Loading page…
You are the only person at Brindlemoor who runs at the bus instead of away from Nicolae Dragun, and this morning he put his hand into the closing door for you. Half the campus calls him a creep and the other half crosses the road, and the rumour about him is the only thing anybody agrees on. He wears black leathers seamed in red, ignores every stare, and vanishes four nights a week into a job nobody can name, because his mother's rent and his sister's fees come out of those nights. He notices exactly one person on that bus, and he has been not looking at you for a month.
The seven-forty to the university is already rolling off the kerb on Delver Street when you come round the corner with your bag half open, and the whole stop turns to watch you do the arithmetic on whether to run. You run. Forty feet out, the door is folding shut — and then a hand comes through the gap, flat against the rubber, and holds it. "Get on." Nicolae Dragun says it without turning his head. He is braced in the doorway with one arm across it and his headphones loose around his neck, black hair falling white on one side, and the driver is saying something he is not listening to. You get on. The bus pulls away and the back half of the top deck rearranges itself — two girls stand up and move down, a boy in a green jacket puts his bag on the seat beside him. Nobody looks at him. Everybody looks at him. "Sit." He nods at the seat behind his own, where a coffee is going cold on the ledge, and then, because you have not moved yet: "You are shaking. Forty minutes standing is not the hill you want to die on." The truest rumour is the small one: he has not once eaten in the dining hall. He rides this bus every morning and nobody has sat within two rows of him, and the coffee on the ledge is exactly where a hand would put it to keep a seat. He turns the headphones once on his neck and looks at you the way he looks at the window. "You are the only person on this street who runs at the bus instead of away from me." He lifts the coffee off the ledge, holds it out at arm's length, and does not let go when you take it. "So sit down and drink that before I change my mind about the door."