She nodded. “I know, right? I know. I was horrified too. But then I was, like, kind of elated. And I was, like, springier and more alive, somehow. It made me think:
“This is all really here. It’s not like a picture in a book or on a screen. It’s not even under glass or behind ropes. It’s all just amazingly here. Until I saw some of it broken, I hadn’t really understood. I’m here, you know? And this is all real, real enough that if you bump into it something could break. I’m really here.”
She was beatific with the memory.
Then she grinned and snapped out of it. “It’s amazing, you know?” she said.
I smiled back. I just stretched my face and held it tight. I was remembering something broken too. I never should have closed my eyes.
“Where are you from?” she asked. “Is this your first year?”
I didn’t answer right away. I nodded, to buy time. I made my mind imagine vases. Over and over again my mind went clatter-pow. I forced it to be vases in my mind.
Liv’s college is Magdalene, which is pronounced like it means “sentimental.”
She lives in a riverside building with brick windowsills and fancy wooden banisters. The architect who designed it made every banister different so that drunk students could feel if they were on the correct stair. Hers had a kind of obelisk, and posts carved like checkerboards.
She’d covered the wall over her bed with pages from her sketchbook. I recognized details from paintings in the Fitzwilliam-lots of Monet poplars-and sights from around town. She didn’t choose obvious targets. There was no King’s College Chapel, its towers jutting from either side of its roof like the tufts on a great horned owl. Instead she drew two-story buses, shopwindow mannequins, and the snack aisle of the supermarket. There are literally dozens of flavors of potato chip here, and the many bright colors all lined up on the shelves give the appearance of a busy, upright garden.
“Here, give me a hand,” she said, plonking down a stack of printed pages on her bed. “Reusing is even better than recycling, right?” She had two pairs of scissors, one for each of us.
The pages were old essay drafts. She’d been cutting them up into intricate little snowflakes that now nearly filled a plastic grocery bag.
At first I watched her: She’d cut a small piece off, no worry about its shape, and then fold it twice. Snip, snip, snip, then unfold. The folding gave the cuts a symmetry within the random edges. I took a page. Cut, fold, snip. Each sheet made a dozen or more sharp flakes, each one different.
When we were done, she undid the fancy iron fasteners on the casement windows over her bed. She grabbed a handful of paper snowflakes and heaved them out. She pressed another handful into my open palm.
We threw fistfuls of paper snow down onto the busy path below, while Liv shouted, “Ho ho ho!” Some people stopped to look up at us in annoyance, shaking the papers out of their hair or brushing them off their shoulders. One didn’t. He bent to sweep up the scraps. At first I thought he was a neat freak, some kind of anti-litter crusader. But then he stood and pulled his arm back, and pitched the debris at us like a snowball. It couldn’t make it up to Liv’s window; it didn’t have the weight or cohesion for that. Instead it showered back onto him, drifting down past his great, huge smile.
That’s how we met Nick.
Liv was out in the hall before I even turned around. Her footsteps clattered down the stairs while mine padded. Out on the path, we tried to have a snowball fight, but even a ream of paper isn’t enough for that. We halfheartedly threw bits around, but the wind had carried a lot of it away. The river would be dotted with it.
A dozen paper flakes were caught in Nick’s hair. They were, by chance, arranged in a ring like a halo. Liv reached to tousle them out, but he ducked away from her hand. He reached up and rubbed them out of his hair himself. So Liv sprinkled another handful on, and he gave in and left them there. We all smiled. Teeth were everywhere.
Nick had to leave. He was a graduate student, a paleobiologist, at Magdalene too. He had a meeting. Liv got his phone number.
“Oh my God!” she said, laughing. “Oh my God!”
“What?”
“He’s so cute! Do you think he likes me?”
“Yeah! Of course he does. I think he really does.”
She hugged herself and spun around. She almost slipped on the mess of scraps, but caught my arm and righted herself. Someone else didn’t quite manage that.
“Oh!” A surprised woman fell backward. Her skirt rode up, and the side of one soft leather boot scraped against the walk. A thin white cane pointed straight up into the air. Oh crap, she’s blind…
“Shi-!” Liv said, rushing to help her. “It’s me, Liv. Here, let me…” She pulled on the woman’s hands to haul her up. Resistance; confusion. Liv ended up whacked in the face by the cane. She stepped back with her hand on her cheek while the woman got herself back up to standing unassisted. She wiped her damp knees and smoothed out her skirt. She demanded to know what was on the ground.
“Some idiot dropped paper all over the walk,” Liv explained. I sucked in a breath.
The woman’s thick beaded necklace was caught on her top button. Despite brushing her hands together and wiggling her fingers, a few paper flakes still stuck. “They should be reported to the porters,” she declared.
Liv agreed, gravely. It took both my hands to keep the laughing in my mouth.
There was a smear of dirt and scraps on the back of the woman’s peacock blue coat. “You look great,” Liv assured her.
Her heels and cane tapped on the path: click click click away from us.
“See you tomorrow! Gretchen!” Liv called out after her.
“Was that Gretchen Paul?” I asked, grabbing Liv’s arm. I’d heard of her from two girls in my building who studied English. “What class do you have with her?” Liv majored in Art History, so I didn’t know what she would be doing with a Lit professor.
“I don’t. I work for her. Shit, shit, shit. I hope she’s not mad.”
“She probably just needed to get somewhere,” I said, but actually she had looked pretty mad.
“Really?” Liv said. “Do you really think so?” She squeezed my hand.
I opened and closed my mouth. A porter saved me.
He boomed out, “Do you know who did this?” The broom in his hand contrasted with his neat, formal suit.
“Some first years,” Liv said easily, pulling me along like we had somewhere we needed to go. We didn’t slow down until we were out on Magdalene Street, heading for the bridge.
“What does it take to get someone to lighten up around here?” she shouted, with her hands cupped around her mouth. Quayside was full of people: waiting in line for coffee, hanging out, eating at outdoor tables. All of them looked at us.
It turned out we were both turning twenty that week. So we went out to a pub to celebrate. Liv was in her second year, and twenty because she had taken time off to paint before coming here. I was twenty as a first year because our school district had had a draconian cutoff for starting kindergarten. And I took time off after high school too.
“They call that a ‘gap year’ here. What did you do?” Liv slowed down with her own beer, even though she really didn’t want to, to keep pace with me, which was nice.
“Nothing. Just a break, you know?”
“Sure,” she said. “But really, doing what?”
The whole group at the next table cheered about something.
“Look, nothing, leave it alone.” I didn’t recognize any of the beers advertised on the cardboard coasters. I hadn’t smelled cigarettes in a restaurant since I was a little kid.
She waved her hand in front of my face. “Hello? You were drifting away there for a minute.”
The pub was really noisy. I could barely hear her.
“I think I need to go back to my room. I might be coming down with something.” I got out into cooler air.