“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.
My stomach twisted as we climbed the stairs. There were about a dozen people crammed in Abby and Julia’s small common room. Julia was across the room, talking to Patrick, another guy from our entryway. She looked different, but it was hard to say why. She tossed her head back when she laughed and kept resting her hand on Patrick’s forearm.
“Evan,” Abby said, pulling me aside. “Evan. I have to tell you something. She might kill me for telling you first, but I don’t care.”
“What is it?”
Her eyes sparkled. “Julia and Rob. They broke up.”
The rolling eyes, the mimed pistol. Julia had started to hint that the end was imminent. Abby laughed. “Oh, come on. Don’t act like you’re not totally overjoyed.”
“I’m not. I mean, I am. But—”
She shoved me. “Go.”
The mantelpiece served as the makeshift bar. I went over and poured myself a drink, willing my heart to slow down. I glanced at Julia, but she was still talking to Patrick. She hadn’t seen me, or she was pretending she hadn’t. It seemed strange.
“Hey,” I said to Arthur when he wandered over. “Hey, Arthur, guess what.”
“Julia and her boyfriend broke up. I know. Abby told me, too.”
“Yeah. Big news, right?”
“So this is it, then? You guys are gonna be together now?”
I shrugged, but I liked the suggestion of inevitability. Julia. It did seem inevitable. It always had. “I haven’t even said hi to her yet.”
“You sure it’s such a good idea?”
“What do you mean?”
But at that moment, an arm slipped through mine. “Hey, stranger,” Julia said, kissing me on the cheek.
“Hey, you,” I said. Arthur was slinking away toward the door.