Boo regarded Alistair with surprise. She immediately walked up to him.

“Oh . . . hello. I’m Bhuvana. Everyone calls me Boo.”

“Boo?”

Boo burst out laughing. Alistair and I just stared at her.

“Sorry,” she said. “I am called Boo. That’s always funny, though.”

Alistair nodded dismissively and turned back to his book.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Boo said. “Really.”

“Is it?” he asked.

“This is Alistair,” I explained to Boo. Then to Alistair I said, “I need a good book on Samuel Pepys.”

“McCalistair. The one with the blue cover and the gold lettering.”

I scanned the shelf for a book that fit this description.

“Rory and I are roommates,” Boo said. “I’m new.”

“Well done,” Alistair replied. “So there are two of you now.”

“Three,” I said. “We have a triple.”

I found the book and held it up to him for confirmation. He nodded. It was huge—a two-hander with a layer of dust on top. I thought we were done, but Boo sat down on the floor next to Alistair.

“Is this your favorite spot?” she asked.

“It’s private,” he said.

“You go,” she said, waving me off. “I’m going to talk to Alistair for a while.”

I had serious doubts about how well that would go down with Alistair, but he raised no objection. If anything, he seemed slightly curious about Boo and her incredibly forthright approach to conversation. Whatever the case, if it gave me five minutes away from her, I was taking it.

I went back downstairs to my table and opened the book. It had a pronounced old book smell, and pages that had been allowed to turn very slightly golden, but not brown with age. Alistair had given me a serious book, one that covered every aspect of Samuel Pepys’s life. It was time to be a serious student, so I found the section of the book devoted to the section of the diary I was reading at the moment and tried to develop an interest. But what I was really watching was the light in the aisle upstairs. It clicked off, and neither Boo nor Alistair emerged, and Boo didn’t switch it back on. They had to be talking, or . . .

It was hard to imagine Boo and Alistair instantly making out, but that actually made a lot more sense than the idea of them having a long conversation. Alistair liked books and emo eighties music and being poetic—and Boo liked the opposite of all of those things.