“Sure.” Luce popped the top on the Coke she’d bought at the vending machine near the powder-deter-gent-strewn laundry stations.
“I thought you were bringing me a diet?”
“I did.” Luce reached into her laundry basket for the can she’d bought for Nora. “Sorry, I must have left it downstairs. I’ll run and get it. Be right back.”
“Pas de prob,” Nora said, practicing her French. “But hurry. Hailey says there’s a varsity soccer team infiltra-tion on their side of the hall. Soccer boys equal good parties. We should head over there soon. Gotta go,” she said into the phone. “No, I’m wearing the black shirt.
Luce is wearing yellow—or, are you gonna change? Either way . . .”
Luce waved to Nora that she’d be right back and ducked out of the room. She took the stairs two at a time, winding down the floors of the dorm until she stood on the tattered maroon carpet at the entrance to the basement, which everyone on campus called the Pit, a term that made Luce think of peaches.
At the window leading out into the courtyard, Luce paused. A car full of boys was stopped in the circular drive of the dorm. As they climbed out, laughing and shoving each other, Luce saw they all had Emerald Varsity Soccer shirts on. Luce recognized one of them. His name was Max and he’d been in a couple of Luce’s orientation sessions that week. He was seriously cute—blond hair, big white smile, typical prep-school-boy look (which she recognized now after Nora drew her a dia-gram the other day at lunch). She’d never talked to Max, not even when they were teamed up with a few other kids on the campus scavenger hunt. But maybe if he was going to be at the party that night . . .
All the boys getting out of that car were really cute, which for Luce equaled intimidating. She didn’t like the thought of being the one shy girl in Jordan and Hailey’s room upstairs.
But she did like the thought of being at the party.
What else was she supposed to do? Hide in her dorm room because she was nervous? She was obviously going to go.
She jogged down the final flight of stairs to the basement. It was getting close to sunset, so the laundry room had emptied, giving it a lonely glow. Sunset was the time you wore the things you’d washed and dried. There was just one girl in crazy thigh-high striped kneesocks, savagely scrubbing a stain from a tie-dyed pair of jeans as if all her future hopes and dreams depended on the stain’s removal. And a boy, sitting atop a loud and shaking dryer, tossing a coin in the air and catching it in his palm.
“Heads or tails?” he asked when she walked in. He had a square face, wavy amber hair, big blue eyes, and a tiny gold chain around his neck.
“Heads.” Luce shrugged and gave a little laugh.
He flipped the coin, caught it, and flipped it over into his palm, and Luce saw that it wasn’t a quarter. It was old, really old, a dusty golden color with faded writing in another language’s script. The boy raised an eyebrow at her. “You win. I don’t know what you won yet, but that’s probably up to you.”
She twirled around, searching for the diet soda she’d left down there. Then she saw it about an inch from the boy’s right knee. “This isn’t yours, is it?” she asked.
He didn’t answer; he just stared at her with icy blue eyes, which she saw now suggested a profound sadness that didn’t seem possible in someone his age.
“I left it down here earlier. It’s for my friend. My roommate. Nora,” Luce said, reaching for the can. This boy was strange, intense. She was blabbering. “I’ll see you later.”
“One more time?” he asked.
She turned around in the doorway. He meant the coin game. “Oh. Heads.”
He flipped. The coin seemed to hover in the air. He caught it without looking, flipped it over, and opened his palm. “You win again,” he sang in a voice eerily iden-tical to that of Hank Williams, a favorite old singer of Luce’s dad.
Back upstairs, Luce tossed Nora the Coke. “Have you met the crazy coin-toss guy in the laundry room?”
“Luce.” Nora squinted. “When I run out of underwear, I buy new underwear. I am hoping to make it to Thanksgiving without having to do laundry. Are you ready? Soccer boys are waiting, hoping to score. We are their goal, but we must remind them they can’t use their hands.”
She took Luce by the elbow and steered her out of the room.
“Now, if you meet a boy named Max, I suggest avoid-ance. I went to Dover with him, and I’m positive he’ll be on the soccer team. He will seem cute and very charming. But he has the biggest bitch of a girlfriend back home. Well, she thinks she’s his girlfriend”—Nora murmured behind her hand—“and she got rejected from Emerald and is ferociously bitter about it. She’s got spies everywhere.”
“Got it.” Luce laughed, frowning inside. “Stay away from Max.”
“What’s your type, anyway? I mean, I know you’ve moved on from gangly old Jeremy.”
“Nora.” Luce gave her a little shove. “You are not allowed to bring him up all the time. That was late-night roommate private conversation. What happens in pajamas stays in pajamas.”
“You’re totally right.” Nora nodded, putting up her hands in surrender. “Some things are sacred. I respect that. Okay. If you had to describe your dream kiss in five words or less . . .”
They were walking around the second bend of the U-shaped dorm. In a moment, they would turn the corner and approach the end of the hall, called the Caboose, where Jordan and Hailey’s room was. Luce leaned against the wall and sighed.
“I’m not embarrassed about having, you know, no experience,” Luce said quietly—these walls were thin.
“It’s just, do you ever feel like nothing has happened to you? Like you know you have a destiny, but all you’ve seen of life so far is unexceptional? I want my life to be different. I want to feel that it’s begun. I’m waiting for that kiss. But sometimes I feel like I could wait forever and nothing would ever change.”
“I’m in a hurry, too.” Nora’s eyes had gone a little fuzzy. “I know what you mean—but you do have at least a little control. Especially when you stick with me. We can make things happen. Our first semester’s barely even started, kid.”
Nora was eager to get to the party, and Luce wanted to go; she really did. But she was talking about that inde-scribable thing that was bigger than having a good time at a party. She was talking about a destiny that Luce felt like she had as much control over as the outcome of a coin toss—something that was and wasn’t really in her hands.
“You okay?” Nora tilted her head at Luce. A short auburn curl flopped down over her eye.
“Yeah.” Luce nodded nonchalantly. “I’m good.”
They went to the party—which was just a bunch of open dorm room doors and freshmen walking into and out of them. Everyone had plastic cups filled with this super-sweet red punch that seemed to replenish itself automatically. Jordan DJ’ed from her iPod, shouting,
“Holla!” every now and then. The music was good. Her sweet next-door neighbor David Franklin ordered pizza, which Hailey improved by adding fresh oregano from the herb garden she’d brought from home and installed in the corner by the window. These were good people, and Luce was glad to know them.
Luce met twenty students in thirty minutes and most of them were boys who leaned in and put their hands on the small of her back when she introduced herself, as if they couldn’t hear her otherwise, as if touching made her voice clearer. She realized she was keeping an eye out for the coin-toss guy from the laundry room.
Three cups of punch and two slices of amazing thin-crust pepperoni pizza later, Luce had been officially introduced to and then spent the next ten minutes trying to avoid Max. Nora was right: He was good-looking, but way too flirtatious for someone with a crazy girlfriend back home. She and Nora and Jordan were crammed on Jordan’s bed, whispering ratings for all the boys there in between fits of giggles, when Luce decided that she’d had a little too much mystery punch. She left the party and slipped down the stairs, seeking quiet air.