the melancholy Dane - numer drei.

That evening, I read Big Red, and think about philosopher kings.

A problem all Johnnies encounter at some point, before or during their four years in Annapolis: how to read without becoming distracted or falling asleep. Where to do it? In bed, on the quad, in the library –– truly, they’re all bad options, because no matter where you are, it is either comfortable enough to doze off, or public enough for friends to find you.

I have a unique solution to the problem. My room’s windows lead out onto the roof. The concrete cannot be called comfortable, and with the curtains drawn, my roommate knows well enough not to distract me. A reading light clips comfortably onto Big Red’s spine. It usually works.

Today, I can still taste the gelato on my tongue, and I am distracted by it. My eyes scan the words, but the meaning doesn’t even begin to register. It’s no use. I close the book and look out over the quad, brick behind me, rapidly cooling October air all around me. My balcony becomes a prison, and I must sit out my sentence.

Oh, it’s melodramatic, of course. I know. We all know –– those of us who don’t are generally regarded as insufferable by the rest. Some even feign acceptance, as if they, in a place like this, are well-adjusted. As if they could be.

Here is what I dread: I am alone, and I am thinking. No escape in sight.

It’s not that I’ve been stricken by some kind of existential angst. I feel it, but I feel it for someone else –– for her. I want to believe because she wants to believe. The vision of her looking away, all her warmth and joy dampened –– it makes me want to cry. I don’t cry. I haven’t cried in a long time.

Faith. What a gift.

I don’t remember believing, not when I was two, ten, or thirteen; certainly not now. Contentedly, thoughtlessly, I have checked the “agnostic” box throughout my life. How? How have I lived before now, without desire, without despair?

“Søren?”

She can pronounce my name, and uses it to my face. It’s so strange. She’s so strange. And she knows where I am. How does she know where I am?

I lean over the edge.

“How did you find me?”

She smiles a little. “I guessed.”

“Oh.”

“Can I come up?”

“I’m trying to read.”

“Can I come up anyway?”

Ah, hell. It’s not as if I’m actually reading. She’s been up here all this time.

“Sure.”

I sit back against the wall, eyes settling on the purple-blue sky. She knows where my room is? How does she know ––

“Nice place you have up here.”

Wasn’t my room locked?

The curtains are parted, and she’s peeking through. She steps onto the roof with one bare foot, steadying herself on the window frame. Faith is so natural up here. I can’t explain it –– the way her silhouette fits against the almost-night sky, the way her eyes reflect the quad and the trees and College Creek. She belongs like the wind and humidity, just another force of nature.

“It’s a good place to read,” I tell her. “Most of the time.”

“Not right now?”

“Not so much.”

“Why?”

How am I supposed to answer that?

“Ducks,” I say at last.

“Ducks?” She crosses her arms, tilts her head so her curls fall into her eyes. “But the ducks don’t need you.”

I feel how she felt, burning, wounded, weak. “I think the ducks need me.”

“They don’t know you. They’ll swim toward anyone.”

Disgraced, childish, petulant. “They don’t need to know me. They still need me –– they need someone.”

She smiles, and I smile, hesitantly, in return. She sits next to me, close –– closer than I would have expected. Our shoulders brush against one another.

“You can get away with skimming it,” she tells me, eyes traveling from the gold-leaf words on the cover of the book up to my face. “And you don’t have to have it read for another two days.”

I see myself in her pupils and irises, the latter so deep and warmly dark that they’re hardly distinguishable from the former. My reflection is distorted, my nose too big, eyes and mouth withdrawn. My hair is messy –– which I knew –– and I look content –– which I didn’t know.

She pokes my nose. “Don’t you remember what we’re here for?”

“To read great books?” I speculate.

“Part of it. What else?”

I don’t know, although I know I should. “Remind me,” I say.

“To find the truth.”

A beat, and I smile. “Ah. That.”

“Yes. That.”

A gust of wind passes through, and I look away. The sky is darker now, and it is nearly nighttime proper, colder and blacker all the time.

“We have four years,” I say as I turn back to her.

“You say it like it’s a long time,” she answers, more quietly. “Some people never even begin in their lifetimes. Our odds for starting and finishing in just four years are pretty bad.”

“At least we’ve started.”

“At least we’ve started,” she agrees.