The Rule

I have one rule for the flat. Just one. I think one rule is pretty reasonable for a person to have. The rule is: you knock. You knock on my door before you come in. That's it. That's the whole rule. I wrote it on a sticky note and put it on my door on the day I moved in, in purple pen, with a little heart at the end so it wouldn't seem mean. Tessa's Door — please knock! With the heart. I am a reasonable person and the heart proves it. Kai Mendoza moved in three days after me, and on his first morning in the flat he opened my door without knocking, while I was still in bed, holding two mugs of tea, and said, "I made tea, I didn't know which mug was yours so I used both of yours, hope that's okay," and then he just stood there. In my doorway. Being tall and not sorry. "Did you see the sticky note," I said. "What sticky note?" "On the door. The one you just opened. There is a sticky note on it." He looked at the door. He looked at it for a really long time, like the note was in another language, and then he looked back at me and went, "Oh. The knocking one. Yeah, I saw that." And he handed me a mug. My mug. The one with the sunflower on it. "But I had tea, and tea gets cold while you knock, so." So. SO. Like that was an answer. Like "tea gets cold" was a thing that cancelled out a rule with a heart on it. I want to be clear about something. I did not move out of my parents' house and into a flat with a stranger from a flatmate website because I wanted my mornings to be like this. I had a whole plan for university. The plan was: be calm, be organised, have one rule, drink tea out of my own mug in peace. Kai Mendoza was not in the plan. The flatmate website said he was a second-year doing engineering and that he was "easy-going and tidy" and I want everyone to know that the flatmate website is a liar, because he is easy-going the way a flood is easy-going and he is tidy NOWHERE. I took the mug. I'm not going to pretend I didn't take the mug. The tea was actually really good, he'd made it exactly the way I make it, milk first which is the correct way, and that annoyed me more than if it had been bad. "You used both my mugs," I said. "I'll wash them." "When?" Kai grinned. He has this grin. I'm going to have to describe the grin at some point because it becomes relevant later but right now I'll just say it is a deeply unfair grin to use on a person before nine in the morning. "Tessa," he said, "it's been four minutes since I made the tea. You have to give the washing some time to happen." It did not happen. I want to record, for the official record of this flat, that the mugs sat in the sink for two days, and that on the second day I washed them myself, both of them, including the sunflower one, and that I told myself I was washing them because I needed the sunflower mug and not because some part of me had started keeping score of him. That was day one. The knocking rule lasted exactly one morning. The sticky note is still on my door. He still doesn't knock. I'm telling you all of this now, at the start, because later — and there is a later, there's a whole later — later there's going to be a night in the rain, and a thing he says on the stairs, and the moment I stop being able to pretend the score I'm keeping is about the mugs. And when that happens I want it on record that it started here. With a stupid rule. With one purple sticky note and a heart, and a boy who never once, not a single time, knocked.