague email, warning us to be vigilant. They tell us to disinfect surfaces with bleach and wash our hands with soap and warm water for 20 seconds. The mode of transmission is still unknown; the researchers are working on characterizing it, we are told.

I imagine tentacular pathogens nestling in my hair and tunneling into the mucosal layer of my lungs. We take longer showers, turning the knob to the highest temperature possible. We draw faces in the condensation collecting on the mirror. Minutes later, they contort and melt towards the faucet.

—

Two weeks later, the first mentions of the disease trickle through campus. A girl—a Chinese international I began following on Instagram as a prefrosh—is isolating in the city hospital. A photo of her is leaked online. Anika and Tati admit that she’s beautiful in a cruel, gaunt way, with dark bangs that slice straight across her forehead. It’s difficult to tell whether genetics, malnourishment, or illness has hollowed out her cheeks.

In the common room, I plaster sticky notes on the wall: “Look.” I point at the central note. “Cynthia was in the Blackout dance group, and they went to Rhode Island for a national championship, so she must’ve gotten it there.”

“Did you look up their tour schedule?” Anika says.

“I just asked a friend. And anyway, it’s on their website.”

“This is so extra, Seline,” Anika says, fingering the peeling notes uncertainly. “Just let EHS take care of it.”

“But don’t you want to know what’s going on? No one’s taking care of anything!”

“This is so HIPAA non-compliant. Let Cynthia be sick in peace.”

“Everyone is posting about it—who cares about HIPAA?”

“You’re always in everyone’s business. Chill out.”

“Can you not be such a bitch?” I feel a pinprick of regret but don’t take the insult back. My temper is rivaled only by my mother’s, and my stubbornness is rivaled only by Anika’s. I once overheard Anika calling me bratty and untrained behind my back. We refused to speak to each other for two weeks afterward.

Now, Anika disappears into her room. Her anger lingers like an icy mist. Tati and I look at each other, and then Tati follows her, as she always does. I hear their murmurs through the door but refuse to enter on principle.

—

The second case is another girl in Blackout. She catches it during their winter performance. This time, there’s video evidence: her limbs, encased in halogen-green light, slash the darkness. We gather on the common room couch, thigh pressed up against thigh, arms intertwined, to watch the video on repeat. The girl leaps, and her head tilts back at a mesmerizing angle. At first, we think it’s part of her routine (“Is that normal?” Tati says. “No, obviously,” Anika says.) But then a bird call spirals from her mouth, sharp and ecstatic. A moment later, her head jerks forward, and a cascade of Japanese floods from her throat. A knot of syllables follows. (“A mix of Dutch and Chinese,” I say. Anika says, “You don’t even know what Dutch sounds like.”)

Someone in the audience shouts, “Shut it down!” There’s an eruption of murmurs and movement. Then the overheads flicker on, drenching the auditorium in baptismal light. The girl, still speaking an undecipherable tongue, disappears behind a surge of bodies.

—

The illness spreads from Blackout to Ellie, a girl in the theater department, then to Jessica, a math-chemistry double-major, and Avery, a trans girl on the soccer team. The students begin to panic. We feel it, the strange, crushing helplessness and anticipation mixing in the air like a toxic aerosol. Girls begin to skip classes to isolate in their dorms. The gender ratio in classes and dining halls slowly skews male.

The isolation quarters half a mile off campus fill with the ill as the school hides the afflicted girls. A long gravel pathway, which we call the Road, leads to the foot of the buildings. They once belonged to the fallen frats and the crew house. Now, they are encrusted with mold and lichen. During the day, we hear the girls’ voices droning in a hundred different languages. When the crickets begin to sing, they tap Morse code against the sides of the house, a steady drumming of flesh against wood. Then, one by one, they grow quiet.

—

For one reason or another, we all stay at school. Tati’s mother wants her to return home to Palo Alto, but we know Tati doesn’t want to. Even in the face of an epidemic, she has terrible FOMO. Besides, the illness has spread; the first hotspot in California has cropped up in Orange County. Anika’s parents are at a Jesuit retreat in the Catskills and are unreachable. Anika isn’t even sure if they know about the illness. My mother and father tell me to stay at school. The school, as expected, refuses to refund students who leave. The alternative—dropping out halfway through the semester—is out of the question. Besides, I would always choose to stay at school rather than go home.

The state health department tests the water sources for mutagens, the EPA assesses the nearby plastics factories, and the public health workers conduct epidemiological studies. They trace it back to one woman in Lowell, Massachusetts—a woman we imagine is now sequestered in the basement of a sterilized institution, porcupined with needles as anonymous scientists sample her blood, urine, brain.

Meanwhile, the constellation of sticky notes on my wall grows to resemble a misshapen continent with a dozen archipelagoes.

I categorize every case by color. Blue for the girls on the sports teams, green for the dancers, pink for the STEM majors. “Nicole was friends with Ella, I know, but then they’re not friends with Natasha. And how about Grace? How did she get in contact with them?” Anika and Tati watch as I tear pieces of dental floss and string them between the names.

Tati kneels next to me. “Oh, Sel,” she says. She braids my hair with the practiced motions of someone with too many American Girl dolls.

“You should get some sleep,” Anika says. She sets a mug of chamomile tea beside me.

They head into Anika’s room and close the door. I can picture them: Tati stretched out on the yoga mat and Anika perched on her bed, cradling her penguin plushie. An indie-R&B song pulses beneath the door, muffling their conversation. I know they are talking about me.

They don’t understand that my meticulousness isn’t just inborn neuroticism or a quirky personality trait. It is what scrutinized the tax returns, the lease agreements, the fine print my parents couldn’t read. It kept me up at night, plunging down Reddit rabbit holes to understand what the college adcoms wanted. It made me memorize thousands of lines of Latin, savoring the rigor of an ancient language that emanated a purity my parents and our tiny apartment in Tacoma couldn’t touch. It was survival.

A moth brushes past my cheek and homes in on the lamp. I put on my headphones and snip another piece of dental floss. It feels like the only thing to do.

—

Spring arrives, dripping with wet buds and slick branches. The isolation quarters off campus reach maximum capacity. The school enforces lockdown, but only for women; not a single man has contracted the illness. We watch our lectures live, buried in coats and blankets, while binging on Doritos and instant phở.

“Honestly, this is pretty nice,” Anika says. “I could get used to this.”

“Such an introvert,” I say, and Tati affectionately pats Anika’s head.

A group of anxious parents petitions that female suitemates should be separated due to concerns about close contacts in the dorms. Their appeal momentarily circulates online and gains almost three hundred signatures. It dies down once the school issues a statement that female suitemates must remain in their original housing arrangements due to alumni concerns about co-ed dorming, which violate student privacy and “institutional and social traditions.”

From the window, we observe men moving across the icy campus in wolf-like packs.

“This feels like a simulation,” I say.

“Life is a simulation,” Anika says.

“You guys are so pessimistic,” Tati says. “It’ll all be over soon. They’ll figure out a vaccine or something.”

But the media is quiet. The school doesn’t send another email. The researchers are perplexed.

We watch as a girl from our first-year orientation program threads through the courtyard to pick up her pre-packaged dinner at the dining hall. A trio of boys stalks her from twenty feet behind. When she turns to snap at them, they shriek, “Ayo! She’s avocal!” and bolt away as if she’s on fire.

“Fuck off!” she yells at them.

The boys continue screaming, sliding across the ice-studded courtyard in their haste to get away. We can’t tell if they’re mocking her or afraid of her. We glimpse her face before she vanishes into the dining hall, hurt scrawled across her features. We know that feeling. I recognize it as my own.

—

Tati comes into the common room on Saturday morning. Her cheeks are flushed, her hair knotted; we can tell she tried to comb it back with her fingers.

“Looks like someone is doing the walk of shame,” Anika says.

“Where were you?” I say.

“Nowhere.” Tati’s voice is high and false.

I grab the tote bag swinging from her arm and rifle through it. A satin dress. Heels sticky with alcohol. “Did you go to a party?”

Tati rocks back and forth in her rainboots, shedding bits of ice and salt crystals on the ground. We wait; we know she will spill because she always spills. “Well, Chi Psi was throwing, and Anabel, you know, the Phi Beta Pi VP, was texting me asking where I was, and it’s just been so boring around here.”

“Why the fuck would you go to a party with a bunch of other girls?” I feel a slash of anger like a papercut. “In the middle of an epidemic, or whatever this is?”

“It’s fine,” Anika says. “We don’t know how transmission even works. The New York Times said so.”

“It doesn’t matter. Tati shouldn’t have gone. She’s just starving for attention.”

Tati’s face shrinks into a peach pit, flushed and rigid. Her shoulders cave in, and she begins to hiccup. We know what this means, too.

“Now you’ve made her cry.” Anika glares at me. “It’s fine, Tati. Look, it’s not like you’re sick. And there’s no obvious pattern with the cases. We don’t know if it spreads through contact or aerosols or by some fucking voodoo magic.”

“I’m sorry, Seline, I really am.” Tati’s voice quivers.

“Don’t say sorry to her,” Anika says.

“You treat her like she’s two,” I snap. “She’s a grown-ass woman.”

Anika gives Tati a tissue, and Tati burrows into Anika, wiping at her eye line. It’s my turn to be silent.

Our gaze falls on the wall of sticky notes, which have begun to blanch in the sun.

—

We eat in the common room of our suite since the dining halls pack all student food in to-go containers. Tati scrolls through a dating app as we shovel curdled mac and cheese into our mouths. She sandwiches herself between Anika and me, since Anika and I have only exchanged curt replies since she came back from the party.

A 24-year-old frat boy holding a whiskered, obese trout shimmers on her screen. “No,” we all say at the same time. She swipes.

Next, a 21-year-old guy in a sweater, cuddling a dog with fur so transparent it looks hairless.

“Ew, no,” Seline says.

“Well…maybe,” Anika says, then coughs.

It’s so subtle we don’t notice it at first. The next photo appears. “Meh,” I say. Anika issues another shuddering, raspy cough, then says, “我能听到.”

She looks surprised, then opens her mouth again. “سماعه؟ تستطيع هل”

“Anika?” Tati says.

“वह कौन है?”

“She has it,” I say, standing up suddenly. “Anika has it.”

Anika shrugs, and her eyes roll back so we see the glittering whites, then roll forward.

“Oh my god,” Tati says. “Oh my god.” She never knows what to do in extraordinary circumstances. She’s short-circuiting, we used to say when the stress paralyzed her. “What do we do? What do we do?”

“Anika?” I say, tentatively. She doesn’t hear us.

We lift her under the armpits. We’re surprised at how compact and angular her body feels beneath her oversized hoodie. Then we half-carry, half-drag her into her bedroom. She lands unceremoniously on her bed. We close the door and take steaming, twenty-minute showers. I gurgle with mouthwash until my throat is scalding with spearmint.

—

In retrospect, it is surprising Anika gets it first. Anika is the one who stays inside the longest, who, even before quarantining, ate her meals in her room and wouldn’t emerge until eighteen hours later, smelling of stale shrimp chips and despondency. Tati is the one sneaks off campus to go to raves with the state school kids. It was supposed to be her.

We text Anika.

How are you feeling?

Do you need anything?

Anikaaaaa do you want shrimp or chicken from the dining hall?

She doesn’t send anything back. We notify the campus authorities that one of us has the illness. They email us that the isolation quarters are already at capacity, so Anika should quarantine in her room. We leave boxes of food outside her doorway, and when we show up again, the boxes are gone. Occasionally, we hear her muttering. Her room begins to reek of sweat and chicken-flavored cup of noodles.

Without Anika, our conversations circle around the epidemic, then wither away, until one of us retreats into our bedroom. Whenever she is excited or crying—her two main emotional states—Tati always goes to Anika’s room, never mine. Without Anika, she is on edge and over-apologetic.

Both of us remember sophomore year, when Tati had to choose one person as her date to her sorority’s spring formal. She knew how ardently I wanted to go; all of the international Chinese girls were supposed to be there, and I was intent on proving myself equally relevant, if not superior. The first step was to be invited to their exclusive social events.

At 3 a.m. on the night of the formal, Tati and Anika stumbled into the common room, giggling and effervescent. When Tati saw me on the couch, watching Epic Rap Battles of History for the fourteenth time, her face turned mushy with guilt. “Still up? Why such a long night?” she said. I saw that Anika was wearing her gold hoop earrings—the ones she only wore on formal occasions—and I knew I had not been chosen.

Tati apologized to me profusely for days. A bottle of my favorite nail polish and a bouquet of peonies appeared in front of my bedroom door. We never talked about it again, though I once overheard Anika refer to it as “the Incident.”

—

Three days after Anika experiences the symptoms, Tati is singing an indie pop song in the shower when she abruptly stops. The water shuts off.

She enters the common room in a daze. Strings of syllables slip from her mouth. Soap suds glint in her hair. “kto szepnął? Czy to ty?”

“Tati!” I rise from the couch. She ignores me and drops her shower caddy. Her toothbrush and retainer clatter to the ground. Without warning, she rushes to Anika’s door, pushes it open, and bursts in. “Tati, what are you doing?”

Anika, who is curled on her yoga mat, surges up. She and Tati collide and give each other rib-crushing hugs. A silent form of communication passes between them. Anika begins to cry.

“Anika, what’s going on?” A familiar blade of bitterness wedges itself through my sternum.

They both look at me, or through me.

“You’re both sick now, aren’t you?” I stay at the threshold of her room and cover my mouth to avoid the stench of cloistered bodies. Wrinkled tissues float across her desk like crêpe streamers. “How did you get it? You guys, please—please just talk. Please try to talk to me.”

Tati’s head is tucked against Anika’s shoulder. They continue watching me with a quizzical, bird-like look in their eyes. A shaft of light turns the bubbles in Tati’s hair opalescent.

I am struck, suddenly, with the memory of our first Family Weekend. I’d teased Tati about one of the buildings on campus, named Sanderson Quadrangle. “Did your great-grandparents donate that?” I joked. Tati laughed it off for weeks, but when her parents arrived, floating through campus with a perceptible air of ownership, they made her pose in front of the building. “You’re the next in our growing legacy, Tatiana.” Tati looked like she wanted to jump off the roof of Sanderson Quad.

Anika’s parents had arrived late because of a conference in Hong Kong. They were charming, with immaculate accents and PR-trained voices: brilliant philosophy professors and part-time college consultants. My mother couldn’t come; the restaurant would dissolve into chaos without her. I ate dinner with Tati, Anika, and their parents at an expensive seafood bistro on the bay, and I kept looking at them, rotating them in my mind like the facets of a disco ball. They reflected off of each other, their quips about stocks and their children’s futures ricocheting between them like particles of light. Their svelte, thinly wrinkled faces hardly moved.

I can’t draw my eyes away from Anika and Tati, who stand on the frayed yoga mat, frozen and beautiful, like a statue that always existed in this college dorm room, number C28A, years before I moved in. They are as immovable as the ancient oaks lining Mavers Campus. Their hair flutters in the wave of heat from the HVAC system. I choke back tears and slam the door shut.

—

Outside, the campus falls silent, except for the low hum of male voices. Every Saturday night, the men line up at the edge of the campus’s central courtyard. Then, on the count of three, they run at the same time. Some tear off their clothes to expose their lean, hungry bodies, and they scream, as if to fill the void on campus. The sound holds lust, or anger, or aggression, riddled with longing. Tingles shoot down my spine.

The school newspaper strikes the women off of its masthead. All avocal women no longer have language capacities, written or spoken, so suddenly the editor-in-chief is Jack Dyson, and the managing editors all have names like Sam and Noah.

I write an editorial and email it to the masthead, titled, “A Sisyphean sea of loneliness.” It ends with: Is there anyone else like me out there?

I receive a smattering of likes from some male self-proclaimed feminists on campus, but no other unafflicted women reach out to me. My DMs are empty. My inbox fills with spam. I wonder if I am the last vocal woman on campus, and if this is it. If I will never get it.

—

Anika and Tati retreat into their own world. They stay up late together. From under Anika’s door, I hear strains of BoJack Horseman, one of the shows I hated that the two of them loved. I knock on their door, but they don’t open it; they are in their own silent arena, a playing field I cannot infiltrate.

I count the days in isolation on a sticky note. I write messages on the wall. You’re not going crazy. It’s all fine. Everything is— I throw the pen across the room before finishing the message. Then I tear all the sticky notes with the avocal girls’ names on them, destroying the documentation of every new case I kept up for two months.

I stop showering and washing my hands; I never wear a mask. I sleep on the common room couch under a thin blanket. When Tati and Anika drop their empty food boxes outside of their rooms, I hesitate, then bend down and lick their used forks and spoons clean. I eat the remnants—the chicken gristle and the diced-up squash and slabs of pork fat. I walk around campus late at night, taking meandering routes to avoid the campus security and the clusters of male students. I trek down the Road with just my phone as a flashlight and sit on a mossy log by the isolation quarters. Then I scream. I scream myself hoarse and pretend I am a man, one of those shirtless boys with winter-pale skin.

Morse code raps against the sides of the isolation building. Then I realize it is a tree branch knocking against the window, and a profound hollowness wells inside of me.

I run back to my dorm and pound on Anika’s door. My right fist splits and begins to bleed, a red hyphen along the side of my palm. I smear it on my shirt and beat against the door again.

“Please, please, Anika. Tati, please. I promise I’ll be better to you both. I’m sorry for ever being jealous or terrible or—or bitchy. You guys—please. Just answer me.” But the moment the words touch the air, they evaporate. They taste meaningless in my mouth. I fall asleep in front of Anika’s bedroom, my cheek pressed against the corner of the yoga mat wedged beneath the door.

—

One day, weeks later, I am watching BoJack Horseman for the third time, training myself to laugh at the right moments. The microwave beeps shrilly, and the smell of MSG and yeast extract engulf the common room. When I reach into the microwave for my cup of noodles, my head tips wildly to the side, and words I have never known, never heard before in my life, clatter out of my mouth. “là tôi đây. ମୁଁ ଏଠାରେ ଅଛି.” I smile.

The doors to their bedrooms open at once, and they gaze at me with electric eyes, and a taut line of understanding gleams between us until, finally, the איצט אונדז איר הערט?

And then the web clarifies triangulates clearly

it all velkommen tilbake ita ligadu hanesan ida de’it agora,

ita hotu feto sira mir kënnen all eenzel aner betraff Fra op der Welt héieren

તમે અમારા જેવા દેખાશો and of course

I’m sorry I wanted nang nangmah you all that I wanted เราเสียใจที่ไม่ได้ตอบ

we it was

just kaulâh ngarep

be’na ngartè satèya us

әйе әйе

yes—

Hannah Han is a Taiwanese-Vietnamese American writer from Los Angeles. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Passages North, Quarterly West, diode poetry journal, and elsewhere. She recently graduated from Yale University with degrees in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and the Humanities.

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