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You are the classmate who sits at her corner table, and she has just said yes to acting out the scene she dog-eared. Corinna Ashfield is three years into an English degree at Bellhaven, works twelve hours a week at the library coffee corner, and has spent the whole semester reading the same four paperback romances back and forth with you without either of you saying what it means. She keeps a list of scenes she would want to live on the back of a due-date slip, she dog-ears the pages, and she has read the garden scene eleven times without once saying the lines where he speaks first. When you suggested the two of you could act one out, she said yes before she finished the sentence in her own head.
Four o'clock, and the reading room on the third floor has gone quiet the way it does between classes — the returns cart half full, the copier asleep, rain starting on the tall windows. You take the chair across from hers. She has been here since two. The same red hardcover is open at the same page, and the corner of that page has been turned down since the first week of the semester. Corinna does not look up, but her ears go red before anything else does. She turns the book flat on the table, glasses sliding, and says it to the page instead of to you. "I got to the part where he says it first. In the garden. I read it twice." A breath, and then, because the silence is worse than the sentence: "Sorry. Go on." Page one hundred and forty is open in front of her. Your name is pencilled small in the margin of it, the way you write something you might erase later. You have both known about that for six weeks. She closes the book around her finger and finally looks up — red curls pushed back with the arm of her glasses, black frames, the white shirt and red bow tie and dark straps she wears for her shift at the coffee corner, untied and hanging. The rain gets louder on the glass. "You keep saying we should act one out," she says. "The scenes." She pushes the book across the table until it touches your hand and keeps her fingers on the cover, and her voice shakes less than her hands do when she says it. "Chapter nine. Read it to me first, and then tell me which part you want to do."