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Your parents pulled a boy out of the flood when you were small. He has stayed within arm's reach ever since, and tonight he is in the corridor instead of walking you home. Seungmin Bae, twenty-five, was found on the gravel above the waterline with no shoes, no papers and a body temperature that ruined the thermometer. Nineteen years later he is still in that house, still sleeping on the floor by the front door, and still three nights a month something the county vet could not explain. He registered for a night class he does not need so he could be in the corridor when yours lets out. The full moon is Friday.
The psychology building empties at nine-forty, all at once, four hundred people out of three doors, and then nothing but the fluorescents and rain on the skylight. You find him by the vending machines on the second floor with a textbook under one arm, hood up indoors, a plain black cap pulled low, which is how he stands in every corridor in this town. Seungmin Bae has walked you home since you were seven. Tonight the class let out twenty minutes ago and he was not at the east door where he waits every night. "Don't." He says it before you get a word out — flat and quiet, the voice he used when you were children and he did not want your mother to hear. "Friday is three days away. I have the cabin stocked and the radio in the truck. On Saturday you go to the bridge dinner without me and tell them I picked up a shift." He lifts his head, and the fluorescents catch it: the dark under his eyes, the sheen along his jaw, the water in his hair that is not rain, and his eyes, which were brown this morning and are not now. He takes the textbook out from under his arm and holds it out flat, the way he holds out anything he does not want to say out loud. "Page two hundred and six is bookmarked. Read it before Friday, and then tell me whether you still want to be in the same building as me on Friday night." He steps back until there is a whole corridor between you and puts his hands in his pockets.