A new student moved into the single by the stairwell where Annie Apuzzo had lived until the letter with the bad news came and called her back to Columbus. Luis, peeking into the hall, wants his roommate August to knock on the door and introduce himself.
Because if we don’t do it now and enough days pass, it won’t happen. We can’t say, hi, I’m Lu, by the way, and you are…? Not to a person we’ve nodded to a hundred times. That’s awkward.
After several weeks of hearing we need to clean this shithole and we ought to order a pizza, August understands that by we, Luis means August, but since Luis is burrowing into his hankering with the tenacity of a tick and won’t let up, August sighs and closes Introduction to Ancient Cures for Common Maladies and Disturbances of the Soul. At the end of the hall, he raps on the door.
The newcomer answers.
Hey, August says with a downward gaze, not because he’s bashful but because her shoes are remarkably sequined.
Hey, she replies.
They exchange a few words, then August returns to his dorm room and picks up the splayed book.
Well? Luis leans over him, an indignant umbrella.
Gable Gray.
What kind of name is Gable?
What kind of name is August?
Are you sure she didn’t say Gabrielle?
Maybe. August scans for where he left off.
How did she look?
Sparkly.
Like wet silver, he thinks, then squints at the page, ignoring as well as he can the patter of Luis’s hopeful speculations. He reads about mercury and alchemical transmutation. He falls asleep. He dreams he’s still reading and learns Gable transferred to UT from the moon, skating on the tail of a comet. He half-awakens when Luis sighs, I hope she’s hot. This dorm could use a hot girl. There is a serious shortage of hotness on this campus. I bet hot men outnumber hot women, four to one. That’s unfair.
Luis’s monologue sends August back to sleep, and in his dream, Gable answers Luis with a glower and points to her sequined slippers, as if to warn, Shut up or I’ll kick you.
At some point in the near future, August will begin to listen for the opening of the door beside the stairwell. He will keep his own door open. He will wait for stepping slippers, for the flash of tiny coins. He will think to look up from the shoes. He will still see the sparkle. And he will pay for the watching, failing two philosophy classes in one semester, ending his relationship with Tina back in Camden, pissing off Luis, too, who will feel jealous and abandoned.
He will discover her name is, in fact, Gabrielle. But he will call her Gab and sometimes think of her as Gable. She will envelop him. She will come to mean something like home to him.