“How’d you find me?” I wonder aloud. Maybe I should have asked more questions before agreeing to this outing. Not that I ever technically agreed.
“Your music,” Finn answers. “But this was the sixth dorm I tried! Trust me, you were not easy to find. I’ve been barely entertaining myself for a week.” He gestures at his ridiculous outfit. “I was beginning to think I was the only person on campus.”
Finn and I cross into O’Neill Plaza and make our way toward the sad, unlit Christmas tree at its center. Is this where we’re going? Some adventure this is. With students home for break, the facilities staff must have decided it wasn’t worth the cost of electricity to keep the tree lit, even on Christmas.
“Wait here,” Finn instructs.
He leaves me standing under the tree and heads toward the library on the east side of the plaza. I’m not close enough to see what he’s doing, but I hear the jingle of keys he produces from underneath his cape and watch him slip inside the building.
I jump from foot to foot to stay warm as minutes pass and he doesn’t reappear. For a second, I wonder if I’m being abandoned—again—and he has a getaway horse-drawn carriage waiting on the other side of the building.
I’ll give him five more minutes before I head back to the warmth of my dorm and queue up Die Hard. As I look down at my watch to start timing him, the tree in front of me flickers on. I crane my neck to gawk at thousands of rainbow twinkle lights. I can feel myself grinning like an idiot. Okay, Finn Everett, not a bad start.
I don’t hear him approach over the wind whipping through the plaza, but when I look over, he’s standing next to me with a smug grin on his face, watching me take in his handiwork. “How’d you know how to do that?” I ask.
He gives a faux-innocent shrug and ignores my question. “We can’t have an adventure without ambience, can we?” He winks at me. “Onward!”
“Where are we going?” I trail him down more stairs.
“You’ll see. Patience, darling,” he calls over his shoulder.
“Hannah,” I correct him, realizing he never asked my name. Apparently, the who was not critical criteria in an adventure companion. Now I feel even sillier traipsing through campus, probably about to break my neck on these icy stairs, with this weirdo in a cape who doesn’t care to know my name.
He pulls to a stop on the landing, and I almost crash into his back. “Hannah,” he parrots back at me, rolling the name over in his mouth. “A pleasure,” he says with a small bow.
A nervous giggle escapes my throat. I’ve never been bowed to before. He’s so strange, but also maybe kind of endearing? Plus, he was right, what else do I have to do tonight?
“Well, c’mon, before I freeze my ass off!”
* * *
? ? ?
?After a stop at Robsham Hall to raid the theater department’s wardrobe closet and some heated negotiations about my outfit for the evening （he pressed for a corseted Victorian gown, but I bargained him down to a red, fifties-style dress with an itchy petticoat underneath）， we’re standing outside Lower Dining Hall, which is closed. Except nothing is closed to us tonight with Finn’s magic key ring. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a janitor duct-taped to a chair in a maintenance closet, missing one set of keys.
The tea-length dress Finn talked me into wearing swishes around my knees as we make our way into the cafeteria portion of the dining hall.
“And what will the lady be having this evening?” Finn asks.
The options are limited since the dining hall is closed. Without the hot food stations or the salad bar, our options are chips, granola bars, or cereal. “The lady will have your finest Honey Nut Cheerios, my kind sir.”
“We can do better than that,” Finn says as he ducks behind the service station.
“If you could have anything to eat in the whole world—well, maybe not the whole world, but that would normally be available at Lower—what would it be?”
We seem to be gearing up for a make-believe tea party situation, but I’m willing to play along.
“So?” he presses.
“Pancakes!”
“That’s so boring. Try again, but do better this time.”
“Chocolate chip pancakes?”
“Better, but barely.”
He bends to open a stainless-steel fridge below the service station and resurfaces with a carton of milk and a stick of butter.
“Back in a flash.” He disappears into the kitchen, which I’m positive is off-limits to students. He returns, hugging a mixing bowl filled with dry ingredients to his chest with one hand and dangling an unopened bag of chocolate chips from the other.
“Hop right up.” He points to an empty counter.
“You have the most important job of all. You will hold my cape. Guard her with your life,” he says, before adding, “No, seriously, I’m dead if I get this dirty. We’re doing Phantom next semester.”
Finn rolls up his sleeves and gets to work measuring milk and cracking eggs into the bowl of dry ingredients. After mixing, he dumps in the entire bag of chocolate chips and flashes me a wink.
“So, how’d you know where all that stuff was?” I ask. I’m surprised at his confidence in the kitchen, especially this kitchen, which he appears to know his way around.
He crosses to a different station and turns on a flat-top grill, hovering his hand over it to see if it’s getting hot. Satisfied with what he feels, he nods to himself and pulls a ladle from a bin of utensils beneath the countertop. “I work here. It’s my work-study job.”
“Oh, so that’s why you have all the keys.”
“No, that’s because of my other job. I also work in the provost’s office. I’m the errand boy. I have to make a lot of deliveries, hence the keys.”
Two jobs. Wow! I managed a straight-B average last semester and I have zero jobs. The upside to dead parents, if you’re a silver linings person—which, let’s be clear, I am not—is that I have money from the sale of my childhood home to pay for college and should graduate debt-free. The downside, of course, is no parents.
“Is that why you didn’t go home for Christmas? Because it was too expensive?”
Finn gives a heavy sigh as he ladles globs of batter onto the grill. “Not exactly.”
I decide to shut up. I’ve become the question person I hate so much. For a minute, we watch the pancakes bubble in silence.
“My dad’s an asshole. He cut me off after I came out last summer. It’s like marrying a Black woman was his one progressive deed for his whole, dumb life, and now he’s done. He didn’t even try to understand.” His words spill out in a breathless run-on like he can’t stop himself from telling me.
“Oh, Finn.” My response is inadequate, but I don’t know how to comfort him. Hell, I only met him an hour ago.
“I didn’t want to transfer schools, so I loaded up on jobs to pay for tuition. But now I’m failing all my classes because I have to work so much. So I guess it wasn’t a flawless plan.”
He flips the pancakes. The smell is pure heaven. At least there’s that.
“What did your mom say?” I ask.