The Office of the Registrar closed at 4, and the clerk looked like he wanted to be there even less than Daniel did.
She slid the driver’s license to him.
He picked it up, checked the photo, and looked up at the woman sittting in front of him. Then he looked back down at the photo. Then up again, and then he couldn’t seem to look anywhere else at all, and his face went a deep and immediate red.
“It’s me,” she said, her face fixed in an unconvincing smile.
He handed the license back and started typing.
She tugged her collar straight. The shirt was one of the two that still sort of worked, which meant it was enormous everywhere except for two unfortunate buttons, and she’d been adjusting it roughly every ninety seconds since eight that morning. It hadn’t kept anyone from staring.
She and Nate had managed to put a couple of new holes in her belt, which was the only reason the pants were still up. The length, mercifully, was about right - she’d been surprised by that. Everything else was hopeless. The shoes were the worst of it. Tied as tight as they’d go, her heels still came out with every step, and she’d spent the whole day gripping with her toes to keep them on.
“Okay,” the clerk said, to his monitor. “So this is a Section Four.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s a lot of pages.” He pulled a stack out of a drawer - an actual stack, held together with a binder clip - and set it down between them with a sound like a phone book hitting a table. “Legal name, gender, housing, medical, athletics. Everything routes through here at the end. That’s why you’ve been to four other buildings today.”
“Five.”
“Five.” He clicked a pen and offered it to her. As she took it, he looked up again and flashed a smile Daniel had been seeing on a lot of faces lately.
“You want a drink or anything?” he asked, in the tone of a man making conversation about the weather. “It’s a lot of pages.”
She looked at the stack as if he’d put a piece of roadkill on the desk. “I’m okay.”
“Oh. All right.”
They started.
It went the way the other four had gone, like the slow, boring cousin of a root canal. He read a field, she answered, he typed it, they moved on. Date of birth. Permanent address. Emergency contact - she gave her mother’s number in Seattle and did not want to think about that phone call, which was tomorrow’s problem. Height, five nine, a full four inches shorter. Weight, she’d been afraid to look. Hair, she hadn’t been sure herself; Keiko and a council of girls from the floor hadn’t been sure either and had settled on strawberry blonde. She just said blonde. Eyes, blue. She’d caught herself in the bathroom mirror a couple of times that week and been startled both times.
Around page nine she got curious.
“So,” she asked, “does this happen a lot?”
The clerk kept typing. He was making a studied effort not to look at her again, which she’d noticed about ten minutes ago and had privately decided was the most respectful thing anyone had done for her all day.
“Wouldn’t say a lot,” he said. “Couple years back there was a guy in the Japan program, did something stupid at an Inari shrine. Came back like that.” He shrugged. “Pissed off a fox, from what I heard.”
“Oh.”
Somewhere around page twenty they got to athletics.
It wasn’t announced. There was no moment. He turned a page in the stack, spun it around so it faced her, and put his finger next to a box.
“Initial here.”
She read it. It was four lines long and most of it was a statute number.
“This is the scholarship.”
“That’s the termination acknowledgment, yeah.” He was already looking at the next page. “Eligibility’s tied to the roster spot. Roster spot’s men’s track. You’re not on it anymore, so...”
“Oh.”
She initialed the box a bit more shakily than the others.
He took the page back, put it in the pile, and kept going. And that was it. It took her a moment to process the shock.
“So it’s gone?”
“Mhmm.”
“All of it?”
“Mhmm.”
“Even this year’s?”
“Mmhmm.”
Daniel stopped asking questions.
They did nine more pages.
“All right,” the clerk said. “Almost done. Last one’s the name.”
“We already did that.”
“The system’s going to keep generating flags every time somebody pulls your record. Housing, health center, the library, everybody. We can leave it as is, but -”
He pulled another form.
She looked at the stack. There was still an inch of it left.
“Oh, joy,” she groaned.
He typed it.
She looked up sharply, and had her mouth halfway open to say something before she realized she didn’t actually have a better idea. If she stopped him now she’d have to think about it, and thinking about it would take time, and there was still an inch of stack left.
That, and she really didn’t want to think about it right now. It could get in line with the rest of her problems.
“Added.” He pointed with the pen. “Now over here for your new student ID photo.”
Outside, the light was doing the thing it did in September, going gold across the plaza and making everything look picturesque, beauttiful, and suddenly far out of her price range.
She had wanted to run home.
Running cleared her head. She’d done it whenever something was bothering her, and right now she was having trouble thinking of anything that wasn’t.
But her focus slipped, then her toes with it. Her heel came out of the shoe again. She swore and worked her foot back in. Running was not on the menu. Running was for people who owned clothes that fit.
Forty feet of shuffling later, something crossed her mind that wasn’t financial ruin or footwear.
“Joy,” she said.
It sounded like nothing. It sounded like a word she’d read off a box of cereal.
She kept walking, past the fountain, and tried it again with a little more in it.
“Joy.”
Better. It had some shape to it that way.
“Joy!”
That one carried. Two girls coming the other way looked over, and a guy on a bench looked up from his laptop, and for the first time that week, Joy was smiling.
Dogwood smelled the way all the dorms did. Cheap food, chemical cleaner, weed, and things that probably should have been cleaned months ago. Joy walked past a number of open doors, people looking up wordlessly as she passed. Most of the floor didn’t know who she was yet, and after the day she’d had, she was a little grateful for that.
As she walked toward her room, a blur shot through an open doorway straight at her head.
Her body moved before her thoughts did. She snapped backward with the same explosive speed Daniel had used coming out of the starting blocks, one heel sliding halfway out of her shoe as she threw up a hand and snatched the object from the air.
A coffee cup.
She stared at it.
That’d been lucky.
“That’s not what I meant by ‘toss me my cup,’ dumbass!”
A guy stepped out of the room and stopped when he saw her. Derek. He and Alex lived next door, and Daniel had spent plenty of time in their room, shoulder to shoulder with them over Alex’s Xbox. From the look on Derek’s face, he had no idea who she was.
“Hey.” His face broke into the same dumb smile the clerk had been wearing earlier.
“Hey.”
He glanced at the cup in her hand, then back at her. “Nice catch. Sorry about that. My roommate can’t throw.”
“No, you just can’t catch worth shit!” Alex shot back from inside.
Derek ignored him. “Don’t think I’ve seen you around here before.”
Joy gave him a nervous smile as she handed the cup back. “Really? I’m around here all the time.”
“Then I clearly haven’t been paying enough attention.” He smiled, visibly pleased with the recovery.
“Derek, quit failing to impress her and get in here! I’m getting my ass kicked!”
Derek turned to shout something back. Joy squeezed past him and escaped into the room she shared with Nate.
Nate Reyes was at his desk, busy with a hair dryer.
The desk lamp was in pieces in front of him - shade, harp, socket, three screws lined up on a Post-it in order of size - and he had the hair dryer aimed into the base of it on what she assumed was the low setting.
He glanced up when she came in. Then he went back to the lamp.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” She stopped. “Is that my hair dryer.”
“Yup, lamp decided to die, getting some corrosion scrubbed off of it."
“Nate, it’s a twenty dollar lamp.”
“It’s a twenty dollar lamp somebody threw away,” Nate said, “which is how I got it.”
She tossed the binder full of paperwork up onto her bunk, then crashed down onto the vacant one below that she and Nate had turned into an improvised couch.
“How’d it go?”
“Well,” she said, tossing her head back and putting a hand over her eyes with an exasperated sigh. “I’m Joy now.”
“Hm?”
“My name. Had to pick a new one.”
Nate turned the hair dryer off and turned around to look at her. He thought about it for a second, the way he thought about everything, which was longer than most people would and with more of his face involved.
“Suits you.”
Joy did not have the energy to construct a reply. She grabbed a cushion without moving the hand over her eyes and threw it in his general direction.
“Asshole.”
Nate laughed and went back to the lamp. The hair dryer started up again.
She slumped back on the couch and parted her fingers, looking at the slight splintering in the wood that held her bunk up. She had been staring at it since move-in, and she was going to keep staring at it, apparently, for three more years. Assuming three more years happened.
“They took the scholarship,” she said.
The hair dryer stopped.
“Because of track.”
“Because of track.”
Nate set the hair dryer down on the desk and turned around in his chair. Joy frowned. He didn’t do that often.
“So why can’t the women’s team pick up the scholarship? You’ve got to still be fast, even after…” He waved his hand up and down Joy for emphasis.
“I asked. They don’t have an open scholarship slot this year.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
They sat there in silence for a moment, Joy staring down at her lap.
“So how much?” he said.
“For the whole thing? Tuition, housing, fees, all of it, through graduation?”
“Yeah.”
“About a quarter million.”
Nate looked at her.
“Shit,” was all he could say. “Can you do, like, a payment plan or something?”
“Good news there, there is a payment plan. The payment plan is that you pay them a couple hundred thousand dollars and change.”
“Shit,” Nate said again.
“Better news is I only need about a hundred thousand of it by the end of this year.”
“That’s pretty crappy as good news goes.”
“Yeah,” Joy said, folding a leg under herself.
“Okay.” He turned back around, picked up the smallest of the three screws, and put it down again. “Loans?”
“No cosigner. Mom and Dad’s credit is what it is since their business went under.”
“Job?”
“Sure. Know any companies with a CEO opening looking for somebody whose résumé begins and ends with ‘some college’?”
“Yeah, yeah. Fair enough.”
She let her arm fall. Somewhere down the hall a door slammed and somebody yelled something about a charger.
“So what are you going to do?” he said.
She thought about it. She thought about it properly, for a good four or five seconds, longer than she’d thought about her own name, and out of the whole enormous unmanageable shape of the thing, exactly one idea presented itself.
“How much do you think a kidney’s worth?”
“Yours or mine?”
“Let’s start with mine.” Joy held up a hand and started counting. “I’m young. I’m an athlete. I have never done a single interesting thing to my body in my entire life, which as of last Tuesday is an absolutely hilarious sentence-”
“Joy.”
“-I am, and I want you to really sit with this, low mileage-”
“Joy.”
“I’m saying it’s a good kidney, Nate.”
Nate turned the lamp base over in his hands, checking the underside, thinking about it.
“Depends who’s buying,” he said.
Joy tucked her other leg under her and sighed. “Pretty sure whoever it is, it’s going to take a lot of kidneys to-”
The door flew open.
“Dude, Nate, I just ran into the hottest girl in the hall. She caught Alex’s cup one-handed, and she was totally into-”
Derek saw Joy sitting on the lower bunk. He stopped.
Joy stared at him.
Nate stared at him.
Derek’s mouth remained open, but nothing else came out.
Nate lasted two seconds. Joy made it three. Then they were both doubled over laughing.