Ray stands over the dining hall table, trying to find a place to set his tray down. Bear, in his hirsute glory, is seated between Stick on his left and Lightning on his right. Bear shares the real first name of “Michael” with the former, which at the beginning of the year had earned the pair of frosh their descriptive nicknames purely on the basis of disambiguation. On the other side of the table sat Christopher, a math major who refused to go by any shorter moniker, his girlfriend Monica, who in the opposite spirit called herself “Mo”, and an Asian girl whom Ray didn’t recognize.
“Hey Ray,” Stick says. “I thought you weren’t coming to dinner.”
“Alice woke me up,” Ray says. He turned his tray sideways and wedged it between Lightning and Christopher’s trays, then turned to get a chair.
“Oh?” says Christopher. “What was Alice doing in your room?”
“Nothing,” Ray says. “She didn’t actually come in. She just dropped off an old box she wanted me to look at.”
“Oh really?” Christopher asks, a devilish curl in his lips. “For what purpose?”
“For Josh’s computer.” Ray abruptly drops his fork into his mashed potatoes. “What’s with the sudden interest? I don’t even like her. That way.”
“Just asking.” Christopher pokes at his limp vegetables.
After a moment, he continues: “It’s about time you worked on that thing, anyway. What’s it been, three weeks?”
Ray looks Christopher straight in the eyes. “It’ll be a lot longer than that if you keep pestering me. I don’t see how it concerns you, anyway.” He turns back to his mashed potatoes and forks himself a few testy mouthfuls.
There is an awkward silence.
Lightning turns to face the other corner of the table. “So, Mo, who’s your friend?”
“Oh! Her name is Kiri; she’s visiting from California…”
Ray zones out as Mo keeps explaining. His eyes drift to the wall of windows on the other side of the dining hall. Bergmann Dining Hall faces the central part of campus, which is currently lit up by the setting sun slanting across Easting Field. The field never fails to confuse prospective students: Easting is on the west side of campus, between the academic buildings and the STI dorms. Ray watches the light glint wanly off the narrow, high windows of the geology and astrophysics building, conveniently close to where all the science majors live.
Saloma College is divided into two semi-autonomous institutions. Saloma Arts College was founded first, in the 1960’s , by a group of moderately well-off local activists who were too old to be hippies, but liked the idea and wanted a place in Northern Idaho for the young ‘uns to congregate and get some higher learning. Saloma Technical Institute, the half Ray attends, was founded a decade later by a filthy rich agribusinessman who hoped to benefit his trade by having links with the science departments at the college. The SAC faculty and staff considers STI a disease that they can’t get rid of, and the attitude tends to rub off on the students.
Which is why Ray is puzzled by the appearance of a Studio Art major in Bergmann. SAC has its own dining hall in the other corner of campus, close to their dorms. She was a tall Pacific Islander, black hair down to her rear. He’d taken a digital art course with her last year as part of his one-per-semester arts requirement, but they hadn’t talked much beyond the regular pleasantries. He couldn’t even remember her name now. His eyes follow her as she moves down the salad bar, then to the cash register where she pays a ridiculous amount per ounce for her vegetarian roughage. She begins walking along the window wall.
“What are you looking at, Ray?” Lightning asks, barely audible over the conversation going on around them. Ray’s eyes don’t move off their target.
“Kiri, Kiri,” Stick is saying, sounding out the name. “Sounds familiar. Japanese, right?”
“Yeah!” the small Asian girl says, overly cheery. Lightning begins staring at the art major even more raptly than Ray is. “It means ‘fog’!”
“Which is just about the only thing that’s in her head,” says Christopher. Mo nudges him with her elbow, bumping him into Ray.
Ray, jolted out of his reverie, looks down into his mashed potatoes again.
“Ooooh baby,” says Lightning. “That piece is fine.”
Bear looks up and tries to figure out what Lightning is looking at. Stick finds it sooner, just as Lightning points her out.
“Who is that?” Bear says. He catches Ray trying to disappear into his now-cold entree out of the corner of his eye.
“Temptation,” Lightning observes, “thy name is Penelope.”
