William rarely noticed other students during classes, but Julia Padavano stood out in his European history seminar because her face appeared to be lit up with indignation and because she drove the professor—an elderly Englishman who held an oversized handkerchief balled in one fist—crazy with her questions. Her long, curly hair shifted around her bright face like curtains while she said things like: Professor, I’m interested in the role of Clementine in all of this. Isn’t it true that she was Churchill’s main adviser? Or: Can you explain the wartime coding system? I mean the specifics of how it worked? I’d like to see an example.
William never spoke in class or utilized the professor’s office hours. He believed that the role of a student was to keep his or her mouth shut and soak up as much knowledge as possible. He shared the professor’s opinion of the curly-haired girl, which was that her frequent interjections and inquiries, though often interesting to William, were impolite. The fabric of a serious classroom was created by students listening and the professor providing wisdom in a carefully unrolled carpet of words; this girl poked holes in that fabric, as if she didn’t even know it existed.
William was startled one afternoon after class when she appeared at his elbow and said, “Hello. My name is Julia.”
“William. Hi.” He had to clear his throat; this might have been the first time he’d spoken that day. The girl was regarding him with wide, serious eyes. He noticed that in the sunlight her brown hair had honey-colored highlights. She looked lit up, from without and within.
“Why are you so tall?”
It wasn’t unusual for people to remark on William’s height; he understood that his size was a surprise whenever he entered a room and that most people felt compelled to say something. Several times a week he heard, How’s the air up there?
Julia looked suspicious when she asked the question, though, and her expression made him laugh. He stopped on the path that crisscrossed the quad, and so she stopped too. William rarely laughed, and his hands tingled, as if they’d just woken up from an oxygen-deprived sleep. The overall sensation was one of being pleasantly tickled. Later, William would look back at this moment and know that this was when he fell for her. Or, more accurately, when his body fell for her. In the middle of the quad, attention from a specific girl reeled in laughter from the nooks and crannies within him. William’s body—tired and bored by his hesitant mind—had to set off fireworks in his nerves and muscles to alert him that something of import was taking place.
“Why are you laughing?” Julia said.
He managed to mostly tamp it down. “Please, don’t be offended,” he said.
She gave an impatient nod. “I’m not.”
“I don’t know why I’m so tall.” Secretly, though, he believed that he’d willed himself to this height. A serious basketball player needed to be at least six foot three, and William had cared about that so badly that he’d somehow defied his genetics. “I’m on the basketball team here.”
“At least you’re making a virtue of it, then,” she said. “Perhaps I’ll come to see one of your games. I generally don’t take an interest in sports, and I only come to campus for classes.” She paused, and then said quickly, as if embarrassed, “I live at home to save money.”
Julia told him to write her phone number on his history notebook, and before she walked away he’d agreed to call her the next night. It was to some extent irrelevant whether he’d fallen for her or not. In the middle of the quad, this young woman seemed to have decided they would be boyfriend and girlfriend. Later, she would tell him that she’d been watching him in class for weeks and liked how attentive and serious he was. “Not silly, like the other boys,” she said.
Even after he met Julia, basketball still took up most of William’s time and thoughts. He’d been the best player on his high school team; at Northwestern, he was dismayed to discover he was among the weakest. On this team, his height wasn’t enough to set him apart, and the other young men were stronger than he was. Most of them had been weight lifting for a few years, and William was panicked not to have known to do the same. He was easily shoved aside, knocked over, during practices. He started going to the weight room before practice and stayed on the court late to drill shots from different angles. He was hungry all the time and kept extra sandwiches in his jacket pockets. He realized that his role on this team would probably be as a “glue guy.” He was good enough at passing, shooting, and defense to make himself useful, even though he wasn’t a gifted athlete. His most valuable skill was that he rarely made mistakes on the court. “High basketball IQ, but no hops,” William heard one of the coaches say about him, when they didn’t know he was within earshot.
His scholarship required that he work a job on campus, and from the list of possibilities, he chose the one that took place in the gym building, because it would be convenient for basketball. He reported to the laundry facility in the sub-basement of the enormous building at the assigned time, where he was confronted by a skinny woman with a tall Afro and glasses. She shook her head and said, “You’re in the wrong place. They told you to come here? White boys don’t get assigned to laundry. You need to get yourself to the library or the student rec center. Go on.”
William looked down the stretch of the long narrow room. There was a row of thirty washing machines on one wall and thirty dryers on the other. It was true that as far as he could see, no one else was white.
“Why does it matter?” he said. “I want to do this job. Please.”
She shook her head again, and her glasses waggled on her nose, but before she could speak, a hand clapped William on the back and a deep voice said his name. He turned to see one of the other freshmen on the basketball team, a strong power forward named Kent. Kent had nearly the opposite set of basketball skills from William: He was a supreme athlete who dunked theatrically, crashed the boards, and sprinted every minute he was in the game, but he made bad reads on plays, caused multiple turnovers, and never knew where to be on defense. The coach gripped his head while he watched Kent run the court, presumably reeling at the disparity between the young man’s physical potential and his high-speed, erratic play.
“Hey, man,” Kent said. “You working down here too? I can show him the ropes, if you like, ma’am.” Kent gave the stern woman a wide, charming smile.
She softened and said, “Okay, fine, then. Take him off my hands and I’ll pretend he’s not here.”
From that point on, William and Kent timed their shifts in the laundry so they could work side by side. They washed hundreds of towels and the uniforms for every team. Football uniforms were the worst, because of the smell and deep grass stains that required a special bleach to be scrubbed into the fabric. William and Kent developed a rhythm to each step of the laundry process; with their focus on timing and efficiency, the work felt like an extension of basketball practice. They used the time to break down plays and figure out how their team could improve.