Thirty Days and A Girl

Ivery's POV My mother used to say that you could tell everything about a person by watching what they did when they thought nobody was looking. I have spent nineteen years testing this theory and I believe she was right. Not about everything, my mother was spectacularly wrong about a number of things, including her belief that I would outgrow my obsession with basketball and her certainty that Mason was a good person because he had a nice smile, but about this specific thing, she was right. People reveal themselves in the unwatched moments. In the elevator alone. In the car at a red light. In the thirty seconds between sitting down at a table and realizing someone is there. I thought about this on my first morning at college because I had approximately four hours of sleep and thinking about my mother's theories was easier than thinking about the things I had promised myself I would not think about. Mason, for instance. The way he had looked at me the last time I saw him — standing in the doorway of his apartment while I carried the last of the things that were mine out the door, watching me with an expression that was not anger or regret but something colder and more patient. Like he was not saying goodbye. Like he was simply waiting. I had not looked back. I was not going to think about that. I was going to think about the fact that the elevator in my new dormitory building was out of service, which I discovered after dragging two suitcases and a box of books up four flights of stairs in the August heat. I was going to think about the girl standing on the bed when I pushed open the door to my room, standing on the actual mattress, phone raised above her head at an angle that suggested she had been in this position for some time and was committed to it. She looked at me. I looked at her. "Tell me this building has wifi," she said. "I have no idea," I said. "I just got here." She dropped her arm. Looked at my suitcases, my box of books, then back at my face with the quick, thorough assessment of someone who processed people fast. "You're my roommate," she said. "Looks like it," I said. She smiled, wide and immediate and completely without calculation, and jumped down from the bed. "I'm Sammy. I've been here twenty minutes and I already hate this place." "Ivery," I said. "It gets better." "How would you know? You just got here." "Optimism," I said. She laughed. Grabbed one of my suitcases without asking and dragged it toward the wardrobe. "I like you," she announced, in the decisive way of someone who had made a judgment and saw no reason to qualify it. I smiled at the back of her head and thought: this one is safe. Not in the obvious way. In the specific, instinctive way I had learned to feel since Mason — the quiet read of a person's energy, the assessment of whether they were the kind of person who would one day use your vulnerabilities against you. Sammy was not that kind of person. I knew it in the first thirty seconds. I was getting better at knowing it fast. You had to, after someone spent eight months slowly convincing you that you were too much and not enough simultaneously, that the bruises were your fault for making him angry, that nobody else would be patient enough to love the specific difficult thing that you were. You had to learn to read people faster. I put my box of books on the desk and decided, for the fourth time since I had packed up my life and moved it here, that this year was going to be different. That I was going to be different. Not the version of me that had shrunk herself to fit inside someone else's idea of acceptable. Not the version that had learned to move carefully around another person's anger like it was furniture in the dark. The version before that. The one that played basketball until her lungs burned and said exactly what she meant and took up the precise amount of space she required without apology. That version. Now is not the time for boys, I told myself. Now is the time for becoming yourself again. I believed it completely. I almost meant it. The student ID portal situation ate an hour of our afternoon. The administrative office was understaffed and overwhelmed and the waiting area was full of freshmen in various stages of frustration, and Sammy and I found two chairs near the window and settled into the kind of conversation that happened when two people discovered they had more in common than the occasion required. Theater, her for writing, me for performance. Basketball, with an intensity neither of us had found in anyone else before. The specific experience of being Nigerian in rooms that expected you to explain yourself. "What are you running from?" Sammy asked, somewhere in the middle of hour. I looked at her. "Sorry?" "People don't transfer colleges mid-program unless they're running from something or running toward something," she said, without judgment. "You have the face of someone running from." I looked at the queue ahead of us. "I'm running toward something," I said. She looked at me for a moment. "Okay," she said, in the tone of someone who did not entirely believe me and had decided to be patient about it. She was right not to believe me. I was running from. I was running from a boy who still lived forty minutes from my former campus and who had, three weeks ago, stood outside my last lecture of the semester and waited. Just waited. Patient as anything. I had transferred within the week. But I was not going to think about that. The library. The sports complex. A basketball game that I won three to zero and which Sammy accepted with significantly less grace than she would later claim. The cafeteria at the end of a long first day, my body finally registering that I had not eaten properly since the morning. I found a table near the window. Waved Sammy toward the counter. The boy at the far end of the table had dark sunglasses on inside, which should have looked ridiculous. It did not look ridiculous. He had the kind of face that made most things work simply by proximity, dark skin, strong jaw, the particular quality of stillness that belonged to people who had decided a long time ago that they were not going to perform anything for anyone. He was looking at his phone and had not noticed me. I waved in his general direction. "Hi." He looked up. The assessment behind the sunglasses was quick and thorough and entirely unimpressed, which I found interesting. Most boys looked at me and found something to perform at. This one looked at me and went back to his phone. "Can I sit here?" I said. "My friend is coming." "Sure," he said, without looking up. I sat. Took out my own phone. We existed in parallel silence that was, somehow, not uncomfortable. His name was Favour, introduced himself when Sammy arrived, delivered a line about being called Favour of God with the confidence of someone who had used it before and found it effective. Sammy played along. I watched and said nothing and ate my chicken. He was fine. Warm, genuine beneath the performance, the kind of person whose friendship would be easy. I was watching him when the door opened. I did not look up immediately. I was mid-bite and there was no particular reason to look at a cafeteria door. But something changed in the quality of the air. A shift in the room's attention, collective and involuntary, the way a room responded to something that did not require announcement. I looked up. He was tall. Broad-shouldered in the way that suggested it was structural rather than worked for. Dark skin, dark eyes that moved across the room with the specific, unhurried scan of someone who was looking for something specific and was not concerned about how long it took to find it. He moved through the cafeteria like the tables had arranged themselves for him, not arrogantly, not performing it, just with the absolute ease of someone who had never once in his life been uncertain about where he was going. He had not looked in my direction. Something in my chest did a thing I did not authorize. No, I told it. Absolutely not. We talked about this. "Hellooo Ivery." Sammy's voice arrived from a distance. "Earth to Ivy." I looked away. Looked back at my food. Looked back at him once more, he was still walking, still had not looked at me, and then firmly, deliberately, looked at Sammy. "What?" I said. She had an expression on her face that I did not yet know well enough to read. Later I would understand it meant she had filed something away and was already planning what to do with it. "Nothing," she said. And smiled into her food. At the end of the table, Favour's face changed. He sat up. Grabbed his phone and started typing rapidly. Across the cafeteria, I heard the specific buzz of a phone receiving a message. And the tall boy with the unhurried walk stopped. Read something on his screen. Put his phone away. And for the first time since he had walked through that door, he looked up and scanned the room with the slow, indifferent patience of someone who was never in a rush because everything always waited for him anyway. His eyes moved across the cafeteria. They had not found me yet. My phone buzzed. Unknown number. I frowned at it and opened the message. I heard there were two new girls worth meeting. Favour has terrible taste so I'm not optimistic.King I stared at the message. Then I looked up and across the cafeteria and found him already looking at me, the tall boy, phone in hand, expression giving absolutely nothing away. He looked at me for exactly two seconds. Then he looked back at his phone. I put my phone face down on the table. My heart was doing something entirely unprofessional. Now is not the time, I reminded it. It did not listen.