It turned out that on a campus with one student union, one post office, one bookstore, one video arcade, and one main cafeteria, it wasn’t that difficult to stalk a person who wore the same pair of shoes almost every day. I watched him eat breakfast and check his mail. I watched him play Asteroids. I watched him read a textbook and nap and perform the occasional set of pushups on the grass next to the Business Building. And I watched him practice his craft. The day he was allowed to grab the second bar (still not yet at the point where he could release his legs from the first), I nearly applauded.

A girl tapped my shoulder. “What are you doing here?”

I was sitting on the bleachers just inside the entrance of the tent. People seemed to be wandering in and out all the time. Entire art classes sat around sketching. I hardly thought I stood out. I’d seen this girl harnessed up with four different safety lines, carrying a pole across a tightrope: she was official circus. “Research,” I said.

She tilted her head to one side. Her hair was pulled up into a biscuit that sat on top of her head and her hands were in her back pockets. She looked entirely wound, and I had the feeling she was going to spring forward and pounce. But something flickered in her eyes. With a fluid motion, she released her hands and entwined her arms over her stomach. Her head drifted back to north. “What for?”

“Exposé on the circus,” I said, digging my notebook out of my pocket. “For the school paper.”

She smiled, introduced herself, and told me she was from Tampa. Then she talked for twenty minutes straight while I took notes and tried to look interested.

I had other things to do, of course, and I did them sufficiently. While learning that Margolis chatted about the weather with the woman who worked the card-reader at the cafeteria, and that he liked to squeeze his hand grips while running at the track, and that he belonged to the Sigma Nu fraternity, I somehow managed to do fine in my classes—probably because I knew his schedule so well that whenever I spent time on my studies, I did so fixated on the reward of seeing him.