The Futures(5)

“Carlton. It’s in British Columbia, the interior.” She shrugged, and I laughed. “I knew it. What about you?”

“Boston. Well, just outside Boston. Brookline.”

I was tempted to say something about the Red Sox, remembering the hat from that morning, then I reminded myself that she didn’t know I’d been looking.

“Did you go out tonight?”

“Yeah, with my teammates. Hockey,” I added.

“That explains the Canadian thing. You must get that a lot. Or you will.”

I laughed. My beery buzz had vanished. The way she was looking at me wasn’t the way the other girls looked at me back home. Her face was like an image firmly fixed on canvas where the other girls’ had been slippery glass. Right here in the present, breathing the same air, not off in some imagined future. Midnight wasn’t late. The night was just starting. “Hey, are you hungry?” I asked.

“Starving, actually.”

We walked to the pizza place on Broadway. Up at the counter, she reached for her purse, but I waved her money away. I could give her this, at least. On the way home, we sat on a low stone wall, waiting for the pizza to cool. I watched as she plucked a piece of pepperoni from her slice. Her kind of beauty snuck up on you. You had to look a little closer to really get it. Someone called her name from across the street. She waved back at him.

“That was fast,” I said.

“What was?”

“You made friends already.”

“No, we went to high school together. There are a bunch of us here.”

“Oh. That must be nice.”

“I guess. What about you? What do you think of it so far?”

“This place?” I swiveled, taking in the panorama. “Just like the brochure. But more drunk people.” She laughed. “It’s about what I expected. Or not. I don’t know. I’m still taking it in.”

“Different from home?”

“Are you kidding?”

She smiled. “It must be an adjustment.”

“That’s an understatement. What about you? What do you think of it?”

“It’s just like the brochure.”

“Touché.” I laughed. “So, Julia. How was your summer?”

She blinked once, staring down at the sidewalk. She blinked again.

“I’m sorry. Wrong question?”

“No, no, it’s just—long story. I don’t need to burden you with it.”

“You can tell me.” A beat. “People like to tell me things.”

“You’d better be careful. I might never shut up.”

Eventually she took the last bite of her pizza, and then she held the crust out toward me. “Do you want it? I never eat the crust.”

“Sure?”

“I wouldn’t offer it to just anyone,” she said in mock solemnity. “But I can tell we’re going to be good friends.”

Back in the dorm, we stood in the hallway outside her room. It was late, 3:00 a.m., then 4:00 a.m. Other students tripped up the stairs to bed, but we kept talking and talking, and whenever I thought maybe the conversation had reached its natural end, one of us fired off in a new direction, bringing the other along. She didn’t invite me inside. Mostly I was glad for that. Finally, when she started yawning uncontrollably, I said that I should probably get to bed.

“Yeah. Me, too.” She paused, hand on doorknob. “Thanks for the pizza, Evan.”

“Anytime.”

She smiled. “See you in the morning?”

Julia had a boyfriend. Of course she did. A guy named Rob, from her boarding school. They’d been together for almost two years. But by mid-September, she was barely mentioning Rob. Usually I was the one to ask about him, as a way of making sure he did in fact still exist. I wondered how much she and Rob actually spoke, how much she told him about her new life at college.

It turned out to be easy enough: making friends, fitting in. It didn’t seem to matter how different two people might be or how different their lives had been before college. That was true for me and my roommate, Arthur. We fit together like puzzle pieces, a big one and a small one. And it was true for me and Julia. She took my hand at parties, leading me through the crowd. She came and went through our unlocked door like another roommate. She helped me cram for midterms; she read my papers. I needed the help. That was what surprised me most—how hard the work was. It was like the other students saw English where I saw hieroglyphs, even in the most basic, introductory courses. Maybe that hometown feeling had been right all along; maybe I was the same as the Evan Peck who’d failed kindergarten way back. I couldn’t admit this to anyone, not even to Julia, although she probably saw it anyway. She saw everything about me.

One night in late October, coming home from practice, I passed her in the courtyard, where she was on the phone, pacing back and forth. I pointed to the door, but she shook her head. Then she snapped: “Rob, listen to me—no, just listen. Why are you so pissed? Seriously? What do you want me to say?” She rolled her eyes at me and mimed holding a gun to her head. She cupped her hand over the phone. “Sorry. He’s ranting. I’ll see you up there in a minute.”

I spent Thanksgiving with Arthur’s family in Ohio. On Sunday afternoon, we got back to campus. Every time I heard footsteps on the stairs from the other students trickling back, I wondered whether it was Julia. We hadn’t spoken during the weeklong break. I fiddled with my cell phone—I’d finally gotten one, after a few months of working on campus—but something stopped me from calling. The neediness of it, maybe. Later on Sunday night, Julia’s roommate, Abby, knocked on our door. They had liquor leftover from before the break and were having people over that night.