His lanyard jingled as he swung his head. It didn’t quite seem to mean yes or no.
The doors swept open again. The wheels on the suitcase were muffled by the thin layer of taupe carpet on the floor here. There were half a dozen closed doors covered in black chalkboard paint. Cornell reached into his pocket again and produced a key from inside of a tiny manila envelope. He stuck it into the first door on the left and turned the knob.
It wasn’t much to look at. Plain white cement walls. Two narrow beds on opposing sides of the room. Two desks with Camp Onward folders and plastic-wrapped T-shirts waiting on them. Two narrow pressboard wardrobes that were less Narnia, more IKEA.
I tossed my backpack onto the left bed. Cornell carefully disentangled himself from my laptop case and set it on the desk chair. He flopped a hand toward the folder.
“If you need anything, all of our phone numbers are in there,” he said. “I’m down on second. It’s the boys’ floor. Or, it will be once everyone else gets here.”
I sat down on the edge of the mattress. It was much smaller than I’d been picturing it.
“Don’t be late to the meet and greet,” Cornell said, edging toward the door. He reached into his back pocket, pulling out a chalk pen. He shook it before uncapping it with his teeth. “Your RA is kind of a hard-ass.”
I tugged at the knots of my shoelaces. I was aching to set my feet to the pavement. I was going to make the most of this whole beautiful weather thing. “Yeah? What did your girlfriend bet against her sticking it out in the dorms?”
The pen cap fell out of his mouth as he laughed. It was a wheezy hiccupping sound that bounced off all of the bare walls and into the hallway. He bent down and scooped up the cap. “No one would bet against her. She’s—well, you’ll see.”
He pressed the chalk pen to the door and wrote “Ever” in looping cursive.
I kicked off a shoe. “Can you work on being comforting, too? Or, like, less cryptic?”
He capped his pen and nodded to me. “I’ll see what I can do.”
3
Every building sprouted out of the ground like a Lego model of a university, all red brick and opaque glass with perfectly manicured trees set between. The schools back home were prison-like cement fortresses compared to this.
The campus was eerily empty as I cruised through it. The paths that curved between buildings were endless stretches of bare benches and clean trash cans and absolutely no signs of life.
I turned up the volume on my running playlist. Pop music never lets you feel alone. There are people and parties and someone turning up the bass until everyone’s heart thumps in time with the 808.
My room key was warm in my pocket. I couldn’t shake how bizarre it was to have my own place, hundreds of miles away from any of my parents. Blowing my allowance on sheets too small to fit my bed at home felt less ridiculous now that they had a place to go. My dorm. Well, my slice of my dorm. There was still the roommate thing to deal with.
And even that was exciting in a stomach churning sort of way. New people. New space. Not another month of Beth knocking on my door in the morning to ask me to drive Ethan somewhere. Or long-distance phone calls from my mom, where I kept from asking when she was coming out to visit next because I didn’t want her to feel guilty. Or going to hunt for public air-conditioning with my friends and ending up sneaking into crappy movies or sipping expensive smoothies.
I’d broken out of the time loop of Elliot Gabaroche’s life. I was Ripley waking up in Aliens, fifty-seven years in the future and away from the monotony of before.
Except without the PTSD and the being chased by Xenomorphs part.
Hopefully.
I turned a corner, following the path behind the dining hall, back to my building. Cornell’s warning about not being late to the meet and greet poked at me. Now wasn’t the time to meander, no matter how nice it was to be moving under the cloudless sky and not stuck in a metal tube. Somehow, getting lost at genius camp seemed worse than getting lost anywhere else.
Ahead, off of a fork in the road and tucked back behind some trees, was one of the closed residence halls. It was taller than mine, with dark windows. The buildings around it threw shadows onto the bricks. Tucked into a corner of the cement steps, there was a boy sitting alone. His black hair was a shaggy approximation of a Beatles bowl cut. It flopped into his eyes as he leaned over a typewriter.
A typewriter.
Pencil lead gray and perched on top of a small suitcase. Or a typewriter case, I guess. I’d never had to consider how people transported typewriters. I honestly couldn’t say that I’d ever seen one in person before. It was like a rotary phone or dial-up Internet. You heard stories, but they always followed the words When I was your age …
Typewriter Guy’s fingers flew over the keys. The sunlight was bouncing off all of the shiny metal parts on his writing contraption, making him squint. The pad of his thumb went between his teeth for a second before he cranked up the paper, slid the top to the left, and resumed typing.
Hipster or ghost?
The only way to know for sure would be to take out my headphones and try to hear the clicky-clack of the keys. I really didn’t want to start off the summer by announcing to all of the campers that we had a wannabe Jack Kerouac specter haunting the closed dorms.
Sure, ghostbusting would be more interesting than the off-brand academic decathlon we were supposed to be here for. But it would raise all kinds of ethical issues. Which would open the door to debating the legal rights of the dead-but-not-gone. If we exorcised one ghost, we’d have to start an ectoplasmic genocide, finding all of the other ghosts on campus to eradicate them.
I veered into the quad and picked up my pace.
Peace out, Casper. Happy hauntings.
*
The residence hall had come to life while I was out. As I paused at a drinking fountain, voices hummed against the walls and I could hear faucets running in the communal bathroom. Every door had been decorated with acid-green chalk. Trixie, RA. Perla and Kate. Avital and Yuri. Itzel and Kayla. Fallon and Meuy. Allison and Annie. My door had “Ever” in Cornell’s white cursive, but another name had been added under a flowery ampersand: Leigh.
The writing on the door to the left of mine was in a third hand, this one sloppier and sharper. It read “Her Imperial Majesty Margaret Royama, supreme overlord.”