mine. And you don’t know me yet; you don’t know my crazy family who are fabulous in eighty-five million ways but who really and truly eat, sleep, and breathe baseball. But I don’t care about baseball, and I needed something to keep me company in all that loneliness.”
I wait a full beat of silence, a full, long beat, and then I start to worry that as much as I feel like I’ve known Alice since we built blanket forts in preschool and spent all year reading our books in there, I’ve been known to be wrong before. And she might think I’m a freak for freely confessing all that stuff, especially since she didn’t—
“I do read them over sometimes,” Alice says quietly. “They’re all in my notebooks and sometimes a poem comes out so perfectly, so right, that I rewrite it in a special notebook, one that I carry with me in addition to my current one. And some of them I never read again; they’re just there so I can continue to practice the craft, hone my skills, and—”
“Heads up!” someone shouts behind us, and I grab Alice around her shoulders and duck down.
I’ve probably attended as many baseball games from T-ball to the majors as Alice has written poems. So I have killer instincts when it comes to a heads up.
“What the—”
A football sails through the air and a guy in a Harvard: the Ithaca College of the South tank top jumps in front of us, catching it in midair.
“Effing hell,” I snap, when he gives us a sheepish half smile.
“You don’t need to thank me for saving you guys.” He laughs, tossing it back to someone in the front of the pack.
“Come on, this time across the street!” the unseen guy yells. “Run!”
“Awesome!” Tank Top Boy shouts, dodging cars to get to the other sidewalk. “I’m clear!”
The football shoots back, this time crossing the intersection diagonally to land a few feet behind Tank Top Boy. Tank Top Boy narrowly misses getting hit by a car as he dives to catch the football. Laughing, he waves to the car that had to stop suddenly, as though to make amends. And then tosses the football back into the group.
“I don’t get why someone would risk injury by hurling a football across an intersection.” Alice frowns.
“I have to write a love letter to the person who put us in the same room,” I say, putting my arm back around her thin shoulders. “But first, are you a morning person?”
“Not until I’ve had coffee.”
“I may need to marry you.”
I know there are many interesting people in the program, but I’m also entirely sure I’d be perfectly happy not to speak to any of them as long as Alice is around.
As it turns out, I don’t need to talk to a soul until we get to the pizza place. Alice and I cover everything from favorite movies (foreign movies for me, romantic comedies for her, bad action movies for both of us) to favorite bands (songs where we can hear the words for both of us) to favorite desserts (ginger cake for Alice, gingersnaps for me). I try to convince Alice that the last point makes us the same person, but she maintains it’s as much as two people can have in common without being the same person.
“If you loved ginger cake more than ginger cookies,” she says as we wait in line to get into the pizza parlor, “there’d be something suspicious.”
I only wish she’d been the one sitting beside me instead of Zeke. We’d have won the grand prize.
Except there’s something radically different about us when we actually get to the front door. Alice takes one look inside and everything that was easy about her demeanor hardens. She pulls herself inward, until I almost believe she might be able to make her shoulders touch each other in front of her.
“I think I’ll wait out here,” she says, trying to fake a chuckle, but it’s dry and off. Very, very off.
“I don’t mind eating standing up,” I say, glancing in the window. With what appears to be our entire dorm in the pizzeria, there are no free tables. In fact, I doubt there’s much free standing space right now, but I’m hopeful by the time the pizza comes—
“I’m really not that hungry.” Alice isn’t looking at me. In fact, she seems to be staring off into the distance, like she’d pay money to be there instead of here.
“But your stomach growled