Thirty Days and A Girl

The Boy the Highway Made

Nathaniel's POV

I sent the text before I walked through the door.

This was Favour's fault. He had been messaging me variations of come to the cafeteria there are two new girls you need to meet since four o'clock, with the escalating urgency of someone who genuinely believed this was a compelling reason to leave my room. I had ignored eleven of the messages. On the twelfth I had typed back: I heard there were two new girls worth meeting. Favour has terrible taste so I'm not optimistic. and sent it to the wrong number.

Or rather. I had sent it to a number Favour had added to my phone without my knowledge, labeled Ivy, the theater one, which I discovered when the response came back not from Favour but from an unsaved contact who wrote:

Favour has great taste actually. But I'll reserve judgment on you.

I read it once. Put my phone away. Walked into the cafeteria.

Found the table.

Looked at her for exactly as long as I needed to in order to confirm she was who I thought she was, which was two seconds, and then looked back at my phone because two seconds was enough and anything more would have communicated something I had not decided to communicate.

She was small. That was the first thing. Petite in a way that was not fragile, there was nothing fragile about the way she sat, the particular straightness of her spine, the quality of attention she brought to the room around her. She was watching everything. Filing it. The kind of person who processed the world by observing it first and engaging second, which was either intelligence or damage or, in the most interesting cases, both.

I sat down.

Ordered food.

Said approximately nothing for the next forty minutes.

This was normal. This was me in most social situations that Favour had organized without my consent, present, functional, contributing the minimum required to avoid being rude, spending the majority of my attention on something other than the performance of being there.

The something other than was, tonight, unremarkable. The music theory paper I had not started. The call from my brother I had been declining for two weeks. The specific weight of returning to a campus that held a version of me I was not certain I wanted to keep inhabiting.

It was not, specifically, the girl across the table.

It was not the way she had written I'll reserve judgment on you with the dry precision of someone who meant it as a warning rather than a flirtation.

It was not the way she moved through the conversation, present without performing, attentive without advertising her attention, laughing at things that were actually funny and saying nothing when things were not.

It was the music theory paper.

"You any good?" I heard myself say, somewhere in the middle of Favour explaining something about theater arts.

She looked at me. The look was direct in the specific way of someone who had decided a long time ago that directness was more efficient than anything else.

"Yes," she said.

One word. No qualification. No performance of modesty or false uncertainty.

Something shifted in my assessment of her. A small recalibration. Not significant enough to mention.

"Confident," I said.

"Accurate," she said, and went back to her food.

I went back to mine.

The cafeteria moved around us and I said nothing further and neither did she and somehow this was not uncomfortable, which was unusual. Most silences between people who had just met required management. This one did not.

I noted that. Filed it in the category of things I was not going to examine further.

At some point Favour said something about a basketball game tomorrow and I said no, categorically, because the last thing I intended to do on my second day back was spend it on a court with strangers. Favour looked wounded. The girl, Ivery, the name sat oddly in my head in the way that specific names did when they fit a person too precisely, looked at me with something that was almost a smile.

"Bold of you to assume you'd lose," her friend said.

"Realistic," I said. "There's a difference."

Ivery said nothing. But the almost-smile deepened by a fraction that she was clearly trying to prevent, and I looked at my food and told myself I had not noticed.

I had noticed.

I left before they did.

Not because I had somewhere to be. I did not, particularly, but because remaining required a quality of social energy I had allocated elsewhere and the return on continued investment was not worth calculating. I said something minimal. Stood up. Left.

Favour followed me into the corridor thirty seconds later with the expression of someone who had opinions about my exit.

"You couldn't stay for ten more minutes," he said.

"I stayed for forty," I said.

"You barely spoke."

"I spoke."

"Three sentences, King."

"Quality over quantity."

He fell into step beside me with the particular energy of someone who was not done with a conversation even when the other person clearly was. This was a defining Favour characteristic. He treated the end of conversations as suggestions rather than conclusions.

"She's different," he said.

"Who."

"You know who."

I said nothing. Which Favour, correctly, interpreted as an invitation to continue.

"She's not trying to get your attention," he said. "Most girls, when you walk in somewhere, they try to get your attention. She didn't. She looked at you once and then she went back to her food."

"People are allowed to not find me interesting," I said.

"That's not what I said." He stopped walking. I did not stop walking. "I said she wasn't trying. That's different from not finding you interesting."

I turned the corner toward the dormitory stairs and left him in the corridor.

In my room I sat on the sofa and looked at the ceiling and thought about the music theory paper, which I needed to start, and the call from my brother, which I needed to decline again, and the specific return-weight of being back in a place that expected things from you that you had not agreed to provide.

My phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

You left without saying goodbye. That's either very cool or very rude and I haven't decided which yet.

I looked at the message for a moment.

It's efficient, I typed back.

Efficient is what people say when they don't want to admit they're running away from something.

I read that twice.

I don't run, I typed.

Everyone runs, she wrote back. The interesting question is what from.

The message sat on my screen and I looked at it and said nothing for long enough that the screen dimmed and went dark. I picked up the phone again. Put it down. Picked it up.

Go to sleep, I typed finally. You have an early orientation.

How do you know when my orientation is?

Favour.

Favour needs to learn boundaries.

Favour doesn't know what that word means.

A pause. Then: Goodnight, King.

I put the phone face down on the mattress.

Looked at the ceiling.

The message from my brother was still sitting unread in my notifications,three days old now, patient in the way my brother was patient about everything, which was not patience at all but the specific certainty of someone who knew you would eventually have to pick up.

I was not picking up.

Not tonight.

I closed my eyes and thought about nothing specific and was almost asleep when Dante came in at half past eleven with bruised knuckles and the expression of someone who had handled something and was not yet ready to account for it.

I sat up.

"What happened," I said. Not a question.

He looked at his knuckles. Then at me. "Nothing serious."

"Dante."

"I said nothing serious, King." He sat on his bed and pulled off his shoes with the careful movements of someone whose body was registering something his face was not admitting. "Some boys from Kingston were at the club giving a bartender trouble. I intervened."

I looked at him.

"How many," I said.

"Four."

"By yourself."

"Justine was there."

"Justine is not" I stopped. Sat on the edge of my bed and looked at him properly, the set of his jaw, the way he was holding his right arm slightly away from his body. "Show me."

"I'm fine."

"Dante. Show me."

He lifted his shirt. Two ribs, at least, possibly three, with the particular purple-yellow of something that had been hit hard and recently. I had seen this before. On him, on Favour, on myself, in various configurations over the years. It never got easier to look at.

"You need to go to the hospital," I said.

"I need to sleep," he said.

"Those are not mutually exclusive."

"King." He looked at me with the flat, exhausted calm of someone who had made a decision and was not revisiting it. "I'm fine. I'll be fine in the morning. Don't make it a thing."

I looked at him for a long moment.

Then I got up and went to the bathroom and came back with the first aid kit that Justine had insisted I keep under the sink last year, which I had never used and which she had refilled twice without being asked.

"Sit still," I said.

He sat still.

I worked in silence. He tolerated it in silence. This was the architecture of how we managed things, efficiently, without ceremony, without making it mean more than it needed to mean in the moment. There would be a time for the full accounting. Tonight was not that time.

When I finished he lay back on his bed and closed his eyes.

"The boys from Kingston," I said, sitting in the chair by the desk. "Anyone I know?"

A pause.

"Chidi's people," he said.

I was quiet for a moment.

"Okay," I said.

"It's fine," he said. "They won't be back."

"No," I said. "They won't."

The room was quiet. Outside the campus had settled into its late-night register, lower, slower, the particular sound of a place winding down.

My phone lit up on the mattress.

Unknown number.

I did not pick it up. I sat in the chair and watched the notification and did not pick it up because picking it up would have meant something and I had not yet decided what.

After a while Dante's breathing evened out into sleep.

I picked up the phone.

One more thing, she had written, forty minutes ago. You said you don't run. I think you do. I think you're very good at it. I think the composed thing is how you run you stay so still that nobody notices you've already gone.

I read it three times.

Then I turned the phone face down and sat in the dark and did not sleep for a long time.

Outside the campus continued its indifferent existence.

Inside my chest something was doing something I had not given it permission to do.

Efficient, I told it.

It did not listen.