“Ray.” Alice’s soft voice barely penetrates Ray’s door.
His eyes fly open, trying to figure out why he’d stopped dreaming. “…Alice,” he says, finally placing the voice to a name. The small, quiet girl with small, quiet ambitions to study electrical engineering and make large, noisy robots is the last person he’d expect to wake him from a nap.
“Ray, would you open the door please? This is heavy.” Her voice is strained, but not any louder than usual.
“Oh.” He shifts under the covers, feeling himself with sleep-clumsy hands. He couldn’t remember if he’d fallen asleep in anything.
“Uh,” he says. “I haven’t got any clothes on.”
“Oh! Oh dear. I don’t mean to disturb you!” The voice gets fainter, as though she’s turning away from the door.
“Unh.” Ray massages his face with his hand. “You’re not. Put whatever it is down while I get some shorts on.”
“I’ll wait.” He hears a solid thonk on the carpet. Ray takes a moment to pull at his forehead more before rolling out of bed. He grabs the nearest pair of boxer-briefs off the floor; sniffs them. They aren’t too musty. He puts them on; gropes for the doorknob.
Alice looks vaguely disgusted, and moves a hand to cover her nose.
“Ah, god, sorry, Alice. I haven’t showered in a few days.” Ray slumps against the narrow edge of the door. “Been busy.” Midterms week always was. Her brow furrows at him from behind her dinnerplate spectacles.
Ray looks down at the floor.
“Whatcha got there?” he asks.
Alice coughs lightly. “It’s a tower.”
He nudges it with his toe.
“My da got it from a telephone company. Said it had voice recognition software on it.”
“Oh,” Ray says.
“I wanted you to take a look at it before I took it apart. Thought maybe…” Alice looks off down the hall.
“Maybe…?” Ray prompts.
“Maybe it would help you with that computer you promised Joshua? I thought since it’s been so long since you said you’d do it–more than three weeks–that you were having problems with the programming part, and this would help…” Alice frowns at herself. She’d said too much.
“Oh.” Ray squats down to look at the machine, face to face.
Alice clears her throat. Ray looks up at her, his eyes still red from the take-home test the night before.
She doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. Ray turns back to the computer and starts dragging it into his dark hole.
“I can… I can take it back with me, if you… don’t need it,” she finally says.
Ray only has a noncommital “Mmm” for that. He continues to inch the thing back into his room. She was right about it being heavy. The case feels like a section of an iron girder. He gets it under his desk with a painful amount of scraping across the floor tiles.
He takes a moment to sit on his black chair. It’s a long enough moment that Alice turns and scuffs down the hall in her stocking feet.
Ray hops up and leans his torso out the door. “Alice!”
Her pale ale chin-length hair flips out as her head whips around.
His eyes lock with hers. “Thank you.” He nods.
She nods back, slowly.
“You’re welcome.”
Ray watches her slim form retreat into the stairwell, small voices of wonder and confusion murmuring in his head.
