gets drunk and loud fast. She laughs hysterically about how much of a lightweight she is, as she slings an arm around Ed.
“Somebody help!” Ed calls out jokingly, as they both start staggering, setting each other off into further peals of laughter. “Al, you’re only a lightweight in one sense of the word.”
Tia hurries over, giggling, to lend a shoulder until Alondra calms down and pulls herself up to her full five foot ten. “Come on, ladies,” she says. “We look hot tonight. Larry, take a picture.”
Lawrence obeys, pulling out his phone and coming around the bar. “One hundred per cent babes,” he says, snapping a photo. As far as Ed can tell, he has a thing for both Tia and Alondra.
“Print me a copy of that,” says Fabbrini, who has turned up without warning to verify the take at the end of the night.
Lawrence nods, edging along the bar to block Fabbrini’s view of the tray of empty shot glasses. “Will do, boss.”
Fabbrini squeezes Ed’s shoulder. “I’ll keep it at home, to remind me of my beautiful girls. So international.”
It’s as if the only people who can see Ed are the creeps, the lechers, and the users.
* * *
“Hi there!”
The man who calls out to Ed from behind the kiosk in the Arts & Science building is standing in front of a banner that reads Campus Esperanto! Speak the Universal Language in hand-lettered blue tempera paint. From the way his eyes occasionally pop with wariness, she suspects he does not have permission to set up a table.
“Hello,” he says, when Ed steps up. “I’m glad you heard me.” He has strange skin—fair around his neck, and irritated, bubbling pink along his jaw. In other places, as along his hairline, it is tanned dark as wet sand. He looks to be at least thirty, not a student at all.
“Hi. Esperanto’s the made-up language, isn’t it?” she asks, hoping that she does not sound unkind. “I remember my high school Latin teacher mentioning it. He thought it was kind of a joke. Too artificial or something. You know?”
“Some people think Latin is a joke,” says the man. His voice is serene, a warm tenor that makes her think of oak casks and aged wine, of deep flavours being slowly released.
She nods. “Dead language and all.” She studies him intently, adjusting the strap of her black bag on her shoulder. Up close, she can see his thin-framed glasses and can tell that he has shaved badly, missing a patch of stubble just visible on the underside of his chin. “My Latin teacher was also very down on the French Academy,” she says. “Trying to prevent French people from saying le hamburger.”
“They’d have a field day here in North America,” he says. “Have you ever been to Montreal? A day there would bring them to their knees, don’t you think?”
“I do,” says Ed, and she hears a high, coy lilt in her own voice, challenging. She has never been to Montreal, but that doesn’t matter. She gets the idea. “So you agree that language can’t be controlled.”
The man seems thoughtful, like someone who might never rise to the bait. “I suppose,” he says. “But I also believe that things can be imagined and made new. Made better.”
He has longish, curly hair that flops onto his face as he reaches down to pick up a flyer from the pile in front of him. Ed notices a gathered corner of his striped shirt poking out from the top of his fly, which is not quite zipped.
“I’m Jericho,” he says. “Take a pamphlet?”
* * *
Ed gloms on to Jericho like wet spaghetti to a strainer. They meet at various cafés across campus, where Jericho drinks green tea and Ed always has two sugared coffees. Jericho talks about his ideals, his dreams of global cooperation through a network of Esperanto speakers. He has a conversational mildness that pleases her, and she likes the way he leans his head to the left when she talks, like a bird listening.
Looking at him in his neatly ironed shirts, his knobby ankles prominent below short pants, Ed feels her anxious cravings ebb away. In the presence of his simple niceness, something loosens around her hips, and she is struck by a sense-memory of what she used to be like, near enough that she can almost grasp it and shrug it on. An easier version of herself: hair long and held back with a plastic headband, spine hunched from the weight of