Turn 26 of 26

You eat with your mouths open as everyone talks about the internships starting Monday, class and what they are doing to prepare. The giggle-snorting happening at all times. You all grab seconds as the greasy makes all of you feel good. You all leave and head back to the honors dorm for mandatory studying. You enter your room and start studying immediately.

You eat with your mouth open — the wire makes it the only way, small two-fingered bites chewed with the lips apart — and the table talks straight through dinner about Monday. Which building the internship is in, whether they'll let you keep your gold star on a desk, what to wear. 'The uniform, obviouthly,' Penelope whistles, dipping an onion ring in cheese sauce, and the whole table giggle-snorts into the grease. Nobody wonders whether the uniform is what you'll be told to wear. It's just obviously what you'll wear. The talk swings to tomorrow's classes — which problems Dr. Prewitt will hang, what Dr. Ambrose's thirty problems mean — and you contribute through your own fused lattice, your voice indistinguishable from Margaret's and Lucy's and everyone's, and every snort sets off another wave until Margaret has to wipe her glasses.

Then, almost in unison, the six of you go back for seconds. The line hands over more glistening tenders, another wet hill of fries, a fresh cup of cheese sauce, and the grease does what it always does now — settles into you warm and good, like being tucked in. Your soft middle presses contentedly against the table edge as you eat, and you finish the second dessert too, chocolate cake number two, slow little bites through the wire.

The trays are stacked and the tide of thirty cardigans turns back across the dark quad toward the honors dorm, lisping goodnights at other tables on the way out, nobody questioning what Ruth says as she stands: 'Ttudy time, girlth. Mandatory. Every night.' Mandatory is just a word that means the thing you were going to do anyway.

The dorm takes you in, brick and ivy and warm windows, and the girls peel off down the second-floor corridor toward their rooms, calling lisped goodnights to each other through doors. Your room — E. KESSLER on the nameplate, the name feeling less like a mistake every day — opens to a desk lamp and a chair, and your body sits down and opens the notebook and starts studying immediately, no transition, no hesitation, the way a machine starts when its cycle is triggered. Problems from room 201. The hanging problem, re-derived. The nested sums from Ambrose's board, checked twice. Your small neat handwriting fills page after page under the lamp, your wired jaw aching faintly and pleasantly from all the talking, and the still, cold thing under the warmth sits quiet somewhere behind your ribs, exactly where it went still when Dr. Ambrose said congratulations.

Down the hall, through every door, you can hear the same thing: pencil sounds. Thirty rooms. Thirty lamps. The whole corridor studying in unison without anyone having called it.