“Do you act too?” My voice rose in excitement. “You should have said something—”

“God, no.” Cary shook his head. He set the bag of laundry at his feet. “I’m…” He looked at me for a moment, like he was making a decision. “Well—what I really want to do is make animated movies.”

“Wow,” I said, impressed. “That’s really cool.”

He gave an embarrassed shrug and looked up at the elevator lights again. “I mean—it’s not a movie yet. Not even close. But I’ve been working on storyboards, and one night when I was here, someone took about an hour to get their dry cleaning together for me to pick up, and Wes saw me sketching.…”

“What’s it about? Your movie, I mean.”

“It’s an adaptation,” he said, looking back at me, the tips of his ears slightly red. “Of ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener.’ It’s a short story by Herman Melville. Do you know it?”

I shook my head. I’d never read any Melville. My dad carted around an old copy of Moby-Dick on our lake vacation every year, always promising that this would be the year he read it, but my mother and I had decided that this was just because he liked telling people that finishing it was his white whale. “What’s it about?”

“It’s about this guy—”

“Bartleby?”

“I thought you hadn’t read it.”

I rolled my eyes at that, and Cary grinned and continued. “Anyway, he’s a scrivener—he writes documents. And then one day he stops. When his boss and the other clerks ask him why, he just says ‘I would prefer not to.’ ”

“I would prefer not to?” I echoed.

“Yeah. And so he refuses to work, and then refuses to leave the office, always just telling people he’d prefer not to. And eventually he’s thrown in jail, and won’t eat—because he’d prefer not to—and then eventually dies of starvation.”

“So it’s a musical?” I asked, deadpan.

“I know,” he said, shaking his head. “Kind of a weird choice for animation.”

“Is this for a class?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized, all at once, just how much I didn’t know about this person. We’d ridden the streets of New York together, and it was easy to banter with him, but we’d skipped right over the foundational details. I’d assumed he was about my age, maybe a little older, but I wasn’t sure if he was in high school still, or in college. He’d been wearing an NYU sweatshirt when he’d first opened the super’s door, but I wasn’t sure if this meant anything.

There was a ding, and the elevator doors slid open, and a woman dragging a reluctant toddler by the hand struggled out the door. Cary picked up the bag and stepped into the elevator, holding his arm across the door for me, and I followed. He pressed PH and the doors slid shut.