But when Dee sees the cookies, he gives me a funny little smile. Then he takes off his coat and hangs it in the closet, even though mine is tossed over a chair. He kicks off his boots. Then he looks around my room.
“Do you have a clock?” he asks. “My phone’s dead.”
I get up and show him the box of alarm clocks, which I have since put back in the closet. “Take your pick.”
He takes a long time choosing, finally settling on a 1940s mahogany deco number. I show him how to wind it. He asks how to set the alarm. I show him. Then he sets it for five fifty, explaining he has to be at his job at the dining hall at six. The reading usually doesn’t take more than a half hour, so I’m not sure why he sets the alarm. But I don’t say anything. About that. Or about his job, even though I’m curious about it.
He sits down on my desk chair. I sit on my bed. He picks up a tube of fruit flies from the desk, examining it with a slightly amused expression. “They’re Drosophila,” I explain. “I’m breeding them for a class.”
He shakes his head. “If you run out, you can come get more in my mama’s kitchen.”
I want to ask him where that kitchen is. Where he’s from. But he seems guarded. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe making friends is a specific skill, and I missed the lesson. “Okay, time for work. See you later, my dropsillas,” he says to the bugs. I don’t correct his pronunciation.
We read a really good scene at the beginning of The Winter’s Tale, when Leontes freaks out and thinks that Hermione is cheating on him. When we get to the end point, Dee packs up his Shakespeare textbook, and I think he’s going to leave, but instead he pulls out a book by someone called Marcuse. He gives me the quickest of looks.
“I’ll make more tea,” I say.
We study together in silence. It’s nice. At five fifty, the alarm goes off and Dee packs up to go to work.
“Wednesday?” he says.
“Sure.”
Two days later, we go through the same routine, cookies, tea, hello to the “dropsillas,” Shakespeare out loud, and silent study. We don’t talk. We just work. On Friday, Kali comes into the room. It’s the first time she’s seen Dee, seen anyone, in the room with me, and she looks at him for a long moment. I introduce them.
“Hi, Dee. Pleasure to meet you,” she says in a strangely flirty voice.
“Oh, the pleasure is all mine,” Dee says, his voice all exaggeratedly animated.
Kali looks at him and then smiles. Then she goes to her closet and pulls out a camel coat and a pair of tawny suede boots. “Dee, can I ask you something? What do you think of these boots with this jacket? Too matchy matchy?”
I look at Dee. He is wearing sky-blue sweats and a T-shirt with sparkly lettering spelling out I BELIEVE. I’m not clear how this reads Fashion Expert to Kali.
But Dee gets right into it. “Oh, girl, those boots are fine. I might have to take them from you.”
I look at him, sort of shocked. I mean I figured Dee was gay, but I’ve never heard him talk all sassy-gay-sidekick before.
“Oh, no, you won’t,” Kali replies, her strange ways of KO’ing words now blending with some latent Valley Girl tendencies. “They cost me, like, four hundred dollars. You can borrow them.”
“Oh, you’re a doll baby. But you got Cinderella feet, and ole Dee’s like one of them ugly stepsisters.”
Kali laughs, and they go on like this for some time, talking about fashion. I feel kind of bad. I guess I never realized Dee was so into this kind of thing. Kali got it right away. It’s like she has some radar, the one that tells you how to pick up on things with people, how to be friends. I don’t really care about fashion, but that night, when the alarm goes off and Dee packs up to leave, I show him the latest skirt my mom sent me and ask if he thinks it’s too preppy. But he barely gives it half a glance. “It’s fine.”
After that, Kali starts showing up more often, and she and Dee go all Project Runway, and Dee always switches into that voice. I write it off as just a fashion thing. But then a few days after that, as we’re leaving, Kendra walks in, and I introduce them. Kendra sizes Dee up, like she does with people, and puts on her flight-attendant smile and asks Dee where he’s from.
“New York,” he says. I make a note of that. I’ve known him for almost three weeks, and I’m just now finding out the basics.
“Where in New York?”
“The city.”
“Where?”
“The Bronx.”
The flight attendant smile is gone, replaced by a tight line that looks penciled on.
“Oh, like the South Bronx? Well. You must be so glad to be living here.”
Now it’s Dee who gives Kendra the once-over. They’re eyeing each other like dogs, and I wonder if it’s because they’re both black. Then, he switches to a different voice from the one he talks to Kali or me in. “You from the South Bronx?”
Kendra recoils a little. “No! I’m from Washington.”
“Like where they got all the rain and shit?”
Rain and shit?
“No, not state. DC.”
“Oh. I got some cousins in DC. Down in Anacostia. Shit, those are some nasty-ass projects. Even worse than where I came up. There’s a shooting at their school every damn week.”
Kendra looks horrified. “I’ve never even been to Anacostia. I live in Georgetown. And I went to Sidwell Friends, where the Obama girls go.”
“I went to South Bronx High. Most wack school in America. Ever heard of it?”
“No, I’m afraid I haven’t.” She gives me a quick look. “Well, I have to go. I’m meeting Jeb soon.” Jeb is her new boyfriend.
“Catch you later, homegirl,” Dee calls as Kendra disappears into her room. As Dee picks up his backpack to leave, he is quaking with laughter.
I decide to walk him to the dining hall, maybe eat there for a change. Eating alone sucks, but there are only so many microwave burritos a girl can stomach. When we get downstairs, I ask him if he really went to South Bronx High School.
When he speaks again, he sounds like Dee. Or the Dee I know. “They closed South Bronx High School a year ago, not that I ever went there. I went to a charter school. Then I got snagged in Prep for Prep—scholarship thing—by a private school that’s even more expensive than Sidwell Friends. Take that, Miss Thang.”
“Why didn’t you just tell her where you went?”
He looks at me and then, reverting to the voice he’d used with Kendra, says, “If homegirls wanna see me as ghetto trash”—he stops and switches to his lispy, sassy voice—“or big-ass queer”—now he switches to his deepest Shakespeare voice—“I shall not take it upon myself to disabuse them.”
When we reach the dining hall, I feel like I should say something to him. But I’m not sure what. In the end, I just ask him if he wants chocolate chip or butter cookies next time. Grandma sent me both.
“I’ll supply cookies. My mama sent up some homemade molasses spice ones.”
“That’s nice.”
“Nothin’ nice about it. She’s throwing down. She wasn’t about to be outdone by somebody’s grandma.”
I laugh. It’s a strange sound, like an old car being started after a long time in the garage. “We won’t tell my grandma that. If she accepts the challenge and bakes her own cookies, we might get food poisoning. She’s the worst cook in the world.”
It becomes a routine then. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: cookies, tea, alarm clock, Shakespeare, study. We still don’t talk much about ourselves, but little things slip through the cracks. His mother works at a hospital. He has no siblings, but five zillion cousins. He’s on a full scholarship. He has a rather huge crush on Professor Glenny. He is double-majoring in history and literature, and maybe a minor in political science. He hums when he’s bored, and when he’s really into his reading, he twists his hair around his index finger so tight, it turns pink. And just as I suspected from that first day in class, he’s smart. That he doesn’t tell me, but it’s obvious. He’s the only one in the entire class to get an A on Glenny’s first assignment, a paper on Henry V; Professor Glenny announces it to the class and reads snippets of Dee’s paper to the class as an example of what the rest of us should strive for. Dee looks mortified, and I feel sort of bad, but the Glenny groupies regard Dee with such looks of nak*d envy that it’s almost worth it. I, meanwhile, get a very solid B on my paper about Perdita and themes of lost and found.
I tell Dee little things about me too, but half the time, I find myself censoring what I want to say. I like him. I do. But I’m trying to make good on my tabula-rasa promise. Still, I sort of wish I could ask Dee’s opinion about Melanie. I sent her the very first piece I made from ceramics class, along with a note about how I’d completely upended my schedule. I sent it Priority Mail, and then a week went by, and I didn’t hear anything. So I’d called her up to make sure she’d gotten it—it was just a crappy, handmade bowl, but it had a beautiful crackly turquoise glaze—and she apologized for not responding, saying she was busy.
I told her all about my new classes, and about the crazy lengths I was going to so my parents wouldn’t find out: sending them biology tests with improving scores (Dee’s and my lengthy study sessions are paying off) but also sending them my old chemistry lab partner’s tests, with my name on them. I figured she’d get a good laugh about this, but instead her voice had stayed flat, and she’d warned me about the kind of trouble I’d be in if I got caught—as if I didn’t already know that. Then I’d switched gears, telling her all about Professor Glenny and Dee and reading out loud and how mortifying I’d thought it would be to read in front of the class but how everyone does it and it isn’t so bad. I’d expected her to be excited for me, but her voice had been practically monotone, and I’d found myself getting so angry. We haven’t talked or emailed in a couple of weeks, and I’m both upset about it and relieved too.
I’d kind of like to tell Dee about this, but I’m not sure how to do it. Aside from Melanie, I’ve never had a really close friend, and I’m unclear how you make one. It’s silly, I know. I’ve seen other people do it. They make it seem so easy: Have fun, open up, share stories. But how am I supposed to do that when the one story I really want to tell is the very one I’m supposed to be wiping clean? And besides, the last time I did open up to somebody . . . well, that’s precisely why I’m in need of a tabula rasa in the first place. It just seems safer to keep it like it is—friendly, cordial, nice and simple.
At the end of February, my parents come up for Presidents’ Weekend. It’s the first time they’ve been up since Parents’ Weekend, and having learned my lesson, I go to elaborate lengths to keep up the image they expect of me. I put my clocks back out. I highlight pages in my unused chemistry textbook and copy labs out of my old lab partners’ book. I make us lots of plans in Boston to keep us off campus, away from incriminating evidence and the Terrific Trio (who now have become more of a Dynamic Duo anyway because Kendra’s always with her boyfriend). And I tell Dee, with whom I now study on weekends sometimes, that I won’t be around and that I can’t get together Friday and Monday.