The Old Normal

It had already been several weeks since she had been home. Campus life had worked its way into her skin: hurried, invisible, calculating. But agreements were agreements, so she came.

In the kitchen, she smelled the familiar scents of tomato sauce, stale bread, and something sharp that had settled into the corners, something that took her thoughts back to the past. Her mother stood by the stove, wooden spoon in hand, while her father filled the glasses with a seriousness that suggested he believed in the ceremony of water.

Everything seemed familiar. But her gaze lingered on the edge of the kitchen cabinet, where an old sticker had half peeled away, a cartoon character, once funny, now strangely anachronistic. “You’ve gotten thinner again,” her mother said without looking up.

Mary shrugged. “We eat pretty light on campus.” Her father sat down. “Before you know it, you’ll be selected for that… what’s it called again? GRACE?”

She looked up, and as her gaze met his face, a shadow slid through her field of vision like second nature:

[UNIDENTIFIED PERSON]

Gray. Her father was still colorless to GRACE, as if the system thought he didn’t count.

“Please tell me you’re not getting involved with that,” he said. “That you can still just look people in the eye without immediately wanting to press a button.”

She smiled. “Of course not.”

Her brain was enough. GRACE was always listening. They ate.

Her mother served something with lentils. The pot steamed. The silence was filled by the soft click of cutlery, the hum of the range hood, a domestic symphony that briefly clung to the old normal.

The door to the hallway creaked. Her little brother came in, hood still up, headphones half on his head.

“Wow, family dinner with lentils,” he said as he shoved his bag against a chair. “What a treat. Are we all going to meditate in silence and stare at a wall afterward?”

Mary smiled faintly. Her mother sighed. Her father poured himself another glass of water, just a little too slowly.

Her little brother grabbed a bag of chips from the cabinet and stomped upstairs before his mother could say anything else about it. “I’m not a cow,” she heard him say.

“I found that shirt of yours,” her mother said. “The one with the text that made both of us raise our eyebrows back then.” Mary looked up.

“‘I am easy to score,’” she said. “White letters. Pink background. God, you even wore it to that debate about privacy.”

Her father snorted. A brief, restrained reaction. As if there were something on his tongue that he didn’t want to say. Only his jaw betrayed him, a slight tightening, just a little too tense. “Oh,” Mary said. “That one.” In a tone that revealed she would be disgusted by it now, too.

“I thought back then that I wanted to go to art school,” she said. “Or actually… Angel wanted that. And I thought it made sense to move along with her.”

Her mother smiled. “It was quite a phase, wasn’t it?” Mary nodded, but her gaze slid away. “It just doesn’t fit anymore.”

“Literally or figuratively?” her father asked, without irony.

“Both.” He said nothing more. But the silence didn’t feel empty, more like something building up, layer by layer, beneath the surface. A little later, at the door, her mother said, “Just tell us if you need anything, Mare.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Of course.”

On the tram back, her hand smelled faintly of tomato and garlic. She looked at the window, where her face floated. Behind her: vague silhouettes. Ahead of her: GRACE, silent and familiar by now.

But somewhere in her field of vision, that gray outline remained. No longer visible, but palpable.

As if her parents had already disappeared halfway out of view. And she had let him go.