Teddy Wayne - Loner

“So far so good,” I said.

“Hey, mind if I do some reading?” you asked, taking out the course pack for Gender and the Consumerist Impulse.

Sometimes I wonder if, having the ability to time travel back to certain moments in which our fear or impulsiveness got the best of us and resulted in an unsatisfying outcome, we would actually alter our behavior knowing what we know now, or if we would end up repeating exactly what we did the first time, surrendering to those elemental directives, incapable of deviating from some preordained essence of our character.

“Be my guest,” I said, and typed up a flurry as if I’d just had a brainstorm, worried you might say you were ready to go to bed and I’d forfeit you altogether.

“How about this?” I read from the new paragraph: “ ‘Daisy can also be viewed as a—’ ”

“I trust your judgment,” you said. “You don’t have to ask my permission.”

A few minutes later you left for the bathroom. I had unsupervised access to your computer. After peeping around the corner to ensure you weren’t coming back early, I clicked on your web browser and visited Harvard’s webmail page, but you weren’t signed in.

I returned to Word, where, I realized, I could read the documents you’d recently opened without much trouble. That was my brand of espionage: rummaging through the academic papers of the object of my desire.

The file menu displayed the names of four documents: the Daisy Miller paper we (I) were currently working on; “de beauvoir response” (you’d read The Second Sex that week for Gender and the Consumerist Impulse, whose syllabus I had saved and been keeping track of); “darwin — worksheet 4,” apparently for the class on evolution I was kicking myself for not shopping; and one mysteriously labeled “log.”

A code name for your journal? An acronym for a list of guys you were dating? A poem about chopped wood?

I opened it. All it contained was a short list of dates, starting at 10/1 and ending the day before:

10/1: $200 dinner at Menton; $35 cab fare to/from — i

10/2: watched college football; $80 on food/drink — c

10/3: bought tampons at CVS ($4) — f

10/4: N/A

It was a confusing budget; I could see how an expensive dinner would rate a mention, but not why buying tampons would. And the codes of i, c , and f were even more perplexing.

You returned to your seat and startled me.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” you said.

“You didn’t,” I said, closing “log” and clicking again on the Daisy Miller essay so it appeared to be the last opened document. “I forgot to put in your TF’s name at the top. What is it?”

“Tom,” you said. “Tom Burkhart.” That was the grad student who had supplied the Blake quotation the first class, and since then, whenever Samuelson interrupted his lecture to invite the four teaching fellows to show off their familiarity with an esoteric line of poetry, he routinely spoke it in as offhand a tone as if stating the day of the week, so much so that Samuelson had begun asking Tom directly. (I always felt a prick of transitive rejection when my own TF, a dowdy woman named Harriet, stayed quiet.)

I typed in your first name, too, but before adding “Wells” I asked, “And your last name?”

You told me. “Acinorev sllew,” I said after I’d transcribed it.

“What?”

“That’s your name backward,” I said. “Only, if you wanted to make it readable in a mirror, it’d be ‘sllew acinorev.’ And you’d have to print the words in reverse.”

You weren’t like those baseball players; I expected you to probe, then I’d explain its origins and my unique and rather intriguing college essay, you’d tell me you, too, felt like you had always seen the world differently from everyone else, though you couldn’t conceive of being able to flip words around in your mind fluently, how exactly do you do that?

But “Ah” was all you said.

The library was nearly deserted by the time I finished the paper. We walked through the Yard in the silence of the small hours, under a black canvas perforated by a few dim pinholes, a diorama with us as the only figurines.

When you discovered that Matthews was also my destination, you asked, “You’re seeing Sara now?”

“No, I live here, too.”

“Oh,” you said with a small note of surprise.

“This is me,” I said when we reached the fourth floor.

You continued on up. “Thanks for your help.”

“Anytime,” I called out. “I’m always available to rescue a damsel in distress.”

You paused midflight and looked down at me, a weird grin on your face.

“Good night, Divad,” you said, and kept walking.

For a moment I thought you’d somehow gotten my name, my easiest of names, wrong, but then I realized you were saying it backward. My paranoia was unwarranted — you’d been impressed with my idiosyncratic talent, after all.

I climbed into bed, though I wasn’t remotely tired; your “Divad” had revived my endorphins. Lying under the sheets, I tried reading in preparation for my meeting with Samuelson but couldn’t concentrate. This was going to be the best year of my life, a Technicolor romp after so many dunnish slogs. I pulled up my window shade and watched the stars fade into the lightening sky, imagining us speaking whole sentences to each other in my reversed preadolescent tongue, an exclusive mode of communication. Veronica and David, people would say, those two have their own language — they’re the only ones who understand each other.

My finger hovered over my laptop’s touch pad with the grave deliberation associated with launching a nuclear strike. It had been thirty-six hours since our evening at Lamont — more than enough time for a friend request on Facebook to seem an afterthought. We were both at Harvard, we lived in the same dorm, we’d “studied” together; this was a perfectly ordinary next step. After you accepted, I’d be able to view your trove of photos and status updates, maybe learn something that would help me win you over — similar tactics had panned out in a number of romantic comedies I’d seen — or at least discover where you were spending your nights.

I clicked.

I didn’t use the site myself except for voyeurism. I was friends with my high school and Matthews confederacies, a smattering of relatives, and the people who sluttishly befriend everyone on it. To avoid advertising the paucity of my social connections, I had hidden my list of friends and prohibited anyone from posting on my wall. Before arriving at Harvard, I’d hoped I would acquire such a bounty of comrades here that I could make my social media presence more transparent, perhaps even add the popular kids from Hobart High to show them how far I’d come. Yet for now I wasn’t eager to be seen in pictures with the Matthews Marauders nor to affirm my relationship with Sara, whose profile photo was of her at her high school graduation, flanked by her deliriously proud parents, off-kilter mortarboard dwarfing her head.

That night I studied with Sara after dinner at the Starbucks located in the Garage, the mini-mall in Harvard Square that seemed to cater to high school potheads. You hadn’t accepted my request yet. That was fine; maybe you were busy or took pleasure in leaving me in suspense. I tried to distract myself by reading even further ahead in the syllabus for my meeting with Samuelson.

“Why are you checking your phone every two minutes?” Sara asked. “What’s so important?”

“I’m just nervous about this meeting tomorrow with Samuelson,” I said.

She looked unimpressed.

“He’s probably the most important English professor here, which basically means the most important one in the country,” I added, and suggested we go home.