They meet on day one, on a boat that winds a slow u around the bottom third of the island where she is, as of August, a resident. She's wearing a white top that's too cropped and not well laundered, with stains at the pits so she can't lift her arms up, and a girl she has just met, someone from Singapore in a blue satin bustier over a black slip dress, sips a creamy iced coffee, rattles the cubes around in plastic, deems it "too sweet for consumption," but finishes it anyway.

He has blonde hair to his shoulder blades, the kind that's thick enough to look hard to comb. He played football in high school, sophomore and junior year. "I stopped because of the brutality," he says to the group of them, people whose names she doesn't know yet, all of them in a circle on the deck of the boat in the sun and with the water hitting against the metal in a way that reminds her of soup cans in a paper bag.

"What were you in high school?" he says and looks at her.

"I was nothing," she says.

"No, really," he says.

Her hands make knots at her thighs. "Really," she says. She is sure her wide face suggests I used to ring up Diet Cokes at a small-town convenience store and not I'm someone who thought about poetry while walking through tallgrass.

"I doubt that," he says, and she tries to think of a good reply, but then someone else has his attention. She hates him a little for his certainty.

The boat stops, and they clump together before stepping again onto land where she's not so stupid as to stare up at the way the buildings lose their tops in the clouds. Instead, she looks at her feet in white sneakers clunky as ice blocks. They load into a city bus, and a woman, a stranger, talks to them the whole way back to campus about how what happens their first year will embed in them forever like a stain or a scar.

That night, there's a party on her floor. She can hear people and music and can see shadows of movement out the pinhole in her dorm room door. When she has to use the bathroom, she walks out into the gray tube of the hall in her robe, the white short one she'd taken from her mom's closet instead of the purple one with the grapes pattern that she actually wore each night back at home. There he is, of course, leaning out of someone's doorframe. His hair is a batwing across half of his face. People sit on the floor around the door, and she has to step over legs. She thinks of all the places these people used to live, in countries she's never thought of traveling to. The music is something she knows she's supposed to know but doesn't.

"Oh, hi," he says.

"It's you, Mr. Former Football," she says, though it feels stupid before it's even fully out of her mouth and like something her mom would say. She's old already, though she's only newly eighteen.

"That's what my mom calls me at least," he says.

"Where is your mom?" she says, but instead of seeming like a normal question about family, it comes out like an interrogation.

He laughs, though. "My mom? She's in Idaho," he says, and then she feels less weird for being from the middle of nowhere.

He doesn't do any of the things she had, in high school, presumed someone would do if she ended up at a party, which this isn't exactly. It's more a gathering of people spilling out of an open room. He doesn't offer her a drink in a red cup. They don't sit on the floor and talk until dawn about something one of them thinks is interestingly obscure, like the flight patterns of vultures. He doesn't push her against a wall in the stairwell.

Instead, she blinks too many times and puts her hand on her hip like a ticket taker at the county fair where she once watched cars ram into each other while people cheered about demolition. No one in her previous life has prepared her in the right ways for anything.

Someone inside the open dorm shouts something to someone she can't see. Someone turns on another song. Someone else trips in the hall in front of her but laughs it off haha no really I'm fine I'm fine.

She tells him goodnight, and he pulls his hair back and then lets it loose, which she sees now is one of his moves. No, worse, she says it in French. "Au revoir," she actually says, and then walks down the hall in a Walmart robe.

She goes back to her room, takes the contraband matches from her drawer, lights the picture of herself on her 18th birthday in front of a row of lilac bushes next to her house on fire, and lets it go out the open ninth-floor window. Someone below, someone on the eight or seventh floor, tipsy maybe, trying to fall asleep, catches a flash of light passing their window and for a second wonders or maybe thinks nothing; maybe surprises like that are a part of their life already.

The sirens from Mount Sinai next door to her dorm repeat. The air conditioner is blasting, and her sheets are tight, and she's in the narrow bed on her back like a goddamned mummy. The sirens are different here, a deeper drone. Red and blue lights make tracers on the walls as the ambulances speed down her block toward the hospital entrance, while experts, quick with needles, with tubes, save someone from something.


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