I was alone in my room, Amanda having gone to the library before dinner. I was in my bed, that narrow dormitory bed that I already loved. This was only the first of many rooms I was going to sleep in, I felt sure. I meant to see the world. And more than see it. Know it. Fall asleep in rooms and wake up in rooms and smell their scents and notice how light illuminated those rooms.

Light fell in stiff lines through the venetian blinds of my dorm room, deep gold afternoon light, the light of October at four in the afternoon. It put stripes on the wall across from me, the warm orange stripes of a tiger cat, and I’d been watching the stripes lengthen and widen all afternoon as the sun sank swiftly. Already I knew this room intimately. It smelled of peppermint tea, and coconut oil, and pencil shavings.

“He’s been up there for hours,” my mother said.

“He’s up there now?”

“And the police got involved, so he’s scared to come down.”

“Call them off,” I said. “He’ll come down when it’s dark.”

She sighed. Just hearing her voice on the phone transported me from my dorm room back to the rooms I’d known best and longest. I could smell my mother’s sandalwood oil, which she dabbed on her skin and threw in with her laundry. The house’s perfume of mildew and wood.

“Now it’s a breaking-and-entering issue,” she said. “I can’t call them off, my friend. We’ll be lucky if they don’t arrest him.”

“I don’t know why you’re calling me,” I said. “I’m trying to write a paper, and it’s due tomorrow. And I still have to go to dinner.”

“Forgive me for thinking you’d want to know.”

We were both quiet, and I listened to her breathing. Her posture—I could see it clearly—would be perfect yoga posture. She was a tall woman to begin with—a full inch taller than my father, who himself was tall. Her yoga practice seemed to increase her height, or the impression of height, a full inch or more. She towered. When she sat, she rose from the seat like a pillar. When she stood, she reached the sky, an oak tree, a mountain. Her spine was the envy of middle-aged yogis everywhere.

“I’m not coming home,” I said.

“I wasn’t asking you to.”

“I’ll be home at Thanksgiving. He can stay up there until Thanksgiving if he wants to be stubborn. I’m not coming now.”