Her friend the poet had drawn away, and Lily and Ronny sat in comfortable silence for a moment. The others on the steps were beginning a conversation about their grades for the semester, what Max Steele, the creative writing director, had told them during office hours, and snipes about other students in the workshops. Ronny had taken one class in fiction writing before he realized it was not for him; now he was studying English literature and journalism.

Lily took a pen and notepad out of her purse, tapped it on her thigh. “So, seriously, what will you do?”

“I don’t know. I’m almost broke, it’s the end of the semester.”

“Can’t your mom help you?”

“Not really. I have to figure this out myself.”

“At least you’ll be here this summer. We can hang out.”

“That will be nice.” He picked oak tassels out of his hair, finding them by touch. The world felt wild with pollen and other forms of plant copulation. “You can show me more of your poems.”

She appeared inordinately pleased to be asked and handed him a new poem out of her folder of work, something called “Seven Long Phrases,” with a nice line at the end, “and has the last word under water.” He told her he liked the syntax, not sure whether he was using the word in the right context, but he must have gotten it right because she just blushed a bit. He did like the poem, too. She said, “I just went by the newspaper office, nobody is there.” They both worked for The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper. “Strange to see all those desks empty, nobody typing.”

“I guess it’s just the business people in there now.”

Pleasant to sit there watching the traffic in and out of the bookstore and the student union. Flyers flapped on the Cube when a wind came up. The folks on the steps spent the sunset talking about the books of Virginia Woolf, the shape of the moral universe, and why a cow in a field might have an independent reality even if no human ever saw the cow; he figured they had all read Jacob’s Room. They talked about what kind of art was the best art and why a student who majored in business administration was missing out on the roots of things. Lily’s poet friend said, “I think it would kill my soul to do anything but art.”

“What will kill your soul is starvation for not getting paid for doing art,” said Charlotte, a Durham housewife who was taking poetry workshops; she’d made a lot of friends among the students. “Take it from an old lady.”

“Then I die for art,” the poet said, and everyone agreed he was brave and noble.

“What a way to go,” said Charlotte, and puffed her French cigarette.

After sunset, he said goodbye to Lily, watching her walk away with her manuscripts and books in her arms, long hair swinging side to side. He walked back to his dorm, finding his roommate, Kelly, already passed out, another stack of pizza boxes in the middle of the room—really, it was as if they bred and reproduced; one person could not eat that much pizza, could he?