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hips.
    “Maybe the queen found a better place to rule.” Her full lips open and close as she fights a smile. “Let me just recommend this book to you. You know, for next time.”
    She grabs that book from the shelf behind me and hands it to me. The cover picture is someone’s fingers pushing over a chain of dominos. The Book Thief .
    I should probably go all indignant, but I laugh. What’s the use in pretending? She’s not going to bust me.
    I say, “I’m without my books. Just moved. If it’s all the same to you … ?”
    “Dakota.”
    “If it’s all the same to you, Dakota, I’ll start with Flowers for Algernon .” I reach for it, remember I’m broke, and turn the gesture into a point.
    “I just thought you might relate.” She quick-wrinkles her nose and replaces The Book Thief .
    “I relate better to Algernon.”
    “The lab mouse they did all those experiments on?”
    I glance at Mirriam, press my index finger to my lips, and whisper in my best Elmer Fudd voice, “Be vewy, vewy quiet. I’m being tested.”
    Mirriam is leaning on the counter, the toe of her shoe bouncing against the floor. She lets out a big sigh.
    “Oh, sorry to keep you waiting,” Dakota calls over to Mirriam. “We’re short-handed—looking for help.” She leans over to me, and I get that cinnamon-rain scent again, while she whispers, “Be sure to come back, okay? I’d hate to break up a chess set as gorgeous as this one.”
    Oh, yeah? Everything breaks up. It’s called entropy .
    Dakota walks over to the counter and starts scanning the bar codes of Mirriam’s books. I watch her moving, lifting the books, bending them for their bar codes, and sliding them across the flat screen, her eyes on her work.
    I begin reloading my bag. I’m not sure if she’s actually pretty, or if I just think that now that she’s saved my hide. When I pick up my camera, I figure I can decide later. I take off the cap, line up the shot, and adjust the aperture. The shot looks boring, so I wait until I can see her eyes flash or her head turn—something. She reaches down for a bag, and when she comes up, her hair swings, her lips puckered while talking, and I click.

chapter 5
    a fter we get back and I’ve showered, I walk into Christian’s bedroom, hoping he won’t mind if I borrow some clean clothes. My jeans are covered in the dust of four states, my shorts in the sweat of an impromptu World Cup final.
    A pile of New England Journal of Medicine s is stacked inside a wooden cube that doubles as a night table. His walls are empty: no framed pictures, no postcards stuck in the mirror’s edge, nothing. His dresser is decorated with only the practical: an empty money clip, a change jar that’s heavy on the silver, and a pocketknife. Who lives like this?
    I find jeans and a black T-shirt with hot air balloons that says DUKE CITY MARATHON on it. The jeans are too big. I transfer my belt to Christian’s jeans and roll up the cuffs. My dirty clothes lie on his carpet like roadkill. Looking for the hamper, I open the closet. Something bangs against the inside of his door. I turn—his diplomas are framed and hung.
    I stop. It’s the first thing of him I’ve recognized: his pride twisted up with his modesty. Yes, he puts them up, but where no one can see. He probably stares at them every morning for a second, marking the distance between here and Chicago, but I’ll bet no one knows they’re here.
    When he was in ninth grade, a girl he was trying to impress came over and laughed at his room, at how all his awards were framed and hung on his walls—his boyhood immortalized. He boxed all the awards and stashed the box in his closet. But some mornings, I would hear him slide the cardboard across the floor, and I knew he was looking at them.
    Now I toss my clothes in his hamper and pull his high school diploma off the hook. I slide my thumb along the glass that protects his printed name: Christian Emerson Witherspoon. The University of Chicago,