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salad, she says, “Why does your roommate get all the windows? It can’t be healthy to live in a cave like that. You need sunshine.”
    “I’m usually in class or at the library during the day.” Or the student lounge or holed up in Chuck and Pete’s room playing DOA5 . “Anyway, I don’t mind. I kind of like the cave feeling. It makes it easy to sleep.”
    “If you’re sleeping when it’s dark out,” she says, “windows don’t make it difficult to sleep.”
    “The security lights shine in. Even with the blinds, it’s kind of bright.”
    She forks her salad again. “Do you want me to send you some thermal curtains?”
    “No, don’t worry about it.”
    “That’s my job, Shane. To worry about it. You can smell the cigarette smoke on that roommate of yours. What did you say his name was?”
    “Derek. Mostly I just smell leather.”
    Her nose wrinkles. “I smelled that too. He looks like one of those thugs in an old movie. Rebel Without a Cause . All he needs is a motorcycle.”
    “He has one.”
    “Of course. You don’t go riding on it, do you?”
    “I haven’t even seen it.”
    “Good. You know, they could move you in with someone more compatible. Do you want us to call the school and talk to them?”
    “No!” I do not want to be that kid.
    Again.
    “It’s fine,” I say. “Really. How can I study if I’m spending all my time moving from room to room anyway?”
    She stirs her iced tea.
    “We’re not incompatible anyway. He wants to be a forensic chemist,” I say. “You know, analyzing crime scene evidence. He’s putting himself through school with a side business.”
    “Oh? Doing what?” Her voice has a politely distant tone as she pokes the tines of her fork into a cherry tomato.
    “He makes leather products—belts, wallets, that sort of thing. That’s why the room smells like leather. He sells them online.”
    “He makes them in the room?”
    “Yeah.”
    “How industrious. The school doesn’t have a regulation against running a business from your room?”
    “Not that I know of.” Please don’t look it up, find out they do, and call the school to complain . I wouldn’t put it past her. I say, “He manages to do that and keep his grades up.” This is my opening for what I really want to talk about, though I’m finding I also really want to talk about Derek, defend him. Because she’s already made her mind up, and it’s made up on the basis of stupid bullshit, not what Derek’s really like.
    “Well,” she says, “we can do anything if we’re forced into a situation where we need to.”
    “I was thinking I could do something like that. It would be good experience.”
    “You want to start a business?” my dad says, wandering into the conversation for the first time in ten minutes. He’s been looking at his phone. He drops it back in his pocket and reaches for the last of his sandwich.
    I focus on the pickle slice I’m pulling from the side of my burger as I say, “There’s this band that’s looking for a guitar player.”
    “Oh, now,” my mother says.
    “And it pays?” Dad says.
    “I don’t know. I haven’t actually talked to them. A guy I met told me about it.”
    “So it’s not a very well-thought-out plan,” he says, wiping his hands with his napkin.
    “I didn’t want to go talking to them when I don’t even have a guitar here to play. That’s why I was going to ask you—”
    “What’s your astronomy grade like?” he says.
    “Sketchy,” I admit, “but I’m bringing it up.”
    He frowns. His glasses had gone blank, the sun moving behind a cloud. “You need to focus on your coursework. This is college. This is what your future employer will be looking at.”
    My mother says, “I brought you some of those Haribo gummi bears you like.”
    * * * *
    “Shiiit!” Pete calls out when I trounce him in the latest round of DOA5 ’s fight mode. I headed straight here after seeing my parents off, finding myself highly unmotivated to work on my