Arthur Braling was less prepossessing in the world of primary colors, but so many things are. He was not without a certain charm, red curls combed high above a bright, eager face. He wore a red necktie over a white shirt, not because Mershon College had any rules about this, but because he happened to like to wear neckties.
This was really all most of his classmates knew about Arthur: “He likes to wear neckties.” It was all most of them really wanted to know. A small coterie of associates found him useful. His notes were always complete and he always remembered which paragraph the professor really leaned on in a lecture.
With a smile, Arthur was always willing to supply missing details of an assignment, cram information into other brains the night before an exam, and warn that a prof had reached a point where a pop quiz was inevitable. Despite unheroic proportions, he was this close to being named honorary captain of the Mershon Wrestling Team; Coach knowing very well who had kept his wrestlers eligible during a rocky period.
Being useful is far from the same as being interesting. Arthur’s only close friends were leftovers from high school, relationships maintained from kindergarten on, who kept in touch via emails filled with esoteric trivia quizzes.
Unencumbered by social obligations, Arthur had plenty of time to explore the town, the campus, and the respective libraries of each. He had acquired the habit, encouraged by his roommate, a late sleeper, of taking a long, leisurely stroll in the early hours of morning. The whole town could be covered end to end in about half an hour, but Arthur preferred a leisurely pace. He could visit the neighborhood where you saw where the railroad tracks had run, when the trains were still running. Blocks and blocks of houses here had no sidewalks in front of them. The neighborhood with the churches and the homes bankers had built a century or more before was another direction. Still another was the new part of town, with the elementary school, and the expanse of identical houses.
Today’s walk had taken him past the Mershon Museum of Fine Arts (closed at this hour, but with much to read posted on the outdoor announcement board) and Griese park. He tried to take this walk at least once a week. He knew about the plan to turn the park into a passive one—had signed a petition against it that was going around—but supposed he could take a walk here either way.
He liked the sense of elusive history in the park, a little harder to find than in his walks through the Grandview cemetery, at the other end of town, or on campus, with all its commemorative plaques. These corners where feet had worn the grass away in shortcuts had probably been mutilated that way for generations, while the names and the dates scrawled in the concrete went back some forty years. He paused before one of the oil drum trashcans. Could an expert tell the age of an oil drum by some features unobserved by the uninitiated? Could that expert do it even through what was obviously the ninth or tenth coat of industrial green paint?
Turning slowly, he studied Griese park: the old swings, the broken benches, the backstop at the softball diamond. How old were these things? If he got involved in the movement to preserve the park as it was, he’d have excuses to dig through the back issues of the Mershon Messenger. No time, really, he supposed. His eyes swept across the view again, resting on the woman who read on the bench no longer than on the trash cans.
Julia Sangerman yawned and brushed her hair back from under her glasses. Bringing a book out here to read still seemed a little extreme, but it was quieter than the lounge in the dorm. And getting out of her room was vital. Over the summer, Meredith had developed a fitness mania, which involved an early morning nude exercise session.
“Exercise rags just constrict the muscles, Jul. You have to try this!”
Julia had no objection to getting up at this hour, but watching her roommate flop around to “Bohemian Rhapsody” before breakfast was more than flesh and blood could bear. Besides, Meredith’s intention to run a marathon had not changed her habit of staying out until one in the morning. Some day, that girl was going to break down completely, and Julia wasn’t planning to be there to watch it happen.
She shifted the big book on her legs. Last year, she had done her early morning reading in the library after breakfast. Cutbacks meant the building didn’t open before ten now. Any extra credit she could scrape together, she could use.
Julia was quite a respectable student. Left to herself, she could easily have achieved a 3.5 GPA, with time left over for a life. At Mershon, this would have graduated her cum laude. But her grandparents, whose funding took care of her room, board, tuition, textbooks, and microwave popcorn, would settle for very little less than 3.95 and summa cum laude. More than just these four years’ schooling hung on this result. The estate would one day be divided among six cousins, five of them divvying up half of it, with the other half going to the one with the best academic credentials. Julia wanted that money: it would cover a master’s degree, a doctorate, and a number of years of study in Europe.
Such exalted and expensive goals were difficult to reconcile with a naked roommate defining triceps to The Best of Queen. (She could at least have edited out “Fat-Bottomed Girls”.)
She slid her thin skirt a little tighter around her thighs, braced the books against the breeze, and slid out the paper she was using to take notes. A butterfly flitted across this page, on its way to an odd young man swinging a bag of books as he strolled along the crooked path. Her eyes followed it for a space, but not as far as Arthur’s smiling face.
In a tree above the bench, a small bird broke suddenly into a high trill. Arthur looked up, but rather too far up. Neither he nor Julia heard a short snort of disgust, or the cry of “Watch this!”
“Oopf!” Arthur’s right toe caught in a crack just as his bag of books was on the upswing. The straps tore loose from his hand, sending eight hundred dollars’ worth of the wisdom of civilization in the general direction of the singing bird.
“Heads up!” he shouted, seeing the bag start back down, well short of the feathered musician.
Julia’s head did come up, allowing Arthur’s investment to land squarely in the middle of the kingdom of the Ostrogoths. Books and bookbag bounced forward, sending Julia’s bookmark in one direction, and her notes in another.
“Hey, I’m sorry!” Four hands grabbed for the notes. Julia’s hair was not thick enough to provide a good cushion as foreheads met. Arthur pulled back in time to swat her flying glasses, sending them into the grass under the bench instead of onto the cracked pavement.
“Good one!” Julia told him, reaching down for them, between her ankles. She did not notice, in doing so, the knee—not hers, as they were deep in grass now–on the hem of the skirt. Glasses in hand, she came up, only to come back down.
“Oh! Sorry!” Arthur jumped back, slipped, and saw one foot headed for the glasses in her hands. Twisting desperately, he sent the foot instead into the spine of the Ostrogoths, and himself sat down hard next to his bookbag.
The pair paused, glaring at their common enemy, those inanimate objects strewn in the grass. Arthur got a knee under himself and grabbed for his bookbag. A cloud—or something—drifted across the sunlight, making him mistake his aim. He took the bag up by the bottom seam.
He distinctly remembered zipping the bag shut. He always zipped the bag shut. Still, books, notebooks, pencils, pens, and one disc flew free. A breeze he had not noticed until now took a personal interest in his History 211 notes.
Julia had her glasses in one hand, and slapped the other toward the fleeing flashes of white. “I’ve got….”
Her feet were still behind her on the bench. As she lurched up to capture more pages, one shoe hit the concrete support. The shoe came loose, throwing her off balance so that she knocked Arthur’s bookbag from his hands. She used her nose for this.
“Whose side are you on?” Her head continued into his chest like a cannonball in a blanket. He hadn’t touched a woman’s hair since he was four.
Julia started to say “I….” but felt her glasses slip from her hand. She swept around to grab them before they bounced. Arthur, always helpful, had made the same grab at the same time.
“Long time no see,” Julia noted, as their heads collided once more, this time cheek to cheek.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t give up now. You’re just getting the hang of it.” Pushing back with one foot, she snatched at her specs, bringing her bare foot down on a book which had been six inches away just a moment before. Not knowing what it was, but feeling sharp corners, she threw her weight to the other side, twisting to look. Her other foot, however, was insecure on a small stack of paper discussing Jeffersonian democracy.
“Hang…ack!” Seeing her falling, Arthur had moved forward automatically but did so more quickly than he intended as one of Julia’s flailing hands took hold of his necktie. A move the wrestling coach would have admired enable him to avoid crashing facefirst onto the bench, but he had to add another twist to avoid kicking the tumbling Julia. One more sagacious twist was too much to ask of fate. His face buried itself in the grass, coming down with enough momentum to pull Julia, who still had a grip on his tie, up and over.
Julia jumped up as he squawked. She had not ridden on a man’s man since she was three. She landed on all fours, her hands square on top of Arthur’s extremely dull disquisition on Thomas Jefferson and religious change.
Sitting up, Arthur might have caught an indiscreet glimpse of his future had he not had to roll away or get kicked in the face as Julia scrambled to catch a stray page of trivia about Amalric of the Ostrogoths. What his eyes spotted instead was his forlorn, empty bookbag. He took hold of that as he came around.
He was already moving it when he realized one of Julia’s feet was caught in a canvas handle. He did not have time to slow down, and Julia landed hard in the dewy grass as pages flew up from under her hands.
Arthur got his feet under him. “I’m really….”
“You’re sorry!” snapped Julia. “I’ve heard it before!” She caught up the heaviest thing at hand and flung it up at him.
Paul had no interest at all in his Business Administration minor, but his parents had insisted. The Public Relations textbook flying through the air represented two weeks’ salary at his cafeteria plate-scraping job. It was going to miss him high and wide: to catch it, he needed to jump up on the bench.
Julia repented the second the book left her hand, charging after it. You didn’t throw textbooks, which cost their weight in dollar bills. It was in Arthur’s hand by now: such heavy reading sent him backward over the bench. Julia had to skid sharply to avoid dark brown shoes, and sat down hard in front of the bench. She was up again almost immediately, flailing at the stapler which had slid under her just before she landed. This left her no time to notice the figure limping around the bench. The two heads which came together should have been used to this by now.
She caught hold of his shoulders; he grabbed an arm. For a moment they clung to each other, huddling for protection against what was obviously a hostile universe.
Arthur came to his senses and tried to push her away, but Julia pulled him closer. “Listen!” she whispered. “We’ve got to do this scientifically.”
“Got it,” Arthur replied. “You grab the books, and I’ll get all the papers together.”
“Sounds good,” murmured Julia. “On three? One…two…three!”
They dropped away from each other, moving on all fours through the dirt and scraggled grass. Julia snagged the stapler first, while Arthur slapped his hands down on pages of Jefferson. From the stapler, Julia moved to the Public relations text, bouncing back for a moment when the wind ruffled the pages at her. But the best defense…she pounced on the book.
Julia had more to handle, by weight, but the books took less actual travel. Arthur found that a list of Ostrogothic kings could apparently take wing without warning, apparently aiming for the next zip code. He threw himself bodily on the sheet of paper, and took on a grim grin as it crumpled beneath him.
Julia moved more slowly: she had already encountered a stapler, and she knew pencils lay in wait, their leads all sharp for the dense. Then, too, she had to keep part of an eye on the unguided and possibly lethally thick skull of her fellow hunter, bounding after loose paper. Arthur was doing his best, for his part, to follow paper and watch out for her remarkably solid cranium. Eyes may stray, though, while two people crawl on all fours around spots where dogs had paused.
“Gotcha!” cried Arthur, snatching at a pair of fugitive fragments of his genius. He wasn’t aiming to bump hips with Julia, but he hadn’t done much to prevent it, either. The papers crumpled in his grasp as she swung her hips right back at him, nearly knocking him over.
“You play fair or I’m telling the lifeguard,” he snarled, shoving a hand against her to push off in pursuit of another list of Ostrogoths, just as she was about to snag a pen.
Eventually, she rose, pens and such tucked in the canvas bag, books stacked by size in her arms. “This might be all,’ she called. “Did you have four pencils and a pen?”
“Just right,” said Arthur, coming up from under the bench, a massive wad of undergraduate notes clutched to his chest. “Let’s see what’s here.”
Julia came to her feet, looking around. “I don’t see any more. “You must have….” She turned to face him, and found no face. Looking down, she found him sitting crosslegged in the dirt, the papers heaped in the fortress formed by calves and thighs.
She set the books on the bench and came back up, her head cocked to one side. “You want some fresh ground pepper on that salad?”
“No, thank you. And I didn’t order these assorted greens.” Arthur plucked a few leaves from among the paper and flung them aside.
Julia watched him sort the pages into piles, feeling a little ridiculous so many miles above him. Checking her skirt and seeing it was already grass-stained, she sat down across from him, just in time to keep the fourth pile from taking off in a sudden breeze.
“I guess we can’t drop anything if we’re down here already.” She tucked one ankle under herself. He grinned up at her; she was still taller even sitting down. “Oh, don’t bet on me when it comes to dropping things. I could drop a porcupine cover with Krazy Glue.”
She laughed, and pushed her disarranged hair back from her forehead. “My name’s Julia, by the way.”
“I saw that.” He pointed to her name on the first stack of paper, and shifted the finger to the next stack. “I’m Arthur.” The finger moved on to the third stack. “I see you’ve got Dr. Bronson this semester. What’s he like?”
“Sweat. He likes sweat on the faces of students who can’t guess what he’s going to do next. I’m glad to have those. I could have printed out new pages, but those have all my corrections, and I don’t want to start over. He’ll ask for them two days before I expect.”
“Thanks for the warning: I’ve got him in spring. I’ll lay in some aspirin.”
“Tranquilizers,” she corrected. “And don’t get him the period after lunch. Bad for your digestion.”
“Maybe I’ll change my major to Physical Education.” Arthur glanced at his watch. “Speaking of digestion, it’s about time for breakfast.”
Julia didn’t often eat breakfast, but it sounded like a good idea just now, perhaps due to all this exercise.
She set her hands on the bench to pull herself up. Nearly there, she whirled, almost falling back on top of him. Arthur put up both hands to catch her, abandoning the piles of paper he had so painstakingly gathered.
“Are you all right?” he demanded. “What happened?”
Her eyes narrowed in suspicion but, realizing he had been down on the ground all along, pulled herself back up. “I’m okay.”
“All right.” Arthur pulled the four piles of paper together into one. “Um, I like your perfume, by the way.”
“I’m not wearing any.” Julia reached for the stack of textbooks but paused, looking back at him under the crook of her elbow. “Why shouldn’t I remember you, with all these bruises?”
She was frowning. Arthur frowned back. “What?”
She straightened, the books gathered between her arms. “Didn’t you just…whisper in my ear that I should remember you?”
“No. But it’s not a bad idea.” Arthur reached past her and took up his canvas bag. Shaking it a little, he held it open. “Here. Unless you want to carry my books to school for me.”
Her mouth jerked up on one side. “Put the papers in there. They won’t get away this time.”
“Good thought.” He slid the stack in among his pencils. “Ready?”
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