tail, making the apartment shudder just a little. It was, she figured, its unique way of saying good morning and breaking the loneliness that was her life, just like the bullfrog of her girlhood had kept her company at night with its own reptilian kindness.
Ballet slippers might as well be glass slippers; matter-fact, might’s well be glass ceilings, Erycha thought. The ballet slippers she could buy, but it was all the expenses that purchasing the slippers entailed that became the problem. The slippers were an investment, followed by one expense after the next, so much money down the rabbit hole that her dancing life had become. There was no way to justify spending all that money, but once those slippers were on her feet again Erycha knew how hard it would be not to take the next step. Her whole body went tense at the thought of those slippers, like a noose drawn tight. The boy sitting next to her in the bleachers must have felt it, too, because he flinched a little and gave her a quick, concerned glance.
Erycha looked back at him. Couldn’t take her eyes off him now. She hadn’t had but two hours of sleep and figured the Kool-Aid red veins around her pupils probably made her look crazy. She noticed how the boy was leaning away from her and into his mother as he frowned back in her direction. He even lowered his gaze. But she couldn’t take her eyes off him.
Erycha didn’t know what college would be like. Already she was having trouble concentrating on what the student speaker wearing a gray U.S. Army T-shirt was preaching from his pulpit of a podium at the basketball gym’s center court. Her attention had run off and hid and no matter what the man said, he couldn’t call it back.
Sitting next to her but leaning away and into his mom, Touissant Robert Freeman wasn’t interested in ethnic diversity or a more perfect university culture or anything else that the student speaker had to say. The speaker was from the military, which meant that he probably knew a lot about the mercenaries and losers that populated college campuses. A speech along those lines, or to do with the coked-up Christian college kid who earlier that year went wilding like an act of God and burned down the neighborhood Buddhist temple, now that would make for an interesting speech. Touissant thought about the brand new mega church, its cement foundation snuffing out smoldering embers. The best stories never got told, or people long after the fact and far from the source mixed things up and got it all wrong.
He listened to the speaker firing off automatic rounds of platitudes, but his attention drifted to the girl sitting next to him: just a second prior she’d leaned into him out of carelessness or suggestion and he’d noticed the momentary friction of her skin on his. She was the color of chocolate and wood, her body small and light so that it only slightly moved him when she leaned in. Her eyes were fierce, charged with an intensity not of her environment. He didn’t try to meet her gaze.
The second phase of orientation involved ushering the parents away with suggestions of fine dining in city restaurants and the refettering of the students based on their intended majors. Touissant kept his eye on the girl from the bleachers as she made her way out of the gym. He decided he would major in whatever she had decided to do with her life.
He followed the girl underneath a placard reading Dance. She had a long striding walk, elegant for such a short and shapely girl. And she moved slow too, slow enough that he walked up too close behind her and ticked her foot, which caused her to lose her footing and tremble in her heels.
“Hey there, what’s your name?” he asked opportunistically. He came shoulder-to-shoulder with her.
She cut her eyes his way. “Erycha Evans.”
Erycha gave him her hand.
He was already looking at her, appraising her. She judged him and his appraising eyes right back, a full-on stare. Like so many boys, he had eyelashes that she would kill for; even once-a-week trips to Miss Simms’s beauty parlor couldn’t lengthen her lashes that long. Ironic, she thought, how pretty a boy could be. She thought about the beauty parlor back home, the sweet smells, the sour talk, the divas coming and going and prettying her up. She didn’t have money enough to go there and get fine right now. She knew she was half as pretty as she could be, wondered why he was even interested.
“Where you from?” she asked.
He blinked at her like the question was unusual somehow even though it was the first question everyone asked where she was from. “Highland,” he said after a second.
“You are?”
He nodded.
“Me too,” she stuttered, “I’m from there, too.”
She had never seen him before. He had never seen her.
“You are?”
“Yeah.”
“Highland isn’t big enough to hide people.” He laughed. “I live over by where the Buddhist temple used to be.”
She laughed. “I’m a lot closer to Central City Mission than that Buddhism place.”
The mystery was solved. “Oh,” they said in unison.
“You’re from the Westside.” He laughed.
“You from East Highland.” She smiled, letting her teeth show this time. “But it’s all good: we still from the same city.”
“The same suburb.” He corrected her.
“Nah, where I’m at, it’s city.”
Like the city that had birthed and nurtured it, the university was vast but uncrowded and serene, a hot and windless plain of scattered trees and infrequent buildings and wandering students who came and went in ones and twos. The campus’s long deserted pathways seemed to reach out into the sky or over the edge of the world they ran so long and so deserted. The pathways ran into and out of the school and because of the lack of trees and buildings the new students had a view onto the city that would soon be their home, a nondescript industrial sprawl of shopping centers and apartment houses and motels and tire and brake shops and supermercados. This wasn’t San Diego or San Francisco, Santa Cruz or Santa Barbara; there was nothing picturesque or even vivid in these polluted skies. “When the smog recedes in the evening, we have the loveliest sunsets,” their tour guide told them.
“On your left,” he continued, “is the Science Library: it’s newly renovated with beautiful new carpeting, couches for study groups and individual desks for individual students. We’ve installed a temperature control panel. And to your right, you’ll notice two towering smokestacks in the sky. Those constitute the mathematics hall . . .
“Now here’s our English Library. Constructed in 1964, it is the oldest building on the campus, and what it lacks technologically it makes up for in charm and dignity. Though the air conditioning is only a feature of the first and third floors, the second and fourth floors have been equipped with large electric fans . . . ”
The tour lived and died like this, a long string of introductions to various inanimate objects.
The sun shone overhead, a cruel brilliance of heat and light.
“We the only two,” Erycha said, peering up at him to catch his expression. She still didn’t know his name. “Did you notice that, we the only
