I only went because my parents forced me out of the house. I had started playing mahjong with a group of women, sometimes for entire afternoons. Once, they invited me to come with them to one of these gatherings. Everybody would be my age, they promised, although I would be the odd one out, since I was not in university.

The event was held on campus at the local university. Thankfully it was winter, so the heat was not as oppressive. Most of the people there knew one another from class. I only knew the woman who invited me, who quickly abandoned me after seeing her classmates. I made a show of looking at the tent of meager refreshments. In the end, I sat on the outskirts of the crowd, next to a boy drinking, of all things, soup.

“Soup?” he asked, raising a spoonful.

“No thank you.”

When I faced him, he recognized me.

“You’re the pencil girl” were his exact words. “You work at the Phoenix Pencil Company.”

“I do.” I looked at him more closely, but I did not recognize him. I was the one working the storefront in those days, and so I knew most of the customers. “Do you get your pencils there?” If so, I likely would have Reforged his words before.

“No. My sister does though.” He pointed at one of the women in the gathering closest to us. “She raves about them.”

I wanted to warn him, let him know anything his sister wrote could one day be used against her, that our pencils were not safe. But I barely knew him, and so I said, “That’s nice.”

“I love communication,” he blurted out, which was such an odd thing to say. He put his soup down and looked at me intently. He was much thinner back then, but the intensity in his eyes was the same. “That’s what I study,” he said quickly. “Communication.”

“Oh.”

“Your pencils are a means of communication, too, aren’t they? The way all writing is.”

“They’re just pencils.” I shrugged, even though they very much were not just pencils. I took one of ours out of my bag. I always had at least one with me. I twirled it expertly between my fingers, hoping to distract him.

“You must know all about how people communicate,” he said almost dreamily.

We were getting into uncomfortable territory. “What do you study about communication?” I asked to turn the conversation away from me.

“How to secure it,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“Well, in wars there is always a necessity to send secure messages. That’s what I study. How you secure a message.”

The topic had somehow turned even more uncomfortable.

“So do you go to this university?” I asked, another attempt to change the subject.

“I take a lot of classes here,” he said. “But I’m not technically a student. What do you do?”

I shrugged.