The beginning was the titration lab, sophomore year, which I've already told you, and which I won't belabor, except to say that Dashiell apparently spilled sodium hydroxide on his own sleeve in the first five minutes and Hesper, without saying a word, unbuttoned his cuff and rolled it back and pushed his arm under the eyewash tap and held it there for fifteen minutes by the clock, because that was the protocol, while Mr. Strickwell filled out an incident form. Fifteen minutes is a long time to hold someone's arm under running water. They had to talk about something. They talked, Dashiell said, about whether it was possible to calculate the exact number of cranes you'd need to fill a window. Hesper said it depended on the window. He said the window in question was his, the one facing her yard. She said she knew which window. She said she'd always wondered if he'd thrown them away.
"I hadn't," he said, to me, at my kitchen table. "I took them down in eighth grade because I was embarrassed. But I didn't throw them away."
"They're in the basement," I said. "In the box with your baby shoes."
He went pink. Hesper looked at him sideways with an expression on her face that I recognized, because I had worn it myself, once, a long time ago, in a dorm common room in Athens, Ohio, looking sideways at a boy named Wystan who had just said something accidentally sweet.
After the lab, they started studying together. Not at either house. At the Community Library on Cherry Street, in the back corner by the large-print mysteries, on Wednesday afternoons when Hesper was supposed to be at a debate team practice that had actually been canceled for the season because the coach went on maternity leave. Hesper had simply never told her mother it was canceled. She had a debate team practice in her calendar every Wednesday for a year that did not exist.
"I'm not proud of that," she said.
"No," I agreed.
"I'm a little proud of it," she amended, and then looked at her toast.