ONE
Nadya opened her eyes, groggily. She hated flying, but at least she’d managed to get some sleep on the flight, she thought, as she sat up in her seat.
New York. Back to New York. She looked through the window and took her headphones off so that she could better hear the announcement of their arrival. The captain sounded chipper and welcoming, and in her dour mood, Nadya couldn’t help but resent him for it.
She was sitting in an aisle seat, and had to look across her neighbor to see out the window. As she did, her eyes caught on the book the meek, college-aged brunette was reading. She smiled to herself.
“Yes?” the girl asked, jolting Nadya out of her private little world of recollection.
“Oh, nothing,” Nadya replied. “I just recognized your book. You’re Poli-sci?”
The girl nodded. “At NYU. Are you?”
Nadya couldn’t decide whether she was flattered or annoyed at being confused with a student. Something about her huge emerald eyes always made her look a little bit young for her age, and, more to the point, she wasn’t much too old to be an undergrad. At only 21, if she’d got a late start of things, Nadya could still have been studying. But it had been three years, now, since she left that life behind. She’d worked hard, with big plans of what she’d do with her degree when she was done. She was going to change the world. Get her foot in the door and then head straight to the top. Probably the same kinds of dreams that this girl next to her had now.
“Seattle U,” Nadya said. “But not anymore.”
She didn’t mean to sound sad about it. She truly didn’t think she was. But the girl reacted as though she felt like she was intruding, awkwardly shrinking back in her seat.
“I like your headphones,” the girl offered, after a second.
It was a deflection, and poor one, but Nadya thanked her anyway. She liked her headphones, too. They were expensive – the latest generation of sound-cancelling technology. She liked the way they made the world around her disappear.
Nadya put them back on and settled back into her seat, preparing for landing, as she thought about the day she’d gotten them. They’d arrived a couple of weeks ago. Just a blank cardboard delivery box on the stoop of the low-rent, run-down apartment above a bowling alley that Nadya tried to convince herself she was only renting until something better came along, but that she’d been living in for several months, now.
When she opened the box, at first it had felt like Christmas. She’d always admired these headphones, but never could have justified buying them for herself. As she thought about where they must have come from, they began to feel like less of a gift, and more of a peace offering.
Jasmine. It had to be. The only one with the money and inclination to send an expensive gift, with the falling out they’d had before as motivation.
So Nadya hadn’t accepted them. She hadn’t thrown them away, either. She wasn’t that foolish. But they had sat in their box in the corner of her kitchenette, and Nadya would look over at them occasionally, glowering about the fight she’d had with her sister, and just letting the resentment grow that Jasmine had thought she could be so easily bought off.
And then, a few days later, when she got the email confirmation that Jasmine had booked and paid for plane tickets for Nadya to come back to New York for four days, she saw the headphones for what they really were: a bribe.