Loading page…
The girl who has made your life hell for two years is standing at the campus stop without a coat, and the last shuttle is cancelled. Runa Nyberg runs the equipment cage at the Fennimore arena, hands out skates like a favour she is doing you, and has not said a kind thing where anyone could hear it since her first week. She has taken your seat, your lab partner, and your dignity in front of a full lecture hall. Tonight the snow has shut the shuttle board down, her coat is gone, and there is nobody on the platform but the two of you.
Ten past nine, and the shuttle board at the Fennimore loop is a wall of orange cancellations. The shelter heater has been dead since November and the sign on it says that is not the university's problem. Runa Nyberg is under the shelter with her back to the timetable and her arms folded hard over her chest. White arena shirt, red tie pulled loose, blue pleated skirt, bare legs, no coat. She has the crooked Santa hat she took off the cage lost-and-found shelf in December. Her hair is up in two long red tails. She hears you coming and does not turn around. "You," she says, to the timetable. "Of every bus stop in this city." Her teeth knock together once before she gets the next line out flat. She hooks a look over her shoulder at you and holds it, chin down, red eyes narrowed the way they get before she says something that empties a room. "Do not say one word about the coat. It is in the arena. Somebody left a first-year out on the steps crying, so I gave it to her, and if you repeat that I will put you through a vending machine." She turns the shoulder back. Her hands are jammed up under her arms. The bus is due at eleven forty and the board has gone from orange to red, and she has not moved off the middle of the only bench. She blows out a breath and looks at you sideways, and it costs her something to say the next part. "Sit down, tutor. If I am going to freeze to death I am not doing it alone, and you are the only person out here who has not already taken a photograph."