Otis had a slightly high-pitched voice, a way of furrowing his eyebrows when he was thinking, a nose that had been broken a couple of times, a poster of Joni Mitchell on his wall. Beside his bed on the windowsill was a worn Bible. Never crude in the show-off style of his teammates or of the other guys in the dorm, he talked haltingly, unwillingly, at first. But the two of them made a good team. Only later would Ronny find out Otis thought of him as a friend, in a way.

Otis wrote well if he had the time, but the class schedule required speed, and he had none, in terms of making sentences. Sitting in Ronny’s dorm room, cement block walls traced with shadows from the desk light, working to turn their notes into prose, Ronny witnessed the guy’s struggle, earnest and even endearing. Hunched over his notes with a pen worrying at his lip, he fretted over interview questions, wondered whether his interview notes were clear enough.

The night before their story was due Otis said, “People always talk about what a lummox I am.”

“Yeah, well. People are like that. People talk about what a sissy I am.”

Otis grunted, nodded slowly as though his head were a great weight. “Dumb stuff.” He had been scribbling on his legal pad and showed it to Ronny.

“That’s a good sentence,” Ronny said, looking it over.

“Maybe for the lead.”

“I think so. But we’ve got to go faster if we’re going to get this done.” So Ronny took over the writing and typed the story with Otis looking over his shoulder. The two of them worked into early morning, going back and forth from notes to manuscript. Kelly had gone to his girlfriend’s apartment for the night. Sirens sounded through the closed window, a typewriter banged and clattered. A blackbird hopped along the windowsill looking for food.

When it was graded, Ronny visited Otis and drank half a glass of beer. Ronny was used to excellent grades; Otis was surprised and quietly happy, holding the paper in his thick hand while Ronny looked over his shoulder. “That’s something,” Otis said. “Amanda would be tickled.” He hoped she would come back to him, which was evident from the number of times he had mentioned her during the course of the project, as if she were keeping watch on him secretly.

“She would,” Ronny said.

“Maybe you can help me out with the feature assignment. Just read it, you know. To check it.”

About that time Otis’s roommate came into the room. Ben Nickelsen and his girlfriend, Kathy Moore. She was a tall, pretty girl, freckled, with a sultry voice, smiling as she set her purse on Ben’s desk, talking about her calculus professor, who was Eastern European, with one long eyebrow across her face, stretching almost as far as her ears, she said. Ben was sleepy and lay on the bed. Handsome, it was hard not to stare.