Chapter 3 #2
“Amir lets it happen in the alley,” I say. “He lets it happen because he wants the kite, and he wants his father to look at him the way his father looks at Hassan. He spends the rest of the book figuring out he can’t have both of those things and lying about which one he wanted.”
She looks at me.
I drink my beer.
The city makes a low sound around us. Tires on wet pavement somewhere below. A horn two blocks over. The roof holds the cool air between us like it has decided this conversation matters and wants to hear the rest.
She says, “Huh.”
“Huh?”
She shrugs. “You seem to like reading. What’s next? You’re going to tell me you read The Hunger Games trilogy?”
“My sister made me.”
“Your sister has taste.”
“My sister is also terrifying.”
“Even better.”
“I stopped her at Twilight.”
Livia laughs then.
Not loud, exactly, but fuller than the almost-smiles. The sound moves across the roof with enough force to make me look away for half a second. Not because I am embarrassed.
Because I want to look too much.
“I bet you’d be Team Edward,” she says.
“No. I’m Team ‘I’ll Never Read It.’”
“Coward.”
“Survivor.”
She lets the smile stay this time. Just for a second. Then she goes back to the considered, slightly arched face of a woman who has decided I’m acceptable but is not ready to commit to anything stronger until further information becomes available.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Creed.”
“Creed.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a name?”
I grimace.“My mother liked it.”
“Was your mother a fan of believing things?”
“My mother is a fan of having strong opinions and naming her children before her husband could object.”
“Smart.”
“What’s yours?”
“Livia.”
“Livia,” I repeat. “It’s beautiful.”
She shrugs like compliments are objects she doesn't know where to put.
“Like Augustus’s wife,” I add.
“Yes . . .” She stops and gives me a look.
She had not, I think, expected that.
The face she makes is the face of a person being mildly surprised by a man on a roof, and the face is, frankly, devastating.
It is the face of a woman who has spent her entire life explaining that no, it is not Olivia.
And yes, Livia is a real name: and no, her parents weren't trying to be difficult on purpose, although evidence suggests they may have enjoyed the outcome.
“Sabine,” she says after a moment. “Livia Sabine Crane.”
“Three names.”
“My mother is also a fan of having strong opinions and naming her children before her husband can object.”
“Hers might be a worse case than mine.”
“Significantly worse.”
I take another drink.
She wraps her arms around herself.
I don't say anything for a moment. She is sitting on our shared roof in her pajamas with her arms tucked around a sweater too big for her, and she has just read both Cloud Atlas and The Kite Runner and made jokes about both.
The correct move is to let the silence sit for a beat and not fill it with whatever stupid thing my twenty-two-year-old mouth might decide is useful.
She fills it.
“So what do you do, Creed?”
“I play hockey,” I say. “For the Night Hawks.”
She blinks.
“I don’t really follow hockey.”
“Okay.”
“My parents are golf and tennis people. I have spent a lot of my life at country clubs being polite about handicaps.” She rolls her eyes. “Don’t judge me. I didn’t choose that life.”
“That sounds like its own form of suffering.”
“I sat through a six-hour Masters dinner once.”
“I am so sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you.” Her gaze narrows with interest. “So. Night Hawks. Are you good at it?”
I look at her.
She asks it the way you ask a person about their job when you genuinely have no information and want to know if they are good at it the way they say they are.
“I’m okay,” I say. “I’m in my second year. I’m a defenseman. I get on the ice a lot. I’m not the guy people come to see, but I’m the guy people pay attention to if they know the sport.”
“Do you like it?”
That catches me.
It shouldn’t.
People ask if I am good. If I am tired. If I am ready.
If I think we have a shot this year. Reporters ask about systems, pressure, matchups, minutes.
Coaches ask if I can go. My father asks if I am taking care of my body.
My mother asks if I am eating enough, then ships food regardless of my answer.
Do you like it?
The question is too simple to be easy.
She is good.
I am beginning to realize she is very good.
“Yes,” I say.
She waits.
The air shifts again, cool against the back of my neck.
“I love it,” I admit.
Her face softens, but only a little. She will not rescue me from my own answer.
“Why?”
I look out over the park.
Because there is a second before a play breaks when everything becomes honest. Because a forward can lie with his eyes, his shoulders, his stick, but his skates always confess. Because the ice tells the truth faster than people do.
“Because it’s the one thing I do where my body and my head are in the same sentence,” I admit. “Most of the time, my body knows something is happening, and my head is half a second behind. On the ice, they arrive together.”
“You might teach me to like hockey,” she says and then looks away first, toward the river, and I understand that she has heard more than I meant to say.
For a minute, neither of us speaks.
Livia tucks one sleeve-covered hand under the other arm.
“What about you?” I ask.
“What about me?”
“What do you do, Livia Sabine?”
Her mouth opens. Then closes.
“I go to Columbia,” she says. “Art History and Chemistry.”
“Those are two things.”
“They’re related.”
“In what universe?”
“In the universe where you want to know whether a painting is a forgery, and the only way to know is to ask the canvas, and the canvas only talks to chemists.”
Then, before I can say anything, she asks, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
She nods. “Acceptable.”
“Acceptable for what?”
She smiles.
She lets it happen this time. Full. Wide. Not for half a second, not buried, but the whole smile arriving and settling on her face like she’s done pretending she’s not having a good time.
“For sharing a roof,” she says.
“Right.”
“What did you think I meant?”
“I refuse to answer that.”
“Smart.”
We are on the roof for another forty or so minutes.
She tells me she just moved into the building three days ago.
Her mother didn’t like her roommate and made it a whole thing—too embarrassing to keep a friendship.
She’s on the ninth floor, two below me, in an apartment her parents picked because the building has a doorman with thirty-two years of experience and they decided that was sufficient information.
She hasn’t unpacked. She has eaten three meals at the Vietnamese place on Columbus because she doesn’t yet know how to cook and isn’t yet ready to find out.
She is reading Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass for the third time, because every September she rereads His Dark Materials, and apparently September makes her nervous.
“You have a seasonal anxiety novel?” I ask.
“Trilogy,” she corrects, without looking up.
“That feels worse.”
“It’s organized.”
I tell her I read His Dark Materials once and didn’t get the fuss.
She looks at me like I have admitted to a small criminal record.
“You didn’t get it.”
“The compass thing seemed busy.”
“Read it again,” she orders, appalled.
“Why?”
“Because the books are about a girl who realizes the adults lying to her aren’t smarter or kinder or more moral than she is,” she says. “They just got to the lies first. So she learns how to lie back, and you’re going to find that information useful at some point in your life.”
I look at her for a second.
“That’s what you took from the talking bears?”
“Armored bears,” she corrects. “And yes. Some lies trap you. Some lies keep you alive. The trick is knowing which one you’re playing.”
“That sounds useful?”
“As I said, you’re going to find it useful at some point in your life.” She shrugs one shoulder.
I sit with that for a long second.
“I’ll read it again,” I say.
“Good.”
Around midnight, she stands up and stretches and announces, with no preamble, that she is going to bed.
I stand up too. Habit. Manners.
“I’ll walk you down,” I say.
“I live in the same building.”
“I know.”
“You don’t have to walk me down.”
“I know that too.”
She considers me for about three seconds. Which is, I’m learning, the full duration of Livia Sabine Crane’s consideration window. After three seconds, you have either passed her test or you haven’t.
“Okay,” she says.
We take the back stairs.
I let her go first because the stairs are narrow and the back-stair railing is somebody’s idea from 1923 of a railing, and if she missed a step, I would rather catch her from behind than from above.
She doesn’t miss a step. She walks down the two flights ahead of me with the same comfortable competence with which she sat on the parapet, and when we get to the ninth-floor landing, she pushes the door open and holds it.
Her apartment is the second one on the left. 9B.
She stops at her door. Hand on the knob.
“Creed.”
“Yeah?”
“What are you doing tomorrow night at eleven?”She asks.
“Reading Cloud Atlas.”
“Are you going to be insufferable about it?”
“Probably,” I say.
“All right. I’ll see you up there.”
“Yeah.”
She opens the door.
She stops with one foot inside and turns back to look at me then says, “Have a good night, Creed, and thank you for the company.”
She is on the roof the next night at eleven.
I am on the roof the next night at eleven.
We sit diplomatically at a forty-five-degree angle facing each other, and she gives me grief about Cloud Atlas, and I give her grief about The Subtle Knife, and at one o’clock in the morning, we go down the back stairs.
She stops at 9B and says, “Same time tomorrow,” and I say, “Yeah,” and we do this—we, plural, like a unit — for the next three weeks before either of us figures out we are doing it.