Chapter 2
Campus was a map drawn for a different kind of person.
Lina stood under the clock tower with the welcome folder pressed to her chest and felt the city lean over her.
The tower’s shadow cut the quad into two temperatures: sun on the brick, cold in the shade.
Students moved in packs, coffee cups, lanyards, a laugh that jumped from one group to another like a ball.
Someone shouted a name across the grass.
A skateboard whispered behind her and a boy missed her suitcase-bag by a hand’s width.
“Sorry, babe,” he said, already gone.
In Vilnius she knew which doors were quiet. The old courtyard. The side entrance of the library where the heaters ticked. Here every door seemed to open on noise and carpet and a smell of printer ink and damp jackets.
The ID office gave her a card with a bad photo.
Her own face looked startled, glasses-catching the flash, mouth not ready.
The bookstore swallowed her in orange sale signs.
Textbooks stacked like bricks. The receipt was a strip of paper that felt like a small rent payment.
She folded it into the welcome folder so it would not get lost, then felt foolish for treating a receipt like a document.
The library was better.
Stone steps. A smell of dust and heat. She found a chair that faced a window so she could look at trees instead of people.
The trees here were taller than she expected, still holding late leaves.
She mapped bus routes in her notebook: neat columns, arrows, Lithuanian notes in the margin.
If she could ride the bus she would not have to ask Cole or Ryan.
If she could ride the bus Mark would not need to drive and watch her in the rearview like the airport run.
At noon she ate bread from her suitcase on a bench. The crust was dry from the plane day. She picked it apart and watched a couple kiss on the quad as if the grass were a locked room. The girl’s hands were in the boy’s hair. Lina looked at her own hands, at the notebook, at a pigeon working a crumb.
She wrote *museum list* and numbered the first five in small careful numbers.
Her phone buzzed.
Mark: Need a pickup? Campus can eat you alive the first week.
Lina: I will take the bus. Thank you.
She added a period so it would sound certain.
The bus was simple in the way machines are simple.
Exact change. A recorded voice naming stops.
A man in a work jacket slept against the window.
Lina held the rail and watched the city repeat itself: lots, chain stores, a church with an electric sign, then quieter streets with big houses and bins at the curb.
Her stop smelled like cut grass and someone’s dryer vent.
Diane had left a note on the kitchen counter, paper torn from a pad with fruit on it.
*Snacks in fridge. Rest. Dinner 6:30. Welcome again. — D*
The fridge was full in a way that felt like showing off: yogurt, grapes, leftover chicken in glass.
Lina took an apple because an apple was a thing she understood.
She carried it upstairs. The guest room still smelled like laundry soap and empty wood.
She shut the door and looked at the chair she had used last night.
In daylight it looked childish, a student’s trick. She left it in the corner.
The syllabus waited on the desk. English words for requirements piled up: participation, office hours, academic integrity.
She translated half of them and still felt behind, as if the semester had started without her body.
Tomas would say she was ahead. Tomas was a small square of light on a laptop, not in this pale room with the street outside.
Footsteps in the hall. Two sets. The same laugh split in two.
They did not knock.
Cole’s head came in first, scar at the eyebrow, grin already on. “You’re home. Ryan said you’d get lost and we’d have to put your face on a pole.”
“I did not get lost.”
Ryan leaned on the frame, arms crossed, looking at the apple, the notebook, her cardigan. “Campus big?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll show you the good coffee. Not the library sludge.”
“I have a list,” Lina said. She lifted the notebook a little, like proof. “Museums. Library. That is enough.”
Cole’s grin widened. “She’s got a list. We’re doomed.”
Ryan’s eyes sat on her mouth when she said *enough*.
“You can close the door when you leave,” Lina said.
They left. The door stayed open on purpose or laziness. She stood and closed it. The click was small. It did not make a lock.
She ate the apple down to the core and wrapped the core in a tissue so the room would not smell sweet.
Dinner was pasta in a wide bowl, steam on Diane’s glasses, a candle Diane lit and then forgot. Mark poured wine for the table and paused the bottle over Lina’s glass. Red hovered.
“Sure? Welcome week.”
“I don’t drink. Thank you.”
Ryan mouthed *nun* at Cole. Cole kicked him. The table jumped. Diane said their names without heat.
Mark asked about Lithuania as if it were a model he could put on the shelf. Parents. Winter. Why this campus. Lina answered in short sentences and felt him watch her throat when she swallowed water. She set the glass down too carefully, the way you set down a thing that has been observed.
“They said study and come back,” she finished.
“Careful’s good,” Mark said. “Careful girls last.”
Diane’s fork paused, then went to the pasta again.
“What do you want from the city?” Mark asked.
“Old buildings. Art. To walk without getting in the way.”
“You’re not in the way.”
The sentence sat in the candle smoke. Lina looked at her plate.
After dishes they put on a movie she had not chosen.
The couch was too soft. She took the end cushion and buttoned the last button on her cardigan.
Cole dropped into the middle and stretched until his knee found hers.
Warm through two layers of cloth. She moved her knee.
He moved his back, patient, like the register lesson in a shop she had not entered yet.
On the screen people ran. In the room Ryan lay on the rug and looked up at her.
“All Lithuanian girls this quiet?”
She thought it was a joke. She laughed the small laugh she used at relatives’ tables.
“No. I am only me.”
“Only you is working,” Cole said.
Diane said, “Cole,” and did not look away from the exploding car.
Lina waited for a loud scene, murmured that she had reading, and took the stairs.
The guest room felt like a held breath. She turned on the desk lamp and the window went black, her own face floating in it: tired mouth, careful hair, a girl who had laughed when she should have said less.
She studied until midnight. Vocabulary in lists.
Bus times copied again though she already knew them.
A paragraph about a painting she had not yet seen, practice English, the sentences stiff as new shoes.
The house settled under her. Television bass.
Water in the walls. Mark in the hall telling the twins to go to bed as if they were still boys with backpacks.
The laptop chimed.
Tomas. Evening on his side, a lamp she knew, the corner of their river in a poster behind him.
Lithuanian filled the room and her shoulders dropped a centimeter.
“I miss you,” he said.
“I miss you.” She meant him. She also meant the version of herself that had packed extra socks and believed socks were the largest problem waiting overseas. “Campus is large. I found the library. I drew the buses.”
“You sound far.”
“It is far.”
“The family?”
“Kind. Loud. The mother cooks too much. I am fine.”
Fine again. The word was getting thin.
Tomas tapped the camera with one finger. “Eat more than bread. Sleep. Dream of the river, not their kitchen.”
“I will try.”
After the call the screen went dark and the house noises came back in. No footsteps this time. A laugh behind the twins’ door, cut off. Ice falling in the fridge downstairs, a sound like a small collapse.
Lina opened the notebook.
*City bigger than my head.*
*Wine no.*
*Mark watches when I drink water.*
*Cole’s knee.*
*Ryan thinks quiet is a type.*
*I laughed. I should not have laughed.*
*Tomas tapped the glass. I almost told him about the door.*
She put on socks. White. Doubled. She did not drag the chair to the knob. She told herself that was progress and not surrender.
She missed Tomas.
She missed the girl who only wanted museums and a library chair by a window.
Both absences fit under the cardigan.
Sleep came late. The movie’s explosions still lived in the drywall. Somewhere a phone buzzed on a wood floor. One twin laughed into a pillow.
Lina turned her face into the guest-room case, the soap smell of it.
Tomorrow she would ride the bus she had drawn in ink. She would find the second museum if the hours were true. She would sit in the library until this house felt like a place she only slept in, a station, not a plot.
That was the plan.
The plan did not include a knee that followed hers or a host father’s gaze resting on the swallow in her throat.
She added those to the list of American things she would get used to.
Getting used to them already felt like a small betrayal of the boy in the evening lamp.
She slept in her socks.
The door stayed unlocked because the house said family, and family, here, meant no click from the inside.
Morning would be a recorded bus voice and a clock tower and a list written in ink she could still control.
Ink did not watch her swallow.
Ink did not sit too close.
Ink, at least, stayed where she put it.