natural

[a vision and revision from the asylum of "jcsmith."]

The first Tuesday of the semester, I could not cover my freckles no matter how much foundation I patted on top of them. The bathroom mirror had me at twelve, maybe thirteen years old, round cheekbones and big blue eyes. Lipstick and blush reduced me to five or six, a little girl messing with her mom’s makeup. Resigned, I took two steps back from the sink and reassured myself that, from my pearl-strung neck down to my slacks and low heels, I looked mature and professional. My classmates would not mistake me for a daydreamer or an academic – not in finance, not in economics, not in creative writing.

Creativity is one thing. A lack of ambition, a childlike devotion to one’s “art” – those are neither necessary to creativity nor conducive to real success. Princeton isn’t a cloister or a conservatory: it’s a mercenary academy – and what’s so wrong with that, anyway? So I want to live comfortably – so I want to write what sells. So what?

Walking through the college gothic to my morning lectures, I saw the mercenary posture dressed in sundresses and argyle. There – ambition and discipline in polished shoes and pressed shirts. And on their arms, or walking a friendly distance to the left – those sly smiles and swinging hips are who I came here to become. I knew. I was certain that if I were one of them, I could do anything.

The lectures were exciting in the way that any vague and vast thing is exciting, like a mountain skyline mostly hidden in clouds. I spent as much time watching my classmates as taking notes. The short, dark nails on the women, the Grecian sandals, the Tropic of Cancer tans – and the other eyes observing with me, snapping nervously back to attention when they noticed they’d been noticed. I smiled at them. I was learning the rules of the game.

But after the lectures let out, as I followed my introductory fiction classmates into the arts center, I could see it in every sloping shoulder: the writers did not see Princeton as anyplace military, as meriting any restraint or propriety whatsoever. They shed their outer layers in the afternoon heat of our south-facing classroom, two of the women left only in camisoles, the men – boys, to be honest – in T-shirts. My blazer stayed on, and I patted the perspiration from my forehead with a tissue. Fleshy patches of makeup came off with the sweat.

We were all prepared, a page or two of prose printed in every hand. Today we would become acquainted with one another’s writing (but not one another; I would not learn most of their names until three or four weeks later). Today we would get some idea of what we’d signed up for.

I can’t say Adrian caught my eye at first; he didn’t, though he sat directly to my right. But as our classmates began to read, he began to write, and my attention swerved from the words in the air to his left hand, fingers bent back under the pressure of his grip, pencil always seeming about to break on the page. His handwriting looked thorny and pained, as though every little ‘n’’s arch were barely an arch and nearly the abrupt angle of a broken bone. His fingernails were cut straight across the quick, and did not curve but lay flat across his fingertips. When he was not writing, Adrian tucked his pencil behind his ear.

In my creative writing notes, I drew a silly face every second or third page, wrote sardonic comments in the margins, ellipses between phrases like furrows between eyebrows. Adrian wrote only serious things in his notebook. He asked only earnest questions. All semester, his stories would be full of grotesque not-quite humans, not quite even not-humans, somewhere uncomfortable between comic and tragic. That first day, he read a page and a half about a feral girl named Callie who, at least, lived on Earth. None of Adrian’s other characters lived on Earth.

And I, directly after him, read from a fantasy story I’d been working on all summer, a scene of childbirth on a white-sanded isle. The passage induced him to talk to me after class, to compliment me on my world-building – a phrase I associated with Tolkien and which flattered me so much that I resolved immediately to forget I had heard it, and couldn’t. As we spoke, I added black eyes, a broad, Asian face, and a pink mouth to my image of him, though nothing stayed with me like his trembling left hand. I knew a little about southpaws. I knew they couldn’t sign up for fMRI studies in the psychology department; they were wired differently.

“Do you play RPGs at all?” he asked me as we walked down the cramped stairwell.

“I never had video games in my house,” I confessed. The words were familiar; I’d said them so often in the past two weeks.

He lowered his thick eyebrows. “I mean tabletop. Dungeons and Dragons, stuff like that.”

I probably pulled a face at that. What did he think I was, some kind of social leper? I was a professional, a polished young woman. I wore blazers and concealed my freckles and kept my hair short.

I’m embarrassed to remember. But all I said was: “oh. No.”

Then awkward, waved goodbyes, walking off in different directions only to realize that he was following Washington Road too, but on the other side. From two lanes’ distance I did not watch him. I looked ahead at the back of a long-legged girl’s sorority T-shirt and worried about my shiny forehead in the heat.

* * *

My three suitemates talked a lot about popular culture. That night in the dining hall, when they asked me what type of music I listened to and I told them that I loved Wagner and admitted to liking Rachmaninov, they seemed bemused. Over the past week, I had summarized to them my catalogue of strangenesses: no video games, no high school dances, no sleepovers, no siblings, every new confession accompanied by that familiar sensation of building a wall, each word a brick, competition for mortar, between me and my peers.

It’s not that I disliked them, but they were another set of rules to learn. I watched Beyoncé videos and heard about the latest episodes of whatever it was they were talking about. My mother called every night, and when she asked I was hard at work; when my suitemates were watching, I was slacking off. By the first Friday of classes, meetings in the campus center and press building began gnawing away at my time with them, and I was almost grateful to be gone. Before long, it all seemed normal, though not exactly comfortable.

Hailey, pretty and half Chinese and a legacy on her father’s side, asked me to go out with her that Saturday. “It’ll be fun,” she said, sitting on my desk, her slim dancer’s thighs pinning my problem set to its surface. “Get your mind off things.”

I leaned back in my chair and clasped my hands in my lap. “I didn’t realize my mind was on things.”

“You’re super focused, Mar,” Hailey said. Mar, because I guess Margo wasn’t nickname enough for Hailey. She pointed to my computer screen, her finger resting near the title of my story for creative writing class: Manyone. It was about creatures that could spontaneously split into their single-celled components and reconfigure, lose and remake their macroscopic identities, a meditation on modernity and the self in the collective. I thought it was going well. An intense piano concerto still rang in my left earphone.

“Yeah,” I said uncertainly.

“It’s awesome, I mean, I wish I could do that, but it’s a Saturday night.” She leaned forward. “Working is, like . . . unnatural.”

“It’s just what I’ve always done,” I admitted, imagining this new brick in the wall to be about as weird as only-child or can’t-ride-a-bike. “I don’t want to fall behind.”

“You won’t. The semester’s barely started.”

I was glad she hadn’t asked about the latest brick. She didn’t seem likely to understand. She’d probably gone to every high school dance.

“And besides,” she added, “if you don’t go now, then when?”

“I’ll get around to it,” I assured her, setting my feet on the floor and starting to type as some huge-handed pianist struck a bracing chord in my ear. I believed I would get around to it, at the time; it was just that my muse sat on my shoulder, whispering what came next, and a writer would have to be a fool to ignore her muse.

Hailey made a moue and stood up, shuffling my papers around as she left the desk. “Julia!” she called plaintively to our suitemate. “Will you come out with me?”

I finished the story before they stumbled back, Hailey laughing and Julia reeling. And then Sunday, while they were sleeping off their night out: editing and streamlining, cleaning up the muse’s enthusiastic abundance into something concise, something I could sell. And Monday locked in my bedroom, reading aloud to my mother over the phone, never needing to remind her to spare the compliments and cut to the criticism.

* * *

That Tuesday, my conversation with Adrian picked up again after class as he tried to hold the door for me. He seemed pleasantly surprised when I pushed open an adjacent door, ignoring his chivalrous gesture.

“I’m starting a campaign,” he said, leaving his foot in the doorway long enough to let two of our classmates pass before falling into step next to me. “What would I have to do to get you to join?”

I had some response prepared, but it caught in my throat, and when I got it unstuck it was incoherent. I settled on “a campaign for what?”

“Fantasy setting, 3.0 – oh.” He laughed, or maybe chortled – he had a strange note in his laugh, like a musketeer or mad scientist. “D&D,” he clarified. “Games are campaigns.”

That week, he had written about a blind mole-humanoid who, to the disgust and fascination of our classmates, lived happily ensconced in a mass grave, nosing and chewing his way through corpses to make new passages and search for food. When the authorities in the world above decided to rebury the bodies, they destroyed his home and elicited his fury, causing him to gnaw through the abdomen of the project’s overseer. The story ended, as it began, with him underground.

I was skeptical about joining Adrian’s campaign and told him so, citing prior commitments to various campus activities and my lack of roleplaying experience.

“We need someone like you,” he said. “My PCs – uh, the players, the roleplayers – they’re not really roleplayers. You can feel a character. We need someone who isn’t just rolling dice and killing monsters.”

“But I don’t even know how to roll dice and kill monsters.” I found myself diverted from the route back to my dorm, forced to argue with him as he walked a long diagonal across campus.

“That’s what I mean, that’s good. And you can learn. The other stuff you can’t teach – but you have it.” He smiled a little. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to DM a game with a bunch of people who just want to get the treasure and kill the boss? It sucks.”

I didn’t know what he meant. I anesthetized myself against my characters – I posed them and moved them and made them speak, but I tried to avoid understanding too well what they felt. And anyway, my characters that week hadn’t even been characters. They scattered as soon as they socialized, never consistent from moment to moment. How could you feel a character like that?

Feeling led to bad writing, I knew. A tight plot, coherence, editorial savvy – that’s what would sell books. Get the treasure. Kill the boss.

But I was curious about the me he saw, the shape reflected in those black eyes. I wondered if she was real.

* * *

After Adrian first described himself as a DM, I looked it up online and learned that it was synonymous with God, or possibly the puppetmaster of all the gods, in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. Adrian was the Dungeon Master. He would build the world, write the story, execute the rules, and stop just short of controlling the other tabletop players. We PCs, playable characters, gamers in his game, would hang onto the agency required to get ourselves devoured by monsters, should we so choose, or should we be so stupid.

I met the rest of Adrian’s other four PCs the Friday night before the first session of the campaign. They were all male except Kayla, who had started gaming to humor her boyfriend, a soft-jawed blond named Luke. She greeted me with one arm around his waist, wearing his hoodie.

“It’s good to get some more estrogen in the group,” she said. “Maybe we can get Adrian doing some DM gymnastics with our wicked female ways.”

I laughed, she laughed, the laughter spread around the group. The phrase “DM gymnastics” sounded suspect, but I decided not to ask, even when Travis, a gangly boy who would play the party’s cleric, wrote “9.7!” on a sheet of looseleaf and waved the makeshift scorecard around giddily.

We were strewn around one corner of Café Vivian with pencils and character sheets and calculators, inventing the people we would become on Saturdays. After that night I would completely forget everyone’s actual name and remember them as their characters: Kayla was Iophiel, the party’s elf paladin, though she looked nothing like an elf. The other PCs – sophomores, like Adrian himself – were old hands at character creation, so the DM sat with me, flipping through rulebooks at my request, explaining my options.

“The party is already pretty balanced. You can be whatever you want.”

Usually you can’t be whatever you want.

“Here are the races,” he continued, flipping through a section of the book illustrated with burly dwarves, supple elves, boring humans, and – I stopped him here – sturdy, sprightly humanoids.

“What’s this one?”

“Those are gnomes.”

It turned out that gnomes were just petite, tan-skinned, crafty people, so I decided to be one. Why not?

“Going for your animus, huh?” Adrian said, erasing, rewriting, flipping pages. After a moment’s puzzled silence, he looked up. “Your opposite-demon – your repressed other side.”

“Um. Not on purpose.” I thought myself plenty crafty, certainly enough to be a gnome. I was almost offended.

“Oh?”

“Well, I guess gnomes are . . . short?” I’m about five foot nine – Adrian is barely taller. His friends giggled in the background and he couldn’t quite stifle a smirk. As I watched that weird curl take over his mouth, I sensed that, to these people, whom I had branded social lepers, I was the outcast. Anywhere else, Adrian would have been the gawky pariah and these the closest people he had to friends, but here, he was the prophet and I was a new initiate in his – well, not in a cult, exactly, but in a culture.

“Pick a class,” he told me, tapping the book as the laughter cleared. “Probably not a cleric or a front-line type – we’re fine on those. And we have a ranger.” His black eyes watched me closely, as though in suspense until the next chapter of my motion.

“Don’t you need a . . . um . . . bard?”

Adrian’s smile widened and he shook his head, glancing down to write the class on my character sheet in his thorny scrawl. “Nah, you’re not projecting at all,” he said wryly. He filled in much of the rest of my character sheet on his own, barely consulting me in the ten minutes it took him. I watched him – in the café’s low light, it crossed my mind that his cheekbones and clavicles could have hung in the Met – and peered over his shoulder. My character was chaotic good, had high charisma and wisdom and low intelligence and strength, brown hair, brown eyes, and carried a flute and a slingshot.

My eyes narrowed. “How did you know I play the flute?”

“I didn’t,” he said, glancing up. “But she isn’t you, is she?”

* * *

She isn’t – she wasn’t. But my economics classes weren’t getting any less uselessly abstract, nor were my finance classmates proving interesting beyond their carefully tailored outer selves. I vaguely recalled plans to network, to make good on my promise to Hailey, to smile and sway my way into the hearts of trust fund children and future eccentric billionaires, but it never happened. There were infinite excuses not to do all that I’d intended, though there was only ever one reason. My roommates talked celebrity gossip and played unfamiliar music as I tried to write, but my muse would have nothing to do with my keyboard: she had migrated to my throat and started to speak with my voice, just one or two nights a week, only in Adrian’s third floor room in Forbes, where the dungeon sessions were held.

Those nights, I wore jeans and tank tops and sweatshirts. I didn’t bother to wear makeup on weekends, and then on Mondays, and before long my fading winter freckles were visible all the time. Sometimes Adrian or Kayla would find one on my nose and poke it or even pinch my cheek, then Adrian would put on a lazy, unstudied brogue and tell me:

“Ye’ve got the map o’Ireland written all o’er yer face, sweetheart. Why doncha let me buy y’a pint?”

I wondered why I had ever tried to hide them in the first place.

When I pushed open the door to my room somewhere between night and morning on Saturdays and Sundays and found a roommate awake and around, she would look a little puzzled, ask me how the session went, and I’d tell her something without telling her anything.

“When are you going to bring this master of yours back to meet your roommates, huh?” Hailey asked one night as she dabbed makeup off her face. She slurred her words, but only very slightly; it was easier to tell she’d been drinking when she walked.

“He’s not my master,” I told her from the couch. “He’s my DM.” I checked my cell phone absentmindedly: three missed calls, all from home, that would wait until morning – again.

“Whatever, Mar. Come on, we want to meet the man of mystery.” She put on a spooky, singsong voice and waved her hands around her bedraggled hair.

“It isn’t like that.” I paused for a second, glancing over the pages of the short story anthology propped up against my knees. There was Hailey, long and lean, purple flannel PJs falling short of her narrow hips. She probably knew a thing or two about ambiguous relationships, but not the right thing or two.

She caught me looking and burst out laughing. “It is!” she cried, waving her hair straightener at me delightedly. “You’re blushing. Oh my God, you’re bright red. It totally is like that.”

I growled a little and set my jaw, trying to make light of her accusation by playing serious, and hid my smile in my book. She was wrong, but in saying that wrong thing, she had changed my mind and become right.

* * *

The sessions started slow because, as it turned out, all the dice-rolling and number-crunching was actually quite complicated. But after I learned the basics and became acquainted with Adrian’s shelf of rulebooks, I could sense the satisfaction in his voice as he ordered me to roll saves, checks, initiative, and all. I was exactly what he had wanted. It was strange to hear, stranger than praise for an elegant plot arc or a well-developed protagonist: he liked the way I wrote myself. He had stopped caring about what I read in fiction class; on the way out the door, he’d ask me about last session, joke about the natural one that had landed the entire party in a skeleton-filled tar pit, and urge me to bring my gnome’s backstory to the foreground the way a psychotherapist might urge a client to remember a dream. He always seemed very urgent, his eyes always wide open, his hairline speckled with sweat as often as not.

My first impression of Adrian – his thick left palm and fingers crushed around a yellow pencil – had given way to an image of him standing behind the DM screen, a three-paneled, foot-high barrier that separated him from us in game. Behind the screen were all the places we could go, all the monsters we could fight, all the puzzles we would need to solve to win the game he had written. All we ever knew of them was what he told us in his steady voice, or what he drew for us on the whiteboard grid.

I wanted to leave nothing unknown. I wanted to urge him to reveal his unused plans, and I even asked him once to tell us what we’d missed in a labyrinth, but he just laughed.

“That’s what you guys get for getting beaten to a pulp while taking your time figuring out the first encounter. If it teleports, grapple it! Come on.” He dug his elbow into Travis’s knobby side. “I taught you better.”

We were sitting in a circle on the bare wood floor at quarter after three on a Sunday morning, burning out the caffeine we’d accumulated over the past twelve hours. My mind ran through the dungeon over and over, wondering which fork we had failed to take, which hidden door I hadn’t searched hard enough for, which informant I hadn’t pressed for all his secrets. As I walked back to my dorm around four, one memory lodged in my brain: the enchanted stone gate of the dungeon, the riddle it posed, and – most puzzling of all – the body it had taken on to talk to me, the human whose eyes were cool and dark as carbon then, as if the humanity had left them to make way for that strange adversary.

“Through this cavern no man has passed,” said the gate with Adrian’s mouth. Luke wrote down what he said, word for word, and asked a question I didn’t hear. What I heard came from behind Adrian’s screen, sure, but it was buried under more than a few dice and character sheets.

“No man has learned the way.”

Adrian stared fixedly at the wall. Kayla tried a question, and his head didn’t turn. His lips moved.

“No man was foolish enough to return to me.”

I wanted him to look at me, but he wasn’t looking at anything.

“No man’s bones lay in these my crypts.”

More questions, more vague answers. I tapped my pencil’s eraser on my knee.

“I’m rolling a general knowledge check about people named No Man,” I announced, and I did, and it was a natural 20.

When I looked up, Adrian was smiling at me, more bemused than pleased. “Roll to confirm the critical,” he told me.

I rolled again and made the check.

The dungeon master chuckled and shrugged. “Well, all right,” he said. “You have a moment of miraculous insight and shout out the answer to the riddle. The gate swings open.”

I became aware of other people in the room again and, for the first time in weeks, regretted not wearing foundation. My cheeks must have turned beet red.

“So what’s the answer?” I asked.

“Hey, your character knows,” he replied. “Ask her. You don’t need to know everything she knows, right? You just demonstrated that.”

That was his power, beyond that screen: to put knowledge in my head and words in my mouth without ever telling me what I said or knew. That night, as I brushed my teeth, climbed into my bunk bed, and stared at the ceiling, it raked my too-awake nerves: if I, Margo, had figured out the way into the dungeon, instead of leaving the job to the wits of my crafty little gnomish flautist, then I, Margo, would know the way in. I wondered where in Adrian’s strange left-handed brain No Man’s bones were rotting.

* * *

Midterms didn’t go well. I avoided telling my parents for as long as I could – which wasn’t terribly difficult, since we only spoke once or twice a week – and once they found out about my B and two Cs, they were baffled. I expected silent disappointment, but instead heard “is anything wrong?” and “can we help?” and even once, from my mother, “is there a boy involved in this?”

“No, Mom, of course not,” I said, not sure whether I was lying. “It’s just my classes aren’t engaging. They’re huge, introductory lectures, you know? It’s hard to believe the grades count as much as they do.” That much, anyway, was true.

When I went home for fall break, my parents coddled me. My father, a law professor who raised his eyebrows at A-‘s in high school, said I needed time to recharge. “The most important thing is your health,” he told me at breakfast, which my mother cooked when I woke up at half past noon.

Break should have been refreshing. I certainly didn’t miss school, strictly speaking. But whoever my friends were in high school, they had wandered off to their own colleges and weren’t home; the more time I spent reading, writing, and dozing in my violet-wallpapered room, the less I considered those scattered people my friends. They took classes with me, they competed with me in extracurricular after extracurricular, they applied to the schools I applied to, but no sleepovers. No bike rides. No partying. No video games.

No D&D, either – no dark-eyed Adrian or weapons shopkeep or high priest of Glittergold or whoever he was on any given night. The other PCs, my roommates, my classmates drifted away and left me with the memory of him. He was standing onstage the Friday before I left, performing with his improv troupe: spotlit, features blurred by too much light and too little makeup, but voice as steady and same as in any of his many characters. After the show he mingled with strangers, laughing and doing tricks with his personality like jugglers do with rings and scarves.

That is probably why I did not recover my sleep deficit over break, and why I sent too many text messages, and maybe why I didn’t drink coffee because my head was already pounding all the time, as though my brain were swelled with him and straining its seams. As for why this why – well, I don’t know. Do you understand why you fall in love?

* * *

Now, this first Sunday night after break, it’s sleeting and my boots are beating out iambs in the four-inch-deep slush. There’s Adrian, walking a little ahead and to my left, stocky and Korean and drenched in his black hoodie and jean shorts because he won’t wear a coat or pants until it actually snows. When he sees me looking, he grins like the Cheshire cat.

We’re just having dinner and talking tonight, the way friends have dinner and talk, the way we haven’t over the past week. He’s going to make stupid jokes about politics and video games and maybe segue into deeper, more important things; I’m going to raise eyebrows at his impracticality, make analogies to the publishing and finance worlds he never thinks about – the worlds that, now, I barely think about, though I pretend to. We will be cynical with each other. So why doesn’t it feel that way?

My 20-sided dice are clattering in my coat pocket, and I know I need to roll for something. Unfortunately, it’s an opposed check, and the only person who can tell me which stat to use is my combatant. I guess I could ask him – I could confess that I still feel new to the game. I guess I could let him know that way.

Oh, that would be too fantastical, too cute. Much too cute for real life.

We enter the main building of Forbes – he holding the door open and I, for once, not objecting – and float through the servery without running into each other, without so much as looking up.

He is never totally himself, but tonight he is a different different, as though he decided I hadn’t asked enough questions yet, or had wandered through the dungeon backwards. “That’s what you get,” he’d tell me, “for burrowing into your own escape tunnel.” I reach for the salad tongs and wonder if he knows.

Now we’re sitting down to eat, right next to the window, where the D&D group always sits for brunch before dungeon sessions, but the rest of the group is absent. It reminds me of an interrogation scene in the campaign two or three weeks ago. Adrian took each one of us down the hall to the floor common room, alone, for a couple minutes of thoroughly unorthodox one-on-one roleplaying. At the time, I wondered what the point could be. How would the other players know what’s going on?

But that must’ve been the idea. He’s never himself when he’s behind the DM screen, nor on stage in his improv troupe, nor in his acting classes, but then, in the sunlit room with the big-screen TV streaming muted tennis and life insurance commercials behind him, he leaned forward, twitching, demanding answers my little gnome flautist could not give. His voice rasped and snapped like a dry, steady fire. He was taller – or did I leave my shoes in his room?

I was supposed to be able to roll a will save and resist interrogation. That was really the problem. Those few minutes trying not to meet the monster’s gaze in Adrian’s eyes, he had me there, I was stuck without a way back into the room, without a way out, without a 20-sided die. It was supposed to be my clever little gnome in that room, but it wasn’t.

“You were born to roleplay, you know,” he told me on the walk back to his room. “You should act. I told you – you get into character like a natural.”

Maybe Adrian is the thing he becomes behind the DM screen, the creatures he writes for fiction class. Maybe he is the blind mole-person, the enchanted gate, the monstrous interrogator. And now, seeing him smiling around a forkful of tofu as he tells another story about his uncle the rural veterinarian practicing improvisational medicine on human relatives, I realize: I have never been able to tell when he stops acting and starts being.

The sleet has slowed to wet, heavy snow and piled up against the dining hall window. To me, it looks like the solution. There is nothing simpler to say.

“I don’t want to walk up campus in this.”

“It’s just going to get worse,” he remarks, not looking up from his no-cream, too-sugary coffee. “But you can crash and hope for it to clear up a little, if you want.”

“Maybe just until the plows come around.”

“Sure. You brought stuff to do, right?” He downs the sweet dregs of his drink and stands up in one motion. He seems likely, at any moment, to split into billions of separate creatures and swim away to create new, separate selves.

I grab my coat, hat, bag, and plate, each item affording another moment to wonder if he understands. He isn’t looking at me.

“Yeah,” I tell him, “I have to write for this week.”

We walk upstairs quietly enough to hear the voices of Forbesians in their rooms. Those voices, not so light on my ears as my muse’s, don’t hold any wonder for me, but windows always have, especially curtained dorm windows. Next year, I want a single room with richly colored curtains, saturated blue or burgundy and just a little bit sheer, so other people will look up at the softened light and wonder, as I have: what kind of life is going on in there? But voices are too close to being real. I could hear voices anywhere, and I could often match them with real, human faces, but in those curtained rooms, everything could be different.

Adrian doesn’t have curtains, of course, and the walls on his side of the room are covered mostly in artifacts of his particular brand of creativity: maps of imaginary places, pencil sketches of imaginary people or not-quite people, as hard-pressed and angular as the left hand that drew them. When I walk into his room behind him, my fingers are pushing my 20-sided die from one side of my pocket to the other.

He drops his bag on his bed and spreads his long-since-removed hoodie over the back of his chair, but I hang onto everything. Should I just go now? He doesn’t want me here and anyway, do I want to be here?

“Better take off your boots – you’ll track slush everywhere.”

I look up and there are his eyes, perfectly black, suffering not even my reflection in them. He’s using his “roll initiative” voice – authoritative, never doubting whether I’ll comply. Something is on the tip of my tongue, the tips of my fingers, but the next time he speaks, it dissolves.

“You don’t have to know exactly what you want.” His hand is in my pocket, then out of my pocket, with my hand in it, and my d20 in my hand. It is plastic and purple, gaudy and unlike me, the flecks of glitter catching the snow-white light from the windows.

Adrian steps back and glances at the bare wooden floor, then back at me – at my closed hand.

“Go on. Roll for it.”