American Panda(49)



Her magenta lips turned up in a sly smile. “Well, well, what’ve we got here?”

I reluctantly stepped out of his arms and made introductions.

“We’re helping Mei forget about her overbearing parents,” Nicolette told him. “They disowned her earlier.”

I was partly relieved that Darren knew and I didn’t have to be the one to say it, but I was also peeved that Nicolette was speaking as if she were reciting the symptoms of a damaged sympathetic cervical trunk.

I gazed up at him. “Kiemasu, right?”

He smiled sadly, then nodded. “Kiemasu.”

Nicolette clapped him on the back. “Want a turn?”

“I think I’ll go flying immediately on account of these.” He waggled a long leg. “That’s a nice chair. Where’d you get it?”

She grinned proudly. “Did you see that Tech article about how three chairs went missing from the Reading Room?”

“That was you?”

“No, but it sounded like a good idea, so I went in and stole two more.”

Darren raised his eyebrows at me. “I need to be more careful around you. You’re running with the rough crowd.”

Nicolette laughed. “Yeah, that hack we pulled last week during the football game? Where we tricked those Crimson preppies into spelling out ‘Harvard Sucks’ in the stands? That was all me.”

“Hack” was MIT’s term for sneaky pranks, and it spawned the word computer geeks use today. We liked to play jokes on other schools and put weird things, like cop cars, onto MIT’s iconic Great Dome.

“Hey, is that where you are most nights?” I asked Nicolette. “Hacking?”

She nodded. “Yeah. What’d you think I was doing?”

“No idea,” I lied, then flashed an innocent smile. She chuckled. My first guess couldn’t be that far off; she hadn’t gotten chlamydia crawling in tunnels and climbing on pipes.

“Come on, big guy, Hello Kitty,” she said, nodding at each of us. (I rolled my eyes.) “You guys are in for a treat—just follow this hacker.”



After weaving through the tunnels, a basement, and too many stairs to count, we made it to the door. Which door, I had no idea. I lost track of our whereabouts hundreds of steps ago.

“Keep an eye out for cops,” Nicolette said as she turned the lock pick with expertise. “I just need another . . .”

Click.

“Ha!” she exclaimed as the door swung open. “Welcome to MIT’s famous domes.”

I followed Darren onto the roof of Building 7. From this height, the Boston skyline was visible both in the distance and reflected on the Charles River. Despite the lights on the horizon, the stars scattered across the dark sky shone brightly.

“Orion,” I whispered, pointing at the constellation’s three-pronged belt. My mother used to take me stargazing. The thought of her made my heart lurch.

Darren took my hand and we strolled toward the little dome. He ascended the neck-high platform first (chest level for him) and extended a palm down. I grabbed hold, thankful that it had warmed slightly the past few days and I was wearing my thin, flexible down coat (curated by scared-of-the-cold Mǎmá Lu, of course). With Darren’s help, I heaved myself onto the limestone.

I turned to assist Nicolette, but she was nowhere in sight. That sneaky wonderful girl. No wonder she had spouted off so much information on our journey over here—she hadn’t planned to come onto the roof with us.

Following Nicolette’s advice, we scooted up the dome on our butts. The height didn’t bother me, but I wondered what kinds of germs I was rubbing into my pants to bring home later. Bird poop? STDs from MIT students who’d once had sex here? There was definitely a picture making the rounds on Facebook of a couple doing it on the little dome. Maybe it was Nicolette, I realized. Maybe she did get chlamydia from hacking!

When we reached the local maximum (not the global one—that was the Great Dome), I snuggled against Darren for warmth. Just me and him, on top of the world, where nothing else could reach us.

“Saved anyone else recently?” he asked, staring at the stars overhead.

“Nope. The campus has been safe—no distress calls.” I pictured someone beaming a dumpling into the sky to ask for my help and had to stifle a laugh.

The teasing crinkle appeared, along with a new, unreadable tilt to his lips. “So you haven’t had to tell your Horny story again? How is Horny, by the way?”

My mouth slacked open. “You heard that?”

“Every word.”

We burst into laughter at the same time.

“Well, that’s mortifying,” I said when, really, it wasn’t. Back at Chow Chow all those weeks ago, I had thought Darren knowing about Horny would have been The Worst Thing, but now it was just funny.

When the laughs subsided, he said in his warm honey voice, “Actually, it made me notice you more.”

Seriously? He hadn’t looked my way once that day. The blonde popped into my head, and I shoved her out with a kick to her perfectly plump behind.

“Made you notice my weirdness maybe,” I said as lightheartedly as I could.

“I prefer to call it ‘uniqueness.’?”

He leaned in to me, our knees interlacing and his sandalwood scent enveloping me. I wondered if he could smell my soap too.

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