Some things click into place so quietly that you can’t even hear it, I typed, as Leigh tumbled backwards into a headstand. I don’t know the first time I understood what space was. It’s always been there, waiting for me to return to it.
Now how was I supposed to connect that with real, historical facts? It was like opening up my rib cage and stuffing memos inside. I remembered Galen scoffing at the idea of us needing help with our essays, on the first day of classes. I missed agreeing with him.
“Damn and crap and balls. I need to have a full draft of this ready to print by dinner so I can print it out in the library before we have class tomorrow.” I closed the laptop screen and glanced at Leigh’s rapidly reddening upside-down face. “You know, if you popped your head off right now, you would look exactly like the Cheshire cat.”
“I hate Alice in Wonderland,” she mused. “And Peter Pan. We glorify so many books written by pedophiles.” She bent her knees and slowly lowered herself into downward dog. “Are you studying again tonight?”
“Aren’t we all studying literally all the time?” I asked the top of her head. The neon yellow was starting to fade, letting the hint of dark roots start to bleed through. Until Isaiah had mentioned her being mixed, I hadn’t considered what her hair would look like grown out. I couldn’t picture her with my springy-soft curls. Maybe her hair would be ringlety, like my brother’s had been before Dad convinced Beth to let him start shaving it off.
It seemed rude to ask her, though.
“Are you studying with Brandon tonight?” she clarified, the question aimed at her own belly button.
“I don’t know.” And I didn’t. Sure, we had studied together regularly for the last few nights, but every day was a new possibility that he wouldn’t at some point look at me and say, “Sci-fi?,” as though I wasn’t already heading there or disappearing to the Magrathea table mentally throughout the day.
“Ever,” she said. “Come on.”
“What? You come on.”
“No.” She drew out the word into a trill. “You come on.”
“We could do this for the rest of our lives and neither of us would get anywhere.”
“Fine.” She dropped into a push-up position and curved her body upward like a snake so she could look me in the eye. “If you tripped and fell into Brandon’s mouth, would you immediately back away or would you—I don’t know—make yourself at home?”
I glared at her. “I am not going to dignify that with a response.”
“Okay. A nonconsensual hypothetical wasn’t the best place to start. What if you had a written confession from him that he would be into you tripping and falling onto his face?”
“Why am I so clumsy in this fantasy?”
“There are trip wires everywhere. Or tree roots. Or you’re so overwhelmed with ghostly lust that you forget how to use your feet.”
I reopened my laptop. Working on my essay was way more useful than putting a magnifying glass up to how I felt about my study buddy.
God. Were we study buddies? That was the most sexless sanction you could give someone, outside of actually becoming related to them.
“How close are we to lunch?” Leigh asked, dropping back down onto her forearms so that her body went board straight. It was no wonder she’d been able to scurry up the ash tree in the arboretum. She had the abdominal strength of a steel beam.
I laughed. “You’re kidding, right? We’re fifteen minutes into this period.”
She raised one arm off the ground and pointed toward the residence hall. Kate was marching down the steps, her binder hugged to her chest as tightly as possible. She took short, scuttling steps toward us.
“Sorry,” she said, halting abruptly a couple of feet away. “It is so loud in the hall right now. I couldn’t focus. It’s like no one else is worried about their essays. You guys don’t mind if I join you, do you?”
“Go right ahead,” Leigh said.
Kate let out an audible sigh of relief and sat down next to Leigh’s stretched legs, smoothing her binder over her knees. She plucked a pencil out from the rubber band holding back her ponytail and starting writing in a flurry.
Leigh caved to the peer pressure, finally lying down flat and drawing her notebook under her nose.
The three of us worked in relative silence for about ten minutes before I looked up to see Galen and Hunter coming out of the residence hall, both with laptops under their arms. They sat down with us in time to watch Brandon and Jams following their footsteps.
“In case you were wondering if we can hear what’s happening on your floor,” Jams said with a grimace as he sat down beside Hunter, “we can.”
“I already knew that,” I said. “You knocked on my floor yesterday.”
“Well, we knocked on our ceiling,” Brandon said. I was unsurprised to see that he’d left the typewriter behind. It really wasn’t a practical piece of equipment.
“Is that girl still crying?” Kate asked Jams, who nodded.
“Who’s crying?” Leigh asked.
“Someone on your floor,” Hunter said. “There’s been a lot of thumping and shouting and crying.”
Jams nodded. “Sounds like a nasty row.”
“He means ‘fight,’” Brandon translated.
“That was an easy one,” Hunter said, turning his beatific smile to Jams. “That one is in Harry Potter.”
“But who was it?” Leigh repeated, aiming the question at Kate again. “Did you check to see if she was okay?”
“It was one of Perla’s friends,” Kate said, her chin retreating into her neck. She was particularly horselike when she was affronted. “Meg is taking care of it. It is her job.”
Leigh tapped her pencil against her teeth. “She must not be doing a great job if the noise drove you all out here.”
“But now we get all this great quality time,” I said.
Brandon brought his knees up to his chest. “I bet that was Meg’s plan all along.”
Galen’s eyes widened. “I don’t think so, guys…”
The doors to the residence hall opened and adults appeared. I was more surprised to see them than I should have been. The school couldn’t be completely abandoned. Presumably there were people working in the admissions office, and custodians working in the shadows. But I hadn’t seen a real, live, non-Cheeseman adult in a full week.
The single teen in the group was a girl with blunt bangs, bloodshot eyes, and two lip rings, who I recognized as one of Perla’s cool cola-drinking friends. Now, her entire face was wet with tears and mucus and smeared mascara. She was flanked by Bryn Mawr, Meg, and three women I’d never seen before. Two of them—both youngish and blondish—held suitcases and backpacks. The third was squat, with light brown skin, and spoke into a cell phone, with a slight Spanish accent.