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Raleigh meets Hermann and Newt in literally his third second as a college student. He’s holding a box that feels like it probably contains all of his dictionaries and trying not to drop it on something important like his foot when the door to his dorm room swings open and someone invisible behind the box says, “Mein Gott, that might be the biggest box I’ve seen since whatever the hell my dad’s television came in.”
“Great,” Raleigh grits out through his teeth. “Can you—move, then?”
“That’s not actually a television, is it?” someone else asks, sounding horrified and British. Raleigh knows that he has a double with a guy named Newt—chosen because it’s short for Newton, not because of my affinity for the animal in question, although let’s be honest regeneration is sexy as hell, according to the Facebook message he’d sent Raleigh when they were deciding who would bring the mini-fridge—so he’s confused about why there are already two people in his dorm but not enough to worry about it because: books.
Raleigh deposits the box right inside the door and can’t help the grunt that escapes. The top of box says RALEIGH’S SHITTY TASTE IN MAJORS in Yancy’s terrible penmanship. “Hey,” Raleigh says when he can breathe properly, offering his hand to the very short guy in front of him. “I’m Raleigh.”
“Got that,” the guy says, shaking his hand. “Between Facebook and this university’s really pathetic excuse for firewall. That’s Hermann, by the way.” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder to an equally small guy—to be fair, most guys are small, compared to Raleigh—sprawled across the lower bunk, which is already haphazardly strewn with sheets.
“Hello,” Hermann says, sounding long-suffering and irritated. “Don’t worry, I live down the hall.”
“He basically lives here,” Newt says blithely. “It’s okay, though, we’ve known each other since the womb and he’s an incurable jackass so you just have to get used to it.”
“That,” Hermann observes, “might be the most ironic statement you have ever uttered, Newton.”
Yancy comes up behind Raleigh with two duffle bags slung across his chest and a box that says OFFICE SUPPLIES AND TOILETRIES in Raleigh’s not-terrible handwriting, right as Newt squawks and launches himself across the room on top of Hermann. That he doesn’t brain himself on the top bunk is probably a miracle.
“Well,” Yancy drawls, grinning at Raleigh as he stands in the door like a jackass, “this is cozy, isn’t it?”
“God, shut up,” Raleigh mumbles through his teeth. He knows he’s still smiling like an idiot, there’s no need for Yancy to draw attention to that in front of Raleigh’s new roommate and Raleigh’s new roommate’s—whatever. Boyfriend? Maybe. What they’re doing could be two non-athletic and uncoordinated people wrestling, or it could be foreplay.
Yancy drops the box of office supplies on top of the box of dictionaries and reels Raleigh in with an arm around the neck. “You’re gonna be great, brat,” he says, giving Raleigh the nicest, gentlest noogie Raleigh has ever received in his life. “Let’s get the rest of the boxes, yeah?” He smirks over Raleigh’s shoulder. “Before you see your roommate’s dick prematurely.”
“Newton,” Hermann is hissing, “there are other people present.” That seems as good a cue as any for Raleigh and Yancy to get the hell out of the room, so they take it.
~
Raleigh doesn’t have that much stuff, which is a direct byproduct of having dead parents and a distinct lack of interest in shit cluttering up a one-bedroom apartment shared between two giants; he’s unpacked by the end of the night, his four boxes collapsed in a neat pile by the door and his three empty duffels tucked into the back of the shelf at the top of his closet. Newt had ended up bringing the mini-fridge, so Raleigh’s brought a microwave and a flat pack of Cup Noodle that he offers to share with Newt.
“Don’t do that,” Hermann advises from where he’s still lazing on Newt’s bed. Raleigh hasn’t seen him move all afternoon. “He’ll eat it all, and then he’ll eat the packaging itself.”
“God, shut up, Arschloch,” Newt hisses, leaning over to smack Hermann in the face with the flat of his palm. “Mom said that I’d love having my best friend come with me to college, but clearly she was fucking full of it.”
Raleigh already misses Yancy and he’s trying not to think about it too hard, because he’s eighteen, not eight, and Yancy is less than sixty miles away. If you don’t obey traffic laws—which Yancy does, but Raleigh tends to forget—it’s not even an hour’s drive. Raleigh’s just used to living on top of his brother, to them getting in each other’s way and mock-fighting in the living room and elbowing each other for space at the bathroom sink at night.
“Best friend?” Raleigh settles on.
Hermann frowns and turns pink. “He’s emotionally underdeveloped,” he tells Raleigh.
“Hey, fuck you!” Newt replies quickly. “My boyfriend, okay, jackass? Mom said I’d love having my boyfriend come with me to college, but she clearly neglected to remember that he’s a raging dickbucket—”
Hermann and Newt look three seconds from eating each other’s tongues, so Raleigh pockets his ID and his phone and stands quickly to put on his shoes. “I’m, um, going to dinner,” he says, grabbing the collapsed boxes as he goes. There’s the distinct chance that neither Hermann nor Newt even hear him leave. They’re arguing so low that Raleigh can barely hear them. At some point, Raleigh is going to have to casually drop into conversation that he knows German, to keep them from talking dirty to each other in his hearing.
He only realizes once the door has shut behind him that he hadn’t thought to grab the campus map that had been helpfully left on his desk by his Tendo, his RA, along with a rape whistle and a flyer for the activities fair on Sunday. The campus is big but not ridiculous; Raleigh is fairly certain that he’ll be able to find the dining hall, and he’s not certain that if he opens the door he’s not going to be scarred for life.
By his third lap of the main green, he’s not certain of anything except that someone sadistic designed this campus and made the dining hall indistinguishable from any of the other buildings. He’s entering his fourth lap, pausing to study the sign in front of each building for any indication of food being peddled within, when he nearly steps on top of a girl. He’s distracted by trying to determine if McKinnon Hall jogs his food-related memory and she’s apparently standing along the shoulder of the sidewalk, totally still and mostly masked by the shade of a nearby oak.
“Shit!” Raleigh says, catching himself against the tree before he kicks her in the shins. “I’m really sorry, shit, are you okay?”
The girl says, “Yes,” with a slight accent, tugging the edges of her cardigan more securely around her. Raleigh is distracted by the two streaks of blue peaking out from under the front of her hair. She’s—god, she’s really pretty.
She also still hasn’t spoken another word to him and is mostly pinned under his arm to the tree.
“Shit,” Raleigh says for the four millionth time, jerking back so he’s not a gigantic creep. “Sorry. I’m—really lost.”
“Freshman?” she asks. At least she’s not sprinting in the other direction. Raleigh can feel a flush crawl up his neck; he rubs the line of his jaw with his thumb and tries not to stare at the perfect shape of her face.
“Yeah,” he says with a brief laugh. “I mean, being lost probably gave it away?”
She doesn’t laugh but a grin tugs the corner of her mouth up, exposing what turn out to be fucking amazing cheekbones. Raleigh should probably stop looking at her. “Yes,” she agrees. “I am also new, but I know where I am going.”
“Well, bully for you,” Raleigh says, laughing again. “Can you help me, if you’re such an expert? I’m trying to find the dining hall.”
“Which one?” the girl asks.
“Fuck,” Raleigh says, “there’s more than one?” He definitely should’ve braved dicks to go back for the campus map.
This time she laughs. Raleigh wasn't—really prepared for that. “The main dining hall is in Aberdeen. It is the brick building there, between the two very old trees.” She points literally twenty feet away, at a squat brick building that Raleigh has wandered past three times in the last half hour.
The flush definitely extends past his neck at this point. “Thanks,” Raleigh says. She nods, adjusting the hem of her cardigan with two fingers. “Um, I’m Raleigh.”
“Enjoy dinner, Raleigh,” she says. “My name is Mako.”
Raleigh doesn’t walk into a tree as he leaves, but it’s a near thing.
~
Raleigh doesn’t find out that his roommate—and his second roommate, if we’re being realistic here—are proper geniuses until the third week of classes. Raleigh hasn’t been doing the drinking and socializing thing much; he doesn't have a roommate likely to drag him to floor events and he has no reason when he’s increasingly paranoid that he’s going to fail all of his classes and lose his scholarship within the course of the first semester. He spends most of his time in his room at his desk with his headphones on while Hermann and Newt argue and throw things at each other, and when the throwing devolves into kissing Raleigh goes to the engineering library the next building over. He doesn’t know where the normal library is and the engineering library works fine, as it is distinctly lacking in people having sex within Raleigh’s peripheral vision.
He’s been haunting the engineering library enough to have a preferred table when the first person approaches him. Looking small and terrified—which, shouldn’t that be Raleigh? He’s the freshman who doesn’t know where the fucking library is—the girl skirts the edge of Raleigh’s table and says, “Are you—um, are you Newton Geiszler’s roommate?”
Raleigh has never seen this girl before in his life. “Actually, yeah,” he says, confused but smiling at her anyway because it’s only polite. “How’d you know? Did he tape a sign to my back?”
The girl laughs at an awkwardly high pitch. “No!” she says, and then she follows it up with, “ha ha,” each of the syllables spoken independently like Yancy does when he’s being sarcastic. Raleigh gets the impression that this girl is not being sarcastic. “No, just, um, I was—I was wondering what he’s like? I’m sorry, this is really strange.”
Even though Raleigh is sitting down and she’s tall enough to be above him, Raleigh feels like he’s staring down at her. “Sorry,” he says. “Did you—do you want to know what my roommate—does for fun?”
Looking close to vibrating, the girl asks, “Does he have his desk organized a special way?”
Raleigh is pretty sure that Newt’s desk is organized so that everything nonessential can be swept out of the way whenever Newt and Hermann want to have sex on top of it. That’s probably not what this girl is asking, and Raleigh is also reluctant to tell a stranger about his roommate’s sex life. “I don't really know,” he hedges. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh,” the girl says, deflating. “He doesn’t—you don’t think he uses, like, feng shui or anything?”
As Raleigh has honestly never known a person less likely to be interested in improving the chi of his desk space, he says, “No, I don’t think so,” and the girl nods twice, sadly, and wanders off towards the stacks. Raleigh stares after her and then he shakes himself and plugs his headphones back in, trying to get back into the rhythm of comparing various Indo-European verb forms and mostly succeeding.
It seems like the kind of funny story Newt will want to add to his repertoire, so when Raleigh goes back to their room after dinner, he makes sure to say, “Hey, Newt, some girl asked me this morning if you feng shui your desk.”
Hermann, neatly tucked into Newt’s desk and scribbling on a stack of papers as thick as Raleigh’s Latin-to-English dictionary, groans almost theatrically. “Another groupie?” he says. “Marvelous. Truly marvelous. I’m delighted.”
“Shut up, Hermann,” Newt says lazily. He’s up on Raleigh’s bunk, hanging upside down, holding his glasses onto his face with one hand and his tablet with the other. “If you get groupies, I get groupies.”
“Where were you accosted?” Hermann demands. “Were you in the biomedical science towers? They do quite a trade in Newton’s hangers-on, there.”
Confused, Raleigh says, “No, I was in the engineering library, actually. Why would—you have groupies? And how do they know who I am?”
“Facebook,” Newt guesses. “You have really shitty privacy settings, Raleigh. Like, ten minutes on that thing before we were friends and I knew your mother’s maiden name and the names of your first five pets. You’re a banking security system’s worst nightmare.”
“Yeah,” Raleigh says agreeably, since that’s true, “but why do you have groupies?” He’s learned by now that repeating the same question over and over again is the best way to ensure that either Newt or Hermann will answer it eventually. If he waits and lets them get into squabbling then he’s never going to find out who drank the last of the milk and is therefore responsible for replacing it.
“In the engineering building?” Newt says. “I honestly couldn’t tell you. That’s more Hermann’s line of work.”
“Engineers,” Hermann sneers, the same way Yancy says White Sox fans.
Raleigh sort of thinks that’s that, except he’s back in the engineering library two days later and a guy with a neck of a linebacker, wearing a very fitted polo and a kind of douchey expression, walks up to him and says, “Hey, you’re Gottlieb’s roommate, right?”
“Um,” Raleigh says. “No?”
The linebacker—Raleigh has yet to learn that there’s a specific subset of engineering majors who look like they play professional sports, so he spares a moment to wonder what the hell this guy is doing in the engineering library, never mind that Raleigh himself, a linguistics major who can bench 250, looks just as out of place—frowns and points a thumb over his shoulder, to a table full of guys also in polo shirts. “My bros said you were.”
“I mean, he’s functionally my roommate,” Raleigh clarifies. He’s pulled his headphones down to curl around his neck. He can hear MS MR pounding through the speakers and he wishes he were enough of a jackass to just pull them back on and ignore this guy. “But my roommate is Newt Geiszler.”
“No fucking way,” the linebacker says, turning a shade of pink that violently clashes with his gingery buzz cut and his red polo shirt. “Man, that’s fucking ace.”
“Yeah,” Raleigh says vaguely. “I guess.”
“You into that shit?” the linebacker asks, leaning forward to get a look at the work Raleigh has spread around himself. He’s working on an assignment for his Japanese III class, mostly kanji practice, and the linebacker frowns at Raleigh’s extremely poor attempts at completing his character worksheet.
“No,” Raleigh says, mystified as to why some guy he’s never met is interested in his major. “I’m a linguistics major.”
The linebacker’s face falls. “Oh,” he says, looking comically disappointed. “Well, if you see Gottlieb, tell him we still want his ass on STARS, yeah?”
“Sure?” Raleigh offers.
“Great,” the linebacker says, reaching forward and slapping Raleigh on the back. “Thanks, bro. Good luck with your weird shit.” He returns to his table of polo shirts, and Raleigh blinks after him once or twice, feeling four times stupider than he usually does while doing his Japanese III homework, before he tugs his headphones back on and turns up the volume so loud that he hopes it dissuades any future interruptions.
~
“I think he said stars?” Raleigh offers at dinner that night. He’d managed by virtue of politely asking to secure one of the booths in the back of the dining hall in the basement of Aberdeen—despite Mako’s insistence that there’s more than one dining hall, he’s yet to find another one—and Hermann and Newt are sitting across from him, Hermann picking listlessly at a bowl of tofu stir-fry and Newt stuffing his mouth with chicken tenders.
“Stars?” Newt frowns, half-masticated chicken almost managing to leak out of his mouth. “Like—the astronomy half of the physics department?”
“He gave it a lot of emphasis,” Raleigh says. “Like it was the name of something?” Finishing his green beans and cheeseburger hadn’t been hard, but these mashed potatoes taste like they were made from a powdered mix. Raleigh would know, since he’s a champion at making mashed potatoes from mix, but at least his don’t taste like shit.
“Oh,” Hermann says, spearing a soybean with a fork and grimacing. “STARS. The Space Technology and Rocketry Society. Yes, they sent me a few emails about joining their little club.”
“Boring NASA shit?” Newt offers sympathetically.
Hermann nods and stabs a few carrot slivers aggressively. “Absolutely nothing to do with my research interests, of course, but I’m afraid Professor Wang dropped my name to the president of that particular society in casual conversation and he’s become obsessed with my joining.”
Raleigh had been under the impression that all science geeks liked NASA, but it’s not like he’s ever been particularly talented at science, or even known other people good at it. Most of his friends from home had either been on the football team with him or also members of the various foreign language honors societies to which Raleigh had belonged.
“Is NASA not a thing you like?” he asks. He honestly doesn’t know why Newt and Hermann keep hanging out with him, since it’s obvious that the three of them only share interest in the German language and Mass Effect, but it’s probably not in Raleigh’s best interests to tell his only friends to fuck off.
“STARS is not NASA,” Hermann sniffs dismissively, “even if they wish that weren’t the case. At any rate, I don’t have time to join them, even if we had overlapping research interests. The work I’m doing with Professor Wang barely qualifies as applied mathematics, let along astrophysics.”
“Yeah, they’ll have to get a pet genius somewhere else,” Newt adds, fitting an entire chicken tender into his mouth. That doesn’t impede him from saying, “You don’t see me caving every time the fucking Biology Club comes to call, do you?”
Raleigh can tell from the way that Newt says ‘pet genius’ that he isn’t being sarcastic. “You’re both like scary smart, aren’t you?” he says, resigned now as he stuffs a forkful of gritty mashed potatoes into his mouth and immediately regrets everything in his life.
“Yeah,” Newt says. “Whatever, you’re some kind of polyglot prodigy, right? We’re the fucking crew of the USS Enterprise up in here, Uhura.” He leans across the table to offer Raleigh a fist bump.
It probably says a lot about how Raleigh was raised—which was mostly by Yancy—that he’s pleased by the comparison. “Sure,” he says, gently tapping Newt’s fist with his. “Which one of you is Spock, then?”
“I’m Spock,” Hermann says, long-suffering. “Newt is McCoy.” The words sound dragged out of him, rather like they’re the result of an old argument.
“Damn fucking straight,” Newt says, beaming at his boyfriend before his face falls. “Shit, I’m out of chicken and I’m still fucking hungry. I’m going to go see if there’s any mint chocolate chip left. Either of you want anything?”
Hermann eats a piece of tofu mutinously.
“Yeah,” Raleigh says, mouth dry and gross. “These mashed potatoes are disgusting.”
There turns out not to be any mint chocolate chip, only vanilla. Fake-gagging, Newt goes to scope out the pie situation. Raleigh is pleased by this turn of events—so he likes vanilla ice cream, sue him—and he’s trying to judge if three scoops is too much when he realizes that the person politely waiting behind him for a turn at the ice cream freezer is Mako.
“Hi,” he says quickly, straightening and almost braining himself on the overhang of the freezer. “Mako. Hey.”
She flicks a look at Raleigh from under her bangs, mouth twisting slightly in confusion, before she brightens. “Hello, Raleigh,” she says, sounding quietly pleased. “I see you found the dining hall.”
The half-filled scoop in Raleigh’s hand is dripping into an empty container of chocolate ice cream but he can’t remember if he was going to put the scoop in his bowl or finish compiling a complete scoop; he ends up hovering, undecided, looking down at Mako and trying to find his tongue. “Yeah,” he finally says, like a moron. “I mean, you gave pretty good directions. ‘Walk straight for twenty feet, enter building.’”
Mako grins at him. “You’re good at following them,” she says.
Raleigh wants to ask her about her major and her phone number and what she does for fun and if she would ever possibly be interested in doing something fun with him, but three more people have queued up behind Mako and the girl directly behind her looks like she’d fight Raleigh for his ice cream and she’d definitely aim for his nuts.
Deciding to forgo more, Raleigh dumps the rest of the ice cream in the scoop in his bowl, and then he hands the scoop to Mako. “I’ll see you around?” he offers.
She accepts the ice cream scoop delicately; their fingers don’t brush and Raleigh isn’t disappointed by that because they barely know each other and he isn’t creepy. Her hands are really tiny, though. Strong-looking, but tiny. Maybe she plays tennis or something. “Yes,” Mako says, so definitively that Raleigh turns pink and stays pink, as he walks back to his booth and consumes his half-melted ice cream. Yancy would’ve said something about that, but Newt and Hermann are too busy fighting / flirting to do so; it’s the first time Raleigh has been really grateful that Yancy isn’t around since classes started.
~
At the beginning of the fifth week of the semester, Raleigh’s Japanese III teacher sternly reminds their class that they have to log ten hours with a conversation partner before the end of the semester to receive full participation credit. Raleigh hasn’t even been thinking about conversation partners; his Monday-Wednesday Sound Patterns in Human Language class has been kicking his ass up and down campus and he barely has time to sleep, let alone meet someone for coffee once a week to practice his conversational Japanese.
Probably because everyone looks so fucking guilty, their professor passes around a sheet of paper and asks them to put down their name, email address, and times they’re available. “We’ll have our volunteers sign up for slots,” she says in Japanese, “and send you an email. Don’t schedule anything for these time slots until you hear back in the next few days.”
Naturally, that means Raleigh signs up the next day for a study session with the rest of his recitation from Dr. Pentecost’s class and it turns out to conflict with his conversation partner’s schedule. He sends an apologyvia email and offers to come by right after the study session, which turns out to be shitty for the guy but he has a friend who can cover for him.
Raleigh leaves the study session three minutes early, under the beady and unrelenting stare of Herc, Dr. Pentecost's TA and the recitation leader, to sprint across campus and make it to the Starbucks next to the student union. He’s still four minutes late, but he hadn’t even been aware that it was possible to cross the entire campus in seven minutes, so that’s nice.
“Sorry,” Raleigh gasps to the floor when he sees the Japanese III textbook prominently displayed on the table nearest to the door. He’d jokingly suggested a white rose to his original conversational partner, but the guy had sent back a cryptic, She’d tear off my balls with her teeth, so they’d decided on a textbook instead.
It’s Mako, of course, who looks up from a cup of something cute and foamy-looking. “Raleigh,” she says, sounding delighted. In Japanese, she asks, “Are you the student who needs a conversation partner?”
“Yes,” Raleigh says. He gives her a jerky bow and dumps his bag at his feet. “Do you mind if I get something to drink first?” The muscles in his legs are burning and his face is probably unattractively red and sweaty, but Mako smiles and nods.
“We have time, I think,” she says. “I won’t punish you for being late.”
Raleigh’s brain does an awful staticky thing where he can’t even think; he’s just staring at her, his brain shrieking her words over and over again, and it’s even worse because they’re in Japanese and her voice is so goddamn sexy and fuck, fuck, Raleigh hadn’t even been aware that he might be into something like that.
“Okay,” he croaks, and he hopes she just thinks his Japanese is rusty and he’s nervous because of that. “One minute?”
It takes considerably longer than a minute to get a black coffee, but Mako is reading when he makes it back to their table. They’re supposed to be talking, after all, so Raleigh slips into a seat across the small table from Mako and asks, “What are you reading?”
“International Finance: Theory and Policy,” Mako says in English, holding her textbook up so he can see the cover for himself. She carefully closes it and slips it back into the backpack at her feet; she returns to Japanese to say, “I’m an Economics major.”
“Are you a freshman?” Raleigh asks. He’s done the year-major-where you from dance with the other students in his class; it feels different with Mako, like he’s back in the Japanese I class he’d taken at Malcolm X College last winter. He feels so conscious of the way his mouth shapes the words. Is this supposed to be for cultural practice, too? Raleigh can’t remember what the printout from his professor had said.
“Yes,” Mako replies, “but I grew up near the university and have taken classes here since I was in high school.”
“That’s cool,” Raleigh enthuses, like no one else has ever done that. Like Raleigh hadn’t done that. Yancy is right, he’s such a dork. “What do you like about economics?”
As it turns out, Mako likes everything about economics. Most of what she likes is unintelligible to Raleigh; he has to get her to slow down, explain terms he’s never heard before, summarize the purpose of organizations he hadn’t been aware even existed. By the time their hour has ended and Mako is apologetically explaining that she has dinner with her father and she needs to leave, Raleigh has learned that Mako owns more cardigans than any other article of clothing, collects traditional Japanese pottery—mostly teapots—and wants to save the world with her (future) PhD.
Raleigh hasn’t drunk any of his coffee and he’s pretty sure he’s in love.
~
Hermann and Newt are waiting for the elevator when Raleigh sprints out of the staircase, flat-out running for their room. “Oh, hey,” Newt yells after Raleigh. “You want to get dinner?”
“Can’t,” Raleigh yells back. He’d feel bad for the people whose doors are open as he runs past, but at least three guys on the floor listen to Justin Bieber full blast when they shower and they deserve it. “I’m meeting Mako at the library in—shit, two minutes ago.”
He’s trying to shove his keycard into the door as Newt says, “Oh, right, Mako,” and Hermann snorts unattractively. “I hope you starve,” Newt continues to shout. “I hope you starve for love, Raleigh Becket!”
Raleigh’s inside the room then and he can’t respond; he’s too busy pulling his t-shirt off with one hand and scrambling for his deodorant with the other. He hadn’t meant to get distracted on his run, but he’d spaced out going up a hill and he’d ended up in a part of campus he’d never seen before, probably having taken the wrong leg of a fork.
He kicks his running shoes off so hard one of them hits Newt’s mattress and hits the floor with a loud thunk; normally Raleigh is pretty careful with his things, but he’s trying to hop into his jeans and find a sweater at the same time and there’s no time. He forgoes an undershirt and yanks on the sweater as he grabs his bag and dashes for the stairs. He tries to check his hair in the glass doors of the engineering library as he runs past, but it’s just a blur of blond and he doesn’t want to slow down.
The actual library—which, naturally, Mako had shown him after their third coffee meeting, explaining that she preferred the quiet of the mostly-empty fourth floor to the hectic rush of Starbucks at 5pm—is fairly busy when Raleigh propels himself through the front doors. It makes for a good cover; he doesn’t slow down until he reaches the stairs in the middle of the building, which he takes two at a time.
“Always running,” Mako chides him in gentle Japanese when he skids to a stop in front of her table. She pulls down the screen of her laptop and smiles at him. “Do you own a watch?”
“Sorry,” Raleigh says when he can breathe. “I was on a run, I lost track of time.” He’d been thinking about the streaks in Mako’s hair, the way they curled under her chin when she broke eye contact—which was rarely—and looked down. She’d done that once to blush; Raleigh had tried to figure out what had caused it for the rest of their meeting, desperately trying to recreate the situation, but he hadn’t been able to figure it out.
“I see,” Mako says. “Well, exercise is very important. More important than Japanese?”
Raleigh knows she’s teasing; he sinks into a seat and pulls his knee up to his chest for a quick stretch. It’d be just his luck if his legs seized up while he was sitting here. “Oh, definitely,” he says. “I’m becoming an expert. I don’t know if you’ve talked recently to my conversation partner, but apparently I’m a natural—”
Mako rolls up a nearby print out and leans across the table to whack Raleigh in the calf he currently has suspended. “Naturally terrible,” she says, but her grin breaks through. “We don’t have to keep meeting, if you’re so great. You can explain to your professor why you don’t have a conversation partner any more.”
Dropping his leg, Raleigh pulls up the other one and involuntarily grimaces at the strain. He needs to stop spacing out in runs. “Don’t,” he says, still caught a little in the pain. “I got a 95 on my last oral exam, and that was basically entirely due to you.” It comes out sounding too sincere; Raleigh drops his leg and his eyes immediately, stretching his arms out behind his back as an excuse.
He doesn't look at Mako until he’s pulling his arms over his head. She’s look at his stomach, where his sweater has pulled up, and there’s a cute little frown hovering in the corner of her mouth. Raleigh has no idea what she’s thinking, but he knows what girls look like when they’re checking him out; generally, they’re not frowning.
“Hey,” he says, to drag her out of wherever she’s gone. “How did your Lit Theory exam go?”
Mako absently correct his pronunciation of ‘theory,’ and then adds, “It was all right. I’m worried my feminist analysis didn’t include all of the major points that my professor wanted. There was too much to choose from.”
“Was this the Left Hand of Darkness essay?” Raleigh asks. Newt has told him more than once that Raleigh probably knows more about Mako’s classes—and he only really talks to her once a week—than he does about Newt’s. At least Mako’s classes make sense, though. All of Newt’s are biochemistry and things about macromolecules. Raleigh’s not even sure he could name a macromolecule, but he at least knows what a book is.
Visibly shaking off whatever is bothering her, Mako says, “Yes. It’s too good, in some ways. Too many examples, not enough time in the class period of the exam to talk about all of them.”
“I hate that,” Raleigh deadpans. “When I’m so good at something and there’s not enough time for me to explain—hey!” He flinches back before Mako’s rolled-up sheet can hit his shoulder. He laughs as she stands up and hits him in the head. “I’m just saying, Mako. You’re brilliant. I’m not sure you’re capable of writing an essay that isn’t awesome.”
Mako’s chin tilts down and her cheeks pink. “Thank you,” she says politely, as Raleigh mentally pumps his fist. “The praise is unnecessary, but—”
“Oh, come off it,” Raleigh interrupts. “You know how smart you are, you don't need to—dissemble.” He can’t remember what dissemble is in Japanese, or a good Japanese alternative, so he says it in English.
Clearly scandalized by the thought of letting Raleigh go to his Japanese III recitation the next day without the best vocabulary possible—Mako has already let it slip that it’s a matter of pride amongst the volunteers whose conversation partner ends up with the best grade in the class—Mako derails their conversation so she can make sure Raleigh has a thorough grasp of the Japanese nuances between various types of lies.
Mako runs off to meet with her father before Raleigh can get up the nerve to ask her for coffee or to join him off-campus for dinner. Having been athletic and tall in high school, Raleigh isn’t inexperienced with dating, but Mako feels different. Mako feels amazing. Raleigh has never met a person who overwhelms him every day the way Mako does, even though she has a mouthy temper and a tendency to hit him with rolled-up paper like he’s an errant puppy. He just wants—to do this right.
~
“All right,” Newt interrupts in the middle of Raleigh’s sentence. “Let me just finish this for you, okay? ‘Mako Mori saved the day, puppies wept, and the sun came out to beam its light upon her.’ The end.”
He proceeds to roll his eyes, like he has any leeway to talk. He rhapsodizes about his lab work with Dr. Diaz way more than Raleigh talks about Mako.
Raleigh is about to point this out, but Hermann gets there first. “Don’t be a tit,” Hermann says. “Raleigh might be in love and disgusting with it but you tried to sneak samples home from the lab last night.”
“God, Newt!” Raleigh says. He looks down at his tuna sandwich and feels distinctly less hungry. “No lab samples in our room, we put that in our roommate agreement.”
“I wouldn’t have let anything touch your desk,” Newt whines. “I just wanted to finish looking at some of the specimens we pinned for anatomical studies and Dr. Diaz kicked me out of the lab. He’s refusing to give me a ProxCard for another semester. Apparently I don't understand how boundaries work.” Newt sniffs, obviously offended.
Hermann, meanwhile, chokes on a snow pea because he’s laughing so hard. “I would say Dr. Diaz understands you perfectly,” he cackles.
“Oh, fuck you,” Newt says, “I’m sorry that my work isn’t easily transferred via rolling chalkboard.”
Raleigh is still pretty hungry, but his class with Dr. Pentecost starts in fifteen minutes and looking at his sandwich for too long brings up horrifying mental images of the pygmy squid species that Newt’s lab studies. To be totally honest, Raleigh isn’t even sure that Newt goes to his classes; he seems to spend all of his time doing research with Dr. Diaz and making fun of terrible journal articles on his tablet.
“I’ve got to head out,” Raleigh says, swiping a handful of chips from Newt’s plate while he’s distracted by his argument with Hermann. “Newt, I’m totally serious—no specimens in our room. If you bring anything with tentacles back, I’m kicking you out and you can live with Hermann and Chuck.”
In unison, the three of them say, “Chuck,” in tones of deep loathing.
Chuck, in addition to being Hermann’s official roommate and the only other linguistics major on their floor, is a total ass. Raleigh had grown up with guys like him, ones who thought that because they were big they needed to be tough, but weren’t cruel enough to be the ugly kind of bully. He’s harmless 90% of the time, when he isn’t in Raleigh’s direct line of vision, but that other 10% of the time Raleigh really doesn’t like him.
Unfortunately, Dr. Pentecost’s Monday-Wednesday-Friday 1pm lecture—LING 0270: Meaning—falls under that 10%. Raleigh sits in the front of the lecture hall, partially because Dr. Pentecost is the kind of amazing professor that, if Raleigh does well and gets on his good side, will probably write him a kickass letter of recommendation for graduate school in three years, but also partially because that means about 200 freshmen will be between Raleigh and Chuck, who always sits in the back.
Dr. Pentecost finishes out the lecture with a loud reminder of their upcoming exam and Herc’s increased office hours to deal with the influx of students who haven’t been studying at all for the past few weeks. Raleigh almost makes it out of the room before he realizes that Mako is sitting next to Herc, in the front row seat closest to the far wall. She’s reading a textbook, wielding a yellow highlighter, and has been mostly hidden from the rest of the room by Herc’s bulk.
“Hey, Mako,” he says, drawn towards her like Newt to a dissected pygmy squid.
“Raleigh!” she says. “Hello.”
It’s habit to lapse into Japanese; he doesn’t realize he’s done it until he’s already begun to speak, and at that point it would probably be awkward to switch back. “I didn’t think you were in this class,” he says. “I mean—I know you aren’t in this class. You don’t have enough free credits. Are you auditing it?”
“No,” she says, smiling at Raleigh and then at a point behind his shoulder. “Actually, my father teaches it.”
“Your dad is Dr. Pentecost?” Raleigh says, choking on the words. He can’t help that his whole body sort of flinches sideways. “That’s—wow. He’s a really great professor.” He literally can’t think of anything else to say; he’s kind of stupidly in love with Mako, but Dr. Pentecost scares the shit out of him.
“He mentioned a student by whom he was very impressed,” Mako says. Her Japanese has become slow and deliberate; Raleigh half-turns and sees that Dr. Pentecost has come closer, looming over Raleigh with a kind of immutable lethality. It’s obvious to potted plants and small children and passing Chihuahuas that Raleigh is in love with Mako, so he doesn’t know why he expects her father to be any different. “I think I know why.”
“Thank you, Mako,” Dr. Pentecost rumbles in English. “That’s enough, I think.”
Mako grins brattily at him and Raleigh—is gone. Totally gone. He can’t even look at Dr. Pentecost or Herc or anyone else in the room. He’s overwhelmed by how much he wants to cup Mako’s chin in his hands and kiss her until he can’t even breathe. Dr. Pentecost crooks a finger at Mako and she goes with him, patting Raleigh on the arm as she passes and whispering in Japanese, “Wait for me? I’ll be a few minutes.” Raleigh nods.
That makes it, naturally, the perfect time for Chuck to come down the aisle in a kind of lazily douchetastic roll. “Hey, Herc,” he says. He flicks a glance to Raleigh and smiles meanly. “Becket. That your girlfriend? She’s cute.”
Technically Chuck hasn’t said anything out of line, but the way he drawls ‘cute’ makes Raleigh want to punch him in the face. “No,” Raleigh says through his teeth. “She’s a friend.”
Herc’s eyes roll heavenward. Clearly he knows to expect what happens next.
“That’s too bad,” Chuck says. “I guess there’s probably not room for her in your threesome with Gottlieb and Geiszler, is there?”
Because Raleigh doesn’t have the emotional maturity of a four-year-old, he’s pretty sure that Chuck is upset that his roommate never even bothered to get to know him. That doesn’t mean that Raleigh needs to cater to Chuck’s toolish ways, but at least it gives him enough perspective to take a step back. “I don’t think Newt and Hermann recognize other human beings as sexual objects,” Raleigh says, aiming for wry. “They’re pretty much it for each other.”
Chuck sneers. “Feeling lonely, then? Or are you after her for the grade bump?”
Raleigh says, “Please tell me you didn’t just say that,” already letting his bag fall off of his shoulder. Just because Yancy taught him to be better than a brawl doesn’t mean Raleigh doesn’t know how to brawl.
Either Chuck’s too reckless to recognize the fury Raleigh is emitting or he’s itching for a fight; he pulls his lips back from his teeth like some kind of rabid dog and says, “Are you fucking your girlfriend for an A, mate? That’s a little low, don't you think? Even for a cute little thing like her.”
Raleigh ends up throwing the first punch, but Mako throws the second.
~
It turns out that Mako doesn’t play tennis, but she is the most promising new member of the university’s aikido team. Raleigh finds this out after Chuck has been left as a mostly groaning mess on the floor and Herc had issued a broad apology for his idiot brother’s behavior.
Mako looks perfectly fine, but Raleigh still feels guilty about letting his inevitable fight with Chuck bleed over onto her. “I’m sorry,” he says for the third time, when they’re at the vending machine down the corridor from the lecture hall where Herc is shouting, loudly and incomprehensibly, at Chuck.
“Don’t be,” Mako says in English. She feeds a couple of quarters into the vending machine and bites her lip. “I’m getting a caramel Snickers. Do you want one?”
Before Raleigh can politely refuse, his stomach grumbles unhappily. “I kind of—missed lunch,” he says in awkward apology, and Mako laughs as she slips digs a few more quarters out of her coin purse.
“No, hey, let me,” Raleigh says. “You just took down Chuck way better than I ever have in my daydreams, you don’t need to buy me a Snickers, too.” He reaches for his wallet but Mako’s quicker; she presents him with a Snickers bar faster than he can get out a dollar bill.
“A present,” she says. “For giving me the opportunity.”
Raleigh laughs and accepts the candy bar. “I’m pretty sure Chuck set up the opportunity for his own destruction,” he says. “I don’t even know what I did to him, he just sort of hates me.”
“Yes,” Mako agrees, her expression serious and focused as she unpeels her caramel Snickers. “You’re the best new linguistics student in the department, my father really likes you, your best friends are geniuses, and almost every freshman girl on campus has a crush on you. I have no idea why he hates you.”
“Mako,” Raleigh laughs helplessly, “most of the freshmen girls on campus don’t know who I am. That also applies to the faculty in the linguistics department.”
Mako shrugs minutely and takes a delicate nibble of the edge of her Snickers. “My father is very impressed by you,” she says. “I am being serious. And you’re very good at Japanese.”
“I have what I am told is the best conversation partner on campus,” Raleigh tells her, trying to match her serious tone. He thinks about continuing on in that vein, teasing her until she gets pink and flustered and tilts her head so the streaks of blue brush against her chin, but for some reason the chocolate enters his veins as liquid courage. “Mako, you know—that I don’t care about freshman girls, right? Or upperclassmen girls. Or—any girl, really. That isn’t you.”
Naturally, Raleigh punctuates his mangled series of sentences with an extremely large bite of Snickers, just so he has something to choke on when Mako says, “Will you have dinner with me?”
A speck of peanut almost comes out of his nose, but Raleigh croaks, “Yes,” and then has to cough to free his lungs of any stray bit of nougat. “Now?” he offers. “Are you free now?”
“It’s two in the afternoon,” Mako reminds him.
“I’m free,” he says. “My next class is at 8am tomorrow.”
“I am not,” Mako says, with an apologetic twist to her mouth. “I have Economic Anthropology in thirty minutes. I hope the Hansens have vacated the lecture hall by then, or else I have a feeling Dr. Chau will have a few uncomfortable words for them.”
Raleigh says, “I can work with thirty minutes,” and he stuffs his half-eaten Snickers bar into the back pocket of his jeans and crowds Mako up against the vending machine, not even caring that this is the kind of gross, delinquent behavior that Newt and Hermann frequently complain about when they’re taking a break from complaining about each other.
Luckily, Mako is the only one around and she doesn't seem to care; she has to go up on her toes to sling her arm around Raleigh’s neck, but it’s worth it when he can kiss the burnt sugar taste of the caramel into her mouth. Raleigh likes licking into Mako’s mouth with the cool Plexiglas of the vending machine against his palms, but he likes it even better when Mako manhandles him into an empty classroom and onto the long table by the door, crawling onto his lap and using fistfuls of his hair to guide his mouth where she wants it.
Thirty minutes of kissing Mako end up feeling like simultaneously five seconds and a million years, which Raleigh thinks bodes well for their future.
~
(According to Newt, “Mako is Kirk, clearly.”)