The room did feel small, the blue walls giving the light a submarine look. There was a Tar Heel basketball picture calendar on the wall, showing a shot of Walter Davis rising above Phil Ford and some Duke player; Davis hung in the middle of the air with ease, as if he were floating, about to release the basketball. A couple of Doonesbury cartoons torn out of the DTH shook in the breeze from the open window, beside an exam schedule with a couple of dates circled. He unpacked his boxes and soon the room looked as much his own as it ever would, certainly as much as the dorm ever had. Setting his electric typewriter, bought with scholarship money, onto the worktable, he felt at home here. He placed his hardback copy of The Lord of the Rings beside it. He sat on the edge of the bed.

The empty boxes he broke down and took to the back of the house, putting them beside the garbage. None of the downstairs tenants was home, and Mrs. Delacy’s bedroom door was closed. Quiet sound from a radio threaded through the stillness. He walked around the house and took a good look at it, poking his head into the kitchen, sitting awhile in the living room, smelling someone’s barbecue at a neighboring house, hearing the blare of horns at the nearby intersection.

He breathed fresh air on the porch and walked around the yard. Grass and clover needed mowing, and little veins of green cracked through the walkway. Along the faded fence grew rosebushes that had a plump, healthy sheen, pink blossoms fallen from the blooms and littering the ground. Mrs. Delacy must like roses, he thought. Cars parked on the street had yellowed from the fall of pollen. A dog was sniffing the tires, going from one to the other, walking with a limp and a wagging tail. Maybe lost. Ronny tried to call the dog but it only stared at him for a moment, not quite hopeful, then went on with its nose-work.

He went back upstairs and read. The quiet was eerie. He would have no phone while he lived here, which was all right with him; he could get along without it for three months. No TV either, not that he ever had one in the dorm. But he was five minutes’ walk from campus and equally close to downtown, so he should be able to find things to do. It was late in the semester, of course, but Lily would still be in town, and maybe Charlotte, the two of them sitting by the brick plaza called the Pit. There would be a summer weekly newspaper if he wanted to work on it.

He walked downtown and got dinner at Hector’s. There were help wanted signs in a couple of the windows of the restaurants, and the sight of them cheered him a bit. He could apply for jobs tomorrow, maybe. Waiting tables in a restaurant would be all right for a summer. Or working the cash register in the bookstore or the record store. He put his hands in his pockets and walked along the street, past the Zoom Zoom toward the Little Professor Bookstore, where he waved at Hoagie the clerk through the plate window. The movie playing at the Carolina Theater had drawn a bit of a line and he studied the poster: That Obscure Object of Desire, in French, with subtitles, by Buñuel, whom the students in the de Beauvoir class had talked about. But he had better not pay for a movie tonight. Save his few dollars.