Senior spring, but still. They’d met in the gardens. They’d seen one another before, but had never spoken until then. Which was at least half by design. For by the afternoon they came into each other’s lives, Whitney had been operating for some time at a frequency that she and she alone was tuned to, moving about campus with urgency and purpose, and a well-honed indifference to student life. She was just ready—had been ready all her life, maybe—to get up and out and on with it. Just as she had been with her first exit, when she left home for school. It was time now to get going with the life she’d been looking for all this time. Consequently, she seemed then to carry herself like someone with a hard-won secret or a past forged by fire, or at least like someone with several somethings figured out. It was the thing that attracted Will to her so very much that first afternoon—that she possessed a knowledge of herself like no one else he knew, like someone in at least her mid-twenties.
Whitney would joke with Will for weeks and then months and then years that they couldn’t have met a day earlier. That it was serendipitous timing, the only way it could’ve worked out. Until that afternoon, she’d argue, he wouldn’t have been ready for her—submitting his sweat-stained T-shirts and milkshake addiction and lack of a single credit card to his name as evidence of the lack of requisite maturity. But deep down, Whitney knew that it was really she who had needed every last hour up to that point to complete her transformation away from where she’d come from and who she’d been.
There would be a grand dispute in the years that followed about who smiled at whom first. But what is undeniable is that the screenplay Whitney was reading that day was a screenplay Will knew by heart. And when he told her so, she told him to prove it. He asked her to read a setup, and when she did, he delivered Michael’s lines to Kay: This one time, this one time I’ll let you ask me about my affairs.
What made the whole thing spark, though, wasn’t that he’d answered correctly, but rather how embarrassed Whitney had been made by his earnestness. She burst into laughter, the squeaky wheel of delight that he’d soon learn meant that the comedy was actually tickling her nose. Still, she picked another scene and read another prompt, and though he knew those lines too—knew them like breathing—he refrained this time. Will had proven that he’d understood. And that successful navigation of the challenge—that restraint and that pivot—was what prompted each of them to draw for one another, for several warm hours, much of the map of their separate lives apart up until then.
He left her there in the gardens that afternoon because he had to meet some friends for dinner downtown, near the house they shared. There was a March Madness game on and their school was playing, did she know that? Of course she knew—but she let him tell her himself. They had won in the first two rounds of the tournament. They were in the Sweet Sixteen thanks to the junior star, JJ Pickle, who had led them deeper into the postseason than the program had ever been before. But besides JJ Pickle, Will and his housemates were certain the winning streak had been preserved because they’d each eaten a fried-chicken sandwich during both the first half and the second half of the first two tournament games. It was important to do their part again tonight, she surely understood.
She liked that he walked away from her that day, that he left her there in the long shadows that hadn’t been present when they’d first started chatting. She liked that he didn’t ask for her number, even if he’d meant to. She could find him, just as he could find her. But of course, after all those years of never crossing paths, they bumped into each other at a bar that very night. Maybe she went downtown knowing that there was a chance. Maybe she went downtown knowing that that was the point. They’d dispute that intention, too, for weeks and then months and then years. But if running into each other out of the blue again wasn’t a clear enough sign from the universe that they’d better go home together that night, then they didn’t know what was.
When Whitney woke up beside Will the next morning, she surprised herself with how purely at home she felt in his bed. She wasn’t concerned by the light coming through the beach towels he’d nailed to the window frame in lieu of blinds, nor by the laundry lining the baseboard that made it impossible to tell whether the floors were carpet or hardwood. The only thing that bothered her even a little that late-March morning was the realization that they had just six weeks left of college to make up for all the lost time. She rested her head on his chest. She watched his eyes flutter to consciousness. But even as she stretched her mind to its vastest limits, it would’ve been impossible for Whitney to comprehend that it would be Will, and Will alone, for the next seven years of her life.
The waitress plopped down the first dish: garlic shrimp and fried eggs. They were starved, but they ate patiently. They didn’t know how
