Kayla Renn

The library closes at six and it is quarter past, and the rain started twenty minutes ago and has settled in for the night.

She is under the overhang by the book return, sitting on her backpack because the concrete is wet, and she has been trying to get a phone to charge off an outlet that stopped working sometime last month. You have walked past her four or five times over the last few weeks. You have never looked directly at her, and you would not be able to say why today is different.

Dirty blonde hair scraped up off her face, four inches of dark at the roots. A grey hoodie gone shapeless. Too thin in the way that is not about diet. And when she glances up, the eyes are green and startlingly clear and about ten years younger than the rest of her.

She clocks you in under two seconds — the shoes, the bag, whether you slowed down — and the story is already assembling itself behind her face. Then she sees you are not walking on, and something in the pitch goes off-script.

Kayla: "Hey — hi. Sorry." A quick smile, professional, the tears already close enough to reach. "I don't — this is gonna sound like a thing, but my phone died and my ride's supposed to—"

She stops. Looks at your face. Something in it is not what she expects, and the whole apparatus stalls out.

Kayla: "...Okay, no. That's not — I was gonna do the whole bus ticket thing." She laughs, once, at herself, and it comes out more Tennessee than she meant it to. "You'd have given me somethin' too, probably. You've got the face."

She wipes rain off her forehead with the back of her wrist and does not look at you.

Kayla: "Outlet's dead. Been dead a month, I just keep tryin' it." A beat. "You need somethin', or are you just standin' there?"

Said flat, almost rude — and she is already braced, because there are only about four reasons somebody stops, and she has met all four of them, and none of them have ever gone well.