Ben sprinted up the stairs with hatred coursing through his legs. He hauled open the fire door and smacked down the hallway in his hard shoes. He pushed the door open and beheld Ahmed, sitting on the couch still in the undone shirt and boxers, patiently feeding a cuff link through the holes in the shirt’s left cuff.

He looked up and nodded, then leaned back over his work and said, “Sometimes it goes through right away, and sometimes it is like threading a needle with a noodle.” He looked up again and smiled at the assonance.

“Ahmed, what are you doing? Everyone’s waiting for you downstairs!”

Ahmed snapped straight, and with his cuffs flapping, he hurried to the trousers over the back of his chair. Ben sprinted back down the hall and through the fire door, then leaned over the banister and shouted down, “He’s almost ready, we’ll be right there!”

Dennett called back, “Listen, you know where the Dish is, right? You’re at table eight in the Middle Dining Hall and Ahmed is table fourteen in Lower, okay?”

Ben wanted to keen and run after them, but the idea of Ahmed wandering alone through the empty campus pained him. He ran back to the room to find Ahmed with a long shoehorn gently lowering his heel into a light brown shoe. Ben looked out the window and saw the thinning troops of girls in white and black moving across the grass and out of sight.

“Ahmed…”

Finally they were going down the stairs. Ben hit the crossbar of the exit door and they moved out into the slow air. The bottom edge of the sun was at the tree line. The campus was as empty as a public square after a bomb scare.

“Oh, it is so beautiful here. My brothers should be able to see this place!”

With each step, Ahmed seemed to savor pressing up onto the ball of each foot. His right hand swung away from him as though he were a farmer in a poem casting seeds into a furrow. Ben walked faster and almost pulled Ahmed along as they headed onto the path around the pond. The trees closed in around them.

“I am sure they would not start without us.”

“Five hundred people are not going to stop dinner for the two of us, Ahmed.”