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never complains about it.”
    “Boy,” I said. I took a sip of coffee.
    And Cynthia, for the first time, smiled. “‘Boy,’” she said. “That’s all you have to say, Terry?
‘Boy’?
” As quickly as it had appeared, the smile vanished. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I expect people to say. I don’t know what the fuck I’d say if I was sitting across from me.”
    “I don’t know how you handle it,” I said.
    Cynthia took a sip of her tea. “Some days, I just want to kill myself, you know? And then I think, what if they showed up the day after?” She smiled again. “Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head?”
    Again, the smile drifted away as though carried off by a gentle breeze.
    A lock of her red hair fell forward across her eyes, and she tucked it back behind her ear. “The thing is,” she said, “they could be dead, and they never had a chance to say goodbye to me. Or they could still be alive, and couldn’t be bothered.” She looked out the window. “I can’t decide which is worse.”
    We didn’t say anything for another minute or so. Finally, Cynthia said, “You’re nice. If I did go out with someone, I might go out with someone like you.”
    “If you get desperate,” I said, “you know where to find me.”
    She looked out the window, at other students strolling past, and for a moment, it was like she had slipped away.
    “Sometimes,” she said, “I think I see one of them.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked. “Like a ghost or something?”
    “No no,” she said, still looking outside. “Like, I’ll see someone I think is my father, or my mother. From behind, say. There’s just something about them, the way they hold their head, the way they walk, it seems familiar somehow, and I’ll think it’s them. Or, you know, I’ll see a boy, maybe a year older than me, who looks like he could be my brother, seven years later. My parents, they’d still look pretty much the same, right? But my brother, he could look totally different, but there’d still be something about him that would be the same, wouldn’t there?”
    “I guess,” I said.
    “And I’ll see someone like that, and I’ll run after them, cut in front of them, maybe grab their arm or something and they turn around and I get a good look.” She turned away from the window, gazed down into her tea, as though searching for an answer there. “But it’s never them.”
    “I guess, someday, you’ll stop doing that,” I said.
    “If it’s them,” Cynthia said.

    We started hanging out. We went to movies, we worked together in the library. She tried to interest me in playing tennis. It had never been my game, but I gave it my best shot. Cynthia was the first to admit she wasn’t a great player, just a fair player with a magnificent backhand. But it was enough of an advantage to make mincemeat out of me. When I served and saw that right arm of hers swing back over her left shoulder, I knew I had little hope of sending that ball back across the net to her. If I even saw it.
    One day, I was hunched over my Royal typewriter, even then approaching antique status, a hulking machine forged out of steel and painted black, heavy as a Volkswagen, the “e” key looking more like a “c” even with a fresh ribbon. I was trying to finish an essay on Thoreau I honestly didn’t give a flying fuck about. It didn’t help any that Cynthia was under the blanket, fully clothed, on the single bed in my dorm room, having fallen asleep reading a tattered paperback copy of
Misery
by Stephen King. Cynthia wasn’t an English major and could read whatever the hell she wanted, and found comfort sometimes in reading about people who had gone through worse things than her.
    I had invited her to come over and watch me type an essay. “It’s quite interesting,” I said. “I use all ten fingers.”
    “At the same time?” she asked.
    I nodded.
    “That does sound amazing,” she said.
    So she brought some work of her own to do, and sat