Therese Jones had a list of enemies. She was overlooked by everyone and no one saw her looking back at them, her tiny form swallowed by the puffy parka she wore to and from work, her eyes constantly down and her hands knotted in fists at her side. Both the coat and her hair were the pale color of a magnolia blossom slip. Her list was not the kind of list you’d see in a movie, or read about in a book, where the crossing off the names of those who had committed crimes against a tragic antihero was something you could root for, a list prayed before the main character falls asleep each night, hoping for a chance to balance the scales of injustice with violence. This was a list of tiny grievances.
Indictments such as that loud woman who cut in front of me at the grocery store and that guy who cut me off in the meeting—smells like he bathes in beef broth were written with venom into the lines for that day. Therese had never had a true enemy, but her hatred was as valid as an orphan cast out in any Dickens novel. She hated her neighbor, her neighbor’s cat, her boss, her colleagues, her mailman. She hated her parents and her sister and the old woman who worked at the local library. She felt slighted and inconvenienced by them all, as if her entire existence was on the inside of a pincushion. She woke up each morning and felt the needles, the sharp agitation of existence, and went looking for someone to blame.
On the bus on a boring and typical Thursday morning, she was shoved aside by a woman sitting next to her. Practically flung off into the next row over, Therese scowled as she wrote Bus Bitch into an empty line in her notebook. Pinned between the woman’s shoulders and the metal wall of the side-facing seat, she pursed her lips and grunted, hoping the woman would overhear and know that she had just made an enemy. Of course, no one on the list knew they were on the list or suspected the existence of such a list. Therese hoped, however, that some of what she felt passed onto the other person with a withering look, frown, or passive aggressive throat clearing. She tried to communicate volumes with those subtle weapons.
“You can come sit over here, if you’d like.”
She looked up and saw a person across from her in a front-facing seat, who shifted over to the window and nodded at the empty space.
“Better hurry, though.”
Four other passengers were already eyeing the spot.
Therese’s throat went dry. The thought of accepting a seat from a stranger—who must be pitying me—was galling, but the opportunity to beat someone else to the free seat made her the closest she could come to the term happy. Besides, she scowled at the woman next to her; she was liable to be smashed to pieces if she stayed in her current spot.
Therese moved next to the person across from her and muttered a “Thank you” so low under her breath she almost choked on the words at the back of her throat.
“You’re welcome,” the person said, smiling much too broadly for anyone to smile at 7:28 in the morning. “Zyan.”
“Therese.” She shrugged as she offered her name. Why do people give names like that? It’s a bus, not a cocktail party. She harrumphed as she held her bag tighter to her chest. Why had she given her name like that?
Zyan took the name as an open door and began talking at length with her. Therese tried to say as little as possible, she truly couldn’t understand why Zyan was asking her anything, let alone an interrogation as thorough as the one that followed. Zyan began by asking what pronouns she preferred and offering theirs, moved into talking about their job, asking Therese about hers, how long had she lived in Seattle, and how she liked the shift in weather when she informed them that she was originally from New Mexico.
“I like the gray,” Therese huffed, trying not to look at them. Ignoring people was usually easy for her, but there was something magnetizing about Zyan. She glanced over.
Zyan was beautiful. They had a strong jaw, the kind you see drawn on superheroes in comic books, with a purple lip stain on their lips that reminded her of blackberries at the end of summer. Their dark brown eyes twinkled, and the barest amount of makeup over them made them seem longer then they were, deeper set, and full of mysteries. Their hair was black all over except for a sapphire streak that framed their face. Zyan turned to look at her and Therese jumped and faced front.
“I noticed you writing in a notebook over there,” Zyan said, eyes front. “Is it a grocery list? Poetry?”
Zyan smiled as Therese tried to look occupied by staring ahead. “Or government secrets?”
Therese grunted in reply and shook her head. She wanted to look at their sapphire hair more, but wouldn’t let herself turn.
“Secrets. Obviously. Your silence says everything, Agent X,” Zyan whispered. “Don’t worry, I won’t blow your cover.”
The bus slid to a screeching halt as Zyan rose and looked down at Therese. It occurred to her that she should move and she did, with a clumsy “oh,” half falling into the aisle to make room.
“Until next time, Agent,” they said with a wink as they left the bus, skipping down onto the sidewalk and walking off to the entrance of a large blue glass skyscraper.
Therese found herself sighing. She’d never sighed over someone in her life. She took out her book and began writing Zyan—wasting time but stopped before she could get more than a Z on the paper.
She scribbled over the letter and began to put the book away when the man in front of her let out a loud, hacking chain of coughs. Of course, he wasn’t bothering to cover his mouth. Her lips curdled in disgust as she wrote Balding Idiot—for coughing and spreading plague into the line where Zyan’s name should have gone.
The bus pulled up in front of her house the next morning and Zyan was there with a seat saved for her. They waved—as if they were kids on the way to school—for her to come and sit. They were actually beaming. Therese tried to stifle an eye roll.
She hated that she felt her heart beating faster as she sat down and hoped Zyan wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary with her pulse or breathing. In fact, she realized, she had stopped breathing for fear of them noticing anything.
This is stupid. She let herself take a breath.
“I was going to pick you up a coffee, but it occurred to me that I don’t know your drink order. You always carry that travel mug with you, but anything could be in it: coffee, tea, absinthe, arsenic for your enemies. . .”
She looked over sharply at the word enemies.
“You like your guessing games, don’t you?”
Zyan laughed. “I suppose I do. So which is it? It’s arsenic, isn’t it?”
“It’s plain coffee, nothing fancy, thankyouverymuch.”
“Allergic to milk, thrifty, or just can’t be bothered with flavor?”
“Black coffee is safe. You know what you’ll get with a cup of black coffee. Coffee is coffee, after all. Only idiots spend their life savings trying to dress up bean water.”
She glanced over at their cup and saw an impossible list of letters standing in for modifiers scrolling down the cup. She gulped. She hadn’t meant to put that much vinegar on it. They were just asking a question. She sniffed and looked down.
“You, my dear, have never had good coffee. I’m bringing you some tomorrow.”
Therese turned and began to open her mouth to protest, but “no” and “why” were simultaneously on her tongue.
“I don’t need someone else’s coffee,” she said finally.
“Well, it won’t be anyone else’s. It’ll be yours. Trust me. One cup of good coffee—no frills,” they added. “And you won’t go around thinking that coffee is coffee.”
Therese’s cheeks were burning. She wanted the bus bench to swallow her whole—she was sure that the light coming off her cheeks must be as obvious as a bonfire at night.
Zyan’s stop. They rose and tapped her shoulder. She’d forgotten to move again.
“Until tomorrow, Agent.”
She smiled—actually smiled—and waved to them as they left. Rolling her eyes at herself after the bus began moving again, she took out her notebook. She had meant to take the ride to work to add a few co-workers who misused the “Reply All” function in recent email threads, and Zyan had taken up most of her commute with their coffee talk.
Her stomach tied itself in knots just thinking of it.
Therese woke up at 5:10 a.m. Her alarm was set to go off in twenty minutes, but a text message reverberated on her nightstand drawer. She picked it up, her face illuminated in the blue glow of the screen in her dark bedroom. It was her sister.
Will you be attending any holidays this year? Y/N?
Therese set the phone, screen-side down, next to her and rolled over in her bed. Her sister’s name was already in the book. Several times over, not that it made her the worst enemy Therese had ever had, but there were just so many things that J did that drove her up the wall. Texting before 6:00 a.m. Buying a scarf after she had just seen Therese buy it. That one time she dismantled the swing set to build a tree house—which was still yet to materialize, decades later—and of course, perennially, pestering her about holidays. This would be the first of many holiday-related texts, and answering yes or no wouldn’t make a difference.
If she said yes, it was followed by all the planning. Real state secret-level planning on presents, pageantry, food division, when to show up, where to go— and if Therese said no, there was the interrogation. Was she depressed again, was she seeing someone, was work too much, was it J’s fault . . . one year Therese had fallen for that and said yes, but it hadn’t felt good to say. It never felt good to call out J directly for anything. She always found a way to get back to the issue at hand. It was never about people hurting her or Therese or anyone. There were problems to be solved, as if the people followed the problems and not the other way around.
Therese knew better—people were the problem. Therese was a problem. She rolled back over, grabbed her phone, and deleted J’s text.
She glared at the time on the screen. 5:27 a.m. Three minutes until the alarm. She cast a despairing look at her pillow and pulled herself up off the bed.
Zyan held up a cup of coffee towards Therese as she got on the bus. They had been doing this for weeks, no matter how many times Therese had said she was fine without their fancy coffee. She had stopped bringing her thermos on the bus, though, which Zyan had mentioned a few days ago with both a sneaky satisfaction and a too-practiced attempt at nonchalance.
That particular morning, groggy from her unplanned wake-up text that morning, Therese had already had three cups before the bus arrived. She grunted as she walked towards Zyan and took the cup with a frown.
“What have I said? You don’t have to get me anything. I’ve already had too much coffee today.”
“Coffee crystal tea isn’t actually coffee. We’ve established this.”
Therese rolled her eyes. She glared at the cup in her hands. Zyan’s name was written on both cups with a heart where the a should’ve been.
“Why too much coffee? Did you have to work from home before coming in?”
“My sister woke me up with plans for the holidays this morning. At 5:27 am. It was a rough start to the day.”
“Aren’t the holidays four months off?” Zyan laughed. “What, does she start growing the tree now?”
The corner of Therese’s mouth tugged upwards. “I wouldn’t put it past her. She’d brand it as an organic, artisanal, handcrafted tree.”
Zyan snorted. Therese’s half smile broadened—only slightly. They’d talked about her sister before. And their brother. Their parents. Zyan didn’t seem to be the sort of person who kept a list, but that didn’t stop them from agreeing with Therese that her sister was too much. They even added in a few jokes at their own family’s expense while discussing family traditions, although Zyan always followed their comments up with some empathetic attempt to see the other person’s point of view.
The coffee smelled amazing, as always. It annoyed her—she’d never smelled anything quite like it and still hadn’t gotten used to the warm, rich aroma or the way that every time she had smelled coffee over the last month, she thought of Zyan and her heart raced.
The bus stopped and a herd of people milled in, crowding into each other in the center aisle with all the grace of drunken linebackers. Zyan’s eyes were on the newcomers, so Therese slipped the coffee cup to her lips as discreetly as she could and inhaled it.
It was delicious. She shook her head.
“Still mad that I was right?” Zyan asked. They grinned. “It’s the best coffee. Admit it.” They nudged her. “Come on. Say it’s the best.”
Therese flushed. “It’ll be on your head if I’m too wired to think straight at work today.”
“Well, if you have extra energy after work, it’d be nice to meet up.” They paused and fidgeted a bit with the clasp on their satchel. “Can I take you out for dinner?”
Therese felt like the world stopped in that moment. Her heart stopped, at the very least. She resented that Zyan had that effect on her. More than resentment. She was furious—panicky—that they made her feel this way.
“Why?” she exhaled, both out of breath and sharp in tone, her cheeks crimson, her stomach in knots.
“You’d have to come to dinner to find out.”
Therese wanted to search the bus for anything that she could use as an excuse, but she couldn’t look away from Zyan and their lovely brown eyes. She gulped. No one asked her out. No one would have any reason to—it had to be a trap. A joke. Ask her out; stand her up.
“No, I don’t think so.” Therese thrust the cup of coffee back at Zyan.
They looked down at it, and then back up at her. They didn’t take the cup.
“If you don’t want to, I understand.” Zyan looked flushed now. A muscle above their jaw fluttered rapidly. “I just thought that you—”
They blew air out their cheeks and stood up as the bus stopped in front of Zyan’s building. “Nevermind.”
Therese got up for them automatically; she wasn’t aware of moving until she saw them pass by. Zyan looked hurt as they walked to the bus door. She didn’t understand. Somewhere inside her, she began to ask herself if it was possible they had meant it. What would it mean if they had? She stopped asking herself that question, though, before it could bloom into any false realizations. She knew they’d meant it. She’d seen the earnestness in their eyes.
She sat back down and watched them walk towards their building. Zyan looked back over their shoulder, eyes glistening and rimmed with red. Her insides felt frozen.
Therese took out her book and stared at the page full of names. She had been meaning to write J again, for the text that morning. But she didn’t feel like writing any name at the moment. She closed the book and slid it back into her purse.
Therese had been asked out properly just one other time in her life. She had been seventeen, and a boy she’d had a crush on for years asked her to dinner. It was her first date and she had been petrified to go on it. She had been afraid even then, after a childhood and teen years of constant bullying, that this wouldn’t end well. When she did manage to work up the courage to speak, it seemed to be the wrong thing at the worst moment. Shyness was protection from all the possible blunderings she would make, as she had just done, if she allowed herself to speak. It was a permanent hesitation meant to insulate her from her own mistakes. Over years of bullying, she had only just begun to wrap antipathy for others like a warm cloak against the cold.
But this date had been different, it was her last chance to connect with someone. The boy who asked her was awkward like her, a splinter in the skin like her, and she decided to take a risk for him. Maybe, at the very least, she’d come away from it with a friend, since she had been still barely able to fathom that he’d take an interest in her.
But she waited for hours in that overheated and overcrowded restaurant. She grabbed hold of the cynicism she’d been cultivating and wrapped it around herself like a jacket against the cold. She felt a comfortable anger harden in her gut. Of course, he stood her up.
It was then that she decided that he was her enemy. Everyone was—when would she finally learn that? Feeling stupid, she jumped into the car and had peeled out of the parking lot, vowing all sorts of never agains to herself as she turned her music up.
No man or woman had ever directly asked her out after that. She had plenty of passive aggressive passes, but no formal “can I take you to dinner” came her way. She was glad of it. She hated feeling fear or anger or even yearning for anyone. She only wanted cynicism, to comfort herself in the distance it provided. She was safer that way.
She looked at the cup on her desk. Zyan’s name with the heart in it. She took out her book and wrote in a new name: Therese.
Zyan wasn’t on the bus the next day or the day after. Therese stood in the aisle both mornings. They could be sick, she told herself, but she wasn’t convinced. She was haunted by the look in their eyes. They had been hurt. She had done it.
On her lunch break she looked at the book. She had written no names in it since her own. How many lists was she on? Did anyone else keep lists?
She looked around. No one in the office talked to her, just over her. She frowned. It didn’t matter if she was on their lists. She just didn’t want to be on her own.
She went to her boss’s table. The office had adopted a ridiculous open workspace design a few months ago. Everyone worked at picnic benches, slid their items into each others’ spaces, and yelled over each other for meetings and phone calls. So many names had gone on her list after the new layout that Therese had filled up an entire notebook and moved several pages into the new one.
“Mike?”
Her boss looked up, wearing his permanently pinched expression. He had a habit of giving her much too direct eye contact that always made her flush. There was definitely not an attraction there, but anyone who stared that much made Therese feel like she was getting an eye exam, with those tiny pen lights that optometrists flash into your eyes to see how you’re seeing. It was painful to talk to him, especially because she knew he mistook her flushing as an attraction. She looked at the ground.
“I need to take off early and get in to see my doctor—can I work from home this evening and get that report into you by eight?”
“I can’t just let anyone go whenever they feel like it. You know that.”
Therese shifted side to side. She had to find Zyan and—well, she didn’t know what she would say when she found them. She’d never tried to get off her own list before. She’d never let anyone off her list.
Mike cleared his throat. People had stopped work to watch them. Therese realized she had not said anything in a minute and that she must look deeply upset at Mike’s decision. She saw Mike glancing around at everyone else. There was a tiny hint of nervous energy in his sudden finger tapping.
“I’ll let you go this once, Therese,” he said, “but this is both permission and a warning. The next time you’re sick, let us know in advance.”
Therese raised her eyebrow at him—the stupidity of that had to be plain to everyone, including him—but she shook her head and went back to looking at the ground. “Thanks, Mike. Will do.”
She turned and sped away to her desk, grabbed her bag, and went out the door.
It was a gray afternoon, the air heavy with impending rain. The sky rumbled above her as she sat in the courtyard outside Zyan’s building. She would get drenched waiting if it began to pour. She looked at her watch. 5:17 p.m. Maybe they were sick.
What if they saw me waiting outside and went out some other entrance? She felt sick and that familiar anger began to rise up, opening its arms to her. She took out her book. Her name was still the last one written in there.
“For a reason,” she muttered to herself.
She would say sorry. She’d take her name off the list. Maybe go out with Zyan, if they were still willing?
She shook her head. No. They wouldn’t be. Maybe they and she could just return to being friends? She hadn’t had a friend outside of work—or at work— since college. Even that felt like hoping for too much, but the truth was she had missed talking with Zyan, even if they made her mad. She had never missed anyone like this.
Drops of rain began to fall and people ran with bags clutched over their heads to shield themselves. The bus pulled up. She had a choice. Keep waiting and get soaked or go home.
Zyan wasn’t here or had avoided her. She was glad it was raining—the thought had brought tears to her eyes. She was too tired from waiting and worrying to care that they had that effect on her.
She got on the bus and sat down. Maybe she wasn’t just tired—Zyan was worth crying over. The thought rose up from a place planted deeper within her than her anger.
She would never remove her name from her list.
The next morning, Zyan was on the bus. They didn’t wave at her or even smile, but there was a seat saved for her. As Therese came near, Zyan moved their bag from the seat to their lap to make room.
They stared out the window. “I saw you waiting for me yesterday.”
So they had avoided her. She wrung her hands. She fought off the anger by thinking of her name on the list. Zyan had every right to avoid her.
“I was in a meeting,” they continued. “But that was you, wasn’t it? Waiting in the courtyard below?”
Therese couldn’t look over; her mouth didn’t work. In a meeting. All she could do was nod.
“Why were you there?”
She wanted to look over. She was that scared kid in the booth again, waiting for her dream person to come in and be, at the very least, a friend. If she said even a word, she’d mess this up again. What grown person gets this scared? Zyan would laugh if they knew how hard it was even to talk to them.
“Fine. I thought—” Zyan sighed before cutting off, hands flexing into fists and then smoothing out again over the pleat of their pants. The bus began to slow down. “Take care, Therese.”
Therese didn’t stand up to let them out.
“My stop’s here,” Zyan said. They were standing up. She felt their gaze on the back of her neck.
Therese’s mind was both a blank and a whirl of words, too many to come out at once. She wanted to scream, to ask Zyan to stay on the bus, to ask them out, to cry, “Please be my friend. I don’t know how to have friends, but I’d like to be yours if you’re okay taking that risk.”
But she didn’t say anything. Or move.
“I need to get off,” they said in a quiet, patient voice. Therese winced and looked up.
“I’m sorry,” Therese took a deep breath, briefly making eye contact before looking away. “I’m sorry for the other day.”
The bus doors opened with a hiss. She got up and moved aside for Zyan, eyes on her shoes. They moved out into the aisle.
“I should’ve said yes, but I didn’t think—” she ended with a moan before she could add that she didn’t believe they meant it. “I’m not—”
Shame swallowed the words again.
She heard the bus doors squeak closed and looked up. They were gone. She crumpled back into the seat. What had she expected? It was a bad apology, and it barely made up for hurting Zyan the other day.
This was what happened when she tried with people. She clutched her bag to her chest and felt the solid shape of the book inside it. She’d write the whole world down on her list, just to remind herself to stay away from people.
No, she thought as she leaned against the window. She’d just write her own name down, over and over, every day until she stopped hurting.
The next morning, Zyan was on the bus. They didn’t look up when Therese approached, but there was a space. She sat, hoping they wouldn’t be upset that she had.
Zyan kept staring forward. No coffee for her was waiting—not that she had the right to expect it.
“I’m not asking you again. If you don’t want to go out with me, I was wrong to be upset by that.”
Therese was startled that Zyan spoke, more to the window than to her.
“I just want to know why you were waiting outside my building. If you didn’t want to go out, why the apology? Why try and find me?”
Therese’s hands had been balled up as she listened. She forced her fingers to relax and looked towards Zyan, just enough to see them in her periphery.
“I wanted to say yes. I thought you were making fun of me, asking me out a joke, you know?”
“Who would do that to you?” Zyan said, suddenly looking at her. She smiled at their shock and shrugged.
“People. People aren’t my favorite.”
Zyan nodded. “I know.”
“But—” She looked at them, full on in the eyes. It was like getting all the air knocked out of her lungs to do, but she felt electric all over as she held their gaze. “You’re my favorite. The only person I like.”
She felt agitated just by saying the words. “I just don’t know what to do with that.”
Zyan gave her the smallest smile. It filled her with so much hope that it hurt. It was like dawn breaking apart the night.
“Have I made it in the book yet?”
“The book?”
“Your book of enemies. The one you scribble in when someone jostles our seat from behind or talks too loudly in front of us or blasts the music from their game on their phone without headphones. Do you really think I haven’t seen you writing in it?”
“I didn’t think—” She looked at her purse and back up at Zyan, curiosity and tears in her eyes. There were a thousand “whys” swirling around in her brain: why had she not realized they could see her? Why were they paying attention? Why would they ask her out knowing she was the sort of person to keep a list? They would never do something like that. They were—
She looked up. “Wait . . . you want to be in the book?”
“I figured I might have earned it, since liking me bugs you so much.”
The bus slowed down. It was Zyan’s stop, but they made no effort to stand.
“So am I in it yet?”
Therese shook her head. “No, but I am. After what happened last week.”
Zyan tsked and held out their hand. Therese’s eyes widened as she withdrew the book and placed it in their hands. They opened it up and removed the ribbon and got out their own pen.
“Z-Y-A-N,” they mouthed as they wrote, and added a subscript: for being charming without a license, handsome without a permit, gorgeous without permission, for giving up too easily, for which they will never be forgiven.
Therese’s heart sank at that line—were they joking or serious?—but then saw Zyan continue: Repercussions to be administered over dinner. Friday at 7pm. 510-701-1064.
Zyan smiled and sidled past her while she sat, reading the words they’d written as if they were written in a foreign language.
“We’ll talk restaurants tomorrow, okay?”
Therese nodded at Zyan, words still far from easy to get out. They smiled and nodded back.
The bus pulled away and she took out her pen, clicking it ready. She wanted to cross out Zyan’s name. They weren’t her enemy. She paused and read what they’d written. She didn’t feel angry, at herself, at Zyan, at anyone on the bus, despite how loud and awful and—
She clicked the pen nib away and left the names where they were. She was her own enemy, maybe she always had been. And Zyan? Therese put the book away. Zyan would be to her whatever they wanted to be—both a pain in her ass and the only person she’d sit next to in the entire world, for as long as they wanted to sit next to her.
Sarah Salcedo is an author, illustrator, and filmmaker based in the Pacific Northwest. Her prose has been published in Pacifica Literary Review and Hypertext Magazine, her art has been published in Cascadia Magazine, and her first feature documentary, Promised Land, won multiple awards. You can follow her on Twitter or Patreon @sarahsalcedo, on Instagram @sarahvsalcedo, and on her website sarah-salcedo.com.