Hello Beautiful

In college, William gravitated toward history classes when filling his schedule. He had what felt like gaping holes to fill in his knowledge of how the world worked, and it appeared to him that history had the answers. He appreciated that the academic subject looked at disparate events and found a pattern. If this happened, then this happened. Nothing was completely random, and therefore a line could be drawn from the assassination of an Austrian archduke to a world war. College life was too new to be predictable, and William struggled to find any sense of equilibrium in the face of excited students who offered him high fives while he made his way down the noisy hallway in his dorm. He divided his days between studying in the library, practicing on the basketball court, and attending classes. In each of these locations, he knew what to do. He sank into every classroom chair, opened his notebook, and felt his body sag with relief when the professor began to talk.

William rarely noticed other students during classes, but Julia Padavano stood out in his European history seminar because her face appeared to be lit up with indignation and because she drove the professor — an elderly Englishman who held an oversized handkerchief balled in one fist — crazy with her questions. Her long, curly hair shifted around her bright face like curtains while she said things like: Professor, I’m interested in the role of Clementine in all of this. Isn’t it true that she was Churchill’s main adviser? Or: Can you explain the wartime coding system? I mean the specifics of how it worked? I’d like to see an example.

William never spoke in class or utilized the professor’s office hours. He believed that the role of a student was to keep his or her mouth shut and soak up as much knowledge as possible. He shared the professor’s opinion of the curly-haired girl, which was that her frequent interjections and inquiries, though often interesting to William, were impolite. The fabric of a serious classroom was created by students listening and the professor providing wisdom in a carefully unrolled carpet of words; this girl poked holes in that fabric, as if she didn’t even know it existed.

William was startled one afternoon after class when she appeared at his elbow and said, “Hello. My name is Julia.”

“William. Hi.” He had to clear his throat; this might have been the first time he’d spoken that day. The girl was regarding him with wide, serious eyes. He noticed that in the sunlight her brown hair had honey-colored highlights. She looked lit up, from without and within.

“Why are you so tall?”

It wasn’t unusual for people to remark on William’s height; he understood that his size was a surprise whenever he entered a room and that most people felt compelled to say something. Several times a week he heard, How’s the air up there?

Julia looked suspicious when she asked the question, though, and her expression made him laugh. He stopped on the path that crisscrossed the quad, and so she stopped too. William rarely laughed, and his hands tingled, as if they’d just woken up from an oxygen-deprived sleep. The overall sensation was one of being pleasantly tickled. Later, William would look back at this moment and know that this was when he fell for her. Or, more accurately, when his body fell for her. In the middle of the quad, attention from a specific girl reeled in laughter from the nooks and crannies within him. William’s body — tired and bored by his hesitant mind — had to set off fireworks in his nerves and muscles to alert him that something of import was taking place.

“Why are you laughing?” Julia said.

He managed to mostly tamp it down. “Please, don’t be offended,” he said.

She gave an impatient nod. “I’m not.”

“I don’t know why I’m so tall.” Secretly, though, he believed that he’d willed himself to this height. A serious basketball player needed to be at least six foot three, and William had cared about that so badly that he’d somehow defied his genetics. “I’m on the basketball team here.”

“At least you’re making a virtue of it, then,” she said. “Perhaps I’ll come to see one of your games. I generally don’t take an interest in sports, and I only come to campus for classes.” She paused, and then said quickly, as if embarrassed, “I live at home to save money.”