The Submission

She submitted at 9:14 the next morning, from the MedGen car park, twenty minutes before her first meeting, because she'd decided the night before that doing it anywhere except her actual life — dressed for work, coffee going cold in the cupholder, ordinary Tuesday traffic still moving past the windshield — would make it feel too much like an event, and events were exactly the kind of thing she could talk herself out of.

Six files. A five-song plan document, mirrored on the same format her Exercise to Music Level 2 coursework had used. One click, and then the small, anticlimactic confirmation screen: Submission received. You'll hear back within two weeks.

She sat in the car park a moment longer than she needed to, waiting for some feeling to arrive that matched the size of the thing she'd just done. Nothing enormous came. Just a kind of quiet, settled exhaustion, the particular flatness that follows effort rather than preceding it, and underneath that, very faintly, something that might have been pride if she'd let it sit still long enough to become that.

Rachel texted at lunch: did you send it??? Sam sent back a single thumbs up, because she didn't yet have better words for it, and Rachel replied with four exclamation points and nothing else, which felt, somehow, exactly right.

The two weeks that followed turned out to be their own kind of chapter, one where nothing happened and everything did. She kept teaching herself not to check her email every forty minutes, and failed at that fairly consistently. She kept driving to Birmingham on Saturdays, because Amrit's studio didn't stop just because a decision was pending, and found the classes themselves oddly steadying — a return, however briefly, to the version of this where she was just a participant again, nothing on the line, nobody assessing anything.

Maya took to asking, every evening at dinner, with the same deadpan delivery: "Any word from the bhangra people." It became a running joke between them, the kind that only works because underneath it both of you know exactly how much it actually matters.

Harpreet, for her part, simply started making a little more food than usual, the unstated logic being that a woman waiting on news should not also be responsible for feeding herself properly, and Sam let herself be fed, gratefully, without protest.

On day eleven, she caught herself, briefly, hoping it would take the full two weeks — some superstitious sense that a fast answer meant a bad one, an instinctive flinch she recognized, distantly, as the same flinch that used to keep her from checking her university transcript the day grades posted. She let herself have the superstition. It didn't cost anything, and there was, by now, nothing left to do but wait.