The girl standing in front of me was perhaps my age, carrying a bag that looked like it had been repaired twice in two different colors of thread and wearing a jacket with a band name on the back I half-recognized. She had the kind of face that made expressions completely without diplomacy, currently registering mild offense and, underneath it, frank curiosity.
"There's no designation on it," I said.
"Sentimental designation. I've eaten lunch here every Tuesday for two years." She looked at the bench, then at me, then at the bench again. "The wood on the left side is slightly warmer. Better angle from the sun."
I looked at the spot she meant. She wasn't wrong.
"Sit down," I said, and moved my bag.
She sat. Pulled a container out of her bag, something that smelled of garlic and lemon, and opened it without ceremony. Looked at my notes.
"Macro?" she said.
"Second year content. I tested out of the intro sequence."
She nodded, unimpressed in a way that felt more like acceptance than dismissal. "I'm in the music program. We don'ttouch economics until third year and then it's one survey course that everyone hates." She stabbed something with a plastic fork. "Cleo Baptiste."
"Avery Callahan."
She ate. I made a note in the margin of my paper. A bird landed on the path in front of us and reconsidered immediately.
"You transferred in," Cleo said. It wasn't a question.
"Yesterday."
"From where?"
I told her. She nodded with the specific nod of someone who knew the school by reputation and had no opinion about it one way or the other. No recalibration, no social arithmetic, just the acceptance of a fact that didn't change anything about the present situation.
It was, I realized, the first exchange I'd had in two days where the other person wasn't calculating something.
"What instrument?" I asked.
"Piano. Jazz primarily." She tilted her head. "My father plays at Preservation Hall some nights. Tourists come specifically for him, which he pretends to find annoying."
"Does he?"
"God, no." The corner of her mouth lifted. "He'd die without it. He just can't say so because complaining about the tourists is basically a municipal tradition."
I looked at her. The ease of her, the complete absence of performance, she talked the way people talked when they weren't trying to produce an effect, and the effect she produced was of someone entirely at home in herself, even with a bag she'd repaired twice and a bench she claimed on sentimental grounds.
I had not mentioned Dominic. I made the decision somewhere in the space of that observation — the low-probability read being that someone in a music program, two years on the same bench, outside the obvious informationcircuits, might simply not have heard. That with her I could be Avery Callahan, transfer student, new to the city, and nothing else. The decision felt clean. It was the first one since I arrived that had.
I had not realized, until this moment, how hungry I was for that. For something that was simply what it appeared to be.
"I have contract law in ten minutes," I said.
"Professor Arceneaux?"
"The schedule just said contract law."
"It's Arceneaux." Cleo gathered her container, resealed it, returned it to the bag with the efficient movements of someone on a known schedule. "He's brilliant and he knows it and he uses it like a weapon." She stood. "He'll ask you a question on the first day to establish your level. Don't answer unless you know the answer completely."
"And if I do know the answer?"
She gave me a look of measured assessment. "Then I'd enjoy being in that class."
She walked away in the direction of what I estimated was the music building, and I sat for another moment on the warmer side of the bench in the thin sun before picking up my bag and going inside.