The smokers backed off after that. A few of them even nodded at me like I had passed some unspoken test I did not know existed. May did not look at them. She looked at me.
She had changed.
The girl from the academy files, the one with the plain glasses and the quiet posture, was still there, but she had dressed for something more than class. A simple cream blouse tucked into a dark skirt that stopped just above the knee. The blouse sat close enough to show the small, careful shape of her. Her hair was down instead of tied. The glasses were the same, thin frames that made her eyes look larger than they already were. She stood a little too straight, like she had practiced walking out of that house and still did not trust her own legs.
For a slum girl she looked expensive in the way quiet things sometimes did. Clean. Intentional. Like she had spent the last hour choosing every piece so that I would not look at the street behind her and change my mind.
"You came," she said.
