Between Us, Part 10: Sorry Is Not Enough

Between Us, Part 10: Sorry Is Not Enough

The Story Begins

The break started louder than usual. Someone by the window was playing a short video on their phone, there was a discussion near the back desks about who had forgotten the markers for a project, and underneath it all came the rustle of snack wrappers.

Nela packed her notebook into her bag more slowly than she needed to. Really, she was just waiting for the crowd around her desk to thin out.

Just then, Kaja appeared beside her.

“Can we talk for a minute?” she asked quietly.

Nela looked up. Kaja was wearing her colourful hoodie, the kind she wore almost all the time, but today she was nervously pulling the sleeve over her hand. She did not do that often.

“Here?” Nela asked.

Kaja looked towards the door. “Maybe by the window. There are fewer… people there.”

They only moved a few steps away, but the noise of the classroom seemed to blur behind them. Between the window and the supply cabinet was a spot where no one usually sat. Outside, the morning was grey, and tiny drops from the night’s rain still clung to the glass.

Kaja looked at the windowsill for a moment.

“I wanted to say sorry,” she began. “For what I said that time. And for acting afterwards as if I didn’t even know why you were angry.”

Nela said nothing.

“I know I went too far,” Kaja continued more quickly. “And I was defending myself instead of listening to you. I shouldn’t have said those things in front of everyone. It was horrible.”

The word horrible hung between them. Nela remembered the argument, a few sentences spoken too loudly, and the way some classmates had suddenly stopped pretending not to listen. The worst part was not even what Kaja had said. It was that she had said it as if Nela were not standing right there.

“Okay,” Nela said at last.

Kaja looked at her with a flicker of hope. “Okay as in…?”

Nela tightened her grip on the edge of the notebook she held against her chest. “Okay that you said it.”

“So is everything okay now?”

The question came out so quickly that Kaja probably had not meant to ask it quite like that. She lowered her eyes straight away.

Nela felt words pressing at her throat, but none of them would come out in the right order. She could nod. It would be easier. Kaja would smile, they would sit beside each other again like before, and no one would ask anything else.

But her stomach tightened at the thought.

“I need to think about it,” she said quietly.

Kaja blinked. “Sure. Okay. I mean… sure.”

The bell rang. Nela headed back to her desk before it could lead to another question. As she sat down, she could feel Kaja’s gaze on her back, but she did not turn around.

During maths, the teacher explained equations and wrote on the board at a pace that made it seem as though nothing in the world could matter more than x and y. Nela copied the examples, but sometimes the numbers blurred together.

Kaja sat one desk away by the window. Normally, she would have turned around at least once during class, raised her eyebrows at a strange problem, or slid a crumpled note towards Nela. Now she did not turn around once.

The others noticed the silence too.

A phone buzzed somewhere beneath a desk. Then another. Nela tried not to look, but when Lea at the next desk rested her phone on her thigh, the class chat flashed on the screen for a second.

When Things Start to Change

8.B No Panic

Lea: It’s kind of quiet today.

Filip: That’s because we have maths.

Adam: Or because some people suddenly aren’t whispering every five seconds.

A laughing reaction appeared beneath the message. Someone removed it immediately.

Nela lowered her eyes to her notebook again. She knew Adam’s comment might not have been meant badly. Even so, an uncomfortable heat rose to her face, as if the whole class had been told about something that should have belonged only to her and Kaja.

A few desks away, Kaja saw the chat too. Her fingers squeezed the pen so tightly that it left a blue line along the side of her hand.

The teacher turned from the board. “Kaja, can you solve the second problem?”

Kaja flinched. “Me? Yes. I mean… yes.”

She stood and read the numbers so quietly that the teacher had to repeat them. A few classmates exchanged looks. No one laughed. That was almost worse. Everyone acted as if nothing had happened, yet it was clear that everyone had noticed everything.

When the bell finally rang, Nela was among the first to leave the classroom. The corridor was cooler, and the vending machines by the stairs smelled of cocoa. She walked to the large window at the end of the corridor, where younger pupils usually crowded during breaks, but no one was there now.

She opened her sticker-covered notebook. Between her biology notes were several blank pages that belonged to no subject.

First, she wrote:

I heard her.

She looked at the sentence for a while. Then she added beneath it:

But I don’t know what to do with it yet.

Her pen stopped above the paper. Kaja’s question echoed in her mind: So is everything okay now?

No, she thought. Not yet. And that doesn’t mean I want to hurt her.

The door to the corridor opened, and Lea came out with a bottle of water.

“Are you writing a secret novel?” she asked with a smile.

Nela closed her notebook a little. “No. I’m just writing things down.”

“Oh.” Lea leaned against the windowsill beside her. For a moment, all they could hear was the noise from the stairwell. Then her classmate asked carefully, “Is it really bad between you and Kaja?”

Nela took a breath. Everything in her wanted to say nothing’s going on so she would not have to explain. But now the sentence sounded too much like a lie.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t want to deal with it through chat and through everyone who asks.”

Lea nodded. “I get that. In our class, even silence sometimes acts like a TV series.”

Nela almost smiled.

“I won’t ask,” Lea added. “Just… if you need anything.”

After Lea left, Nela wrote one more line in her notebook, this time in smaller letters:

I don’t have to answer straight away just to be polite.

Meanwhile, Kaja stood by the lockers, aimlessly running her finger across her phone screen. Adam leaned against the locker beside hers. He had a black backpack slung over one shoulder and looked as if he were only waiting for the next lesson.

“You seem a bit off today,” he said after a while.

“I’m not.”

“Sure.”

Kaja rolled her eyes. “What? Does everyone have to notice absolutely everything today?”

Adam looked up from his phone. “No. Only when someone is slamming locker doors so hard that I’m worried about my textbooks.”

An Important Moment

Kaja noticed that she really was gripping the locker door too tightly. She let go and closed it more gently.

A new message appeared in the chat.

Filip: Who has a photo of the science assignment?

Lea: I’ll send it.

Adam: See? The world keeps turning.

Kaja read Adam’s last message twice. “Was that about me?”

“More about everyone,” he said. “Our class has this talent. When two people stop talking, everyone else immediately starts adding subtitles.”

“I apologised,” Kaja blurted out. “Properly. No excuses. And she said she needs to think about it.”

Adam looked at her for a moment. “Then she probably needs to think about it.”

“Thanks, that never would have occurred to me.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way.”

Kaja put her phone in her pocket. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do now. Sit and wait until she decides whether I’m a terrible person?”

“Probably not. But maybe you don’t have to know right away how it will end either.”

“That’s easy to say.”

Adam shrugged. “I don’t like waiting either. But if you keep pushing someone to give you an answer, you don’t really give them a chance to work it out.”

Kaja wanted to snap that she was not pushing Nela. Then she remembered her question by the window. So is everything okay now?

It had only been one sentence. Even so, it held everything: Please say yes. Please let me stop feeling bad. Please let everything be normal again.

“Maybe I wanted it to end quickly mostly for my own sake,” she said at last.

Adam did not look smug or wise. He only nodded. “That can be pretty common.”

After the last lesson, the corridors emptied quickly. Doors slammed, someone called goodbye far too loudly from halfway down the stairs, and the cleaner by the entrance was already wiping wet footprints from the floor.

Nela was zipping up her jacket at her locker when she heard Kaja’s voice behind her.

“Nela?”

She turned around. Kaja stood one step farther away than she had that morning. This time, she did not come closer.

“Can I ask you something?”

“You can.”

Kaja took a breath. “Was the apology too little?”

The question sounded different now. There was no hope in it that she would get the right answer. There was more fear that she would not get an answer at all.

Nela adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder. “It wasn’t too little.”

Kaja straightened a little.

“It just wasn’t… everything,” Nela finished. “It’s good that you said sorry. Really. But I can’t be just like before straight away.”

Disappointment flickered across Kaja’s face. This time, though, she did not hide it with laughter or throw her hands in the air.

“So you don’t want us to be friends?”

Nela quickly shook her head. “That’s not what I said.”

“But maybe that’s what you think.”

“Maybe I don’t know exactly what I think yet.” Nela looked at the row of lockers, not directly at her. “When what happened happened, I felt really awful. And then for a few days, you talked to me as if it wasn’t important. I don’t want to pretend it suddenly doesn’t matter just because you apologise.”

Kaja nodded slowly.

“I’m not ignoring you as punishment,” Nela added. “I just need some peace. So I can work out whether I’ll trust you the same way again. Or differently. I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Kaja said.

What Comes Next

Nela looked at her in surprise. She had expected another question, perhaps a defence. But nothing like that came.

“It’s not exactly okay,” Kaja corrected herself, taking a deep breath. “It feels pretty awful. But I understand, I think. At least a little.”

“I don’t know how to do this right either,” Nela admitted.

“Great,” Kaja muttered. “So there are two of us.”

For a moment, they both smiled. It was not the old, easy smile that put everything back in place. It was more like a small space opening between them.

Then Kaja stepped back towards the stairs. “I won’t push you. At least I’ll try not to.”

“Thanks,” Nela said.

“And if you want to talk…” Kaja shrugged. “I’m here. Even if I’ll probably be really bad at waiting.”

“I noticed,” Nela replied more softly.

This time Kaja really did laugh, though only briefly. “Yeah. I’m working on it.”

That evening, Nela sat at the table at home. The lamp lit her notebook, a glass full of pencils, and the corner of the history textbook she was supposed to be reading. Behind the door, someone in the kitchen was washing dishes. Her phone lay beside her, screen down.

The class chat was already discussing a photo of the science assignment, tomorrow’s PE lesson, and whether the school cafeteria was capable of making normal pasta. There was nothing in the messages about her or Kaja.

A few streets away, Kaja sat on her bed with her phone in her hand. Several times, she opened her conversation with Nela. She typed: Are you okay?

Then she deleted the message.

She typed: I’m really sorry.

She deleted that too.

In the end, she set the phone beside her and looked out at the dark rooftops. Waiting still got on her nerves. But for the first time, she did not think silence had to mean the end.

Nela turned to a clean page in her notebook. She held her pen above the paper for a moment, then wrote one sentence.

Sorry needs time.