Double Digit (3 page)

I got back to my room by pretending to boogie down the hall. I waved my arms in the air,
woot-woot,
high-fived a few drunk people, and shoved that same kissing couple two inches to the left so I could reach my doorknob. I locked it behind me and threw myself on my bed. The first night of college had been a bit like drinking water from a fire hose. Overwhelming, but still refreshing.

I turned out the lights, and the moon cast the sinister pattern of the old leaded windows on the wall over my bed. Each pane had four rows of three rectangles, which minded their own business while a branch poked at them at irregular intervals.
Stop poking me,
I thought, and immediately missed my brother, Danny. He was three days away from starting his senior year and would surely sail through it with his patented mixture of fun, sweetness, and getting away with murder.

Murder . . . which brought me to the kidnapped man’s 3-D artwork that threatened to pounce on me from across the room. With the music still booming on the other side of the wall, I decided to call John in L.A.

“Hey. How was the first night?”

“Interesting.”

“How?”

“I danced. I met a bunch of hackers. They swore me to secrecy over some robot they built. And then I danced home. It was actually kind of cool.” I felt better just talking to him.

“That sounds pretty good. I miss you.”

“Maybe I should come home. I could be in Malibu in eight hours, and we could go to the beach.” I heard a sigh.

“Don’t tempt me. I thought about flying out there today and being that creepy boyfriend who shows up all the time. I don’t even know what to do with myself without you here. I was thinking earlier of stopping by to see Danny, but that just seemed pathetic.”

“Seriously, classes don’t start for two days. I feel oriented already. Maybe I should come see you.”

“I’ll be in New York next week. And I’ll be up to see you in two weeks. It’ll seem like nothing someday.”
Grownups.

I
WOKE UP AT TWO A.M
.,
POSITIVE
that someone was standing over my bed. The moon was still projecting a shadow on my wall, but no one was there. I kind of had to pee and weighed the creepiness of my room against the potential creepiness and stickiness of the dark hallway that led to the huge communal girls’ bathroom. I decided I was being ridiculous and that I wasn’t going to be able to hold it for four years, so I got out of bed and found my slippers. And my brand-new I’m-going-to-college bathrobe. All I needed was a big set of curlers to look exactly like my great-grandma Dorothy.

I poked my head out of my room and looked both ways down the dark hallway. The smell of stale beer was intense. I looked left and right maybe six times—I’d crossed highways with less caution.
It’s a hallway, Digit.
I tiptoed into the darkness and moved toward the third door on the left, focusing on the reassuring light coming from under it. My heart was racing from I-don’t-know-what as I finally pushed the door all the way open to flood the hall with light.

A guy was standing at the sink, in a towel, shaving. It took me a few beats to register:
A guy is standing at the sink, in a towel, shaving.
He turned to look at me. His sandy hair was wet and shaggy like he’d given it a once-over with the towel that was now wrapped around his waist, too low. Really, impossibly low.
How do men keep towels up when they have no hips? Is there a special way to fasten it at the front? Maybe there’s Velcro
. . .
I’d feel so much better if I knew there was a little piece of Velcro holding that tiny little flap . . .
because it could definitely slip any second now, and he’d just be standing there
. . .

“Hello?” He was saying something. And I was staring. I started shifting in my slippers from side to side. How long had I been staring at that most precarious spot where the top of his towel met the very, very bottom of his stomach? As my eyes lowered, I started to focus, as only I can, on the striped pattern of his towel. Every brand in America makes a striped towel, but this one had a break in the stripes so that every fifteen inches, the stripes stopped matching up. No, not every fifteen inches. Every fifteen, then six . . . I needed him to turn around to see the back. I couldn’t break myself away from trying to force those stripes to meet. “Is there something the matter with you?” the guy said.
Uh, what was your first clue?

“You’re going to have to take off that towel.” Oh my God. “No! Don’t take off that towel!” I closed my eyes and tried to picture a perfect circle. I knew I looked completely nuts, but if I was going to recover, I needed to snap out of it and try to explain. But I didn’t want to keep having to explain this, and certainly not to a mostly naked guy. “You know what’s weird?” I opened my eyes. “I think I was sleepwalking. Just woke up! Wow! Now I’m awake. And maybe in the men’s room? Hmm. I’ll just . . .” I started backing up, not sure why I wasn’t turning around to just get out of there. Maybe I was waiting for some acknowledgment that this happens all the time, that I was the third girl to walk in on him tonight.
Why is he walking toward me?

“I’m Bass.” He reached out a hand to me and, thankfully, secured his towel with the other. “I’m the RA on this floor. We’ll be meeting in the morning. Fully dressed.” Is it possible to have a little twinkle in your eye while standing half-naked and half-shaving-creamed in front of a total stranger? Unfathomable.

“Okay.” I turned to go, managing to secure my eyes on the dirty floor where they should have been all along.

“The girls’ bathroom is across the hall. It says ‘girls’ on the door.”
Gee, thanks.

I managed to get through the get-to-know-your-friendly-RA meeting without making any direct eye contact. I mean, isn’t it some sort of sexual assault seeing someone in a towel? Yeah, I walked in on him, but still. Now that he was fully dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that said
NEVER DO ANYTHING YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO EXPLAIN TO THE PARAMEDICS
, I could actually look at him. He had an unnerving way of smiling with his eyes while barely lifting the corners of his mouth. His eyes were blue and lit up with amusement at almost everything, and I found myself staring at his mouth to see if it would curl up enough to match them. When he laughed his mouth was forced all the way into action, but when he smiled it was mostly his eyes. Sometimes I wish I could just gloss over the details.

A one-eared dog sat at his feet while he talked to us. “About your little party last night. This may come as a shocker, but there is no alcohol allowed in the dorms. If you thought maybe you were getting away with something, well, you were. I let that happen for a couple of reasons, and don’t expect a repeat. First of all, it was the first night, and I wanted you all to let loose and maybe get acquainted. I can see you accomplished that.” Laughter all around. The couple who had been making out against my door got a lot of looks. “And, second, because now you guys owe me. I am not allowed to keep a dog in here. And I don’t know how I’d be able to do it without you guys knowing. It’s only for a couple of weeks. His name’s Buddy, and he’s a rescue dog. I’ll find him a home pretty soon, but you guys have to keep it to yourselves. Okay?”

I personally couldn’t have cared less if he had a dog in his room. What was cool was that we all suddenly had the sense of community that comes with a shared secret. Bass waited until all twelve of us had nodded in agreement.

“You should also know that he can sniff out any illicit substances you might be keeping in your room, so as my first official act as your residential adviser, I advise you to get rid of it.” We all looked at each other, trying to scope out any potential potheads. Bass got up and started to leave the room. “Now you have twenty minutes to clean up that hallway before the janitors show up and we’re all busted. Mops and garbage bags are in the closet by the girls’ bathroom.” Putting his hand on my shoulder, he said, “This young lady should be able to show you where that is.”

I’m not a huge blusher, and I’m not even that fair-skinned. But some kind of fiery redness shot out of my cheeks, and I had to completely bow my head to conceal it. Clarke’s natural tendency to be personally offended by absolutely everything saved me. “Uh, yeah, Bass, we’re all pretty smart. We can find the girls’ bathroom.”

After twenty minutes of mopping, bagging, and stashing, I felt comfortable with all the kids on my hall. Even the big guy who I was sure was going to grope me last night seemed fun and harmless. His name was Kevin, and he was from Topeka. He would forever be known as Kevin from Kansas. That seemed to be the tricky part of the first few days, just avoiding a bad nickname. I was glad to have brought my own.

I walked to the big freshman orientation breakfast with my new hacker pals and Tiki. Scott gave me a shove as we walked. “Um, sure you got a good-enough look at that RA, Digit?”

Tiki laughed. “Yeah, there’s a little drool right . . . there, in the corner of your mouth. You may want to wipe that before your ‘boyfriend’ (
please don’t get me started on air quotes
) visits.”

Everyone laughed in a good-natured, it’s-no-biggie sort of way. This alarmed me for two reasons: Was I really staring at him for so long that people noticed? Why were they acting like it didn’t matter if I did? I mean, didn’t girls in love not notice other guys?

The orientation breakfast was pretty fun. I stayed with the kids from my hall mostly but met some new people too. No one really knew anybody, so even the introverts were forced to introduce themselves. The dean gave a speech about new beginnings, and we ate scrambled eggs and bacon from chafing dishes.

When we got back to the dorm, it was surrounded by police cars. At first I thought something had happened to someone and was waiting for a stretcher to come out the front door. But the dorm would have been completely empty with all of the freshmen away at breakfast. We stood outside the yellow police tape and speculated about what might be going on.

“Somebody’s taken Clementine!”

“Nobody’s taken Clementine. No one even knows about Clementine.” Ella was trying to sound reassuring.

“Who’s Clementine?” Tiki asked.

“Except for Digit and now her, starting now,” said Clarke.

Scott took this as permission to tell Tiki all about Clementine and the robotics competition that they were going to enter. It’s funny how there are certain secrets that people don’t mind sharing with everyone who will listen, as long as they preface them with “This is top-secret . . .”

Bass walked out with two cops. “Okay, I’ll get them. But really, there’s no reason to say anything about the dog in your report, right?” He told us that six rooms on our hall had been broken into in the past hour. “The police think it was a professional job, someone who knew what they were looking for and when you would all be away. Nothing seems to be missing though, so will you guys go up to your rooms and see if you notice anything?”

Scott raced into the building to make sure that Clementine was all right (she was). I walked in with Bass, unworried because I have nothing to steal but my laptop and a gold necklace that my grandmother gave me. “You didn’t have to go to that breakfast. Were you here?”

Bass turned to me, and I saw the cut over his eye for the first time. “Yep. Lucky me. Mine was the last door they opened, and I was able to stop it with my head. Buddy went nuts and they ran off.”

“What did they look like?”

“I gave a full description to the cops. What, are you, like, in law enforcement or something?” Eyes smiling, mouth barely. I hoped I would soon get used to this because I found myself spending an inordinate amount of time staring at his mouth, just checking for motion.

“Watch a lot of cop shows. Plus I’m curious about what kind of creepy guys were going through my stuff.”

When we got to my room, I found that nothing was missing. They hadn’t even taken my laptop. Bass ran his finger over the 3-D overlay in Adam Ranks’s poster, which I was quickly learning was impossible not to do. He opened my closet and found only my winter coat hanging. “You sure nothing’s missing here?”

“Nope. That’s all I’ve got.” I wasn’t going to explain to him that my wardrobe consisted entirely of wash-and-wear foldables in three colors. He’d figure that out in time.

He nodded like that meant something. “Good for you.”

I could have obsessed over the break-in. I could have dwelled on my safety. But classes started the next day: Principles of Chemical Science, Multivariable Calculus, Physics II, Communications, and Artificial Intelligence. My first class was Multivariable Calculus, and I arrived twenty minutes early and nabbed a center seat in the third row. The vibe in the big lecture hall was unlike any class I’d ever been in. The kids didn’t look much different from the kids in my high school, except maybe they were more conservatively dressed. It wasn’t until the class was over that I figured out what the difference was: Every single student wanted to be there. I mean, every one of them had busted their butts to get into MIT, and, just like me, they felt like this class was a reward for their hard work. People asked questions about things I’d never heard of, and it occurred to me that there was more for me to learn than I had even hoped. I could actually feel my cells accelerating throughout my body, like I was super alive instead of just regular alive. We were being fed by that lecture, the way some people feel at a museum or a concert or a sample sale. I looked around the lecture hall and thought:
These are my people.

I met Ella for coffee after my first Artificial Intelligence class and asked her so many questions about computer science that she finally had to stop me. “Can we just take a break and talk about your old man boyfriend?”

“There’s not that much to say.”
There is so much to say!
“He’s a really great guy, and he’s coming to visit next weekend.”

The thought of seeing John made my stomach flip. Every inch of me was aching to see him, to smell his neck, and to hold his hand while I walked.