“Thank you,” she whispered in my ear as she sat down.

“What for?”

“Just… thank you,” she said, a smile on her face but with no pearly teeth showing through her full pink lips. I looked at her face through her blond curls, trying to remember what I had done to make her thank me.

That followed me all day. It danced through my mind, taunting me with its ambiguity. It trickled through the layers of my brain, and each level tried over and over to decipher her words but found nothing still. It shadowed me until the final bell when I gathered up my bags and waited for her in our usual spot, needing to know what she meant.

I waited for ten minutes, then twenty, knowing that she wouldn’t let me hang like this. I had stopped my pondering but after standing there for so long my paranoid thoughts surrounded me.

Thank you. What for? Just… thank you.

My imagination saw her lying on the floor of her bedroom, her cream carpet a deep red. Then a text hit my phone.

Sorry, it said. Just sorry.